by Lisa Gardner
It was nice to have a man at the table again. And by that she meant a man, as in a man—someone who was not a blood relation, someone who didn’t tousle her hair, slurp food or drive her crazy with adolescent antics. Someone who sat up straight, said please and thank you and ate with such quiet dignity even Randy was shocked into practicing table manners.
Brandon Ferringer sat in a hard wooden chair at her beat-up round oak table, oblivious to the stir he was creating, while she studied him shamelessly from beneath the cover of her bangs. She’d made a deal with herself. As a practical woman, as a red-blooded twenty-seven-year-old who still had a pulse, dammit, she wasn’t allowed to dream, but she was certainly allowed to stare. And what fine staring it was.
Brandon Ferringer certainly looked like he’d climbed mountains and scaled new worlds. His craggy face was windburned, his brown hair sun-streaked. His dark blue eyes were permanently crinkled from squinting toward distant horizons while his palms bore pads of thick yellow calluses from gripping ropes and pounding tent pegs. In his worn jeans, his simple blue chambray shirt and his thick black hiking socks, he still emanated the capable, graceful ease of a strong, virile man who’d gone the distance and somehow found himself there.
And tonight, having passed her father’s background check, Brandon Ferringer would be sleeping in a cabin fifty feet from her bedroom window. Buck naked, would be her guess. He looked like a man who would never tolerate pajamas.
She vehemently stabbed a pea with her fork, splitting it in half. Don’t think about it, don’t think about it, don’t think about it. You got a son to raise and a ranch to run and two new foals to train and bills to pay and feed to buy and—
“Mom,” Randy exclaimed. “Are you gonna pass me the potatoes or what?”
Victoria passed the mashed potatoes. Of course she was paying attention. The kitchen lapsed into the comfortable silence of three hungry people devouring a hot meal. She studied Brandon again. So far, he seemed to honestly like the fried chicken.
Cooking wasn’t exactly her thing. After being up at the crack of dawn running errands, managing the horses and trying to keep up with Randy, the evening meal was generally simple, hot and representative of four food groups. She didn’t have time or inclination for more.
Once, when she’d been sixteen or so, she’d been young enough or naïve enough to envision herself as a Western version of Mrs. Cleaver. She would tend horses, raise children, bake big hearty meals while her husband ran the ranch. In Beaverville, Oregon, where there wasn’t much else to do on Friday nights, she and the other girls in her high school class had spun their fantasies. She supposed statistics, small-town boredom and youthful ignorance were impossible to escape, however. By the time Victoria was seventeen, the first of her friends was pregnant. Her senior year, they all seemed to come down with it, as if it was a contagious disease. At nineteen, just two months after graduation, Victoria caught the plague herself.
She and Ronald had made a go of it, like most of their friends. They’d found each other irresistibly attractive—love at first hormones—and getting married and having kids was pretty much all they’d expected out of life, anyway. Then Randy had arrived, squalling, demanding, breathtakingly beautiful—and Ronald had bolted for the first exit he could find. Diapers weren’t his thing. Crying babies weren’t his thing. The prospect of failing such a small, delicate new life definitely wasn’t his thing.
Hanging out with his buddies, drinking, joking, getting into bar brawls at Whiskey Jack’s was so much more his style. Victoria tried to tell herself boys would be boys. God knows her brothers had sowed some wild oats. Her father was the one who’d finally told her about Ronald’s drug problem. Victoria just hadn’t wanted to see the signs.
Luckily, her parents hadn’t raised her to mope, and her brothers hadn’t conditioned her to hide. She’d given Ronald one last chance to clean up his act, and when he emptied out their meager savings account for dope, she’d kicked his sorry ass out of the house and gone at it alone. And her family had stood by her one hundred percent because that’s what families did.
