Having extracted himself from the bevy of moms at the bus stop, Hank Whittaker strode down the middle of the street to his cousin Evan Russell’s driveway and his own pickup truck. He had a full day’s worth of work to get in at his ranch before Casey and Chris Russell got home from school.
A full day’s work, that is, if he could concentrate around the image of the beautiful, blue-eyed woman in the tiny red sports car. Sakes alive, but he’d felt drawn to her. Instantly.
Such hogwash.
The only time he’d ever heard a real, living, breathing person tell of love at first sight was when his Pa, Jeb Whittaker, told the tale of the first time he’d seen Miss Lily, newly moved to Oklahoma, with her family at a square dance. Miss Lily had been so homesick for Georgia, and Jeb had been so smitten by the lovely Southern belle, that he’d determined right then and there that he’d be the one to carry her back to the state of her birth. He’d be the one to see her then-sad eyes light up and her beautiful face blossom into a smile. A week after Jeb had met Lily, he’d asked for her hand in marriage. A month later, married, they were settled in Georgia. And until his death, not two months after hers, Jeb Whittaker loved his wife with a blazing intensity. The love at first sight never diminished one iota.
Hank shook his head as he climbed into his truck. Fairy tales.
From experience he knew that far too many relationships—including Jeb and Lily’s—ultimately ended in the pain of loss.
Grumpily, he maneuvered his way out of the subdivision. His grumpiness didn’t arise from the weekend task at hand. He loved being with the Russell kids. They were part of his extended family. And he certainly didn’t mind doing a favor for cousin Evan and his wife Cilia if it meant they could patch up their marriage. But this living in big houses on tiny lots with your neighbors knowing your every move gave him the creeps. He liked his privacy. Even his hundred-acre ranch, with subdivisions increasingly ringing its borders, seemed too small at times. Just maybe he’d be the Whittaker brother to pull up stakes and buy a truly big spread out West.
Out West. The source of all his Pa’s tales. The source of the magnificent Whittaker boys’ childhood fantasies.
Not more than ten miles down the road from the Holly Mount subdivision, Hank turned his truck onto a dirt road and under a rustic arch hung with a sign that read Whispering Pines. His ranch. His refuge from a too quickly changing world.
Breathing a hearty sigh of relief, he drove between the fenced, rolling pastures toward home. In the distance he heard the soft nicker of his horses. Percherons. Red Suffolks. Draft horses that he bred, raised and trained to be loggers. In the old tradition.
He smiled to himself. Pa had always said that cowboy was a state of mind. Hank had carried that concept one step further. It was next to impossible to recreate a Western ranch in the foothills of the Piedmont, amid the tall Georgia pines. But if you believed that ranching was a constantly evolving state of mind, anything became possible.
The sprawling ranch house, ringed with pecan trees, came into view. To the right Tucker, his apprentice, worked an enormous gray Percheron in the paddock. To the left, near the kitchen garden, Willy, his foreman, waved his hat and shouted curses as a very large pot-bellied pig, a plume of red dust in his wake, ran for high ground.
Hank was in for one of Willy’s lectures.
Pulling his pickup truck in front of the bam, he waited a minute before getting out. Composed his facial features to eliminate any sign of a grin. Willy hated it when Hank didn’t take the feud between the foreman and the pig seriously.
“What the hell you doin’ back?” Willy’s weatherbeaten, toothless face popped up at the driver’s side window.
“Heard you needed help with a pig.”
Willy squinted and examined Hank’s face, most probably looking for any hint of amusement. “One of these days I’m gonna have Reba cook me up some pork chops.”
“You won’t. Reba loves that pig, and you love Reba.” Reba was Hank’s housekeeper and Willy’s unrequited love. Winking at the old man, Hank opened the truck door, then slid out. “No pig...no Reba.”
Willy spat a string of curses under his breath.
“To answer your question,” Hank continued, unable to suppress a smile, “I came back to work the ranch until Casey and Chris get out of school.”
Willy scowled. “No need. That young whippersnapper Tucker and me, we got it under control.”
“I don’t doubt it. But I couldn’t spend one more minute than necessary in that cramped subdivision. Not with folks living right on top of me. Breathing down my neck.”
Willy looked down at his boots. Scuffed one toe in the dust. “Kinda hoped you’d meet a purty woman,” he muttered.
An image of the beautiful blonde in the sports car sprang unbidden to mind. “Now why would you want that?” Hank asked defensively.
“Tucker and I can handle the logging horses and the grain fields. Reba’s got the house in hand. You need someone to occupy your heart so you stop bringing strays—like that damned pig—onto this spread. As it is now, it’s more Noah’s ark than ranch.”
As if on cue, a barn cat with her litter of kittens paraded across the packed dirt of the barnyard, then wound herself around Hank’s legs. Trying to shake off the image of the woman at the bus stop, he bent and picked up the ginger mama. “Are you trying to tell me we don’t need a few good mousers?”
“Mousers are one thing. Vietnamese pot-bellied pigs are another. And hissy-spitting llamas. And crippled mules. And half-blind dogs. And mean Canada geese.” Willy threw his arms in the air in obvious exasperation. “And any other wounded, abused or abandoned animal you can think to haul back here.” He jammed his fists on bony hips, leaned forward and skewered Hank with a one-eyed Popeye stare. “Hell, you spend almost as much time on these castoffs as you spend on your legitimate business.”
“Your point?” Hank tried to look stern, but failed as the ginger cat licked the tip of his chin. He respected Willy too much to remind the foreman that he had been one of the “castoffs” Hank had rescued.
“The point, as if you didn’t know, is that a man needs something to love, sure. But it should be a woman.”
A sudden slice of pain across his heart, Hank gently put the mama cat down in the midst of her mewling kittens. Years ago he thought he had found a woman to love, only to find out she didn’t love him enough to live the hard but rewarding life of a rancher’s wife.
“Well, you’re out of luck,” he replied with a forced grin. “I didn’t see a woman that so much as even tweaked my curiosity.”
Lie.
Willy rolled his eyes. “Well, if you plan to continue sleeping with the dogs, Bowser needs a flea bath. Bad. Like today.” He turned in a huff, then stumped across the yard toward the barn, muttering under his breath every step of the way.
Hank shook his head. Willy made it seem as if his boss’s single state was some kind of degenerate condition. He yanked his Stetson off and rubbed his forehead. The ranch’s Noah’s ark aspect, as Willy referred to it, took no time at all. What chewed up the moments was the foreman’s infernal and constant confrontations on the topic of women. His insistence that an unmarried state was an unnatural state.
Heading for the ranch house and a ton of paperwork, Hank slapped his hat against his thigh in frustration. It was easy for Willy to comment. He loved Reba. A good-hearted country woman. There weren’t many women like her. Women who loved the life Hank lived. Who loved the solitude, the lack of city or suburban lights. Who loved hard physical work. And the animals. Both the purebreds and the strays.
Despite those challenges, Hank had a deep, dark secret that he wouldn’t admit to Willy: