Outlaw Seal

by Kate Sheperd

  And I believed him.

  *****

  I fingered the edge of my hat nervously as I waited in my attorney Herb’s office for Ruth and her lawyer to show up. To say that she hadn’t taken it well when I’d asked her for the divorce was an understatement. I was not looking forward to this meeting.

  “Showtime,” I said under my breath when I heard her approaching in the hallway. Herb gave me a reassuring nod and I drew a deep breath.

  Ruth’s attorney was a severe looking blonde with sharp blue eyes. I’d be willing to bet she wasn’t an inch over 5’ 3”. I’d also be willing to bet she could mop the floor with anyone who crossed her. Ruth was doing her best to pretend I wasn’t in the room. I was pretty sure that there were glaciers that were less icy.

  “Mr. Williams,” said the attorney.

  “Ma’am.”

  “Marsha Swann,” she said as she gave my hand a curt shake. She had a grip like a vice.

  “Please, have a seat,” Herb said, gesturing to two empty chairs.

  “Thank you,” Marsha said as she seated herself.

  “I’ll stand, thanks,” Ruth said coldly as she stared out the window.

  Marsha turned her attention to the manila folder she had brought with her. She passed it to Herb.

  “I think you’ll find my client’s demands quite reasonable,” she said. “I feel certain that we can settle out of court.”

  I narrowed my eyes. If Ruth thought I’d sell off the ranch without a fight, she had another thing coming. But I held my tongue as Herb flipped through the pages of the document. He cleared his throat when he reached the end of the document.

  “Is this…are you serious?”

  “Perfectly,” Ruth said without shifting her gaze from the window.

  “Alright,” he said disbelievingly.

  I almost didn’t want to know what those papers said.

  “Well, Buck,” Herb said. “This seems…reasonable. Very reasonable.”

  “Ok,” I said. I braced myself before asking, “What is she asking for?” It felt odd talking about her as if she weren’t in the room.

  “Nothing, really. Personal effects. Several pieces of antique furniture. Her vehicle, of course.”

  “And?”

  “And nothing. That’s it,” he said, holding his hands up.

  I was completely taken aback. “The ranch?”

  Ruth said something under her breath, but I didn’t catch what it was.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I said I don’t want your damn ranch,” she snapped. “I want the family we were supposed to have. I want Colton back.”

  I winced at those words. There wasn’t a damn thing I could say to that.

  “I hate you,” she said. “I hate you for making me this way. So no, I don’t want a damn thing to do with you or your Godforsaken ranch. You can just go right to hell. And take your little whore with you while you’re at it.”

  “Leave her out of this,” I said.

  She didn’t reply except to sneer, turn her back to me, and walk out of the room.

  *****

  December came faster than I could have imagined. I held Charlie’s hand as she pushed. And screamed. A lot. She had been in labor for almost 12 hours and the baby was going to be here any second. I was almost afraid for it to come. I couldn’t help but remember the eerie silence, the unnatural stillness of Colton when he had come into the world. I would never have told Charlie, but I was terrified.

  “Come on, Charlotte,” Doctor Jansen was saying. “Big push. You can do it.”

  She nodded and pushed with everything she had.

  “There we go!” he said elatedly. “It’s a girl,” he said with a big smile.

  Her tiny cries filled the room as he held her up. I didn’t realize until then that I had been holding my breath. Doctor Jansen let me cut the cord before handing her to Charlie.

  “You done good, Darlin’,” I told her. She smiled up at me as she held our daughter in her arms. I didn’t think it was possible to love anyone so much.

  Wrangling for the Ranch

  I.

  “You know,” Buck said, pulling up on the reins of the sorrel gelding and looking over at Karissa. “I’ve sunk every cent I’ve ever made and a hell of a lot of blood, sweat and tears into building this place up. It wasn’t much when my Dad died and left it to me, but I’ve made do with it and built it into something that he’d have been proud of.”

  “It’s certainly beautiful.” Even in jeans and a long-sleeved flannel shirt, Karissa McCall looked the part of an immaculately kept, attorney of a higher social class. Her blonde hair was kept perfectly under the brand new felt hat that she had bought just for the occasion. “It’s so peaceful and that breeze blowing off of the mountain bringing the hint of wildflowers, umm.”

  She tilted her head back, closed her eyes and inhaled deeply.

  Buck Kaufman was silent for a few minutes, watching the attractive blonde as she enjoyed something of which he held a great deal of pride. She was certainly out of his league, but he couldn’t help wondering what it would be like to hold her in his arms, stroke those silky blonde strands and take in the fragrance of her expensive perfume.

  Buck had brought his divorce attorney, Karissa out to the ranch for the day, hoping that it would motivate her to help him hold onto it. 5000 acres of prime grassland with two streams that provided good water and allowed him to produce winter feed along their banks, wandered up off of the plains and up into the edge of the mountains.

  Up to that point, it appeared that his plan was working out. She seemed to be enjoying herself and was being swept up into the spirit of “the wind and the wild,” which is how he liked to refer to it. The only drawback was that he was struggling with the fact that his typically sinister outlook on attorneys was slowly changing and she was beginning to become human; a damn fine looking human at that.

