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How many times had she lain awake at night, wondering if Donnie ever regretted enlisting before the war had taken him from her. Even now, after all this time, she hadn’t really come to any sort of a satisfactory conclusion.
“No,” he told her honestly. “I went to fight for my country, and I’m proud of that part. I just wish I hadn’t seen what I’d seen. Nobody should see that kind of thing,” he said quietly. “Nobody should have to live through it, either.”
Then, as if he replayed his own words in his head, Chance blew out a breath, mystified. “How’d I get started on that?” he asked. The question was meant more for him than for her. Clearing his throat, he abruptly changed the subject. “Anyway, at least now we know that we’re not out for the same job.”
Roger, who had been hanging back quietly this whole time, finally spoke up.
“Well, glad that’s been cleared up—and just in time, too.” His attention was immediately redirected to the sound of the front door being opened. “Looks like your future bosses are back,” he told Chloe and Chance with a broad wink.
They turned toward the front door in time to see Graham and Sasha walking in, along with a little girl. With her straight blond hair and her delicate features, she looked like a miniature version of her mother. All except for the arm that was in a cast and held by a sling around her neck.
Chloe winced in sympathy. That had to be Maddie, she thought, her heart immediately going out to the little girl. She hoped that Maddie wasn’t in too much pain.
“Well, we made it back,” Sasha announced. “Sorry for the wait.” She looked around. “Uncle Roger, where’s the baby?”
Roger pointed to Chloe. “This one got her to go to sleep just like that.” He snapped his fingers to illustrate just how fast Chloe had performed what was clearly a magic trick to him.
Sasha smiled warmly at Chloe.
“Well, I’m won over. You’ve got the job,” Sasha quipped.
“You’re not serious, are you?” Chloe asked uncertainly.
“No, she’s not,” Graham agreed. “But almost,” he told Chloe. “Sasha goes on gut instincts, same as me,” he told her.
“Hey, kiddo, you want to go upstairs and lie down?” Roger asked his grandniece, who had momentarily gotten lost in this verbal exchange between the adults.
“No,” Maddie cried, protesting the very idea. “They had me lying down forever when I was in the hospital, getting all those pictures took of my arm.” She looked at her cast. “What I want is you to sign my cast,” she declared, pointing to the newly applied cast with her other hand. Barely an hour old, the cast already had a handful of autographs and well-wishes written on it. “I got these from the nurses. And that’s from that doctor who put it on,” she told her granduncle, pointing out the different signatures. “Isn’t it neat?”
“It sure is,” Roger agreed with the kind of enthusiasm that appealed to young children. “Neatest thing I’ve ever seen. What do you say you and me go get us a sandwich in the kitchen and I’ll see if I can come up with something real good to put on that cast?”
Maddie perked up visibly. “Can I have anything I want to eat?” she asked eagerly.
“You can have anything that’s in the refrigerator,” Roger qualified with a wink.
Maddie’s grin all but split her face. “Cool!”
Roger pretended to misunderstand her declaration. “Cool or hot. Whatever’s there, is yours.”
Sasha exchanged looks with her amused husband. “I think maybe I should go supervise,” Sasha said, following her uncle.
Wanting to be as accommodating as possible, Chloe called out after Sasha’s departing back, “I’ll just sit right here until you get back.”
“You can if you want to, but feel free to move around if you like. You’ve already got the job,” Sasha called back over her shoulder, accompanying her injured daughter to the kitchen.
Chloe looked at Graham. Sasha hadn’t asked her a single question that had to do with the job she was applying for. Just what had gotten the woman to decide in her favor?
“I’m confused,” Chloe confessed.
He laughed. “Sasha’ll do that to you,” he said in a completely understanding voice. “I feel like my head’s been spinning ever since I first met her. But since she’s a better judge than I am when it comes to this position, I’ve made up my mind. You do have the job.” And then he grew more serious. “Do you mind being left alone for a few minutes?” he asked. “I’d like to ask Chance some questions in private.”
Then, before she could answer him, he made a suggestion. “Feel free to look around the house, or to join Sasha, Maddie and Uncle Roger in the kitchen.”
