True Love at Silver Creek Ranch

True Love at Silver Creek Ranch - By Emma Cane

Chapter One

Her chestnut quarter horse, Sugar, was the first to notice something wrong, startling Brooke Thalberg from her troubled thoughts. The November wind high in the Colorado Rockies, just outside Valentine Valley, was unseasonably brutal, whipping snow off the peaks of the Elk Mountains like lumbering giants exhaling icy puffs of breath. Sugar raised her head, sniffing that wind, ears twitching, leaving Brooke unsettled, uneasy, as she rode the pastures of the Silver Creek Ranch. She was checking the fence line so that the cattle didn’t find their way through and wander toward someone else’s land.

It was usually peaceful work, but today she was looking down the long road of her future and feeling that something was . . . wrong. And she hated to feel that way because she’d been blessed with so much.

Sugar lifted her head and shook her mane, neighing, her body tensing. Whatever she sensed wasn’t going away. Brooke lifted her own head—

And smelled smoke.

A shot of fear made her vault upright in the stirrups. She scanned her family’s land, focusing on the house first, framed between clusters of evergreens and aspens. But its two-story log walls seemed as sturdy as always, a faint haze of smoke rising from the stone chimney. The newer barn and sheds nearest the house seemed fine, and gradually she widened her search until she saw the old horse barn, farthest from the house—smoke billowing through the open double doors.

She kicked Sugar into a gallop, leaning forward over the horse’s twitching ears, the breath frozen in her throat. Oh, God, the horses. Frantically, she saw that several trotted nervously around the corral as if they, too, knew something was wrong. She tried to count them, but it was as if her brain had seized with the terror of what she was seeing.

Sugar’s hooves thundered beneath her, faster than even in her barrel-racing days, the ground a blur. The smoke pouring out of the open door grew darker and more menacing, twisting Brooke’s fear ever higher.

At last she reached the barn and threw herself off Sugar’s back, stumbling momentarily in the dirt before she found her balance. The smoke made her lungs spasm in a cough, but even that didn’t make her second-guess what she had to do. She pulled her neck scarf up over the lower half of her face and ran inside, keeping to a crouch. Immediately, the world became darker as the smoke swirled around her. Her shallow breathing was hot and stifled beneath the scarf. If she let herself panic, she could become disoriented, lost, so she kept a firm grip on her emotions. She’d yet to see flames, but she could hear several horses, their neighs more like screams that tore at her heart.

“I’m coming!” she cried, flailing toward the stalls.

She ran into something hard and was only saved from falling to the ground by hands that clasped the front of her coat.

A man pulled her toward him, a stranger, tall and broad-shouldered, his face beneath his cowboy hat obscured by a scarf just like hers was. She could only see a glimpse of his narrowed, glittering eyes, focused intently on her. Who was he? Had he set the fire? she wondered with outrage.

“Are you all right?” He shouted to be heard above the growing roar of the fire and the frightened cries of the horses. “How many horses are there?”

For a moment, her mouth moved, and nothing came out. She saw the tack-room door hanging ajar, its interior full of fire that crackled and writhed. The sight momentarily stunned and mesmerized her, then she suddenly snapped into a sharp awareness. She couldn’t worry about who this man was or what he was doing there. He’d offered to help, and that was all that mattered. Mentally, she counted the horses she’d seen out in the corral. “Should be two inside—no three!”

“I’ll take that side”—he pointed through the smoke toward the west side of the barn—“and you start here.”

She nodded and turned her back, beginning to fling open each stall door. At the fourth door, she was met by hooves pawing through the air. She cried out, diving sideways as they slammed into the wall right beside her. Before Dusty could rear again, she grabbed a blanket hung near the door, flung it over his head, and grabbed ahold of his halter. For a moment he fought her, but she wouldn’t give up.

“Please, Dusty, be a good boy. Come on!”

At last he seemed to dance toward her, and she felt a momentary triumph. She started to run, leading him toward the double doors open to the corral. As they reached fresh air, she pulled the blanket off Dusty’s head and he charged to the far end, where the other horses huddled nervously.

