by Jeannie Watt
“They’re going to miss their friends,” Emma said, slipping her backpack onto her shoulders.
“I don’t think they had that much contact with their friends,” Zach pointed out. The leppies had their own corral.
“They talked over the fence,” Emma stated matter-of-factly before starting down the road toward their house.
“Can I have a ride to the house?” Lizzie asked hopefully.
“Roscoe’s being a butt today. You can ride Snippy later if you want.”
“Okay.” Lizzie took off after Emma, her bright pink backpack bouncing on top of her grayish-lavender coat—a color she didn’t seem to mind one bit because it wasn’t red, which Lizzie had recently explained to him was a boy color. Lizzie didn’t do boy colors.
That left Darcy and Beth Ann, who was unloading her laptop and box of supplies from the trunk.
“Everything go okay?” Darcy asked.
“Fine,” Zach said, wondering what could have possibly gone wrong other than Roscoe leaving him on the mountain again. Darcy sent a quick look at Beth Ann, then swung her backpack up onto one shoulder and followed her sisters.
“So she gave you the pasture,” Beth Ann said as soon as Darcy was out of hearing range, although sometimes Zach wondered if Darcy was ever out of range. She seemed to hear everything.
“Tess is leasing it to me, yeah.”
“That’s good. I guess.”
“Why ‘you guess’? I think it’s just plain good.”
“Something about her bothers me,” Beth Ann said, settling the edge of the box on her hip and looking upward with a frown as if trying to recall some illusive detail. “Oh, yeah,” she said, bringing her eyes back to meet his. “I know what it is. She’s acted like a wacko ever since she moved here.”
Maybe she has reason. “She gets better the more time you spend with her.” Beth Ann’s eyebrows shot up in a way that surprised him, as if he’d just said the last thing she’d wanted to hear. Then she pressed her lips together and reached down with her free hand to pick up the handle of the laptop case.
“If you say so.”
“You want some help?” Zach asked after reaching out to shut the trunk lid for her.
“No.”
“Dinner tonight?”
She shook her head. “I have to work on one of my ridiculous college assignments that has nothing to do with real life education of children, but I’ll do it to get that piece of paper that allows me to teach.”
A familiar rant and not unjustified, since in a small rural school the aids sometimes did almost as much instruction as the actual teacher. But there was something else bothering her. Tess?
Beth Ann and Karen had been very different, despite being close. Karen had been the easier going of the two, tactful and nonconfrontational—unless something threatened someone she loved. Then the gloves came off and she took care of business. Beth Ann tended to skip the tactful phase of negotiations and took care of business from the get go.
“I’ll come to the house later to help Darcy with her math and make sure Emma’s doing her social studies project.”
“Lizzie’s in the clear?”
“Finished her spelling during class, so yes.”
“Come to dinner. You need to eat,” Zach said.
Beth Ann hesitated, then her shoulders drooped a little and when she looked up at him, she made an effort to smile. “Did you make anything in the slow cooker?”
“Just another stew.” About all he had time for in the spring.
“Well,” she said, “maybe you can set me a place. It wouldn’t kill me to take a break before starting this stupid assignment.”
“Will do, Beth Ann. See you then.”
* * *
TESS WAS UP and dressed in her usual less than flattering outfit of loose jeans and T-shirt when Zach knocked on her door at 8:00 a.m. The dogs did their tough act at the sound of the knock, but it lacked conviction, telling her that they already knew Zach, knew he wasn’t a threat. In fact, when she opened the door, they both fell back and slowly started wagging their tails.
“Just thought I’d let you know I was here,” he said, tilting his ball cap back so she could see his eyes. As usual, she found them utterly fascinating and also found herself wishing she wasn’t dressed so poorly, even if she had done it on purpose.
Tess did not want to be attracted to this man, but she was, so she’d put on some ugly armor and hoped it would remind her of all the reasons she needed to stay sane.
“I brought some fence posts to replace the ones that Irv knocked over. It looked like they had some rot.”
“I’ll pay you for those,” Tess said. “How much—”
“No need.” He smiled slightly. “Maybe you could just come out and keep me company while I work.”
Tess’s stomach flip-flopped, which in turn irritated her. She was not sixteen and Zach was not the cute guy next door. Well, he was, but she was definitely beyond sixteen.
“Sure,” she said with a casual shrug.
“Maybe we could leave Cujo and the missus in here?” he suggested, nodding at the dogs.
“Package deal,” she said. “All or none.”
“Fine. Bring the wolf pack,” he said with an easy smile. “Meet you out back?”
“Yeah.”
Zach had already knocked down the parts of the fence that Tess had propped up using old weathered 2x4s she’d found stacked near one end of the house in deep grass.
“You want to grab the posthole digger?” he asked when she came down the steps, Blossom and Mac close behind her.
