The Rancher She Loved

by Ann Roth

  ‘So I took the test in the bathroom of a gas station while B waited for me outside the door.’” Sarah took a sip of her coffee. “I wonder who B is?”

  “Probably the guy she was sleeping with.”

  “You mean my biological father. I’d sure like to know his name.” She returned to the journal entry. “‘The worst has happened. I’m pregnant. The whole rest of the trip and all the way home, I prayed and prayed to God to take this baby up to heaven. If He doesn’t, B and I don’t know what we’ll do.’ That’s the last thing she wrote.”

  With a heavy sigh, Sarah closed the book. “Poor Tammy.”

  Clay was more interested in Sarah. Compassion and caring brushed her features with softness. Her eyes were shadowed and sorrowful, as if she knew exactly how Tammy had felt. For all Clay knew, she could’ve experienced a teenage pregnancy herself.

  “Do you know anyone else who’s gone through something like that?” he asked.

  “A girl in my college dorm. But she was almost twenty-one. She and her boyfriend got married and as far as I know, they’re happy. When you’re sixteen, pregnancy has to be that much more difficult and lonely.”

  Clay knew something about teen pregnancy. “It is. My junior year of high school, one of my female friends got pregnant.”

  Sarah’s expression shifted to surprise, then something much different. “Was the baby yours?”

  The cool lift of her chin rankled. Figured she’d think that. “She was just a friend, Sarah. We never even kissed each other. My dad didn’t want me getting into trouble like him. He raised me to be careful, and I always have been.”

  “With all the women you’ve slept with, you’d be crazy not to.”

  She sounded offended, almost angry. But her article had ruined his life, not the other way around. Clay bristled. “What have you got against me?”

  “Nothing.” Her lips clamped shut, but only for a moment. “What did your friend do about the baby?”

  “Like the girl you knew in college, she got married. Because she and her boyfriend were so young, their parents had to sign a document that it was okay. But the marriage didn’t work out, and a few months after their son was born, they split up. The baby’s father paid what he could to help out, but he didn’t have a high-school diploma, and didn’t earn much. My friend ended up moving back in with her parents while she earned her GED and got on her feet financially.”

  Sarah looked thoughtful. “Do you think...do you think Tammy’s parents accepted her pregnancy?”

  “If they had, would she have given you up for adoption?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.” She hugged the journal close, the yearning on her face making Clay’s chest ache. “I would guess that the family left town because of Tammy’s pregnancy, except my birth certificate says I was born in Saddlers Prairie. But if they stayed here, why did they sell the house, and why did they leave this trunk and Tammy’s bedroom furniture here? If this stuff is even hers.”

  She set the journal aside and massaged her temples, as if so many unknowns gave her a headache.

  Clay could only wonder at the answers to those questions. Despite himself, he was beyond curious. He wanted to know what had happened to the Becker family, and especially Tammy. “She mentioned church a couple times, and her youth group. Maybe you can find out which one the family belonged to, and do some research there.”

  “Good idea. There can’t be that many churches around here.” Sarah gestured at the papers in the footlocker. “Maybe there’s something in here about where the family went.”

  She rolled onto her knees in an easy move Clay envied. If he tried that, his bad knee would scream. Kneeling in front of the footlocker, she began to pull things out and stack them around her.

  From where Clay sat, he had a great view of her backside. From time to time, her blouse rode up, revealing tantalizing glimpses of smooth skin. He told himself to look away, but didn’t.

  In no time, record albums, three-ring binders, spiral notebooks and a couple of skinny high-school yearbooks piled up around her. One too-tall stack toppled sideways, just missing Sarah’s barely tasted coffee. Which was probably cold by now.

  “Why don’t you give me that mug,” he said.

  “Oh. Sure—thanks.”

  She arched backward and massaged the small of her back, causing her breasts to jut out. Clasping the handle of the mug, she reached across the mess, and handed it over. Her skin was warm now.

  Clay was hot enough to boil water, and the brief slide of the backs of her fingers against his palm only upped his temperature.

  Oblivious to his feelings, Sarah pored over an old report card. “This is from January of her junior year. I was born that August, which means she was barely pregnant. She may not even have known yet. She got an A in English, but almost flunked math. I was the same way.” Sarah glanced around and frowned. “I don’t see any other report cards. I wonder if they got tossed out, or maybe she dropped out of school before the end of her junior year.”

  “Could be either one. Why don’t you check those yearbooks and see what you can find out? I’d start with the one from her junior year.”

  “There isn’t one,” she said. “Just the freshman and sophomore years. She went to a school called Four City High School.”

  “Saddlers Prairie is too small for its own high school,” Clay told her. “We have a one-room school that goes through eighth grade. The older kids are bussed to the high school. If it were me, I’d check out Four City. Maybe one of her high-school teachers is still teaching there or lives somewhere close.”

  “I will.” Sarah opened the yearbook from Tammy’s sophomore year and propped the book on her lap. “Lots of kids signed Tammy’s yearbook, but I don’t see anything special. Just the usual, ‘Have a great summer’ and ‘See you at church camp.’ No mention of anyone with the initial B, and nothing signed by a boy whose name begins with that letter. But then, maybe Tammy didn’t have a boyfriend yet. I wish she’d written something in her journal about him.”

