by Caro Carson
Emily stared Gus down. “I’m not a Waterson.”
“You’re James and Jessie Waterson’s niece. You’re the closest thing to a sister that Luke and Trey have. I don’t appreciate you expecting me to treat you like you’re some ranch hand looking for starter pay and a room. You’re crazier than a bull-bat if you think I’m going to put Luke Waterson’s sister in the bunkhouse for him to find when he gets back.”
Graham understood, as he had while listening to Emily last night, that he didn’t know enough about her family or about ranching to be able to advise anyone in this situation. But his uncle was squaring off with the woman who had his heart, the two of them bristling like a couple of wolves about to go at it, so Graham needed to defuse the situation. Immediately.
Emily didn’t want any softness from him. Since he was a little behind her, he could gesture impatiently at his uncle without her seeing it. Sit down, back off. Graham hooked his foot around the leg of a straight chair and kicked it closer to the desk, the least tender way he could possibly offer Emily a seat.
It worked. Once Gus sat, she sat. There was nowhere for Graham to sit, but that was fine. He crossed his arms over his chest and stayed beside her. I’m on your side. Even though he’d taken her job.
She glanced up at him and did a little double take. “I don’t need a bodyguard. I’ll take Gus out if he takes a swing at me.”
Gus snorted. “Only because I’ve got forty years on you. If I were forty years younger...” He trailed off and looked at Graham. “Well, if I were forty years younger, I’d be him. And when I was young, if I met a pretty spitfire like yourself, the last thing on my mind would be fighting. I’d—I’d...” He looked from Graham to Emily and back. “Never mind what I’d do. How do you two know each other?”
Neither of them spoke for a moment too long.
Emily went with the truth. “He was at Keller’s last night.”
“Keller’s? Heard there was a fight. They called police out and it was a mess all ways to Sunday.”
“We waited it out on the patio,” Graham said. It was true enough. “We had a lot of time to talk.” Also true.
“We talked about this job,” Emily added, “but he never said his uncle’s name was Gus.”
She said it through clenched teeth. Since the subject was serving the purpose of distracting her and Gus from tearing each other’s throats out—and since Graham had his own grievance—he stated his case, too. “You said your family owned twenty dairy cows.”
Gus snorted at that.
“I did not.”
“Did so.”
“Did not.” She pressed her lips together when she realized where that was going. “I said we had twenty dairy cows when we lived in San Antonio. That was the smallest, tiniest bit of ranching in my life, but it was still ranching.”
Gus snorted at that, too, but he seemed satisfied with how they knew one another, because he sat forward with his hands clasped together on the desk. He no longer had white knuckles and that angry stare.
Mission accomplished.
Emily sat back in her chair and crossed her arms like Graham as she picked up her gauntlet once more. “Okay. Let’s say you’re right. I’m not greenhorn. I’m way too knowledgeable about this ranch to ever be a greenhorn.”
I hear you. Don’t rub it in.
“Luke wants Trey and Uncle James to step up. You hired Graham here for Uncle James, but what about Trey? He’s supposed to hire someone, too, since he’s never around, but hiring two greenhorns isn’t really going to do the trick, is it?
“It seems to me that you and Luke and even Uncle James seem to have some kind of superstition about family being on the land. If I’m family, like you say, I’ll represent Trey. Then Luke can live part-time in Austin, and there will still be a Waterson on the land. Between me and Luke, family will always be around.”
Emily grew more excited with each sentence. “Since you think I’m some kind of ranch royalty that can’t live in the bunkhouse, I’ll live in the ranch house. That’ll make you happy. Luke built himself that new addition. I can use Trey’s old room and not be in their way.”
Emily had no quit in her. She’d taken in Gus’s objections and come up with a new plan that should satisfy everyone.
She looked up at him, just to see if he liked her idea—he knew that was behind her half smile, the same as it had been last night when she’d told him all her plans. Too quickly, she remembered that he was in the job she’d wanted. Her smile died before it got started, and she turned back to Gus.
