Taming Clay

by Raeann Blake

  She nudged Charlie’s arms and said, “Does anybody have a video camera? We might need to document this for future reference.”

  Charlie nodded and laughed with the others but he was keeping an eye on Lynn, too. She always made sure it was when Hailey wasn’t looking, but she cut several disgusted looks up to her then back down to her plate.

  When Hailey took the last bite she rose as she swallowed the last of her coffee then glanced at Lynn.

  “Are you about done?”

  “I know the way back,” Lynn snapped.

  Hailey stopped and turned back to her. “I’m sure you do. We’re ridin’ the same area. They sent us in together. I thought it might look good if we showed back up together.”

  Lynn’s jaw clenched several times before she rose and muttered, “Whatever.”

  Hailey shrugged her shoulders and walked back to the mess area. Shack waved a hand at her and said, “Knock some of that dirt off of you when you get there. Give that from the second half of the trip a place to settle.”

  Hailey laughed as she dropped her dishes in the galvanized tub. “I’ll do that. See you at the end.”

  She didn’t wait for Lynn, but she knew she was right behind her. She led Soldier back a little and mounted him in one swift motion and walked him out of the camp then waited for Lynn to move her horse into a canter before she urged Soldier to follow suit. When they reached the herd, Lynn dropped off where Laine was positioned and Hailey kept riding until she reached Cole.

  “Beef stew. Go ahead,” she said as she took up position without looking at him.

  “Thanks. See you later,” he called back. He rode to where Laine was waiting and they rode into camp together. They each went silently through the line until they stopped in front of Shack and looked up at him with a silent question. The steady gaze said he had something to tell them. Laine nodded slightly and jerked his head for Clay to follow him. They had just sat down when Jean Ann stopped and crouched in front of them.

  “You’re doin’ the right thing. Stop worryin’ so much. If they’re gonna get into it, it’ll happen whether you let them work together or not. Quit doggin’ ‘em and let them do their jobs.”

  “Hailey tell you to stay that?” Clay snapped.

  Jean Ann barked out a short laugh and met Clay’s eyes squarely. “Sonny, you ought to know by now that nobody tells me what to say. Just some friendly advice, that’s all.”

  Laine waited until she walked away before he looked back at Clay. “Man, why do you jump straight to the conclusion that anything that comes up is her fault?”

  Clay shook his head and said, “I don’t know, Laine. I guess because I want to trust her, but I just don’t know how.”

  “Well, you better figure out how if you wanna keep her. She doesn’t strike me as the type of woman who will settle for half a man. You either give her all of you, or you won’t be givin’ her any of you,” Laine whispered when others moved closer.

  “And you know all about that, do you?”

  “I know enough to know that,” he said then stopped talking when one of the men settled directly beside him.

  They ate in silence and both hung back drinking a cup of coffee until most of the others had gone back to the herd. Shack finally motioned to them to follow him and walked a short distance away. He explained what had happened, the things that had been said.

  “Goddammit,” Clay growled. “She shouldn’t just confront her directly in front of the whole group like that. It makes it look like…”

  Shack held up his hand and said, “Whoa, son. You’re missing the bigger picture. She didn’t confront Lynn. Lynn took the first shot. Hailey just stood her ground, that’s all. She didn’t take any pot shots at her. Just told her straight out that if she owed her an apology she’d get it. Even said she was right about the chip on her shoulder. Whatever that was about. What Lynn said challenged her. All Hailey did was put her in a spot that there was nothing that she could come back with that wouldn’t knock her own self down a peg in front of the others. You can ask her all day long not to start something. You can’t ask her not to stand up for herself.”

  “I’m not trying to ask her to do that. But dammit it doesn’t look good for somebody in her position…”

  “Clay Cardell, don’t you finish that sentence. What you’re just about to say is exactly what it sounded like you were jumping on Lynn last night for saying. Listen to yourself,” Shack said sternly.

  Clay started to protest then clamped his mouth shut and ran his hand across the back of his neck when he realized he was right. “Yeah. I guess you’re right. Let’s get this herd movin’ or it’ll be after dark when we get there.”

  Shack nodded and went back to packing away the wagon as Laine and Clay both mounted and rode out. A couple of hours after they got the herd moving again, Clay caught up with Laine and rode beside him silently.

  “I guess you want me to grunt?” Laine finally asked.

  “You know…”

  “Oh, Lord,” Laine muttered then laughed when Clay shot him a narrowed gaze.

  “If we go with the top hand idea, whoever you pick is gonna need your office. That means you’re gonna need a new one. What about it being in the house whether you decide to move in there or not. I mean think about it, my office is in there. Hailey’s office is there. Why shouldn’t all of the management offices be together? Could you do what you need to do from there?”

