Page 69 of The Cowboy's Christmas
Chapter Fourteen
“He’ll be heretomorrow?” Savannah asked as soon as Deke hung up the phone.
“Bright and early, he said,” her uncle answered, gathering the lunch plates off the table. The girls had left tattered bits of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so he scraped those into the trash before running water over the plates in the sink.
After shutting off the faucet, he wiped his hands and then hung the towel next to the stove. “This will be a very short-term employment, Vannie. I don’t want to give this guy much time to wreak havoc.”
He was hiring Jeff Barnett as a favor to her, and perhaps as a favor to Quinn.
“Give it a week,” she said. “We’ll reevaluate then.”
Perhaps by that time Deke would be ready to run the tractor one-handed. Operating the levers would tax his ribs, but at least they’d be back in their routine—Deke at the controls, Savannah opening gates and dumping hay, the girls sharing the jump seat.
“When are you going to tell Quinn?” Deke asked.
“When he gets back.” Quinn had left as soon as they’d finished feeding. There hadn’t been a lot of communication between them that morning, and Savannah thought that best until Deke got an answer from Jeff Barnett.
There was no reason not to tell him that they were shopping for a replacement—he’d seemed fine with it before, and his brothers needed help—but she wasn’t going to say anything until she knew for sure. Then they would have a conversation; one that she wasn’t practicing in her head for once in her life.
She was going to go with instinct when she explained to Quinn that he’d saved them, and they were appreciative, and now he was free to go his own way.
“Best to do it soon, so that he can make plans.”
“I will.”
Deke nodded, then headed for the living room and his recliner. He was moving better. Maybe the thought of Jeff Barnett on the place was hurrying the healing process.
Savannah made a face to herself as she turned to the window, her gaze automatically straying to the empty place where the flatbed would be parked when Quinn returned.
Surely Jeff Barnett couldn’t be that bad.
Deke simply preferred Quinn, because Quinn was an amazing guy that she was about to let slip away.
*
Quinn got backmuch later than he’d anticipated, pulling into the ranch a little after nine, just ahead of the storm bearing down on the area from the north. There was something about dealing with his brothers that threw off his schedule, but, as it turned out, not in a bad way. If they hadn’t spent that extra hour talking in Grey’s Saloon the first day they’d met, he wouldn’t have met Savannah. Or Deke, or the little girls. He’d grown fond of the Dunn family.
It seemed possible that the same could happen with his brothers’ families. He’d enjoyed helping Les around the ranch while Ty and Shelby were in Bozeman with their young son, offering moral support for Austin, Kristen, and little Alison Rose Harding.
Les had asked him to dinner, which was bagged salad and frozen ravioli, close to what Savannah had offered him the day they’d moved the cattle down from the high pasture. He’d accepted, and they’d had a good time talking about the ranch—which both of his brothers lived and worked on—and what it meant to be a family. Eventually the conversation had turned to his father.
Les didn’t have a lot to say, except that Kenny had probably found himself between a rock and a hard place where Quinn was concerned. He’d had some grand dreams, followed by some knocks in life, and his marriage and his kids were his one great achievement. Right or wrong, he hadn’t the guts to mess with that.
Quinn said that he understood.
He did. And he understood that while the child in him would always feel cheated, accepting those feelings and moving on was better than denying their existence. He could admit now that he wanted to build a relationship with his brothers—to be the third Harding brother, rather than the third Harding. He’d never know his dad, but he could know his brothers.
He’d just turned out the lights and gotten into bed, when a soft rap on the door brought Pepper to her feet, barking protectively.
Quinn shushed his dog as he pushed up onto his elbow, wondering what ranch emergency had just reared its ugly head. Broken gate? Cattle surrounding the house? Nothing he liked better than a late-night roundup in freezing weather.
But there was no noise outside.
“Yeah?” he called, snapping on the bedside lamp before swinging his legs over the side of the bed. “Come on in.”
The cold linoleum stung his feet as he stood. He’d left the heat off that day, and the place had become something of a tomb because of it. He reached for his hoodie, pulling it over his head as the door opened and Savannah walked inside, shaking snow off her coat. The storm had arrived.
Pepper trotted over to Savannah, pushing her nose into Savannah’s hand and getting a couple of strokes before she retreated to her bed under the table.
