Читать книгу A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas - Maisey Yates - Страница 9
ОглавлениеGRANT DODGE WAS ALONE. And that was how he liked it.
He had spent the entire day out in the cold mountain air conducting roping demonstrations and leading trail rides. Not that he minded any of those things in isolation. It was the addition of people that made them somewhat challenging.
Worse than having to deal with people in a general sense was dealing with people who recognized him.
Not the typical small-town recognition; he was used to that. Though he could live without getting sad widower face from people he barely knew in the grocery store, but even then, at least it was people who knew him because he’d lived in Gold Valley all his life.
What really got to him was the people who recognized him from the news stories.
Eight years hadn’t done anything to make those moments less weird. People often couldn’t place where they knew him from, but they knew they did. And they would press, and press, until he told them.
The woman who had recognized him today had been a grandmother. A great-grandmother, even. Sweet and gray-haired and looking at him with sympathetic eyes that made him want to jump off the nearest bridge.
It always seemed worse around the holidays. Perhaps because of the sentimentality people seemed to feel that time of year. And tried to inflict on him.
He didn’t really know.
Whatever the reason, he seemed to have an uptick in well-meaning-but-irritating interactions.
Maybe that was why he always wanted to drink more this time of year, too.
He shook his head and settled down into his chair, looking around the small, cozy cabin that he called home. And then he looked into the full, inviting whiskey glass he called salvation.
He didn’t have a problem or anything. He was functional. He considered that the benchmark. Low though it might be.
He was functional enough that his family mostly joked about his drinking, which meant it was probably fine.
But the one thing he didn’t want to do was get in bed at night stone-cold sober. Sometimes he could. When the long, hard day of work came inside with him, resting on aching shoulders and the lower back that was getting touchier with each passing year—because age. Not that thirty-four was exceptionally aged, not at all. But physical labor had a way of speeding all that up.
But then, the alternative had been to spend the rest of his life working at the damned power company, living in a little house on a quiet street in a neighborhood tucked back behind the main street of Gold Valley living the life of a man lost in suburban bliss, without any of the trappings that generally made it blissful.
No children.
No wife.
Not anymore.
He never had the children, but there had been a time when he and Lindsay had hoped for them. Even though...
That had always been a pipe dream, he supposed.
But for a while, he and Lindsay had lived in a world of dreams. Reality had been too harsh. And sometimes sitting around and making plans for a future you knew wouldn’t be there was all you could do.
He took a long swallow of whiskey and leaned back in his chair. This was why he didn’t go to bed sober.
Because it was these quiet moments, the still ones—particularly this time of year—that had a way of crushing in on him, growing louder and louder in the silence of the room.
Solitude was often as welcome as it was terrifying. Sometimes it had teeth. And he did his best not to get savaged by them.
He took another swallow of whiskey and leaned back farther in the chair before setting the glass on the table with a decisive click. Then he let his head fall back.
He must’ve dozed off, because when he opened his eyes again the hands on the clock hanging on the wall had made a more pronounced journey than it would have if it had only been the few minutes it felt like.
He stretched, groaning as his joints popped. He stood, making his way over to the window and looking out into the darkness.
At least, he should have been looking out into the darkness.
Instead, he saw a dim light cutting through the trees.
They did have guests staying on the property, but none out in the woods behind Grant’s cabin.
Grant lived well out of the way, on the opposite end of Dodge land from the guest cabins. And if there was anyone out there right now, they were not where they were supposed to be.
He opened up the drawer in the kitchen and took a small flashlight out, and then shoved on his boots before heading outside. He supposed, if he were thinking clearly, he would have called his brother Wyatt. But then, he was half-asleep and a little bit drunk, so he wasn’t thinking all that clearly. Instead, he made his own way out through the trees and toward the single light that was glowing in the woods.
When he was halfway between his house and the light it occurred to him what he was probably about to walk in on.
The back of his neck went hot, tension rising inside of him.
Odds were, anyone out in the middle of nowhere at this hour was up to one thing. And he didn’t especially want to walk in and find two people having sex in the middle of the woods, interrupting his drinking and sleeping time. The teeth on that would be just a little bit too sharp to bear.
