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Chapter Four
Emma watched Ted round the corner, his stride straight and sure. How he possessed so much confidence, Emma didn’t know. When she’d looked up and seen the tall, broad-shouldered, shadowy figure….
The scream had been instant. So had the bottle throw.
Ted had some good reflexes too, and Emma was very lucky that bottle was made of plastic and not glass.
Embarrassment squirreled through her, getting into the really tight corners and making her mood turn sour. How did she keep running into him? She couldn’t get up any earlier to come feed the foals, and she shouldn’t have to.
“Maybe you should start later,” she mumbled to herself as she walked over to the industrial sink in the corner. She washed out the bottles and set them to dry for later. “All right, guys,” she said to her babies. “I’ll see you tonight.”
She left the stables, and the pink and yellow in the sky made everything sweeter. The last time she’d seen the sky like this, she’d been sitting with Missy out at the Frio bat caves. The sky was getting darker and darker then, not coming to life, but the feeling was the same.
There was a time between dawn and sunrise, and dusk and sunset, where the earth held its breath. Everything was calm and peaceful, and Emma had no worries, no doubts, and no insecurities.
She’d placed a kiss on Missy’s temple, and not ten minutes later, thousands and thousands and thousands of bats had come pouring out of the caves. Emma had never seen anything like it, and she’d stood there with her daughter in complete awe.
It had been a great experience for both of them, and when Emma had driven away last Sunday night, it was one of those times that she cried a lot on the winding roads back to Sweet Water Falls.
Thankfully, Ginger had been out on a walk with Nate, and Emma had managed to sneak through the house while Jess and Michelle shared a bowl of popcorn in the living room. By morning, her tears were dried up, the redness in her eyes gone.
A week and a day later, Ted had shown up, asking questions he had no right to ask.
She couldn’t believe that had just happened yesterday afternoon. It felt like he’d been on the ranch for a lot longer than that.
Emma returned to the homestead and poured herself a cup of coffee while the house cat, Frisco, wound between her ankles. She got out the sugar-free chocolate syrup and squirted in a healthy amount. With added cream, her cup no longer steamed, and it was more like a mug of hot chocolate with some slight coffee flavoring. Just the way she liked it.
The hot chococoffee was all she had in the morning, and since she wasn’t spiking her blood sugar, she counted it as if she’d eaten nothing.
She went into the office and pulled the cord to open the blinds, Frisco mewing behind her. The sunshine had started to stream over the Gulf of Mexico, and while there were a few islands between the ranch and the actual Gulf, Emma stood in the golden glow and fed off the energy of the sun, the sea, and the sky.
Another sip of her hot chococoffee, and Emma sat down at the computer. She had processed all of the invoices yesterday, and she needed to go through accounts receivable this morning, as well as look ahead to Friday, which was payday.
She had paperwork to process for Ted, now that he was here, and she’d need to meet with Ginger to make sure the Bureau of Prisons got the packet back they wanted, by the deadline. That ensured the ranch got the promised checks from the BOP, and Ginger would stay in good standing with them.
Emma got to work, only marking time by how restless she became the closer noon got. When her stomach gave one mighty growl, she allowed herself to glance at the clock in the corner of her computer screen.
Almost noon. Praise the Lord.
She got up and went into the kitchen, Frisco right behind her, intending to put together a shredded Caesar salad and pull out one of the leftover mini-sandwiches from yesterday. She did just that, and sat at the bar. She could take her food back to her office, but she’d made a pact not to eat in front of a screen, because then each bite was mindful.
Emma wasn’t exactly overweight, but that was because she worked really hard at not letting herself develop bad habits. The truth was, she’d lost ten pounds in the past year, after gaining twenty-five the year before.
The weight didn’t come off as fast as it went on, that was for dang sure, especially the closer to forty she got. She didn’t recover as easily from a busy day either, and if she didn’t get enough sleep? She couldn’t catch up without literally snoozing all day on the weekends.
This weekend, she had another trip to San Antonio on her calendar, and she swiped open her phone to check which hotel she’d book for herself. She stayed in a different one whenever she went, and she’d never used the same name twice.
She always paid in cash, and she’d even thought about renting a different car every other weekend when she went to visit her daughter. If anyone watched her for very long, they’d easily see she went to San Antonio on the second and fourth weekends of every month. Month after month, for years.
She’d made that deal with Ginger the day she’d shown up on the ranch, asking about the administrative job. She’d never told Ginger what she was doing, because Ginger assumed she was going to visit her family.
They’d talked a lot about family and the importance of it, and Emma hadn’t lied. She was going to see her family—just not the family Ginger knew about.
Her sisters had never asked her to come visit, and Emma probably wouldn’t have gone anyway. Sally and Meredith were like Mary Poppins—practically perfect in every way. They both had husbands with respectable jobs, and families of boys and girls—the exact same number of each.
Sally had two boys and two girls, while Meredith only had one of each. They all still lived in Lincoln, a posh little suburb of Dallas, where her parents still resided as well.
Only Emma had broken the mold and dared to move outside city limits. Only Emma hadn’t been married. Only Emma didn’t have the perfect family unit to bring home on holidays and anniversaries.
