“I can handle it.”

“Can you?”

She knew she was being baited and she flushed. After all, this guy wasn’t a boy; he was a man and he scared her more than a little. “I can handle a lot of things,” she said, tossing her head. Margaret Cawthorne might have taught her daughter to be a lady, but she’d also instilled a fervor in Bliss to carry her own weight and be independent enough not to have to rely on any man, especially not a cowboy.

John walked out onto the porch. “Damned mechanics,” he grumbled, then noticed Mason. “Take the trunk and the rest of her things into her bedroom—down the hall, second door on the right. Next to the bath.”

“I can show him. I know where it is,” Bliss said, feeling the fiery rays of the sun beating against the back of her neck. Heat shimmered in waves across the pastures, and dust, kicked up from the movement of cattle and horses in nearby fields, floated in the air. She was beginning to sweat and her blouse was sticking to her back and her heart was pounding so loudly she was sure everyone within ten feet of her could hear it.

“Good.”

“When you’re finished with the luggage, Lafferty, run down to the machine shed. The combine’s acting up again, according to Corky, and the shop in town is overloaded. No one can look at the machine for three weeks at the earliest. Holy hell, how can you run a ranch like this?” Scowling and grumbling to himself, her father strode across the parking lot toward the machine shed.

Mason’s jaw hardened. He held the screen door open for Bliss. “Your old man is gonna give himself a stroke if he doesn’t calm down a little.”

“It’s just his way,” she said, but felt an unspoken tension in the cowboy walking beside her. His muscles were suddenly strung tight, his knuckles showing white around the handle of the trunk.

Hurrying through the cool interior of the house, she bumped shoulders with him a couple of times and nearly tripped over her feet at the contact. Being alone with him was nerve-racking. She reminded herself that he was just one of her father’s hands—a worker on the ranch. Right? So why did she feel instantly that there was something about him, something primitive and sexual, which bothered her and caused her already-flushed skin to break into beads of anxious perspiration? “You can put the trunk in the corner,” she said, opening the door of her room and indicating a spot near the small closet.

“Whatever you say, princess.”

She bristled at the name. “I’m not a princess.”

His lips twitched. “Hmm. Coulda fooled me.” He dropped the trunk on its end and hesitated long enough to make her uncomfortable. There was something in his eyes, something wickedly intriguing that warned her he was the kind of man to avoid; the kind of man a woman in her right mind wouldn’t trust. “Anything else?”