Читать книгу Thankful For You - Joanna Sims - Страница 11

Chapter Three

It took them three days of sweaty, backbreaking work to clean out the cabin and get it rehabbed enough for him to bunk there with relative comfort. It had running water and electricity in from the main part of the ranch. It was humble, but it was habitable. Dallas had taken a break from training long enough to get him in the cabin; today, the fourth day of cleanup, she insisted on taking a break to practice barrel racing.

“How are you gettin’ on?” Ketch asked him when he came back from giving Dallas some critiques on her technique.

Ketch was the only person Dallas had invited out to Lightning Rock. Nick had a feeling that Dallas didn’t trust many people, including him, but she trusted Tom Ketchum.

“She’s pretty quiet, most of the time.”

Ketch kept his focus on his student. “She’s been through a lot, that one.”

“I think everything we’ve been doing out at Lightning Rock,” Nick said about sifting through the remnants of Davy Dalton’s life, “would be sad for anyone.”

“Trouble is a private thing,” Ketch agreed, then went back to coaching Dallas.

Nick watched Dallas with unabashed fascination. She was in complete control of her horse; sometimes she careened around the barrels so fast and so low that it actually made him hold his breath thinking that the horse was going to tip over onto her leg and pin her on the ground. She was fearless, her hair flying loose down her back, her cowgirl hat worn square on the top of her head. He hadn’t thought she was beautiful when he first met her—cute, maybe. Now he had it in his head that she was one of the prettiest women he’d known. For sure, she was prettier on the inside than most he’d met. She was pretty on the inside like his sisters Taylor and Casey. That was the highest praise, as far as he was concerned.

“Woooo-weeee!” Dallas let out a loud whoop after her last barrel run. It felt great to be back in the saddle doing exactly what she loved to do. Blue’s coat looked a shade darker from the sweat and he had white foam dripping from his mouth.

Dallas gave Blue some big pats on the neck to praise him for a job well done. She slipped her feet out of the stirrups, dropped the reins so her horse could have his head loose and she kicked her legs forward.

“He did better with a couple days off, Ketch!”

“He’s lookin’ good. He’s gonna be ready to win big next time ye’re in it.”

Dallas picked up the reins to whoa her big blue roan gelding.

“He’s tight and fast,” Dallas said, her face flushed bright red from heat and exertion. “I can’t wait to get back out there. I can’t wait!”

“When you plannin’ on gettin’ back out there?” Ketch asked.

Nick, from her point of view, was paying particular attention to her answer to that question. The only thing she wouldn’t like about being back out on the road was the fact that she wouldn’t be spending time with Nick. They had been building a friendship, a genuine friendship, out there at Lightning Rock, and she was going to miss him. She truly was.

Dallas swung out of the saddle and landed on the ground easily. She slipped the reins over her horse’s head, loosened the girth and started walking over to the one spot where she could rinse the sweat off her horse’s neck and back.

“I think I’ve just about got enough stuffed under the mattress to make a go of it once I’m finished takin’ care of Pop’s business.”

Ketch stayed around to talk with them for a couple of minutes longer before he headed off to tend to the rest of his day. She finished rinsing off Blue before she turned him out with the rest of the horses. After such a great practice session, she really didn’t want to ruin her good mood by tackling more of the cleanup.

Back at Lightning Rock, she said to Nick, “I’m so greasy and grimy, and the water pressure in that ol’ outdoor shower Pop rigged up is as about as useless as tits on a bull. I swear I’ve got a week’s worth of dirt in my hair that I can’t get out. If I don’t take a quick minute to jump in the lake, you’ll be able to smell me from a mile away.”

He smiled at her. “Let’s avoid that.”

She stood there for a moment, just enjoying the way it felt to have Nick Brand smiling at her. So handsome, that man. She got butterflies in her stomach whenever he watched her practice—she never got nervous around anyone when she raced the barrels, but something about Nick was different. Something about Nick made her feel different.

* * *

While Dallas grabbed a bottle of shampoo, a bar of soap and a threadbare towel, Nick pondered on the way Dallas had looked at him just seconds before. She had stared into his eyes and although the moment was fleeting, he had wanted it to keep right on going. She was such a complicated woman that it was hard to figure her out. Maybe that was part of the attraction. She was a challenge.

“You can come, if you want. I’m wearing a bathin’ suit.” Dallas said, “I don’t suppose you brought anything to swim in?”

