by Becky Wade
“You okay?” he asked.
“Yes.”
She led him along the hall and down the central staircase. She’d noticed his handsomeness the first day they’d met, of course. But it had been more of a scholarly notation. Like the way she’d assess a painting: “Hmm. Handsome.” It hadn’t affected her . . . until now. Huge uh-oh.
In the great room, she checked the baby monitor. She could hear waterfall, but nothing else.
“Sadie Jo’s going to take over for you soon, right?” Bo asked.
“Yes. She insisted on doing something, so she’s going to sleep in the room with him tonight, and then she and Lynn are going to watch him in the morning until Amber gets back. She wanted to do even more, but she’s eighty years old. He’s too much work for her.”
“I’m thirty-two and I feel like I need to sleep for a week.”
“Exactly. Me too.”
“If you want to head back to your place, I’ll wait here for Sadie Jo.”
“It’s all right. Go ahead and take off. I don’t mind waiting.”
They faced one another across a pause of quiet. While Jayden had been in the mix, and before she’d felt that fateful tug, things had been easy between them. Now, though, that friendliness had changed. The intensity in his eyes had darkened to something much more personal.
The skin between her shoulder blades tingled in answer. She couldn’t stop herself from making a very unscholarly assessment of him. In this instant, she found Bo Porter to be ruggedly, real man, take-your-breath-away gorgeous. And she had a wild whim to throw herself into his arms.
Impossible!
“I’ll be going, then,” he said.
“Thank you so much for helping me today.”
“It was nothing.”
“It meant a lot to me.”
He retrieved his hat from a nearby table and settled it on his head, giving her another peek at his tattoo. Goodness. Could he . . . might he . . . have more tattoos somewhere? A blush burgeoned on her chest and expanded up her neck to her face.
They walked through the foyer to the huge front doors, and she opened the right one.
“G’night.”
“Good night, Bo.”
He moved past her toward his truck. When he reached it, she closed herself in and leaned against the inside of the door. Her hands, which had been overtaken with fine trembles, raked into her hair.
She couldn’t. She couldn’t like him in any way except the politically correct way that bosses liked the managers beneath them.
Her mind turned over slowly, its gears mired in tar. In recent years she’d had male colleagues she’d called friends. And that’s how she’d been thinking of Bo. Calming cowboy; colleague. But her thinking had shifted, uninvited, to calming cowboy; sexy colleague.
Was it even legal for her to think like that? Didn’t it constitute sexual harassment? She signed his paychecks, for goodness’ sake.
Earlier today she’d been attaching words like safe and friend to Bo. At this point in her life, she dearly needed a safe friend. But thanks to those flashes of bone-melting chemistry just now, safe and friend both seemed questionable. She welcomed the peacefulness she felt around him. She didn’t welcome, didn’t want to feel, the whole he-makes-my-toes-clench bit.
And yet, at the same time, she did want to examine that tattoo.
If Meg had been anything all of her life, she’d been a rule follower. She respected the way of things, tried with all her might to do the appropriate. It made her comfortable and secure to do the right thing. To skate by without drawing undue attention to herself. To walk within the boundaries.
Harboring romantic feelings for Bo Porter? Outside the boundaries. Very inappropriate.
She’d probably have died of fatigue if she’d had to care for Jayden solo today. Even so, she’d overstepped when she’d agreed to let Bo baby-sit alongside her. Because no matter how willing Bo had been to help her with Jayden, no matter how thankful she’d been for his help, the situation had proven too intimate.
She was his boss.
Ooh, but he was hunky—
Meg Cole! You’re. His. Boss.
Chapter Seven
He was her employee. But Bo’s feelings toward Meg had just about nothing to do with employment. They should have. But they didn’t.
After they finished baby-sitting Jayden, Bo took himself to Whispering Creek Horses and threw himself into work because he couldn’t bear to sit still with either his thoughts or his emotions.
