Finally Home (4 page)

The bunkhouse dropped into silence.

“What was that about?” Casie asked.

“Paranoia?” Colt guessed and shelled out the Winchester's bullets.

“Yeah. Sophie's always worried about the horses.”

He set the rifle aside, butt end on the floor, as he settled his shoulders against the wall. “I meant
you
.”

“What?”

He exhaled carefully, eyes narrowed, saying nothing for a moment, but finally he spoke, voice low, expression somber. “I'm not Bradley, Case.”

“I know that, but . . .” She shook her head and shrugged.

“But what?”

“I can't . . .” She glanced away, feeling frantic, knowing she was being unfair. “You're not ready to settle down, Colt.”

“
I'm
not or
you're
not?”

“What about your career?”

“What about it?”

“You're a bronc rider.”

“I
was.
”

“Was? What are you talking about? You're ranked thirteenth in the world.” She shook her head, feeling frantic. “You can't just give that up.”

“If Niagara can, I can.”

She scowled. “What?”

“Niagara Falls, the horse that threw me in Dallas. Gave me this.” He pointed to the crease in his brow, watching her steadily. “Maybe knocked a little sense into me. I heard they're retiring her. I might make them an offer.”

“For . . .” Casie shook her head.

He shrugged. “Could be I owe her something. For the life lessons.”

She opened her mouth, nerves jittery with hope, but she shushed them with a stern command. “You could never make the kind of money ranching that you made on the circuit.”

“Probably true.”

She scowled, entirely uncertain where to go from there, but she hurried on, sure there were a thousand reasons she should discourage him. “And what about . . . about . . .”

“What?” He narrowed his eyes at her.

She pursed her lips. Silence lingered between them.

“The women?” he asked.

She raised her chin. “You're a bronc rider,” she said again, tone steadier now. “The term is practically synonymous with playboy.”

“Are you serious?” he asked and took a step toward her.

She stood her ground. “Yes, I'm serious,” she said. “Jess—”

“I told you I'm sorry about Jess.”

“Sorry?” She laughed. “Holy cow, Colt, she was going to have your baby!”

“And you were going to marry Bradley. Now you're not.”

“I . . .” She shook her head, trying to muster her thoughts. Glancing out the window, she sighed. “You don't want this,” she said. “Not really.”

“What don't I want?”

“The endless hours, the monotony, the—”

“The
monotony?
Are you kidding me?” he asked and waved a wild hand toward the door. “A teenage girl with daddy issues and a grudge just about shot us two minutes ago.”

“And that's another thing you don't want . . . the kids. They're . . .” She shook her head, breathing hard. “They'll make you crazy. Just the other day—”

“You must be joking.”

“No, I'm not joking. It's really hard. They need—”

“You think I don't know what they need?” he asked and took the few steps that remained between them. “Dammit, Case, what do you think I've been doing for the past two months?”

“Two
months?
As far as I know these kids are here for good, so this is a life sentence, Dickenson. This is up at dawn, to bed at midnight, with sporadic periods of insanity in between. This is dirty diapers and clogged drains and lawsuits and—”

“I know what I'm getting into.”

“Listen, you've been great.” She felt as if the air had suddenly evaporated from her lungs, but she dared not back down. Not for her own sake and not for his. “And I really appreciate it, Colt. I do, but—”

“Who do you think rushed Emily to the hospital when she was in false labor? Who do you think saved Curly and got Ty away from his dumb-ass parents and rocks Bliss to sleep when she's colicky?”

The image of him with tiny Bliss tucked against his flannel-clad shoulder was almost her undoing. She responded with anger. “So fine! You're Superman! Is that what you want to hear?”

“No! I'm not Superman. I'm just a man who—” he shouted, but he stopped abruptly, rocking back on his heels a little. “That's the problem, isn't it?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You don't trust men.”

“That's not true. I—”

“Name one.”

“What?”

“Name one man you trust.”

She glanced out the window again, wishing she was gone. She detested controversy, would rather spend the night in a cold barn with a sick cow than argue about anything with anyone. Which meant she must be pretty close to her wits' end to be fostering this argument. “My dad . . .” she began, but Colt interrupted her.

“Let you down in a hundred ways,” he said.

She pursed her lips, knowing it was true. In her entire life, Clayton Carmichael had never once opened up to her. Hell, if he hadn't died, she would have never known the ranch was in financial trouble, would have never guessed that without his wife, with whom he had feuded incessantly, he had no reason to go on living. “Fine,” she said. “I don't trust men.” She fisted her hands beside her thighs. “Would you?”