Gus was looking a little sad. No—it was pity. “Emily, sugar, before you get your heart set on that, you need to talk to Trey about filling in for Trey.”
“Only Watersons can hire Watersons?” Emily rolled her eyes a little. “Okay, then. Trey lives in Oklahoma, but I have to drive back to Tech to move out of my campus apartment, anyway. I’ll take a detour and go see him in person. We’ll get it all worked out. This will be a better solution than me just taking that three-month contract.”
“Sugar,” Gus started. Hesitated.
Graham had that moment of emptiness again, the one that came before he forced himself to see the truth. He hadn’t wanted to see that the James Hill was Emily’s family ranch, and now he didn’t want to see...
Her plan couldn’t work. Trey wasn’t in Oklahoma. He was here, after an absence of ten years, signing contracts like the owner he was. Emily didn’t know it yet.
Emily, sweet girl, it would have been a good solution. I’m so sorry...
“Sugar, I mean that Trey is going to take Trey’s place. He’s moving back home. You just missed him, in fact. He went into Austin to meet up with Rebecca and get some building permits and such.”
“He’s back?”
Gus was silent.
“It’s been ten years.” Emily sounded stunned.
“Well now, seems that once he set foot back on his land, he decided not to leave again.”
“He didn’t even recognize me when he came for the wedding. He hadn’t seen me since I was in middle school.” Abruptly, she stood up, her chair scraping across the floor for a few noisy inches. “Right when I’m finally done with college, right when I could start living here full-time, now Trey’s back? Now he’s decided he gives a damn about this ranch?”
“Trey’s going to marry Rebecca and settle down right here, where he belongs.”
Graham didn’t know who Rebecca was, but Emily gasped at this news, too. “He just met her. We all just met her. How could he possibly be that much in love with her?”
You stole my heart before sunrise, sweet girl. It happens.
The girl who had Graham’s heart didn’t have the heart to keep fighting this battle. In silence, in defeat, she turned to leave. Graham was standing between her and the door. He uncrossed his arms, but he couldn’t think of the right thing to say.
“You’re not off the grid, Graham,” she whispered. “You’re just in my way.”
She stepped around him and left.
Chapter Sixteen
Graham followed.
He didn’t interrupt her silent thoughts. He didn’t try to touch her, but he walked beside her. She’d been his lover just hours ago. He wasn’t going to leave her when she was grappling with the wouldn’t.
“I don’t want to talk to you,” she said too calmly.
“I know. You don’t have to.”
She walked up to the split rail fence of the horse pasture and allowed herself to deflate a little, hugging the top rail and setting one boot on the bottom rail.
Graham put his boot on the bottom rail, too.
That seemed to annoy her. “What are you doing?”
It was an excellent question. He wasn’t doing anything he’d expected to be doing this morning. He wasn’t doing anything he coul
d have predicted while sitting in a classroom, or at an office desk, or in a sandbag bunker. But ever since he’d seen Emily’s face in the light at that bar, his own life had started to take shape. He was breathing again, waking up, seeing in color.
It wasn’t the type of answer she was looking for, but Graham rested against the fence and spoke the truth. “You know how you never want to leave this ranch? I never want to leave you.”
She sucked in a breath, short and sharp, like he’d pricked her with a needle again.
“I didn’t steal your job,” he said. “It was offered to me just after Christmas. You decided to apply last night, but it had already been filled for weeks.”
She was silent. She wouldn’t look at him, but she must have felt him looking at her, because she did give him a regal nod worthy of ranching royalty.
“Regardless, Gus wouldn’t have hired you because of the family connection.”
