“No,” the woman agreed. “I can sass you because you know I’m right. The poor girl’s got enough to deal with, just being shown around town by Mike. Hi,” the vibrant dark-haired and very visibly pregnant young woman said to Sam, putting out her hand by way of a greeting. “I’m Alma, Mike’s sister,” she said, introducing herself.
“More like my cross to bear,” Mike commented. Sam noticed that there wasn’t so much as a hint of a smile on his face as he said that.
“Right back at you, big brother.” Unconsciously resting her hand on the pronounced swell of her abdomen, Alma looked at the newcomer. Her voice dropped half an octave as she instructed, “Don’t let my brother intimidate you.”
“You mean his bark is worse than his bite?” Sam guessed.
“No, his bite’s worse, but just don’t let him intimidate you,” she repeated. “Give him as good as he dishes out,” she added. “The rest of us would love to see him put in his place.”
Mike shot her a dark look, then laughed. “You should live so long,” he told her.
Alma merely smiled at him. “That’s my dream, big brother. So,” Alma continued, switching her attention to the new face in the diner, “have you had a chance to look at the diaries Dad found?”
Sam shook her head. “Not yet, but I’m looking forward to it. Your father thought I should go on a tour of your town first, learn my way around,” she explained as to what she was doing here instead of being on the ranch.
“Tiny, isn’t it?” Alma asked with a laugh.
“Where are you from?” Miss Joan asked without any preamble, her very voice commanding attention from her.
Sam immediately turned toward the older woman. “I live in New York,” she answered.
“Then this town must seem really tiny to you,” Alma speculated.
Miss Joan, however, wasn’t all that convinced she’d given the right answer. “Not with that accent you’re not. Where’re you from originally?” Miss Joan pressed.
Was it that obvious to the woman? Sam wondered. She’d worked hard to erase her initial accent. Her goal had always been to sound as if she could fit in anywhere, come from anywhere. No doubt, she couldn’t fool this woman’s ear.
“Originally, Broken Saber, Oklahoma. But we moved to Maryland when I was about three.”
This answer the old woman found acceptable. “That’s more like it,” Miss Joan said with a triumphant nod of her head. “Knew there was another accent lurking around your words.”
Alma glanced at her watch. “Well, I’d better be getting back. Miss Joan, you have the sheriff’s coffee?” she asked.
“Fresh and ready to go,” the woman replied, producing a tall covered container and puting it on the counter. In exchange, Alma placed a couple of bills on the counter before she picked up the coffee. Miss Joan frowned deeply, pushing the bills back toward the deputy. “Take that back, girl. The sheriff knows his money’s no good here.”
Alma made no effort to retrieve the bills. Instead, she deliberately ignored them even when Miss Joan moved them closer to her on the counter. “You know how he feels about that, Miss Joan.”
Impatience fleetingly passed over her pale features. Miss Joan took Alma’s hand and pressed the bills into her palm.
“Tell him to come argue with me himself if it means that much to him,” she told the sheriff’s deputy. “Until then, not another word.” It wasn’t a request, it was an order.
Alma looked as if she was about to say something, but then thought better of it. Everyone knew that arguing with Miss Joan was nothing short of a colossal waste of time and effort.
“Don’t people win arguments with Miss Joan?” Sam asked Mike in what she thought was a soft whisper.
Having made her way down the counter to wait on another customer, Miss Joan was still able to hear her. “Not hardly. Only one who ever did is Harry.”
Sam looked to Mike for an explanation. “Harry?”
It was Miss Joan who answered. “My husband—and he only won because I wanted him to,” she emphasized the point. Miss Joan looked over toward the sheriff’s deputy who hadn’t left the diner yet. “You might want to remind your boss of that little fact when you bring him that coffee—which, by the way, is going to start growing cold if you don’t get a move on, girl.” The hazel eyes deliberately shifted toward the door.
Alma turned to leave, uttering a friendly, “See you later,” to Miss Joan.
The deputy’s manner, Sam couldn’t help thinking, was every bit as warm and outgoing as her father’s. Sam had a hunch that the whole family had that sort of a personality—all except for Mike, it seemed. Had he been hiding behind some wall—or better yet, some cloud—when warmth was being handed out to his family?
Or was his lack of warmth because he had gotten an extra dose of good looks instead? Because there was no disputing the fact that of the four Rodriguez family members whom she had met so far, in her opinion Mike was the handsomest one.
Of course, Sam amended, she hadn’t met the other three yet, but if any of the others were more handsome than Mike was, she reasoned that it would probably hurt just to look at him.
Okay, get a grip, Sam. You’re here to work, not to drool or have extraneous thoughts that aren’t directly connected to turning out the very best possible product that you possibly can.
“Nice meeting you,” Alma called out to her as she started to leave. She lingered for another second to issue a good-natured warning to her older brother. “You be on your best behavior, you hear?” She pinned Mike with a significant look.
“You’re forgetting who’s the older one,” Mike retorted, raising his voice as he called after his exiting sister. It was against his nature to be vocal around others, but he had no choice at the moment. And there was no way he wanted her to think he was cutting her any extra slack because of her condition. Alma would have had his head if she thought that.
