Western Romance Collection: Rugged Cowboys Part 9

It's not like they were going to get another chance to screw around trying to ride that horse, and the more saddle-broken the Black was, the better for the final sale.

And since Philip Callahan was in no mood to do any real work today, they might as well be allowed to have their fun. James was up on the horse this time. The Black tried to kick him off for a minute, but the attempts were getting fewer and shorter by the minute. Soon, no doubt, it wouldn't fight them so much as ignore them to start off.

Callahan leaned up against the fence and watched. Too old to be doing that kind of crazy s.h.i.t-if he got knocked off the way they kept getting knocked around, he'd have a broken rib in no time flat.

James gets the stallion running. His hair whips back in the wind. The look on his face is sheer enjoyment. That's how it is, though, when you're riding a horse that's fast as lightning.

He does a couple quick, easy laps around the yard, then draws the horse up back near the stables and hops off.

Randy's turn again. He scrambles up, a little taller than his brothers and his legs a little longer, so he sits higher in the saddle. The black jogs a little sideways. Maybe if he can just, slip the saddle a little, it'll come right off.

But it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. If he wasn't a horse, and built with a horse's mind, there wouldn't have been any question.

The youngest gets the horse going. Faster. He carries his weight low, but with his hips raised off the saddle, to cushion. Apparently, now that it's not a rodeo every lunch hour, it's time to move from rodeo star to professional jockey. Though, who ever heard of a six-one jockey-that much he apparently wasn't thinking too hard about.

Not that Callahan would blame him. You want to have fun, you have fun. Doesn't matter if you're in a position to seriously make an attempt at doing it professionally, after all.

If you had to be a pro at something to do it, well... Callahan would probably still be working this ranch, to be honest. Those boys, though, they'd be doing something else entirely. Took them almost a year to be real good at what they were doing.

They followed orders, from what he could see, almost as well as Morgan did. She was a fiery woman, and she had real trouble with authority. Then again, when you're the boss, it's easy to ignore trouble with authority. She is the authority, and anyone questioning her is the one with an authority problem.

Like that kid, whatever his name was. Brad or something. Problem with authority. He seemed for all the world to think that he was in charge of the place. Well, the minute that the trucks say 'Brad or Whatever' on the side of 'em, he can be in charge.

Until then, he can do his job. Which is exactly the lesson that the brothers had learned. Not that Callahan made learning easy on them.

It's easy to work for someone who's a hard-a.s.s. Philip's father had been that way, before he pa.s.sed. Ranching was a hard life, and he'd been a man who didn't want to shield anyone-least of all his son-from that.

No, he'd come right out and tell you, and if you couldn't cut it, he'd tell you that, too. Which made him a hard man to have as a father, but he was an easy man to work for.

You never got confused about where the line was between the work and his personal feelings. In his case, because there was nothing but the work. You don't joke around, you don't laugh with the guy. You get to work, and he gets to work, and in the end you get a lot done.

And then, twenty years later, you bury him in the ground with not much to say about the man except for the good work he did, and that he left behind a solid ranch.

Phil wasn't that kind of boss, though maybe he should have been. After all, the boys weren't his sons. Someone else's, though he'd never met their father and likely never would. They weren't in that kind of position, after all.

n.o.body was, not when the man was outside of anyone's reach as far as Callahan was aware. They'd never mentioned him and if he didn't miss his guess, they never would mention him.

Callahan closes his eyes a minute. He's got way too much on the brain today. Too many thoughts running through his head on repeat. And the biggest one is trying to figure out what in the h.e.l.l he was thinking last night.

What in the h.e.l.l Morgan had been thinking. They weren't dating. They weren't even really seeing each other. They'd fallen into bed together by accident, one time, and now he'd let things go too far at a dinner that was, by all accounts, only there for them to discuss business plans.

She'd come to him with something she needed done, and he'd apparently decided that it was open season on the poor woman.

If she wasn't happy about the way things had gone-and from all he could tell, she most certainly wasn't-then it was only because he'd given her the wrong idea. Because he'd let things get that far.

But it was one thing to be able to say, well, I made a mistake-I was a little drunk.

It's another to take advantage of a woman's situation and do it knowing full well what you're doing as you're doing it.

That's another thing entirely, and Philip doesn't want to see himself as that kind of man. Maybe he had made a mistake. Maybe he'd make plenty more mistakes in his time.

But he wasn't going to go to bed with a woman who'd just want to forget about it in the morning. Worse, though he doesn't want to think about her that way, is the idea that she wouldn't want to forget. She'd want to remember, but not because she was looking for a relationship.

After all, she had told him why they were going out. It wasn't on a date, it wasn't to get to know each other. She'd wanted to go out to talk about business.

Business. It was something that he knew pretty well. He'd had to deal with it for a long time. Now he'd done a real good job f.u.c.king that up.

