Hidden in a Heartbeat (A Place Called Home, Book 3) Page 3

  The Far Hills Ranch owner aimed a glare at her foreman that appeared to have no effect on him at all. Her expression warmed to a smile as she turned to Rebecca.

  “Morning, Rebecca. I’d like you to meet my friend, Fran Sinclair.” After the introductions, Marti took up the conversational reins again. “I’m glad to see you came back. I would stay to show you around myself, if I didn’t have an appointment in Sheridan. But I’m sure – ” Another dire glare shot toward Luke. “ – Luke will show you around.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Susland, I’d – ”

  “Marti.”

  “Marti,” Rebecca said with a smile. “I’d like to see as much of the ranch as I can, and hear all the details of the operation, so I can offer you the best set-up for your needs.”

  She was looking at Marti, so she couldn’t see any response from the foreman; maybe it was a guilty conscience that thought he seemed suspicious.

  “I’m sure Luke can help you with everything you need. Tell you what, you get a look around Far Hills with Luke in the next few days, and then you come to lunch Friday, and we’ll see where you’re at by then. Okay, Luke?”

  It wasn’t an order, yet it carried expectations.

  “Marti, this heap isn’t running, and the boys have all the other vehicles.”

  Marti shrugged. “I’m confident you’ll work something out.” She gave Rebecca a look that might almost have been conspiratorial. “Luke’s a wizard with engines. I’m sure he’ll fix this. I’ve got to go now, but here’s a supplement to the Far Hills Banner that might interest you. It’s all about the history around here. Meant to give it to you when we talked yesterday. Kendra wrote it, and Ellyn did the design – they both live here on the ranch with their families, so it was a real family effort.”

  “Thank you. I look forward to looking at it, and learning – ” Rebecca’s polite response almost faltered as Fran Sinclair sent a piercing gaze from Marti to Rebecca and back. What was that about? “ – more about the region’s history.”

  “The research was fascinating. Fascinating,” Marti said. “I found out a lot of things I’d never known, even though I’ve lived here my whole life. It gives an overview of the area’s history plus how Far Hills Ranch was started. You might find that especially interesting – personally interesting.”

  The regional background could be useful for her work. Whatever personal interest she had in the Susland family ranch, however, was its more recent history. Regardless, she expressed suitable thanks.

  “You’re welcome. I’ll see you Friday – noon, okay?”

  “Yes, thank you, Marti. I’d like that.”

  As the two women left, Rebecca turned back to Luke. His easy posture hadn’t changed, even though his mood seemed to have soured, as she heard him mutter something under his breath that sounded like a curse and the word “wizard.”

  “If you don’t think you can fix this old truck, then ...” Rebecca looked over her shoulder to the shiny large green pickup parked near the foreman’s cabin in the distance.

  “I’m not taking my new truck on the range for sight-seeing.” His tone left even less doubt than his words.

  “I can drive my ca – ”

  “That tin can wouldn’t make it a hundred yards off the main roads.”

  She’d selected the car upon her arrival in Wyoming more for low price and high gas mileage than its off-road ability, but she wasn’t ready to give up. “I can ride. If you have a pair of mounts – ”

  “Mounts would take too much time. I’ve got other things that need doing today. Like fixing this old rattletrap. You can wait to see if I can fix it,” he allowed grudgingly.

  She tugged on the inside of her bottom lip with her teeth. Although she’d brought papers to review to make full use of any spare moments, she hadn’t planned on spending more than a portion of the morning here. “How long do you think that’ll take?”

  “Could take all day.”

  “All day?”

  He nodded and she detected satisfaction in the gesture. She wished she could snatch back her words and wring every ounce of dismay out of them.

  “When will you know?”

  “I’ll know better after I try to crank it up.”

  “Then, by all means, crank it up.”

  He pushed off from the bumper and sauntered to the driver’s door. For a man who claimed to have such a full day of work, he certainly didn’t hurry himself.

