River's Bend

by JoAnn Ross

  “But meanwhile, the rustlers have an unbranded calf.”

  “Got it. A calf they can add to their herd without all that much risk of being caught.”

  “You would’ve caught them.”

  His deep, low chuckle had her feeling the ground begin to shift beneath her feet again. “Now you sound like your son.”

  “I may not be ready to go to bed with you. Not that I’m saying it’s ever going to happen,” she tacked on when she saw the look of satisfaction flash in his smiling eyes. “But I can recognize dedication and intelligence when I see it.”

  “You’re damn good for a man’s ego, Rachel.” He skimmed a roughened finger down the slope of her nose. “I’ll go get Jake.”

  After Cooper had left the kitchen, Rachel squared her shoulders and took three deep breaths. “The thing to do,” she reminded herself. “Is keep your eye on the goal of getting this place open without becoming sidetracked by a sheriff who’s too sexy for his badge.”

  Which, as Cooper returned with her bricklayer, looking lean, hard, and unreasonably hot, was proving easier said than done.

  21

  Jake Buchanan, whom Rachel immediately recognized as Bad Bill Barkley from the outlaw train ride, didn’t look like a criminal. He was neatly dressed in a red plaid shirt and jeans. His scuffed brown boots had wedge heels that, along with his leathery dark skin, revealed a lifetime spent in the saddle.

  To her vast relief, neither did he behave like a criminal, but greeted her politely when Cooper introduced them, exchanged greetings with the other men and went straight to work. Rachel returned to her painting.

  By lunchtime she had three of the four walls finished and was ready for a break. Taking a brown paper bag out of the refrigerator, she entered the dining room to find Jake still hard at work.

  “Where are the others?” she asked, glancing around. Cal, Fred, and Dan were nowhere to be seen.

  “They went to pick up some supplies in K. Falls. Said they’d get lunch there,” he replied without turning around.

  “Oh. What about you?”

  “What about me?”

  “Wouldn’t you like some lunch?”

  “I’d just as soon keep working if it’s all the same to you, ma’am.”

  “Surely you’re hungry,” Rachel coaxed.

  Jake’s only response, as he cut a brick in half, was a nonchalant shrug.

  Well, at least she didn’t have to worry about the man talking her to death. Rachel decided to try again. “I got a little carried away this morning,” she said with a smile. “I’ll never be able to eat all this by myself.”

  Although she was loath to admit it, she’d packed the extra food in hopes that Cooper happened to drop by for lunch.

  Nothing.

  Jake continued measuring and cutting.

  “It’s meatloaf,” she offered.

  The older man slowly put the saw down and turned around. “With ketchup?”

  “Tons.”

  “And onions?”

  “Ever hear of a meat loaf without onions?” Rachel countered.

  “I like mustard in it, too,” he said, testing her further.

  “Got it covered.”

  “The yellow kind or that fancy European stuff they advertise on television?”

  Strike one. “I’m afraid it’s brown,” she admitted.

  “Figures,” Jake harrumphed. “I’m partial to the yellow kind, myself.”

  “I see.” So was Scott, but Rachel didn’t think it prudent to accuse the man of having the palate of a nine-year-old.

  “No offense meant to your cooking, ma’am, but the yellow kind is spicier,” Jake said.

  “No offense taken, Mr. Buchanan,” Rachel assured him. “However, this mustard has horseradish mixed into it.”

  He arched a wiry brow. “Horseradish?”

  “That’s right.”

  She waited while Jake thought the matter over. “I reckon horseradish might give it the right amount of kick,” he allowed finally.

  Rachel repressed her smile. “I’ve always thought so.”

  He rubbed his unshaven chin as his eyes drifted to the brown paper bag she was still holding. “I suppose I could give it a try. Seein’ as how Cooper didn’t see fit to feed me a proper breakfast. Never have figured out how a grown man can eat all that sugarcoated cereal first thing in the morning,” he complained. “Not to mention how the stuff turns the milk different colors.” He fixed her with a direct look. “You ever try eating blue milk with a hangover?”

  “No, that’s something I’ve never experienced.”