Business and dating aren't the same thing. What's worse, they rarely mix. When they do mix, they mix to everyone's detriment. So in the first place, he's barking up the wrong tree. But the temptation is just a little too real.

Callahan takes a deep breath. he made a mistake last night, but he's not going to have a woman finishing off a business dinner with the first part of his payment.

If it's because she wants him, then she can want all she likes. But if it's anything else-he'd rather not.

And there's never been any sign that he's anything other than fooling himself thinking there's going to be anything else on her mind.

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Morgan Lowe isn't thinking too hard about what she's doing. It's an old trick that she's learned over the years. As long as she doesn't think it through, she doesn't have to face the fact that she's making a big mistake.

Maybe going to the ranch was a mistake. There were plenty of reasons that she hadn't gone sooner after their last... interlude. Plenty of reasons.

And yet, here she was now, and here she was going to be as long as she could.

Her stomach twists and flips in her gut. Once she got home-and, she adds surrept.i.tiously, after she took care of her little problem-it was dead easy to understand what had happened. She shouldn't have expected any different.

How sketchy was it, exactly, to be looking into buying a man's land, and then try to slot yourself right into his bed? With an objective lens, it was easy to see that she must have seemed like she was trying to seduce him.

The problem was, she hadn't been looking at it objectively before that. It was actually the first time she'd even considered the idea for a moment. Which is to say, it was a big surprise, even if it shouldn't have been.

Morgan's head feels light from the embarra.s.sment. You always make mistakes. That's true in business, and it's even more true in life. But you get over them-eventually, if you're lucky.

Well, Morgan wasn't lucky, but she was prepared to deal with the fallout from her actions. And thanks to her business career, she was also prepared to make the first move.

She wanted the land, and that wasn't going to change. But the days spent with Philip Callahan were among the better days since her father left the company and left her alone almost six months ago.

Was she willing to trade that for a business win?

Morgan's throat tightens and her breath catches in it. She eases the car onto the old dirt road that leads past the Callahan ranch. If she gets the land, she'll have to renovate it, put in a blacktop road surface.

The place isn't busy. It never is. Who would come here? Maybe someone looking to buy a horse, but it's doubtful that there would be a good deal of media attention, and it's doubtful that you would have more than one or two people coming at a time.

Which means that, fundamentally, it's never 'busy,' not in the sense that places in Vegas are busy. There's work being done, but it's not the kind you see from the street.

What is less usual, though, is the fact that there's n.o.body visible from the front. Neither Philip nor the boys are working in the yard. The horses aren't out in the yard.

And, more noticeable, none of the vehicles are there. It's easy to jump to conclusions, to say that they must be out. That there must be some other place that they've gone. Maybe they're picking up feed.

Not likely that anyone would need four people to do it. Probably, it just gets forklifted up into the bed of the truck, and they unload it at their leisure when they get back.

It's possible, though, that there's something else going on entirely. Maybe they're doing work with heavy stuff, in the back of the yard. Where she can't see. The property is ten acres or more; she's not going to see the whole thing from the seat of a sports car, her head no higher than a man's waist.

She slips out. Either she's the only one here, and they're off somewhere mysterious, or all she has to do is just look around and she'll see them. Either way, it can't hurt to get out and stretch her legs.

From higher up, she's able to get a little angle on the rest of the ranch. And again, she's able to confirm-there's n.o.body here. At least, n.o.body that she can see.

Morgan lets out a breath. Well, if higher can see better, it doesn't take long to figure out where the best vantage point is going to be. The hill. The one with the little sapling on top of it. That's where the best view is going to be.

It's not a long walk. It's only a hundred feet past the house, after all. Five minutes. The soft gra.s.s beneath her feet crackles a bit, a little dry from the lack of rain the past couple days.

As she gets closer, the hill looms a little larger. It seemed like a real small hill from far away, but it might be twenty feet up. She scrambles up the side, the last little bit steep enough that her shoes threaten to slip off with little or no purchase.

But once she's up, she's got a good view of the ranch. She can see all the way down the road, all the way to where the country road turns off the main road and breaks suddenly through the Callahan land.

She follows that line with her eyes. She can almost make out, a few miles down, a second house. That one is owned by Lowe, now. It's not going to mean a h.e.l.l of a lot without Callahan's ranch, but when they've got the entire block...

Well, it's something for later. The road disappears behind the house into a speck too small to see clearly from this distance.

The view is amazing, from up here. Anything a person can see, she can see that far. Like the entire hill captures all the nature around her, and captures the way that the Callahan ranch works with it, around it, and sometimes, against it.

The entire thing is a little humbling. As it always is, but this time is special. This time, she's not thinking about how she can make this s.p.a.ce into hers. Not right now.

Once the papers are signed and the ink is dry, she can think about how she's going to set this land up. But right now, all she's doing is admiring the natural beauty. And oh, how abundant it is.

