Montana Homecoming

by Jeannie Watt

  Well, I kissed Travis...

  “McHenry’s Gold is settling in at the McGuire ranch.” The mare had been nuzzling one of her cousins over the fence when Cassie got into her car, wondering if she dared ever come back to the ranch. Yes, she’d held her own nicely after kissing Travis, but she didn’t know for how long she could keep it up.

  The man could kiss.

  “And how did barn cleaning go?”

  “Messy.” In more ways than one. She gave Katie a bright look as she latched onto a distracting element. “I heard kittens today. I think the mama was in the process of moving them as Travis and I worked through the junk.”

  “Do you think Tigger would like a friend?”

  “That would be fun,” Cassie said. Maybe she should have gotten a kitten instead of a horse. Cheaper, easier to care for—but it wouldn’t get her out into the sunshine, so she was still hoping that her McHenry mare would work out. “As to the barn, I think we’ll be done in a matter of days and then it’s a matter of how much decorating do we want to do?”

  “The long-term forecast hasn’t shifted. A solid week of rain.”

  “It’s Montana. Anything can happen.”

  Kendra reached for the metallic gold crayon that was just beyond her fingertips and Cassie rolled it her way. The little girl smiled her thanks and began to tackle a buckle on a dog collar with careful strokes.

  “I want to color good like Aunt Cassie,” Bailey muttered as she inched her crayon closer to the outline of a butterfly.

  “Go really slow,” Cassie said. There was no use telling her young niece that her motor control had yet to fully develop and that coloring inside the lines would get easier as she got older.

  “I used to scribble, too,” Kendra said as she colored just up to the dark lines on her picture, taking care not to cross them.

  “I’m not scwibbling.”

  “Scr—” Kendra started to correct her sister, but stopped and glanced at Cassie, who gave her an encouraging smile.

  It was good to correct correctable behavior, but she’d had to explain to Kendra that some things would correct themselves with age. Nagging wouldn’t help.

  Cassie was familiar with nagging, because she’d nagged Katie when she’d been young, doing her best to turn her little sister into a clone of herself. It hadn’t worked in the way she’d expected. Katie had become an overachiever, just like her two older siblings, but she’d never been happy with her traditional career. It wasn’t until she’d moved home and started the herb business—which had truly concerned Cassie—that she’d come into herself. She still overachieved, but in a different way.

  “That’s a beautiful butterfly,” Cassie remarked when Bailey held up her picture. She’d been so careful of the lines that there wasn’t much color within half an inch of the boundaries, but she’d accomplished her goal. And Cassie had to admit that her niece had an eye for color.

  “What color should I make my puppy’s collar?” Kendra asked.

  Cassie considered, then said, “What’s your favorite color?”

  “Purple, but I make everything my favorite color,” Kendra said.

  “Ah.” Cassie pulled out her phone and brought up a picture of a color wheel. “Then let’s try the complementary color of purple.”

  Kendra gave her a bewildered look and Bailey leaned closer to look at the phone.

  “This wheel has all the main colors,” Cassie said.

  “Where’s pink?” Bailey asked.

  “Pink is a hue...” Cassie bit her lip. “They don’t have the light colors. Just the dark ones.”

  “Oh.”

  “If you add white, you get the light ones,” Kendra said importantly. “We did that when we painted at school.”

  Bailey was jealous of Kendra going to school and didn’t reply.

  “Okay. Find purple.” Two small forefingers stabbed at her phone. “Now, let’s go straight across the wheel and what color to you get?”

  Kendra traced the path. “Yellow.”

  “That’s right. Yellow and purple are complements. If you mix them together, you get black.”

  “Ick.” Kendra made a face.

  Cassie laughed. “You don’t have to mix them. But these complementary colors are special buddies. They go well together.” She moved her phone in front of Bailey. “Pink is really light red, so find red.” Bailey pointed, then moved her finger across the screen to green and then smiled up at Cassie.

  “That’s good. Green and red. Now, let’s do blue...”

  Her phone rang, startling them all, and when she saw her assistant Anna Lee Novak’s number on the screen, her heart skipped. They’d agreed that Cassie would be out of all loops except for in a dire emergency.

  She gave her nieces an apologetic smile. “This might be something important. We’ll talk more about colors later. Anna Lee, hi.”

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Cassie, but I need to give you a heads-up.”

  “Sure.” Cassie kept her voice bright as she looked over her shoulder at Katie and then strolled down the hallway out of earshot. “What’s up?”

  “I don’t know, but something is going on. There’ve been a lot of school board members going in and out. Closed-door meetings. Stuff like that. And you know how you can just tell that something is wrong?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Something’s going on. Everyone is on edge. Even the people in Payroll, and that department has been cut to the bone, so you know that they aren’t worried about being laid off.”

  Cassie pressed a hand to her forehead. If the higher-ups—Doug Everett, the superintendent, and Rhonda, who had the job that Cassie would move into after sabbatical—were dealing with something behind closed doors, it had to be serious. Cassie was not so foolish as to pooh-pooh office vibes.

  “There’s one more thing, and it’s why I’m really calling.”

