Montana Homecoming

by Jeannie Watt

  It seemed that whenever he tried to leave, the ranch called him back.

  “And here I am,” he muttered.

  “I see that.”

  He jumped at the sound of Cassie’s voice and turned to see her standing in the doorway, very much as his grandfather had been standing in the doorway of the Callahan barn the day before. “I didn’t expect you for another twenty minutes or so.”

  “I got away early. Didn’t you hear me drive up?”

  He shook his head. “The house blocks the sound. I’ve missed more than one signature delivery because of that.”

  “You need a dog to alert you.” She smiled wryly. “Or a goat.”

  “I have dogs.” He nodded at Will’s two old Aussies sleeping next to the grain shed. “Deaf, both of them. And if I brought Wendell back to the ranch, it would break Lizzie Belle’s heart.” He’d given the dwarf goat to Katie a little over a year ago, to keep her little goat company.

  “True. They are inseparable.”

  So far so good. No snarking.

  And Cassie had on her business face. He imagined she’d spent as much time convincing herself they could do this job peacefully as he had.

  Cassie walked into the barn and did the same thing he’d done just a few minutes before, settling her hands on her hips and turning a slow circle. “Wow. I kind of forgot what a really barnlike barn looks like.”

  “Yours is in much better shape junkwise,” he agreed.

  “My grandfather and dad were nuts about cleaning it out every spring. We did have the neatest barn of any of our friends. The thing is, yours is bigger and I don’t think Grandma wants to get married on the ranch she came to as a new bride.”

  “Totally understood.” And since Will’s wife divorced him and remarried when Travis’s dad was a kid, Will didn’t have the same feelings about his ranch. He hadn’t built a life there with anyone except for his kids, whom he’d raised.

  “Overwhelming.” Cassie summed up the situation with a single word.

  “That’s an understatement.” He came to stand beside her, his unlikely partner. “By the way, I promised Grandpa no blood on the walls.”

  “We can wash the walls,” she deadpanned.

  He gave a short laugh. “I hope we won’t have to do that more than once or twice.”

  She arched an eyebrow at him. “Well, it is us...”

  Travis nodded. It was them.

  He shifted his attention to the heaps of stuff, ridiculously aware of Cassie standing next to him, her hands resting lightly on her hips as she, too, studied the junk, no doubt developing a plan of attack and wondering how to get him to sign off on it.

  Finally, she broke the silence. “In the old days I would have taken one half of the barn, you the other, and we would have raced to see who could get it done first.”

  “But this isn’t the old days.”

  “No.” She sounded almost wistful. “But wouldn’t that have been fun and easy?”

  He got it. Their old relationship hadn’t required much effort. They simply fed off one another. It was irritating and invigorating and...predictable in an odd way. Now they had to come up with a whole new way to deal with each other and he’d be the first to admit that he had a lot to learn. More than that, he wanted to learn.

  She gestured at the larger equipment parked in front of them. “Let’s get that stuff out of here, then lay out a plan for the rest. What we can hide, what we have to move. Like that.”

  “What we have to wash down.”

  “Oh, that will be everything. Do you have a fire hose?” She craned her neck as if expecting to spot one somewhere.

  “That’s quite possibly the one thing we don’t have.”

  “What a shame.”

  “But I have a pressure washer and we’ll be using it.”

  “Do you have a plan in mind?”

  “I thought we’d develop it as we go.”

  “That seems a little loose to me. I think we should have something concrete in place, because as I see it, our biggest obstacle is a mutual need to be the boss.”

  “You don’t say,” he stated dryly.

  “The Ray Quentin affair perfectly demonstrated that need.”

  His eyebrows came together. “I wasn’t trying to boss you in that bar, Cassie. I was trying to protect you.”

  She looked as if she expected him to suddenly say, “Ha. I’m kidding.” When he didn’t, she said, “It appeared to me that you were trying to take control of a situation I already had under control. I didn’t need to be protected until you showed up.”

  “How, in a thousand years, could you have thought that?” he demanded. She hadn’t had the situation anywhere near under control.

  “I thought it because you pushed your way into the situation and tried to take over,” she replied, missing the point entirely.

  “Do you think I did it for fun?” He tapped his cheek beneath his sore eye, then, remembering his objective, dropped his hand. Still, it took him a second to ask, “What are we gaining by rehashing this?”

  Her mouth tightened, but to her credit, she didn’t push on.

  “I have an idea,” he said. It was getting late and he still had stuff to do that afternoon. “For today, and today only, you take that half of the barn and I’ll take this one. We clear out the big stuff, then tomorrow we will come up with a plan of action.” His lips twisted. “The concrete kind.”

  “Great,” Cassie said on a sniff. “We’ve wasted enough time.”

  Because someone wanted to argue...

  Travis kept the thought to himself. And that seemed to be the best strategy moving forward—to keep their mouths shut. Tomorrow, as he’d said, they’d give it another go.

  He made a sweeping gesture. “Pick your side.”

  She pointed to the side she was standing on and he said, “Cool. We work until eleven, then I have to go to town.”

