Last Second Chance (A Thomas Family Novel Book 2)

by Kristi Cramer

  There was obvious heat in that kiss. Knowing he should be embarrassed, or at least look away, Tim couldn’t help but watch in fascination. So this was the man who had won his sister’s heart, had coaxed her out to Kansas and away from the big city, and had gotten her to put a ring on her finger. It was a circumstance he found impossible to imagine for the girl he grew up with.

  Finally, they broke away from each other and turned to face him. He had never seen his sister look so...soft and radiant. Love looked good on her.

  The man held out his hand. “You must be Tim,” he said, vigorously pumping Tim’s hand. “Welcome to the Lazy J.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I’m happy to be here, Mr. Thomas.”

  “Call me Blue. We’re family here.”

  “Thank you for the opportunity to come work for you.” He bit back the urge to swear he wouldn’t let the big man down.

  Blue laughed. “I reckon you might not be so grateful after I put you to work.”

  “I can’t imagine anything would make me regret coming here.”

  Blue reached out and pushed his beefy fist into Tim’s shoulder hard enough that if he hadn’t seen it coming and braced for it, it would have knocked him off balance. Immediately wary, Tim did a double-take, but saw nothing other than mischief in the other man’s expression.

  “Glad to hear you say that.” He turned his head toward the men gathered by the back of the trailer. “Hey, Charlie! Got a volunteer here to wash out your truck!”

  Tim’s heart sank when he realized he’d walked straight into that one.

  ⋘⋆⋙

  Janie watched as her brother and his wife stood talking with the stranger. The man didn’t look out of place, per se, but he didn’t look like he fit in, either. Maybe it was the fact his clothes looked fresh out of the store. Even his boots, while not fancy, didn’t have any dust clinging to them...yet. Maybe it was the way he fidgeted in those boots, like he wasn’t used to wearing them. Or the way his hands hung at his sides rather than hooking his thumbs in his belt like the other cowboys did. Maybe it was his bare head among all the Stetsons and ball caps around the corral.

  This guy didn’t strike her as a cowboy, but he was lean and muscular. He didn’t look soft like most city slickers. He was an enigma, and Janie resolved to see if she could find out who he was. Not that the comings and goings at the ranch were her business anymore, at least not since she moved into town with Kylie. But Blue was her brother, and she couldn’t help her curiosity.

  Just then, one of the hands called out to her that they were ready to start cutting the new cattle into the quarantine shed so she could start the four-week process of clearing them to join the herd.

  Time to go to work, she thought, rolling up the sleeves of her work smock.

  Several hours and three dozen calves later, Janie stripped off her work gloves and wiped her forearm across her brow. The majority of the cattle had made the trip in decent condition, only a couple having travel-related injuries that time would heal, and no signs of sickness. Of course, tests on the samples she had collected would frame the complete picture, but Janie was very familiar with this supplier. Their calves were some of the healthiest Angus stock money could buy.

  The day had turned hot under the metal livestock shed, and she stepped out into the cool breeze filtering through the fence.

  “Thanks for your help, Deke,” she said, nodding to the older hand who had helped her check out the new arrivals.

  “Happy to help, Janie,” Deke said, heading toward the chow hall, presumably to find himself something cold to drink.

  Janie looked around for her brothers, but caught sight of someone else engaged in a puzzling activity. Puzzling, that is, until she realized who it was. The stranger, looking decidedly more “broke-in” than he had a few hours earlier, was in the corral with a pitchfork and wheelbarrow, picking up cow pies.

  She walked to the rail and leaned in, watching him from between the top and second rails. Intent on what he was doing, he hadn’t noticed her, and Janie chuckled. But as she watched him and realized he really didn’t have a clue, she felt the stirring of pity.

  “Howdy, stranger,” she said cheerfully, climbing up so he could easily see her above the top rail.

  The man looked up in surprise, lifting the pitchfork as though ready to use it as a weapon. He’s sure jumpy.

  Looking left and right, as if to be sure she was speaking to him, he nodded to her before going back to his work. “Hello.”

