Teaching the Cowboy (20 page)

Chapter Sixteen

R
onnie had just finished making the after-church rounds with Sid, and the two arrived at the Lundstrom ranch just in time for supper. Anna had actually extended an invitation ahead of Becka for once and had claimed her for every meal in the near future as well. She’d made up some bullshit lie about how Liss wouldn’t eat unless Ronnie was there. Ronnie had called her on it, but Anna had given her a placid expression and resumed her potato peeling.

The two passed Landon in the living room, where he was sitting on the sofa in his souvenir NC State sweatshirt with his feet propped up on the coffee table. Ever since returning from his trip, he’d been attached to his laptop from sun-up to sundown. With his headphones jammed over his ears, he typed without looking up to greet them.

“Are you working or playing?” Sid asked her nephew.

Landon closed the lid and shoved the headphones back. “Definitely playing.”

“Rated PG, I hope,” Ronnie said. Landon gave Ronnie a look identical to one of Phil’s patented aloof expressions. The resemblance was so startling, she narrowed her eyes at him before Sid pushed her on. Phil was certainly a corrupting influence, but Landon had only been in North Carolina a couple of days. No way Landon could have absorbed Phil’s bad habits that quickly.

“Come on, lady. Let’s find that brute brother of mine and find out what he did to piss off Becka this time. Between him and Anna, they keep her tears flowing.”

They heard John before they saw him. As they walked through the corridor to the far end of the house where the ranch office was situated, the decibel level of John’s deep voice escalated, becoming louder and louder. In opposition to it was an equally deep, though more mature, tobacco-ravaged bark.
Senior
.

“Oh, shit. I wonder what it is now.” Sid idled with her hand resting on the doorknob and her ear against the panel.

Ronnie shifted her weight and pressed her hands against the small of her back. She wasn’t sure what was more uncomfortable: sitting or standing. If that’s what almost five months pregnant felt like, she was scared shitless what nine would do to her spine. She sighed. “Do they argue like this often?”

“Oh, honey, they’re not arguing so much as talking loud. Neither ever concedes, so they’re just speaking all over each other, trying to make non-existent points. They’re too much alike. Stubborn Swedes.”

“I count you in that lot.”

“Hey, now.”

Ronnie pushed Sid’s hand away from the knob and turned it herself. “Sorry, I have to pee. They can talk loud after I’m done.” She pushed the door in, and both John and Johan turned to acknowledge her with their glances briefly before resuming their previous line of discussion. With the door open, the topic was now crystal clear.

“Don’t give her another goddamned penny. It doesn’t make good sense. I raised you better than that. Where’s your backbone?”

John slid the folder across his desk and pounded his fist. “You haven’t been the one dealing with this shit. They’re not your kids. Don’t worry about my pride. You think it’s easy for me to hold my head up with the way everything shook out? You think I don’t know how people talk? Whatever I give her at this point is worth it to be rid of her.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Sid said. She walked up to the desk and brazenly picked up the file. “Someone clue me in as I suspect this row has to do with people I am somehow connected to.”

“Ya think?” John said.

Senior fell heavily into the loveseat near the window and crossed one ankle over the opposite knee. “In summary, John’s been trying to get mommy dearest to—”

Ronnie put up her hands. “Maybe I shouldn’t be here. I’ll talk to you later, John. It’s not even that important.” She spun on the heel of her Bean Boot and started toward the door only to freeze when John barked, “No. You stay.”

She rolled her eyes, although he couldn’t see it. “I’m not a puppy,” she said. Still, she turned back around and cut across the room to the loveseat where she sank into the soft cushion beside Senior. It was the farthest she could get from John and still be seated.

Senior continued, this time facing Ronnie as if she had a stake in the matter. “John here has been trying to get his ex to terminate her rights to the kids.”

The blood drained from her face, but she turned away from Senior before he could notice anything was amiss. She cleared her throat. “Why?”

John answered. “In all the time you’ve been here, have you observed the children speaking to her once? Has she visited once?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and then shook her head. “Well, I’m not here all the time, so I really don’t know the specifics.”

“Why now, John?” Sid asked.

Now
that
Ronnie was interested in.

“She wants more money.”

Ronnie’s jaw dropped, but no one saw. They were all too busy watching John and he was too busy scowling at his sister.

“For what? She should be completely flush. Steven’s paying her rent.”