  Prudently, she stepped to one side before he tried the ignition. It gave her a view of him in the driver’s seat through the curved glass where the windshield turned from the front toward the side.

  The engine coughed once, then roared to raucous life. The truck could probably be impounded for noise pollution, but it most definitely ran.

  “I guess you are a wizard.”

  She grinned as she met his eyes through the windshield. He wasn’t smiling.

  Still, he got the last laugh. He leaned out the open window and announced, “If we’re going to go, you’d best close the hood before you get in.”

  * * * *

  Rebecca Dahlgren of Delaware let out a most unladylike squawk as the top of her head connected with the roof liner of the old truck’s cab again.

  “Shock absorbers are shot,” he called out over the rumble of the engine and the out-of-tune whistles of the wind through the gap between the body and doorframe on his side.

  “I’d surmised that,” came back primly.

  “Springs aren’t much, either.”

  “That,” she pronounced with dignity, “is a criminal understatement.”

  Luke bit back a grin as they jounced over the rutted road.

  Rebecca Dahlgren wasn’t going to be as easy to dismiss as he’d initially hoped – thought.

  Not that he’d given the stranger much real thought. Not after that talk with Marti last night.

  He turned the truck sharply, and beside him, Rebecca braced one hand on the tattered seat, the other on the frame of the glove compartment that had long ago lost its door and both feet against the floor.

  This computer stuff was part and parcel of Marti trying to put Far Hills in his hands. But she wasn’t pushing only the computer.

  And Rebecca Dahlgren of all the women in the world!

  Strait-laced? Hell, she probably used a tape measure to keep her laces the proper distance apart. Her pants would have suited a nun. Or a coalminer. And above them, she had on enough layers to protect a linebacker for the Denver Broncos.

  At least her shoes today were more practical than yesterday’s. Though how she’d thought she could ride – mounts, he mentally snorted – with those clunkers on, he couldn’t imagine. She’d have needed stirrups the size of a basketball hoop to fit those thickly treaded soles.

  He wouldn’t be a living breathing male if he didn’t miss yesterday’s skirt and nylons-clad legs.

  Especially when he’d turned around and spotted her barely an arm’s length away.

  She’d worn a blush and a light in her eyes that he’d seen other women wear ... although at the time those other women hadn’t been wearing anything else.

  And his body reacted the same way. Except this hadn’t been a matter of a couple of adults knowing what they were about to do, and agreeing on what it meant and what it didn’t mean. It had been a proper lady standing in front of him in clothes heavy enough to be armor and no such thoughts anywhere in her starched little soul.

  Then, when he’d meant just to knock her off her MBA stride by pointing out she was apologizing all over the place, she took his words to heart. And that quiet, solemn pledge to try to stop saying I’m sorry. He should have laughed. Why hadn’t he felt like laughing?

  He steered across another rut just for the hell of it.

  A faint oof came from beside him. It turned out to be a preamble.

  “Tell me about Far Hills Ranch.”

  “What about it?”

  “If I knew what to ask, I wouldn’t need to ask.”

  He tasted the
tartness behind her polite tone, and despite himself, he liked the flavor. He discovered a need to look out his side window.

  “Pretend,” she was continuing in that same tone, “that I’m a tourist and that you’re a tour guide. Don’t you think that’s what Ms. Sus – Marti intended?”

  They both knew it was.

  “This is what’s called a cow-calf operation. Calving season’s in early spring. There’s not much sleep then. Some of ‘em need help, especially the heifers – they’re the young cows.”

  In as few words as possible he tried to boil down the cycle of the seasons to breeding, feeding, birthing, seeding, fencing, moving, doctoring, irrigating, branding, haying, weaning, shipping, repairing machines, and more fencing, always fencing, while skipping most of the intricacies and variables that made every day different and unpredictable and frustrating and rewarding.

