Chapter 4
“Oh. I see.” The light had come on for Tillman. “You weren’t in jail because you had done anything wrong. You were in jail for a fundraiser for your...friend who lives here on the ranch.”
Man, he felt like an idiot. He had judged Phoebe, intentionally or no, based on where he’d seen her, and even went so far as to think that she might have been tipsy.
“Yeah. That was my first time in jail. Hopefully it will be my last too, although I think there were a few people who really enjoyed seeing me there and who would donate a lot of money to the cause.”
“You have enemies?”
“More like friends who have a twisted sense of humor,” Phoebe said with a laugh, not explaining any further. But she didn’t really need to. He had friends like that. Good friends, friends who knew him so well that they knew that having him do something out of character, something that would make him uncomfortable, would probably be good for him.
“Sometimes friends can be a real pain in the butt,” he said, but while his voice sounded a little gruff, there was affection in it, which he intended.
“Yeah. But you wouldn’t trade them for the world, and sometimes I’m one of those pain-in-the-butt friends to my friends.”
He doubted that. She didn’t look like she had the ability to tease in her. She just looked sweet and...way too nice. Too nice for her own good. Too nice to work on a ranch. Too nice to be in the same world with people like Nicole.
No. Nicole had gotten him under her spell to begin with. He had fallen for that sweet, pretty face and her big blue eyes when they batted up at him, and her silky blonde hair that fell in shimmering waves over her shoulders. The curve of her hip, the turn of her ankle, and all of the other things that he admired about her had totally blinded him to her true character. He wasn’t going to be that ridiculously stupid again.
Never again.
“I’m sorry I jumped to the wrong conclusion,” he said, remembering that Nicole had told him that he needed to learn to apologize, instead of yelling at her and trying to defend himself.
At the time, he thought that she needed to take some of her own advice, because she never apologized, and she would say it was because she was never wrong.
He disagreed. But he couldn’t change her, he could only change himself, and she was right. He didn’t like to apologize. He found, in the short time since she’d said that, that it was easier to apologize right away than it was to go back and dig up old bones. He’d rather put things to bed and let them stay there.
“It’s okay. It’s perfectly acceptable. I would have done the same thing if I would have met someone coming out of the jail. I would just assume that they were there because of something they’d done wrong and probably even made judgments about their character because of that.”
“Guilty. I assumed you were tipsy when you ran into me.”
She laughed. “Well, I’ve never been accused of being drunk before, but I am clumsy. I guess I should just warn you now. I would love to be one of those tall, graceful kind of people, but unfortunately, I never outgrew the tall, gangly stage, where you seem like you’re more elbows and knees and feet that get in the way than anything else.”
He disagreed. She walked gracefully, matching his stride. There weren’t too many women who he didn’t have to slow his walk down for so they could keep up, but Phoebe matched him perfectly.
Which did not matter. Not in the slightest.
“All right. This is the bunkhouse. The guests stay on the other side. We put a wall up so that if we had any hired help, they could stay here. A couple of my brothers choose to stay here as well.” She paused. “We only have family working on the ranch, except Stonewall. He was friends with our family, and with my sister Johanna in particular, and he moved with us when we moved from Wyoming.”
“Wow. He must’ve really liked you guys to move that far.”
Phoebe looked around, and then she lowered her voice. “I think he had some ulterior motives, but he really did grow up with us. He’s worked on our ranch, first for my dad, when he was even younger than a teenager, and goodness, he’s done as much work here as any of us have. He certainly deserves to move wherever we do.”
Deserves. Like just because he acted like he was a part of the family he deserved to be treated like it. That was kind of a novel idea too. But after knowing Ezra in college, he knew the Clyborne family wasn’t a typical family. First of all, there were twelve kids in their family. No one had a family like that anymore. In fact, it was almost impossible to. Laws were certainly not geared toward making life easy for families with more than two or three kids.
She opened the door to the bunkhouse and led him down a hallway with the occasional door off to the right.
“This used to be all one big room, but we figured that folks would want a little room for privacy. So, there isn’t much to the bedrooms, just a single bed, a dresser and mirror, and a chair and lamp. An end table as well. We have a rack for you to hang up a few clothes, but not enough room to hang many.”
She walked to the end of the hall and opened up the last door on the right.
“They’re all the same, except for this one which is slightly bigger. My brother just moved out of it, and when Ezra heard you were coming, he asked me to get this one ready for you.”
If it was slightly bigger than the other ones, Tillman couldn’t imagine how small they must be.
“He said you were pretty tall and could use the extra space.” Phoebe had a little bit of humor in her voice, and she had been talking like they were friends, even though they had just met each other that morning. There was just a casual, friendly-type demeanor to her that he found both attractive and off putting.
He didn’t want anyone to know him that well. He didn’t want to have new friends. He didn’t want to open up his heart or his life or his soul again. He wanted to close it off and protect it. That wasn’t necessarily a deliberate decision that he had made, but it was something he wanted to do nonetheless.
“This will be just fine,” he said, although he hadn’t been asked. It wasn’t like he was going to get offered anything else. His only other choice would be to quit the job and find a different job. That wasn’t going to happen, so whatever they gave him, whether a room like this, or a spot in the barn under a leaky roof, or told him to go find his own lodging somewhere else, he would do it.
Farms and ranches, especially family farms and ranches, were going under at an alarming pace. He could work for a big corporation, and he might have to at some point, but as long as he could choose to work for a small ranch, the kind that he wanted for himself, he would do it. No matter the hardship.
