Teaching the Cowboy (5 page)

She ground her teeth and smiled regardless. “No need to trouble yourself in the future. Just call. My phone reception isn’t so great out here, but eventually your message will catch up to me.”
Assuming I don’t delete it unheard.

He walked the periphery of the room, examining this and that without touching anything.

What must he have been thinking, studying her lodging like that?

“I’ll get you a phone,” he said, pulling open a cabinet door and peeking inside. Becka had stashed paper towels there. Nothing special.

“Thank you, but that’s not necessary.”

He closed the cabinet and leaned his butt against the counter edge. “Yeah, I think it is. You don’t want to be on a ranch like this and not have a way to reach people when you need to, or for people to reach
you
. I’ll just add it to the long list of things I have to do tomorrow.”

Well, don’t do me any favors, guy.
She grinned her beauty-queen grin and shook her head, hoping he didn’t think she was just being overly accommodating. “You’re a busy guy, so don’t trouble yourself. Maybe I’ll start a fire and send up smoke signals. Got anyone on the ranch who can interpret those?”

“Funny.” He focused that intense blue gaze at her and licked his lips again.

Ronnie looked away first and hid her burning cheeks.

“Are you comfortable here?”

“In Wyoming?” She sank into the desk chair again and resumed her email scrolling, not that she could see straight. The man was crossing her wires in all the right ways. Or maybe the wrong ways. “I haven’t been here long enough to make that determination. Haven’t even unpacked.”

“That’s good.”

“How’s that good?”

“If you want, I can move you over to the Lundstrom ranch. There’s a furnished guesthouse we built for my in-laws. More amenities. Actual hot showers.”

She widened her eyes again, and this time she didn’t work so hard to look calm. He couldn’t see her face from where he stood. She kept clicking random things on her computer screen.

Her shower hadn’t exactly reminded her of ice water, but it was far from luxurious. She figured it was a consequence of trailing Phil’s forty-minute shower more so than the fault of the small hot water heater. Either way, she didn’t want favors. Especially not from this guy.

“No, thank you. This’ll be just fine. More than enough, even.”

“You gotta let me do something for you. Pull my weight. I mean, if you’re doing all the teaching over here at the Ericksons’ and you’re living over here, too, I feel sort of like I’m slacking off.”

She turned around in her chair and faced the man, who was now rubbing his stubbled chin and pacing near the dinette set. Pacing must have been his vice. She filed that away for later.

“Mr. Lundstrom,
John
, did you and the Ericksons not have a conversation about my accommodations before I arrived?”

He shrugged. “To be perfectly honest, I completely forgot about the arrangement until Landon showed up for lunch today saying you were on the way. Days start to blur together for me, Ronnie. Sometimes I forget what commitments I’ve made until someone tells me I’m supposed to be somewhere. He’s the one who reminded me I wrote a big-ass check back in May when Becka and Ted proposed this scheme.”

Sounds like Daddy
.
He never remembers anything. Who could blame him, though?
“Maybe you should hire an assistant.”

His lips curled up into a tiny smirk. “Nah. I lost the one I had in the divorce, not that she was ever that great. Hell, Liss is more efficient than she was and Liss can barely read a calendar. Glad she didn’t inherit that DNA from her.” He added that last bit in a mumble.

Ronnie hid her cringe by turning back to the screen.
Yeesh
.

“Can I ask you something, Ronnie?”

She didn’t like the tone of his voice. It wasn’t nasty, not at all, but there was a note of curiosity in it that warned her he was going to ask something she didn’t necessarily want to answer. She nodded anyway, but kept her back turned.

“Is Phil your boyfriend? I mean, is he going to be visiting often?”

She clamped her hand over her mouth and nose and stifled the snort before it could squeak out and reverberate through the room. Definitely not what she expected him to ask.

“Well? I think it’s a reasonable question.”

Reasonable? By what standards?

“No.” She wiped the tears seeping from her eyes on the back of her arm. When she turned to face him, she was still giggling.

He didn’t look amused.

“Look, our mothers are best friends. They’re from the same tribe and we grew up in the same town from the time I was ten. He’s been my roommate since I moved off-campus nine years ago.”

“Ah. So, no hanky-panky?”

“No. Why?”

His boot heels clacked against the wood floor as he made long strides to the door. “No reason.” He paused with his hand on the door handle and worried his bottom lip between his teeth for a moment before he continued. “We should have dinner. Or lunch. I mean, just the two of us. After you’ve had a chance to go over Peter’s stuff. We could talk about your plan, see what ideas you have. Maybe tomorrow? I can get Anna to cook whatever you want.”

