Fortune's Second-Chance Cowboy

by Marie Ferrarella

  Chloe took a breath. “Okay, this is me being honest. Yes, I can see how having me live here would be more beneficial so I could be on call anytime for the boys, and yes, I would rather have my own small space than live in the main house with you. That way, I won’t be underfoot,” she added.

  Sasha laughed, looking pleased at the progress they seemed to be making. “There now, was that so hard?”

  “Actually, yes,” Chloe admitted. When Sasha raised her eyebrow quizzically, she explained, “I don’t like worrying that I might be hurting people’s feelings.”

  “Well, I for one would rather have my feelings hurt than find out I have been lied to—even if it involves just a little white lie,” Sasha added with a wink. “All right, it’s settled,” she announced, rising to her feet. “You’ll be moving in to the guest cottage,” she told the other woman. “It hasn’t been used for a while, so if there’s anything you find that you need—or that needs fixing—please don’t hesitate to tell either Graham or me.

  “While I have to admit that we aren’t exactly the handiest people in the world, we do have the connections to always find someone who is.” Again, she took Chloe’s hands in hers. “We want you to be happy here,” she told Chloe.

  “Just being given the opportunity to try to help those boys you told me about will make me happy,” Chloe responded.

  “Good, I’m glad.” Sasha released her hands. “But don’t expect miracles,” she warned. “This isn’t some TV drama where everything’s tied up neatly with a big red bow and fixed in sixty minutes—not counting commercials,” Sasha added flippantly.

  “I know that,” Chloe assured her. “I have a degree in counseling, not fantasy.”

  “As long as we’re on the same page,” Sasha said agreeably.

  Just as Chloe rose to leave, Graham came in carrying Sydney. The baby was crying just the same way she had when Chloe had first encountered her.

  “What’s wrong, little one?” Sasha asked her daughter.

  “I’m not sure. I changed her and I don’t think she’s hungry. Uncle Roger said that she was screaming her lungs out earlier, until Chloe—” he nodded at his half sister “—got her to stop.”

  “Chloe?” Sasha asked, looking at the other woman with interest.

  “All I did was just hold her when he handed her to me,” Chloe said, not about to take credit for any sort of “miracle.”

  The next thing she knew, Graham was handing the baby over to her.

  Startled, she took the baby and after a few seconds of rocking, Sydney stopped crying again.

  Sasha looked on, clearly surprised and very pleased. “Maybe we should offer you two jobs here at Peter’s Place,” she quipped.

  Graham exchanged looks with his wife. “Works for me,” he chimed in.

  In response to their words, Chloe felt a warm feeling spreading out all through her. A feeling of acceptance.

  She blinked several times to keep the tears back.

  Chapter Five

  “Looks like today’s moving day for both of us,” Chance observed the next day, peering into the guesthouse through the door that Chloe had left opened.

  Startled, Chloe swung around, her hand pressed against her pounding heart, to find the tall cowboy standing just outside the doorway. Naturally assuming that she was alone, she had just begun arranging the furnishings in her new quarters to her liking.

  The guesthouse was actually more of a large studio apartment with a small bathroom attached to it than an actual house in the traditional sense. But located about a hundred yards behind the main house, it felt like her own private little space, which was all that really mattered to Chloe right now. It made her part of the whole organization, yet just separate enough to satisfy her need to be alone at times.

  Except that right now, she wasn’t alone.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to scare you,” Chance apologized, crossing the threshold. “I guess I should make more noise when I come up behind someone.”

  Embarrassed at her reaction—he was probably going to think she was afraid of her own shadow—Chloe waved away the cowboy’s apology.

  “No, I was just really focused on trying to figure out where to put my things.” She glanced around again. Somehow, with Chance inside, the space looked smaller to her than it had a few minutes ago. “I think I brought too much with me. I just wasn’t sure what I was going to need.”

  He’d seen a sedan parked by the guesthouse. There were a number of boxes and a couple of suitcases in the backseat.

  “You have a place of your own apart from here?” he asked. Sometimes he forgot that most people did. He’d moved around so much since he’d been discharged from the army that when he was in between jobs, he just lived out of his truck. It was simpler that way.

  Chloe nodded. “An apartment in town.” It wasn’t all that big—but it was bigger than the guesthouse, she thought.

  Usually one to keep to himself, Chance realized he was asking too many questions, but curiosity was spurring him on. “If you’ve already got a place, why aren’t you staying there? Can’t be that far away from the ranch,” he guessed.

  “Sasha thought it might be easier if I was on the premises to begin with. You know, just in case there was some kind of an emergency with one of the boys, they wouldn’t have to wait for me to drive in.” Replaying her words in her head, Chloe laughed. “I guess that sounds kind of dramatic, doesn’t it?” She supposed she could have just told Sasha that she could make the run from her apartment to the ranch quickly enough if the need arose. “It’s just that this is my first real counseling job and I don’t want anything to go wrong.”

  She saw a look akin to sympathy enter Chance’s piercing blue eyes. “Oh, it’ll go wrong,” he said with certainty.