He opened his mouth, then gritted his teeth and shook his head. “No. Men are mostly bastards.”

She nodded once, gaze steady on his. “I'll bet that's what Jess thinks.”

Anger erupted on his face. “Are you going to throw that at me every time we argue?”

“You made a baby, Colt! Another human being! So yeah, the point's going to come up a couple thousand times,” she snarled and waited for him to blast her, but instead, he studied her in silence for what seemed like forever.

“I've got a barrel full of faults, Case. I'm not denying that.”

She laughed out loud, egging on his temper, but he drew a careful breath and continued.

“I'm stubborn as a cranky mustang, I need a hit of caffeine first thing in the morning, and sometimes I'm an ass, but if I say I'll stick, I'll stick.” He nodded at her, eyes hard. “You can take that to the bank.”

“I've heard that before,” she said.

For a moment she thought he'd whine or protest or scoff, but instead he just stepped forward, standing within inches of her.

“Not from me you haven't,” he said, and grasping her set jaw in his right hand, kissed her square on the lips.

She felt her knees go weak and her brain go soft, but before she slipped to the floor in a puddle of soppy mush, he turned on his heel and left.

CHAPTER 3

“W
here's Mr. Dickenson?” They were the first words out of Emily's mouth when Casie finally toed off her gone-through-hell Sorel boots and headed into the kitchen. Her feet felt wooden against the discolored linoleum.

“Man, that smells great,” she said and studiously ignored the question as she sniffed the aromatic steam that drifted from the pot atop the Lazy's ancient stove.

“Mr. Dickenson . . .” Emily said, hurrying into the entry to search in vain before tromping irritably back toward the stove. “Where is he?”

“No one makes stew like you do, Em,” Casie said.

There was a moment of tense silence, then, “You turned him down, didn't you?”

Emily held a wooden spoon in one determined fist near her hip, dreadlocks in wild disarray around her face. Casie opened her mouth, ready to attempt to allay the storm, but before she had a chance to try, Sophie stepped into the room from the stairwell.

“Is supper ready or what?” she asked. “I'm starving. Is that—” She stopped abruptly, perfect brow furrowing. “What's going on?”

“Nothing's going on,” Casie said. To say her cheeriness was forced would have been a miscalculation of Clydesdale proportions. “Let's eat,” she suggested, but Emily remained exactly as she was, arms akimbo and spoon held like an impromptu weapon.

“He asked you, didn't he?” she said.

Casie felt depleted and exhausted and as jittery as a spring colt, but she remembered that she was the adult here. When that did nothing to bolster her spirits, she told herself in no uncertain terms that she had nothing to be ashamed of. That proved to be fairly ineffective as well, so she punted. “Where's Ty?”

“Asked her what?” Sophie said, and lifting the cover from the pot on the stove, sighed before dipping a spoon into the broth that boiled up between the cracks in the dumplings.

The fact that Emily didn't take the girl down like a grizzly on a jack rabbit was proof enough that she was distracted by other catastrophes. “Mr. Dickenson asked Casie to marry him,” Emily said and sharpened her glare. “Didn't he?”

“What!”
Sophie asked, momentarily forgetting the broth that drizzled slowly back onto the dumplings.

“And you turned him down,” Emily said.

“Who?” Sophie asked.

Emily shook her head, disapproval steaming from every pore. “What is wrong with you, Case?”

The girl's disappointment hurt far more than Casie would have ever thought possible, stinging on contact, burning with contempt.

“
Colt
Dickenson?” Sophie asked.

“Oh, for Pete's sake!” Emily snarled, turning toward the younger girl. “Who do you think we're talking about?
Monty?
”

Sophie ignored the reference to the elder Dickenson. “
Colt
asked you to marry him?” she said and dipped her spoon back into the broth. Steam wafted like fragrant magic into the air. “That doesn't even count as a proposal.”

They both stared at her.

“I mean . . . come on . . .” She exhaled a laugh. “He's a
bronc
rider.”

“Exactly!” Casie concurred, though, in truth, a dozen reasons to defend him came rushing to the fore. “See? Sophie understands, Em. Colt isn't ready to get serious. He's—”

“So I was right,” Emily said and dropped dismally into the nearest chair. “He
did
propose. And you said no.”

