by Diana Palmer
He laughed. “Not so much. You have to have training for that sort of work. Most of the rehabilitators are overworked. All of them around here specialize. We have one for raptors, one for small mammals, one for large mammals, that sort of thing.”
“What a wonderful job,” she sighed.
“You wouldn’t think so if your phone rang off the hook all hours with people needing help.”
“I don’t know,” she replied. “It sounds like a worthwhile occupation.” She glanced toward the kitchen. Her boss was just coming out of it. Cassie’s worried expression told him a lot.
“Two eggs, scrambled, with bacon and toast and grape jelly,” he said at once. “Strong black coffee to go with it.”
She smiled and her eyes mirrored her gratitude as she jotted down the order. “I haven’t spilled anybody’s coffee so far today,” she said.
“I spill mine half the time,” he said easily. “I trip over my own feet. I catch pot holders on fire.” He shrugged. “I won’t mind if you spill the coffee.”
She laughed. “Okay. Thanks.”
“No problem.”
She went at once to get his order. Mary gave her a secretive smile and a hidden thumbs-up. Cassie flushed. Mary laughed as her newest employee dashed to the counter and gave the order to the cook.
* * *
Cassie managed to get the coffee to JL in one piece, without dropping the cup. She let out a sigh of relief when she had it on the table before him, along with a napkin and silverware.
“Not bad,” he remarked. “You know, your clothes are still at the house.”
“Oh, gosh, I keep forgetting about them!” she exclaimed apologetically.
“It wasn’t a complaint,” he replied. “But I thought you might like to come over and get them Saturday. You can see the calves.”
Her eyes lit up. “You have calves?”
“Lots of them. Even a pair of twins,” he added. “We have our cows drop calves in the early spring, when the young grass is just coming up and most of the snow and sleet is done with.” He sighed heavily. “Not that it’s quite spring just yet,” he added, shaking his head. “We’ve got our hands full with this latest snowfall.”
“I love snow,” she said softly. “It’s so beautiful.”
“Not when you’re trying to shovel it out of cattle pens and feeders.”
She laughed. “Yes, but I don’t have to do those things.”
“Don’t they have snow where you come from?”
She made a face. “One or two days a year.”
“Heaven,” he retorted.
“It’s a matter of perspective,” she pointed out. “What we don’t have often becomes a joy.”
“I can think of several inappropriate replies to that,” he said with a wicked smile. “The main one being raging indigestion.”
“Oh, boy, can I sympathize with that!” she said. “I have heartburn so bad! I have to take medicine for it.”
“Acid reflux?” he asked.
She laughed. “Yes.”
“I have it, too.” He shook his head. “The sad part is that I love spicy food, preferably Tex-Mex with lots of salsa and peppers. Can’t eat it very often.”
“I like spicy Asian food,” she confessed. “Especially Chinese.”
He laughed. “Kindred spirits. So,” he added. “Saturday morning, about ten? I’ll come and get you.”
Her face colored. She was shy and it was difficult for her to be herself with a man. But she was excited and happy, and that showed as well. “I would like that,” she said, trying to rein in her enthusiasm.
“So would I. Cassie, isn’t it?”
She nodded. “Cassie.”
“Is it a nickname or your actual name?”
She sighed. “My actual name is Cassandra,” she confessed. “My mother was reading a romance novel just before I was born, and she loved the heroine’s name. So Cassandra I became. But everybody just calls me Cassie.”
“I like it,” he said softly.
She smiled. He smiled back. They exchanged a look that made her toes curl inside her shoes. “Oh! Your order . . . !” She laughed self-consciously and retreated to the counter to pick up his breakfast.
“Aren’t you lucky that we’re not crowded?” the cook, Agatha, asked with a wicked grin. “He’s a dish, isn’t he?”
Cassie went red from her forehead down. “Oh, Agatha . . . !”
“Never mind me. I always wanted a little bow and an arrow and a cherubic face. . . .”
Cassie wrinkled her nose at the older woman and carried the plate and the saucer containing the toast on a tray to the table where JL had cleared a path in between his coffee cup and his utensils for them.
She eased the plate down and almost lost the saucer, but she recovered it just in time. “Oops. Nearly a disaster. Sorry.”
He chuckled. “Nice reflexes. I’ll bet you’re a terror on the tennis court.”
“I don’t play tennis,” she said.
“I do. I’ll teach you.”
She laughed. “I’d trip over my feet and go headfirst into the net.”
“Okay. How about horseback riding?”
“I’ve only ever been on a horse once or twice, but I really liked it,” she replied.
“Fine. We’ll forget tennis and go riding.”
“I’d love that.”
“Me too.”
She picked up the empty tray and held it under her arm. “Ten o’clock Saturday.”
He nodded. He smiled. “I’ll look forward to it.”
She hated her helpless blush. “Me too.” She went back to the counter and put up the tray quickly, because a party of four just walked in the door. The morning rush had started.
* * *
JL paid the bill at the counter, because Cassie was in over her head trying to cover three tables at once.
“She’s shaping up nicely here,” Mary told him as she returned his change, indicating Cassie. “She’d never waited tables, but she’s honest and quick to learn, and she works hard.”
