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Todd was looking at her with evident appreciation. He grinned. “Two week trial?” he asked. “While we see how well we all get along? I can’t do you much damage in that short a time, and I might do you a lot of good. I have a way with balance sheets.”
“We couldn’t be much worse off,” Tim reminded his boss.
Jane was silently weighing pros and cons. He had a daughter, so he had to be settled and fairly dependable, if Cherry was any indication. If she hired anyone else, she’d have no idea if she was giving succor to a thief or even a murderer. This man looked trustworthy and his daughter apparently adored him.
“We could try, I suppose,” she said finally. “If you’re willing. But the ranch isn’t successful enough that I can offer you much of a salary.” She named a figure. “You’ll get meals and board free, but I’ll understand if that isn’t enough—”
“If I can keep on doing my present job, in the evenings, we’ll manage,” Todd said without daring to look at his daughter. If he did, he knew he’d give the show away.
“Your boss won’t mind?” Jane asked.
He cleared his throat. “He’s very understanding. After all, I’m a single parent.”
She nodded, convinced. “All right, then. Would you like to follow us out to the ranch, if you’re through for the day?”
“We’re through, all right,” Cherry said on a sigh. “I’m dejected, demoralized and thoroughly depressed.”
“Don’t be silly,” Jane said gently, and with a smile. “You’ve got an excellent seat, and you’re good with horses. You just need to get over that irrational fear that you’re going to go down on the turns.”
“How did you know?” Cherry gasped.
“Because I was exactly the same when I started out. Stop worrying. I’ll work with you. When we’re through, you’ll be taking home trophies.”
“Really?”
Jane chuckled. “Really. Let’s go, Tim.”
He wheeled her to the cab of the motor home and opened the door. “I guess bringing this thing ten miles looks odd,” Tim murmured to Todd, “but we had to have a place where Jane could rest. We’ve carried this old thing to many a rodeo over the years. She takes a little coaxing sometimes, but she always goes.”
“Like Bracket,” Jane mused, glancing back to the trailer where her palomino gelding rode.
“Like Bracket,” Tim agreed. He reached down. “Let’s get you inside, now, Jane.”
Before he could lift her, Todd moved forward. “Here,” he volunteered. “I’ll do the honors.”
Tim grinned, his relief all too obvious. Jane wasn’t heavy, but Tim was feeling his age a bit.
Todd lifted Jane gently out of the wheelchair and into the cab of the big vehicle, positioning her on the seat with a minimum of discomfort. She eased her arms from around his neck a little self-consciously and smiled. “Thanks.”
He shrugged powerful shoulders and smiled back. “No problem. Where does the chair go, Tim?”
He folded it and the older man climbed up into the motor home and stowed it away. He got behind the wheel and paused long enough to give directions to Todd about where in Jacobsville the ranch was located before he and Jane waved goodbye and drove away.
“Dad!” Cherry laughed. “Are we really going to do it? What will she say when she finds out?”
“We’ll worry about that when the time comes. The ranch budget sounds like a challenge, and you could use some pointers with your riding,” he added. “I think it may work out very well.”
“But what about your company?” Cherry asked.
“I’ve got good people working for me and I’m on holiday.” He ruffled her hair. “We’ll think of it as summer vacation,” he assured her. “It will give us some time together.”
“I’d like that,” she said solemnly. “After all, in four years I’ll be in school, and you probably won’t get to see me twice a year. I’ll have to study very hard.”
“You’re smart. You’ll do fine.”
“Yes, I will,” she assured him with a grin. “And you can have all your medical care free.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“Don’t be sarcastic,” she chided. “And you have to be nice to Miss Parker, too.”
“She doesn’t like me very much.”
“You don’t like her, either, do you?” she asked curiously.
He stuck his hands into his pockets and frowned. “She’s all right.”
“If you don’t like her, why are you going to help her?”
He couldn’t answer that. He didn’t know why. She was a woman in a wheelchair, who looked as if in her heyday she’d been nothing more than a fashion doll on a horse. But she was crippled and in bad financial circumstances, and all alone, apparently. He felt sorry for her. Funny, that, because since his failed marriage, he didn’t like women very much except when he had an overwhelming desire for someone female in his arms. Loving and leaving wouldn’t be possible with Jane Parker. So why was he going out of his way to help her? He didn’t know.
“Maybe I feel sorry for her,” he told Cherry finally.