“No,” Casie said and hurried over to crouch beside her chair. Somewhere inside, she knew it shouldn't matter so much what Emily thought. The girl was barely eighteen years old. She was bruised and unpredictable and fragile in ways that still weren't readily apparent. But somehow, somewhere along the battering life they shared, Emily Kane had become the soul of the Lazy Windmill. There was no explaining that. It was just a basic truth. “He
didn't
ask,” Casie said.

Emily stared at her a second, then sighed. And somehow that sound was even more discouraging than her anger. “But he was going to.” She smiled a little, a tiny tug of plump, cynical lips. “Colt Dickenson was going to ask you to marry him until Sophie barged in to shoot you.”

“I wasn't going to—” Sophie began, then exhaled, breath cooling the stew. “Seriously, Colt Dickenson . . . married . . .”

Emily shook her head, never taking her gaze from Casie. “What were you thinking?”

“Listen . . .” Casie said, reminding herself yet again that
she
was the adult. This ranch was
her
responsibility. As were the teenagers and the livestock and the bills. “I know you're fond of him, but—”

“
Fond
of him?
Fond
of him! Casie, do you think men like that come along every day? Do you think they just pop up . . .” She raised both hands in wild unison as if a cowboy were magically conjured into the air between them. “Like sunflowers in June? Well, they don't. Things happen. People let you down. Or die. Or leave. Or—” She sputtered to a sighing halt, making Casie wonder again exactly what the girl had endured before arriving at the Lazy. What she had endured and how it would affect her in the long run.

“Colt Dickenson wants to get married?” Sophie mused. “To Casie?”

They both turned toward her. Emily's brows puckered. Casie felt heat strike her cheeks.

“I didn't mean it like that,” Sophie said. “I just meant . . .” she began, but Casie rose to her feet.

“No, you're right. It would be like . . .” She shook her head. “Like hitching a mule and a Friesian together.”

The kitchen went silent for a second.

Sophie scowled. “Which one's the mule and which one's the Friesian?”

“What's a Friesian, and what does that have to do with . . . No!” Emily said, slicing the air with her hand. “This is stupid. We're talking about Colt Dickenson.”

“And
Casie?
” Sophie said, as if to clarify it further in her own mind.

“Yes,
Casie,
” Emily shot back. “Geez, Soph, try to keep up. Cassandra May Carmichael turned down—”

“He didn't actually—” Casie began, but her tone was weak.

“She was
about
to turn down Colt Dickenson, the sweetest, sexiest, most hardworking man in the state of South Dakota.”

The house went silent. Casie felt pale. Colt
could
be sweet. No doubt about that. And he had been known to put in a full day of work before most people got out of bed. And yeah, those were fine qualities. Qualities she could maybe deal with on a day-to-day basis. But that sexy thing? She felt nervousness twitter along her spine again. She wasn't built for sexy. Had never been. She was meant to be serviceable, solid. Hell,
boring
made her all but euphoric.

“Well . . .” Sophie said and shrugged as she licked the spoon. “You're too good for him anyway, Case.”

For a moment no one spoke. Casie creaked her head in the girl's direction, brows raised in absolute shock.

“What?”

“What?”
Emily echoed.

Sophie scowled at their obvious surprise. “I mean, sure, the man's built like a . . .” She paused and shook her head, as if his physique somehow defied description, and hurried on. “And he's all right to look at if you like that rugged cowboy thing. But you're . . .” On the girl's usually aloof face was something indescribable, something that almost looked like admiration. “Hey,” she said, jerking irritably toward Emily again. “Are we going to eat or what?” she asked, but in that instant the front door opened and Ty Roberts stepped into the kitchen. Sixteen, rangy, and reticent, he scanned them with soulful eyes.

Sophie fell immediately silent. For one wild second his gaze met hers, but he turned abruptly toward Casie. His angular face was shadowed by his ever-present baseball cap, his rough, capable hands were bare, and in his arms he cradled a still-wet lamb. “Sorry, Case,” he said, newly lowered voice barely a rumble of disappointment. “Looks like we got us a little problem.”

“Holy shorts,” Emily said, pulling her gaze from Casie to lock it on Sophie, who stood immobilized near the stove. “You're
both
crazy.”

“What?” Ty asked.

Emily sighed. “Nothing,” she said and dropped her gaze to the lamb. “She okay?”

Ty shook his head and hugged the baby a little closer to his chest. “Awful cold,” he said. “But the other two seem okay.”