But then, if he wasn’t getting any, nobody else should, either.
Especially not right next to his house.
That only increased his irritation as he continued on toward the light, the wind whipping through the trees, the bitter cold biting through the flannel shirt he was wearing. He should’ve put a jacket on, but he hadn’t thought of it.
He swore, and then he swore again as he approached the light.
He frowned. Right. There was a cabin back here, but it was dilapidated. One of the original buildings on the property, from back in the late 1800s. One that hadn’t been inhabited in a long time. At least, not by humans. He had a feeling there had been several raccoons, and about ten thousand spiders. But not humans.
And raccoons did not light lanterns. So he could safely assume this was not a raccoon.
He was on the verge of storming in—because why the hell not?—but something stopped him. Instead, he softened his footsteps and walked up to the window.
It was not what he’d been expecting.
It was a person, but not people. And nobody was having sex.
Instead, there was a small woman, curled up beneath the threadbare blanket. She looked like she was asleep. The camping lantern next to her head was turned on, a thin, yellow band of light stretching across what he could see of her face.
She was not one of the guests; at least, he was reasonably certain. He didn’t make a practice of memorizing what they all looked like.
Mostly because he didn’t care.
It was also difficult to identify her positively because she was curled up in a ball, the blanket halfway up over her head. He shifted his position and saw there was a backpack in the corner of the room. But nothing else.
He frowned, looking at her again, and he saw that there were shoes on her feet, which were sticking out just past the edge of the blanket.
He dragged his hand over his face.
She could be a criminal. A fugitive from the law. But then, most likely she was a woman running from a difficult situation. Possibly from a man.
Which could mean there was a safety issue. And he had guests on his ranch, not to mention his younger sister, Jamie.
Jamie knew how to handle herself, of course. She was a tough-as-rawhide cowgirl who was often packing heat. But that didn’t mean Grant would knowingly expose her to danger.
It was a lot of drama that he didn’t want coming to roost.
He stood there, debating for a moment, and then he turned away from the cabin, jogging back to his house and grabbing his cell phone off the bedside table. He dialed his brother Wyatt’s number, knowing that he was going to wake up spitting mad. Because it was four-thirty in the morning, and nobody wanted to be woken up at that hour. Though the Dodges were frequently up before the sun. They had responsibilities to take care of on the ranch that dictated early mornings. Though not this early.
“What the hell?” Wyatt asked by way of greeting.
His voice was gruff, evidence that he had been asleep.
“We have a visitor,” Grant said, keeping his own voice low.
“Are you drunk?”
“No,” Grant said.
At least, he didn’t think he was. But even if he were he wouldn’t hallucinate a woman sleeping in a cabin on their land.
“Really?” Wyatt pressed.
“Not anymore,” Grant said.
“What’s our visitor?” Wyatt asked, clearly confused.
“I woke up early,” Grant said, by way of explanation. There was no need to tell Wyatt that he had fallen asleep in a chair in his living room after drinking a glass of whiskey. And that the pain in his back from sitting sleeping up had been the thing that had woken him. “I went and looked out the window and saw a light coming from the woods. I investigated. There’s a woman sleeping in one of the cabins.”
“What?”
“I wanted to call you and find out what the hell you want to do about it.”
“You could call the police,” Wyatt suggested.
“No,” Grant said. He wasn’t sure why that was his conclusion, only that it was. Just that... He had no idea what the circumstances might be. She could be young. A runaway teenage girl, and if they called the police...who knew who might come for her. It might be the very people she was running from. And he would rather make sure he wasn’t throwing her back into harm’s way.
Grant didn’t consider himself a particularly compassionate person, not these days. He’d drained all that out of him over eight years of being a caregiver to the woman he was married to. He didn’t resent it. Didn’t resent Lindsay at all. But that didn’t mean he had anything left to give anyone else. Particularly a random stranger.
That artery had been bled dry.
Still, he couldn’t ignore the fact that there was something incredibly vulnerable in the way she was sleeping. With the light on. Like she was afraid of monsters even out there in the middle of nowhere.
“Okay,” Wyatt said slowly. “Then what do you suggest?”
