Love on the Line (10 page)

“Looks like trouble,” Cain said as they came in sight of the marina at Albion Bay.

On the short stretch of rocky beach north of the marina, Ryan could make out a woman wielding a massive pole net. At first he thought she was trying to net a dog, but as Cain maneuvered closer to the dock, Ryan saw that it was a sea lion. A very big and apparently angry sea lion.

“Grab the dock line and loop it through the cleat,” Cain said to Ryan. “Jackie’s going to need some help with that big boy.”

The four of them jogged down the dock and over to where the woman Cain had called Jackie was trying to net the sea lion.

“Stay back,” she shouted to them.

“Jackie, I’ve helped you do this a dozen times,” Cain said, ignoring her. He turned to Ryan. “Go around to the other side, but keep your distance. I’ll cut the sea lion off at the shoreline. Laurel, Cara, stay put.”

Cain waded into the water and spread his jacket open. To Ryan he looked like some sort of crazed superhero from a video game. The sea lion backed away from the water and moved a few feet up the beach.

“I have it
handled
,” Jackie said.

The animal snorted and lunged for Jackie. She dodged out of the way and the net she’d held fell to the pebbled beach.

“Well, almost handled,” she said with a laughing English accent.

The woman was about to be charged by a four-hundred-pound sea creature and she was laughing?

Ryan grabbed the net and stretched out to hand it back to her.

“You’re taller,” she said to him. “See if you can get the net over him.”

With a move he’d used a hundred times to rope steers, Ryan settled the net over the animal’s head.

“One sea lion about to be freed from a packing strap,” Jackie said.

But the sea lion fought in the net and roared its disapproval. Cain splashed out of the shoreline and helped Ryan and Jackie steady the net against the animal’s forceful bucking.

“Can you grab my case?” Jackie shouted over to where Cara stood with Laurel.

Cara dashed up the shore and grabbed what looked like an oversized tackle box.

“Open it and hand me the syringe on the right.”

Cara pulled a large hypodermic needle from the case. The sea lion lunged through the net at Cara as she approached.

Jackie took the syringe and with a quick, deft move, injected the sea lion, then backed away from its snapping jaws.

“Hold the net tight,” she ordered. “Maybe four or five minutes. That sedative will put him out enough for me to clip off the packing strap and see to his wound.”

The sea lion stopped bucking and slumped to the beach.

“Keep the net on,” Jackie said in a level voice. “I’ll work through it, just in case.”

Cain braced both feet on the rim of the net. “Where’s your rescue crew?”

“Helping out in the Sausalito headquarters today. I was out for a walk on the beach. Lucky thing I had the net in my truck. Another couple days and this guy would’ve been done for. It’s only a few centimeters from severing his artery.” She turned to Cara. “Nice save. I’ve seen you around town, but we haven’t met. I’m Jackie.”

“Cara.”

Jackie turned to Ryan. “I’m your first baseman’s wife,” she said with a grin.

Ryan had known that Alex Tavonesi’s wife headed the Marine Mammal Center and that they’d built a small triage center and research lab just outside of Albion Bay. He actually had Alex to thank for finding his ranch; it was Alex who’d suggested that Ryan look for land up in the area. He’d just never expected to meet her like this.

“And that’s Laurel,” Cain said with a nod up the beach. “She’s... um, she’s—”

“
Crazy
to be going out with you on a day like this,” Jackie finished for him. She clipped the strap and smoothed a thick ribbon of salve on the wound. “You all are.”

She injected the sea lion with a hefty dose of antibiotics and asked Ryan and Cain to help her remove the net. But it had caught under the animal’s front flipper and it took him, Cain, Jackie and Cara to move the sea lion enough to pull the net free.

“Normally I’d have a crew take him down to headquarters,” she said. “But I think he’ll do better in the wild.”

She motioned for them to back away. “We’ll hear if he re-strands.” She put her hands on her hips and stared down at the sea lion. “That light sedative will wear off in about five minutes.” She squatted down and packed up her case. “You the same Ryan that stitched up Belva?”

“Guilty,” Ryan said. “Apparently this town is short of a clinic.”

