Overprotective Cowboy: A Mulbury Boys Novel (Hope Eternal Ranch Romance Book 2)

by Elana Johnson

  Emma wasn’t exactly overweight, but that was because she worked really hard at not letting herself develop bad habits. The truth was, she’d lost ten pounds in the past year, after gaining twenty-five the year before.

  The weight didn’t come off as fast as it went on, that was for dang sure, especially the closer to forty she got. She didn’t recover as easily from a busy day either, and if she didn’t get enough sleep? She couldn’t catch up without literally snoozing all day on the weekends.

  This weekend, she had another trip to San Antonio on her calendar, and she swiped open her phone to check which hotel she’d book for herself. She stayed in a different one whenever she went, and she’d never used the same name twice.

  She always paid in cash, and she’d even thought about renting a different car every other weekend when she went to visit her daughter. If anyone watched her for very long, they’d easily see she went to San Antonio on the second and fourth weekends of every month. Month after month, for years.

  She’d made that deal with Ginger the day she’d shown up on the ranch, asking about the administrative job. She’d never told Ginger what she was doing, because Ginger assumed she was going to visit her family.

  They’d talked a lot about family and the importance of it, and Emma hadn’t lied. She was going to see her family—just not the family Ginger knew about.

  Her sisters had never asked her to come visit, and Emma probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. Sally and Meredith were like Mary Poppins—practically perfect in every way. They both had husbands with respectable jobs, and families of boys and girls—the exact same number of each.

  Sally had two boys and two girls, while Meredith only had one of each. They all still lived in Lincoln, a posh little suburb of Dallas, where her parents still resided as well.

  Only Emma had broken the mold and dared to move outside city limits. Only Emma hadn’t been married. Only Emma didn’t have the perfect family unit to bring home on holidays and anniversaries.

  She’d never told her parents or either of her sisters about Missy either. She’d wanted to, and she’d even called Meredith, the oldest sister, to tell her. But their mother had called in, and Meredith had made it a three-way call.

  She’d said, “Em was just going to tell me something.”

  “Oh?” their mother had asked. “I’m sure it’s just something about one of her students. You’ll never guess what I learned from Margaret today. Her daughter is pregnant!”

  “Oh, no,” Meredith had moaned. “Not Ginny. She’s not even married. She should give that baby up for adoption.”

  They’d continued their conversation while Emma sat there and listened, horrified. No way she could tell them now.

  She wasn’t married. She was pregnant. And yes, it had to do with one of her students…and his father.

  She’d hung up silently, and Meredith hadn’t even noticed for another twenty minutes.

  The doorbell rang, and Emma was glad for the distraction. She didn’t like to dwell on negative things, but they’d all been stirred up with three simple words.

  Have we met?

  She left the rest of her salad on her plate and went to get the door. They didn’t get a lot of visitors to the ranch, and Emma couldn’t remember the last time she’d used this door. She expected to see a salesman standing on the porch when she opened the door, and she regretted interrupting her lunch to do it.

  There wasn’t anyone on the front porch anyway. “Hello?” Emma stepped out onto the porch, her eyes scanning the front yard and the dirt lane beyond, the trees, all of it.

  A blue truck sat at the fence just beyond the grass, but Emma couldn’t see anyone sitting behind the wheel. No one walked down the sidewalk or the road. She looked left and right, wondering how someone could ring the doorbell and then disappear so quickly. They’d have to positively fly down the steps and around the corner of the house.

  She hated pranks and jokes, because making someone else feel stupid wasn’t funny. She eased back into the house and closed the door, locking it behind her. The air conditioning blew, and Emma was surprised she hadn’t heard Frisco yowl when it had clicked on. The cat didn’t like the sudden whoosh of air, and sometimes he ran under Emma’s desk as if the devil was trying to get in through the vents.

