Chapter Nine

Nine

“I still can’t wrap my brain around that.”

Mel released a soft sigh that was part exhaustion, part frustration: frustration at her inability to make any more sense of the crazy turn her life had taken.

She sat in the grass, one leg folded beneath her, the other extended because she had a cramp in her calf, drawing aimless patterns in a sandy patch of earth with the end of a stick. The sun was hanging low in the sky, nightfall a mere hour away. From her seat behind the barn, she could hear the hungry whickers of horses as Toto and the Danville brothers poured the evening feed.

“I know,” she relented.

Her friend Elyse made a tsk-ing sound from the other end of the cell phone Mel held against her ear. “You are not working at some dude ranch, Mel. This is insane.”

“It’s not a dude ranch,” Melanie said, feeling a touch defensive.

“Well, whatever, it’s not a dressage farm either, which is where you need to be.”

At the moment, Mel had little patience with her friend’s – and fellow Carlton working student – habit of emphasizing words without necessity. “I need to be wherever my horses aren’t going to get attacked.”

“You don’t know for sure that -,”

“Elyse,” Mel cut her off sharply, “it’s bad enough I had to listen to Marissa call me a liar. I know Riley tried to hurt Roman.” A beat of silence passed in which she wondered if she’d been too harsh, but then dismissed the idea. The proof of Riley Carlton’s malicious nature had been too obvious for anyone to ignore, even Riley’s mother, who’d defended him because he was her offspring, not because he was innocent.

“I know,” Elyse admitted. “I just keep hoping that if you’d apologize, you could come back.”

“Not gonna happen.”

Her friend sighed. “But this is Carlton. What’s gonna happen if other farms hear you got kicked out of Carlton?”

“I quit,” Mel said, sounding braver about the whole thing than she felt. “I didn’t get fired.”

“That’s not the way Marissa’s gonna spin it.”

“I know.”

She flopped back on the grass and stared up at the interlocking branches of the tree above her. Though evening was fast giving way to night, the breeze that rippled across her skin was still hot and heavy with the day’s heat. It had been so much easier to think about today, and the days to come, in an optimistic light before she’d returned Elyse’s phone call.

“It’s weird over here without you,” Elyse said. “I can’t get over it. No way are you gone.”

Though she would have preferred to hear soothing words about how it would all be okay, it might have been more hurtful to think that everyone at Carlton had forgotten she existed in just two short days.

“It’s strange,” she agreed, then sighed. “Okay, it’s pretty damn awful.” Disappointment – largely in herself – washed over her, left a lump in her throat. “But at least the people here are nice. Most of them,” she frowned as she thought about Dan. Her hope that they might have established an uneasy truce had been dashed when the two-year-olds had arrived and he’d sent her off to exercise a much older, calmer horse instead.

“And you’re literally around the corner from here?”

“More or less. This place is huge by comparison, so it’s a long corner.”

Her phone beeped, indicating that there was another caller trying to get through, and when she pulled it away from her ear for a quick glance, her stomach lurched when she saw that it was her mother.

“Hey, I’ll call you back.”

-O-

“So what do ya think?”

“About…?” Dan pretended not to know the subject of his boss’s obtuse question. They were in the truck, heading down the drive toward the cattle pastures, both staring through the bug-spattered windshield, and Dan had the impression Larry had been itching to ask him about their new “employee” for hours.

Larry snorted, which was code for you know what.

With a sigh, Dan propped his arm on the window sill and stared through the glass. “She rides alright,” he said with a shrug.

“But,” Larry prompted.

“But we don’t know anything about her. What do you want me to say?” he gave his employer a sideways look. “Even you don’t make friends this fast, Larry.” The rancher’s hand clenched on the wheel: Dan had hit a nerve. “She can sit on a horse, that’s all I know.”

As he turned back toward the view of the pasture rolling past them, Dan felt no small amount of annoyance bubbling up in his chest. He was tired of this. He didn’t want to talk about the girl, didn’t want to think about her. Didn’t think she ought to mean anything to the Shaw family. “I’m done talking about it,” he said with a rush of intolerance, knowing he was being disrespectful and not caring at the moment. “You keep her around if you think she knows something about your Hayley, but I’m done gossiping.”

Larry made a noncommittal sound in the back of his throat. “Alright,” he drawled.

They took grain to the cows – they had their own specialized bovine diet and were fed all together in a long, metal feed trough – and as the sun met the horizon with a last flare of orange, purple pushing in on the rest of the world, Dan noticed headlights coming down the driveway toward them.

A silver VW Bug was bouncing along the rutted, sand and gravel drive – miles of trail across the whole property had made paving it all too expensive – and with a familiar mix of anticipation and dread, he recognized the latest in his string of casual female acquaintances.

“Someone you know?” Larry asked with a dark chuckle as the Beetle pulled up to a stop behind the flatbed and the driver door opened.

The statuesque brunette who’d followed Dan home from the rodeo walked around the front of her car, the vehicle’s headlights bathing her long, bare legs. She wore cutoffs and a sleeveless, western shirt knotted above her waistband. Her stilettos made the gravel dangerous, and she walked with mincing, awkward steps that ruined the intended sexiness of her getup.

Carla? Mia? Or was it Dawn? Dan still had no idea what her name was, though, considering she was halfway back to his cabin, she now knew the entry code at the front gate.

