Everyone pitched in on the cleanup, ordering Harry and his mother out on the porch to enjoy their cup of coffee. Chilly enough to need a light jacket, but still a beautiful night, and they’d done the cooking, so relaxation was in order. While Ryder and Daisy cleared the table, everyone else rinsed dishes, loaded the dishwasher and scrubbed pots.
As usual, Drake and Mace sparred verbally while the rest of them shook their heads.
“Pass me that gravy boat, will you?” Drake held out a soapy hand.
“What? Your arm broken or something?” Mace passed it over, anyway, grumbling. “Put an apron on you and you think you’re Harry.”
Drake replied, “I don’t see you washing a damn gravy boat, Mr. Vineyard. I still have to ride fences tonight. Here’s some info for you. You’re coming along. I could use help looking for that missing calf.”
“Fine. That means you’ll whip off those boots and squash grapes with your toes the next time I need a hand.”
Drake, who was rinsing a wineglass, looked at it in feigned alarm. “You don’t really do that, right? I’ve smelled your feet and—”
Raine, wiping off the kitchen island, gestured at Slater and Grace. “I’ll manage the rest of this if you want to go for a walk. Run while you can. When these two get going…well, you know what happens. And yes, everyone will keep an eye on Ryder.”
Didn’t have to ask him twice. Slater grabbed Grace’s hand and practically dragged her to the door. They needed to talk. “Let’s go.”
They even brushed past his mother and Harry with just a wave, and then suddenly he had Grace all to himself on a perfect Wyoming night, with stars everywhere and just a hint of a cloud over the moon.
“You’re good for Ryder,” she said as she walked beside him on the path to the stable. “All of you. The two of us did okay together, but we were hurting in the ‘circle the wagons’ department. Only two of us. No wagons. In my former line of work, that translates to no backup.”
Maybe Red’s influence had rubbed off in the Old Western Idioms department. “As a family we do tend to stick our noses in. I wish I could promise you otherwise. We like Ryder. Enough said.”
She continued to walk next to him, her expression pensive. “The thing is, I didn’t come from a big family, and he’s an only kid, so I can’t give him advice about how to adapt to another change in his life. No mother, then his father and I split, and then he was bounced off to his grandparents, and sent back over the net like a tennis ball—”
“Grace, he’s doing fine.”
“I know. Thanks.”
“I have a question.” He needed to ask this carefully. Not everyone would be comfortable with it, and if she wasn’t, fine. But he hoped she’d agree…
Grace glanced up at him. “What is it? With everything that went on today, I’m in a fairly mellow mood. ”
Might as well just ask. “In those pictures of the hotel you let me take, there’s a woman who reminds me of you. She’s gorgeous, with long hair like yours, and supposedly she was quite the legend around these parts. I’m definitely including her in the movie and…I wondered if you’d pose for some footage? The records say she was a redhead and married one of the owners. I want a reenactment and you’d be perfect.”
“I’m gorgeous?” Grace shot him a killer look. “Way to try to flatter, Carson, to get me to do something I have no idea how to pull off. In a movie?”
“I want it in the beginning of the movie. I’m getting that sense of how I want to structure it. I emailed the director and he agrees, since he met you at the dinner. So…there we go.”
“I’ve never acted in my life. Not a school play, not anything. I could arrest someone on camera, but otherwise you might just doom your movie.”
“I was being honest.” He really thought she was the right fit. The first time he’d seen the old photograph, he’d instantly thought of Grace.
“What, is she naked?”
He had to laugh at her suspicious tone. “Sweetheart, do you think I’d let anyone else see you naked? No, she’s leaning over and giving her husband a kiss while sitting on her horse. It’s quintessential Wyoming.”
“Does he happen to look like you?”
“He?”
“The husband.”
“No. I wouldn’t say that. Why?”
“Tall, attractive rancher type? Dark hair and blue eyes?”
“It was in this area a hundred-plus years ago. Yes, I guess tall rancher type would work. You think I’m good-looking? Good to know.”
