Leave It to Chance (10 page)

Emory stood on one of the intact bales and wrinkled her nose. “It stinks.”

Sierra agreed. The stall needed to be cleaned. Chance shifted his weight, resting the tip of one back hoof on the dirt floor. The power in those hindquarters. If she got behind Chance and Chance didn’t like it … how long would it take someone to find her? What would the kids do? She didn’t need Braden entering the stall attempting a rescue.

She couldn’t help the terror that surged through her every time she walked near the giant gray animal. And she worried that Chance sensed her fear. Didn’t that make animals more aggressive? She’d read that when training a dog, you had to show them who the alpha leader was. Well, Chance was the alpha leader of this pack.

She stood on a bale with the kids and studied the horse. Braden twisted to see her around Emory, the bale rocking beneath them. “We need to clean his stall, Mom.”

Sierra chewed her lip. There was no way she was going in that stall, but she couldn’t ask Ross to do the job for her either.

The sound of a vehicle crunching up the gravel drive entered the barn. Braden bolted for the door and looked out. “It’s Ross.” Her son disappeared. Sierra sighed. So much for avoiding the man.

Ross rolled to a stop under the carport alongside the house. With a big grin Braden opened the door of the truck.

“Hey, Braden,” Ross said. “You guys feeding Chance?”

“Yeah. We might ride him today.”

“That so?” The eagerness of the boy tugged at him, stirring feelings long dormant. That hunger to be noticed and to matter to a father figure reached so deep. “Well, I’m planning to work on the fence tomorrow night. Do you want to help me?”

“Yeah! Could we do it tonight?”

“No, I’ve still got some work to do. I just ran home to fill my growling stomach.”

Braden laughed. “Yeah. We need to clean Chance’s stall, but Mom’s starting to look squirrelly again.”

“Squirrelly, huh?”

“Yeah, like how a squirrel runs around when it’s nervous.”

“Gotcha.” He chuckled, imagining Sierra running around the barn.

“My mom’s scared of horses. Do you want to come see him?”

If he went to the barn, it wouldn’t be to see just Chance. The image of the woman with hair dark like Braden’s came to mind. He glanced at his watch and shook his head. “I’d like to, but I need to eat dinner and get back to work.”

Braden’s eyes dropped to the gravel. “Okay.” He gave him a half-hearted smile and started back for the barn.

He watched Braden disappear through the doorway. The disappointment in the boy’s smile wasn’t the only thing that stopped Ross from heading into the house, it was the sadness behind it. He glanced up the road toward Alex Cranwell’s house with a sigh, shut the pickup door, and started for the barn.

The four of them were lined on the bales of hay next to Chance’s stall. “Hey.”

The whole family turned, and Braden’s face lit up. The boy jumped down and ran over. Sierra’s gaze lingered for a long moment, but other than that Mona Lisa smile, she didn’t say anything.

He tilted his chin toward the flakes of hay. “I see you managed to break the bale open.”

She nodded and clenched her palms together. A hint of rust from her efforts with the baling wire stained her fingers.

“I gave him grain, too.” Braden hooked a thumb through his belt loop.

Ross shifted his weight and adjusted the thumb already resting in his own belt loop. “I bet he liked that.”

“He does. He’s still eating it.” Emory tossed a grin over her shoulder.

“He eats loud.” This from the smallest guy.

Ross glanced at his watch again and took a step toward the door. “Well, I—”

“His bed stinks.” The little boy balanced next to his mom on the bale and pinched his nose.

Sierra was biting her lip, but when he caught her eye a smile peeked through. She tousled the boy’s hair.

Braden shifted his stance, matching Ross’s cocked hip. “Could you help us?”

Consternation washed the smile from Sierra’s face. “Braden.” She shook her head at the boy.

Braden’s head went down, and Ross caught the flash of anger in his eyes.
Lord, I don’t have time to do this.
He sighed, knowing full well that he needed to help this family. But God wasn’t working on his timetable. But with the way the woman had destroyed his hydrangea the other day, there was no telling what his barn would look like if he left. He put a hand on Braden’s shoulder. “I’ll show you where the pitchforks are.”

