Page 30 of A Rancher's Heart
“Deal. Love you too.” Tamara hung up and stared happily over the view. The grazing cattle in the distance were little black specks against the faded yellow brown of the dry grass. They needed the snow to turn everything fresh and clean again.
She took a deep breath and sucked in the cool air like a balm for the soul.
It was too nice to not share. She leapt to her feet and headed indoors to Sasha’s room.
The girls had music playing in the background, and the entire contents of Sasha’s closet piled in one enormous heap on her bed.
Tamara raised a brow. “Interesting cleaning method.”
They glanced at her guiltily from the floor where they were both ignoring the mess and had their noses tucked into books.
“We were just—” Sasha started before Tamara interrupted.
“No excuses. You need a break from cleaning, but not more indoor time. Grab your coats and pull on your boots. We’re going out for some fresh air.”
The girls scrambled to their feet, and they were all outside in under two minutes.
Sasha headed toward the cottage her aunt had lived in, but Tamara called her back. “Let’s go to the barns.”
A quick twist and Sasha was racing in a new direction, Emma hard on her heels. Tamara followed more slowly, the trail in the grass well worn by previous trips. She smiled, wiggling her shoulders under her fall coat. She’d need to break out something more substantial soon.
They passed an old chicken coop, the fencing broken in a few places. Tamara paused to examine it, but the girls were far enough ahead she only took a moment. It hadn’t been used for a few years.
She caught up with them, but instead of heading into the barn they were climbing on a tire swing hanging outside the arena.
Tamara stopped to let them play for a bit, and that’s when she realized that there was no door into the barn anywhere close to them.
“Hey, Sasha. How do we get into the barn?”
The dark-haired girl stared at her in surprise. “Daddy takes us.”
What? “You mean you never go into the barn unless Caleb is with you?”
Emma answered this time, shaking her head slowly, her eyes wide.
She was missing something. “Then how do you do your chores?”
“We don’t have chores in the barn. We have chores in the house,” Sasha explained, a tiny bit of smugness coming into her voice that she knew something Tamara didn’t.
“You don’t take care of any of the animals?” Oh. Maybe there was a reason for that. “You don’twantto take care of any of the animals, is that it?”
Once again, the girls exchanged a glance and this time Emma snuck close to her sister, motivated enough to make her point clear. She put her hand around Sasha’s ear and whispered.
Sasha turned back with a shrug. “Emma and I like the cats, and I like horses, but Daddy says they’re too big, and we’re too little. He takes us riding, though. Him and Uncle Luke, and sometimes Uncle Dusty.”
“So you don’t go in the barn, and you don’t have chickens—did you used to have chickens?”
Sasha’s face closed up like a thunderstorm had hit. “Not for a long time.”
Then she caught Emma by the hand and the two of them headed back toward the house as if they were on a mission. Emma glancing over her shoulders a few times, her sad little eyes burning into Tamara’s soul.
Okay, something was wrong. The girls obviously took that path often enough that it was still easy to see, but they weren’t mucking about in the barn? They weren’t climbing up into the hayloft to chase down kittens?
Simmering began in her belly, but Tamara didn’t say anything as she followed the girls to the house, She made them a snack before getting them back on task in Sasha’s room.
Only by lunchtime the simmering had turned into a small pocket of very hot coals, and if she didn’t do something about it she was going to explode.
Maybe it was the phone call from Lisa that morning—a reminder that her father was still making her sisters’ lives miserable. But she hadn’t thought Caleb to have been of the same old-school bigotry that controlled George Coleman hard enough to have sent Tamara off the ranch.
