Cavanaugh Cowboy

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Can’t worry about that,” Sully muttered. He was here, and he had to make the most of it. He hadn’t traveled all this way looking to make new friends. He just wanted to get back his zest for life. The zest he’d lost along the way while tracking down a serial killer.

  Sully decided that he might as well pull his vehicle up in front of the ranch house and see if there was anyone there who could tell him where he could find the ranch foreman. He didn’t want to wander around aimlessly—for all he knew, that could get him shot out here.

  Sully smiled grimly. He supposed that would be one way to deal with the funk he had slipped into.

  After parking the truck, he got out of the cab. For now he left the one suitcase he’d packed where he’d put it, in the back seat. No sense in lugging it around until he found the foreman.

  Sully smiled to himself as he approached the ranch house. The outside looked as if it had come straight out of one of those old Westerns he used to watch with his father. According to his dad, Angus, the Westerns had been old when he was a kid watching them with his father. That just made them classics in his book, his father had said.

  Smiling to himself as he recalled the old memory, Sully knocked on the door.

  When there was no answer, he knocked again. And again after he’d let a couple of minutes pass.

  After the fourth time, he decided that no one was home and he was going to have to search for this elusive ranch foreman somewhere else.

  Sully looked around. Maybe the man was in the large structure located some distance behind the house. It was worth a shot.

  Sully had just turned away and gone down the three steps off the front porch when the front door suddenly opened.

  Finally! Sully thought turning back around.

  The single celebratory word faded instantly as the person he found himself looking up at turned out not to the foreman.

  It wasn’t a man at all.

  Instead, it was a slender young woman who appeared to be in her twenties. She had long straight black hair pulled back into a ponytail, prominent cheekbones and the most incredible blue eyes he had ever seen.

  For a moment, the blue eyes held him captive, melting time and space into a single entity.

  It took concentrated effort for him to finally come back to his senses.

  “Yes?” One hand on her hip, the woman fired the single word at him like a bullet. Rather than friendly, she seemed exasperated.

  Sully found himself wondering why. “Um, Miss Joan sent me.”

  “Of course she did,” the slender young woman in jeans and a work shirt said with a sigh, looking more harassed. “You got any gear?”

  He hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about. “Gear?”

  Her impatient look grew only more so.

  “Things,” she told him. “Your possessions, clothes, whatever.”

  He felt like an idiot, but then, people didn’t talk the way she did back home. And they didn’t snap their questions unless they were interrogating someone.

  “Oh, in the truck,” he said, then to make sure he was being clear, he jerked a thumb in the direction of the vehicle parked close by.

  The woman’s expression looked no friendlier. “You can park your car behind the house and your gear in the bunkhouse.”

  “Bunkhouse?”

  “Behind the stable,” she said. Since it was obvious that didn’t clear anything up, she said, “C’mon, I’ll show you.” In a second, she was down the steps and striding toward the rear of the house ahead of him.

  They were not starting off on the right foot, Sully thought. Hell, he’d encountered friendlier criminals. Raising his voice, he called after her. “Wait!”

  The woman swung around on her heel, still looking as if her supply of patience was seriously depleting by the second. She didn’t say anything, but her entire countenance let him know that she was waiting for him to say something.

  Obviously, conversation was not at a premium around here.

  “I’m looking for the foreman,” he told her. Since she was still standing where she’d stopped, he crossed to her. “Ray Mulcahy.”

  She continued looking at him as if waiting for something to dawn on him. When it didn’t, she said, “You found her.”

  “Where?” he asked, looking around. And then the pronoun she’d used suddenly echoed in his brain. “Her?” he asked incredulously.

  She opened her mouth, and he had a feeling she was about to say something less than flattering, but then she closed it again. Regrouping, the woman said, “You’re serious.”

  “Yes.”

  Blowing out a breath, she spread her hands wide and said, “Here.”

  Sully stared at the shapely woman, dumbfounded. So much for the sanctity of old Westerns. “You’re the foreman?” he questioned in disbelief.

  It wasn’t the first time one of the down-on-his-luck drifters Miss Joan had decided to take in looked appalled at the idea of having a woman giving him orders.

  “I am. Something wrong with that?” Rae asked.

  “No, no,” Sully denied, trying not to trip over his own tongue.

  He had grown up in a house of capable females. He had no problem with the idea of a woman running the ranch and issuing orders—he just really wished he’d been briefed about that ahead of time so he wouldn’t have come across like a dolt.

  Belatedly, he said, “I’m fine with that.”

  Rae took a deep breath, silently telling herself not to get on her soapbox. Scrutinizing the man in front of her, she decided that he didn’t really look as if the idea of having a woman telling him what to do went against his grain. But the guy did look stunned.

  She came to the only conclusion she could. “Miss Joan didn’t tell you, did she?”

  Sully allowed himself a hint of a smile. “That she did not.” Then, because he could be seen as partially to blame, he said, “In all fairness, I didn’t ask. She just said to go find the foreman, Ray Mulcahy.”

