A Rancher's Pride

chapter Fifteen





Early the next morning, Kayla stood beside Sam at the cash register at Harley’s General Store as he paid the bill. She ran her hands up and down her arms, trying to warm them. They’d spent too much time in the frozen food aisle while Becky deliberated over the ice cream. If Sam had gotten his way, Kayla didn’t doubt, he would have bought every flavor in the freezer case.

“I need to thaw out,” she told him, reaching for the handle of their overflowing cart. Sam had told her all the food for the barbecue would be taken care of, but she and Sharleen between them had come up with a long list of things they still needed. “Becky and I will take the groceries to the truck.”

“All right.”

She gestured for Becky to leave the store ahead of her.

Outside, Kayla hurried over to Sam’s pickup truck and transferred everything into the flatbed, making sure to load the three gallons of ice cream Sam had insisted on buying into the insulated cooler they’d brought. Good thing she had remembered the cooler, or they would have left a trail of sweet ooze all the way back to the ranch.

Becky, standing beside her, suddenly gave her happy screech. One hand clapped over her eye, she took off across the sidewalk.

Pirate.

Here in town?

Kayla turned. The puppy was indeed here. He sprawled, belly flat, on the cement walk outside the barbershop. When he saw Becky running toward him, the puppy bounded to his feet. He lunged forward but was stopped short by the leash around his neck. The other end of the leash seemed to be tied tightly to a railing outside the shop.

The leather strap gave him enough leeway to jump, though, and he leaped back and forth, tail wagging, until Becky reached him.

She patted his head. Then she grabbed at his tail with one hand, pushed at his rump with the other, somehow managing to get him to sit still. But not for long. He rolled over onto his back, exposing his underside for a belly rub.

Kayla laughed. He was such a cute pup. So patient with Becky, too. And she seemed to have no fear of him at all.

After the rub, Becky reached for the leash, tugging on it as if trying to pull it loose from the railing.

Kayla started forward. She had made it halfway to the barbershop when a stocky, red-faced man burst through the doorway. With his hair half-combed, he looked as if he’d jumped out of his chair before Lou, the barber, had finished his job.

“Hey, you,” the man called, “leave that leash alone. Hey! Did you hear what I said? Drop it.” He tried to pry Becky’s fingers from the strap.

She gave a startled, high-pitched cry.

“Wait a minute,” Kayla called, doubling her speed. “You leave her alone. She can’t hear you!”

“Porter!”

The roar came from behind Kayla, drowning out her final words. Before she could turn, someone brushed by her, nearly knocking her off balance.

Sam.

He put his hand on the man’s elbow. “Take your mitts off my kid.”

“Or what?” Porter demanded, shouldering Sam aside.

The shove pushed Sam into Pirate, who had sprung up and begun jumping back and forth again. In turn, Sam’s weight pushed the dog against Becky, who lost her footing and fell against the rail.

Sam swung at the other man. The sight of his fist connecting with Porter’s chin made Kayla wince.

A crowd had started to gather, drawn from the barbershop and Harley’s.

She rushed over to the two men and wedged herself between them.

“Sam.” She put her hand on his arm. “Let’s go, okay?”

He stared past her at his neighbor. “Not okay.”

Porter backed off, rubbing his jaw and glaring at them.

“We don’t want a scene,” she hissed, nearly into Sam’s ear. “And you especially don’t want one with this man.”

For a long moment, he did nothing. Then he silently took Becky by the hand and walked away.

As Kayla breathed a sigh of relief, Becky gave one last look over her shoulder and waved goodbye to Pirate.

Porter yanked on the leash. The pup let out a low growl.

“Everything’s fine, folks,” Sam called.

“That’s good to hear.” Lou had been hovering in the doorway of his shop. After nodding at Kayla, the barber stepped back and closed the door in Porter’s face.

She hurried to catch up to Sam. He had already settled Becky in her booster seat in the truck. Kayla climbed into the cab and had barely strapped herself in when he started the engine. He took off with a burst of speed that bounced her back against the seat.

She looked over her shoulder. Becky sat looking out the window at Pirate.

“Sam,” Kayla said, “it would be nice to get home with the groceries still in the truck.”

“Yeah.” He growled the word. And sounded almost exactly like Pirate. But the truck slowed.

“What is it with you and Porter?” she demanded.

“You seemed to know all about it, with that warning you gave me.”

She shook her head. “Not all. Just some.”

“Where do you get your information?” She hesitated.

“Don’t bother,” he added. “I can guess. The women of Flagman’s Folly are always ready for a good gossip.”

Feeling her cheeks flush, she adjusted the air conditioner vent. Finally, she said, “I’d rather hear the full story from you. The true one.”