“We make do,” Cain said.

Ryan heard the defensiveness in his voice and saw Cara brace. He hadn’t meant it as a criticism, but he was an outsider. He’d have to watch his step if he wanted to be accepted into the community.

They watched from up the beach as the sea lion revived. Ryan couldn’t help cheering as it waddled down to the water and swam off.

At his suggestion, the five of them celebrated over cinnamon buns and coffee at the diner. The story of the rescue had already spread around town. Several locals came up to congratulate them and to ask Cain about the best spots for fishing, but Ryan’s attention was on Cara. Though he noticed that Cara asked more questions than she answered, she and Jackie seemed to hit it off. Laurel appeared fascinated by the fast banter between the two women. Jackie watched Cara with a thoughtful look in her eyes.

Before they paid their bill, Laurel offered to volunteer for Jackie’s marine mammal rescue squad. As long as she didn’t ever have to get on a boat, she qualified with a shy laugh.

Ryan was intent on securing another date with Cara. When she rose to leave, he walked with her out of the diner.

“I have a game tonight,” he said as they stepped onto the front sidewalk. “Would you like to come?” He shoved his hands in his pockets. “I could send a driver for you,” he added when she didn’t reply.

She stared at him for a moment and then shook her head.

“That’s kind,” she said, “but I can’t.”

“Tomorrow’s Sunday, it’s a day game. We could have dinner in the city after. There’s a new chef at the Ritz”—he saw her stiffen—“or we could just drive up the coast to The Blue Heron and have some oysters.”

“I really can’t,” she said again.

Maybe she hated baseball.

“How about a hike? There are some good trails that back up to my ranch.”

He was grasping at anything he could think of. Hiking was not an activity high on his list. If he’d gone out hiking on the ranch where his father worked, the hands would’ve thought he was nuts. But right then he would’ve offered up almost anything just to have another opportunity to see her. A hike was a small price to pay.

She laughed. “Okay.” She crossed her arms and shrugged, and an enchanting smile curved into her face. “I thought I’d better stop you before you threw in an offer for hang-gliding.”

He laughed with her, but he felt off balance. One minute she seemed a simple country soul and the next her smooth, sophisticated manner and ability to charm him made him feel like he was dealing with a worldly Cleopatra. She had a damned disturbing way of shifting her behavior and his expectations.

Chapter Eight

Cara pulled up to the gate at Ryan’s ranch. All week she’d considered calling and canceling their date to hike.

It’d been a week from hell.

The school bus blew a tire and scared the daylights out of her, to the delight of Sam Rivers and his friends. If they’d been on anything but a straight stretch of road... Well, she didn’t want to think about what could’ve happened.

Her mother was still insisting on coming out to Albion Bay. Cara had put her off again, but the deferment wouldn’t last.

The details and bother of dealing with her financial life had mushroomed beyond belief. She’d bought herself a reprieve by stalling her decisions, but it was just that, a stall.

And hiding her business was becoming more difficult. Although she’d wisely opened a post office box in a neighboring town, the clerk had eyed the pile of registered letters when she’d gone in to collect her mail. She hoped he wasn’t a talker.

She had few choices for dealing with the mountains of paperwork that settling her grandfather’s estate had generated. When there was that much money to deal with, electronic signatures just wouldn’t cut it. Alston offered to hold her mail and have it delivered twice a week, but the idea of having a convoy of special delivery trucks hauling in and out of her place was appalling. Already that week she’d had to drive into the city twice to meet with Alston and her financial advisor and sign papers that Alston hadn’t felt comfortable sending by mail.

And she hadn’t been sleeping well. Adam Mitchell had started on her decks, and the fumes of the deck stain had given her headaches, keeping her tossing and turning.

But worse than all that, she couldn’t keep her mind off Ryan Rea.

Before he’d shown up in Albion Bay, she’d been fine.
Fine
. Going about her life and living as she chose.

If she were honest, she’d have to admit that it wasn’t the deck fumes keeping her awake. When she’d given up trying to sleep in her bedroom and dragged her duvet outside to her hammock, sleep was far less appealing than remembering the delicious feeling Ryan had fired in her body, than imagining what it might feel like to kiss him or be held in his arms.

