Dalton's Undoing

She looked as if she wanted to argue, but Morgan coughed just then and her mother nodded. “That’s probably a good idea.”

Seth scooped the girl into his arms easily, and headed for the house with Jenny and Cole following behind him. Morgan still breathed shallowly, her little chest rising and falling quickly as she tried to ease the horrible breathlessness he remembered all too well.

“I hate having asthma,” she whispered, her voice far too bitter for a little girl.

He recognized the bitterness, too. He knew just what it felt like to be ten and trapped with a body that didn’t work like he wanted it to. He had wanted to be a junior buckaroo rodeo champion, wanted to climb the Tetons by the time he was twelve, wanted to be the star pitcher on the Little League baseball team. Instead, he’d been small and weak and spent far too much time breathing into a lousy tube.

“Sucks, doesn’t it?” he answered. “The worst is the one time you forget to take your inhaler somewhere and of course you suddenly you get hit by a flare-up.”

She blinked at him and he was struck by how sweet it was to have a child look at him with such trust. “You have it, too?”

He nodded. “I don’t have attacks very often now, maybe once or twice a year and they’re usually pretty mild. When I was your age, though, it was a different story.”

He set her down on his leather sofa and grabbed a blanket for her.

She couldn’t seem to get over the fact that he knew what she was going through. “But you’re big! You ride horses and everything.”

“You can ride horses, too. You just have to watch for your triggers, like I do, and do your best to manage things. When I was a kid, they didn’t have some of the newer maintenance meds they have now and we had a tough time finding the best treatment for me but eventually we did. You probably know you never grow out of asthma, but lots of times the symptoms decrease a lot when you get older. That’s what happened to me.”

“You probably weren’t afraid like I am when I have an attack. Cole says I’m a big wussy.”

Jenny looked pained by the admission and Seth sent the boy a pointed look. At least Cole had the grace to look embarrassed.

“I was just kidding,” the kid mumbled. He needed a serious attitude adjustment, Seth thought, wondering if he’d been such a punk when he’d gone through his rebellious teens.

“I can’t think of anything scarier than not being able to breathe,” Seth told Morgan. “People who haven’t been through it don’t quite understand what it’s like, do they? Like you’re trapped underwater and somebody’s got two fists around your lungs and is squeezing them tight so you can only take a tiny breath at a time.”

Morgan nodded her agreement. “I always feel like I’m trapped under a big heavy blanket.”

“What’s your peak flow?”

She told him and he nodded. “Mine was pretty close to that when I was about your age.” He paused and saw the conversation was starting to tire her. “Can I get you a glass of water or some juice?”

She nodded, closing her eyes, and he rose and went into the kitchen to find a glass. Somehow he wasn’t surprised when Jenny followed him.

“Thank you.” She gave him a quiet smile and he felt an odd little tug in his chest.

“I didn’t do anything,” he said as he poured a glass of orange juice from the refrigerator.

“You were very kind to her and I appreciate your sharing your own condition with her. It’s great for Morgan to talk to adults who have managed to move past their childhood asthma and go on to live successful lives. Thank you,” she said again, following it up this time with another small, hesitant smile.

He studied that smile, the way it highlighted the lushness of a mouth that seemed incongruous with her buttoned-down appearance.

What was it about her? She wasn’t gorgeous in a Miss Rodeo Idaho kind of way. Not tall and curvy with a brilliant smile and eyes that knew just how to reel a man in.

She was small and compact, probably no bigger than five foot three. He supposed he’d call her cute, with that red-gold hair and her green eyes and the little ski jump of a nose.

Seth couldn’t say he had a particular favorite type of woman—he was willing to admit he loved them all—but he usually gravitated toward the kind of women who hung out at the Bandito. The kind in tight jeans and tighter shirts, with big breasts and hungry smiles.

Jenny Boyer was just about the polar opposite of that kind of woman. Cute or not, he probably wouldn’t usually take a second look at a woman who looked like a suburban soccer mom, with her tailored tan slacks and her wool blazer. Jenny Boyer was the kind of settled, respectable woman men like him usually tended to avoid.