  This wasn’t the sort of pep talk she’d expected, Chloe thought. As a matter of fact, it sounded more like some kind of prediction of doom.

  She stared at him. “What?”

  Maybe he should have explained what he meant when he said that, Chance thought. “No matter how perfect things are, something is always bound to go wrong. It doesn’t have to be some kind of a major disaster—and it usually isn’t,” he said with certainty. “But it’s a fact of life that things do go wrong, usually when you least expect them to. Once you make your peace with that, you can relax and get the job done,” he told her. “Just remember, do the best you can. Nobody expects perfection.”

  Easy for you to say, she thought. Just look at yourself.

  “Do things go wrong for you?”

  What he’d just said made her curious. She imagined that Chance was quite good at what he did. Practice alone probably made him perfect, and from what she’d gathered from Sasha, Chance had worked on ranches both before and after his stint in the military.

  He laughed, tickled by the fact that she actually thought he might say no.

  “Do you want that alphabetically, chronologically or listed in order of importance? And if it’s the last one, would you like that in descending order or ascending order?”

  Realizing that maybe she’d made a mistake, Chloe put her hands up as if to ward off any further questions.

  “Point taken,” she told Chance.

  Looking at him more closely, she decided that he looked pretty relaxed. Since he’d mentioned something about it being “moving day” for both of them, she assumed that Chance had finished moving in to the bunkhouse. Men always had less baggage than women, she thought enviously. “I guess you’re all settled in.”

  Chance moved his shoulders in a careless shrug. “A couple of changes of clothing, an extra pair of boots, razor, shaving cream and toothbrush. Not exactly much to ‘settle,’” he told her, going through everything he’d brought with him.

  Chance looked around the guesthouse. There was a combination stove, refrigerator
and sink unit against one wall with a table for two right in front of it. Next to that was a sofa that he suspected pulled out into a bed. It was facing a small flat-screen on the wall that looked as if it was the latest piece of technology. Near the flat-screen was a chest of drawers.

  It seemed like almost too much space for him, he thought.

  “Need help with anything?” he asked her.

  She’d already gotten started. “I just need to bring in a couple of suitcases and three boxes from my car. Oh, and I picked up two bags of groceries on my way here. But now that I see the size of the refrigerator, I’m not sure if it’ll all fit in there.”

  “You could always stash the excess in the closet,” Chance suggested with a straight face.

  “I could,” she allowed, taking his suggestion at face value. “If it was a walk-in. But it’s not. It’s barely a hang-in,” she quipped.

  His eyebrows drew together as he tried to make sense out of what she’d just said. “A what?”

  She flushed just a little. “That was a lame joke about there not being enough room to hang more than a handful of clothes in the closet.”

  That had never been a problem for him. “I never really had more than a handful of clothes at any one time myself.”

  That fit the image she’d gotten of him. “Of course you didn’t. Just your cowboy hat, your boots and your lariat should cover it,” she deadpanned.

  His eyes crinkled a little in amusement. “You been peeking into my closet, Chloe Elliott?”

  The thought of peeking into his living space suddenly made her blush. She struggled to get that under control. “Just making an educated guess.”

  He wondered if he seemed that predictable to her, or if she was just kidding. Either way, she struck him as a fairly sharp lady. “Well, if that’s the kind of thing a degree in counseling gets you, I’d say that it was money well spent.”

  That being said, he had to admit he was a little leery of psychologists and people who felt all problems could be tackled and solved by delving deeply into people’s backgrounds and into what made them tick. That meant hours and hours of talking. He believed in action, not in talking a thing to death.

  “But just so you know,” he added, “I don’t really enjoy having someone poking around in my head, wanting to know if I grew up thinking there were monsters under my bed.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she agreed so readily, he found himself believing her. “Neither do I.”

  Chance jerked a thumb toward the car she had parked out front. “Want me to bring in those suitcases and boxes for you?”

  She didn’t want him feeling as if he had to do anything for her. And she didn’t want him thinking of her as helpless, either. “You don’t have to.”

  “I didn’t say I had to. I asked if you wanted me to,” he pointed out.

  On the other hand, she didn’t want to come off like someone who slapped away a helping hand, either.

  “Yes, please. That would be very nice of you,” she told him.

  Chance was out the door before the last word had left her lips. He was back just as quickly, juggling both suitcases as well as the three boxes. It amazed her that he hadn’t dropped anything.

  “You certainly move fast,” she marveled.

  “It’s a little something you pick up when people are shooting at you,” he told her. Looking around the room for a likely spot, he asked, “Where do you want me to put these?”

  “Doesn’t matter, just any place,” she said vaguely. “I’ve got to empty the suitcases and hang the things up inside that shallow closet.” She waved at the small door that was off to one side.

  He set the suitcases and boxes down next to the sofa. “Again, that wouldn’t be a problem for me—if I had a closet,” he added with a hint of a grin.

