The Rancher’s Second Chance Read online

  He pushed his feelings down. “You didn't need to come tonight.”

  “You needed me.” Sammie shrugged.

  “I did,” he confessed. Then shook his head. “But I really shouldn't have. I should have to be able to do all this shit on my own.”

  She leaned close enough that the memory of their kiss, lost under the haze of exhaustion and stress of the night, suddenly rose to the surface again. He felt himself lean forward, waiting for her to kiss him again. He wouldn't mind that kind of soothing.

  She pressed her forehead against his shoulder. Resting. Breathing. “You could do it on your own if you had to.” She pulled back. “But you don't have to.”

  He swallowed hard. Then nodded. She pressed her hand to his cheek.

  And in spite of the guilt that weighed down on him, he felt strangely lighter.

  The eastern sky was just starting to lighten when Cole walked across the parking lot, cradling his sleeping son and his new blue cast. The nurse had wished him well. And Sammie had been with him the whole time.

  I can't do this alone, he thought with a resigned sigh. There was no sudden jolt of realization. It came to him as if it had been waiting there for him to accept all along. And I have to stay here so I can have that kind of help.

  Sammie slid into the passenger seat next to him and handed him his keys. “I'm too tired to drive,” she yawned, balling up her blood-stained sweatshirt and pillowing her head with it as she slumped against the window.

  He gazed at her perfect profile. That upturned nose. Those kissable lips. “Thank you.”

  She sighed and shifted. “For what?” she mumbled sleepily.

  “For being with me tonight. I guess I can't do it alone. You got those book smarts.” He chuckled. “I always was jealous of you.”

  Sammie sat up and looked at him, an unreadable look on her face.

  He jerked his thumb towards the sleeping Devon. “Think, if I hang around, you might teach that little boy some smarts? Lord knows, he clearly needs them.”

  Sammie clapped her hand over her mouth to keep from laughing and waking Devon, but her mischievous blue eyes sparkled at him from over the top of her hand. In spite of everything, he grinned right back.

  Then, without thinking, he grabbed her hand and kissed the back of it before putting the truck in gear and taking them home.

  Eight

  She must have dozed off, because the next thing she knew, they were bumping back up the drive to the ranch.

  Sammie cleared her throat and sat up straight. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep,” she said quietly

  “It’s fine,” Cole replied. He parked and turned off the truck, but neither of them moved for a long moment.

  Sammie snuck a peek at his profile. The top half of his face was in shadow, but the grim set of his mouth was highlighted by the rising sun. Without thinking, she reached over and squeezed his hand.

  “Hey,” she said. “You did great tonight.”

  “I’d hardly call anything that happened tonight 'great,'“ he glowered. Then he turned and met her eye. “Well, one thing was pretty great.”

  She squeezed his hand again. “Yeah. Pretty.” She gave him a teasing smile.

  He grinned back. But it slid from his face when Devon whimpered in his sleep. “Poor little man,” Sammie sighed.

  “Yeah.” Cole fell silent. He climbed out of the truck then carefully lifted his son in his arms and headed into the house. While he fussed and fretted in Devon's room, Sammie longed to know what he was thinking. The way he watched his son, always keeping his eye right on him, always checking in, stirred something strange in Sammie. Half was a latent maternal streak she wasn't even aware she possessed, half a child’s lingering resentment when she realized her own father had never once looked at her the same way.

  Throughout this whole awful night, Cole had never once looked away from his son. Sammie had had to turn her head several times. The doctor sewing up the gash on Devon's forehead was the worst. But Cole never took his eyes off of him, even when what he saw had to be painful. When Cole emerged from Devon's room and shuffled into the kitchen, she was waiting there with two glasses of bourbon on ice.

  “Mind reader,” Cole sighed thankfully, swirling the amber liquid around before knocking back a huge swallow.

  “I wasn't sure you'd even need it, but I sure do,” Sammie observed. She swirled her own glass nervously, setting the ice cubes clinking against the glass. “You don’t seem to shake as easily.”

