He couldn’t help himself. He covered her hand with his and squeezed gently. “You won’t.”
She looked at their hands. He figured it was progress that she didn’t move hers away.
“If our caseworker decides that I can’t keep him on the right path, I will.” Her lips twisted sadly. “The court let me bring him here because I convinced them that the new environment would help. But here we are. We’d only been in town a few weeks when he broke that window of yours. The caseworker will be visiting before school lets out for the summer. If Murphy isn’t showing signs of settling in by then, she could well decide he’s better off in foster care.” Her voice turned raw. “I can’t let that happen.”
“Then we have to make sure he settles in.” He squeezed her hand once more then dropped it. He’d play the role of “just friend” if it killed him.
And sooner or later, God willing, she’d be ready to move on.
And then, all bets would be off.
He was a Clay. When they set their eyes on something, very little would stand in their way.
She studied him for a moment. “Why do you care? Murphy barely tolerates me. I can only imagine how he behaves toward you when I’m not around.”
He left his reasoning out for now. “Murph and I are coming to a meeting of minds.” He’d wondered if the kid would tell her about the water-tank business. It seemed obvious that he hadn’t. “Trying to push me around isn’t quite the same as doing it to you.”
Her eyebrows yanked together. “Murphy doesn’t push me around.”
Erik knew she wouldn’t appreciate the word manipulate any better, though he didn’t have to stretch his imagination far to figure out that it was the more accurate term. “Push his boundaries with you, then,” he amended tactfully.
Her lips compressed. Aware of a movement from behind, he looked over his shoulder to see Murphy finally emerging from the barn. The hammer was slung over his shoulder, and even across the distance, Erik recognized the measuring look he gave them.
Whether Isabella knew it or not, the boy considered her his territory.
And he didn’t want to share.
Considering Murphy’s situation, Erik couldn’t really blame him. If he’d been a fatherless boy and some guy had come sniffing around his mother, he’d have felt the same. Murphy had to be very aware that Isabella was his only hope of having some sort of family to call his own.
Erik pulled out the gloves he’d shoved in his back pocket and slapped them against his palm. “I’ll let you get on your way.” He would’ve been happy to stand and talk with her for a month of Sundays, but he needed to rethink his opinion some about the kid. And she’d need space to think about what he’d said. “We’ll see you when you come back.”
She nodded silently and lowered herself into the car, only to pop back out. Her hands closed over the top of the door again. “Erik?”
It was the first time she’d said his name.
And damned if it didn’t do something strange—and not entirely unpleasant—to his knees. “Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Where should I start?” She lifted her shoulders. “For everything.”
“You don’t have to thank me. What’re friends for?”
Her lips curved into a slow smile. She shook her head, looking a little bemused, then climbed into her car again. This time, she shut the door and started the engine.
He watched until she’d driven out of sight.
A friend for now. But with time and a lot of luck, he intended to be more.
A lot more.
* * *
Isabella was trembling so badly that as soon as she was certain she was out of sight of the ranch, she stopped right there in the center of the bumpy, ridged road.
She rested her elbows on the steering wheel and raked her fingers through her hair, resting her forehead in her hands.
What was she doing?
Entertaining notions of being friends—or anything else—with Erik Clay was so far off base that she needed her head examined.
The man was nice. He was decent. And heaven help her, he’d wakened every hormone she possessed with a vengeance.
Agreeing to be friends was about as safe as offering a pyromaniac a lit match. And about as foolish.
Knowing that he was attracted to her, too, just poured gasoline over the whole mix.
But she wouldn’t—couldn’t—dare let Murphy get burned in the process. And what would happen to him when Erik’s interest waned? She knew perfectly well that few men were ever interested in permanently taking on someone else’s child. She’d grown up seeing that fact proved again and again.
She’d simply have to set Erik straight the next time she saw him. Tell him that she appreciated his concern, and certainly his willingness to let Murphy work off the damage he’d done, but that was all. And if he repeated his suspicion that she was attracted to him as well, she’d deny it.
She’d loved Jimmy.
Feeling anything for another man was out of the question. “Out of the question,” she repeated aloud. Just hearing her own adamant voice steadied her.
She put the car in gear and bumped her way down the hideous path, trying to put Erik Clay behind her where he belonged.
She might as well have wished for a smooth, paved road.
* * *
“Come on.” After a morning of demo work, the barn was finally down and Erik set aside his sledgehammer. There would still be a lot of cleanup, but the worst was done, at least.
He walked up behind Murphy where he was stacking the boards Erik wanted to save and flicked the kid’s ball cap so that it fell forward over his nose. “Go put away the hammer.”
The boy looked at him. He was obviously whipped from the pace that Erik had set. So tired, even, that the angry, defensive look his eyes always carried was absent. Which left behind only a brown-eyed, skinny kid who looked as young as he really was.
“Why? Iz isn’t gonna be back yet.”
“I know. I want to check one of the water tanks.”
Murph’s eyes widened with alarm. “I haven’t done—”
“Relax. I’m not tossing you in. Just making sure it’s still full.” He wiped his sweaty brow with his arm. “Cows get thirsty, too. Go on. Get a move on.”