Just the two of them? How would that go? More arguing? Another staring match? More of him licking his lips and her feeling like a wanton hussy for enjoying the show?

Suddenly, the small house felt very hot and she brushed the back of her hand against her damp forehead. “Um. I’m going to be out and about most of tomorrow, taking Phil to the airport then running some errands.” She added in a mumble after that, “And the Ericksons have asked me to have dinner with their family tomorrow.”

He stiffened before forcing a long exhale through clamped lips. He sounded like a stuttering motorboat. “And the next night too, I bet.”

She shrugged. Yep, Becka thought ahead.

“Lunch on Saturday, then?”

She snapped her fingers. “That I can do. I’ll pencil it in.”

“Ink it in.”

She frowned at the command.

He pulled open the door without acknowledging her distress. “I’ll send Landon by tomorrow morning so he can go with you on your errands. Make sure you get back okay.”

“That’s not necessary. Let the boy sleep in. No need for all of us to be miserable.” Her voice was light. His expression wasn’t.

“He’ll be here at four. There’s only one flight out to Denver, so I imagine Phil needs to be there at dawn.” John stepped across the threshold onto the stoop and closed the door before she could rebut.

She got up and jogged the short distance to the door and snatched it open, thinking she’d yell out to him. Too late. He was already in his truck and turning a circle back toward the ranch road.

“Damn it.” She inched the page of phone numbers out of her shorts’ pocket and stabbed his number into her phone’s touch screen.

Didn’t matter. No signal again.

Chapter Four

“L
andon, I’m really sorry your dad prodded you into this.” Ronnie pressed the accelerator pedal harder and barreled her small car south toward Cheyenne. “I told him it wasn’t necessary. I could have made it back to Storafalt without supervision. I’m a grown-up.” She watched Landon shrug via the rearview mirror.

“It’s all right. What’s one less hour of sleep to a cowboy?”

Phil mumbled something under his breath and sank lower in his seat.

“What’s with the sunglasses, Phil? Sun’s not even up,” she teased, giving his side a little nudge.

He swiveled his head microscopically in her direction, an action which seemed to cause him great pain and distress judging by the way his lips peeled back from his teeth. “Do you know what time I got in last night?” he rasped.

“Nope. I went to bed and you weren’t back. I woke up, you
were
.”

“I got back an hour before you woke up.”

Ronnie did the math. That would have put his return at around two, two fifteen. No wonder he’d been so hard to rouse. “What the hell were you doing out in the dark all that time?”

He cleared his throat and winced. “Carousing.”

“With who, the cows?”

“No.” A long sigh escaped his lungs as he rubbed his eyes beneath the sunglasses. “Bunch of the Ericksons’ ranch hands. Someone brought out a jug of rotgut and I didn’t want to back down from a challenge, so…”

Landon snorted. “I’ve heard about that shit. Dad made a ranch rule last year that the staff couldn’t have it on the premises. Before that, it’d laid a bunch of guys out and screwed up production for a couple weeks. I’m surprised you’re upright as much as you are.”

“I’ve got an efficient liver and hardcore kidneys,” Phil said and leaned his head against the window.

Ronnie laughed and sung with exaggerated cheer, “You’re going to have such a great day.”

Phil covered his face with his summer-weight jacket and hissed from behind it, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore.”

Once the aching lush dragged his one bag into the airport, moaning all the way, Landon took his abandoned seat in the front of the car and drummed percussively on the dashboard. “So, what do you need?”

“Aren’t you enthusiastic?” Ronnie pulled her phone out of her denim jacket’s pocket and queued up her to-do list. “Well, there’s a homeschooling supply store here in Cheyenne I need to check out for some workbooks.”

Landon made a face.

“Some of those will be yours. Big thick ones, too.”

His enthusiasm waned a bit more. That made Ronnie grin. “You’ll be fine once you get back into the swing of it. Let’s see.” She brought up her mapping application and searched for a nearby super-store. “And if there’s a Target with a pharmacy around here somewhere, I need some things. They should be able to pull my records.”

“Like what? There’s a little mom and pop pharmacy in Storafalt if you want to have your prescriptions transferred. It’d be an easier drive.”

She cleared her throat. Yeah, as if she was going to have a conversation with her client’s nineteen-year-old about her contraception requirements. She rooted in the console for her AUX cord and plugged it into the phone’s jack, queuing up the map’s turn-by-turn voice command feature. Her phone had a 4G signal again, at least for the moment.

