April, Dani - Raven's Ranch (Siren Publishing LoveXtreme) (4 page)

“Call me
boss
again,” she teased him. She had kicked off her shoes and brought her bare feet up to rest against the dash of his truck.

“Boss,” he said, and smiled across the seat at her.

“Call me
ma’am
,” she prodded him further, and they both laughed.

“Ma’am,” he repeated for her.

She laughed and nudged him with her bare foot. “You spoil me.”

Normally she hated it when people called her that, but not when Connor did. Somehow when he called her this, she found it sexy in a kinky sort of way.

“The boss always gets spoiled at the Lazy L…
ma’am
.”

She laughed again and rested her head against his shoulder and watched the blacktop pass them by on the endless miles of highway outside the window.

“Tell me more about my ranch?” she asked.

“What would you like to know?”

“Tell me about the other ranch hands? Are they all like you?”

“No, don’t worry about that.” Connor gave a chuckle. “I’m the ugly one.”

“If you’re the ugly one, then I have died and gone to heaven.”

Connor laughed with her and reached an arm around her shoulder, driving the truck with one hand. She cuddled up to him more comfortably. Why couldn’t this road trip with this man just keep going forever? She wouldn’t mind never seeing her ranch if she could just keep driving down this highway in Connor’s arms for the rest of her life.

“Seriously,” she told him. “Tell me something about the other guys.”

“I love those guys,” he said with conviction. “They’re all like brothers to me. On the ranch we’re like one big family.”

“Will they like me?”

“We’ll be there in a couple of hours. We’ll just have to wait and see.”

She pushed him. “That’s not the answer I was hoping for.”

“They’re going to be shocked when they get a look at you.”

“Shocked in a good way or a bad way?”

“It’s going to take some getting used to. You
are
a beautiful woman.”

“Thank you.”

“We’re not used to women on the ranch, beautiful or any other kind. Hell, until I got into the city it had been a year since I’d seen an eligible woman anywhere near my own age.”

“No wonder you’re so shy around me.”

“Hey, I wasn’t shy last night.”

Raven smiled and settled back against his shoulder.

“What kind of guys are they?”

Connor thought about that for a moment. Raven could tell the other guys were really important to him and he enjoyed talking about them.

“They’re all different,” he started. “Chip is the baby of the ranch. He’s probably a year or two younger than you are. He dropped out of high school and came out to work on the ranch a few years back. For a guy his age, he’s very dedicated to his work, and he’s already learned more than most men do after twenty years on a ranch.”

“I think I’ll get along with him,” Raven said. “I know what it’s like to grow up in a small town. I wanted to drop out of high school every day I went there.”

“Then there’s Bran,” Connor continued. “He’s a giant. You won’t believe him until you see him.”

“A giant?”

“I’m not kidding. The guy is close to seven feet tall. He used to be a professional wrestler. I guess he made some pretty good money doing that but didn’t like all the travel. He’s only been with us a little while, but with his size and strength, there’s nothing he can’t do. He’s trying to learn the ropes so he can buy a place of his own someday.”

“He sounds interesting,” Raven mused.

“Then we’ve got Roy,” Connor said and wrinkled his brow. “Roy is the bad boy of the ranch, hell, he’s even the bad boy of the whole county. If there’s any trouble to be had, Roy will find a way to get it. He smokes, he drinks, he fights, he gambles.”

“Why in the world do you all let him stay on?” Raven asked, wondering if she would like this one.

“Because he’s the hardest worker we have and hands down the best hand on the ranch. We’d be lost without him.”

“So I shouldn’t fire him right away?”

“That’s up to you,
boss
?” And they both laughed again when he called her the name, a running joke established between them during the long hours of driving.

“Then we’ve got Tyler,” Connor continued, talking about his ranching family. “Tyler is the guy with the big heart. He’s the nicest guy you’d ever want to meet. The other guys are always kidding him about being a big pussy. Thing is, however, about three years back his wife was killed in a car accident. They hadn’t been married very long, and she was pregnant at the time. He sold his own ranch then and came out to work for us. Poor guy has never gotten over it.”

“My God, that’s really sad,” Raven exclaimed. “I used to know Tyler. I remember him from when I was a kid. He had a small ranch to the northwest of the Lazy L.”

“That’s the one.”

“I think he was about ten years older than me. I remember he was, like, the youngest rancher around at that time. I always had a schoolgirl crush on him. I thought he was the handsomest man I’d ever seen. I remember he had a girlfriend back then, and I wanted to grow up to be just like her someday.”

“Yeah,” Connor said, his voice tinged with regret. “He married his girlfriend, and she’s the one who died.”

“Help me to fit in with these guys, Connor,” she said, gripping his chest. “I want to fit in with them. I want to be a part of the family.”

“The guys will love you, Raven,” Connor said, and his voice took on a serious tone. “I’m just afraid they’ll love you too much.”

