Teaching the Cowboy (3 page)

She sat and looked up to find Mr. Lundstrom watching her with a curious grin. She busied herself with her cloth napkin.

“Well, Raleigh isn’t quite the beach.” Phil said after piling several slices of beef onto his plate. “We could certainly get to one in three hours, though.”

Becka dropped her fork. “Just three hours? Well, you might as well be right there on the shoreline.”

He chuckled and spooned healthy portions of sides onto his plate. “I guess it would seem pretty close to y’all. Me and Ronnie go to the beach pretty much every other weekend during the summer.” He reached for a roll and paused mid-pluck. “Or used to go, anyway. Guess I’ll have to find a new beach buddy for the next ye—”

“So,” Ronnie said and gave Phil a warning glare. It worked on her sixteen-year-old students; it worked on him. He zipped his lips. “Why don’t you all introduce yourselves and tell me what you hope to accomplish this year.”

“Well, that’s a good idea,” Ted said. He’d left a curious wedge-shaped space on his plate, and she understood why when the pan of cornbread made it around. “Who wants to go first?”

“Youngest to oldest perhaps?” She looked at Liss.

The little blonde slumped in her seat.

“Okay, how about other way around? Who’s my eldest student?”

The seven kids looked from face to face, and finally all, except one, landed on Mr. Lundstrom’s elder son.

“I guess I am,” he said with a shrug. “I’m Landon. It’s my birthday by the way.” He wriggled his eyebrows behind his glasses.

Ronnie laughed. Oh, he was cheeky.

“You won’t have to worry too much about me. I graduated in May, but didn’t do any college prep last year, so that’s what I’m catching up on.”

“No testing at all?”

He shook his head.

She cringed. “And you’re out of practice now. Oh, well, we’ll figure it out. Have you visited any schools?”

“None. I go plan on applying to someplace with a veterinary school, though.”

“Here in Wyoming?”

“He wants to go east,” Mr. Lundstrom said. “A big school.”

She turned her head to meet his gaze and found something unreadable in his face. It was an expression that didn’t have anything to do with Landon at all. It was brooding.
Personal
. If they hadn’t been surrounded by eleven other people, she might have pressed him on it. Instead, she licked her dry lips and said, “We’ll get him squared away as soon as I get online and checked in with the agency.”

He looked down at his meal.

She looked around the table. “Who’s next?”

Each child went in order, with some nudging from their parents when they couldn’t quite figure out whose turn was whose, until they made it all the way around the table to the quiet little girl again.

“So, you’re Liss?”

“Yes,” she said in a whisper so low it sounded like a hiss.

“What’s Liss short for?”

“Felicity,” Mr. Lundstrom said.

Ronnie gave him a nod of thanks, but kept her gaze on the quiet girl. “Felicity, are you going to be a kindergartener or first grader?” Ronnie asked in a soft voice.

“First grade,” Liss said in that same reverent whisper.

“Are you a good reader?”

“Sometimes.”

“Good. I need a sometimes-girl to help me out.”

Liss’s bright eyes went wide. “What does the sometimes-girl get to do?”

“Oh, lots of paperwork. I hope you like red pens. You’ll get to use a lot of those.”

The other kids groaned.

Liss nodded and smiled wide to expose a snaggletoothed grin.

“When are you going to start with ’em?” Mr. Lundstrom asked. He hadn’t even touched his dinner. Meanwhile, Landon, Ted, and Phil were all on second helpings, or beyond, in Phil’s case. Where’d he put it all? He couldn’t have weighed much over a hundred sixty pounds and at five-ten he was rather streamlined.

“Well, that’s up to y’all. This was the date the agency contracted me to come out. They like to give us a bit of time to gain some familiarity of our new areas and find out what the local educational resources are. Usually the agency covers our room and board the first six weeks or so, but this was a unique situation. I don’t know anyone who’s been assigned to a ranch. Uh,
two
ranches. A lot of my peers tutor young actors and musicians who can’t attend traditional schools for obvious reasons.”

“Well, we may not be famous, but I think you’ll have a lot of fun,” Ted said with a deep laugh that vibrated the table.

Ronnie raised a brow and cut her gaze toward Phil. He was giving her the
oh,
honey
look.

“Anyhow, I’m driving Phil to the airport tomorrow. I’ll probably explore some and root around for some things for the house while I’m out.”

Becka’s head snapped up. “Do you need anything? Did I forget anything?”

Ronnie suppressed a giggle. “No, actually, I’m surprised at how well-furnished my bunkhouse is. You really didn’t have to paint especially for me, Becka. I’m just picky about my coffee and other things.”

“How picky?” Mr. Lundstrom asked, voice flat.