“What about that?” The boy gestured at the sledgehammer Erik had left propped against the recovered boards. “You want me to put that away?”
He started to shake his head, but nodded instead. The tool was heavy. Weighed thirty-six pounds with a yard-long handle. He doubted Murphy had the strength left to carry it all the way back to the new barn.
But since Murph had asked, Erik would let him. “Just leave it against the tool chest,” he said. “You don’t have to hang it up on the rack.”
Murphy grabbed the long handle and grunted when he swung it upward, obviously planning to carry the handle against his shoulder the way Erik usually did, only to have to take a step back when the weight of it sent him off balance.
Erik barely kept himself from grabbing it, but the heavy hammerhead hadn’t come close to hitting Murphy, so he let the boy handle the matter himself. Though he did pick up the claw-foot hammer and hand it to him so Murphy didn’t have to bend back down to get it.
“Thanks,” Murphy muttered and turned away.
Erik watched. Waited.
Halfway to the barn, Murphy let the hammerhead fall down to the ground. He adjusted his grip on the handle and dragged the thing in the gravel behind him.
Erik hid a smile.
The hammer wasn’t gonna take any harm from a little gravel, after all.
Erik went into the house and retrieved a few cold bottles of root beer, then went out to the truck and drove it over to the new barn, meeting Murphy on the way. The kid climbed in when Erik stopped, and he handed the boy one of the bottles.
Murph’s eyes goggled a little. The longneck brown bottle had no label. “Is that beer?”
Erik
snorted. “Yeah. I’m gonna give an eleven-year-old a beer. It’s root beer.”
Murph twisted off the cap and tossed it on the console where Erik had tossed his. “My dad gave me beer,” he boasted.
Erik had no reason to think badly of a dead man, even one who still held Isabella’s heart. But if the kid was being truthful, his estimation of the man dropped some right then and there. “Did you like it?”
The bill of the boy’s cap dipped. “’Course,” he scoffed. “Drank it all the time with him.”
And that was a lie. Erik could hear it in the kid’s voice.
He drove toward the pasture he wanted to check. “First time I drank a beer, I was sixteen. Puked it right back up.” His grandfather Squire had found him and Case out behind one of the barns at the Double-C. The old man had just laughed and told them it served ’em right. “Did your dad teach you how to handle a ball the way you do?”
“Yup.” The boy looked away but the lie was as clear to Erik as the first one.
He hid a sigh. Murphy wouldn’t appreciate sympathy. “You play in school? Little League?”
“School.”
“Weaver’s got a decent community league.”
Murphy’s lip curled. “This dinky town?”
“Surprised you haven’t heard about it.” Rob Rasmussen was one of the coaches, and Erik knew Murph had him as a teacher. “They ought to be taking sign-ups soon. It goes all summer. I played when I was younger.” He still did whenever enough guys could get together for a game.
Murphy’s bottle halted midway to his lips. “What position?”
“Shortstop.”
The boy kept drinking, studiously disinterested. “My dad was always pitcher when his firehouse played. He’d tell me ’bout it when he’d get home.”
“He play a lot?”
Murphy shrugged. “I guess.” He looked out the side window. “Iz was gonna marry him, you know.”
“I know.” Erik tooted the horn to nudge a few stubborn cows out of his path. Used to his truck, they slowly plodded aside, moving on to another patch of green to chew on.
“She’s never gonna marry anybody else.”
“I guess that’ll be up to her, won’t it?” he said a lot more easily than he felt.
He knew the kid was warning him off.
That was okay. At least it showed some protectiveness toward Isabella.
He pulled up near the tank and climbed out. “Put down the root beer and come on. No sitting around on your butt when there’s work to be done.”
Murphy didn’t put the bottle down until he’d chugged the rest of the contents. Then he let out a loud burp and shot Erik a quick look.
“Good root beer,” Erik commented blandly.
“S’okay,” Murphy muttered, but when he turned to get out of the truck, Erik thought he caught a wisp of a smile on the kid’s face.
* * *
Isabella had to screw up every speck of courage she possessed when it was time to drive back out to Erik’s place to retrieve Murphy.
The only way she managed at all was to keep reminding herself how quickly Murphy had been ready to leave the last time. She’d tell Erik that she appreciated what he was doing for Murphy but that was as far as her interest went. She wasn’t looking to add friends. There’d be no reason to linger. No reason to chat it up with him about anything else. No reason to keep thinking about his wrists or how he’d looked without his darn shirt.
But when she pulled up next to the house and parked, neither Erik nor Murphy was in sight.
She got out of the car and walked past the end of the house. Erik had said he wanted to get the rest of the old barn torn down that day, and they’d certainly accomplished that. There was nothing left but piles of wood and other rubble.
She walked across to the other barn, passing white metal-fenced pens and a tall stand of trees along the way. The steeply pitched barn was as tall as the two-story house, and considerably larger. The wide doors at the narrow end of the white building were pushed open and she walked from the sun into the shade of the interior.
