Chapter Four
Sarah
“Wake up,” I said as I poked Garrett in the cheek.
I only stood there long enough for him to open his eyes and realize it was me and then I quickly left. My father would have killed me if he saw me anywhere near the bunkhouse. When I was younger, I loved to flirt and hang out with the ranch hands and my father never allowed it. It was fun back then to go against his wishes, but now I knew better. Many of the men who worked for us were on the run from the law, family, and other obligations. Some were good men who had made bad choices, but some weren’t good men at all.
I thought Garrett was one of the good guys. He looked the part at least and didn’t disrespect me, although he certainly could flirt better than most of the guys on the ranch. When men normally tried to flirt with me, they ended up fumbling their way through it, but Garrett seemed much more confident. If I hadn’t known better, I would have thought he was quiet the ladies’ man outside of a ranch environment.
The ranch was a world all of its own. As much as we had to work, most of the people who worked the ranch also lived there and everyone was friends as well. We didn’t get days off and we didn’t have much time for going into town or socializing. The ranch was our morning, noon and night; so I was happy to have someone cute and interesting around.
The ranch was quiet at four o’clock in the morning; I loved the feeling in the air before the sun rose. Over the years, one of my favorite parts of helping out at the ranch was making breakfast for the men. It was the start of a new day and optimism was always in the air. All the tiredness from the day before had worn off and most of the men had a smile and were ready for the new day of work.
“How do I even know it’s morning? It still looks like nighttime,” Garrett said as he jogged up behind me. “Why on earth do we need to get up this early anyways? Can’t we make breakfast be at a respectable hour like, eight o’clock or something?”
I knew the feeling. I hated that we served breakfast so damn early, too. By the time everyone got to lunchtime, they were starving again. I could only imagine how hungry Garrett had been when skipping breakfast all together.
The days on the ranch were long and having the ranch hands working so many hours wasn’t ideal. Sure, a ranch hand job was expected to be long hours. But the guys on our ranch often worked seven days a week and from five in the morning to nine at night. It couldn’t be legal, but I suspected my father paid many of them under the table and most of the men liked it that way. They weren’t working on our ranch so they could work up in their careers. The men who came to our ranch were only worried about getting some cash in their pockets and moving on.
“Can’t you feel the crisp air? It’s so much different than normal air. I mean, regular air, oh … you know what I mean.”
Garrett looked at me out of the corner of his eye and started to laugh, I tried to resist laughing with him but soon we were both laughing. It was fun being up early; I liked having the world all to myself. I was happy to help my mother with the meals throughout the day and on that morning, I was happy to have Garrett with me.
He was funny and I had found myself thinking about him a lot since we first met. He seemed so naive to the ways of the ranch, but not necessarily naive to the ways of the world. The way he held himself and even the way we talked with each other made me think that Garrett had seen much more in his life than he was letting on.
“Normal air?” he said through his laughter.
“Oh, shut up. You know what I meant.”
“I’ll keep my eyes out for the normal air later this afternoon,” he teased me.
There was no use fighting with him; I had to just laugh. I tended to fumble my words when I was around a man who intimidated me. It had happened in my office all the time and I hated it. I always wanted to be a strong woman who couldn’t be rattled by what was going on around me, but it didn’t work out for me the way I wanted it to. Instead, I often ended up fumbling for the words I wanted to say and unable to argue the points I wanted to get across.
I had hoped that building my abilities in my workplace would help with my confidence and therefore help with my ability to stay on point when I was intimidated. But I had to leave before learning those skills. Then as I stood in front of the very handsome new ranch hand, I felt just as disorganized as I had felt in front of a boardroom full of executives.
Garrett commanded an energy about him that felt so similar to how my coworkers had felt. The confidence with which he looked at me had me feeling like I couldn’t say or do anything right. It was uncomfortable, in a weirdly erotic way.
“How are your hands feeling? Do you think you can handle cutting up some vegetables?” I asked as I grabbed a knife for him.
We had bandaged his hands up with some gauze and medical tape and they looked perfectly capable of helping me. I had notice he was moving them just fine and seemed to not have any pain at the moment. I suspected he would heal up just fine in the next couple of days.
“Show me how you like it done,” Garrett said in a low sexy voice that rattled me to the core.
It was like he was purposely trying to titillate me. The look in his eyes spelled out trouble and I had to look away quickly, but not before I caught a deep gaze from his brilliant blue eyes. Oh, how those eyes seemed to look right through me. It was as if he read every secret I had with just a simple gaze.
