by Cat Schield
“I don’t want to make a big deal about this,” she said. “I just thought you might want to get a good night’s sleep and start fresh in the morning.”
“While you spend the night checking on your herd.”
“I took a three-hour nap.” His outrage was starting to amuse her. “Okay. You can come with me. I won’t say another word.”
He growled at her in frustration before striding off. Brandee grabbed a second thermos from her cabinet. Coffee would help keep them warm and awake. To her surprise, Brandee caught herself smiling at the thought of Shane’s company tonight. Working together had proven more enjoyable than she’d imagined. She didn’t have to keep things professional with Shane the way she did when working with her ranch hands. She’d enjoyed talking strategy and ranch economics with him.
As if he feared she’d head out without him, Shane returned in record time. She handed him a scarf and watched in silence as he stepped into his work boots.
“Ready?” she prompted as he stood.
“Yes.”
“Do you want to take separate vehicles? That way if you get...” She trailed off as his scowl returned. “Fine.”
Irritation radiated from him the whole drive down to the ranch buildings. In the barn, she chatted with her foreman, Jimmy, to see how the afternoon had gone. H545 had dropped her calf without any problems.
“A steer,” he said, sipping at the coffee Brandee had just made.
“That makes it fifty-five steers and fifty-two heifers.” While the ratio of boys to girls was usually fifty-fifty, it was always nice when more steers were born because they grew faster and weighed more than the girls. “Anyone we need to keep an eye on tonight?”
“H729 was moving around like her labor was starting. She’s a week late and if you remember she had some problems last year, so you might want to make sure things are going smoothly with her.”
“Will do. Thanks, Jimmy.”
The moon was up, casting silvery light across the grass when Shane and Brandee rode into the pasture. The pregnant cows stood or lay in clusters. A couple moved about in a lazy manner. H729 was easy to spot. She was huge and had isolated herself. Brandee pointed her out.
“She’s doing some tail wringing, which means she’s feeling contractions. I don’t think she’ll go tonight, but you can never tell.”
“How often do they surprise you?”
“More often than I’d like to admit. And that drives me crazy because there’s nothing wrong with nearly eighty percent of the calves we lose at birth. Most of the time they suffocate because they’re breeched or because it’s a first-calf heifer and she gets too tired to finish pushing out the calf.”
“How often do you have to assist?”
“On nights like this it’s pretty rare.” The temperature was hovering in the low forties; compared to a couple weeks earlier, it almost felt balmy. “It’s when we get storms and freezing rain that we have our hands full with the newborns.”
Shane yawned and rubbed his eyes. Brandee glanced his way to assess his fatigue and lingered to admire his great bone structure and sexy mouth. It was an interesting face, one she never grew tired of staring at. Not a perfect face—she wasn’t into that, too boring—but one with character.
“What?” he snapped, never taking his focus off the cows. Despite the shadow cast by the brim of his hat, Brandee could see that Shane’s jaw was set.
“I was just thinking it was nice to have your company tonight.”
For the briefest of moments his lips relaxed. “I’m glad to be here.”
She knew that showing she felt sorry for him would only heighten his annoyance. Big strong men like Shane did not admit to weakness of any kind. And she rather liked him the better for gritting his teeth and sticking with it.
“That being said, you can take my truck and head back if you want. I don’t think much of anything is going to happen tonight.”
“I don’t like the idea of you being alone out here.”
“I’ve been doing this since I was ten years old.”
“Not alone.”
“No. With my dad. On the weekends, he used to let me ride the late-night watch with him.”
“What did your mom say about that?”
“Nothing. She didn’t live with us.”
Shane took a second to digest that. “They divorced?”
“Never married.”
“How come you lived with your dad and not your mom?”
Insulated by her father’s unconditional love, Brandee had never noticed her mother’s absence. “She didn’t want me.”
It wasn’t a plea for sympathy, but a statement of fact. Most people would have said her mother was a bad parent or uttered some banality about how they were sure that wasn’t true.
Shane shrugged. “You are kind of a pain.”
He would never know how much she appreciated this tactic. Shane might come off as a glib charmer, but the way he watched her now showed he had a keen instinct for people.
“Yes,” Brandee drawled. “She mentioned that often after my dad died and I had to go live with her.”
Judging from his narrowed eyes, he wasn’t buying her casual posture and nonchalant manner. “Obviously she wasn’t interested in being a parent,” he said.
Brandee loosed a huge sigh and an even bigger confession. “I was the biggest mistake she ever made.”
Six
Shane’s exhaustion dwindled as Brandee spoke of her mother. Although he’d grown up with both parents, his father’s endless disappointment made Shane sympathetic of Brandee for the resentment her mother had displayed.
“Why do you say that?”
“She gave birth to me and handed me over to my dad, then walked out of the hospital and never looked back. After my dad died and the social worker contacted my mom, I was really surprised when she took me in. I think she wanted to get her hands on the money that my dad left me. He’d saved about fifty thousand toward the down payment on his own ranch. She went through it in six months.”
