A Small Town Thanksgiving

But for now, she tried to set his mind at ease as best she could.

“Mr. Rodriguez, I’m not exactly sure what it is you’re saying or what you expect me to be, but I was raised in a small town in Maryland where they rolled up the sidewalk at seven-thirty every night. I don’t require a ‘night life.’ What I require is a comfortable work atmosphere and an occasional conversation with friendly, decent people, something I’m assuming won’t be difficult to encounter here.

“Now, if you find any of that objectionable or believe that any of it wouldn’t be to your father’s liking, tell me now so we can iron all this out before I get down to work.”

Mike frowned as he listened to her, unable to believe that a woman who looked the way this Sam person did would be satisfied with so little.

“You’ll be bored,” Mike predicted.

Sam smiled at him in response. A wide, amused, guileless smile that sent ripples of unnamed anticipation through his gut.

“I am never bored, Mr. Rodriguez,” she told him. “If need be, I make my own entertainment. Now, is there anything else?” she asked.

He blew out a breath and picked up the suitcase handle again.

“No,” he told her, then added as an afterthought, “You can call me Mike.”

“Mike,” she echoed with a pleased nod of her head. She’d found the first chink in the wall. Sam considered it her first victory.

The first of many, Sam promised herself.

Chapter Three

“This is really beautiful country,” Sam commented as she stared out the window of Mike’s truck.

They’d been driving for about half an hour and in that time, the rather stoic cowboy behind the steering wheel had said nothing. Oh, he’d grunted a couple of times in acknowledgment of something she had said, but only after she’d deliberately addressed the remark or question to him.

As far as forming actual words on his own, he’d stubbornly refrained from that.

Obviously, the man had used up his less than vast supply of vocabulary at the airport. Determined to get more than a noise in response, she tried again, hoping that commenting on a preferred topic would get the taciturn man to speak.

“It probably hasn’t changed all that much since the first settlers came out here in their covered wagons,” she speculated when he still said nothing. “It looks untouched,” she added, glancing in Mike’s direction. When he still gave no indication that he was going to comment on her observation, she piled on another word. “Pristine, even.”

Mike snorted.

“What?” she asked, eager to prod him. “Did I say something wrong?”

He made another noise and she thought that was all the interaction there was going to be, in which case she had gotten more of a response from a squeaky floorboard. But then Mike surprised her.

“Pristine,” Mike repeated with a mocking tone. “All except for the electrical wires and the phone wires that’re buried underground,” he pointed out crisply.

“All except for that,” she agreed, doing her best to keep a straight face. But her tone betrayed her when she told him, “Some progress is actually a lovely thing, Mike.” Was he the type who had little patience with any kind of modern advancements?

“Never said it wasn’t,” Mike replied, keeping his eyes on the road despite the fact that there was nothing moving in either direction and most likely wouldn’t be for most of the drive back to his ranch. They were twenty-five miles into their journey and the only thing on the road was more road.

After the sparse exchange between them, there was more silence.

Sam suppressed a sigh. This man would have no trouble with solitary confinement, she thought. As for her, she didn’t relish silence.

She gave conversation another try. Eventually, the man would have to do some talking, if only in self-defense.

“So, is it just you and your father on the ranch?” she asked him.

He spared her a look that was completely unfathomable. “What makes you say that?”

“No reason,” Sam said with a careless shrug. “I don’t have anything to go on, really, so I thought I’d make a guess.”

He glanced back at the road. Questions about this woman were beginning to pile up in his mind, but he deliberately shoved them to the side, telling himself he didn’t care one way or another.

“You guessed wrong,” he told her in a monotone.

“Obviously,” she allowed good-naturedly. “Okay, why don’t you fill me in?”

It seemed to her as if he turned his head in slow-motion to look at her. “On what?”

Since she knew nothing about him or his family, that left the door wide-open when it came to subject matter. She spread her hands wide to underscore her feeling.

