by Diana Palmer
“Upkeep and maintenance,” he said as he got out of the SUV and went around to help her down. He held her just in front of him for a long moment, savoring the closeness. “Something I should have been doing all along. Now it’s piled up and it takes a lot of manpower to set things right. Your eyes are the oddest shade of blue,” he added, searching them in the long silence broken only by hammering nearby. “They’re china blue.”
“Like my mother’s,” she said with a sad smile. “But her hair was black. I inherited mine from her grandfather. I’m the only redhead in the family right now—well, what there is left of it. I have an uncle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and a grandfather somewhere in Canada. He roams.”
“I had a great-uncle who lived in a cabin up in Alberta with a black bear.” He shook his head. “No accounting for taste, I guess.”
“The bear didn’t eat him?” she asked.
“Not that we know of. He died slumped over a poker hand at his weekly game. He’d won the pot, too.”
“That’s a shame,” she said.
“Not so much. He was always happy, always smiling. We figured he went the way he would have wanted to go. Quick and easy, no long stay in a hospital or a nursing home. There’s a lot to be said for that.”
“I totally agree,” she said.
She reached back into the SUV for the bag she’d put the clothes in. “I almost forgot to give these back. Thanks so much for the loan,” she added, handing it to him.
“I’ll put these,” he indicated the bag, “in the house and bring yours out. Bessie washed and dried them for you.”
“Bessie?”
“My housekeeper. The clothes I loaned you were her daughter’s.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “Thank her for me.”
“She wouldn’t mind. Nita works for a bank down in Denver. She’s sweet.”
“I see.”
He cocked his head and smiled at her. “No, you don’t. I’m not carrying a torch for her. She’s sweet, but she’s outlived three husbands already. She’s on number four now. And she’s only thirty-one.”
“My goodness!”
He sighed. “I guess some people have a hard time with marriage.”
“I guess.”
He led the way to the front door. “Want a cup of coffee before we go?” he asked.
“That would be nice.”
“And warming,” he added, noting her slight discomfort in the way she hugged her arms around herself. “You’re not used to Colorado weather yet, I see.”
She raised her eyebrows in a question.
“This is fur coat country. Or shearling coat country. Lightweight jackets won’t cut it out here.”
“I’m not really cold,” she lied. “I just had a chill.”
“Uh-huh,” he murmured.
He led the way into the kitchen.
She remembered it from the last time she’d been here. It was roomy, spotless, with appliances like the ones she had in storage, that she’d cooked on when she lived in Atlanta.
“I love your kitchen,” she said with a sigh. “You must have every gourmet tool they make.”
“Bessie does,” he said, smiling. “She can cook anything. Food’s great, too.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Do you cook?” he asked.
She nodded. “I can’t do haute cuisine, but I can do most any food there’s a recipe for. And I can make any kind of homemade bread and rolls. I do those for Dad. He loves fresh yeast rolls,” she laughed.
“Bessie doesn’t do breads. I’d love to try those rolls sometime,” he added, pouring the brewed coffee into two cups.
“I’ll make you a pan of them, if you like.”
His dark eyes searched hers and he smiled. “Yes. I’d like that.”
She flushed a little from the intent gaze she was getting.
He put her coffee in front of her and sat down next to her at the table. “Do I make you nervous?” he asked.
She drew in a breath. “A little.”
“In a bad way?” he asked, without looking at her.
“N . . . No. Not . . . in a bad way.” She was floundering like a child in school facing an oral book report for a book she hadn’t read.
He turned and stared at her quietly, his dark eyes intense. “I speak pretty bluntly sometimes. But it’s best to set boundaries, don’t you think?”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
He leaned back in the chair and sipped coffee. “Okay. It’s like this. I’m still getting over a failed engagement. I’m pretty raw and I’m still not quite myself. So suppose we begin as good friends and let it go at that. For the time being.”
She let out a sigh. “I’d like that.”
His thick eyebrows arched. “You look relieved.”
She bit her lower lip. “Look, my mother was overprotective. A lot. I wasn’t allowed to date until I was in my late teens, and then only double dates. I don’t know much about men, I’ve never had an affair, and I’ve tried to avoid men who were aggressive because I’m not . . . well, modern.” She felt as if she’d rambled, but he only smiled.
“In other words, you don’t sleep around.”
“That’s it.”
“No problem. Even if I were over my ex-fiancée, you’d have nothing to fear from me,” he said softly. “I don’t amuse myself with innocents.”
She laughed. “Thanks.”
He drew in a long, heavy breath. “I’m glad we got that out of the way. I didn’t want to give you the idea that I was in the market for a serious relationship.”
“I’m not, either,” she confessed. “Dad and I have had a traumatic time just lately. Neither of us is quite ourselves, either.”
“Oh? What happened?”
“My mother killed herself.”
Chapter Four
“I’m sorry,” she said at once. “I didn’t mean to blurt it out like that!”
He winced. “God, you poor kid!”
She linked her hands around her coffee cup. “It’s hard, getting over it.”
“Was she always depressed?”
