Rancher's Deadly Risk

Stifling a sigh, she bathed and dressed in a flannel shirt and jeans, caught her hair up in a short ponytail, and dug out her planning books. Yesterday had pretty much driven everything else out of her mind, and she needed to come up with some kind of new, hands-on project that would teach math in a real-world way.

It had, she admitted, been easier to come up with things at the start of the year, but as the weeks passed, ideas had become thinner on the ground. She scanned the topics to be covered that week, seeking some fertile soil. Unfortunately, she didn’t think most of her students were quite ready to enjoy math for the sake of math.

She was searching around on her computer looking for ideas that might work with at least some of what she would teach this week, when the phone rang. She answered, her heart lifting a bit, expecting to hear Linc’s voice.

Instead what she heard was a deep, angry voice. “Stay out of what doesn’t concern you, bitch, or you’ll pay.”

Before her jaw could even drop, the other party had disconnected. At once she pressed the caller ID button, but it told her only that the call had come from Wyoming. Great help.

She sat there, staring at her phone, shaken. Just words, she told herself. Just an empty threat. But she couldn’t quite persuade herself of that. Her stomach kept flipping nervously, and she’d have given just about anything to call back and give that man a piece of her mind. It would have relieved her anxiety just to be able to yell at him.

Just as anger began to seriously overtake uneasiness, the phone rang again. Without even looking to see who it was, she snapped, “What?”

There was a pause. Finally Linc’s familiar voice said, “Cassie?”

At once embarrassment filled her. “Sorry,” she said, aware that her voice had thickened, “I just got a nasty call. I thought it was another one.”

A moment of silence. “What kind of nasty call?”

“Telling me to stay out of things that don’t concern me, with an implied threat and a bit of name-calling. It’s nothing, it just made me mad.”

He didn’t reply directly. “Are you going out?”

“No, I’m doing my weekly planning.”

“I’ll be there in forty-five minutes.”

Then he was gone, leaving her to wonder what had lit the fire under him. Surely the call, as annoying as it had been, didn’t require immediate action. Heck, she didn’t even know for sure what it was about.

Then it struck her that Linc was on his way over. She hurried into her bedroom and changed into something more attractive than the baggy clothes she had been working in. Nothing too much, just a more attractive blouse with a pair of reasonably new jeans. Another brushing of her hair, a tiny—just tiny—dab of makeup around her eyes and some gloss on her lips.

Then she started a fresh pot of coffee, since somehow she had managed to drink most of it while working this morning. That much caffeine? It struck her that that might have caused the stomach flips as much as the phone call.

She threw open a window to let in some of the fresh, chilly air, then tried to return her attention to her planning. It didn’t work. All she could think about was Lincoln Blair coming here. Imagining him walking through her door. Wondering how he would be able to keep up that shield he seemed so determined to place between them while they were working on a project.

God, was she really thinking like this at the age of thirty? That man had truly gotten to her, yet what did she really know about him? That he looked good enough to model on a magazine? That he was popular with both faculty and students?

That meant nothing, really. Nothing. She gave herself a firm mental shake and told herself to remember that she was simply going to be meeting him to work on a project, something she had done countless times before with teachers she found attractive or not-so attractive. So what the hey?

Despite her best efforts, she couldn’t help being a little nervous anyway. If he arrived here packed in his personal brand of refrigerant, she didn’t know how she would manage. Yes, she had worked with difficult people before, but there was difficult and then there was difficult.

Cussing silently, she waited for her doorbell to ring, giving up hope of focusing on her work. Instead she looked around her little office, the house’s one spare bedroom, and decided she liked what she had so far been able to do with it. Little by little she was transforming the place into a home that reflected her love of bright color and handmade crafts. Some items she had brought with her, and some she had discovered since arriving here, at a little hole-in-the-wall place that seemed left over from an earlier century.

Finally Linc arrived. Butterflies fluttered wildly in her stomach as she went to open the door.