Her parents cosigned her mortgage on the ranch and helped with the down payment. Her brothers assisted with the larger projects and made sure Randy never suffered from a lack of male attention. The house could be more, of course—cleaner, nicer, fancier. But the roof didn’t leak and the hot water ran if you hit the pipes just right. The money could be more, as well. She couldn’t afford the fancy baseball shoes and gloves the other boys on Randy’s team wore. Instead of a new encyclopedia set or deluxe computer, Randy had a 1972 world globe she’d picked up at a garage sale. One of these days, she was going to have to remember to tell her son that that big thing marked Union of Soviet Socialist Republics no longer existed.
But there were good things, too. There was Randy. The best. She wouldn’t trade her son for the world, and if she had to do it all over again, she’d make the exact same mistakes just so she could hold him in her arms and hear him cry in his exasperated voice, “Mom!” She and Randy made a fine team.
And she wondered if, sitting in a beat-up old kitchen, eating a simple ranch-style dinner, Brandon Ferringer thought the same. According to her father’s background check, Brandon used to be some Donald Trump–style New York investment banker. He rented a penthouse apartment in downtown Manhattan, owned more gold cards than Victoria had horses and had earned enough degrees and honors to wallpaper a house.
He could afford to stay at a place a lot fancier than her one-bedroom cabin, and he could do a hell of a lot more than work six months a year for ten bucks an hour in the middle of a wall of flames.
The man must be addicted to adrenaline in the worst way. And Victoria was afraid she already knew his type—except for the money, he wasn’t so different from her rowdy, stir-crazy brothers, after all. And just like them, just like all the men it seemed she knew, he wasn’t the kind of man who stuck around.
“How’s the chicken?” Victoria asked Brandon at last.
“Excellent.” He was cutting into his third piece. She’d never seen anyone eat fried chicken with a knife and fork before, but he made it look quite elegant. Beside her, Randy gave it a go and sent his drumstick skittering onto his lap. Unperturbed, he plopped the piece of chicken onto his plate and tried again.
“May I please have more peas, Victoria?”
“Who’s Victoria?” Randy asked, still wrestling with his drumstick.
“I’m Victoria.”
“You’re Vic. Or Mom. But he can’t call you Mom. Only I can call you Mom.”
“Mr. Ferringer can call me Victoria, then.” She didn’t mind it, the way he said it. The accent, of course.
“You don’t like Victoria—”
“Randy, it’s fine.”
“Victoria’s a girl’s name.” Randy scowled.
“I need to find the duct tape,” she murmured.
“The peas?” Brandon requested politely once more.
She passed the peas and offered a rueful smile. “Dinners around here are a little informal. Generally it’s just Randy and me . . . I . . . me. Well, we’re a pretty casual household.”
“Oh, I don’t mind. It reminds me of my grandmother.”
“Is your grandma in England?” Randy asked with fresh interest. “I looked up England. It’s on a whole new incontinent.”
“Continent.”
“Yeah, that.”
“My grandma doesn’t live in England,” Brandon said, “but that’s where I grew up so I’m happy you could find it on the globe. More Yanks need to be able to locate the mother country, you know.”
Randy beamed. Brandon picked up his fork. Victoria rolled her eyes. Yanks, indeed.
“Actually,” Brandon continued, “my grandmother, Lydia, runs a dairy in Tillamook, on the coast, right here in Oregon. Have you ever eaten Tillamook cheese?”
“Oh, yeah.” Randy made a
face. Oregon cities weren’t as exciting as English ones. At the wise age of six, he’d already declared that he was going to leave Beaverville ’cause it was too boring. Victoria had hoped it would take him another six years to figure that out.
“Tillamook is a beautiful place,” she said levelly. “I’ve been there twice, and it’s so . . . so green.”
Brandon nodded. “Most definitely. My grandmother came from Texas during the Depression. They traveled for weeks, and she likes to say that the minute she saw the rolling green hills and the mist-shrouded mountains, she knew she’d found home. My father grew up on the farm. After his plane went down, she made sure myself and my two half siblings, C.J. and Maggie, spent our summers there, as well, so we could learn about Tillamook and each other. Those were wonderful summers.”