“That’s the only way I’ll do it. If my co-star looks like you—exactly like you, in fact. Then I’ll do it. Otherwise, no.”
“You want me in the shot?” He stopped and turned her toward him.
“That’s the deal.”
She had him over a barrel. He wasn’t an actor, either, but for a few minutes of footage without dialogue he could pull it off, and he already had the scene in mind.
“Are you saying yes?” he asked.
“If you are, Showbiz.”
Everyone was going to love this, from his staff to his family. But he had to admit he didn’t want anyone else kissing her, so…it might as well be him.
“All right, I’m game. On-screen kiss. Let’s make it memorable.”
He was actually looking forward to it. In fact, maybe they should rehearse right now. “Grace, I’m feeling my way with this, acting in a scene together, but I’m so in love with you, I can’t think of a better reason to do it.”
Her expression softened and she melted into his embrace. “If that’s your pitch, I can see why you’re successful in the movie business.”
“Hmm.” He led her toward the closest fence. When they got there, he lifted her up and set her on the top rail. “Now, kiss me. Let your hair fall down over your shoulder. Romantic?”
“You’re too bossy. If you’re like this on location, I’m not sure I can put up with it.” Her mouth curved provocatively.
“The director is more in charge than I am when we’re actually filming.” His hands lingered at her waist, her long legs dangling. “I’m just trying to see that we get the right shot.”
“We might have to practice it a few times.” She leaned down and teased him with a brief touch of her lips. “Is this what you were thinking of?”
Hardly. He wound his hand into her hair and tugged her closer. “You know damn well I have something else in mind.”
“I’m new to this acting thing.” She failed at looking innocent.
The second kiss was much better with him as director. Grace seemed to approve, too, her mouth soft and receptive, her arms around his neck.
He wanted nothing more than to lay her down and make love to her, but they had the rest of their lives for that and of course, Drake and Mace could come riding through at any moment, no doubt arguing all the way.
So he settled for one more electrifying kiss under a beautiful Western sky.
Not too much of a sacrifice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
BAD DAY/GOOD DAY.
Grace couldn’t bring herself to scold Ryder. On the one hand, she felt like pointing out that he knew what his father was like, knew he couldn’t count on Hank to tell her. And hello, didn’t he realize she’d be worried? But another, more pragmatic impulse won out. She acknowledged that he wasn’t ultimately responsible—and she didn’t want to spoil his elation at tonight’s success.
So instead she listened as they drove home.
“He was brilliant.” He was talking about the horse he’d ridden in the competition. “I wonder… I mean, you let me have Bonaparte, but if I worked hard, could you think about me getting a horse?”
That meant he was probably getting about five horses already. Let’s see—Red, Slater, Drake, Mace, Blythe and Harry. Wait. That made six.
Raine might buy him one, too. She was as bad as the rest of them.
“You can have a horse if you take care of it.” Grace turned onto Main. She didn’t want to put too much emphasis on
one accomplishment. He was exceptionally good at horse-related activities, apparently, but school was important, too. “I have a feeling the Carson ranch will let us board your horse there. Why don’t we make a deal? You pass English and at the end of the school year, we’ll ask Red to come with us and we’ll go pick out a horse. Okay?”
“I got a C on my last assignment.”
She was fine with that. C was a passing grade. “Ryder, I’m never going to ask you to be perfect at everything. None of us are. It’s just impossible. This person can do one thing, and this other person can’t. I want to know you’re trying. That’s all. You did really well today. You—”
“Could our place be on fire?”
Distracted by the sudden change in subject, she said, “What?”
He pointed through the windshield.
The plume of smoke was alarming. They said in unison, “Bonaparte!”
Grace cared about her personal belongings and even more about the things she’d inherited from her grandmother, but she cared a lot more about the cat. As she drove in, she saw that volunteer firefighters were already there and taking care of the problem, but it was definitely her condo with the plume of smoke billowing out.
