“This feels heavenly,” she said. “My plan is to take something I get from your place and make enough profit to fix the stupid AC in my truck.”
“It doesn’t work?”
“Pooped out on me a few weeks ago. I’m running the two-sixty air now—two windows at sixty miles per hour.” She laughed a little at her own bit of humor.
She might be making light of the situation, but no AC in Texas was like no water in the desert—unbearable. Working outside in the heat was one thing, but living without it when you were in your house or car was just cruel and unusual punishment.
He slowed down when they came up behind the mail carrier, then pulled around via the opposite lane. Ella waved at the woman driving the little red pickup.
“So you’re not from here,” he said. “How did you end up in Blue Falls?”
“I visited with a friend and liked it so much I made it a goal to move here. It just sort of fit my personality.”
He glanced over at her. “How so?”
“It’s friendly, eclectic, has small-town charm but isn’t so insular that newcomers are treated like invaders. It just seemed to be a nice place for people who’ve lived here their entire lives to share space with people who choose to relocate here.”
“Never thought of it that way.”
“Probably not at the front of your mind when you live so far away,” she said as she readjusted one of her air vents. “How’d you end up in Dallas anyway?”
“It’s where I got a job after college.”
“So Keri said you work for an energy company. What do you do?”
“Head of logistics.”
“So you tell people where to get stuff when.”
“In a nutshell.” He slowed as they came into the edge of town.
“Sounds...um, very organized.”
“Which in Ella language means boring?”
“You said it, not me.” The way she appeared to be trying not to laugh caused him to snort a little as he made the turn into the parking lot for Gia’s.
When he held open the front door of the pizzeria for her, her smile lit up her entire face. And damn if he didn’t think it was the prettiest thing he’d seen in ages.
“Thanks,” she said. “Nice to see the city hasn’t robbed you of your chivalry.”
“You do know Dallas is still in Texas, right?”
“Really? I hadn’t heard.”
He smiled and shook his head. Ella Garcia had a lot of sass in that little body of hers, and damn if he didn’t like it.
They slid into a booth in the back corner near the entrance to the kitchen. He took off his hat and placed it in the seat beside him.
“Nice hat, by the way,” Ella said. “It suits you.”
Maybe it had at one point in his life. “You barely know me.”
“I’m decent at pegging people quickly. Comes from never staying any one place too long when I was growing up. It was figure out who to make friends with fast or not have any at all.”
“Lot different than going to school with the same people for thirteen years in a row.”
“Yeah, foreign concept to me.”
The waitress, a little blonde teenager about the size of his pinky finger, came and took their order for a large sausage pizza.
“So, back to the hat,” Ella said. “You look at home in it. No interest in becoming a rancher?”
“When I was younger.” Back when he’d held out hope that maybe his grandparents would change, would see how the way they chose to live affected him.
“When I was younger, I thought I’d be a fighter pilot when I grew up.”
That surprised him. “Really?”
“And then I changed my mind and was determined to become an anthropologist. Then a professional figure skater even though I’d been on ice skates exactly twice. But, hey, it was the year the Winter Olympics were in Nagano, and we were living in Japan. Guess you could say I changed career paths as often as we changed addresses.”
“And you settled on making stuff out of other people’s junk?”
She sighed. “People are too eager to label things junk. We’re such a throwaway culture. I like trying to imagine how to give something that’s seemingly outlived its usefulness a new life. And lucky for me, there are buyers.”
“A lot of them?”
“Enough that I need to figure out how to clone myself. And my house.”
His skin itched at the idea that she might be packing her house as full as his grandparents had. “You don’t have a shop?”
She shook her head as the waitress placed their drinks on the table then spun to take the order at the next table.
“A little toolshed and the back porch. One of my long-term goals is to be able to buy a place with a lot of room to spread out with storage and work space separate from my house.”
He tried to imagine her selling enough reclaimed home decor to afford such a place and had a hard time picturing it. But then he wasn’t the most knowledgeable guy about interior decorating or whatever was in style. Somehow he thought his style was probably called minimalist.
“I know a place that will be for sale soon,” he said with a little smile that conveyed he knew that probably wasn’t in the cards for her.
“Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. Alas, it’s me and the little rental for the foreseeable future. I may see if I can convert the toolshed into a little store if my landlord will let me since they’re working to get the arts and crafts trail up and running.”
He must have given her a questioning look because she went on to explain.
“The local tourist bureau is compiling a list of all the artists and craftspeople in the area and is going to create a trail with a map so tourists can go from one to the next shopping for handmade items and original art.”
“Sounds like a good way to bring in more tourist dollars.”
He tried to picture Ella sitting in a little metal toolshed with the name of her business painted on the outside. For some reason, he didn’t like the image. She seemed like a hard worker, a go-getter, someone who believed wholeheartedly in what she was doing. Someone like that deserved a better public presence than a place you’d normally store garden tools and lawn mowers.