“No, I’m not,” was Alma’s final say on the matter. His sister was gone before he could go on record with a rejoinder.
Miss Joan immediately turned her attention back to Miguel’s houseguest.
“You been doing this long?” she asked. When Sam looked at her uncertainly, the woman added, “Spending time putting down other people’s words for them in your own fashion?”
That wasn’t quite what she did, but Sam didn’t want to get into the particulars right now. The diner owner might think she was challenging her. So instead, she said, “A few years.”
Miss Joan nodded, absorbing the answer. “You any good at it?” she asked.
The woman certainly didn’t waste time with niceties and beating around the bush, Sam thought. “I’d like to think so.”
“Good,” Miss Joan pronounced with a nod of her head. “You’ve got confidence.” She smiled, then added, “Hang on to it.” Picking up her ever-present coffeepot, the woman filled a cup with steaming black coffee, then slid both the creamer and the sugar over next to it.
Sam raised her eyes from the cup to look at Miss Joan. “I didn’t order anything,” she protested.
“No, I did,” the woman told her. “I thought it might help you hold your own against this one.” To underscore her point, Miss Joan inclined her head in Mike’s direction. “He’ll roll right over you if you give him half a chance,” she warned.
“And coffee is supposed to help stop him?” Sam asked skeptically.
“Well, it sure can’t hurt,” Miss Joan countered.
“What about me?” Mike asked the feisty woman he had known all his life.
Miss Joan regarded him with barely veiled amusement. “What about you, handsome?”
“Don’t I get a coffee?” he asked.
Miss Joan laughed. “You, handsome, are revved up enough as it is. And no amount of tea in the world is going to counteract that. I’m just trying
to level the playing field for this little lady.” About to carry away the coffeepot, Miss Joan paused and patted Sam’s hand. “You got any questions, honey, you find your way back to me.”
“What kind of questions?” Sam asked. Was the woman talking about questions regarding the history of the countryside, or was she alluding to something a little more personal?
Miss Joan’s hazel eyes danced with humor as she leaned in toward her. “Any kind of questions,” she emphasized. The next moment, the woman was working her way down the counter, calling out a greeting to two men who had just walked into the diner and taken seats on the far end.
Sam could feel Mike looking at her. The next minute, he asked her, “Ready to go?”
The way she saw it, she was fitting into his schedule so it was up to him to determine when they left. “You’re the guide,” she pointed out.
“Doesn’t mean I’m going to be dragging you around from place to place when you’re not ready to leave. Now, you ready or not?” he asked.
Sam drained her cup and set it back down on the saucer, feeling a definite jolt to her system as the coffee wound its way throughout her body.
“Ready,” she declared.
Sam found herself saying the word to his back. Mike was already on his feet, heading for the door. He might not have any intentions of dragging her around, but neither, apparently, did he intend to hang around and wait for her, either.
Figuring the man out was going to take a lot of patience on her part, Sam decided.
She had just enough time to slide off her stool, wave goodbye to Miss Joan and hurry after the man. He was, after all, her ride back.
Well, one good thing, Sam thought in her never-ending quest to find the positive side of every situation. She certainly wasn’t going to be lacking for exercise on this assignment.
* * *
RATHER THAN WHISK her back to the ranch, the way she expected, Mike told her that he was taking her to all the places that his father would want her to see. He also made it known that he thought this tour was rather pointless. Since she had no car of her own, if she had any desire to go to town for some reason, she’d have to ask one of them to take her, hence negating any need for her to learn her way around Forever and the roads that led to it.
But Mike knew better than to point out the obvious to his father. Miguel Rodriguez marched to a different drummer than he did, but since he was his father—and he did love the old man—Mike gave him the respect that was his due.
Secretly, Mike had to admit that he was rather curious to see how a New Yorker would react to their less-than-sophisticated little blip on the map. Granted she had mentioned something about originally coming from Oklahoma, but the last place she’d lived would be the most vivid to her.
Forever didn’t exactly fare well in a comparison to New York City.
“You had enough?” Mike asked her abruptly as they left the sheriff’s office.
“You make it sound like an endurance test,” she told him.
“Isn’t it? For you?” he added in case she thought that was his take on the town. This was where he’d been born and raised and he had no regrets if this was also going to be the place where he died. Everything he wanted was right here within the town limits or on the ranch.
Sam abruptly stopped walking. She’d promised herself to just go with the flow, not challenge the man or take offense at his edgy, critical manner. But she was going to be living at the ranch and despite what she foresaw as a dedicated work schedule, their paths were destined to cross every so often.
She wanted the air cleared now rather than to have a future confrontation hanging over her head. Hands on her hips, she faced him. “Why are you so angry at me?”
He barely spared her a look as he strode past. “I’m not angry.”
But Sam wasn’t going to be ignored. She grabbed his arm—or rather, his sleeve, and said, “Trust me, on my end of this, you definitely sound angry. Why?”
