The Rancher's City Girl

by Patricia Johns

  “No, go on.” Eloise perched on a stool by the counter, leaning on her elbows. She found it endearing that he would think he was boring, but his life here in on the ranch was so different from anything she’d ever experienced. She found it all intriguing.

  “You want to hear about this?” Cory asked doubtfully.

  “Absolutely.”

  Cory shrugged. “Well, we have a part of fence on the far west end of the property that needs repair. It’s sagging, and one more winter will probably do it in, so I’ve got to put some guys on it. We have a couple of ranch hands that came with zero experience, and Chad will be gone by morning, so that will make a third new hand on staff who will need to learn the ropes around here. That means either Zack or I’ll have to go do it.”

  As he talked, he pulled vegetables from the fridge and kicked the door shut as he pivoted and ambled back to the counter.

  “Do you want some help?” Eloise asked, suddenly feeling guilty for sitting while he both entertained her and cooked.

  “I’m fine.” He grinned. “About time someone waited on you for a change.”

  Eloise felt pleased and settled back to watch him work. His hands moved nimbly with the knife as he chopped and diced.

  “So, what are we having?” she asked.

  “Kind of an egg scramble. Sound good?”

  “Sounds great.”

  He pulled out a pan, then headed back to the fridge, returning with sausage. “You know, I thought I’d have more time to talk to my dad, but he sleeps a lot.”

  It struck her then that Cory didn’t know much about the process of dying. Families were never prepared to lose a loved one, or in Cory’s case, an estranged parent. How much did he feel this? she wondered. He kept a lot hidden under that tough exterior, but she knew that inside he must have been experiencing some emotions about his father.

  “It’s part of this stage of things,” she explained gently. “The painkillers make him drowsy, but he’s much more comfortable with the medication.”

  “Would it be...” He paused in his work. “Is he in much pain?”

  “That’s why I’m here.” She nodded reassuringly. “I give him what he needs. There is no virtue in suffering, especially now.”

  Cory began to chop again, peeling the sausage’s casing away from the seasoned meat.

  “He’s what, eighty?”

  Eloise nodded. “Eighty-two.”

  “He would have been in his late forties when I was born.”

  Cory started the burner on the gas stove, the blue flame leaping up to caress the bottom of the pan. After a moment, the meat hissed against the warming oil.

  Cory couldn’t help that his father was dying, and in Eloise’s experience, sometimes it was better to focus on other things than the impending passing of a loved one. Dying was hard, but it wasn’t the biggest part of a person’s life—living was. And his father was still living.

  “I asked him about his marriage to Ruth today,” Eloise said, attempting to move the conversation toward more cheerful ground. “I wanted to know what made it a success.”

  “What did he say?” Cory’s dark gaze flickered up toward her, then back down to the cutting board.

  “He talked about how divorce just wasn’t an option. I suppose his generation was different that way.”

  “Hmm.” Cory nodded.

  “There was one thing he said that was actually rather sweet. He said that Ruth had him at hello, and she knew it.”

  Cory chuckled softly. “It’s hard to imagine that cranky old man being romantic, isn’t it?”

  Eloise laughed. “A little.”

  Cory grabbed an onion and sliced the peel with one smooth stroke, his movements relaxing in the change of conversation.

  “Did Deirdre have you at hello?” she asked.

  Cory arched an eyebrow. “I don’t remember. We got to know each other a little more slowly. I knew her from around town a bit, but we didn’t start dating right away.”

  Eloise nodded.

  “You want to know if there’s a secret to a marriage that lasts that long, don’t you?” he asked.

  “Maybe I do,” she admitted. “Don’t you?”

  “I guess. I mean, obviously I don’t know what happened between my dad and his wife, but they made it to the end, at least.”

  Cory slid onions and peppers into the pan. Eloise was suddenly aware that she was crossing lines again. Her being at the ranch wasn’t about her marriage or her personal search for answers. This was about an old man dying and his estranged son attempting to build a relationship in the last weeks he had left. A surge of guilt welled up inside of her for her fixation on herself.

  “I’m really sorry,” Eloise said. “I don’t mean to put myself into the middle of your situation here.”

  “Why can’t you be a part of this?” Cory caught her gaze. “You’re a friend. My dad certainly sees you as more than a nurse in his life. It looks like you’re pretty much all he’s got.”

  “Thanks.” Eloise wasn’t sure how to answer, and she shrugged. “Things get complicated. Nursing is so personal.”

  Cory nodded. “Yeah, I get that. You want to know what I’ve been wondering about?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Why he chose his wife over my mother. It’s ridiculous, because I wouldn’t have wanted my mother to break up someone else’s marriage, but what made my mother the one to drop? Especially when she was pregnant with me?”

  They wanted to know the same thing, apparently. She nodded.

  “You must have missed having a father,” she said.

  “Of course. But I’m glad I listened to her and didn’t look for him.”

  “Oh?” Eloise was surprised by that answer. She would have thought he’d resent the lost time now that his father was dying.

