Kelton's Rules

“He’s a boy, ain’t he? When I was his age, anything on wheels was fair game. How else is he s’posed t’learn?”

“Driver’s Ed when he’s of legal age!”

“Pshaw! Most ranch kids’re driving by the time they can see over the steerin’ wheel.”

“But he’s not—” Abby swiped a lock of hair behind her ear and blew out her breath. “Okay. What’s done is done. About fixing it, though. Whitey, you really can’t give me an estimate?”

“None that I’d care to stand by.” Whitey shifted from his good leg to his bad and back again. “You know, you might want t’chew it over, Miz Lake. I’m in no hurry. Can’t work on her anyways, ’cept Saturdays and Sundays. We’re pretty hard-pressed out at the Circle C, since Kaley dropped her twins this spring, smack in the middle of calving season. Been up to our ears in puke and diapers ever since, ain’t we, Chang?” He looked down at his feet, then quickly around when he didn’t see the dog.

A feline screech and a flurry of barks dragged everyone’s eyes across the yard. DC shot out from under the truck with the Pekinese snapping toothlessly at his heels, bellowing blue murder.

“Dadblast you, Chang!” Whitey yelled, “Get on back here!”

The tomcat swarmed up the swing oak and disappeared beyond the leaves. Chang hopped twice, scrabbling frantically at the bark—then collapsed in a wheezing heap at the base of the tree.

“Gonna give yourself a stroke someday,” Whitey scolded, though Jack could tell this was for Abby’s benefit. The old man’s face was pink with pride. “I’m mighty sorry, ma’am. If a cat looks at him sideways, he can’t control himself.”

The kids had hopped out of the bus at the first sound of mayhem. Sky leaned against the trunk, staring upward. “DC? DC! What if he falls, Mom?”

“He’s not an outside cat,” Abby explained to Jack. “I don’t think he’s ever been up a tree before. Certainly not a high one.”

He was an hour late for work already and his ladder was across town at the building site. Jack clamped a lid on his instinct to ride to the rescue. For Abby, anytime, but not for a cowardly hairball. “Not bad for a beginner.” And what goes up must eventually come down. No use breaking his own neck speeding the process along. “Once Chang goes away…”

“He’s leavin’ now. We gotta get a move on.” Whitey whisked his snarling companion into the truck, clambered up, then poked his head out the window. “You sleep on it, Miz Lake, and give me a call, okay?” With a wave to the children, he rolled off toward the street.

“I can get him,” Kat declared, peering up into the branches. “If I had spiked boots like a lumberjack it’d be easier, but if somebody’d boost me up to that first limb…”

“Uh-uh.” Jack tugged on her ponytail. “You’re grounded, kiddo, and that means what it says. Both feet strictly on the ground.”

She gave him a disdainful look, or it would have been, except for those funhouse eyebrows. “Aren’t you supposed to be at the office?”

He showed his teeth. “I am. Soon as I set you up. Go get the extension cord out of the Jeep and plug it into the carport plug. You’ve got some sanding to do. Lots of sanding.”

Kat made a terrible face, but she knew when to stop arguing. Off she trotted.

Sky looked from the tree to the departing girl squeezing through the gap in the pickets. “Don’t you try and climb this, either,” Jack warned him. “He’ll come down when he’s hungry.”

“DC’s always hungry.”

“Then we’ll see him soon.”

Sky nodded doubtfully, then brightened. “Can I help Kat, Mr. Kelton?”

“Not for a minute. I suppose you can watch, but don’t let me hear that you helped, Skyler. Kat earned every inch and splinter of this job and now she pays up.”

They watched the boy hurry down to the gate, then through. “There was a fire?” Abby inquired after a pause.

“Mmm.” Jack hooked his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans and braced his back against the tree trunk. “She snuck out on her baby-sitter last night, then went over to where I’m building a house, across town. Played with my butane torch and somehow set a can of kerosene on my workbench—and then the bench itself—on fire. Luckily Sheriff Noonan happened by while she was trying to beat out the flames.” And if Noonan hadn’t? His shoulders jerked in a shudder. “At this rate I’ll have white hair before I’m forty. I had a pet raccoon when I was a kid that could open any drawer, any cabinet, any package a human could, but Bandit wasn’t half this much trouble.”

