AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yeah.”
“I think we should talk about this.”
“What good will that do?” he threw back at her. “Nothin’s gonna change. I still don’t have a pa. Just like the kids say!”
“That’s not true!”
His defiance eased a bit. “I just want to go fishin’, okay?” Pain twisting her heart, guilt washing over her in hot waves, Dani nodded tightly. “The sooner, the better,” she said before her anger subsided. “Just be back by noon, okay?”
“Sure.”
He started to tum, but she stopped him by touching his arm. He jerked it away. “Where are you going fishing?”
“Probably the hole near the south fork.”
“Okay. Do you want to take something to eat?”
Forcing a smile, he fished in his pocket and pulled out three candy bars. “I’m all set.”
“For nutritional suicide.”
Cody swiped at his tears and Dani pretended not to notice. Turning his back to her, he went to the back porch, grabbed his fishing pole and stained vest and whistled for Ru
nt. Then he was off, running through the fields toward the foothills with the dog racing ahead, frightening grasshoppers, birds and rabbits in the stubble of the pasture.
With a tired sigh, Dani walked up to the porch, reached for her hoe and leaned on it while watching her son until Cody was out of sight. What had she done to the boy? Should she have stayed married to a man she didn’t love, a man who had done everything in his power to hurt and embarrass her for the sake of her son?
Without any answers to her questions, she looked across the fence to the Johnson field. Chase was there, standing with his muscled back to her and staring at Cody’s retreating figure as the boy crawled under the fence separating one of her fields from another before disappearing through the brush at the far end of the pasture.
* * *
Chase watched the boy and dog sprint through the dry fields and, for a moment, he remembered his own youth and the warm Idaho summers.
The boy ducked under the fence and disappeared into a thicket of blackberries and brush, the lop-eared dog on his heels. Chase couldn’t help but smile. Cody and his beautiful mother made him feel dangerously younger than his thirty-four years.
For the first time in what seemed forever, a woman had gotten under Chase McEnroe’s skin. It had been only hours since he’d left Dani but, despite his promise to the contrary, he was already restless to be with her again. The fact that she was near enough to see only made it worse.
He jabbed his shovel into the soft ground near the bank and cursed quietly to himself. The memory of touching her had made the rest of the night excruciating. He’d lain awake for hours, twisting and turning on sweat-dampened sheets and feeling a gentle but insistent throb in his loins. A throb that reminded him of her willing, warm body, softly parted lips and perfectly rounded breasts. Hell, he’d felt like a horny kid all over again. Just because of one damned woman!
Dissatisfied with life in general, Chase continued to dig, throwing the power from his tense shoulders and arms into each jab. The ground around the creekbed gave way under the thrust of his shovel. Swirling muddy water filled the hole.
Still he couldn’t get Dani out of his mind and it sure wasn’t for lack of trying. Telling himself that he had to avoid her at all possible costs, he plunged into his work with a vengeance, thrusting his shoulders and mind into the task of working the creek and getting the hell out of Montana as soon as he could.
All morning he’d made impossible demands on the men and himself, trying to exorcise Dani’s image from his mind.
But each time he looked up from his work, she was there. Whether she was standing at the kitchen window, working with the cattle, or as she was now, hoeing that miserable patch of ground she considered her garden, she was there; only several hundred yards away.
The effect was devastating for Chase. Torture, he thought angrily to himself, working so close to her was sheer torture. “She’s just a woman,” he grumbled to himself, “just one woman!”
“Hey, Chase! Over here!” Ben Marx, one of his employees, shouted, dragging him out of his fantasies about Dani.
“What?”
“I don’t know,” Ben said. He was a young, bearded man who had been with Chase for nearly two years, ever since Eric Conway had walked out on Relive to start a rival company. Ben’s hat was pushed back on his head, sweaty strands of sandy hair were protruding under the brim and the man himself was staring at a large ten-gallon metal drum that he’d pulled from the creek. Rotating the drum on the ground, he gave out a long, low whistle just as Chase approached.
“Looks like an old barrel of some kind of herbicide,” Ben said.
“Herbicide?” Chase repeated, bending to examine the can. “Wait a minute. There it is. Dioxin.”
