by Alicia Scott
Brandon contemplated the boy. He recognized the intense look, the determination to be tough. Randy was the eight-year-old man in the family. Brandon respected that.
Brandon squatted. He spoke man-to-man. "I've gone scuba diving in open seas."
"That's just water."
"I've hiked the volcanoes of Indonesia. The ground shakes and pops beneath your feet. You have to watch your step. One wrong move, the hot lava bursts beneath you and sprays sulfur all over your legs."
Randy appeared slightly more interested. "Oozing rocks, huh?"
"I've done peak bagging," Brandon said sagely. "Do you know what peak bagging is?"
"Peak bagging? What's a peak? Does it have fangs? Does it growl? Can it tear you from limb to limb?"
"Not quite. A peak is the top of a mountain. The very tippy-top most people never see. You know how early explorers—"
"Lewis and Clark."
"Yes, Lewis and Clark. They went into hard, brutal terrain most people would never attempt to cross. Peak bagging is like that. You hike up tough mountains and rough trails most people wouldn't be able to handle. You have to be in a great shape, have strong legs, good lungs. You have to be willing to keep climbing even when your whole body wants to stop.
"Then, when you reach the top of the peak, you've bagged it. Some people bag the different peaks of the Appalachian Trail. Some people try to bag the fourteen-thousand-foot peaks around the globe. Then there are peaks over twenty thousand feet high, so tall and so cold, you have to bring your own oxygen."
"Have you done twenty-thousand-foot peaks?"
"Yes," Brandon said quietly. "Everest."
"Mount Everest!" Randy's eyes went saucer-wide. "Did you make it to the top?"
"Not quite. The weather took a turn for the worse. But we were close."
"What was it like? Did it hurt? Was it hard?"
"The hardest thing I've ever done," Brandon said honestly. "And it was the most beautiful place in the world. Everest is twenty-nine thousand and twenty-eight feet tall, give or take ten feet because of snow. Up that high, the whole world is thick and white and the sun glints blue off the ice caps. It's like walking on top of the world, through the clouds."
"I bet it was dangerous," Randy said shrewdly.
"It was dangerous."
"Did people die?"
Brandon hesitated. "It was dangerous." Two men in their team had died. Sometimes Brandon still dreamed of the men's frozen blue faces and wide-open eyes. Sometimes, he dreamed that they were him.
"Keeewl," Randy drawled breathlessly. "Wait till I tell Mom!"
He leapt off the porch, went racing pell-mell across the yard, then came to a skittering halt that churned up plumes of red dust. "You're supposed to come, too," he called. "It's dinner!"
"Oh," Brandon said, having not understood that part. He straightened slowly, feeling suddenly hesitant about approaching the main house and sitting down with Randy and Victoria. It would be such a cozy scene. Homey, comfortable. Those were things Brandon hadn't felt in a long, long time.
"Hurry up!" Randy yelled from across the yard. His impatient look clearly stated that if they didn't eat absolutely, positively now, the food would magically disappear and they would both starve. Brandon got moving.
Randy scurried up to the front porch then waited, propping open the door with his hip and working the laces of his sneakers. "No shoes in the house."
"All right." Brandon removed his worn hiking boots and placed them side by side by the door. Randy tossed his tennis shoes in two different directions. One landed beneath the rocking chair.
"Gotta wash up before dinner. Do the back of your neck, Mom checks."
"I see."
Randy led him to the utility room just inside the door. A big old metal sink, rimmed with eight kinds of disinfectants and cleansers, loomed. Randy took up a position on the right side. Brandon went left. They stood shoulder to shoulder, preparing for battle.
"The trick is to lather up good," Randy informed him. "Specially 'cause then you smell like soap, and if you smell like soap, she won't look so hard."
"Good point."
Randy scrubbed his face so hard his freckles should've come off. Then he passed the lumpy bar of soap, and Brandon lathered up. Under Randy's watchful gaze, he washed the back of his neck, too, finally earning the boy's nod of approval.
