Erin's Way

by Laura Browning

  Erin punched him in the arm. “Don’t be dense. You know I mean more than that.”

  Sam glanced over his shoulder before he gently rubbed the back of his hand over her cheek. “I know.”

  Erin’s breath caught at the look on his face. Was she reading too much into what she saw there? Because to her it looked like a whole lot more than a you’re-so-hot look.

  “I think we’re ready,” Jenny said, interrupting her thoughts. “Ev, have Melodie bring Peter in, and Joseph can say the blessing.”

  The meal was filled with chatter. Sam and Stoner began discussing the calving season, while Evan and Joseph talked basketball. To Erin’s right, Catherine helped Melodie with her plate and kept one eye on Peter who sat in his high chair gurgling and playing with toys that he inevitably carried straight to his mouth. Tabby and Jenny discussed how Holly was doing carrying her twins.

  “You should talk to Rachel Hastings,” Catherine said to Erin out of the blue. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it sooner.”

  Erin tilted her head. Where had she heard that name before? Hastings. “The kid at the computer store mentioned her when I bought the reading software.”

  Catherine brightened. “So you’re working on it?”

  Erin nodded. “I—I have a voice recognition program embedded in the computer, but I practice with the reading program.”

  “Is it helping?”

  Erin shrugged. “Sometimes I think so. Then there are some days the words just seem to jumble in front of me.”

  “You should talk to Rachel,” Tabby said. “I met her last fall before I quit teaching. She teaches Freshman English and a reading intervention class. She’s a certified reading specialist, and I know she did her dissertation on dyslexia intervention strategies. Besides that, you’d like her.” Tabby’s grin turned mischievous. “She’s tiny, just like you and Jenny.”

  “So speaks the Amazon woman.” Jenny laughed.

  “Are you talking about Rachel Crawley?” Sam asked from the other end of the table.

  Catherine nodded. “Yes, I believe that was her maiden name. Do you know her?”

  Sam chuckled. “Not that well. She was a freshman in high school when I was a senior. A real nerd—two years ahead of herself and complete with coke bottle glasses. It always seemed like Luke—Jake’s older brother—had to run interference for her.”

  Erin gaped at them all. “You want me, the class idiot, to hook up with a freaking genius? Oh yeah, that will make me comfortable.”

  Tabby frowned. “Rachel’s not at all like that. And she could help you, Erin.”

  “I wish I’d known,” Joseph commented. “She was in church this morning.”

  “Oh I hate I missed her,” Tabby remarked. “That would have been perfect.”

  “That was always part of the problem, as I recall,” Sam said. “Rachel was easy to overlook, except for those eyes of hers. Purple as pansies. Luke Allred sure noticed ‘em.”

  “Not enough to stick around,” Evan commented.

  Sam shrugged. “Things change. Jake says Luke’s veterinary practice is very successful. We were really close up until he got married. Then we kind of lost touch. You know how it is. You get busy. Life happens.”

  As the conversation drifted back again to finances, Erin absently munched on her food and listened. The conversation turned toward a prominent pharmaceutical company, and her interest perked up.

  “I wouldn’t invest in that company right now,” Erin interjected after a few minutes. Four pairs of male eyes turned to stare at her. Erin grinned. “Their flagship drug is about to go generic, so you can expect them to take a big hit in the market in the next couple of weeks. Of course, you could wait for their stock price to bottom out, then buy. They’re expected to make an announcement within two months of a breakthrough on a new drug to substantially reduce the length and severity of common cold symptoms. At that point, I would expect their stock to double and split at the very least. So if you’ll be patient enough to wait for the price to tank, you could see an enormous ROI down the road.”

  Her father stared at her as if she had suddenly grown a second head. “How do you know all this?”

  Erin set her silverware down and looked at her father. Sucking in a deep breath, she realized she might as well get it all out. “It’s what I do when I’m not cooking, pulling calves, or shoveling sh…” Her glance landed on Melodie’s interested expression. “…poop.”