  And therein lay the problem, Rae thought. “Rae’s short for Rachel,” she told him.

  “Oh. Never thought of that,” he confessed.

  And then, for the first time in a while, Sully started to laugh.

  Rae’s eyes narrowed, and she felt her back going up again. She’d worked hard to get and keep this position. Miss Joan was charitable, but the woman was also tough and gave nothing away that hadn’t been earned.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  It took Sully a second to catch his breath. “My sisters are really going to get a kick out of this when I tell them about how I put my foot in my mouth.”

  “You have sisters?” she asked.

  The drifters who came through professed to be loners and kept to themselves for the most part. They hardly ever volunteered any details about themselves, and certainly never this soon.

  Maybe this one wasn’t just a drifter, she thought.

  “And brothers,” Sully told her.

  Somehow, it felt comforting to mention his family. That surprised him, because all he’d wanted to do in the last few weeks was just detach himself from everyone and everything.

  “And a whole bunch of cousins,” he added, “almost half of whom are female.” He offered her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was insulting you before.”

  “You weren’t,” Rae replied.

  Even if he had, it wasn’t the sort of thing she admitted. To do so would have been to expose her own feelings, and she never did that.

  Rae examined him more closely. He had a tired look about him, she decided. But he didn’t appear as if he’d been knocked down one too many times or lost one con too many. That raised questions for her.

  “Why are you here again?” Rae asked.

  He wondered if she was trying to trip him up. “Miss Joan sent me.
”

  “To work?” she questioned.

  Sully thought for a second, wanting to get the wording just right. “She said something about earning my keep.”

  Rae studied the man next to her, trying to work this out in her head. He didn’t look like a wrangler, but then, neither did Rawlings or Warren, the men who were currently working on the ranch.

  But there was something different about him, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She didn’t like not knowing. Not knowing made her feel as if she wasn’t fully prepared for whatever might come down the road.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “Aurora. California,” Sully added when the young woman who was Miss Joan’s unlikely foreman continued looking at him blankly.

  “California,” she repeated. “And you worked your way here?”

  “I flew,” Sully told her, not really sure just what the woman was asking him.

  This was still not really making any sense to Rae. “To Forever?” she asked skeptically.

  Sully still didn’t see what the problem seemed to be. “Yes.”

  Rae’s eyebrows drew together over penetrating blue eyes. “On purpose?”

  He nearly laughed at the disbelieving expression on her face but instinctively knew that would not go over too well with this woman.

  So instead, he told her, “Seamus, my great-uncle, thought I might like it here.”

  “This great-uncle of yours, Uncle Seamus,” she said, wrapping her tongue around the man’s name. “He doesn’t like you very much, does he?”

  The way she said it, it wasn’t a question—it was a conclusion.

  Chapter 3

  Sully looked at the woman, wondering if Rae was trying to goad him or if this was actually her opinion. He couldn’t help wondering what Seamus would have thought of this feisty five-four embodiment of womanhood.

  He probably would have liked her, Sully decided. His great-uncle liked women with fire in their blood who weren’t afraid to speak their mind.

  “Never had a reason to believe that before,” Sully finally replied.

  Rae shrugged, her shoulders moving carelessly beneath her checked work shirt.

  “Have it your way. Anyway, you’re in luck,” she told him. “Early this morning I found a whole length of fence that needs to be replaced and you look more able-bodied, like you could probably do a better job of it than the two wranglers I’ve got here working on the ranch now.”

  Leading the way to her truck so she could drive him over to the location, Rae stopped walking for a moment. She decided it would be more prudent for her to ask rather than just to assume. “You do know how to dig post holes and swing a sledgehammer, don’t you?”

  There was a fifty-fifty chance she wasn’t trying to insult him, Sully thought. In either case, he answered, “I think I can manage.”

  Rae nodded. She’d thought as much. “Good. At any rate, you probably can’t be any worse at it than Rawlings and Warren are.”

  “Rawlings and Warren?” he echoed. He was trying to keep all the names straight, having a feeling that Rae Mulcahy wasn’t much for repetition.

  Rae nodded. “Those are the current two drifters that Miss Joan okayed to work on the ranch. Actually,” she reflected, “Mr. Harry was the one who gave the okay in this case.”

  “Mr. Harry, that would be Miss Joan’s husband?” Sully asked.

  He was fairly certain that Miss Joan’s husband and Mr. Harry were the same person, but he didn’t want to take anything for granted and make a mistake. He had a feeling that people around here were pretty touchy. He wasn’t really familiar with the names and dynamics of this hamlet yet, and he didn’t want to step on any toes if he could help it.

  This time Rae didn’t stop walking as she spared him a quick glance. “Is that just a lucky guess on your part or are you bucking for sharpest tool in the tool box?” she asked.

  He got the feeling that he was attempting to maneuver across a chasm walking on a tightrope and trying not to lose his balance—while his foreman was rooting for the rope.

  “Why don’t we split the difference and just move on?” Sully suggested diplomatically.