Victoria found them a moment later, Randy hunched over the sink, his face soapy and water sticking his oversize red shirt to his thin shoulders and bony little-boy's frame. Beside him, Brandon filled out the room with the unmistakable form of a man. Wet spikes of hair rimmed his crinkled blue eyes. Beads of water trailed down the smooth line of his square-cut jaw and dampened his blue chambray shirt. His lean fingers gripped the soap, squishing white suds across the back of his bronzed skin and drawing her gaze to the rippling strength of his forearms.
"Oh, my," she whispered, stomach tightening. She'd told herself the moment in the cabin had been a product of her imagination. Obviously she'd lied, because here was Brandon Ferringer, damp and soapy, and heaven help her, she was growing warm all over.
Her son was looking at her curiously. She whisked herself to attention. "I mean, oh, my, it looks like you're both ready for dinner."
Randy promptly thrust out his hands and face. "I'm washed up! Time to eat."
"I smell like soap," Brandon said modestly.
"You put on a new shirt," Randy accused Victoria shrewdly. "Why'd y'change your shirt?"
Uh-oh, she was busted. She'd hoped her son wouldn't notice, but fat chance of that. Like any good eight-year-old, Randy only ignored things that could be used against him in a court of law. She squirmed beneath her own child's gaze, twisting the hem of her shirt. The shirt wasn't much, just an old plaid shirt like the rest of her wardrobe. Of course, it was lavender and she'd been told it highlighted her eyes, but that had nothing to do with it.
Her son was still staring at her, astute enough to make Torquemada proud. "Uh, my other shirt had hay on it," she tried.
"Your shirts always have hay on them."
"Gee, you're all washed up. Why don't you go sit at the table now?"
"Okay!" The promise of food sent Randy bolting from the room. Child-rearing was definitely ten percent skill, ninety percent blatant bribery.
Victoria turned toward Brandon, hoping she looked natural, figuring she probably didn't. Ferringer, on the other hand, looked great. When he'd arrived this afternoon, he'd looked too grim, worn around the edges. Now, however, his shoulders were down, his face was relaxed. She'd recognize her son's handiwork anywhere.
"Isn't he something?" she said.
"I like him," Brandon said promptly and looked a little dazed. Yep, Randy had that affect on people.
She began to relax, but Brandon took a step forward, she inhaled instinctively, and her pulse skittered out of control. Lord help her, he did smell like soap. Good strong spicy manly soap. She swore it didn't smell like that on her brothers.
"Thank you for the dinner invite, Victoria. Generally I just eat alone."
"No problem," she said in a voice that was two octaves too high, then dug her fingernails into her palm. Dammit, she was too old and too sensible for this. Sure Brandon Ferringer was a good-looking man in that rugged outdoorsy sort of way, but she had a ranch to run and a son to raise. She was beyond the stage of being easily impressed by the male half of the species. Now, if he knew how to train horses, rebuild a ranch or grow money on trees…
"Mom!" Randy wailed from the kitchen. She smiled. Oh, yeah, hers was the glamorous life.
"That's our paging system," she informed Brandon.
"Highly effective."
"Oh, you haven't heard anything yet. Let's eat."
"Wonderful." He fell in step beside her. "I'm really looking forward to this, Victoria," he said somberly. "I washed the back of my neck, you know."
Chapter 2
« ^ »
It was nice to have a man at the table again. And by that she
meant a man, as in a man—someone who was not a blood relation, someone who didn't tousle her hair, slurp food or drive her crazy with adolescent antics. Someone who sat up straight, said please and thank you and ate with such quiet dignity even Randy was shocked into practicing table manners.
Brandon Ferringer sat in a hard wooden chair at her beat-up round oak table, oblivious to the stir he was creating, while she studied him shamelessly from beneath the cover of her bangs. She'd made a deal with herself. As a practical woman, as a red-blooded twenty-seven-year-old who still had a pulse, dammit, she wasn't allowed to dream, but she was certainly allowed to stare. And what fine staring it was.
Brandon Ferringer certainly looked like he'd climbed mountains and scaled new worlds. His craggy face was wind-burned, his brown hair sun-streaked. His dark blue eyes were permanently crinkled from squinting toward distant horizons while his palms bore pads of thick yellow calluses from gripping ropes and pounding tent pegs. In his worn jeans, his simple blue chambray shirt and his thick black hiking socks, he still emanated the capable, graceful ease of a strong, virile man who'd gone the distance and somehow found himself there.
