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At that, she laughed a little. “Why would I need a truck? My Jeep has been fine for me in the snow.”
“The wheelbase is too short,” he told her, and shook his head when he saw the blank confusion in her eyes. “Too easily tipped over. And in a high wind on the mountain road...”
She shivered as he’d meant her to—because the thought of her navigating those switchback curves alone in a storm gave him a damn heart attack.
“For another thing,” he added, “you’ll need the truck bed, because there’s no trash collection here. You’ll have to make trips to the dump yourself.”
She chewed at her bottom lip and Sage felt a confusing mix of satisfaction and guilt. He didn’t necessarily want to be the one to ruin her dream. But hell if he wanted her alone in a situation she wasn’t prepared for either.
“Where’s the dump?”
“I can show you.” And that would serve as a negative, too. Once she got a whiff of the dump, she’d be less inclined to have to go there regularly.
“Okay...”
“There’s no mail delivery up here either,” he said while he still held her attention. “You’ll have to get a P.O. box in town.”
She sighed. “I hadn’t thought it would be so complicated.” Turning in a slow circle, she let her gaze wander over the walls of tools as if she were trying to figure out how to use them. “All I want to do is live on the mountain, closer to where my patients will be.”
“Most things generally are complicated,” he said, emptying the work bucket he’d brought in with him. He opened drawers, returning the hammer, nails and leftover shingles to their proper places and when he was finished, he turned to find Colleen staring at him, a smile as bright as sunlight on her face. “And when you live up here—especially alone—you have to expect to take care of a lot of things most people don’t worry about...what are you smiling at?”
“You.” She shrugged. “It’s funny, but I don’t think I ever pictured you as being a fix-it kind of guy.”
“Yeah, well.” He closed the drawer and walked to set the bucket down in a corner of the shed. “J.D. had Dylan and I working all over Big Blue when we were kids. The two of us had a chores list that would make a grown man weep. We worked with the cattle and the horses, learned how to rebuild engines and shingle roofs when they needed it.” He leaned one hip against the workbench, folded his arms across his chest and continued, “J.D. thought we should know the place from the ground up. Be familiar with everything so we were never at the mercy of anyone else. During school, we had plenty of time for homework, but during summer, he worked us both.”
She tipped her head to one side and looked up at him. “Sounds like it was hard work.”
“It was,” he admitted, realizing he hadn’t thought about those times in years. When they were kids, he and Dylan had hated all the chores. But they’d learned. Not that Dylan needed most of those lessons today, what with spearheading the Lassiter Grill Group. But Sage could admit, at least to himself, that everything he’d learned on the Big Blue had helped him run his own ranch better than he might have done otherwise. Sourly, he acknowledged that growing up as J.D. Lassiter’s son had prepared him for the kind of life he had always wanted to live.
All those hot summers spent training horses, riding the range rounding up stray cattle. The long hours sweeping out the stable and the barn. The backbreaking task of clearing brush away from the main house. He and his younger brother had become part of the crew working Big Blue. The other wranglers and cowboys accepted them as equals, not the boss’s adopted kids.
Shaking his head, Sage looked back on it all now and could see that J.D. had been helping them build their own places on Big Blue. To feel a part of the ranch. He’d been giving them a foundation. Roots to replace the ones they’d lost.
“Crafty old goat,” he muttered, with just a touch of admiration for the father he had resented for so long.
“He really was, wasn’t he?”
Sage caught the indulgent smile on her face and stiffened. But Colleen was unaware of the change in him, because she kept talking.
“He used to make me laugh,” she was saying. “He couldn’t get out much in his last couple of months, but he managed to steer everyone around him into doing just what he wanted them to do. He ran the ranch from his bed and his recliner. He even convinced me to accompany him to the rehearsal dinner,” she added softly, “when I knew he wasn’t well enough for the stress of the evening.”