“That’s what he said, but we’ll never know what would have happened if the position was empty.” Then she ducked between the fence rails and started walking away from him—or maybe, he hoped, it was less that she was walking away from him and more that she was walking toward the horses. He’d thought of the horses as being untouchable, isolated on their side of the fence like exotic animals in a zoo, but Emily strolled among them, putting out her hand to pat one or two as she passed them. Old friends.
One horse seemed particularly alert to her presence, lifting his head in her direction, twitching his ears. She stopped and petted his nose, stroked his neck, combed her fingers through his mane. As Graham watched, she simply gripped a handful of the horse’s mane, gave the smallest hop and a kick, and vaulted onto the back of the horse. She landed so lightly, it looked like the most natural, easy thing to do.
He didn’t see her tap her boot heels into the horse’s side or give any kind of verbal command, but the horse started walking directly to a gate on the far side of the pasture. Emily leaned down to open it, ride through, close it. Graham missed the command again, but the horse broke into a run as Emily bent close to its neck, riding bareback, just that handful of mane in her hand as she disappeared down the rise.
Gus spoke from close behind him. “She’s quite a horsewoman.”
It was beautiful. It was humbling. Emily had a whole way of life Graham knew nothing about. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“You rarely do.”
“Where’s she going?”
“She won’t go too far, not without a bridle. Let her go. It’ll be good for her.”
Let her go? Graham had no choice. How did his uncle think he’d follow her? Emily called her own shots, as Graham had told Mr. Schumer just last night, but she lived in a world where men seemed to think they were allowing her to do things—allowing her to buy beer when they knew she was of legal age, allowing her to ride a horse when she was already its master, allowing her to work for free during every college break, when they probably relied on her. As an outsider, Graham could see it. In this ranching world, he suspected the men did not. But Emily did, and it was wearing her down.
His uncle took her place at the railing. “Now, would you care to explain to me if you were under some covers at a hotel with a heated swimming pool before you met her at Keller’s Bar, or after?”
Graham ran the pad of his thumb over his bottom lip. Emily had only told Gus about the bar. The pond, the dock and the rope, those were secrets between them, and always would be. Graham and Emily, down by the lake that night.
“She’s the boss’s sister,” Gus said.
“Cousin.”
“Either way, it’s asking for trouble. How much trouble there’s already been is what I’d like to know.”
Graham kept his eye on the spot where she’d disappeared. “I meant what I said in there about being grateful you brought me on board at this ranch, but I’ve been on my own for too long. I don’t account for my whereabouts or my covers or anything else to anyone. Not even to the uncle I owe this job to.”
“I’ve known her since she was yea-high in pink cowgirl boots. It would be a sin to break that girl’s heart.”
“I didn’t. This ranch did.”
Graham pushed off the fence and turned back to the barn. It was time to go shovel out stalls.
* * *
Graham’s shoulder withstood the shoveling well enough. He didn’t have to lift the pitchfork high to toss manure into a wheelbarrow, and the constant motion of sifting through hay from one stall to another, stall after stall, kept the joint too warm to freeze up. He was going to feel it tomorrow morning, though. Sleep made his shoulder stiff.
Sid was useless once more after another attempt to haze him. He’d tried to make Graham use a garden hoe, then a snow shovel to clean out the first stall, but both tools failed the common sense test. Graham had needed to set Sid straight again before he’d been handed the right pitchfork. Sid had the lazier, easier job of watching Graham clean out the stall, then coming after him and tossing in some fresh hay apathetically.
“Fancy.”
Graham stopped what he was doing.
Sid wolf whistled, but being the sad sack he was, he kept it low enough for only Graham to catch. He didn’t have the guts to actually whistle at the boss’s cousin.
“Mm, mm, mm...”
Graham smacked the pitchfork into Sid’s hands. “Finish up.”
“Hey, man.” But that was the extent of Sid’s objection this time. He was learning.
Graham went to the open barn door to see Emily returning, riding her horse at a gentle walk. Uncle Gus was waiting for her, rope in his hand. He looped the rope over the horse’s neck as Emily neatly dismounted. Graham couldn’t hear what was said, not really, but if his lip reading was good enough, Gus had said, “He’s waiting for you.”