Her memory had not exaggerated his Celtic-warrior good looks, not one bit. He stood there in a light jacket, jeans and his usual chambray shirt—it was almost a uniform. On his head sat a felt cowboy hat that looked as if it had seen better days.

“Howdy,” he said.

His deep voice seemed to pluck a string inside her and make it vibrate. She very nearly forgot to invite him in, then realized she was in danger of standing there like a starstruck kid.

“Come on in,” she said. “You didn’t have to race over here, you know.” Not that she was exactly objecting.

“Probably not, but we needed to meet anyway.” He stepped inside and looked around her cozy living room. He surprised her with his choice of words. “Very inviting,” he said approvingly.

“That’s what I hope,” she said as she closed the door behind him. “Coffee?”

“Love some.”

He followed her into the kitchen, and as naturally as if he belonged here, he pulled out a chair at her dinette and sat. She filled two mugs, vaguely remembering from school that he liked his black.

“We could go to my office in the back,” she suggested.

“This is fine for now.”

As if he didn’t want to get any deeper into her life or her house. Feeling a bit stung, she placed his coffee in front of him and sat facing him.

“So I started thinking about this program,” she began.

He shook his head a little. “In a minute, Cassie. First I want to hear more about that phone call.”

As if a switch flipped in her head, she heard that angry, deep voice again. “What’s there to say? I told you what he said. He sounded angry, and threatening, but it was just a phone call. It’s easy to make anonymous threats.”

“It may be easy, but it’s seldom pointless. Somebody’s angry with you, and I doubt that many people know yet about what happened yesterday. The boys involved, maybe their parents if Les has already called them all. Maybe a few people they talked to.”

She shook her head. “Nothing has happened. Nobody has been suspended. If this stops, nobody gets suspended. Scholarships are protected and so is the almighty state championship. If anyone hoped for anything from that call, it’s that I wouldn’t push this into a suspension.”

He set his mug down. “I agree. Essentially. What’s troubling me is the way you got treated yesterday. Your authority was ignored, you were pushed, not just brushed by, and now today a threatening call. That incident yesterday was unusually aggressive for students that age. I’m not saying they never get past name-calling and the occasional spat, but like I said yesterday, by this age they’re mostly past ganging up and getting physical. Add that to the way they treated you and I’m concerned, that’s all.”

She thought it over for a moment. “Then maybe I’m not the best choice to help with this antibullying campaign. If I’m seen as just a troublesome outsider, the message may be lost.”

“You’re not doing this alone,” he reminded her.

No, she wasn’t. She had tried to avoid meeting his gaze directly, but now she did, and felt as if she were falling into the depths of the incredible blue of his eyes. An almost electric spark seemed to zap her.

Then he broke eye contact, returning his attention to his mug. “I spent some time this morning exploring the subject,” he said. “Unfortunately, I have a dial-up connection out there and the internet moves like molasses.”

“I’ve got broadband. We can use my computer.”

“Or go to the school.”

She sensed he wanted to be out of her house and into a more neutral environment as quickly as possible. Again she felt that sting, but did her best to ignore it. No point creating a Shakespearean tragedy in her own mind.

“Sure, if you want,” she said quickly. “Let me get my jacket.”

Five minutes later, with a couple of her travel mugs filled with coffee for the two of them, they stepped outside into a brisk morning. Fluffy white clouds raced overhead in a cerulean sky.

“God, it’s beautiful here,” she said.

“Really?”

She glanced at him. “Don’t tell me you don’t notice.”

“Well, I actually do, especially out at my ranch.” For the first time he cracked a genuine smile.

It almost took her breath away. Of course she’d seen him smile on occasion around school, but never had the full wattage been directed her way. Warmth drizzled through her all the way to her toes, and she had to fight to collect her thoughts.

“What do you raise?” she asked as he helped her into his battered pickup, a truck that might have once been a bright red, but now was dulled with age and liberal applications of touch-up paint.

