Authors: Hope Navarre
“So the story about helping your uncle was bogus?”
“No. I'm actually helping him out.” She rubbed her fingertips between her eyebrows, soothing the frown that had formed there. “It gives me something to focus on.”
“Seems to me you have a lot to focus on.”
“Something else,” Ellie amended. “I need something to occupy my brain so I don't spend all my time worrying about the future.”
“I've never known you not to have a carved-in-stone plan,” Kate said, and again Ellie could hear the concern in her voice.
“Amen,” she said softly. Everything in her life had fallen into place because she'd always had a plan. “I can't stay here forever.”
“Of course not,” Kate said.
“I'll have to find a job, a new place to live until my sublet contract expires.”
“You can move in with me.”
“I'd like to be able to pay my part of the rent,” she said drily.
“You'll be able to get a job.”
“I'm pregnant.”
“You can't be refused employment because of that.”
“Not officially,” Ellie said. She knew of people who had landed jobs while pregnant, but in a tight job market it wasn't exactly a point in her favor. She could keep it secret if she interviewed before she ballooned up, but that was no way to start a positive working relationship with a new employer. “I have a lot to figure out, but I'm feeling better about it than I was only a week ago. Plus I'm getting a lot of fresh air. How are you doing?”
“Well, after that bombshell, the stuff in my life seems pretty mundane....” Kate sighed. “I just wish you were closer so I could help you out.” There was real warmth in her voice and not for the first time, Ellie counted the one blessing that was the direct result of being dumped at boarding school. Having a real mother would have been cool, but a friend like Kate was the next best thing.
* * *
E
LLIE
BARELY
SLEPT
after she'd confessed her pregnancyâprobably because now that she'd told her best friend, she had to tell her mother. Finally, around 4:00 a.m., she picked up her phone from the nightstand, knowing that with the time difference on the east coast Mavis would be out of bed.
“Ellie,” Mavis said upon answering, “why on earth are you calling at 6:00 a.m.? You know this is my yoga time.”
“I'm calling because I knew I could catch you now,” Ellie said. And because the thought of making this call was eating a hole in her stomach.
“Is there a problem?”
“There's news,” Ellie said. “I'm pregnant.”
The long silence she'd anticipated followed her blunt announcement. Ellie heard the sound of her own breathing as she waited for a reaction.
“Well,” Mavis finally said. “That is news.”
“There's more. I have no relationship with the father and don't intend on having one. He wants nothing to do with the baby.”
She heard her mother inhale deeply before proclaiming, “This is not what I expected of you, Ellie, but it's your life.”
“I made a mistake, Mom.”
“Obviously.”
Ellie waited, but when Mavis said nothing more, she added, “I quit my job and I'm staying on Angela and Milo's Montana property.” She realized then that she was trying to push her mother's buttons with this recitation of blunt facts, trying to get some kind of a reaction. An explosion. An indication that she was concerned.
Something,
for Pete's sake.
“I see.”
Ellie could almost see her mother staring off into the distance, brushing her hair back with one hand as she did when she was anxious to get on with her own affairs. “Don't you even want to know how far along I am? When the baby will be born?”
“How far along are you, Ellie? When will the baby be born?”
Tears stung Ellie's eyes. This was useless. “The baby will be born in February.”
“February.” Mavis cleared her throat and for a moment Ellie thought she was going to say something important. Instead she said, “That should give you time to get a new job. I'm sure you'll do fine in that regard, but if you need any financial help, I'll be happy to assist.”
“Thank you, Mom,” Ellie said, wishing she could reach out and shake her mother a few times, get her full attention.
“I take it Angela has known for some time?”
Ellie sucked in a breath and then confessed, “She was easier to call than you.”
“Of course she was,” Mavis said briskly. “Well, if you need anything, please call.”
“I will.”
“Goodbye, Ellison.”
“Goodbye.”
