Heartbreak Ranch

by Kylie Brant

  As if that wasn’t enough, Annie had chosen today to visit her niece in Butte. She wouldn’t be back until sometime tomorrow evening. Last night at the supper table she had dismayed both Julianne and Jed by announcing that Julianne could do the cooking tonight, since she’d been giving her lessons.

  If Jed hadn’t looked so wary, Julianne would have refused on the spot, but her pride had been on the line. Then he had offered to eat at the diner in town, and pride had become something more. She wasn’t too eager to make supper for a man whom she would give away her diamond earrings to see choke on a chicken bone. But when it had been clear that he’d thought she couldn’t do it, she’d had to prove him wrong, for integrity’s sake.

  Right now, though, integrity seemed a miserable excuse. She stared balefully at the mound of ground chuck in the bowl in front of her and tried to remember what all Annie put in meat loaf. It had seemed a relatively innocuous selection for tonight’s menu. What could be more simple, really, than a pile of meat shaped into a pan?

  Because she knew Jed hated it, she’d made a big bowl of spinach salad. With some of Annie’s homemade dressing, it was really all she needed to fill her up this evening. There was something about cooking, she’d observed, that killed the appetite. For appearance’s sake, of course, she’d have to taste everything, so regardless of how tempting it was, she should probably curb her urge to poison him.

  She used a generous hand with the salt and pepper and then remembered onions. She was certain that Annie put onions in meat loaf. Her search through the refrigerator yielded three. She peeled them and then threw all three into the food processor. It made a heck of a racket, but it was better than dicing them up herself and ruining her makeup with watery eyes. She’d agreed to make supper for the big oaf, but she’d be darned if she’d sacrifice her looks for him. Remembering their parting words in the pickup, she scowled. Or anything else, for that matter.

  The bread she’d prepared earlier that day was rising nicely. She recovered it and left it on the counter. It should be ready to go in the oven shortly, and she couldn’t wait to see Jed’s face when he bit into it and realized that she’d learned Annie’s baking secrets. It might be petty, but she was game for anything that proved she wasn’t as useless as he seemed to think she was. The big jerk.

  Dinner was always promptly at six, and though she wasn’t exactly certain how long meat loaf should cook, she figured an hour would be plenty of time. She mixed the onions with the meat loaf, pressed the whole concoction into a pan and smeared it with ketchup. She turned the oven on and placed the meat in to cook.

  Wiping her hands down the front of her jeans, she gave a satisfied sigh. A firm believer in the restorative nature of bubble baths, she decided to treat herself to a leisurely soak. Halfway up the stairs, she backtracked and poured herself a glass of wine to take with her. A job well done, she thought smugly, should always be rewarded.

  Whether it was the bath or the wine, she was feeling decidedly more mellow when she reentered the kitchen forty-five minutes later. She set two places at the table and put in a couple of potatoes to bake. The microwave oven was perfect for someone with her cooking inexperience. It even had a setting specifically for potatoes. She heard the door open and close, and Jed’s footsteps on the stairs. He always showered before dinner. She started the microwave, set the salad on the table and poured herself another glass of wine.

  She sat down and propped her feet up on another chair, feeling very Martha Stewart. She was midway through her wine when two loud explosions, one right after the other, jolted her upright. Her first thought was that someone was firing a gun right outside the kitchen. But as she ran to the door she passed the microwave, and her eyes widened with dismay. Reaching out with one hand, she opened the door to the appliance and surveyed its interior with amazement. How the heck had Annie managed to buy exploding potatoes?

  She heard Jed come into the kitchen then, and she shut the door quickly and whirled around. “You’re late,” she snapped.

  He slid into his seat and cocked an eyebrow. “It’s only six-fifteen. Ramsey ran into some trouble with the fence line. Found the place where the cattle have been getting out and…” He stopped and sniffed. “Is something burning?”

  She jerked around and lunged for the oven. Opening the door, she waved away the smoke, reached for a hot pad and removed the meat loaf. It didn’t look that bad, she consoled herself, and it was really only burned around the edges. She threw a hot pad on the table, slammed the meat loaf down in front of Jed and silently dared him to say a word.

