by Hope Navarre
“Sorry I’m late,” she said. “I overslept.”
“Me, too.”
“What’s that for you? Four a.m.?” she asked grumpily.
“Five,” he said as she came to a stop in front of him, hands still deep in her sweatshirt pockets.
“What are we doing today?”
“Putting new posts into the holes we took the old posts out of yesterday.” He motioned to the truck with his head. “You can drive, I’ll load.”
A few minutes later Ellie pulled the truck up to the post pile and sat in it while he loaded thirty posts. She acknowledged him with a look when he got back inside, then put the truck in gear and headed for the pasture gate.
“Something wrong?” he finally asked. She shook her head without looking at him, which told him, yeah, something was wrong.
“Why?”
“You seem preoccupied,” he explained.
“I’m fine.” She made an obvious effort to speak lightly. “Just tired after being in the sun all day yesterday.”
“I didn’t think you were going to show this morning.”
Her gaze jerked toward him. “Why not?”
She sounded so insulted that he felt like smiling. Wisely, he did not. “You made your point yesterday. You did a day’s work.”
“The deal was for a week.”
“We never shook on it,” he said.
Ellie took her right hand off the wheel and shoved it toward him, meeting his eyes dead-on as she did so. “Fine. Let’s shake.”
* * *
ELLIE’S HAND HOVERED and she was starting to feel foolish, but she wasn’t going to have him thinking that her word was no good. After a second’s pause, Ryan took her hand, closing his warm, callused fingers around hers, causing unexpected heat to unfurl deep inside her. She had the sudden urge to pull her hand back while she still could, but it was overpowered by an even stronger urge to leave her fingers right where they were. What would the pleasantly rough fingers feel like on her body?
“Deal?” she asked, glad that her voice sounded so steady.
“Deal.”
“I don’t shirk my commitments,” she muttered, putting her hand back on the wheel, still feeling the warmth of his touch. “I’m not that spoiled.”
“I shouldn’t have said that,” Ryan acknowledged. “And I apologize. Spoiled women don’t spend the day in the sun fencing. And they don’t staple race.”
“What?” Ellie pulled to a stop in front of the gate. “Staple race?”
“You were trying to pull staples faster than me yesterday.”
“I was not.” He met her eyes, a wanna-bet gleam in his. Ellie tried to keep from blushing, but felt color creeping into her cheeks despite her best efforts. Damn fair skin. “What if I was?”
“Nothing.” Ryan got out of the truck.
“It kept me from getting bored,” she said as soon as she’d driven through the gate and he’d gotten back inside. “How do you keep from getting bored?”
“I don’t know. I guess I just get into the zone. Sometimes I visualize.”
“Visualize what?”
“Roping. I go through everything in my head over and over and over.” He shrugged. “It seems to work.”
“I looked you up on the internet,” she said. It had been something to do last night when she was having trouble going to sleep after calling Kate. “Quite an impressive career. I have no idea what the stats mean, but apparently you’re doing something right.”
“Does that mean I can have my days off this week?”
She knew he wasn’t really asking—that he would take them anyway—so she said, “As long as you’re covered.”
“I’m covered. You can even go out with Lonnie, if you want...but he’d probably be a fumbling tongue-tied mess. Maybe you’d better wait until I come back.”
He smiled at her and Ellie felt herself smile back. Warmth flowed through her and she told herself it was gratitude. He had no idea how glad she was that he was keeping her talking, which in turn kept her from thinking about her fun-filled early-morning hours.
Ellie had developed a whopper of a headache from replaying the conversation with her mother. And even after the headache had faded, she kept going back to Mavis’s comment about it being her life.
Yes, it was. Her life. Emphasis on her. All by herself. It’d been like that for almost as long as she could remember.
“Ellie?”
Ellie glanced over at Ryan, wondering from the way he was looking at her if he’d had to say her name more than once. “Yes?”
“I’m going to have you drive along the fence line and I’ll drop off posts. Just go slow.”
“Sure.”
Ryan climbed into the back and she put the truck in gear, focusing on slow. Slow was good. Fast had gotten her into trouble.
For once in her life she’d wanted to do something without planning, to be impulsive...and she’d gotten burned in a big way. Which wasn’t fair because Kate had escaped unscathed more times than she could count.
Well, you’re not Kate.
But if she had been Kate, she would have at least had a supportive family. While at boarding school Kate had been a townie—she’d gone home for the weekends. Eventually she’d gotten permission to take Ellie with her. Ellie loved Kate’s family.
“I might be all you have,” she muttered to her midsection as Ryan threw off the first post and it landed with a hollow thud. “But I will be there for you.”
Even if her maternal instinct never kicked in, as Mavis’s never had, she would fake it. She’d win an award faking it.
Another post hit the ground. Ellie looked into her rearview mirror to see Ryan’s long, strong legs as he balanced himself near the tailgate. “Hey!” she heard him yell, and realized the truck was drifting.
