Rancher at Risk

by Barbara White Daille

  Not gonna happen.

  Ryan rose from his camp chair. She wasn’t about to get away without him. He caught up with her halfway across the dimly lit clearing.

  When he touched her shoulder, she turned. Surprise and pleasure mingled in her face, and his stomach started a flip.

  “You don’t need to come with us,” she said. “It’s not that far to the bunkhouse, and we can see the lights from here. You can stay with the scouts.”

  He shrugged. “Everything’s covered. The boys have cleanup duty, the troop leaders will handle the fire and Tony’s here for the final checkup. I’m not needed.”

  “I wouldn’t say that.” She smiled.

  His heart thudded. But when he took her hand, her eyes grew wary.

  “The kids will be up for a while.”

  He nodded. “I figured that. I can handle it.” He hadn’t intended to quote her, but the idea made him smile.

  They walked back to the house in silence—except for P.J.‘s chatter and the occasional crunching of brush underfoot.

  Lianne had left the light on in the kitchen. When they all went inside, the kids immediately settled at the table.

  Becky curved one hand as if holding a glass, but instead of pretending to drink, she rested her thumb on the back of her other hand and rubbed it against her skin.

  “Oh, no,” Lianne said. “After hot dogs and corn on the cob and s’mores and everything else? You can’t possibly want hot chocolate tonight.”

  Both kids made fists and shook them up and down.

  Groaning, Lianne looked at him. “That means ‘yes.’”

  He nodded. “I recommend you go easy on the marshmallows.”

  She laughed.

  P.J. dropped the sack of games onto the table and spilled out the contents. “Checkers, Ryan.”

  “Why don’t you pick something you all can play.”

  “Chutes and Ladders!” P.J. said.

  Billy’s favorite board game.

  He could see him at the coffee table standing on tiptoe to spin the dial, as if that would help him score the number he wanted. He could hear him screeching with laughter when Ryan hit a space forcing him to slide down a chute.

  Becky put her fingertip to her cheek and twisted it.

  “Candy Land,” he said.

  “What?” Lianne looked as if she thought she hadn’t read him correctly.

  Without thinking, he had blurted the name of Billy’s second-favorite game. He looked from her to Becky and back again. “She wants Candy Land,” he said, as if they played it together every day of the week.

  Lianne looked at the table. “It’s not here.”

  “We left it in the living room,” P.J. said. “I’ll go get it.”

  “How did you know?” she asked, her tone puzzled but her lips already curving in a smile.

  He shrugged. “I may not be a quick study, but I catch on to things. Eventually.”

  * * *

  ALONE IN THE KITCHEN, Ryan stacked the boxes on the table. They’d played a board-game marathon until the kids had started nodding off.

  “Don’t let them fool you,” Lianne had said before following Becky and P.J. out to the living room. “They’ll be up chatting half the night. I’ll have to leave a light on downstairs.”

  He had nodded. They’d always kept a night-light on for Billy, too.

  He frowned, thinking of that and of the joke about the man and his wife and the lights in the motel. Of walking back to the house across the dark clearing, letting the light Lianne had left on in the kitchen guide their way.

  Of the night they’d gone to her room. The night they’d almost made love. She wouldn’t let him turn off the lamp…and he hadn’t gotten it until just now. She wouldn’t let him turn off the lamp because she couldn’t read his lips in the dark.

  Smiling, he shook his head. Damned idiot.

  Maybe he did catch on to things eventually, as he’d told her a while ago. But some of those things sure took him a hell of a long time to figure out.

  Lianne returned and sank into her seat at the table. “I managed to get them into their sleeping bags, but I can’t guarantee how long they’ll stay there.”

  “They’ll be up for drinks of water,” he said automatically.

  “You’ve had experience.”

  He shifted the pile of games on the table.

  “It’s obvious,” she continued. “You knew all the rules to the games.” When he said nothing, she added, “And as we reminded the kids a few times, one of the rules is taking turns. Then there’s minding manners. We’ve talked about me. I have to be polite and give you a turn.”

  He took a sip of tepid chocolate.

  “Tell me about him,” she said softly.

  Word had gotten out. Someone from Flagman’s Folly had told her about his wife and son. He had known it would happen sooner or later. He was actually surprised it had taken this long. “What do you know?”

  “Just that he was four and there was an accident.”

  He nodded. “Billy. He had a cowlick like P.J. Asked a lot of questions like him, too.” At a loss, he gestured at the boxes. “Chutes and Ladders was his favorite game. We played it three or four times a week.”

  “Did you let him win?”

  Despite the pain of the memories, he chuckled. “Hell, no. I couldn’t get away with that. He wanted to win on his own.”

  To do everything on his own. Like Lianne.

  He cleared his throat, licked his dry lips. He couldn’t look at her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk. But he thought of all the things she had told him about her school days, her rebellion. Her challenges. He ran his finger down the handle of his mug. “He didn’t want the other kids to know he slept with a stuffed tiger. He thought tigers were tough, but still…”

  “Did he have any pets?”