“Actually my dogs do the raising,” he said humorously as he climbed in behind the wheel. “They do a damn good job of looking after my sheep and goats. And I have a few horses. It’s not much, but it’s all I can handle while I’m teaching.”

“Why do you keep on doing it?”

“I enjoy it, for one thing. For another, that place has been in my family for over a hundred years. I’m not going to be the one to give it up.”

She could understand that, although it was hard to imagine. “You must feel a lot of loyalty.”

A faint smile this time, directed out the windshield as he drove toward the school. “My family invested a lot of sweat in that place. It was their place in the world, and now it’s my place. Maybe some day I’ll have kids and they won’t want it, but fact is, I’m rooted here until I die.”

“That must be a good feeling.”

“Sometimes.” He hesitated. “You?”

“Rootless. I have no way to really understand how you must feel about your ranch. My mom moved us around the country a lot. I was lucky to finish high school in the same town where I started it.”

“And you’ve continued the gypsy tradition?”

“You mean because I came here?”

“For one. But what about the past?”

“I’ve moved a lot, too. You want the truth? It’s getting old. I’ve never known anyone for more than a few years, and then they get left behind. I started thinking about that, and it struck me that’s a really lonely way to live.”

“So you’re looking for a place to stay permanently?”

“If I can find one.”

“Why this place?”

“Because it feels right. Because after I’d spent a week here considering the job, I got the feeling that if I stayed long enough to become a part of the community, I could put down some really deep roots. People wouldn’t be strangers on a busy street. They’d have names, and I’d get to know them at least a bit. That maybe someday I wouldn’t be an outsider anymore.”

“So you’ve always been an outsider?”

“I’ve never been anything else.”

He fell silent, pulling into a faculty parking spot near the west wing door. From here she could see the freshly painted and repaired roof and side wall. “Someone said a tornado hit the building?”

“Yeah, last spring. What a mess, but at least no one was killed. It just grazed the town, but the thing was a half mile wide. If you get out into the countryside you can still see the scars where it passed. At least no one was killed, although we had some injuries.”

“Is that common here? Tornadoes?”

“It’s really rare. I won’t say never, but what we saw last spring was one for the record books.”

“Nobody told me how bad it was.”

He gave her an amused glance as he turned off the ignition. “They probably didn’t want to scare you away.”

“I’ve lived in tornado country. It wouldn’t panic me. I just prefer it if they’re not common.”

“They certainly aren’t here.”

As they climbed out and headed inside, she could hear sounds from the athletic fields on the other side of the building. “Practice today?”

“Not until later. I think some youngsters must be playing on the outdoor basketball courts.” He unlocked the door and held it open for her.

“Why would the school have outdoor courts? I never got that.”

“Only the team and supervised students get to play basketball in the gymnasium. Outdoors is for fun and practice.”

“That’s really a nice idea.” But she couldn’t help thinking he had brought her to this side of the school in case some of the basketball players were out there. Or some of the kids she had interrupted yesterday. She doubted he was afraid of any of them, so he must be trying to avoid giving her a moment of discomfort. A generous thought, but really not necessary. She liked to believe she was tougher than that.

They wended their way through virtually empty hallways. In the distance they could hear a janitor working with a buffer, but other than that the place seemed abandoned.

He took her to his office just off the gymnasium, not to his homeroom. She guessed it made sense that he’d have two offices given that he wore two hats at the school.

It wasn’t a huge space, but it contained enough room for maybe half-a-dozen students to gather with him, and a counter where he had a coffeepot and microwave.

“This is positively homey,” she tried to joke.

“Given their age, high metabolism and activity level, it takes a lot of effort to keep those young men fed. That microwave gets a megaworkout.”

“I bet.”

He cleared a stack of papers to one side, pulled a chair around so she could see his computer screen and turned on the machine.

“Okay,” he said. “You’ve worked in a lot of different places. How familiar are you with antibullying programs? How much do you already know about the dangers of bullying?”

“Some,” she admitted. “In one of the schools where I worked, the program had been in place for at least ten years. It started in kindergarten, actually, and was covered every single year.”