Ellie leaned back against the pillows, still holding the phone loosely in one hand. The conversation had gone exactly as she'd thought it would, so it shouldn't have hurt.
Shouldn't have, but it did.
* * *
R
YAN
COULDN
'
T
REMEMBER
the last time he'd had such a rotten practice. Yes, he was dealing with out-of-the-blue complicated shit he didn't need right now, but he'd always been able to push issues aside and focus on his craft. He thought he'd been doing that last night, but his times had sucked.
It was on the drive home that he'd realized roping felt different now that his brother was no longer in the picture. He'd lost his past two rodeos, and while it bothered him, it didn't eat at him the way losing had when Matt was competing. He didn't feel like a failure. For as long as he could remember, he'd competed against Matt. It was what he did. He beat his brother...or his brother beat him. And now the game had changed. So was it just the shock of discovering how fast things could change that made things feel off? Or had his only motivation been beating his brother, which seemed pretty damned shallow?
It was something to think about...something besides the freaking lawyer's mystery call.
Ellie wasn't waiting at the truck the next morning as promised when Ryan came out of his house, so he tried the law offices, once again getting the voice mail giving their hours. What happened to the eighty-hour attorney workweeks he'd heard about? He did not want to spend the day wondering why these guys wanted to speak to him, but it looked as if he had no choice.
As he pocketed his phone, Ellie came out of the house wearing close-fitting jeans and the same hooded sweatshirt as the day before. She shoved her hands into the pockets as she walked across the flagstones, head down. She looked exhausted. Her gaze came up as she stepped onto the gravel, meeting his as if she'd been well aware he'd been studying her.
“Sorry I'm late,” she said. “I overslept.”
“Me, too.”
“What's that for you? Four a.m.?” she asked grumpily.
“Five,” he said as she came to a stop in front of him, hands still deep in her sweatshirt pockets.
“What are we doing today?”
“Putting new posts into the holes we took the old posts out of yesterday.” He motioned to the truck with his head. “You can drive, I'll load.”
A few minutes later Ellie pulled the truck up to the post pile and sat in it while he loaded thirty posts. She acknowledged him with a look when he got back inside, then put the truck in gear and headed for the pasture gate.
“Something wrong?” he finally asked. She shook her head without looking at him, which told him, yeah, something was wrong.
“Why?”
“You seem preoccupied,” he explained.
“I'm fine.” She made an obvious effort to speak lightly. “Just tired after being in the sun all day yesterday.”
“I didn't think you were going to show this morning.”
Her gaze jerked toward him. “Why not?”
She sounded so insulted that he felt like smiling. Wisely, he did not. “You made your point yesterday. You did a day's work.”
“The deal was for a week.”
“We never shook on it,” he said.
Ellie took her right hand off the wheel and shoved it toward him, meeting his eyes dead-on as she did so. “Fine. Let's shake.”
* * *
E
LLIE
'
S
HAND
HOVERED
and she was starting to feel foolish, but she wasn't going to have him thinking that her word was no good. After a second's pause, Ryan took her hand, closing his warm, callused fingers around hers, causing unexpected heat to unfurl deep inside her. She had the sudden urge to pull her hand back while she still could, but it was overpowered by an even stronger urge to leave her fingers right where they were. What would the pleasantly rough fingers feel like on her body?
“Deal?” she asked, glad that her voice sounded so steady.
“Deal.”
“I don't shirk my commitments,” she muttered, putting her hand back on the wheel, still feeling the warmth of his touch. “I'm not that spoiled.”
“I shouldn't have said that,” Ryan acknowledged. “And I apologize. Spoiled women don't spend the day in the sun fencing. And they don't staple race.”
“What?” Ellie pulled to a stop in front of the gate. “Staple race?”
“You were trying to pull staples faster than me yesterday.”
“I was not.” He met her eyes, a wanna-bet gleam in his. Ellie tried to keep from blushing, but felt color creeping into her cheeks despite her best efforts. Damn fair skin. “What if I was?”