“Just cut them in small bits; I’m going to put them in the omelets,” I said as I handed him a knife and some onions and started cutting them into small pieces.
“Like this?” Garrett said as he grabbed the knife with his whole fist and started moving it roughly over the onion.
“God no, you’re going to cut off your fingers.”
“Like this,” I said as I moved next to him and put my hand gently over his and guided him along. “And keep the tips of your fingers tucked under to keep them safe.”
“Show me some more,” he said with a mischievous smile and that damn low sexy voice.
I grabbed his other hand and tucked the fingers under for him as I moved the knife gingerly along the onion. Slowly we moved it up and back down again as our bodies pressed up against each other. I could feel his breath next to me and I felt like he moved purposely closer to me as we progressed through one onion.
His body was warm and I wanted to know what it looked like under his clothes. I could tell he was in good shape and I suspected he had muscles almost everywhere. Normally I didn’t have such fantasies about seeing a guy naked, but I couldn’t stop thinking about Garrett and his delectable, naked body. I knew I wouldn’t get to see it, not as long as my father was around, but I couldn’t stop thinking how good he would make me feel.
Normally, I would have pulled away from any other ranch hand who had moved that close to me, but I didn’t want to pull away from Garrett. My heart pounded with the excitement of having him so close to me, feeling his breath near me, and feeling the touch of his hands and mine together. My heart pounded with the anticipation of each movement.
“Think you can handle it?” I asked.
“I think so. But if I get into trouble I’ll need you to give me another demonstration,” he said with a glance.
As we started preparing the breakfast for everyone, I was pleasantly surprised with Garrett’s abilities in the kitchen, his cutting speed quickly picked up. Most of the men who worked on the farm had probably never made their own meals except for things that could be heated up in the microwave. But Garrett knew what he was doing. I watched as he expertly cut up the vegetables, his fingertips curled under to prevent himself from getting cut. That was a tip not many people remembered when I showed them, unless they were familiar with cooking.
I also watched his arms as they moved to hold the vegetables. Garrett was strong; his biceps looked like he could bench press me if I gave him the chance. Oh, how I wouldn’t mind having his hands on my body. After working to clean out his blisters the day before, I longed to find a reason to hold his hands again, to touch him, or to have him touch me.
His blond hair caught the reflection of the lights that were over him and I realized just how perfectly symmetrical his face was. Garrett looked like he could have worked as a model somewhere; it was curious to me that he was at our ranch. I didn’t mind, not at all, but there was something different about him compared to the other men working for my father. And it wasn’t just his good looks.
We continued to prepare for breakfast quietly as we both did what needed to get finished. But as I watched Garrett I started to get a sneaking suspicious that he really did know how to cut vegetables. His fingers were still tucked under and he was expertly gliding his knife from one end of each vegetable to the other. He quickly twisted the cut pieces and diced them into perfectly cubed small bites.
“Have you worked in a restaurant before?” I asked.
“Why?”
Garrett smiled at me and I knew there was so much more to him that he wasn’t telling me. He had been trying to get me near him and pretending like he didn’t know how to cut up vegetables. It was clear that he really did know how to work in the kitchen and I had to think there was so much more about him that he was keeping secret.
I didn’t mind him keeping some secrets, just as long as I didn’t feel like he was manipulating me. I hated it when men lied for the sole purpose of getting what they wanted from a woman. I was an adult, and if I wanted to have Garrett in my bed I would, but I didn’t need to be manipulated into agreeing to it.
That was one thing I hated most about the men in New York. If I could find a man who was interested in a strong woman, he always wanted to play games and manipulate the situation. They were rarely honest and hardly ever actually interested in a relationship that lasted longer than a night.
New York had to have been one of the worst places in the world for dating. Although, the middle of nowhere Montana probably wasn’t the best place either. I was pretty sure Garrett was the only man even remotely worth me flirting with, and when he decided to leave I’d be left with no one.
Leaving was what the ranch hands did. I knew not to have feelings for them or to expect much more than a little flirting. But it was fun to imagine a little fun with a guy like Garrett around.
“You seem to have picked up the art of cutting vegetables very quickly.”
“Maybe I just had a really good teacher?”
“Maybe.”
“Perhaps you’d like to help me with my French kissing skills later?” Garrett asked as he moved toward me.
