Maddie Inherits a Cowboy

IT TOOK ALMOST AN HOUR for the hot-water tank to do its job. Madeline was too impatient to wait, so she started cleaning with paper towels and water, pretty much making mud on the silty counters during her first swipes, and then after rinsing the thankfully strong paper towels, eventually getting the surfaces clean.

Once the counters were done, Madeline regarded the floors, also silt-covered. When she’d first set foot in the house, she’d wondered why there was no carpeting. She didn’t wonder anymore. Carpet would be a commando dust trap, even with a supervacuum.

Right now she wished she had a SuperVac. Or a broom.

Madeline pressed a hand to her forehead, then went to the counter where her cell phone was plugged in, for all the good it would do. She turned it on and found that it was still searching for a signal. Crap. She knew there’d been a signal at the turnoff for Lone Sum Road, because she’d talked to her grandmother, fending off questions about why she wasn’t finishing the semester at the college. Eileen knew about Dr. Jensen, but Madeline hadn’t yet broken the news that she, too, was under investigation. Connor and her cousins were under strict orders not to let it slip. Madeline didn’t want her grandmother worrying about her, so she’d intimated that she had a grad student who needed teaching experience, thus freeing her to take care of business at the ranch. Eileen had more questions, but fortunately Madeline lost the signal as she started up Lone Sum Road. It had been a good thing, too, since the last few miles had required all of her attention.

She turned off the phone, set it back on the counter. Apparently if she wanted to make a call to Connor for moral support, she was going to have to drive to the bottom of the mountain to do it. Not tonight. She walked over to where her suitcases sat on the dusty floor. She didn’t want to open them for fear of getting dust on everything in them, so instead she paced to the curtainless window and stared out at the lights of Ty’s house, a hundred yards away. The ranch was set up so that they had their privacy. Skip’s house was close to the barn and Ty’s close to the gate.

And both houses close to nothing else. The only sound was the generator, the source of her power, chugging away. How was she supposed to sleep with that noise?

Skip? Explanation, please? How did you handle this? Why did you handle this?

She probably wouldn’t be sleeping, so she might as well be cleaning. To do that she needed a few things Ty probably had. Madeline pulled on her coat and headed for the door.

The generator was louder outside. She didn’t have a flashlight, and the ranch had no yard light, so she made her way to Ty’s house by moonlight reflecting off the snow. When she got there, she knocked and was greeted by loud, serious barking.

A second later Ty opened the door, his dog regarding her suspiciously from behind the man’s long legs.

Madeline tilted her chin up. “May I please borrow a broom?”

Ty’s mouth tightened and then he nodded. He left the door open as he crossed to a utility closet in the kitchen. Madeline hesitated, then stepped inside, keeping her eye on the less-than-friendly-looking dog. Weren’t collies supposed to be friendly?

“And a dustpan?” she called when Ty pulled out a broom.

He reached back into the closet, pulling out a dustpan, along with a mop and bucket. He set the bucket on the floor and thrust the cleaning implements at her.

“Anything else?” he asked in an expressionless voice.

“Cleaner?”

He didn’t say a word as he went to a kitchen cabinet and pulled out a bottle of 409. He walked back to where she stood, guarded by his dog, and dropped the bottle in the bucket. It landed with a small thunk.

Madeline squared her shoulders. The guy did not like her. The message was oh-so clear in his closed-off body language, his refusal to speak. Well, she had invaded what he probably, erroneously, thought of as his turf. In a way, she understood his reaction, but it wasn’t going to have any effect on her behavior toward him.

After she had gathered the cleaning supplies and stepped back out onto the porch, he finally said, “If you’re going to clean tonight, you’d better hurry.”

She turned back with a frown. “Why?”

“You have half an hour before I turn off the generator.”

“I have what?” She really hoped her jaw didn’t drop.

“Half an hour. We don’t have enough fuel to run your generator full-time, and frankly, it’s too old to run full-time.”

“Does your power go off, too?” she demanded. Over his shoulder she noticed a computer sitting on the desk, a search-engine screen clearly visible. He had internet. She couldn’t even get a cell signal.

“Of course,” he said, and although his expression remained passive, she had a feeling he was enjoying this.

“When do you turn the power back on?”

“In the morning for a few hours. Do you have a flashlight?”

“In my car,” Madeline said in a faint voice as she weighed the ramifications of this new and unexpected information.

“Don’t plan on using a lot of water while the gen’s off. No power, no pump.”

Her eyes flashed up to his face. “Excuse me?”

“You have a water storage tank, but it’s not huge. Don’t take a shower or anything.”

For the second time that night Madeline was left staring at a closed door.

Was he being serious? Or inventing rules to make her miserable?

If he was… If he was, Madeline had no way of finding out. She was in over her head here, but damned if she was going to cry uncle.

She lifted her hand and pounded on the door. For a second she didn’t think he would answer, but he did, swinging it open, a harsh expression on his face.

“What?” he asked in a deadly voice.

“Would you give me some warning before you turn off the electricity?” Madeline said calmly, making Ty feel like a jerk for growling at her. But damn it, he wasn’t used to having other people around, insulting his integrity, then knocking on his door and borrowing cleaning supplies.

The sane thing to do would be to teach her how to operate the generator so she could turn the power on and off herself. It was hers, after all, but no one within sixty miles worked on the machines, so if it went down, it could be down for days. In the dead of winter. That wasn’t an option. He didn’t want her trying to move in with him.

“I’ll knock on your door. You don’t need to answer.

Just get into bed before the lights go out.”

“Thank you.” Madeline gathered her supplies and trudged off down the path through the snow to Skip’s house, the mop bobbing as she walked. Ty watched her for a moment before closing the door.

When he went back to his work—a rural development grant for pasture improvement—he couldn’t concentrate.

He doubted he’d be able to focus as long as Skip’s sister was on the property, and that wasn’t good, since she appeared to be putting down roots.

Ty waited until he couldn’t stay awake any longer before letting himself out into the cold to turn off Madeline’s generator. The porch steps clunked under his boots as he climbed. He gave two loud raps, then turned and retraced his steps, hands thrust deep in his pockets. He hadn’t bothered to put on gloves. He didn’t want to talk to Madeline and he didn’t trust her not to open the door and either ask a question or make an observation. Sure enough, he heard the door open behind him, but pretended he didn’t. A second later, it closed again. Bullet dodged.

He waited in the barn for a couple minutes to give her time to settle, then flipped the toggle on the generator. The house went dark. He hoped Madeline had gone straight to bed, as he’d suggested. But he had a sneaking suspicion, given the flashlight beam arcing through the interior of the house, that she hadn’t.

Welcome to life off the grid.

CHAPTER FOUR

OKAY, SKIP. I WANT ANSWERS.

Madeline burrowed deeper into the sleeping bag she’d laid out on the leather sofa. She hadn’t folded the couch out into a bed, for fear of the amount of dust she might find inside. She hadn’t started cleaning, either, not wanting to suddenly find herself in the dark. But for some reason, Ty had waited almost an hour before turning off the electricity. Wasted time.

She wasn’t sure what exactly she’d expected when she got to the ranch, but it wasn’t this—a dusty, empty double-wide with intermittent electricity. When Skip had said they generated their own power on the ranch, she’d had a romantic vision of solar panels and twenty-four-hour-a-day electricity.