“No, but I get the message,” he told Ena, the corners of his mouth curving ever so slightly. “You want to go back to the ranch.”
That was putting it rather bluntly, but there was no denying that he was right. “Very good. What gave me away?” she asked him sardonically.
“I guess it was just my steel-trap mind,” he responded. “I also have the ability to read minds on occasion, so if I were you, I’d stick to thinking pure thoughts.”
She laughed at that, her mood mercifully lightened. “I suppose that means I can’t fantasize about strangling you?”
“Not at the moment,” he answered, then grinned. “But maybe later.”
Bemused, she shook her head. “You are one very weird man.”
He flashed another grin at her, and although she tried not to let it get to her, she couldn’t deny that it did.
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
Ena frowned at him, but her heart really wasn’t in it. “I’m not sure that I meant it as one.”
“That’s okay,” he told her, enjoying himself. “I can still take it as one.”
* * *
The ride back to the ranch was less awkward than the one she had experienced coming into the town. It was as if, because of the things that Mitch had shared with her, an unspoken truce had been struck up between them.
In addition, Ena no longer felt that Mitch had some sort of hidden agenda when it came to her or to running the ranch. She’d decided that Mitch was on the level and that he just wanted to live up to the promise he had made to her father.
Ena glanced at Mitch’s chiseled profile. For a moment, she had to admit to herself that she was glad that he had been there in her father’s last days.
I guess you really did find the son you always wanted, Dad. Sorry it couldn’t have been me, she thought as they approached the ranch house.
* * *
Even in her present mind-set, it still took Ena several days before she worked up the courage to finally walk into her father’s room.
In part it was because she didn’t want to deal with any unanticipated painful old memories. Being in her father’s house was difficult enough for her. Entering the man’s room, his “inner sanctum” so to speak, was another matter entirely. In addition, she didn’t want to accidentally stumble across anything that might make those old memories even worse.
Mitch hadn’t said anything about it, but maybe her father had taken up with someone in the last years of his life. Someone who had replaced her mother in his eyes.
Ena wasn’t certain how she would deal with that.
Yes, her father had had every right to see someone. After all, he had been a widower and he had also been a grown man who needed companionship.
But after the surly way he had been toward her mother, there was a part of Ena that felt her father had no right to look for and find that sort of happiness with someone else.
So she wavered about walking into his room. Eventually, she lost her temper with herself. This was stupid. She was a grown woman. She could handle whatever she might find—not to mention that there might be nothing to find.
With effort, Ena managed to steel herself, blocking out any extraneous thoughts that could get in her way and torpedo what she was attempting to do. She was strictly on a fact-finding mission, she told herself. She wanted to get a sense of how her father had spent the last ten years of his life, and while asking Mitch questions would certainly help fill in the gaps, Mitch might have his own agenda when it came to dealing with this. He might be trying to keep things from her because, for whatever reason of his own making, he wanted her to think well of her father.
Too late for that, she thought, although she had to admit that some of her thoughts had been tempered and softened a bit because of the things that Mitch had told her.
Still, she didn’t want the foreman to influence the way she ultimately viewed her father’s last days. All she had to do was summon eighteen years of bad memories and any good things that Mitch might have had to say were in serious jeopardy.
The second she finally walked into her father’s bedroom, a sense of his presence instantly seeped under her skin. He’d been dead for a month and she could swear she could still smell the soap he always used.
She slowly looked around the exceptionally masculine room.
“Well, I’m here, Old Man. You got your way. At least for now,” she qualified. “You got any hidden surprises to spring on me? Something to make me feel that I wasn’t a total fool for coming here?” Ena walked around the room, touching things. Thinking. “Because if you think that the ranch is my consolation prize for enduring everything that went down between us, you’re wrong. I don’t want the ranch. I never wanted the ranch. That was always your thing,” she said, addressing the air with a touch of bitterness in her voice.
“I’m planning on selling the ranch the first chance I get once the deed is officially in my name. So I’m going to put up with those conditions you stuck into the will. I’m going to live up to my end of it, and you, you’re going to live up to yours. Pardon my pun,” she told her father’s spirit whimsically.
Roaming around the darkly furnished room, she thought of how he had removed all traces of her mother from what had once been their bedroom. Even the curtains that she had put up were gone. Her father had hung drapes in their place.
Opening his closet showed her that he had taken all her mother’s clothing and put them away, as well. Most likely gave them away.
But there was no evidence that her father had taken up with another woman. There was no trace of anyone else in the room. No clothing, no small bottles of perfume left behind and forgotten. Not so much as an empty makeup container.
Still, she was her father’s daughter, which made her inherently want to be completely thorough. So she moved around the room, opening doors and drawers, rummaging through any and all places, trying to find something that didn’t belong.
Ena was very nearly finished with her search when she found it.