“She’s a tiny little woman,” Grant said. “I imagine we can handle her. Go in and talk to her. Maybe Lindy should talk to her.”
“Hell, no,” Wyatt said. “We are not sending my wife in to talk to a random stranger squatting on our property.”
Wyatt had gotten married only a couple months earlier—extremely quickly—after finally getting together with the woman he’d been obsessing over for years. Although Wyatt would never say he’d been obsessing over Lindy for that long, but Grant knew it was true.
When you were a man with no social or sex life you had a lot of time to observe things. The entire world was Grant’s own personal Where’s Waldo game. He had nothing to do but sit around and identify hidden feelings and truths in the lives of other people.
And drink. There was the drinking.
“We’re going to end up giving her a damn heart attack,” Grant said.
“She’s sleeping on our land,” Wyatt said. “As much as I don’t relish the idea of terrifying a woman, it’s not like she checked into the Embassy Suites and bought herself some privacy.”
Grant shrugged. Mostly, he didn’t want to hassle with her personally. He wanted to go back to sleep and wake up in a world where he didn’t have to contend with another person or care about their feelings or whether or not he scared them.
“You’re right there,” Wyatt pointed out. “Why don’t you wake her up?”
“And then what?”
“I don’t know. Bring her over to the house. Give her some breakfast. Unless she shoots you.”
“Which is a good point,” Grant said. “I don’t want to get shot.”
“Bring your gun.”
“I don’t want to be in a shootout.”
“Bring something.”
Grant hung up the phone. His brother was just getting on his nerves now. He grumbled and grabbed hold of his hunting knife, which was in a leather case that snapped onto his belt. He put it on his hip, grabbed his cowboy hat and went back to the front door.
He was not using a hunting knife on a woman, even if she came at him. But he supposed if there was a gun involved he might have to use something.
He just felt resigned, really. If she wanted to shoot him he might let her.
Then at least he could get some rest.
He grunted and walked out of the house again, shoving his phone in his pocket, because he should probably bring that, too. In all honesty, he would need the phone before he needed the knife.
He walked quietly across the heavily wooded ground, careful not to land any heavy footfalls. Of course, if he did, he might wake her up, startle her and send her off running. And if she did that, then she wasn’t his responsibility. Not anymore. If she wasn’t on the property, what did he care where she was?
He didn’t.
He gritted his teeth and stopped right in front of the cabin door. And then he pushed it open.
* * *
MCKENNA TATE WAS used to sleeping lightly. And tonight was no exception. She had been keeping one ear tuned into the sounds around her, just in case, even while she dozed.
Not that deep sleeping in this place was likely. It was cold, and the floor of the little cabin was hard. Two days spent in it didn’t make it feel any more like home.
Except it wasn’t fine right now, because she heard something. And that was why she’d stirred.
Suddenly, reality slammed into her. The door to the cabin was opening.
She scrambled into a sitting position, attempting to push herself onto her feet, but then the door flung open completely, and she found herself stumbling back, hitting the wall and curling up there like a startled animal ready to strike.
It was a man. Which, out here in this big bad world, was the scariest thing she could think of. She would rather tangle with a bear any day. This was definitely a man.
Silhouetted in the doorway, tall and broad and terrifying. He had a cowboy hat pulled down low over his face, and she couldn’t see any of his features. She could just see that he was big.
“Calm down,” he said, as if a command issued from a stranger would make her feel calm.
“What?” So, now she knew he was insane, which was great. Telling a woman whose sleep he’d just interrupted to be calm.
“I said,” he responded, “calm down. I’m not going to hurt you.”
“Like you would announce you were going to hurt me if that was your plan,” she said, curling up tighter.
“I have no idea what I would do if I was going to hurt you. Because I’m not going to. I do, however, want to know what you’re doing here.”
“Sleeping.”
“I can see that. Or rather, I could. Though you aren’t sleeping now.”
“Very observant. I’d give you a trophy, but I’m fresh out.”
He shifted, crossing his arms. “You’re awfully mouthy for somebody sleeping on someone else’s property.”
“And you’re awfully chatty for a guy who just found someone sleeping on his property. Don’t you have follow-up questions?”
“Several. But I don’t want you crouched there in the corner like you think I’m about to stab you.”
