Home Is Where Hank Is (Cowboys To The Rescue 1) (19 page)

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Authors: Martha Shields

Tags: #Contemporary, #Romance, #Fiction, #Forever Love, #Adult, #Bachelor, #Single Woman, #Sensual, #Hearts Desire, #Harlequin Treasury, #Series, #Cowboys, #Rescue, #Family Life, #Western, #Rancher, #Rodeo, #Teenage Sister, #Caretaker, #Household, #Manage, #Persuade, #Reconcile, #Relationships, #Marriage Minded, #General Romance, #Silhouette, #1990's

BOOK: Home Is Where Hank Is (Cowboys To The Rescue 1)
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Claire joined her twenty minutes later. Together they started cooking enough hamburgers to feed the troops while Alex kept a watch for Hank. Halfway through, she saw him striding across the yard.
“There he is,” she told Claire. She didn’t have to say who. Alex hurried to the screen door, Claire not far behind.
Travis didn’t get up as Hank stepped onto the porch.
“What are you doing out of bed?” Hank demanded.
“Go to hell, big brother.”
Hank stiffened.
“Travis!” Claire exclaimed.
“Hank—” Alex began.
Hank cut her off with a chopping motion of his hand. “I’ve had a bellyful of my little brother’s fits.” He pointed a finger at Travis. “You’ve been a jackass since the minute we walked into your hospital room. If it’s the pain—”
“It’s not the pain.”
“Then what the hell is it? I demand to know why you’re treating me and Claire and Alex like something you stepped in at the barn.”
“Oh, you
demand
to know, do you?”
“Damn straight.”
Travis rose with a grimace of pain. “Hank, the great communicator, demands an answer. He has to know why I’m being such a jerk. Why should I tell you anything? You never return the favor.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about a conversation I had with Ruff Lewis. You don’t know him, do you? He’s the foreman at the Box Seven south of Winslow, Arizona. It’s owned by a Japanese firm. He wanted to know more about the sale of the Garden. Seems his company is planning to put a bid on it.”
Alex covered a gasp with her hand. She felt Claire stiffen beside her.
Travis took a menacing step forward. “Is it true, big brother? Is the Garden up for sale?”
Hank stared at his brother a long moment, then glanced at Alex and Claire. “I would’ve called you by now if you hadn’t gotten hurt. Now that you’re here we can discuss it face-to-face.” He ran a hand down his jaw. “We have to sell the Garden.”
Chapter Ten
A
s Claire cried, “No!” Alex stumbled through the door. She faced Hank, willing him to take back his words.
He stared at her, his eyes unblinking, unreadable.
Travis took another stiff step toward his brother. “When were you going to tell us? When you wanted our signatures on the papers?”
Hank grabbed his hat off with one hand and ran the other through his hair. “Things aren’t final yet, but we’ve got to decide soon. I told the agent I’d get back to him after I talked to you. Ruff’s Japanese firm has the highest offer.” He told them exactly how much it was.
Travis cussed, Claire gasped and Alex glanced at the three Edens. So much money. How could they refuse? But how could anyone put a price on their home?
“That’s an awful lot of money,” Claire said. “But where would we live?”
“You’ll have enough money to get a place while you go to college,” Hank said. “And you can afford to go anywhere you like, not just a state university.”
Travis walked to the edge of the porch and looked out over the ranch. “Grandpa Henry must be turning over in his grave. Dad, too. Edens have lived on this land for a hundred years, and you want us to sell out.” He turned to face his brother. “You’ve broken the barrier string this time, Hank. I’m not selling a single rock on this ranch.”
“Then tell me how we keep it.”
Travis was silent a long minute. “What the hell are you talking about? The Garden isn’t in financial trouble. You brought us out of debt years ago.”
“And the politicians are working to put us right back in. I’m talking about property taxes, little brother. You don’t stay in one place long enough to have ever heard of them, but they’re killing the Garden. They rose seventy-five percent last year alone. Looks like they’ll rise again this year. Ranches have gone under all over Wind River Valley, one by one. Looks like ours is next.”
Alex felt like the world was being ripped from beneath her. What she thought was solid ground suddenly shifted, leaving her drifting in space. She thought she’d found the home she’d been searching for all her life. The Garden seemed so permanent. Edens had been living on the ranch for nearly a hundred years. She’d been certain they’d be there for a hundred more. Her feelings for Hank were so mixed up with her love for the Garden that she didn’t know if she loved the man or the ranch.
Suddenly the difference seemed important.
“The hell ours is next,” Travis replied, drawing her attention back.
“Then tell me how we keep it,” Hank roared. “I’ve been tearing my hair out for three years now, trying to figure it out. I can’t see any options.”
“There are always options,” Travis said.
“Give me one.”
“How much are the taxes?”
Hank named a sum that made Alex’s heart plummet She’d had no idea it cost so much to maintain a ranch. And that was just one expense.
“I can cover that,” Travis said without blinking. “I’ve got enough winnings saved up to—”
“No,” Hank said flatly. “I’m not taking your money.”
Travis’s eyes narrowed. “You don’t have any choice, big brother. You only own one-third of this ranch. You may control Claire’s share, but not mine. I will pay the damn taxes, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”
