The Cowboy's Lesson in Love

by Marie Ferrarella

  Wynona unconsciously squared her shoulders, bracing herself for a no-holds-barred confrontation. Her eyes continued to meet his.

  “Yes,” she informed him. “I came to tell you that Ryan has gotten a ten on his quiz.”

  “A ten?” Clint repeated. He knew his son wasn’t a walking brain, but the kid wasn’t dumb, either. “That doesn’t sound very good.”

  “That’s ten out of ten,” Wynona pressed, realizing that Washburn probably thought she meant ten out of a hundred.

  The angry crease across his forehead relaxed. “All right, then that’s a good grade.”

  “Yes, it is.” For just a split second, Wynona caught herself being distracted by Washburn’s chiseled face. There was such a thing as being too good-looking. And this man was. “And I also came to tell you that Ryan was like a different boy in class today. He was actually smiling.”

  Clint continued to peer intently at her. “And you think that’s a good thing?”

  Did he actually have to be told that? she couldn’t help wondering. “Yes,” she said emphatically. “That’s a good thing.”

  “Okay,” Clint said, trying to get to the bottom of why she’d appeared on his property and came at him as if she wanted to hang him by his thumbs. “So why do you look like lightning bolts are about to come shooting out of your eyes?”

  The rancher was more than six inches taller than she was but Wynona wasn’t about to be intimidated or back down. This was important. “Because you obviously thought that treating Ryan like a human being was a onetime thing and you and I both know that it can’t be.”

  He stared at her. “Let me get this straight. You came all the way out here so that you could lecture me again?” he demanded.

  Honey. She could catch more flies with honey, she silently cautioned herself. Wynona tempered her voice. “I’m not here to lecture,” she answered in a softer voice. “I’m here to beg you.”

  Clint’s eyes narrowed as he continued to pin her in place. “I don’t follow.”

  “Then let me explain.” She noted that Ryan’s father bristled slightly at her tone. She proceeded carefully. “That little bit of attention you showed your son had a huge effect on him. For the first time since the beginning of the school year, I saw a smile on Ryan’s face. Not only that, but come recess time, he actually went out to play on the playground,” she told him.

  To her surprise, Washburn looked completely unimpressed. “I thought he was supposed to learn something, not play.”

  “Part of learning is to learn how to play with others,” Wynona countered. “My job isn’t just to teach reading, math and history,” she told him, her voice beginning to rise. “My job is to teach the whole child, to help him cope as he goes on to be a well-adjusted adult.”

  A look of impatience creased Clint’s face. “Adult? He’s eight.”

  “But he’s not always going to be eight,” Wynona reminded him.

  Clint made the natural progression. “Nine’s not an adult, either.”

  “No, but it’s closer to an adult than eight. See how this goes?” she asked.

  He’d wasted enough time arguing with this woman. “What I’d like to see going is you, Ms. Chee, because I have work to do.”

  He began walking away from her. She was quick to catch up. She wasn’t finished with him yet. “Seems like you always have work to do.”

  “You’re catching on,” he tossed over his shoulder as he kept on walking.

  “Your number-one priority should be your son,” Wynona insisted, following him again.

  Clint stopped walking and turned to face her, annoyed. “I don’t need you to tell me that.”

  But Wynona didn’t back down. “I think you do.”

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” he began, “but I don’t really care what you think.”

  She surprised him by saying, “Fair enough—but don’t you care what your son thinks?”

  He didn’t answer her, but a small voice behind her spoke up. “Ms. Chee, what are you doing here?” Ryan asked.

  Turning around, she saw that Ryan was standing right behind her. She hadn’t even heard the boy come up.

  “I, um, came to show your father your quiz.” She pulled the paper out of her bag and held it up for the little boy to see it. “You got a ten, Ryan. I’m very proud of you.”