And tonight, having passed her father's background check, Brandon Ferringer would be sleeping in a cabin fifty feet from her bedroom window. Buck naked, would be her guess. He looked like a man who would never tolerate pajamas.
She vehemently stabbed a pea with her fork, splitting it in half. Don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it. You got a son to raise and a ranch to run and two new foals to train and bills to pay and feed to buy and—
"Mom," Randy exclaimed. "Are you gonna pass me the potatoes or what?"
Victoria passed the mashed potatoes. Of course she was paying attention. The kitchen lapsed into the comfortable silence of three hungry people devouring a hot meal. She studied Brandon again. So far, he seemed to honestly like the fried chicken.
Cooking wasn't exactly her thing. After being up at the crack of dawn running errands, managing the horses and trying to keep up with Randy, the evening meal was generally simple, hot and representative of four food groups. She didn't have time or inclination for more.
Once, when she'd been sixteen or so, she'd been young enough or naive enough to envision herself as a Western version of Mrs. Cleaver. She would tend horses, raise children, bake big hearty meals while her husband ran the ranch. In Beaverville, Oregon, where there wasn't much else to do on Friday nights, she and the other girls in her high school class had spun their fantasies. She supposed statistics, small-town boredom and youthful ignorance were impossible to escape, however. By the time Victoria was seventeen, the first of her friends was pregnant. Her senior year, they all seemed to come down with it, as if it was a contagious disease. At nineteen, just two months after graduation, Victoria caught the plague herself.
She and Ronald had made a go of it, like most of their friends. They'd found each other irresistibly attractive—love at first hormones—and getting married and having kids was pretty much all they'd expected out of life, anyway. Then Randy had arrived, squalling, demanding, breathtakingly beautiful—and Ronald had bolted for the first exit he could find. Diapers weren't his thing. Crying babies weren't his thing. The prospect of failing such a small, delicate new life definitely wasn't his thing.
Hanging out with his buddies, drinking, joking, getting into bar brawls at Whiskey Jack's was so much more his style. Victoria tried to tell herself boys would be boys. God knows her brothers had sowed some wild oats. Her father was the one who'd finally told her about Ronald's drug problem. Victoria just hadn't wanted to see the signs.
Luckily, her parents hadn't raised her to mope, and her brothers hadn't conditioned her to hide. She'd given Ronald one last chance to clean up his act, and when he emptied out their meager savings account for dope, she'd kicked his sorry ass out of the house and gone at it alone. And her family had stood by her one hundred percent because that's what families did.
Her parents cosigned her mortgage on the ranch and helped with the down payment. Her brothers assisted with the larger projects and made sure Randy never suffered from a lack of male attention. The house could be more, of course—cleaner, nicer, fancier. But the roof didn't leak and the hot water ran if you hit the pipes just right. The money could be more, as well. She couldn't afford the fancy baseball shoes and gloves the other boys on Randy's team wore. Instead of a new encyclopedia set or deluxe computer, Randy had a 1972 world globe she'd picked up at a garage sale. One of these days, she was going to have to remember to tell her son that that big thing marked Union of Soviet Socialist Republics no longer existed.
But there were good things, too. There was Randy. The best. She wouldn't trade her son for the world, and if she had to do it all over again, she'd make the exact same mistakes just so she could hold him in her arms and hear him cry in his exasperated voice, "Mom!" She and Randy made a fine team.
And she wondered if, sitting in a beat-up old kitchen, eating a simple ranch-style dinner, Brandon Ferringer thought the same. According to her father's background check, Brandon used to be some Donald Trump-style New York investment banker. He rented a penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan, owned more gold cards than Victoria had horses and had earned enough degrees and honors to wallpaper a house.
He could afford to stay at a place a lot fancier than her one-bedroom cabin, and he could do a hell of a lot more than work six months a year for ten bucks an hour in the middle of a wall of flames.
The man must be addicted to adrenaline in the worst way. And Victoria was afraid she already knew his type—except for the money, he wasn't so different from her rowdy, stir-crazy brothers, after all. And just like them, just like all the men it seemed she knew, he wasn't the kind of man who stuck around.