  “You haven’t missed much, that’s for sure. Those Murphys have always been crazy. And Cooper’s the worst of the lot, ’cepting old Malachy.”

  “Malachy?”

  “Cooper’s great-great-great-granddaddy. He founded River’s Bend.”

  “So you spent the night with Cooper?” she asked conversationally as she took out a foil-wrapped sandwich.

  “Thanks,” he said as she handed it to him. “Didn’t Coop tell you? I spent last night in jail.”

  “Oh.” Rachel was momentarily nonplussed. “I didn’t know. I mean I did know that you’ve had a few unfortunate brushes with the law, but I hadn’t realized that—”

  “Cooper arrested me for being drunk and disorderly outside Mel Skinner’s house around one o’clock this morning,” Jake said matter-of-factly. “And disturbing the peace.”

  “Were you?” Rachel couldn’t resist asking. “Disturbing the peace?”

  “Sure. But I didn’t have any choice. If the bastard would’ve let me in, I’d have been drunk and disorderly inside his house. That way I wouldn’t have woke up the entire neighborhood.” He unwrapped the sandwich, wadded the foil into a ball and tossed it into a nearby cardboard box.

  “Just Mr. Skinner’s sleep.”

  “Hell—sorry about the language, ma’am—but Mel Skinner is nothin’ but a double-faced, two-tongue lying polecat. He deserves a helluva lot more than having his sleep disrupted. The fiend stole my money. Now he’s tryin’ to steal my land. Land that’s been in the Buchanan family for five generations.”

  He took a forceful bite of the thick sandwich. “Well, I’m not about to let that happen,” he mumbled around the spiced meatloaf.

  It was more than an idle threat made by a man with a hangover. Viewing the icy determination in Jake Buchanan’s brown eyes, Rachel found herself hoping that Cooper would be able to solve his problem with the government while in Salem this afternoon. Because, if not, he might just find himself having to arrest his friend for something a great deal more serious than drunk and disorderly.

  “This is real tasty,” Jake said, breaking the silence.

  Now that she’d witnessed the simmering anger inside the man, Rachel no longer felt as comfortable around him as she had earlier. “You sound surprised.”

  “I kinda figured you’d be one of those fancy Eastern cooks who whips up things with fou fou names nobody can ever pronounce. Stuff made outta eel gizzards or brains, or some such thing.”

  “Eel gizzards?”

  He nodded as he chewed. “Yeah. You know, all that highbrow stuff. Like sushi.”

  “Sushi.” She handed him a small plastic bowl of potato salad.

  “Yeah. Never have understood the appeal of that stuff,” he said around a mouthful of salad. “I used to have this lady friend. Taught English at Klamath Community College. She was from California and plumb crazy about the stuff. Acted kinda like a horse on locoweed, if you know what I mean.”

  “I believe I get the picture,” Rachel murmured. “And although I do happen to like sushi myself, I’ve no plans to put it on the New Chance’s menu.”

  “Good idea,” he agreed, looking over the food she’d spread out onto a two-by-four. “Wouldn’t think you’d have too many customers if you did. Are you gonna eat that pie?”

  “It’s yours,” Rachel offered, handing over the piece of apple pie she’d never had any intention of eating.

&nbs
p; “This is damned good.” Jake looked at her admiringly. “You’re gonna do real good in River’s Bend, Miz Hathaway.”

  “I fervently hope so, Mr. Buchanan.”

  He took another bite and rolled his eyes. “Real good,” he repeated. “Folks around these parts like good, basic food. Not that raw fish stuff.” His eyes danced with the first humor she’d witnessed. “Course, we’ve had sushi around here for a real long time,” he revealed. “Probably as far back as the time River’s Bend was founded.”

  “Really?”

  “Sure . . . But we’ve always called it bait.”

  When Rachel laughed, as she was supposed to, Jake grinned.

  The uncomfortable moment had passed.