“Nothing.” Ryan got out of the truck.
“It kept me from getting bored,” she said as soon as she'd driven through the gate and he'd gotten back inside. “How do
you
keep from getting bored?”
“I don't know. I guess I just get into the zone. Sometimes I visualize.”
“Visualize what?”
“Roping. I go through everything in my head over and over and over.” He shrugged. “It seems to work.”
“I looked you up on the internet,” she said. It had been something to do last night when she was having trouble going to sleep after calling Kate. “Quite an impressive career. I have no idea what the stats mean, but apparently you're doing something right.”
“Does that mean I can have my days off this week?”
She knew he wasn't really askingâthat he would take them anywayâso she said, “As long as you're covered.”
“I'm covered. You can even go out with Lonnie, if you want...but he'd probably be a fumbling tongue-tied mess. Maybe you'd better wait until I come back.”
He smiled at her and Ellie felt herself smile back. Warmth flowed through her and she told herself it was gratitude. He had no idea how glad she was that he was keeping her talking, which in turn kept her from thinking about her fun-filled early-morning hours.
Ellie had developed a whopper of a headache from replaying the conversation with her mother. And even after the headache had faded, she kept going back to Mavis's comment about it being her life.
Yes, it was. Her life. Emphasis on
her.
All by herself. It'd been like that for almost as long as she could remember.
“Ellie?”
Ellie glanced over at Ryan, wondering from the way he was looking at her if he'd had to say her name more than once. “Yes?”
“I'm going to have you drive along the fence line and I'll drop off posts. Just go slow.”
“Sure.”
Ryan climbed into the back and she put the truck in gear, focusing on slow. Slow was good. Fast had gotten her into trouble.
For once in her life she'd wanted to do something without planning, to be impulsive...and she'd gotten burned in a big way. Which wasn't fair because Kate had escaped unscathed more times than she could count.
Well, you're not Kate.
But if she had been Kate, she would have at least had a supportive family. While at boarding school Kate had been a townieâshe'd gone home for the weekends. Eventually she'd gotten permission to take Ellie with her. Ellie loved Kate's family.
“I might be all you have,” she muttered to her midsection as Ryan threw off the first post and it landed with a hollow thud. “But I will be there for you.”
Even if her maternal instinct never kicked in, as Mavis's never had, she would fake it. She'd win an award faking it.
Another post hit the ground. Ellie looked into her rearview mirror to see Ryan's long, strong legs as he balanced himself near the tailgate. “Hey!” she heard him yell, and realized the truck was drifting.
“Sorry,” she called back. She held a steady course down the rest of the fence line, slowing to a stop after Ryan had pushed off the last post. She turned off the engine and pushed open the door, looking at the long line of posts.
“There's a lot,” she said.
“We'll do half today.”
“And then?”
“I have to check a couple stock ponds.” He pulled a bucket out of the back of the truck and then handed Ellie a strange two-handled contraption as if he expected her to know what to do with it. “It'll be an easy way to end the day.”
Ellie put a hand on each of the wooden handles and moved them back and forth, opening and closing the two-part metal cylinder on the end. “To clean out the holes?” She was guessing.
“Yep,” he said. “That's your job.”
“These do not have a history of injuring people?” she asked.
“They'll blister your hands if you don't wear gloves.”
Ellie smiled at him as the wind blew little wisps of hair across her face. She was growing to like this guy, but even as the thought struck her, she tamped it back down.
As the morning wore on, Ellie realized that she was engaging different unused muscles than the ones she'd used the day before, and that she was going to be sore again tonight. But she wasn't sitting alone in the ranch house thinking, and if she spent time out like this, she'd be in a better position to understand the ranch-consultant recommendations. A week working in the field wasn't much, but it was better than no experience at all, and she had to admit that Ryan had had a good idea when he'd suggested thisâalthough she was fairly certain his objective had been to make her uncomfortable. He had no idea how much she'd needed to get out of that house.