Page 12 of Rocky Mountain Cowboy Christmas
“The ranch.” He waved a hand around, as if indicating all the buildings and land around them. “I know you’ve just seen a limited amount of it, but you were looking cold, so I thought we could warm up in here before we finished the tour.”
“Tour?”Please just write the check and let me go.“Oh. Um… Maybe we could put that off until spring?” Her hands were still uncomfortably prickly. Besides, even though she was interested in seeing the barn and the other horses, it seemed like it’d take more time than she cared to spend alone with Ryan.
His smile drooped a bit before returning. “You’re right. It’s too cold to be dragging you around the unheated outbuildings. How about we move this tour to my house? My place is on the west side of the property, just a couple minutes from here. We could warm up, have some lunch.”
She blinked at the unexpected offer. What was up with Ryan’s new obsession with trying to feed her? Even though she wasn’t the most cosmopolitan of people, she was savvy enough to know not to accept an invitation to go with some guy she didn’t really know to his isolated house, especially if she was already having that itchy feeling that something was off. “Sorry, but I should get home. Christmas orders, you know, and a cat. I mean, I have a cat, a hungry cat that needs to be fed, so…I should go.”
His smile dipped again and didn’t recover this time. “Sure. I get it. Let me write you that check, and you can head home to…feed your cat.”
Although her cheeks burned at how inane she must’ve sounded, relief rushed through her. She wanted to laugh at herself, at how panicked she’d gotten. Ryan’s interest felt awkward, and his constant come-ons made it easier to run back to the safe haven of her workshop. Too bad she couldn’t have Steve’s teenage son Will as her one-and-only Springfield ranch contact. She’d been able to talk to him without descending into her usual babble. Well, there might have been a little babble, but definitely not as much as when she had to talk to another adult. Maybe she could make that a condition of selling her sculptures at the store.
Pulling a key ring out of his pocket, Ryan unlocked one of the desk drawers and extracted a checkbook. They were both quiet as he wrote out the check, the scratch of his pen against the paper the only sound in the room. As Camille waited, nerves steadily climbing, she decided that electronic payment would be a second stipulation for future orders. Too bad Will didn’t look old enough to drive, or he could’ve picked up the sculptures from her workshop.
“Here you go.” Ryan’s voice interrupted her wandering thoughts, and she jumped to her feet, eager to leave. As she took the check, Ryan’s pocket buzzed. “Excuse me for a moment.” Pulling out his phone, he read something on the screen and gave a grunt of annoyance. “Joe left his keys in the store and needs me to grab them for him. I’ll be right back.”
She followed him to the door, unwilling to give up the opportunity to escape. “That’s okay. I should be going anyway.”
“No, please stay here. We still need to talk about the next order.”
“Can’t we talk about that some other time?” she asked with more than a little desperation. She’d already talked to more people in one day than she usually did in a week. The very little bit of social butterfly-ness in her had been used up, and she needed some workshop time to recharge. A month or so should do it.
“Sure.” Why didn’t she trust his instantaneous smile? “I’ll come by your place tomorrow. Should we say about seven? We can go out to dinner. If you don’t like any of the places in town, we could drive to that new place in Ebba. It’s only an hour or so away, and I’ve heard good things about the food.”
That’s why she couldn’t trust his smile. “Okay, I’ll wait here until you get back.”
He actually looked disappointed by that, making Camille wonder if he reallyhadbeen asking her to dinner, rather than just trying to terrify her into waiting while he retrieved Joe’s keys.
“Why can’t Joe get his own keys?” She knew she sounded sulky, but she didn’t care. It’d been a long day already, and it wasn’t even noon.
“Because he’s a cranky hermit, and everyone enables him.” Ryan rolled his eyes. “Everyone including me, because if I don’t do this, he’ll text me every two minutes until I give in. He only goes into the store when no one’s there. If there’s a customer within a mile of the place, he goes phantom on us and finds something that has to be done at one of the far corners of the property.” He paused. “Anyway, this’ll take me two minutes. Don’t go anywhere, and I’ll be right back.”
With a silent sigh, Camille settled back in her recently abandoned chair, thinking that she could sympathize with Joe, the cranky, customer-avoiding hermit. His easy avoidance of any and all strangers was pretty much her life goal. Maybe she needed a ranch. Her house and workshop had limited places for her to hide. On a ranch, no one would be able to find her unless she wanted them to.
A loudbangshook the floor, and Camille jumped to her feet, jolted out of her thoughts. She searched for the source, for whatever had fallen or exploded, but nothing in the office looked out of place. The sound had come from behind the door set in the back of the office, and Camille eyed it, trying to decide whether she should investigate or just stay where she was.
It seemed rude to just wander around someone else’s property investigating strange noises, but wasn’t it her duty to check out a possible accident? The sound had been really loud, almost like an explosion, and someone could’ve been hurt. What if they were waiting for help right now, and Camille was the only one who was close enough to get to them in time?
Curiosity and a bone-deep sense of responsibility drove her to hurry across the office. She carefully pulled open the door slightly. Something was burning, judging by the hint of acrid smoke, but it wasn’t enough to warn her to evacuate the building. She opened the door wider, revealing an expansive, well-outfitted shop—and a preteen girl who looked both grease-spattered and guilty as she stood over a table covered with what appeared to be pieces of a disassembled engine, extraneous parts that Camille didn’t recognize mixed in with the others.
“You okay?” she asked tentatively, taking a few more steps into the shop once she saw that nothing was actually on fire.
“Yeah.” The girl sighed as she wiped half-heartedly at her face with her flannel shirtsleeve. Camille didn’t mention that her efforts only smeared the grease spots, turning the black freckles into streaks. “I just hope my dad wasn’t around to hear that.” She eyed Camille with tentative optimism. “Do you know if he’s back from the fire station yet? I’m hoping not, because I can probably convince my uncles to keep their mouths shut about this.” She waved her arms, the gesture encompassing the entirety of the shop.
“Which one is your dad?” Camille asked, even though she was fairly certain that this girl was another one of Steve’s. Her light-brown hair, tied in a messy knot on the back of her head, matched his, although her eyes were a deep, dark brown, rather than Steve’s light, greenish hazel. Her firm, stubborn chin was his, as well.
“Steve,” the girl said.
“That’s what I thought.” Camille studied her, seeing more and more similarities between father and daughter, from the shape of their eyes to the angle of their cheekbones to the way their wide mouths gave them an amused, kind look, even when they weren’t smiling. “You look like him.”
“Really?” She sounded surprised. “He always says I look like my mom, but sometimes I wonder if he just says that to be nice. She died when I was three, so I can’t really remember her, and it’s hard to tell with pictures and even videos, you know? People look different in real life.”
“I know what you mean.” Intrigued by the odd collection of engine parts, Camille moved closer to examine them as she spoke. Although she tended to see mechanical pieces as potential sculptures, she had a basic working knowledge of engines, and, for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out how all of these parts would fit together. “My mom died when I was six, so I’m sure my memories aren’t the most accurate, but the photos I have of her don’t match the pictures I have of her in my mind.”
“How’d she die?”
Camille studied an intake manifold. After a close-up view of the collection of parts, she still had no idea what they were going to be used for. It would be a crazy, Frankenstein-esque motor if all the pieces were put together to form one engine. “She overdosed.” The words came out absently, most of her attention focused on the metal parts in front of her. As soon as she heard her own words, though, she jerked up her head and met the girl’s gaze. “Sorry! That probably wasn’t a good thing to tell a kid.”
With a snort, the girl waved off her apology. “I’m almost twelve. I know about overdoses. My mom had ovarian cancer.”