  There was a note in Anna Lee’s voice that had Cassie gripping the phone a little harder. “I heard Rhonda talking on the phone in her office when I came in early from lunch and I very distinctly heard her say, ‘If I retire. That may not come about given the circumstances.’”

  Cassie’s heart skipped. What circumstances? “You’re sure that’s what she said?”

  “It was plain as day. She didn’t realize I was in the outer office.”

  Rhonda made no secret about the fact that she loved her job, and Cassie had secretly wondered just how happy she was about the way things had worked out. She didn’t have as many years to give the district as Cassie, but she was only fifty-six. She could easily give them a decade more if she so desired, but her husband had retired and wanted to travel, and Rhonda had grudgingly agreed to work one more year and then retire herself.

  “She might have been joking,” Anna Lee added weakly. “You know how hard it is to tell with her.”

  “Yes.” As in the woman rarely joked, so when she did, it took people a while to catch on.

  “That doesn’t sound like a joke to me.”

  It had seemed like Rhonda was on board when they made the deal with the superintendent and the board members, who had seemed relieved to have a difficult decision taken out of their hands. But what if Rhonda changed her mind? She had seniority and Cassie would get squeezed out of her job after putting everything she had into it.

  “No,” Anna Lee said apologetically. “I thought you should know, which is why I broke my promise to you and called.”

  “Feel free to break it again. Anytime. I’d like to be kept abreast of what’s going on if at all possible.”

  “I’ll keep my ears open and if I find out anything, I’ll call.”

  “Thank you, Anna Lee.”

  “Hey,” she said softly. “I’d rather work for you than Rhonda. I always know where I stand with you.”

  “Thank you. Talk to you later.” Cassie had bar
ely ended the call when Katie walked into the sitting room.

  “Don’t say it,” Cassie muttered.

  Katie, of course, ignored her. “I thought you were on sabbatical.”

  “I am.”

  “Then you have no business taking calls from school.”

  “This is important.”

  “Do you want to know how many times I’ve heard that over the past two years? You know, when you had to miss Christmas and stuff.”

  “I can’t fix the past.”

  “Exactly. But you can fix the present.”

  She’d fallen into that trap neatly enough. Cassie tried the big-sister scowl. It didn’t come anywhere close to working. From there she worked into, “Katie, I appreciate your concern, but this is none of your business.”

  Katie made a rude noise in return. “Try to keep me out of it.” She unfolded her arms. “Cassie, wake up. You are wasting your life.”

  “I am not.”

  “Not your career. Your life. There’s a difference. You wouldn’t be on sabbatical if deep down you hadn’t recognized that you were having an issue separating your life from your job.”

  “I’m on sabbatical so that I can further my education, spend time with my family and so that my colleague can retire without penalty.” A colleague who’d better not screw her over.

  “But you can’t keep your finger out of the pie. I may be the youngest,” Katie continued, settling her hands on her hips, “but I’ve gone down this path and I see things that I don’t think you are seeing.”

  “I’m building a career. I’ve been working in this direction since I left college and I’m seeing returns on my investments.”

  “At what expense?”

  “An expense I’m willing to pay.”

  Katie gave her a sad look. “I think your jawbone is about to shatter.” Then she turned and walked down the hall to the kitchen, where Bailey and Kendra were still talking colors.

  Cassie blew out a breath. She and Katie were different people. Cassie could no more imagine leaving her career than she could imagine washing all the colors of her laundry together into one load. She wasn’t wired that way. Katie was. But, if her career left her, then what?

  You roll with the punches, girl.

  But so far, professionally anyway, she hadn’t faced any real setbacks. She’d had bumps and obstacles in the course of her career, but no real setbacks or detours. She’d told herself that it was due to careful planning, keeping her finger on the pulse of the school district and adjusting her professional course accordingly.

  Now it occurred to her that maybe that hadn’t been enough.

  Maybe she’d been fooling herself.

  Maybe things were going to be taken out of her hands, and she was going to spend a year eating up her savings, only to find herself without employment at the terminus. Maybe Rhonda was going to try to stay and force the school board to decide between them—the local woman whose family went back generations, or the woman who had no community connections other than having worked there.

  And suddenly kissing Travis McGuire seemed like an easy-to-deal-with problem by comparison.

  * * *

  CASSIE ARRIVED AT the McGuire ranch earlier than usual, but Travis was already working when she got there—not out of a sense of competition, but because there was so much to be done in a short period of time.

  “Morning.” Travis looked up from the metal tray where he’d dumped a can of miscellaneous hardware and was now sorting through it. When they put the stuff back in the barn, it would be organized.

  “About that kiss yesterday.”

  Travis’s hand stilled before dropping large bolts into a Folgers coffee can. “What about it?”

  “Be on notice that if I’m preoccupied today, it’s not because of you or the kiss or anything along those lines.”

  “It would be bigheaded of me to think that,” he agreed solemnly.

  Cassie laced her fingers together and stretched them in front of her as if cracking her knuckles, making him wonder if he needed to do some warmup exercises of his own.