He measured out the nutritionist’s recommendation of feed for the mares, adding his own adjustments based on his knowledge of each one. He mucked out already clean stalls.
When the night man came on duty, he gave Bo a look and apparently decided, based on Bo’s expression alone, to hold his tongue and cut a wide path around him.
Bo drove to the yearling barn and examined his yearlings with care, one by one. Then on to the stallion barn. He escorted some of the horses inside and some out. He swept the asphalt surface of the shed row.
By midnight, he’d visited each of his five barns, and with nowhere left to go, he drove home. He paced his living room, stared into the refrigerator without eating, and finally spent an hour lying in his bed in a tangle of sheets thinking about Meg.
The whole time since the moment they’d parted company, he’d been trying to talk himself out of caring about her. Not caring would make his life a heck of a lot easier, would help him keep his priorities focused on the farm. Guilt twisted within him. It wasn’t right for his thoughts to be consumed with Meg when his farm was dying.
Unfortunately, though, not thinking about her, not caring about her, wasn’t an option for him. And hadn’t been, almost since their first meeting.
He cared. He cared about her with a burning heat that filled his entire chest, mind, and heart.
The next morning Bo arrived at the warm room of the yearling barn and had just opened his laptop when Jake shouldered in, bringing with him a wave of chilly air.
Jake raised one eyebrow at the sight of Bo. “You look terrible.”
“Thanks.”
“Been up all night?”
“Something like that.”
Jake shrugged off his jacket and settled into the chair across from Bo. Bo had picked up two black coffees from McDonald’s on his way in. He nudged Jake’s cup across to him.
“Appreciate it,” Jake said.
They sat together for a few minutes, working on their coffee.
Even after four years of looking at the scar on Jake’s face, it still hurt Bo to see it. They were both grown men, but Bo would always be the older brother. He’d never stop wanting to defend his siblings from harm and never stop regretting the times he’d been unable to. Ty, Jake, and their baby sister, Dru, all came after him, and he felt protective toward each of them.
“What’re you looking at?” Jake asked.
“Your mug.”
“Real pretty, huh?”
Girls had always taken an interest in all three of the Porter brothers. But they’d been the most interested in Jake because he’d been the best looking. Bo wished that were still the case.
Like Bo, Ty, their father, John, and their grandfather, Jake had gone into the Marines after high school and become an infantry rifleman. Bo, Ty, and Jake had gone on several tours of duty, survived countless combat operations, and lived through firefights to write home about. But only Jake had had an IED explode under his Humvee. Only Jake had seen three of his men mangled to death, had his face sliced open by shrapnel, and been plunged into post-traumatic stress disorder.
When the Porters had first heard about Jake’s accident and been told that Jake would recover, they’d been filled with gratitude and relief. But when Jake returned home a grim, numb shadow, they realized that Jake himself didn’t share their enthusiasm.
Thank God that Jake’s gift with horses, at least, had been spared. He had an uncanny way with the animals: gentle and knowledgeable. He could communicate with them t
hrough body language and read them the way most people read books.
Jake had come back from the war right around the time that construction of Whispering Creek’s stables had been completed. Bo had hired Jake as the farm’s trainer before the first of the Thoroughbreds had arrived.
Four years later Jake still struggled with PTSD nightmares, memories, and survivor’s guilt. He still lived as if protected behind a sheet of Plexiglas that none of them could break. Bo no longer held out hope that Jake would ever return to the man he’d been before. Instead, Bo had to be satisfied with the fact that Jake had improved over the years and was, at least, better than he’d been when he’d first come home. Bo knew that most of that improvement had come because of Jake’s work. Training horses gave Jake a reason to put one foot in front of the other.
“Were you up all night because Meg Cole’s planning to close the farm?” Jake asked.
“Yeah.” That had been part of it.
“Do you think she’s starting to bend on that at all?”
Jake asked him this question at least every third day. “I’m not sure.”