  A section of fence that appeared to have dropped into Bender Creek caught his eye. They’d finished most of the fencing early this spring, but this section was late to grass up, so when a late spurt of calving, the early branding and an outbreak of stomach flu among his crew had left more work than hours, this got pushed to the “later” list. Now, later had come, and the fence had to be upright before he put cattle out here this fall.

  He flipped down the visor, took the pencil he kept jabbed into a tear in the fabric and made a notation on the piece of paper held by a rubber band wrapped around the visor.

  “So, a cow that produces strong calves year after year is more valuable than one that doesn’t – how do you keep track of that?”

  He turned enough to look at her from the corner of his eye. She’d processed all the information he’d given her and hit the bull’s-eye, so to speak. “We mark them, get to know them. Remember from year to year.”

  “A computer program could certainly help track that. No matter how much you can remember, a computer can remember more. And it can cross-reference the data. A spreadsheet would ...”

  She was off onto an explanation of possibilities that sounded as intricate and frustrating as his job, though he had his doubts about the rewarding part.

  As they crept across a section with ruts even rougher than usual, he found himself listening to her voice instead of the words. He also found himself glancing her way too often for his peace of mind or for this truck’s remnants of a suspension system. He frowned and looked off to the left, and gratefully grabbed the first thing other than Rebecca Dahlgren to occupy his attention – a badly listing section of fence on the north border. Again he dropped the visor, and jotted on the paper.

  She interrupted herself to ask, “What are you keeping track of?”

  “Fences needing fixing.”

  She shifted closer to peer toward the paper. He watched the swing of her shining, dark hair just miss brushing his arm. Even without the touch, it raised the fine hairs there, like a sweet breeze.

  “You have abbreviations for where the fence is?”

  “What?” He’d heard her words, but he was a beat behind putting them together to make sense.

  Still leaning across the seat to look at the paper on the visor, she turned her face toward him.

  Her light brown eyes were alive with problems and solutions, probabilities and certainties. All he could think of, looking from the wide, warm eyes to her wide, full lips, were the possibilities of pleasure there. The certainties of wanting more.

  “Your handwriting’s legible, but I still can’t make sense of this, so I suspect you have a code.”

  “Yeah. Which field, which sides.”

  “How often do you have to repair each fence?”

  “Hard to say.”

  “Try.” That tartness was back. Along with a spark in her eyes that said she wasn’t going to be put off so easily.

  “Some winters are tougher than others on fence. Freezing, thawing, freezing again. Up the mountains, we get wildlife coming through. That can be tough on fence. Some springs we get to all the repairs. Some we don’t.”

  “Surely it would help to have an estimate of how much material you’re going to need for repairs each year. A computer system could offer you a projected range, if that would help.”

  “Would help more if the computer could repair fence, but, yeah, I suppose it would help.”

  She didn’t crack a smile. Much less give off the signs women did when they were interested in exploring those possibilities he’d spotted.

  He’d pegged her from the start.

  It wasn’t just that she came from a different world – as a younger man he’d had a fling or two with wealthy Easterners who’d wanted a taste of the Wild West. Not this one. It stood out all over her.

  Everything serious. Everything proper. Everything by the rules – and she had a million of them. Otherwise she wouldn’t have to keep apologizing for breaking them.

  “I can set up a computer program to track fence repairs, factoring in previous years’ usage as well as weather variables. It would take a few years of data to fine-tune it to an acceptable projection. However, if you have back information, I could set it up to project a rough estimate of materials even before it had accumulated a pertinent data sample.”

  Maybe a computer system wouldn’t be all bad.

  It would shake things up. Maybe that would be good for the operation. But the sort of shakeup Marti was pushing for was another matter entirely. What had gotten into the woman?

  I don’t want to be tied down –

  Nonsense. You’ll never leave.

  Marti didn’t understand him half as well as she thought if she believed that.

  Far Hills Ranch foreman was a job for him – a good job, but that’s all. He didn’t get tied to places. Or people. That road wasn’t for him.