  His greeting wasn’t exactly warm, but it hadn’t felt rude, either. More like shy or embarrassed. Janie watched a few moments longer to see if he would look up again. He didn’t, although she got the sense he was very aware of her scrutiny.

  “Hate to be the one to break the news to you,” she said at length, “but they’ve got a tractor attachment that will do what you’re doing in a fraction of the time.”

  The stranger looked up quickly. This time, she noticed his hazel eyes as they widened in surprise, then narrowed with what looked suspiciously like anger before deliberately mellowing into acceptance. He jammed the tines of the fork into the sandy dirt of the corral and shifted his grip to the end of the tool.

  “Really,” he said, attempting to make the word a statement rather than a question.

  Janie knew better, though, and waggled her finger at him. “Nobody I know willingly picks a corral with a pitchfork.” He looked down and his broad shoulders sagged. “Don’t feel bad. You’re not the first city boy to fall for it. Think of it as a touch of hazing to welcome you to the Lazy J.”

  “I suppose the truck didn’t need washing out, either.” His voice, now that he had spoken more than a single word, was low and had an edge of hardness to it. It matched the set of his jaw, the firm line drawn by his lips, and the dark brows knitted above eyes now squinting in the bright sun.

  His demeanor was thoughtful, as though contemplating the circumstances he found himself in, wondering how he ended up here.

  “Oh no. That needed washing, but Charlie usually has it done out by the truck stop.” Before he could spend any more time wondering about the time he had wasted, Janie held out her hand. “I’m Janie Thomas.”

  The stranger looked down at his dirty hands and didn’t move to take hers, even though they were hardly sanitary themselves. “Tim Reardon,” he replied. “Sorry if I don’t shake your hand. I’m filthy.”

  “All part of working a ranch. So, you’re Mitzi’s brother?”

  “Yes, I am,” he said, and looked up at her with a grimace that wasn’t quite a smile. “I sure feel like a jackass falling for this.” He lifted his free hand and gestured at the wheelbarrow.

  “Don’t,” Janie reassured him. “Like I said, you’re not the first. I’m fairly mortified my brother would pull that on you. I guess he just couldn’t stand to break with decades of tradition.”

  “Decades, you say?” Janie nodded, smiling at him as he considered this information. “What happens if I don’t finish? I hate to leave a job half-done.”

  “Well, after a shipment of calves, sanitation needs to be done. We can’t risk spreading disease. I could help you hook the attachment to the tractor, and you can impress the heck out of Blue, getting the job done the way it is supposed to get done.”

  That brought a spark of appreciation to his eyes and a smile to lips that seemed far too used to frowning. Janie smiled back. They stood that way for an extended moment before Tim looked down at his boots.

  “It’s over here,” Janie said, trying to decide if Tim was just shy, or if he had another reason not to make eye contact with her. She pointed toward the barn, then climbed off the fence to walk over there.

  Chapter Four

  Tim watched Janie for a moment before following her toward the barn with the pitchfork and wheelbarrow. She wasn’t the first woman he had seen since coming home, but she was sure the nicest. Despite the smudges of dirt on her broad cheeks, narrow nose, and rounded forehead, she was pretty. Her short blonde hair
was held away from her face with a black plastic headband that glittered in the sunlight, and her green eyes were clear and direct.

  Her open, pleasant gaze disconcerted him. He was used to the game of meeting a direct stare with hostility to show he wasn’t an easy target, but he didn’t detect anything other than friendliness from Janie. As a result, he found himself looking away, unsure of how to respond.

  The white smock Janie wore over her clothes hid her figure, but he could tell she was taller than he was by a full inch, and he didn’t think she was rail thin under there. He took note of her hands. They looked strong and capable, used to manual labor. He had observed her working with the cattle, so he knew she was fearless around the beasts. Not at all like a city girl. Janie looked like she could handle any situation.

