Rancher at Risk (20 page)

He’d gotten used to the noise level around her, from the clanging file drawers to the crashing pots and pans to the booming radio. And he’d reached the point a while ago where he could understand her speech without a hitch.

Come to think of it, she’d gotten good at reading him, too. That brought a smile to his face.

Now he listened to her voice as she told the scouts a joke. Something about a deaf man and wife in a car at a motel…

He drifted away from the story and watched her instead. Her mouth as she spoke, her hands as she signed for Becky, her hair as it shifted in the firelight. He thought about a motel room for just the two of them.

“…and when all the lights went on, only one room stayed dark. And that’s how the man knew where his wife was.”

Everyone around the circle laughed.

He might have enjoyed the joke, too, if he’d heard it all the way through. But he’d missed a lot of it.

The way Lianne sometimes missed things.

Natural when more than one person was talking at once or if the situation didn’t work for lipreading. The night at the Whistlestop, she’d struggled with Nate’s enthusiastic delivery. She’d gotten lost in many of the conversations at the community center.

When he was alone with her, he could make all those adjustments he’d learned. But he couldn’t do anything about the times she found herself lost in a crowd. No matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t save her from the frustration of not knowing what someone had said.

Which was another reason he wanted to be the one to give the presentation at Town Hall. Besides…maybe he’d finally get the chance to make a good impression on the folks of Flagman’s Folly.

* * *

L
IANNE
LAUGHED
AS
she watched P.J. and Becky. They would stretch a charbroiled marshmallow until it reached its limit and broke and then try to catch the sweet, sticky strand with their tongues.

She thought of the sweetness of Ryan’s mouth against hers. Her lips still tingled from those lovely moments in the kitchen. She had known what he’d wanted. She had wanted it, too. Thank heaven he had managed to pull away and remind her of the kids in the other room, because she hadn’t had a functioning brain cell left.

She’d felt his desire, as well, and the memory alone made her flush and feel grateful for the warmth of the fire to excuse any added redness in her cheeks.

From the camp chair beside her, he met her eyes.

The heat in his gaze made the flush spread upward and over her scalp. He squeezed her hand and smiled as if he knew very well what caused the color flooding her face.

She took a deep breath. “I hate to break this up,” she said, “but I think it’s time for me to get the kids back to the house.”

“They’re staying the night?”

Nodding, she watched his expression for disappointment or frustration, the sign that would show he wanted to continue what they had started in the kitchen. She looked for irritation or annoyance, an indication he didn’t want to have to deal with Becky and P.J. at the ranch house again.

But she didn’t read any of those emotions in his face.

He simply nodded, squeezed her hand again and smiled.

She waved to get the kids’ attention.
“Come on, guys, time to go home.”

It took them a while to gather up their things, but when Becky and P.J. finally started heading toward the house, Lianne waved a quick goodbye. She smiled at Ryan and turned to follow the kids.

Not gonna happen.

Ryan rose from his camp chair. She wasn’t about to get away without him. He caught up with her halfway across the dimly lit clearing.

When he touched her shoulder, she turned. Surprise and pleasure mingled in her face, and his stomach started a flip.

“You don’t need to come with us,” she said. “It’s not that far to the bunkhouse, and we can see the lights from here. You can stay with the scouts.”

He shrugged. “Everything’s covered. The boys have cleanup duty, the troop leaders will handle the fire and Tony’s here for the final checkup. I’m not needed.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” She smiled.

His heart thudded. But when he took her hand, her eyes grew wary.

“The kids will be up for a while.”

He nodded. “I figured that. I can handle it.” He hadn’t intended to quote her, but the idea made him smile.

They walked back to the house in silence—except for P.J.‘s chatter and the occasional crunching of brush underfoot.

Lianne had left the light on in the kitchen. When they all went inside, the kids immediately settled at the table.

Becky curved one hand as if holding a glass, but instead of pretending to drink, she rested her thumb on the back of her other hand and rubbed it against her skin.