  “Get in,” she told him, indicating the truck. When she got in behind the steering wheel, she waited for him to sit down on his side before she asked, “What’s your name, anyway?” Rae had suddenly realized that while this new man knew her name, she hadn’t bothered finding out his.

  “Sully,” he answered just as she started up the truck.

  Rae frowned, obviously rolling the name over in her head. “What kind of a name is Sully for a man?” she asked.

  “What kind of name is Ray for a woman?” he countered.

  “It’s Rachel,” she reminded him pointedly. “But men don’t seem to be able to take orders very well from a Rachel out here. They will, though, take orders from someone named Rae.”

  Sully nodded. “Point taken. And it’s Sullivan,” he told her after a beat. “My full name,” he added when she made no response.

  She ran the name through her mind. “Sully’s faster to say.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “You got a last name, Sully?” she asked, sparing him a glance now that they were out in completely open country. “Or is that it?”

  “Cavanaugh,” Sully told her. “My last name’s Cavanaugh.”

  “Sullivan Cavanaugh,” Rae repeated. He wasn’t sure if she was mocking him or trying it on for size. “That’s quite a mouthful. Anyway, when you get a chance, you can store your gear in there,” she told him, indicating the single-story structure they were passing at the moment. “You can sleep in there at the end of the day, too.”

  The structure wasn’t very much to look at, he thought as they made their way to the open range. “Was that the bunkhouse?”

  “You guessed it. It’s closer than the hotel,” she told him drily. “I’ll introduce you to Rawlings and Warren—they should be working on the fencing by now—and then you can get started. Dinner’s at six—unless the job runs over. It’s served in the main house,” she told him, then in case he wondered about the logistics, she explained, “There’s no kitchen in the bunkhouse.”

  He figured as much. “Understood.

  “You got work gloves?” she asked as the question suddenly occurred to her.

  “No.” He’d noticed a general store in town. He could always get a pair there.

  Rae frowned slightly.

  “It figures.” And, even though she was driving, she paused to take a closer look at his hands. Taking one of his hands in hers, she gave it a cursory glance. “No gloves,” she repeated. “Your hands are softer than Miss Joan’s. Let me guess, you’ve never done any physical labor before.”

  “I have,” Sully contradicted. He didn’t care for the woman’s way of passing quick judgments. “I just didn’t think to bring any gloves when I packed.”

  “Left in a hurry?” she asked. It was a rhetorical question she didn’t expect him to answer. “Well, we’ll see if we can find you a pair. Wouldn’t want you to mess up those soft hands of yours any more than you really have to.”

  Foreman or not, he had had just about enough of the woman’s goading attitude. “Just show me the area that you want me to fix and I’ll worry about my hands.”

  She drove to a section of the fence that was clearly in disrepair. It appeared to be about a hairbreadth away from falling over.

  Sully noticed the frown on her face was growing more pronounced the closer they came to their destination.

  “Something wrong?” he finally asked the woman.

  “Yes, there’s something wrong,” she snapped, although this time it didn’t sound as if her annoyance was directed at him or his question. “There should be two people over here.”

  She pulled up abruptly, parking the truck. Getting out
, she got up into the back of the flatbed and then turned 360 degrees around, trying to get a wider view.

  It didn’t help.

  Rae started to climb down from the flatbed and was surprised when Sully suddenly offered her his hand.

  At first she started to ignore it, then, blowing out a huff of angry air, she wrapped her hand around his and got down.

  “Thanks.” Begrudgingly, she all but bit off the word.

  He wondered if she had always been this angry, or if it was something she had developed working out here. Either way, he wondered what she looked like when she smiled.

  “I take it your two wranglers are supposed to be here,” he surmised.

  “They’re not my wranglers,” she corrected. “And yes, they’re supposed to be here. They’re supposed to be working to fix the damn fence.” She let out an exasperated huff. “I had a bad feeling about those two from the minute each of them first set foot on the ranch. Mr. Harry just got too big a heart.”

  Having said that, the foreman looked at Sully accusingly.

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said by way of denial. “I only met Miss Joan, and she didn’t really strike me as a pushover.”

  “That’s because she’s not—that doesn’t mean she doesn’t have a good heart,” Rae quickly interjected in case he was going to comment on that.

  “Never said she didn’t,” Sully replied.

  Standing next to the truck, she looked around again. There was still no sign of either one of the two men who were supposedly currently involved in earning their keep on the ranch.

  This was going to put fixing the fence seriously behind schedule, Rae thought irritably.

  “Well, those two had better show up if they know what’s good for them. In the meantime, I need you to get to work before this whole fence falls down.” She paused, assessing the man before her. “You want me to show you what to do?”

  Amusement curved his lips. He resisted the temptation to tell her to go ahead and demonstrate. “I think I can handle it.”

  “For all our sakes, I hope so,” she told him. “I’m going to take the truck and go back to the bunkhouse.” Surveying the work that had to be done, she wasn’t sure if she was making a mistake. “You sure you’ll be all right if I leave you here?”