Brooke turned around to head back into the barn, only to see the stranger leading two terrified horses outside. Thank God, she prayed silently. But could she have counted wrong? How could she take the chance? She tried to race past him back into the barn, but he caught her arm and wouldn’t let go.

“You said three horses!” he shouted from beneath the scarf.

A groan seemed to emanate from the barn timbers, turning both their heads. Smoke wafted out in great streams to the sky, but the fire still seemed contained in the tack room.

“I can’t be sure until I check each stall!” She tried to yank her elbow away, but his grip was strong. A blast of heat wafted out, engulfing her, making her sweat even more beneath her layers of winter clothing. She felt almost light-headed.

He loomed over her, and now she could see the sandy waves of hair plastered above his ears, and his narrowed eyes, brown as the sides of the barn but so intent on her.

“I checked all six on the west side. I didn’t hear anything more coming from the east after you’d gone.”

“I can’t take that chance. I only got through four stalls on my side.” She stared at the herd of horses clustered uneasily at the far end of the corral. Nate’s horse, Apollo—was he there? She’d never forgive herself if anything happened to him. And then she saw the dappled gray gelding, and relief shuddered down her spine.

The man didn’t answer her, and she turned to see him disappear into the barn, the smoke swirling out and around him as if to draw him deep inside. A stab of fear shocked her—why was he risking himself for her? Her eyes stung as she reached the entrance, but he was there again, stumbling into her, the upper half of his face dirtied by the soot, his eyes streaming.

“It’s empty!” he called.

She could have staggered with relief that her beloved horses were all right—that this brave man hadn’t been injured.

But relief was only momentary as she began to think about the structure itself, built by her family well over a hundred years before. She hugged herself against the sadness.

As if reading her mind, he said, “You can’t do anything now. And I hear sirens.”

The fire engine from Valentine Valley roared down the dirt road that wound its way through the ranch. The horses were going to be even more frightened, so she ran to the end of the corral and opened the gate so they could escape into the next pasture.

When she returned to the stranger’s side, they were pushed out of the way by the trained professionals. Most were volunteers, like Sally Gillroy from the mayor’s office, who liked to gossip, and Hal Abrams, the owner of the hardware store where her dad and Nate met fellow ranchers for coffee. She recognized all these men and women, but it was strange to see their grim faces rather than easygoing smiles.

“Are you all right?” Hal demanded, his glasses reflecting the flames that had begun to shoot out both doors.

Brooke nodded, still hugging herself, feeling the presence of the stranger at her back. She almost took comfort from it, and that was strange.

“Horses all saved?”

She nodded again, and was surprised to feel a wave of pride and even excitement. Knowing she’d risked herself made her feel more alive and aware than she’d felt in a long time. Everything in life could be so transitory, and she’d just been accepting things that happened to her rather than making choices. She couldn’t live that way anymore. She had to find something that made her feel this alive, that gave her more purpose and focus.

And it scared the hell out of her.

“You’re in the way,” Hal said. “Go on up to the house and clean up. We’ll wet down any nearby buildings to keep them safe. But the barn is a goner.” He turned his shrewd eyes on the stranger. “Is that blood?”

Brooke spun around and saw that the stranger had lowered his scarf. In another situation, she might have been amused at the dark upper half of his face and the white lower half, but she saw blood oozing from a cut across his cheek.

“I’m fine.” The stranger used his gloved hand to swipe at his cheek and made everything worse.

“Come on,” Brooke said wearily, refusing to glance one last time at her family’s barn although she could hear the crackle and roar of the fire. “The bunkhouse is close. We’ll wash up there and see to your face.”

And she could look into his eyes and see if he was the sort who set fires for fun. He didn’t seem it, for he didn’t look back at the fire either, only trudged behind her.

The bunkhouse was an old log cabin, another of the original buildings from the nineteenth-century silver-boom days, when cattle from the Silver Creek Ranch had fed thousands of miners coming down from their claims to spend their riches in Valentine Valley. Brooke’s father had updated the interior of the cabin to house the occasional temporary workers they needed during branding or haying season. There were a couple sets of bunk beds along the walls, an old couch before the stone hearth, a battered table and chairs, kitchen cabinets and basic appliances at the far end of the open room, and two doors that led into a single bedroom and bathroom.