"How's the chicken?" Victoria asked Brandon at last.
"Excellent." He was cutting into his third piece. She'd never seen anyone eat fried chicken with a knife and fork before, but he made it look quite elegant. Beside her, Randy gave it a go and sent his drumstick skittering onto his lap. Unperturbed, he plopped the piece of chicken onto his plate and tried again.
"May I please have more peas, Victoria?"
"Who's Victoria?" Randy asked, still wrestling with his drumstick.
"I'm Victoria."
"You're Vic. Or Mom. But he can't call you Mom. Only I can call you Mom."
"Mr. Ferringer can call me Victoria, then." She didn't mind it, the way he said it. The accent, of course.
"You don't like Victoria—"
"Randy, it's fine."
"Victoria's a girl's name." Randy scowled.
"I need to find the duct tape," she murmured.
"The peas?" Brandon requested politely once more.
She passed the peas and offered a rueful smile. "Dinners around here are a little informal. Generally it's just Randy and me … I … me. Well, we're a pretty casual household."
"Oh, I don't mind. It reminds me of my grandmother."
"Is your grandma in England?" Randy asked with fresh interest. "I looked up England. It's on a whole new incontinent."
"Continent."
"Yeah, that."
"My grandma doesn't live in England," Brandon said, "but that's where I grew up so I'm happy you could find it on the globe. More Yanks need to be able to locate the mother country, you know."
Randy beamed. Brandon picked up his fork. Victoria rolled her eyes. Yanks, indeed.
"Actually," Brandon continued, "my grandmother, Lydia, runs a dairy in Tillamook, on the coast, right here in Oregon. Have you ever eaten Tillamook cheese?"
"Oh, yeah." Randy made a face. Oregon cities weren't as exciting as English ones. At the wise age of six, he'd already declared that he was going to leave Beaverville 'cause it was too boring. Victoria had hoped it would take him another six years to figure that out.
"Tillamook is a beautiful place," she said levelly. "I've been there twice, and it's so … so green."
Brandon nodded. "Most definite
ly. My grandmother came from Texas during the Depression. They traveled for weeks, and she likes to say that the minute she saw the rolling green hills and the mist-shrouded mountains, she knew she'd found home. My father grew up on the farm. After his plane went down, she made sure myself and my two half-siblings, C.J. and Maggie, spent our summers there, as well, so we could learn about Tillamook and each other. Those were wonderful summers."
"Your grandmother sounds like a very smart woman." Something had come over Brandon's face. He looked … homesick, as if he still missed the days of his youth, sometimes even ached for them.
"I'm done," Randy announced.
She tore her eyes from Brandon to Randy. "Eat your peas."
"I ate two of them."
"I know, now try two bites of them."
Randy rolled his eyes and gave Brandon a long-suffering look, seeking an ally. But Brandon piled peas onto his fork, scooped them into his mouth and made a great show of enjoying each and every one of them.
"Gross," Randy muttered, but grudgingly followed suit. Victoria gave Brandon a grateful smile.
"My sister still lives in Oregon," Brandon said after a moment. "Her husband programs CD-ROM games for your computer. His name is Cain Cannon. Maybe you've heard of him. His biggest seller is Break Out."
"I don't have that," Randy announced. "I don't have a computer." He gave Victoria an injured look.
Even more than a new baseball mitt, Randy wanted a computer. Last week, he'd gone so far as to explain how they could keep the ranch finances and horse-breeding records on it. One of his best friends, Arnie, had a computer and he did everything on it—school reports, surfing the Web. Games. Victoria was no dummy.
"No, we don't," she said firmly. "Computers are a major investment. However—" she caught her son's eye so she would have his full attention "—I was thinking that this summer you could help me train one of the foals. With the right training, she'll be worth a lot of money come fall. We could sell her. Maybe after we deducted the cost of feed, breeding and training, there would be enough money left over to buy … oh, I don't know. Say, a computer."
"Oh," Randy said, his eyes already widening with the possibility. "Neat! Great! Cool!" He whirled toward Brandon like a mini tornado and expelled in a rush, "Our foals are royalty. They're beautiful. They got bloodlines! We saved for two years to breed our mares with Sir Henry. Now we got two re—recent—re vent…"