Teaching the Cowboy (17 page)

He cocked his head to the side as he thought, pursed his lips, and shook his head. His glasses slipped down his nose so Ronnie nudged them back up.

“Are you sure?”

He grinned and shook his head.

She wished them well and backed off the porch with her heart burdened. It was an unusual situation, but not necessarily dangerous. Davey’s parents were elderly and they all took care of each other the best they could. Some days were harder than others. She always felt relieved when she saw all three family members at the church.

“I didn’t know you could sign,” John remarked when they got on the road again. “What else can you do?”

She closed her eyes and slumped as much as she could down into the heated seat. “I’ll let you read my curriculum vitae later.”

“Now that sounds romantic.”

“Not romantic at all. I’m a teacher. I pick up tricks and tools that help me teach. Some are more useful than others.”

“Think you could teach me anything?”

She opened her eyes and sat up enough to see him smirking. She didn’t say anything, but the voice in her head said,
Yeah, I’ll teach you that you’re not keeping me.

Chapter Thirteen

S
omething was up with Ronnie, and Sid was going to figure out what. Ronnie was the only real friend she had anymore, and Sid knew down to her cells that the woman was going to bolt. She didn’t know when or why, but something was going to send her running. She put down her marker and shoved back from the table where she’d been sketching out the design for a contracted quilt. The customer wanted something with cow print, but elegant, they’d said. Sid blew a raspberry and at the sound of the doorbell, bounded down the stairs to street level.

“Can I help you, cowboy?” she said to the man’s plaid back after pulling the door open, and when he turned around to reveal his familiar turquoise eyes, black hair, and churlish grin she sucked in air and held it. The legendary flirt, right there on her metaphorical doormat.

“How’re ya?” Eddie asked.

“Good.” Sid straightened up and pulled the edges of her robe closer together. Folks usually called before they came over. “What can I do for you?”

“Oh.” He smiled and shoved a hand into the back pocket of his jeans. He extracted a piece of paper, unfolded it, and handed it to her.

“What’s this?”

“Well, Christmas is coming and I thought I’d do something special for my mom this year.” He lifted his hat and raked a hand through his thick hair. “We lost a lot of things to that house fire years ago. Anyway, there was a quilt my mother’s grandmother passed down to her that she lost.”

“Oh, shit.”

“Right? She never really got over it. I priced it out a few times before a few different places and couldn’t afford to have anyone make it at the time. Well, I think I’m ready now and I hear you’re the best.”

Sid blew out a breath and stared down at the crude drawing. She hated to break it to him. She didn’t have time in her busy schedule before Christmas to make it and even if she did, he couldn’t afford her usual rates.

Sid looked up into his face and found him chewing on his bottom lip. He seemed genuinely distressed, and before that moment she hadn’t known that was one of Eddie’s flavors.

What the hell? What’s one more quilt?
“Sure. Okay.”

He smiled a wealth of white teeth, and his glee went straight to his eyes. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“Woo-hoo!” He bent down and picked her up by the waist, twirling her around a couple of times until she cried uncle.

“That make you happy, Eddie?”

He hugged her some more, swaying side to side and taking her along for the ride. “Are you kidding? This is the biggest damn deal in my life right now.” When he set her down, finally, Sid felt breeze on her cleavage and hurriedly pulled the edges of her robe together. It was too late. Eddie winked at her before he strutted away.

Goddammit.

Sid closed the door and growled as she climbed the stairs two at a time. She was not going to be one of Eddie’s conquests, not even for a mutual one-night-stand. She respected herself too much, and besides, she had more pressing matters to contend with. She had an extra project all of a sudden and her best friend, who probably didn’t know she was her best friend, was being really squirrelly. Sid pushed aside all the fabric scraps on top of the kitchen counter and found her landline phone beneath the mess. She dialed the ranch and paced in front of the loft’s front window as it rang on the other end.

“Yep?” Anna answered.

“Where’s Ronnie eating Thanksgiving?”