“Hold it, bucko; I don’t think you need help with those skills.”
“How do you know?” Garrett said as he inched closer toward me.
There was no doubt in my mind that Garrett didn’t need help with French kissing or any other skills that involved his mouth. He had the confidence level of a man who spent plenty of time with the ladies. Plus, Garrett was just too damn handsome to need help with any of the stuff like that. Even if he was a horrible person, which he wasn’t, he would have gotten plenty of girls.
“Stop playing with me; I don’t think you need help French kissing,” I said as my face turned bright red.
“Perhaps you’d like to teach me how to saddle up a horse sometime? I’d love to learn that.”
I was much more comfortable with the request to help with horses, but it did seem odd to me that the man had come to work on a ranch but didn’t know how to work with horses. It was one of those things that almost all the men who came to the ranch knew how to do. Why else would they be looking for work on a ranch unless it was something they were familiar with?
“So why exactly did you come to a ranch to work if you’ve never been around horses before?”
Garrett looked away from me and walked back over to his vegetable work area. He smiled but then looked back down at his vegetables and started to cut them again. I hit a nerve with him, I was sure of it. It was a tell-tale sign that he wasn’t interested in telling me why he really had arrived at our ranch. But I was open to hearing the version of his story that he wanted to tell me, too.
“Oh, you know. A man’s got to work.”
I waited to see if there was anything else he was going to add to his story. Maybe why he was traveling from Wyoming to Washington? Or how he had even found our ranch in the first place. I wanted something, any sort of real explanation, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to give it to me.
Over the years, I had heard some pretty crazy stories for why people ended up at our ranch. Some were traveling away from their past, others just trying to waste some time. I tried not to judge people when they ended up at our ranch. Ranch hands were needed, that was a fact. It didn’t really matter how they arrived on our doorstep; we needed them and they needed work. But I did prefer to know the truth of what was going on with them. The truth was something I valued very much in the people I associated with.
“Yep, that’s true,” I said. “Let’s finish up and get you out of here so you can eat and get started on all that work you need to do,” I said as I tried to hide how annoyed I was with him.
Why couldn’t he just talk to me like a normal person and tell me why he was there? Garrett seemed to love keeping secrets and it was all fun and games at the moment, but I was going to get really tired of it really quickly.
“I’m happy to help serve the guys, too, if you’d like.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Don’t let the guys see you back here with me,” I said as it got close to breakfast time. “Go wash up and come in for breakfast with the rest of them. I don’t need help serving.”
Our short conversation had reminded me exactly why my mother had always told me to steer clear of the ranch hands; they never stayed long. When I was younger, I thought she didn’t like me hanging around them because they were older, or because they were poor. I even remembered getting into a huge argument about one young man who had arrived at our ranch suddenly in the middle of the night. My father had brought him and he looked scared to death to be there. He was quiet and I naturally reached out to him to make him feel more comfortable. After a couple of weeks on the ranch, we had grown close and we were laughing and flirting with each other every chance we got.
My mother warned me to stay away from him, she told me I had work to do and so did he. But we kept talking and flirting, then suddenly one morning the young man was gone. He had just up and left us in the middle of the night, just as suddenly as he had arrived. He never said goodbye to me, never told me he was thinking of leaving; I was so heartbroken that I hardly left my room for a week. It was then that I realized my mother had only been trying to prevent me from getting a broken heart.
Sure, there were good guys and bad guys who worked at our ranch. But they were all going to leave sooner or later and that meant I needed to guard my heart and keep it from getting broken. Even a good-looking, funny guy like Garrett wasn’t going to catch me off guard. I had already had my heart broken by the company I loved, there was no need to open it up and have it broken by a man in the same month.
“You’re afraid the other guys will get jealous of me?” Garrett joked.
“Just do what I tell you,” I said sternly.
I didn’t mean for my words to come out so bitchy, but I wasn’t going to take them back. The truth was, I was his boss and he was an employee of the farm. I wasn’t going to flirt with him and I didn’t need him flirting with me. If he couldn’t even be honest with me about little details of his life I wasn’t going to hold out hope that he was even going to be at the ranch for long.
Men who had lots of secrets to hide weren’t my type. I liked guys who were strong, handsome, caring, and honest. So far, I was beginning to wonder if Garrett was honest at all. He certainly seemed to be strong and handsome though. He was the kind of guy I could see myself marrying somewhere long down the road, but the one I finally settled on would have to be caring and honest, too. I wasn’t going to settle for anyone that didn’t have all four traits.