She snorted out a laugh. “Oh, I’m not really that worried you’re gonna randomly stab me. It’s other things I worry about with men.”
“You don’t have to worry about that, either,” he said.
His voice didn’t soften it all. He didn’t look like he felt bad for her, or like he pitied her in any way. That would not be the angle to take with him. Crying or anything like that. She could see that right away. She could paint a glorious picture of her tragic plight, and he would probably just stand there like a man carved from rock. Unmoved. Whoever he was, he was not a soft touch.
She was pretty good at identifying a soft touch. They were the kind of people who came in handy in desperate situations. People who wanted to wrap you in a blanket, give you a piece of pie and say some encouraging words so that they could go on with their day feeling like they were decent human beings.
She had a feeling this man did not care whether or not he was a decent human being.
She recognized that in him, because it was the same thing in her.
You couldn’t care much about whether or not you were decent when you mostly just wanted to be alive.
“I just want to sleep here,” she said, holding her hand out. “That’s all.”
“You don’t have anywhere else to sleep?”
“Yeah, actually, I have a mansion up on the hill. But I like a little impromptu camping. Bonus points if it’s on someone else’s land, because it adds to the spirit of adventure. I love being woken up in the middle of the night by large, angry ranchers.”
“It’s not really the middle of the night. It’s almost five in the morning.”
She groaned. “Close enough to the middle of the night in my world.”
“This is usually about the time I get up every day.”
“Don’t brag to the less fortunate,” she said. “I’m liable to get jealous of such decadent living.”
“Are you a runaway?”
She laughed. “Right. Because somebody would care if I left.” He kept on staring at her. “I’m twenty-six.”
He nodded slowly, as if now he understood. “Running from someone?”
“Nope,” she said.
Not that she’d never run from someone, but she’d given up counting on men to take care of her. That only ended one way. It all bumped along nicely for a while, and then inevitably it exploded and she was left with less than she had before. Always.
It was why she’d been resolutely without a man for about three years.
“Then why are you sleeping out here?”
“I’m new to town,” she said, keeping her tone casual, as if they’d met on a bustling street in the bright light of day and not like this.
And she was new in town. That much was true.
“My truck broke down and it cost a crap load to fix.” And ultimately she’d had to let the thing go and give it up for dead, after giving up all the money she had to get this far. “While I was waiting for the prognosis, I was stranded for a few days longer than I anticipated. Had to stay in a hotel for some extra time.” And then she’d ended up hitchhiking into Gold Valley after her truck’s inglorious death on a stretch of lonely highway. “Anyway. I ran out of money. I’m hoping to get a job in town, but I haven’t managed it yet. Even when I do get a job I’m not going to get paid for a few weeks.”
“You couldn’t camp?”
“As much as I would love to sleep out under the stars beneath this threadbare blanket, that’s a hard pass. I mean, obviously I would have if I had to.”
“Homeless shelters?”
She snorted. “I’m not homeless.”
With a hard bump of her heart against her breastbone, it hit her that...she was lying. This cabin was the only place she had to sleep. She had nowhere to go back to. Nowhere she was heading to.
That was the definition of homeless, and she was it.
She never figured rock bottom would look like a damp wooden floor. But hell, it seemed to be.
She had managed to stay a few steps ahead of that since she had been turfed from the last foster home she’d been in eight years ago. But now... Of course, it was the move back home that had done it.
Home.
Gold Valley was home.
A home that she couldn’t remember, but it was the place her father was from, the place her mother had been born. The place she had been born. She had decided that it was time to come back. Time to try and... Find where she came from. She had to do something. Otherwise, she was going to be stuck in this endless loop. Dead-end jobs, crappy apartments. Nothing but barely making ends meet forever.
She supposed that was life for some people. For a lot of people.
But she’d hit the end of it. She’d had her birth certificate in a folder with all her legal documents—all gifted to her by the great state of Oregon on her eighteenth birthday when she’d been turfed out into the real world—and it had simply been sitting there.
Her every connection printed on a black-and-white document, as flat and dead as the paper itself.
Annie Tate was listed as her mother. And under father, a name McKenna had never even heard before. Henry Dalon.