  She flipped to the class pictures. After staring at the page with Tammy’s photo, she held it up for Clay to see. “That’s her, on the left. Neither of my adoptive parents had a wide mouth like mine, and I always wondered where I got it.” Clearly emotional, she swallowed. “Now I know.”

  “Let me see that.”

  Clay stood. Sitting too long had caused his knee to stiffen up, and he winced as he joined Sarah on the rug.

  “Are you in pain?”

  “Still healing from an injury.” Not wanting to invite questions, which would lead to the pity he detested, he studied the yearbook.

  The girl staring from the photo was pretty, with big eyes and a begging-to-be-kissed bottom lip, a teenage version of Sarah. “You have her face shape and eyes, too,” he said.

  “I noticed that.” She fiddled with an earring. “I wonder what color her eyes were. With black-and-white photos, you can’t tell.”

  Clay had no idea and didn’t care. He was lost in the expressive depths of Sarah’s eyes. Something sweet and warm passed between them, a bond of sorts, born out of sharing the contents of the old footlocker.

  Cheeks flushed, she dropped her gaze to the yearbook on her lap. “I wish there were more pictures of her. And at least one of her parents. My grandparents.”

  Though her gaze remained on the yearbook, Clay had the feeling she wasn’t seeing it.

  “I hardly remember my adoptive grandparents,” she said. “A car accident took my maternal grandparents before I was born, and I was three when my father’s parents died in a plane crash. Two horrible tragedies.”

  Clay had always taken his parents and four grandparents for granted. They all lived a few miles from each other in Billings, along with his aunt, his sister, her husband and their two kids. He’d never even imagined what his life would’ve
been like without them.

  Sarah had no living relatives except, possibly, for her biological parents and grandparents—people she’d never even met. That had to feel lonely, worse than any emptiness Clay had experienced.

  “You never know, you might find photos buried somewhere in this stuff,” he said.

  “Which is why I’m going to look carefully through everything.”

  That could take hours—days, for that matter. He didn’t think he’d be able to handle having Sarah around that long.

  Looking thoughtful, she tapped her finger to her mouth. “I wonder what her friends thought about the pregnancy, and how the school reacted.”

  “Thirty years ago, in a small town? Probably not well.”

  Once more, her beautiful eyes met his. “I feel so bad for Tammy. I would really like to meet her and talk about it.”

  Clay hoped she got that chance. He wanted her to find and reunite with her relatives, so that the shadows and worry faded from her face.

  “You don’t have to worry about me, Clay,” she said as if she’d read his mind. “I’ve been alone for a while now, and I’m okay.”

  He had no doubt of that. He’d never met a woman like her. She was strong and didn’t flirt or fall all over him.

  Most of the women he’d known said what they thought he wanted to hear, instead of speaking their minds. Sarah didn’t seem to have that problem. At times, she seemed cool and distant, but right now, she was open and warm, just as when she’d followed him around for that piece she was writing about him.

  Back then, he’d been so sure she cared for him—not as a rodeo star, as a man.

  Her behavior after that kiss had proved the opposite.

  He’d liked her three years ago, and fool that he was, he liked her now. Whether she cared for him any more than she had then was anyone’s guess, and if he knew what was good for him, he’d get rid of her now.

  He rolled his tense shoulders and cleared his throat. “I need to make a few calls and tackle some chores.”

  “Of course.” Sarah glanced at her watch. “I’ve been here two whole hours? I had no idea this would take so much time, and I’ve barely touched the surface. There’s still tons of stuff to go through. Would you mind if I took the footlocker back to Mrs. Yancy’s?”

  Clay didn’t care what she took, so long as she left. “It doesn’t belong to me or Ty, so I don’t see why not.” Ignoring his protesting leg, he pushed to his feet with barely a wince. “So you’re staying with Mrs. Yancy?”

  “That’s right.” She began to pile things back into the trunk. “Do you know her?”

  “We’ve met. She talks a lot.”

  Sarah grinned at that. “Yes, she does.” Having returned everything to the footlocker, she closed the lid and fastened it. He offered her a hand up.

  Much too late and all too soon, she pulled free.

  “She means well, though,” she said. “I think she’s lonely. She’s a great cook. This morning, she made the best breakfast.”

  “That’d compensate for a lot of chatter.”

  Sarah laughed, and for that moment her cares seemed to fall away. Her wide, perfect smile took his breath away.

  It was all Clay could do to not pull her close and move in for another sizzling kiss. He backed toward the door.

  “Right, you have things to do,” she said, misinterpreting his retreat. “Thanks for sitting with me while I looked through this stuff. Having you here made the whole process easier for me.”

  But not for him. Since yesterday’s kiss, his body had awakened after a long drought, and a certain part of him was raring to go. He gave a grudging nod, and then hefted the footlocker to his shoulder.

  It wasn’t that heavy, but Sarah’s eyes widened, and he thought he saw admiration on her face. She grabbed her purse and collected her mug from the floor. “I’ll drop this off in the kitchen.”

