Now she was at her desk, hanging up her phone after a call from a woman who apologized profusely for canceling her trip to New Orleans and her reservation at Briarstone for the weekend because her husband had been rushed to the hospital for emergency gall bladder surgery.

Slade had spent the last hour working on her laptop at the small table she’d tucked near the kitchen. A warm summer breeze drifted through the screen door, and Bo, making the weird high-pitched whine he always did while sleeping and dreaming, was lying just outside on the porch.

“This should work a lot faster,” Slade said, screwing the computer’s case into place.

“How do you know how to do this?” She motioned toward the laptop.

“What?”

“Fix the damned thing? Add memory? All of it?”

His grin was lazy and amused, his thin lips twisting. “You don’t think we have computers on the ranch?”

“Yeah, I know, but, I mean—”

“I told you that Bad Luck’s in the twenty-first century, right? And I’ve been a closeted geek for years,” he teased, glancing up from the screen. He slid his chair back and stood, still holding the screwdriver, stretching his arms high enough over his head to nearly touch the ceiling while listening to his spine pop.

“Really?” She tried not to notice that his shirt hiked up as he stretched, exposing those lean, hard muscles of his abdomen, the trail of dark hair that slipped beneath the waist of his jeans.

“You don’t remember?” He cast a surprised look down at her, one of his eyebrows arching.

“That you were into high tech?” she asked. “No.”

“I said ‘closeted.’ ”

She rolled her eyes up at him. “So it’s true. The wife is the last to know.”

“ ‘The wife’ hasn’t been around much lately,” he reminded her, and the barb was as sharp as the Pomeroy utility knife she was planning to use on the wide tape that sealed the five boxes she’d found in the attic over her small garage.

There it was between them.

The marriage.

The impending divorce.

She didn’t want to think about that, not right now. “So you really are the computer-genius cowboy?”

“Yes’m,” he drawled, twirling the screwdriver like it was a six-shooter, then holstering it into his jeans pocket. “Here at the BS Ranch—and that BS stands for Briarstone, don’tchaknow—we do it all. Everything from pulling calves to restoring laptops.” His crooked, decidedly sexy smile stretched wide.

“BS is right,” she said, and laughed for the first time in what seemed like eons. She also remembered why she’d fallen so hard and fast for him. Oh, Slade, she found herself thinking, if only we could start over—wipe the slate clean.

She realized then that she’d never stopped loving him.

Her throat caught for a second. What an idiot.