Emily turned to look for...him. Graham knew it in his bones. He was the man on her mind.
But Gus had been talking about Trey, who’d been leaning against the side of a building, watching his cousin ride in from the land beyond the pasture. No doubt, Gus had filled Trey in on the situation when he’d returned from Austin. Emily dusted her hands off, Gus took the horse away, and Trey simply walked up to his cousin, put his arm over her shoulders and started walking her back to the house, the Waterson house, where the ranch royalty lived.
Graham didn’t give in to the heartache. He knew what he’d seen. Emily had looked for him.
It kept him going long enough to finish the work for the day, to return to the barracks—the bunkhouse—to take a shower after being awake for thirty-six hours. When he would have fallen into bed, instead he dressed with some care, a collared shirt and fresh jeans, and he brush-shined his black boots, because military men didn’t walk around with dusty boots, not even on a ranch.
He walked a mile to the main house in the last of the twilight. Trey answered his knock.
“May I speak to Emily?”
“She’s not here. She went back to her mother’s house.”
Graham let that sink in a moment. It was possible Emily had just felt like a third wheel with Trey and someone new named Rebecca, so she’d gone back to her home to sleep tonight.
That wasn’t why she’d gone, and he knew it.
She’d gone back to confront her mother about the master’s degree. Emily didn’t know how to not fight for what she wanted. She had so much heart. She had his heart, too, whether she needed it or wanted it, and he didn’t like not knowing where it was.
“Is there any chance you’ll give me that address?”
“I don’t have it.”
Trey wasn’t lying. He was too straightforward, too much like Emily. Graham should have seen the resemblance right away. He just hadn’t been ready to.
“If this is the part where you warn me off dating your cousin, it’s unnecessary. I know I’m wr
ong for her.” There were too many gaps between what he should have done, what he had done, what he wanted to do. “I’m still going to check on her.”
“Nothing’s a secret on this ranch for long, but if you haven’t been informed, I’ll tell you that I haven’t seen Emily in ten years. The Emily I knew had braces on her teeth and tried to play some god-awful boy band music in the barn. Looks like she’s all grown up now to me, so what one grown-up does with another is none of my business, as long as the ranch runs smoothly.”
Graham nodded.
“As long as you’re not cruel. Or careless.” Trey sized him up. “Then it would get interesting.”
Graham wasn’t cocky enough to predict an easy victory over Trey in a fistfight. Interesting meant Trey felt the same about him.
Graham had no intention of letting anything get to that point. He wasn’t cruel. He knew what cruelty looked like, bloody and merciless and sick. Combat had, once more, stolen his ability to claim anything else was cruel for the rest of his life. Intentionally breaking a heart was low, but it wasn’t inhuman cruelty.
When it came to being careless with a lover’s emotions, Graham couldn’t get out of his own head long enough to be careless. He’d been too intentional every step with Emily, but he was glad Emily had a cousin like Trey in her corner, if there were another man in her future.
The possibility of future men, fumbling idiots, made him angry.
“All right,” Graham said. “Good night.”
“Work should be light tomorrow. Good time for you to get up on a horse.”
Emily had promised him his first ride.
But Emily didn’t work here. Graham did, and Trey owned the place, so Graham just nodded, repeated his good-night and walked back to his new home, alone.
Twenty-four hours ago, it had been all he wanted. Now, it was all wrong.
* * *
Emily knew she was a failure.
She hated it.
Worse, she hated that Graham was the one person in the world who would know exactly how far short of her goals she’d fallen. She returned to the James Hill in the morning wanting only to saddle up a horse and disappear. Instead, she’d found Graham in the barn’s center aisle, along with Sid and Bonner. The two hands were snorting and laughing up their sleeves, taking the saddle off an impatient, young gelding.