  Instead of returning to the kitchen, Emma edged over to the front window, which was a bay. It jutted out, and she moved to the other side before barely cracking the blinds, so she could see the whole front yard, the blue truck, the fence, and the road beyond.

  That blue truck hadn’t been there earlier—at least Emma didn’t think so. She wasn’t sure. There were so many trucks on the ranch, and she didn’t even know if it belonged to Hope Eternal or not.

  She held very still, her heart pounding in the back of her throat, and watched the landscape in front of her. Literally nothing moved. It was just another normal day, full of sunshine and blue sky, with the breeze gently disturbing the grass.

  No one used the front yard unless Nate was throwing a ball for Ursula so Connor would cheer up. Everyone loved Ginger’s German shepherd, Emma included. Well, Frisco wasn’t a fan of the big dog, but even they got along okay.

  Suddenly, a man emerged from the corner of the house, and he didn’t glance left or right as he went. He carried a clipboard and a handheld instrument, and Emma thought perhaps he was checking the meters on that side of the house. Energy or water or something. People did that, right?

  But why would he ring the doorbell?

  She watched as the man went over the fence instead of through the gate. Odd, Emma thought. He did look around suspiciously then, and he turned and looked right at the house. Emma sucked in a breath and shrank back, but there was no way he could see her.

  She inched forward again, trying to memorize his face. He was white, and he stood almost as tall as the truck. He wore a blue baseball cap with a white letter D on it, and she wasn’t sure what team that was for.

  He had on jeans and boots, but not the cowboy kind. The oddest thing was his jacket. It was nowhere near cold enough to wear a bulky denim jacket with fleece lining. He was definitely hiding something.

  From this distance, she’d call his hair brown, and she couldn’t see his eyes.

  She squinted as if that would help her see better, but she still couldn’t get any more distinguishing features. She’d left her phone next to her uneaten salad, and she wished she had it to snap a quick picture. She wanted one of the man and his truck, and she frantically searched for his license plate as he opened the door and got behind the wheel.

  There was no license plate on the front bumper. He backed out and turned, and Emma noticed a logo on the side of the truck. A large grasshopper.

  She started to relax; he was the pest control guy, and he’d probably wanted to drop off the bill before he left. They did knock on the door after a treatment. The blue truck trundled down the lane, and Emma did see a license plate on the back bumper.

  She only caught a couple of letters, and she recited them to herself as she hurried to retrieve her phone.

  She’d just typed them into her notes program when the back door opened and a couple of male voices filled the house. “…it’ll be thirty seconds,” Nate said, appearing from around the corner. He sounded slightly annoyed, but when he saw her, he brightened. “Hey, Emma. Ginger sent me over to get her pregnancy notebook?” He shifted his feet and cleared his throat. “She said you’d know what that meant.”

  “It’s where she keeps track of all the births on the ranch,” she said, starting to move her hand to pocket her phone as Ted came around the corner too. She dropped her phone then, because she seemed to forget how to be human when he was around.

  The device clattered to the floor, a terrible snapping sound filling the air. She gasped and looked down, the jagged crack in her screen obvious. “Oh, no.”

  “We’re going to get Ted a phone,” Nate said. “You could come along.”

  “No,” she said, though she did despera
tely want to. She bent to pick up the phone, thinking she’d just use it as it was until she could get to town. She had a screen protector; everything would be fine.

  She tried to swipe and pain sliced through her fingertip. She cried out and looked up at Nate. “Yeah, okay. I’ll come with you. Can you give me a minute?”

  “If you get me that notebook, I’ll take it to Ginger, and then we’ll swing by here again to grab you.” he looked at Ted. “It’ll be another ten seconds. Emma will literally jump in the truck as we’re moving.”

  Ted nodded, and Emma deduced he must be in a hurry to get to town. She didn’t blame him. He was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and he didn’t even have a phone.

  “Give me a second.” She set her ruined phone on the counter beside her lunch and went into the office. Ginger kept meticulous records of the horse births on the ranch, and she loved the leather-bound notebook with a decade’s worth of data in it. Emma took it to Nate and said, “This is like her most prized possession. Don’t lose it.”