Searches for him had turned up nothing promising.
While working as a waitress, McKenna had ended up having a conversation with a customer about a website that allowed free searches for public records. And McKenna had gone searching. She’d started with her father’s name, and then switched tactics.
She’d searched her own, and discovered not the printed, digitized version of her birth certificate but a scanned version of the original. Where handwritten down in the bottom corner, and smudged, was a name that looked a lot more like Henry Dalton.
Apparently, she’d learned after calling the records office, misspellings on records were common enough. Especially when no one had requested the documents, or done any checking on them. Seeing as Annie Tate had surrendered her parenting rights when McKenna was two, it didn’t shock her that her mother had never done her due diligence making sure everything on McKenna’s birth certificate looked right.
From there, McKenna had printed off the certificate and folded it up in her backpack, a piece to the puzzle of her life she was actively trying to put together.
She’d started searching for him after that.
Annie Tate, with her common first and last name, was impossible to track down, and anyway, McKenna already knew she didn’t want to know her.
There were a few Henry Daltons, but one in particular that was in the right geographical location to be a likely candidate. Henry “Hank” Dalton.
He’d had been all over her searches. A famous rodeo rider with three sons. Three sons who were McKenna’s half brothers, most likely.
Caleb, Jacob and Gabe.
Brothers. Family.
In Gold Valley.
But she had to figure it all out. She had to get the scope of things. The lay of the land.
She watched as the man took his phone out of his pocket, and the screen lit up.
“Come with me,” he said.
Panic fluttered around in her breast like a caged bird. “Are you calling the police?”
“No,” he said, his thumb swiping over the screen a few times. “I’m taking you to my brother’s house.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s food there,” he said simply.
She scrambled to her feet, her stomach growling. She realized that she had only eaten a couple of times in the past three days. And trail mix and granola bars could only get you so far. They weren’t...food food.
“Why do you want to feed me?” she asked, narrowing her eyes.
“Correct me if I’m wrong,” he said. “But you’re harmless.”
She huffed. “I’m not harmless.”
“Really?”
“I have a pocket knife. I can cut you up.”
“Right. Anyway. Harmless. And probably hungry.”
“And you care?” This offer of food and his lack of...calling the cops on her had all her defenses up. People weren’t just...nice.
It made her feel compelled to push. To push him away. To push him to get down to what his deal actually was.
She didn’t trust people. She didn’t trust anyone.
But there was always some part of her...some small part that glowed bright sometimes and made her ache.
Hope.
Yeah. Well, for all the good hope had done her. She was filthy and cold and had no money. She’d do better to expect him to turn out to be a creep than a nice person who was actually offering to feed her for nothing.
He stared back at her, his features completely shadowed still. “No. Not really.”
It was the lack of niceness that made her hackles lower, just a bit.
There was something about that honesty that struck her. People were never honest. At least, they weren’t kind and honest. There were people who were cruel, who spent no small amount of time lecturing her about how her circumstances were her own fault.
And maybe they were.
Sure, she’d been sent out to live on her own at eighteen with a garbage bag full of her belongings, but there were plenty of people who didn’t have advantages in life who probably did better than she did.
But people like this... Who could openly admit they didn’t actually care, but offered help, anyway...
There were no people like this. She had no idea what kind of anomaly she was staring down right now.
“Do you want food?” he asked, sounding irritated and impatient now.
“Yes,” she said, scrambling to a standing position. She looked at her blanket, and her backpack.
“Grab those,” he said.
Right. Because of course he was willing to bait her out of the cabin with food, but it wasn’t like he was going to let her stay here. She felt pressure behind her eyes, but she knew she wouldn’t cry. She had quit doing that a long time ago. There was no point.
“Okay,” she said, taking hold of the blanket and her bag and holding them both close.
The man took a step forward, holding out his hand, and that was when her lantern caught his face.
He was...
He was beautiful.
His dark hair was a little bit shaggy, and he had a light beard that might be intentional, or might just be because he hadn’t shaved for a few days. His nose was straight, his lips firm looking, set into a flat line. His shoulders were broad, and so was his chest, his waist lean, the tight T-shirt suggesting that he was also...well, fully and completely built.