  Cole’s eyes darted away and then back to her. “I’m sorry?” There was a grit in his voice she hadn’t expected to hear.

  But after tonight, after what they’d gone through together, she wasn’t going to let that aggression make her back down. “Are you used to it? Dealing with blood and stuff like that? From being in the Army?”

  As soon as she asked it, she wished she hadn’t. Cole had never volunteered much about his time in the service, other than a quick joke here or a faint allusion there. She half expected him to duck away again.

  But to her surprise, he didn’t. He held her gaze, watching her so intently she wondered what he was seeing. She desperately wanted to fidget, to look away, to brush her hair back, to knock back the rest of her bourbon like a shot. Anything to lighten the moment.

  “I wasn’t paying attention when Jameson fell.” He said it in such measured, calm tones, that for a second, the enormity of what he was confessing escaped her.

  “What do you mean?” She hardly dared to breathe.

  Cole leaned back in his seat. “I was too blitzed. Too busy getting shitfaced to see what was going on.” He licked his lips and looked away, losing himself in the memory. “We were hanging out under the Highway 12 bridge. You know, the one that goes over Mud Creek? There's a kind of swimming hole there, and some rocks for jumping. But see, we always jumped from the low point. You know that rock that sticks out? It’s about ten feet up?”

  “I was never brave enough to jump from there. It hurt bad enough when I jumped from the tire swing.”

  Cole gave her a soft smile. “Didn’t hurt if you jumped right.”

  “Did Jameson not jump right?”

  “He jumped from the bridge.”

  Sammie clapped her hand to her mouth.

  “If I’d been paying attention, I would’ve called him down,” Cole said. “Reminded him of that shallow spot. If he’d jumped further out even, he still would’ve been all right. It was just one of those things where he hit the water at the wrong place and from the wrong height.” The skin around his eyes tightened, and Sammie silently refilled his glass. “Problem was, I wasn’t even looking until it had already happened. Right then and there, I made a vow that I would never turn away from the hard shit.”

  “You definitely kept that promise,” Sammie said quietly.

  “Yeah.” From the sound of it, he wasn't sure he had. “I watched in the service, too,” he said in such a ragged whisper Sammie had to lean in just to hear it. “Couldn’t do nothing but watch neither, since my leg was all busted up. I had to just lie there. Watching.”

  The hunted look in his eyes let her know exactly what he’d watched. She reached out and touched his face. “Cole,” she breathed.

  He closed his eyes, pressed his lips together, and took a long, deep breath.

  He'd shared something so personal with her. She thought it was only fair to share something in return. But her life had been so boring and so safe. What did she have to give him that could compare to what he had given her?

  “I never got much of a chance to deal with emergencies like this,” she said slowly. “My mom…”

  She paused. Where was this coming from? She rarely spoke of her mother, and the expression on Cole's face told her he knew exactly how strange it was now.

  Sammie took a sip of her bourbon. The ice was melting now, watering it down just enough for her to take a bigger swallow. The warmth in her veins made her bolder.

  “She was sick, but since I was a kid…it…” Sh
e swallowed and tried again. “I feel like they tried to shield me from the worst of it. And sometimes I wonder if that didn’t make it harder when she finally did go.” Sammie looked up, hoping this made sense. She felt like her brain was lagging behind her words. Everything that came out of her mouth surprised her. “Because it seemed like one moment she was fine, and the next minute she was gone. If they'd told me…if I knew she was getting worse…maybe…?” Her voice caught. “What I'm saying is, if I had seen some of the rough stuff leading up to it, maybe it wouldn't have been so wrenching to lose her. Maybe I might have had some time to say goodbye.”

  She searched his face as if he might have the answer. She figured he'd be watching her with that same unreadable expression she was coming to know so well. But to her surprise, he was looking away. His jaw was clenched, and his knuckles were white, he was clenching his glass so tightly. His whole body radiated anger.