Chloe shook her head, declining both offers. Right now, she just wanted to sit exactly where she was and absorb what had just happened.
And, in her opinion, what had just happened amounted to being given a job, a rather important job in her estimation, practically sight unseen.
Well, she’d been seen, Chloe amended, but obviously a great deal had just been read into whatever Sasha Fortune Robinson thought she saw in her.
“I’m good, thank you,” she told Graham, turning down his offer.
In response, her half brother smiled at her and nodded. “I won’t be long,” he promised.
Her half brother.
It was still hard to think of him that way, Chloe thought as she watched him take Chance into what appeared to be a den that was directly off the living room.
Hard to think of herself as being anyone’s half sister.
Or a half sister to what amounted to practically a legion of other half siblings, she added silently. She’d grown up thinking she had no family at all beyond her mother and now she had more family than she could shake that proverbial stick at.
And one of those half siblings had just given her a job.
Not just any job but the kind of job she had set her heart on before she’d ever sent in her application to college. So far, she’d been stitching together a living taking anything she could get—even working at a local coffee shop on weekends to help pay her rent. She felt as if she’d finally crossed a threshold into her field.
Talk about luck.
Glancing around to make sure no one could see her, Chloe pinched herself. And then, just to make certain, she pinched herself again because she had to admit this all seemed like some sort of dream. A dream that she was going to wake up from at any minute now.
Except for the part about Donnie, she thought grimly. If this was a dream, he’d be right here beside her.
But he wasn’t.
She was sitting in this big old living room all by herself, waiting for her half brother to come back in and tell her all the details she needed to know about this job she was going to be starting. She was convinced that she’d gotten this position strictly because she was “family” despite all of Graham’s talk about instincts and gut feelings.
No matter, she was determined to prove to them that they hadn’t made a mistake in hiring her. She was going to work really, really hard and be the best counselor they could have possibly hoped for. She owed it to them.
Most of all, she owed it to herself—and to the memory of her husband, who had always encouraged her and told her she could be absolutely anything she wanted to be once she set her mind to it.
She glanced toward the door that Graham had closed behind him and Chance. She wondered how the interview was going.
She really hoped that Chance was going to get the job. She’d gotten the impression that although Chance wasn’t down on his luck, landing this position at Peter’s Place was really important to him.
Without realizing it, Chloe crossed her fingers for him, wishing that she was one of those people who actually believed in sending good vibes. Because if she was, she’d be sending them right now.
She watched the door intently.
And when it finally opened, only a few minutes later, she popped to her feet like a newly refurbished jack-in-the-box. Fingers still crossed, her eyes immediately went to the taller of the two men emerging from the room.
Chance was smiling.
She was confident that she knew the results before he said a word.
Chapter Four (#ulink_b8b7ad78-59b5-549a-8c00-3419ea67ce6a)
Chance’s smile was as broad as his shoulders as he crossed to her.
“Looks like you turned out to be my good-luck charm,” he told Chloe. “’Cause I got the job.”
“Luck has nothing to do with it,” Graham told him, reaching up just a little to put his hand on his newest ranch hand’s shoulder. “The people you worked for all spoke very highly of you. As a matter of fact, Kyle McMasters said to tell you that if it doesn’t work out for you here, he’d be more than happy to have you come back to work for him at the Double M.”
Chance made no comment regarding his former boss’s remark. Instead, he looked at his new boss and asked, “When can I start?”
“Bright and early tomorrow morning’ll be fine.” As a rule, ranch hands were usually up around sunrise, if not before, so Graham made a suggestion. “How does seven o’clock suit you?”
The early hour didn’t faze him in the slightest. He was accustomed to being up earlier, even when he wasn’t working. It was just the way his inner clock worked. “I can be here earlier if you need me to be,” Chance told him.
“No, seven’ll do fine. You can bring your gear then and move in to the bunkhouse,” Graham told him. “We’ve got two on the premises. One just for the ranch hands and the other one’s where the boys stay.”