“Hey, there!” she greeted in a loud, sing-song voice laced with too much honey. Dan cringed inwardly – he really didn’t like to listen to her talk – but he wasn’t interested in her for the things she said. “There was a guy with a mustache up front who let me in,” she explained her appearance.

When Dan only nodded at her, Larry injected himself in the situation.

“Well hey there, darlin’. Who are you lookin’ for?” he asked with a barely masked chuckle.

The girl’s overbright face seemed to brighten some more and her painted lips stretched as her brain put together an answer. “I came to see Danny! We’re dating,” she said with an exaggerated wink.

“You’re real funny,” Dan told his boss as he headed up the rise toward the driveway, and his “date” for the evening.

Larry thumped him on the shoulder as he passed.

-O-

“Oh, Melanie,” her mother had said over the phone the night before, that sad, hopeless strain to her voice. It hadn’t been disappointment, but a resignation, an expectant letdown as if she hadn’t thought Mel’s Florida plans would go well.

It was that voice, that sentiment from her mother that led Mel down the steps from her barn apartment at five-thirty the next morning. Led her over to Nora’s ledger on the desk where she traced the week’s schedule with a finger. Foster picked his blue-and-white head up from his bed, regarded her with disinterest a moment, then went back to sleep. Under the big flood lights around the arena, she worked Sampson and was then trotting Sugar through a series of serpentines and circles as dawn broke and the rest of the ranch came to life.

She’d left a big mark on the chart hanging from Sampson’s stall so there’d be no mistaking he’d been ridden this morning. So as she pulled the pony up to a walk and cooled him out, she fought a pleased smile to see Dan lead Penelope -  a liver chestnut mare – up to the arena. It was a small victory, a tiny one, but he knew she’d ridden Sampson and had been forced to move on to his next mount. She may have been nearing exhaustion at seven in the morning thanks to her early wakeup, but as Dan swung into his saddle, the tight set to his jaw made it all worth it.

Mel had been pushed out of one job and wasn’t going to be badgered out of another.

“Morning,” she called as Dan neared her along the rail.

Beneath the brim of his hat, a dark expression skittered across his face. But to her surprise, it left as quickly as it had come. And with stiff, formal politeness, he dipped his head in a nod and said, “Mornin’.”

At another time, she would have laughed at her sense of triumph, as small and fleeting as it was, but she would take a win in any form, no matter how pathetic.

She was humming to herself as she dismounted and loosened Sugar’s cinch, the pony taking a grateful deep breath and rubbing his ear against her shoulder. The sound of tires on gravel pulled her attention toward the drive and she watched a silver Beetle limping its way toward the gate, the low-slung car’s undercarriage scraping over the uneven ruts the truck tires had left behind. Mel knew she should have kept walking, but curiosity got the best of her when she saw Dan pull his horse up along the rail. The car came to a halt and a woman unfolded her tall frame from within it. Mel bit down on the inside of her cheek to keep from laughing.

The girl – woman – Mel herself looked younger than her twenty-six years, so she was a poor judge of age in others – had a distinctly disheveled look about her: her heavy waves of dark hair were tousled and flattened in places, she’d missed a button on her cutesy little pink and white western shirt, and only remnants of shadow still decorated her eyes. As she tiptoed toward the rail of the arena in her heels, she did not, however, look at all embarrassed during her walk of shame. In fact, the smile that stretched across her face was self-satisfied.

“Hey, baby,” she drawled as she looped her long, tan arms over the rail and gazed up at Dan. “Wanted to say ‘bye’ before I left.”

A pause hung between the couple that was one-sided in its degree of affection. Mel watched the woman’s smile begin to falter as Dan stared down at her from his horse without a trace of kindness on his hard face. In fact, from Mel’s vantage point peering around Sugar’s head, he looked much like he had that first day she’d met him at the rodeo, which was anything but friendly.

“Well,” he said after a long moment. “You said it.”

It was so rude, so callous, and had Mel been on the receiving end of that kind of disdain from a man she’d spent the night with, she would have been furious. But in this instant, she found it hilarious for some reason and clapped a hand over her mouth to stifle the giggle that bubbled up out of her throat.

The brunette’s head snapped in Mel’s direction, the sudden scowl that pinched her features deadly. “What are you laughing about?” she snapped, all her put-upon sugar gone. She didn’t give her a chance to respond. With one last, hurt expression tossed toward Dan, she pranced back up to her car. “I’ll call you,” she said to the cowboy, but her voice wasn’t hopeful as she slid into the VW and put the little car into gear.

Gravel pelted the rail of the fence in her wake, the horses both bobbing their heads in mild surprise.

Mel shouldn’t have said anything, but like with the giggling, she couldn’t seem to help herself. “Your girlfriend?” she asked, all innocence.

His head snapped toward her, his face impassive save for a telltale tautness along his jaw. “What do you think?”

Stop now, a small voice in the back of her head warned. But instead, she asked, “What’s her name?”

No comment.

Mel’s smile stretched until her face hurt. “Can I guess if you won’t tell me? ‘Cause I think she looks like a ‘Bambi’.”

A muscle ticked in Dan’s cheek. Now she’d done it; she’d pissed him off past the point of annoyance. But to her shock, a half-smile twisted his lips. “Bambi, huh?”

She lifted her chin in an attempt to both look taller, more casual, and to keep a laugh at bay. “I think so.”

When she made a grand show of turning around and mimicking the brunette’s tiny, high-heeled steps as she led Sugar toward the barn, she thought she heard Dan chuckle to himself.