  Eyes gleaming suspiciously, he surveyed the blackened meat loaf, then raised his gaze to her. His tone polite, he inquired, “Are we having any potatoes?”

  “Only if you feel like scraping them off the inside of the microwave.” She fetched the wine bottle and tipped some more wine in her glass. On a second thought, she went to the refrigerator and got a gallon of milk and set it down next to him with a bang. Then she dropped into her chair, took a big gulp from her glass and dished up a large helping of salad on her plate. It appeared to be the only edible thing on the menu tonight, and the fact that Jed hated it was just a bonus.

  She kept her knife within reach just on the off chance that he would dare say anything. But when she shot him a sideways glance, he was gallantly sawing at the meat loaf, lifting out a generous portion for himself. The inside, she was relieved to note, looked normal.

  She wasn’t watching him; she really wasn’t. She just happened to look up as he was chewing the first bite, just happened to catch the arrested look on his face as he paused. She eyed him warily.

  “Onions.” He resumed chewing and then swallowed, reaching for the milk.

  “So? Annie always puts onions in the meat loaf.” At least she thought so. “Doesn’t she?”

  He eyed her above the rim of his glass and nodded. Lowering the glass to the table, he picked up his fork again, this time looking resolute. “She sure does. She just never—” he hesitated, looked at her again, then finished “—just never puts enough in to suit me. This is just about perfect.”

  Partially mollified, she watched him take another bite. He held her gaze, chewing and swallowing with a look as stoic as any plaster of paris saint.

  “What’s that?” He nodded at the counter. “Did you leave your laundry up there?”

  Julianne’s head swiveled, and then she let out a small shriek. “The bread!” Jumping up, she hurried over and whisked off the towel she’d had covering it. Her eyes went round. How could flour, water and yeast balloon up to that size? Jed came to join her and they both stared incredulously. “It’s the thing that ate Montana,” she murmured in awe. She pressed the back of her hand to her mouth to stifle an unexpected snicker. “News at eleven.”

  Jed reached out and punched it with his fist, and air hissed as the mass of bread dough deflated. They both stared at the flat substance for a long moment.

  “I think you killed it.” She tried, valiantly she thought, to battle laughter, but it bubbled up, anyway. “My hero.” Grasping the counter for support, she struggled for composure.

  His mouth quirked. “Shucks, little lady,” he said in a passable John Wayne imitation, “t’weren’t nuthin’.”

  Delighted with him, she gave into the mirth that was shaking her and howled. He joined in with a chuckle so low and rich and deep that it threatened her insides with nuclear meltdown.

  “Only your quick thinking saved us,” she gasped helplessly. “So glad you could rise to the occasion.”

  He put a gentle hand on her face and gave a friendly shove. “Puns are the lowest form of humor.” After waiting a beat, he drawled, “At yeast, that’s what I’ve heard.”

  She turned to the table, still snickering. With the exception of the wine, the offerings on the table looked decidedly unappealing.

  “Well, the whole meal wasn’t a bust. The meat loaf turned out okay.”

  Absurdly touched, she said, “Bucking to be fit with a halo, Sullivan?�
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  He lifted a shoulder. “Believe me, I’ve had worse. Actually tried my hand at cooking once or twice before I almost burned the kitchen down. After that Annie started leaving meals that could be warmed up.”

  For some reason, hearing him admit to a very human flaw softened her enough to offer, “Well, I can always look in the refrigerator and see if there’s enough ham left over for some sandwiches.”

  The hopeful look on his face made her smile. In another moment she discovered that there was, indeed, enough ham left over for several sandwiches. She knew it would require a plateful to fill up Jed.

  “Tell you what,” she said, her head still in the fridge, “we’ll have a picnic in your study. You get things ready in there and I’ll make the sandwiches.”

  “Why aren’t we going to eat in the kitchen?”