A long pause, as he drove slowly down Signal Street and along the back lanes already familiar to her, that took them out of town.

She should have known he wouldn’t answer her.

But when he turned, at last, onto the road that led to the ranch, he surprised her.

“How much do you know already?” he asked.

“Well.” She chose her words carefully from Matt’s report. “When you were a teenager, there was an accident, a fire on the Porters’ property. And there were animals lost.”

“Kind of cold, isn’t it?”

She frowned, puzzled.

“Say it like it was, Kayla.”

“You mean…”

“No, you mean, I started a fire in the Porters’ barn, and I killed off half the livestock in it.”

“You forgot the accident part.”

“Who said it was an accident?”

She turned abruptly toward him and almost choked when the seat belt stopped short. Now she knew how poor Pirate had felt with that leash around his neck. She loosened the strap. “Come on, Sam. I know you wouldn’t do something like that on purpose.”



SHE BELIEVED HIM.

The knowledge rocked him, making Sam grip the steering wheel so hard, he thought he’d leave permanent grooves. A mile down the road later, he still couldn’t get over it.

Or figure out how to answer her.

Kayla believed him, but she didn’t understand how much she was asking of him by wanting to know the full story. There were details about that night in the Porters’ barn that no one else had ever learned.

No one could learn them, because he’d made a promise to the only other person who knew what had happened. A teenage promise that had gone a long way toward helping screw up his life.

But Kayla sat there looking at him, waiting for him to answer.

Trusting him, for once, to tell her the truth.

He shifted his grip on the wheel, looked at the road ahead and in his rearview mirror. No one else in sight. They might have been alone, the three of them.

Except for the man he’d never forgotten, who could just as well be riding alongside him now, invisible, for all that Sam couldn’t force him from his mind.

And except for the animals who’d been trapped in the burning building. The memory of them stayed with him, too.

“We’d gone into the barn that night to get out of the cold,” he said slowly.

“You and…?”

“Porter.”

“The man who owns Pirate?”

He nodded.

“He’d turned on a kerosene lamp, low. We could just about see our hands in front of our faces. Enough to do what we wanted to do.” He flexed his fingers, then tightened them on the wheel again. “We had a bottle of whiskey he’d taken from his old man’s stash in the garage. First time we’d ever done that. Felt like a real kick to be sneaking into the barn, hanging out like the ranch hands did.” He paused, then went on. “We both got stupid-drunk.”

He glanced at his mirrors again then looked in his rearview at Becky. She was turning the pages of a picture book.

Kayla sat watching him intently.

He shrugged. “We started goofing around with the hay and next thing we knew, we had started a fire we couldn’t control.”

She sucked in a breath so loud, he could hear it over the hum of the pickup’s tires against the road. “You didn’t do it deliberately.”

“No, but we were under the influence. And it was my fault.”

“Yours? How can you say that? It sounds like you both messed up.”

“Yeah, but I was the one who’d come up with the idea of taking the whiskey.”

She said nothing. She didn’t need to. He knew what she was thinking. So much for trusting him now. So much for asking him for the truth. He’d never lied before the night of that fire. A couple days later, after leaving the courtroom, he’d sworn he’d never do so again. But that one lie of omission in front of the judge had hurt him ever since.

Finally, she spoke. “What happened? With the fire?”

He stared, unblinking, into the distance, trying to get the words from his throat. “Some of the rags the ranch hands used to polish the tack started smoldering, too. We barely had time to blink before we were surrounded by smoke and flames. We…we headed for the animals. Tried to get them out of their stalls. They were scared. Confused. In a panic. So were we.”

The road ahead was clear.

He couldn’t help himself, he had to close his eyes for the briefest of moments. Had to try to shut out the sights from that night. The sounds, the smell.

A second later, his eyes shot open again. The blackness behind his lids only made the images more clear, the memories more real, like watching a movie projected on a screen in a darkened theater. Cold sweat ran down his brow.

“You can’t repeat any of this, Kayla. No one knows Porter was there that night.”

“What? How could they not know?” He could hear the bewilderment in her tone.

“The ranch hands were there in no time, but everything was in chaos. Later, Porter said he’d been in the house and run out to do what he could to help.”

“Sam…” She shook her head. “I just don’t understand. Why would you let him get away with that? Why would you take all the blame, when he was right there with you?”

“He begged me to. He’d been in trouble so often his old man had threatened the next time he would ship him off to military school.”

“Maybe that’s what he needed.”

