The deep smile and familiar tone nudged forward more memories from her past. Her eyes slowly swept over the dusty, rangy cowboy. It couldn’t be—
Could it?
“Mitch?” she asked uncertainly. But even as she said his name, part of her thought she was making a mistake.
Until he smiled.
Really smiled.
Even as a teenager, Mitch Parnell had always had the kind of smile that the moment it appeared, it could completely light up the area. She and Mitch had gone to high school together, and for a week or two, she had even fancied herself in love with him—or as in love as a seventeen-year-old unhappy, lost girl desperately searching for acceptance could be.
Her mother had died the year before and communication between her father and her had gone from bad to worse. It felt as if the only times Bruce O’Rourke spoke to her, he was either lashing out at her or yelling at her. Hurting, she had been desperate to find a small haven, some sort of a retreat from the cold world where she could pretend she was loved and cared for.
But at seventeen, she had been awkward and not exactly skilled in womanly wiles. Consequently, she just assumed that Mitch had missed all her signals. It even felt as if he had dodged all her outright romantic gestures. In any event, she wound up withdrawing even further into herself, biding her time until she finally graduated high school and could flee the site of her unhappiness.
At the time, Mitch had just been someone she’d gone to school with. If anything, he had been a further reminder of her failure to make a connection with someone. She didn’t associate him with her father’s ranch. Had he come to work here after he had graduated high school? The few conversations they’d had back then, he had never mentioned anything about wanting to work on a ranch. Seeing him here was a surprise.
It occurred to her that she knew next to nothing about the good-looking guy she had briefly thought of as her salvation.
“Mitch?” she repeated, still looking at him, confused.
Pleasure brought an even wider smile to his lips. “So you do remember me.” There was satisfaction evident in his voice.
Ena fervently hoped that he merely thought of her as someone he’d gone to school with and not as the girl who had made an unsuccessful play for him. This was already awkward enough as it was.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I work here,” Mitch answered. His tone was neither boastful nor solicitous. He was merely stating a fact. “As a matter of fact, your dad made me foreman of the Double E almost three years ago.”
Ena stared at him, trying to comprehend what Mitch was telling her. When she’d left, her father only hired men to work on the ranch who he’d either known for years or who came highly recommended by men he had known for years. Apparently, some things had changed in the last ten years.
“Where’s Rusty?” she asked, referring to the big barrel-chested man who had been her father’s foreman for as long as she could remember.
The smile on Mitch’s lips faded, giving way to a somber expression. “Rusty died.”
She stared at Mitch in disbelief. “When?” she finally asked.
This was almost more than she could process. Rusty Hayes had been the man who had taught her how to ride a horse. When she was really young, she remembered wishing that Rusty was her real father and not the man who periodically growled at her and even growled at her mother on occasion. Rusty had been even-tempered. Her father couldn’t have been accused of that.
“Three years ago,” Mitch told her. There was sympathy in his eyes. “You didn’t know,” he guessed.
“There’s a lot I didn’t know,” Ena bit off. “My father and I didn’t exactly stay in touch,” she added angrily, trying to process this latest blow.
Mitch continued to look at her sympathetically. “So I gather.” She was still standing on the top step of the veranda. He decided that maybe she needed a gentle nudge. “Would you like to go in?” he asked.
The question seemed to snap her out of the deep funk she had slipped into. Ena pulled her shoulders back as if she were gearing up for battle. “I lived here for eighteen years. I don’t need your invitation to go in if that’s what I want to do,” she informed him.
Mitch raised his hands up in mute surrender. “Didn’t mean to imply that you did,” he told her, apologizing without saying the actual words. The next moment, he saw her turning on her heel. She walked down the three steps, away from the porch. “Are you leaving?” he asked her in surprise.
“Are you trying to keep tabs on me?” she demanded.
To Ena’s surprise, rather than answer her, Mitch began to laugh. Heartily.
Scowling, she snapped, “I wasn’t aware that I had said something funny.”
It took him a second to catch his breath. “Not exactly funny,” he told her.
Her eyes had narrowed to small slits that were all but shooting daggers at him. “Then what?” she asked.
This whole situation had made her decidedly uncomfortable, as well as angry. This person she had gone to school with—and had briefly entertained feelings for—was acting more at ease and at home on this property than she was. For some reason, that irritated her to no end.
Mitch took in another deep breath so he could speak. “I was just thinking how much you sounded like your father.”
If he had intentionally tried to set her off, he couldn’t have found a better way. Anger creased Ena’s forehead.
Struggling not to lose her temper, she informed him, “I am nothing like my father.”
Mitch’s response was to stare at her as if he were trying to discern whether or not she was kidding him. Before he could stop himself, he asked in amazement, “You honestly believe that?”
“Yes,” Ena ground out between clenched teeth, “I honestly do.”
The smile on Mitch’s face was almost radiant. He pressed his lips together to keep from laughing again, sensing that she really wouldn’t appreciate it if he did. But he couldn’t refrain from saying, “Wow, you really are like your father.”
No wonder her father had made this man his foreman. Mitch Parnell was as crazy in his own way as her father had been. “Stop saying that,” she insisted.
“Okay,” he agreed good-naturedly, relenting. “But it doesn’t make it any less true.”
Ena curled her fingers into her palms. She wasn’t going to give Mitch a piece of her mind, even though she would have liked nothing better than to tell him what an infuriating idiot he was. Which only left her with one option.
Ena turned on her heel and headed back to her vehicle—quickly.
Mitch followed at a pace that others might refer to as walking briskly, but he cut the distance between them so effortlessly it didn’t even look as if he was walking fast.
“Hey, was it something I said?” he asked. “If it helps, I can apologize,” he said, although he had no idea what he could have said to set her off.
But because he had just lost a boss who over the years had become more like a surrogate father to him, Mitch was willing to apologize to Bruce’s daughter. He knew that having her here would have meant a lot to his boss. Besides, he had looked into Ena’s eyes, and while she probably thought she had covered up things well, he had glimpsed pain there. Having her run off like this wasn’t going to eliminate that pain.
“I came to see the ranch house,” Ena informed him crisply. “And I saw it. Now I’m going to see my father’s lawyer and find