“You must have been a really good boss; you’re excellent at giving orders,” Garrett said.
“I wasn’t a boss.”
“In that picture I saw, you looked like a boss.”
“Why? Because I was dressed in a suit? I asked him.
Again, I noticed the stern tone in my voice, but I didn’t mean to argue with him, my work was just a bit of a sore subject. I had dedicated myself to my job since getting out of graduate school. I worked up to twenty hours a day sometimes, yet at the first sign of financial distress, the company chose to let me go. It wasn’t what I had expected. I certainly couldn’t have planned it or even prepared myself mentally for the news. But there I was, back home on my parents’ ranch at twenty-seven years of age.
It was hard not to feel like a failure and Garrett bringing that photo up just reminded me that I was no longer that person. Maybe I had never really been that woman at all. All I knew at that moment was I enjoyed being home and I was going to do everything possible to ensure my father could keep his farm. Maybe we would have to sell part of it, or maybe we would have to change how things were done, but I was home for a reason and that was to help my family.
“And the large corner office.”
“Well, in New York there are a lot of corner offices; I wasn’t anything special.”
“I doubt that,” Garrett said as he took a couple steps forward. “You’re special no matter what you’re doing for your job.”
He was only about a foot away from me as his large chest hovered near me. I looked up at him and felt my breath catch as my body reacted to him. Garrett had a delicious looking smile filled with confidence as he looked down at me. For a moment, I could have sworn he was going to kiss me from the look he had in his eye. I quickly took a step back and looked away. There would be no kissing going on in that kitchen on that morning. I appreciated a good man as much as the next woman, but Garrett needed to understand that I wasn’t interested in his charms.
Okay, maybe I was interested; but I wasn’t going to give in until I knew more about the man. He was going to have to show a little bit of honesty before I would be falling for his flirting. But I suspected Garrett wouldn’t be around all that long. From the way he was keeping secrets, he was probably going to be back on the road within the week.
“You better get out there so you can eat.”
Garrett nodded his head and gave me one last glance before he turned to leave the kitchen. Every muscle in my body relaxed when he had finally left and I shook my whole body in a big shiver. The way Garrett made me feel was unsettling in a way a man hadn’t made me feel in a really long time.
I hated it, but liked it all at the same time. I felt energized and ready to take on the day like I had just finished a whole pot of coffee. I wouldn’t give up on him totally, not just yet. There was always the possibility he would come around.
I wasn’t the type of woman who had one night stands, or even relationships that I knew wouldn’t go anywhere. But if I was that sort of woman, the idea of sleeping with Garrett even if he was only at the ranch for a short time, well, that didn’t sound all that horrible.
“No, no, no; you stay away from that one,” my mother said as she walked into the kitchen. She was smiling as she looked at me and I knew right away that she was joking.
“What are you talking about? He was just helping me with breakfast.”
“Oh, I saw how you looked at him. Just remember, we know nothing about these men and any one of them could have a past that is dangerous. He could be a murderer.”
“Mom, any man could have a past he’s not telling a woman about. You can’t tell me to stay away from every man on the planet. Anyways, why are you up? I told you I could handle breakfasts. There’s no reason you can’t sleep in.”
My mother had already started unloading the plates and piling them up near the front of the kitchen. It felt like when I was a teenager and I was helping her out; she was instantly in charge of everything. I knew she just wanted what was best for me and I wasn’t going to argue with her logic. It was true: Garrett could be hiding a lot from me. I felt like he was hiding something, but I certainly didn’t think he was a murderer.
“I’ve been getting up before dawn for over twenty years. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.”
“So what do you know about Garrett?” I asked with a raised eyebrow. “Do you know something about him that I should know?”
We continued setting up the line for breakfast as we talked. The men were going to start arriving shortly and I liked to have everything ready for them before the first one entered the hall. They worked hard and a good meal was the least we could do for them. I actually really enjoyed helping with the meals on the ranch; it was more fun than dealing with the pigs — that was my least favorite job on the farm. Those damn things always ran from me and I inevitably ended up injuring myself in some way.
“I thought you weren’t interested? Hmmm?”
“I’m not. But Dad wants me to teach him about the horses so I was just wondering if you knew anything about him.”