  22

  Every Halloween of Scott’s life, his parents had taken him to the country club for a party. He’d rather have gone running from door to door, yelling trick or treat and having people put candy in his bag. But whenever he brought up that idea, his father would point out that the houses in their neighborhood were too far apart. Then his mother would bring up the possibility of bad people putting razors into candy bars. Which had never made any sense because he’d been pretty sure they hadn’t had any bad people living in their neighborhood.

  Instead, they’d go the club, where the kids would have to stand in lines to play stupid games like tossing beanbags into plastic pumpkins and throwing orange tennis balls into the mouths of more pumpkins painted onto a wooden board. The only halfway good part was when they were blindfolded and put their hands into bowls of weird food that was supposed to be creepy stuff like guts, brains, zombie eyeballs, and maggots. The boys all thought it was cool, mostly because the girls would squeal and scream about how icky everything was.

  Finally, they’d put on a costume parade for parents who had their own grownup party in the club dining room. All the moms and dads would clap and cheer. Then every kid left with a costume prize. Which pretty much took any specialness away from winning.

  Here in River’s Bend, because so many of the kids lived out of town on ranches, where it would be even harder to trick or treat than back in Connecticut, all the stores on Front Street had gotten together to offer treats.

  Instead of candy, the bookstore lady handed out cupcakes with tiny books made of sugary stuff on top of the frosting. The two ladies at the scrapbook shop handed out sheets of stickers and though Scott had been warned that the market gave out the dreaded boxes of raisins, he left with a blue glow stick.

  Some of the stores still gave out candy, but the very best stop of all was the sheriff’s office where Cooper, Cal, the new deputy Travis Yates, and LuluBelle had sheriff’s badges for everyone. Not real ones, like Cooper wore, but as he pinned it onto his blue cowboy shirt Scott didn’t care.

  “So,” his mom asked after they’d returned to the house and he was sorting through his loot, “did you have a good time?”

  “It was the best Halloween ever,” Scott said truthfully.

  “I’m glad. That girl with the pretty blond hair you were talking with at the sheriff’s office seemed nice. The one wearing the tiara.”

  “It was a crown,” Scott said. “That’s Ariel.”

  “I recognized the cameo on the tiara. Crown,” Rachel corrected. “What’s her name?”

  “I told you. It’s Ariel.”

  “Oh. I thought you were talking about her character.”

  “Her mom named her after the movie.”

  “Well, it’s a pretty name for a pretty girl.”

  “It is pretty. She’s pretty.” Scott bit into a coconut covered doughnut hole decorated to look like a bloody eyeball he’d picked up at the hardware store. “I love her.”

  “Do you?” Rachel felt her heart twinge, just a bit, at the thought of this child she’d not that long ago brought home from the hospital in a soft blue blanket and knit booties growing up.

  “Yep.” Coconut fell onto the front of his new shirt that was sporting the metal badge he’d gotten at the sheriff’s office. Rachel suspected the badge would be showing up on his pajamas tonight. “We’re going to get married.”

  “Not right away, I hope.”

  “I’m nine-years-old,” he reminded her unnecessarily. “That’s too young to get married. But when we’re grown up we’re going to live on a ranch and have lots of dogs and cats and horses. And five children.”

  “Well, it sounds as if you have it all planned. What does Ariel say about all this?”

  “She’s all for it. The cats were her idea. She says we need them to catch mice in the barn, and since she lives on a ranch, she should know. She decided to have five kids because she has two brothers and two sisters and says it’s the perfect size family.”

  Rachel tamped down a twinge of guilt that her son didn’t have any brothers or sisters. An only child herself, there had been times when she’d wished for siblings. As she realized that quite a bit of discussion had gone into this plan she was only now hearing about, she felt her metaphorical mom apron strings begin to untie.

  “Well, as your mother, I’m happy to hear you plan to stay in River’s Bend.”

  “I knew we belonged here as soon as I saw the cow,” Scott said. “It was the same way I felt when I saw Ariel the first day of school. She says sometimes you just know.”

  Although Rachel was certainly in no hurry for her only son to leave home, that fact that he’d given his nine-year-old heart to his first girlfriend indicated that he’d turned the page to an optimistic new chapter in his young life.

  And wasn’t that what this move had all been about?

  A new beginning for them both?