“Never,” she said softly. “She wasn’t a selfish person. She always put all of us before herself, in everything. She would never have put such sorrow and guilt and heartache on us if she hadn’t been half out of her mind . . . !” She stopped, fearful of saying too much.
He tugged one of her hands loose and linked it with his. It felt good, that big, calloused hand so tender as it curved around her own. “What happened to her?”
She hesitated, trying to find a way to put it that wouldn’t make him suspicious. Even out here, they’d probably heard of the scandal. She looked at his clean, flat nails instead of his face. “She was harassed on social media, constantly,” she said finally. “She had . . . enemies. She never hurt anybody in her life, but something happened to someone she loved, and she became a target.” She closed her eyes and shuddered. “She walked out onto the balcony of her twentieth-floor apartment and . . . jumped.”
“Dear God.” His hand tightened.
“Dad had to identify her at the morgue,” she said. She bit her lower lip. “We had a closed casket. Even morticians can’t fix some things. She’d have hated having people stare at her. Not that there was a crowd at the memorial service. It was just me and Dad.”
“Didn’t you have family, friends?”
Their friends had deserted them and their family, sparse as it was, ran from them, fearful of being connected to the scandal.
“They were too far away to come,” she said, forcing a smile. “It was very sudden.”
“What about the culprits who harassed her?” he asked. “Did you file suit against them? Surely there are laws that apply in a case like that.”
Of course there were laws, but if you were a public figure, as her father was, you had no right to privacy. Especially if you were the biggest story in the headlines. But she couldn’t say that.
“Dad isn’t the type to sue people,” she said finally. “Neither was m
y mother. We used to say that she could find one nice thing to say about the devil.”
He smiled. “My mother was like that, too. She never moved with the times. She was a founding member of our local Baptist church.”
“I’m Methodist,” she said softly. “Or I was.”
His fingers closed around hers for a minute and then let go. She felt cold and empty and alone, all of a sudden, and smiled to hide it.
“I hope you have a horse who likes people for me to ride,” she said. “The last one I was on tried to scrape me off against a tree. Maybe it was the soap I used,” she confided.
He chuckled. “Not likely. If you’re afraid, horses can sense it.”
“I’m not afraid of most of them. Just the ones that try to scrape me off against trees,” she said, grinning at him.
“I’ll make sure we don’t give you one of those,” he promised. He finished his last swallow of lukewarm coffee and got up. “Ready to go?”
“You bet!”
He laughed. “Are you always so enthusiastic about things?”
“I’ve never been on a real ranch in my life,” she said. “I’m looking forward to seeing the calves.”
“We’ve got a nice crop of them this year. We’ve only lost two, and that’s very few considering the size of the herd.”
“What happened to them?” she wondered aloud.
“Two Toes,” he said curtly. “But not for long. We’re going to track him and trap him and give him to that wildlife rehabilitator I told you about. He can eat soft food and lay by the fire in his old age.”
She laughed at the picture that popped into her mind. “Just make sure you don’t dress him in a granny gown and put a frilly cap on him. And don’t let little girls wearing red hoods into the house where he lives.”
He stared at her pointedly.
“I don’t have a red hood,” she said quickly.
He chuckled. “Come on.”
* * *
He had a cowboy saddle two horses. The one he gave her was called Buck, and it was a very gentle gelding.
“Why is he called Buck?” she wanted to know as they rode lazily down the trail that led around the stables toward sprawling pastures dotted with black-coated cattle.
“In his younger days, there wasn’t a cowboy on the place who could stay on him.”
She looked worried.
“He’s twenty years old,” he added when he saw her concern. “And Parker tamed him seven years ago. He’s converted.”
“Parker?”
“Man who works for me,” he said. “He’s part Crow. He has a way with horses. I’ve never seen one, however wild, that he couldn’t calm just by talking softly to it. He’s the best wrangler we’ve ever had.”
“Was he the man who saddled the horses back there?”
“Oh, no,” he said. “We keep Parker out at the line cabin.”
“Should I ask why?” she teased.
He chuckled. “He was in the military. He’s got a mouth that ten bars of soap wouldn’t wash clean, so we keep him away from the house. Great with horses. With people, not so much.”
“He sounds fascinating.”
“A couple of single women felt that way, too, until they talked to him for five minutes. One developed a sudden headache, the other had a hair appointment she’d forgotten. Neither of them ever came back.”
“Maybe he likes being alone,” she pointed out.
“That’s exactly my take on it,” he agreed.
“Does he say why he cusses so much?”
“He said he learned how while dodging bullets in Iraq,” he sighed. “I know how he feels. I learned a few bad words of my own, doing the same thing.”
“It’s rough for soldiers over there,” she said, recalling a friend who’d helped her with research for a screenplay she was writing; one that later was made into a TV movie.
He glanced at her. “And you’d know this, how?”
“I had an acquaintance who was in spec ops over in the Middle East,” she said. “He told me a lot of things that civilians don’t usually get to hear.”
“Civilians?”
