by Liz Isaacson
He’d grin at her and ask her how she was. Explain the situation at the ranch and shake his head like it was a goldarn shame he couldn’t get those trucks to start. Then she’d show him the nicest, biggest work trucks she had on the lot, and he’d buy a pair of them.
Easy.
In and out.
Nothing at a car dealership was ever in and out, Ranger knew that. But if he could spend the hours with Oakley, he didn’t care. If he read the situation right and he employed his voice, he could leave with two trucks and a dinner date.
His lungs shook a little when he breathed, but he gripped the wheel and kept going. He pulled into the lot at Mack’s, and they seemed pretty busy for a Wednesday afternoon.
He parked and got out of his truck, noticing way more balloons that should be around. Where would they even get balloons right now?
The clean-up around town and in the surrounding areas of Three Rivers had been plugging along day by day. Ranger and the other cowboys had just finished at Seven Sons, where they’d worked for five straight days.
Number one, that ranch was massive, with a lot of buildings. Number two, Liam Walker’s house had suffered much more damage than Aunt Lois’s, and the majority of the men and women who’d been going around to help one another had worked at his homestead.
Then, back at Shiloh Ridge, Bear was pushing them to get the ground ready for planting, despite the three tornadoes that had torn through town only eighteen days ago.
Ranger was glad Bear had taken on that role, because he’d rather his taller, wider cousin got whispered about behind his back. Ranger would just nod and agree, and then he’d listen to his brothers and cousins when they sat down to eat lunches together, and when they drove down to church together on the Sabbath.
He and Bear met every other day for at least fifteen minutes to exchange information and make major decisions for the ranch. Bear attended the ranch ownership meetings in town, and Ranger was more of the silent, hidden glue that kept everyone and everything together at Shiloh Ridge.
A blast of music came through the speakers, and Ranger startled and turned toward the huge glass building that housed the showroom. The song had a rock beat, but it was clearly a love ballad, and Ranger took a couple of steps toward the building, trying to see what was happening.
It sure seemed like a party was going down, and he found that odd too. He glanced around and saw no sign of the tornadoes, so perhaps they’d been hit and already cleaned up. Life did have to go on at some point, Ranger knew that.
Sometimes, after a major event, he felt absolutely stuck in time, his feet cemented in the same day over and over. He’d lived a year’s worth of days that held the feelings and thoughts of a man who’d just lost his father. He distinctly remembered the day he “woke up” and realized that so much time had gone by, and it was time to start living again.
He took a breath and walked toward the big, glass building. The other times he’d come to Mack’s, he hadn’t made it five steps before a salesman approached him. Today, there was no one.
They were all inside, gathered mostly in a circle, where a tall man stood, a wide smile on his face as he held a massive bouquet of red roses.
He handed them to a dark-haired woman that made Ranger’s breath catch in his chest. “Oakley.” Her name slipped between his lips, and immediate humiliation followed. He glanced around to see if someone had heard him. Again, no one seemed to notice they worked at a car dealership.
She tipped her head back and laughed, took the bouquet that dwarfed her, and tipped up onto her toes as she hugged the man.
Horror snaked its way through Ranger. He couldn’t go in there now.
“Sir?” someone asked, and he turned away from the scene. “Can I help you?”
“Are y’all havin’ a party today?” He clamped his mouth shut, hating his Texan accent in that moment.
The salesman looked toward the showroom. “Yeah,” he said, a frown furrowing between his eyebrows. “Oakley and whoever she’s dating this month just had their one-month anniversary.” He turned back to Ranger, whose eyebrows had lifted at the dismissive and unprofessional tone of her employee. “I’m sorry. That came out wrong.”
“No need to apologize to me.” He glanced at Oakley and her boyfriend, who were now slow dancing in front of everyone, gazing up at one another as if they were alone. Ranger swallowed, wishing the foolishness would go as easily.
He wanted to ask if she dated a lot, but the salesman’s words had stuck in his ears, and it was pretty obvious she did.
