“Sorry, Luke,” she said, again without looking at him. How polite and cool they were being with each other. “So you’re going to keep the ranch, even though you’ll go back to California? You think you’ll come back to the ranch someday?” she asked, watching him and curious about his answer even though she knew she shouldn’t care at all. They would never again mean anything to each other. Unfortunately, the jump in her pulse today showed she still had to work at getting him out of her system.
“No, I never will, but at this point in my life, I just don’t want to let it go. I know that doesn’t make sense, because California is absolutely my forever home.”
“You don’t need to be in a hurry. Your dad is still around. It may mean something to him.”
“Booze is the only thing that means anything to him,” Luke said, and she heard the anger and bitterness in his reply. “He’ll never be able to live alone again.”
After they left the McKittrick ranch, they rode quietly. Her thoughts were in turmoil because she couldn’t lose that intense awareness she had of Luke. She never had been able to ignore him, and she definitely couldn’t now. Why couldn’t she ever see him as just another guy? She had to get over him or get hurt again. She could never be the woman for him because of her fertility problems. One man who loved her enough to ask her to marry him had already walked out on her. Luke hadn’t been interested when he had never been out of Texas and was getting ready to leave the family ranch. Now, he wouldn’t have any permanent interest in a small-town female vet who couldn’t bear his children. If she got involved with him, he would love her and leave her and in doing that he would get to know her baby. If she let Luke in her life again, when he said goodbye, he would not only break her heart again, he would break little Carl’s heart. That could be a lifetime hurt for her and her baby.
Scarlett tried to avoid remembering Luke’s kisses, but whenever she glanced at his handsome profile or his sexy mouth, the memory was vivid, tantalizing, still painful after all this time. She looked at his big, masculine hands on the steering wheel, but shifted her attention swiftly because she could remember those hands on her body, working their magic. An undercurrent of longing taunted her.
She released a quavering breath. Why did her heart race when he had merely brushed her fingers with his? She remembered how much she’d hurt when he left when she was sixteen. She didn’t want a bigger hurt now.
She couldn’t understand her own reactions to him. She wasn’t in love with him—she barely liked him because of the bitter fight before he left for California. How could he set her pulse pounding just by reappearing? She had to get over him. She didn’t want to spend years longing for a guy she knew as a boy in high school. A guy who didn’t want her.
They rode in silence until he turned and headed up the road toward the house where he had spent his boyhood.
The first sign of neglect was a rusty pickup smashed against a tree. She saw bullet holes where kids had probably placed bottles on it or just shot out the windows and used the truck for a target. The wheels were gone. Weeds grew up in the road that was barely visible in spots.
“Evidently, after Dad let the hands go, he sold some of the horses to subsidize his alcohol addiction.” Luke scowled. “I used to send money home, but he just bought liquor with it, so I stopped. I’ll get a crew out here as fast as I can, but right now I wanted you to see if we can’t save some of these horses. But honestly? I don’t know how the horses I saw can last through the night. No one works here. The damn ranch is deserted—the animals left to starve and die.”
She could hear the anger and pain in his voice and couldn’t blame him for his reaction. She was equally shocked by the terrible conditions.
In minutes, Luke approached a pasture with half a dozen horses standing near a stock tank that needed water. The windmill had broken boards and wasn’t working. She gasped. “Oh, no,” she whispered without knowing she had spoken when she saw the horses with ribs painfully revealed and two with their heads hanging. All the horses looked severely malnourished. The stock tank had holes in the side.
“Sorry to pull you into this because I know it’ll tear you up, but I need your help here,” Luke said.
“Oh, my heavens. Look at the horses,” she lamented. “It breaks my heart. You know I’ll help these animals,” she said, horrified to look at the condition of the horses. She felt sympathy for Luke, even though she didn’t want to get caught up in his problems. But what he had come home to was ghastly, and he had tried to help his dad to keep the ranch in good shape.
She could certainly understand his anger and disappointment, and gave a silent prayer of thanks for her own family. They helped each other and did the best they could and always could be counted on. “Oh, Luke, this is unbelievable. I had no idea this ranch had just been abandoned. We’re neighbors. Our ranch adjoins yours, and nobody in the area has said a word about it. Why didn’t someone speak up? The last hands that left here—why didn’t one of them contact you? How could your dad neglect everything so badly?”
“Because he’s a sick old drunk who doesn’t care about anybody or anything except his next drink,” Luke bit out, and she was sorry for saying anything because Luke was obviously suffering over finding his home in shambles.
“I’ll get the pasture gate,” Luke said, getting out to drag open a sagging, battered gate made with barbed wire. He returned to drive the pickup in and close the gate.
“Sorry, Luke,” she said stiffly when he was behind the wheel again. She spoke without looking at him, trying to avoid thinking about what he was going through. “We’ll start. Let’s get to work.”
“I’ll patch those holes enough to get water in that tank so they can drink. I sent Dad money to get fiberglass tanks and look what we’ve got—the old corrugated metal the cows have pushed against and bent years ago. Damn, I wasn’t sure what I’d find here, but I didn’t expect it to be this bad. Every dime I sent home must have gone for booze.”
She looked around and saw three horse carcasses. The live horses had moved away from them and they were decomposing, probably torn by predators and birds.
“You have dead animals.”
He sighed. “Damn. I can get a temporary crew out here to help.” He parked near the horses and a few watched them while two slowly moved toward them. Luke was already on his phone, calling someone who worked for him to start trying to hire a crew of cowboys to do temp work.
When she approached the horses, her sympathy shifted to the animals, and she could hardly blame Luke for being so upset at his father for letting this happen. When Luke was a kid, the Double U had been a fine ranch. His dad was a good rancher, and he knew what he was doing to his livestock when he neglected them. At least he had to have known when he was sober. She spoke softly and got her bag of apples, but the horses couldn’t raise their heads. She knelt to open her bag and get a needle to give shots that would help more than anything else.
“I’ll get these horses to the pasture by the barn. There’s water there. I’ll get halters on them and lead them back, and you drive the pickup. You can follow the road here to the house,” he said. “If there are any horses we can’t move, we’ll try to take care of them here.”
It was almost an hour later when they climbed back into his pickup and drove toward the house.
“I came home every year for the first three years while I was in college, and it was never like this. Things were messy at the house, but otherwise, he kept things in relatively good shape.” He scrubbed a hand over his jaw. “We had some good hands and a good foreman. I never stayed more than a night or two, so he must