“On anything you want to. Family dynamics. The average annual rainfall around here.” She continued making suggestions since she wasn’t getting any kind of a reaction from him. “What your favorite animal is—”

“What?” Mike turned to look at her again, his brow furrowed. “Why would you want to know that?”

Finally! she thought in triumph. She’d gotten a reaction.

“Because it would be a start,” she told him honestly. “I’m not picky, Mike. I like to get to know the people I’ll be dealing with and,” she continued with emphasis, “I’m a good listener—but you’re going to have to talk for me to have something to listen to.”

Mike blew out a long breath and the silence continued. Just as Sam was starting to think that she’d completely lost him, she heard the tall, silent cowboy say in a low voice, “I’ve got four brothers and a sister, all younger. Only Ray, the youngest, still lives at the ranch—besides me,” he amended. “I’m partial to my horse and I have no idea what the ‘average’ rainfall around here is. I just know if it’s been a good year or a bad year. Anything else?” he asked, although, for the most part, he expected that what he’d just volunteered would be enough to satisfy her.

Looking back later, he realized that he should have known better. It was true that he hardly knew the woman, but he’d always been fairly good about picking up clues and nothing about this woman had suggested that she was the quiet type, given to meditating and being content with her own thoughts for company. He had a feeling that she was the type who probably thought that a brass band was understated.

As suspected, he didn’t have long to wait for the torrent of questions to begin.

“What are your brothers’ and sister’s names? If they don’t live on the ranch with you and your father, what line of work do they do? Are any of them married? What do they think of your father wanting to have his great-great-great-grandmother’s journals and diaries turned into a memoir? And how could you not at least look through one of the journals once you knew about them?”

Overwhelmed by the questions and the speed with which they were emerging and flowing from her lips, Mike pulled the truck over to the side of the road and turned the engine off.

“Hold it!” he ordered.

The command jolted Sam into a moment of silence. But only for a moment. The next moment, she was back asking questions.

Or at least a question.

“Is something wrong?” Sam asked. She assumed that there had to be something wrong with the truck because why else would he have pulled over so abruptly?

“When I asked if there was anything else, I was being—” The proper word eluded him for a moment.

“Sarcastic?” Sam guessed as the situation suddenly dawned on her.

He supposed he had been, but he hadn’t expected her to actually say it. Nor had he expected the tidal wave of words that had come at him. It had completely overwhelmed him.

“I didn’t think I was sending out an invitation for the Spanish Inquisition,” he countered.

“I wasn’t expecting you to answer all the questions,” she told him. “I was giving you a number of questions to choose from.”

No, she wasn’t, Mike thought. She wanted answers to all of them. He could tell by the look in the woman’s eyes—eyes that were unnervingly blue and hypnotic.

As for answering her questions, the hell he would. All answers did for someone like Sam was create more questions.

“Shouldn’t you have a career that would be more in keeping with that insatiable curiosity of yours?” he asked the woman. “Like a journalist, or better yet, a TV reporter?”

She had no use for the latter, not after what she’d lived through.

“You mean someone who sticks a microphone into people’s worst moments and tries to shatter their privacy by asking the most invasive questions?” she asked, thinking of the reporter who had camped out on her doorstep, hoping to capture her reaction for the viewing public when she first heard about Danny’s accident.

Ordinarily, she wasn’t a violent person, but she’d hit the woman’s microphone out of her hand before escaping to her car and driving away. She’d cried for almost half an hour after that.

“Not exactly my cup of tea,” she told Mike stoically.

“Why an invisible writer?” he asked her.

Sam looked at him blankly for a second, then realized that he’d gotten his terms confused. “You mean ghostwriter?”

He shrugged as he turned his key in the ignition again and drove back to the road. “Invisible, ghost, same thing,” he told her glibly.

She supposed that in a way, it was. Besides, he didn’t strike her as a man who liked to quibble over definitions while hunting for the appropriate word to describe something.