She picked her cloth napkin up off her lap and rolled it on the tabletop into a tight tube. When she looked up at the man, he’d narrowed his eyes at her. She narrowed hers right back. “I don’t like generics.”

He smirked. “Not much out here is generic.” He lowered his voice to a near-whisper. “I promise you that.”

Ronnie and Mr. Lundstrom locked in a staring competition long enough that Landon, across the table, obviously noticed and said, “Miss Silver, how ’bout you start with me on Monday for college admission exam prep and the rest of the kids can start mid-August when public school begins? Everyone else okay with that?”

The folks around the table murmured their assent and then quickly ignored the guest of honor as an older, heavyset woman walked into the room with a massive sheet cake.

“Holy hell, what’s that, Anna?” Ted asked, standing. “Chocolate on chocolate?” He cleared a space on the table, right in front of him, naturally.

Anna guffawed. “Chocolate-chocolate
chip
on chocolate,” she corrected. “Landon, you’re on your own for next year if you ain’t here.”

Landon grinned and pushed his glasses up. “I’ll keep that in mind. Can we forego the candle and singing bit this year?” He looked at Ronnie, then Phil, who grinned and gave the kid a wink.

If Ronnie had been close enough to her old friend she would have kicked his shin under the table. She planned to have a nice long chat with him after dinner, not that she expected any good to come of it. Phil was a flirt. It was in his blood. Asking Phil not to flirt would be like asking him not to blink or swallow. Fortunately, Landon seemed good-natured enough to not be bothered by it.

Anna put her hands on her hips and scowled at Landon. “What do you mean forego the—Peter!”

They all looked down the table to find Peter shoveling a handful of chocolate cake into his mouth.

Mr. Lundstrom sighed and turned his head slowly toward Ronnie. He said through clenched teeth, “We need to have a little talk about Peter.”

Ronnie nodded.

Obviously
.

Chapter Three

“I
’m sorry to pull you away from cake, especially one of Anna’s. She’s been spoiling us Lundstroms with her cooking for three years now and she keeps outdoing herself. But, I wanted a chance to talk with you while Peter’s out of earshot. That kid’s got hearing like a junkyard dog, and he’s sensitive about his diagnosis.” John pulled the thick, rubber band-secured manila folder out of his desk drawer and slid it onto his desktop.

Yeah, he’d wanted to talk about that and had intended to even as her car kicked up dust coming down the Ericksons’ long ranch road. But then, shit, she’d gotten out of the car and looked like
that
. His two heads were in direct opposition.

Well, no, they weren’t. The one in his pants was just less diplomatic than the one on his neck. His brain was saying, “Steady, steady.” His cock wanted to know if she had bikini tan lines from all those weekends at the beach and whether she’d let him lick ’em.

Goddamn it.
He adjusted the crotch of his jeans beneath the desk.

She nodded as she pulled the file folder closer and dropped it onto those bronze-y thighs he ogled. “Don’t worry about it. I’ve had my fair share of kids with impulse control and attention deficit issues.”

“Really? His school didn’t really know what do with him, but that’s not saying much.” He added that last bit in a mumble. The way he saw it, the teachers at the community school were running about even with Becka as far as academic retention went. The fact Liss could read at all was due more to Landon’s efforts than the school’s. John felt awful about it, like a failure as a parent. He should have been on top of things, but he couldn’t do
everything
, could he? Wasn’t that why men had wives? Not that his had been all that productive.

“Yes.” She peeled back the cover of the folder and he held his breath, bracing himself for a cocked eyebrow, cringe, or wince. None of those came. She just flipped through the years of school records, medical exam summaries, and meticulous notes scribbled by John or his late mother until the last page. She closed the folder and looked up at him. “Why didn’t you hold him back? He should have been held back second, third grade at the latest.”

John slumped a bit in his seat and sighed as he raked his hair back from his face. “I thought so, too, ’cause my mom had to leave me back once. No one at the school agreed. They said he’d catch up and that he was just a boy being a boy. And my ex-wife, well, she thought it’d just look bad if he didn’t move on with his peers.” He scratched his chin. “All eight of ’em.”

Ronnie tapped her fingertips on the file and stared at the wall just over his head for a moment before she responded. “I can’t make you any promises, Mr. Lundstrom.”

“John. Call me John, please.”

She tightened her fingers around the folder’s spine and brought her dark gaze down to meet his.

God, she’s pretty.
Maybe too pretty.
His last pretty woman had bounded off, but there was something different about this one. He never wanted to be on the wrong end of the indubitable intelligence in her eyes.

