Sage Creek Page 5

  “Whoa, Sophie. What are you doing? That was real nice and all. But you’re fifteen. You’re just a kid—”

  Mortification seared through her. She didn’t wait around to hear the rest. What she’d just done, and the expression of baffled sympathy on his face, brought her crashing back to reality, and she wrenched free, backward, scrambling out of the pickup so quickly she fell onto the gravel and scraped her knee.

  She couldn’t remember later if she’d ever thanked him for bringing her home. She only remembered running, her legs pumping like pistons as she darted across the dirt, not looking back as she stumbled up her porch steps and burst into the house.

  It was cool and quiet inside, and she was grateful with every fiber of her being that no one else was home.

  No one would ever need to know what a fool she’d made of herself by kissing Rafe Tanner.

  Except Rafe.

  Now Sophie studied Rafe’s daughter as she dropped down onto the sidewalk outside of Roy’s, her shoulders hunched, her shopping bag from Top to Toe beside her, and her knees drawn up.

  “Where’s Ivy’s mother?” she asked Lissie suddenly.

  A dark look entered Lissie’s usually sparkling eyes. “Who the hell knows? Or cares?”

  “Does she ever see her?”

  “Not since the day Lynelle left.” Lissie stabbed the last of her coleslaw with her fork. “And for Ivy’s sake, let’s hope she stays away.”

  Sophie wondered what had happened. Lissie was the kindest person she knew. The split must have been pretty ugly to get this kind of reaction.

  It was none of her business though, she told herself. Rafe Tanner, his daughter, and his ex-wife were not her concern. Lil came up with their bill just then, and the moment was gone.

  Chapter Five

  It was Sophie who spotted the dog.

  Lissie was tired by the time they drove home, and Ivy was quiet, locked in her own thoughts. Sophie had just turned the Blazer onto Thunder Ridge, only a half mile from Lissie’s house. She’d been thinking about Roy’s Diner closing. And about needing a job.

  And was musing over the possibility that had come to her in a momentary flash.

  Thanks to California’s divorce laws, she’d had to give Ned fifty percent of the money from the sale of Sweet Sensations.

  There was enough left to last her for a while, but not forever.

  She needed to work.

  But not just for the money. She missed baking and she missed the little shop she’d opened years ago, all by herself. Sweet Sensations had evolved into something much bigger and very different by the time she sold it. It had been so long since she’d talked to customers, learned their names, actually fed people, instead of dealing with contracts and managers.

  She missed the cozy warmth of a place where people came to meet and relax or to buy themselves a treat before going to work or school.

  She wanted that again. The smell of fresh dough and chocolate and cinnamon. The hustle and bustle, chatter and laughter.

  Something more and bigger in her life than the sum of her own problems.

  That’s when she saw the dog.

  He was small, a black and brown mutt with white feet and a sad little stump of a tail, walking all alone. His head was hanging down as he trudged aimlessly down the center of the road.

  She eased the Blazer to a halt. At the same time, Lissie leaned forward.

  “Oh, no, look at that poor little thing. I wonder if he’s lost, or if some idiot just left him.”

  “One way to find out.” Sophie already had her door open and was springing down. Behind her, she heard the back door creak and Ivy’s feet hit the ground.

  “Hold on a minute, Ivy, let’s make sure he’s friendly. We don’t want to converge on him and scare him away.”

  Sophie approached the dog slowly as the girl reluctantly hung back. The mutt turned toward her, his eyes and his body language wary.

  “Hey, there, peanut.” In response to her quiet voice and whatever other vibes his instincts picked up, the mutt’s tail began to wag with a hopefulness that twisted at her heart.

  Equal measures of eagerness and caution shone in the dog’s eyes.

  “Come on. Over here. Don’t be afraid.” When she knelt down only a few feet away, he finally took a step forward.

  “There you go. Come on, only a few more.”

  The closer he got, the more his pathetic little tail wagged.

  Ivy crouched beside her. “I’ve never seen him around here before. He doesn’t have a collar or anything. I wonder how long he’s been out here alone?”