“We’ll find him,” she told Ryder, thankful they hadn’t been there when the blaze started. “That cat is so smart…”
She prayed it was true. The first thing she did was call Slater. There were fire trucks all over the place, and she usually was calm under pressure, but nothing like this had ever happened to her. “I need you here.”
He didn’t even ask. “On my way.”
She had to park down the street, and she and Ryder ran to the closest truck. There was a firefighter standing next to it, and Grace had enough experience with this type of situation to figure out that he was the one in charge. She caught Ryder by the arm as he was about to charge past her. “Grace Emery,” she told the firefighter. “That’s my place. We have a pet. A small black cat. Can you please find out for me if anyone’s seen him? We’ll stay out of your way, I promise, but that would really help the situation.”
He was thickset and had a goatee liberally streaked with silver, and he looked as if he’d be at home at Bad Billy’s. He took one look at Ryder’s anxious face and at her hand, clamped on the kid’s arm, and nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Lots of smoke, but not much real damage. We got the alert from your security alarm when the back door was broken in. Hopefully, the critter left that way. We realized right away that it was arson, but things are under control now, and none of the other condos were affected. Whoever did this didn’t know what he was doing. Thank God…” He looked around. “Let me ask about the cat.”
“Grace, he’ll come to me but not to them.” Ryder tried to wriggle away as the man walked off.
“You’ll interfere with them doing their job. You’re staying right here. I mean it.”
He muttered a word she usually disapproved of, but the situation did warrant cutting him some slack. He was having a rollercoaster kind of evening; they both were. Hers had started low, gone high and was now back to low.
The ranch was hardly right next door, so when Slater arrived twenty minutes later, she’d already filled out a police report and surveyed the damage, which, as the firefighter had told her, was mostly smoke and water. Whoever had done this—and that wasn’t really a question in her mind—had set her new couch on fire.
She was going to miss that couch, but at least they’d found Bonaparte in his usual hiding place, and Ryder had coaxed him out from under the bushes.
Child safe, the child’s beloved cat safe… So, not a bad outcome to a bad event.
But she was sick of it. Sick of the constant threat, the malicious and increasingly dangerous incidents.
“I’m done,” she said when Slater and Drake walked up. “This is over.”
Slater watched a fire truck pull away. “Can’t say as I’m opposed to that. Let’s board up the broken door and head back to the ranch. Drake will get the cat in the carrier. Mom loves cats. She’s still in mourning over her last one, who finally passed away at the age of twenty-one. Bonaparte is more than welcome.” He held her gaze steadily. “I want you there. Please agree that this is getting way too dangerous.”
She did agree. “For David Reinhart it is.”
She saw Drake walk over, point at the open pet crate, and the cat scooted right out of Ryder’s arms through the open door.
“The sight of that crate usually sends that cat into deep hiding.” She really was incredulous.
Slater shook his head. “Don’t ask me how, but it just happens. He’s a wizard. I’ve told him he should grow a long beard, wear a robe and put a nest of baby birds on his head.”
Drake looked pretty comfortable in a hat and worn jeans versus the wizard getup, but the cat had gotten his message without any trouble. Grace managed to find some solace in that.
“We’ll go home and sort it out.”
Home. That sounded comfortable. But… “I don’t want to depend on you for every little thing.”
“You don’t want to depend on me for anything. Hey, look around, someone set your house on fire. That’s not little. Besides, Grace, I’m the person you should count on for everything. Just like I should count on you.”
No, it wasn’t little. What had begun as a simple matter—firing a dishonest employee—had escalated way out of control. She couldn’t look over her shoulder every minute of the day, nor could she send a bodyguard with Ryder, or for that matter, Slater. She had work, Ryder had school and Slater seemed invincible with his broad shoulders and male confidence, but she knew he wasn’t. Her ex-husband came across that way, too, and he’d been knocked unconscious. She gestured at the ruined remains of her living room. “I wonder if this is why he was here when he hit Hank. He was getting ready to break in to start the fire and Hank walked out the door. Obviously he came prepared with something heavy enough to break some pretty solid glass.”