“No,” Nick said. And now, more than ever before in his life, he coveted his few pairs of clean, dry underwear. Besides, wet white underwear in front of Dallas? The family jewels looked much smaller after an exposure to cold water.

“Do you want to swim?”

“Now that you’ve put the idea in my head, I’d love to get in the water.”

“Go grab me one of your pairs of jeans, then.”

He returned with his last pair of clean jeans; he’d been avoiding wearing them because they were brand-new and too expensive to use for the kind of dirty work he’d found himself doing of late.

“Give me a minute,” Dallas said.

“Hey...what are you going to do with those?”

“Give me a minute,” she said again.

Good as her word, she was back in about a minute. “Here. Go put these on and let’s go.”

Nick took his jeans from the cowgirl. His expensive jeans were now shorts. He didn’t bother to ask her what she had done or why she had done it. That part was obvious.

“These were brand-new,” he said.

“They’re still new.”

The way she shrugged made him believe that she was completely naive to the price of the jeans she had just ruined.

“They’re just shorter. Go put ’em on.”

* * *

Dallas peeled off her sweaty T-shirt, balled it up and dropped it on the bank of the small, clear-water lake. She sat down to yank off her boots as quick as she could. So hot, sticky and gritty. She couldn’t wait to get into that cool lake water. Her luck and her curse were that she was focused to a fault. All she could think about after practice was cooling off in the lake.

“I’d thought that I’d been to all of the Bent Tree lakes when I was a kid,” the lawyer said to her.

“It’s always been my private spot.” Dallas unzipped her jeans, shoved them down over her hips and legs so she could step out of them.

Dallas had strategically worn her old Speedo bathing suit under her clothing so she could get into the lake anytime she wanted. Her feet were tough from years of walking barefoot, so the pebbles and broken brush along the side of the lake didn’t bother her.

“You much of a swimmer?” Dallas loved the feel of the earth, warmed by the sun, beneath her bare feet. She always had, ever since she was a little girl.

Nick joined her by the edge of the lake. She glanced over at him as he peeled off his shirt. It was a quick glance, but long enough to notice how light the skin on his stomach was compared to the golden color of his arms and neck. He was a fit man; not ripped and shredded like a bodybuilder, but toned as if he spent some of his time, at least, working out. She seemed to like looking at Nick whether he had a shirt on or not.

“I was captain of my high school swim team.”

His profile to her, Nick seemed to be taking stock of the clear-water lake.

“It’s deep enough to dive from that boulder over there.” She pointed a couple of feet away from where they were standing.

Not able to spend one more second in her grubby skin, Dallas tromped through the short brush, careful not to step on the Sweet William wildflowers that grew in brightly colored clumps along the bank of the lake.

The boulder was hot beneath her feet. To her, the burning was a challenge. The longer she could stand it, the tougher she was. And being tough, being able to handle her business alone in the world was a matter of survival. She didn’t have anyone to depend on. Now that Davy was gone, she didn’t feel like she had a family. The way her brother had treated Davy in his last years, like he was a pariah—that wound might scar over, but it would never truly be healed.

No. She was alone in this world.

Dallas stepped to the edge of the boulder, lifted her arms above her head and touched her fingers together like a steeple. With one strong vault, she arced into the air and cut the water with her hands with only the smallest of splashes. She knew this lake—had spent hundreds of hours in her youth swimming in this lake. This lake was her swimming pool; the banks of this lake were her playroom. At Lightning Rock, she was more at home than any other place on earth. She hadn’t known how attached she was to the place—she hadn’t realized how hard it was going to be to say goodbye to this beautiful slice of paradise—until she had begun to clear out her father’s belongings. How many times a day had she stopped herself from tearing up? Countless.

Dallas touched a rock lodged at the bottom of the lake before she somersaulted forward to push herself up to the surface with her feet. She broke through the surface of the water just in time to hear Nick’s warning.

“Incoming!”

Dallas was treading her legs so she could wipe the water off her face and out of her eyes. She opened her eyes just in time to see Nick performing a cannonball off the boulder. Nick landed a short distance away from her with a giant splash. Some of the water displaced by his cannonball hit her in the face. She sputtered a little bit, spitting out lake water and wiping the water out of her eyes for a second time.

“What score would you give me?” Nick asked after he swam over to her.

The man’s arm strokes had been clean, strong and confident. She had spent so much of her time around rodeo men who had a propensity for stretching the truth a bit, she had half doubted Nick’s claim to be captain of his high school swim team. But not anymore.