“Because I think this is a waste of time.”
She tried to untangle his meaning. “A waste of time taking me around, or a waste of time, my transcribing the journals?”
His eyes all but pinned her in place. “Yes,” he answered. The next moment, he’d shaken her hand off and was heading for his truck.
“Well, that certainly cleared things up,” she said sarcastically. Sam was fairly trotting now to keep up, but she would have rather died than asked the man to slow down. “It’s me you object to, isn’t it?”
It wasn’t her he objected to, it was the money. They were doing well now, but it wasn’t all that long ago that foreclosure was a reality. He didn’t want it making a reappearance and the best way he knew how to avoid that was by keeping spending down to a minimum.
“Don’t see why he needed to bring someone in just to read a bunch of books and pull out the highlights. Any one of us could do that for him,” Mike informed her coldly.
It was beginning to make more sense now, she supposed, although she didn’t appreciate his passing judgment on the quality of her work before she had a chance to even produce it.
“And you told him this?” She assumed his answer was yes.
But he surprised her by saying, “No.”
They reached the truck. Tired of talking to the back of his head, she moved quickly to get in front of him and was all but in his face as she asked her next question. “But you’re willing to spend the time doing it for him.”
The shrug was impatient as well as frustrated. “Not exactly now, but soon.”
Triumph blossomed on her face. For a moment, it mesmerized him—until he forced himself to dismiss both her face and the emotion she was radiating.
“That’s the whole point,” Sam insisted, not about to be summarily rejected. “‘Soon’ doesn’t come nearly as quickly as promised—if at all. Bringing someone like me into the project just makes it a reality instead of a wish.”
The expression on his face announced that he was already bored with the topic and he shrugged his shoulders, muttering, “Whatever you say.” But for once he didn’t say it nearly as grudgingly or dismissively as she’d expected.
Sam read between the lines and realized that she had a minuscule chance to make a true believer out of a skeptic.
She fully intended to.
That became her real challenge rather than the project she’d agreed to take on. She knew she was capable of handling this project. Oh, there might be a couple of false starts along the way, but at this point in her work, she knew she could more than do it justice.
It was the former—making Mike into a believer, not just of her but of the entire process, of the need for people to connect across the generations—that would prove to be a test of her abilities.
Sam told herself that she was up to it.
Now all that remained was to make sure she hadn’t bitten off more than she could chew.
Chapter Seven
“When you were growing up, did your brothers or sister sometimes tag along after you when you were hanging out with your friends?” Sam asked him.
The question seemed to come out of the blue. It took him a few seconds to process it. “I didn’t do a lot of ‘hanging out’ when I was growing up,” Mike informed her coolly.
There was always something to do on the ranch, horses to feed, stalls to clean out, along with the normal load of schoolwork. Attending to each didn’t exactly leave all that much time for him to be young and irresponsible, which was what “hanging out with friends” meant to him.
“But you did do it once in a while, right?” Sam persisted.
He shrugged. “Maybe.” Where was all this going? And why was this so important to her? “What’s your point?” he asked.
“My point,” Sam told him, lengthening her stride for the umpteenth time in order to kee
p up with him as they walked through Forever, “is that if one of your brothers or sister did tag along after you against your expressed wishes, I’m guessing that this had to be what they felt like.”
He stopped walking to regard her in earnest. Since he did it without warning, Sam bumped right into him. He caught her by the shoulders to steady her. It was either that, or he would be forced to pick her up off the ground. This seemed the better way to go, even if it did involve touching her—and experiencing an unsettling reaction to the contact despite his attempt to merely dismiss it.
“What the hell are you talking about?” he asked.
It took Sam a second to get her bearings. He was still holding her by the shoulders, still causing her startled insides to scramble and knot and her heart to rev up and race unaccountably.
She forced herself to keep her mind on the conversation and not some random, unspoken cluster of sensations, no matter how much they made her insides quicken.
“I’m talking about feeling like a burden, like someone trying to keep up with a person who would really be happier if I was still somewhere on the other side of the country. Look, I meant it when I told you that you didn’t have to show me around. I’m used to getting around on my own. It’s not as if this were something new for me.”
“And I told you that I told my father I would do it and I’m as good as my word, so there’s no point in debating this. If you don’t like the way I’m handling this little tour, then you’re free to go back to the ranch. Just say the word and I’ll take you.”
“Oh, no, I’m not going to be the one to throw in the towel.” She squared her shoulders. “Okay, what else is on the agenda?”
So far, Mike had taken her to the emporium and introduced her to the couple who ran the store, had pointed out the movie theater that only opened after sundown during the week and had taken her by the medical clinic run by the town’s only doctor who, coincidentally, was married to the sheriff’s sister-in-law. He took her by the saloon, Murphy’s, the only place in town where alcohol was sold, and rounded out her tour by bringing her to the sheriff’s office, where she ran into Alma again as well as met the sheriff and the two other deputies—Mike’s brother Gabe and Joe Lone Wolf, a full-blooded Navajo Indian. The latter had asked her if she’d had a chance to see the reservation yet.
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