  Sammie clapped her hand over her mouth. They'd spent the night working as a team, side by side. They'd shared…something…that was powerful enough that she felt safe enough to bare her soul to him. Here she was confessing things, opening her heart to him, and he was pissed about it?

  She stood up abruptly. Her only thought was to get away before she exploded, so she hurried to her room without saying good night.

  It was a long time before she finally fell asleep.

  * * *

  Sammie stayed in bed well past when she should have been up. The pulsing pain of an exhaustion headache sat right between her eyes, but no matter how she tried, she could not force herself to fall back to sleep.

  She turned onto her side and curled herself into a ball around her pillow. She hugged it tightly to her chest, feeling small and vulnerable after Cole's rejection. The angle of the sunlight pouring through her window got steeper and steeper as rose higher in the sky. She watched a square patch of sunshine as it crept up her bedspread.

  When it reached her face, blinding her, she swore at herself and threw the blankets to the floor. It was ridiculous. She was behaving like a pining teenager, not the strong woman she really was. This was her house, not the high school hallway. Back then, she'd ducked into the girls' room rather than run into Cole after their break up. Hiding in her bedroom was no better.

  She pulled on a bra and her nicest panties, then the jeans she knew made him check out her ass. She brushed her hair until it shone and let it tumble loose past her shoulders.

  There. No one could accuse her of hiding now.

  Sammie strutted down the hall with her head held high and her speech prepped and ready to go. “We overstepped some boundaries last night,” she recited in her head. “I think it would be best for us both to take a step back.”

  She'd stayed in her room so late that Cole was already in the kitchen. He sat at the table, his sandwich untouched in front of him, as he frowned over a stack of forms. Devon was strapped into his booster seat beside him. The sight of the bandage on his forehead and the pale blue, duckie-printed cast on his tiny arm made Sammie wince internally, but the toddler seemed completely unaffected by last night's adventures and was gamely attempting to spoon yogurt into his mouth. He was getting most of it in his hair, but that happened when he had the use of both arms, too.

  Sammie took a deep breath, ready to launch into her rehearsed speech.

  Cole looked up from his forms. “Mornin'. I'm glad you're up.”

  “Yeah, I was—”

  “Been waiting to ask you something.” He straightened the stack of papers and set them to one side.

  Sammie froze and swallowed back the words at the tip of her tongue before they fell out by accident. “Okay?” she squeaked.

  “That stuff you told me last night. About your mom?”

  “Yeah?” Was he going to tell her she'd crossed a line? That there was no way to compare her pain with the pain of going to war? Or worse, was he about to apologize for getting angry? Sammie almost wished he'd lay into her. At least that way she could shout at him rather than burst into tears. “Which part?” she tried to joke. “The part about how my entire view of family life is skewed because my parents only showed me the good parts? Or how I'm now terrified of ever having a family of my own because I have no model for dealing with conflict or getting through the rough patches?”

  Cole pressed his lips together. “Well now,” he said after a long beat, “I think you just answered my question for me.”

  Heat clawed across Sammie's cheeks, and she was certain she was blushing right up to the roots of her hair. “What were you going to ask me?”

  “If you think not having a mama around affected you somehow.” He took Devon's spoon and gently scraped the yogurt off his face and into his waiting mouth. “I was just wondering, because I was trying to figure what would be worse—having a bad role model or no role model at all.”

  “My mama was a great role model,” she said fiercely.

  “Hang on now. I meant no disrespect. I was thinking about Devon.”

  As quickly as it rose, Sammie's anger dissolved again. “Oh.”

  “When you were talking last night, it got me thinking is all. You had your mama such a short time, but this guy?” He brushed his finger down Devon's cheek. “He had his for even shorter.”

  Sammie had no idea what to say.

  Cole glanced at the clock on the wall. “Oh, I'm lollygagging over here. Would you mind watching him real quick while I grab a shower?”