The walls were filled with unframed photos of the various hands they’d employed to work the ranch over the years. Some of those photos, tacked up haphazardly and curling at the edges, were old black-and-whites going almost as far back as photography did.

Brooke shivered with a chill even as she removed her coat. The heat was only high enough to keep the pipes from freezing, and she went to raise the thermostat. When she turned around, the stranger had removed his hat and was shrugging out of his Carhartt jacket, revealing matted-down hair and a soot-stained face. He was wearing a long-sleeve red flannel shirt and jeans over cowboy boots.

To keep from staring at him, she pointed to the second door. “Go on and wash up in the bathroom. I’ll find a first-aid kit.”

He silently nodded and moved past her, limping slightly, shutting the door behind him. He might be hurt worse than he was saying, she thought with a wince. As she opened cabinet doors, she realized the kit was probably in the bathroom. Sighing even as she rolled up her sleeves, she let the water run in the kitchen sink until it was hot, then soaped up her black hands and started on her face. If her hair hadn’t been in a long braid down her back, she’d have dunked her whole head under. She’d have to wait for a shower. Grabbing paper towels, she patted her skin dry.

A few minutes later, the stranger came out of the bathroom, his hair sticking up in short, damp curls, the first-aid kit in his hand. His face was clean now, and she could see that the two-inch cut was still bleeding.

“You probably need stitches,” she said, even as the first inkling of recognition began to tease her. “You don’t want a scar.”

He met her gaze and held it, and she saw the faintest spark of amusement, as if he knew something she didn’t.

“Don’t worry about it, Brooke.”

She hadn’t told him her name. “So I do know you.”

“It’s been a long time,” he said, eyeing her as openly as she was doing to him.

He was taller than her, well muscled beneath the flannel shirt that he’d pushed up to his elbows.

And then his name suddenly echoed like a shot in her mind. “Adam Desantis,” she breathed. “It’s been over ten years since you went off to join the Marines.”

He gave a short nod.

No wonder he looked to be in such great physical shape. Feeling awkward, she forced her gaze back to his face. He’d been good-looking in high school—and knew it—but now his face was rugged and masculine, a man grown.

She got flashes of memory then—Adam as the cool wide receiver all the high-school girls wanted, with his posse of arrogant sidekicks. He’d been able to rule the school, doing whatever he wanted—because his parents hadn’t cared, she reminded herself. And then she had another memory of the sixth-grade science fair, where all the parents had helped their kids with experiments, except for his. His display had been crude and unfinished, and his mother had drunkenly told him so in front of every kid within hearing range. Whenever Brooke thought badly of his antics in high school, that was the memory that crept back up, making her feel ill with pity and sorrow.

“Your grandma talks about you all the time,” she finally said. Mrs. Palmer spoke of him with glowing pride as he rose through the ranks to staff sergeant, a rarity at his age.

“Hope she doesn’t bore everybody,” he answered, showing sincerity rather than just tossing off something he didn’t mean. “I hear she lives with your grandma. The Widows’ Boardinghouse?”

“The name was their idea. They’re kind of famous now, but those are stories for another day. Come here and let me look at your cheek.” He moved toward her slowly, as if she were a horse needing to be calmed, which amused her.

“I can take care of it,” he said.

“Sit down.”

“I said—”

“Sit down!” She pulled out a kitchen chair and pointed. “I can’t reach your face. I’m tall, but not that tall.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he answered gruffly.

She pressed her lips together to keep from smiling.

He eased into the chair just a touch slowly, but somehow she knew he didn’t want any more questions about his health. Adam Desantis, she told herself again, shaking her head. He wasn’t a stranger—and he wouldn’t have started the fire, regardless of the trouble he’d once gotten into. She told herself to relax, but her body still tensed with an awareness that surprised her. She was just curious about him, that was all. She cleared her throat and tried to speak lightly. “I imagine you’re used to taking orders.”

“Not for the last six months. I left after my enlistment was up.”