“Sure,” Tess said. “Go lie down,” she told the dogs, who trotted to the middle of the lawn and dropped into the grass. Blossom started to roll, a blissful expression on her face.
“They’re bilingual?” Zach asked as he started knocking a panel free of the old fence post with a few blows of a hammer. He seemed to know exactly what he was doing, working without a wasted motion. “German and English?” he added.
“Dutch,” she said as she walked over to his pickup, which had several posts and various tools in the bed. “I give them the Dutch commands—the ones I can remember—when I mean business. The rest of the time I just talk to them and they seem to know what I mean.” She moved a shovel aside to get at what had to be the posthole digger, since the only other tool in the truck was a long steel bar. “They’re really remarkably smart.”
Zach knocked another panel free, then examined the post and set it aside.
“Is the rest of my fence going to fall over from rotted posts?” It didn’t seem damp enough here for anything to rot.
“I think you have several years left on these posts, but the alkaline soil tends to eat them, so there’s no sense putting the old posts back if they’re not one hundred percent.”
“At least part of my fence will be standing in a few years?”
“We can hope,” he said, taking the diggers from her, their hands brushing in the process. And because she’d expected his touch, Tess did not react. Visibly, anyway.
The posts Zach had brought were longer than the ones the cedar panels had been attached to, so he needed to deepen the holes. On the one hand, Tess didn’t feel totally comfortable with him doing all this work for no recompense, but on the other, it was rather fascinating to watch him do it.
He stabbed the diggers into one of the holes, then opened the handles and pulled the tool back out, dumping the damp earth in the grass at the side
of the hole.
“Your grass is getting long,” he said.
“Going to offer to mow my lawn?” she asked wryly.
“I can put a few cows back here. They mow and fertilize.”
She laughed. “Actually I have a new lawn mower coming. I ordered it a few days after the barn burned.” Another stab of the diggers, another ripple of muscle under his cotton shirt. “Before that I was going to see what could be done with the old ones stored in the barn, but I never got the chance.”
“Are you familiar with engine repair?” he asked.
“No,” she said with a smile. “But I actually got one started before it turned to toast.”
“Then you must be familiar with engine repair,” Zach replied dryly. “I’ve seen Anderson’s mowers.”
“Not really, but I am familiar with starter fluid and checking the oil. I used to help the caretaker with the gardening where I lived.”
“Caretaker?” Zach pulled the diggers out of the hole and then leaned on them, holding her gaze with a slight frown. “As in your family had a groundskeeper?”
Tess made a face. Oh, yeah. Right. The closest they’d come to groundskeeping was when Eddie tended the pot plants, and they were inside the house. No grounds involved.
“Nothing like that,” she said. “I stayed in a home for kids for a while when I was growing up and they had a caretaker. We took turns helping with the upkeep of the house. Learned some practical stuff.”
She didn’t know why she’d given him that little tidbit of personal history. Maybe to put another wall between them, since the one she usually depended on, rude and distant behavior, had crumbled days ago. If he asked why she was in a home, she was simply going to tell him her family life had sucked and she didn’t talk about it.
He didn’t ask. Instead he started digging again—the best possible move he could have made. After he finished one hole and started on the next, he asked, “What kind of stuff did you learn?”
Tess answered, even though she wasn’t certain she wanted to. “I learned about maintaining—and starting—lawn mowers and weed whackers and stuff like that.” She shrugged. “A little about cars.” Even though they weren’t allowed to have cars. “The caretaker was always working on hers and I watched when I had nothing better to do.”
She hadn’t thought about how much she’d enjoyed that in a long time. It wasn’t the engines—she didn’t have the fascination with mechanics that some people had—it was the meticulous order of things. The slow step-by-step process that didn’t change.
In other words, the antithesis of what her life had been before landing in the home. And maybe that was why she was trying to learn to sew. To follow a process and end up with something usable.
“Caretaker was a lady?”
“A very competent woman,” Tess said. “A survivor. She told me not to be afraid to follow dreams, because if I didn’t, I’d regret it. So I did follow my dreams for quite a while.” She smiled with a hint of sadness. “I tried to contact her to thank her for the advice a few years ago, but she’d moved on.”
“What were your dreams, Tess?”
She stilled then said, “A career in advertising.” Not really a lie. “I worked at it for several years.”
“But gave it up?”
Tess shrugged, starting to feel uncomfortable. She hadn’t realized how badly she had wanted to simply talk about herself, to lighten the burden she carried, but this was getting dangerous. Her mouth was getting away from her and she was dropping way too many hints about who she was. Zach must have noticed her shift in mood because he asked no more questions, but instead focused on deepening the fence holes. Tess tried very hard not to focus on him. She failed.
The sun rose higher as Zach dumped the five fence posts, one after another, into the new and improved holes.