She took a breath. “I started out as a newspaper reporter,” she confessed. “Newbies get to do the police beat. Things you have to see, you don’t share with people who don’t have a connection to news or emergency services. I loved it,” she laughed. “I got to know all the local law enforcement, the EMTs, the dispatchers, the politicians. It was hard to leave it.”
“Where did you work?”
“A small town outside Atlanta,” she replied. “I got a better job, but I missed reporting. I always knew where the bad guys were,” she added with a grin.
He laughed. “It’s like that here, too. We only read the paper to see who got caught. We already know everybody’s business.”
Not mine, she thought thankfully, or my dad’s.
They came to a fence post that was leaning, with the wire attached to it bent down by a tree limb that had fallen. He swung out of the saddle, looped the reins over the horse’s head, and let them drag, while he went to right it. She noted that he had thick gloves on those big hands. Muscles rippled in his powerful legs as he lifted the limb off the fence and then righted the fence post and straightened the wire. He pulled out his cell phone when he was finished and called out some numbers to someone and instructed them to get out and fix it before cattle poured out onto the road.
He came back and climbed into the saddle with the ease of long practice. “Can’t afford to let cattle get out,” he said as they rode forward. “Even on a spread this big, every head counts.”
“Are they all Black Angus?” she asked.
“Every one. We sort them when we start branding. Those with good conformation go into one pen, the others are gelded and put into a separate pen. We feed out the yearlings for the sale lot, for breeding stock.”
“And the others, the ones you don’t breed?”
He glanced at her and pulled his wide-brimmed hat over one eye. “I think you can guess.”
She made a face.
He laughed. “That’s ranching,” he said. “We can’t keep them all. I sell the steers and keep the rest.”
She frowned. “Why don’t you keep them for beef?”
“I can’t eat something I’ve raised,” he said simply. “Some ranchers have gone into signature beef that they produce and slaughter and package and sell, right from their own ranches.” He grimaced. “I’d never be able to do that. So I run purebreds.”
She smiled. “I like that.”
He glanced at her with warm brown eyes. “Tender heart.”
“I can’t help it. I take after my mother.”
He drew in a long breath. “I guess I’m more like my dad,” he said. “He was a third-generation rancher, but he was so educated that he never really took to the chores. I hated the ranch when I was in high school. There was a girl I liked, and she said she didn’t like boys who smelled like manure.” He shook his head. “I told my grandad that, and he hit the ceiling. He was good for thirty minutes about snooty city girls with stuck-up noses. They’d never get down in the dirt and work with you, if you had to grub for a living, he said. They lasted only as long as the money did. Better to find a woman who wanted to make a home and have a family, even if she didn’t wear silk dresses and look like a magazine cover.”
“Smart man,” she murmured.
“Sometimes money would get tight and my grandfather would work for a mechanic in town, just part-time, you know, to tide us over.” He didn’t add that his father didn’t offer any such thing. Not that there was a college in Benton where he could have taught. “That was when my brother and I were in grammar school.” He didn’t add that it was also before their grandfather died and left them a fortune. The ranch had never fallen on bad times since. “Dad was bad to drink after we lost Mom.”
“What happened to him? If you don’t mind telling me,” she added quickly.
He shook his head. They rode down the lo
ng, wooded path toward the mountains. “We found him sitting up in a line cabin, stone dead.” He grimaced. “It was one of the coldest nights of the year, snow piled up six feet deep. It looked to us like the fire went out in the fireplace after he dozed off. He just never woke up.” He glanced at her. “Not a bad way to go, I guess, but Mom had died a few months earlier of a heart attack. We didn’t even know she had a heart problem.” He smiled sadly. “She wouldn’t go to the doctor for what she thought was simple indigestion. It wasn’t.” He pushed his hat down over one eye. “My dad was never the same, after. He blamed himself because he didn’t make her see a doctor.”
“Sometimes things happen because they’re meant to,” she said simply. “It doesn’t make sense to some people, but it does to me. I think we die when we’re supposed to.”
“Maybe we do.”
“Was it a long time ago?”
“Six years,” he said. “My older brother’s unit had been called up three years before all that and he died over in the Middle East.”
“I’m truly sorry. At least I still have my father.”
“I miss my grandfather,” he confessed. He’d missed his mother, but he and his father weren’t close. They had very little in common until after JL went to college and then his father found him interesting. His dad missed teaching. It was the only thing he ever talked about.
They rode along in a peaceful silence for a few minutes, with only the creaking of saddle leather and the pleasant rhythm of the horses’ hooves on hard ground making a noise.
Snow was just starting to fall. She lifted her face to it and smiled. The wind picked up and she shivered slightly.
“Cold?” he asked, reining in.
“Just a little chill,” she lied. “I love snow.”
“Nobody who ranches out here loves it, I can promise you,” he chuckled. He glanced out over the landscape. The mountains were topped with snow. The ground was getting lightly covered with white.
“I hope we get enough to make a snowman,” she said, laughing.
He glanced at her, fascinated with the way she looked when she laughed. She was pretty, in her way. He liked her all too well.
“We’d better get moving before we turn into snowmen,” he teased.