Yet here they were, and he couldn’t seem to keep his eyes off her. She might not be his usual type but he sure liked looking at her.

He frowned a little at the unexpectedness of his attraction to her, then decided to shrug it off. He would never do anything about it. Not with a woman like Jenny Boyer, who had Complication written all over her.

Morgan’s color was much better when they returned to the living room. She was sitting up bickering with her brother, something he figured was a good sign.

She took the juice from him with a shy smile.

“Cole and I have things to do but you two are welcome to hang out here until Morgan feels better.”

“I think I’m all right now,” the girl said.

“I should get her home for a nebulizer treatment and to check her peak flow.”

“I can carry you back out to the car if you want.”

Morgan shook her head. “I can walk. But thanks.”

After her daughter was settled in the SUV, Jenny turned to him and to Cole.

“What time shall I come back?” she asked.

He thought of his schedule for the day. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll be running into town about four. We should be done by then so I’ll bring him back and save you a trip. Just take care of Morgan.”

“All right. Thank you.” She looked at her son as if she wanted to say something more, but she only let out a long breath, slid into her vehicle and drove away.

“So are we going to work on the car or what?” Cole finally addressed him after the SUV pulled away.

If Seth hadn’t noticed how concerned the boy had looked during those first few moments of the flare-up, he would probably find him more trouble than he was worth.

“Oh, eventually,” he said with a smile that bordered on evil. “First, you’ve got some stalls to muck. I hope you brought good thick gloves because you’re going to need ’em.”

Chapter Three

Fourteen was a miserable bitch of an age.

Though more than half his life had passed since that notable year, it felt just as fresh and painful now as Seth watched Cole Boyer shovel manure out of a stall.

Though the kid wasn’t tall by any stretch of the imagination, he was gangly and awkward, as if his muscles were still too short to keep up with his longer bones.

Seth remembered those days. He’d been small for his age, too, six inches shorter than most of the other guys in his class, and with asthma to boot. His father’s death had been just a few years earlier. And while he hadn’t been exactly paralyzed by grief over the bastard, he had struggled to figure out his place in the world now that he wasn’t Hank Dalton’s sickly, sissy-boy youngest son.

He’d been a little prick, too, full of anger and attitude. He had brothers to pound on to help vent some of it, but since fights usually ended with them beating the tar out of him, he tended to shy away from that activity. Eventually, he’d turned some of his excess energy to horses.

He trained his first horse that year, he remembered, a sweet little chestnut mare he’d ridden in the Idaho state high school rodeo finals a few years later.

Yeah, fourteen had been miserable, for the most part. But the next year everything started to come together. Between his fourteenth and fifteenth years, he hit a major growth spurt, the asthma all but disappeared and he gained six inches of height and thirty pounds of muscle, almost as if his body had just been biding its time.

Girls who’d ignored him all his life suddenly sat up and took notice—and he noticed them right back. After that, adolescence became a hell of a lot more fun, though he doubted Jenny Boyer would appreciate him sharing that particular walk down memory lane with her son, no matter how miserable he looked about life right now.

He should be miserable, Seth thought. Though he was tempted to turn soft and tell Cole he’d done enough for the day, he only had to think about the damage to his GTO to stiffen his resolve.

A little misery never hurt a kid.

“Can you hurry it up here?” Seth leaned indolently on the stall railing, mostly because he knew it would piss the kid off.

Sure enough, all he earned for his trouble was a heated glare.

“This isn’t exactly easy.”

“It’s not supposed to be,” Seth said.

After three hours, the kid had only mucked out four stalls, with two more to go. The more he shoveled, the grimmer his mood turned, until Seth was pretty sure he was ready to implode.

Tempted as he was to wait for the explosion, he finally took pity on him and reached for another shovel.

Cole gave him a surprised look when Seth joined him in the stall. “I thought I was supposed to be doing this.”

“You are. But since I’d like to take a look at the car you trashed sometime today, I figure the only way that’s going to happen is if I lend a hand.”

“I’m going as fast as I can,” Cole muttered.