“Sorry,” she called back. She held a steady course down the rest of the fence line, slowing to a stop after Ryan had pushed off the last post. She turned off the engine and pushed open the door, looking at the long line of posts.
“There’s a lot,” she said.
“We’ll do half today.”
“And then?”
“I have to check a couple stock ponds.” He pulled a bucket out of the back of the truck and then handed Ellie a strange two-handled contraption as if he expected her to know what to do with it. “It’ll be an easy way to end the day.”
Ellie put a hand on each of the wooden handles and moved them back and forth, opening and closing the two-part metal cylinder on the end. “To clean out the holes?” She was guessing.
“Yep,” he said. “That’s your job.”
“These do not have a history of injuring people?” she asked.
“They’ll blister your hands if you don’t wear gloves.”
Ellie smiled at him as the wind blew little wisps of hair across her face. She was growing to like this guy, but even as the thought struck her, she tamped it back down.
As the morning wore on, Ellie realized that she was engaging different unused muscles than the ones she’d used the day before, and that she was going to be sore again tonight. But she wasn’t sitting alone in the ranch house thinking, and if she spent time out like this, she’d be in a better position to understand the ranch-consultant recommendations. A week working in the field wasn’t much, but it was better than no experience at all, and she had to admit that Ryan had had a good idea when he’d suggested this—although she was fairly certain his objective had been to make her uncomfortable. He had no idea how much she’d needed to get out of that house.
“Tell me about what part of your job you like best,” Ellie said after Ryan got done tamping earth around their fourth post. He sent her a where-did-that-come-from look and she said, “That’s one of the standard questions I use in the course of my
job.”
“What exactly is your job?”
“I evaluate employees and workforces.” Ellie felt heat building in her face as she lied by omission. She no longer did that. “I help to decide who to hire and fire, although we didn’t use those particular terms.” She stabbed the diggers into the next hole, brought up some loose dirt, deposited it at the edge of the hole and then stabbed them in again. Before she pulled them out, she tilted her head at Ryan. “You have amazing patience.”
“How so?”
“I can see how badly you want to take these away from me and do this more quickly and efficiently.”
“You’re doing fine.”
“I know I am.” She hauled more dirt out of the hole, peered down inside then stepped back. “But I’ve also seen impatient males wanting to take over.”
“Have you, now?” he asked as he dumped the post into the hole and held it vertical with one hand while he shoved dirt down the hole with his boot.
“Yes. And I just ignore them.”
“Somehow I don’t find that hard to believe.”
Ellie considered his answer for a moment, trying to decide whether or not she’d been insulted. Did it matter? Oddly, she decided it did. “Meaning?” she asked.
He flashed her a quick look. “Are you fishing for a compliment?”
“No.” The word dropped like a stone. She most certainly had not been.
“All I meant was that a person like you has probably had a lot of practice ignoring impatient males...which was exactly what I said.”
“I don’t believe we were speaking in the same context.”
“No kidding,” he said drily before kicking more dirt into the half-filled hole. When she didn’t respond, he moved on to more mundane matters. “You asked about what I like about my job.”
“Yes,” she agreed, glad they were moving back to steadier ground.
“I like managing the grazing land. Over the past couple years, I’ve developed a system that allows for more re-growth and therefore more forage on some of our poorer pastures. We get more animal-unit days.”
“Which are...?”
“AUs are basically the amount of forage needed to support an animal for a day.”
“Sounds very scientific.”
“Ranching is all about science in one way or another.”
“Not my best subject in school.”
Ryan leaned on the bar he used to tamp the earth. “I bet you got As.”
“Why?” Ellie pushed her hair back again.
“Did you?”
She smiled wryly. “Yes.”
“As I thought.” Ryan started tamping again. “I studied a lot of science in college. It was my best subject.”
Ellie watched him work, filing away information as he continued to talk about grazing and pasture management while they set the next six or seven posts. Ellie lost count. He spoke with simple eloquence about a subject she’d never much thought about—okay, she’d never thought about—managing ranchland. “Technically your job title isn’t cowboy, is it?”
Ryan grinned at her and Ellie swore her heart stuttered a little. “Range manager might be more appropriate, but I always think of myself as a cowboy.”
As did she.
Ryan stabbed the bar into the earth, focusing on what he was doing as he said, “I have to admit that Walt wasn’t the best grazing manager—a lot of guys of his generation weren’t—and then when the drought hit, followed by the wildfire...too much to recover from. He hired me right out of college, but we couldn’t turn things around fast enough.”
“He was in pretty deep debt, I gather.”
“Oh, yeah. He did everything but sell organs to hang on to this place. And I hate to think what would have happened had he thought of that.” Ryan leaned on the bar for a moment. “Does your uncle know anything about ranching?”
“He’ll be dependent on his manager,” Ellie said tactfully. “Which is why that manager needs to have communication skills and not bite people’s heads off because he’s angry that he lost his property.”