“And you got nothing?”
“Not a penny.”
“So your father died when you were twelve and your mother spent your inheritance.”
“That about sums it up.” Brandee spoke matter-of-factly, but Shane couldn’t imagine her taking it all in stride. No child grew up thinking it was okay when a parent abandoned them. This must have been what led to Brandee erecting her impenetrable walls. And now Shane was faced with an impossible task. The terms of her wager made much more sense. There was no way he was going to get her to fall for him.
After a slow circle of the pasture, Brandee declared it was quiet enough that they could return to the barn. Leaving the horses saddled and tied up, they grabbed some coffee and settled in the ranch office. While Brandee looked over her herd data, updated her birth statistics and considered her spring-breeding program, Shane used the time to research her.
“You started a fashion line?” He turned his phone so the screen faced her.
She regarded the image of herself modeling a crocheted halter, lace-edged scarf and headband. “A girl’s got to pay the bills.”
“When you were eighteen?”
“Actually, I was seventeen. I fudged my age. You have to be eighteen to open a business account at the bank and sell online.”
“From these news articles, it looks like you did extremely well.”
“Who knew there was such a huge hole in the market for bohemian-style fashion and accessories.” Her wry smile hid a wealth of pride in her accomplishment.
“You built up the business and sold it for a huge profit.”
“So that I could buy Hope Springs Ranch.”
He regarded her with interest. “Obviously the fashion line was a moneymaker. Why not do both?�
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“Because my dream was this ranch. And the company was more than a full-time job. I couldn’t possibly keep up with both.” She picked up her hat and stood. “We should do another sweep.”
Back in the saddle, facing an icy wind blowing across the flat pasture, Shane considered the woman riding beside him. The photos of her modeling her clothing line had shown someone much more carefree and happy than she’d ever appeared to him. Why, if there’d been such good money to be made running a fashion company, had she chosen the backbreaking work of running a ranch?
Was it because she’d been trying to continue her father’s legacy, molded by him to wake up early, put in a long day and take satisfaction in each calf that survived? From the way she talked about her dad, Shane bet there’d been laughter at the end of each day and a love as wide as the Texas sky.
He envied her.
“Is that the cow you were watching earlier?” He pointed out an animal in the distance that had just lain down.
“Maybe. Let’s double-check.”
When they arrived, they left their horses and approached the cow on foot. Judging from the way her sides were straining, she was deep in labor.
It struck Shane that despite spending his entire life on a ranch, he’d only witnessed a few births, and those had been horses not cows. He took his cue from Brandee. She stood with her weight evenly placed, her gloved hands bracketing her hips. Although her eyes were intent, her manner displayed no concern.
“Look,” she said as they circled around to the cow’s rear end. “You can see the water sack.”
Sure enough, with the moon high in the sky there was enough light for Shane to pick out the opaque sack that contained the calf. He hadn’t come out tonight expecting excitement of this sort.
“What did you expect?” It was as if she’d read his mind.
“Frankly I was thinking we’d be riding around out here while you kept me at arm’s length with tales of your brokenhearted ex-lovers.”
With her arms crossed over her chest, she pivoted around to face him, laboring cow forgotten.
“My brokenhearted what?”
“I don’t know,” he replied somewhat shortly. “I’m tired and just saying whatever pops into my mind.”
“Why would you be thinking about my brokenhearted ex-lovers?”
“Are you sure she’s doing okay?” He indicated the straining cow, hoping to distract Brandee with something important.
Unfortunately it seemed as if both females were happy letting nature take its course. Brandee continued to regard him like a detective interviewing a prime suspect she knew was lying.
“What makes you think that any of my lovers are brokenhearted?”
“I don’t. Not really.” In truth he hadn’t given much thought to her dating anyone.
Well, that wasn’t exactly true. To the best of his knowledge she hadn’t dated anyone since moving to Royal. And despite the womanly curves that filled out her snug denim, she always struck him as a tomboy. Somehow he’d gotten it into his head that he was the only one who might’ve been attracted to her.
“So which is it?”
“Is that a hoof?”
His attempt to distract her lasted as long as it took for her to glance over at the cow and notice that a pair of hooves had emerged.
“Yes.” And just like that she was back staring at him again. “Do I strike you as the sort of woman who uses men and casts them aside?”
“No.”
“So why would you think I would end my relationships in such a way that I would hurt someone?”
Shane recognized that he’d tapped into something complicated with his offhand remark and sought to defuse her irritation with a charming smile. “You should be flattered that I thought you would be so desirable that no one would ever want to break up with you.”
“So you think I’m susceptible to flattery?”
He was in so deep he would need a hundred feet of rope to climb out of the hole he’d dug. What had happened to the silver-tongued glibness she liked to accuse him of having?
“Is she supposed to stand up like that?”