  The dog looked at her as she spoke, as if to say too long.

  He was bedraggled, dirty, and painfully thin. But he kept inching right up to Sophie, and as she slowly extended her hand, he nuzzled his head against it and his tongue shot out, giving her fingers a grateful lick.

  “Well, now, it’s a pleasure meeting you too,” she murmured.

  “Look how skinny he is.” Ivy reached out to stroke the dog’s head. “I wish we had some leftovers from Roy’s to give him.”

  “He’ll be okay just as soon as I get him home,” Sophie told her cheerfully as the dog nestled closer, his wariness forgotten. He gazed happily into Ivy’s face, his tail wagging harder as she stroked his matted fur.

  “I’ll feed him the minute we get back to the ranch. A home-cooked meal, a bowl of water, and a quick bath, and this little guy will be just fine.”

  “I wonder if he has a chip?” Lissie called from the car.

  “Doc Weatherby should be able to tell me that tomorrow. But from the looks of him, he’s been on his own for quite a while.”

  Sophie gently scooped the dog into her arms. He stared at her rapturously.

  This poor creature had known hard times. Maybe his entire life has been hard, she thought, her throat tight. She held him close, but carefully, aware of how thin and frail his body felt. She hoped he wasn’t sick. She didn’t even want to imagine what he’d been through.

  “But all that’s behind you now,” she muttered as she carried him to the car. “Don’t you worry about a thing. We’re going home.”

  Ivy was practically hopping with excitement behind her.

  “Can he sit in back with me?”

  “Absolutely.”

  After Sophie started the engine, she glanced in the rearview mirror at the girl in the backseat. The dog was now sprawled across Ivy’s lap, trying to lick her hand as she pet him. “You have a dog, Ivy?”

  “We had two, but Leggo got old and died last spring. We still have Starbucks though. He’s nine.”

  “You’re good with this little tidbit.”

  “You should see her with the horses,” Lissie said. “She has a way with them, just like Rafe.”

  “Back in California, they’d call that good energy.” Sophie smiled into the rearview mirror.

  “My dad says I take after him.” Ivy was focused on the contented stray in her lap. “I just get animals. So does he. It’s hard to explain. I’m going to be a vet when I grow up. Can I . . . come visit him if you keep him?” she asked suddenly as Sophie pulled up in front of Lissie’s house.

  “Anytime you want.”

  After Lissie and Ivy had gone inside, Sophie reached around and scooped the little dog up front, onto her lap.

  Tidbit curled up in a ball with one long sigh, then slept all the way to the Good Luck ranch.

  Chapter Six

  Sitting in his truck, Rafe watched Ivy do that still-a-littlegirl-at-heart half run, half skip toward the porch of Shannon Gordon’s house.

  It always made him smile. She wasn’t grown up, not yet, not by a long shot, and that was a big relief.

  As always, she whirled around and sent him a hurried wave when Shannon opened the screen door, then vanished inside the small gray frame house surrounded by old cottonwoods and a meticulously groomed garden.

  She’d been in a pretty good mood when he got home—chattering about a stray dog she, Lissie, and Sophie McPhee
had found on the way home from town. She was even more excited about the dog than about the clothes she’d bought, and had begged him to let her go over to the Good Luck ranch one day to visit it.

  Unfortunately though, her upbeat mood hadn’t lasted. By the time they’d headed out to the Gordon place a short time later, it had disappeared like the sun when rainclouds drifted in across the Crazy Mountains.

  And as usual when it came to his eleven-year-old daughter’s moods, Rafe had no clue why.

  As he was backing out of the drive, Kate Gordon, Shannon’s mom, stepped onto the porch. “Rafe, how about joining us for supper?”

  “Thanks, Kate, can’t tonight. ’Preciate the offer, though.”

  He actually could have stayed for a meal and would’ve had a helluva better one than what he was planning at home. But for some reason, Rafe wasn’t in a mood for making conversation. He felt out of sorts, restless—“itchy,” his dad would have called it—and wanted to fix himself some hot dogs and beans on the stove, open a beer, and try to get a handle on the ranch books for a few hours.

