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Trent
Wowzie, wowzie, woo, woo.
I feel like a school boy imagining his first kiss with the most popular girl in school.
I can’t believe my luck right now. Tonight, I’m sitting across from the most beautiful woman that I’ve ever had the good fortune to meet. Her blonde bob sits just right atop her head, curling under her chin and accentuating her high cheekbones. Oh! And don’t even get me started about her eyes. So, vibrant with just the right amount of sparkle, shining even more with the color she’s chosen for this evening’s date. She ditched her suit and badge for a lovely red lace dress, that makes her curvy body more enticing.
I’m just staring at her, waiting for her to finish her food since my plate is now empty. Sipping the wine, my head is in my hand and I’m daydreaming about any kind of sex with her. Foreplay, kissing her lips, caressing her…
I hear a snap and I’m back at the dinner table with her, torn from my sexual fantasy.
Kelly.
“Hey, are you in there somewhere?” snapping her fingers again.
“Oh! Yes, yes I am,” I sit up straight, sheepishly smiling. “I’m terribly sorry. Just fixating on the bad happenings around the ranch.” Kelly gives me the eye, like she knows exactly where I went as she sips her wine. Where most men’s minds go when they’re next to her.
“Well, hopefully we can solve all of this for you and Owen,” She finishes her potato and sets her fork down. “It’s a shame that someone could do this out of anger and jealousy.”
“You already have someone pegged for all of the destruction?” I ask earnestly.
She smiles and says, “I’m good, but not that good. I still have some investigating to do, but I do have some gut feelings.”
I’ll bet you’re good at a great many things. “Care to elaborate?” I pick my glass up and swirl the wine to smell the heady notes of oak and cherry. We’re connecting on so many levels that it makes my head swim, but it could be the wine. It’s weird, but I kind of always had the notion that all detectives were sticks in the mud, straight-laced so to speak.
“I can’t right now. Just have some hunches that I want to follow up on. So, tell me a little tale,” she asks me, prying into my life, as most good investigators do. “Tell me why your name, Hawk, is on the ranch, but not Owen’s.”
“Well,” I sit back and fold my hands in my lap. “I sort of alluded to it yesterday, but when he and I went to purchase this, Truman uncovered that this land, the ranch, actually was occupied by my people, the Comanche tribe,” I sip my wine and set it down again. “That is, until it was colonized.”
“Interesting and yet, amazing that it traced back to your ancestry,” she says, staring into my eyes.
I wonder what she’s really thinking behind those blue eyes. “Yeah. It actually was Owen’s idea to put just my name on the ranch out of respect, but he’s on everything else.”
“Does that make him resent you?” she asks me, poignantly.
Where is she going with this? Does she think that Owen would purposefully sabotage the equipment and destroy crops when his hard work and money are tied into it just like mine? Ruining all profits in the end? “Why would he? It was his idea in the first place.”
“I just need to be certain about his motives before I can rule him out is all,” Kelly sits up, knowing that I’m a little uncomfortable with the implication of Owen for such things. He would never do that in a million years. “I’m not accusing him, just so you know. It’s just part of my job to look at every angle and rule them out one by one.”
She trails off for a minute, staring beyond the window pane, out into the landscaping. Now it’s her turn to be somewhere instead of here. Kelly comes to her senses and says, “Sometimes, it’s a lonely position. That’s the only thing about my job that I don’t like.”
With sympathy and yet some angst that she would even think that Owen would double-cross me, I rewind my memories of the past. We’ve been the best of friends for as long as I can remember, growing up just down the street together. He’d always come to my house and my mom would always fix his wounds from his drunken father and then comfort his heart.
Hell, I bet we know more about each other than we know about our own selves. There isn’t a thing in this world that Owen wouldn’t do for me, nor me for him. We tell each other everything. If our friendship could last through Wayland’s ranch, it could last through anything.
My brother from another mother.
“If he were that resentful about my name being on the ranch, he would have talked to me about it by now,” I tell her.
Seeing the look on her face after I take up for Owen, let’s me know that she does indeed, believe me. Kelly sits up and says, “Enough with the investigation, let’s talk about something else.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“I don’t know,” she looks into her lap and then back to me. “What do you like to do for fun?”
“Running the ranch is a full-time job, but every once in a while, I kick up my heels in a square dance or have a couple of beers with the ranch hands playing horseshoes,” I tell her. “There’s nothing like the sound of a fiddle and some cold beers, chasing the sweat from a hard day’s work.”
She laughs out loud at my response. “You’re a typical cowboy, then?”
I shrug my shoulders saying, “Can you blame me?”
Still chuckling, Kelly leans into the table, and whispers, “Do you have other forms of fun?”
I think I know where she’s wanting to have some fun.
Score!