  Clay nodded and followed her from the room. She moved fast, her hips swinging. She wasn’t trying to be provocative. All the same, she was.

  He felt bewitched. Gobsmacked. In lust.

  By the time Sarah returned from the kitchen and joined him at the door, he was fighting a hard-on. Lucky for him, her attention was on the load balanced on his shoulder.

  She opened the screen door for him, holding it while he maneuvered through with the footlocker. His forearm accidentally brushed her soft breasts. A jolt of pure, hot desire surged through him, and he nearly dropped the trunk.

  Sarah blushed.

  “Uh, sorry about that,” he lied.

  He moved past her, when what he really wanted was to get a whole lot closer.

  Outside, she fell into step beside him. Too close, and Clay gripped the footlocker and lengthened his stride. His leg protested, but the pain was a small price to pay for putting more space between them.

  Dimly, he registered that for the first time this spring, the air was hot. He forced himself to pay attention to the penned dogs in his neighbor’s yard, barking out hellos, and noted that one of the flowering bushes had burst into bloom. Anything to distract him from the woman a few feet behind him.

  None of it made a whit of difference. Blood pounded in his head, and his long-denied body homed in on her and refused to leave things be. He figured he’d cool down once she drove off.

  Standing back, he waited for her to pop the trunk of her car. He set the footlocker in, slammed the lid shut and then made a show of checking his watch.

  Sarah started for the driver’s side of the car, but stopped and turned toward him. “I almost forgot—Mrs. Yancy told me about your ranch.”

  “It won’t be up and running for a while yet,” he said in a gruff voice.

  “That’s a huge change from rodeoing.”

  A tiny bit of paper was stuck in her hair. To stop himself from reaching out and removing it, which would be dangerous, he shoved his hands in the rear pockets of his jeans. “My life is totally different now. A lot quieter. Buckle bunnies don’t flock around me, and reporters don’t call.”

  Why had he told her?

  “Do you miss the attention?”

  “Not really. I’ve been too busy, focusing on the ranch. It needed a ton of work.” Repairing the dilapidated outbuildings and researching the stock-contracting business had taken a huge chunk of time, effort and money. “I don’t have any cattle yet, and I haven’t hired a crew, but I’m working on both.” After the crew was in place and settled into their trailers, he would put them to work, repairing and replacing fencing so that he could safely pen his stock. It was work he’d attempted to tackle himself, but his bum leg made for slow, painful progress.

  “I’m sure you’ll do very well.”

  She looked and sounded as if she believed in him. These days, not a lot of people did. That felt good, made him want to show her his property and share the house plans.

  “I’d like to interview you about what’s involved in setting up a ranch,” she said.

  “For the article you’re writing?” he guessed.

  She nodded. Clay didn’t trust her enough.

  He didn’t trust himself, either.

  He rocked back on his heels. “I don’t think so.”

  “I guess I’m not surprised.” She looked half-sorry for the lies she’d written, and for a moment he thought she might apologize.

  Instead she blew out a breath and shook her head in disbelief. “The article came out almost three years ago, Clay. I don’t understand why you’re still so angry.”

  Because his life had been forever changed. “You left a day early, without so much as a goodbye, and you never answered my calls or emails,” he said. “Never even gave me the courtesy of an explanation, just left me to deal with the fallout. Why’d you do it, Sarah? Why did you tell those lies about me?”

 
Chapter Five

  Sarah had seen Clay laugh, had seen him serious, somber and irritated, but until now, she’d never seen him truly angry. The sheer size of the man, combined with the ominous gleam in his narrowed eyes was intimidating and then some.

  Briefly, she considered jumping into her car, locking all the doors and speeding away, but she was upset with him, too. This was the second time he’d called her a liar. She wasn’t. She took her writing career far too seriously to fabricate anything,

  Once and for all, it was time to set Clay straight.

  Trembling inside—whether from fear, anger or a combination of both—she squared her shoulders and raised her chin. “I left early because I had all the information I needed and there was no reason to stay. And as I explained before, every word of that article was the God’s honest truth.”

  Clay snorted. “Let me refresh your memory. And I quote, ‘Clay Hollyer is as talented a bull rider as you’ll ever meet, with an ego as big as the crossbred Brahma bulls he so skillfully stays astride. To see him in his chaps, denim shirt and Stetson, holding tight to the bull rope while his powerful legs grip the bucking bull is to witness the unforgettable spectacle of man against eighteen hundred pounds of turbo-charged animal.

  “‘A ten-time world champion, and as friendly as he is talented, the popular Hollyer is often sought out by fans for photos. Women travel from around the country to seek out the wealthy, handsome bachelor, in hopes of lassoing his heart. He has been linked with numerous females, including models and actresses. But never for long. Buckle bunnies, the groupies of the rodeo world, vie and flirt for his attention like bees around honey.’”

  Sarah opened her mouth, but Clay wasn’t finished.

  “‘Clay is the number-one bull rider in the country and a skilled lover,’ enthused one buckle bunny who wishes to remain anonymous,’” he went on. “‘I’d be crazy to not want a few hours alone with him.’”

  He shut his mouth, rested his hands low on his narrow hips, no sign of the Hollyer charm in sight.