Her Right-Hand Cowboy

Calm down, Ena. You’re jumping the gun and getting way ahead of yourself, she silently counseled.

But she wasn’t here to try to prove that Mitch had somehow brought about her father’s demise because he had designs on the Double E. She was here to try to make the best of the situation, sell the ranch and move on. With any luck, by the end of the week she could put her whole childhood behind her once and for all.

Starting up her car, she half expected Mitch to run up to her window and try to stop her—or to at least say something inane such as “Don’t do anything hasty.” But as she pulled away, the foreman remained standing just where he was.

She could see him in the rearview mirror, watching her and shaking his head.

The smug bastard. Was he judging her?

Deep breaths, Ena, she instructed herself. Deep breaths. You can’t let someone out of your past get to you. You’re here to listen to the reading of the will and to sell the ranch. The sooner you do that, the sooner things will get back to being normal and you can go on with your life.

A life she had fought hard to forge, she reminded herself. On her own. Without asking for so much as a single dime from her father.

She was proud of that.

At the same time, the fact that she had had to do it on her own, without any help, or even an offer of help, from her father managed to sting bitterly. It reinforced her feelings of being by herself. She hadn’t always been alone. There’d been another child, her twin brother, but the baby had died at birth. While her mother had treated her as if she were a perpetual special gift from Heaven, she had always felt that her father resented that she had been the one to live and her brother had been the one to die.

“Sorry, Old Man,” she caught herself saying as she drove into town, on the lookout for the attorney’s office—there had been no lawyers in Forever when she had left. “Those were the cards you were dealt. You should have made the most of it. I would have made you forget all about the son you never had. But you never gave me the chance.” She shrugged, her shoulders rising and then falling again carelessly. “Your loss,” she concluded.

The next moment, not wanting to put up with the silence within her car a second longer, Ena turned on the radio and let Johnny Cash mute her pain.

Chapter Two (#u24835d01-3b54-5852-8dd5-bf75274c8407)

Mitch watched as Ena’s rather impressive but highly impractical car—at least for this part of the country—become smaller and smaller until it was barely a moving dot on the winding road.

She had come back, he marveled. He’d had his doubts there for a minute or two after Bruce O’Rourke had died and Cash, her father’s lawyer, had sent a letter to notify Ena, but she had come back.

Ena was even more beautiful than he’d remembered, Mitch thought. Hell, every memory involving her was sealed away in his mind, including the very first time he ever laid eyes on her.

He smiled to himself now, recalling the event as if it were yesterday. It was a Tuesday. Second period English class. He’d been a new transfer to the high school and had just been handed his class schedule. He’d walked into Mrs. Brickman’s class fifteen minutes after it had officially started.

Everyone’s eyes in the class had been focused on “the new kid” as he walked in the door, doing his damnedest to look as if he didn’t care what anyone thought of him, even though he did.

And then, as his eyes quickly swept over the small class, he saw her. Ena O’Rourke. Blue eyes and long blond hair. Sitting up front, second seat, fourth row. He caught himself thinking that she was the most beautiful girl who had ever walked the face of the earth.

He’d almost swallowed his tongue.

It took everything he had to continue with his blasé act, appearing as if he didn’t care one way or another about any of these people.

But he did. He cared what they all thought.

Especially the blonde little number in front.

And because she had suddenly become so very important to him, he deliberately acted as if he didn’t give a damn what any of these people thought of him. Especially her.

With a Navajo mother and an Irish father, Mitch felt as if he had one foot in each world and yet belonged nowhere.

He remembered Ena smiling at him. Remembered Mrs. Brickman telling him to take the empty seat next to Miss O’Rourke.

Remembered his stomach squeezing so hard he could hardly breathe.

Wanting desperately to come across as his own person and not some pitiful newcomer, he had maintained an aloof aura and deliberately kept everyone at arm’s length, even the girl who reduced his knees to the consistency of melted butter.

Why had he ever been that young and stupid? he now wondered. But life, back then, for an outsider hadn’t been easy.

It hadn’t become easier, he recalled, until Bruce O’Rourke had gruffly given him a chance and hired him to work the ranch shortly after his parents died, leaving him an orphan.

Funny the turns that life took, he mused.

Mitch observed Wade McCallister making his way over to him. The heavyset older man looked more than a little curious. He jerked a thumb at the departing vehicle. “Hey, boss, was that—”

Mitch didn’t wait for the other man to finish his question. He already knew what the ranch hand was going to ask and nodded his head.

“Yup, it was.”

Wade had worked off and on at the Double E Ranch for a long time. Long enough to have known Bruce O’Rourke’s daughter before she was even a teenager.

Turning now to watch Ena’s car become less than a speck on the horizon, Wade asked, “Where’s she heading off to?”

“She’s on her way to talk to the old man’s lawyer,” Mitch answered. Even the dot he’d been watching was gone now. He turned away from the road and focused his attention on Wade.

Wade’s high forehead was deeply furrowed. The ranch hand had never been blessed with a poker face. “She’s gonna sell the ranch, isn’t she?” the older man asked apprehensively.

“She might want to,” Mitch answered. “But she can’t.” His smile grew deeper. “At least not yet.”

“What do you mean she can’t?” Wade asked him, confused.

Wade had known Bruce O’Rourke longer than Mitch had. But Wade didn’t have a competitive bone in his body and he wasn’t insulted that his normally closemouthed boss had taken Mitch into his confidence. As a result, Mitch had been devoted to the old man and everyone knew it. While the rest of them had lives of their own apart from the ranch, Mitch had made himself available to Bruce 24/7, ready to run errands for him no matter what time of day or night. No job was too great or too small as far as Mitch was concerned.

“The old man put that in his will.” He had been one of Bruce O’Rourke’s two witnesses when his boss had had the will drawn up and then had him sign it. Afterward, Bruce had expanded on what he had done. “He said the ranch was hers on the sole condition that she stay here and run things for six months.”

It sounded good, but it was clear that Wade had his doubts the headstrong girl he’d watched grow up would adhere to the will.

“What if she decides not to listen to that—what do you call it? A clause?” Wade asked, searching for the right term.

Mitch nodded. “A clause,” he confirmed. “If she doesn’t, then the ranch gets turned over to some charitable foundation Mr. O’Rourke was partial to.”

The furrows on Wade’s forehead were back with a vengeance. “Does that mean we’re all out of a job? ’Cause I’m too old to go looking for work with my hat in my hand.”

Mitch shook his head and laughed at the picture the other man was attempting to paint. “Too old? Hell, Wade, you’re not even fifty.”

Wade wasn’t convinced. “I’d have to pull up stakes and try to find some kind of work somewhere else, and I’m comfortable where I am.” The ranch hand’s frown deepened. “Like I said, too old.”

“Well, don’t go packing up your saddlebags just yet,” Mitch told the man he regarded as his right-hand man. “Even if the ranch does get sold down the line, whatever organization takes over is doubtlessly going to want the ranch to keep on turning a profit. But don’t worry,” Mitch assured the other man. “The old man was banking on the idea that once his daughter gets back to her roots, she’s not going to want to let this place go.”

Wade, however, wasn’t convinced—with good reason, he felt. “You weren’t here when she left. To be honest, I’m surprised the old man’s daughter came back at all.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Mitch said, thinking back to his own childhood and adolescence. It had taken him time to make peace with who he was and where he had come from. Now he was proud of it, but it hadn’t always been that way. “Our past has a greater hold on us than we’d like to believe.”