“Sounds good to me,” Chance replied. “All I really require is enough space to stretch out at the end of the day, nothing more.”
Graham nodded. “We’re going to get along just fine,” he predicted. “Just to let you know, I’ve got plans for you. You’re not just going to be a ranch hand. After you get the lay of the land around here, and things look like they’re going well, I want to make you the coordinator for Peter’s Place.”
Graham smiled. “I think your being ex-military might just come in handy. The boys who are here now need a firm hand and they need to be made to respect authority. That’s not to say I want you coming down hard on them. Just make sure they don’t take advantage of you or anyone else here,” Graham added. He looked deliberately at Chloe as he said the last part.
Chloe appreciated the thought, but she had been looking after herself for a long time now.
“You don’t have to worry about me,” Chloe told her half brother. “I might not be as tall as you two, but I’m not a pushover, either. And I can definitely take care of myself.”
Graham held up a hand. “I never meant to imply that I thought of you as a pushover. But knowing someone has your back certainly doesn’t hurt in this kind of a situation,” Graham assured her.
Then he launched into a rundown of the current residents staying at Peter’s Place. “Right now, we’ve got four boys staying here. They’re all decent kids, but for one reason or another, they’ve lost their way and all of them feel like they’ve been dealt a pretty bad hand.” He spared a glance at Chloe. “Sasha can do a better job filling you in,” he said to Chloe.
As if on cue, his wife came in from the kitchen. “Did I just hear my name being mentioned?” she asked, a bright smile on her face. Before Graham had an opportunity to respond to her question, Sasha told her husband, “You’ll be happy to know that breaking her wrist did not affect our daughter’s appetite. She’s eating up a storm in there. Uncle Roger’s whipping up his ‘famous’ corn dogs wrapped in bacon for her. I set the limit at two but I’ve got a feeling he’s not going to stick to that. Maybe you can make him understand the wisdom of not letting Maddie stuff herself to the gills.”
“I’m on it,” Graham said, beginning to leave the living room.
Sasha looked at Chance and Chloe. “So, I take it that they both said yes.”
“That they did,” Graham said, tossing the words over his shoulder.
“Well then, welcome to Peter’s Place,” Sasha told the duo warmly. “I hope you like it here,” she added. “We try to keep it homey. For some of these boys, this is the first actual ‘home’ they’ve had in quite a while.”
The sound of a baby crying was heard coming over the monitor that Chloe had positioned on the wide coffee table.
Sasha sighed wearily as she looked at the monitor. “Looks like I’m being summoned,” she told Chloe as she started to get up.
“Why don’t you stay here and get Chloe up to speed on the boys who are currently here?” Graham suggested. Sasha began to point out the obvious, but never got very far. “I’ll go see to Sydney,” Graham told her. “I’m sure Uncle Roger knows enough not to overfeed Maddie. If he doesn’t, Maddie’s got enough sense to stop.” Pausing for just a moment before he went up the stairs, he turned toward Chance. “And I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Count on it,” Chance told him. Putting his Stetson on, he tipped it ever so slightly to the right, unaware that he was creating a rakish image as he did so. Chance nodded first at Graham’s wife and then at Chloe. “Ladies, I’ll see you tomorrow,” he promised just before he headed for the door.
Chloe just stared at his retreating form. A very sexy form, she had to admit.
“He’s a tall one, don’t you agree?”
The comment snapped Chloe to attention. She hadn’t even realized she was still staring at the closed door. “What? Oh, you mean Chance. Yes, I guess he is at that,” she murmured.
When she looked at Sasha, she thought she saw a hint of a grin on her lips. She hoped that Sasha didn’t think that there was anything between her and Chance—or that there would be in the future. She’d come here strictly because she wanted work as a counselor and nothing more, she silently insisted.
“So tell me about the boys at Peter’s Place,” Chloe urged. She thought it best to change the subject immediately.
Sasha sat down beside her on the sofa, and then a sudden thought occurred to her. “Oh, where are my manners? Having your daughter break her wrist kind of knocks everything else out of your head,” she apologized, then asked, “Can I get you anything? Something to drink perhaps?”