John’s blue eyes nearly bulged. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

Sid closed her eyes and shook her head. “Nope.”

“You have proof of that?”

“I’ve got some e-mails from our children’s illustrious grandparents explaining that Steven couldn’t make his child support payments because he was helping
her
with her rent, and that I should cut him some slack because people help one another.”

Senior nudged Ronnie’s ribs with his elbow. When she turned her attention to him, he pretended to cover his mouth and said in a stage whisper, “They’re both idiots.”

John flopped onto his desk chair and gaped. “How long has that been going on?”

“At least a year.”

“Can you forward those e-mails to Mick?”

Sid shrugged. “Just out of curiosity, how much were you going to pay her off?”

He didn’t answer.

Senior was glad to, though. “Five hundred thou. Can you believe it? That’s the price tag she put on her kids.” He rubbed the scruff of his chin. “This week, anyway.”

John put his face against his desktop and groaned.

Senior turned to Ronnie again. “He’s excellent at managing the affairs of the ranch in my absence, but he sure does have a messy personal life.”

Ronnie turned her face toward the door. “I’ll say.”

“Please get out,” John said with his face still pressed against his desk calendar.

“John, if you’re thinking about getting wasted right now—”

“Goodbye, Sidney. I’m pretty sure dinner’s ready. Why don’t you go eat it?”

Sid sighed. She pivoted toward the door and waved Ronnie on. Ronnie started to stand with a bit of an “oomph” as the nerves in her back revolted.

“You all right?” Senior asked, eyeing her as she twisted at the waist to work the kinks out of her spine.

She offered him her pageant smile and nodded. “Yeah, I think it’s this cold, dry weather. My body doesn’t know what to do with it.”

“Get to be my age, and your body won’t know how to do much about anything.”

They made it as far as the doorway when John said, without even picking up his head, “Ronnie, you stay. I need to talk to you.”

“Uh-oh,” Senior teased. “I think that’s his firin’ voice.”

She shrugged. “
C’est la vie
.”

Senior laughed as he followed a reluctantly retreating Sid down the hall. “I like you, Ronnie. You go with the flow. You’re not uptight like some people I know.”

You have no idea just how much flow-going I’m doing.

She started for the loveseat again, but John ordered her back from whence she came. “Close the door, will you?” When he picked his head up and opened his eyes, the whites were visibly red.

She exhaled and shut the door softly. “What do you want to talk about?”

He leaned against the backrest and tented his fingers. “Why are you so far away? Come here.”

She walked to the front of the desk and took one of the armchairs in front of it.

“You’re acting a little bit like you don’t know me.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I don’t just mean today with you putting this giant desk between me and you, but for weeks. Why?”

She looked down at her hands.

“Something you’re not telling me?”

No shit.
“Uh…”

“Am I not the man you thought? Did I turn you off somehow?”

That made her sit up straighter. “No, not at all. You’re exactly the man I thought you were. I just…”

“You thought it was just sex?”

That thought had never crossed her mind. She shook her head.

“Well, what, then? Turned off by my baby momma drama?” He swept his hand in the general direction of the file folder on his desk.

She shook her head once more.

“Then what?”

She told the truth as she knew it, even though it was only a small sliver of it.

“Homesick. I miss home. I miss North Carolina.”

His mouth opened but no words came out. He just tented his fingers again, and after a while he nodded. “I’ve never lived anywhere else, so I can’t pretend I understand how you’re feeling. You’re a long way from what you know.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything I can do to make it easier for you? For the time you’re here, I mean. Are you still thinking about leaving at the end of your contract?”

She lowered her head and nodded. “No, everyone’s been doing so much to make me comfortable. I’m a fish out of water. I don’t thrive here.” She emitted a hoarse chuckle. “And while we’re on the subject of you doing things for me, could you stop antagonizing Becka?” She looked up to find him tapping his fingertips together.

“You think I give a shit about the hospitality pseudo-feud she’s single-handedly carrying on? I told her I’d pay for you to fly home for the holidays, because I don’t want you wasting days driving by yourself. It’s a long way and you can’t do all that driving alone.”

“I can buy my own plane ticket, John. I do get a paycheck.” She laughed. “You pay half of it.”

His face took on a hard expression she just barely caught before he smoothed it to stillness again. “You don’t want me buying you things?”

“It’s not personal. I give my mother a twenty dollar spending limit for my Christmas gift every year.”

