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