  “Can you imagine a teenager dealing with him?” Anger flickered deep in Cory’s dark eyes. “As a kid, I would have been devastated to know that my dad had no interest in knowing me.”

  Cory had a good point, Eloise realized sadly. Children needed love and encouragement, and his father hadn’t been able to provide those things.

  “It sounds like you had a good mom, though,” she offered.

  “I did.” The fork ticked lightly against the side of the bowl as he whisked the eggs. “I had a good life. From this side of things, I have to say that I was better off with my fantasies than I was knowing the truth about my father.”

  Someone had to get hurt. Wasn’t that what the old man had said? One stupid decision, and someone’s life would be ruined—he just had to pick the woman to cast aside.

  Yet, against all odds, he’d chosen his wife, and in a strange way that comforted Eloise. Even in grouchy old Mr. Bessler, there was something stronger than his attraction to a younger woman—something that kept him with the woman to whom he’d made vows.

  “I think he missed out in not knowing you,” Eloise said. “I have a feeling he would have been a different man if he’d taken the risk to reach out to you.”

  Cory shrugged. “Maybe not. Who knows if Ruth even knew about me.”

  Eloise sighed. Someone had to get hurt. Just not Robert Bessler.

  Cory poured the eggs over the vegetables and sausage in the pan, and the mixture sizzled deliciously.

  Eloise looked around the warmly lit kitchen. Robert was another subject she’d never be able to fully comprehend. He was a perplexing old man, and no matter how hard she tried to make sense of his motives, she came up short.

  “I don’t know what makes for a lasting marriage,” Cory admitted as he spooned steaming eggs, vegetables and sausage from the pan onto plates. “When I do find the right woman and get married, I’m not going to make my father’s mistakes.”

  Eloise nodded. “You’re different fr
om him.”

  Cory pushed a fork across the counter, then placed a plate in front of her. “Eat up. Out in the country, we don’t count calories. We burn them off.”

  Eloise laughed out loud and picked up the fork.

  Chapter Seven

  Afternoon sunlight spilled down the hallway from the dining-room window, warming Eloise’s legs as she pushed open Mr. Bessler’s bedroom door and peeked inside. He lay in the dimmed room, his chest rising and falling with each soft snore. She eased the door shut again with a click and stood with her hand on the knob. The morning had been busy. A ranch hand dislocated his shoulder in a riding accident, and then another man had broken a toe when a heifer stepped on it. Zack had driven her from patient to patient, and Nora had volunteered to stay with Mr. Bessler as he slept.

  Now that Eloise was back again, she’d been planning on taking the old man into town so she could get a few items from the drugstore and give him some different scenery. She thought he might enjoy it, but today he was more exhausted than usual. The last stretch for a terminal patient was the hardest on everyone, especially the patient.

  “Eloise?”

  Cory ambled down the hallway, then stopped short when he saw her face. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s still sleeping. I checked his vital signs earlier, and he’s doing well, considering.”

  He nodded. “You look worried.”

  “I’d hoped to get into town today and buy him a few supplies. You could also use some more antinausea medication. I used up the last of your stock for Chad.”

  “Good point.” Cory nodded. “I can give you a ride if you like.”

  “But your father is still sleeping.” Days like this were difficult for a nurse. Mr. Bessler had slept most of the morning, woken for a few hours around noon, and had just fallen back asleep. Her patient needed someone with him, but beyond that, the hours crawled by.

  “Follow me.” Cory headed back toward the kitchen and Eloise followed.

  Nora looked up from the table, which was covered in ledgers. A pencil was balanced behind her ear and she clutched a pen in one hand. She bent over the books and ran a hand through her straight, shoulder-length hair. “Sorry to eavesdrop, but I’m going to be here all afternoon if you’d like me to keep an eye on Mr. Bessler. We’re redoing the kitchen floor over at our place, so it’s kind of a mess over there.”

  Cory raised his eyebrows questioningly and Eloise pressed her lips together, considering for a moment.

  “You’ve already done that once today,” Eloise replied. “I don’t want to impose.”

  “I’m here anyway,” Nora replied with a shrug. “It doesn’t put me out.”

  “If you could just look in on him once every twenty minutes or so. He’s sleeping normally right now. He’s already had his pain medication and shouldn’t have more until I return. If anything changes—if he complains about pain, seems short of breath, or anything like that—you could call me on my cell phone.”

  Nora nodded. “Definitely.”

  Eloise smiled. “Thanks, Nora, I really appreciate it.”

  “No problem.” Nora shot Eloise a smile. “You could use some time off, you know.”

  Eloise shrugged. Nursing didn’t offer regular breaks—her focus was the patient. That being said, she was starting to tire out.

  “A trip to town takes an hour if we rush, a couple of hours if we stop for coffee.” Cory picked up an apple from the fruit bowl on the counter and polished it against his shirt. “We don’t have to be gone too long.”

  “A couple of hours is just fine.” Nora dropped her gaze to her ledgers and waved Cory and Eloise away. “Have fun.”