“Fine, John. No promises. I’m not going to sweep in here and claim that I can work Mary Poppins miracles with Peter or even get Landon into college. I won’t know what I’m dealing with for certain until I sit down with the kids and do formal assessments. I’ve got a whole slew of records to go through and a lot of lesson plans to make. What I can tell you is that I’ll do the best I can by all the kids. Liss, Peter, Landon and all the Erickson kids, too. You don’t know me, but you’ll learn soon enough that I’m the kind of person who doesn’t just try to run hard and fast up a hill, but I’ll keep that same intensity on the downward slope, too. I will keep plowing on until I have no other options to exhaust.”

Maybe it was the steely glint of her eyes or the way her knuckles were going white around that folder, but he believed her. He’d be a fool not to. The woman had passion. Guts. He adjusted his crotch again. At the rate he was going, he’d be in a cold shower within fifteen minutes.

“I appreciate your enthusiasm, Ronnie,” he said, after clearing his throat. “I don’t want promises from you. I don’t need promises. I just want to know there’s a plan.”

“Then you’re talking to the right person.”

“Can I ask you a question?”

She shrugged. “Certainly.”

“Excuse me if this is too personal, but I didn’t get to vet you the way Becka did. Hell, I don’t even know if Ted had a say. I’m just curious, so don’t read anything into the question that isn’t there. How did you go from being a classroom teacher in what sounds like a pretty large school system to a traveling tutor?”

She didn’t answer immediately. She ground her jaw left to right and flicked at the tab on the file folder with her thumb.

He thought maybe she wouldn’t answer at all, but then she sighed and crossed her legs at the knees. “As concisely as possible, I’ll just say I needed a different experience in order to gain better knowledge of what kind of administrator I want to be. I did the classroom thing for a lot of years. Student-taught at a small rural school when I was twenty-three, but even then I was within an hour of a city. I needed something extraordinary. Something to challenge the way I look at curriculums.”

“So, you don’t want to teach long-term?”

“That’s the thing. Administrators
are
teachers. They may not spend as much time in the classroom as some, but at their cores, they’re educators. You can’t change policy if you don’t understand who it’s affecting. You can’t help students learn if you don’t have hands-on experience working with special cases.”

Special cases? He raked a hand through his hair and pulled. “Is that what we are?”

She worked her lips from one side of her jaw to the other and stared at him a moment. “John, may I be candid?”

He tented his fingers and stared back.

She didn’t seem fazed, so he nodded. “Go for it.”

“Okay.” Her fingertips drummed a percussive pitter-patter atop the folder as her forehead furrowed. She blew out a sigh. “Completing this assignment will qualify me for a program that’ll pay my graduate school tuition. PhDs are expensive, and I’m too old to earn scholarships the way I used to.”

Too old? He swayed in his chair, pondering both her age and just what kind of scholarships came with age limits.

Her arched brow brought him back to the conversation.

“What you’re telling me is you were only going to be here for a year.”

She nodded. “A year. Yes. That’s how we’re contracted. One year at a time. Some tutors stay on longer if they’re content with their placements. Some get married and move back home.”

Married. He hadn’t considered that perhaps she’d have someone back East. Did she?

She continued. “Others just do the year and use it as a segue to other opportunities.”

Who needed a cold shower? The conversation was all the ice water he needed. “That seems right to you? All the gains you’d make with the kids by the end of the year, they’d lose when the next person came along. Seems like a waste of everyone’s time.”

“A waste?” She shook her head and narrowed her eyes, obviously incredulous. “No. This isn’t just a day job to me, Mr. Lundstrom.”

He ground his teeth and crossed his arms over his chest. “You got more to say, go on and say it.”

That earned him an eye roll. “Thanks for the permission. Look, this is my career. I chose to teach. It’s not a fallback for me because I wasn’t good at anything else. Kids like me for some reason, so I guess this is my calling.”

He scratched his stubbly chin and fixated on the flush of her cheeks. The anger in her eyes. Already on her bad side. He tried not to make it personal. This was about the kids. Not him. He was finding his emotions toward this woman hard to compartmentalize. They all just lumped together into one big, confusing, testosterone-soaked blob.

“I’m damned good at it,” she continued. “I refuse to be just good enough. To be complacent. I don’t half-ass anything, and that’s why I’m here this year, pushing myself in an exceedingly uncomfortable environment.”

Ah, that helped clear his mind. This year. One year. “Were you going to tell us you were only in it for short-term?” He knew there was an edge to his voice, but didn’t care at the moment.

Apparently she didn’t either. She didn’t even flinch, and that was the same voice that made so many of his ranch hands cower. “No. I would appreciate it if you kept that between us.”

“Why?”