“I know. If I thought you were slacking, you can bet I’d still be out there watching.”

Surprise flickered in eyes the same green as his mother’s, but he said nothing. They worked in silence for a few moments, the only sounds the scrape of shovels on concrete, the whickers of the horses around them and Lucy’s curious yips as she followed them.

Only after they’d moved onto the last stall did the boy speak. “Why don’t you have a real job or something?” he asked, his tone more baffled than hostile.

Seth raised an eyebrow. “You don’t think this is real work?”

“Sure. But what kind of loser signs up to shovel horse crap all day?”

Seth laughed. “If this was the only thing I did around here all day, I’d have to agree with you. But I usually leave the grunt work to the hired help while I get to do the fun stuff.”

“Like what?”

“Working with the horses. Breeding them, training them.”

“Whatever.”

“Not a real horse fan?”

“They’re big and dumb. How hard could it be to train them?”

“You might be surprised.” He scraped another shovel full of sunshine. “I can tell you there’s nothing so satisfying as taking a green-broke horse—that means an untrained one—and working with him until he obeys anything you tell him to do without question.”

“Whatever,” Cole said again, his voice dripping with scorn.

To his surprise, Seth found he was more amused by the kid’s attitude than he’d been by anything in a long time. “Come on. I’ll show you. Drop your shovel.”

Cole didn’t need a second invitation. He dropped it with a clatter and followed Seth toward a stall at the end of the row, where his big buckskin Stella waited.

In moments, he had her saddled, then led her outside to one of the corrals where he kept a dozen or so cattle to help with the training.

“Okay, now pick a steer.”

“Why?”

He had to laugh at the boy’s horrified expression. “I’m not going to make you ride the thing, I promise. Remember how I was telling Morgan about cutting? Stella’s going to cut whatever steer you pick out of the herd for you. Just tell me which one you want her to go after.”

“How the hell should I know? They all look the same!”

“You’ve got a lot to learn, city boy. How about the one in the middle there, with the white face?”

At least the kid had lost his belligerence, though he was looking at Seth like he’d been kicked by a horse one too many times.

“Sure. Get that one.”

He gave the commands to Stella then sat back in the saddle and let her do her thing. She was brilliant, as usual. In minutes, she had the white-faced Hereford just where Seth wanted him, away from the herd and heading for the fence where Cole had perched to watch the demonstration.

“There you go. He’s all yours,” Seth called over the cattle’s lowing.

The boy jumped down faster than a bullet at the sight of a half-ton animal heading toward him.

Seth pulled Stella off and let the steer return to the rest of the herd, then led the horse back through the gate.

“So what do you think? She’s brilliant, isn’t she?”

“You told her what to do.”

“Sure. But she did it, didn’t she? Without even hesitating. She’s a great horse.” He slid out of the saddle, then sent the kid a sidelong glance. “You do much riding?”

Cole snorted. “There aren’t too many horses on Seattle street corners sitting around waiting to be ridden.”

“You don’t have that excuse here. Get on.”

Before Cole could argue, Seth handed him the reins and hefted him into the saddle.

He looked even smaller than his age up on the big horse, though Seth gave him points for not sliding right back down. With one hand on the bridle, he led them back inside the training facility.

“You probably know the basics, even if you’ve never ridden before, just from watching TV. Keep a firm hand on the reins, pull them in the direction you want her to go. Above all, have fun.”

He let go of the bridle, confident the horse was too well-trained to unseat her rider, no matter how inexperienced.

Sure enough, she started a slow walk around the arena. Cole looked terrified at first, then he gradually started to relax. By the second time around the arena, he even smiled a little, though he bounced in the saddle like a particularly hapless sack of flour.

“I suck, don’t I?” he said ruefully as they passed Seth.

Sit up, boy. Or are you too tired to learn to be a man? You’ll never be able to ride the damn thing if you slouch in the saddle like that and gasp like a trout on the end of a frigging hook every time the horse takes a step.

