She had a hell of a great effect on his son, Anderson thought. Maybe having this woman here for the afternoon might turn out to be a good thing after all.
He realized that he could probably stand to learn a few things from her—whether he liked the idea of not.
“Do you want a hint?” Jake was asking, fidgeting in his seat and moving his feet back and forth, like someone who was desperately in need of channeling his energy somewhere.
“Well, I’m pretty good at picking up hints,” Marina told her student, urging him on because she sensed that Jake wanted her to. “It won’t spoil the surprise, will it?”
Damn, but she was good, Anderson couldn’t help thinking. She really looked as if she was having a serious conversation with his son rather than the kind most adults had with children—a few words before they were brushed off.
Moreover, he could tell that Jake was totally eating all this up.
This woman was really worth observing more closely, Anderson told himself. He was rather certain that he could pick up a few pointers from her on how to communicate with his son. With all his heart, he really did want to build a better, closer relationship with Jake. That was, after all, he reminded himself, the reason he’d given in and invited Marina over in the first place.
Glancing up, Marina’s eyes met Anderson’s in the rearview mirror. For the last few minutes she’d thought she felt his eyes on her and she looked up, thinking perhaps she was just imagining things.
But she wasn’t.
Anderson seemed to be watching her like a hawk. Why? Did he expect her to do something to upset his son? The man hadn’t struck her as the protective type, but he obviously was. Marina viewed that as a good thing, even though it made her feel as if she was under a microscope. But she would gladly put up with it, for Jake’s sake, given this rather delicate situation he found himself in.
“Jake,” Anderson cautioned, “why don’t you hold off on the hints? I’m sure Ms. Laramie likes to be surprised and she already said that she’s very good at unraveling clues. You don’t want to spoil her surprise for her, now do you?”
“Uh-uh,” Jake piped up, shaking his head from side to side so hard that his straight light brown hair swung back and forth.
“I guess that I’ll just have to wait,” Marina said stoically, playing along.
“It’ll be worth it,” Jake assured her, his excitement once again bubbling up to the surface. “You’ll like it.” He glanced toward her daughter. “So will Sydney.” The little girl made a sound in response to her name and Jake declared happily, “Did you hear her, Ms. Laramie? She agrees with me.”
“Certainly sounds that way to me,” Marina replied, doing, Anderson thought, a more than credible job of keeping a straight face.
She raised her eyes to meet Anderson’s again, hoping that there would be something there to give her a clue as to whether she should be braced for something, or if his son was getting excited just because he had gotten caught up in the visit and the promise of the day that was ahead of them.
From the way she saw Anderson’s eyes crinkle as he looked at her, she realized that the man had to be smiling.
It was going to be all right, she silently promised herself. Whatever the surprise was, she felt fairly confident that there wasn’t going to be something overwhelming going on. She began to relax and lower her guard.
And then it hit her.
The tension she’d felt ever since she’d agreed to this outing and had hung up the phone yesterday was gone. She was actually relaxed and, in a way, even looking forward to spending the day with her daughter on the ranch. She genuinely liked Jake and wanted to be able to help the boy fit into a home-life setting, something that she felt he both needed and deserved.
As for Anderson, he seemed somewhat abrupt at times, but she could tell that he loved his son and, bottom line, that was all that counted.
She rather envied Jake that. He had something that her daughter had been deprived of—a father who cared.
“Dad and I made lunch for you,” Jake announced out of the blue. “We did it ahead of time,” he added proudly. “Well, Dad made it and I helped.”
Now that surprised her. “Your dad cooks?”
The tone of her voice had Anderson raising his eyes and looking at her in the mirror again. “Does that surprise you?”
She hadn’t meant to say that out loud. Caught, she had to confess. “No disrespect intended but—yes.”
“The best chefs in the world are men,” Anderson pointed out.
“A handful,” Marina allowed. “But that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of men aren’t sure how to even boil water.”
Ordinarily, he would have just disregarded her comment, letting it pass and not caring one way or the other what she believed or thought. But for some reason, he didn’t want her having that kind of a negative image of him.
“In my family,” Anderson heard himself saying as they neared the ranch, “everyone was taught to pull their own weight and at least knows how to cook well enough to survive.”
“Then I’ll look forward to lunch,” Marina assured him, allowing just a glimmer of her amusement to show through.
“We’ve got milk for Sydney,” Jake piped up, not to be left out, “’cause Dad said that she can’t chew her food like I can.”
“She can’t,” Marina confirmed, then explained, “because she only has three teeth.”
Jake looked at her, concerned. “The janitor in my old elementary school, Mr. Wilson, he didn’t have any of his teeth and he said he lost ’em in a fighting match.”
“A boxing match?” Marina supplied, trying to get the details of his story straight.
Jake nodded. “Yeah, that’s it, a boxing match. You saw it?” he asked. It was obvious that he thought since she was familiar with the term, that meant that she had to have been there to witness the event.