“What’s this, Piss Anna Off Day?”

“What’d I just step in?”

“Turkey shit, probably. The last time I checked, which was five minutes ago, by the way, Ronnie was eating over
there
.”

“You mean at the Ericksons’?”

“I said over
there
, didn’t I?”

“Why didn’t you ask first?”

Anna shouted wordlessly.

“Sorry. I’m guessing I’m not the first person to ask about this.”

“No. You’re not. You’re the fourth today.”

“Who were the other three?”

“John, although he should have known better than to ask, Peter, and Liss.”

“Not Landon?”

“Landon’s too smart, nothing against Peter and Liss. They’re young.”

Sid paced some more and rubbed a hand through her choppy hair while she thought. “What time were you thinking of serving?”

“Why, you coming?”

“Maybe.”

“Same time as always.”

“I have no idea what that means. I haven’t been to the ranch for Thanksgiving since before Mom died.”

“Four.”

“Hmm.” She picked at a dry spot on her bottom lip as she stared at the old mercantile across the street.

“What are you thinking?”

“You know I’m not one to buck tradition.”

“Ha.”

“Okay, point taken, but what if you shifted the meal time this year so dinner doesn’t overlap with the Ericksons’s? That way Ronnie wouldn’t worry about hurting Becka’s feelings.”

“And John won’t end up in a funk for the rest of the night.”

“Why would John be in a funk?”

Anna sighed. “You should come around more often or else you’d have put two and two together.”

“Do the math for me. My talent is making pretty things, not arithmetic.”

“Your brother is in love with Ronnie.”

Sid nearly dropped the phone. “Do what now?”

“Yep.”

“How can you tell?”

“Come around more often and I wouldn’t have to tell you. I gotta go flip the burgers. Bye.” Anna hung up.

Sid grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled. “Shit, shit, shit.”

She knew it. Something was scaring Ronnie off and now she knew what, or who, it was. It was that freakin’ conservative dolt. Had to be. Sid unbelted her robe and dashed to her bedroom in search of legitimate clothing.

“What are you doing here, Sid?” Ronnie was at the long table that acted as her desk at the Erickson place, sticking little Post-it flags to pages of Peter’s social studies workbook.

Sid, who never quite shed her hipster aura even in her Sunday dresses, was showing off just how out of place she was on the ranch by wearing black leggings that had a couple of large holes in the weave and an oversized men’s gray sweater layered over a white tank. She had her pale blonde hair tied into a sloppy ponytail held in place by a soft measuring tape wound several times around the base.

Sid walked to the table where Kitty was working out some algebra proofs and ruffled the girl’s hair. “Oh, just stopping by a bit early to get Kitty. We have to be somewhere at two.”

“We do?” Kitty bent down beneath her desk and mumbled something.

“Listen, Ron.” Sid wove her way back to the middle of the room and perched on the edge of her table. She wore a smile that made Ronnie suspicious.

“You look like you want to get me into some trouble.”
More than I’m already in.

Sid swatted a hand at her. “Oh, no, not at all. I was just wondering if you’d give me a hand getting the guesthouse set up for Dad tomorrow. I’m picking him up tomorrow evening and hate springing that stuff on Anna, you know? She’s already got so much to do.”

Oh. Well, that’s easy.
“Okay. I was going to be working over there with Pete tomorrow, anyway.”

“Excellent. There’s just one other little thing.” Sid brought the pads of one thumb and index finger close together to show just how insignificant the thing was.

“That little?”

Sid scanned the room and after studying each of the occupied students, bent in a little closer to Ronnie to whisper, “We’re doing Thanksgiving at cocktail hour this year. Do you think you can save room for some of Anna’s pecan pie?”

Ronnie sat up a little straighter. “Pecan pie?”

Sid gave her a wink and nodded. “Mm-hmm. It’s one of Anna’s specialties. You know, she used to work at the diner before it shut down and she went to work for John? Pie is her best thing.”

Ronnie licked her lips. “You people are trying to kill me with food.”

