The Rancher Meets His Match

by Patricia McLinn

  Dax glared at his sister, who appeared totally unaffected as she leaned comfortably against the counter. He made an effort to keep his tone reasonable when he asked, “What are you talking about, Will?”

  “I’m talking about when I go to college.”

  “That’s not for years yet.”

  “Less than three,” June said.

  “Fine,” Dax snapped. “Less than three years. So what?”

  He’d meant it for June, but Will answered, and sounded a bit agitated. “So what are you going to do then? You’ll be all alone.”

  “I can handle the ranch.”

  “That’s not what I mean. What about . . .” Will gave a wave of his hand, obviously trying to find words. “What about people?”

  “I see people,” Dax protested.

  “Not if they see you first,” June said.

  “June—”

  Dax’s warning died abruptly as Will cut across his words. “Aunt June’s right. And you keep making it worse. Getting on the wrong side of Sheriff Milano, and Jessa and Cambria yesterday. You already snap at Aunt June, you won’t talk to Grandma and you drove Hannah off—”

  “I didn’t drive Hannah off.”

  “Yeah, you did. She told me. She said women don’t always want to leave, but sometimes it’s what’s decided between the man and the woman. I know she didn’t want to leave—everybody says so—so it was you who decided. You drove her off.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “The hell you didn’t!”

  “Will! Don’t you talk to me that way.”

  “Fine. Then I won’t talk to you at all.” He jammed the remnants of jelly-slathered toast in his mouth, leaving a smear beside his mouth. But Dax felt no urge to chuckle at his man-child, especially when the slam of the back door reverberated into silence.

  Dax threw up his hands, then slapped them back to his thighs. “What is the matter with everyone?”

  June brought her cup down to the counter with a thud. “Not everyone—you. You’re an infectious black cloud. And you have been ever since—’’

  “Don’t say it.”

  “—Hannah left,” June finished grimly over his warning. “Where are you going?”

  “I’ve got a ranch to run. I’ve got haying to finish and cattle to move.” He grabbed his jacket and kept going. June’s voice dogged him, anyway.

  “Well, I hope it helps you get yourself straightened out. In case you didn’t notice, now you don’t have your son talking to you, either. The way you’re going, pretty soon the cows won’t put up with you!”

  * * * *

  The trouble with haying was it left a man on a tractor using only the little bit of his brain needed to keep the thing moving straight and the hayer from fouling. And that left entirely too much time to think.

  The trouble with moving cattle was it left a man on a horse who knew its business so well that it could spot a heifer about to bolt, ease her back into the herd and keep plodding away without the man having to do any more than not fall off. And that left entirely too much time to think.

  The trouble with both haying and moving cattle was Hannah rode along with him. He saw her face, felt her touch, smelled her skin and heard her voice. Especially he heard her voice.

  If you and your mother could talk . . .

  I’m glad Sally came to the dinner. For Will’s sake and for hers.

  Will’s sake?

  Was he hurting Will?

  Hannah thought so.

  Not forgiving her is hurting you, Dax. It’s even hurting Will. You’ve got a chance to make the present and future so much better than the past. Give your mother that chance. Give yourself that chance. You deserve it.

  He deserved it? Hannah said he did.

  But with Will there was no question. Will deserved everything in his life being as good as Dax could make it.

  Why was Will having such trouble making the step of asking Theresa for a real date? Dax had done that—he’d asked Hannah out. That had been the whole idea, to let Will see his father showing interest in a woman, asking her out, going on dates with her. He’d done all that. And more.

  Ah, maybe seeing what followed had Will holding back. Maybe Hannah’s leaving . . .

  I know she didn’t want to leave—everybody says so—so it was you who decided.

  Was it his fault she’d left? Did that mean she might come back?

  His mother had tried to bridge the canyon between them.

  The thought hit him so hard he hauled back on Strider’s reins, and the horse shook his head indignantly.

  You need to tear down the wall you’ve set up between you . . .

  You need to start somehow.