  “Fine.”

  “Okay, then.”

  For several long seconds they stared one another down, then Cassie did a pivoting turn and headed for the stack of old asphalt roofing shingles. Travis sucked in a breath, then turned and headed toward his side of the barn.

  At least there wasn’t any blood on the walls.

  * * *

  EVEN THOUGH SHE was driving, Cassie closed her eyes in relief as her truck bumped over the McGuire ranch cattle guard on the way home. She opened them again when the tires hit gravel.

  The day was done.

  Her clothes were dusty, her shoulders were stiff and her jaw ached from not talking while working in the barn. Tomorrow they could talk, work out that concrete plan. Today she’d needed time to collect herself, and it wasn’t only because they’d managed to morph their initial conversation into another argument about the Ray Quentin situation; it was because she was working out how to deal with a guy whom she found unexpectedly attractive.

  Her peers would have laughed their behinds off at the idea of her, the great negotiator, having to have a self-imposed time-out because she couldn’t control her mouth—or her eyes.

  Being hyperaware of his black eye, she couldn’t help but study it in the same way one touched a sore tooth. Yep. Still there. Still appears to be painful. And he kept catching her. Generally, she was immune to embarrassment, but that wasn’t the case with Travis—thank you, unexpected attraction—and after the third or fourth catch, she almost said, “I’m watching your eye, not you, buddy.” Instead she’d lifted something that was too heavy and almost fell over.

  Saying she was only checking out his eye would have been a lie, of course. She also noticed the way his muscles moved under his T-shirt, the easy way he walked. The way the sunlight caught the brown stubble on his jawline and how his cheeks had hollowed under those ridiculously high cheekbones. She noticed things that had never been on her radar before, and the more sh
e noticed about him, the more she was tempted to do something to drive a wedge between them.

  Unfortunately, wedge driving was not on the agenda. They were working together to learn to do just that—work together; therefore, working in silence seemed her safest bet.

  But what about tomorrow? They couldn’t clear out the entire barn in silence, could they?

  She toyed with the idea of being candid and telling him that, in a very technical sense, she found him attractive. Physically attractive. Therefore, if he caught her staring, that was all it was.

  Right.

  No way was she giving him that kind of ammo. He could just catch her staring and wonder why. Best-case scenario, he’d think she was plotting something against him.

  The thought made her smile. A little. Then she was back at the conundrum.

  She wasn’t feeling herself—or rather, she wasn’t feeling like the person who’d left Wisconsin for a visit home before classes. She didn’t know if it was the time off, being back in Montana or being in close contact with her former nemesis, but she wasn’t as securely buttoned-up as she had been only a few days ago.

  Travis thinks you’re stiff, and Katie thinks you’re there but not, so at least you appear to be all buttoned-up. They didn’t have to know that she was wrangling unfamiliar feelings and sensations. She was a good actress.

  Taking comfort in the thought, she turned onto the county road. She might feel different inside, but it was just because of all the changes raining down upon her.

  Her phone rang as she rounded a corner and seeing the name on the screen, she pulled over on a wide spot to answer the call from Darby.

  After a quick hello, Darby said, “I didn’t get the job.”

  “At least you heard back.” In the current job market, it wasn’t uncommon to not hear.

  “I have a friend who works there, so that was probably why. There was no offer to keep my résumé on file.”

  “Maybe your current company can turn things around. They hired a new CEO.”

  “Death throes,” Darby said darkly. “But I’ll hang on until the bitter end, or until I find something else. I want to be back in Montana, but now I’m going to broaden my search. If my company goes south, I can’t afford to be picky.”

  “You don’t care what you do as long as you’re close to home?”

  “Let me put it this way—I currently live in a vibrant city with lots to do, and I still miss Gavin. Yes. I’d like to be closer to home.” She hesitated, then said, “I thought about applying at Hardwick’s Grocery store, but they only have part-time positions. I need more income than that.”

  “Something will come up.” Cassie wasn’t a huge fan of platitudes, but she knew when her friend needed to hear one.

  “Thank you,” Darby said softly. “I’ll keep you posted. Have you seen Travis since...you know?”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m leaving his place. He and I are cleaning out the barn in case it rains on Grandma’s wedding day.”

  “You and him and no one else?”

  “You mean like a referee?” Cassie asked dryly.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Nope. It’s just the two of us.” And since she was still embarrassed at being taken to task by Will McGuire, she didn’t delve into the details of how it all came about. “It needs to be done, and it saves Will and Grandma the cost of hiring a crew.”

  “I’m surprised that Travis has enough free time to do that with Will living in town. Did they hire help on the ranch?”

  “No,” Cassie replied with a thoughtful frown. “We’re only working a couple of hours a day.” But Darby brought up a good point. On their ranch, Nick and Brady would start haying soon, and there were the pivots to tend and the fences to mend. When did Travis find the time? And why hadn’t she thought of that?

  Perhaps you are a little too focused on yourself...

  Perhaps.

  “How’s his eye?”

  “Swollen and colorful.” And he was still ridiculously good-looking.

