The Runaway Bride

by Patricia McLinn

  His head jerked around to her. That took him aback, and she loved it.

  “Even if you believe the horse is easier to deal with than your sister, surely you’re not saying training Dickens is more important than getting along with her.”

  “Right now, nothing’s more important than getting this colt trained.”

  She waited, but he added no explanation. She made a sound of exasperation that had Dickens pricking his ears as if it was familiar. She wouldn’t be the least surprised. Stubborn and ornery creatures often elicited that sort of response.

  She turned her back on man and beast and started toward the house.

  “Hey, Helga.”

  For an instant she thought he was going to admit she was right, or tell her why it was so important to train this horse, or maybe say it had been nice to see her. Then she saw his face, intent and puzzled, and knew he would not be admitting or sharing or complimenting.

  She had to get a grip on her fantasies.

  “Mind opening the gate?”

  That was his reason for calling her back? But she complied. She closed it again after he and Dickens had passed through.

  “What did you mean, right after you crashed your car, that the horse isn’t the right color?” He asked it like he’d just thought of the question, but she would have bet it had been rolling around in his head since that first moment.

  She propped her hands on her hips. “You make it sound like I crashed the car for the fun of it. You mean right after I hit the tree to save your neck.”

  And of course, then, with her feeling justifiably huffy, he grinned and said, “Yeah, that’s what I meant to say.”

  So what could she do? “I said he’s the wrong color because he’s reddish brown.”

  “And what color should he be?”

  “White.”

  “I don’t know why I’m asking, but—why?” His mouth curved, as if anticipating amusement.

  “For the Lone Ranger. The Lone Ranger’s horse was called Silver, but he was white.”

  “Okay, I follow that, but why would you have expected to see the Lone Ranger?”

  “I didn’t expect to see anything. I did see you—a lone ranger.”

  That’s how she saw him? A lone ranger?

  The questions had echoed throughout the hour-long ride to check heifers in the home pasture, then the return to the corral.

  “Why do I think that doesn’t mean she sees me as a masked hero?”

  Dickens’s ears flickered at the question.

  “You’re right. Better not to ask questions like that.”

  Thomas unsaddled the horse, and got the bucket with curry combs. Dickens looked around with wary eyes, started to take a step toward Thomas as if to catch his foot, then thought better of it. Thomas gave him a rub and words of praise.

  “You won’t get this treatment often like some prissy show horse, but you need to get used to this, too.”

  He brought the comb down in a firm but gentle stroke, giving the animal a predictable rhythm and pressure. A rhythm that also left Thomas’s mind free.

  The Lone Ranger had roamed from place to place. That sure didn’t fit. As for fighting injustice where he found it, it was more like trouble found him, and it sure seemed like he lost more than he won. Some TV series his adventures would make.

  But he sure as hell felt like a lone ranger sometimes.

  He had for a long time. Maybe since his mother had died and his father had fallen into his grief. Gran had been around, of course, but with her job teaching plus running the house, there hadn’t been a lot of time for cozy chats. Besides, that wasn’t his way. Maybe he got that from his father.

  The only thing that seemed to pull Rick Vance out of his grieving was when an unexpected guest showed up at the ranch one summer. Unexpected, female, attractive and determined.

  In short order Thomas had had a stepmother and a baby sister. There’d been a brief period when he hadn’t felt so alone—when Becky was big enough to get around, and his father had been okay…then Becky’s mother had taken off.

  There’d been no choice but to do things himself—if he hadn’t done them the ranch would have fallen apart, because Rick Vance sure wasn’t paying any heed to the Diamond V. All he did was try to think of ways to get Maureen back.

  Right up until the end—and beyond.

  Thomas put the combs in the bucket and unhooked Dickens’s reins from the fence to lead him to the big pasture where he’d be set loose for the rest of the day.

  “If Dad’s the example of what happens to a man when he falls for a woman, then I’m damned happy to be a lone ranger.”