He pushed away the echo of his father’s voice, wondering if he’d been four or five during that particular riding lesson. “You don’t suck,” he assured Seth. “You just have to learn to move with the rhythm of the horse. It takes a while to figure it out. For your first time, you’re kickin’ A.”

For one shining instant, Cole looked thrilled at the praise. He must have felt himself smile, though, because he quickly retreated back into his brittle shell.

“Am I done here? My butt’s starting to hurt.”

Seth sighed as the momentary animation slipped away. He shrugged and held Stella again so Cole could slide down.

“We’ve got one more stall to finish. Work on that while I take off Stella’s saddle.”

Cole grimaced but headed back to his shovel.

He couldn’t expect to change the kid’s attitude with one horseback ride, Seth thought. But maybe the car would do the trick.

He caught his own thoughts and grimaced at himself. Since when was he the do-gooder of Pine Gulch? He had no business even trying to fix this troubled kid’s problems. Better just to get his money’s worth out of him in labor to compensate for the car damage and leave the attitude-adjusting to his mother.

Saturdays were usually one of her most productive days of the week, away from the office and all the distractions of running an elementary school with four hundred students.

She usually accomplished more in a few hours than she could do in two days at school, between lunch duty and phone calls from concerned parents and dealing with state and federal education regulations.

Today, Jenny couldn’t seem to focus on work at all while she waited for Seth Dalton to return with Cole.

After trying for an hour and a half to slog through some paperwork while Morgan rested on the couch next to her in the den watching television, she finally gave it up for a lost cause.

She wasn’t worried about Cole. Not precisely. She was more concerned that her belligerent son would forget Seth was doing him a huge favor and instead would vent his unhappiness in all the usual ways.

She couldn’t stress about that. Something told her a man like Dalton was more than capable of holding his own against a fourteen-year-old rebel.

He struck her as a man who could handle just about anything. She thought of those strong, capable shoulders and had to suppress a sigh. Why couldn’t she seem to get the man off her mind?

She’d had an unwilling fascination for him since the first time she heard his name, long before her son’s recklessness brought them into his orbit. It had been a month or so after school started and she’d been in her office after lunch when one of her brand-new teachers, just out of college and still half terrified of her students, stopped in during her prep hour to talk to Marcy, the school secretary.

It hadn’t surprised her the two were friends. Marcy was only a few years older than Ashley Barnes, the new kindergarten teacher. Beyond that, she was warm and bubbly, the kind of person who drew everyone to her. Not only was she great at her job but the children adored her and Jenny had learned most of the other teachers did, too.

She hadn’t meant to eavesdrop, but her door had been open and she’d been able to hear every word.

“He said he’d call me,” Ashley complained. “How stupid was I to believe him?”

Marcy had only laughed. “You’re human and you’re female. There’s not a woman in town who can resist Seth Dalton when he gives that smile of his. Heck, he even has all the old ladies in my grandma’s quilting club batting their fake eyelashes at him.”

“That night at the Bandito, you’d think I was the only woman in the world,” Ashley said, the bitterness in her voice completely at odds with her usual sunny disposition. “He never left my side all night and we danced every single dance. I thought he really liked me.”

“I’m sure he did like you that night. But that’s the thing about Seth. He lives completely in the moment.”

“He’s a dog.” Ashley sounded close to tears.

“No he’s not. Believe it or not, he’s actually a pretty decent guy. He’s the first one out on his tractor plowing his neighbors’ driveways after a big snowstorm and he always stops to help somebody in trouble. But he was blessed—or cursed, however you want to look at it—with the kind of good looks that make women go a little crazy around him.”

“You think I imagined that night?”

“No. Oh, honey, I’m sure you didn’t,” Marcy had replied in her patient, kind voice. “My friends and I have a theory. We call it Seth Dalton’s School of Broncobustin’. If you’re lucky to find him turning his attention to you, just climb on and hold on tight. It probably won’t last too long, but it will be a hell of a ride.”

“I’m not like that!” Ashley had exclaimed. “I never even go to bars. I don’t drink. I probably wouldn’t even have met him if my roommate hadn’t dragged me along that night.”