“Did you have something you were looking for?” he asked again.
“No,” Ranger said, tearing his eyes from the brunette he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about. “Sorry, I changed my mind.” He turned and started back toward his truck.
“Sir,” the salesman said, hurrying after him. “I hope it’s not because of what I said.”
“Not at all,” Ranger said easily. He tipped his hat at the unhappy salesman, got behind the wheel, and did his best not to peel out of the parking lot in his haste to get out of there.
“Idiot,” he muttered to himself, setting his truck down Main Street. The progress in town was astronomical, as most of these streets were actually clear. The businesses lining Main Street had been repaired already, and now that the power and water had been restored to town, most of the shops were open.
The power restoration hadn’t come a moment too soon. Bear had started to turn Grizzly about using their generator, but Ranger wasn’t about to take a cold shower when they had the battery right there, ready and willing to heat the dang water.
They ran on a well system at Shiloh Ridge too, so not having water wasn’t an issue for them. Thankfully. He knew others in town hadn’t had things as easy.
But services had been restored, and the mayor had called for a special light parade to come together and celebrate. Ranger had been excited about it, because he’d started to think of himself as wandering through the park, his hand in Oakley’s, as they looked for his big, loud family. They’d sit by them and enjoy the complimentary sweet tea and twitter with excitement when the sun finally went down enough for the parade to start.
His throat narrowed, and his mouth was so dry. “Don’t worry,” he told himself. “You can get a bottle of water at the automotive store.”
He did too, and then he found the manual for the make and model of the trucks they had at Shiloh Ridge and started loading any and every part he could find into a cart. He was going to repair those trucks if it was the last thing he did. Oh, yes, he was.
Chapter Fourteen
“Hold it steady there, Link,” Bear said, giving the child a moment to lean into the door. “I’ll latch it.” He reached above the boy’s head and did just that. “Got it.” He smiled down at Link, who had fit right into the culture at Shiloh Ridge Ranch.
Today, they were working at Three Rivers Ranch, and Bear and Link had been given the task of making sure all the doors in the four barns could open and close, latch and unlatch. Any that couldn’t, should be fixed. Bear had already rehung one on its tracks, and he’d given Link a hammer and told him to pry out a few rusty nails that were preventing another from closing.
“This one’s good, right, Bear?” Lincoln looked up at him, so cute in that cowboy hat and those big, wide, brown eyes.
“Sure is,” he said. “We’ve got to rebuild the chicken coop today, and we’re supposed to check all the row houses and stables over here too.” He looked up, a sense of being overwhelmed and utterly spent threatening to choke him. He put his head down and said, “Stables or chickens, Link?”
They’d been working at Three Rivers for a week already, and combined with their own cowboys chipping away at all the little things that the tornadoes had disrupted, the ranch was nearly back to its former glory.
Some things simply couldn’t be restored, and Bear could see evidence of that everywhere. The most noticeable one was the huge, glass-front building that housed Courage Reins, Pete�
��s equine therapy center here on the ranch.
Those windows had all been shattered. The offices inside had been disheveled and destroyed. When Bear and Lincoln had first arrived at the ranch forty-five minutes north of Three Rivers—almost a ninety-minute drive for Bear from Shiloh Ridge—the building had been half-rebuilt.
Across the road, Bowman’s Breeds had also seen plenty of new construction as Brynn’s fences had been swept away in the wind. Bear and Link had worked over there for the first few days, and Link sure did like the horses.
When they went back to Shiloh Ridge, Bear had been teaching Lincoln how to ride, and the boy was getting really good now that he’d been coming to the ranch with Bear for a little over two weeks now.
He still startled when the boy put his hand in Bear’s. Bear looked down at Lincoln, his heart warming toward the child. He’d never been against having children; he’d simply never had the opportunity.
Sammy asked him every dang day if Lincoln was doing okay at the ranch, and Bear really needed to gently ask her to stop doing that. Lincoln was doing much more than okay, and Bear really enjoyed having him around.
“I’m hungry, Bear,” he said.