“Your grandmother sounds like a very smart woman.” Something had come over Brandon’s face. He looked . . . homesick, as if he still missed the days of his youth, sometimes even ached for them.
“I’m done,” Randy announced.
She tore her eyes from Brandon to Randy. “Eat your peas.”
“I ate two of them.”
“I know. Now try two bites of them.”
Randy rolled his eyes and gave Brandon a long-suffering look, seeking an ally. But Brandon piled peas onto his fork, scooped them into his mouth and made a great show of enjoying each and every one of them.
“Gross,” Randy muttered, but grudgingly followed suit. Victoria gave Brandon a grateful smile.
“My sister still lives in Oregon,” Brandon said after a moment. “Her husband programs CD-ROM games for your computer. His name is Cain Cannon. Maybe you’ve heard of him. His biggest seller is Break Out.”
“I don’t have that,” Randy announced. “I don’t have a computer.” He gave Victoria an injured look.
Even more than a new baseball mitt, Randy wanted a computer. Last week, he’d gone so far as to explain how they could keep the ranch finances and horse-breeding records on it. One of his best friends, Arnie, had a computer and he did everything on it—school reports, surfing the Web. Games. Victoria was no dummy.
“No, we don’t,” she said firmly. “Computers are a major investment. However”—she caught her son’s eye so she would have his full attention—“I was thinking that this summer you could help me train one of the foals. With the right training, she’ll be worth a lot of money come fall. We could sell her. Maybe after we deducted the cost of feed, breeding and training, there would be enough money left over to buy . . . oh, I don’t know. Say, a computer.”
“Oh,” Randy said, his eyes already widening with the possibility. “Neat! Great! Cool!” He whirled toward Brandon like a mini tornado and expelled in a rush, “Our foals are royalty. They’re beautiful. They got bloodlines! We saved for two years to breed our mares with Sir Henry. Now we got two re—recent—revent . . .”
“Regents.”
“Regents out back. Have you seen them? I’ll show you after dinner if you’d like. They’re named Mary and Libby and they already come when they’re called. They have papers, they’re so fancy—I don’t even come with papers. And Mom’s gonna train them and they’ll be worth a fortune. My mom is the best trainer in Beaverville. There’s no one like her.” He whipped around to Victoria and beamed so big she felt twenty feet tall. The thing that never failed to amaze her about her son was that in his eyes, all her dreams had come true. She was a hero.
“I’ll work them with you,” he said in a rush. “Every day. It’ll be great. Before or after baseball, though, of course, right? I can’t miss practice.”
“We’ll work them in the morning, then.”
“I’m going to get a computer and play games!” Randy chortled. “It’ll improve my hand-eye coordination so someday I can be a jet fighter.” He cocked his fingers, lined up his sights and took out the mashed potatoes with a hail of imaginary bullets. “I’m gonna be the best jet fighter pilot in the world!”
“That will be great,” Brandon said seriously.
“The computer isn’t for games,” Victoria intoned.
“I’m gonna be a jet fighter!” Randy roared again.
“Fine, fine, Ace. Now eat your peas!”
After dinner, she served apple pie and black coffee. Brandon insisted on doing the dishes, so she sat at the table and watched. Not a bad deal. Eventually, Randy dragged out his homework and piled it on the table. He was learning to multiply mixed numerals, and both of them were having a hell of a time with it. Victoria had passed grade school, but these days, she had no idea how. Surely the most convincing argument against having sex was that someday you would have to help your children with their homework.
She labored through the first problem set with half her attention on her son’s efforts and half her attention on Brandon Ferringer’s body. When she and Randy got the first four equations wrong, she supposed she shouldn’t have been surprised.
“You don’t have to find a common denominator,” Brandon said abruptly from the sink.
“What?”
“For multiplication of fractions, you multiply the numerator and denominator straight across. Finding a common denominator is for addition.”
“But don’t you have to invert the second fraction?”
“That’s division.”
“Oh,” she said.