Tearing open an antiseptic towelette, she leaned toward him, feeling almost nervous. Nervous? she thought in surprise. She worked what most would call a man’s job and dealt with men all day. What was her problem? She got a whiff of smoke from his clothes, but his face was scrubbed clean of it. She tilted his head, her fingers touching his whisker-rough square chin, marked with a deep cleft in the center. His eyes studied her, and she was so close she could see golden flecks deep inside the brown. She stared into them, and he stared back, and in that moment, she felt a rush of heat and embarrassment all rolled together. Hoping he hadn’t noticed, she began to dab at his wound, feeling him tense with the sting of the antiseptic.

Damn it all, what was wrong with her? She hadn’t been attracted to him in high school—he’d been an idiot, as far as she was concerned. She’d been focused on her family ranch and barrel racing and was not the kind of girl who would lavish all her attention on a boy, as he seemed to require. Brooke always felt that she had her own life to live and didn’t need a boyfriend as some kind of status symbol.

But ten years later, Adam returned as an ex-Marine who saved her horses, a man with a square-cut face, faint lines fanning out from his eyes as if he’d squinted under desert suns, and she was turning into a schoolgirl all over again.

Adam stared into Brooke Thalberg’s face as she bent over him, not bothering to hide his powerful curiosity. He remembered her, of course—who wouldn’t? She was as tall as many guys and probably as strong, too, from all the hard work on her family ranch.

A brave woman, he admitted, remembering her fearlessness running into the fire, her concern for the horses more than herself. Now her hazel eyes stared at his face intently, their mix of browns and greens vivid and changeable. She turned away to search the med kit, and his gaze lingered on her slim back, covered in a checked Western shirt that was tucked into her belt. Her long braid tumbled down her back, almost to the sway of her jeans-clad hips. It’s not like he hadn’t seen a woman before. And this woman had been a pest through his childhood, too smart for her own good—seeing into his troubled life the things he’d tried to keep hidden—too confident in her own talent. She had a family who believed in her, and that gave a kid a special kind of confidence. He hadn’t had that sort of family, so he recognized it when he saw it.

He wondered if she’d changed at all—he certainly had. After discovering his own confidence, he’d built a place and a name for himself in the Marines. His overconfidence had destroyed that, leaving him in a fog of uncertainty that had been hovering around him for half a year now.

Kind of like being in a barn fire, he guessed, feeling your way around, wondering if you were ever going to get out again. He still didn’t know.

After using butterfly bandages to keep the wound closed, Brooke taped a small square of gauze to his face, then straightened, hands on her hips, to judge her handiwork. “You might need stitches if you want to avoid a scar.”

He shrugged. “Got enough of those. One more won’t hurt.”

He rose slowly to his feet, feeling the stiffness in his leg that never quite went away. The docs had got most of the shrapnel out, but not quite all of it. The exertion of the fire had irritated the old wound, but that would ease with time. He was used to it by now, and the reminder that he was alive was more than he deserved, when there were so many men beneath the ground.

After closing the kit, Brooke turned back to face him, tilting her head to look up. They stared at each other a moment, too close, almost too intimate alone there. Drops of water still sparkled in her dark lashes, and her skin was fresh-scrubbed and free of makeup. She looked prettier than he remembered, a woman instead of the skinny girl.

Adam was surprised at the sensations her nearness inspired in him, this awareness of her as a woman, when back in high school she’d barely registered as that to him. He’d dated party girls and cheerleaders—including her best friend, Monica Shaw—not cowgirls. Now she held herself so tall and easily, with a confidence born of hard work and years of testing her body to the limits.

She cleared her throat, and her gaze dropped from his eyes to his mouth, then his shirtfront. “You have a limp,” she said. “Did one of the horses kick you?”

“Had the limp on and off for a while. Nothing new.”

She nodded, then stepped past him to return the med kit to the bathroom. When she came back out, she was wearing a fixed, polite smile, which, to his surprise, amused him. Not much amused him anymore.

“I’m glad you’re not hurt bad,” she said. “You did me—us—a big favor, and I can’t thank you enough for helping rescue the horses. How’d you see the fire?”

“I was at the boardinghouse and saw the smoke out the window.” If the trees hadn’t been winter-bare, he might not have seen it at all, which made him think uneasily of Brooke, battling the fire alone. “Where are your brothers? They might have come in handy if I hadn’t seen the fire. I assume they still work on the ranch?”