A concrete floor ran down the center of the building with stalls on one side all the way to the door at the other end. On the other side, there were half as many stalls, but there was also a workbench surrounded by various tools, plus a whole lot of equipment that looked completely foreign to her.
Except the saddles. At least she could recognize a saddle when she saw one. There had to be at least a dozen of them.
She looked up. Large utilitarian light fixtures hung at regular intervals from the rafters, and she could see bales of hay and other farm implements stored high above the stalls on each side.
She’d never been inside a barn before. She’d have expected it to smell like animals. Or manure or something. But it smelled like fresh air and open fields, and everything struck her as incredibly tidy. And strangely peaceful.
“Erik? Murphy?”
The only answer she got was the faint meow of the cat that poked its blue-black head around the edge of a stall door to see who was disturbing the quiet.
She crouched down and held out her knuckles. The long, svelte cat suspiciously padded forward, sniffed Isabella’s hand, then butted its head against her. “You’re friendly, aren’t you?” She rubbed the cat’s head.
“She is when she recognizes a soft touch. Otherwise Friskie there is hell on wheels.”
Startled, the cat’s tail went straight up and she bounded away. Startled as well, Isabella nearly jumped to her feet and turned to see Erik standing in the doorway behind her.
Sunshine made his hair glimmer like gold.
Almost resentfully, she wished he had on a hat. Anything that would dim the overwhelming effect he seemed to have on her.
“I didn’t know where you guys were. I wasn’t trying to snoop.”
He stepped toward her, out of that glorifying sunshine. But the violet gaze he trained on her was no less disturbing. Particularly considering the engaging way his eyes seemed to smile, even when his lips weren’t. “Didn’t figure you were,” he drawled. “But if you’re interested enough to snoop, knock yourself out.”
She could feel her cheeks warming and she shifted. She’d changed into one of Jimmy’s old T-shirts after she’d finished at the studio but the comfort she’d always found wearing his favorite shirt eluded her. “Where’s Murphy?”
“He’s inside the house washing up. And probably trying to sneak a fresh root beer without me knowing.”
She shook her head. “Murphy doesn’t like root beer.” He considered it babyish. All he wanted to drink was cola, the same way his dad had. Now she used the treat of an occasional one as a bribe for him to drink his milk.
“Sure looked like he was drinking it when he sucked down the bottle I gave him earlier.”
“I don’t want him drinking too much soda. So many artificial ingredients.”
“What I buy is home-brewed. Not full of the usual stuff.”
“I didn’t know you could brew your own root beer.” Her mind boggled at the oddity of the conversation. “I guess it makes sense, though. People can brew their own beer. Jimmy tried once. Bought a kit.” She smiled a little at the memory. “Stuff was swill, but he insisted we all taste it. Even Murphy got a sip. He promptly spit it out right there on the floor.”
Erik grinned. “That’s more like it.”
“Excuse me?”
He gestured toward the opened doorway. “Come on inside. If you’re not in a rush, I’ll toss together some sandwiches.”
She would not let herself be tempted. She needed to set him straight and be on their way. “We can’t stay,” she said quickly. She walked past him and out into the sunshine. He smelled of grass and sweat, and she shouldn’t have found it appealing, but she did.
She quickened her step.
It did no good. He easily kept pace.
“How long have you had your ranch?” Darn it all, that was not telling him what she’d rehearsed.
“Four years. Ar
e you going to jump like a scalded cat every time I’m around just because I told you I was attracted to you?”
She gaped at him. “Do you always say whatever’s on your mind?”
“Pretty much,” he admitted, not one whit fazed. “So?”
She pressed her lips together. She had absolutely no idea what to make of him. He wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met. “I only jumped because you startled me,” she said witheringly. “And I don’t need more friends.” There. She’d said it.
“Everyone can use more friends,” he said, evidently unperturbed. “Are you really gonna teach belly dancing and pole dancing at Lucy’s place?”
Frustrated, she stared at him. So far, those possibilities had only been kicked around by Lucy and her. “Possibly. Do you disapprove?” It might be to her advantage if he did.
He cocked his head slightly. His lips twitched. “It’ll raise a few brows around here. But you think any man in his heart of hearts is really going to protest?”
“It’s about exercise,” she said flatly.
“Don’t doubt it.” He took a step closer.
She jerked a little.
He smiled gently. “Isabella, you’ve gotta learn how to relax. And I know just the place.”
She shook her head. She didn’t need Erik Clay telling her what she did or didn’t need. “Whatever you have in mind, forget it.”
“Okay.” His tone was as smooth as a peaceful pond. “But you don’t know what you’re missing. A spring barbecue over at the Double-C isn’t like anything else you’ll ever experience.”
“Double-C?”
“My grandfather’s ranch.”
“Rocking-C. Double-C. I feel like everyone’s speaking a foreign language.”
“You know the fastest way to learn a foreign language, don’t you? Total immersion.”
She smiled despite herself. She didn’t want to like him. Liking him was worse than squelching the occasional lustful thought.
Occasional?
Laughter cackled maniacally inside her mind.
A Weaver Vow Page 6