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“She’s the one who found Pokey. He was lost, and the fire almost got him. But she saved him, didn’t you, Shannon?”
The cluster of grinning children beamed at Shannon in a way that made her want to sink into the floor. What could she say without taking away Kenny’s moment in the limelight? “I didn’t exactly find him—he found me.”
Laura Cozzins suddenly appeared at Shannon’s side, saving her from having to say anything more about Kenny’s dog. “Well, now, I see you’ve already made friends with Kenny and his pals. Wonderful, Shannon.” She beamed. “Why don’t you take them into the art room and let them draw and color and make all kinds of wonderful things?” She smiled broadly as she elicited nodding approval from the kids. “Doesn’t that sound like fun, children?”
Shannon could have summoned a hundred reasons why she was the last person in the world to be put in charge of a bunch of kids, but she didn’t have a chance.
Kenny grabbed her hand. “You can be our teacher.”
The rest of children nodded and crowded around her with smiles and beaming faces, effectively eliminating any chance she had for refusal. As the children began to pull Shannon toward the classroom Laura completely ignored her frantic plea for help.
“You’ll have fun,” Laura promised with a chuckle, and quickly turned away to draft someone else for one of her projects.
How in the world did I get myself into this? Shannon would have rather faced a roomful of hostile executives than a roomful of squirrelly youngsters. Raised as an only child by parents who never stayed in one city very long, she had always been the new kid in school, and being around younger children had never been a part of her upbringing. She grew up in an adult world where achievement and success were the driving goals. As a result, Shannon was competitive, motivated and competent when it came to the business world, but it only took ten minutes in the art classroom with a cluster of scattering children to discover that her people-management skills were sadly lacking in the present situation.
“Everyone sit down,” she said in a normal voice, which had little impact in the noise level of excited kids darting about the room, handling everything that wasn’t tacked or glued down.
Boxes of donated supplies were on the tables. She knew that if she didn’t do something, impatient children would be diving into them, and the chaos would grow worse by the minute. It didn’t help her confidence to realize no one in the room was paying any attention to her.
She had to take charge, and quickly. Remembering that one of the first rules of a successful business leader was to command attention, she clapped her hands loudly and raised her voice above the bedlam. “Listen to me! I want everyone to sit down now! And be quiet!”
Later Shannon wondered what she would have done if the kids had ignored her, but to her relief, they quickly filled the chairs at two long tables and fixed their grinning smiles on her. She guessed that their ages ranged from kindergarten to second or third grades. Now that she had their attention she didn’t know what to do with it.
She walked over to a table and looked at the boxes of pencils, crayons, paper and a few coloring books. She cleared her throat, hoping she would sound steadier than she felt. “All right, we’re going to draw and color pictures.”
“I want a picture to color,” a curly-headed girl named Heather howled when Shannon gave the last coloring book page to someone else.
“I bet you can draw a nice picture of your own to color,” Shannon coaxed.
Heather set her lips in a pugnacious line. “I want a real picture.”
“Sorry. I’m afraid that there aren’t any coloring book pictures left,” Shannon said flatly.
“Then you draw me one,” Heather ordered with pouting lips, and shoved her plain sheet of paper toward Shannon.
Fuming silently, Shannon grabbed a pencil, and as quickly as she could she sketched a house with a flower garden and tall tree with a child’s swing in it. “There. Color that.”
Heather looked at it, then gave Shannon a broad smile of approval. “It’s nice.”
“I’m glad you like it,” Shannon said in relief as the little girl picked out some crayons and began to color the picture.
Shannon dropped down in the teacher’s chair and wondered how long it would be before she could send all the kids back to the gym.
When Heather finished coloring her picture, she started showing everyone and bragging, “See the picture teacher drew for me.”
“I want one, too.” The children began to line up at her desk, all of them wanting a special picture of their own. “Draw me something, teacher.”