She hadn’t made any assumptions about his looks when he had first come in, mostly because he had shocked her, waking her from a dead sleep. And then... He had sounded a bit like a curmudgeon, so she had assumed that he was an older man. But now she thought he couldn’t be much older than thirty.
“Let me take those,” he said, taking the bag and blanket from her.
She started to protest, but he had taken them before she could get the words out. It made her feel naked. He had her things. Everything she owned in the entire world. Except the lantern. She bent down and picked it up, clutching it to her chest. She would hold that.
He didn’t offer to take it from her. He turned, without a word, and walked out of the cabin, clearly just expecting her to follow.
There was an offer of food, so of course she was.
She scrambled after him. It was still dark outside, and it was cold. She had a jacket, but it was in her bag, and currently Mr. Tall, Dark and Cranky was holding it. So she figured the best thing to do would be to follow along.
The place he led her to was a small cabin, but he didn’t go to the front door; instead, he went to an old truck. “We’re going to drive to my brother’s house. It’s on the property. But I don’t really want to walk.”
She didn’t, either. In fact, she had a feeling that he didn’t mind one way or another, but had sensed that maybe she didn’t. Knew that she was cold.
Right. He doesn’t care. Don’t go applying warm and fuzzy motives to him.
She climbed cautiously into his truck, closing the door behind her. “A gentle reminder,” she said when he started the engine. “I do have a knife.”
“Yeah,” he responded, starting the engine and putting the truck in Reverse. “Me, too.”
“Why do you have a knife?”
“For all I knew you had a gun.”
She sputtered. “If I had a gun and you had a knife it wouldn’t help you.”
“It’s just a good thing it didn’t get to that.”
“Well. See that it doesn’t.”
“I know,” he said, his tone dry. “You’ll cut me.”
They didn’t speak for the short drive down the bumpy, pothole-filled dirt road. McKenna folded her hands in her lap and stared down at her fingers. There was dirt under her nails.
You’re homeless. It’s been days since you’ve had a shower.
It was amazing how you could push all of those things to the side, but the minute you had to interact with another person—a beautiful person—it all came rushing back.
“Where are we going?” Suddenly, she was full of panic.
“To my brother’s house,” he repeated. He had said that already.
“And he’s going to be there?”
“Yes,” he responded.
“Oh,” she said, looking back out the window.
So, someone else was going to see her like this. She didn’t really care. Her entire life had been a series of inglorious situations. It was just that this was the worst.
She’d done a pretty good job of letting shame roll off for most of her life. She’d been the poor kid. Had never had cool clothes. Had never been able to have friends over. Had been shuffled around homes, some good, some bad. She’d built up some tough armor over the years.
But this was a new low, and apparently...apparently shame still existed inside of her.
They pulled up to the house and her heart sank into her stomach. She hadn’t fully realized where she was. She had hitchhiked to the edge of town, and she had fully intended on camping out in the woods. She had happened upon a collection of cabins on the edge of the woods, and then had circled around, and found a dilapidated, abandoned one deeper in. She had realized she was camping out in a place people stayed in for money, but she hadn’t realized people also lived there.
Or that it was quite so fancy.
Her companion got out of the truck and headed toward the broad front steps that led to the porch. She just sat there. She took a breath, and opened the door. There was no point being timid. No point feeling like crap. She knew what she was.
And that was: more than her current situation.
It didn’t matter what these people thought of her.
It mattered if they turned out to be psychotic killers, though. But she really did have a pocket knife.
And okay, she knew that wasn’t the deadliest of weapons. But she had sat outside a self-defense class one time and had heard the woman talking about how the element of surprise was generally on your side when you were a woman. It was about the only thing on your side, so you had to use it. They didn’t expect you to fight back.
McKenna Tate had been fighting back for her entire life. She wouldn’t stop now.
And she supposed that right there was the point of that hope inside her chest she often resented. It had brought her this far. Made her feel determined. It was what kept shame and hopelessness from taking over.
As long as she never let it get out of hand, it was what kept her going.
She walked slowly up the front steps and stood next to the man. She came up to the top of his shoulder. Just barely. He was so tall. And yeah, now that she was a little bit more awake, and it was a little bit lighter out, she could see... Definitely as beautiful as she had first thought. If not more so.