  “No grudges?”

  “We worked through that,” Cassie said, hoping she sounded casual instead of shifty. There wasn’t much that she kept from Darby, but this thing with her and Travis... It felt too personal to share.

  “I bet that was interesting.”

  Cassie laughed, glad that her friend was letting her off the hook. “Keep me posted on your job search, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  “And call me anytime you need to. Promise?”

  “Only if you do the same.”

  “I will.” Maybe.

  There were some things, like negotiating peace with a former nemesis, that a person simply had to handle alone.

  * * *

  “THIS COULD PROVE INTERESTING,” Rosalie said as she pulled the cozy off the teapot. She and Will had developed a nice routine of having beer or wine before dinner and tea after, often on the front porch of his new house, where they sat together and watched the world go by. Every now and then, Gloria would walk the two blocks down the street with her new rescue dog, Sylvia, and join them.

  “Interesting in what way?” Will asked as he accepted the cup of tea and then leaned back in his chair. He hadn’t been much of a tea drinker when they’d started seeing one another in a serious way, but he’d become a convert after she’d made him his first chai latte. He’d also sworn her to silence. “Travis would poke fun at me in an unmerciful way,” he’d said. Rosalie doubted that, but she agreed that it would be their secret.

  “I believe you know what I mean.”

  “Oh. The barn going up in flames.”

  “What?” She nearly dropped her teacup.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean that literally. I meant the two of them working together could cause some friction.”

  Rosalie knew that Will thought Cassie and Travis’s habit of butting heads upset her, but the truth was that Will was the one who seemed to find it the most upsetting. She didn’t know if he was projecting his feelings onto her, or if he was simply trying to keep her happy by negotiating peace between their grandchildren.

  Rosalie took her seat next to Will and balanced her cup on the arm of the chair. Cassie and Travis were both grounded individuals, college educated, successful in their chosen fields...and they still triggered one another.

  She waved at their neighbor across the street as the woman left her yard to go on her exercise walk, then glanced at Will. “I have a hard time, given Cassie and Travis’s history, believing that they volunteered together for this task out of the blue.” She gave Will a sideways glance. “Especially after the incident at the Shamrock.” Cassie had called to explain how Ray Quentin had given Travis a black eye, but Rosalie was certain that she hadn’t been told the full story.

  Will shifted in his chair and Rosalie pretended not to notice. So much for them “volunteering.” Will obviously had something to do with it, but if Cassie and Travis had agreed to the plan, she thought it was a great way for the two of them to get their mutual need to take one another off at the knees out of their systems. They hadn’t been particularly kind to each other during their teen years and now, thanks to her and Will, they were going to be seeing more of one another.

  On the plus side, anything that distracted Cassie from the job that was eating her from the inside out was A-OK in her book. Rosalie hoped it took two weeks to clean the barn. Maybe by that time, Cassie will have developed some perspective. Or maybe she’d continue her no-holds-barred career path.

  “But here’s the thing,” Will said, drawing her attention back to him. “The hay is almost ready to cut and if we’re looking at rain at the end of the month, we need to get it taken care of.”

  “And Travis is busy with the barn this week.”

  “Exactly. So I’m going to handle the haying.”

  “Do you have enough help?”


  He smiled that smile that made her knees go a little weak. Will was one handsome man. “Lester has volunteered.”

  “In the same way Cassie and Travis volunteered to clear out the barn?” she asked mildly.

  Will laughed. “Les offered to help.” He patted her knee. “I won’t be seeing you so much before the wedding.”

  “I’m going to be busy with preparations.” And not only her own. Katie wanted her Christmas wedding to be a small affair, but there was still a lot to do. Two weddings in a matter of months did keep one hopping.

  “I could drive into town, of course, but sometimes we work at night.”

  “I know the drill,” Rosalie said with a gentle smile. She had reason to, having been a rancher’s wife for over three decades. “And if you need help, I drive a mean swather.”

  “I thought you hated ranch work.”

  “I prefer town work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have skills.” She looked over her teacup at her man. “Skills that I am not afraid to use.”

  “Well, if Lester’s wife isn’t as understanding, then I may be calling on you.”

  She smiled at the man who’d somehow slipped into her heart. “You do that,” she said softly. “Anytime you need me.”

  * * *

  CASSIE ARRIVED AT the McGuire ranch at exactly eight o’clock, ready to discuss next steps in the barn project, which meant negotiating and not arguing. She’d slept like the dead thanks to all the tugging and lifting and hauling she’d done the day before, and there was nothing like a good night’s rest to help one gain perspective. Unfortunately, the perspective she gained when she was alone seemed to shift when she was with Travis. If that happened, she’d deal.

  The driveway gravel crunched noisily under her running shoes as she approached Will’s old dogs, who were sleeping next to the stuff they’d stacked on opposite sides of the open bay door yesterday—her pile and his pile. She leaned down to stroke their heads, earning herself canine smiles, then cleared her throat before entering the building just in case Travis needed a warning to stop talking to himself. She needn’t have bothered.