  “Yeah. A pony and a parakeet. Tagalong and Ocean. We told him the bird was as blue as an ocean.” As blue as your eyes. He tightened his hand around the mug. “Once we said that, he wouldn’t hear of any other name.”

  “Stubborn child. Sounds like he took after you.”

  He laughed softly. “Maybe.” He sipped again from his mug. He hadn’t talked about Billy like this since it happened. Maybe he’d started to heal some. Maybe she just asked good questions.

  “Did he like school?”

  “Oh, yeah. He loved preschool. He’d bring home a gold star for something every day.”

  “He made his daddy proud, didn’t he?”

  His throat closed.

  “What happened, Ryan?”

  He breathed for a while until his throat loosened up, and then he shook his head. “An accident. My wife and son were both in the car. They went into a skid at eighty-five miles an hour, hit a concrete wall. So they tell me.”

  “You don’t believe the reports?”

  “They’re not reports. They’re just empty words. The speed, yeah. Skid marks, winding up against the wall, yeah. But that’s all they could tell me. And there were no witnesses.” He shoved the mug away from him. “You don’t just go into a slide for no reason. Something had to cause it. But I don’t know what happened.”

  When Ryan turned his head away, Lianne bit her lip, trying to focus on the pain there and not the one in her heart, knowing how much more hurtful these memories must be for him.

  He had turned away without thinking, but she didn’t need to see his face to know tension ran through him. She could see it in the way his shoulders had risen and in the sudden cording of the muscles in his neck.

  She moved to stand behind his chair. For a moment, she just held on to his shoulders. Then she smoothed her hands across them and began to knead the tight muscles.

  “I can’t read your lips now, but I can read what your body’s telling me.”

  Her hands rose and fell. He had taken a deep breath and released it.

  She closed her eyes and bent to rest her forehead against his crisp hair for just a moment. It smelled of wood smoke from the fire. She t
ook a deep breath, too. “Do you remember the day we met?”

  A muscle ticked in his jaw. She’d seen that happen time and again, and this time she longed to reach up and stroke his face, to ease his tension.

  But she sensed he didn’t want her to see him.

  Finally, he nodded.

  Unable to have a conversation with him from where she stood, she tried to ease his pain through her words alone. “When Becky ran out into the street that day, she’d gone after Pirate. She knows she’s supposed to look first, but we don’t always do what we’re supposed to do. She chased Pirate because she wanted to protect him. She did it without thinking. Out of instinct. Because it’s an instinct to take care of those you love.”

  He shook his head.

  She caught the words on his lips only because she had seen them moments before.

  “…I don’t know what happened.”

  She squeezed his shoulders and brushed her cheek against his hair again. “You can’t keep holding on to this, Ryan. It’s not something you can control.” She returned to the chair beside his. “Some things happen for no reason. Or for one we’re not meant to know.”

  He met her eyes. “Like your deafness?” he asked.

  She should have been ready for it. The unexpected question—the kind he asked so often, in a way no one else had ever done.

  She nodded. “Even that. We’ve had deaf relatives in our family for generations. There’s a medical cause. A genetic factor. But no one knows why one family is chosen over another to receive a specific gene. Or why one person in a family has a certain talent when no one else does. Or why lightning strikes one tree and not the next. There just are no explanations for some things. Like the accident that happened to your family.”

  The accident that made him want to control everything around him.

  She swallowed hard. “I understand what it’s like to want answers, though, and to be angry when you don’t get them. Being born deaf made me angry for a long time, too.”

  “Why?”

  Another truth only he would know.

  “When my mom and dad sent me away to school, I thought it was because they wanted only perfect children like my sisters.” She shrugged. “My first rebellion started early, at six years old. Once they rejected me, I rejected them, too. For years, that was another reason I didn’t want to go home.” She ran her hand along the edge of the table. “Later on I learned they hadn’t rejected me at all. They loved me, and as I once told you, they did what they thought was best. From then on I wanted to be perfect for them. I thought, like you, if I could find a reason—the reason I’d been born deaf—I could fix it. But I couldn’t fix something that was out of my control.”

  He said nothing, just watched her, his eyes dark and his hand tight on the coffee mug.

  She realized she’d gripped the edge of the table, too. “And, eventually, Ryan, I figured out another truth. There’s no need to fix something that isn’t broken.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  Ryan paced the floor in the kitchen. He didn’t want to think about what Lianne had said in that very room last night.

  But he wanted Lianne there with him.

  After they had talked, Becky and P.J. had wandered in for a drink of water. They’d stayed a while, chattering away, and it wasn’t until today that he’d realized Lianne hadn’t missed a word of the conversation.

  She hadn’t let him miss anything, either. She’d told him everything Becky had said.

  At the start of the second round of drinks, he had shaken his head, smiled at Lianne and run his hand down the length of her hair. Smooth as satin. Fine as silk. He wanted to see it spread out on her pillow. But he had taken a deep breath and said, “See you in the morning?”

  She had smiled and nodded, her thoughts easy to read. She was happy he understood they wouldn’t share her bed while the kids were there.

  Frustrated as it made him, he was happy to wait for tonight instead. Hell, who cared if they made it to the bedroom or if they did anything at all. He just wanted to be with her again.