Chloe shook her head. She didn’t want anything to distract her. Right now, all she wanted to do was focus on any information that Sasha could give her. She wanted to be as fully prepared as possible when she finally met the boys who had been sent here to atone for their misdeeds and to ultimately become better people.
“No, I’m fine. Really,” she stressed when Sasha looked at her somewhat skeptically. “Just tell me about the boys I’m going to be working with. I want to learn all I can about them.”
Sasha seemed to ponder her reply for a moment, no doubt wanting to cite the boys in the proper order.
Then she began. “The first teen we took in here at Peter’s Place is Jonah Wright. A basically good boy, Jonah kind of hit a rough patch when his father ran off, deserting the family. Consequently, to make ends meet, his mother had to hold down two jobs. Because she wasn’t home very much, she expected Jonah to look after his three younger siblings. I don’t have to tell you that that’s a lot of responsibility to heap on such young shoulders. Jonah loved playing baseball after school and he had to give that up in order to be there for his siblings.
“After a while, life felt as if it was crashing in on him and Jonah just kept getting angrier and angrier. He started ditching school, vandalizing property and getting into fights almost all the time. He started shoplifting and got away with it the first couple of times.
“And then he got arrested. They were going to send him to jail, then at the last minute, the authorities decided to send him here instead. It was kind of touch and go with Jonah for a while, but he turned things around and it looks like he’s on the road to getting his life back.” Sasha smiled, clearly pleased to be able to relate this to Chloe. “Things look pretty promising and he’s even going to be playing baseball soon, just like he always wanted to.”
Sasha stopped for a moment, seeming to gather her thoughts.
“The second teen who was sent here was Ryan Maxwell. He was a lot less hostile than Jonah was when he came here, but he was also a great deal more depressed and withdrawn.”
“Do you know why he was depressed?” Chloe wanted to know.
Sasha nodded. “Both of his parents died and social services sent him to live with his uncle. Family isn’t always the best way to go,” Sasha told her. “In Ryan’s case, his uncle turned out to be a lowlife. He stole and spent all of the money that Ryan’s parents had set aside to pay for his college education. Personally, I suspect that Ryan got into trouble and vandalized private property just to get away from the man.”
“You’re probably right,” Chloe agree. “He probably felt he had nothing to lose and just maybe something to gain if he got away from his uncle.”
Sasha smiled. “Since he came here, he’s been doing a lot better. He’s now in both a math club and a science club in school. If he keeps things up this way, he’s on track to get a college scholarship,” Sasha told her proudly. “And if that happens, he can write his own ticket. His future is a great deal more promising than his past.”
“And the other boys?” Chloe asked, wondering if their stories would wind up ending this well.
“Well, the last two are newer and I’m afraid they haven’t really adjusted to living here—yet,” Sasha emphasized, obviously holding out a great deal of hope for the fates of both of these newer residents at Peter’s Place. “Brandon Baker lost his older brother in Afghanistan, and I get the distinct feeling that he’s just mad at the whole world right now.”
Chloe could certainly identify with the way Brandon felt. When Donnie had been killed, there was a point when she’d been convinced that her anger was going to suffocate her. It had been touch and go for a while.
“And the last boy?” Chloe prompted.
“That would be Will Sherman. His mother is a single parent, and she has her own share of problems. The woman is an alcoholic,” Sasha confided. “The Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde kind who takes all of her frustrations out on Will. A social worker found him wandering the streets one night, so battered she didn’t know how he was able to even stand up, much less walk.” Tears shone in Sasha’s eyes as she told Chloe, “When the social worker questioned him, he denied that his mother had beaten him. It was heartbreaking how protective he was of that woman. But it was obvious to everyone who came in contact with this boy that he couldn’t be allowed to go back home. It was just as obvious that it would be just a matter of time before Will turned to less than acceptable ways, trying to support himself on the street.
“He’s been here for a while, and I think he still feels that life has abandoned him, just like his mother has. He needs to learn how to relate to people and how to trust again.”