  Laine thought for several minutes and said, “I don’t know, Clay. It’s a pretty good walk from the stables to the house to make it fifty or sixty times a day. That’s about how many times I’m in and out of my office on any given day. Of course that would drop some if I’m not managing the day-to-day affairs of the hands, but it would still be a lot of times. I’m in and out all the time to go check on this thing or that then back in there to put something in the computer or look something up.”

  “Hmmm. I didn’t think about that. Maybe we need to build a new office in the stables then.”

  “That might be better. We’ve got that spot right next to my office that’s not being used. It’s small but not much smaller than mine.”

  “Where the tack used to be?” Clay asked.

  Laine nodded. “Yeah. Until our supply outgrew the size of that room. We’d need a whole new office set up. Desk, chair, computer, printer, the whole works.”

  Clay waved his hand and said, “I’m not worried about that. Hailey can handle all of that.”

  Laine blew out a short laugh and said, “I don’t know. You think we should let her go into that electronics store alone again?”

  Clay grinned and nodded. “Hell, yeah. Got a good price, didn’t she?”

  “Well, yeah. Maybe we should have Davey call up that blonde. You know, give them some advance warning. They might wanna sell tickets or something.”

  Clay burst out laughing and nodded. “Now that you mention, I might wanna buy one myself.”

  “I’d pay for one. Might be a little anti-climactic though. After the first round, he probably won’t be so quick to dismiss her the second time around if he sees her coming. Maybe we should pick a different store this time. Just so we can get the full effect, I mean.”

  Clay immediately shook his head with a little grin. “Uh-uh. If there’s one thing I have learned in the few days she’s been here, it’s not to tell her how to do that job. No, sir. She can pick the store.”

  “She really knows what she’s doing, doesn’t she?” Laine asked seriously.

  “She does. It felt so odd to have somebody just walk in and take over. A little unsettling too, I guess. I mean there I was struggling with all that stuff and she walked in and started telling me what we should do and how we should do it. Don’t get me wrong. I bowed up about it a little at first, but it didn’t take me long to figure out that she was right. Before I could even blink, she had the bills straightened out and what’s not paid is lined up and ready. She started talking about forecasting reports and trending reports. Hell, I didn�
��t even know that software had reporting. And that backup drive…can you imagine what we would have gone through if we’d just suddenly lost everything on that computer?”

  Laine shook his head and said, “I don’t even want to think about it. It never crossed my mind.”

  “It didn’t mine either. When I bought the computers, they tried to sell me on a backup drive for it and I blew ’em off. I figured they were just trying to add to the sale, you know like a car salesman does. I never gave it another thought after that. I swear she turned three shades of gray when she found out we didn’t have a backup of any kind.”

  “Probably about the same color I did when she mentioned it to me and it dawned on me what would happen if that thing just died on us. Can I tell you something?”

  Clay turned to look at him without saying anything and Laine grinned broadly at him. “Do you know that you’ve said more in the last ten minutes than I’ve heard you say in the entire time I’ve been on this ranch?”

  Clay snorted and jerked his thumb to the back of the herd. “It’s her fault. She came in for supper that first night and started rattling about something and I haven’t been able to shut her up since.”

  Laine threw his head back and roared then slapped Clay on the shoulder. “That’s it. You haven’t been able to talk since she got here and now you’re making up for it.”

  “Damn right,” Clay said then grinned when Laine laughed again.

  When he could Laine looked back at him and said, “Okay, tell me about these reports. What kind of reports do we have that we didn’t know about?”

  “Oh, you should get her started talking about that. She said that if we had been using those reports that we would have seen the spike in the monthly costs right away when Yates jacked up those prices. The way she said it was that we can use them to chart our expenses and compare month to month, same time period over different years. All kinds of stuff. You ask her about it. I swear she rattled off stuff so fast I couldn’t keep up with half of it. Well to be honest, I probably wasn’t listening to about half of it. I was more interested in watching the way her face looks when she gets started talking about it. She’s like this wind-up toy except instead of winding down, the longer she goes the faster she gets.”

  “Can I tell her you said that?” Laine asked quickly.

  “Absolutely not,” Clay growled but then laughed with him.

  “So, I shouldn’t tell her?” Laine asked again trying to hide the grin on his face.

  Clay opened his mouth then clamped it shut and let his eyes drift closed when he heard the creak of saddle leather on the other side of him.

  “Oh, damn. She’s right beside me, isn’t she?”

  “Yes, I am. A wind-up toy, huh?” she asked quietly. She was smiling at Laine but quickly dropped her face into a frown when Clay’s head turned towards her.

  “Now, Hailey…I meant that in the best way possible,” he started then stopped when the laughter came out and she kicked Soldier into a canter to move on up the herd.

  “Goddamn,” Clay breathed and jerked his hat off and slapped Laine on the arm with it. “You couldn’t have told me she was there, asshole?”