“You spent time with her yesterday afternoon, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“And? We’ve already burned ten days off that six-month deadline. What’re you doing to change her mind?”
“Not much.” He’d bribed her into a few riding lessons. But he’d been thinking mostly of himself and very little about the ranch when he’d made that bargain.
“Well, talk to her, man. Try to persuade her.”
Bo didn’t want Meg to think—not ever—that he was trying to capitalize on their friendship. And if he had a conversation like that with her at this point, or at any point in the future, how could she not? “Here’s the thing, Jake. I don’t feel right about trying to persuade her.”
“What?” Worry lit his brother’s eyes.
“I don’t. I’ve thought about it a lot.”
“Then why in the world were you over at her house for half the day yesterday?”
“She needed help baby-sitting the little boy that’s staying with her.”
“Help baby-sitting?” Jake repeated with disbelief.
In the pause that followed, Jake stared hard at Bo. A horse whinnied and muted voices passed by the warm room’s door.
“You don’t have a thing for her,” Jake said. “Do you?”
Bo thumbed the lid of his coffee.
Jake released a whistling breath. “You do have a thing for her. What exactly is going on between you two?”
“Nothing. I work for her. We’re friends.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“But you like her.”
“I like her.” Such a huge understatement that it was almost a lie.
“It’s impossible, Bo. A relationship between you two can’t happen.”
Bo held his brother’s gaze. “I know.”
“Say you two start dating and then three months from now, or five months from now, or fifteen months from now she gets mad at you for some reason. She could shut down the farm anytime she wants, just out of spite.”
“I don’t need convincing, Jake. I already told you that I know it can’t happen.”
“The livelihood of all the people who work here is at stake—”
“Enough,” Bo warned, his anger rising.
Jake set his mouth in a line. “If you’re not going to do anything to change her mind, then what can I do to change it? What can any of us do?”
“Nothing. She’s a businesswoman. She can make an educated decision all by herself.”
“She’s already made a decision, and it’s the wrong one.”
“It seems wrong to us because we like horses. She doesn’t, at least not yet. With any luck, she’ll start coming out to the farm. And if that happens, maybe she’ll get to know the place and the people.”
“That’s your strategy? Sit back and hope she visits?”
“No, my strategy is to focus on paying off the farm’s debt. That, and pray.”
Jake made a scoffing sound.
Bo had decided, back on the day when Meg had visited the broodmare barn, not to put the farm’s interests above hers. The future of his staff might prove to ride on that decision. Jake’s sanity might prove to ride on it. And yet still, for better or worse, Bo wouldn’t choose differently. He only hoped he’d chosen correctly.
“Are you going to start selling horses?” Jake asked.
“I’m going to wait and see how we do at the track first, and how our yearling sales go. Selling off horses is my last resort.”
“You’ll not sell Silver Leaf.”
“No,” Bo answered automatically. “Not Silver Leaf.” He wouldn’t consider selling that particular horse, not even when the farm ran out of time and hope. He’d scrape together his life savings and buy Silver Leaf from Meg himself first.
Jake pressed to his feet and tossed his coffee cup in the trash. “I’m going back to work.”
“I’ll join you.” The brothers walked together down the length of the barn, similar in height, size, and pace. They passed a groom hand-walking a horse in the other direction.
Jake led one of their yearlings from his stall to the round pen. Bo followed, coming to stand inside the pen, leaning back against it with his arms crossed over his chest.
Jake unhooked the shank from the colt’s halter and chirped to him, urging him from a jog to a lope, around and around the pen.
Bo watched the animal’s gait with a practiced eye, judged the colt’s conformation, weighed his muscle development. All promising.
He’d meant what he’d said to Jake earlier, about praying. His parents had raised him right, with his butt in the church pew every Sunday morning. He was a praying man, and he believed that God could change Meg’s heart in ways that he couldn’t.
His brother might not believe it at this moment, but Bo loved this place. He loved it even more than Jake did.