Shannon’s first reaction was to refuse, but somewhere at the back of her memory was a remembered pleasure in what her parents had called her doodling. Even though an art teacher had told Shannon once that she had an artistic flair, she’d had never had time or the inclination to foster it. Giving a soft laugh, she said, “All right, let’s see what I can do.”
Quickly she sketched some simple scenes, then some cartoon figures that seemed to come easily to her. As she handed each drawing to a child, she was rewarded with a broad grin and a thank-you.
“Do one for me,” Kenny begged.
“Well, let’s see.” Shannon pretended to think. “I bet I know one you’d like.”
She was drawing a cute puppy with ears and a tail just like Pokey when she was startled by someone leaning over her shoulder. “Very good,” Ward said, as his warm breath bathed her ear.
Startled and instantly embarrassed, Shannon almost covered the sketch of the puppy with her hand so he couldn’t see. A deep conditioning from her childhood had made her instinctively want to hide what she had been doing. She could almost hear her father’s voice. Wasting your time again, Shannon!
As Ward saw the muscles in Shannon’s cheek tighten, he reassured her. “I mean it. It’s very good.”
“It’s Pokey,” Kenny said happily. “I’m going to color him black and white. And I’ll stay in the lines,” he promised solemnly, as if someone had pointed out this little goal to him once or twice. He proudly took the picture to his table.
Ward eased down on the corner of her desk, lightly swinging one leg as he looked around the room. “I didn’t know you were a teacher in the making.”
“I’m not.”
“You could have fooled me.”
He grinned at her, and she didn’t know if he was secretly amused or impressed that the children weren’t climbing the walls.
“What brings you back to the school this morning?” she asked lightly. She wasn’t going to let him know that she’d been disappointed when he hadn’t come to the school at all yesterday.
“I had a little time between chores and helping out the fire wardens this afternoon. When I came in, Laura asked me to deliver a message to you.”
“And what was that?” Shannon stiffened, wondering if the preacher’s wife had come up with another volunteer job for her.
“It’s time to let the kids go to lunch.”
She looked at her watch in surprise It was almost noon. She couldn’t believe the morning had passed so quickly. When she announced that it was time for lunch, there were some protests from those who wanted to finish their pictures.
Shannon vaguely promised they could finish their pictures some other time or take them with them. Ward sat on the edge of the desk watching Shannon while she collected crayons, pencils and paper. For some reason, his smiling approval was irritating.
“Well?” she demanded, challenging him to say something. “You don’t have to look so smug. Laura caught me at a time when I had no chance to refuse.”
“It looks like she drafted the right person, all right.”
“At least it’s better than peeling potatoes, thank you.”
Ward laughed, secretly relieved to find her spitting words at him instead of curled up somewhere battling fear. He had some bad news for her. Flying sparks carried by the wind had ignited the tops of tall ponderosa pines on the other side of the high-ridge fire line. Ground crews were scrambling to clear brush in the area, and airplane tankers were dropping fire retardant chemicals in an effort to control the blaze before it became full-blown and started down the mountainside. A dozen homes were in danger of being lost—as well as a white sports car still perched precariously on a rugged rocky slope.
“What is it?” Shannon asked as his smile faded and his forehead furrowed in a frown. Her hands tightened on the piece of paper she was holding, crushing it. “My car’s gone, isn’t it?”
“No, it’s still there.”
“But?” she prodded.
“The fire is threatening to start down this side of the mountain. New fire lines are being set up, and crews are cutting down brush and trees around some of the high mountain homes in an effort to save them.”
“And if they don’t stop it?” Even as she asked, she knew the answer.
“It could sweep down the mountain to the river and spread along the valley below.” He didn’t add that his ranch would be vulnerable to any fire sweeping up the canyon toward his pastureland. “We’re all praying that that doesn’t happen. Which reminds me, we’re going to have church services here at the school on Sunday. Our little church won’t hold this crowd, and I’m sure there’ll be a lot more worshipers than usual.” He gave her a wry smile. “Lots of people wait to make a 911 call to the Lord, you know, instead of keeping prayed up.”