  “And miss the look on your face? No damn way.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Well you look a damn sight better,” Shack said with a wide grin. Hailey smiled back and took the cup of coffee he was holding out to her.

  “Thanks. I feel lighter anyway. And Soldier’s not brown anymore,” she said then took a sip of the coffee.

  “Neither are you,” Charlie said from behind her then laughed when Hailey turned amused eyes to him.

  “I guess we were pretty covered with dirt. But it was so much fun.” She stopped when she saw Clay standing at the outer edge of the camp, just looking around the area.

  “What’s he doing?” she asked Shack.

  “I can tell you that,” Jean Ann said as she walked up beside her. “This is kind of like coming home for him, too. Have they told you anything about his daddy?”

  Hailey nodded and said, “Yeah. Some.”

  “When things got to be too much for him, he’d sneak off up here to get away. That pond over there in those trees where you cleaned up is where he used to camp out when he’d sneak up here. We knew he was over there, but he wasn’t hurtin’ anything. So, we left him alone. I’m sure we didn’t know all the times he was here, but I knew when he was it was really bad at home.”

  Hailey sighed and turned to look back at Jean Ann. “You knew his parents?”

  “Yeah, I knew them. Clayton Cardell was the coldest bastard I ever met in my life,” she said harshly.

  “And his mom?”

  Jean Ann sighed and leaned back against the tree they were standing beside. “She was…broken. That’s about the only way I can describe her. He broke her. I didn’t know her before they were married. She wasn’t from here. When they first married, she was a bright and sunny young woman. It didn’t take long before he took away that light in her soul. There just isn’t any other word to explain how she was towards the end. Broken.”

  “How could she leave him and Kathy with somebody like that?”

  Jean Ann cut her eyes to Shack and shrugged her shoulders without looking back at Hailey again. Hailey looked between them then closed her mouth. There was obviously more there that they both either knew or suspected but didn’t want to say. And she was sure that she shouldn’t ask.

  “You two gonna gab all night or do you plan to eat some of this chili?” Shack asked quickly.

  “Don’t rush me, old man. I’ll get there,” Jean Ann grumbled then winked at Hailey and pushed away from the tree.

  “Old man, my ass. I ain’t all that much older than you are, old woman,” Shack shot back.

  Jean Ann laughed and Hailey grinned at both of them. It was easy to see that they both enjoyed the jabs back and forth that they kept up as she and Hailey moved down the line.

  She glanced back at Clay when she settled between Charlie and Davey. He had walked over to the trees now and was leaned back against one with his eyes closed. At least she thought his eyes were closed. It was pretty close to dark now. The sky had already faded to a deep purple and was turning into the inky color that it always became just before night closed in around them.

  “He’s alright,” Charlie said softly. “He does that every time we come up here. I’m not sure what he’s thinkin’ about. Maybe he’s hearing or seeing things from another time. But he does that for a while and then he’ll come back and join us.”

  Hailey nodded slightly and forced herself to turn her head back around to start eating. She glanced once in Lynn’s direction and saw her watching him steadily, too. They hadn’t spoken again for the rest of the day. She didn’t know if she’d done the right thing at lunch or not. Having never worked with women before, she didn’t know if you were supposed to treat them differently or not. But she knew that she didn’t want them to treat her differently so she wasn’t going to treat Lynn that way either. She’d said the same thing to her that she would have said to any one of the men. If it was wrong, then there wasn’t anything she could do about that. But she had challenged her to some extent. Maybe part of it had been her own temper, but mostly it was just a determination to let her know that she wasn’t going to intimidate her.

  When she glanced back at her again, neither the expression on her face nor the direction of her gaze had changed. She cut her eyes to Jean Ann then over to where Laine had just sat down. Jean Ann was paying attention to her supper, but she found Laine’s eyes fastened on Lynn as well.

  “Lynn…something wrong with your chili?” he asked lowly.

  Hailey quickly dropped her eyes and didn’t look back up again.

  “No, sir. Nothing at all,” Lynn said evenly.

  He waited until she’d taken several bites before he turned his head and glanced up at Clay once then started eating.

  Clay blew out a long sigh and let his eyes open slowly. He never came here without f
eeling a mix of emotions. This particular spot gave him some measure of peace. It had been his place to hide and get away from the constant criticism and deliberate belittling at the hands of his father. But at the same time, it brought it all back again. He could still hear his voice, every word that cut deep no matter how hard he tried not to let it. No matter how many times he came here, it was always the same.

  He let his eyes drift across all of the hands gathered around eating now. They had moved the herd farther into the area and left them there. The grass was lush and plentiful. They would be fat and happy when they came back to move them again. He could still hear them in the distance but they always came back to this spot to make their camp for the night.