  She nodded, but the second Cole left the room, she remembered something. She'd never once been alone with a kid.

  “Hey, buddy,” she said, feeling more awkward than she ever had in her life.

  Devon regarded her with solemn eyes.

  “You know who I am, right? You know my name?”

  He nodded.

  “Sammie?”

  “Bammie,” he repeated.

  She giggled. “That works for me. You want to hang out with Bammie for a sec?”

  “Dirt,” he said.

  “What?”

  He pointed at his spoon. “More dirt.”

  Sammie blinked. “Oh, yogurt!” she crowed, feeling like she had discovered the theory of relativity. She sat down across from the toddler. “I can definitely make that happen.”

  When Cole returned from his shower—looking well rested and smelling like a dream—he stopped in the doorway. Sammie felt his eyes on her as he took in his boss feeding his serious son giant spoonfuls of “dirt.”

  “Well. He’s got you wrapped around his little finger now.”

  “He didn't have to work very hard at it,” Sammie laughed, scraping the spoon across the bottom of the plastic container.

  “Yeah, but he's been eating for the better part of the morning. Time for a nap.” Cole scooped his son carefully into his arms. “Plus Daddy needs quiet if he's gonna make heads or tails of this paperwork.”

  “Is that from the hospital? Jeez, they sure don't waste any time.” Sammie shuffled through the pile.

  “No nap!” bellowed Devon.

  “Go,” Sammie urged, nudging Cole. “Don't worry about it. I can finish these for you.”

  “Really?”

  “Don’t sound so surprised,” she teased. “I’m an economist. I've never met a form I didn't like.”

  Cole turned. Then paused and gave her a look that made her toes curl. “What?” she breathed.

  “I’m real proud of you,” he blurted. “I want you to know that.”

  Sammie could only gape at him in open-mouthed shock.

  “I always knew you'd be a success,” he continued. “And I always knew you were the smartest person in the room. And I don’t mean just when I’m the only other one in it.”

  As he spoke, two spots of adorable color rose to his cheeks.

  He cleared his throat, turned on his heel and hurried from the room.

  As Devon's yells of “No!” receded down the hallway, Sammie looked down at the paper in front of her.

  But could barely focus on the words over the din of
her heartbeat. If she wasn't careful, she might find herself falling for Cole Baker.

  Again.

  Nine

  Cole clenched his teeth as he waited for the sudden parade of cars to pass. It seemed like every person in Hope Springs and all five surrounding counties had shown up to prevent him from making the last left-hand turn into Little Lambs Day care.

  He glared at the digital clock on his dash: 5:59 PM. He had exactly one minute to get his ass in there before they started charging the late fee.

  He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. He didn't mean for time to slip away from him like it did. But after spending the whole day mending and reinforcing the broken fence, he'd returned to the main barn to find the irrigation line had somehow sprung a leak and was merrily spilling precious water all over the yard. And the location of the leak didn't make a damn bit of sense, either. Right in the middle of the line like that, rather than at a bend or a stress point?

  Cole wondered if he'd unwittingly broken a mirror and was enduring his seven years of bad luck. Because as soon as he fixed one problem at Bitter Ridge Ranch, another two popped up to take its place.

  And now he was about to be late picking up Devon.

  “Seriously?” he growled at the broken down VW bus chugging past at a stately five miles an hour. He couldn't take it any longer. “Sorry!” he yelled, cutting the wheel and squeezing himself into a space in front of a red sedan. The sedan slammed on its brakes and laid on the horn. “Sorry!” he said again. It was a dick move, but desperate times called for desperate measures. He’d already been late once this week, and every minute past six PM cost an extra fifteen dollars he didn't have.

  He leaped from the cab, and sprinted to the front door, pulling it open so fast it bounced back on its hinges. “I’m here!” he yelled.

  Three female heads turned his way. One silvery gray, one full of close-cropped dark curls.

  And one with blonde hair that gleamed like sunshine.