“What were the important mechanisms?”

“First, faculty and administration. It’s so important for teachers not to ignore bullying, to listen to student complaints about it and do something, and for the administration to be fully involved. You get nowhere if the adults in the school brush it off.”

He nodded, his blue eyes touching lightly on her face before returning to the computer screen. She wondered, half-humorously, if he would have liked to dive into the monitor to escape. “And the students?”

“We tried to create a culture where bullying was frowned on. You know as well as I do that peer pressure is more important to youngsters than anything adults do or say. So if you can persuade the students to self-police, to look down on bullies, you can stop a lot of it.”

“That’s going to be the hard part.”

“No kidding. Changing a culture takes time. One assembly won’t do it, it’ll just get the ball rolling. This is going to have to be an ongoing program.”

“Where do you suggest we start?”

She liked that he was looking to her for advice. Even in this supposedly more equal time, she was used to men just taking over and directing projects. She’d always put it down to testosterone or something, but maybe it wasn’t. Linc didn’t strike her as short on testosterone or manliness, come to that.

“Ideally,” she said slowly, “we’d like to get the cooperation of students who are looked up to. The tone-setters.”

“Like some of my players.”

“Exactly. They can be our first peer-pressure group, the guys and gals most of the other students respect.”

“We need to get across how dangerous this really is. It’s not just a matter of scaring or upsetting another student.”

“No,” she agreed. “It can have lifelong consequences. It can cause posttraumatic stress disorder. And have you looked at the rate of teen suicide? A lot of those can be linked directly to bullying.”

“We’ve definitely got our work cut out for us. First to get the staff and a core of students on our side. Once we have the kernels we’ll need to help them grow.”

Then he looked at her. “Have you ever been bullied?”

“Of course. Most people have been.”

“Badly?”

She hesitated then sighed. “I guess. I got picked on a lot for my weight.”

He astonished her then. “I don’t see anything wrong with your weight. Were you heavier back then?”

“Actually, not by much.”

He shook his head. “Amazing. I would have thought most men would have thought you were gorgeous.”

Her jaw dropped but he had already turned away. “I wondered,” he said, returning to the subject at hand, “because you didn’t seem to take the way those guys brushed against you as bullying. Almost as if it were normal.”

“I didn’t think of it that way,” she admitted. “It was a little strong but I didn’t feel intimidated.”

Blue eyes settled on her again. “Really? But that’s what they intended, don’t you think? Letting you know that they were bigger and stronger and not afraid to push?”

She bit her lip, considering it. “I guess so. There was no other reason for it. They didn’t frighten me, though. I just got angrier.”

“Somebody sure tried to frighten you this morning.” He frowned then and leaned back a bit in his chair, as if thinking things over. “I don’t like this,” he said. “Bullying in general, of course, but I don’t like the way it seems to have escalated, judging by what you saw and what you experienced. Some element is getting way out of line and we need to yank them back as quickly as possible.”

“Maybe it’s just the four I caught in the act. Maybe it isn’t a trend at all.”

One corner of his mouth tipped up, and his eyes scraped over her briefly. “You’re quite the optimist. I’m more inclined to think this is the tip of the iceberg. These things don’t usually happen in total isolation.”

She rested her chin on her hand. “You might be right.”

“I hope I’m not,” he admitted. “Unfortunately, I’ve been watching that steady fracturing I mentioned yesterday ever since the semiconductor plant arrived. Little by little a line has been drawn. And when you start drawing lines, how long is it before the people on the other side of the line from you become objects of your scorn?”

“You may be right.”

“Basic social dynamics. We’ve always gone to war over our differences. A school is just a microcosm.” He shook his head. “Don’t let me start thinking about humanity as a whole. Right now we need to deal with a front-and-center neighborhood problem with as little scarring and fallout as possible.”

She gave a laugh. “Yeah, we can’t reform humanity in a day, or a school in even a week. How do you want to approach this?”