They all stared at the infant in silent unison. Emily spoke first.

“Put the lambing box in front of the oven. I'll dish up the stew.”

 

The meal was amazing. Emily was a phenomenal cook. No one said different, but it was Sophie's proximity across the table from Ty that made it impossible for him to put two coherent thoughts together. Thus he sat in silence, grateful that three feet of aging wood separated them. On occasion, circumstances dictated that they sit side by side, but her nearness always made it difficult to eat . . . or breathe. Sophie Jaegar was not the kind of girl who made life easy.

“So you think her siblings are okay?” Casie asked and glanced at the box that sat on the floor in front of the oven.

The “lambing box” was nothing more than a corrugated container that had once housed some kitchen appliance long ago forgotten. It was frayed at the top and bent at one side, but newborn lambs were not known for their wild attempts to escape, and dozens had been warmed in that same crate just as this one was now, tiny head nestled into the terry cloth towel that cushioned the bottom, knobby legs folded under its angular form.

“They seemed to know which end was up,” Ty said.

“So they were nursing?” Casie asked.

“Yeah.” Their tiny tails had been twitching merrily while their smaller sibling had stumbled around blindly searching for a meal. But unlike cows, who had four plates at the dinner table, sheep only had two. It made no sense, since the former would almost invariably give birth to a single offspring, while ewes were known to produce three with disturbing frequency. Neither did it make sense that they would, more times than seemed logical, refuse to take one of those offspring while accepting the other two. That had been the case today. He glanced at the lamb, which, to his eyes, possessed all the charm of her siblings, and wondered why some mothers could love with selfless charity while others . . . He winced, mind jolting back to the present.

Casie was staring at him. “What's wrong?” she asked. Her voice was soft, as was her heart. There was no reason to bother her with the fact that the ewe had knocked this particular baby to the ground more than once. No reason to debate why she found this infant so patently detestable.

“Nothing,” Ty said and glanced at the soup bowl in front of him.

“Is there something wrong with the stew?” Emily asked. She was different from Casie. Not so soft, but her heart was good as gold. She was loyal as a hound, tough as a screw. If someone asked, he might be able to admit he thought the world of her. After all, they'd been cut from the same tattered cloth.

“No. Course not. It's real good,” he said and took a bite, though thoughts of mothers always put him off his feed.

“She'll probably eat when she warms up a little,” Emily said.

“Sure. I ain't worried,” Ty assured her, but it was an out-and-out lie. He worried about a whole lot of things and they all knew it. The crazy thing . . . the thing that still baffled him was that they cared. Oh sure,
Casie
would . . . she was the kind of person who'd take a kick in the head to save a June bug from a tornado, and Emily . . . Emily was his friend, had been ever since she'd refused to mind her own business in the foster home where they'd both been dumped years before. But Sophie . . . He chanced a look at her, but she was watching him out of the corner of her eye, so he yanked his attention away just as she did the same, heart beating a raucous cadence like it always did when she was near.

“Is everything okay with Angel?” Casie asked.

Ty zipped his gaze to her, already fretting even though the flea-bitten mare was doing as well as could be expected considering her advanced age. “She's doing real good,” he said.

“Chesapeake didn't get in trouble again, did he?” In the past couple months Casie had become increasingly attached to the bay stallion Colt had delivered months ago with several other half-starved horses. It was a fact about which no one was particularly thrilled; Chester was as unpredictable as he was handsome.

“Nope,” Ty said.

“Is something wrong with Free?” Sophie asked.

“She's fine, too.” Freedom was no Angel. Goofy as hell and flighty as a songbird, she wasn't the kind of animal that appealed to Ty's need for calm, but since the day he and Sophie had found her tethered and neglected in a neighboring pregnant mare urine facility, the girl had been in love with the horse. And there wasn't no accounting for love. He glanced across the table once again. Sophie's long, smooth hair shone like a pampered sorrel's in the overhead light. The pink turtleneck she wore under her sleek zip-up sweatshirt matched its trim to perfection, and her earrings, though small and barely visible past the burnished sheen of her hair, probably cost more than he had earned in his life.

He curled his ragged fingernails into his palms and scowled at the unoffending stew.

“What about Blue? He didn't get that bandage off again, did he? Or Marley!” They'd spotted a trio of unclaimed horses in an overgrown hayfield a few weeks ago. Sophie had named the unkempt buckskin after the Jamaican musician and worried about the feral animals ever since, though they'd proven impossible to track.