  But he didn’t know he’d be waiting this long.

  Ten o’clock.

  She’d left before noon to take the kids back home.

  At the end of his day, he’d come back to an empty house. Frustrated desire gave way to concern; concern turned to worry; worry sucked him into old memories he didn’t want to have anymore.

  He shoved them away before they could fully form, knowing he was overreacting, the way she had said he’d done that first day on Signal Street. But he was eaten up by the things he couldn’t control. By not knowing where she was, not knowing if she was safe, not being able to take charge and get answers and to make everything right.

  To fix things.

  He rubbed his eyes and ran his hand through his hair and walked over to the sink.

  It was his turn now for a drink of water. By the time he’d taken a long, throat-soothing swig, he’d calmed down some.

  When he heard the front door open and slam closed, he had no doubt who had just come home. He managed to walk down the hall and into the living room and to rest one shoulder against the stair rail. And he managed to smile, which wasn’t hard to do once he saw the wide grin on Lianne’s face.

  Her eyes danced and she had her arms wrapped around her as if she had to keep the rest of her from dancing, too. “Kayla had the baby. Sam Junior.”

  “Everyone okay?”

  She nodded. “They’re fine. They’re both fine. Look.”

  She reached into her bag and took out her cell phone.

  On the screen, he saw a photo of her sister, Kayla, cradling a tiny blue-wrapped bundle in her arms. His throat tightened all over again, and he wished he’d brought the glass of water with him.

  “They’re all fine. Becky’s ready to burst at being a big sister and Sam’s stopping people in the hospital hallway to announce the news.” She grinned.

  He smiled back. He was happy for her, but somehow, standing just inches from him, she felt far away.

  “We managed to get Becky into bed only an hour ago. She was overtired. After the council meeting on Monday, I’ll bring her back here. That will give her grandmother some time to spend with the baby. And to take a break.”

  She laughed. The husky, throaty sound put her right there next to him again. Until now he hadn’t realized how much his body had relaxed once he’d seen she had walked in the door, safe. But now, he found every part of him tensing up again. For a different reason.

  “Meanwhile…” She drawled the word. She held up the phone and pressed a button.

  The light on the screen faded to black.

  Her blue eyes sparkled.

  * * *

  “RYAN, I NEED TO ask you something.”

  Her face looked wary now. He rested his hand flat on the bed and tried not to jump to conclusions. He tried not to think this trip to her bedroom might be doomed to end like the previous one.

  “The first time we were here,” she continued, “my phone went off. I didn’t see it, but you did. And even though we were…in the middle of something, you stopped and told me.” Her eyebrows drew together. “Why did you do that?”

  “Because I could hear it and see it and you couldn’t.”

  “That’s all?”

  “No.” He scowled. “Far as I’m concerned, people need to stop walking around like those things are surgically attached to their ears or their fingers. But still, I figured you had just as much right to answer your phone as somebody who could hear.”

  “Oh.” She bit her bottom lip.

  Damn, were those tears in her eyes? Maybe he’d done the wrong thing, had hurt her when he’d tried to do just the opposite. “Bad move?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “Good move. That’s the sweetest thing any man has ever done for me. Any hearing man,” she added, laughing.

  The sound caught at him. Made him realize how much he’d come to love it.

  “I wouldn’t have answered the phone just the
n,” she said, “if not for Kayla being so close to having the baby.”

  “Why not?”

  “You know.”

  “Tell me.”

  She blushed. “Because we were just about to do then what we’re about to do now.”

  “Nothing to stop us tonight.”

  “No.”

  Her smile made his heart pound. He slid his hand to the top of her blouse. With every button he unbuttoned, he envisioned another piece of clothing he had once seen her wear. The skirt flipping around her knees the night of the party. That ruffled blouse that brought out the blue in her eyes. The damp towel wrapped around her shower-moistened hips. The exercise gear clinging to every curve.

  When all the buttons were unbuttoned, the snaps unsnapped, the zippers unzipped—his and hers—she lay beside him covered in nothing but cool, soft, smooth skin—tanned here, pale there, rosy-pink in other places.

  And it was all his for the taking.

  His body hardened and his palms itched and his heart thundered against his ribs at the thought of finally, finally getting what he’d wanted for so long…the chance to warm her all over.

  He brushed his fingers across her cheek and lowered his head. She shifted against the pillow.

  Oh, hell, no. If she pulled away now, if she’d changed her mind, if she sent him packing, he’d never survive.

  “Turn off the lamp, please.”

  He froze. “The lamp. You’re sure?”

  “Yes, I’m sure,” she whispered.

  After a long moment, he reached for the switch. Who could blame him that it took three tries to find it. Or that he needed a deep, calming breath once the room had gone dark. He knew what making love without the lights on meant for her.

  And he swore he’d prove, without a word, that she’d made the right decision by trusting him.

  * * *

  SHE HAD NEVER made love in the dark.

  Before this her nights had been filled with obligations, with having to read lips and to anticipate needs in a room where the lights stayed on.

  The experience hadn’t prepared her for a night with Ryan.

  With him she had no obligations, no expectations to meet.