  “So, you told me that you have 5000 acres that runs right up to the edge of the mountains?” she ventured. “This place must have one hell of a price tag on it. No wonder Denise is going after you so hard.”

  That was the end of his fantasies. Just like your typical lawyer to head right back to focusing on the dollar signs. “To me it’s priceless,” he muttered.

  “I think I saw a valuation of $15,000,000 in your paperwork?” she ventured.

  “That’s just the dollar figure that some assessor put on it,” he replied. He was frustrated that she hadn’t yet caught on to what he was trying to communicate to her. You couldn’t put a dollar amount on something like his ranch. Sure, everything, in the eyes of an assessor, would have a dollar value to it, but the value that he had in the ranch was something that sunk down deep into his soul.

  Seeing his frustration, Karissa quickly backtracked. “Yeah, of course, it has a great deal of sentimental value to you that an assessor couldn’t possibly figure into the price.” She was regretting that she had gone in that direction with the conversation. Her problem was that she wasn’t sure how to talk to Buck. They were from two different worlds. In her world, value was always represented with a dollar sign in front of it. Though she could feel that there was something special about Donavon’s Spread; the name, Buck had told her, was given to the place by his grandfather, but she couldn’t quite put a finger on what it meant. What she did know, though putting it into words wasn’t coming to her at the moment, was that making certain that Buck was able to hold on to most if not all of it was becoming a major motivation to her.

  She’d been on a horse a few times when she was younger, but hadn’t ridden a great deal, therefore, when Buck had invited her to go out to the ranch and go for a ride with him, she had accepted eagerly. She’d been pretty intimidated by her lack of experience when she first swung her leg over the saddle and took her seat, but since Buck had kept a pretty easy pace going, her confidence in her riding skills had grown quickly.

  “Look,” she said, trying to fill the long, awkward silence that had suddenly turned up. “I know
what you’re doing and it’s working. I promise that I’m not looking at this place in terms of dollars, but in value. There’s a lot more to value than the numbers behind a dollar sign.”

  Buck had tried to conceal his disappointment, but evidently she was able to see right through him. She’d nailed down his feelings in that short statement. Since he and Denise had separated, he’d done nothing but worry about how he was going to hold onto his family’s place. It had been in the possession of three generations before he came along and he wasn’t about to become the one that lost it. Needless to say, he had been pulling his hair out, looking at things from every angle and trying to figure out how Denise was going to play her hand.

  “I guess I’m wearing my feelings on my sleeve, huh?” He hoped that the stirring attraction that he’d been feeling for her hadn’t been quite as obvious. He wasn’t in the mood for embarrassing himself.

  “Yeah,” she laughed softly. “You could say that. But that’s not all, Buck. This place is really starting to grow on me.”

  “Well, hell,” he chuckled. “By the time this damned divorce is finished and I have to liquidate, you might pick it up for a song.” It was a cowboy’s way to make light of their own difficulties. He’d grown up with that sort of gallows humor all around him and didn’t realize that Karissa might take it as an insult.

  “I should hope that I wouldn’t do that badly,” she countered, pushing her lower lip out in something of a pout. The moment she produced that expression, she drew her lip back in. What had possessed her to act like a schoolgirl? Sure, he was attractive and rugged, she’d thought so the minute he walked into the office, but she wasn’t looking for a man, she had a career to think of and goals to achieve. Besides, he probably wasn’t interested in hooking up with someone while the wound from his separation from Denise was still so raw. Why am I even thinking about that right now? She reeled in her feelings.

  “I didn’t mean that you won’t do well on my behalf.” He’d just screwed that up. That’s one of the problems that came with two people from so dramatically different backgrounds tried to communicate with one another. Maybe his whole idea of bringing her out to the ranch, other than getting a chance to see how well she filled out a pair of jeans, had been a bad idea. I wouldn’t mind spending a hell of a lot more time riding with her. You better head off thoughts like that, Buck.

  Most of the conversation died out from that point on and a somewhat awkward silence lingered around the edges. Neither of them was sure if they were making the other one uncomfortable, or if they were just uncomfortable and projecting their own discomfort onto the other. The more they each tried to analyze it in their own minds; however, the harder it became to try to communicate in any form.

  “I thoroughly enjoyed the ride,” Karissa beamed as Buck walked her to her Mercedes after their ride was over. “You certainly have something worth holding onto. I promise I’ll do everything in my power to help you do that.”

  “I hope you do,” he replied. “Like I said, this is all I’ve got and means more to me than anything in the world.”

  “We’ll meet next Tuesday at 9:00 a.m., then?” she confirmed.

  “I’ll be there,” he said. As he was pushing the door of her car closed, he presented one more offer. “You’re welcome out here any time. You’re not bad company, even for a lawyer.”

  II.

  There was no doubt that Karissa was fighting the battle on Buck’s behalf with every ounce of her skills brought to bear. The divorce proceedings were drawn out for months, even after it looked like they were about to reach a settlement. Though they were both frustrated that things weren’t moving more rapidly, or even in their direction, neither of them ever gave up hope until the final declaration was reached and the judge signed the final order.