“Walt will come around.”
“He’s not showing signs yet.”
“He’s still acclimating to the idea.”
“It’s been over a year.”
“He’s grieving.”
“He needs to get over it,” Ellie said. “If he doesn’t...” She didn’t need to finish the sentence. She could see that Ryan got her drift...and that he didn’t like it. Well, reality was reality. Milo was already of the opinion that Walt was a difficult employee and so far Ellie hadn’t seen anything that would allow her to go to bat for the man.
* * *
RYAN AND ELLIE parted company at the gate. He was kind of sorry to see her go, even if they didn’t see eye to eye about Walt. He parked the truck behind the barn then headed straight to his house, where he dialed the lawyer’s number, something he’d both been looking forward to and dreading all day. There was an immediate answer and one associate put him through to another.
“Mr. Madison, I’d like to arrange a meeting.”
“Am I being sued?” Ryan demanded.
“No,” the associate said in a placating tone. “But this is a sensitive matter that we’d prefer to address in a private meeting.”
“Look,” Ryan said. “I’m not big on mystery.”
“And we don’t want this to be a mystery, but as I said, this is a sensitive matter.”
“I’m going to hang up.”
“I represent Mr. Charles Montoya.”
What the hell? Why was his father siccing a Billings law firm on him? “He’d like to meet with me?”
“As his representatives, he’d like us to meet with you.”
Somehow Ryan wasn’t surprised. “When?”
“We’d like to arrange something next week. In Billings.”
“No. If you want to meet, we meet in Glennan. I think Mr. Montoya can afford to pay you for your travel time.”
The associate cleared his throat. “I’ll have to confer with Mr. Montoya.”
“You do that,” Ryan said. “I can meet with you next Tuesday or Wednesday. You can set the time.”
“I don’t know—”
“And I don’t care.” With that, he hung up.
For a few seconds Ryan sat staring across the room. What in the hell could his father want badly enough to set up a meeting? It had to have something to do with whatever had upset his mom, and if push came to shove, Ryan would go to Billings to meet with the attorneys and find out what the deal was.
But he didn’t want Charles to think that he was calling all the shots here.
CHAPTER EIGHT
FOR ONCE ELLIE was up near sunrise. There was an avian symphony outside the bathroom window and even though she’d slept soundly, once she woke, she couldn’t roll over and go back to sleep as usual. Partly because the birds were making so much noise, but mostly because she’d felt a jolt of pleasant anticipation at seeing Ryan again. Inappropriate, she told herself as she flopped over and tried to go back to sleep.
It wasn’t inappropriate if he didn’t know.
And why should he?
She was barely willing to acknowledge it to herself—it wasn’t as though she was going to announce it to him.
“Hormones,” she muttered as she got out of bed. Coupled with a little too much alone time.
Maybe that was it. She just needed to be with people. Yesterday she hadn’t obsessed over the frustrating conversation/confession with her mother or thought about being pregnant more than a couple dozen times—as opposed to the several hundred times a day that had become the norm of late. For almost the entire time she’d been with Ryan she’d felt normal. Like her old self.
You can’t be your old self.
No doubt. Her old self wouldn’t have put on these filthy, scuffed-up hiking boots. Ellie wrinkled her nose, then shoved her foot inside. She didn’t want to be late for work.
Walt was opening the barn door when she left the house, a thermos of herbal tea in one hand, a jug of water in the other. He looked at her, started inside then stopped and turned back around.
“Good morning,” he said stiffly.
“Good morning,” she answered, thinking he sounded very much as if someone was twisting his arm to make him speak.
“If you have any questions about operations, you can ask me anytime. And if you’d like to know more about the cows and the breeding program, I can carve out some time.”
“I’d like to learn about the cows,” she said, stopping a few feet away from him. The invitation sounded anything but sincere, but he’d made it and she was going to take him up on it—even if it killed both of them.
He grunted in reply and then headed off into the barn, leaving Ellie staring after him.
“Problem?”
Ellie turned to see Ryan approaching from his house.
“Walt just invited me to a sit-down to learn about his cows.”
“You take him up on it?”
“I did, but we didn’t set a date.”
“Maybe I can be there, too.”
“To referee?”
“Possibly.” He started toward the pickup. Ellie smiled a little. She was fairly certain that Ryan was responsible for Walt’s grumbling invitation. It touched her that he was so loyal to the old man, but it was going to take more than a cow talk to turn Walt into the kind of manager Milo was looking for.
* * *
RYAN FOUGHT A yawn as he waited for Ellie to open the gate. Practice had gone okay, but he’d been unable to sleep afterward as he’d replayed the conversation with the attorney a few million times in his head. When Walt had showed up he’d helped him grain the calves, and then suggested that he make a few overtures of friendliness toward Ellie.
Trust Walt to consider the invitation to hear about his cows an appropriate gesture.