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“Thank you—again.” Vada pushed back her chair and walked Stevie to the door. “I’ll see you on Monday if Theron will agree to go see the horses, but don’t expect a miracle.”
Stevie stopped at the back door and said, “Mia and I have vet appointments all day, but I’ll call you that evening to see how things go.”
“Fingers crossed that I’ll be able to tell you good things.” Vada watched her drove away and then closed the door and went back to the table.
Even though the idea of horse therapy was new to her, she crossed her fingers in hopes that it would help Theron to overcome being in a crowd. She finished off her breakfast, loaded and started the dishwasher, and headed down the hallway to her home office. She opened the door into Theron’s bedroom and was surprised to see the lights on, the window blinds open, and his hood thrown back to show his pretty blond hair.
“I’ll be in my office if you need me,” she said.
“I’m doing research,” he said without looking up.
She sat at her desk, opened her computer, brought up the day’s work for the insurance company out of Dallas that she’d worked for since she graduated from college. A picture of Theron as a baby sat beside her computer, and next to it, the latest one of him taken last Easter with one of his rare smiles. He had been born just a few days after her twenty-sixth birthday. Who would have thought that by the time he was crawling, he didn’t want anyone other than Vada to hold him—and that included his father? Or that by the time he was three, he wouldn’t function well with anyone else around him other than Vada?
She glanced over at the last picture taken of her grandmother. She had done her best to make their holiday together last year special for Vada—and for Theron. She had always been patient with him, understood that he had difficulties with his peers, and had told Vada that God must trust her a lot to give her such a special child.
“It’s going to be tough without you this year, Granny.” Vada wiped a tear from her cheek. “I probably won’t even put up a tree. Theron hates anything that changes in his world, so what’s the use.”
Don’t give up hope. Miracles happen during this season; her grandmother was back in her head.
Chapter Two
Lucas had slept in bunkhouses for most of the past twenty years, and the one he awoke in on Monday morning wasn’t all that different. A living area with a couple of bunk beds shoved over to one side. A door that led to a large pantry, and another one into a bathroom. The kitchen was part of the open living space and had a table and chairs for four people, and a separate bedroom and bathroom for the foreman, which he figured he’d might as well take since there was no one else to claim it. For just a split second, he had trouble remembering where he was when opened his eyes. He was used to sleeping in a bunk—if he was lucky—or in a sleeping bag out under the stars, not in a king-size bed that felt like it covered an acre of ground.
He remembered that Theron was coming that morning and bailed out of bed so fast that he scared the ranch hound dog, who’d been sleeping on the rug beside the bed. “Sorry about that, Tex. I got excited about a kid coming out here for his first session in horse therapy.”
He remembered Vada from high school and almost blushed when he thought about the crush he had had on her. Not that he ever approached her or even spoke to her all that often because she and Travis Winters, the star of everything in school, were a couple, and she only had eyes for him.
Tex growled and headed toward the door without even looking back.
“Guess you aren’t interested in hearing me talk about how I’ve always measured every woman I dated by what I thought Vada would be like?” Lucas plodded along behind him and let the dog outside. “I built her up in my head to be a perfect woman, and now no one else has snowball’s chance in hell of measuring up to that.”
Tex took off in a dead run around the bunkhouse without even so much as a growl.
Lucas closed the door, went back to the bathroom just off his bedroom, shaved, combed his hair straight back, and stared at his reflection in the mirror. “She’s only here for therapy for her boy. Remember that and don’t get all shy and bashful around her.”
His reflection didn’t have a single bit of advice for him, so he got dressed and headed out to the kitchen to make himself some breakfast. He had worked in huge ranches and hung his hat in both small and huge bunkhouses. He had stayed in this very one a couple of times when he had come home the past year, but that morning when he made an omelet, it felt emptier than it ever had before.
He had gotten in so late the night before that he put the horses in the barn and then went straight to the bunkhouse. Stevie had called him about the time he hit the Texas line and told him about the child who needed help, and he was too excited to get much sleep, and up too early to join the family for breakfast. He would get hugs from them all when he saw some lights come on in the ranch house, but right now he was hungry. At the news of having his first horse therapy client, he’d been too excited to eat supper. He’d just finished slipping the omelet out of the cast iron skillet and over onto a plate when he heard Tex scratching at the door.
“Great timing,” he said as he slung the door open to let the dog back inside. “I suppose you want a bite of my breakfast, right?”
The noise that Tex’s claws made when he marched across the wood floor into the kitchen area echoed through the place. Lucas thought of grumbling cowboys fussing at one another for snoring or telling tales about the night they’d just had with some lady they’d met at a local bar, and the bunkhouse seemed to get even emptier.
Even though he was the one who sat back and listened most of the time, he missed the hustle and bustle of what had become his normal routine. Tex sat down beside his chair and waited for Lucas to share a few bites with him.
“I’m not really a people person,” Lucas said as put a forkful of the omelet in his mouth, and then gave Tex one, “but I’m figuring out real quick that I don’t like to be alone either.”
When he and Tex had finished breakfast and he had cleaned up the kitchen, Lucas put on his coat and hat and headed outside with Tex right behind him. Lucas made a left turn when he reached the fork in the path—one led to the ranch house where Jesse and Addy lived with their family, and the other one led to his folks’ place. Tex turned around after he’d gone a few feet down the well-traveled path toward the ranch house and bounded back toward Lucas.
“So you decided to have a second breakfast with Mama and Dad, rather than Jesse and Addy, did you?” Lucas chuckled.
Tex barked his answer and took off in a trot toward Pearl and Sonny’s house. Sunflower Ranch had four dwellings on it—the original ranch house where Jesse lived with his family, the foreman’s small house where Pearl and Sonny now lived, Stevie and Cody’s place across the section line road, and, of course, the bunkhouse. Lucas had spent a lot of time sitting on the former foreman’s porch and in Henry’s house when he had been a teenager. Henry had been the ranch foreman long before the three Ryan brothers had been adopted and had been more like a favorite uncle to all of them than a hired hand. It still didn’t seem right that he had left Sunflower Ranch for a cabin in the Colorado mountains.
Lucas didn’t knock on the back door but stuck his head inside and yelled, “I smell coffee and bacon.”
“Come on in and pour yourself a cup,” Sonny called from the table where he sat with his morning newspaper. “Breakfast is on the bar. Your mama hasn’t learned to cook for two yet, so there’s always plenty.”
Lucas removed his coat and hat and hung them on an old, familiar rack beside the back door. “Mama’s food is the best in the whole world,” he said as he crossed the floor and kissed his mother on the cheek, then gave his father’s shoulder a gentle squeeze. “I’ve eaten in too many bunkhouses to count, and Mama’s food tops them all, but I’ve already had breakfast.”
