by Zoe York
The derision, the sneer on Wyatt’s face when he heard the news…Stetson didn’t need to actually tell his oldest brother the truth to know what Wyatt’s reaction would be. It was the same reaction that Wyatt had for almost every piece of news Stetson had to relay – good, bad, or indifferent.
And this news was definitely not indifferent.
No, he couldn’t tell his brothers. He couldn’t admit how much things had gone downhill since their dad died. They’d never forgive him.
Not, of course, that any of this was his fault. It was all the damn bank’s fault. Why, his dad was hardly even cold in the ground. They didn’t need to be circling like vultures overhead, just waiting for a chance to shred him to pieces. They could at least give a guy a chance to get his feet underneath him.
Stetson picked up the letter, unsullied by even a dirty fingerprint, and stared down at it unseeingly. Then, with a precision worthy of a surgeon, he began tearing it into strips. Long, straight, neat strips.
“When that asshole banker gets here, I’m gonna give him a piece of my mind!” Stetson growled to himself, tearing the letter into smaller and smaller pieces. Each tear of the paper was satisfyingly precise. “I’ll teach him how not to be a bastard. I’ll teach him with my fists, that piece of shit—”
A clearing of a throat cut Stetson off at the pass. He froze, hoping that if he just stood there long enough, no one would notice him. He’d blend into the background, like a cowboy version of a chameleon, and avoid the wrath of his housekeeper.
She cleared her throat again.
Dammit.
Stetson let the pieces of the letter flutter to the ground – his one act of defiance that he dared to do in front of his formidable housekeeper – and then turned to the doorway.
There Carmelita stood, her fists planted on her hips, shooting him glares that Stetson could only be grateful didn’t actually kill.
Behind his fiery, rotund Hispanic housekeeper stood…a woman?
Stetson stared.
She stared back.
Time stood still as Stetson’s mind scrambled to put the information in front of him together into a coherent whole. The hated banker, the one he was going to beat into the ground with his fists was…a woman.
“That low-down snake!” Stetson erupted, staring at the female banker. “That piece-of-shit bank president sent in a woman to do his dirty work? Is he hiding behind your skirts? Huh? Why doesn’t he come in here like a real man and face me?”
Carmelita’s face, unhappy to begin with, turned a bright shade of red that Stetson hadn’t seen since he’d gotten the oh-so-grand idea at age six to dye the white sheets in the guest bedroom a deep red. He’d used them as a cape to jump off the roof – he was gonna fly like Superman.
He wasn’t sure which had hurt worse: His broken leg or being on the receiving end of that stare.
“This lady is going to look at your books,” Carmelita ground out, staring Stetson down, which considering she had to crane her neck upwards to do, was quite the feat. His righteous indignation began to seep out of him like a balloon with a pinprick in it. “And you will treat her like a lady!” she thundered.
With that, his housekeeper moved to the side, letting the tiny woman through. Even with heels on, the banker barely came to Stetson’s shoulder.
“Hi,” the woman said, extending her hand toward him. “I’m Jennifer—” She stopped abruptly, Stetson noted with pride. Probably because he was looking down at her hand with all the respect he might give a rotting fish.
Good.
Maybe he couldn’t punch the banker, and maybe he couldn’t use choice words to tell her exactly what he thought of her chosen profession – stealing farms from hard-working, red-blooded Americans – so he’d do the next best thing: He’d put her in her place.
“I know who you are and why you’re here,” Stetson said flatly. “Let’s get some things straight. First, you’re not staying here. This is not a guest house; you can get a room in town. Second, this is my home, and I’ll not have it invaded by…” he waved his hand in the air, “bank people. You can use the office and the bathroom. The rest of the house and farm is off limits.”
Really warming up to the task of telling this woman what’s what, he continued, “Third, I’m not paying for the privilege of having my farm stolen from me. If you have to make a phone call, you’ll do it on your own dime. Use your damn phone, not mine. Fourth, Carmelita serves lunch at noon each day. Because I’m a good host, I’ll let you eat one sandwich with a glass of water, but that’s it. Finally, you’re gonna start at 8 and be gone by 5 every day. No exceptions.”
Drawing in a deep breath, he crossed his arms and glared down at her. Damn, it felt good to order the bank around. It was ‘bout time they got a taste of their own medicine.
Chapter 2
Jennifer
Jennifer stared up at the pissed-off farmer, towering over her, and had the most vivid – if short – daydream of stomping into his instep, kneeing him in the balls, and walking out the door. With that, she could go back to her boss, tell him that the farm had failed the audit and that the Miller Farm needed to be repossessed for lack of assets and income. It’s what her boss wanted her to report back, anyway. Jenn knew that.
But she pushed down her urge to knock the asshole of a farmer down a peg or two, and instead forced a smile onto her face. An unconvincing, stiff-as-dried-plaster smile, but a smile nonetheless.
“Thank you for the information. Now, if you wouldn’t mind, I have work to do, since it appears none has been done in months.” She stared pointedly at a particularly precarious pile of file folders tottering on the edge of the desk and then back up at Mr. Miller.