She chose her words carefully. “Oh, well, my doctor prescribed a Vitamin D mega-dose at my last physical. Apparently I don’t get enough sunlight.”

He seemed to buy it, relaxing into his seat and picking up Ronnie’s phone to study the cardinal pattern on the case. “Not a problem we ranch types have. How do you manage to have a D deficiency if you go to the beach so often?”

She pointed to her brown forearm. “Pale people absorb it more easily, and I’m lactose intolerant so I don’t get it from milk, either.”

“You can’t drink milk? Are you serious? That must suck.”

She shrugged. “I can drink substitutes, but they leave a bit to be desired. Either the taste or the consistency is off-putting. I only know that because my body didn’t really give up on dairy until I was around fourteen. Waged an admirable battle, but lost. Anyway, it was bound to happen. My people really aren’t built to digest cow milk.”

“Your people?”

“Yeah. Neither side. My mom is Lumbee, like Phil.”

“Lumbee?”

“Yeah, you probably wouldn’t have heard of that. It’s a small Native American group in eastern North Carolina. The lore is we’re descendants of the Lost Colony and the Croatan Indians. History geek that I am, I could bore you to death about all the theories surrounding the Lumbees, but I’ll keep it terse.”

“No, go on, please.”

She stole a glace away from the road and crooked an eyebrow up at him. He seemed serious. Gaze back on the road. “Really, I’ll spare you, but I’ll say that Native Americans are far more likely to be lactose intolerant than the typical paleface.” She winked at him.

He smiled.

“My dad is black, and people of African origin don’t naturally have the ability to digest cow’s milk. Hell, most people who aren’t of Northern European extraction lack the mutation that spawns the enzyme, so it’s actually a pretty common thing.”

“Wow, that’s really interesting.” He sounded like he meant it, and Ronnie wanted to give him a gold star.

“It’s just one of those things that makes you really think hard about migration patterns and how they affect physiology. There’s a reason people develop certain immunities, and reasons why some don’t. Oh, that reminds me.” She handed Landon her phone as she pulled into traffic. “Can you pull up the notepad and add lactose-free milk onto my grocery list? Cereal kind of sucks when it’s dry.”

After she filled her cart with necessities at Target, actually leaving a few behind for the sake of her mystique as Landon kept on her heels the entire time, she fetched her D-supplement at the pharmacy counter. The tech pulled up some information in the computer and darted her gaze back and forth between her and Landon.

Ronnie caught the drift. “Oh. Hey, Landon? I forgot to pick up a ream of printer paper. Can you run over to the office supplies and get me some? Just basic twenty pound stuff.”

“Yep.” He was off.

“Ma’am,” the tech said in a whisper. “Your auto-fill for your Loestrin ended last month. Did you know that?”

Ronnie inserted an index finger near the top of her bun and scratched her scalp. “Um, no. Has it been a year already?”

The tech shrugged. “Yeah, sorry.”

“I’ll have to make an appointment somewhere. Damn, I don’t even know what my insurance is going to cover out here.”

The girl turned, stood on tiptoes and scanned the area behind her. No one was watching. She made a
come close
gesture with her hand, and Ronnie leaned onto the counter.

“I have a really good doctor,” the tech whispered. “Lets me pay in installments and everything. Still paying off my last baby’s delivery, but she don’t hound me about it. Want her name?”

Ronnie wanted to ask if she thought for some reason she looked like the sort who’d need to pay in installments, but she kept it to herself. As young as the tech was, there was no way she could have a well-functioning filter between her brain and mouth. Some people never developed one. Momma, for instance.

Ronnie shrugged and pushed back from the counter. “Sure, I’d love her name. Thank you.”

Landon returned, hauling an entire case of paper. He’d probably had some team member cart it out of back stock. Ronnie cringed. It was excessive, but hell, when was she going to get out again?

The tech scribbled a phone number onto the back of a new prescription worksheet and pressed it toward Ronnie. “Tell that hag of an appointment lady Ashley Ross referred you. That’ll get you in. Doc don’t take everybody. Calls herself semi-retired.” Ashley snorted.

Ronnie cocked up an eyebrow, figuring she was missing a joke. She hoped it wouldn’t be on
her
. She stuffed the paper into the top of her purse and zipped it. “Appreciate it.”

After a number of stops at a variety of bookstores and office supply depots that should have tried Landon’s patience, but didn’t, and navigating them through a fried chicken drive-through at Landon’s request, Ronnie steered the car toward Storafalt. She waited until Landon had consumed three extra-crispy drumsticks, then said, “Landon, you don’t have to answer this if you don’t want to, but sometimes it helps me teach if I know what’s going on with my kids.”