“If you’d like me to look at a business plan or your work flow plan, let me know.”
She stopped with her glass halfway to her mouth. “You’d do that?”
“Yeah. Why do you seem so surprised?”
“Because quite honestly I’m surprised you stopped progress on getting the house ready to sell long enough to come eat, let alone look at the business plan of someone you’ve known barely more than two seconds.”
“It’s something I can do easily when I go back to the hotel at night.” It was certainly a better use of his time than staring at the ceiling imagining Ella lying in bed next to him. At that thought he had to shift in the booth to make himself less uncomfortable. Thank goodness the table hid what those kinds of thoughts did to him.
“I’ll think about it. Thank you for the offer.”
“That wasn’t meant to say you don’t know how to run your business.”
She flipped her hand as if to wave away his concern that he’d insulted her.
“Just a little intimidating. I mean, I’m not exactly running a big corporation here.”
“Every company starts small.” True enough, but a lot of them failed, too. Ella seemed to believe in her business so much, it’d be a shame if hers failed because of lack of proper planning. Sure, he didn’t understand her business, but all businesses came down to numbers. And numbers and logistics he understood.
Their pizza arrived, and for a few minutes they abandoned conversation in favor of downing their food. When they got to the last slice, Ella eyed him and po
inted at the pizza.
“You going to eat that?”
“No, I’m good.”
Unlike most women with whom he’d shared a meal, Ella didn’t eat like a little bird. Once she admitted she was hungry, she went about the business of fixing the problem with the same gusto she attacked clearing out his grandparents’ house. He admired that she didn’t make false pretenses of being full after half a slice.
He found himself wanting to know more about her. Even if he wasn’t sticking around Blue Falls for long, it couldn’t hurt to be friendly. Especially since they were going to be spending time in close proximity over the next several days.
Austin took a swig of his Coke then placed it back in the ring of condensation on the table. “How did you finally settle on the decor business?”
“Would you believe I fell into it? After all that believing I’d be this or that, my career found me.”
“How so?”
She wiped her mouth with her napkin, and he tried like crazy not to think about what the texture of her lips might be like against his own.
“I moved into this apartment in San Antonio where the previous occupant left several boxes of things behind. The owner said he’d take care of getting rid of it, but I managed to talk him into cutting a little off my first month’s rent if I did it instead. Well, I found a bunch of old T-shirts, and I ended up making rag rugs and even a woven basket out of them. I painted some old jars and turned them into a chandelier. I liked how the stuff looked in my apartment so much that I was hooked. Granted, that apartment needed all the help it could get.”
Ella got a faraway look in her eyes, as if she were back in that apartment filled with what she saw as her recycled treasures. She seemed to come back to the present as she leaned against the back of the red vinyl booth.
“My landlord was so impressed with what I did that he told his wife. She had me make a lighting fixture for their house out of old canning jars. That was my first sale, and I haven’t stopped coming up with ideas since.”
He could tell by the light in her dark brown eyes that she really did love what she did. He found satisfaction in his job, he was good at it and the position paid well, but he couldn’t say that he got out of bed every morning with excitement burning a fire in his veins. But that was unrealistic for most people. He counted it a victory that he didn’t hate his job as lots of people did, even a lot of his coworkers.
“I’m still surprised that people seek out things made out of other people’s castoffs.”
Ella fiddled with the straw in her glass. “Well, I’m glad they do. It’s certainly never boring.”
“And my job is?”
Ella pretended to nod off and snore. If anyone else had done it, he might have been annoyed. But there was something about her that instead made him laugh. While he liked his job fine, he couldn’t sit there and say that sometimes it didn’t have its boring days. Ones when he’d stare out the window at the glass and metal and concrete of downtown Dallas and wonder what his life would have been like if he’d followed his boyhood dream of running the ranch.
No sense wondering when he’d never know the answer.
“Austin?”
He looked up to see Ella watching him.
“You went away there for a minute,” she said.
“Sorry. The combination of sitting and a full stomach is making me realize how tired I am.”
She nodded once. “It’s partly the emotional fatigue, too. I’ve never been so tired in my life as I was in the weeks after my dad died. Just getting up in the morning was exhausting.”
“What happened?” he asked, not wanting to think about the loss of his grandfather and the opportunities he’d missed in recent years to put away past disagreements and spend time with the most important person in his life.
Ella picked at the edge of her napkin, shredding little pieces. “He was on a patrol in the mountains of Afghanistan when a Taliban sniper shot him.”
Damn. “I’m sorry.”
She shrugged as if she’d done it countless times before, the universal symbol of “You can’t change the past, no matter how much you might want to.”
“How old were you?”
“Fifteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
Ella’s lips quirked up in a slight smile. “You said that already.”