“You probably know more than I do. I’ve only had a couple conversations with him. He seems like a good kid, from Wyoming, I think. Not sure how your father found him or how he ended up working here. I can see you took care of his blistered hands for him.”
“Oh, yeah, they were the worst I have ever seen. But the strange thing was that he wasn’t even complaining about them. He was going to just keep working. It actually was pretty impressive. Remember that one guy who got blisters and stopped working by noon each day? Oh man, that was hilarious.”
My mother stopped to think for a moment as she looked up into the air. My mother was a beautiful and kind woman. Over the years, we had taken in many men who just weren’t cut out for working on a ranch. But she was always kind to them and always did her best to help them out. Even my father would pull the men aside and work with them to teach them what they needed to know to get by. It had always been strange to me that some men would just show up at our ranch and think that the work was going to be easy. Within a day or two, they were obviously in over their heads; it was quite funny to watch.
“Oh, yes, that poor guy. I remember father ended up teaching him how to use the tractor mower and having him mow for us and feed the animals.”
“That guy certainly didn’t earn his paycheck. I remember he’d always be reading books before anyone else had even finished their jobs. Why did father let him stay for so long?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he felt bad for the guy. You know your father; he’s always trying to help people out.”
“Yeah, he needs to start being a little more selfish.”
As the men started to line up for their plates, I noticed Garrett as he walked into the building. Damn he was a good-looking guy. His chiseled jaw and brilliant, blue eyes were embedded into my mind and I couldn’t get them out of it. Garrett Reynolds was much too good-looking to be a ranch hand.
I could see Garrett as a model or business man, certainly not a ranch hand. I was going to have to work hard to get his story out of him though, because he wasn’t willingly going to share it.
“He is handsome, I’ll give him that,” my mother said as she noticed me looking at Garrett. “But you need to stay away from him. Let him do his job and you do yours. You said you wanted to come home to get your mind straight, I don’t think anything about that man will help you plan for your future.”
“I know.”
“Do you really?”
“Yes, mother. I’ll stay away from him.”
“Your father said one of the guys he’s hired just got out of prison. I don’t know which one it is, but you need to keep your wits about you. A handsome man can still be a bad one.”
My mother cracked me up. She was so kind to everyone who came through our doors yet she was trying to warn me away from Garrett. I knew that she wasn’t afraid of him anymore than I was. She had a good eye for people just like my father did, even the ones who recently got out of prison.
That was a big lesson I had learned at a young age; just because people did something bad in their past didn’t mean they were bad people. And just because they didn’t have a criminal record didn’t mean people were automatically good either. People were complicated characters and I felt like I was constantly learning and trying to understand them.
“Mom, I seriously doubt Garrett is a killer. The man looks like a fraternity boy who got lost on a camping trip.”
We both laughed as Garrett stood in front of us with his plate held out for his breakfast. He grinned and looked between my mother and me before moving down the line. I swear I held my breath every moment he was standing there.
Garrett had charisma and I liked that. His thick muscles made him a joy to look at and that was all I planned on doing. Like the fancy merchandise in the stores, I was going to look and not touch. Well, I might touch a little, but I wasn’t going to fall in love with the guy. A quick, summer fling before he took off on the road, that’s the most I would do: nothing more. I had to think about my own future and the plans I wanted to start working on for Garrett and myself would certainly distract me from those plans.
“You know, you two could be sisters,” he as he walked back past us and just before heading to his table.
“Mr. Reynolds, it’s nice to see that you were able to wake up this morning and eat some breakfast. I look forward to seeing you again tomorrow morning,” my mother said.
She was horrible at taking a compliment and Garrett was a little too cheesy with his. Although, I had heard people say my mother and I looked a lot alike and some had even tried the sisters line before. But my mother had aged a lot over the last few years. The sun, work, and money stressors were taking their toll on her.
“I will be here tomorrow morning,” Garrett responded confidently as he sat down next to Forest.
“Do you think Forest has told him how everyone manages to wake up in the mornings?” I asked my mother.
“Well, he was up this morning, so maybe.”
I wasn’t about to tell my mother that I had woken Garrett up on my own. She certainly wouldn’t have been happy with me and I liked when my mother was happy. My mom could get pretty wild when she was angry. There had only been a few times in my life that I had witness her truly upset with me and I didn’t plan on repeating that experience anytime soon.
“Yeah, he must have told him.”