“Nice character traits,” JL replied.
“She’s pretty green. . . .” She said it hesitantly, not wanting to interfere.
“I noticed that, too,” he said softly, and he smiled. “Another very rare trait, in these overly modern times.”
She laughed. “It is.”
“Tell Agatha the eggs were perfect. Nobody cooks them like she does.”
“I’ll tell her. She’ll swoon,” she teased. “She thinks you’re the dishiest man since Sean Connery.”
“My God, what an image to have to live up to,” he returned with a grin. “I’ll have to grow a beard and practice my Scots accent.”
“Then she’ll really swoon,” Mary assured him.
He turned and caught Cassie’s eye and waved. She tried to wave back, dropped her order pad, and then scrambled to pick it up again. She was as red as a beet.
He chuckled with pure pleasure and waved again as he walked out the door.
* * *
“You’re very unsettled tonight,” her father remarked when they were eating supper.
“It’s been an odd couple of days,” she replied.
“Cary hasn’t been back, has he?” he asked with some irritation.
She just stared at him. “Cary?” she asked softly, fishing for how much he knew.
“Small towns run on gossip,” he reminded her. He chuckled. “What I heard was that Cary got fresh with you and you put him down. One of my coworkers said he wished his wife had that kind of spunk.”
She laughed. “I wasn’t going to tell you,” she confessed. “You’ve had so much worry lately. . . .”
“This doesn’t worry me. Actually, it was nice to have something to laugh about. People say Cary’s bad to drink with and he gets aggressive. I was afraid he might come back and say something to you.”
“No,” she told him. “That’s not what happened at all. He swore that his hand slipped, and he apologized profusely. But JL Denton heard
about what happened, too, and he came for breakfast to ask me about it.”
“Protecting his cousin?”
“No. Protecting me, actually,” she said. “He doesn’t like his cousin.”
“A lot of people don’t like Cary, from what I’ve heard.”
“Mr. Denton asked me if I’d like to go horseback riding with him on Saturday.”
“Well!”
“He’s got lots of calves,” she added.
He chuckled. “Say no more. I can drive you over there and pick you up later.”
“He’s coming to get me,” she returned.
“A gentleman.”
“I hope so.” She finished her meat loaf and mashed potatoes and put the plate to one side. “I don’t really know him.”
“Everybody in town knows him,” he replied. “He’s respected and well liked. People are still sorry for him about his fiancée walking out; something his cousin provoked, they say.”
“That’s what he says, too.”
“You should be safe enough. You can always call me if you run out of defensive techniques.”
She laughed. “I don’t plan to throw Mr. Denton around, Dad.”
“He was in the military,” he said surprisingly. “And he was a master trainer in hand-to-hand combat, they say. I expect you’d have your work cut out to put him down the way you did his cousin.”
“Well!” she said with a quick breath.
“He does drink, like his cousin,” he told her. “So be careful.”
“I will.”
“Make sure you keep your cell phone charged, so you can call me if you get into a situation you can’t handle. And make sure you don’t leave without your meds,” he added firmly.
“I will. Worrywart,” she teased.
He grinned.
* * *
She didn’t sleep that night, thinking about JL. She didn’t know much about men, despite working around them for several years. Most of them were businessmen or entertainers, and they wore nice suits or expensive leisure wear, not denim and cowboy boots. JL Denton was completely out of her experience. He was very attractive. She hoped she could keep her head. She didn’t want to become a notch on his bedpost.
On the other hand, he seemed like a gentleman. Her mother always said that a man treated a woman the way she signaled that she wanted to be treated. If she acted like a lady, that’s how she’d be treated.
Her mother would have been taken aback if she’d seen Cary in the restaurant putting his hand on her daughter’s bottom.
Accident or not, that had been offensive and it made Cassie angry. No man had the right to be that forward with any woman. It was condescending and crude.
She was glad that JL was angry about it, too. It made her feel better. In all the years since she’d graduated from high school and then college, she’d never had a man treat her that way. She’d never worked for the public, though, especially in a job like waitressing. And she’d been sheltered, mainly because she’d been sick so often. When she was a reporter, almost every man she knew treated her like one of the guys. Only one man had asked her out in all those years, but she’d turned him down. He worked for the same paper she did. She didn’t want to risk a workplace romance. She smiled, remembering what her mother had said about the fellow reporter. Her mother had been very protective.
It hurt her to remember her mother, shamed and flooded with e-mails and nasty notes on social media. Neither Cassie nor her father had known about them until they checked her computer after she died and found them. Several had invited her to kill herself because she was married to a nasty and obscene lecher.
Cassie’s father had never been a lecher. He was a perfect gentleman, and he was completely faithful to his wife, a rarity in the circles he moved in. Her mother had snapped under the unrelenting pressure of crusading newsmen and newswomen, ceaseless pointing fingers at her father for being one of those overbearing animals that preyed on women who were subordinate to him at work. The tragedy was something that Cassie and her father still couldn’t talk about. The wound was too new, too fresh.