“The other reason that Ezra wanted you to have this room is because of this.” Phoebe had walked over and opened a door on the left-hand side of the room. “We had a little bit of extra room when we were laying things out and putting in the plans for the rooms, and we ended up with two small rooms on this side.”
She stepped back so he could see.
“Originally we were going to make them into bathrooms, but we put beds in them and kinda thought that maybe if our guests had a family that needed to have some privacy for some reason, someone who was physically disabled...or something. We just...didn’t really know. But maybe it was God. He knew you’d be here, and you’d have your kids staying at some point. So, this room has two bedrooms off it, just small rooms with beds and nothing else, where your kids can stay when they come to visit.”
So she knew about his children. Probably because of Ezra. It unsettled him a little to know that she knew something he hadn’t told her, that she’d been talking about him when he wasn’t around.
He didn’t know what Ezra thought, didn’t know what Ezra would have told her, other than he’d never heard Ezra say an unkind word about anyone, so he didn’t think that Ezra would all of a sudden have gone out of character and started talking badly about him.
For some reason, that was important to him. He wanted Phoebe to think the best of him.
Not that he cared. Not that there was going to be anything between them, not for any reason like that, just...he already thought highly of her, and he wanted her feelings about him to be mutual, he supposed.
Whatever it was, he tried to shake it off. But he couldn’t shake off his gratitude. This would go a long way toward what he wanted at his next court date. To get his children for the summer. If Nicole was going to have them the whole school year, it was only fair that he got them for the summer.
He wasn’t sure how he was going to pull that off, since he figured they would be sharing whatever accommodations he had, which...he had thought might be a communal room with all of the hands—one room with beds strewn along the walls like a person might find at a summer camp for kids. Those were the accommodations he had before.
This was better than what he had dared to hope for.
Hopefully the judge would see it that way too.
“I really appreciate your consideration. Custody has been...a battle. I suppose that’s why people talk about battling for custody. But this might actually help me in my quest.”
“I can’t imagine being separated from my children.” Phoebe lifted her shoulder. “I was never blessed with children or a husband, but I raised my younger siblings as my own, and seeing them go off to college just tore my heart out. Even though I knew it was for the best, that they were doing what they needed to do with their lives, it was hard. I can’t imagine having them taken from me when they were younger.”
So she’d never married. And if she was just a little bit younger than Ezra, that meant she was just a little younger than him. Maybe thirty-six or thirty-seven. Since he was knocking hard on forty at thirty-eight.
“Yeah,” he said, not saying anything more.
The rooms were very simple and small, as Phoebe had said. Just a bed and a small nightstand with a lamp on it. That was it. There was a small area where his door opened, with the door to the right and then a door to the left. Neither of the rooms had windows.
Maybe, he’d be able to spend some nights under the stars with his kids. Although, that wasn’t something he was going to ask about today. He didn’t even know if he was going to be able to get his kids here. He was pretty much at Nicole’s mercy, since he was allowed to visit at her house, but he was not allowed to take the children with him overnight. At the time the judge had issued that order, he hadn’t had a home or a job.
His new court date should hopefully show that he had both and would hopefully get him more time with his kids.
“If you need some time to unpack, that’s fine, just say so,” Phoebe said as they closed the door and she walked to the opening of his room. Like she didn’t want to stand in his room with him. He hadn’t seen her looking uncomfortable at all, but just the way her hands moved at her waist, like she didn’t know where to put them until she got to the door, made him think that either being in the room with him made her uncomfortable or being alone with him? He wasn’t sure. Something had made her feel a little antsy though. It wasn’t hard to see that at least.
“I don’t need any time. I’ll deal with this when I get off tonight. I was supposed to start today, and I intend to put in a full day’s work.”
She nodded, smiling, like she had expected it. “All right. Let’s go back and get your saddle, and if you don’t mind driving your pickup, I’ll ride along with you and show you where we keep the horses and tack.”
“All right. I don’t mind.”
She led him back through the hall. It was dark and narrow, but he understood why—to give the rooms as much space as possible.
“You do share a bathroom, and that’s here,” she said, pointing to the last door on the left as they walked out. “We cook all the meals, including breakfast. Typically, we pack a lunch, where you have a sandwich to take with you or can come back to the ranch and grab it, and a full supper as well. It depends on how busy everyone is as to whether the food is hot or cold. In harvest season or during days that we’re working the cattle, food is scarce and cold, typically. Although, with Alaska here, that’s Ezra’s wife—”
“I met her,” he interjected, when she had a bit of a question in her voice.
She nodded, acknowledging his words. “She does a lot better job of just staying in the house and making sure people eat. I was always supposed to be cooking, but then someone would need me outside, and I’d go, and we’d end up eating the bits and pieces that I could scratch together when I was done working. As I got better at it, I planned for those times and made meals that involved the crockpot in the morning and food ready for a big lunch, then we’d have leftovers for supper.”
“All right,” he said, not bothering to say that anything that she made would be better than what he made for himself. He could cook; it wasn’t rocket science, but he never put a lot of effort into it. He’d rather be out doing something than spending time in the kitchen, because once a person cooked, there was the cleanup to do as well. So, sandwiches were pretty much what he’d subsided on, along with canned soup, and anything that was easy. Anything that could be made in the microwave in five minutes or less.
He had a feeling he’d be eating better here than he ever had in his life before. And somehow, with that thought, came another. There would be a lot of things he would be doing here that would be better than they’d ever been in his life before.