The Camden Cowboy. Victoria Pade

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СКАЧАТЬ didn’t strike her as strange that he hadn’t noticed her. He was replacing a section of fence that had collapsed somehow. His back was to her and to the road where she’d parked. Plus he was so far from the road that she doubted he’d even heard her car.

      Lacey’s right ankle buckled just then and she veered wildly to one side. She didn’t fall, but it was close, and she checked to make sure she hadn’t broken the heel off of her shoe.

      She hadn’t, so she continued on, focused on the man who was her goal.

      A grayish-white cowboy hat was her only view of him from the neck up, but below that he was dressed in a white crewneck T-shirt, jeans and cowboy boots. Lacey could tell that he was tall even from where she was—over six feet tall, she judged. And he had broad, broad shoulders that she watched expand when his massively muscled arms rose in the air, lifting a posthole digger from out of the hole he was working on.

      He gripped the handles of the X-shaped tool in his leather-work-gloved hands and he pivoted slightly to his left with it. He pressed the handles together to open the blue steel head at the opposite end, releasing the dirt he’d taken from the hole. Then he drew the handles apart, pivoted to his original stance and stabbed the closed head into the hole once more.

      As she approached, he stood with his legs apart. Long legs that were thick enough to test the denim of his jeans. Even from a distance she could tell that the twin pockets of those jeans cupped a rear end that rivaled the best she’d ever seen. And being in contact with the players on her father’s new football team—the Montana Monarchs—Lacey had seen some great ones.

      Another near tumble almost landed her on her own rear end but she managed to keep herself upright, returning her gaze to Seth Camden as she continued on.

      His back was straight and strong, and while the white T-shirt he was wearing wasn’t tight, it was damp with the sweat of working in the sun on an August day and it clung to him like a second skin. It clung to back muscles that any athlete she knew would have envied. Well-honed muscles that narrowed gracefully to a taut waist. And that rear end again …

      Okay, enough of that! she told herself, as she began to draw nearer. Near enough, she thought, to shout, “Excuse me …”

      But either she wasn’t near enough or her timing was bad because rather than respond, he again jabbed the posthole digger into the ground.

      Feeling the August heat herself, Lacey paused long enough to remove her suit jacket, fold it neatly in half and place it over her arm. Thank goodness her cotton blouse was sleeveless because it was blazing hot out there.

      Despite the heat and the terrain, when the daughter of football legend Morgan Kincaid set her mind to something, she followed through. So once she’d taken off her jacket, she forged ahead—this time keeping her gaze high enough to take in the man’s substantial neck peeking from beneath the brim of the cowboy hat.

      A Camden who was a cowboy—that seemed like a contradiction when the Camden family was renowned in the business world.

      Lacey’s own father had parlayed his professional football fame and fortune into an impressive empire that encompassed retail, rental and hotel properties, car dealerships and various other businesses along with his newest venture—owning an NFL expansion franchise.

      But Camden Incorporated? If Camden was like a giant, lush bowl of fruit, the Kincaid Corporation would equal one small stem of grapes on a single cluster in the Camden bowl.

      The stores that bore the Camden name were the superstores of all superstores. With multiple locations in every state and in several other countries, they had no equals. The Camden stores put under one roof almost every item and service the consumer wanted or needed at the lowest prices that could be had. They advertised that an entire house could be built, finished, furnished, landscaped and lived in for a lifetime without the owner ever needing to step foot in another store. Even banking, legal and health needs could be seen to there.

      But behind the stores themselves, the Camdens owned much of what supplied the products they sold—factories, manufacturers, farms, ranches, dairies, timberland, lumber mills, bottling plants, and numerous other production-level businesses and industries that facilitated their low prices. They also had a hand in distribution centers and had now added a network of medical, dental and vision clinics to each store to go along with pharmacies that offered low-cost prescriptions—because they even owned pharmaceutical companies and research facilities.

      There just wasn’t much the Camdens didn’t have a hand in, so it was surprising to find one of the ten grandchildren who now ran Camden Incorporated acting like a small-town cowboy.

      Not that she knew the intricacies of the family, because she didn’t. An entire section of a course she’d taken in college had been devoted to studying the business model of Camden Incorporated, but when it came to the Camdens themselves, only H. J. Camden—Seth Camden’s great-grandfather and the founder of the business—and H.J.’s son, Hank, who would have been Seth Camden’s grandfather, had been discussed.

      The present-day Camdens tended to crop up occasionally in the news in conjunction with charities they sponsored. But beyond that they kept a very low profile, and Lacey couldn’t name them or what any of them did.

      Still, it seemed strange that a member of a family like that would be out here working in the hot sun digging postholes.

      “Excuse me …” she tried again.

      But no sooner had the words come out of her mouth than she raised one foot to take another step and lost her shoe completely, costing her precious balance.

      In fact this time she pitched forward, her jacket went flying and only at the last second did she catch herself and somehow manage to keep from landing face-first in the dirt.

      “Whoa! Nice save!”

      Oh, sure, now he noticed her.

      Lacey stood straight again, brushing her hands together to get the dirt off of them and retrieving her shoe with a yank to get the heel unstuck. Then she brushed the dirt off her bare foot, replaced her shoe and rubbed her hands together again.

      When she was finally put back together she looked up to find that Seth Camden—if that was who he was—had abandoned his hole digger and gloves, and was picking up her jacket. It had flown off her arm and landed on the ground a few feet away.

      He grabbed her jacket, shook the soil from it and then stood up to look in her direction.

      The Camden blue eyes—Lacey did recall mention of those somewhere. Now she knew why they were noteworthy; when her gaze met his, the sight of bright, brilliant cobalt eyes staring quizzically back at her was something to see.

      And since they went with a face that was drop-dead gorgeous enough to steal her breath, for a moment all Lacey could do was stare.

      With his sharply drawn, chiseled features, the man before her couldn’t have been more handsome if he’d tried. He had a squarish jaw and chin, a perfectly shaped mouth with lips that were full but not too full, a just-long-enough nose. And those eyes peering at her from beneath a straight, strong brow.

      “Are you all right?” he asked in a deep voice that was so masculine it made very girly goose bumps erupt along the surface of her skin, even in the summer heat.

      “Oh. Fine. I’m fine,” Lacey said, coming to her СКАЧАТЬ