  * * * *

  “Oh, Dax!” Sally Randall’s eyes widened when she saw who stood outside the back door. She opened it quickly. “Come in, come in. It’s a snow’s-coming wind blowing out there.”

  “I know. I’ve got that replacement storm window in the truck. It finally came.” He stepped in, then hesitated as if he’d never been in his sister’s house before.

  “June’s not here, Dax. She’s got a flight coming in.”

  “I know.” He cleared his throat. And again. It still felt tight “I came to see you.”

  “Oh. Oh.” Her hands fluttered to her chest. “Then you better sit down. Would you like some coffee?”

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He took one of the chairs and deliberately didn’t watch his mother’s movements, concentrating solely on the mug as it was placed before him. When she sat on the bench at right angles to him instead of on the chair across the table, his muscles twitched as if urging him to get up and move from her nearness.

  But he’d come this far. He wasn’t a quitter.

  “Why’d you leave me when you left the ranch?”

  She sucked in a quick breath, but she spoke slow and calm, as if she’d been practicing the words for a long time. “I thought it was best.”

  He snorted in disgust. “That’s what you tell a seven-year-old and maybe he tries to believe it. But not anymore. I’m a man, and I want the truth.”

  “I’ve told you the truth before, Dax, but you’ve never listened. Not when you were seven, not when you were sixteen, not when you were twenty-one and had a baby to raise on your own and I wanted to help you more than anything in the world. Leaving you at the ranch was the hardest thing I have done in this life. Harder than leaving my husband. Harder than burying my first son. But I searched my heart and as much as I wanted you with June and me, I knew that doing that wouldn’t make any of us happy. Because you would have hated it, and that would have made me miserable in the end, too.”

  He held his disbelief in silence, but she seemed to hear it.

  “Do you remember before June and I left for good? Do you remember the summer we stayed with my sister in Denver? I brought you with me then. I thought maybe by getting away for a spell your father and I could . . . We stayed more than two months. You hated it. I thought you’d get used to it. I thought you wouldn’t miss the space and the animals and the land. You were only six. I thought it couldn’t be that deep in you already.”

  He had a memory, faint and drifting, of white curtains blowing in the breeze, of strange smells, of a loneliness that seemed to come from his bones, of deep, racking sobs that shook his soul.

  “I couldn’t bear to see you so unhappy. So we went back. But your father and I couldn’t get back to where we’d once been. I knew we never would. That time when I left, I knew I couldn’t take you away from the ranch. I couldn’t do that to you.”

  “So you left me with a man you hated.”

  “Oh, Dax, I never hated your father.” Her distress was too real to be disbelieved. “Never. I couldn’t live with him anymore. But I still loved him too much to take you away from him, when you wanted that life, too. If you hadn’t loved the ranch so much, if you hadn’t idolized him so much . . . But how could I separate you from the two things you loved the most? How could I take away from him th
e one person he loved more than anyone else on this earth? You and the land were the only things that brought him any peace. I know in my heart he hoped he’d get killed when he reenlisted after Drew died.”

  Had his father loved him? He’d been so sure for so long that he hadn’t. And he’d always known his father loved Drew, so with a child’s logic, he’d known it was his fault he wasn’t loved. He’d grown to a man and discarded the logic, but the pain and the doubt hadn’t gone. And he’d never considered it might have been his father’s pain that kept him from loving too deep, or maybe just from showing it.

  “He called me that a lot.” Odd, saying it now didn’t hurt.

  “What?”

  “Drew.”

  “Oh, Dax.”

  She reached out. He felt the old urge to pull away. He didn’t. Her touch fluttered against his temple and he realized her hand was shaking.

  He looked down at her and was shocked to see how wrinkled her skin was, how faded her eyes had become. He hadn’t really looked at her in years. She no longer was the dark-haired woman with the smiling eyes of the photograph he’d kept deep in his bottom drawer, the woman sitting on a porch step with both arms around a little boy and her check pressed lovingly to the top of his head.