Shannon refrained from commenting. She hadn’t seen any evidence that churchgoing people had it any easier in life than anybody else. The only time she was ever in a church was for weddings and her parents’ funeral. Neither her mother nor her father had held to any religious faith, and she had been brought up to believe that being a “good” person was all that was necessary.
Ward could tell from her expression that worship was not a part of her life, and for some reason, he felt challenged by her lack of spiritual awareness.
“What do you say to lunch at Bette’s Diner?” he asked impulsively. “It’s only a short walk from here, and I bet getting out of here for even an hour would do you good.”
Shannon searched his face. Was it pity that prompted the invitation? Or did he need an hour away from the heavy pressures as much as she did? There were shadows under his dark-brown eyes and visible lines in his forehead and around his mouth. She wondered how much sleep he was getting these nights.
“Sounds great,” she said honestly.
As they left the school, they passed a roped-off area where anxious pet owners were milling around kennels and cages lined up by the building. Shannon couldn’t believe the menagerie of animals—cats, rabbits, dogs and other furry creatures—that had been brought to the school for safekeeping. When Shannon spied Kenny running across the playground with Pokey on a leash, she waved and smiled at him.
“You ought to do that more often,” Ward told her.
“Do what?”
“Smile instead of frown.”
“Oh, is that your way of saying I look like a sourpuss?”
“Yep.”
They both laughed, and he took her hand with a playful swing. As his long fingers gently closed around hers, she felt a kind of peace and harmony that denied the biting odor of smoke and the wailing of emergency vehicles.
Neither spoke as they walked slowly away from the school. Shannon was surprised at her sudden sense of freedom from the pressures that had been weighing her down. Nothing had changed. Nothing at all. Her life was still in the pits, but somehow, walking hand-in-hand with him, she felt in a world apart from the shambles of her life. She’d never allowed her feelings to dominate her rational thoughts before, and every ounce of common sense told her to shut down this emotional reaction before she lost her mind completely, but she kept her hand in his, drawing warmth and reassurance from the touch.
They strolled down the hill until they reached Main Street—two blocks of clustered rustic buildings that housed one gas station, a small mercantile store, a feed store, several small businesses and one restaurant named Bette’s Diner.
Schoolchildren were bused into Beaver Junction from the whole county, since most of the population lived on ranches and scattered mountain homes. At the moment, the influx of outsiders was ten times the normal population, and the tiny network of roads around the Junction was snarled with emergency vehicles.
Bette’s Diner was crowded from one end to the other, and Ward and Shannon were lucky to squeeze into a booth just as a couple of men vacated it. They didn’t have to wait long for service. They had barely seated themselves when a waitress breezed over to them with a welcoming smile aimed at Ward.
“Hi, there. I was wondering if you were going to make it for lunch today. Somebody told me you were up at the base camp shortly after dawn.”
Shannon recognized the attractive brunette who had hugged and laughed with Ward in the gym that first afternoon. She was still dressed in Western pants and shirt, and a small apron encircled her waist. Shannon guessed she was probably in her late twenties, and the way her eyes lit on Ward made it easy to tell how she felt about the rancher.
“Judy, this is Shannon Hensley,” Ward said, quickly introducing her. “She’s waiting out the fire at the school.”
“Yes, I know,” Judy said as she darted a quick glance at Shannon. “From Hollywood, someone told me. Of course, you can’t believe everything you hear.”
“It’s true. Would you like her autograph?” Ward asked with mock solemnity.
“Are you…somebody?” Judy’s eyes widened as she stared at Shannon.
“Of course, she is. Would I bring a nobody to Bette’s Diner for lunch?” Ward asked facetiously.
“Don’t pay any attention to him,” Shannon said with a laugh. “I’m a working girl from Los Angeles.” And out of a job, she could have added.
A faint color rose in Judy’s cheeks. “I should know better than to fall for his joshing.” As she readied her pad and pencil for their order, she became all business. “What can I bring you?”