Sierra watched them walk off, Ross’s hand still on Braden’s shoulder. Her son’s face was clear and animated as he chatted with the man. Emory and Trevor scampered over to a stack of hay bales to play king of the mountain.

Ross and Braden reappeared a few minutes later with two pitchforks and a wheelbarrow. Man-sized gloves swam on Braden’s hands.

Ross’s stance seemed stiff, and he definitely wasn’t smiling. He led Chance into an empty stall and bolted the door shut.

Sierra walked over to the dirty stall. “You don’t have to do this, Ross.”

His smile was brief. “It’s not a problem.”

She chewed her bottom lip. “About your mom’s plant, I can’t apologize enough for what happened.”

Hands at his hips, Ross swung to look at Chance, who circled his new surroundings. “I can’t say I would have cried if it had poisoned him.”

She couldn’t tell if he was joking. There was no hint of a smile anywhere on his face, just hard planes as he stared at Chance. She waved a hand toward the wheelbarrow. “Really, we can take care of cleaning the stall.”

He tilted his head and watched her a moment. Then a slight smile crossed his face and his tone seemed deliberately upbeat. “You would, huh?” He grabbed the pitchfork and entered the stall. “This from the woman who parted my hydrangea bush like the Red Sea?”

She felt heat like two branding irons in her cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I just—” He stabbed a heaping load of dirty straw and carried it to the wheelbarrow and dumped it in, Braden right behind him with a smaller forkful. “I didn’t know I’d mangled the bush so badly until you pulled me out of it.”

Ross looked at her and grinned. “Don’t worry about it. It was due for a good trimming anyway.” He went back in for another scoop, then stopped, resting the pitchfork tines on the ground, and laid an arm across Braden’s shoulders. He pointed to where Braden was working. “Let’s leave the clean straw and just get the stuff that looks dirty.”

Braden nodded. “Okay.”

Ross gave his shoulder a squeeze, then moved to separate some of the straw with the tines. He glanced at Sierra, a warm glint in his eye. “You’ve got a hard worker here.”

Braden grinned at him, a glow on his face that gave Sierra pause. How sad that her son was so hungry for a man’s attention that he’d look for it in someone other than his father. Yet Michael had all but disappeared from his life in the past several months.

Sierra gave her son a teasing look. “Yes, he is. Though I’d say he’d rather scoop up horse poop than unload the dishwasher.”

“This is real work, isn’t it, Braden? Builds muscles on a man.”

Almost of their own accord, Sierra’s eyes moved to Ross’s well-developed shoulders and arms to verify that it was indeed so. She made herself look away.

Braden strained to lift the huge pile of straw he’d scooped. “Yep!”

Sierra cleared her throat. “My mom said you did all the landscaping here yourself.”

“That I did.”

“I don’t think I’ve seen another place quite like it.”

“Thanks.” A boyish grin flashed before he turned away to dump another load. “I bought this place from my folks six months ago.” He shrugged. “It’s been a lot of work, but I enjoy it. It’s also great advertisement for my business.” A slight shadow crossed his face. “My neighbor, Alex Cranwell, hired me to do his landscaping after he bought the place across the road.”

Braden lifted the handles of the wheelbarrow. “You want me to dump it now?”

Ross stood his pitchfork on end. “Yeah, on that pile outside that I showed you. Thanks, Braden.”

Her son disappeared through the barn door.

“You know there’s a lot of value in saying a person’s name,” Sierra said.

He looked at her with interest. “That so?”

She felt heat rise in her face again. While they worked she’d watched Braden, watched how he relaxed around Ross. She lifted her eyes back to his. “It acknowledges a person’s identity, tells him that he’s noticed.”

“And people want to be noticed, don’t they?”

“In the worst way.” She stared in the far end of the barn where Emory and Trevor were playing hide-and-seek around the small fort they’d built out of a pile of bales.
Have I ever truly felt noticed?

“It must be tough raising kids by yourself.”

She gave him a half smile. “It has its moments.”