  Ryan took the paper in his hands, his eyes shining. “I got a ten?” he cried, and then he grinned. “Hey, I did. I got them all right!” It was obvious that he was thrilled. He looked up at his teacher and then at his father. “I’m gonna go put this back in the house. Is that okay, Dad?”

  Clint nodded. “Yeah, sure. That’s fine.”

  Ryan was almost jumping up and down. “And then I’ll come right back to help you like you said you wanted me to.”

  As she watched the boy dash off, Ryan’s joyfully proclaimed words replayed themselves in her head. Washburn had actually asked the boy to help. Just as she had told him he should do. Apparently, the rancher was one jump ahead of her.

  More than a little embarrassed, Wynona turned to look at the boy’s father.

  She cleared her throat and then said, “I guess I owe you an apology.”

  Chapter Six

  Clint allowed his eyes to drift slowly over the length of the woman standing in front of him. He didn’t say anything. It was as if he was taking stock of his words, deciding which ones he was going to use. Seconds went by, intensifying the silence.

  Finally, he acknowledged, “I guess maybe you do after jumping all over me like that.”

  By then Roy had obviously decided to join them. He was as curious about things as his older brother seemed to be indifferent to them. Roy had managed to reach his brother and Ryan’s teacher just in time to hear the last exchange.

  The younger Washburn filled in whatever blanks still existed. “C’mon, Clint, lighten up. Ms. Chee wasn’t trying to tread on your toes. She was just thinking of the boy and putting his best interests before everything else.”

  “I was,” Wynona said, quick to pick up the lifeline. “But obviously I spoke out of turn because I wound up jumping to conclusions. The wrong conclusions,” she emphasized. “After seeing Ryan so happy earlier today, when I came out here just now, it looked like he’d been excluded from the activity that meant so much to him, so I thought—well, I guess you can see why I thought what I did.” She looked at him, expecting Washburn to come to the same conclusion that she had.

  “Actually, no, I can’t,” Clint answered flatly. “Maybe because I’m not in the habit of sticking my nose into other people’s business.”

  “Clint!” Roy’s admonishment came automatically before he had a chance to censor himself.

  Although he was definitely on her side, Wynona hardly took note of Washburn’s brother. She was entirely focused on Ryan’s father—and doing her best not to lose her temper. Again.

  The man had definitely cornered the market in pigheadedness, she thought.

  “Your son’s welfare is my business, in the same way that the welfare of all the other children in my care is my business,” she informed Clint icily. Her eyes had narrowed into slits and she had raised her chin pugnaciously.

  “Did I miss something here?” Clint demanded. “Aren’t you Ryan’s teacher, not his social worker?”

  The man looked as if he was on the verge of having steam come out of his ears, but she wasn’t about to allow him to intimidate her. Angry, she was not about to back off. “We’re all our brother’s keeper.”

  “Oh wow, lady. You really are something else, you know that?” Washburn marveled and she didn’t have to guess that he didn’t mean that in a flattering way.

  Shooting Clint an impatient look, Roy took a step forward, moving closer to his nephew’s teacher. “I’d like to apologize for my brother.”

  Clint’s dark look shifted
toward his brother. “Nobody asked you to speak for me,” he informed Roy coldly.

  The last thing she wanted was to start something between Ryan’s father and his uncle. “That’s all right, I should be—”

  “Dad,” Ryan called out as he returned from the house. “Lucia wants to know if Ms. Chee is gonna stay for dinner. Can she?”

  Both Clint and Wynona turned toward the boy and answered his question almost at the same time.

  “No!”

  And, at the same time, they both saw the boy’s face as it fell.

  Seeing his obvious disappointment, Wynona felt a sharp stabbing pain in her heart. However, despite the housekeeper’s question, she was not about to stay anywhere she wasn’t welcomed. It didn’t take any sort of advanced degree for her to see that she definitely wasn’t welcomed at Clint Washburn’s table.