She turned her face back to the door in front of her.
Her new friend knocked, and they waited.
The man that answered the door was nearly as tall as the man at her side, and just as good-looking. Though in a different way. He had that easy manner about him, a charm that the other man did not have.
She didn’t trust charm.
“Hi,” she said. “I was told there would be breakfast.”
The new man looked at the other man, and then back at her. “Wyatt Dodge,” he said, sticking out his hand.
“McKenna Tate,” she responded, grasping it with her own.
Of all the ways she had envisioned being caught by the owners of the property, she hadn’t imagined this.
And then she realized that she still didn’t know the name of the man who had found her in the cabin. The beautiful one. The one who looked like he might not remember what a joke was, much less have a whole store of them like Wyatt Dodge probably did.
She looked at him, and he looked at her out of the corner of his eye, but didn’t offer a name.
“Come on in,” Wyatt said, still eyeing his brother speculatively.
She took him up on his invitation.
The inside of the house was even more beautiful than the outside. Rustic, but incredibly comfortable. Cozy. She suddenly became aware of how cold her nose and cheeks had been when they began to warm up.
She looked to the left of the entryway and saw that there was a fire in a rock fireplace. She wanted to go sit in front of it. She wanted to press her face against it.
But then, she also smelled food. Bacon.
She’d had many a disagreement with the man upstairs over quite a few of the circumstances in her life, but right about now she was feeling much friendlier to him. She sent up a prayer of thanks.
If anything could surprise the divine, McKenna Tate being thankful might do it.
“My wife, Lindy, is in the kitchen,” Wyatt said.
“Not cooking,” a voice rang out from the next room. “Just waiting for the bacon to be done.”
He gestured that direction and McKenna followed the directive, walking into the beautiful kitchen, to see an equally beautiful blonde woman sitting at a small breakfast table. Her blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, her manner elegant even though she was wearing sweats.
“I’m cooking, technically,” Wyatt said. “It’s part of the agreement.”
“Agreement?” McKenna asked.
“Yes, I agreed to marry him and move from my winery to his ranch. But only if he cooked me breakfast at least four days a week. The other three days I get a pastry from the coffee place in town.”
McKenna’s stomach tightened. Jealousy. She was as familiar with that as she was with hunger, and right now she felt nearly overtaken by both.
Not because she wanted the man cooking the bacon, specifically. Just that it would be nice to have an arrangement like that in general. Someone who cared. Someone who would vow to cook bacon four days a week just so you would marry him.
She couldn’t imagine someone caring like that.
“What are you doing on my property, McKenna Tate?” Wyatt asked, turning toward the stove and getting bacon and some scrambled eggs out of a pan, putting them on a plate and setting them down on the table. She eyed them hungrily.
“Have a seat,” he said.
She hesitantly did as he said, sitting next to his lovely wife, and feeling every inch the bedraggled urchin that she was. “Eat.”
Her man said that.
Not that he was her man, just that he was the one that had woken her up, and she still didn’t know his name. And on principle, she wasn’t going to ask.
Still, she obeyed.
“Coffee?” Lindy asked.
“Yes, please,” she said, trying her best to eat slow, and feeling like she was going to end up failing the moment the salty, savory bacon touched her tongue. She was ravenous. She hadn’t let herself realize just how much.
“What were you doing?” Lindy asked, her voice soft.
“I just needed a place to sleep. I’m new to Gold Valley... I decided to move here,” she said. She wasn’t going to get into the whole thing about looking for her family. Not that she believed they were going to have some tearful reunion. She wasn’t that stupid. Life didn’t work that way.
Her mother, who had given birth to her, had walked away without a backward glance. A father who’d probably never even met her, maybe didn’t even know about her? Why would he want anything to do with her?
The very thought of it, of putting herself in front of him and risking a rejection, made her feel...
It didn’t matter. From what she had found out about the Daltons, they were well-off. Famous rodeo riders and owners of a massive plot of land just on the outskirts of town.
Surely they would be able to spare a little seed money to keep her off the streets. And they’d probably be happy to fling some money at her to get rid of her, anyway.