“Me too, boy,” he said, his voice soft and loving. He barely recognized it as his own. “Let’s go through these stables and check the doors on the way. Miss Kelly and Miss Chelsea will have lunch on the lawn.”
“Do you think they’ll have those brownies?”
“If they do,” Bear said, detouring into the stable nearest to the barn they’d just finished inspecting. “You can only have one before you eat real food. The last thing I need is to tell your mom I don’t feed you properly.”
Lincoln smiled up at him. “All right, Bear.” He let go of Bear’s hand and skipped ahead. “Just checking to see if the doors open and close and latch?”
Bear looked down at the clipboard in his hand. “Yep,” he said, finding the checklist. The ranch had been keeping their horses out in the pastures they’d cleared, and as soon as the stables were finished, Squire would fill them with wood chips or sawdust, and get his horses back inside. Rather, Pete probably used these stables, as they were closest to Courage Reins.
Bear followed along behind Link as he opened, closed, and latched. They removed quite a large rock from one stall and Lincoln lugged it outside and dropped it in the dirt.
He returned and opened the next stall, only to have a squawking chicken fly at his face. “Whoa,” Lincoln said, ducking as a yelp came out of his mouth. He spun around to watch the brown hen flap to the top of the stall across the aisle. “Did you see that, Bear?”
A laugh started in Bear’s chest. “I sure did,” he said, a chuckle coming out. “You were like a ninja, boy. That was incredible.”
Lincoln laughed too, and Bear liked the sound of it. He was a somewhat sober child, and Bear supposed he had cause to be. He hadn’t dared ask anything about his family, but as they continued down the seemingly never-ending aisle, Bear pushing open the stalls on the right while Lincoln did the ones on the left, he asked, “Lincoln, do you miss your parents?”
“Uh,” Lincoln said, his back to bear. “Sort of?”
“Sort of?”
Lincoln turned and looked at Bear, who paused. He waited for the boy to speak. “I was only three when they died,” he said. “I don’t remember them much.” He lifted his bony shoulders and dropped them again. “I like the stories Gramma tells me, and I like looking at all the pictures Sammy has.”
“She calls you her son,” Bear said. “But you call her Sammy.” There was a question there, but Bear didn’t give it voice. He wondered if the boy would hear it and answer it anyway.
“Yeah,” Lincoln said. “She said I can call her what I want, and I mostly call her Sammy. But she’s my mom. She takes care of me, and loves me, and makes sure I wash before dinner and get my homework done. That’s what moms do, right?”
Bear smiled at him, noting the wide-eyed anxiety on Lincoln’s face. “Yeah,” he said. “That’s what moms do.”
“What do dads do?” Lincoln asked, turning back to his stall.
“A lot,” Bear said automatically. “They watch over their families. They help people. They sometimes have to pay the bills and do the dirty work no one else wants to do.”
“Sammy said last night that she wished she had someone to wash all the dirty dishes. Like that?”
Bear chuckled. “Yeah, kind of.”
“She’s not married.”
“No,” Bear said. “She’s not.”
“I think I’d like a dad,” Lincoln said. “My friends’ dads play baseball with them, and Davy’s dad taught him how to build a fire. He makes him empty the dishwasher too, so dads must make their kids do chores.”
“That they do,” Bear said. “My father was the ultimate taskmaster. He had to be. We have six kids in our family.”
“Wow,” Lincoln said. “Six kids?”
“Five boys and one girl,” Bear said, thinking of his brothers and sister.
“What kind of chores did you have to do?”
“So many,” Bear said. “I fed cattle before school, as well as after. I fed chickens before school. I had to walk this lame horse every afternoon. I ran the tractor when I turned twelve. I had to help Mother in the garden with the weeds. I hate weeding.”
“Sammy makes me clean my room,” Lincoln said. “She’s kind of like my mom and my dad.”
“Yes,” Bear said. “She works really hard, Link. You should do whatever she asks, and maybe clean your room before she has to ask you.”
