The Rancher She Loved

Sarah looked thoughtful. “Do you think...do you think Tammy’s parents accepted her pregnancy?”

“If they had, would she have given you up for adoption?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.” She hugged the journal close, the yearning on her face making Clay’s chest ache. “I would guess that the family left town because of Tammy’s pregnancy, except my birth certificate says I was born in Saddlers Prairie. But if they stayed here, why did they sell the house, and why did they leave this trunk and Tammy’s bedroom furniture here? If this stuff is even hers.”

She set the journal aside and massaged her temples, as if so many unknowns gave her a headache.

Clay could only wonder at the answers to those questions. Despite himself, he was beyond curious. He wanted to know what had happened to the Becker family, and especially Tammy. “She mentioned church a couple times, and her youth group. Maybe you can find out which one the family belonged to, and do some research there.”

“Good idea. There can’t be that many churches around here.” Sarah gestured at the papers in the footlocker. “Maybe there’s something in here about where the family went.”

She rolled onto her knees in an easy move Clay envied. If he tried that, his bad knee would scream. Kneeling in front of the footlocker, she began to pull things out and stack them around her.

From where Clay sat, he had a great view of her backside. From time to time, her blouse rode up, revealing tantalizing glimpses of smooth skin. He told himself to look away, but didn’t.

In no time, record albums, three-ring binders, spiral notebooks and a couple of skinny high-school yearbooks piled up around her. One too-tall stack toppled sideways, just missing Sarah’s barely tasted coffee. Which was probably cold by now.

“Why don’t you give me that mug,” he said.

“Oh. Sure—thanks.”

She arched backward and massaged the small of her back, causing her breasts to jut out. Clasping the handle of the mug, she reached across the mess, and handed it over. Her skin was warm now.

Clay was hot enough to boil water, and the brief slide of the backs of her fingers against his palm only upped his temperature.

Oblivious to his feelings, Sarah pored over an old report card. “This is from January of her junior year. I was born that August, which means she was barely pregnant. She may not even have known yet. She got an A in English, but almost flunked math. I was the same way.” Sarah glanced around and frowned. “I don’t see any other report cards. I wonder if they got tossed out, or maybe she dropped out of school before the end of her junior year.”

“Could be either one. Why don’t you check those yearbooks and see what you can find out? I’d start with the one from her junior year.”

“There isn’t one,” she said. “Just the freshman and sophomore years. She went to a school called Four City High School.”

“Saddlers Prairie is too small for its own high school,” Clay told her. “We have a one-room school that goes through eighth grade. The older kids are bussed to the high school. If it were me, I’d check out Four City. Maybe one of her high-school teachers is still teaching there or lives somewhere close.”

“I will.” Sarah opened the yearbook from Tammy’s sophomore year and propped the book on her lap. “Lots of kids signed Tammy’s yearbook, but I don’t see anything special. Just the usual, ‘Have a great summer’ and ‘See you at church camp.’ No mention of anyone with the initial B, and nothing signed by a boy whose name begins with that letter. But then, maybe Tammy didn’t have a boyfriend yet. I wish she’d written something in her journal about him.”

She flipped to the class pictures. After staring at the page with Tammy’s photo, she held it up for Clay to see. “That’s her, on the left. Neither of my adoptive parents had a wide mouth like mine, and I always wondered where I got it.” Clearly emotional, she swallowed. “Now I know.”

“Let me see that.”

Clay stood. Sitting too long had caused his knee to stiffen up, and he winced as he joined Sarah on the rug.

“Are you in pain?”

“Still healing from an injury.” Not wanting to invite questions, which would lead to the pity he detested, he studied the yearbook.

The girl staring from the photo was pretty, with big eyes and a begging-to-be-kissed bottom lip, a teenage version of Sarah. “You have her face shape and eyes, too,” he said.

“I noticed that.” She fiddled with an earring. “I wonder what color her eyes were. With black-and-white photos, you can’t tell.”

Clay had no idea and didn’t care. He was lost in the expressive depths of Sarah’s eyes. Something sweet and warm passed between them, a bond of sorts, born out of sharing the contents of the old footlocker.

Cheeks flushed, she dropped her gaze to the yearbook on her lap. “I wish there were more pictures of her. And at least one of her parents. My grandparents.”

Though her gaze remained on the yearbook, Clay had the feeling she wasn’t seeing it.

“I hardly remember my adoptive grandparents,” she said. “A car accident took my maternal grandparents before I was born, and I was three when my father’s parents died in a plane crash. Two horrible tragedies.”

Clay had always taken his parents and four grandparents for granted. They all lived a few miles from each other in Billings, along with his aunt, his sister, her husband and their two kids. He’d never even imagined what his life would’ve been like without them.

Sarah had no living relatives except, possibly, for her biological parents and grandparents—people she’d never even met. That had to feel lonely, worse than any emptiness Clay had experienced.

“You never know, you might find photos buried somewhere in this stuff,” he said.

“Which is why I’m going to look carefully through everything.”

That could take hours—days, for that matter. He didn’t think he’d be able to handle having Sarah around that long.

Looking thoughtful, she tapped her finger to her mouth. “I wonder what her friends thought about the pregnancy, and how the school reacted.”

“Thirty years ago, in a small town? Probably not well.”

Once more, her beautiful eyes met his. “I feel so bad for Tammy. I would really like to meet her and talk about it.”

Clay hoped she got that chance. He wanted her to find and reunite with her relatives, so that the shadows and worry faded from her face.

“You don’t have to worry about me, Clay,” she said as if she’d read his mind. “I’ve been alone for a while now, and I’m okay.”

He had no doubt of that. He’d never met a woman like her. She was strong and didn’t flirt or fall all over him.

Most of the women he’d known said what they thought he wanted to hear, instead of speaking their minds. Sarah didn’t seem to have that problem. At times, she seemed cool and distant, but right now, she was open and warm, just as when she’d followed him around for that piece she was writing about him.

Back then, he’d been so sure she cared for him—not as a rodeo star, as a man.

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