The only good that had come out of it, and it was small consolation, was that the media backed off after the tragedy. One newscaster was angry enough to castigate his colleagues on the air for being so aggressive and unfeeling that they cost a human life. But it was like closing the gate after the horse was gone. It didn’t bring back Cassie’s sweet mother.
She rolled over in bed and fluffed up her pillow. She had to stop looking back. Life was sweet again. It was a new start. She could live in Colorado for the rest of her life in total obscurity. No reporters would come here to harass her and her father. They’d left no trail that could be followed, even by an aggressive reporter. This little town was like shelter in a storm, and Cassie looked forward to making a new life here with her dad.
It might be a pipe dream, she thought as she closed her eyes. But dreams were sweet, when you had little else to cling to. She smiled, thinking of JL and Saturday, as she drifted off to sleep.
* * *
Saturday morning, she was up at seven o’clock. She made breakfast, cleared away the dishes, and then spent two hours trying on clothes to see what looked best on her. She didn’t have a large wardrobe; she and her father had packed the bare minimum to come out here, putting everything they owned in storage for the time being. Back home in Atlanta, she had nice clothes, even a few designer ones, especially things for evening. But she didn’t want to wear anything fancy around JL. It would be stupid and cruel to wear designer clothes around a cowboy who lived in a house with peeling paint, on a ranch with broken fences. She wasn’t going to do a number on his pride. So she wore simple off-the-rack jeans with a pullover yellow sweater and ankle boots. She left her hair long, curling around her face and shoulders, and she used a bare minimum of makeup and cologne.
“You look nice,” her father remarked as she folded the clothes she’d borrowed, which she’d washed and dried, to give back to JL.
“Thanks,” she told him. “I didn’t want to look too dressy.”
“Nice manners,” he said softly. His face saddened. “Like your mother.”
She bit her lower lip. “Oh, how I wish we could go back there and punch those reporters!”
“Life pays us out in our own coin,” he reminded her. “God gets even with people who hurt us. They’ll find that out one day, in this life or the next,” he added. “You can’t dwell on wrongdoing, even things that make you miserable. Hating only hurts you. It never hurts the person you hate.”
“I guess not,” she conceded.
“Got your rescue inhaler?”
“Yes,” she said, smiling.
“Okay. EpiPen, too?”
“Right here.” She patted the small purse where she carried her necessary medicines. “But we’re not too likely to run into stinging insects in the snow,” she pointed out.
“There are still venomous spiders about.”
“I hope they have overcoats, so they don’t freeze,” she said, tongue in cheek.
He laughed. “All right. I’ll stop being overprotective. Where’s your coat?”
“Oops. Forgot.”
She went back to the closet and pulled out her swing corduroy coat. It was tan and matched her ankle boots. She drew it on.
He frowned. “Is that going to be warm enough?”
“Surely it will,” she said. “I’m layered.”
“I’m used to cold weather, but you aren’t, sweetheart,” he replied softly. “Colorado is very different, especially here in the mountains.”
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him. She listened and heard the loud purr of a truck approaching. She dashed to the window and her heart raced.
“It’s him!”
“Well, have fun,” her father said.
“I will. See you later. Love you, Dad.”
“Love you back.”
She opened the door and ran outside just as JL was climbing down out of the cab of the big SUV.
He looked surprised to see her running toward him. He laughed with pure delight and went around to open the door for her.
“Handhold’s just inside, above,” he said.
“Thanks! It’s a long way up,” she laughed as she got inside.
“For a shrimp like you, it is,” he teased, closing the door on her mock-indignant reply.
He climbed in beside her and put on his seat belt, glancing at her to make sure hers was in place as well before he started the big vehicle and turned it around, heading it down the driveway.
He was wearing a shepherd’s coat over a red-and-black flannel shirt, with jeans and big boots and that creamy Stetson. He looked like a man who lived on the land.
There was patchy snow on the side of the road. She glanced over the rolling landscape to the snow-peaked mountains beyond. “It’s so beautiful here,” she murmured.
He smiled. “I think so.”
“Were you born here?” she asked.
He smiled. “No. Near Dallas, remember?”
She ground her teeth together. “No, sorry.”
“No problem. My father was born here. So was his father, and his grandfather, and so on.”
“It must be lonely, with your parents gone,” she said delicately.
He nodded. “It’s hard to lose both parents within a few months. Dad was never the same after she died. They were married for a long time, and they loved each other desperately. I had an older brother. I lost him overseas, in the last Gulf war.” He sighed. “It’s lonely when you don’t have anybody. Well, except for Cary, and I’d give him away to anybody who wanted a bent and broken relative to keep. He’s not even a blood relative, at that.”
She grinned.
He laughed at her expression. “I told him to keep his hands to himself, but it wasn’t necessary. He said he was getting into a tub of liniment and he hoped you’d understand if he went searching in another direction for company.”
She laughed, too. “Oh, I understand perfectly. No problem.”
He pulled up in front of the sprawling ranch house. There were men working everywhere, including on the front porch.
“This is why I said we’d go riding,” he said under his breath. “They seem to multiply every time I leave home.”
“What are they doing?”