A rectangular box shoved all the way into the recesses of her father’s closet.
The lid on the box was secured by several large rubber bands the size of small bungee cords. The fact that it had so many cords aroused her curiosity.
Moving very carefully, she took off one cord after another until she could finally lift the lid off unimpeded.
This had to be it, Ena thought. Whatever was inside here probably had to do with her father’s mystery lady. The person he had at least hoped to replace her mother with.
Ena sat down on the edge of the bed with the box next to her. Taking a deep breath, she braced herself, then slowly lifted the lid.
There were several envelopes in the box, all addressed to her father.
Recognition was immediate.
The handwriting was hers.
The envelopes had been from her, sent to her father those first two Christmases so that he wouldn’t worry that something had happened to her. She’d been so sure that he had thrown them away. He certainly hadn’t acknowledged them.
She could remember waiting each year, long past Christmas, for some word from him, but there hadn’t been any.
Her hands trembled a little as she took out the first card. The note she had written to her father fell out. When she picked it up, she could see that the paper was worn, like it had been taken out and read over and over again, then carefully returned to its envelope.
She took out the last one. This note looked like the first note had: worn from frequent handling. The notes hadn’t been crumpled in anger or torn the way she would have expected. Just worn because they’d been read and reread countless times.
By a man who would have loudly protested that he didn’t care—but obviously had.
She sighed, holding the letters in her hand. Her eyes stung and she blinked, determined not to shed a si
ngle tear.
But she ultimately lost that battle the way she knew she would.
Chapter Eleven
It was turning into one big perpetual juggling act.
Because Ena didn’t want to run the risk of possibly losing her position in the hierarchy at the firm where she had worked so hard to get ahead, three days a week Ena got up before the crack of dawn to work on the accounts that had been forwarded to her via email. She took them on because she had always believed in shouldering her responsibilities, not shirking them, and these were her accounts.
But as the days went by, she began to feel that her heart wasn’t in this as much as it had been. While there was a certain satisfaction working with numbers, it wasn’t the same sort of satisfied feeling she derived from working with the horses.
Besides, she discovered around the latter half of the second week she was there, if she were really looking to balance a ledger, she had her father’s accounts to work with.
Or, more to the point, to set right.
“You really didn’t have a head for figures, did you, Old Man?” she marveled, addressing the hodgepodge that Bruce O’Rourke had undoubtedly referred to as his accounting method.
As Ena paged through the worn ledger that looked as if it had been used as a doorstop more than once, she was stunned to see that her father had left some columns completely blank and others without any totals whatsoever. Toward the latter half of the book, there was hardly a balanced statement to be found.
Piecing things together, Ena concluded that her father had stopped keeping records, or at least accurate records, somewhere around the time that her mother had taken ill. And it had all gone downhill from there.
Prior to that, the columns had all been neatly written. She looked closer and saw that every number was written in her mother’s very precise handwriting.
“She was your accountant, wasn’t she, Old Man?” Ena murmured.
She frowned, flipping through the pages. It looked as if not only wasn’t her father’s heart in the work but he had barely paid attention to it, and when he did, it all looked as if it was haphazard and slipshod.
Getting this in order was going to take a monumental effort, she thought.
“There you are,” Mitch declared as he came into the den. “I was looking for you. Felicity said you had breakfast early. Are you ready to get to work?” he asked.
She spared him a quick glance. “I am working,” she informed him. “Did you know that my father’s records were a complete mess?”
Mitch shook his head, although her question didn’t surprise him. “He never let me look at any of that. Always said that he had it all under control.”
She frowned as she turned another page, all but shuddering at what she found. This was going to take her weeks and weeks to straighten out, if not longer, she thought in mounting despair.
“Well, he lied,” she told the foreman.
“Maybe he didn’t realize how bad this was,” Mitch guessed.
That, she thought, was being far too kind. “Oh, I think he knew exactly how bad this was. He probably didn’t care. To him, ledgers and accounts weren’t what ranching was about. That kind of thing was just a nuisance that he felt just got in his way.” She thought back to her childhood. “As long as he made enough money selling horses to pay his men and to keep the ranch afloat, he figured he was doing all right.”
“But he wasn’t?” Mitch asked, waiting for her to fill in the details.
Ena flipped to another page. It was just as awful as its predecessors. Closer examination showed her that there were entries on those pages without any sort of rhyme or reason.
She sighed. “So far from all right that I don’t see how it didn’t catch up to him long ago.”
“Does this mean you’re going to lose the ranch?” Mitch asked. It was obvious that he was concerned.
Ena shook her head. “Not if I can help it. It’s going to take some clever calculating and manipulation of figures, but I think that the situation might be salvageable.”
“Well, if anyone can do it, you can,” Mitch said with confidence.
Ena blinked. Now he was just trying to butter her up. “How can you say that? You don’t know anything about my work.”
