Married In Montana. Lynnette Kent
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The word Thea muttered under her breath would have horrified Beth Peace. “You’re guessing.”
“Am I wrong?”
“No, damn you.” A sudden lull in the hubbub around them told her she’d been too loud. She lowered her voice. “But what, exactly, do you think I can do? Or anybody else, for that matter?”
Rafe leaned his elbows on the table. “Talk to him? Better yet, get your dad to talk to him.”
“You’re assuming Robert Maxwell would admit to himself or anybody else that his son wasn’t the finest specimen walking the earth today.”
“He’s a successful rancher. He has to be a realist.”
“About everything but Bobby.” She heard her own comment, realized how jealous and petty she sounded. Hands flat on the table, she tried to retrieve her self-respect. “Look, Bobby’s always been a handful. He’s not real happy being at home right now—that youthful desire to see the whole world, you know?”
He grinned. “I’ve been there.”
She stiffened her spine against the urge to melt. “So, he’s got to get this out of his system. Better here in Montana, where there aren’t so many people, than Los Angeles or San Francisco. He’ll settle down.” She knew how naive she sounded. “Start taking the work and his place in it seriously. We just have to wait for him to grow up a little.”
Rafe’s gaze acknowledged her wishful thinking. “I can’t cut him that much slack. I have other people to consider.” He reached out, ran his knuckle along the back of her hand from wrist to fingertip. “You’re one of them. I can see you’re caught in the middle.”
Thea knew better than to fall for such an obvious line. She’d recognized Rafe Rafferty as a ladies’ man from the beginning.
But, oh, she wanted to believe. Something inside her ached with the need to believe that touch, to accept the concern in that handsome face, those dark brown eyes.
While she was still battling herself, Mona came back to the table with the coffeepot. “Refills?”
Grateful for the diversion, Thea pushed her mug to the edge. “Sounds good.” Rafe did the same and they all watched the process in silence…until Thea’s stomach produced a loud and unmistakable growl. She felt her cheeks heat up, wished the earth would open and swallow her whole.
With only a half smile, Rafe glanced at his watch. “It’s after eleven. That’s close enough to lunchtime, isn’t it?”
The other woman wiped a cloth over the table between them. “Far as I’m concerned. I made a big pot of chili this morning and there’s corn bread baking. Want me to bring you each a bowl?”
Thea managed to meet Rafe’s eyes for a split second, found his eyes kind. Maybe even hopeful. “Sounds really good.”
Mona nodded. “Back in two shakes.”
Rafe added sugar and milk to his fresh coffee, wondering how to get the woman across the table to relax. He’d had his own nerves about this meeting. He cared way too much about what Thea thought, about the way things between them turned out. But she seemed almost paralyzed. And Rafe really didn’t think he was that intimidating. At least, not without a gun in his hand.
So he set himself to calm her down, with as innocent a topic as he could come up with. “You must have quite a few dogs on the ranch.”
She grinned, and her flush faded a little. “Cow dogs, sure. And strays the hands feed, who never leave again. Seems like each cowboy has his own mutt to take care of.”
“Don’t you have a mutt of your own?”
Her black hair bounced as she shook her head. “I guess it seems weird, but we don’t have house dogs at all. Our housekeeper got bitten when she was little, and something like that tends to stay with a person, I think. She’s been running the house since forever, so what she says pretty much goes. The dogs stay outside.”
There was a wistfulness in her eyes that prompted him to ask, “What kind of dog would you choose if you could get one?”
She grinned easily, for the first time. “Well, I think I’d want a big one…”
The chili arrived while they talked about dogs. With their second helpings, they moved on to horse breeds and training.
“I didn’t realize you had ranch experience.” Thea crumbled corn bread over her chili. “More than just summer camp, I’d say.”
Rafe decided to take that as a sign she’d been wondering about him. “I grew up on a spread in southern California. Nothing even a tenth the size of Walking Stones. But I learned the business.”
“Do your folks still run cattle?”
“The ranch belongs to my aunt and her husband. My parents died when I was six.”
She looked up at him, her eyes dark with pain. “I’m sorry. That’s really hard.”
“I didn’t mean to make a play for sympathy.” He shrugged. “I grew up okay.”
“Most of us do. That doesn’t mean it’s the best way. Bobby might not be such a…a problem if our mom hadn’t died when he was four.” In one of the lightning change of moods he was coming to appreciate, Thea chuckled. “Who knows? Maybe Dad wouldn’t be such a pain in the butt, either.”
Rafe laughed with her. “There’s a thought.”
Mona’s apple cobbler with ice cream and more coffee took them into movies and books. Rafe surrendered to impulse and recounted his one run-in with a Hollywood star while on the L.A. police force. “We spent four hours combing every inch of Rodeo Drive, looking for this crazy lady’s dog. You haven’t felt like a fool until you’ve crawled through an alley on your hands and knees yelling for Horatio.”
He got another one of Thea’s deep chuckles for his efforts. “Where’d you find him?”
“In the back room of a jewelry store. The dumb dog had slipped through security and curled up on a workbench in the middle of a few hundred thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds. They had to brush the stones out of his fur.”
“Not your standard impression of police work in Los Angeles.” She was still laughing. “Drug busts, gang wars, high-speed chases—that’s what I would expect to hear about.”
“I did that, too.” Rafe shook his head. “Sometimes I think maybe I should have stayed, tried to improve the place. I guess you could say I bailed out.” Damn. Something else he hadn’t meant to say. The woman didn’t want to hear about his personal doubts.
“You can’t be responsible for saving the whole world, or the state of California, or even a neighborhood.” Her quiet tone respected his frankness. “I tend to think most people have a purpose in life, something they were meant to do. Maybe your responsibility lies somewhere besides L.A.”
“God knows there are enough troubles in the world to go around.” The woman had a way of making him feel good without even trying.
She nodded at his observation, and from there the conversation veered toward resolving world hunger, whale hunting and the destruction of the rain forests.
The lunch crowd came and went and they were still sitting there, trading philosophies. Rafe accidentally caught sight of the time. “Jeez, I didn’t mean to keep you here all day.”
She glanced at the empty tables around them and got a guilty look in her eyes. “You were probably supposed to work this afternoon.”
“Everybody knew where to find me if something went wrong. A little place like this doesn’t present all that many law enforcement challenges.”
Her eyes changed. “Except for Bobby.”
“Well, yeah.” Rafe couldn’t