Rancher to the Rescue

by Arlene James

  She glanced at Clark, color rising in her cheeks. “Oh, uh—”

  “Earlier? Later?” Jake asked patiently.

  Biting her lips, she glanced at Clark again then quickly, quietly said, “Five thirty will be fine.”

  Smiling, Jake took Frankie by the hand, nodded at Clark and got out of there.

  Would the day ever come, he wondered, when he could simply, formally ask the woman for a date? Maybe it was time to step up his game.

  * * *

  “Dese for you!” Frankie called, thrusting the bouquet of flowers at Kathryn with both hands.

  As wide as he was, the colorful mixed blooms had been wrapped in the waxy, green paper that she recognized as coming from the local grocery. She’d never received flowers before, but then she’d never had so many invitations, either. First Jake, then Clark and two others, now Clark and Jake again. At least Clark had the good manners to make an actual request for her company. She just wished she could be as happy about that as she ought to be. Instead, it was Jake’s high-handed assumption that she considered him her escort for the evening that both infuriated and thrilled her. The flowers just intensified the thrill.

  Even if Frankie had delivered them, she had no doubt who had thought of and purchased them. He shouldn’t have done it, not with the drain on his finances that the shop was making, but she couldn’t be upset with him.

  Her first date. Her first kiss. Her first flowers.

  She didn’t dare carry the thought further. She couldn’t, wouldn’t, let Jake Smith be her first love. If Jake was her first, she feared she would never know another. Taking the flowers in hand, she backed away from the door and smiled down at Frankie. She made a show of sniffing the blossoms.

  “Mmm. Beautiful. Thank you so much.”

  Frankie swung his arms, obviously pleased with himself. “We gots ’em for Mizz Ann, too, an’...” He screwed up his face as if trying to remember. “Mizz Billie!”

  “Donovan’s great-grandmother,” Jake informed Kathryn. “She lives with them.”

  “How very kind,” Kathryn managed, busily tweaking one blossom after another. Finally, she looked at Jake.

  He regarded her steadily, his hat in his hands, his folded sunshades poking up out of his shirt pocket. He’d shaved again since church, and her heart flip-flopped inside her chest. Flustered, she suddenly couldn’t seem to breathe properly.

  Oh, she was in trouble.

  Big, big trouble.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Turning, Kathryn fled toward the kitchen, saying, “I’ll put these in water and get the cake.” Frankie ran for the sofa. Behind her, she heard Jake step into the house and close the door.

  She was standing on a stool and pulling a vase down from an upper cabinet when Jake came into the kitchen. He tossed his hat onto the counter and reached around her, wrapping his long, strong fingers around the dusky green vase and taking it out of her hands. He stayed where he was as she backed down off the low stool. Slowly lowering the vase to the countertop, he momentarily surrounded her with his arms, his chest scant inches from her back. Kathryn closed her eyes, taking in the aroma and heat of him.

  He smelled of shaving cream and mint, and though no part of him touched her, she felt warmed, embraced. After a moment, he backed away. Her heart hammering, she quickly turned to place the vase on the island beside the flowers and pulled open a drawer to find scissors.

  “You could get the cake out of the fridge,” she told him, beginning to trim the flower stems. “I put it in there to set the icing.”

  Ann had tasked the Loco Man contingent with dessert for their cookout. Kathryn had proposed a strawberry cake. Tina had volunteered to provide homemade ice cream. Kathryn had placed the cake, on her mother’s crystal cake plate, on the lowest shelf of the refrigerator. Bending, Jake carefully pulled it out.

  “Wow. Chocolate-covered strawberries.” He set the cake on the end of the island and licked a tiny blob of pink icing from his thumb. “Mmm, strawberry and cream cheese. Forget the steaks. This is my main course.”

  Dropping stems into the vase, Kathryn glanced at the cake, smiling. Chocolate-covered strawberries were her favorite indulgence. She’d covered the top of the cake with them. Jake apparently shared her affinity for the sweet, red fruit dipped in waxy chocolate.

  “The cover is on the counter behind you.”