The cool, fresh water made her feel renewed. She smiled with a laugh and held up two fingers playfully. “I had a better cannonball when I was nine.”

“Oh, yeah?” Nick asked, treading water beside her. “You think you can do better? Show me.”

The competitive spirit in her made her swim to the edge of the lake and back to the boulder to at least match, if not surpass, Nick’s “city boy” cannonball. Without paying attention to the time, the two of them tried to one-up each other in the cannonball arena. They should have been heading back to the homestead and tackling the trailer, but instead, they frolicked together in the lake as if they had nothing better to do and all the time in the world. The early afternoon slipped away from them, and it wasn’t until Nick called a tie that Dallas decided to let the competition end. She shared her bar of soap and shampoo with Nick, and they both left the lake a heck of a lot cleaner than they had gone in.

Together, they sat on the boulder to dry off in the sun. Sitting next to Nick, at one of her favorite spots in the world, felt as natural as being on the back of a horse. It didn’t—couldn’t—escape her notice that Nick had been making it easy for her to let down her guard. He liked her, she could see that in his eyes when he looked at her—she could hear it in his voice when he spoke to her—but he’d always been respectful. He’d always been kind. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so close to a man. Was she falling for Nick Brand? Her feelings were so mixed-up lately, she couldn’t be sure. But, the nervous excitement she felt in her stomach whenever he stared into her eyes made her think that she might be falling for the Chicago lawyer. Hard.

“My sinuses are clear, that’s for darn sure.” Nick pinched his nose with his fingers and shook his head a bit.

Dallas had grabbed her towel and had spread it out so they could both sit down without burning their butts and the backs of their legs.

“Mmm, I feel so good right now.” Dallas tilted her head back to let the sun shine down on her face. “There’s nothin’ I like better than spending an afternoon swimming in Sweet William. This takes me back. It really does. Way back.”

“Sweet William? That’s the name of this lake?”

“Not the official name.” Dallas kept her eyes closed. “But it’s what me and Pop call it.”

She opened her eyes and pointed to the flowers growing wild along the bank of the lake. “See all those flowers? Those are Sweet Williams. They love to drink up the sun and bloom in the summer. I love me some good ol’ American wildflowers, don’t you?”

* * *

An American wildflower. That’s what Dallas was. Much like the wildflowers she loved so well, Nick had finally found a way to think about the cowgirl in a way that made sense to his brain. She was just as pretty and wild and hearty as those Sweet Williams growing on the side of a secret lake in Montana.

Sitting next to Dallas on that boulder, so close that he could smell the sweet scent of the soap on her browned skin, he couldn’t think of a time in his life when he wanted to touch a woman as badly as he wanted to touch her. He wanted to kiss away the little droplets of water on her neck and her shoulders. He wanted to slip her modest bathing suit straps off her shoulders, just enough to kiss the water from between her modest breasts.

The cowgirl had been difficult to read, but the giant “hands off” sign she wore like a badge of honor was easy enough to decipher. If he tried to kiss her, which had been a thought in his head for a couple of days, she would freeze him out. They were friendly acquaintances now; if he made any sort of move that she interpreted as sexual, he’d lose that precious ground and then some.

Why did he care so much about preserving his budding friendship and trust building with Dallas? He wasn’t entirely sure. Yes, he was attracted to her. But he didn’t have any illusion of starting a lasting relationship with a wild-child barrel racer. His life plan and hers were at serious odds. He had tried to imagine Dallas in Chicago and had failed. So it had to be the challenge that Dallas offered to his ego. He hadn’t always been the best-looking guy in the room, or the tallest, but he was decent looking, had blue eyes that women often gushed about, and he always had access to money and lots of it. Rejection wasn’t something he’d had to deal with too often in his life. With Dallas, it seemed like a 100 percent certainty.

* * *

“I’d like to make a quick run back to the ranch for supplies. I didn’t realize how bare our cupboards are,” Dallas said as she came out of her horse trailer dressing room wearing a clean, ribbed tank top and pair of faded blue jeans. Her hair was still damp and blowing in curly wisps around her face.