“Sometimes they need to walk around a bit.” This time Brandee didn’t spare the cow even a fraction of her attention. “She may be up and down several times.”
“I think our arguing is upsetting her,” he said, hoping concern for the cow would convince Brandee to give up the conversation.
“We’re not arguing,” she corrected him, her voice light and unconcerned. “We’re discussing your opinion of me. And you’re explaining why you assume I’d be the one to end a relationship. Instead of the other way around.”
At first he grappled with why he’d said what he had. But beneath her steady gaze, he found his answer. “I think you have a hard time finding anyone who can match up to your father.”
She obviously hadn’t expected him to deliver such a blunt, to-the-point answer. Her eyes fell away and she stared at the ground. In the silence that followed, Shane worried that he’d struck too close to home.
Brandee turned so she was once again facing the cow. The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her features, making her expression unreadable. Despite her silence, Shane didn’t sense she was angry. Her mood was more contemplative than irritated.
“I never set out to hurt anyone,” she said, her voice so soft he almost missed the words. “I’m just not good girlfriend material.”
Was that her way of warning him off? If so, she’d have to work a lot harder. “That’s something else we have in common. I’ve been told I’m not good boyfriend material, either.”
Now both of them were staring at the cow. She took several steps before coming to a halt as another spasm swept over her. It seemed as if this would expel the calf, but no more of the baby appeared.
“Is this normal?” Shane asked. “It seems like she can’t get it out.”
“We should see good progress in the next thirty minutes or so. If we don’t see the nose and face by then, there might be something wrong.”
Shane was surprised at the way his stomach knotted with anxiety. Only by glancing at Brandee’s calm posture did he keep from voicing his concern again.
“How do you do this?”
“I have around seven hundred cows being bred over two seasons. While I never take anything for granted, watching that many births gives you a pretty good feel for how things are going.”
“Your business is a lot more complicated than mine.” And offered a lot more potential for heartbreak.
He certainly wasn’t standing in his field at three o’clock in the morning waiting for new calves to be brought into the world. He bought eight-month-old, newly weaned steers and heifers and sent them out into his pastures to grow up. Unless he was judging the market for the best time to sell, he rarely thought about his livestock.
“Not necessarily more complicated,” Brandee said. “You have to consider the market when you buy and sell and the best way to manage your pastures to optimize grazing. There are so many variables that depend on how much rain we get and the price of feed if the pastures aren’t flourishing.”
“But you have all that to worry about and you have to manage when you’re breeding and optimize your crosses to get the strongest calves possible. And then there’s the problem of losing livestock to accidents and predators.”
While he’d been speaking, the cow had once again lain down. The calf’s nose appeared, followed by a face. Shane stared as she began to push in earnest.
“She’s really straining,” he said. “This is all still normal?”
“She needs to push out the shoulders and this is really hard. But she’s doing fine.”
Shane had the urge to lean his body into Brandee’s and absorb some of her tranquillity. Something about the quiet night and the mirac
le playing out before them made him want to connect with her. But he kept his distance, not wanting to disturb the fragile camaraderie between them.
Just when Shane thought the whole thing was over, the cow got to her feet again and he groaned. Brandee shot him an amused grin.
“It’s okay. Sometimes they like finishing the birthing process standing up.”
He watched as the cow got to her feet, her baby dangling halfway out of her. This time Shane didn’t resist the urge for contact. He reached out and grabbed Brandee’s hand. He’d left his gloves behind on this second sweep and wished Brandee had done the same. But despite the worn leather barrier between them, he reveled in the way her fingers curved against his.
After a few deep, fortifying breaths, the cow gave one last mighty push and the calf fell to the grass with a thud. Shane winced and Brandee laughed.
“See, I told you it was going to be okay,” Brandee said as the cow turned around and began nudging the calf while making soft, encouraging grunts.
A moment later she swept her long tongue over her sodden baby, clearing fluid from the calf’s coat. The calf began to breathe and the cow kept up her zealous cleaning. Brandee leaned a little of her weight against Shane’s arm.
That was when Shane realized they were still holding hands. “Damn,” he muttered, unsure which had a bigger impact, the calf being born or the simple pleasure of Brandee’s hand in his.
He hadn’t answered the question before she lifted up on tiptoes and kissed him.
* * *
Being bathed in moonlight and surrounded by the sleepy cows seemed like an ideal moment to surrender to the emotions running deep and untamed through Brandee’s body. At first Shane’s lips were stiff with surprise and Brandee cursed. What had she been thinking? There was no romance to be found in a cold, windswept pasture. But as she began her retreat, Shane threw an arm around her waist and yanked her hard against his body. His lips softened and coaxed a sigh of relief from her lungs.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and let him sweep her into a rushing stream of longing. The mouth that devoured her with such abandon lacked the persuasive touch she’d expected a charmer like Shane to wield. It almost seemed as if he was as surprised as she.
