She knew her outfit was hardly the type to go traipsing around a ranch in, but she had come directly from a meeting in Cranbrook with a toy distributor and hadn’t had time to change.
Denny had obviously gone to church. He wore dark jeans, a white shirt and a corduroy blazer. He had shaved and his hair was tamed. When she’d seen him get out of his truck, she’d felt a jolt of awareness.
He cleaned up good.
“Five-year lease agreement,” Denny replied.
“So it’s temporary. A hobby?”
“Running yearlings is hardly a hobby,” he said, sounding testy.
Evangeline shot him a surprised look. “Sorry. I understand yearlings don’t require a steady time commitment.”
Her father had run yearlings just before he’d leased out the ranch to other ranchers. He would buy them in the spring, run them on pasture to fatten them up, then ship them out in the fall. “Easy-peasy,” he would always say. Paying hobby with no commitment.
“It’s the best way for me to run my trucking business and the ranch at the same time,” Denny replied.
“So no permanent plans?” No sooner had the question left her lips than she regretted asking it. It was none of her business what Denny did.
“Not yet,” he said with a shrug. “I’ve got my gravel business going and I’m trying to set up my stake first.”
No wonder he was friends with her father, Evangeline thought. Andy Arsenau always talked the same way.
“We’re moving back to the ranch once I get my stake, once I have enough laid by to help us live in style,” he would say. “I want it to be perfect for you, poppet.”
She used to cling to those words whenever her father came back to Hartley Creek throwing out promises as lightly as he threw out the cash he spent on her.
And she always believed him. Never questioned why they needed a stake to move back onto a place they’d lived before her mother died.
She pushed the depressing thoughts aside. This morning she had tried to call him again, and again she’d left a message.
She was about to ask Denny another question when his cell phone sent out a tinny whistle.
Denny looked at the screen with a crooked smile, then dropped it back into his pocket.
“Do you need to get that?” Evangeline asked.
“No. Just a text from one of my sisters. She’s trekking in Nepal right now.”
“That sounds interesting.”
“Not the way Adrianna travels. Open ticket and plans made on the fly. No thanks,” he said.
His talk of a sister created a gentle yearning. As an only child Evangeline had spent hours on her own. When she’d stayed with her aunt upstairs at the bookstore, she would create imaginary playmates. Always a sister who would play dolls or cutouts or pretend plays about princesses being rescued.
“Do you have other family besides your sisters?” she asked, suddenly curious about him.
“Yeah. Besides the three girls, a foster brother.”
“Do they live close by?”
Denny shook his head. “Adrianna lives wherever she is working. Olivia and Trista are tree planting up in northern B.C. this summer. And Nate...” Denny’s voice trailed off and he gave a shrug. “Last I heard, he was at a cutting horse competition in Elko.”
“That’s a lot of family,” she said with a wistful note in her voice. “And your parents?”
“They died in a plane crash when I was nineteen.”
A shadow crossed his face and Evangeline saw that the memory still caused him pain. In that moment Evangeline felt a bond between them. A bond between children whose parents had left a family too soon.
At least she still had her father.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, sympathy softening her voice. “That must have been so difficult.”
“We got through it. I’m sure you know how that works. You lost your mother, too.”
Then he gave her a rueful smile, which, combined, with his acknowledgment of her own pain and history, made her heart flutter. Just a bit.
She returned his smile and as their eyes held, awareness bloomed.
Evangeline caught herself and looked away. This was not the man for her.
“Besides the house, is there anything else you need to know about the place?” Evangeline asked, feeling a sudden need to get this tour over and done with. From the first moment she’d met Denny, she’d felt as if her emotions were a tangle that she couldn’t sort out.
She’d thought Tyler was the right man, and look how that had turned out. Andy Arsenau had broken Evangeline’s heart enough times that she would be crazy to feel anything for someone exactly like him. She didn’t trust her judgment in men anymore. “I’m sure my father filled you in,” she continued.
“I think I’ve seen what I need to see,” he said, giving her another crooked grin.
“Okay, then,” she said, then turned and walked toward her car, signaling the end of the tour.
They arrived at the vehicles but Evangeline stopped there, drumming her fingers on the hood of her car. “How did you meet my father? How did you know about the ranch?” she blurted, unable to contain her curiosity about Denny and Andy.
Denny scratched his forehead with a fingertip as if wondering himself.
“We met at a truck stop. We were on the same gravel haul. I’d seen him a couple of times before, and we ended up sitting together. Talking. That was about a year ago. We clicked. We started arranging to meet when our schedules worked. One day he told me he had this place that wasn’t getting used to its potential. I told him I was looking for a place for a few years and he offered to lease me this ranch. He talked about you a lot and said he missed you—”
“So what kind of truck do you drive?” she cut in, her disappointment with her father too fresh to hear false platitudes.
Denny’s frown made her regret her sharp tone, but at the same time she wasn’t in the mood to hear secondhand about her father’s affection for her.
“I have three gravel trucks,” he said. “They keep me busy.”
Of course they did. The more she talked to Denny, the more she understood how her father would have connected with this guy. They had so much in common.
“Then if you’ve seen what you need, I guess we’re done here,” she said, pulling her keys out of her purse. If she stood here long enough she would get angry with her father again and that was an exercise in futility. She had to move on from the past.
But as she drove away, she glanced in her rearview mirror at the man who stood by his truck looking over the ranch with the same expression she had caught on his face as they’d walked the yard.
As though it was home. A place he belonged.
Evangeline tore her attention away, memories, long buried, assaulting her.
She and her mother working in the garden....
Riding in the hills with her father and mother to check the cattle on the upper pasture....
Coming home from the bookstore after spending Saturdays there with her