  He stopped the truck, putting it in reverse gear, because the ruts were so deep here that trying to turn could rip a few more vital parts loose from the undercarriage. He slung his right arm over the back of the seat, brushing Rebecca’s shoulder on the way. And tried to ignore her startled expression.

  “What’s wrong? Why are you going backwards?”

  “I’m taking you back to the home ranch. We’ve done enough touring for today. I’ve got work to do. Real work. That’s my job.”

  * * * *

  “Vince? Do you have a few minutes?”

  “Sure, Rebecca, come on in.“

  Rebecca stepped into the commission director’s office and sat in the metal chair that provided the only horizontal surface not covered with books, papers, folders or files. Vince Carling had enough paper packed into the tiny room to account for a small forest. Any piece of information she asked for, though, he retrieved in a flash.

  “I was going to find you in a minute, anyhow,” he was saying. “I talked to the folks up at Little Big Horn, and they said Friday morning would be good. That okay for you?”

  “Yes, that that will be fine.”

  Vince had suggested a trip to the Battle of the Little Big Horn monument to see how the National Park Service interpreted a site from approximately the same era. But that wasn’t what she wanted to talk about now.

  As she told him of her hopes of supplementing her contract at the historical site with one at Far Hills Ranch, his eyebrows ascended toward the glasses he customarily perched on a forehead tactfully termed “high.”

  Twice she found her words heading toward her less-than-successful meetings with the Far Hills foreman. Vince was not only easy to talk to, he seemed to have a rapport with the ranchers whose property surrounded the 1860s site of Fort Big Horn. Maybe he could offer her some insights, some tips.

  Both times she backed away.

  Not because of her unruly body’s response when Luke happened to be leaning into a truck engine. Or sitting in the enclosed space of a truck cab. Or staring at her when she’d thoughtlessly moved too close then turned to face him ...

  She’d thought he was going to kiss her. For one, incendiary flash she’d been certain of it. That flash seemed to lodge inside her,
burning in her throat as she tried to breathe, making each beat of her heart a pulse of heat, simmering low in her belly. It took all her Dahlgren control to not let him see her weakness.

  But that had nothing to do with not bringing the topic up now. No, it boiled down to the roadblock named Luke Chandler not being Vince’s worry. Besides, he might wonder at her determination to secure this job.

  “I can assure you it will not interfere with my work here.”

  Vince’s lips parted, but nothing came out.

  “If you think it’s going to be a problem, Vince . . .”

  “Problem? No, there’s no problem. I was surprised, that’s all. I didn’t think you knew anyone around here. But as for working for Marti, that’s no problem. She’s a big supporter of Fort Big Horn. Backed us all the way on getting this computer system. Was on the search committee that found you, too.”

  “Ah, that explains how Marti came to contact me so quickly.” Rebecca had wondered, but had not been about to question her good fortune.

  “I suppose so. As for the work, your references all say you can do any job you say you can do.” He smiled, and Rebecca relaxed. “It makes sense. With a non-profit like this, it’s not a huge contact and you’ll have down time while we get approval for each phase.”

  “I’m so pleased you feel that way. If at any point – ”

  “Sure, sure, it’ll be fine.”

  The rest of that Tuesday went smoothly and productively. That was a nice change from the start of the day.

  Putting together a proposal for Far Hills Ranch meant starting nearly from scratch: she knew computers, but Luke was right that she knew nothing about ranching. That job, however, was pivotal to her search for the letter-writer. She simply had to get past her ignorance – and past Luke Chandler.

  It didn’t help that she hadn’t gotten much sleep last night, with working late over material from the library – none of it yielding any clues – then getting up early to be at the ranch. She’d have to get up even earlier to get there before Luke started work. She couldn’t afford to waste time. She had a single needle to find in a limitless haystack, and only a few months to do it.

  Her work for Fort Big Horn could stretch some – which would hurt no one since she was paid by the job, not the hour – but only so much. Rebecca had rationalized this job as broadening her professional horizons. To stay beyond the job would be much harder to explain.