  She balanced the leftover ham, mustard, butter and mayo in a wobbly tower in her arms and headed toward the table. “I don’t know about you,” she said, her voice muffled by the mountain of ingredients, “but I don’t think I could eat staring at the corpse of meat loaf past over here.”

  “You’ve got a point. After supper we can give it a decent burial, with a shrine to burned offerings.”

  “You’ve already admitted your deficiencies in the homemaking department, so drop the superior act, Sullivan.”

  “It isn’t an act.” He ducked out of the kitchen in time to avoid any missile she would have thrown in response and missed the smirk his words brought to her lips.

  She may not have achieved gold-star status in cooking, but she could put slabs of ham between pieces of bread. In no time she had fixed a mound of sandwiches, taken out some chips and loaded cookies onto a plate. Carrying the sandwiches to the den, she nodded approvingly at the afghan and pillows Jed had spread out on the floor.

  He gave a shrug when their gazes met. “Everybody knows that food tastes better when eaten on a blanket. It’s some kind of picnic law, or something.”

  “I hope you didn’t deplete your store of macho strength when you laid out that blanket, ace, because there’s still food to be brought in from the kitchen.”

  He followed her obediently to the door and asked blandly, “Didn’t you ever hear that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar?”

  She seized the opportunity to return to their old relationship with the easy bantering. “If I was a frog, I’m sure I’d treasure that bit of wisdom.”

  In the kitchen she gave him the chips and cookies, then picked up her glass and the wine bottle. “Get me a couple of beers,” he ordered.

  Raising her eyebrows, she did as he requested and trailed after him to the den. “Beer at dinner? My, my, Jed. Whatever will Annie say?”

  “Let’s leave that burned carcass of a meal on the table until tomorrow night and then hear what Annie has to say.”

  Any discomfort that had lingered from their encounter from a few nights ago dissipated over flavorful ham, salty chips and sweet cookies. It was simply impossible, Julianne reflected, to nurse a good grudge over Snickerdoodles. Actually, it had always been difficult for her to stay mad. She figured that she was basically too lazy to sustain that level of emotional intensity for long. Her temper tended to be the kind that exploded easily, spectacularly, then faded as quickly as it had ignited.

  Stretched out on the floor with some pillows at her back and the wine at her side, she contemplated the man opposite her. Jed’s blood, on the other hand, tended to run hot, as did his temper. He had a fuse that could sputter and spark, and his temperament could be a bit unreliable. But it wasn’t the explosion at the end of that fuse that was to be feared. When infuriated, he maintained an icy calm that was all the more frightening for its control. It was then he was the most deadly.

  Involuntarily, she gave a quick shudder. At least, so she’d always thought, until those occasions when she’d been in his arms. Now she knew for certain that the one time Jed Sullivan was the most dangerous to her was when he was aroused. It was a basic biological reaction to all that testosterone, she assured herself. Nothing to be worried about. After all, this was Jed she was thinking of. The man who, if she exerted herself just a bit, she could almost remember as a thin, gangly preteen with a wary disposition and an appetite that rivaled a small army’s.

  She nudged his stocking foot with one of her own. “You’ve got to admit, Sullivan, this was a great idea I had.”

  “We had,” he corrected her.

  Her eyebrows skimmed upward. “We? Let’s be realistic. If we’re dealing out credit here, your share is pretty paltry. I made the sandwiches—”

  “Burned the dinner—”

  She ignored his interruption. “Gathered the chips, cookies and beverages. You, on the other hand…spread a blanket. In the grand scheme of things, I’d hardly call our parts equal.”

  “You forget, I did bring my appetite.”

  He had a point, and the appetite he’d brought was truly awesome to witness. He’d just finished off his third sandwich and was making a serious dent in the plate of Snickerdoodles. She gave a brief thought to battling him for the last cookie, then gave up the idea as too arduous. She was feeling entirely too mellow. The wine had done its job—well enough, in fact, that she was on her final glass. A slight buzz was pleasant, but she never allowed herself to get tipsy. Just the thought inspired too many unpleasant memories from her marriage.