  “…and I’m saying Helga hasn’t been outside since—”

  “Yesterday.” Thomas filled in Gran’s sentence, then glanced across the supper table at the object of their conversation.

  “That’s true,” she said. “I watched Thomas and Gandy working with Dickens for a while.”

  “What? At the corral? Fifteen yards from the kitchen?” Gran scoffed. “That girl—”

  “It’s farther than that.”

  “—needs to get away from the home ranch—”

  “We could go into town, go shopping?” suggested Becky.

  He expected Judi to jump on that suggestion, but she didn’t appear disappointed when Gran shook her head.

  “Not shopping. What she needs is fresh air. When you’re someplace you should take advantage of what it has to offer. And what we have to offer on the Diamond V is wide open spaces. That’s the kind of break Helga needs. She looks tired.”

  “A break? She just got here Wednesday.”

  “And she hasn’t had a moment off since then. She’s been working hard.”

  “I didn’t get a day off when I was doing my regular ranch work, along with keeping up with the house and—” He wouldn’t say taking care of Gran, because that might sound like he was complaining about her. “All.”

  “Your idea of ‘keeping up with the house’ is the reason I’m working so hard,” Helga muttered. “But, really, Gran, I’m fine. There’s no need to—”

  “You need to get out, instead of staying inside all day playing nursemaid to a useless old woman.”

  “You are not useless or old.”

  “All I can do is sit in this chair.”

  Thomas had sensed Gran’s frustration, but this was worse than he’d expected.

  “How about your knitting?” Helga said.

  “If this was World War I, I could knit mufflers for the boys overseas—that would be useful. As it is I’m going to have enough afghans to cover the Rocky Mountains. And that’s not anybody’s definition of useful.” Gran turned to Thomas. “She needs fresh air. When you’re checking the herd or gathering or riding fence during the middle of day, take her along.”

  “Wearing that?”

  The blue shorts she had on today would leave her legs bare against the saddle and expose them to brush and brambles. There was a reason people working cattle wore chaps. The ornery critters found the wildest, thorniest spots to get themselves into. Those smooth, pale calves would get scratched and slapped. The long expanse of thigh that finally disappeared under the blue hem in the nick of time would be rubbed raw by the friction of the saddle. Why she’d need salve rubbed all the way—

  “Thomas!”

  He blinked at Gran. “What?”

  “I said just because she’s wearing shorts today doesn’t mean the girl doesn’t have a pair of jeans with her.”

  Thomas glanced toward Helga, and her expression confirmed what he’d suspected from her silence. “Do you?”

  “Uh, no. No jeans.”

  Skirts slit up to her waist, shirts that didn’t come down to her waist, and shorts that seemed to barely cover her waist. But no jeans.

  “But you should see what she does have!” Becky said.

  Pink rose up from the collar of Helga’s sleeveless shirt, climbing her throat and into her cheeks.

  What the heck could she have that made Becky
crow like that and Helga blush? No, no he didn’t want to know. And that sure wasn’t why he intended to look through her things. That was solely to find out about her so she couldn’t pull any fast ones.

  Blanking out any curiosity, he said, “It can’t be worse than the outfits we’ve been seeing.”

  “Oh, if you only knew!”

  He wondered which delighted Becky more—that she knew something he didn’t or that she thought he’d be somehow taken down a peg if he did know what she did. He looked at his half sister, trying to remember when she used to be his ally.

  “All I need to know is she doesn’t have the clothes needed for riding.”

  “Don’t be so quick to give up, Thomas.” Gran’s admonition had an undertone of sarcasm that said she knew darn right well he wasn’t “giving up”—he was escaping.

  “She could wear a pair of mine,” Becky volunteered.

  “I don’t think—”

  “Wouldn’t fit.”

  His declaration overrode Helga’s tentative start and he wanted to kick himself when both his grandmother and his sister turned speculative eyes toward him.

  “You’ve noticed that, have you?” murmured Gran.

