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After the fourth time, he decided that no one was home and he was going to have to search for this elusive ranch foreman somewhere else.
Sully looked around. Maybe the man was in the large structure located some distance behind the house. It was worth a shot.
Sully had just turned away and gone down the three steps off the front porch when the front door suddenly opened.
Finally! Sully thought turning back around.
The single celebratory word faded instantly as the person he found himself looking up at turned out not to the foreman.
It wasn’t a man at all.
Instead, it was a slender young woman who appeared to be in her twenties. She had long straight black hair pulled back into a ponytail, prominent cheekbones and the most incredible blue eyes he had ever seen.
For a moment, the blue eyes held him captive, melting time and space into a single entity.
It took concentrated effort for him to finally come back to his senses.
“Yes?” One hand on her hip, the woman fired the single word at him like a bullet. Rather than friendly, she seemed exasperated.
Sully found himself wondering why. “Um, Miss Joan sent me.”
“Of course she did,” the slender young woman in jeans and a work shirt said with a sigh, looking more harassed. “You got any gear?”
He hadn’t the slightest idea what she was talking about. “Gear?”
Her impatient look grew only more so.
“Things,” she told him. “Your possessions, clothes, whatever.”
He felt like an idiot, but then, people didn’t talk the way she did back home. And they didn’t snap their questions unless they were interrogating someone.
“Oh, in the truck,” he said, then to make sure he was being clear, he jerked a thumb in the direction of the vehicle parked close by.
The woman’s expression looked no friendlier. “You can park your car behind the house and your gear in the bunkhouse.”
“Bunkhouse?”
“Behind the stable,” she said. Since it was obvious that didn’t clear anything up, she said, “C’mon, I’ll show you.” In a second, she was down the steps and striding toward the rear of the house ahead of him.
They were not starting off on the right foot, Sully thought. Hell, he’d encountered friendlier criminals. Raising his voice, he called after her. “Wait!”
The woman swung around on her heel, still looking as if her supply of patience was seriously depleting by the second. She didn’t say anything, but her entire countenance let him know that she was waiting for him to say something.
Obviously, conversation was not at a premium around here.
“I’m looking for the foreman,” he told her. Since she was still standing where she’d stopped, he crossed to her. “Ray Mulcahy.”
She continued looking at him as if waiting for something to dawn on him. When it didn’t, she said, “You found her.”
“Where?” he asked, looking around. And then the pronoun she’d used suddenly echoed in his brain. “Her?” he asked incredulously.
She opened her mouth, and he had a feeling she was about to say something less than flattering, but then she closed it again. Regrouping, the woman said, “You’re serious.”
“Yes.”
Blowing out a breath, she spread her hands wide and said, “Here.”
Sully stared at the shapely woman, dumbfounded. So much for the sanctity of old Westerns. “You’re the foreman?” he questioned in disbelief.
It wasn’t the first time one of the down-on-his-luck drifters Miss Joan had decided to take in looked appalled at the idea of having a woman giving him orders.
“I am. Something wrong with that?” Rae asked.
“No, no,” Sully denied, trying not to trip over his own tongue.
He had grown up in a house of capable females. He had no problem with the idea of a woman running the ranch and issuing orders—he just really wished he’d been briefed about that ahead of time so he wouldn’t have come across like a dolt.
Belatedly, he said, “I’m fine with that.”
Rae took a deep breath, silently telling herself not to get on her soapbox. Scrutinizing the man in front of her, she decided that he didn’t really look as if the idea of having a woman telling him what to do went against his grain. But the guy did look stunned.
She came to the only conclusion she could. “Miss Joan didn’t tell you, did she?”
Sully allowed himself a hint of a smile. “That she did not.” Then, because he could be seen as partially to blame, he said, “In all fairness, I didn’t ask. She just said to go find the foreman, Ray Mulcahy.”
And therein lay the problem, Rae thought. “Rae’s short for Rachel,” she told him.
“Oh. Never thought of that,” he confessed.
And then, for the first time in a while, Sully started to laugh.
Rae’s eyes narrowed, and she felt her back going up again. She’d worked hard to get and keep this position. Miss Joan was charitable, but the woman was also tough and gave nothing away that hadn’t been earned.
“What’s so funny?” she asked.
It took Sully a second to catch his breath. “My sisters are really going to get a kick out of this when I tell them about how I put my foot in my mouth.”
“You have sisters?” she asked.
The drifters who came through professed to be loners and kept to themselves for the most part. They hardly ever volunteered any details about themselves, and certainly never this soon.
Maybe this one wasn’t just a drifter, she thought.
“And brothers,” Sully told her.
Somehow, it felt comforting to mention his family. That surprised him, because all he’d wanted to do in the last few weeks was just detach himself from everyone and everything.
“And a whole bunch of cousins,” he added, “almost half of whom are female.” He offered her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was insulting you before.”
“You weren’t,” Rae replied.
Even if he had, it wasn’t the sort of thing she admitted. To do so would have been to expose her own feelings, and she never did that.
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