The Cowboy and the Lady. Marie Ferrarella

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СКАЧАТЬ realizing what the man with her had to think. “I’m sorry if I sound like I’m being overly protective, but I’m the only family that Ryan has left and I don’t feel like I’ve been doing a very good job of raising him lately.” She looked over her shoulder again in the direction her brother had gone as he left the area.

      She spotted him with Garrett. The two were headed for the bunkhouse. Garrett had one arm around her brother’s shoulders—most likely, in her estimation, to keep Ryan from darting off. Not that there was anywhere for him to go, she thought. The ranch was some distance from the stamp-sized town they had driven through.

      “He’ll be all right,” Jackson assured her. “Garrett hasn’t lost a ranch hand yet.”

      “Is that what you call the boys who come here?” she asked, thinking it wasn’t exactly an accurate label for them. After all, they were here to be reformed, not to work on the ranch, right?

      She looked at Jackson, waiting for him to clarify things. What he said made her more confused. The man seemed very nice, but nice didn’t get things done and besides, “nice” could also be a facade. That was the way it had been with John. And it had fooled her completely.

      “I found that ‘ranch hand’ is rather a neutral title and, when you come right down to it, the boys do work on the ranch. My office is right in here,” he told her as he opened the door for her.

      She was going to ask him more about having the boys work on his ranch—had she just supplied him with two more hands to do his bidding?—but when he opened the door to his ranch house without using a key, her attention was diverted in an entirely different direction.

      “Your door’s not locked,” she said in surprise.

      He heard the wonder in her voice and suppressed a smile. He knew exactly what she had to be thinking. “No, it’s not.”

      “Do you think that’s wise?” she asked. “I mean, if you and your brother are outside, working, isn’t that like waving temptation right in front of the boys that you’re trying to reform?”

      “They’re on the honor system,” he explained, closing the door behind her. “I want them to know that we trust them to do the right thing. You have to give trust in order to get it. Around here, the boys keep each other honest. For the most part, the ones who have been here the longest set an example and watch over the ones who came in last.”

      She looked at him skeptically. “That sounds a little risky.”

      “We find it works,” he told her. “And just for the record, ‘I’ don’t reform them. What we do here is present them with the right set of circumstances so that they can reform themselves. Most of the time I find that if I expect the best from the teens who come here, they eventually try to live up to my expectations.”

      Debi looked around. The living room she had just walked into was exactly what she would have expected: open and massive, with very masculine-looking leather furniture, creased with age and use. The sofas—there were two—were arranged around a brick fireplace. The ceiling was vaulted with wooden beams running through the length of it. The only concession to the present was the skylight. Without it, she had a feeling that the room would have a dungeonlike atmosphere.

      The rustic feel of the decor seem like pure Texas. Debi really had no idea why that would make her feel safe, but it did.

      Maybe it had to do with the man beside her. There was something about his manner that gave her hope and made her feel that everything was going to work out.

      She knew she wasn’t being realistic, but then, she’d never been in this sort of situation before.

      Realizing that she’d fallen behind as he was walking through the room, Debi stepped up her pace and caught up to Jackson just as he entered a far more cluttered room that she assumed was his office.

      “Sounds good in theory,” she acknowledged, referring to his ideas about trust.

      “Works in practice, too,” he told her with just the tiniest bit of pride evident in his cadence.

      Sweeping a number of files, oversized envelopes and a few other miscellaneous things off a chair, Jackson nodded toward it. He deposited the armload of paraphernalia on the nearest flat surface.

      “Please, sit,” he requested.

      Debi did as he asked, perching on the edge of the seat. She appeared as if she was ready to jump to her feet at any given moment for any given reason, he noted.

      This woman was wound up as tightly as her brother. Maybe more so. Undoubtedly because she was constantly on her guard and vigilant for the next thing to go wrong. And he had a feeling that she was doing it alone. She’d said she was the teen’s only family.

      “So,” Jackson began as he sat down in his late uncle’s overstuffed, black leather chair. It creaked ever so slightly in protest due to its age. To Jackson, the sound was like a greeting from an old friend. “What do you think is Ryan’s story?”

      Debi blinked, caught completely off guard. His wording confused her. Did he believe she wasn’t involved in her brother’s life and could only make a wild guess as to why he was the way he was? Her problem was she was too involved in her brother’s story.

      “Excuse me?” she demanded, forgetting all about feeling as if she had failed her brother.

      Jackson patiently explained the meaning behind his question. “Every parent or guardian who comes to us usually has some sort of a theory as to why the boy they brought to us is the way he is. They give me a backstory and I take it from there. Sometimes they’re right, sometimes they’re wrong. Not everything is black or white.” He leaned back in the chair. The motion was accompanied by another pronounced creak. “What’s Ryan’s backstory?”

      He did think she wasn’t involved, Debi thought. She set out to show this man how wrong he was by giving him a summarized version of Ryan’s life.

      “As a little boy, Ryan was almost perfect,” she recalled fondly. “Never talked back, went to school without a single word of protest. Kept his room neat, ate whatever was on his plate. Did his homework and got excellent grades. He was almost too good,” she added wistfully, wishing fervently for those days to be back again.

      No one was ever too good, but he refrained from commenting on that. Instead, Jackson gently urged the woman on. “And then...?”

      It took her a moment to begin. Remembering still hurt beyond words. “And then, three years ago, he was involved in a car accident. He was in the car with my parents.” A lump formed in her throat, the way it always did. “They were coming out to visit me—I was away at college.”

      She would forever feel guilty about that. Guilty about selecting her college strictly because that was where John was going. If she’d attended a college close to home, the way her parents had hoped, this wouldn’t have happened.

      “Except that they never made it,” she said after a beat, forcing the words out. “A truck hauling tires or car batteries or something like that sideswiped them.” She had no idea why it bothered her that she didn’t have all the details down, but it did. “The car went off the side of the road, tumbled twice and when it was over...” Her voice shook as she continued. “My parents were both dead.” Taking a breath, she continued, “And Ryan was in ICU. They kept him in СКАЧАТЬ