  She was crying.

  “You haven’t let me touch you for a long, long time.”

  He hadn’t ever known if he was the boy in the picture or if it was Drew. Now it didn’t matter.

  He slid onto the bench beside her, put his arms around the frail shoulders, and when she put her head against his shoulder, he rested his cheek lightly against the gray hair. A burning in his eyes made him blink twice, three times. A tear slid down, and then a second.

  Later, still sitting side by side, she asked, “What are you going to do about Hannah?”

  “What’s there to do? She left.”

  “Like Elaine? Like me? Is that what you’re thinking, Dax? Because you’re wrong.”

  “I don’t . . .” The denial faded under his mother’s gaze.

  “There’s a world’s worth of difference between leaving and not being asked to stay.”

  He hadn’t asked Hannah to stay. The knowledge hung there between them.

  “Will said I drove her off. But that’s not true. I didn’t make her leave.”

  “Are you sure of that? Did you give her a choice?”

  Had he?

  “Would you have still left if he’d asked you to stay?”

  His mother put her hand over his where it rested on his thigh. “If William could have asked me to stay, I wouldn’t have had to leave.”

  * * * *

  Dax walked over to the four-wheel drive that pulled to a stop by the open barn door. Boone sat behind the wheel, with Cambria in the passenger seat, the seat belt across the mound of her pregnancy. After greetings, Boone got right to business.

  “Dax, I’ve got a proposition for you if you can get away from the ranch for a while. Can you?”

  “Depends.” Fall was the quietest time on the ranch, with the cattle down in the home meadows, but the grazing still good enough that he didn’t have to worry about feeding them.

  “On what I have to offer?” Boone grinned. “I think you might be interested. Cambria and I are heading back to North Carolina. Trouble is, we’ve got the two vehicles to get back there, and I don’t want Cambria driving alone so close to her due date.”

  “No reason I couldn’t drive,” Cambria grumbled. Then she seemed to catch herself. “Not that I don’t think Boone has a good idea where it concerns you, Dax.”

  “Too close,” Boone said firmly. “So we’re going to drive back in the four-wheel drive, and that leaves the truck. If you’d be willing to drive the truck to North Carolina, we’ll pay for your expenses during the trip, put you up a few days at the other end and give you a first-class ticket to fly back.”

  North Carolina. Hannah.

  Their ploy was as obvious as a thunderstorm boiling across the sky.

  “When?”

  “Up to you, as long as the truck’s there after the baby comes.”

  “And what are you going to do without wheels until then, Boone?” Cambria’s question was sugar over steel.

  “Cambria, I don’t think you should be driving—”

  “Too bad. The doctor says it’s fine. I’m indulging you on this trip back to North Carolina, but if you think I’m going to let you wrap me up like an invalid—” She caught herself. “But we can talk about that later. It’s Dax we should be talking to now.”

  Boone turned to him. “So, what about it, Dax?”

  Dax had heard their wrangling, but his mind had been caught on one image. Hannah. Trying to smile as she said goodbye. Then a wavery image of her face framed in the airplane window, growing smaller and smaller.

  If William could have asked me to stay, I wouldn’t have had to leave.

  “I’ll think about it.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for the offer.”

  “But—”

  Boone overrode his wife’s objection. “Good enough.” Boone shook his hand as his mouth twisted in a wry smile. “One last thing.”

  “Yeah?”

  “There’s one expense we won’t cover.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Speeding tickets.”

  * * * *

  Hannah shifted the phone to her shoulder so she could transfer clean glasses from the dishwasher to the cabinet and repeated, “Mandy, I am fine. A little post-vacation letdown is natural.”

  “You don’t sound fine. Ever since you came back from Wyoming you’ve sounded strange. I thought that trip would do you good. Now I regret encouraging you to go. I mean, you sound worse than when you and Richard broke up. You sound like—”

  “Mandy.” The warning went unheeded.

  “Like your heart’s broken.”