Amber’s return from Lubbock officially increased Whispering Creek’s I-survived-a-connection-to-Stephen-McIntyre population by two.
Meg toyed with the idea of putting Amber to work at Cole Oil, but she decided not to go that route because the commute to Dallas and back would cut at least an hour out of Amber’s time with Jayden every day. Instead, Meg made a call to Holley’s mayor, a longtime friend of her father’s, in search of a job opening for Amber. As it turned out, the mayor himself offered Amber a position as a part-time office assistant at his law firm.
Thus, Amber’s employment began just a day and a half later. Meg and Lynn determined that Whispering Creek’s maids would care for Jayden during the hours that Amber worked until a nanny could be found.
As the work week progressed and Easter Sunday drew near, Meg and Amber met each evening to sort through nanny résumés and references. After their meetings, Meg returned to the guesthouse and studied Cole Oil reports and manuals until her eyes crossed and her lids refused to stay open.
Faithfully, she read her Bible, prayed, and pored over her book of verses. She tried her best to accept His peace. Tried and mostly failed. Her job continued to overwhelm, and her panic continued to hover.
Every morning when she parked in the underground lot beneath the Cole Oil building, Meg wanted to throw up at the thought of the people above—her assistants, Uncle Michael, and all the smart executives—who would be waiting for her and expecting her to display the famous Cole confidence, intelligence, and business acumen.
She longed to take a trip to the horse farm to see Bo, but refrained. In the hours after their baby-sitting gig together, she’d talked herself into the idea that the crackle between them hadn’t been all one-sided, that he might feel a little stirring of something for her, too.
She even prepared herself to rebuff him if needed. But the weekend came without him making any effort to contact her, which kind of took the wind out of her sails.
Maybe she’d gotten it wrong. Her man radar had always been hayw
ire. Like a faulty sonar machine on a submarine, it had never been trustworthy. It was possible that she’d misread him. He might not like her romantically at all. Or, possibly, he did like her, but would rather go to the grave than violate the whole employer-employee thing.
Uninvited thoughts of him came to Meg at the oddest moments. She’d be washing her hair and would remember him at the paddock, his fingers twining with easy familiarity through his horse’s mane. She’d be sitting in her father’s office downtown looking at a document, and she’d remember the way he’d quieted little Jayden’s separation anxiety. She’d fill her coffee cup in the morning and remember the way he’d extended those confounded tissues to her at the top of the stairs. “I told you I’d have them ready,” he’d said.
Who did that? Who carried around tissues for a woman they hardly knew, just in case she got teary? The tissues were to blame, she’d decided, for the turn her heart had taken. It was all, all, ALL the tissues’ fault!
Meg enjoyed so many things about Easter.
She loved the boxes of Godiva truffles that she and Sadie Jo exchanged every year when they sat down to share a big breakfast of pancakes, bacon, orange juice served in crystal glasses, and coffee served in china teacups. She loved the praise, triumph, and hope of Easter morning worship service. She loved singing “Up From the Grave He Arose.” She loved the foil-covered bunnies, wicker baskets, and jelly beans that overran the store shelves. She loved buying a new dress and matching high heels. She loved the dogwood trees with their bright new blossoms, and flower arrangements of daffodils and tulips.
However, she did not love the big formal lunch her mother’s side of the family held every Easter Sunday. Her overriding emotion whenever she had to deal with her grandmother Lake, her mother’s three older sisters, and her nine female cousins?
Intimidation.
This year the Lake family decided to gather at Aunt Pamela’s newest McMansion in the ritzy Dallas neighborhood of Highland Park. Since Amber and Jayden had nowhere else to go to celebrate the holiday, Meg brought them along for lunch, and thank goodness. Because of them, Meg wasn’t the only normal human at Pamela’s mile-long table, a table otherwise filled with a convention of the most stunning and fashionable people the state of Texas had to offer.