She rolled her eyes again and then rubbed the heels of her palms against them with a sigh. “Isn’t that obvious? Children get attached to their teachers.” She dropped her hands onto her lap and straightened up her spine. Now her expression was just weary. She was through with the conversation. “Mr. Lundstrom, it’s different for kids who are in a school, because they move up the next grade but still have the opportunity to go back and visit last year’s favorite if they want. This is a unique situation.”

“Right. A special case. Like you said.” He smacked the desktop and stood. “Damn right, kids get attached. They get attached to the animals. To the staff. The family members that walk off. Now you?”
Incredible.
“Don’t you think it would better if the kids knew up front that you weren’t going to stick around past May? Or are you that callous? Being a schoolteacher made you hard, sweetheart?”

That
made her flinch. Finally, a limit. A button for him to push if need be.

Before speaking, she stared down at that folder and smoothed the label with her thumb pads. Her voice was low. Steady. “Mr. Lundstrom, you tell them and they’re not even going to try. Why set them up to fail?” She stood and placed the folder on the desktop, now chewing the lipstick from her bottom lip, and cast that dark gaze up to him.

He stilled as she pressed her palms onto the flat surface and leaned in close.

“You tell them that, and you might as well go ahead and have me leave right now. You want to do that, Mr. Lundstrom? You want to squander what’s probably going to be the only chance you have this year of getting your kids remediated? And by someone who actually knows what the hell she’s doing? I’m good. And that’s not bragging.”

He believed her. Still…

He eased from the desktop and paced, clamping his arms over his chest. “Maybe you are, but then what? Next year, Peter and Liss will fall behind again, and we’ll be no better than when we started off.”
Fifteen thousand dollars with no renewal option. Sounds like a bad investment.

She stepped right into his walking path and forced him to stop. To pay attention. To focus. With her hands on her hips like that, she was probably aiming for formidable. There was a touch of that there, but she was practically half his size. She was difficult to take seriously seeing as how he could probably haul her up to his shoulder and cart her off to…

His eyes must have taken on a faraway look, because she snapped her fingers in front of his face.

“Yeah?” he rasped.
Shower. Cold shower.

“We’re having an important conversation. Please be a grown-up.”

His thoughts were grown-up enough. They were just way off the rails. He tried not to feel indignant about her brute redirection. It’d been a long time since anyone had made him listen. Normally, he forced his agenda, whatever it was, and that was that. But, this was about the kids. Not him.

“I’m listening. I’m sorry.”

She narrowed her eyes slightly but pressed on. “Kids are adaptable. Give them some credit. Teach them to cope. Give them the skills. Show them how to learn. You do that, and they can teach themselves. You should never have your children in a situation where they’re wholly dependent on teachers to learn. No one learns well that way. They need reinforcement from home, so you tell me—where were you last year and the year before when your children were falling behind?”

His jaw dropped. “You seriously went there? Where do you think I was? I was running my goddamned ranch. You know, making money so my kids had a roof over their heads and food to eat.”

“Mm-hmm.” She nodded and moved out of the way, so he resumed his pacing. “But really, Mr. Lundstrom, how hard could that be? Feed some cows, clean out some barns. You should have plenty of downtime to see how your kids are doing and fix their educational shortcomings. You do have staff, after all.”

He stopped pacing, his back to her, and meditated on the ornate filigree frame ensconcing his mother’s portrait over the sofa. Then he shifted his gaze up to his mother’s coy grin and those intelligent blue eyes that always seemed to see straight into his soul. Mom had always been so patient. So prescient. But she hadn’t been afraid to put him in his place when he needed it.

He turned to Ronnie and found she’d crossed her arms over her chest, too, and had her lips set in a flat line.

“You don’t know anything about ranching and what goes into it,” he said, voice with an edge now, but his heart wasn’t really in it.

She shifted her weight. “Are we even now? Did I find a button to push, Mr. Lundstom?”

Of course she had. Try as he might, he couldn’t do it all. Recently, he’d sucked it up and hired some help on the management end, but that help was greener than a four-leaf clover. He wasn’t sure if he was doing better or worse with Rufus under his employ.

“Let me tell you something. You don’t know anything about the way I teach. So fire me now and send me back to Raleigh, or let me do my job the way I need to. The kids don’t need to know it’s not permanent.”

Back to that again. He was about to refute some point, which, he did not know, but Rufus knocked on the doorframe of the office and poked his head in.

“Hey, John. How you doin’, ma’am?” He tipped his hat.

John groaned inwardly.
Go away.

“Sorry to interrupt, but you remember that longhorn with the sore on her belly?”

John blew out a breath and turned away from the pretty, angry tutor. “Vaguely. Remind me.”

“That sore done turned into an out-right infection. What’d you want to do about it?”