“Which is probably the reason he didn’t call you,” Marcy pointed out gently. “You’re a kindergarten teacher with Marriage Material stamped on your forehead. You’re sweet and innocent, and you probably have already got names picked out for the four kids you’re going to have.”

“Is that such a bad thing?”

“Oh, honey, absolutely not. I think it’s wonderful, and somewhere out there is someone who is going to love those things about you. But that’s not what Seth Dalton is about.”

One of the third-graders had come in just then complaining of a stomach ache. Marcy had turned her attention to calling the girl’s mother to come get her and Ashley had returned to her class, but not before Jenny had developed a strong dislike for the man under discussion.

It was one of those weird cases where, once she heard a name, she suddenly couldn’t seem to escape it: Seth Dalton’s kept popping up.

She heard another teacher just before the start of a faculty meeting talk about running into him in the grocery store and how she’d been so flustered just because he’d smiled and asked her how she was that she’d left without half the items on her list.

When they were brainstorming ways to raise money for new library books, someone suggested a bachelor auction and someone else said they’d have enough books to fill every shelf if only they could get Seth Dalton on the auction block.

Now that she’d met him, she certainly understood all the buzz about the man. A woman could forget her own name just from one look out of those blue eyes.

“Are you done with your work?” Morgan asked from her spot on the couch, distracting her from her completely unproductive train of thought.

She closed her laptop and gathered her papers, shoving them back into her briefcase. She had learned long ago how to recognize a lost cause. “For now. Want to watch a DVD or play a game?”

“Sure. You pick.”

They were still discussing their options a moment later when she heard the back door open and a moment later her father came in, his cheeks red from the November chill and his arms full of wood to replenish the low supply in the firebox by the woodstove.

“You should let me do that,” she chided, upset at herself for being too distracted by thoughts of Seth Dalton to pay attention to her father’s activities.

“Why?” Jason looked genuinely surprised.

“I feel guilty sitting here where it’s warm and comfortable while you’re outside hauling wood.”

“I need the exercise. Keeps my joints lubricated.”

She had to laugh at that. At sixty-five, her father was more fit than most men half his age. He rode his mountain bike all over town, he fished every chance he got—winter or summer—and his new passion was cross-country skiing.

“Maybe I need the exercise, too.”

“And maybe it does my heart good to know I’m still capable of seeing to the comfort of my daughter and granddaughter. You wouldn’t want to take that away from an old man, would you?” Jason said, with a twinkle in his eyes and the incontrovertible logic that had made him such a formidable opponent in the courtroom.

She rolled her eyes and was amused to see Morgan copying her gesture.

“Grandpa, you’re silly,” her daughter said with fondness. “You’re not old.”

The two of them were kindred spirits and got along like the proverbial house on fire. Coming to Pine Gulch had been the right decision, she thought again. Even if Cole still fought and bucked against it like one of Seth Dalton’s horses with a burr under the saddle, the move had been good for all of them.

She couldn’t be sorry for it. Morgan and Cole had come to know the grandfather they had been acquainted with only distantly, and in a lot of ways, Jenny felt the same. Jason had been a distant, distracted figure in her life, even before her parents had divorced when she was twelve. Coming here had led to a closer relationship than they’d ever had.

“We’re going to watch a DVD. Are you interested? We’re debating between a Harry Potter or one of the Lord of the Rings trilogy.”

“Oh, Tolkien. By all means.”

They settled on which of the three to see and were watching the opening credits when by some mother’s intuition, she heard the low rumble of a truck out front.

“Go ahead and start the movie,” she said. “Since I’ve seen it at least a dozen times, I’m sure I won’t be too lost when I come back.”

She reached the front door just as Cole hopped down from a big silver pickup truck. Through the storm door, she studied her son intently. Though he didn’t appear to be exactly overflowing with joy, he didn’t seem miserable, either, as he headed up the sidewalk to the house.

She wasn’t really surprised when Seth climbed out the other side of the truck and followed the boy up to the house. She opened the door for her son, who would probably have walked right by without even a greeting if she hadn’t stepped right in his way.