Chapter 5
Mom
Call your dad
James
Why? Did he forget how phones work?
Mom
What do you mean?
James
He doesn’t have to wait for me to call him. He can literally call me whenever he wants. My number is programed into his phone.
Mom
He wants you to call him. He misses you so much, honey.
James
Then he can call me.
Mom
You know he won’t do that.
James
Because he”s too stubborn.
Mom
Well, I guess that makes two of you.
I showed up at the main house Sunday evening promptly at 5:30, bearing cobbler, nervous as heck about seeing Adam again. Our first encounter had been a disaster. Our second went better, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that my new boss was less than pleased about the arrangement. He hadn’t said much, letting Blaine do most of the talking while he stood there, arms crossed, terse and unsmiling.
Third time’s the charm, I told myself as I rang the doorbell, hoping it was true.
Was it too much to ask that I charmed the pants off him? Figuratively, not literally, despite my mind choosing this exact second to relive the feeling of his mouth smashed against mine, the hard muscles of his shoulders under my hands.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “It’s fine, it’s fine, it’s fine,” I muttered.
Was it, though? Was it really.
Well, fake it ’til you make it, as Mom always said. Of course, Mom never had to fake anything except her hair color. So.
The door flung open, and I beamed a smile without knowing who the recipient would be. It landed on Ben.
“Hi,” he said. Then tilted his head, considering me, before slowly smiling back. I liked that. I got the feeling this kid didn’t say or do anything he didn’t mean.
“Hi,” I said back.
His eyes fell on the covered dish in my hands. “What’s that?”
“Cobbler. I stopped by the farmer’s market in town, so it’s got a mix of fresh local berries. Do you like cobbler?” I asked hopefully.
He lifted a shoulder. “Never had it. But I’ll eat it. Gramps says the only person who gets to complain about the food is the cook.”
I laughed. “That’s a good rule. But you’ll tell me if you like something better, right? So I’ll know what to bring next t—”
Adam appeared, looming over Ben like the Rockies over the plains. Glowering, of course. “You coming in or what?”
I blinked, my smile wavering ever so slightly. What was it about this man that always made me feel like I had been caught doing something naughty?
Worse, made me want to do something naughty. Just to see what he would do about it. He was all roped forearms and broad shoulders. Furrowed brow. Scowling mouth. This man had buttons I wanted to push. Hard.
I stepped inside. Ben disappeared, leaving us alone in the foyer, staring at each other. I lifted the dish higher, like a peace offering. Not that we were at war. It was just…tense. “I brought cobbler.”
He frowned. Literally frowned. As though my cobbler was a personal affront. He had that mean teacher vibe. Like he was on the brink of issuing detention to a precocious student.
Unfortunately for him, I had always been precocious. So, really, it was his fault that when he reached for the cobbler, I said, “Careful. You wouldn’t want to accidentally kiss me again.”
A muscle in his cheek popped as he stared at me. Then his gaze trailed from my face down my body to the cobbler in my hands, all the way down to my pink boots and back up again. His voice was perfectly flat when he said, “That’s not going to happen.”
Clearly, he found me lacking.
It would have been unnerving if I hadn’t had a lifetime of experience disappointing men. Maybe I should give him my dad’s phone number. Let them commiserate.
I maintained eye contact, smiling the whole time, as he relieved me of the cobbler. He didn’t smile back. Maybe that was a good thing. Scowling, he was already the most beautiful man I’d ever clapped eyes on. Smiling? That might be too much. He was my boss. We needed to keep this relationship strictly professional, which would be hard to do if his smile melted the panties off my body.
The scowl was dangerous enough as it was.
“Thank you,” he forced out, like the words were physically painful in his mouth. The tips of his ears were red beneath the glints of silver in his dark hair. Was he blushing? Or merely annoyed?
“You’re welcome,” I said.
Once again, we were staring at each other. Awkwardly.
Okay, no. We could not go on like this. This job was too important to me to allow something as stupid as an accidental kiss to mess it all up. I had won over psychopath stallions with murder on their minds. Could one grumpy cowboy really be that hard?
Other than his very hard shoulders, obviously.
“Do we have a problem?” I asked. “I mean, I realize the way we first met was…” I waved a hand in the air, lacking words to adequately describe what that was. “But we’re both adults, right? We can move past it. We have to move past it if we’re going to work well together.”
His brows pushed together. “We don’t have a problem.”
“Oh,” I said. “Great. Your scowl sure had me fooled there for a second.” I offered him a cheeky grin.
His scowl deepened, if that was possible. “I’m not—” He lifted his hand to his forehead and mouth to verify. He blinked, his expression changing to baffled exasperation. “Well, shit.”
I burst out laughing and he blinked again, like it had caught him by surprise. “That’s okay, boss. Now that I know you have Resting Grump Face, I won’t take it personally.”
“Hey, there you both are. We’re all in the kitchen.” A man who matched Adam in height, but was slightly slimmer through the shoulders, appeared in the hallway. He took the pan from Adam, gave it an appreciative sniff, then turned to me. With the cobbler balanced on one palm, he extended his other hand out to me. “I’m Braxton Hale. Brax. You must be James Campos.”
“That’s me.” His large hand engulfed mine, but I held firm.
His eyebrows went up. “Nice grip.”