She nodded. “They’re at the hospital with my dad, visiting my mom. Did you remember she has MS?”

He shook his head. “I never knew.”

“She never talked about it much, so I’m not surprised. Most of the time, she only needs a cane, but she’s battling a flare-up that’s weakened her legs. The guys took their turn at the hospital today, while I rode fence. Guess I found more than I bargained for.” She eyed him with speculation. “So you’re back to visit your grandma.”

She put her hands in her back pockets and rocked once on her heels, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself. That stretched her shirt across her breasts, and he had to force himself to keep his gaze on her face.

“Grandma’s letters were off,” he admitted. “She seemed almost scattered.”

Brooke focused on him with a frown. “Scattered? Your grandma?”

“My instincts were right. I got here, and she was a lot more frail, and she’s using a cane now.”

“A cane? That’s new. And I see her often, so maybe I just didn’t notice she’d slowly been . . .” She trailed off.

“Declining?” He almost grumbled the words. Grandma Palmer was in her seventies, but some part of him thought she never changed. She’d been the one woman who could briefly get him away from his parents to sleep on sheets that didn’t smell of smoke, to eat meals that didn’t come from a drive-thru. He was never hungry at Grandma Palmer’s, whether for food or for love. There weren’t holidays or birthdays unless Grandma had them. All he’d been to his teenage parents was an unwanted kid, the result of a broken condom, and they blamed him for making so little of their lives. He saw that now, but at the time? He’d been relieved to enlist in the Marines and start his life over.

Now he and Grandma Palmer only had each other. His parents had died after falling asleep in bed with cigarettes a few years back, and he hadn’t experienced anywhere near the grief he now felt in worrying about her. He might have only seen her once or twice a year, but he’d written faithfully, and so had she. The packages she’d sent had been filled with his favorite books and food, enough to share with his buddies. He felt a spasm of pain at the memories. Some of those buddies were dead now. Good memories mingled with the bad, and he could still see Paul Ivanick cheerfully holding back Adam’s care package until he promised to share Grandma Palmer’s cookies.

Paul was dead now.

When Adam was discharged, it took everything in him not to run to his grandma like a little boy. But no one could make things right, not for him, or for the men who had died. The men, his Marine brothers, who were dead because of him. He didn’t want to imagine what his grandma would think about him if she knew the truth.

“Those old women still seem strong,” Brooke insisted. “Mrs. Ludlow may use a walker, and your grandma now a cane, but they have enough . . . well, gumption, to use their word, for ten women.”

He shrugged. “All I know is what I see.”

And then they stood there, two strangers who’d grown up in the same small town but never really knew each other.

“So what have you been up to?” Brooke asked, rocking on her heels again.

He crossed his arms over his chest. “Nothing much.”

In a small town like Valentine Valley, everyone thought they deserved to know their neighbor’s business. Brooke wouldn’t think any different—hell, he remembered how she used to butt into his in high school, when they weren’t even friends. She’d been curious about his studies, a do-gooder who thought she could change the world.

She hadn’t seen the world and its cruelties, hadn’t left the safety of this town, or her family, as far as he knew. He’d seen the world—too much of it. There was nothing he could tell her—nothing he wanted to remember.

“Oo-kay then,” she said, drawing out the word.

He wondered if she felt as aware of the simmering tension between them and as uneasy as he did. He wouldn’t let himself feel like this, uncertain whether he even deserved a normal life.

“What am I thinking?” she suddenly burst out, digging her hand into her pocket and coming out with a cell phone. “I haven’t even called my dad.”

She turned her back and stared out the window, where the firemen were hosing down the smoldering ruins of her family barn. For just a moment, Adam remembered coming to the Silver Creek Ranch as a kid when his dad would do the occasional odd jobs for the Thalbergs. He’d seen the close, teasing relationships between Brooke and her brothers, the way their parents guided and nurtured them with love. Their life had seemed so different, so foreign to him.

And now Brooke would never be able to understand the life he’d been leading. So he turned and quietly walked out the door.