  He turned, spied the domed cake cover and picked it up by the glass knob on top. Carefully, he settled the glass dome over the cake. Folding his arms, he backed up to lean against the counter behind him and watched her arrange the flowers.

  “That must be a new outfit you’re wearing.”

  Keeping her head averted, she nodded and turned with the vase to carry it to the sink, where she began filling it with water. She’d told herself that her choice of deep, olive green had nothing to do with Jake’s preference for army colors. Green, after all, was always her color of choice. She had passed over similar loose, comfortable capris and matching tops in two other shades of green, however.

  “I like it,” Jake said. “But then, you always look good, no matter what you wear.”

  Kathryn froze in the act of lifting the vase out of the sink, her pulse pounding. “Thank you.” The words came out softer and more husky than she’d intended. Perhaps if she could breathe, she could speak normally.

  Jake stepped up next to her and picked up the flowers. “Where would you like these?”

  “I-island, for now.” Later, she would move them to her bedroom, where she would see them the moment she awakened.

  He carried the vase of flowers to the island and placed them in the center of the countertop before picking up his hat and fitting it to his head. “I’ll get the cake.”

  Kathryn caught her breath and followed him into the living room. Frankie went nuts over the cake, hugging Kathryn and pretending to gobble the dessert with his hands.

  “Um-um-um-um.”

  His antics eased Kathryn’s hyperawareness of Jake. Laughing, they trooped out to the truck. Jake secured the cake in the back seat, and Frankie kept pretending to eat it as they drove to the Pryor farm. They were still getting out of the truck when Donovan Pryor and Tyler came running around the house. Donovan’s red hair glowed like a flame against the sinking sun.

  “We got ice cream!” Tyler called happily.

  “An’ cake!” Frankie shouted as Jake lifted him down to the ground. “Wif s’rawburries! Candy ones!”

  “Strawberries,” Donovan repeated, licking his lips. “Yum.”

  Jake handed Frankie the wrapped roses, and the boy ran toward the older ones, calling, “I gots flou-hers!”

  Shaking his head, Jake instructed Frankie to deliver the roses. All three boys took off, yelling about strawberries, cake and flowers. Chuckling, Jake reached into the truck for the cake and carried it toward the house, Kathryn at his side.

  “Looks like I’m going to have to fight off the hordes to keep my cake.”

  “Your cake?”

  “My girl, my cake,” he said silkily, dropping a warm, lazy look on her. Kathryn’s heart stopped, her jaw dropping.

  Before she could get her mouth closed, Dean Pryor, Ann’s husband, came out onto the porch, calling to them. “Good to see y’all! Come on in.” He reached for the cake as they climbed the steps, saying, “I’ll take that.”

  “Oh, no, you won’t,” Jake said, twisting to keep the cake out of Dean’s reach. “If you’re real nice, I might let you have some, though.”

  Dean laughed. “It’s like that, huh? I can see we’re going to have to bribe you to share.” Laughing, he pulled open the screen door for them.

  “That might work,” Jake conceded, winking at Kathryn. “Let’s see what you’ve got to trade.”

  They walked through the old house, with its charmingly outdated furnishings and many family mementos, to the kitchen, w
here Ann and an older woman whom Dean quickly identified as his grandmother Billie were accepting Frankie’s roses with smiles and exclamations of delight.

  “KKay gots more,” Frankie reported, holding his arms wide. “S’lot more. Huh, Daddy?”

  “Lots more,” Jake corrected, while Kathryn bit her lips to conceal a smile and tried to hide her blush.

  “What’s the occasion?” Ann asked.

  Jake shrugged, grinning. “Steaks and strawberry cake. What else do you need?”

  The two roses were deposited in matching vases and sent out the door with the boys and Dean.

  Ann came and took the cake. “Thanks for the roses. That was so sweet. Oooh, the cake does look good. I’ll put it over here next to the ice-cream freezer.”

  “I’m gaining weight just thinking about it,” Tina drawled, entering the room from another part of the house.

  “Me, too,” Billie Pryor declared. “Let’s get some exercise.” She headed toward the door, waving for the others to follow. “I want to show y’all the garden before it gets dark, and I’ll need some help gathering the corn.”

