That wasn’t entirely true, he thought, but it was better than butting heads with this woman.
But Rae refused to back off. “Why don’t you want to be closer to home? What happened?”
If she still had a home—and a family—nothing would have made her leave. She would have fought to stay. She couldn’t understand someone willingly abandoning his home.
Okay, he’d been polite enough. Time to mark his territory, Sully thought. “That, Ms. Mulcahy, is none of your business. It has nothing to do with how well I work or how fast I can get things you need done.”
Annoyed, Rae decided to back off for the time being. She could be patient. She’d get the information she wanted another way.
“Prickly sort, aren’t you?” she commented. “All right, I’ll leave you to it, then. And when you finish digging that hole, start putting the poles up. I’ll be back later.”
“Looking forward to it,” Sully told her. There was no emotion in his voice to give her any indication how he actually meant that.
Rae opened her mouth to make a retort, then decided there was no point. Instead she got into her truck without another word and drove back to the bunkhouse.
* * *
After considerable effort, Sully finished digging the last hole. Taking a five-minute break, he next turned his attention to properly sinking the new posts into the holes he had dug.
He quickly discovered that doing that on his own was a lot more challenging than he’d initially thought. The problem arose because the object was to make sure that the post was straight once the dirt was firmly packed around it.
After two failures, he tried a third time.
Sully once again leaned the pole against his shoulder as he grappled with refilling the hole. He had finally gotten the first pole in position when he heard the sound of a truck approaching.
He blew out a breath, not sure if he was relieved or annoyed at the interruption.
“Looks like the boss lady’s checking up on me,” he muttered under his breath.
He would have preferred getting at least one—if not more—of the poles up before Mulcahy came back, but obviously there was nothing he could do about it now, Sully thought.
However, when the truck pulled up next to him, it wasn’t Rae who got out of the cab. Instead, it was the man she had introduced as Jack Rawlings and another, taller man who got out on the driver’s side.
Pausing, Sully dragged the back of his wrist across his forehead in an effort to wipe away the sweat before it dripped into his eyes and stung.
He did a quick assessment of the man next to Rawlings. He was about half a head taller than Rawlings, but he looked even more out of shape. Soft and pudgy-looking—in Sully’s estimation the so-called wrangler appeared as if he would have been more at home behind a desk.
“I take it you’re the missing wrangler,” Sully said to Rawlings’s companion.
“Missing?” the man repeated, confused. When he squinted, looking from Sully to Rawlings, his eyes all but disappeared. “I wasn’t missing. I just had something to do, that’s all.” He glanced again at the man beside him, clearly annoyed and yet somewhat afraid of showing it. “You told this guy I was missing?”
It was apparent that Rawlings didn’t do well with blame. “You weren’t in your bunk when I woke up. How’m I supposed to know you didn’t take off?”
“The last time I looked, you weren’t my ex-wife,” John Warren all but snapped. He backtracked a little as he added, “I don’t have to ask your permission to go somewhere.”
In Sully’s estimation, this could turn ugly given enough fuel. He didn’t want to get caught up in the middle of that.
“Hey, guys, I could use a hand here,” Sully said, calling the wranglers’ attention to the pole that was still propped up against his shoulder. “If one of you could just hold this upright and straight, the job would go a lot faster.”
It was plain by the look on Rawlings’s face that everything was going to rub the man the wrong way no matter what was said. “You her junior foreman now?” Rawlings challenged belligerently.
“I’m just trying to get the job done,” Sully answered. Thinking that being nice to the wrangler wasn’t working, he had nothing to lose by putting Rawlings in his place. “Maybe if you put down that giant chip on your shoulder, you could move a little faster.”
Rawlings looked incensed, and for a split second, it seemed as if the wrangler was going to launch himself right at him, Sully thought.
But obviously at the last moment, common sense—and the fact that Sully was close to a foot taller than he was—prevailed.
Rawlings frowned, glaring at Sully. “This isn’t over, you know,” he warned.
“Didn’t think it was,” Sully replied mildly. It took effort, but he forced himself to get back to the immediate problem he was dealing with. “Now can one of you hold this?”
It was obvious that Rawlings wasn’t about to make an effort, so Warren stepped up. “I’ll do it,” the no-longer-missing man volunteered.
“Thanks,” Sully said.
When Warren wrapped his arms around the post, Sully picked up the discarded shovel. Within moments, he was attempting to evenly shovel dirt around the pole. Although this job was a lot less taxing than digging the holes had been, Sully could swear he felt calluses forming on the palms of his hands.
“Hey,” Warren called over to the man who had supposedly gone looking for him. When Rawlings, who had just sunk down on the ground some distance away from them, looked in their direction, Warren told him, “We could use some help over here.”
But Rawlings didn’t budge. “Looks like you’ve got it all under control to me.”
“Then maybe you should get your eyes checked,” Sully told the inert man in an even voice, one that gave every indication that he expected to be listened to.
He wasn’t here to win any popularity contest, Sully thought. Right now, he just wanted to get a job done, one that Miss Joan’s foreman had assigned to him. He had no idea what Rawlings’s problem was, but he wasn’t about to let it get in the way of their getting this job done.
“Now get over here and help Warren hold this pole in place so that it looks straight and I can get it put into the ground properly.”
“C’mon, Rawlings,” Warren appealed to the other wrangler. “The sooner you help, the sooner we’ll get all these posts in the ground so we can all get back to the bunkhouse.”
Again Rawlings wasn’t about to take the blame. “Hey, I’m not the one who took off,” he snapped.
“You’re also not the one who did any work today,” Sully reminded the antagonistic wrangler. His voice was low and civilized. But there was no mistaking that the man behind the calm voice could only be pushed so far and no more.
Swearing and muttering some unintelligible things under his breath, Rawlings joined them and grudgingly put his back into it.
* * *
After she’d made sure that both Rawlings and the “missing” Warren were on their way to help Cavanaugh, Rae made a beeline for town and Miss Joan’s diner. She had questions that needed answering, and it seemed that she was only going to get those answers from one source.
The moment she walked into the diner, she saw the person she needed to talk to.
“Miss Joan, about that new guy you just sent