Before sunset, they pulled into the valley where the Lazy L had been located for five generations of her family. The ranch was practically in the mountains. It was at a higher elevation than what she was used to, and the oxygen became thinner, and her mind relaxed, and she felt at peace with the world.

To both the north and south were five-thousand-foot mountains, and further to the west, rolling foothills built up to a six-thousand-foot giant only ten miles away. The sky above had never looked so big, and away from the city smog it became a rich blue with every white fluffy cloud rolling across it, taking on the vestige of a passing angel walking across heaven.

Raven remembered when she had been out here before as a girl, how she had always been amazed at how far she could see in the distance, and the stark colors of the ground, green and brown, sometimes black, broken in places by passing creeks and uneven hills. Mostly wide open land for the cattle, the one or two little patches of light forest contrasted with the flat, rolling plain, and brought beautiful shadows across the meadows as the sun made its daily trip across the sky overhead.

They pulled up in front of her grandfather’s house. It was not at all as she had remembered it.
Dilapidated
was the word that came to mind when she first saw it. It was badly in need of paint. Weeds covered the front yard at unruly angles, and one side of the roof looked as if it might cave in at any moment.

Climbing out of Connor’s truck for the first time in four hours, Raven stretched her legs and walked around the ruin of the old home.

“What happened?” she asked him. “Did a tornado hit it or what?”

“Sorry,” Connor told her, stepping up to her side. “I forgot to mention that. Your grandpa wasn’t real good about keeping his place up, mostly because he hadn’t lived there in years.”

“Why would he let it get like this?” she asked, the disappointment flooding her voice. “This place is terrible.”

“He told me the place held too many painful memories for him after your grandmother died, and then your mom died, and you abandoned him for life in the city. He said he felt lonely when he was inside that house, and so he never came here. I think it had probably been ten years since he laid eyes on this place.”

“Well then where did he live?” Raven asked, starting to feel desperate.

Connor coughed and cleared his throat. “He lived down the road a spell. You got to remember that the Lazy L covers more than thirty miles.”

“I’m almost afraid to ask, but what about the rest of the ranch?”

“Don’t worry,” Connor tried to reassure her with a smile. “The rest of the ranch is actually in top-of-the-line condition. It’s just this old house here that needs to be put to the wrecking ball.”

“So tell me where I’m going to stay?” she asked, not liking the situation.

“You can stay in Mr. Spencer’s trailer,” Connor told her. “That’s where he lived. It’s parked next to the guys’ trailers. He was the boss, but he was also one of the guys. So he bunked down with us.”

Raven started to climb the wooden steps leading to the front porch, the creaking of unsteady planks sounding beneath her feet. Connor put a protective hand on her arm and held her from going farther.

“I wouldn’t,” he told her. “This old porch looks like it could fall in any minute.”

“I find this really depressing,” she told him, as tears welled in her eyes. “Half of my childhood is in this house. This old home is as dead as the rest of my family.”

“We’re your family now, Raven,” Connor told her, his arm going around her shoulder. “Me and the other guys on the Lazy L
are
your family.”

“This is going to be harder than I thought,” she said, gripping his hand.

She stood back from the house, out in the front yard with the high weeds rising to her knees and stared at the house for a long while, trying to remember it as it had been many years before. She walked around the side to get a view of the rest of the place. The backyard and the big back porch were in just as bad of shape.

As the wind blew off the mountains to the west, a gutter running along the roof, loosened from lack of care, banged against the side of the house. The sound it made was loud as she stood directly beneath it.

Connor came with her at her side and held her hand. She was happy to have him at that moment, have his strength. If he had not been standing at her side, then she probably would have gotten in the truck and driven back to Chicago without stopping.

“You sure the rest of the ranch isn’t going to be like this?” she asked him.

“No, it’s not. But like I told you before, the financial end of it is pretty messed up. We’re the only private ranch left out here in these parts. The rest have all been bought out by corporations. That makes it pretty hard to compete.”

“Okay, let’s get out of here,” Raven said with a sigh, giving up on the old house. “Show me where I’m sleeping.”

“The trailer park is only a few more miles down the road,” Connor told her as he led her back to his truck. “Don’t worry, your trailer is the biggest and the nicest.”

She put her arm around his lower back as they stepped over the weeds. His body still felt delightful to her, but touching him made her think about something that had been gnawing at the back of her mind all day as they neared the ranch on the highway.

“Connor,” she started, “now that we’re finally here we should probably talk about our sleeping arrangements.”

“I think I know what you mean,
boss
.”

She laughed and nuzzled into his big shoulder as they walked. “Stop that, you idiot.”

“Seriously, I was thinking about that same thing.”

“I don’t think we should sleep together while we’re on the ranch,” she told him. “At least not for a while. I think it would set a bad example for the other ranch hands. I’m afraid they would think I’m a ranch slut or something. Here I am moving out here to be the boss, and the first thing I do is start to screw my foreman. It just wouldn’t look right and might get me off to a bad start with the guys.”