“Oh, no,”
Lianne said.
“After hot dogs and corn on the cob and s’mores and everything else? You can’t possibly want hot chocolate tonight.”

Both kids made fists and shook them up and down.

Groaning, Lianne looked at him.
“That means ‘yes.’”

He nodded. “I recommend you go easy on the marshmallows.”

She laughed.

P.J. dropped the sack of games onto the table and spilled out the contents. “Checkers, Ryan.”

“Why don’t you pick something you all can play.”

“Chutes and Ladders!” P.J. said.

Billy’s favorite board game.

He could see him at the coffee table standing on tiptoe to spin the dial, as if that would help him score the number he wanted. He could hear him screeching with laughter when Ryan hit a space forcing him to slide down a chute.

Becky put her fingertip to her cheek and twisted it.

“Candy Land,” he said.

“What?”
Lianne looked as if she thought she hadn’t read him correctly.

Without thinking, he had blurted the name of Billy’s second-favorite game. He looked from her to Becky and back again. “She wants Candy Land,” he said, as if they played it together every day of the week.

Lianne looked at the table.
“It’s not here.”

“We left it in the living room,” P.J. said. “I’ll go get it.”

“How did you know?”
she asked, her tone puzzled but her lips already curving in a smile.

He shrugged. “I may not be a quick study, but I catch on to things. Eventually.”

* * *

A
LONE
IN
THE
KITCHEN,
Ryan stacked the boxes on the table. They’d played a board-game marathon until the kids had started nodding off.

“Don’t let them fool you,” Lianne had said before following Becky and P.J. out to the living room. “They’ll be up chatting half the night. I’ll have to leave a light on downstairs.”

He had nodded. They’d always kept a night-light on for Billy, too.

He frowned, thinking of that and of the joke about the man and his wife and the lights in the motel. Of walking back to the house across the dark clearing, letting the light Lianne had left on in the kitchen guide their way.

Of the night they’d gone to her room. The night they’d almost made love. She wouldn’t let him turn off the lamp…and he hadn’t gotten it until just now. She wouldn’t let him turn off the lamp because she couldn’t read his lips in the dark.

Smiling, he shook his head.
Damned idiot.

Maybe he did catch on to things eventually, as he’d told her a while ago. But some of those things sure took him a hell of a long time to figure out.

Lianne returned and sank into her seat at the table. “I managed to get them into their sleeping bags, but I can’t guarantee how long they’ll stay there.”

“They’ll be up for drinks of water,” he said automatically.

“You’ve had experience.”

He shifted the pile of games on the table.

“It’s obvious,” she continued. “You knew all the rules to the games.” When he said nothing, she added, “And as we reminded the kids a few times, one of the rules is taking turns. Then there’s minding manners. We’ve talked about me. I have to be polite and give you a turn.”

He took a sip of tepid chocolate.

“Tell me about him,” she said softly.

Word had gotten out. Someone from Flagman’s Folly had told her about his wife and son. He had known it would happen sooner or later. He was actually surprised it had taken this long. “What do you know?”

“Just that he was four and there was an accident.”

He nodded. “Billy. He had a cowlick like P.J. Asked a lot of questions like him, too.” At a loss, he gestured at the boxes. “Chutes and Ladders was his favorite game. We played it three or four times a week.”

“Did you let him win?”

Despite the pain of the memories, he chuckled. “Hell, no. I couldn’t get away with that. He wanted to win on his own.”

To do everything on his own. Like Lianne.

He cleared his throat, licked his dry lips. He couldn’t look at her. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk. But he thought of all the things she had told him about her school days, her rebellion. Her challenges. He ran his finger down the handle of his mug. “He didn’t want the other kids to know he slept with a stuffed tiger. He thought tigers were tough, but still…”

“Did he have any pets?”

“Yeah. A pony and a parakeet. Tagalong and Ocean. We told him the bird was as blue as an ocean.”
As blue as your eyes.
He tightened his hand around the mug. “Once we said that, he wouldn’t hear of any other name.”