“No,” she told him. “Just a lucky guess.”
Jake cocked his head, studying her in fascination. “Are you lucky?”
Was she?
Unbidden, her eyes glanced up and lit on Anderson’s in the rearview mirror. Out of nowhere the words slipped out. “At times.”
Chapter Nine
“This is all yours?” Marina asked in a voice that was just a little above a hushed whisper.
She had been growing progressively more awestruck as the miles had gone by. The land they’d been traveling on to get here was nothing short of overwhelmingly impressive. Squinting just a little, Marina thought she could make out a corral in the distance. There looked to be several horses milling about within its confines.
“Mine and the family’s,” Anderson told her as he drove. “I run the place for them but the ranch actually belongs to my father, Ben. Ranching really doesn’t interest him all that much and his law firm keeps him pretty busy most of the time.” Anderson shrugged good-naturedly. “I have no head for the law, but I like working with my hands, so this arrangement works out to everyone’s advantage.”
Pulling his truck up in front of the house, Anderson turned off the engine, got out and then opened the rear passenger door for his guests.
“Well, this is it.”
Marina peered out through the window before beginning to remove the straps from around Sydney’s car seat. He had pulled up before a one story ranch house with simple, strong lines. It suited Anderson, she thought.
As she began undoing the vehicle’s restraining straps, she saw that Jake, after unbuckling himself, was doing the same on his side of the car seat.
“That’s all right, Jake,” Marina told him. “I can do that.”
But the boy continued, pausing only to look up and tell her, “I like helping.”
She couldn’t very well argue with that. She knew it was a trait to encourage.
&n
bsp; “Well, that’s lucky, because I like being helped,” she responded. “And I very much appreciate yours.”
The remark only managed to spur Jake on and he worked quicker.
“Done!” Jake announced, raising his hands up in the air like a rodeo cowboy when he had managed to successfully finish roping a calf.
“Me, too,” Marina said, matching his tone. She edged out of the truck, wanting to be on firm ground before easing her daughter out.
But she had no sooner gotten out of the truck than Anderson was moving her over, out of the way.
“Okay,” he told her. “I’ll take it from here.”
Before she could demur or offer any protest, Anderson was taking both car seat and baby out of the back of his truck. Then he ushered her toward the house, still holding on to the car seat.
“Let’s go inside,” Anderson said. It sounded more like a command than a suggestion. “Jake said he wanted to show you around. I didn’t think you’d mind,” he said, giving her a way out if she wanted it.
“Well, then, let’s get to it,” Marina urged cheerfully, placing one arm lightly around the boy’s shoulders.
His son, Anderson noted, was now beaming so hard, he had a feeling that if the power in Rust Creek Falls went out, the boy could light the whole town up.
Anderson caught himself smiling as he led the way into the house.
* * *
The tour of the ranch house went rather quickly, with Jake doing virtually all of the narrating as they passed from one room to another. Anderson was surprised that his son had actually picked up so much information about the place in the last three months. If anyone had asked him, he would have sworn that Jake was oblivious to everything that was going on around him, focusing exclusively on the small world that existed within the video games he seemed to be so attached to.
Live and learn, Anderson thought, happy that he had turned out to be wrong about Jake.
At the end of the impromptu tour, they ended up in the kitchen.
“And here we are, back in the kitchen,” Jake declared just before he quietly slipped away, after giving his father a wink.
Marina shifted her daughter to her other hip and drew closer to her official host.
“Where’s he going?” she asked, surprised that the boy had decided to disappear.
“Well, a couple of weeks ago, I would have said that he’s gone to his room to play a video game, but since he seemed so caught up in showing you the lay of the land, I’d say he’s gone to fetch the surprise that he got for you.”
Marina looked at him quizzically. “I don’t think I understand.”
“You will,” was all that Anderson was willing to tell her.
Did he want her to prod him? “You’re being very mysterious.”
Anderson didn’t debate the matter one way or another. Instead, he just told her, “Jake would be very disappointed if I spoiled his surprise.”
That still didn’t really address her concerns. So she came right out and asked, “Should I be braced for something?”
Anderson laughed then. It was a genuine laugh, tinged with amusement. The sound seemed to embrace her. Any concerns she might have had began to melt away.
“Lady,” he told her, “you strike me as someone who’s already braced for anything that might come her way.”
She wasn’t sure if he was giving her a compliment, but she liked to think that he was.
Jake chose that moment to come back into the room. He had a bag with him from one of the local stores in town and he held it out to her.
“This is for Sydney,” Jake told her proudly. “She can’t open it, so you have to.”
Touched, Marina accepted it, then held up the bag for her daughter to see.
“Jake got you a present, Sydney,” Marina told the baby, shifting the tiny girl again so that she could open the bag.
“Dad paid for it,” Jake told her, wanting her to have all the details. “But I picked it out.”
Marina glanced at the quiet man at her side. “You have an incredibly honest son, Mr. Dalton. Anyone else would have taken all the credit himself,” she concluded, looking at Jake. She smiled her approval at the boy.