“Yes, so do I, but we mustn’t let her know it,” she said firmly. “She’s very proud, did you notice?”
He nodded. “Proud and hot tempered.”
“What familiar traits.”
He glowered at her, but she just grinned.
At the luxurious house Todd had bought in Victoria, they packed up what gear they’d need for a few days, explained their forthcoming absence to their puzzled housekeeper, Rosa, promised to be back soon and drove in the borrowed Ford down to Jacobsville to the Parker ranch.
It wasn’t much to look at from the road. There was a rickety gray wood and barbed-wire fence that had been mended just enough to hold in the mixed-breed steers in the pasture. The barn was still standing, but barely. The dirt road that led past a windmill to the house had potholes with water standing in them from the last rain. It had no gravel on it, and it looked as if it hadn’t been graded in years. The yard was bare except for a few rosebushes and a handful of flowers around the long porch of the white clapboard house. It was two stories high, and needed painting. One of the steps had broken through and hadn’t been replaced. There was a rickety ramp, presumably constructed hastily for the wheelchair, on the end of the porch. There was the motor home and horse trailer in the yard, next to a building that might be used as a garage by an optimist. A small cabin was nestled in high grass that needed cutting; the foreman’s cabin, Todd thought, hoping that it was more than one room. Nearby was a bigger structure, a small one-story house. It was in better condition and it had rocking chairs on the porch. The bunkhouse?
“Welcome!” Tim called, coming out to meet them.
They got out and Todd shook hands with him. “Thanks. If you’ll tell me where to put our stuff…?” He was looking toward the cabin.
“Oh, that’s where old man Hughes lives.” Tim chuckled. “He helps me look after the livestock. He can’t do a lot, but he’s worked here since he was a boy. We can’t pension him off until he’s sixty-five, two more years yet.” He turned. “Here’s where you and the girl will bunk down.” He led them toward the small house and Todd heaved a sigh of relief.
“It needs some work, like everything else, but maybe you can manage. You can have meals with us in the house. There are three other hands who mend fences and look after the tanks and the machinery, do the planting and so forth. They’re mostly part-time these days, but we hire on extra men when we need them, seasonally, you know.”
The house wasn’t bad. It had three big bedrooms and a small living room. There was a kitchen, too, but it didn’t look used. There was a coffeepot and a small stove and refrigerator.
“I could learn to cook,” Cherry began.
“No, you couldn’t,” Todd said shortly. “Time enough for that later.”
“My wife Meg’ll teach you if you want to learn,” Tim said, volunteering his wife with a grin. “She likes young people. Never had any kids of our own, so she takes up with other people’s. When you’ve settled, come on over to the house. We’ll have sandwiches and something to drink.”
“How’s Miss Parker?” Cherry asked.
Tim grimaced. “Lying down. She’s not well. I’ve called the doctor.” He shook his head. “I told her not to get on that horse, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Never could do anything with her, even when she was a youngster. It took her papa to hold her back, but he’s gone now.”
“She had no business on that horse,” Todd said, pointedly.
“That was a bad attack of pride,” Tim told him. “Some newspaperman wrote a column about the rodeo and mentioned that poor Jane Parker would probably come out to accept the plaque for her father in a wheelchair, because she was crippled now.”
Todd’s face hardened. “Which paper was it in?”
“That little weekly they publish in Jacobsville,” he said with a grimace. “She took it to heart. I told her it was probably that Sikes kid who just started doing sports. He’s fresh out of journalism school and fancies himself winning a Pulitzer for covering barrel racing. Huh!” he scoffed.
Todd mentally stored the name for future reference. “Will the doctor come out?”
“Sure!” the wizened little man assured him. “His dad was Jane’s godfather. They’re great friends. He has an assistant now, though—a female doctor named Lou. She might come instead.” He chuckled. “They don’t see eye to eye on anything. Amazing how they manage a practice between them.”
“The doctor isn’t married?”
He shook his head. “He was sweet on Jane, but after the accident, she cut him dead if he so much as smiled at her. That was just before Lou went into practice with him. Jane doesn’t want to get involved, she says.”
“She won’t always be in that chair,” Todd murmured as they walked toward the house.
“No. But she’ll always have pain when she overdoes things, and she won’t ride well enough for competition again.”
“That’s what she told Cherry.”