Sid put her hands up. “Hey, my dance card is nowhere near as full as yours. No one wants to feed me. All I know is that Anna’s not going to serve the pie unless you show up. My motives here are obviously quite selfish.”

Ronnie set down her pad of flags and chuckled. “I refuse to be the cause of a Becka break-down.”

“Oh, come on. Eat over here and then slip away under the pretense you’re going home to nap off all that turkey. Trust me, the company will be a lot more enjoyable at the Lundstrom ranch. John may have a stick up his ass, but he’s got good liquor.”

Ronnie flinched. She tried to correct her expression before Sid took note of her distress. She suspected the woman had already seen it, judging by the way she narrowed her eyes at her. Whatever Sid saw in Ronnie’s face, though, she didn’t speak of it.

“So, see you at six on Thursday?”

Ronnie closed Peter’s workbook and nodded. “Sure. Why not?”

“Excellent.” Sid hopped down and breezed over to Kitty. “Let’s go, daffodil o’ mine. We’ve got to head into Laramie for a shitload of fabric.”

Kitty closed her binder and tucked her pencil behind her ear. “You’ve got enough fabric to blanket the Broncos’ stadium. Why do you need more?”

“Special project. Let’s go.”

“Lay it on me, Mick,” John said.

“Okay, this is her latest offer. Don’t say anything until you hear all of it because this might be the most fun you have all day.”

“Do I really want to hear this?” John waved some pedestrians across the path as he turned into the Laramie Airport parking lot and shifted his phone to his other ear.

“Probably not, but I’ll lay it on you anyway since that’s what you retain me for. Here’s the list.” Mick cleared his throat. “First, she refuses to concede to your demand to drop your surname. She’s apparently established under that name and doesn’t want to go confusing all the casting directors knocking down her door.”

“You mean she’s too cheap to have new headshots with the correct name printed up.” John parked the truck and killed the engine. The dashboard clock said four. He had about twenty minutes before his father’s plane arrived.

“Probably. Since you’ve gracefully segued us to the money issue, that’s the next item.”

“Well?”

“She’ll accept a one-time payout of one million dollars in exchange for the support order being pulled.”

John ground his teeth.
She’s out of her fucking mind
.

“Last, regarding the kids, she said she’ll terminate rights to Landon only.”

He ground some more.

“Johan?”

“You said not to say anything to the end, so I’m holding my tongue.”

“Okay. That was all from that ridiculous counteroffer, but I finally got a report back from the private dick. It’s what we suspected.”

John stabbed the catch of his seatbelt and slumped as much as a man his size in a space that cramped could. “Okay, so let me recap. She wants to relinquish only the adult kid, presumably because she’s still got some bargaining power left with the younger two. She’s asking for about five times as much money at once than she would have received from me over time through Liss’s eighteenth birthday, and trust me when I say I had no plans of financing her that long. She’s shacking up with a guy who’s she’s likely sharing expenses with, and she’s using my name for professional reasons even though she hasn’t seen her kids at all this year and could give a shit about me personally.”

“That about sums it up.”

“Well, you can shit on that offer. Perhaps you should tell her or her lawyer or her Svengali, or whoever’s putting her up to this crap, that the spousal support she’s getting now was me being gracious. She left me and her kids. I didn’t cheat. She’s the one who got bored.”

“I know that, Johan. We could go to court and get the money issue fixed really easy, but she’s going to play hardball with the kids. That’s the only chip she has left.”

“Can’t we cite abandonment?”

“Maybe. The judge is going to want proof the kids have only had incidental contact with her in the past year. You really want to push this?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because I plan on getting married again someday to someone who actually loves my kids. That new woman should be their mom, don’t you think?”

“What I think isn’t important. The only person’s opinion you should give a shit about is that one family court judge who has your stack of paperwork on his or her docket. You played nice for too long, J. Let’s put it all behind you once and for all. If you come out looking like an asshole, who cares? Who’s left in Storafalt to badmouth you?”

“Other than her parents?”