Chapter Thirteen
Jayce
They ate lunch on the patio overlooking the rolling fields of the valley. His mom and dad weren’t speaking yet, and they each wanted the other to know it, so a potential truce didn’t appear to be on the table alongside the milk.
Jayce had more important things to worry about than his parents behaving like children. He had a dozen work-related things to attend to while he was home. Equipment maintenance was his responsibility, and the ranch hands were haying, so the hayfields were his first stop after lunch.
His thoughts refused to stray far from Malika. She was another one of his problems. Maybe he’d take her with him to check on some rangeland they’d leased from a neighbor. It was always good to look at familiar things through fresh eyes.
Especially pretty green eyes that refused to stray far from him, either. What might have happened if the idiot scientist hadn’t interrupted? How far might things have gone? Where would she draw the line? Did she have one? Because he couldn’t decipher the signals she sent.
It was like high school all over again.
“How long has your family lived on the ranch?” Malika asked Huck, because she’d faced down one ill-tempered bear already today, and one more wouldn’t faze her.
Fortunately, she’d hit the one topic that his dad could pontificate over for hours.
“Jayce is the fifth generation of Hansons,” Huck told her proudly. “Fourth generation rancher. Most family-owned operations don’t last beyond two or three generations, but we’re still going strong. He’s got a good head on his shoulders and plenty of modern ideas to pass on to his kids.”
The secondary income from Burning Scrub’s ventures didn’t hurt either, because at the end of the day ranching was a labor of love, but no need to burst his dad’s bubble. He had a right to be proud of what the family had built.
“Goodness.” Malika gazed at his dad with wide-eyed admiration.
She really did know a lot about flirting, and she laid it on thick.
She shifted all that admiration to incorporate Jayce’s mom, proving she could charm either sex, regardless of age. “You’re such a wonderful couple. How did you two meet?”
Jayce had heard this story before. It always softened his mom’s eyes and made his dad beam. He gave Malika a careful thumbs-up of approval when his parents weren’t looking.
“We met at a horse sale,” Vanessa said. “I was a city girl. My parents taught at the university. I was a month away from turning seventeen, and they said I could have a horse for my birthday. I had my heart set on a pretty little rescue mare, and I was trying to decide if I could afford her, when this cocky young cowboy sidled up to me and started to quietly point out all the reasons why she was a bad choice for me. Then he proceeded to sell me one of his horses.”
“At a steep discount,” Huck added. “On the condition she allow me to visit the horse every now and then.”
Vanessa smiled at her husband, and Jayce began to have hope that they’d put their squabble behind them. “Every now and then turned into every second Saturday. My parents weren’t pleased, but Huck won them over.”
“They weren’t easy to sway, either,” Huck said. “Your parents didn’t like having an uneducated rancher chasing after their precious little girl. They had bigger plans for you than me.”
“So, Huck went to college,” Vanessa said to Malika. “Earned himself a business degree.”
Huck didn’t know how to quit when he was ahead.
“One of us had to get a practical education. That English degree of yours wasn’t going to get you very far without a doctorate behind it.
I ended up having to teach you how to take over the ranch finances.
Would have saved us both trouble and money if you’d got the business degree yourself, in the first place. ”
“What a wonderful story,” Malika exclaimed, apparently determined to ignore the clear signs that the conversation was taking a steep, downward turn. “How lucky you are to have found each other, and to both know what you wanted.”
“I wanted the prettiest girl I’d ever laid eyes on,” Huck declared, and Jayce’s hope rekindled.
Vanessa laughed. “I wanted a horse.”
Huck scowled. “And now, you want ferrets.”
Jayce shook his head and gave up. Nope. No truce today. Something about those ferrets was really bugging his dad. And as for his mother…
She could use a lesson or two about handling bears from Malika.
His mom began gathering the empty dishes. “Sweetheart, give me a hand, will you?” she said to Jayce.
Son of a—
He’d dropped his guard while his parents reminisced, and now that his defenses were sufficiently down, she was about to move in for the kill.
He knew what was coming. Put him in the same room with a pretty woman, and his parents, obsessed over the next generation of Hansons, started having ideas.
His mother planned to give him the third degree in the kitchen.
