A Longtime (and at one point Illegal) Crush (5 page)

Not likely.

Carson gave Elsie another lecture on safety—she never got tired of those after her brush with danger—and then turned to Kye. “Thanks for saving my kid sister’s neck.”

“I’m glad I could be there for Elsie . . . for all of it.” Kye’s lips quirked up into an almost smile as he said the last part. It was so subtle
Carson probably didn’t notice, let alone wonder what it meant. But Elsie couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Did he mean he was glad he was there for the kiss even though he’d rebuffed her? No, that wasn’t it. She was still reading things into his actions, although now the book
was one penned with rejection. Kye meant he was glad he could set her straight. He’d known about her crush all along but had never had an opportunity to properly deflate it. Now he had.

Elsie hadn’t expected to have any time alone with Kye. As he was leaving
, though, Mrs. Clark instructed Elsie to get a box of the rhubarb applesauce and give it to Kye.

“You don’t have to do that,” Kye told Mrs. Clark
. “If you keep giving it to me, you won’t have any left for yourself.”

Mrs. Clark waved away his protest. “We still have plenty, and Elsie won’t help me eat
the jars with the rhubarb—no appreciation of zing.”

Kye nodded, acquiescing, and Elsie was sent to get applesauce from the
basement pantry. While she pulled a box from the shelf, she heard someone coming slowly down the stairs. Kye.

She tramped over to him and shoved the box into his outstre
tched arms. “Here’s your zing. I hope you like it.”

“Elsie . . .”

“By the way, I didn’t know you were coming to dinner tonight.”

He
shifted the box so he could hold it with one arm. “Yeah, that was pretty obvious by the way you threw your lamp at me.”

“I didn’t throw it at you. I dropped it in shock.”

Kye held one hand up as though she was being overly touchy—as though he had every right to hang out at her house, and it shouldn’t upset her to run into him when she was barely dressed. “I’m just kidding,” he said. “I didn’t really think you tried to club me with a random appliance.”

She was getting sick of his amused tone. She glanced at the
stairs to make sure they were still alone, then lowered her voice. “How could you come to dinner at my house?”

He lowered his voice too.
“How could I not? Your mother kept asking me for a day that worked with my schedule.”

Elsie let out a huff of exasperation. He was right. Her mother had most likely hounded Kye into coming. Appl
esauce wasn’t enough of a thank you for the man who had saved Elsie from a hoodlum. Pot roast was required for that task.

Kye leaned
closer to Elsie, so close she caught the scent of his aftershave. “Look, when you’re older, we’ll talk about all of this.”

He meant when she was mature enough to realize how stupid she’d been to throw herself at a teacher. It wasn’t a conversation she ever planned on having.
“Have a nice night, Mr. McBride,” she said and walked around him. She pounded up the stairs without waiting for a response. All the way to her room it bothered her that she hadn’t been able to come up with a better parting line.

Chapter 4

After the
graduation ceremony, while Elsie’s parents snapped pictures of her holding her diploma, Kye emerged from a group of black-cloaked faculty. He strolled up to her, waited for her parents to finish with their photo shoot, and then shook her hand. “Congratulations,” he said. “I know you’ll go far.”

“I
plan to,” she said, meeting his eyes. “I’m going as far away from Lark Field as I can get.”

He looked at her questioningly, as though he wasn’t sure if she meant it.

She pulled her hand away from his. She meant it. But just so that her parents wouldn’t think she was being rude, she smiled the entire time she said it. “Thanks for being my teacher. I learned a lot from you.” She had learned she wasn’t pretty enough or charming enough to tempt Kye into kissing her. She had learned that age mattered much more than personality.

“Did you?” he asked, his expression
unchanged. “Good. I hope my lessons stick.”

And then he was gone, leaving her with only frustration and a vague underlying humiliation rattling around in her chest.

She didn’t really go all that far to college, only across the state to the University of Montana, but that was far enough. During the summers, instead of coming home, she worked in Missoula to pay her tuition. She had only been home to Lark Field six times since graduation: the last three Thanksgivings and Christmases. She’d gotten together with her old high school friends during those vacations, making sure she never went anywhere Kye McBride might be. If he came over to see Carson, she stayed in her room. She even found reasons to skip out on church. Sudden sickness, mostly. God could do without her when Kye was in the building.

Avoiding Kye had made the
return trips to Lark Field bearable, fun even. She should have known, however, she couldn’t cheat fate for long. Fate enjoys a good drama.

Elsie
had known she would have to face Kye at her brother’s wedding. He was going to be Carson’s best man. Still, she hadn’t planned on him seeing her this way—a bedraggled traveler stuck on his property while his cows held her hostage.

Elsie
sat in her car, gripping the steering wheel while Kye rode up on a chestnut horse. Kye was close enough now that she could see wisps of brown hair sticking out from under his cowboy hat. His features were just as she remembered them: strong jawline, slender face, dark blue eyes that could look into your soul and then come up with a math equation to quantify what he saw.

She immediately felt eighteen again.

He prodded his horse to walk around to the driver’s side of the car, only casually glancing at the cows that surrounded her. He motioned for her to roll down the window, then leaned forward over the horn of the saddle. His amusement showed in the quirk of his smile. “So, having car problems?”

“Cow problems, actually,” she replied
lightly. “Do you train them to surround strangers this way? If I hand over my wallet will they go away?”

Kye
surveyed the cattle. “You honked your horn at them, didn’t you?”

