Chapter Two

      Austin battled the frustration eating at him from the inside as he walked back toward the house. For some reason that escaped him, he’d just agreed to let a woman who barely came up to the midway point on his chest have the time to haul all his grandparents’ belongings away by herself. When she’d said that the piles of stuff could be useful, he’d been jerked back to his childhood, to when his grandmother had explained they couldn’t throw anything out because they might need it someday.

      Most of the time he couldn’t remember what her voice sounded like, but he could hear her say that clear as day in his memory.

      Even as a little boy, he’d known that there was no use for a black-and-white television that no longer worked or dozens of plastic butter containers that had been washed after the butter was eaten then stashed in the kitchen cabinets. What Ella Garcia saw in a lifetime of hoarding, he had no idea. And he didn’t care as long as she got it out of his sight.

      He fought against the urge to haul everything outside and set it on fire. But his rational brain managed to beat down that visceral need. While he might want it all gone now, realistically what did a few more days matter? It wasn’t as if he didn’t have enough work around the place to keep him busy while Ella toted away everything.

      He stopped at the corner of the house and took a couple of deep breaths, ashamed that he let being here upset him so much. He needed to focus on things other than the past—things like fixing the sagging gutters on the house, checking the fencing around the ranch to see if it needed repairs, doing research to figure out what asking price he should shoot for when he talked to a real estate agent.

      Movement out of the corner of his eye drew his attention. Ella Garcia hurried up the front steps of his grandparents’ house. Now that he had a plan for clearing out the house and surrounding buildings, it was as if a layer of distraction that had been blinding him to her physical appearance had been peeled away.

      Damn if he didn’t feel his blood rush a little bit faster in his veins as he watched her fit legs carry her up the steps and toward the front door. As if they had a mind of their own, his eyes made a quick perusal up her legs and over her backside, all the way up to where she’d pulled her dark, curly hair into a pseudo ponytail on the back of her head. And his very male eyes liked what they saw, sending a message south to react accordingly.

      Austin cursed under his breath. He already had about a dozen helpings too much on his plate. The last thing he needed was to be attracted to Ella. In a few days, his time in Blue Falls would be up and he’d be back in Dallas, where he wouldn’t feel as if the world was caving in on him.

      Needing to fill his mind with anything other than Ella Garcia’s curves, he retraced his steps to the barn. While he didn’t want to walk inside, he needed a ladder if he was going to start work on the gutters. At least the barn wasn’t as bad as the house, he told himself as he stepped into the dim interior.

      Luck was finally on his side when he spotted a ladder hanging on the wall about halfway down the alleyway. He started in that direction but paused when he reached Duke, his grandfather’s sorrel stock horse.

      “Hey, fella,” he said as he scratched between Duke’s ears. He smiled when he thought about how the horse had gotten his name, after John Wayne.

      Austin’s grandfather must have seen each of Wayne’s movies at least a hundred times. The old VCR tapes were likely buried under fifty pounds of other stuff inside the house. Despite the happy memory of watching those movies with his grandfather, he didn’t want the tapes. But he did sometimes find himself flipping channels at home or on a business trip and stopping to watch The Searchers or The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

      His heart squeezed at the fact that he’d never again be able to talk to his grandfather, the man who’d been so much more than a grandparent to him. Dale Bryant had been the only father he’d ever known.

      As if Duke could read Austin’s thoughts, he lifted his head and bumped it against Austin’s hand.

      “You miss him, too, don’t you?”

      Duke let out a sad-sounding snort as if to give an affirmative answer.

      Austin rubbed his hand along Duke’s neck. “We’ll go out for a ride tomorrow, boy.” He let his hand drop away and made his way down the narrow path between wooden crates and old ranch equipment to reach the ladder.

      But when he reached it, the crumbling wooden rungs made it obvious that he wasn’t going to be using it to clean and fix the gutters. “Damn it.”

      “Something wrong?”

      He spun toward the entrance to see Ella’s petite form backlit by the strong sunlight outside.

      “Useless ladder.” He pointed toward where it hung on an old metal hook.

      “I have one you can borrow. No need to get another if you’re not keeping the place.”

      His instinct was to decline. Though when he stopped to think about it, that didn’t make sense. What did make sense was not buying a ladder that he’d be using for only a few days, one that he couldn’t transport in his car anyway.

      “Thank you. I appreciate that.”

      “No problem.” She held up something. “I found this and a bunch of other toys. I thought maybe they were yours when you were a kid and, well, you might want to keep them?”

      It took him a moment to figure out that she was holding the engine to the wooden train set he’d had as a young boy. He hadn’t even seen that in probably twenty years. For a split second, he thought maybe... He shook his head. “No. Like I said, there’s nothing here I want. If you find things you can’t use, I’m happy to pay you to haul them away. Or leave them and I’ll have a trash crew come in and get the rest.”

      She glanced at the toy in her hand, and he’d swear he saw a flicker of sadness in her expression. Maybe she was just one of those people who got attached to things. He wasn’t. Things had to be useful, a means to an end. There was no other reason to have them.

      And yet there was some strange part of him that wanted to keep the train engine simply because she evidently wanted him to for some reason. Crazy.

      “Okay,” Ella finally said. “I’ll bring the ladder with me tomorrow unless you need it sooner. I could take a small load of stuff home then come back with it.”