His uncle Hank and aunt Barb had let Dallas “shop” at Bent Tree every week to stock up on supplies so they didn’t have to make the trip to town. Would the supplies have flown so freely if he was the only one camped out at Lightning Rock? No. He was certain of that. His uncle had refused to talk to him about the sale of Lightning Rock; his uncle had refused to discuss easement rights that would allow the new owner to travel across Bent Tree land to reach Lightning Rock. So far, he’d been happy to avoid that “come to Jesus” moment he needed to have with his uncle. There was still so much cleanup left to do. But he couldn’t let his uncle put this off indefinitely. Uncle Hank, who was known in his community as being levelheaded and fair, lost all of that levelheadedness and reason when the topic of rightful ownership of Lightning Rock came up.

“You comin’ or stayin’?” Dallas put her cowgirl hat on, which signaled to him that she was officially ready to go.

Normally, he would steer clear of the farmhouse in order to avoid any possible confrontation with his uncle. Today, now halfway through the cleanup efforts, Nick realized that time for avoidance was running out.

“I’ll come with you.”

If Dallas was surprised by his choice, she didn’t show it on her face. She was a woman who kept her cards held tightly to her chest. Dallas had to know that she was smack-dab in the middle of a family feud, yet she never asked him one probing question. She kept herself focused on tying up the loose ends of her father’s life and let him handle his own family business.

Dallas climbed behind the wheel of her early-model Bronco and cranked the engine. Nick had been subjected to the cowgirl’s driving enough to grab the handle above the window and hold on tight. She preferred to be the one in the driver’s seat—so did he. If they were in Chicago he would be driving, but he was on her turf now, and she had won that battle. On the rare occasion that they had to go somewhere together, she drove.

“You missin’ your life back East?” Dallas asked him. This was about as personal as she had ever gotten with him.

“I do,” he admitted to her.

He hadn’t wanted to pressure her to go through her father’s stockpile of possessions on a timer—this was part of her grieving process and he was trying his best to be respectful. He saw his friends having a good time on social media, he thought of all the work waiting for him at his new gig at his father’s law firm and it made him miss life in Chicago. He missed fine dining and yachting and a comfortable bed. He missed his new Jaguar.

“Yeah.” Dallas had one arm resting on the open window, her left leg bent so her boot was resting on the driver’s seat. “I miss my life.”

He’d already known that about her, so this admission was just confirmation. She had this restlessness about her. There was always a distance in her eyes, as if only half of her was really with him in Montana. There wasn’t a boyfriend out there pulling her away—it was her life. It was the road. It was the competition.

“Do you have a place you call home?” Nick tightened his grip as they flew over a couple of bumps in the road. “Other than here, I mean.”

Dallas gunned the gas, steering the loud Bronco onto the paved highway. “Not really.”

Okay. Let me rephrase that question. “Do you have a place in mind to land once you stop barrel racing?”

Dallas laughed and glanced at him like he had asked a very odd question. “I ain’t never gonna quit barrel racing.”

The next question he asked came out of nowhere for him, and afterward he was left wondering what had possessed him to even bring the subject up. “Do you want to get married? Have kids?”

“I haven’t really spent too much time givin’ it much thought.”

The conversation stopped abruptly with that last question, and Nick discovered just how easy it was to step on a land mine with this woman. Most women weren’t offended by the question of marriage and children even if they planned on building their career instead of building a family. Not so with Dallas Dalton. His asking her about her future status as wife and mother had seemed to touch a raw nerve.

“That’s Clint’s truck right there.” Dallas nodded toward one of the trucks parked near the main house at Bent Tree.

Damn.

If Clint was at Bent Tree, there was a good chance his older sister, Taylor, was with him. He loved his sister—they’d always been close. But they were on opposing sides of the Lightning Rock issue and he didn’t want to get into yet another battle of words with Taylor. He had stopped by his sister’s house in Helena when he first arrived in Montana to meet his niece and catch up, but the minute the conversation had turned to Lightning Rock, they had gotten into an argument. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d argued with Taylor.

“And that’s Brock’s truck right there.” Dallas shifted into Park and shut off the engine. “It looks to me like you’re in for a bit of a family reunion.”

Nick nodded in response.

Both of his sisters, one older and one younger, had married Montana men and settled within one day’s driving distance to Bent Tree Ranch. He had opted to not stay at Bent Tree to avoid conflict with Hank and he had begged off staying with Taylor or his younger sister, Casey, for the same reason. He’d been in Montana for the first time in years, and he’d spent most of his time there avoiding his own family. Maybe it was time to stop avoiding and start facing them. Maybe it was long past time.