“It’s just a plane ticket. Let me.”

She didn’t want to take it, not from him, and not from the Ericksons, either. If she was going to go home, she wanted it to be on her own terms, her own dime. She wrung her hands.

His voice went soft. “Ronnie, please, let me. It would make me happy.”

“Why?”

“Because as much as I hate the idea of you going away for three weeks, I know you’ll be happy while you’re there. Maybe you’ll bring some of that happy back to me.”

They stared at each other across the desk, which suddenly seemed even bigger, for a minute before she nodded.

“I’ll do what I can to make you happy, Ronnie, and it’s not because of some dumb competition. It’s because I love you and I want you to stay here.”

Her impulse was to say, “I love you, too,” but the moment she thought it, she wondered
Where the hell did that come from
? She ruminated on it while fixing her gaze at the hand-carved reliefs at the side edge of the desk. Did she love him? When she looked up again, his expression was soft, almost pleading. She was going to break his heart so bad, either now or later. Later sounded better. She hedged.

“How do you know you love me?”

He got up, walked around, and crouched beside her feet, forcing her to look down to meet his serious expression. “How do you know you love anything? You don’t know. You feel.”

She nodded. It was all she could do. She knew in the first place it had been a ridiculous question. She knew what she felt for Liss, who she loved more than she should have for someone who wasn’t related. She knew what she felt for Peter, who even in his wildest, most inappropriate moments was truly a sweet, caring kid. She knew what she felt for Landon, who she was so proud of in a way she’d never experienced for any other student. He wasn’t just a student. She didn’t feel any of those ways about the Erickson kids. And she felt an entirely different way about John. She didn’t care for him, want to protect him and prop him up the way she did the Kitty and the rest. She wanted to see his face day in and day out. Wake up next to it. Fall asleep with it pressed against her neck. Watch it twist and contort while he struggled to hold his tongue in front of Becka. Watch it soften whenever Liss stumbled into the room with wild, messy hair.

“Yes. Feel,” Ronnie managed.

He reached up and cupped his hands around her cheeks, pulling her face down toward his. They touched noses, making intimate eye contact for seconds, before he crushed her mouth with his kiss.

She very nearly melted in it, draping her body over the chair arm to pull him closer and feel more of his solid body against her chest. That voice of caution in the back of her mind yelled
stop
, and she swam back up into reality to give her man a small shove back.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

She forced out a ragged breath. “Everything.” She stood, feeling her back seize as she pressed weight to her feet, but soldiered on toward the door.

“Ronnie!”

She stopped, but didn’t turn.

“I don’t get you. I swear I don’t get you. You’ve got to let me in.”

“I hear you.”

She left.

Eddie trailed his fingers around the sharp corner of the crisp, rolled quilt edging, almost reverently as if he were touching some religious relic and not just professionally hemmed fabric.

Sid scraped her hair back and tied it into a loose knot. “You look shocked, Eddie. Didn’t think I could pull it off?” And pull it off she did. She’d worked double-time to finish that damned quilt, working on it at nights while Kitty did homework, and had even skipped a couple of Sundays of church, not that Eddie would have known about that. She did all that in addition to her previously contracted projects and the freelance designs she owed a couple of companies.

Eddie ran his palms over the quilt laid flat on her large studio table and shook his head with wide-eyed disbelief. “Hell, I knew you were good, Sid. I’ve seen your stuff. Admired it. It’s just so much like the old one. The fabrics are different, but the sentiment feels exactly the same. It’s the way a quilt is supposed to be. Supposed to mean something, make you feel something.”

Blood heated her cheeks, and she turned her back to him to fiddle with some crates on the counter. “Do you think your mother will like it?”

“Are you kidding me? She’s going to freak. She’ll probably want to be buried wrapped in it.” His voice was so flat, serious, that Sid turned around to study his expression. He smiled and winked. “She’ll love it.”

“Well, good.”

Sid busied herself with folding the queen-sized quilt into a tidy, compact rectangle and slipping it into its plastic sheath. She fussed with it some more, leaning on the zippered bag to force out air.

“Sid, I think it’ll fit in my truck just fine,” Eddie said with a chuckle. He slipped his hand around his back and pulled out his wallet.

Sid sucked in some air and put her hands on his chest before she could stop herself. “No.”

Eddie’s jovial expression wilted a bit. “I’m sorry?”