  When he realized he was assessing Janie as though she were a prospect for a date, Tim put a quick stop to that line of thinking. She didn’t want his kind of trouble. He was sure the second she found out he was an ex-con, she wouldn’t be so nice anymore. He lowered his gaze to his boots and followed her shadow into the barn.

  And that was how, once she entered the shade of the barn’s interior, he nearly ran into her.

  “Oh man! I’m sorry.”

  Janie laughed. “You’ll learn you have to watch everything around here, Tim, not just where you put your feet. The rake is over there. Ever drive a tractor?”

  He couldn’t stop the scoffing laugh that spilled out of him. “No. Not much call for tractor driving in Denver. At least not where I grew up.”

  “No time like the present to learn something new, I say. Grab the tongue and turn the rake around. I’ll go get the Deere and we’ll hook it up.”

  She strode farther into the barn, leaving him with something that looked like a glorified garden rake. He studied it. The fine tines had pushed into the ground, and he suspected that dragging it around the sandy soil of the corral would scoop up the waste and push it up into the catch trough that ran across the back. He could immediately see how that would be much faster and effective than a single pitchfork.

  He heard the sound of an engine starting behind him, so he walked around to the trailer tongue and lifted it until the tines were out of the ground, then he turned it on its wheels to bring it out of its space. By the time he brought it out, Janie had returned with a small tractor, pulling it past him to present the trailer hitch, which was a spindle rather than a ball.

  Seeing how it should fit, he maneuvered the tongue into place and slid it down over the spindle. A pin dangled on a chain, so he pushed it through the hole in the spindle above the tongue, locking it into place.

  “You sure you haven’t worked with tractors before?” Janie asked, looking down at him from the seat.

  He shrugged. “A friend of mine took me off-roading once when I was a kid. I watched his dad hook up the trailer for the ATV. Just makes sense.”

  Janie nodded her head in approval, and Tim had to check the flush of pride he felt. It isn’t rocket science, he told himself. Get a grip.

  “See that cable?” she asked. He looked where she was pointing and saw a cable running from the tongue to the back of the rake. “Hook it to that ring there.”

  When he did, it activated a lever that lifted the tines out of the ground.

  “Come on up,” she said, patting the seat she had vacated. She stood on the running board and he climbed up, careful not to brush against her as he threw his leg over the seat.

  “Okay,” she said, pointing at the various levers and pedals as she spoke. “This is the accelerator. This is the brake. This one controls the tines, and these are for other types of equipment. All you need to know right now is that this one makes it go forward, this one makes it go backward, and this stops it. And, of course, this,” she wiggled the steering wheel with a smile, “makes it go where you want it to go.”

  Tim hid his confusion by staring at the controls. It wasn’t so much the machine that confounded him. It was the woman. The words she spoke were almost condescending, but her tone was kind and pleasant with no trace of anything but a desire to help him learn. And her proximity was nearly overwhelming. He could actually feel the heat emanating from her fingers where they rested near his on the steering wheel. He could smell the earthy tang of her—not clean and fresh, but not nasty, either. Just someone who worked hard, with an underlying scent of some kind of spiced soap.

  “Right,” he said, covering his discomfort as he reached for the controls. She shifted her hand from the wheel and grasped his shoulder just as he was shifting into gear. The tractor lurched forward and, laughing, she held tighter to him.

  “Easy,” she said. “I centered it up, but you still need to watch the clearance going out the door. Take it out into the corral before you drop the rake. Watch the edges and swing it along the rails first. Ever watch a Zamboni at the ice rink?” Tim shook his head. “If you go around the outside first, then cut across the middle, making two smaller ovals, you can avoid making the turns too tight. Make sense?” Again, he shook his head. “No? Well, just turn when I tell you to. I’ll get you sorted out.”

  She looked down at him and smiled, and he returned an uncertain smile of his own. It was all he could do not to bolt out of the seat and run a safe distance away from the sensations she raised in him. It’s just a reaction from being alone for so long, he told himself. Get ahold of yourself.

  “If you say so,” he said with a small chuckle.

  “You’ll do fine. Try again. Move the lever forward, then ease the accelerator down. There you go....”