  “You don’t have a closet?” Chloe asked, surprised, trying to visualize his living quarters.

  “Does a footlocker count?”

  “Only if you’re in boot camp,” she said before she realized that he was being serious.

  Chance grinned at the reference. It hit home. “Well, it’s kind of like that,” he told her.

  Picking up one of the suitcases, Chloe placed it on the sofa and snapped opened the locks, then lifted the lid.

  Chance caught himself looking into the suitcase. Instead of the jeans and practical shirts he’d expected, he saw that she had packed several very flowery, pastel-colored dresses. The kind, he thought, that seemed more suited to sitting on a porch swing, sipping lemonade, than following around teenage boys as they did their chores on a ranch. From what Graham had explained, Peter’s Place had been founded on the idea that the chores were what taught these troubled kids discipline and doing those chores in turn brought order to their lives.

  Somehow, that kind of dusty activity just didn’t seem compatible with flowing, feminine dresses. At least not to him.

  She saw Chance looking rather skeptically at what she’d packed. She could almost read his thoughts by the expression on his face.

  He was probably right, she thought. What she’d brought with her wasn’t all that sensible. It reflected who and what she was, but it fell short in the practicality department.

  Still, as long as Chance didn’t bring the subject up, she wasn’t about to try to defend her choices.

  She thought of something that Chance had said when he brought her suitcases in. Something that had made her think of Donnie. She’d understood her husband’s reasons for joining up, just like she understood what Chance had said about it the other day. Fighting for your country were sentiments to be admired. But they were also idealistic and they didn’t explain how Chance had dealt with the day-to-day struggle of just trying to survive.

  “How did you stand it?” she asked Chance suddenly.

  He looked at her, confused. She had him at a complete disadvantage. The question had come out of the blue, and since they weren’t actually talking about anything, he really wasn’t sure what Chloe was referring to.

  “How did I stand what?” he wanted to know.

  “When you brought the boxes and suitcases in, you said you learned to move fast because people were shooting at you. How did you stand that?” she asked in all sincerity. “Knowing that any second, no matter what you were doing and how quiet it was, someone could just start shooting at you? Worse, that they might actually wind up killing you?”

  “Most of the time I didn’t think about it,” he told her honestly. “You really can’t spend time thinking about it, or it’ll wind up paralyzing you. You just hope that when someone does start shooting at you, the bullet won’t have your name on it. Or that you get to return fire quickly enough and accurately enough to take out whoever it is who wants you dead.” He paused, his eyes meeting hers. “Everyone who goes over there just wants to get home in one piece.”

  Chance watched as Chloe slowly unpacked, neatly hanging up the dresses. He could easily envision her wearing those dresses, a soft spring breeze flirting with the material, causing it to lightly press against her body in ways that could make a grown man weak.

  He felt his stomach muscles tightening and forced himself to breathe.

  He had no business thinking like that about her, Chance told himself.

  Just like he had no business asking her questions, yet here he was, doing both.

  He had to watch that, Chance upbraided himself.

  Even so, he heard himself telling her, “You know, whenever you’re ready to talk about it, I’m here to listen.”

  “‘Talk about it’?” she asked quizzically. Was Chance just talking in general, or was he somehow intuitively referring to the single loss that had ultimately broken her heart?

  Chance felt as if he was getting in too deep, but now that he had opened the door, he had no choice except to continue.

 
“Talk about whoever it is that you lost,” he explained. “I figure it has to be someone in the military. Even with all the communication we have available today, it still has to be tough, being cut off like that. Not knowing what’s going on until a lot later—if at all.”

  He knew he wasn’t great with words, but he did have a sense of empathy and he knew without putting it into words what she had to have felt. What she still might be feeling. Because he had gone through the same thing.

  “Thank you,” Chloe said quietly.

  She sounded sincere. Awkward or not, maybe he’d pushed the right buttons after all.

  “Then you do want to talk?” he asked.

  “No.” She’d actually thanked him for the offer, not for the opportunity. “No offense, but I can’t. Not yet.”

  Maybe not ever, she added silently because she didn’t know if she actually could. The mere thought hurt too much.

  “But if and when I am ready to talk about ‘it,’” she said, deliberately using his terminology, “I’ll take you up on that offer.”

  Chance nodded. “Good enough,” he told her. “I’ll be around.” He realized how that had to have sounded, so he amended the last sentence. “At least for now.”

  That last comment caught Chloe off guard. “You make it sound temporary. Is there a time limit to the job?” she asked, wondering if there was something Graham had said to Chance before they had come out of his den yesterday after the interview.

  Chance answered her honestly. “Only the one I set for myself,” he said. “I only stay in any one place for as long as it feels right. When it stops feeling right, that’s when it’s time to go.”

  That sounded just too nomadic for her. If things were working out, why would he want to leave? It didn’t make sense.

  “And what makes it time to go?” she challenged.

  No one had ever questioned his actions before. But Chloe put him on the spot. Though it made him uneasy, it also had him looking at her in a different light. The woman had spunk, he had to admit.