  Buck had lost. More surprising to him than losing, was the way that Karissa had abruptly packed up her things in her briefcase and strode rapidly out of the courtroom. In fact, while Buck was still sitting at the counsel table with his eyes closed and sorting through the words that the judge had just spoken to the court, Karissa was already through the doors of the courtroom and on her way back to her office.

  Buck snapped to attention when he realized that Karissa was already gone. He stood, looked around the room and then toward the door. “Damn,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “She got outta here like she’d been shot from a rifle.” He looked across the room toward Denise who was hugging her lawyer and peering over his shoulder am Buck with a satisfied sneer on her lips. “I guess I ought to have taken Karissa’s cue and avoided seeing that.” He turned away from her with his hat in his hands and started toward the back of the courtroom and out the door.

  In the hallway outside, there was still no sign of Karissa and Buck began to wonder if she’d run off to the lady’s room or something. That was the only explanation that made sense to him. Why else would she disappear so quickly? He waited around for another ten minutes or so as the hallway cleared and he and the bailiff were the only ones still hanging around outside the doors of the courtroom. It was then, that he decided that she wasn’t in the lady’s room, she’d simply hightailed it out of there. “Not even a ‘fair thee well’,” he whispered.

  The fact that Karissa had blown the case, and then sprinted out of there without saying a word to him, began to rub on the raw edges of his already irritated nerves. He went through the doors leading out to the wide steps at the front of the courthouse with his anger beginning to grow by the second. By the time he was seated behind the wheel of the Dodge 350 dually with which he pulled the stock trailers on what “used to be” his ranch, he was mad clear through. He was working very hard at pushing down violent thoughts that kept popping into his head regarding all of the possible things that might prevent Denise from enjoying a single red cent of his money as he turned the key in the ignition and listened to the Cummins engine rumble to life.

  After backing out of the four parking spaces that his large truck took up in the parking lot, Buck turned out of the lot on squealing wheels as he gunned the motor and started in the direction of the ranch. He’d only gone a half dozen blocks before he changed his mind and whirled his truck around in a U-turn.

  “No, by God, that shyster lawyer charged me plenty and she damned well needs to face me,” he announced to the windshield.

  Karissa’s office was a couple of miles further along the main drag of the county seat and it took him only a few minutes to cover that ground. He wasn’t really concerned about his speed or how he was driving. If somebody wanted to stop him and give him hell about it, that was just fine, he was itching for a fight anyway.

  Karissa heard the motor of the heavy diesel truck as it pulled into the parking lot outside her office. She had expected him to come after her. No doubt, he was very angry, she certainly would have been too. Who could really blame him? He’d just lost the most precious thing in his life to the person that he’d once loved, but grown to hate more than anything else. Worse than that, it had all happened because of her failure. It hadn’t been just one failure, but a string of failures. Her mind had gone over each of them several times as she was driving back to her office. Her guilt hadn’t let up even after collapsing into the chair behind her desk.

  She’d felt the tears threatening to spill over her eyelids when she was still in the courtroom. Since it would have been completely unprofessional of her to cry at that point, she had rushed out to her car and drove back to her office. In the private comfort of her office, she had allowed a few of the tears begin to flow, in spite of doing her very best not to allow them to. The sound of Buck’s pickup, however, was a stark reminder of her failures and holding back her tears in was no longer possible.

  Typically a laid back and easy going guy, Buck’s temper had reached its boiling point by the time that he got out of his pickup and started toward Karissa’s office with long, determined strides. Losing the case and the ton of money to Denise had been bad enough. In fact, he was probably going to have to
sell the ranch in order to make it all work out. Having Karissa walk out on him without saying a word had pushed him beyond his senses.

  Buck and Karissa hadn’t really developed anything between them, in spite of the fact that there was something always lingering around the edges of their conversations or their meetings; something that, if provided with the tiniest of sparks, would burst into flame. Buck wasn’t sure what it was that he wanted from Karissa, but he damned sure didn’t expect for her to run away. He shoved the door open and strode directly toward Karissa’s office door.

  “Mister Kaufman,” the secretary called out to him. “She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”

  “Humph,” he replied and continued on his path.

  “Mister Kaufman, you can’t go in there.” She considered blocking his path, but as the mountain of a man moved closer and she looked up at his determined face, she decided that she didn’t get paid nearly enough to become Karissa’s bodyguard. She tailed along behind Buck as he pushed open the door.

  Up until that very moment, he’d had plenty of things to say to her, but once he stepped through the door and saw her face, he simply froze. It was obvious that she had been and was still crying. He had a response for nearly anything she threw at him; anger, excuses, lies or any other response from her, except crying. He wasn’t exactly sure how to handle that.

  “I tried to stop him,” the secretary announced from behind Buck’s large frame.

  “It’s okay, Sandy,” Karissa said, turning toward her intruder and swiping at her tears with a linen kerchief. “I’ll be fine. Why don’t you just go on home? I’m pretty sure there won’t be anything else to do today.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes. Just turn on the machine to catch the calls. I’ll see you on Monday morning.”

  “I can stay…”

  “Sandy, please, just go home,” she interrupted.