“Yeah, well, it bore repeating. It’s a crappy hand you were dealt.”
“We’re all dealt a crappy hand at some point or another.”
He knew that firsthand.
“So,” she said, sounding a bit tentative, “your grandparents raised you?”
He nodded. “My mother died in a car wreck when I was six months old, and God only knows where my deadbeat of a father is, if he’s even still alive, which I wouldn’t put money on. My grandparents were the only parents I ever knew.”
“It’s my turn to say I’m sorry.”
He leaned back and rested his arm along the back of the booth. “We’re quite the pair, aren’t we?”
Ella lifted her glass. “Here’s to surviving being dealt crappy hands.”
He raised his plastic glass filled with mainly ice and knocked it gently against hers, making a little thunk sound. Something inside him felt attracted to her in a new way, and this time it wasn’t physical. More the feeling of connection that came from meeting someone with shared experiences, ones the other people in your life couldn’t understand because they hadn’t lived through it.
The waitress stopped by their table again and placed their ticket on the edge. “No rush. Just whenever you’re ready.”
“I better get back so I can go unload and come back for another.”
He stopped himself before he could tell her that she could wait until the next day because he really did need the place cleaned out quickly. He didn’t have endless time off before he had to return to work. As if thinking about work rang the doorbell of the universe, his phone rang and the caller ID revealed it to be his boss. It surprised him to find the interruption annoyed him, a sure sign that he was letting his time back in Blue Falls and with Ella Garcia make him forget what he had to get accomplished in a short amount of time. Making him forget that Ella was nothing more than the woman helping him finally shed the remnants of a past that had weighed on him for too long.
But as he drove them back to the ranch after he finished putting out a logistical fire at work, he couldn’t help stealing glances over to her side of the car. Thankfully she was watching the world go by outside the window and didn’t notice.
After how they’d talked all the way through their meal, now they had fallen into silence. And at least for him it was a strangely comfortable silence, like there was no pressure to fill it with chitchat.
When he pulled up in front of the house under the big red oak tree, he glanced over to find that Ella appeared to have fallen asleep. And he didn’t have the heart to wake her. So he sat, watching the gentle rise and fall of her chest. If she could fall asleep in such a short amount of time, trusting enough to do so with someone she hadn’t known long, that told him all he needed to know about how tired she was.
Knowing he shouldn’t but seemingly unable to stop himself, he reached over and smoothed her curls away from her face. That she didn’t rouse and snap off his fingers gave more evidence that she wasn’t getting enough rest.
At that thought, his own fatigue seemed to catch up to him. So he eased his seat back into a partial recline, rolled down the windows so they’d catch the slight early evening breeze and closed his eyes.
Chapter Five
Ella didn’t remember leaving a fan running when she went to sleep, but the blowing air fluttered the loose hairs at the side of her face. She reached up to push them away as she opened her eyes. Something about the sight that greeted her didn’t sit right in her br
ain. It wasn’t the familiar pale yellow of her bedroom walls or the recovered chair over which she threw her clothes. No, it was...stars?
For a moment, she considered she might be still asleep and dreaming, but then pieces of realization began to coalesce in her mind. Had she...? She turned to her left and saw the sleeping form of Austin Bryant in the reclined driver’s seat of his car.
She’d fallen asleep in his car, and instead of disturbing her he’d allowed her to continue to sleep and done the same himself when he could have returned to his much more comfortable bed in his hotel.
Something she couldn’t name moved within her, something that felt suspiciously like a deepening of feeling toward this man she didn’t really know at all.
Well, she knew enough. He’d been through loss the same as she had. And he wasn’t as tough and unfeeling as he might have seemed at first. Sudden affection made an appearance within her, that and a strengthening of the attraction she’d felt toward him from the first moment he’d graced her field of vision.
With Austin asleep, she was able to look as long as she wanted though the light was almost completely gone outside. Her initial impression of rugged, movie star cowboy was only bolstered by how he still looked incredibly sexy while sleeping. She wanted so much to run her hand through his hair and skim her fingers along his jaw. But the moment he awoke, she’d no longer be able to simply watch him without having to avert her eyes.
Yes, they had things in common. And yes, he was so handsome it threatened to steal her breath. But a voice deep within her told her that there was some other indefinable something drawing her toward him.
As she watched him more relaxed than she’d seen him up to this point, a tiny bead of loneliness that she hadn’t realized existed grew in size. Its very existence shocked her. She would have denied being lonely if anyone had described her that way, but maybe she’d just been so busy with building her business and getting settled in Blue Falls that she hadn’t slowed down enough to notice that little nagging sensation in her middle wasn’t only persistent fatigue. But now as she looked at this gorgeous man, the one who perhaps fit on this ranch more than he wanted to admit, she wondered what it would be like if she had someone with whom to share her burdens and laughter and every other little up and down life presented.
Home on the Ranch Page 5
