The Cowboy's Twins

He’d already answered any lay ranch questions she might have come up with on their walk in the dark.

When her hand brushed his, she sidestepped. And he noticed. Maybe he’d been more on target than she’d realized earlier. The silence was getting to her.

She was undersensitized.

“Can I ask a personal question?” It was better than stumbling in the dark.

“Yeah. I might not answer.”

“What happened to Justin and Tabitha’s mother?” None of them had mentioned her all day. Even over dinner. They’d laughed and told her about some of their other cookouts. Told her about a time when they’d been having a picnic at a lake on their property—Spencer had inserted that it was just a pond—and Justin, who’d been standing on the shore, had seen a fish and had tried to catch it with his bare hands. He’d fallen into the water instead. It had been only a couple of feet deep, but that was when they’d both had to start swimming lessons. Every day. Until they could each make it across the small lake on their own.

They’d taken several steps since she’d asked her question. He hadn’t responded. As he’d warned he might not.

Her door was in sight. He walked her to the stoop. Waited while she took out her key.

“She left,” he said when she’d opened her mouth to say good-night.

“What? Who?”

“Their mother. They were two. And don’t remember her.”

“She’s never been back? She doesn’t come to see them?”

“Nope.”

She wanted to know why. In the worst way, she wanted to know.

But he wasn’t her friend. Wasn’t even a friendly acquaintance.

So she didn’t ask.

* * *

THE RESTLESSNESS PURSUING Natasha as Spencer walked away might have caught up with her once she was alone inside the cabin, except that her phone rang.

“Do you have any idea how long this stretch is in the dark?” her assistant said in lieu of hello.

“The same sixty miles it is in the daytime, I expect,” she said, grinning. Angela had a cryptic way about her, an almost impenetrable independent shell, but she was as hardworking and loyal as they came.

She was also fabulous at her job.

“It’s really dark.”

“I know. I drove it myself a couple of weeks ago, going the opposite direction.”

“You could have warned me.”

“I believe I did.”

“Yeah, well, you could have made me listen...”

Sitting in the rocker by the unlit fireplace, Natasha relaxed. Really relaxed. This was her life.

Angela was her “people.”

“How were things at the hotel?” she asked, knowing that she and Angela could just as easily have had this conversation in the morning when they met at Natasha’s cabin for an early breakfast. She’d invited Angela to stay with her. Her stage manager had opted to take a smaller cabin by herself, closer to the crew.

“Good,” she said. “Great, really. All eight contestants were at the cocktail party, and everyone was pumped up for the road trip.” While most of their crew had just gone into the small local town half an hour from the ranch, Angela had driven into Palm Desert. While there, she’d stopped by the hotel that had a contract with Family Secrets for contestant accommodation.

“The bus is confirmed for a nine a.m. pickup, which will have everyone here by eleven. We can give them the abbreviated tour of the ranch and have them on stage inspecting their kitchens by noon. The bus will be bringing the catered lunch. We should be filming segments by twelve thirty and have them out of here no later than two, which will have them back to the hotel around four, giving them a full evening to enjoy Palm Desert.”

They’d made it a condition of the show that contestants’ flights back home had to be Sunday, not Saturday evening as sometimes happened when they filmed in the Palm Desert studio.

They talked a bit more about the logistics of the next day’s events. About the interviews Natasha planned to do that would be a bit different from every other show’s because she wanted to tie the unique ranch setting in to something personal for every contestant. Something to convince viewers to root for each one. That was her job. To draw in the viewers who continued, after five years of watching four five-week segments a year, to make the show such an unexpected success.

Mostly she was talking to keep Angela awake, to keep her company, while she made the seemingly endless trek back across the desert.

She was talking so she didn’t think about being a city girl. About a rancher who didn’t like city girls. About two little motherless kids who’d loved her chocolate chip cookies. About the glob of peanut butter she’d cleaned up off the floor of the stage, and the smears off the counter, when she’d done her final walk-through just before dinner that evening.

Her mind wandered through all of those thoughts, though, as Angela ran through lists they’d both been over already for the first official event in their very first show on the road. Angela listed which crew members would be staying behind at the ranch Saturday night to clean up and ready the set for the first competition the next week.

“You’ve got dinner with Chandler Grey tomorrow night,” her assistant reminded her when they’d exhausted the next day’s details.

She’d shockingly forgotten about the business meal back home in Palm Desert with one of their cable network’s executives.

Her mind appeared to have taken a long trek away from home, out here on the ranch.