He took the task of finding the students for his core peer group, and she agreed to set about finding materials that they could use in a more public venue.

Then he rose, stretched and said, “I’ve got a team meeting in a little while. I’ll drive you home.”

“I prefer to walk, but thanks.”

“Then I’ll walk with you.”

His words stilled her. “You really are worried about that call.”

“I wouldn’t say I’m worried, but a little caution might be wise until we see if you get harassed again.”

She felt an instant of rebellion. She was an independent woman who felt perfectly capable of taking care of herself, and she didn’t need a white knight to protect her. On the other hand, it would mean a little extra time with him, which she wouldn’t mind. Maybe she could get past the force field a little.

Pulling on her jacket, she remarked, “I thought this was a friendly, nice county.”

“It is, mostly. But like any other place on the planet, not everyone is nice.”

Outside, the air still had that wonderful crisp feel of fall, and she almost thought she could smell snow in the air even though the sun was bright. After he locked the door, they began to stroll toward her house, carrying the travel mugs. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry.

“How do you like living here so far?” he asked.

“I’m loving it, actually.”

“Not dying for lack of nightclubs, theaters and huge shopping malls?”

She laughed. “Not at all. I’ve never enjoyed mall-crawling, for one thing. I’m always looking for little out-of-the way places full of different things.”

“We have plenty of those.”

“I’ve noticed. It’s one of the things that charmed me. I haven’t been in a department store like Freitag’s since I was a little kid. I get a kick out of having the wood floors creak under my feet. Besides, if you’ve seen one mall, you’ve pretty much seen them all. The homogenization of America. You can’t tell what city you’re in.”

“That’s my impression. But what about things to do?”

“There’s plenty to do.” She glanced at him, wondering about the line of questioning. “I get together with some teachers to play cards a couple of times a month. We go out for lunch and sometimes dinner. I never liked the club scene. I guess most people would find me dull.”

“Not around here.”

“And if I ever get an overwhelming urge for a museum or the theater, I can take a weekend and go to Denver. Come on, Linc. You teach. You know how little free time you have.”

He chuckled. “You’re right. And there’s even less with my ranch.”

“And football,” she reminded him. “Anyway, I really like it here so far. It’s different from the places I lived before, but I’m finding it comfortable.”

“I’ll ask for your opinion again come early March.”

She was laughing when he left her at her door, but his smile was faint, and she could almost hear the shield cranking back into place.

What was it with that man?

Sighing, she went inside, taking his advice to lock up behind herself, and decided she would probably never know.

Whatever his problem, Linc had clearly decided not to let her into his circle.

To hell with him, she thought, returning to work on her week’s plans. She needed an idea to excite her students more than she needed him.

Chapter 3

Sunday night turned wildly windy and Cassie awoke to a Monday morning with steel-gray skies and air that felt surprisingly warm. The wind had taken the last of the leaves from the trees, and was still blowing them around as she walked to the school.

With no more phone calls, she felt the incident was closed. Over the weekend, though, she’d been texted by Les, the principal, asking that she and Linc speak to the faculty at the weekly meeting at the close of school that day.

Being the new kid on the block, as it were, she didn’t feel entirely comfortable with that idea, and as she walked she realized she had a minor case of nerves going, the way she often did on the very first day of the school year. Great. She hoped she’d forget about it during the teaching day.

When she reached the school, she found Linc was still on bus duty. At least he smiled faintly when he opened the door for her.

“About this afternoon …” she began.

He nodded. “I can do most of the talking. I understand you don’t want to come off like the new broom.”

“Exactly. Thank you.”

Another brief nod. “You just fill in when you think I’ve left something out. I managed to get some of the first few members of our student squad, though. Some of my star players and a handful of the cheerleaders. I didn’t make a general approach, just handpicked a few, but no turn-downs.”

She turned as she stepped inside. “That’s fabulous!”

He grinned, surprising her. “Despite what happened on Friday, most of our students are good people.”