Part 6
He nodded once, aware that he was standing too straight in a room where nobody had ordered him to attention.
Tess reached for her mouse.
“And Owen?”
He paused with his hand on the door.
“I’m not waiting fourteen years for date two.”
His mouth moved before he could stop it. Her smile answered his.
Dinner on Friday led to another dinner the next week. Then Tess brought her laptop to Veylan on a Sunday afternoon and asked where he kept the rest of the ranch records.
Owen opened a cabinet in the mudroom.
She stared at the first box. Then at the second.
“How many?”
“Three, I think.”
“You think?”
He looked at the shelf above them. “A fourth would be unexpected.”
Tess put her laptop down very carefully.
By the time she carried the first box to the kitchen, Ranger had established himself under the table. Owen brought coffee and tried to make the box appear less full by pressing down on it.
“Please don’t compress the evidence,” she said.
“I can usually find what I need.”
“Then you should work in search and recovery.”
“I’ve searched rooms that were easier to sort than this.”
Tess looked up.
“The damaged ones, too,” he added.
She shook her head, smiling, and began separating fuel receipts from veterinary invoices.
He sat across from her and supplied dates, explanations, and occasional confessions. A handwritten note about fencing supplies turned out to refer to a different year. An envelope labeled with a bull’s name contained a parts receipt.
When a feed invoice slid to the floor, Ranger shifted onto it before Tess could reach down.
She pointed beneath the table. “Your assistant’s destroying the audit trail.”
“He has no access to the accounts.”
“He has the only copy of that invoice.”
Owen bent to look. Ranger opened one eye without moving.
“Protective custody,” Owen said.
Tess laughed, and the dog tucked his nose beneath his tail.
Their days stayed full of work. Owen still had cattle to feed, machinery to maintain, and repairs that waited until the least convenient moment to become urgent. Tess still had clients who believed a shoebox counted as a filing system.
But sometimes she closed her laptop and stayed for supper. Owen learned which coffee she liked and stopped buying his usual blend on the grounds that hot was the only important qualification.
One evening, while he worked late on a stock-water valve, she left dinner on the bench beside him. The next morning he caught himself planning what job he could do for her to settle the exchange.
He ate the leftovers instead.
Tess learned not to interrupt every silence with a question. Sometimes Owen was tired. Sometimes he was working through a problem. Sometimes he was listening, and she could see that from the way he turned his head toward her without taking his eyes from the pasture.
On the porch, they could sit for half an hour while Ranger slept between their chairs.
The dog accepted Tess’s place in the house without requiring a discussion. He continued his morning rounds with Owen, obeyed the same signals, and slept near the bedroom door. In the afternoon, however, he was usually under Tess’s chair.
Owen found him there once before she’d even opened her computer.
“Again?”
Tess rubbed the shepherd’s neck with her boot. “He’s particular about company.”
“He’s particular about snacks.”
“Excellent quality in a business associate.”
The wireless signal at that end of the kitchen dropped while she was sending payroll, and Owen heard a restrained comment that made him decide not to ask a question until she had finished.
By mid-November, ice edged the troughs at dawn. Tess needed to deliver records in Larchmere one afternoon, and Owen needed supplies, so they went together. On the way home, she suggested a walk beside the lake.
Snow showed high on the slopes. The water had a hard blue sheen, and cold air found its way beneath Owen’s collar. Ranger trotted ahead, approached the shore, and considered it with diminishing enthusiasm.
“Were you together your whole time in?” Tess asked.
“No. We got paired toward the end.”
She waited while Owen watched the dog test the edge with one paw.
“He had more speed then,” Owen said. “And more opinions than he knew what to do with.”
“Must’ve been difficult for you.”
He glanced at her. She kept her face innocent.
They walked a little farther before he spoke again.
“You learn what trust looks like at work. Somebody covers their part. You cover yours. You don’t have time to keep checking.”
“With him, too?”
“Especially with him. He could tell me things I couldn’t find out any other way.”
Ranger left the shore and went to examine a clump of dry grass.
Owen picked up a small stone, rubbed dirt from its surface, and put it down.
“I got used to help meaning trouble,” he said. “An injury. A failed piece of equipment. A plan that wasn’t working. If somebody had to step in, something had already gone wrong.”
Tess kept pace beside him.
“Then you bring food,” he continued, “and I start calculating how to pay you back.”
“I did need the dish returned.”
“You got it.”
“Before breakfast.”
He looked at her, then gave a quiet laugh.
Ranger came back with one wet paw and shook himself close enough to spatter Owen’s jeans. Tess stepped clear just in time.
“There,” she said. “You can work out a repayment plan with him.”
“He’s already behind.”
They stayed less than an hour. When they returned to the truck, Owen held the door for Tess, then lowered the step so Ranger could climb in without scrambling.
Beth invited him to Thursday supper near the end of the month. He’d eaten at Eldren for years, but that evening he stopped halfway across the pasture.
Cold had stiffened the grass. Ahead, the farmhouse windows glowed beyond the bare orchard. Ranger went a few steps farther, noticed, and came back.
Owen knew that house. He knew the loose porch board and the kitchen chair Grant would occupy. He knew Beth would have made too much food and insist that she hadn’t.
He could picture Tess’s laptop on his own table. Her truck beside the barn tomorrow, and the day after that. Her irritation when a client missed a deadline. Coffee cooling because they were both busy. An ordinary Tuesday with somebody else’s plans woven through it.
His hands went deeper into his pockets.
Ranger looked toward the house, then back at him.
“All right,” Owen said.
He started walking.
Tess opened the door as he reached the porch. “Dad’s eyeing your biscuit. You’re cutting it close.”
“Can I request armed protection?”
“Against him? You’re on your own.”
She took his coat and hung it beside hers.
A few days later, Owen drove to Fairhollow alone. The woman who’d displayed jewelry at the supper had a small studio there. He stood at her counter trying to describe a ring he’d seen for perhaps thirty seconds.
“Yellowish stone,” he said. “Not bright yellow. More like honey.”
“Sapphire?”
“That’s the word I was looking for.”
“You’ve given me the color of half this tray.”
“The setting was plain.”
She studied him, then reached into a drawer.
He recognized it as soon as she set it on the counter.
“Yes,” he said. “That one.”
The jeweler put it in a small box. Owen paid, took the receipt, and slipped the box into his inside pocket…
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