Tim gave him a wary glance. “You won’t hurt her?” he asked bluntly.
Todd smiled. “She’s very attractive, and I like her spirit, but I’ve had a bad marriage and I don’t want to risk another failure. I don’t get serious about women anymore. And I’m not coldhearted enough to play around with Jane.”
Tim sighed. “Thanks. I needed to hear that. She’s more vulnerable than she realizes right now. I’m not related to her, but in a lot of ways, I’m the only family she’s got—well, Meg and me.”
“She’s a lucky woman,” Todd replied.
He shrugged. “Not so lucky, or she wouldn’t be in that chair, would she?”
They walked up onto the porch, avoiding the broken step. “Meant to fix that, but I never get time,” Tim murmured. “Now that you’re here to tear your hair out over the books, maybe I’ll be able to get a few odds and ends done.”
“I can help, if you need me,” he volunteered. “I do woodwork for a hobby.”
“Do you!” Tim’s face brightened. “There’s a woodworking shop in the back of the barn. We built it years ago for her dad. He made all the furniture in the house. She’ll like having it in use again.”
“Are you sure?” he asked doubtfully.
“You can always ask her.”
They walked into the living room. Jane was lying on the sofa, putting up a brave front even though her face was stark white with the effort. Cherry was curled up in an armchair beside the sofa, her cheek on her folded arms, listening raptly to her idol.
“Doctor should be here soon,” Tim told Jane. He paused to pat her gently on the shoulder. “Hang on, kid.”
She smiled at him, and laid her hand briefly over the one on her shoulder. “Thanks, Tim. What would I do without you?”
“Let’s agree never to find out,” he returned drily.
“Okay.” She glanced toward Todd Burke. The expression on his lean face made her angry. “I’m not a cripple,” she said belligerently.
He knelt by the sofa and pushed back a strand of her hair. It was wet, not with sweat, but with tears she’d shed involuntarily as the pain bit into her. He felt more protective about her than he could understand.
“Don’t you have something to take?”
“Yes,” she said, shaken by his concern. “But it isn’t working.”
He tucked the strand of hair behind her small, pretty ear and smiled. “Guess why?”
She made a face. “I wouldn’t have tried to ride out into the arena if it hadn’t been for that damned reporter,” she said gruffly. “He called me a cripple!”
“Cherry and I will rush right in to town and beat the stuffing out of him for you.”
That brought a pained smile to her face. “Cover him in ink and wrap him up in his newspaper and hang him from a printing press.”
“They don’t have printing presses anymore,” Cherry said knowledgeably. “Everything’s cold type now…offset printing.”
Jane’s blue eyes widened. “My, my, you are a well-spring of information!” she said, impressed.
Cherry grinned smugly. “One of my new teachers used to work for a newspaper. Now he teaches English.”
“She knows everything,” Todd said with a resigned air. “Just ask her.”
“Not everything, Dad.” She chuckled. “I don’t know how to do barrel-racing turns.”
“I hear a car,” Tim said, glancing out the window. “It’s him.”
Todd frowned at the way Jane’s eyes fell when he looked into them. Did she have mixed feelings about the doctor and was trying to hide it? Maybe Tim had been wrong and Jane had been sweet on the doctor, not the other way around.
Todd got to his feet as a tall man with red hair came into the room, carrying a black bag. He was dressed in a nice gray Western-cut suit with a white shirt and a black string tie. Boots, too. He removed a pearl gray Stetson from his head, and tossed it onto the counter. Pale blue eyes swept the room, lingering on Todd Burke, who stared back, unsmiling.
“This is Dr. Jebediah Coltrain,” Tim introduced the tall, slim man. “When he was younger, everybody used to call him Copper.”
“They don’t anymore. Not without a head start,” the doctor said. He didn’t smile, either.
“This is Todd Burke and his daughter, Cherry,” Tim said, introducing them. “Todd’s going to take over the book work for us.”
Coltrain didn’t say much. He gave Todd a piercing stare that all but impaled him before he nodded curtly, without offering a hand in greeting. He was less reserved with Cherry, if that faint upturn of his thin lips was actually a smile.
“Well, what fool thing have you done this time?” Coltrain asked Jane irritably. “Gone riding, I guess?”
She glared at him through waves of pain. “I wasn’t going to let them push me out into that arena in a wheelchair,” she said furiously. “Not after what that weasel of a sports reporter wrote about me!”