“She is rather…high-energy.” Abby laughed softly. “What’s her punishment?”

“I stopped by my site and collected enough rough lumber to build a new bench. But it all needs sanding, then painting. Her eyebrows will grow in before she’s done with the eighty grit.

“And that reminds me.” He caught Abby’s arm—blinked at its silky warmth and slender definition—then eased her toward the gate. “I’ve decided to give her baby-sitter, Marylou, one last chance. But if you happen to see a red pickup parked outside my house anytime today—anytime this week—would you let me know? Marylou can entertain her boyfriend on her own time, not mine.”

“Of course.”

They’d halted, facing each other as they reached the gate. His fingers were strangely reluctant to leave her skin. Been too long, Kelton. He’d been too busy this spring, working every weekend, to chase women. “Well…”

“You’re headed to your office,” she murmured helpfully. “You’re a…contractor?”

He laughed and shook his head. “I build on my own time. Weekdays, I’m a lawyer—family law. Wills. Custody squabbles. Divorce.”

“Ah.” She took half a step backward, out of his grasp. “Oh, I—” If he’d announced he slept with snakes in the bed and ate kitty cats for breakfast, she’d have looked at him in much the same way.

Jack gave her a steely smile. Lots of people didn’t like lawyers. Just as well that Abby was one of them. Last thing he needed was to chase a woman in the midst of the Divorce Crazies. Been there, done that, honey, with the scars—and the kid—to prove it. “Have a nice day, Abby.”

“You, too. And…thanks for retrieving my bus.” She turned away before he did.

A lesser man might have slammed the gate. Jack closed it with a precisely calibrated firmness. The top hinge tore away from the post.

CHAPTER FIVE

IT WAS BO-O-ORING sanding the planks. Kat had enjoyed the feel of a big, vibrating block sander in her hands for maybe five minutes—then it got old. And she’d felt kind of superior at how impressed Sky was that she knew how to use power tools, but then that good feeling had faded, too. Now it was nothing but rumble up the long plank laid out on two sawhorses in her yard, then buzz back the other way.

Each time she turned and faced Sky, who sat on the kitchen steps, she made a horrible face. Since she was using the enormous earphones her dad had insisted she wear to protect her hearing, she couldn’t hear Sky’s resulting laughter, but she could see it.

By the third time, he was making faces back at her. From then on it was a contest: who could make the grossest, most terrible face?

After what must have been hours and hours, Marylou came out on the stoop—her soap opera had probably stopped for a commercial—so Kat made faces at her.

Mushy, gushy Marylou. Kat had actually seen her stick her tongue—her tongue!—in Peter Sikorsky’s mouth last night. They hadn’t realized she was sitting at the top of the stairs while they were on the couch. Revolted by that disgusting spectacle, Kat had decided it was time to go. She’d crawled out her bedroom window to the branch of a tree, then to the ground and away.

And why don’t you go away, she silently told Marylou. Marylou was gooey nice to her when her dad was around. Other times they did their best to ignore each other. Kat touched the tip of her tongue to her nose, well, nearly to her nose, crossed her eyes and wobbled her head back and forth like a dizzy duck.

Marylou shook her head pityingly and went back indoors. Sky almost fell off the steps laughing.

The next time Kat completed her dreary circuit and looked his way, she stopped short and grinned. Sky was standing on his head on the top step, with his mouth twisted into a sneer, which looked like a loony smile upside down.

She switched off the sander. “Not bad.” She would have to try a headstand like that, with her forearms down on the ground. If he could do it, surely she could, too. “Where’d you learn that?”

“My mom does yoga.”

“And she does that?” Kat was impressed.

While she changed to a fresh square of sixty-grit paper, Sky turned right-side up again and came to stand beside her, running his palm gingerly along the board. “Still pretty rough.”

“Yeah,” she agreed glumly. “I have to sand ’em all—” she nodded at the stack of planks “—with sixty grit, then eighty, then Dad’s still deciding about one hundred. I’ll be sanding till I go back to school in September. Till Christmas!” Or maybe she’d die of boredom first.