Charmed by His Love by Janet Chapman Page B

up the road to see Alec’s taillights disappearing around a curve, then looked back at Peg, who was halfway to her children. “Dammit, quit walking away from me.” He opened his driver’s door. “Okay, then,
you
drive.”
    She stopped and turned to him. “Only if you ride in the cargo bed.”
    “What!”
    “That’s the only way I’m putting my kids in your truck.”
    Christ, she was contrary. “God dammit,” he growled under his breath, turning and limping to the rear of the truck. “I didn’t do one damn thing to deserve this. Not one goddamned thing,” he muttered, hoisting himself onto the bumper and practically falling over the tailgate into the cargo bed.
    “Come on, guys, we’re riding,” Peg called out, running to the driver’s door with her children scrambling after her.
    Duncan settled against his duffel bag and turned up the collar on his jacket, grinning tightly at the little heathen kneeling on the backseat giving him the evil eye. Forget the long day; it was going to be a damn long two months.

Chapter Six

    Peg sat at the picnic table the boys had helped her drag down next to the beach and watched them alternating between using sticks to fling seaweed back into the water and stopping to watch the equipment working on the hillside across their … new cove. She in turn was alternating between keeping an eye on them and studying her copy of the agreement she had just signed with MacKeage Construction.
    It was all happening so fast, it didn’t seem real. Yesterday she’d been desperate enough to shoot a deer out of season, and today she was on the verge of being able to buy the rest of the materials to finish her house and also upgrade to a newer used van. And she would still have enough money left over to finally stop feeling like she was one second away from …
prostitution
, she thought with a grimace.
    Of all the crazy things to have said! When she’d climbed into her lonely bed last night, Peg hadn’t been able to stop remembering the look on Duncan’s face when she’d mixed up
destitution
and
prostitution
. His jaw may have gone slack, but she hadn’t missed the unholy gleam in his sharp green eyes that had immediately followed. She’d spent all night being hot and bothered by that gleam, and it had been all she could do to face him this morning without blushing to high heaven.That is, until she’d gotten a good look at his face and smelled his breath.
    Peg lifted her gaze to the excavator digging another test hole and saw Duncan standing off to the side talking to the logger he’d contracted. Oh, she hoped there was gravel up there, because if there was, then a good many of her troubles would be over. But if that horseback continued running west, all of those big fat checks would be going to her neighbors every Friday afternoon—assuming the Dearborn brothers were willing to give up growing pot on their land to sell the gravel beneath it.
    She’d had a couple of go-rounds with the two old coots who’d bought the rickety old shack a quarter mile up the road last spring. They’d started out neighborly enough, but not five months after they’d moved in, Evan and Carl had knocked on her door and accused Peg of sneaking over and stealing buds off their maturing plants—which had made her laugh so hard when they’d left that tears had streamed down her cheeks. But she sure as hell hadn’t been laughing a week later when she’d discovered the two idiots had set booby traps all through the woods around their illegal crop.
    Afraid the twins would get maimed—because what did little boys know about property lines when they were stalking squirrels with imaginary guns?—Peg had waited until she saw the brothers go into town one morning and had marched over and smashed their traps to smithereens. Then she’d cut down one of their pot plants and left it wilting on their doorstep, along with a note saying that she’d turn them in if they didn’t start growing their crop away