Yeah, she had imagined that Gabe Dalton was more like that.

But when she’d come at him, he had done something totally unexpected. He had smiled. And he had... He had acted completely undaunted by her. And then he had gone and done all that chivalry bullshit.

Lifting the saddle, opening the door. Talking about how he was a gentleman. For the first time in living memory, she’d felt at a loss. And she hadn’t had a clue what to do.

Her face had gotten all hot, and her skin had felt kind of prickly. It had been the strangest thing, and she didn’t like it. And was not looking forward to a repeat performance. Ever.

“Fine,” she said.

“Just fine?”

She snapped her fingers. As if she’d just remembered something. “Oh, yeah. Except for the part where he slapped me on the ass every time I walked past him.”

Making that joke was a lot like firing a black powder revolver and getting her hand in line with the cylinder gap. She might have gotten a shot off, but she’d been left with a burn of her own. She ignored the heat in her cheeks and tried to focus on her steak.

She didn’t know why she was letting that man get in her head. He hadn’t even done anything. That was the thing. All Wyatt’s warning her away from Gabe, and he had been completely appropriate. She would have been ready for two things. To have to fend off lecherous advances—not that that had ever happened before—or for him to grouse and get all sour at her for yelling at him.

He had done neither.

“Don’t even mess around like that,” Wyatt said. “I don’t want to go to prison unless I absolutely need to.”

She rolled her eyes. “It was fine. It was a workday. How are things at the ranch without me? Did everything fall apart?”

“Wyatt is falling apart,” Grant commented, a smile curving his lips.

It was a good thing to see her brother smile again, and the source of that smile was sitting right next to him. His fiancée, McKenna, had absolutely transformed him. Had brought him out of the grief that he’d been mired in since the death of his first wife and given him a life that Jamie hadn’t imagined he could ever have.

“I’m not falling apart,” Wyatt said.

“You’re a little testy.”

“Because I care,” Wyatt said, leaning back on the bench he was seated on and taking a bite of steak with him.

“Because the sins of his past are flashing before his eyes,” Lindy said. “And all he knows is what he would have done if he hired a beautiful woman to come and work for him.”

Jamie recoiled. “I do not think that’s what’s happening here.”

First of all, she wasn’t a beautiful woman, though she wasn’t going to get into that. Mostly because she didn’t want her sisters-in-law fluttering and petting her and trying to reassure her that of course she was pretty, because everyone was beautiful in their own way, or whatever. Her saying that had nothing to do with insecurity, and she knew that they wouldn’t understand that.