“Maybe. Who knows now?” He sighed. “But back then, it was a big deal, and he was scared as hell his old man would follow through. Back then, we were best friends. He begged me to cover for him, and I did. And you can’t repeat any of this,” he said again. “I gave him my solemn promise no one would ever know. And even seeing the kind of scum he’s turned out to be, I won’t go back on my word.”



KAYLA LOOKED AT THE MANTEL clock. Not yet time for her to start lunch—or dinner, as they called the noon meal here. She sank onto one of the living-room couches with a cushion cradled in her arms.

On the opposite couch, Sam sat with a ledger spread open across his lap and a calculator balanced on one knee. He’d been at it since they’d come home that afternoon, figuring and crumpling up scrap paper and figuring again. Becky knelt on the floor, her coloring book and crayons taking up most of the space on the coffee table.

The two of them wore nearly identical frowns of concentration.

Kayla held back a groan and hugged the pillow more tightly to her.

After the fight between Sam and his neighbor, she had been frantic to get Sam out of there before any more damage was done. She couldn’t blame him for his reaction. She might have done the same herself. Wasn’t she already rushing to Becky’s aid when he had gone running past?

And that creep, Porter, had been manhandling a four-year-old!

Kayla didn’t know which to be more thankful for, the fact that Sam had stood up for Becky, or that he had trusted her with the truth about his next-door neighbor and their past.

Hearing the story about the fire had shown her Sam in a different light, too. Yes, he had done a stupid thing. But he’d paid the price for it, probably in more ways than one. She could see that in his face when he’d talked about the loss of the animals in the barn.

How could she hold either of those episodes against him?

For all those years, he had honored a promise he’d made to a friend—although to a friend who didn’t deserve Sam’s loyalty.

And today, at least he’d been fighting for his daughter, instead of ignoring her as he had done for so long. Nothing else would have even come close to affecting her. But the show of support for Becky forced Kayla to admit the truth.

Both from her own observations lately and from the certainty that had taken root in her, she knew Sam wanted to be a good daddy to his daughter. He just didn’t know how.

Across from her, he tossed a crumpled-up sheet of paper onto the coffee table. Becky laughed and batted it back toward him.

He smiled. The wistfulness of his expression tore at Kayla’s heart.

Becky got to her feet and ran off to the kitchen, where she’d left her dolls.

Kayla looked back at Sam and forced herself to keep her voice steady, her words light. “Having troubles?” she asked, glancing at the wads of paper all around him.

“Yeah. Color problems. Trying to turn red into black.”

Before she could ask what he meant, he leaned forward and picked up one of Becky’s crayons. With a grin, he held his hand out to her, the crayon balanced on his open palm. “How do you say black in sign?”

Kayla drew an invisible line across her forehead with the tip of her index finger. “What did you mean, you’re ‘trying—?’”

“How about red?” He picked up another crayon. “How do you sign that?” He seemed to want to distract her from what he had said.

Slowly, she touched her same index finger below her mouth and brushed the tip downward and off her chin. His gaze lingered on her bottom lip.

He rose from his couch and came around the coffee table to sit beside her.

She clutched the cushion she had dropped into her lap.

“Green?” he asked, grabbing another crayon.

She held her thumb and index finger a half inch apart. Luckily, she needed to shake her hand to form the sign for green, because her fingers were already trembling.

“Blue?” he asked, looking directly at her.

She glanced down at his empty hand. “N-no fair. You’re not holding a blue crayon.”

“I was talking about your eyes. They’re blue. Very blue. And your cheeks are bright pink all of a sudden.” He smiled and leaned closer. “I can learn all my colors,” he murmured, “just by looking at you.”

Her heart thumped heavily. She wanted to lean back but couldn’t. She should get up and walk away. Somehow, she couldn’t do that, either. “There are more signs than just colors, you know.” Her voice cracked on the last word.

He smiled. He knew just what he was doing to her. And darn him, he was enjoying it.

“True.” He nodded. “How do you say I?”

She pointed her index finger at herself.

“And how do you say want?”

“You…do this.” She held both palms up and crooked all her fingers as she pulled her hands toward her body.

He leaned even closer. “And how do you say a kiss?” he whispered.

“Uhh…” She paused. “I forget.” She had to draw the line somewhere.

Didn’t she?

Chuckling, he shook his head. “Well, maybe this will help your memory.” He slid his arm around her waist and held her close.

Before she could react, could close her eyes or even take a breath, Becky’s high-pitched laughter rang out. She stood in the kitchen archway, her shoulders hiked up near her ears and her hands trying to cover the huge grin splitting her face.

A gesture that could probably be understood in any language.

Then she put the fingertips of each hand together and pursed her lips.

“Saved,” Kayla said, gently pushing Sam away. “You’ve just seen the sign for kiss.”