She set the stack of dirty dishes on the counter above the dishwasher, then started to load them.
Then, she started on Jayce.
“Malika is a lovely girl.” Which was a statement of fact, not a question. “I hear you’ve been spending a lot of time together.”
And so, it began.
“How reliable is your source? Because you didn’t hear it from me,” he said.
“We don’t spend as much time together as you seem to think.
She and Tilly are friends, which takes a lot of the babysitting duties off me.
She’s friendly with Pearl too. Plus, Mavis really likes her and has been teaching her stuff. ”
He was overexplaining. He did that when he was guilty. Except he hadn’t done anything all that terribly wrong, not yet, so the guilt nibbling at the corners of his conscience and spilling out of his mouth was premature.
But his mom didn’t know that. She kept on loading the dishwasher.
“I’m relieved to hear it. She has some very unusual opinions about sex.”
Jayce choked on the cookie he’d swiped from the jar over the fridge. As much as he would love to hear about Malika’s unusual opinions regarding sex, he didn’t need to hear them from his mother.
“Can we talk about something else?”
“I don’t think so.”
She closed the dishwasher door with her hip. Then she folded her arms, meaning she was settling in for a lecture.
She did not disappoint. “Proceed with caution where she’s concerned, sweetheart.
I can see that she’s caught your attention, and honestly, I’d be more surprised if she hadn’t.
She’s unique. I like her a lot. But that girl has relied on women married to much older, far more experienced men, for her information on sex.
Information that’s outdated and exceedingly patriarchal, might I add.
There’s not a feminist bone in her body.
And you are not at all familiar with the world she grew up in.
She’s been sheltered. Very sheltered. Raised to be the wife of a much older, very rich man.
A man who can indulge any sexual fantasies with her he likes, because he believes her body’s his right.
You know what a shotgun wedding is, don’t you?
“Except her male family members are more likely to concentrate on the shotgun for you, not the wedding, because she’s already been bought and paid for.
Mark my words. The wedding her brother arranged for her is going to happen, whether she likes it or not.
She’ll still end up married to the same older, very rich man who bought himself a young, beautiful wife from an influential family.
“If you don’t take care, when he does marry her, he’s not going to value her anymore.
All that spirit you see in her—her innocence, her perspective on life, and her pride—all of it will be crushed.
All for a quick roll in the hay with a cowboy—because she’s as curious about you as you are about her. I want you to think about that.”
What grown man didn’t enjoy getting a lecture on sex from his mom? How had they gone from her encouraging any available woman who showed an interest in him to proceed with caution?
But in this instance, his mom was right. He’d waffled back and forth as to how experienced Malika might be. He’d had his suspicions, and his mom just confirmed them. His mom had no reason to worry.
She really didn’t.
“Thanks. I promise to think about what you said, and I’ll take it under advisement. But you’re worrying about nothing. She’s a paying guest, and I have obligations to Burning Scrub and the ranch.” He kissed his mom on the cheek. “I love you.”
“I love you too. But I can’t help but worry. You’re a man, and men tend to think with their lower body anatomy, not their brains.”
“That’s because we have two brains. Like dinosaurs. And both of my brains work just fine.”
“Good. I expect you to use the one on top of your shoulders to keep that girl out of trouble.”
He wrapped his mom in a full body hug, lifted her off her feet, then set her down.
“She won’t get into trouble if I keep her busy.
I’ll take her with me to check on the new rangeland and see how the haying is going.
Since we’re handing out free advice, though, why don’t you sort things out with Dad while we’re gone? ”
“Your dad needs to sort things out with me,” his mom said.
*
The truck bumped across the field, skirting long windrows of freshly cut grass waiting to be picked up by the balers. Tractors chugged steadily along at opposite ends of the field, churning out tidy bales that were tossed onto wagons to be hauled back to the ranch.
“We store those ones in the pastures,” Jayce explained when Malika asked about the large round bales lined up along the side of the field.
“Not all of them. Just some. In the winter, when the weather’s bad, it can be hard to get into the pastures to feed the cattle, so we keep those out here for backup.
We try not to leave more bales than we’ll need.
They damage the ground—weeds grow underneath them.
We’ll stack the rest in the yard, close to the barns. ”