  Ten minutes later, Cory and Eloise bumped along the drive toward the highway in Cory’s black pickup. Eloise leaned her head back, feeling the tension slide out of her neck and shoulders. Cranton was a twenty-minute drive from the ranch, a drive interspersed with billowing dust from gravel roads and the melancholy jangle from the radio. After a short drive on the main highway, another lengthy road led them into Cranton, a farming community nestled in the middle of rolling fields on all four sides, swallowed up in crops. The town consisted of a couple of small schools, a grocery store and a few streets of storefronts and local businesses, thrown together with rare abandon. The seed store hunched right next door to the local burger joint, and the mayor’s office was next to a butcher on one side, and what appeared to be a closed auto body shop on the other.

  “This is ‘town’?” Eloise asked, looking out the window. A leather and tackle shop looked all but closed, except that the door was propped open with a brick and an old man sat in front, his chair tipped back against the brick wall behind him. Cory beeped his horn and the old man raised his hat, then dropped it back over his eyes in response.

  “This is Cranton, in all its glory.”

  “And I thought Haggerston was little,” she murmured.

  “We make do,” Cory replied, nonplussed.

  “Isn’t it lonely out here, so far from everything?”

  “Lonely?” Cory laughed. “You really aren’t used to small towns, are you?”

  Eloise wasn’t sure what he meant, but the place looked downright dead. A few stores were open, a handful of pickup trucks left clouds of dust behind them as they rumbled through town, but other than the man sitting outside the leather shop, she couldn’t see any signs of life. If Haggerston, where Mr. Bessler lived, was a small town, Cranton was microscopic.

  Eloise’s errands didn’t take long. The drugstore, sandwiched between the hardware store and general fix-it shop, was surprisingly well stocked, and she was able to get everything she needed in a matter of minutes. Waiting for the owner of the store to stop chatting with an older lady and ring up her order, however, took a full fifteen minutes. All included, before half an hour passed, Cory and Eloise pulled into the only establishment that seemed to have any customers: Liza’s Diner.

  “The coffee is hot and the pie is amazing,” Cory said. “It’ll do you good.”

  Liza’s Diner crouched long and low, just outside Cranton on the gravel road that led back to the highway. A red-and-white-striped awning shaded the front door. An Open sign flickered in the window, and next to it, a faded Montana Beef loyalty sign showed a brown cow, staring at the camera, a tuft of grass hanging out one side of its mouth.

  Cory opened the door and Eloise stepped into the stuffy dining room. It didn’t look as if it had been updated since the day it opened, sometime in the seventies it appeared. Brown wooden tables were scattered over an orangey carpet, white-and-red-checkered cloths covered half of the tables, while the rest were bare. The patrons of the diner were obviously local folk from farms and ranches in the area. Two waitresses worked the room with a pot of coffee in each hand. Voices mingled with the clatter of cooking that emanated from behind a swinging door that heaved open every couple of minutes, a server emerging with a tray of steaming food.

  “Hey, Cory Stone.” An old rancher grinned up from a plate of steak and eggs. “How’s the calving, son?”

  “Steady. How about you, Earl?”

  “Lost two calves last night. Twins.”

  “Sorry to hear.”

  Earl shrugged. “It happens, right? Multiples are harder.”

  Cory nodded, making a sympathetic noise in the back of his throat. “How’s Wanda?”

  “Better. The cast comes off next week.”

  “This is Eloise. She’s a temporary medic.”

  “Pleasure.” Earl s
hot out a hand and grabbed hers in a firm handshake.

  Eloise smiled while the men chatted for a couple of minutes about everything from politics to the running of a ranch. As she listened, she noticed that in the back of the room two tables had been pushed together for a larger party—several members of which were staring directly at her.

  Eloise smiled and nodded, looked away. When she glanced back, their attention hadn’t moved on. In fact, the last few who hadn’t noticed her at first had now joined the rest of the group in eyeing her in undisguised curiosity.

  Eloise put a hand on Cory’s strong arm, and he paused in his conversation, his gaze following hers.

  “Uh-oh.”

  Eloise looked up at him, her eyebrows rising in surprise. “What do you mean, uh-oh?”

  “Come on,” he murmured. “Might as well go say hello.”

  “Can’t avoid that one.” Earl smirked. “Nice to meet you, Miss.”

  “Likewise.”

  Earl ducked behind his coffee cup and made a big show of draining it.

  Cory angled a path across the dining room, and Eloise followed his lead. The occupants of the tables in the back turned to their coffee, looking up again only when Cory stopped beside them.

  One woman sat in front of a game of solitaire, flipping cards and creating lines with amazing speed, only half her attention on the game. She met Eloise’s gaze with a wink.

  “Hi, I’m Gloria,” she said with a smile.

  “Eloise, nice to meet you.”

  “That you, Cory?” an older woman asked with exaggerated innocence. “Didn’t see you come in. How’re you?”

  She wore her ash-gray hair pulled back in a French braid. Her face had lines from laughter and worry, and her blue eyes sparkled with kindness.

  “Hi, Aunt Bea.” He bent and kissed her cheek, and she beamed up at him.