  Kathryn followed Billie and Tina out the back door, Jake on her heels. A couple of wood picnic tables, covered with checked plastic cloths, stood just beyond a large, shiny grill, where Ann’s father, Wes Billings, tended a full grate of thick steaks while Dr. Alice arranged plates, napkins, flatware and plastic tumblers for iced tea and lemonade. A bud vase with a single long-stemmed rose rested in the center of each table.

  A cooler of ice squatted between two folding lawn chairs occupied by Rex Billings and Wyatt. Several other chairs stood beneath the overarching limbs of an enormous hickory tree. Dean Pryor rose from feeding wood to a fire in a hole in the ground. A grate covered the fire pit, and a large, heavy pot of water sat atop the grate. He walked over to a lawn chair next to Ryder beneath the tree and dropped down into it before picking up a tall tumbler of iced tea from the ground. He gulped down a long drink, then waved at Jake.

  “Grab a glass and a chair.”

  Tina set off up a small rise after Dean’s grandmother, who now carried a pair of baskets. Jake leaned close to Kathryn and whispered, “I’ll save you a seat.”

  Her heart in her throat, Kathryn merely nodded and went after Tina. Behind her, she heard Ryder teasing Jake.

  “Can’t the woman even walk up a hill without you ogling her?”

  Despite the burn in her cheeks, Kathryn couldn’t help looking back. Jake stood right where she’d left him, watching her. He slid a finger around the front curve of his hat brim in a kind of salute. Despite telling herself that it didn’t mean anything, Kathryn felt as if she could float up that hill.

  To her surprise, Kathryn found Billie Pryor’s vegetable garden to be very interesting, especially the part planted in straw bales. While Billie gently lectured on growing vegetables, Tina and Kathryn followed her to the cornfield and helped her look for the remaining ears of corn and snap them off the stalks. When Billie decreed that they’d gathered enough corn, they carried the ears toward a water bib, where the boys washed and stripped them. Soon the ears went into the big pot heating over the fire pit.

  Kathryn felt uncomfortably warm, despite the slowly sinking sun. Tina fanned herself with her hand and started toward the lawn chairs, saying, “I hear a tall, cold glass of iced tea calling my name.”

  “Funny, I thought that was my name I heard.”

  “If you did,” Tina teased, tossing a grin over her shoulder, “it was Jake calling.”

  Kathryn caught her breath, but then all she could see was Jake smiling at her. Somehow, she managed to make it down the hill without breaking anything. Jake waved her over to a chair at his side. Conversation had already turned to Tina’s plan to put in a vegetable garden at Loco Man Ranch.

  “Dean will till the ground for us,” Tina explained, Dean nodding in agreement. “We just have to decide where to put our garden plot. It should be close to the house. I was thinking out past the storm cellar.” She turned to Kathryn. “What do you think?”

  “Unless you’re planning to take down trees, that’s not much space,” Kathryn said, saddened to think that she wouldn’t be there to see the garden take shape. She dared not linger at the ranch with Jake in this happy mood. It was bad enough when he was ignoring or snapping at her, but this attentive, flirtatious Jake was a great danger to her heart, and now that her car had been returned to her, she had no excuse for staying on at Loco Man.

  “We’d have to push into the pasture to enlarge the area otherwise,” Tina mused.

  “We’ve got two thousand acres, sweetheart,” Wyatt said. “We can give up a few yards of pasture for a garden.”

  “But you’d have to deal with the barbed wire and the cattle, then,” Kathryn pointed out.

  “Don’t worry about that, honey,” Jake said casually. “I’ll build you a fence to keep the cattle out, one with no barbed wire.”

  That word, honey, exploded like a grenade in Kathryn’s mind. Apparently, it had quite an effect on everyone else listening, too. She saw knowing smiles and glances being exchanged everywhere she looked. Her face flamed red, and a lump formed in her throat. Why now, when it was too late? She couldn’t trust him, dared not trust that he’d always be this Jake. The one she couldn’t seem to help loving.

  As night fell and the food disappeared, along with copious amounts of tea and lemonade, laughter rang out and conversation spun from one subject to another. Katherine sat next to Jake and mostly just listened, wondering what it would mean to truly be Jake’s girl. Delight followed by heartache followed by delight followed by heartache? Or love and security without fail?

