Easton usually didn’t have a huge issue with attractive women who wanted to take their clothes off in his presence, but this one was making him nervous. As she shed layer after layer, the woman craned her head to evaluate his vehicle.

“Nice truck. I’m a Dodge girl myself, but there’s something about these old Fords that I always liked.”

Yes. Trucks. Easton could talk trucks. Trucks were a much easier topic of conversation than why she had a suitcase of rocks. “It used to be my dad’s.”

“1982?” she asked.

“’83.”

His passenger shrugged out of her sweatshirt, revealing her tank top beneath. For some reason, she kept the scarf on. “Dual gas tanks really make a truck a truck, huh? And it helps with the crappy gas mileage.”

Who was this woman? She was simultaneously insulting his baby while giving him an unwanted strip show. “The gas mileage isn’t crappy.” He’d just not look her way. Yep, staring at the road.

“It’s not not crappy.” She waved a hand over her overheated, flushed cheeks. “Can you turn the air conditioner on? I’m melting over here.”

“Why would you wear so many layers in the middle of summer?”

“Because my outfit was fine for this morning, when the windchill was fifty degrees and Bree mic’d me. But now it’s boiling hot, and we should have been done hours ago.”

“The air conditioner doesn’t work.”

Closing her eyes in frustration, his passenger dropped her head back on the seat. “Of course it doesn’t. This is a Ford.”

“I’ll try to bring a better truck next time,” he murmured.

One eye opened, and the prettiest grin he’d ever seen on a woman flashed at him.

“If there is a next time,” she told him archly. “I am luring you into the woods, you know.”

See? Right there. It always had to get weird.

• • •

In hindsight, River Lane probably should have kept her temper better. If she had, she might have thought twice before stuffing herself in the passenger seat next to a man whose head nearly touched the ceiling of his truck.

Growing up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming, the actress-turned-director was used to impressively sized men. Everywhere she’d turned, there’d been one more tall, muscled cowboy trying not to step on her feet. But she’d never seen a man this tall or this built. Muscle roped along biceps thicker than the thickest part of her thighs, and his shoulders took up the room of a regular man and half of another one. A thick inch-and-a-half-long beard covered his face, a shade darker than his brown hair. Hair that was smooth and shiny and long enough to be all wrapped up in a man bun so sexy, it would make the guys back in LA green with envy.