  Once again, he felt like her words didn’t match her tone. He could swear she was talking down to him, but nothing in her voice or expression conveyed anything other than encouragement. So he did as he was told and the tractor lurched into motion a little smoother this time. Tim drove it out the door, checking over his shoulder to be sure the ends of the machine cleared the frame. Then he aimed for the open gate of the corral and drove through, moving slowly, frequently checking his clearance.

  Out in the corral, Janie directed him to turn left, following the rail around. Then, after they had made a complete circle, she had him run up the middle and make two smaller ovals. As he shifted over to cover fresh territory, he saw how it worked. If he had kept trying to spiral in on the full circle, he would have run out of turning radius before he got to the center. This way, he could get everything with very little overlap.

  They were nearly done when Blue came out of the office and stepped off the porch, heading in their direction. “Hey!” he called. “You got help. That’s cheating.”

  Janie gave Tim’s shoulder a pat. “No, brother. That’s smart. I can’t believe you boys still pull that prank.”

  “Just giving him a taste of what it was like in the early days, ma,” Blue protested. “No harm, no foul.”

  Blue’s cheerful defiance tipped Tim off as to what that attitude of Janie’s must be. Tim had never been mothered before. To have a woman looking out for his well-being, teaching him with gentle encouragement, was a foreign concept to him.

  His own mother had been indifferent at best, but her neglect was preferable to her drunken, tearful outbursts and sodden fits of hopeless rage. If she ever had treated him with tenderness, it happened when he was too young to remember.

  Janie’s mothering should have irritated him, but while it did cool his ardor, it was also comforting, even though he knew he shouldn’t take it personally. Blue’s attitude told him Janie probably mothered everyone around her.

  With the last pass done, Tim aimed the tractor for the gate. He felt much more comfortable operating the machine now, confident that with a few more opportunities to practice, he could become quite proficient at it. He noticed Blue heading for the barn, too, so he kept up his careful maneuvering and brought the tractor to a stop just inside the door. He set the brake and hopped off, heading around the back to disconnect the rake attachment. Once he pulled the pin and lifted the tongue off the spindle, Janie moved the tractor fo
rward, taking it back to its place in the barn.

  Studying the device for a moment, he saw where he could lift out the catch trough, now full of cow pies, and dump it. Before Blue could offer any instruction, he popped it loose, lifted it, and shook the contents out into the wheelbarrow.

  “Huh,” Blue said in an affable tone that nonetheless set Tim on his guard. “I guess you’re not as much of a tenderfoot as Mitzi let on.”

  Tim shrugged, placing the trough back in the rake before moving it back into its parking spot. “Just making it up as I go along,” he said. He positioned himself between the arms of the wheelbarrow and took up the handles. “Where do I dump this?”

  “‘Round back. You’ll smell the location.”

  Tim laughed. “I can’t smell anything but myself right now.”

  Blue joined in with an easy laugh. “Well, then, turn left off the back corner. You can’t miss it.” Blue’s expression turned less jovial as Tim headed past him, and he put a hand out to stop him. “You’re family and all, but if you hurt my wife or my sister, I will break you in half.”

  Tim turned his head and met Blue’s gaze, taking fresh measure of the giant man. What he saw in the cowboy’s eyes was more troubled than dangerous, more fierce than aggressive, and Tim had no doubt he could depend on Blue being as good as his word. He nodded without breaking eye contact. “I’d expect nothing less. But I wouldn’t dream of hurting anyone.”

  ⋘⋆⋙

  Coming back up the aisle of the barn, Janie saw Blue with his hand on Tim’s arm, an uncharacteristic intensity on her brother’s face. Tim said something she couldn’t hear, and Blue let him take the wheelbarrow out to the dumpsite.

  “What was that about?” she asked, resisting the urge to put her hand on her hip. She hadn’t missed Blue’s earlier insinuation that she was acting like a mother hen again, but it irked her today. She couldn’t help her desire to help people, so why should she try to change that about herself? And what business did Blue have calling attention to that in front of a stranger?