  He figured he needed to start getting himself accustomed to Ivy being gone more and more. Up until lately, she hadn’t slept out that often—when she was younger she’d never wanted to—and he was used to having her around most of the time when she wasn’t at school or the library or a friend’s house.

  He loved every moment he spent with her and always smiled to himself when he heard her laughing as she watched Wizards of Waverly Place. He even liked being with her when she was moping about having to make her bed every day or complaining about a teacher giving too much homework.

  Most of all he loved when she hung out with him in the barn or the corral, working with the horses, brushing them, talking to them in the animated way she had whenever she was around them.

  Tonight she’d been delighted by Bretta and Bonfire, the two broodmares he’d bought today. She’d asked him a million questions as she leaned against the white pasture fence and watched the mares explore their new stomping grounds, eager to hear all about the auction and the gelding that would soon be delivered.

  But on the drive over to Shannon’s, her mood had changed again, quickly, as it so often did these days.

  He’d offered to bring her along next summer to the horse auction in Great Falls, but she’d just shrugged and fallen silent, responding to everything he said after that in monosyllables.

  What was going on inside that head of hers? He knew he wasn’t likely to find out.

  That’s what happens when your daughter’s entering the sixth grade, he told himself. His cousin, Decker, whose kids were all in high school now, had warned him about the powder-keg moods and the pulling away that went on in the tween and teen years.

  At the time Rafe hadn’t been able to picture Ivy ever pulling away from him. But now he saw the future written in her sighs, in her closed bedroom door, in the rolling of her eyes when he said the wrong thing.

  Which lately happened at least once a day.

  Driving down the deserted back roads toward Sage Ranch, Rafe couldn’t help but grimace, remembering the wildness of his own teen years. How he’d been fearless, not to mention reckless.

  He’d thought he was invincible and life a joy ride. He had to shake his head now over how he’d let everything his parents tried to tell him whistle through one ear and out the other.

  Sort of the way his youngest brother, Jake, was now, and Jake was thirty.

  Becoming a rodeo star must have done something to Jake’s brain—he never got tired of living life hard and fast and on the edge. There was no risk he wouldn’t take, no bronc he wouldn’t ride, no woman he couldn’t tease into his bed.

  By now Jake should have grown up, settled down, but he was too much the way Rafe had been as a teen—living life just the way he wanted, tough and wild as the broncs he rode, no ties to anyone or anything except the rodeo, always the rodeo. And the women and beer and risks that were as much a part of that life as the bulls and horses and chutes.

  Travis, on the other hand, had gone the other route. After majoring in criminal justice in college, his middle brother had gone on to law school, eventually becoming an assistant prosecutor. Then, two years ago, he’d joined the FBI.

  And here I am, Rafe thought, catching sight of a doe and her fawn darting through the trees up ahead. Going home to pour kibble into a bowl for Starbucks, fix my own supper, and spend a thrilling night balancing the ledgers.

  The saneness of it actually made him chuckle and wonder what his parents would think if they were still alive and could see their cocky, hell-raising oldest son now.

  The wildest Tanner boy of them all was running the family ranch, breeding and training horses, and raising a child on his own. And he wasn’t one bit sorry for it.

  The most important thing in the world to Rafe now was taking care of Ivy. Then came his love of the Tanner land, which belonged equally to him and his brothers, and seeing to the dogs and horses that had shared life on Sage Ranch with them over the years.

  The ranch house and its outbuildings, and every inch of lush Montana meadow, foothills, and creek stretching to the farthest corners of Tanner land was as much a part of him as the brothers who’d ridden off on their separate ways, following their own paths. Maybe Jake and Travis would come back someday, maybe not. That was up to them. It had taken him a while, but after both his parents died in that small plane crash, and after Ivy was born, it had hit him.

  This was what mattered. The ranch and his daughter, doing his best for her, keeping her safe, happy. And trying to keep her from missing her mother too much.