She didn’t need a family. She’d been just fine without one all this time.
What she needed was something a lot more practical than that. A shovel to dig herself out of the hole she was in.
Money would make for a decent shovel.
She cleared her throat. “I decided to move here, but I had kind of a series of less than fortunate happenings and I ran out of money before I could get a job. So, I didn’t have anywhere to stay.” She wouldn’t have jumped into the Gold Valley situation had she not lost the apartment she’d been in before in Portland. But the landlord had decided she wanted it for her adult son, and McKenna had been unceremoniously booted. Also, she hadn’t gotten her security deposit back. Which wasn’t her fault. It wasn’t like she had created a mildew stain in the bathroom. That was because the roof leaked.
“It was a desperate-times-desperate-measures kind of thing,” she said. “And... Thank you. For not calling the police. And for feeding me bacon. Which seems a little bit above and beyond, all things considered.”
“You don’t have a job yet?” Lindy asked.
“Not yet,” she said.
“What kind of jobs do you normally do?” Lindy asked.
“Aerospace engineering,” McKenna replied, taking another bite of crisp bacon. “But when I can’t find work in that field, waitressing is my fallback.”
“Sadly, we’re fresh out of aerospace engineering jobs,” Lindy said.
“Good,” McKenna said. “Because I was lying about that.”
“I had a feeling,” Lindy responded. “Not because I don’t think you could be an aerospace engineer, just because we’re nowhere near NASA.”
“I’ve done all kinds of things. I’ve been a waitress, hotel maid. You name the manual labor job that doesn’t require much lifting over fifty pounds and I’ve probably done it.”
“Basic cooking?” Lindy asked.
She shrugged. “Diner stuff.”
“Cleaning.”
“Like I said. Housekeeping.”
“I think we could find a job for you right here,” Lindy said.
McKenna frowned. “No offense. But... I’m a stranger who was caught sleeping illegally on your property. Why exactly would you want to give me a job?”
“Because sometimes life is hard and it isn’t fair,” Lindy said, her determined blue eyes meeting McKenna’s. “I’m well aware of that. And sometimes circumstances spin out of your control. It has nothing to do with whether or not you’re a good person. So, you tell me, McKenna. Are you going to steal from us?”
McKenna lifted a shoulder. “Probably not.”
“Probably not,” Wyatt repeated.
“I don’t know. Am I gravely injured? Did a family member of mine come down with a terrible illness and the only way I can get back to them is to steal money from you?” It was moot. She didn’t have any family that knew her. Or that she knew. Just family she was looking for.
“I appreciate the honesty,” Lindy said dryly. “But barring extraordinary circumstances, are you going to steal from me?”
McKenna shook her head. She was a lot of things, and definitely a little bit opportunistic. But she wasn’t an out-and-out thief. “No.”
“Well, then, I don’t see why we can’t give you a job. We can always fire you if you’re terrible at it.” She looked over at her husband when she said that part.
“Fine with me,” Wyatt said. “We were going to have to hire someone else, anyway.”
She blinked. “I...”
“We also have a place for you to stay. One that isn’t that horrible cabin in the middle of the woods that doesn’t have anything but spiderwebs in it for warmth.”
“Oh... You can’t do that.”
“Sure we can,” Lindy said. “We have a bunch of extra room.”
Throughout the entire exchange, her man stood there mute. A solid, silent presence that fairly radiated with disapproval.
“It’s fine with me,” Wyatt said. “But I don’t have time to train anyone right now.”
He shot a meaningful look over at her man. The look that he got back was not friendly at all.
“I’m going to go get dressed,” Wyatt said.
Lindy pushed up from her seat. “Ditto. Enjoy your breakfast.”
The two of them left the room, and they left her standing there with... With him. And he did not look happy.
“I guess I work here now,” she said, trying to sound nonchalant.
“I guess so.”
“Sorry,” she responded.
He shrugged. “Nothing to be sorry about.”
“You don’t look happy.”
The corner of his mouth lifted upward. “I never look happy.”
“Oh. Well. That’s good to know.”
And then he stuck out his hand, his dark, serious eyes meeting hers. “I’m Grant Dodge. And I guess I’m your new boss.”