Randy looked like he was ready to drop out of school. Frankly, she didn’t blame him.
“I could help you, if you like,” Brandon said.
Randy perked up. Brandon set the last battered plate in the drying rack, wiped his hands on an old olive-green towel and came on over. He flipped the chair backward, then straddled it so he could stick his legs out and rub his sore quads.
“May I?” he asked, and took the textbook from Randy, who was only too happy to relinquish it. “Math is rather my thing. Wall Street investments these days are all about exotic derivatives and exponential equations.”
“I don’t even understand what you just said,” Victoria said honestly.
He flashed her a slow smile. “Most people don’t.”
“Just a teeniest bit arrogant, hmm?”
“That’s a kinder word than most people use.”
He picked up Randy’s yellow, number 2 pencil, and scrawled numbers across the lined paper as fast as any computer, then just as abruptly slapped the pencil back down.
“Keeewl,” Randy breathed.
“All right. Let me walk you through it.”
He did, and by the end of the lesson, even Victoria was qualified for grade school once more.
“I used to help my half siblings a lot,” Brandon said by way of explanation, finally climbing out of his chair. The hour had grown late. Both Victoria and Randy should be in bed by now. Instead, Randy was looking at Brandon with the largest case of hero worship Victoria had ever seen and she was wondering at just what point the evening had run away from her.
“I . . . uh . . . thank you,” she said at last.
“No problem.”
“Will you help me again tomorrow night?” Randy wanted to know.
“I don’t know.” Brandon Ferringer looked bewildered, as if he hadn’t bothered to think that far ahead. The look restored Victoria’s bearings. That’s right. She knew this man and this situation, after all. She spent too much time with strong, virile men who only traveled with one duffel bag.
She rose up, ruffling her son’s hair. “Come on, Randy, time for bed. Mr. Ferringer has to get ready for hotshot training so we can’t take up too much of his time.”
Her son looked on the verge of protest. He scoped her out, searching for signs of weakness, but when she merely thinned her lips, he relented with one of his “Aw, Mom” shrugs.
“Brush your teeth. I’ll be in in a minute.”
Randy nodded, made it half out of the room, then surprised them all by returni
ng to give Brandon a quick, furtive hug. Now red all the way up to the tips of his ears, he bolted.
Brandon appeared stunned.
“He’s at that age,” Victoria said at last. “You’ll probably want to set some limits with him or you’ll end up with a second shadow.”
“That age?”
“He’s eight years old, realizing that all the other kids are bringing fathers to the ball games and not just uncles. He’s getting into sports and wanting to know what M-E-N are all about. It’s hard for him. I give him all I can, you know, but frankly, I don’t understand the Y chromosome that well myself. Why do men slap each other’s butts after a touchdown? It’s a mystery to me.”
She smiled ruefully. Brandon, however, God bless him, wasn’t fooled.
“It must be difficult,” Ferringer said gently, “but if a layman’s opinion means anything to you, it seems to me that you’re doing great.”
“Thank you. I try.”
He smiled, and she found herself smiling back. Their gazes locked, held. Victoria couldn’t even tell what was between them anymore. Sparks, emotion, chemistry, friendship. It beat the hell out of her. She just knew her stomach was plummeting and her pulse accelerating and for a crazy instant, she was angling back her head, the way a woman did when she was hoping a man would kiss her.
And Brandon took half a step forward. His eyes narrowed. His lips parted. He leaned down just a fraction, and they hovered somewhere in between.
Abruptly, they both drew back.
“I should be going to bed,” Brandon said briskly.
“Me too. My bed, I mean. The one down the hall. That bed, of course. Yes.” She shut up.
Brandon was nodding sagely, as if she’d actually said something intelligent. “And me, to the cabin. I have to get up bright and early, start training. Six months as a hotshot.”
“Six months,” she repeated emphatically.
“Six months,” he agreed.
And between them both, that said it all. He made it to the door. In another awkward moment, he stuck out his hand.
“Thank you for dinner, Victoria,” he said formally.