Morgan turns further. No matter where she looks, there's no one there. A whole lot of nothing going on. Something below her vision, though, catches her eye. A pair of stones, set into the ground. There's no dirt or dust on them. Last time it rained, some mud would probably have splashed on them, which means that more than likely, they've been cleaned.

The larger reads "Sara Callahan, beloved wife." A pair of dates thirty-two years apart. Morgan's stomach twists up. She shouldn't be here, after all. She should be out of here. She's not just trespa.s.sing on Philip's land. This is a private place. A sick, twisting worry in the pit of her stomach forces her to look at the second plate.

"In Loving Memory," the top line reads. The second, in larger letters: "Roy Callahan." The first and the second dates are the same. It tells her all she needs to know. And it tells her something else.

It tells her what she should've known all along. What her father must have known, whether by doing his research or on instinct or by sheer luck- She shouldn't be here at all. No matter what she does, Philip Callahan's not going to sell the land. This is his place, and he's not going to leave for anything.

And more than that, she shouldn't come back.

Because as much as she's liked the time that she's spent with him, she's already intruded enough.

Her stomach twists up and for a moment she has to check herself before she loses her fight against panic.

And then she's slipping down the side of the hill and taking her footing, and going back where she belongs. Anywhere but here.

Chapter Twenty-Three.

Randy looks strange, lying there in the bed. He's got three inches on Phil Callahan, who'd never thought of himself as short, and he's as strong as the ranch owner ever was. He's got the advantage in terms of age, though, after all.

And yet, now Callahan stands over him, broad-shouldered and stable and he has to keep his face a from getting a little twisted up, because Randy looks like he's practically withered since they were horsing around that morning.

Horses can kick like a son of a b.i.t.c.h, and that Black was always a danger. He was a smart kid, and knew better that to get behind an ornery stallion. But sometimes, it happens, even when you make your best efforts to avoid it. And that's what had happened this time. Nothing to be done about it.

Callahan's gut feels like it's threatening to turn itself inside out, right there on the floor in front of all of them, but there's nothing else that he can do but do but watch. He's no doctor, after all.

It could have been worse. It could have been so much worse. It could have been his head. It could have been his neck. A kick in the back, it could mean any number of things.

It was tempting to tell himself that the kick missed the kid's spine. It was awful tempting indeed. He re-played the scene in his mind, over and over again, and it looked like it did. Looked like it hit below the shoulder blade. Right in the meaty part of his back.

But what if he was wrong? What if he was just a little bit wrong, off by a couple of scant inches?

Well, then it is a very different thing. The boys sit. Whatever their nerves are telling them, whatever they're thinking, they've both settled into their chairs, like stony-faced twins.

Except, of course, that it'd take an idiot not to see that James is taking it worse. He's hiding it as best he can. His jaw tightens and he keeps it tight. By itself, that helps to hide the panic in his eyes.

But you can see the thoughts running through his head, clear as day, as if they were on a ticker-tape across his forehead. If they weren't so stupid. If he had been smarter. If he hadn't let this happen.

He hadn't. n.o.body could blame him, not in any honest way. But that wasn't stopping him from finding a way to blame himself, and if that was what he wanted to do, n.o.body could stop him.

For a moment Callahan almost considers giving him a few consoling words. He keeps his mouth shut. He hadn't wanted to hear them, after Sara and he lost Roy. He hadn't wanted to hear them when Sara went to keep their little boy safe up in heaven.

And now, it wasn't his turn to not want to hear it. It was his turn to stand by the bed, his face drawn with panic. It was his turn to not know what to do, to want to tell them that it would be okay. That they'd feel better, some day. That it was all alright and none of it was their fault.

But that's not the problem. The problem isn't knowing that it's not your fault, because you know instinctively, deep down. There's nothing that could have been done to prevent it, except maybe not being such G.o.d d.a.m.n fools.

But that doesn't stop the constant questions. The constant desire to find a way that you could have stopped it. That was a thousand times louder than anything anyone could say to you.

James had to get out of the woods-if he was lucky, and Callahan hoped he was, Randy had to get out of the woods as well-before he'd hear it. Before he'd hear anything other than someone lying to him, trying to make him feel better with petty lies and plat.i.tudes.

Callahan reaches out and sets a hand on the boy's foot. There's work left to be done. Work that needs doing. But right or wrong, that work can wait. It has to wait. Because right now, they've got bigger concerns.

A doctor finally comes in. He's got a folder that's nearly an inch thick and has a bunch of x-rays sticking out. Callahan's heart jumps into his throat. Moment of truth time, now.

The doctor's got the same look doctors always have. It's bad. It's always bad. If you've got the flu, it's bad. And yet, somehow, when your wife isn't going to wake up again-that's just as bad. Doctors aren't ever happy with the prognosis.

No, it's the nurses who are constantly telling you that it could be fine. People get better all the time from 'never gonna wake up again.' You'll see, Phil. Don't worry about it, it's not your fault. There's nothing you could have done.

He sets the folder on the counter by the bed and flips it open.