The latter beamed in response. “Open it, open it,” he urged her excitedly.
Marina did as he asked. Reaching into the bag, she took her daughter’s gift out.
“It’s a cowboy hat,” she cried. “A really sweet, tiny cowboy hat.” She was delighted with it. “Look, Sydney,” she said, holding it up in front of her daughter. “Your very first cowboy hat.”
“Here, let me help,” Anderson volunteered, taking the hat from Marina and gently slipping it onto the infant’s head.
Once it was on, he tightened the drawstrings beneath her small chin just enough to keep the hat from slipping off her head.
“She looks like a real cowgirl!” Jake enthused, visibly happy that he’d been part of the “transformation” process.
Sydney kept turning her head, as if trying to catch sight of what it was atop her head. After several tries, she finally gave up.
Jake suddenly turned toward his father. “Can we take them out to the corral?” he wanted to know, eager to start the next phase of his plan.
“Maybe Ms. Laramie would like something to eat or drink first before we go outside again,” Anderson suggested.
But Marina shook her head. “No, we’re fine and I’m sure that Sydney would love to see your horses,” she told Jake. “I know I would,” she admitted.
“Okay, let’s go back out to the truck,” Anderson said, beginning to lead the way to the front door.
“Why the truck?” Marina wanted to know, surprised and a little disappointed. “Have you changed your mind about going to the corral and decided to take us home?”
He looked at her quizzically, wondering where she could have gotten that idea. “No, I’m taking the truck so that I can drive you over to the corral,” Anderson explained.
“Can’t we just walk?”
“Well, sure we can,” Anderson agreed. “But I thought that walking all that way over to the corral might be too far for you and the baby.”
Just what sort of women was this man used to? Marina couldn’t help wondering. Granted, she wasn’t exactly pioneer stock, but she didn’t fall apart at the mention of a brisk walk, either.
“Sydney and I really aren’t that fragile, Mr. Dalton. And walking is a very good form of exercise,” she added, glancing at Jake in order to include the boy in this, as well. “I don’t get a chance to do it often enough,” she confided to Anderson.
Jake looked up at his father. “Can we, Dad? Can we walk there?”
Anderson wasn’t about to be the villain of the piece. He’d only made the offer for Marina’s benefit. If she wanted to walk, then that was fine with him.
“Lead the way, Jake,” Anderson told his son. As Jake took off like a flash, Anderson called after him, “Walk, Jake, don’t run.”
Jake came to almost a skidding halt, his face flushing slightly as he turned around to look at his teacher.
“Sorry. I forgot. You can’t run.”
“Who says I can’t run?” Marina wanted to know. “I just can’t run when I’m holding the baby.”
“’Cause you don’t want to drop her?” Jake earnestly asked.
“That would be a good reason, yes,” Marina agreed, doing her best to suppress the laughter that was bubbling up in her throat, threatening to spill out.
“I can take her from you if you feel like stretching your legs,” Anderson volunteered. His offer took her completely by surprise.
Marina was about to thank him, but tell Anderson that it was all right, that she would carry her daughter. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, it was just that she didn’t know how familiar he
was with what it took to walk that distance while carrying an infant—a possibly wiggling infant—in his arms.
But the next moment, she decided to keep the words to herself when she looked at his face. There was something there that allayed her fears about turning her infant daughter over to this man.
So instead, Marina told him, “That would be very nice of you,” as she handed her daughter over, placing Sydney into Anderson’s arms.
She watched, fascinated, as Anderson’s face instantly softened right in front of her eyes. Then and there he seemed to bond with her daughter in a way she would have never expected.
The next second, Jake was declaring, “Race you!” The announcement snapped Marina out of her self-imposed trance.
“You’re on,” Marina responded and then quickly began to run toward the corral.
Marina was careful to keep up, but to never outpace her student, who gleefully made a beeline for the corral, which was the intended finish line.
They reached it almost at the same time, together, with Jake getting to the corral just a few feet ahead of her.
“I won!” he laughed gleefully.
Marina sagged slightly against the corral, even as she affectionately ruffled his hair. “You sure did,” she agreed.
“But you ran good,” Jake was quick to add, not wanting to hurt her feelings.
“I ran ‘well,’” Marina told him, correcting his grammar.
Caught up in the moment and the win, the correction flew right over Jake’s head.
“That, too,” Jake said, nodding his head. It caused her to laugh, charmed by his innocent intensity.
“Let’s catch our breath while we wait for your dad,” she suggested, pointing in the distance to the man and her baby.
Anderson raised his hand in a wave.
As he watched Marina, he couldn’t help thinking she didn’t run like a stereotypical girl. From his vantage point, she ran like a sleek thoroughbred.
Marina Laramie was a thing of beauty to observe, he couldn’t help noting.
Sydney made a noise and he glanced down at the infant he was carrying in his arms.
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