  “I’m literally taking it from here to the stables,” Nate said dryly. “I think I can manage.” He nodded to Ted. “Let’s go.”

  “I need to use the restroom,” he said. “Can I stay here, and you can pick both of us up on the way back by?’

  “I don’t know,” Nate said. “Can you run fast enough to leap into a moving truck?” He laughed and went out the back door, leaving Emma alone with Ted. She stared at him, wishing he wasn’t quite so tall or quite so handsome. She wondered if he even knew what he did to a woman’s pulse.

  “I swear I’ve seen you before,” he said. “Did you grow up in Laredo?”

  “No,” she said, her pulse positively ricocheting now. No, she hadn’t grown up in Laredo. But she’d gone to college there. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though. She’d run with a rough crowd during college, and the only reason she hadn’t ended up in jail herself was because she’d gotten the teaching job in Sweet Water Falls.

  “Okay.” He headed toward the hall and the bathroom where he’d changed yesterday. Emma let out the breath she’d been holding, wondering what Ted had done before he’d gone to prison. Ginger had a whole file on him, and Emma could easily read it. In fact, it sat on the corner of her desk right now.

  She picked up her ruined phone and plucked her purse from the hook by the back door. She was just about to go outside to wait for Nate—Ted could find his own way—when the doorbell rang again.

  Adrenaline spiked through her, and she turned toward the door but didn’t move.

  “I’ll get it,” Ted called, and Emma let him. She heard him say something to whoever was at the door, and then his footsteps came down the hall and into the kitchen. He joined her in the small hallway off the back door, a paper in his hand.

  “It was the pest control guy. He dropped off this receipt.”

  Emma stared at it, her eyes wide. Everything raced now. She grabbed it from him and flew outside, desperate to see the man and the pest control truck. Thankfully, no one ever closed the garage doors, and she could see all the way to the dirt lane.

  A white truck—not blue—still sat there, and it had a license plate on the front bumper. She strode out into the sunshine, lifting the paper as she went. “Hey,” she called, and the guy looked up.

  She went all the way to his door, where he rolled down his window. “You just did this?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said.

  “You don’t drive a blue truck?”

  Confusion furrowed his brows. “No.”

  “Have you ever driven a blue truck?”

  “Not for Eradicate,” he said. “Always white.” He tapped the door. “With the ridiculous ants on the side?”

  She looked down at the side of his truck, which did have several semi-ridiculous cartoon ants painted there. “Not grasshoppers?” she asked.

  “No, ma’am.” He shook his head. “Is everything okay?”

  Ted had followed her, and he leaned his elbows on the top rung of the wooden fence that separated the dirt and gravel from the grass.

  “Yes,” she said, the word barely ghosting out of her mouth. Because it was really a no. No, everything was not okay.

  The man who’d been here in the blue truck was not the pest control. She spun toward the left corner of the house, her fist crunching the receipt. She went through the rungs in the fence while Ted asked, “What’s wrong, Emma?”

  She didn’t answer him as she marched across the grass. All this striding had really gotten her heart rate up, and sweat beaded along her hairline. She arrived at the side of the house, desperately scanning.

  There were no meters.

  “Emma?” Ted asked again, gently. “What’s going on?”

  “There are no meters here,” she said, looking wildly from him to the smooth siding on the house.

  “No,” he said slowly. “There aren’t.”

  “There was a guy here,” she said. “He had a clipboard and a meter thingy, and he was driving a blue truck with a grasshopper on the side.” She couldn’t get the words out fast enough. “He rang the doorbell and then disappeared.”

  What had he been doing? Had he taken pictures of her? Did he know about Missy?

  She needed to call Fran right now. She flung down the receipt and yanked her phone out of her pocket.

  Then she had to face reality—her phone was shattered.