But she wasn’t being honest, and it was starting to get to her. For the past three years she’d imagined that she could continue to live quietly and keep the world at bay. More than imagined, she’d done it. But now everything was fraying. The last thing she needed was to complicate her life by getting involved with a flashy guy like Ryan.

But her heart wasn’t as easily put off as attorneys, decisions and family pressure. Though she’d made a life for herself in the sleepy little town, she’d be lying if she didn’t admit she was lonely. She’d thought that developing a community of friends—friends who cared for her, for what she did and not who she was—would be enough.

But every encounter with Ryan told her she was fooling herself.

Somehow he’d stormed her boundaries and thrown open the gates to a place she had no idea how to navigate, a place where a deep yearning held more power than rational thought and her carefully charted plans. The yearning had spread through her like the opposite of a magic spell. Instead of turning everything into sparkling clarity, the feelings muddled her every thought—and drew her deeper in spite of her mind’s objections.

She pressed the buzzer on Ryan’s gate. He ran out of his house and down the drive, flashing his easy smile and moving with the grace and power of a panther. The bolt of desire that flamed through her and the catch of her breath sent her senses into high alert and warned her that Ryan Rea might be damned hard to keep in perspective.

“I thought you might not come,” he said as he opened the gate.

“I got lost,” she said out the window as she drove through.

To his credit, he laughed.

She sure wasn’t going to tell him she’d started out from her cabin and turned back three times.

“Would you like a coffee?” He offered his hand to help her from the car.

Guided by the power of his strong grip, she nearly sprang out of her seat. Nothing about her world seemed normal when she was around him. But normal was beginning to lose its appeal.

“Coffee?” he repeated.

His eyes crinkled at the corners. He had a way of looking at her that made thoughts flee. Finding herself in an oasis, an oasis she hadn’t had to carve out with her wits, was perhaps part of what she loved about being around him. Even if the power and pleasure of it scared the hell out of her.

“I have a new espresso machine.” He offered the crook of his arm in a disarmingly sweet and old-fashioned gesture. She looped her arm through his and felt the steel-hard muscles of his forearm under her palm. “You’ll never want to drink the diner coffee again.”

“How could I refuse?”

They walked toward his house. His steps and hers felt oddly matched, almost dancelike. Still, while her steps might be steady, the surge of her pulse made her feel anything but stable.

“You’ve done so much here in such a short time,” she said, dragging herself back to reality. Maybe it was lack of sleep, but she felt strange, as if she’d drunk some potion marked “bliss” and her body wasn’t used to handling its effects.

“I’m turning this place into a rescue ranch for abused and neglected donkeys. When I was eleven my mom pried me away from baseball for a week and sent me off to a camp on a rescue ranch. I fell in love with the donkeys on the first day.” He shrugged. “My dad will think I’m nuts, but he already does.”

His plans stunned her as much as the steady hammering of her pulse did. People in town had speculated and gossiped about what Ryan might do with the dilapidated Smith place, but no one had guessed anything even close. She’d given a grant just last year to an organization in Nevada that rescued abused donkeys, never imagining such an effort might start up so close to home. Nothing about Ryan fit with the flashy image she’d formed that first day she’d seen him alongside his Bugatti.

“I understand donkeys are very curious,” she said, hoping the flush of heat rising in her face wasn’t too obvious.

“They’re also independent thinkers. And did you know they can live to be over fifty years old?”

She shook her head.

“They’ll be here in a few weeks. Most of the fencing and paddocks are in.” He gestured toward the back pasture. She gawked, couldn’t help it. If he were to extend both arms, they’d reach wider than she was tall. Yet there was a tensile grace to his every move. And, standing near him, she felt as if her own body was caught up in an energy field, energy that sparked with life and mystery. Her reaction confounded her.
He
confounded her.

“The barn still needs work, and some sections of fencing along the perimeter need repair,” he added.

She heard his words and forced herself to snap to. Daydreaming and fantasizing weren’t usually her style.

“Adam is good with old barns,” she said as they stepped up on the porch. “He’s doing some more work at my place.”