  *

  “Are me and you gonna have Thanksgiving dinner alone again this year?” Scott asked the next night as he set the table.

  He’d dragged the fiberglass cow—steer, Rachel reminded herself—into the kitchen, unwilling to let it out of his sight. She knew it was silly, but she found herself hating the way it seemed to be staring at her through its dark brown glass eyes.

  “Are you and I,” she corrected.

  “Are you and I gonna have Thanksgiving dinner alone again this year?”

  She stopped in the middle of mixing waffle batter. For a restaurant owner, since moving to River’s Bend she certainly wasn’t very innovative with her home cooking. Fortunately, Scott, like all nine-year-olds, much preferred chili to calamari, tuna fish sandwiches to truffles, and waffles to wasabi.

  “Don’t you like the company?”

  “It’s not that.” He began twisting the paper napkin to shreds. “It’s just that it’s kind of nice to do something different.”

  “Such as having Thanksgiving dinner with Cooper at his father’s ranch?”

  He lifted slender shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “I guess we could do that. If you wanted to.”

  “How about you? What do you want to do?”

  He turned to her, his expression as earnest as Rachel had seen it since she’d told him his father had died. “Cooper said I could ride one of his dad’s horses. A real cowboy horse, Mom,” he stressed. “Not like that stupid pony Bobby Erickson had for his birthday party last year.”

  Rachel poured the batter onto the preheated waffle iron and closed the lid. “Goodness,” she said. “Imagine that. A real horse.”

  “Well?”

  The pieces of napkin scattered over the floor looked like Hansel and Gretel’s trail out of the forest. Rachel handed him another. “I don’t know, honey,” she said truthfully. She’d been vacillating since Cooper had first mentioned it. “It’s not as simple as it sounds.”

  Scott took a deep breath. Then blurted out, “Is it because you don’t like Cooper?”

  She would have had to be deaf and blind not to hear the distress in her son’s voice, or see the anxiety written in bold script across his freckled young face. “I like Cooper,” she hedged.

  “He sure likes you,” Scott revealed, placing the napkins and the stainless steel cutlery that had replaced her wedding silver beside the pl
ates.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. Whenever I complain about having to study my spelling words or eat my vegetables, Cooper tells me that I’m real lucky to have you as a mom. But I already knew that. Could we, Mom? Please? I’ll go to bed an hour early for a month.”

  “You don’t have to do that.”

  “How about I promise never to call Mrs. MacGregor a snoopy old walrus again?”

  “Surely you don’t ever call her that to her face,” she said, truly aghast.

  “Nah. Just when I’m joking around with the guys.” He took the milk carton from the refrigerator and filled his glass. “Want some?”

  “Thank you, I would. And from now on, I don’t want you insulting Mrs. MacGregor ever again. Even to the guys.”

  “She does have a big old mustache, just like a walrus,” Scott pointed out.

  “Mrs. MacGregor’s mustache is nothing like a walrus. Nor is it any of your concern, young man.”

  “But she does always snoop on everybody. Every night she asks about how things were back in Connecticut and did you have any boyfriends after Dad died, and how often Cooper visits us.”

  “She does?”

  “Yeah. It gets so bad I have to go into my room and do extra credit homework to escape, instead of watching TV.”

  Rachel wasn’t surprised. Irritated, perhaps. But not surprised. “Well, a little extra studying certainly won’t kill you,” she said. “But I’ll have a talk with Mrs. MacGregor and ask her not to discuss our personal life.”

  “Okay, but I bet that won’t do any good. I think she’s really, really nosy, mom.”

  Rachel smiled at that. Reaching out, she ruffled his hair. “I suspect you’re probably right, kiddo.”

  “So,” Scott said, after they’d finished their light supper, “can we go to the ranch for Thanksgiving?”

  The thought of preparing an elaborate Thanksgiving dinner while she was working so hard at the New Chance was less than appealing. But Scott had experienced so many changes in his young life Rachel didn’t want to give up the traditional meal. She tried telling herself that the only reason she was tempted to take Cooper up on his invitation was to get out of all that cooking.