“Can you give me a hand here?” he asked after setting the last one and tamping the earth around it with his foot.
Together the two of them lifted the panel of cedar planks and Tess held it in place while Zach attached it to the post using a drill and massive screws. When he was done, Tess had a stretch of superbly sturdy fence.
“I really appreciate this,” Tess said as Zach loaded his tools. She wished she had lemonade or tea or something to offer him, but all she had was water and Zach had brought his own.
“No problem,” he said as he picked up the shovel. He met her eyes and she could see that he was about to say something, but wasn’t certain how to go about it. Which in turn made her think she did not want to hear it. She was about to say something—anything—to sidetrack him when he said, “You know, Tess, if—” he paused, as if searching for the right words, and her stomach tightened “—you have concerns, I’m just across the road.”
“What kind of concerns?” Tess asked, her voice suddenly brittle.
“The kind that makes a person nervous.”
Damn.
She’d figured that he was sharp, that he had to know something was up after she’d jerked away from him that day, but she hadn’t expected an offer of assistance.
Brain racing, she was working on forming some kind of a sane nondefensive reply when he said abruptly, “That’s okay.” He tossed the shovel into the bed of the truck with a loud clatter and then slammed the tailgate shut. “None of my business. I’ll move the cattle tomorrow morning, if that works for you.”
“Works just fine,” Tess said, trying very hard for a normal tone. She appreciated his offer. Really she did.
She simply couldn’t accept it without telling him the score, and she was not going to do that.
* * *
HE COULD HAVE been a little smoother in delivery, Zach thought as he unloaded the tools from his truck and stored them in the barn. But at least now Tess knew that he was there, willing to help if she needed him. The big question was whether or not she’d take him up on his offer.
The phone rang in his office as he approached the house and Zach jogged up the steps, half hoping it might be Tess.
But it wasn’t. Bradley James, self-proclaimed gentleman rancher and husband of the hospital administrator, identified himself after a quick hello.
“Bradley, how are you?” Zach said cautiously. He did not like the feel of this.
“Fine, fine. You may have guessed that I’m calling about that parcel.”
“Uh—”
“It’s been a year,” Bradley barreled on, cutting Zach off, “and I just wanted to touch base again. Let you know I’m still interested if you ever decide to sell.”
“Well...thanks,” Zach said. And that was all he said, because he’d made his position very clear the first time Bradley had approached him about buying forty acres. He wasn’t parceling off the ranch.
There was a few seconds of dead air and then Bradley cleared his throat. “I’ll let you go,” he said on a congenial note. “Good talking to you.”
“Likewise,” Zach lied.
The bait tossed out, the hint dropped, Bradley hung up. Now he was probably retreating to his lair to wait for Zach to get out his budget books and realize how much better off he’d be if he sold the forty. It would pay off most of the remaining medical bills—but so would another two years of paying the way he was...and hoping that no emergency situations cropped up.
He’d go with hope and a prayer.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
HOW DID ONE move cattle?
Tess envisioned a big truck backing up to her pasture gate and
cows stepping out of the back, but instead, at about ten the next morning, she looked out her upper-story window—after the dogs had begun some serious barking—to see a herd of cattle ambling down her driveway. There were at least fifty animals, maybe more, most with babies at their sides. Zach rode behind them, and trotting alongside the herd, keeping a close eye on the animals, was Zach’s black-and-white collie.
Since Zach was at the back of the herd, Tess wondered if the dog would be able to stop the cattle from continuing up the driveway to her house and onto her lawn.
But the dog didn’t have to do anything, because the first cow made a beeline for the open gate and all of the other animals followed her inside, where they immediately spread out and started eating. A few of the calves lay down, perhaps tired after the excitement of the trip from one home to another, and the rest hugged up close to their mothers, surveying their new environment.
Tess held the curtain and leaned forward to see what Zach was doing. He closed the gate from horseback, then wheeled the animal around and looked straight at her. Tess stepped back despite knowing he couldn’t possibly see her in the glare of the sun. At least she hoped he couldn’t.
The cows were delivered. Now the cowboy could go home and she could get on with her day. But she’d be thinking about him.
She was getting better, wasn’t nearly as jumpy as she had been, didn’t think about Eddie every waking minute of the day, but he was still out there. Regardless of Detective Hiller’s admonition to get on with her life—or the fact that he’d been right about post-traumatic stress—Tess knew it’d be foolish to think that she was home free. Not if Eddie thought she had money. He might wait a year. Maybe two. Maybe until he was off parole, but he’d come looking for her.
There was no way she would ever be able to totally drop her guard, develop anything lasting with anyone.
But if she enjoyed a few minutes here and there with an attractive guy...well, there was nothing wrong with that. As long as she left it at that.