She wasn’t sure that she had ever really noticed a man’s chest muscles before. But in her defense, this particular man was basically wrapped in a second skin posing as a T-shirt. It looked so solid.

He looked so solid.

Clearly, fiddling with tiny screws out in the boiling sun had fried her brain.

“I’m fine,” she said, not making a move at going back to her work, because if she did, then he would only realize that she was in fact having difficulty. And she didn’t want him to know that.

“Just a little... A little motor,” she said, waving her hand that was clutching her screwdriver. “That’s easy. No big deal.”

“Yeah?”

“Yep.”

“Well, I needed it done today, and I figured I would assign it to you, seeing as you are just like all my other ranch hands.”

“You’re right about that. The other thing is, I know how to read instructions. Pretty groundbreaking, I know, but I’m damned awesome at it.”

“It looks like it.”

“Yep,” she said, backing up slightly.

“Aren’t you going to keep going?”

“Don’t you have somewhere else to be?”

“Oh, I’ve got nowhere else to be,” he said, his lips working up into a smile. “Nowhere at all.”

She swallowed hard, then turned her focus back to the task at hand. And she couldn’t hide the fact that she was struggling for more than a couple of seconds. She grabbed hold of the motor again and gave it a twist, and still it refused to budge.

“Oh, yeah,” he said. “There might be a trick to that.”

She turned around to look at him. “Are you kidding me?”

“No. Why would I kid?”

“There’s a trick?” she asked, aghast.

“Yeah, if I remember right.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Well?”

“I thought you didn’t need help,” he said, lifting a shoulder.

She took a step forward, shaking her screwdriver in his face. “Gabe Dalton, I will skin you with this.”

“Is it that hard to ask for help, Jamie?”

“I wouldn’t need help if there wasn’t a trick.”

“Sometimes in life it’s not all in the directions, honey. It’s not going to kill you to ask for a little bit of advice from someone who knows what he’s doing.”

“You set me up.”

“Maybe I did.” Those blue eyes locked on to hers and somehow it felt like he’d put his hands on her. “Maybe I didn’t. But you’re not going to find out if you don’t ask.”

“I would rather drown in a sea of beetles,” she said, lowering her brows.

“That seems extreme.”

“What is this? Some kind of Mr. Miyagi ranch hand thing? Are you wax on wax off-ing me?”

“No. But the thing is, I’m your boss. And if I assign you to do something, I expect you to do it. And if it’s not in your wheelhouse, I expect you to let me know. And then I expect you to ask for help. If you can’t handle that, we have a problem.”