“No,” Mitch agreed. “But I do know you,” he pointed out. He paused for a second, debating whether or not to say the next words. He decided he had nothing to lose. “Knew the kind of person you were all the way back in high school. You’re not someone who just gives up. You dig in and fight for what you want.”
She looked at him, surprised by what he had said. “All those years back in high school, I thought you didn’t even know I existed. Other than just to nod at.” And that had only been when she nodded first.
His smile widened as he looked at her. “Oh, I knew. And I paid attention.”
She thought back to the way she had tried to get his attention. No matter what she had done, he had just ignored her. Or at least that was the way it had seemed.
“Then why—”
“Didn’t I ever ask you out?” Mitch guessed at the rest of her question. “Because I felt that you were out of my league and I didn’t want you to shoot me down when you figured that out. I had a very fragile ego back then. Put that together with being the new kid as well as being in the foster system, and I just didn’t have enough courage to ask you out and risk ultimately getting turned down. Besides, I knew who your father was and, to be honest, I was pinning all my hopes on getting a job on his ranch when I graduated.”
She hadn’t realized that. She just thought it was a coincidence that he had wound up working here. “So, in a way, this was because of my father?” she asked incredulously.
He couldn’t very well say no after he’d told her the first part. “In a very roundabout way,” Mitch allowed. “For the most part, it was because you were such a big deal and I didn’t have the nerve to fall flat on my face—so I never asked you out.”
“Huh,” she said, turning the swivel chair around to face him squarely. The chair squeaked as it turned, making her wince. “I wouldn’t have pegged you for a coward,” she told Mitch.
“I’m not—anymore,” he told her. “And I’ve got your father to thank for that. He helped me build up my confidence, made me feel that I was capable of doing things.”
Listening to him, Ena shook her head. “It still doesn’t seem like we’re talking about the same man. The Bruce O’Rourke I knew never built up anyone’s self-esteem. As a matter of fact, the old man seemed to thrive on destroying self-esteem.”
“Maybe your leaving was what changed him,” Mitch told her. “Because according to some of the old-timers who were there when I started to work on the ranch, your dad had the kind of disposition that made rattlesnakes duck and hide.”
Ena laughed despite herself. “Now that sounds like my dad,” she told him.
He liked hearing her laugh. She looked good in a smile, he thought. It just brightened her whole face. “Like I said, he changed after you left. Because of that—and thanks to you—he became a fair boss. Stern, like I said, but really fair. And I found that I could always talk to him.”
She was really having trouble making her peace with what Mitch was telling her.
“Well, that made one of us, because I certainly never could, not even when my mother was alive. After she died, life with my father became just like doing time in hell.”
There was sympathy in his eyes as he looked at her. “Was he that bad?”
“He was actually worse, but I don’t use that kind of language, so my description of hell is going to have to do,” Ena told him.
Mitch came around the desk, and to Ena’s surprise, he took her hand, coaxing her up out of the chair. “Why don’t you leave all that for now?”
“But it’s been in this state for years now,” she complained.
“That’s my whole point,” Mitch told her. “If it’s been that way for all this time, it can certainly last for another day. No need to kill yourself to try to get it fixed as fast as you can. As a matter of fact,” he said, considering the ordeal she was determined to take on, “tackling this behemoth in stages might be a better way to go if you think about it. This way, you won’t wind up completely wiped out.”
“Stages, eh?” she asked and Mitch nodded in response. “You, Parnell, have a very unique approach to working,” Ena told him.
“It’s called prioritizing, and it seems to have worked out for me so far so I feel like I can honestly recommend it to you.” His voice grew serious. “There’s nothing to be gained by working yourself into the ground like that. If you’re not wiped out, you can come back and work on this another day. So, how about it?” he asked. “You know the foal’s been asking for you.”
“Right,” she said with a laugh. “And did he ask for me by name?”
Mitch winked at her as he said, “Well, as a matter of fact...”
The man was incredible, Ena thought, amused. “Well, if we’re dealing with a talking foal, let’s not keep him waiting,” she responded. “Let’s go pay the little guy a visit.”
“Now that’s the ticket,” Mitch encouraged. Then, without thinking, he put his arm around her shoulders and guided her out of the den and toward the front door as if they were old friends.
Ena felt something warm sparking within her chest and moving through her limbs. For now she decided to just enjoy it without analyzing it any further.
* * *
She was spreading herself thin and she knew it, Ena thought. But unlike what Mitch had suggested, she couldn’t seem to get herself to prioritize the various duties that faced her.
There was doing the daily work on the ranch—something she knew Mitch and the hands who were working here could have taken on themselves, but that wasn’t the point, according to the terms of her father’s will. She was here to do the work, not shirk it.
Her Right-Hand Cowboy (Forever, Tx Series Book 21) Page 10