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Chapter Twenty-One
It's not like they were going to get another chance to screw around trying to ride that horse, and the more saddle-broken the Black was, the better for the final sale.
And since Philip Callahan was in no mood to do any real work today, they might as well be allowed to have their fun. James was up on the horse this time. The Black tried to kick him off for a minute, but the attempts were getting fewer and shorter by the minute. Soon, no doubt, it wouldn't fight them so much as ignore them to start off.
Callahan leaned up against the fence and watched. Too old to be doing that kind of crazy shit—if he got knocked off the way they kept getting knocked around, he'd have a broken rib in no time flat.
James gets the stallion running. His hair whips back in the wind. The look on his face is sheer enjoyment. That's how it is, though, when you're riding a horse that's fast as lightning.
He does a couple quick, easy laps around the yard, then draws the horse up back near the stables and hops off.
Randy's turn again. He scrambles up, a little taller than his brothers and his legs a little longer, so he sits higher in the saddle. The black jogs a little sideways. Maybe if he can just, slip the saddle a little, it'll come right off.
But it doesn't. Of course it doesn't. If he wasn't a horse, and built with a horse's mind, there wouldn't have been any question.
The youngest gets the horse going. Faster. He carries his weight low, but with his hips raised off the saddle, to cushion. Apparently, now that it's not a rodeo every lunch hour, it's time to move from rodeo star to professional jockey. Though, who ever heard of a six-one jockey—that much he apparently wasn't thinking too hard about.
Not that Callahan would blame him. You want to have fun, you have fun. Doesn't matter if you're in a position to seriously make an attempt at doing it professionally, after all.
If you had to be a pro at something to do it, well… Callahan would probably still be working this ranch, to be honest. Those boys, though, they'd be doing something else entirely. Took them almost a year to be real good at what they were doing.
They followed orders, from what he could see, almost as well as Morgan did. She was a fiery woman, and she had real trouble with authority. Then again, when you're the boss, it's easy to ignore trouble with authority. She is the authority, and anyone questioning her is the one with an authority problem.
Like that kid, whatever his name was. Brad or something. Problem with authority. He seemed for all the world to think that he was in charge of the place. Well, the minute that the trucks say 'Brad or Whatever' on the side of 'em, he can be in charge.
Until then, he can do his job. Which is exactly the lesson that the brothers had learned. Not that Callahan made learning easy on them.
It's easy to work for someone who's a hard-ass. Philip's father had been that way, before he passed. Ranching was a hard life, and he'd been a man who didn't want to shield anyone—least of all his son—from that.
No, he'd come right out and tell you, and if you couldn't cut it, he'd tell you that, too. Which made him a hard man to have as a father, but he was an easy man to work for.
You never got confused about where the line was between the work and his personal feelings. In his case, because there was nothing but the work. You don't joke around, you don't laugh with the guy. You get to work, and he gets to work, and in the end you get a lot done.
And then, twenty years later, you bury him in the ground with not much to say about the man except for the good work he did, and that he left behind a solid ranch.
Phil wasn't that kind of boss, though maybe he should have been. After all, the boys weren't his sons. Someone else's, though he'd never met their father and likely never would. They weren't in that kind of position, after all.
Nobody was, not when the man was outside of anyone's reach as far as Callahan was aware. They'd never mentioned him and if he didn't miss his guess, they never would mention him.
Callahan closes his eyes a minute. He's got way too much on the brain today. Too many thoughts running through his head on repeat. And the biggest one is trying to figure out what in the hell he was thinking last night.
What in the hell Morgan had been thinking. They weren't dating. They weren't even really seeing each other. They'd fallen into bed together by accident, one time, and now he'd let things go too far at a dinner that was, by all accounts, only there for them to discuss business plans.
She'd come to him with something she needed done, and he'd apparently decided that it was open season on the poor woman.
If she wasn't happy about the way things had gone—and from all he could tell, she most certainly wasn't—then it was only because he'd given her the wrong idea. Because he'd let things get that far.
But it was one thing to be able to say, well, I made a mistake—I was a little drunk.
It's another to take advantage
of a woman's situation and do it knowing full well what you're doing as you're doing it.
That's another thing entirely, and Philip doesn't want to see himself as that kind of man. Maybe he had made a mistake. Maybe he'd make plenty more mistakes in his time.
But he wasn't going to go to bed with a woman who'd just want to forget about it in the morning. Worse, though he doesn't want to think about her that way, is the idea that she wouldn't want to forget. She'd want to remember, but not because she was looking for a relationship.
After all, she had told him why they were going out. It wasn't on a date, it wasn't to get to know each other. She'd wanted to go out to talk about business.