  Clint’s expression didn’t change when he saw the distressed look on his son’s face, but that didn’t mean that he was unaffected by it. Although he had managed, over the years, to build an almost airtight wall around himself, sometimes that wall got a little fissure and just for a moment, feelings would get through.

  Wanting to just drop the matter, for some reason he couldn’t begin to fathom, Clint felt compelled to offer a halfhearted explanation to his son. “Ms. Chee’s too busy to have dinner with us.”

  Rather than accept his father’s explanation, Ryan looked up at his teacher as if he harbored a slim hope that she would change her mind if he pressed her to explain why she couldn’t come.

  “Are you really too busy, Ms. Chee?” Ryan asked her.

  The wound in her heart grew a little larger. Wynona could easily see having her stay for dinner meant a lot to the boy and although she would have rather walked barefoot over hot coals than break bread with Clint Washburn, he wasn’t the one who mattered here.

  And neither was she.

  Only Ryan mattered and for him, she would break bread with his father as long as doing so would bring back that sweet smile to the boy’s small face.

  Bracing herself for what she knew in her heart was going to be an ordeal, she asked Ryan, “What time’s dinner?”

  Wynona deliberately avoided his father’s penetrating stare.

  “Five o’clock,” Ryan announced, almost singing out the words. The hopeful look on his face had doubled as he asked again, “Can you stay, Ms. Chee?”

  “Well,” she replied, this time looking over Ryan’s head at his father, “I wouldn’t want to intrude where I’m not wanted.”

  The ball was now in Washburn’s corral, she thought, waiting for him to say something.

  Clint laughed shortly. “Well, that pony’s already ridden out of town,” he informed her evenly.

  “What my brother’s trying to say in his own special way is that of course you’re welcome,” Roy said, a broad smile on his handsome face. “We’d be honored to have you join us for dinner.”

  It wasn’t easy, but Wynona managed not to laugh. “I don’t think that’s quite the word that Ryan’s dad is thinking right now,” Wynona responded. She was talking to Roy but it was obvious that she was looking at his brother.

  The corners of Clint’s mouth curved ever so slightly in a smile that only had a vague hint of humor underlining it.

  “So now you’re a mind reader?” Clint asked her.

  Wynona’s eyes met his. She never wavered. “Doesn’t take much reading in this case,” she answered.

  For his son’s sake, Clint preferred to think that the woman was saying his feelings were obvious rather than saying that he was just simpleminded.

  Looking at Ryan, he said, “Why don’t you take your teacher into the house and keep her company until we’re finished out here?”

  Ryan looked almost stricken. “But I thought I was going to help you fix the fence,” he protested.

  Wynona immediately picked up on the boy’s distress. “I don’t want to disrupt anything,” she protested. And then an idea occurred to her. “As a matter of fact, why don’t you let me help?” She looked at Clint. “That way you can get finished that much sooner.”

  “Help?” Clint echoed incredulously. Was she kidding? Okay, so she could climb over a fence better than he would have thought, but now they were talking about basic labor. And the teacher had delicate hands.

  “This is the kind of work where you have to get your hands dirty,” he told her as if that alone would have her turning on her heel and quickly retreating into the ranch house.

  She chalked his insult up to the fact that Washburn wasn’t very good at sizing up people. “I’m familiar with work on a ranch, Mr. Washburn,” she told him with a smile she didn’t feel. “I grew up on one.”

  Clint looked at her skeptically, but he decided to call her bluff. “All right, pick up a hammer and make yourself useful.” He looked at his brother. Since Roy seemed to have appointed himself this woman’s champion, he could work with her. “Roy, take her with you and go work on that length of rotting fence over there,” he said, indicating the break that they had discovered earlier in the day.

  “Sure thing,” Roy agreed. He looked more than happy to comply. It was obvious that the thought of having Wynona accompany him while he worked on the length of fence that needed replacing had just brightened his afternoon.

  “Don’t worry,” Roy told her, lowering his voice as they began to walk away. “I won’t really put you to work.”