  After her earlier surge of pink, Helga’s skin had nearly returned to normal. Now another tide of pink came in. But she sounded nonchalant as she said, “I’m taller and Becky’s so slender, I’m afraid I couldn’t get into her jeans.”

  If he didn’t know better he’d have said she was trying to distract Gran and Becky from his comment, which they probably thought had a whole lot more significance than it did. All it meant was he wasn’t blind. Any halfway observant human being would have noticed that Helga had more curves than Becky.

  “I guess I won’t be riding.” She sighed and cupped her cheek in her palm.

  “Don’t you be so quick to give up, either. Next time anyone goes into town, we’ll get them to pick you up a pair. Nothing could be simpler.”

  Thomas made a mental note that Gandy would make the next provision run into town.

  Judi heard Thomas coming up the porch steps in a hurry, but she had two more spots on the door hinge to squirt with oil—he could wait an extra few seconds for her to finish and climb down from the chair she was standing on.

  She’d applied the last squirt when he yanked the partially opened door the rest of the way open and walked right into the chair.

  “Hey! Look out!”

  “What the hell?”

  The chair, with the back legs in the kitchen and the front legs on the slightly lower porch floor, rocked under the impact and Judi grabbed for something to hold on to, finding only air. Thomas seemed to be fighting for his own equilibrium, stumbling from the impact with the chair into the doorframe.

  She was going down. There was no way she wasn’t.

  The chair had rocked forward, but her attempts at balance and another knock against it from Thomas now sent it the opposite way—it was going to tip over backward and she was going to go splat on the floor.

  Great, she’d be in a full-body cast and then how would she take care of Gran?

  And then she went splat against something that was definitely not the floor. Warm and hard and a considerable distance above the floor. And she’d found something to hold onto at last.

  Thomas’s shoulders.

  How he’d grabbed her she never knew. He’d been off balance, going down himself. But now he had his arms wrapped around her. One under her bottom, the other at her waist.

  The expansion and contraction of Thomas’s chest brushed against her as he took deep breaths, while she felt as if she couldn’t draw in any oxygen at all.

  He’d lost his hat. Sunstreaked strands of his hair were just under her nose. They smelled like sun and heat and man. She wanted to bury her face in them.

  She squirmed against the temptation and his hold. Neither budged. But she’d slipped, and could see his face. His jaw was tensed, a vein throbbing in his forehead, his mouth compressed, and his gaze staring straight at her breasts.

  The tingling, tightening sensation in her nipples might have been a delayed fear reaction. But she knew otherwise. It wasn’t only his gaze, it was also the warm brush of his breath across the tips covered in material meant to keep her cool in tropical sunshine.

  She wasn’t cool now.

  “Thomas…”

  His gaze flicked up to her face, then away. His arms loosened slightly. Not enough to drop her to the floor, instead letting her slide down the front of his body. She felt the hardness of his chest, the coolness of his belt buckle, then a solid heat below it. That heat flowed across her skin, into her bloodstream and burrowed into her bones.

  Her toes touched the floor and she braced her knees to support herself. Only then did she realize she still had her fingers curled into the muscles of his shoulders.

  She snatched her hands away and backed up.

  He didn’t look at her. He bent with an uncharacteristically awkward motion to pick up his hat. She heard him grunt as if in discomfort. Then he repeated the motion to retrieve the chair, letting the screen door close. He set the chair in front of himself as if presenting a piece of evidence.

  “I—”

  “What—”

  “Sorry, you go ahead,” she told him.

  “What the hell were you doing on a chair in the middle of a doorway? It’s dangerous.”

  All thoughts of warmly thanking him for catching her disappeared like a single hot stone being dropped into Lake Michigan in February.

  “It was perfectly safe until you tried to run me over.”

  “I didn’t see you.”

  “Maybe if you got sleep at night you’d be able to see straight. I would have thought a rancher would be attuned to the rhythm of nature.”

  Thomas’s forehead creased. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “I thought only city folks were workaholics.”