Waaaay up at Mr. Miller. Dammit all, this guy was a giant. Were all Sawyer farm boys this tall? She was going to hurt her neck, craning it like this.
Not that she was going to admit that to this overgrown ape. She’d already had her fill of his condescending attitude and she’d only been in his presence for three minutes. She’d admit a weakness to him about the same time she’d chop off her right foot.
And anyway, it sure as hell wasn’t her fault that her father wasn’t cousin to Bigfoot.
“Whatever. I have work to do. Real work.” He stomped past her and out into the hallway, his footsteps echoing with anger as he stormed out of the house.
Jennifer turned back to the portly older woman still hovering in the doorway, and shot her a more genuine smile. “Thanks for your help,” she said.
“My Stetson should not have behaved that way,” Carmelita announced angrily, her cheeks a flaming red. “I will have a talk with him when he comes back in about his manners.” She too stormed down the hallway but her soft slippers didn’t clomp nearly as loudly as Mr. Miller’s boots had. Jennifer somehow knew that Carmelita was regretting her shoe choices that very moment.
Jennifer turned back to the office, surveying it with a groan. She’d audited some pretty disastrous offices before on behalf of the bank, but she was pretty sure that this one took the cake. In stark contrast to the rest of the pristine house that Jennifer had caught sight of as she’d followed Carmelita back here, this disaster zone really looked like it just deserved to be set on fire so they could start over again.
Why was it that offices run by men always looked like this? When women were the bookkeepers, the offices may not have been spick-n-span, but they were at least tolerable. But men’s offices…it was like they were allergic to filing paperwork. Or cleaning.
Which was, of course, why the bank was sending her out to audit the books to begin with. People who were on top of their paperwork and their filing and their bills didn’t tend to have their businesses taken away from them. That wasn’t always true, of course – sometimes a business ran into a string of bad luck that couldn’t be avoided – but usually, it was a hatred and/or a complete lack of bookkeeping knowledge that put people into this position.
She sighed. She knew from hard-won experience that getting grumpy about
the state of an office at the beginning of an audit did her absolutely no good. It was time to get to work. She could complain about farmers’ inability to file papers into a drawer later over wine with Bonnie.
Just as Jennifer moved to sit down in the rickety old office chair that looked like it’d survived a WWII bombing raid, she heard the front door slam open, footsteps echo through the entryway and hallway, and then Mr. Miller reappeared in the doorway, his face as brilliant red as Carmelita’s had been. Avoiding eye contact, he snatched his cowboy hat off the filing cabinet in the corner – Jennifer hadn’t even noticed it in amongst the piles of papers everywhere – shoved it down on his head, and then stormed back out, the door slamming shut behind him.
Again.
She wasn’t sure if she wanted to laugh or cry.
She sat down in the office chair with a snort-laugh that ended with a yelp of terror when she found herself staring up at the ceiling, her head cracking against the hardwood floor as the chair slammed backwards. “What the hell?!” she half-yelled, the words coming out of her before she could stop them. She usually tried not to swear at a customer’s place of business, but she also usually did not sit in chairs that fell over like fainting goats, either, so she figured she had a valid excuse just this once.
She rocked and rolled and finally heaved herself out of the chair and onto her feet, staring down at the innocent-looking chair with a baleful glare. She brushed her black skirt off, trying to get the bits of hay and mud and cow shit off her from her roll on the floor. That was definitely not how she wanted to start this audit. With a sigh, she hoisted the ancient office chair upright again, settling down into it gingerly this time, finding just the right spot to keep her precarious balance.
Yup, this was gonna be one fun audit, all right.
Chapter 3
Stetson
After laying down the law with that no-good female banker, Stetson stormed out towards the barn, remembering halfway there that he’d left his hat behind, went back to retrieve it, and then stormed out to the barn again, where he promptly spent the rest of the day hiding.
Well, not hiding, of course. He was a man. Men did not hide from women. He was just choosing to spend his day working on very important things that were not inside of the house, was all.
Which was a very different kettle of fish altogether.
His hired hands were working hard on vaccinating the new calves, and he really should go help them, but it wasn’t fair to them if he made them pay for the bank’s bullshit by biting their heads off for the heinous crime of breathing, so on second thought, he should probably stay away from them.
All people, actually. And anyway, Christian – his foreman – was out there with them, so he’d make sure that the men were doing what they needed to.
And while Stetson was staying away from people, he should probably do the same with beasts for that matter. Cows were trying enough on the best of days, and this was definitely not a best day, or even a mediocre day.
So, the barn it was. At least there, he had a reasonable chance of being left alone.
Damn the bank anyway. At least if they’d sent a man, he could’ve told that man what he really thought about him, the bank, and how screwed up this whole situation was, punctuated perfectly with his fists. To add insult to injury, Stetson also knew that he was going to hear about his rudeness – and swearing – from Carmelita sometime in the very near future.
The prospect of an ass-chewing didn’t exactly make him jump up and down for joy.
Stetson looked around, trying to find a very important project to work on. The Miller Family Barn was more of a storage building and workshop combined together than a typical barn. In the winter, he would park tractors and other equipment in it to keep the expensive machinery out of the weather, but since it was the middle of summer, there was a lot more elbow room to be found.