  Sam coughed. “Actually, you listen to the financial news on the radio while you cook and clean stalls like most people listen to music.”

  Erin grinned. “You’re right. Habit, I guess. Look, Daddy. I might not be able to read, but I can listen. So I do, and now that I have the voice software on my laptop, I read that way. Captain Rick urged me to get the computer set up after I gave him a couple of tips, then turned his portfolio over to me to manage along with mine.”

  “You have a portfolio?” her father inquired in a stunned tone.

  “And how has that worked out?” Evan asked curiously.

  Erin shrugged. “I do okay,” she mumbled.

  Everyone stared at her. For several seconds, the only sound in the kitchen was Peter chattering to himself.

  “Dare I ask how okay?” Stoner ventured.

  “Daddy!” Erin flushed. When everyone continued to stare, she shifted. “I tripled Rick’s portfolio in six months. It’s worth about one point five million right now.”

  “Holy sh…Toledo,” Stoner finished with a glance at his granddaughter. “And you?”

  “Mine’s worth more than that,” Erin admitted. Maybe this was something that should make her feel special, but Erin wasn’t at all comfortable standing out in a positive way. That came with expectations, and she had a long history of failing to meet anyone’s expectations.

  Stoner’s silverware clattered. “You’re a millionaire?”

  “On paper,” Erin protested.

  “Will you take on more clients? Like all of us?” Evan asked quietly into the silence.

  Everyone was watching her and nodding. Erin gulped. It was one thing to play with her own money. She had made extremely high-risk decisions that could have left her broke. Rick too, though she had been more conservative with him. The thought of handling her family’s investments made her quake. It was a game, not something serious. No expectations and no pressure.

  “I…I…” Erin jumped up from the table and fled. She had gone from being an idiot freak right to the other end of the spectrum and didn’t know how to handle it.

  * * * *

  Sam threw down his napkin in disgust. “Now look what you’ve done!”

  “Me?” Evan snapped. “All I wanted to know was if she’d look at our portfolios.”

  Tabby set her silverware down. “Sam’s right. We all need to back off. Look, she’s confused and upset right now.”

  Evan arched one brow. “And that would be different, how?”

  “Evan!” Jenny said. Sam had already come halfway out of his chair. He was sick and tired of Erin being the Richardson family joke.

  “Oh all right. I’m sorry,” Evan said.

  “Maybe you should try saying that to her some time,” Sam suggested, his tone nearly as cold as he felt.

  “You just don’t understand how much she left out of what she told you,” Tabby said.

  Sam thought back to the little nine-year-old who had tagged along behind him wanting so desperately to please, and of the luscious teenager who’d thrown herself at him. Even then she’d been crying out for help, but no one had listened. No one had bothered to look beneath what they saw on the surface: a teenager hell-bent on making life miserable for everyone within range.

  He stood. “I’m going to find her.”

  “Sam,” Stoner started to protest but abruptly halted when Sam glared at him.

  “Of all the fools in this room right now, Stoner, you and I are the biggest.” He stomped out of the kitchen an
d down the hall. Sam found Erin curled on a loveseat in the living room, staring out the front window. She turned her head when he stepped into the room.

  “Is it time to go?”

  Sam sat next to her and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees as he raked his hands back through his hair. He studied her from the corner of his eye. She hadn’t cried, but then he had only ever seen her do that one time. So much miscommunication had transpired among all of them he hardly knew where to start. And he was so afraid he might screw things up beyond repair.

  “You kind of threw everyone for a loop, squirt.”

  Erin snorted and turned back to staring out the window. “And you weren’t?”

  Sam chuckled. “Well maybe by the fact that I’ve been making love to a multi-millionaire, but I’ve gotten used to your ping-pong personality. It keeps me on my toes.”

  He saw her mouth twitch. “Are you trying to say I have mood swings, Sheriff?”

  “No. I don’t believe there was any try in that. I believe it was quite clear.” He leaned back and waggled his eyebrows. “Nobody will dare to come in here for a few minutes. Wanna take advantage of me?”