  “I’m not worried,” Wynona told him as she followed Washburn’s younger brother to the section that Washburn had just pointed to. “But I think you missed the point. I offered to help to make the work go faster. I meant that. I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

  He couldn’t picture her swinging a hammer or using a saw. “Then you weren’t just saying that for Clint’s benefit? Not that I’d blame you,” he said quickly. “My brother’s got a knack of really rubbing most people the wrong way,” Roy confessed. He stopped in front of a section of fencing that was clearly in need of work. Picking up a hammer, he began removing planks of rotting wood. “But he wasn’t always that way.”

  “Nice to know,” Wynona commented.

  She wasn’t really in the mood to listen to Roy make excuses for his brother, even though that did speak well of the younger man. Spotting a second, discarded hammer on the ground, she got to work herself.

  Roy watched her out of the corner of his eye, surprised and amazed. She worked like someone who was used to working with her hands and who could assess what needed to be done without waiting for directions.

  He grinned at her. “You really did work on a ranch, didn’t you?”

  Responding, Wynona grinned back. “I told you I don’t lie,” she said with a wink. “Now, let’s put some muscle into this and see if we can’t get finished mending this length of fence before your brother finishes his.”

  “A competition, huh?” Roy asked. “Well, you won’t get an argument out of me,” he told her. Roy stepped up his pace.

  Pausing just for a moment, Clint watched his brother and Ryan’s teacher working from across the field. The next moment he roused himself and got back to work with Jake as Ryan hovered about, eager to assist in any way he could.

  Glancing back across the field, Clint had to admire the woman’s tenacity, not to mention her form. From where he was standing, there was something almost hypnotic about the way she swung her hammer and threw herself into her work.

  Well, she wasn’t afraid of getting dirty, he’d give her that, Clint thought grudgingly. Quite honestly, for the first fifteen minutes he kept waiting for her to throw down her hammer, declare that she was suddenly really tired and walk away from the fence.

  But she didn’t walk away, didn’t stop. She just kept on working and though he hated to admit it, she was actually pretty good at it.

  Maybe even better than pretty good, Clint admitted grudgingly, although
he made the silent admission only to himself. He wouldn’t have said anything of the kind to anyone out loud.

  Apparently, he didn’t have to, he realized. Ryan was more than happy to make the proclamation for him and anyone else within earshot.

  “I didn’t know Ms. Chee could fix things,” his son said in awe as he looked over to where his teacher was working with his uncle. “I guess she can do just about anything, huh, Dad?”

  He wasn’t about to validate that sentiment, or to say anything more about the teacher than he absolutely had to. “Hold that steadier,” Clint instructed, nodding at the post his son had his small hands on. He’d already anchored the post in the ground. All that was left were the final swings. “I don’t want to hit your head by mistake.”

  “No, sir, I don’t want that, either,” Ryan answered, turning his attention back to the pole he was holding for his father.

  “That’s better,” Clint commented.

  In reality, there was no danger to the boy. He’d safeguarded the pole before he had let Ryan near it. He was allowing Ryan to think he was holding it upright while he drove it into the ground with a sledgehammer so that the boy would feel part of this since it seemed to mean so much to him—as well as to that busybody teacher of his, Clint thought, casting another glance in the woman’s direction.

  Why the woman felt called upon to horn into his life was totally beyond him. No matter what explanations she spouted, as far as he was concerned it wasn’t right for her to come on out here, looking in on him to make sure he was treating his son well.

  She didn’t know him. The woman had no reason to believe that he had, or ever would, mistreat the boy.

  Like he’d ever hurt Ryan, Clint thought angrily. He wasn’t that kind of man. But neither was he the kind of man who coddled his son, either. That was against everything he believed in.

  Still, he supposed that it wouldn’t hurt to teach the boy a few of the basic things, show him how they were done so that he could make himself useful once he got older and actually could be put to work.

  Clint slanted another look toward the teacher.