Weary after the two hours of haggling over the waterfall redesign with the Cranwells, Ross climbed Sid’s sagging front steps and rapped on the door twice. Something he did so often, it was a wonder there was any paint left on that spot.

“Door’s open.”

Ross let himself in and flopped down into the blue recliner across from his nearest neighbor and best friend.

“What’s got your pants all in a dander?”

Ross slid his gaze to Sid. “I have a boarder.”

The grizzled old man muted the television and rolled the piece of fescue to the other side of his mouth in a familiar dance between lip and grass. “Oh, you do? Now that sure does surprise me.”

“Yeah, well it wasn’t my idea.” Ross knew he wasn’t in the best mood. When he couldn’t stand his own company any longer, he’d head for Sid’s.

Sid nodded, blue eyes still sharp and clear. “Kyle.” It wasn’t a question and Ross didn’t need to answer. Sid’s chuckle made him feel that here at least, all was understood. “Another one from church?”

“I think that’s what he said.” The last wayfarer Kyle had collected had said he was a chef. Kyle persuaded Sid that he needed a cook “just until the unfortunate fellow gets his feet under him.” Three nights later a fire truck stood in Sid’s front yard and five hundred gallons of water soaked the kitchen.

“How long’s Kyle got him livin’ with you?”

“Sierra?”

Sid’s forehead bunched, which had the effect of gathering his white eyebrows into bushes over his eyes. “He’s headed for the Sierra Mountains?”

“What? No, Sierra is a woman—”

“What in tarnation? Kyle set you up with a woman?” Sid’s eyes were set to ignite.

Ross exhaled. “A
horse
. I’m boarding a horse for a woman named Sierra.”

After Sid settled back down to roost in his chair again, Ross explained. “And she’s terrified of horses. The woman tried to cut a path through my hydrangea to get away from the thing.”

Sid looked alarmed. “The horse was chasin’ her?”

Ross chuckled at the picture. “No.” He looked away. “Chance had just finished off Mom’s honeysuckle.”

A shine came over Sid’s face when Ross mentioned the honeysuckle. “Now I know your ma is going to hit the high notes when you tell her, but you got to admit that horse has re-
finement
.” Sid had a way of drawing the vowels out of sophisticated words. He’d find them in the daily crossword and then look for an opportunity to saddle one onto a conversation. It didn’t help that Sid tended to prefer horses over people, and when one exhibited good taste it tickled him to no end. “Not just any critter’d pick honeysuckle. Not when you got that fancy stuff crawling up that cedar lattice.”

“Yeah, well I don’t think Mom is going be as excited as you are.”

“Women and their flowers.” Only it came out “wimmen and their flawrs.” Sid might be one of the wealthiest polo trainers in the country, but he sure wouldn’t win a grammar contest.

Ross gave him a look. “You know how much that plant meant to mom.”

Sid waved a hand as if he were swatting a fly. “I know, I know. Remember, I dug the hole when your daddy was away at some lawyers’ conference.” Sid never said “loi-yers”; instead it came out the way it was spelled. “Woman couldn’t stop talking about how her great-grandmother brought a plant over from Holland. She went on and on how each generation snipped a starter off the old homestead bush.”

Ross felt a smile grow inside where Sid couldn’t see it. The older man might growl and complain, but he was as softhearted as they came. When Ross’s dad had been away building up his corporate practice, Sid had looked after them. Primed the pump when the electricity went out. Repaired the fence when the steer escaped the barbed-wire enclosure.

And helped raise a boy who couldn’t seem to find his way in a world that routinely spit out kids who couldn’t read.

“So you need to replace your mom’s plant. But that wasn’t what had smoke rolling out your ears when you walked in.”

Ross felt the tension of the last two months climb back onto his frame.

“It’s that landscaping job across the road, isn’t it?” Sid pulled a pocketknife and a small piece of wood from his pocket. It was his “I’ve got all the time in the world to listen” invitation. And skill didn’t enter into it. He couldn’t whittle animals or any other kind of still life, but he could create a pile of shavings like nobody’s business.