“I’m looking forward to it,” she said with real enthusiasm. She’d been away only for a couple of days, but it seemed like weeks. She missed the city. Missed her condominium.

Missed her usual unflappable calm.

“I think he has the hots for you,” Angela was saying now.

“He’s married.”

“Separated. I hear his wife was unfaithful.”

She still wasn’t interested.

“You haven’t been on a date in months.” Angela was really digging deep for conversation now.

While her assistant wasn’t in a committed relationship, either, she went out several times a week. Mostly with the same guy. Natasha’s theory was that if he asked Angela to be exclusive, she would be. If he asked her to marry him, she’d do that, too—not that she volunteered either theory to Angela.

“I’m not the marrying kind, and men my age are looking for commitment.” That wasn’t entirely true. There were plenty of men who were willing just to have fun, but she wasn’t interested in their kind of fun.

The show was her life. It fulfilled her. And made her so happy she didn’t ever even question her personal choices.

She knew what drove her. Knew her goals. She knew who she was. And knew what she could and could not let others expect from her. She knew what promises she could and could not make.

“I know Johnny hurt you, Natasha, but it’s been almost a year...”

Johnny Campbell. Her “Stan.” The man she’d thought would be her companion for life. They were best friends. Good together. Neither of them were interested in cohabitating or giving up their autonomy.

He was a stockbroker, a mover and shaker who worked unending hours. He’d been her stockbroker. Until she found out he’d been stealing from her. Telling her he was investing her money when what he’d been doing was gambling with it.

Thankfully she’d found out during one of his winning streaks and hadn’t lost as much as she might have.

“I’m not still hurting over Johnny,” she said now, a bit surprised to feel how completely true those words were. “I’m open to dating on occasion. I just haven’t met anyone who tempts me to spend time with him more than the show tempts me to spend time with it.”

Also true.

She was thirty-one, not twenty, and knew that her chances of finding a companionship as open-ended as the one she’d shared with Johnny were dwindling.

She just didn’t dwell on the fact. She wasn’t going to let panic or fear for her future change her mind about what she knew she needed in her present.

Like her mother, she was too bossy, too impatient, too strong and independent to be good in a commitment like marriage.

As she sat there, talking Angela all the way back to the ranch, she found peace with her day. Her mother’s breakup with Stan...it was okay. Because her mother was truly okay with it. She’d made the choice that was best for her, the one she could live with, be good at, be happy with. Which made it the right choice.

Whew.

Getting ready for bed an hour later, Natasha was humming to herself. The day had been rough. Touch and go for a second or two there. But she’d made it through.

And was ready to embrace her world in the morning.

* * *

SPENCER WAS UP before dawn. He checked on Ellie. Had a meeting with Bryant to ensure that he had no immediate problems on the ranch. The ranch hands were handling several tasks that day—fixing a fence that was showing wear, checking a couple of cows from the stock herd who were close to calving, seeing to a bull that had been seen limping on one of the camera monitors, receiving a large load of hay that was being shipped...

And Spencer was packing a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches on wheat bread with potato chips and apple slices. As soon as the twins were up, they were heading out for a day of four-wheeling. Spencer driving and the twins strapped in beside him. Far enough away from the compound that Justin couldn’t somehow create havoc among the ranch visitors that day.

He had the TV filming schedule. And though his kids were tired, he kept them off-roading, laughing over dips in hills and taking small mountains like pros, until well after the tour bus had been scheduled to roll off his property with all Family Secrets contestants on board.

Making a mental note to give Bryant the rundown on the state of more fence lines he’d inspected that day, he fed the kids an early dinner and left them with Betsy while he went to check on the rest of the ranch. On Ellie.

Because it was on his property, and ultimately his responsibility, he stopped by the barn-turned-television-set. A handful of crew members remained, busily moving around the stage with clipboards, setting up cameras, working with lighting, cleaning mini-refrigerators in the kitchen.

He didn’t see Natasha, which was fine. He wasn’t looking for her.

The only reason she’d been on his mind all day was the money she was paying him. He needed her contestants able to cook in his barn, her filming to go well and her crew willing to work with what they had and be able to produce the quality show her network and viewers expected out of Family Secrets.

In the end, after collecting the kids and putting them to bed, he headed out to the farthest cabin in the compound. Just to be a good host. And put his mind at ease that all had gone well.

The cabin was completely dark, and Natasha’s SUV was no longer parked beside it. He’d thought she, like her crew, would be spending one more night on the ranch before heading back to the city for the week.

Apparently he’d been wrong.

She’d already left—without bothering to say goodbye.

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