  He knew Ivy didn’t understand why Lynelle left. And especially the way she’d left.

  He sure as hell didn’t understand it either.

  But deep down it always worried him that Ivy might think he’d leave her one day too—just abandon her and disappear like Lynelle had. So Rafe had made it his job every single day to show her that that was never going to happen. That he’d always be here, taking care of her, looking after her, loving her, no matter what.

  Quite a change from twenty-odd years ago—high school. Back then, Rafe had studied just enough to get by. He hadn’t buckled down until he went to college and decided to major in accounting so he’d have something to fall back on financially besides the ranch.

  But during his teen years, girls and sex had dominated his thoughts the way school should have, and the same had been true for all his friends.

  Which made him all the more apprehensive now about Ivy.

  He despised the idea of any boys thinking about Ivy that way, the way he’d thought of girls when he was in high school. It kept him up nights, more and more, as he realized she was physically maturing, making him wonder with a panicked feeling in his gut about how he was going to prepare her for what was ahead.

  He’d talked to her about some things, and Lissie had helped out by discussing others. But now Lissie was going to be busy with her own baby.

  What Ivy needed was a mother....

  But she didn’t have one. At least, not one who cared about her enough to stick around. Or even to call or visit.

  And Rafe would sooner saw off his own foot than trust Lynelle for thirty seconds alone with their daughter ever again.

  Turning into the drive leading up to Sage Ranch, Rafe wondered where the hell his ex-wife was now. He’d last heard from her two years ago—a short letter that had come a week before their daughter’s ninth birthday, in which she’d asked him to buy Ivy a new dress and tell her it was from her mama. She’d mailed a birthday card to Ivy the same day.

  I love you, baby girl. You’re getting so big. Send a picture of yourself to Aunt Brenda in Forks Peak so I can look at your gorgeous little face. She’ll see that it finds me.

  It was no easy feat finding Lynelle, Rafe thought as he entered the ranch house, switched on the lights, and headed across the hardwood foyer to the kitchen.

  He had no idea whether she’d ever received the photog
raph he’d helped Ivy send to her Aunt Brenda. He only knew there’d been no card for Ivy on her tenth birthday or on her eleventh.

  No phone call or e-mail either.

  There was no way of knowing if Lynelle was somewhere in Montana, or in Reno, or Laramie, or down in the Texas Panhandle, from where the last note had been mailed.

  It didn’t surprise him one bit that she hadn’t been back. There’d only been a scattering of communication since she abandoned their seven-year-old daughter in town, outside the Toss and Tumble Laundromat. Lynelle had left Ivy all alone with nothing but her stuffed giraffe and a bag of Doritos.

  I just can’t bear being tied down in any one place too long, she’d written a week later. It makes me feel like a pig in an ant bed. Don’t hate me, Rafe, but I had to leave.

  Starbucks raced in from the living room to greet him, the old dog’s tail wagging as if Rafe had been gone for weeks and not under an hour. But that was Starbucks’s way, especially these past few months since Leggo had died. The two dogs had been inseparable.

  Now every time Rafe or Ivy came home, Starbucks acted like he’d thought never to see them again. The nine-year-old black lab–golden retriever mix—a halfstarved mutt Rafe had found huddling outside the barn as a puppy—sat on his haunches as Rafe ruffled his ears.

  “Time for some grub, pal. It’s just you and me tonight.”

  As the sun sank in a deep violet sky, Rafe set a castiron pot on the stove, removed a package of hot dogs from the fridge and a can of beans from the pantry.

  It was a pretty good dinner, even better when accompanied by a cold bottle of beer. His stomach was satisfied. But the rest of him . . . wasn’t.

  He checked his e-mail, then he and Starbucks headed out the kitchen door. His foreman, Will Brady, and the wranglers who worked for him had all gone home to their own lives and families. The sky bled pale pink and purple, the encroaching dusk creeping in silence but for the rustling of the pines. A wind foreshadowing the chill of autumn lashed their leaves and branches.