Along one wall, there were workbenches, toolboxes, and all of the miscellaneous tools and junk that had accumulated over the years. The piles of stuff were ostensibly kept under the pretense that they could someday be used to make repairs, but Stetson knew better.
The truth was:
1. He was a farmer;
2. Farmers never threw away anything; and
3. Carmelita was never allowed into the barn.
There were some laws of nature that just shouldn’t be broken.
And then, he spotted it. Hidden in the very back corner of the barn was a small tarp-covered tractor. Unlike the modern equipment that was used for the day-to-day operations of the farm, this tractor was nearly 60 years old.
It had belonged to the Miller family from the day it’d rolled off the assembly line. It was the first piece of motorized equipment Stetson’s grandfather had purchased. Since then, a long line of equipment had passed through their ownership. Bigger, more efficient equipment cycled through as technology advanced, but the family had held on to this particular tractor as a reminder of all the things it symbolized.
Stetson wandered over to the miniature tractor – at least, miniature in comparison to today’s beasts – and pulled the tarp off, sending up a cloud of dust that had him coughing and gasping for air. Once most of it had settled and the air became breathable again, Stetson ran his hand over the rusty, chipped green paint and split leather seat, remembering…
Over the years, the tractor had sat in a field through rain, snow, and shine. Eventually, time took its toll on the machine to the point where it would no longer run. Then one day, Stetson’s father wrapped a chain around the front axle, lifted a much younger Stetson into the seat, showed him how to release the clutch and how to steer, and together, they pulled the rotting tractor to the barn. It was the first thing Stetson had ever driven.
“What’re we gonna do to Grandpa’s tractor?” Stetson had asked.
“We’re going to fix it,” his father replied, amused at the obviousness of the answer.
“But this one’s old and we have better ones over there.”
“I guess that depends on how you judge better,” his father had said, kneeling to look his young son in the eye. “If it wasn’t for this tractor, your grandfather wouldn’t have been a successful farmer, and that means that we wouldn’t have had the money or reason to buy those other tractors that you say are better.”
“But why are you going to fix it? The other tractors are stronger and faster.”
“First, I’m not the only one who’s going to fix this tractor, son. You’re going to help me fix it. Second, we’re going to fix this tractor because it’s a reminder of where our family has come from. It’s a symbol of all the hard work that’s gone into giving us the things we have now. It may never plow another field, but this is the tractor that plowed the fields and planted the seeds that are your future and I want you to learn to respect that.”
Stetson’s vision was blurry. The tractor was fuzzy around the edges and his face was hot, but in his mind, he could clearly see the deep, sun-etched wrinkles at the corners of his father’s eyes.
Stetson wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand as the memory faded. Damn dust in the air, anyway.
The tractor still didn’t run. There was a new part attached here and there, but he and his father had only ever worked on the tractor a few moments at a time over the years.
“If they want my farm, fine. But this tractor will run again, by God,” he said out loud. It was a declaration to the universe. Finally, something that he could do, rather than just sit and worry. What had thirty-one days of worry gotten him? A banker in his father’s office, doing her damnedest to steal the Miller Family Farm.
He grabbed a wrench and got to work. Worrying and stewing over bankers solved nothing.
What about drooling over bankers?
Stetson stopped, his wrench in mid-air as he stared unseeingly at the tiny, antique tractor in front of him. Where the hell had that thought come from?
The stress was getting to him, that was for sure. If he didn’t pull his head out of his
ass, and soon, he was going to lose his mind along with his farm.
And Stetson wasn’t quite sure which one was worse.
Chapter 4
Jennifer
Jennifer gingerly stood up from the chair, rolling her neck from side to side to work the kinks out of it as she looked down with satisfaction at the piles of papers on the wooden, scarred desk. To the untrained eye, it would look a lot like it had when she’d started – just piles of papers laid out everywhere – but this time, there was a purpose for those piles.
Which definitely couldn’t be said for the first set of piles she’d inherited.
She hadn’t sorted out the piles elsewhere in the office, stacked on every horizontal surface available, but hey, baby steps.
Now that there was some semblance of order in the chaos, at least in the desk arena, she just had to find a way to help Mr. Miller save his farm, even if he was an ungrateful ass. He may not appreciate her hard work on his behalf, but that didn’t mean it was any less her job.
Which, now that she thought about it, was rather like operating on a pain-in-the-ass patient and saving their life, whether or not they wanted the help, and whether or not they appreciated it.
Jennifer wrinkled her nose at herself. How was it that she’d gone from one profession to the next, and neither one of them appreciated the effort and care she put in? She must be a glutton for punishment – a masochist of the first order. There was no other explanation.
“Would you like a break now?” came Carmelita’s voice behind her, startling her out of her self-pitying thoughts. She whirled around to face the door, her hand over her heart, a startled yelp spilling out of her.
“Sorry, I did not mean to scare you,” the housekeeper said with a kindly smile. “You have been hard at work for a long time, though, and I thought that you might want to take a break.”