“Tell Ryder to grab some clothes, go get some for yourself, and Drake and I will take care of the door.” He grasped her by the shoulders then gently turned her toward the hallway and the bedrooms.
*
Everything, all her clothes, would smell like smoke, but knowing Harry, by the time she got up in the morning, it would all be washed and neatly folded. Drake was a wizard and Harry was a genie from a bottle. Slater had told her that when he went off to college he’d realized with dismay that he could run cattle, mend a saddle and do just about everything else on a working ranch, but he didn’t know the first thing about washing a load of clothes. He’d sheepishly called Harry for a phone lesson in Laundry 101.
She should make Ryder do his own laundry, Grace decided as she stuffed clothes in a suitcase. It wasn’t something she’d ever thought about, but now…
They were going to live at the ranch. She’d suspected all along that it would happen. Still, she was furious to have the chance to discuss it with Slater taken from her. She zipped up the case, told herself the tears in her eyes were from residual smoke and stomped out of her bedroom.
*
THE WOMAN HAD a serious mad on, and Slater couldn’t blame her.
He certainly wasn’t marrying a woman who dissolved in a puddle of tears when a crisis came along. She was justifiably angry and that wasn’t a secret, but then again, he’d be angry, too. Since Drake was following with Ryder in her car, he ventured a conversation. “If you don’t want to live at the ranch, we can buy a house.”
“Would you stop reading my mind?” From the passenger seat of the truck, she sent him a lethal glare. “And, by the way, that’s not what I was thinking.”
It was tempting to point out the contradiction, but he preferred to believe he was smarter than that. “Okay, what were you thinking?”
“I was thinking you and I should both have a choice. I didn’t want it to happen like this—Ryder and me having no other place to go. I wanted you to ask me, not feel obliged to take us in.”
“I told you I wanted yo
u there with me.”
She shook her head and gave a humorless laugh. “I’m not making sense, I know. Maybe I’m more romantic than I thought. I suppose I pictured us sitting on your porch, holding hands, discussing it in the moonlight.”
He understood. She was used to making her own decisions, and this situation had been thrust on her all at once. “Well, we can’t hold hands while I’m driving, and I need to keep my eyes on the road, but let’s talk about it. If you don’t want to live at the ranch, let’s rent a house while your condo’s being fixed and then we can live there. Or somewhere else. We can build our own house. Whatever you want.”
He wasn’t destined to know how she might have responded because at that moment his phone vibrated and he picked it up to peer briefly at the screen.
Spence.
He punched a button on the dash so he could talk hands-free. “Hey.”
“We got David Reinhart, who is also by the way David Lipman, according to the driver’s license he showed the arresting officer. We took him into custody about fifteen minutes ago. He ran a stoplight. Luckily, everyone at the station knows the story. The officer recognized him from the pictures we’d passed around.”
“That’s great news! Let me pass you to Grace. She’s here with me.”
The cop speak was rapid-fire and he caught only about half of it, but he gathered that there was enough evidence in the vehicle to validate the arrest. She sounded relieved when they hung up. “He’s off the street. The judge will go over all of it, and set bail, pending a hearing on assault and arson charges. The accelerant was in his car. Or rather, the car he was driving, which apparently belongs to his girlfriend. His car was repossessed.”
He carefully navigated a turn. “I knew Spence would get him, just wasn’t sure when.”
“I didn’t doubt him, but this is one of those elusive cases that don’t usually show up very high on the urgent scale. Harassment that doesn’t cause harm is considered more of a nuisance than a crime.”
“He tried to burn down your house!”
“That’s my point. He finally caused harm.” She laid back her head and closed her eyes. “It isn’t over by any means, but there’s enough to charge him—between the eyewitness who saw him trespassing on my property and the fact that they now have his prints.”
Once a Rancher Page 23