Sam addressed the gist of his question instead. “To answer your question, I like to write and more than that, I like to be able to delve into another person’s life, find out what made that person who and what he or she was,” she said honestly. “I like that they share their memories, their childhood, the special moments of their lives. Once I finish, I’m a part of them and they’re a part of me. It gives me roots,” she concluded.

He glanced in her direction. “Don’t you have roots of your own?” he asked.

Maybe she’d said too much, Sam thought. But then, this cowboy probably really wasn’t listening and what she said to him would be forgotten by morning. She risked nothing by sharing and maybe it would even do her some good, she speculated.

“Well, yes, sure,” she acknowledged. “But they’re very sparse roots. My father took off before I was born, so I never got to know him. For all I know, he was an orphan. My mother was hardly ever around, she was too busy earning a living and keeping the wolf from our door. And when she wasn’t doing that, she was looking for Mr. Right.

“When she finally found him,” Sam said glibly, “he was not only Mr. Right, but Mr. Right-Now. They got married and went off to parts unknown.” The last time she’d seen her stepfather or her mother was at their wedding reception. It still hurt her to think about that, but she’d made the best of it.

“They just up and left you?” Mike asked incredulously. The look he spared her this time was longer and he appeared to be more interested than he had before.

Was that compassion she heard in his voice? The idea surprised her. He didn’t strike her as someone who was capable of that sort of a reaction. Maybe she’d misjudged him.

At least she could hope so.

“Well, I wasn’t exactly a baby in a basket that they sent drifting off to sea,” she pointed out with a small, self-deprecating laugh. “I was eighteen and the truth of it was, I’d been on my own pretty much for years. My mother knew I could take care of myself.” And then, of course, she added silently, there’d been Daniel. Daniel, whom she’d always been able to count on and lean on.

Until he wasn’t there anymore and all she had to lean on was herself.

Mike had a feeling she was giving her mother far too much credit. He knew people like her mother. People whose vision was limited to what they saw in their bathroom mirror in the morning. Sam’s mother undoubtedly had a sink-or-swim attitude toward her daughter when she threw her into the deep end of the emotional pool. In either outcome, whether it was sink or swim, the woman’s hands were clean and she was free to just walk away from the responsibility for the human being she had brought into the world eighteen years ago.

Still, just because this woman sitting in his truck had had a hard time of it, that wasn’t a reason he should feel sorry for her or treat her any differently than he treated most people he came across, Mike told himself.

But after a beat, without bothering to look in her direction, he recited the names of his siblings—in birth order. “Eli, Rafe, Gabe, Alma and Ray.”

Talk about coming out of left field. Sam blinked, completely confused. “Excuse me?”

“You wanted names,” he reminded her briskly. “Those are my brothers’ and sister’s names.” Then, because she’d asked for more details, he gave her a little more to go on. “Eli has his own spread, Rafe is looking to have the same. Gabe and Alma work for the sheriff’s office and Ray is still doing odd jobs around the ranch until he decides what to do with the rest of his life.”

“How about you?” she asked. “Have you figured out what you want to do with ‘the rest of your life’?”

He’d figured that out when he was five. “Run the main ranch,” he told her simply.

In his opinion, as the oldest, there had never been any other course for him to take but that one. While it was true that the ranch officially belonged to all of them, someone had to handle the regular, day-to-day decisions that had to be made in order to keep it productive and running smoothly. Right now, that job belonged to his father, but more and more it was falling to him to be in the wings and ready to take over. He did it now for the short haul. Someday, that “haul” would be permanent. He neither resented it nor looked forward to it.

It was just the way it was.

It was his destiny.

Sam could tell by the cowboy’s tone that he meant it. Apparently, he saw the ranch as his responsibility and despite his lack of effusive words, he obviously took that responsibility very seriously.

“No other hidden ambitions?” She couldn’t help wondering.

“Nope,” he answered with just the right amount of conviction to make the denial sound true. “I’m doing what I like. Or at least I will be once I get you delivered to the house,” he amended.

She leaned forward to catch a glimpse of his face as she asked, “Didn’t sign up to drive some woman from back East around, right?”