  Erin’s eyes widened, and she laughed. “You are so bad. What’s even worse is everyone thinks you’re such a paragon of virtue and sober morality.”

  As soon as she relaxed, Sam snatched her across his lap and started running his hand up her thigh under her skirt. His hot gaze lingered on her lush lips and the fragile column of her throat. “We know better, though, don’t we?”

  His hand glided to her inner thigh until his searching fingers were less than an inch from where he wanted to be.

  “Sam,” she breathed. “We can’t. Not here.”

  Reluctantly he removed his hand from under her skirt and smoothed it back down. “A few kisses. We can do that.”

  He nibbled at her lips and wrapped one arm around her shoulders. With his free hand, he cupped her jaw and held her still so he could plunder her mouth. When they were both breathing just a little hard, Sam leaned his forehead against Erin’s.

  “Take pity on them, squirt. First you show up in church with me, dressed like you’re ready for tea at the country club. Then you slap them with the double whammy of your dyslexia and your financial genius. Their brains are still bouncing with aftershocks.”

  Erin giggled, then pulled away to search his face. “And you, Sammy?”

  He smiled at her tenderly. “You’re still an annoying little squirt, baby.”

  She touched his face. “Come on, Sam. You know what I mean. The reading, the money. Does it make a difference?”

  “Erin, I’d already figured out you had a reading issue, so no. As far as the finances? I’d be pretty darn foolish to be anything other than ecstatic.” He paused and grinned at her. “And if you don’t want to work for me, you don’t have to.”

  “I like it,” Erin admitted. “I wasn’t sure at first, and I almost just wrote you a check to pay for everything, but it’s been wonderful.”

  “All of it?” he asked with an arch of his brow.

  She blushed and he laughed.

  “Miss Richardson, I was talking about delivering baby cows. What were you thinking of?”

  She stroked his cheek and stared into his dark eyes. “Oh, Sammy, you’re good for me. You haven’t asked what I’m worth. Don’t you want to know?”

  Sam shrugged. “You’ll tell me when you’re ready. In the meantime, as you would say, I do okay.”

  She held his dark gaze. “I love you.”

  He swallowed, humbled by the simple honesty of her admission. Sam pulled her tight against his chest. “I know you do, baby. I know you do.” But he was frowning again. Say it! Just say it. But he couldn’t make the words come out. Couldn’t take the step he knew would tie him to her…a woman more than a decade younger than him. The bottom line was he feared he would be tying her down just when she was learning how to stretch her wings.

  Chapter 8

  “Are you ready to face everybody again, squirt?”

  Erin fluffed her fingers through her short hair and sighed. “I guess. I’m just so tired of being a freak, Sam. Do you know I think you’re the only one who’s ever looked at me as just Erin?” She bit her lip as she stared into his eyes. “I wish…”

  “What do you wish, baby?” he prompted quietly.

  “I was going to say I wish I’d been older when we first met, that I hadn’t been such a kid.”

  He cradled her cheek in his palm. “We could sit here and work through a whole truckload of might-have-beens, but we are who we are because of everything we’ve gone through just the way we are. I could wish I’d never been sidelined from my football career, but then I might never have been around here to meet you.”

  She leaned her head against his shoulder. Feeling her there, so trusting, made him feel like he could do anything. She made him better than he was.

  “Let’s go finish the meal. Then I’m going to show them what it is I do.”

  “That’s my girl.” He patted her butt and winked at her, loving her just as she was. His Erin.

  Less than an hour later, Sam sat back in Evan’s study, one shoulder propped against the wall as he watched. Erin sat on the couch with Evan and Stoner on either side of her as she breezed through her explanation, looking happy and confident like none of them had ever seen her look. The defiance and anger they all associated with her were missing because she was finally in her element. He wondered if she fully realized it.