It was a pointless question
. He must have heard her from wherever he’d been. Still, the tone of his voice made her feel as though she’d done something stupid, something that needed explanation. “Yes,” she said. “A couple were standing in the road. I honked to try and get them to move.” She looked over her shoulder at the still-gathering crowd of cows congregating on the road behind her.

“
Well,” he said, drawing out the word, “that’s how we let them know it's time to eat. One of the hands drives out here in the truck, drops off the hay, and honks the horn.” He gestured toward the cattle. “They’re waiting for you to hand out some dinner.”

Oh, so this was the cow version of a feeding frenzy, and she was in the middle of it.
She shifted uncomfortably in her seat. “What happens if I don’t feed them?”

Kye didn’t answer. He
already had his cell phone out and was asking someone named Frank to come out and bring hay. Finally Kye slipped his phone into his pocket. “Might as well turn off your car. It’ll take a few minutes.”

“Isn’t there any other way you
can get rid of them? I have, um . . .” She didn’t want to admit she was driving across Montana in a car that had trouble starting. He would think it was a stupid thing to do, and she’d already done enough to convince him of her foolishness.

Kye cocked an eyebrow at her
, waiting for her to finish.

“
My car’s battery is temperamental,” she said. “I don’t want to turn it off.”

“Temperamental?” he asked.
“By that, do you mean old and nearly dead?”

“
No, it’s a new battery. It’s the connections . . . or something,” she added vaguely. Her knowledge of car parts wasn’t extensive. She had planned on turning the entire thing over to her dad and letting him handle it. Her dad loved to tinker with cars.

Kye pulled out his phone again.
This time when he spoke into the phone, he said, “Hey, while you’re out dropping off feed, can you take a look at Elsie’s car? She’s having problems with her battery.”

Kye paused, listening. Elsie wondered if Frank was question
ing why she was driving long distances down lonely roads in an unreliable car.

“Right,” Kye said into the phone. “Thanks.” He slid his phone back into his pocket. “Frank will take a look at your car while he’s out here.”

Elsie tapped her steering wheel. “You really don’t need to make him do that . . .”

Kye tipped his hat in a mock gesture of gallantry. “It’s the least I could offer after you’ve been held up at
cowpoint on my property.”

“Thanks,” she said stiffly.
She turned off her car.

She had expected
Kye to ride off—preferably into the sunset, but instead he gestured for her to get out of the car. “It’s too cold to wait out here. I’ll take you up to the house. You can stay there until your car is ready.”

She didn’t move, didn’t open the door.
The last thing she wanted was to prolong this or any conversation with Kye. “That’s okay. I don’t want to trouble you.”

“Hmm,” he said as though giving her words consideration. “I think
taking you to the house would be much less trouble than having to explain to your brother why your frozen corpse is on my ranch.”

Elsie sighed.
She had no choice. She put on her coat, opened the door, and stepped outside. A cold breeze pushed across her cheeks and fingered through her hair. A Lark Field winter at its best. She pulled up her coat’s hood and shut the car door. The sound seemed hollow, final.

Kye held his hand down to her and took his foot out of the stirrup
so she could get a leg up. “Do you remember how to ride a horse?”

“It’s like a bike, right? You never forget.”

He hauled her up on the horse behind him. “Probably. I imagine there’re a lot of things you never forget, Elsie.”

What was that supposed to mean? She opened her mouth to ask and then decided
against it. She was done wasting her time trying to figure out what Kye was thinking.

“Hold onto me,” he told her.

She wrapped her arms loosely around him. It was disconcerting to sit so close to him, to feel the movement of his body along with the horse’s plodding.

She looked at the wide open spaces around her
, the sea of pine trees that spread across the distant hills. The trees were scarcer down here where it was flatter. It looked like a few dozen of them had wandered away from the hills, probably to round up the stray bushes that dotted the landscape. The sky above her spread out vast and open. When she was a little girl she used to think that if she looked hard enough she could see all the way to heaven.

The hills and trees and sky were
all saying, “Come back and stay where you belong.”

Elsie
kept gazing at the scenery so she wouldn’t think about Kye sitting so closely to her. He was warm and smelled of leather. The last time they’d been sitting so closely together—nope, there was no point in letting herself think about those two seconds . . . his mouth moving against hers . . . the taste of mint on his lips. Had he kissed her back or had it only been horrified alarm?

“So,” Kye said. “I hear you’re majoring in business.”

He’d heard
? She hadn’t expected him to know anything about what she’d been doing. She’d hoped he’d forgotten about her as soon as she graduated, although she supposed that had always been a fruitless hope. He was her brother’s friend, and besides, she had given him enough reasons to remember her.

“You heard right,” she said.

“I always expected you to pick a major that used a lot of math. You were so good at it.”

Yeah, but only because she had wanted to impress him.
She shrugged. “I guess I lost my taste for math after high school.”

Kye’s
voice had the same smooth tone he used when teaching and trying to get a point across. “Maybe you should pick it up again and see if tastes better now.”

Was he flirting?
Teasing? Or just being a math teacher? Well, it didn’t matter. She was over him. She didn’t care how he . . . um, math tasted anymore.

She had gone too long without speaking. He went on, asking her generic sorts of questions about college. Did she like
Missoula? How were her classes going? How many credits was she taking?

She answered as succinctly as possible
, then asked him questions about the ranch and his family so she could get out of talking about herself. It all felt formal and stiff, like two strangers forced into a conversation. On the bright side, at least their first meeting was out of the way. Pleasantries exchanged. Now they could cordially ignore each other at the wedding and be done with it.