Cowboy Comes Home. Carrie Alexander
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Yesterday, she’d bought more produce than she had in the previous ninety days. A mixing bowl filled with Macintoshes sat on the table. “If you slice them up, nice and thin.”
He got a knife and sat at the table. She drained the grease from the cast-iron frying pan, the same one that had always been used at the ranch. She added milk and baking soda to the mixing bowl and began whisking the batter. “So…you seem to have settled in all right.”
Her scalp prickled from the sensation of Rio’s gaze on the back of her head. “I’m at home here,” he said easily. “Nothing’s changed.”
“Except you’re sleeping in the bunkhouse.”
“We did that a few times. Remember?”
Hell, yes, she remembered. As kids, they’d thought it was great fun to take over the cabin on the rare nights that Rooney was gone. They’d played at being cowboys, with a campfire and beans heated in the can and served on tin plates. They’d rolled out their sleeping bags and told ghost stories and dirty jokes that they hadn’t half understood, until finally they couldn’t keep their eyes open any longer.
But there’d been other nights, too, when they’d grown older. In the cabin, in the barn, even, once or twice, in Meg’s bedroom. Her father would have banned Rio from the ranch if he’d ever caught them. That had been half the thrill for her.
“I remember.” She poured a dollop of the batter into the pan and watched the sizzling edges as if they were mesmerizing. Remember was a dangerous word for them.
Rio nudged her. “The apples.”
She stepped away. “Go ahead.”
He laid slices in the frying pancake. “Remember when we tried to roast apples over the campfire?”
“Sure.” That word again—remember. Was he deliberately making her recall how easy things used to be between them? “We stuck them on sharpened sticks. They came out all black and crisp outside and raw inside.”
“Those were good times.”
“Yeah.” Meg retreated. Leaving Rio to flip the pancakes, she snatched one of her lists off the sloppy pile of notepads, instruction manuals and several outdated phone books on top of the fridge. “We should go over the day’s chores. Get it straight how things are going to be around here.”
“Fuel first,” he insisted. “I need a hot cup of coffee and a bellyful of apple pancakes before I can face my first day as your stable boy.”
“You started yesterday.”
They had emptied the cabin, scrubbed the floor and sink, scraped and painted trim, washed the window. Her final task had been to hang a pair of curtains she’d fashioned out of two linen dish towels printed with strawberries and watermelon slices. Rio had laughed and said that Rooney would have never stood for such a womanly touch, but fortunately he was secure in his masculinity.
That was when Meg had scrammed. After soaking in a hot bath and thinking a little too long about Rio’s very secure masculinity, she’d decided she’d have to reiterate their position as boss and employee. She would assign him duties that ensured there’d be as little contact as possible between them during an average day. They’d already become too chummy.
She ducked her head over the list as he put a platter of pancakes between them. Sharing a meal in the cozy kitchen wasn’t helping her cause.
“Today,” she announced, “you can work on repairing the fences.” That would keep him out of her way.
“Shouldn’t I muck out the stalls first?”
“But I was going to groom the horses.”
“Exactly. They’ll be out of their stalls.”
“Of course.” She forked two pancakes onto her plate and four onto his.
He buttered them and added syrup, looking too content for her peace of mind. “I don’t bite, Meg. Hell, I won’t even talk to you if you don’t want me to.”
She frowned. He’d had a knack for knowing what she was thinking and feeling. Except the one time that she’d held a huge secret so deep inside that not even Rio had suspected. He had known that something was wrong, but she’d led him to believe that she was just nervous about their upcoming high school graduation and her plan to leave home immediately afterward.
“It’s not that.” Her eyes darted to his face. He was studiously slicing through his stack and didn’t look up. “We can be friendly, sort of. We just can’t be close. Not the way we used to be.”
He reached for the coffee, still too relaxed. “Why?”
She became very interested in chewing. He was stirring milk into his coffee, the spoon going around and around until she knew that he wasn’t as indifferent as he portrayed.
She hooked her feet on the chair rung. “Too much happened. And too much time has gone by.”
“But if we got it all into the open, wouldn’t that be better?”
“Not for me.”
Rio’s expression didn’t change, but she could tell he was disappointed in her. Join the club, she thought. I may not be much good for closure, but I’m an expert at cutting my losses and moving on.
He jerked the spoon from the mug. “Whatever you say, boss.”
RICHARD LENNOX HAD RUN a good-size herd of cattle back in the day, when the market had thrived and there’d been more than one cowboy in the bunkhouse. Lean years had cut the herd in half by the time Meg had been allowed to work the cattle alongside the men. After she’d gone and Rooney had passed away, the word around town had been that Lennox was a broken man. He’d reduced the herd even more and scraped by on his own. Sometime along the way, a large parcel of the ranch land had been sold.
What acreage remained was remote but prime, reaching as far as the mountains to the south and culminating in a small, deep canyon to the west. Meg could have made a nice sum by selling it, but she was her father’s daughter, likely to turn her nose up at the large ranch corporations or California tourists who’d be the buyers.
While much of the land was free range, the pastures closest to the house were strung with barbed wire. That meant a lot of fence to ride.
Rio could think of worse jobs. Plenty of them. Only months ago, he’d been stuck in a mountaintop outpost in Kunar Province, barely surviving the grinding heat and dust and stones while dreaming of the cold, clear Wyoming skies. Ten years away hadn’t made him forget what it was like to breathe air so pure you felt glad to be alive.
This morning, the wind sweeping off the mountains had a bite. He pulled up the collar of his jacket before returning a steadying hand to the reins. Meg had put him aboard her horse Renny, short for Renegade. The bay gelding had some age on him, but he’d capered like a two-year-old as they rode toward the foothills.
Clouds like thick cotton wadding moved slowly across the sky, hiding the sun. Rio remembered long hours spent down in a bunker while insurgents fired on the camp, the sun beaming relentlessly down on him and his infantry unit. In those hours, he’d often think of Meg. Happy and productive, he’d hoped, but maybe as lonely without him as he was without her.
The war had dragged on. He’d seen soldiers killed. More wounded. Many lost arms or legs. Eventually he’d come to understand that Meg was his phantom limb. A pain so real it woke him up at night.
At his discharge from the army, he’d overcome the temptation to search for her. He hadn’t considered that he’d find her right here, in Treetop, even though that made sense. They’d both returned like homing pigeons.
He studied the landscape that had once been so familiar, recognizing certain trees, particular rocks.
It seemed unbelievable that they were living on the ranch together. Except that the Meg he’d been remembering all this time was not the person she was