“Okay,” Lincoln said.
They reached the end of the row house, and relief filled Bear. He took Lincoln’s hand again and faced the homestead. Sure enough, several long tables had been set up, and he watched as a couple of cowboys and Miss Kelly came down the steps from the deck and started loading them with food.
“Bear?” Lincoln asked. “Are you going to marry Sammy?”
Surprise moved through Bear. “I don’t know, Link.” He hadn’t even managed to take her out alone yet.
Tomorrow night, he thought. He’d been holding on to that thought for a while now—over a week—because he didn’t want to leave Link with his grandparents while he took Sammy to dinner. That had been problem one, and the other had been having a decent restaurant to take her to.
The town was mostly put back together now, though, and when Bear drove through it, the only reason he knew there’d been any wind damage was because of the huge, decorative water tower that sat in the downtown park. It still needed to be repainted, but there was a bit of a debate going on in town about the design of it.
Bear had no opinion on the matter, though he did wish they’d get rid of that ridiculous statue near the bus station. For every person he mentioned it to, though, he found someone who liked the young, pioneer woman waving to some long-lost lover. She’d been stranded in Three Rivers, supposedly while her cowboy had ridden away from her. Jilted, she’d set out to make her own way in the world, right there in Three Rivers.
Bear supposed it was a good story of overcoming the blows life dealt, but he didn’t like the way women went to the statue as if she’d have some sway over their love lives.
“Let’s go down one more row,” he said when he didn’t see anyone congregating on the lawn. “They don’t look quite ready yet.” He nudged Link down the next row instead of continuing toward the food, even though he was starving too.
He distracted himself from the hungry growls of his stomach by thinking about Sammy and their date the following evening. He’d been praying every chance he got that it would be a complete one-eighty from the only other date they’d been on together, and he added a mental plea to that collection as he checked another stall.
Please, Lord, he thought. Bless us to have good conversation and a fun time. When he picked Lincoln up in the morning, they chatted for a few minutes, and it wasn’t awkward. When she came up to Shiloh Ridge to get her son, she stayed and flirted with Bear for ten
or twenty minutes. They texted, and Bear had called when he and Micah had finally finished her parents’ roof.
We need a good date, he continued in his mind. If it be Thy will, I’d really like a good date with Sammy….
The following evening, Bear came out of his bedroom, ready to take Sammy to dinner. “What do you think?” he asked those collapsed on the couch. Ranger was slumped there, with Lincoln curled into his side. His cousin had his arm around Link’s shoulders, and the two of them only moved their eyes to look up at Bear.
Bishop, the only other person in the house, whistled and said, “Wow, Bear, you clean up pretty nice.”
“Thank you,” Bear said with a smile.
Ranger nodded, his dark eyes bright. “The big night.”
“Yeah.” Bear turned away from his cousin, because he couldn’t carry any more pressure than that which already rested on his shoulders. The big night. If this date didn’t go well, he was certain he and Sammy would be over.
He really didn’t want to be over. Pulling in a deep breath, he surveyed the kitchen, but there was nothing to do here. Bishop took care of keeping the house clean, especially the kitchen. He had a thing with smells, and that kept him scrubbing the dishes and making sure the garbage got taken out.
Sammy should be here any minute, and Bear’s pulse started knocking in his chest. He pulled open the fridge but promptly closed it again, because he was going to dinner at any moment.
“I’m going out to the porch,” he said, because it felt weird to have the woman come pick him up. Literally no one had ever done that, and Bear felt himself sliding into grumpy.
“Panda bear,” he muttered to himself as he went outside. “Be nice, Bear.”
He’d been outside for maybe two minutes when he heard the crunching of tires over gravel and the rumble of an engine. Sammy’s truck came into view a moment later, and Bear couldn’t look away from it.
She grinned when she saw him, and she parked and jumped from the truck as if she couldn’t wait to see him. “Hey,” she said, her white skirt billowing around her legs and revealing a sexy pair of cowgirl boots that made Bear’s throat turn to sand.