Shannon followed Ward’s suggestion and ordered baked trout, which he promised was caught fresh daily. After Judy disappeared into the kitchen with their orders, Shannon chided Ward, “Shame on you. You shouldn’t tease her like that. She likes you.”
“I know, but humor is the best defense for a lot of things, like letting friendship get out of hand.”
The way he said it made Shannon wonder if he kept all the women at arm’s length. And she remembered what Laura Cozzins had told her.
“Well, what’s your verdict?” he asked with a raised eyebrow as he leaned back in the booth.
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll tell you a little secret. Your eyes deepen into a startling gray-blue when you’re doing some heavy thinking.” His smile challenged her. “Now, don’t lie and tell me you were thinking about what kind of pie to order for dessert.”
“All right,” she said, resting her elbows on the table. “I was indulging in curiosity about some things Laura shared with me.”
He chuckled. “Well, then, I suppose I should start to deny everything just on principle.”
“Oh, she was very complimentary. She bragged about your ranch and explained that you specialize in raising Appaloosa horses. Frankly, I have no idea what makes one horse different from any other horse.”
“A real city slicker, eh? Well, you’ve come to the right place to get a little equine education.” There was an unmistakable lift of happiness to his voice as he began to tell her about his stable of Appaloosa horses. “They have beautiful markings. Brown and black spots, with white or black tails and mane, are the most common coloring. A wonderful saddle horse, and one of the best mounts for working cattle. The best thing that ever happened to me was coming back to the ranch to devote myself to raising and breeding them.”
“What were you doing with your life before that?”
“Nothing I’m proud of,” his said flatly. “My daughter was only two when my wife died, so I decided to move back to the homestead so my sister could raise her. You’ll have to come out to the ranch and meet them.”
“I’m really hoping to get out of here the first chance I get,” she responded quickly. For some reason, she didn’t want to commit herself to any personal involvement with his family. It was enough of a strain to try to adjust to a bunch of strangers. The less she knew about anyone, especially this very attractive man, the easier it would be to maintain her distance and not get emotionally involved. What a mistake it had been coming to Colorado in the first place. She’d been running away, she could admit that now. Afraid and scared, she’d thought of a mountain cottage as a sanctuary. What a laugh that was!
Ward didn’t know why the barriers had gone up. Probably she was bored to tears with all his horse talk. He wondered why he was so intent upon impressing her. Anyone with a lick of sense could see that his lackluster life wouldn’t hold any charm for her. They were from different worlds, and only a crisis like this fire would have put the two of them together in the first place. It bothered him that he couldn’t figure her out. Spoiled? Certainly. Vain? Probably. Hurting? Definitely.
When Judy served their orders, she made light conversation with Ward and then lowered her voice in a personal tone. “Am I going to see you tonight?”
“Afraid not,” Ward answered readily, giving her his easy smile. “Chores at the ranch have gotten ahead of me. I have to head back as early this afternoon as I can.”
Judy looked ready to protest and shot a quick look at Shannon as she turned away.
Was he breaking a date with her, Shannon wondered. It was obvious that the waitress thought she was going to see him tonight. Were they more than just friends? If Judy was his sweetheart, Shannon didn’t approve of the way he might be standing her up. Was this his usual way of toying with the opposite sex? Her earlier warm and comfortable feeling about him was gone. They finished their meal with only sporadic, desultory conversation.
As they came out of the café, Shannon decided she wanted to pick up a few things at the mercantile store. “I’d like to buy some more coloring books. I don’t want a repeat of this morning.”
“Why not? I’d say you are really talented, drawing all those pictures. Are you an artist in the making?”
“Me?” Shannon protested quickly. “Heavens, no. That’s just doodling—at least that’s what my mother called it. She used to get furious with me for wasting my time, drawing pictures all over my notebooks and scratch pads. Believe me, I haven’t done anything like that for years.”
“That’s too bad. You looked as if you were enjoying it.”
“I was just relieved to find something that would keep the children quiet. It’s worth buying some coloring books to keep them busy.”