“Yeah?”

“Where’s your mom?” She stole a glance away from the road and turned her head to see his lips peeling back into a toothy grin.

Weird.

“This month? Long Beach, I think. Last I heard she was trying out for some reality show. Couldn’t get a role in that indie film she’d stacked all her chips against.”

“Oh, I thought maybe she’d—” Ronnie pressed her lips together. She’d processed that bit of information too fast and certainly not adequately.
Reality show?
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, repeat that?” The stretch of road had become quite twisty, and Ronnie eased off the accelerator and reached for the radio knob. She turned the volume on the rock music Landon had tuned into way down. “Lay that on me again.”

“I think you probably heard me right. Best you hear it from me and not Dad, I guess. One of his triggers.”

“Triggers?”

He didn’t answer for a long while, and Ronnie didn’t push.

She studied the horizon ahead, focusing on the kinks and curves in the road, and occasionally dodging the rare clump of tumbleweed.

Finally, he shifted under his seatbelt and cleared his throat. “You didn’t hear this from me, okay?”

“I didn’t hear it at all.”

“I like you, Ronnie. I’ve had to put a lot of this together on my own. Mom started going offline around the time she was pregnant with Felicity. I didn’t understand it then, but now I realize how disappointed she was about having another baby.”

Ronnie opened her mouth and then closed it, grinding her teeth to squelch the words on her tongue. Who was she to judge? She’d always put her career above settling down herself, so she certainly couldn’t fault another woman for not being completely geeked about maternity. But Liss was such a sweet little girl, a blessing, even if she was a surprise.

“Felicity came and I was at the age where I was helping out more. Peter could pretty much entertain himself, Dad was working a lot, and we had Anna coming in part-time to help with cooking. The house started running itself, and that gave her all the ammunition she needed to check out. Said she wanted to pursue her life-long dream of being an actress.”

“Had she ever acted before then?”

He shook his head emphatically enough for Ronnie to see in her periphery. “Nope. Storafalt girl, born and bred. I love her, don’t get me wrong, but she’s a huge flake. I’m pretty sure Dad pays her rent.”

“Wow. I can see how that would be a trigger.” She was sorry she’d asked. She’d either feel sorry for the kids, or sorry for John. She didn’t want to feel sorry for him. She wanted to be mad at him. Being attracted to him was hard enough, given his jackass-tinged personality, but now she had to pity him, too?

She sighed. Maybe he deserved the pity. She’d gone and picked at him. Gone straight for the jugular just like she always did. Judged without knowing the back-story.

Good job, girl.

She reached into the chicken bucket and wrapped her fingers around what she hoped was a breast as she chose her words. “Do you…talk to her often?”

She asked for reasons beyond professional ones, and it made her feel like a viper. She didn’t pursue men. It wasn’t her style, but she couldn’t help herself. Something about this one man—this bossy, cranky, gorgeous rancher—made her feel somewhat proprietary. Or perhaps maternal?

Maybe that’s all. John needs a mother just as bad as these kids
.

She dragged her tongue over dry lips and swallowed.

Liar.

She didn’t give a damn about who took care of John Lundstrom. But some jealous little voice whining from deep inside her psyche teased, gnawed at her, asking,
Is he still carrying a torch for his ex-wife?

“Not really. She mostly texts and emails, though even that’s rare. Sometimes I wonder if Liss would even recognize her voice if she were to call. She’s kind of a moving target.”

The blood burning behind Ronnie’s cheeks receded. Limited contact. That was good, right? “You don’t seem particularly bitter about it.”

Landon shrugged and slurped his soda. “I’ve learned to—” He drummed the fingers of his free hands on his left knee. “What’s the word, Ronnie? When you sort of put things into separate mental boxes to cope?”

“Compartmentalize.”

“Yeah.”

“That’s pretty mature for a nineteen year old. I’m still struggling with that, and I’ve got you by almost ten years.”

“Ranch kids grow up fast, I guess.” He turned in his seat, pulling his left leg up under his body. “So, tell me about North Carolina.”

She chuckled at the abrupt subject change. “That’s a pretty broad topic. What about it?”

“I was looking at some schools there. NC State has an animal husbandry extension, and the campus would be big enough for me to…” He let his voice trail off as he turned his gaze to the side window. “Get lost on.”

“You could, that’s for sure. I did my own fair share of getting lost on my campus. It was nice to be anonymous sometimes.” She tapped his thigh and drew his attention back to her face. “Phil went to State. I wish I had known you were thinking about it. I would have had you two sit down to talk.”