  A sob started in her stomach and wrenched its way up, catching in her throat for only a moment before it came soaring out of her mouth.

  Chapter Five

  Ted had no idea what was going on, only that something bad was happening. Emma looked one breath away from pure panic, and Ted knew what that looked like. He’d helped a couple of newboots when they’d come to River Bay, and Raymond had suffered a complete panic attack his first night.

  It had been as scary for Ted as Raymond, and they’d been friends until the day Ray got to walk out, a free man.

  Emma was about to lose it, and Ted stepped closer to her as a sob came out of her throat. He gathered her tight, because he knew more now than he had when he’d attempted to help Raymond.

  “Hey, it’s okay,” he said. “You’re okay. You’re right here.” He held her tightly against his chest, and he couldn’t complain when her arms came up and around him too. She clung to him as if she needed him to stand, which was actually fine with Ted.

  Strangely enough.

  “Just take a breath,” he said. “Okay? In with me, Emma.” He drew in a long, deep breath, but she ignored him completely. “And out,” he said anyway, releasing his breath. He did it again, and this time, she matched her breath to his.

  “Tell me what’s in your head,” he said.

  “I can’t.” Her voice was thick as honey and filled with misery.

  “Who was the man that was here earlier?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “That’s the problem.”

  Ted didn’t quite get how. “You didn’t talk to him?’

  “No, I assumed he was the pest guy, because he had that truck with the grasshopper.” Her breath was hot against his chest, but she’d started to calm.

  “You thought he was checking the meters?”

  “Yes.”

  “Or was the pest guy.”

  “Yes.”

  “But he wasn’t either of those.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  Ted didn’t either, but he wasn’t sure why it mattered. Emma didn’t seem like the type of woman to be scared by her own shadow, even though she had screamed when she’d seen him earlier that morning.

  So why would she literally fall apart over a man coming to the house? Surely they had dozens of people coming and going around this ranch. One dude in a blue truck shouldn’t send her into a frenzy.

  Unless she has something to hide, Ted thought, and he realized he’d just hit the nail on the head. Hard.

  Emma had something to hide. Something big, and with someone new on the ranch, asking questions, she was afraid
…of something.

  Ted couldn’t even imagine what, but he knew he’d seen her somewhere, and his guess was in a file for one of the cases he’d worked at his law firm, many years ago. He’d doubted himself for a few hours last night, but this morning, looking at her again in the barn, and then again just now in the house, and he knew.

  He’d definitely seen her face before, either in person or in a picture.

  “Ted?”

  Ted released Emma, but she didn’t move very far from him. Ted stepped to the corner of the house and waved to Nate. “We, uh, need a second.”

  “Need a second for what?” Nate started striding toward them, and Ted ducked back around the corner.

  “He’s coming.”

  Emma wiped at her face, but she’d done a number on her makeup. Her perfectly swept on eyeliner had smudged, and she had streaks down her cheeks. “I’m fine.”

  “What’s going on?” Nate asked. “First, you’re all upset that we have to—oh.” His eyes had landed on Emma, who kept her head down while she kept trying to wipe her eyes and not have black come away on her fingers.

  “I need a minute,” she said, and she spun and went toward the back corner of the house.

  Ted and Nate stood in the shade, staring after her.

  “Teddy,” Nate said slowly. “Tell me you did not make that woman cry.”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Ted said quickly. He explained what had happened in literally the last four minutes, and Nate’s eyes got wider with every sentence.

  “So who was that guy?”

  “She doesn’t know,” Ted said. “She freaked out hard, Nate. There’s something going on with her.”

  “I can ask Ginger,” Nate said. “Should we go wait in the air-conditioned truck?”

  “Heavens, yes,” Ted said, breathing a sigh of relief. He walked with his friend around the front of the house and to where Nate had parked in the driveway. “How well do you know Emma?” he asked. “Do you know what she’s involved in?”

  “You think she’s involved in something?”