  He shrugged. “Just doing what needs doing.”

  “Baloney. You work too hard.”

  His eyes met hers. The look lasted a fraction of a second, but her words had caught him off guard. He picked up the chair and returned it to its place at the table.

  “That’s your professional medical opinion?” He moved the chair two inches to the left then back an inch.

  “It’s my professional opinion as a human being. Gran needs you.”

  He released the chair and strode to the desk. He let the moment stretch while he shifted aside an uneven stack of papers, obviously looking for something. When his voice came it had that hard edge again. He picked up a paper, folded it lengthwise, put it in his shirt pocket. Then he fished out an envelope. “That’s what we’re paying you for.”

  “Not to be her grandson you’re not. And Becky needs you, too.”

  Thomas snorted, as he crossed the room. “Not likely.”

  “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that. What’s going on with you and Becky is—”

  “We’re not paying you to stick your nose into family business.” He thumped an envelope on the table beside her, growled, “First week’s pay,” and started for the door.

  “Consider my advice a bonus.”

  He glanced her way, but his eyes weren’t letting her in. “No.”

  “That’s it? Just no? I can help you and your sister—”

  “Just no.” He pushed out of the door, never pausing.

  “Thomas Vance,” she told the closing door—which did not squeak, thank-you-very-much! “You are the most unreasonable, pigheaded—”

  “Comes by it honestly.”

  Gran’s voice made Judi jump.

  She was going to have to put bells on that walker.

  “Well, he sure doesn’t take after you, so it must be some other aggravating DNA in his gene pool.”

  “He picked up a double dose of stubborn—his father on the one side and his grandfather on the other. My Hal could make a mule look like the soul of reason when he set his feet.”

  “Your husba
nd wasn’t on the Vance side? So you’re—”

  “Thomas’s mother’s mother. My name’s Iris Swift—most everyone calls me Gran, though. Yes, and I see that mind of yours putting the next piece together—I’m not kin to Becky. Not blood kin. But she’s mine, nonetheless. I raised the girl, even more than I raised Thomas. Because at least he had a mother to start with.”

  Judi had enough questions to run a quiz show all on her own, but she figured Gran would tell it the way she wanted to tell it, or not at all. In fear of not at all, Judi kept her mouth shut.

  Gran gave an approving nod as she slowly moved into position in front of her chair. Judi positioned the cushion that raised Gran’s foot to the right height.

  “But it wasn’t his genes I was thinking about when I said he came by his stubbornness honestly. It was his experiences. Come sit down here.”

  Judi pulled up a chair.

  “My Denise died young. She had a heart condition nobody knew anything about until she collapsed, like you hear happening to athletes sometimes. Doctors never had any reason to think there was a problem. When she died, it about ripped Rick Vance, Thomas’s father, to shreds. And Thomas was like a lost wraith. Hal had passed on the year before, so I moved out here from town. Things settled in. Rick was working the ranch, I was taking care of the two of them and teaching, and Thomas was growing like a weed. A towhead, he was, and a smart little dickens.” She laughed. “He deserves that horse now, come to think of it!”

  Judi envisioned a younger, blonder…happier Thomas. He was adorable. But instead of making her smile, it made her sad that he’d changed so.

  “Rick was a lonely man,” Gran was saying. “I understood that, and never would’ve stood in his way. But I suppose it’s hard to say you want to start dating when your dead wife’s mother is running your house and caring for your son.”

  She sighed. Then gave her head a shake, as if to dispel the regret.

  “Didn’t see all that ’til too long after to make any difference. Maureen showed up the summer Thomas was fourteen. Came driving in with that blond hair shining and that smile gleaming. She and her girlfriends from St. Louis said there’d been a mix-up with their arrangements with the Lazy C—that’s a dude ranch over the east end of the county—and Laura Carter suggested they try here. Laura tells a different tale, but in the end it’s neither here nor there. After a week, the two girlfriends had moved on, and Rick and Maureen were off to Las Vegas to get married.”