His Bodyguard. Muriel Jensen
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Ferris, whose property had bordered the ranch. They would never miss treating themselves to a burger, fries and Coke at the café. While they ate, they would boast about their dreams for the future.
“I’m going to be a country-western star with babes following me everywhere I go,” Bill would say.
Amos had envied Bill’s single-mindedness. “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” Amos would say. “Be an architect, maybe. Something like that. And I’m gonna get rich. Yeah. Really rich.”
Like Bill’s dreams of stage-door babes, Amos had been sure that success in business would mean the company of women. And as a fifteen-year-old boy with raging hormones, he’d been convinced that would make up for being alone in the world. He just needed women.
The court had emancipated him at seventeen so that he could go east to college on a scholarship. He’d earned his degree in psychology with a minor in engineering—an odd combination of interests that had served him well when he turned his fascination with toys into a business.
In the years since then, he’d made friends, money and love to a number of women, but the heart of him still felt disconnected from the rest of the world. Set apart. Lonely.
The sound of country-western music and the buzz of conversation punctuated by loud laughter brought him back to the moment. He headed for the counter when he heard a voice call out from behind him.
“Pike?”
He turned to find a tall man in jeans and a Western shirt standing by a table in the middle of the room, a cautious grin on his face.
“You are Amos Pike?” the man asked. Everyone was staring at him, women particularly.
It took Amos a minute to connect the tall, broad-shouldered man with an air of celebrity to Bill Bartell, the childhood friend with whom he’d shared hamburgers and dreams of the future.
Laughing, Amos changed direction and walked into his old friend’s back-slapping embrace.
“Hell!” Bill exclaimed, taking a step back to admire Amos’s well-cut suit. “You did get rich, judging by the look of you.”
“And you got famous. I saw your duet with Alan Jackson in the video for Farm Aid. I suppose you do have babes following you everywhere.”
They sat down on opposite sides of the table. For the first time Amos noticed another man seated at a right angle to him.
“Well, Amos,” the man said, his aristocratic features elusively familiar. “Cutter Brown. You and I had kitchen detail together one month, remember? We were fencing with the brooms and managed to break all the juice glasses.”
Amos laughed again, remembering the incident clearly. “We were grounded for a week.”
“Yeah. As I remember it, we spent most of the time under the big table in the laundry room playing Lego.”
Amos remembered that. The smells of detergent and fabric softener had made it an unusually sweet-smelling construction site. “What are you doing now?”
“I’m a developer,” Cutter replied with a dry glance in Bill’s direction. “Not the babe-magnet job our buddy has. I know you’re the ultimate toy maker. I read about you in Forbes. How’d you get into that?”
“Completely by accident. Titus Toys offered me an internship after college because I had a degree in psychology and they were planning to revamp their personnel tests and evaluations. One slow afternoon I was talking baseball stats with one of the designers, who happened to mention a problem he was having with the movement on an animated tiger. I helped him rework the structure, got a friend to help on the circuitry, and that was it. They transferred me to design.”
Bill raised a hand for the waitress. Amos ordered a burger and fries. His only concession to the intervening years was coffee rather than Coke.
“Well, I can’t imagine you city slickers are going to make half the money in the sale barn that I am.” Bill punctuated the boast with a tauntingly disdainful look at his companions. “I mean, you might look good in the society pages, but in the clinches, let’s get real. Women want sex appeal and muscle. And you just don’t find that in a three-piece suit.”
Cutter sent Amos a challenging look across the table. “We going to let him get away with that?”
Amos rolled his eyes. “He’ll get set straight when we earn twice what he does. Poor man doesn’t even know that women appreciate style and polish as well as muscle.”
“Probably because he’s never had any,” Cutter added.
“Yeah.”
Bill dug into an inside jacket pocket and produced a hundred dollar bill. “This says you’re wrong, and I earn a higher bid than either of you. Can you match it?”
Amos found two fifties and slapped them on top of Bill’s hundred. Cutter wrote a check and added it to the pile.
“Who holds the bet?” Cutter asked.
Bill handed it to him. “Give it to Lindsay Duncan in the morning.” Lindsay was the daughter of the man who’d founded Lost Springs Ranch for Boys and was its current owner. “Whoever wins donates it to the cause in his name. Deal?”
They mounded hands in the middle of the table as they used to do when they were boys.
“So.” Cutter tucked the money into his pocket. “Nobody’s been married?”
Amos and Bill shook their heads.
“Engaged?”
Two more noes.
Amos leaned back in his chair as the waitress arrived with their food. When she left again, he pounded out a blob of ketchup and passed the bottle to Bill. “How have you managed to avoid the groupies?”
Bill grinned slyly. “I don’t avoid them entirely. The right one hasn’t come looking for me yet.”
Cutter frowned as he accepted the ketchup bottle. “Aren’t you supposed to go looking for her?”
Bill shrugged. “Too busy rehearsing.”
Cutter put the ketchup aside. “And you, Amos? I can’t believe toys are more fun than women.”
“They’re not. But they’re easier to deal with. I haven’t found the right woman, either.”
“And the right one would be?”
“Beautiful, amusing, nymphomaniacal—and a great cook.” He dipped a french fry into the ketchup. “I’m sure she’s just around the corner.”
His companions laughed at his prerequisites, then sobered.
“She sounds perfect,” Bill said.
Cutter nodded. “If we’re lucky, she’s a triplet.”
* * *
LORD, IT WAS HOT. Meg, accustomed to breezy San Francisco, walked the grounds of the Lost Springs Ranch for Boys and looked around desperately for shade.
The place was filled with people. Children wielding water guns ran across the grass with barking dogs in pursuit. Meg would have welcomed a good soaking herself. There were booths and tables offering crafts for sale and advertising services. The air smelled of ribs and chicken grilling on an open pit, and something fresh and wild—some herb or grass she wasn’t familiar with.
Her father looked up from a display of leatherwork, but except for a brief double-take at her appearance, he pretended not to notice her. He’d insisted on coming along to be certain everything went according to plan so that he could report back to Ms. Boradino.
Meg put her hands in the pockets of her jumper and walked on, liking the freedom and comfort of her short jumper—or, rather, Becky’s short jumper—and her low-heeled white sandals.
She’d caught her hair back in the clip and put