  Hannah squeezed her eyes shut. Mandy had one thing right. This pain was worse than when she had separated from Richard. She’d been married to Richard, yet two weeks with Dax had brought her richer happiness, deeper change and, yes, sharper pain.

  She’d made the same mistake with both men, though— thinking she could change them. She’d tried to change Richard into the person she’d thought he could be because that was the phantom she thought she loved. But Dax was no phantom. She’d fallen in love with the true man—flawed and magnificent. And so very wary of trusting love.

  If he could have changed, maybe he could have believed in her love. Maybe he could have loved her. And maybe they could have been happy together for a lifetime instead of two weeks. If . . .

  Mandy’s monologue wound to a halt, but all Hannah retained were the final words, “. . . coming home this weekend.”

  “Oh, no, you aren’t. I won’t have you missing your first Homecoming weekend. You go to the parties and football game and have a wonderful time.”

  “How can I when my dear sister is so unhappy?”

  Hannah put plenty of pretend exasperation behind a sigh. “Are you sure you didn’t switch your major to theater and forget to tell me? This is way overboard on the dramatics, even for you, Bernie.”

  A faint chuckle at the nickname short for Sarah Bernhardt rewarded her, but then Mandy hit her with a solemn, “Hannah, tell me the truth. Tell me about this guy Dax that Ethan said you were dating.”

  Hannah opened her mouth to offer her sister more vague reassurances, then closed it. Tell me the truth. The truth was how you built trust. She’d respected that in Dax; how could she not give the same to her sister? So she told Mandy the truth. She told her about Dax and how she’d fallen in love with him.

  “Oh, Hannah, I’m so sorry he broke your heart. You must wish you’d never gone out there.”

  “Mandy, he didn’t break my heart. If it’s broken, it’s my responsibility. He told me how things were from the start. And do you know, I have absolutely no regrets.” She surprised herself as well as Mandy, discovering the truth of the words as she said them. “Not about meeting him and not about
loving him. I learned a lot from Dax. Including how valuable a family’s love is.”

  “I wish I could meet him.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t happen.”

  “Do you have a picture at least?”

  “I haven’t had my film developed yet.” She hadn’t been ready to see that picture of Dax at Shell Canyon. Fuzzy blur or perfect depiction, either would have reminded her it was all she had left of the original.

  But maybe not. Maybe what had just happened with Mandy showed she also had an element of Dax inside her.

  “I’ll show you at Thanksgiving.”

  “We could come sooner, if you need us.”

  Eventually Hannah persuaded her softhearted and hard-headed sister that having her here would not help. She just wished, Hannah thought as she hung up, that she could shake the feeling that this post-vacation letdown would last a long, long time.

  Hannah tucked one pumpkin against her hip and balanced the other awkwardly across her forearm to free a hand to open the front door. The pumpkins would join the pot of chrysanthemums. Seasonal decorations had always perked her up in the past. Maybe she’d add some Indian corn on the front—

  Dax.

  One pumpkin hit the porch floor with a dull cracking sound. The other rolled away from her toward the steps.

  Dax Randall stood on the bottom step, looking up at her. She was too stunned to do anything more than stare and too fearful that if she moved it would be to throw herself in his arms.

  He righted the pumpkin, then came up the final steps to stand two feet away from her. Close enough to touch. But never close enough to hold on to if he wanted to walk away.

  “Hello, Hannah.”

  “Dax? How did you get here?”

  “Drove.” For an instant the quirk at the side of his mouth flickered to life, then it died. “Brought Boone’s truck so Boone and Cambria could drive together.”

  “I see.”

  Dax filled the strained silence by saying, “Interesting country.”

  She smiled wryly. “I think that qualifies as damning with faint praise, Dax. You don’t like the Blue Ridge Mountains.”

  “I didn’t say that. It’s pretty country. Lots of trees.” He glanced up, as if expecting the dark shadows of the arching branches to have moved closer to his head. “Trees are sort of an event in parts of Wyoming.”