  All in all, the evening was turning out much better than she’d had any right to expect, and merely strengthened the conclusion she’d drawn. Anything between them but friendship and a certain quirky connection should be avoided at all costs.

  She raised her glass in a toast. “To us. And to a return to the sometimes strained and ever-amusing relationship that passes for normal between us.” She sipped daintily, then noticed that he’d failed to do the same. “What’s the matter, Sullivan, not big enough to admit when you’re wrong?”

  “Not usually,” he said with an indefinable glint in his eye. “But you’re going to have to help me out here. Just what was it that I was wrong about?”

  “Do you want the short list? Specifically, about you and me, and that…flicker of passion we indulged in.” Ignoring the quick rising heat at the memory, she shook her head.

  “Frankly, neither of us wants, or needs a diversion at this point in our lives. Am I right?”

  Seeming bemused, he nodded slowly and tipped his beer to his lips.

  She looked at him with approval. He was going to manage to be civil about this, after all. It was more than she’d dared hope for. “It would be ridiculous for us to risk what we have together for a temporary flight from our senses.”

  He contemplated the label on his bottle. “And just what is it that we have?”

  Waving a hand casually, she said, “Oh, you know. Familiarity, some degree of affection and a certain grudging respect.”

  His gaze rose from the bottle to fix on hers. “We have all that?”

  Because it suited her to do so, she ignored the hint of irony in his words. There was a higher purpose to be achieved here, at any rate. “Even more than that. Too much to throw away on some momentarily clashing hormones.” She was almost certain she saw him choke slightly at her words. “I think we can rise above our libidos to salvage what’s really important, can’t we?”

  He took another long swallow, and his answer was slow in coming. “I guess I can if you can.”

  “Good. Good for you.” She beamed a smile meant to charm. “Our relationship might not be the easiest, but I don’t think it’s wise to mutate it into some shortsighted orgasmic mistake, do you?”

  This time he did choke. “You’re a poet, you know that? Julianne Dickinson.”

  She set her wine aside and clasped her hands over her pleasantly full stomach. “You’re just being sarcastic because you know I’m right.” Lazily she stretched to jostle his foot with hers. “Would you mind bringing me a bottled water while you’re up?”

  “I’m not up,” he pointed out.

&n
bsp; “But you should be. Eating the way you did with no follow-up exercise is a terrific way to start a paunch. Middle-age spread begins in the thirties, you know.”

  Doing her bidding was easier than listening to her lame gibes, and that was the only reason he got up and brought the water she requested from the kitchen. As a silent comeback, he also grabbed a couple more cookies. Unconsciously, he ran a hand over his washboard-flat stomach. The woman’s tongue could rival that of a demented mynah bird.

  He sat back down, finished off the cookies and washed them down with a long drink of beer. Crossing his legs at the ankle, he decided that there were worse ways to spend an evening. He’d always liked this room, had felt an immediate connection the first time he’d entered it. Although filled with valuable western paintings and the occasional work of art, it was then, and had always remained, a man’s room. There was a quiet elegance to the entire house that missed fussiness and targeted on relaxing. It was a house meant to be lived in.

  It couldn’t have been further from the spacious penthouse where he’d lived so briefly with Kimberley and Luther Templeton. He imagined that the home they’d brought him to had been just as expensive. Certainly it had been jammed with priceless objects. Objects meant to be observed and appreciated. Objects that broke too easily in a young boy’s hand. Kimberley’s displeasure had been swift and sharp.

  You clumsy child. Learn to be more careful, Jed. You’re not living in a back alley slum anymore.

  Although memories of that back alley slum were dim, they were still there, seeping into his unconscious when he least expected them. Mostly he remembered the smells, the sharp pangs of hunger, the incessant noise. He couldn’t summon a memory of his birth mother’s face, but he remembered a short temper and quick hands. And in the darkest part of his dreams lingered the memory of another child in that squalid apartment, the smell of smoke, the stench of burning flesh and a sizzling agony that had seemed endless.