  Rex and Callie Billings created considerable excitement by announcing that they were expecting a third child. Kathryn saw Tina and Wyatt exchange glances and smiles. Rex and his family left soon after, Callie saying she was exhausted all the time in the early weeks of her pregnancies. Rex, an attorney as well as a rancher, explained that he had paperwork to catch up on and needed to get an early start.

  Perhaps half an hour later, Frankie crawled up in Kathryn’s lap and went to sleep on her shoulder. He was a lead weight against her chest, a sweaty one, but she held him close, treasuring the feel of him in her arms, until Jake rose a few minutes later and gathered up the boy.

  “We should be going, hon. Way past his bedtime.”

  Those endearments seemed to roll off his tongue with careless ease lately. If only she could trust in them.

  The party began to break up in earnest, with Tyler whining that he didn’t want to go and Tina herding the exhausted six-year-old toward the front yard while Wyatt fetched the ice-cream freezer. Wes had cleaned the grill as soon as the last steak had come off it, so he and Alice began helping Billie carry leftovers into the kitchen. Ann brought Kathryn her cake plate and dome, clean now. The cake had been a big hit.

  “I hate to leave you with a mess,” Kathryn said.

  “No, no. Dad and Alice will help us finish up while Billie gets the kids down for the night. We’ll be done before you get home.” She hugged Kathryn around the covered cake plate clasped to her chest, adding, “It’s so good to have you in our lives again.”

  Even as she murmured her agreement, Kathryn wondered if she would see any of these people anymore after she stopped working for the Smiths.

  They arrived at her home fifteen or twenty minutes later. Sucking in a deep breath, Kathryn started to thank Jake for the flowers and the evening, but he lightly pressed a finger to her lips, whispering, “Don’t want to wake Frankie.”

  Twisting to look into the back seat, where Frankie slept with his head lolling to one side, Kathryn nodded and reached for the door handle. She was going to miss that little boy fiercely. Jake got out on his side and started around to meet her. He’d turned off the overhead light in the cab, so Frankie slept on.

  She still cradled the cake plate a
nd its cover in her lap. Jake took them from her, and she slid out onto the gravel of her drive. Jake carried the empty cake plate and its cover with one arm and hit the lock with the other hand before gently closing the door. They walked in silence to her front steps and climbed them to the porch.

  Kathryn took out her keys and unlocked the front door. To her surprise, Jake brushed past her and set the cake plate on the small table just inside the door. Kathryn reached for the trio of light switches on the wall above the table, but Jake’s hand got there first. Instead of turning on the living room lights, however, he turned off the porch light. Then, there in the open doorway, he pulled her into his arms.

  She shouldn’t do it. She knew she shouldn’t do it, but a growing sense of urgency filled her, an impatience which she recognized despite never having felt it before this moment. This was the end, her final chance to feel his arms around her. Turning up her face, she slid her arms around his neck and kissed him.

  After the first time, she hadn’t imagined that his kisses could improve, but she found herself moved in profound ways. This kiss shifted her reality.

  She was lost now. She had no choice but to love him.

  Sadly, it changed little. Just her.

  Only his kiss could simultaneously ground her and fling her to the stars.

  Only his kiss.

  And this was the last one.

  * * *

  Jake woke early on Monday morning, as usual. He shaved, slipped downstairs and made coffee, but he didn’t go to the shop. He wanted to see Kathryn as soon as she came in. After last night, she had to know how he felt about her. They had to talk things through and make a plan. He wanted a bit of privacy, not too much, just enough time to say the things he’d been contemplating. But not enough to allow temptation to get the better of him. The woman was a major temptation to him, though he hadn’t wanted to admit it at first.

  He’d realized, just before he’d drifted off to sleep, that he’d gotten so good at pushing away what seemed to weaken or threaten him that it had become second nature. With Jolene, he’d had to do it. No one could live in constant fear of losing someone they loved. Everyone had to find a way to cope with the threat of danger. His way was to deny his fears and refuse to think of them. He’d done the same thing with Kathryn. But it hadn’t worked.