“Stubborn child. Sounds like he took after you.”

He laughed softly. “Maybe.” He sipped again from his mug. He hadn’t talked about Billy like this since it happened. Maybe he’d started to heal some. Maybe she just asked good questions.

“Did he like school?”

“Oh, yeah. He loved preschool. He’d bring home a gold star for something every day.”

“He made his daddy proud, didn’t he?”

His throat closed.

“What happened, Ryan?”

He breathed for a while until his throat loosened up, and then he shook his head. “An accident. My wife and son were both in the car. They went into a skid at eighty-five miles an hour, hit a concrete wall. So they tell me.”

“You don’t believe the reports?”

“They’re not reports. They’re just empty words. The speed, yeah. Skid marks, winding up against the wall, yeah. But that’s all they could tell me. And there were no witnesses.” He shoved the mug away from him. “You don’t just go into a slide for no reason. Something had to cause it. But I don’t know what happened.”

When Ryan turned his head away, Lianne bit her lip, trying to focus on the pain there and not the one in her heart, knowing how much more hurtful these memories must be for him.

He had turned away without thinking, but she didn’t need to see his face to know tension ran through him. She could see it in the way his shoulders had risen and in the sudden cording of the muscles in his neck.

She moved to stand behind his chair. For a moment, she just held on to his shoulders. Then she smoothed her hands across them and began to knead the tight muscles.

“I can’t read your lips now, but I can read what your body’s telling me.”

Her hands rose and fell. He had taken a deep breath and released it.

She closed her eyes and bent to rest her forehead against his crisp hair for just a moment. It smelled of wood smoke from the fire. She took a deep breath, too. “Do you remember the day we met?”

A muscle ticked in his jaw. She’d seen that happen time and again, and this time she longed to reach up and stroke his face, to ease his tension.

But she sensed he didn’t want her to see him.

Finally, he nodded.

Unable to have a conversation with him from where she stood, she tried to ease his pain through her words alone. “When Becky ran out into the street that day, she’d gone after Pirate. She knows she’s supposed to look first, but we don’t always do what we’re supposed to do. She chased Pirate because she wanted to protect him. She did it without thinking. Out of instinct. Because it’s an instinct to take care of those you love.”

He shook his head.

She caught the words on his lips only because she had seen them moments before.

“…I don’t know what happened.”

She squeezed his shoulders and brushed her cheek against his hair again. “You can’t keep holding on to this, Ryan. It’s not something you can control.” She returned to the chair beside his. “Some things happen for no reason. Or for one we’re not meant to know.”

He met her eyes. “Like your deafness?” he asked.

She should have been ready for it. The unexpected question—the kind he asked so often, in a way no one else had ever done.

She nodded. “Even that. We’ve had deaf relatives in our family for generations. There’s a medical cause. A genetic factor. But no one knows why one family is chosen over another to receive a specific gene. Or why one person in a family has a certain talent when no one else does. Or why lightning strikes one tree and not the next. There just are no explanations for some things. Like the accident that happened to your family.”

The accident that made him want to control everything around him.

She swallowed hard. “I understand what it’s like to want answers, though, and to be angry when you don’t get them. Being born deaf made me angry for a long time, too.”

“Why?”

Another truth only he would know.

“When my mom and dad sent me away to school, I thought it was because they wanted only perfect children like my sisters.” She shrugged. “My first rebellion started early, at six years old. Once they rejected me, I rejected them, too. For years, that was another reason I didn’t want to go home.” She ran her hand along the edge of the table. “Later on I learned they hadn’t rejected me at all. They loved me, and as I once told you, they did what they thought was best. From then on I wanted to be perfect for them. I thought, like you, if I could find a reason—the reason I’d been born deaf—I could fix it. But I couldn’t fix something that was out of my control.”

He said nothing, just watched her, his eyes dark and his hand tight on the coffee mug.

She realized she’d gripped the edge of the table, too. “And, eventually, Ryan, I figured out another truth. There’s no need to fix something that isn’t broken.”