The shrug was neither dismissive nor self-conscious. “You said it, I didn’t.”

The man probably didn’t realize that his body language gave away his thoughts. “You didn’t have to. Everything about you says you resent being viewed as an errand boy—even if no one actually sees you that way,” she added with emphasis. She certainly didn’t.

“Just what would you know about it?” he asked.

His tone told her that she’d hit closer to home than he was happy about. She’d been studying people all her life. It had been one of her main interests as well as a source of diversion for as far back as she could remember. It cost nothing and brought an education with it.

“I know a little about having a chip on your shoulder,” she countered kindly. “All it succeeds in doing is weigh you down and make you miserable. The sooner you get rid of it, the sooner you can see things in the right perspective.”

Mike could feel his back going up. He didn’t like being analyzed, even by an exceptionally attractive woman. “Looks like my father lucked out and got two for the price of one,” he said sarcastically.

She didn’t allow his tone to put her off. “I’m afraid I don’t understand—”

“He got a ghostwriter and an armchair psychologist. Maybe even a lecturer thrown into the mix,” he added for good measure.

Maybe she had that coming, Sam thought. She was usually better about keeping her opinions to herself. It was the silence that had gotten to her, made her talkative. Had he been a normal person, he would have felt uncomfortable about the silence as well and would have tried to get some sort of conversation going.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to sound like I was lecturing—or psychoanalyzing you,” Sam apologized. “I was just trying to tell you that I’ve been where you are and I know it’s not a comfortable situation.”

Mike turned his head and stared at her for a very long moment.

Granted it was October, but October in this region of Texas was not cold by any means. Still, she could have sworn she felt frost being sent in her direction.

“You mean like now?” he asked her.

Sam wasn’t sure just what the cowboy was getting at, if he was being sarcastic again or if there was some sort of hidden meaning to his question. In any case, she had a feeling that any further discussion on the topic might lead to some sort of an argument and she did not want to begin her stay here with a confrontation with her client’s son. That didn’t bode well for what she hoped to accomplish here.

Winning an argument had never meant all that much to her.

Still, she really didn’t just want to leave the subject hanging there either, so, in an effort to clarify things for herself, she ventured just one more question. “Did you try to talk your father out of hiring someone to work on your relative’s journals for him?” She needed to know just how much he didn’t want her here, although exactly why that was important wasn’t crystal clear to her yet.

Mike shrugged. “I didn’t know he was hiring someone until a few hours ago.”

Maybe his resentment stemmed from being kept in the dark? That would explain his less than friendly attitude.

“You didn’t know he’d hired anyone?” Sam asked.

Mike didn’t know how much more clearly he could say it. “Not until he told me that he needed me to pick you up at the airport.”

“That must have been some surprise.” No wonder the man seemed so disgruntled. She wouldn’t have been thrilled to have this sprung on her either.

Mike laughed then. It was a deep, robust laugh that sounded hearty rather than perfunctory. Sam found herself instantly captivated by the sound.

“I didn’t know you had the gift of understatement,” Mike said to her.

“I don’t know if it’s understatement so much as empathy,” she corrected him, then confessed, “I can put myself into almost anyone’s shoes. It’s a bit confusing to be able to see both sides of an argument.” At times it made her feel ambiguous, unable to back away from one side or the other. “But that does keep me fair,” she added.

“And that’s important to you?” he asked. He congratulated himself that not a shred of curiosity was discernible in his voice—even though he was.

“That is very important to me,” she told him with emphasis. “Being unfair puts us on the same level as soulless creatures who are looking to get the better of anyone remotely threatening.”

Before he could venture a comment, he saw the ranch house coming into view. They’d been on Rodriguez property for a bit now. That was when he realized that they had been traveling for close to an hour.

He supposed he had to grudgingly admit—if only to himself—that the constant droning of a conversation in the background made the time go by faster.

“We’re here,” he announced for her benefit as the ranch house grew steadily closer.

It was obviously the right thing to say—because Sam abruptly stopped talking.

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