“All the better to hold on for the ride.”
Adam’s eyes narrowed into slits as he looked between us, but Brax laughed, his blue eyes glinting. “Spoken like a true horsewoman. Mom would have loved you. Welcome to Lodestar Ranch, James.”
Well. That was a nice change from his older brother. “Thank you,” I said. “I’m happy to be here.”
“Good. Because we’re happy to have you.”
The scowl on Adam’s face suggested otherwise, but at least this time, it wasn’t directed at me. It was aimed squarely at his brother. Maybe his Resting Grump Face really wasn’t about me at all.
I was happy about that. Truly I was. I didn’t want my new boss to hate me. But maybe there was a tiny, stupid part of me that felt a sharp jab of jealousy, like I wanted to keep all his scowls to myself.
A totally normal, acceptable reaction to one’s boss.
Keep telling yourself that, babe.
Two hours later, stuffed to the ribs with chili, cornbread, and cobbler, the dishes done—I insisted on washing, despite Ted’s protests—I took my beer onto the back patio to enjoy the view at golden hour.
If I had known my grumpy cowboy boss was already out there, I might have made a different choice, but it was too late now. I wasn’t the type to turn tail and run.
He sort of grunted at me, which I took to mean hello, so I smiled and tipped my beer to the mountains. “This place is incredible.”
He grunted again. I took that to mean, I agree. Please keep talking.
“My cabin is really nice, too. Thank you for that.” I paused to give him time to reply. He jerked a nod, which was at least a step up from grunting, and took a pull of his beer. Words were clearly not this guy’s forte. I switched tactics. “Tell me about the ranch.”
He squinted at me. “We train quarter horses. Sometimes we breed them.” Said drily, with a smidge of irony lacing the words.
I laughed. He ducked his head and the corner of his mouth twitched up. It wasn’t a smile, but it wasn’t a scowl, either. “No, I mean tell me about the history. I want to know everything.”
“Everything?” He rubbed his stubbled jaw. My fingertips tingled, like I could feel the scratch of his unshaven beard against my skin. “This land has been in the Hale family for generations, ever since the gold rush days of the eighteen hundreds. Thomas Hale came over from England without a penny to his name. Figured he would strike gold.”
“Did he?” I asked, fascinated.
“No. But he did open a whorehouse and proceeded to make a tidy little fortune selling women and booze.” Adam smirked when I let out a shocked laugh. “He bought acres of property. The next generation started a cattle ranch. The generation after that discovered the land was worth more than the cattle and sold a good chunk of it. By the time my dad inherited, we were down to ninety acres.”
I gazed out at the green pastures that stretched to the mountains. “It’s a good ninety acres, though.”
“That’s what the developers say, too.”
My head turned sharply in his direction. Coming from California, I knew all about developers. Open land was at a premium these days. Everyone wanted this view, even if there wasn’t enough water to go with it. “Would Ted ever sell?”
Adam shook his head. “Nah. Not unless there was no other choice. Lodestar Ranch means too much to him. Horses were always his dream, but he didn’t know what form that would take until he met my mom. Jenny. She was the brains behind it all. They built this place together. Made his dream a reality.”
I was quiet for a moment while I took that in. Ted had told me he had lost his wife to cancer a couple of years ago. He had been up front with the toll that loss had taken on him—and the ranch. I saw that loss a little more clearly now. No wonder it had been hard for him to show up every day at the stables, when everything was a reminder of how much he had lost.
“He must have loved her very much,” I said softly.
“That I did,” Ted said, startling me as he stepped through the doorway to join us on the terrace. “I still do. That’s what grief is, isn’t it? Missing someone you love. I miss her every day. I named this place for her, you know. Lodestar. That’s what she was to me. My lodestar, guiding me through the dark. She never steered me wrong.”
Shit, my eyes were wet. I blinked rapidly. “That’s beautiful.”
“We met in high school. She was fourteen, I was two years older. She was always the one for me from the moment we met. Love like that, it only hits once, and when it hits, you know.”
Only once.
I tried to wrap my mind around that. The confidence of it. It was hard to fathom. In my twenty-eight years, I’d had a handful of boyfriends, none of whom lasted longer than a year. Horses were my focus, not boys. But they had all been good guys—great, some of them. Twice I had even been in love, and those breakups had hit hard.
Yet looking back…phew. I couldn’t imagine being married to any of them. Not happily, anyway. But if someone had asked me three months in, if this was forever? With my last boyfriend, Todd, I would have said yes. Now, a year past the breakup, all I could say was thank god it wasn’t.
“I’m going to see what Ben is up to. I’ll leave you two to the sunset,” Ted said, slipping back into the house.
I peeked curiously at Adam behind my beer, wondering what he thought of his dad’s love story. Ben’s mom wasn’t around, I knew that much. There wasn’t a ring on Adam’s finger, and no one ever mentioned her. Were they divorced? Had they ever been married at all? Where was she now? I scrunched my nose.
Adam took a pull of beer. “What?” he asked.
“Just thinking about what your dad said. How love like that only happens once.” I shook my head. “I can’t decide if that’s romantic or terrifying. What do you think?”
He stared silently out at the mountains for so long, I figured he wasn’t going to answer. And then, finally—
“A relief,” he said.
He disappeared inside before I could ask why.