  “Given yesterday’s finale, no. It wouldn’t be.” She dropped her hands. “I’m fighting on too many fronts, Travis. It’s taking a toll.”

  Travis wasn’t used to Cassie discussing matters she held close, and the honesty of the unguarded words had him abandoning the bolt sorting and moving a couple of steps closer to her.

  “What’s going on?” he asked. The sunlight slanting in through the open door spilled across her face, illuminating shadows beneath her eyes. Shadows that had not been there yesterday.

  “I got a call from work. I’m still gnawing on it.”

  “Whatever the problem is, is it something that you need to worry about while on sabbatical?” He put more emphasis on the last word than he’d intended.

  “Yes.”

  “But—”

  She closed her eyes, looked like she was counting to ten—or reviewing her mental list of what she wasn’t going to do. “It’s not an actual problem. Yet.” She opened her eyes, fixing him with a serious gaze. “It’s the potential for a problem. A big one if it plays out the way I’m afraid it’s going to.”

  “How so?”

  “My school district has lost population—the tax base is shrinking, and we now have too many upper administrators. I am one of two assistant superintendents. One assistant has to go. Rhonda, my counterpart, had one year to go before she could take retirement with no penalty. We hammered out a deal with the school board where I would take a one-year unpaid sabbatical and she would finish her year. I’ll step into the position when she retires next June.”

  He shifted his weight and crossed his arms, mirroring her position. “What’s going on now?”

  “I don’t know for certain,” she said slowly. “My administrative assistant called me to say that something was off, and that she heard Rhonda discussing the possibility of not retiring.”

  “What happens if Rhonda doesn’t retire?”

  “The board would have to choose between us, I guess.” She let out a breath. “I need to know what’s going on.”

  “You aren’t going to abandon your grandmother before her wedding.”

  Cassie gave him a hard look. “I know my track record sucks, but no. I’m not.” She dug her hands into her hair on either side of her head, closed her eyes again. The situation was truly eating at her.

  At least she hadn’t verbally coldcocked him for suggesting she’d abandon her grandmother.

  He frowned at her, but she didn’t look his way as she dropped her hands loosely back to her sides. Her hair stuck out from her hands raking through it, giving her the wild look he remembered from back in the day when she’d accepted any challenge he tossed her way.

  She studied the gravel between them for a long moment, then glanced out over the field where his McHenry mares grazed. “My job is really important to me.”

  “You hide it well.”

  Her laugh ended almost before it escaped her lips. “Thanks.”

  “Are there other fronts besides me and your job?”

  “Katie. She’s relentless in her nagging about my job and priorities. All for my own good in her mind, but she doesn’t understand.”

  He wondered if anyone understood, including Cassie.

  They stood facing one another for a long silent moment, but unlike yesterday, it wasn’t a silence that might shatter at any minute.

  “I want a truce,” Cassie finally said. “A real one.” There was something in her solemn tone that dug at him.

  “What if I think it might do you good to be distracted from the things you can’t control?”

  She shook her head, her faint half smile telling him that she wasn’t interested in being distracted. “A truce. Please.”

  When he didn’t answer—not because he didn
’t want a truce, but because he was coming up with a caveat—she cocked her head to one side. “You are an attractive guy, Travis McGuire. Black eye and all.” She kicked her toe against the ground, but didn’t break her lock on his face. “That said, I need an ally right now, not more things to drive me crazy.”

  Travis gave a slow nod and managed not to say what he was thinking, which was, Well played.

  “All right. Consider me an ally.”

  There wasn’t much else he could say. Cassie had done a masterful job of taking away his option to say anything else.

  * * *

  CASSIE GLANCED UP after hefting a wooden box of old leather strapping and found Travis studying her—again—which meant it was time to address things. She needed an ally, not someone stressing her out by looking concerned.

  She stood patiently holding the box in front of her until he looked up. “I’m fine,” she said as their gazes met.

  “Okay.” He stacked a couple of bolt cans on a plastic storage bin.

  “Don’t make me sorry that I shared.”

  He set the bin back down again. “What are you talking about?”

  “You look like you’re worried about me.” She shifted the box in her arms.

  He let out a soft snort. “You look like you’re worried about you.”

  “One of us worrying is enough,” she said shortly. After her mother died, she’d come to realize that having people worry on her behalf was a burden she did not wish to carry.

  “Don’t obsess over things you can’t control.” She was about to reply when he added, “It doesn’t help.”

  He sounded as if he spoke from experience.

  You don’t want to know. You’ve got your own issues.

  She wanted to know.

  “What does help?”

  “Time. Perspective.”

  “It’s too early for that.”

  “Then why tie your gut in a knot?”

  “Because that’s the way I handle these things.” Cassie carried the box out into the sun and set it with its buddies before stretching the kinks out of her back. Travis was right. She needed to stop creating nightmare scenarios about her job and Rhonda staying, which might mean that she had to leave. She pushed the hair back from her brow, grimacing at the fine grit on her forehead. Too bad they couldn’t have pressure washed first, then hauled stuff. But some of the junk was so rusty it might have welded into one solid tangle if it got wet.