Rodeo Christmas at Evergreen Ranch (Gold Valley #13)(100)

And he was already exhausted, winded from walking around for the last half hour.

This was some bullshit. He wasn’t used to being incapacitated. Not in any way. He didn’t like it at all.

He took note of a few things on the outside of the little house. It was in good shape, mostly, but there was a shutter in the back that was hanging, and there was a big stack of firewood that was in want of splitting. He wanted to do some things for Tala. She had gone above and beyond. He didn’t know very many people who would do this kind of thing for a stranger. Hell, he didn’t know anyone who would.

He certainly wouldn’t have. He would have been too suspicious. He didn’t know why she wasn’t, a woman living alone...

He walked back to the front of the cottage, and she came rushing out. “There you are,” she said. “What dumbass thing are you doing, wandering around outside? Get inside.”

He walked in slowly, and she closed the door behind him. “Maybe I wasn’t clear. I don’t want anyone to know that you’re here. And there are people around here. Everywhere. The Sullivan sisters just live a few hundred yards down the road. And a lot of different ranch hands live in various dwellings on the property. It’s fifty thousand acres.”

“No shit,” he said. “Fifty thousand?”

“It’s eight square miles. It’s a town in and of itself, like I said.”

“Would anybody have any clue that I was staying with you, or would they just think that I was one of the ranch hands?”

“Well, that is a fair point,” she said. “Maybe they wouldn’t know. But your brother would. If he saw you.”

“I told you. I don’t have a lot of confidence in Jake’s smarts. He thinks he’s cleverer than he is. He also thinks he’s scarier than he is. I’m sure he thinks I ran as far and fast as I could. It wouldn’t occur to him that I’d stop and double back.”

“Where is your brother...based out of?”

“Copper Ridge.”

“That’s not very far away.”

“No. It isn’t. But that’s one reason he does it. He doesn’t actually commit crime in the town, but that’s his home base. And that’s how he manages to keep himself pretty clean. How my dad managed to do it before him. Keep your head low, run the nasty shit up to Portland. And there’s a big port up there. Easy to export all the bad stuff. That’s how he does it.”

“Wow. For all that work, you’d think you could just get a job.”

“You would think. That was what I did.”

“What makes people do that, do you think?” she asked. He noticed that there were bags of groceries sitting on the table. Little fabric bags. Of course she had her reusable bags. She seemed like that type. Like she thought about everything.

“What is what?”

“Why do some people do everything that they were raised to do. Then other people don’t. It seems to me, even though we are on extreme ends of the spectrum, that we both decided to be different than our families. I just wonder why. I wonder what pushes a person to make that decision.”

“For me it was when I saw my brother shoot someone. Thank God he lived, but... Some guy that worked for them. Shot him. Like he wasn’t anything. I knew that was wrong. My dad never did anything like that. Not in front of anybody, anyway. There was enough plausible deniability that I can try to find ways to believe what he said when I was young. But you can’t explain away that. I couldn’t excuse that. Didn’t matter that the guy was a scumbag just like my brother. It doesn’t excuse the violence. I couldn’t stomach it.

“I’m just thankful that one year I went to school. We were homeschooled. But I met a teacher that changed my life. She knew things. And she was lovely. And smart and sweet, and I knew that the whole world wasn’t bad. Not the way that my mom thought it was.”

“Well now, that is kind of funny. You had to learn the world wasn’t bad, and I had to learn my family was a whole lot worse than I was led to believe.”

“Yeah.”

“Let me help you with those groceries.”

He went to the table, and started to take out the parcels there. A lot of produce. Meat.

“I could cook for you,” he offered.

“No,” she said. “You weren’t even able to get up on your feet yesterday. I don’t need you cooking for me.”

“I don’t mind.”

“I do. I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you sit at the table and peel potatoes. I’ll cut the veggies. We’ll have some beef stew.”

“Sounds good.”

And that’s what they did. And it was the strangest damn thing, because Clayton hadn’t shared his life with anybody in more years than he could count. And even when he had, it hadn’t been like this. He had friends in the rodeo, sure.

But there hadn’t been anything domestic about that. He had women. Buckle bunnies that liked spending the night with a cowboy. But they didn’t cook for him. He made them breakfast sometimes. But that was it. They hadn’t shared moments like this.

It was a novelty. Talking to a woman like this. Talking to anybody like this. Kind of a damned gift.

And when he bedded down on the couch that night, things seemed awfully sweet. Better than they had for a long time. When he woke up the next morning, it was to see Tala, standing at the dining table, packing things into a bag.