  “It’s a matter of weighing certain risk factors against a list of qualities that all successful companies have in common. Then I apply a formula I developed to predict timing, partially based on widespread investor interest which can balloon a company’s worth…”

  “Whoa!” Evan said with a laugh that sounded vaguely overwhelmed and made Sam want to howl with laughter. After spending so many years feeling like she was their intellectual inferior, it was clear her father and brother were scrambling to keep up with her. “Can you show me?”

  She looked doubtful. “Well, if you can work the computer for me. It will take me too long without the voice software.”

  Sam watched her in wonder. As she talked about money and investing, her eyes lit with an interest he had never seen her show in anything before, except maybe this past week in helping him with the calving, and she thought she was stupid? It appeared to him that the tiniest of the Richardsons might be the most singularly gifted of them all.

  Evan sat at the computer, and Erin talked him into her investment account. When her brother and Stoner saw the amount of money in it and the percent increase in the last quarter, their jaws gaped.

  “Good God, Erin! Can you do this with my money? With Daddy’s or Sam’s?”

  She looked a little dumbfounded. “Well yeah, I guess. It’s not hard. It’s a question of the amount of risk you want to assume. I mean, I do some pretty risky investments because I still have lots of time to recoup if I blow a hunch, but Daddy might not want that same level of risk.”

  Stoner chuckled. “Because I’m old?”

  Erin blushed. “You know what I mean….”

  He squeezed her shoulder. “Yes, honey, I do. I have a lot of my funds in fairly stable investments, and those I won’t gamble with. But I do have a higher risk portfolio I play with, and I’d be happy to put that in your hands, especially seeing what you’ve done with your money.”

  She flushed with pleasure, and Sam sucked in a breath. A line of praise from her father. Such a simple thing was all it took to give her pleasure. “Thanks, Daddy. You have no idea what that means to me.”

  Stoner looked over at Sam. “Sheriff, maybe you should let her handle your finances too.”

  Sam smiled slowly as he caught Erin’s eye. “We’ll see.”

  * * * *

  Erin and Sam had finished the morning feeding and mucking out. There were just a few cows that had not yet dropped their calves, but to Sam’s prac
ticed eye, none of it was going to happen today. As they walked back toward the house, Sam tossed an arm companionably around Erin’s shoulders.

  “I’ve been thinkin’ about what Tabby said about Rachel Crawley…I mean Hastings…you remember, the English teacher over at the high school, her being a reading specialist. I thought I might give her a call if you’d be interested in working with her.”

  He waited, a little uncertain as he felt Erin’s shoulders go rigid, but then she relaxed. “I’d like that, Sam. You know I’ll always be dyslexic. It’s not something that goes away, but I’ve heard about some things people can do to help.”

  “You want to talk to her?”

  “Yeah. If I could even learn to read well enough to read stories to Melodie or Peter….”

  Sam scowled as he felt his throat tighten. He had a sudden vision of her sitting with a dark-haired, dark-eyed little boy on her lap while she read him a story. Not only did he like the picture, but it made the difficulties she’d faced her entire life all too real. It was nearly impossible for him to imagine not being able to pick up a book and read a story to a child.

  “Come on, baby,” he murmured, his voice husky, “let’s get some breakfast, then play for a little while.”

  She grinned at him. “In the tub? I like that.”

  Sam growled. Breakfast could wait. He grabbed her once they hit the mudroom. After they stripped off their coveralls and boots, Sam carried her into his bathroom.

  “I thought we were getting breakfast?”

  “Later. I’m hungry for you right now.” He set her butt on the counter next to the sink and ran his palms from her hips, up her arms, and on to the straps of her bra. As he followed the lace with his fingertips, she sucked in air. He brushed across the swell of her breasts until his fingers met between the twin globes. Her soft skin trembled at his touch.

  “Sam.” It was just a whisper of sound, but it made him shiver with anticipation.

  Her beautiful eyes had gone dark with passion, her mouth full and pouting. Just looking at her, touching her, made him swell to an aching, tumescent fullness. Her fingers hooked into the waistband of his boxer shorts and tugged them down, springing his erection free.