Hank released a deep, frustrated breath. “Okay, say you pay them this year. Say you pay them next year and the year after that. Even as much money as you make on the circuit, you’ll soon run out.”
“I’ll get a job instead of going to the university,” Claire offered, finally speaking up.
“No!” her brothers thundered in chorus.
Claire backed up a step at their vehemence. “But I could help—”
“You can help by graduating and getting a good job,” Travis told her. “We’ve got the short-term solution down. We need to think of long-term now.”
“But Hank said—”
“He doesn’t want to take my money because he thinks losing the ranch is his fault. He thinks it means he’s failed. That he’s let down our father and grandfather and great-grandfather.” Travis met Hank’s eyes squarely, daring him to deny it.
Hank was good at hiding his feelings, but not from Alex. Not anymore. She saw the pain clearly in the tightening of his lips, the muscle that twitched along his jaw. The wound Travis rubbed salt into wasn’t fresh, but it had been picked at a lot, and recently. Hank blamed himself for losing the Garden.
Suddenly Alex knew how she felt—disappointed. And angry at Hank for not telling her or his siblings anything about his plans. But there wasn’t the soul-deep sense of loss that should have been there if the Garden was so vital to her happiness.
Visions of the only home she’d ever known swept across her mind. She could see the house on Magnolia Street plainly even now. White frame with a high pitched roof, it had a deep, wide porch that ran around the front and sides. She could see the corner of the kitchen where she played with her doll listening to her mother hum as she cooked. Her mother’s big bed where she would run to safe, warm arms when something scared her in the night. The deep, cool porch where she and her mother would sit on hot summer evenings, watching the fireflies light up the night.
Her mother. All the memories of that home were tied to her mother. It was her mother who made that old house a home, not the walls.
At times the Garden seemed a larger version of the house she’d lived in with her mother. Alex had worked hard to make it shine, just like she and her mother did with their old house, with wax and elbow grease and love.
But all that work hadn’t made the Garden hers, and it never would. What made it hers were the people who lived there—Claire and Travis and Hank. Most of all Hank.
She knew now that her plan would never have worked. She couldn’t make a home without filling it with people she loved, people who loved her.
Hank was her home, not the Garden.
She loved Hank. If she hadn’t been sure of it before, she was absolutely, positively certain now. An enormous weight lifted from her heart, and she forced her mind back to the argument as Travis continued.
“But it isn’t your fault, Hank,” the younger brother insisted. “Ranches are failing all over the country. The ones that survive are the ones that get creative in their thinking.”
“Like what?” Hank demanded. “The price of beef hasn’t risen in years, but the costs of raising cattle sure has. So adding to the herd will only make it worse.”
“Then let’s cut the herd.” Travis held up a hand to stop Hank from interrupting. “Hear me out. We can raise fewer cows and concentrate more on rodeo stock. The roping horses you train are getting a reputation nationwide. Hell, nine have gone to the National Finals in the past seven years. Cowboys ask me about your stock everywhere I go. We could probably sell four times as many as we do. We could expand that into a real business. Advertise. Hire a few more hands to help. Go to major shows.”
A light went on in Hank’s eyes. “Think we could earn enough money?”
“Hell, yes. Rodeo’s getting bigger every day, getting more professional, more specialized. In order to win, cowboys have to have horses trained by experts. They sure can’t train them themselves, not and be on the road three hundred and fifty days out of the year.”
Hank rubbed his chin. “You might just have something there.”
“Couldn’t we sell off part of the Garden if worse came to worst?” Claire asked. “The couple of hundred acres along the Wind River would probably bring as much as the rest of it combined. They’ve been building a lot of houses along the river in the past few years.”
Travis shook his head. “I don’t want to give up a single tree. I suppose that’s an option if there isn’t any other way, but I think training rodeo stock is our best plan. What do you think, Hank?”
Hank took hard looks at all three of them. Then his eyes shifted out to the land in question. Finally he said, “We need to talk about it some more, but I think it just might work.”
An audible sigh escaped Travis and Claire. Alex felt like her bones were melting into the porch. She’d faced the devil inside her and stared him down. She knew exactly what she wanted to do with the rest of her life, where she wanted to be. She couldn’t wait to tell Hank. But now was not the time. Maybe after lunch—
“Lunch!”
She spun around and raced into the kitchen. Behind her, she heard Travis suggest they move their discussion into the house, but she was too busy saving the hamburgers to care. When she’d rescued the ones in the pan and added another batch, she turned to find Claire and Travis watching her.
“Where’s Hank?” she asked.
“He’s upstairs getting cleaned up for lunch,” Travis told her.
“What do you think about all this?” Claire asked quietly.
Alex thought about that for a minute, then said, “As long as we’re together as a family, I don’t care where we live. But I have to admit I’m glad we’re staying.”
Claire’s face lit up. “Then you’re going to stay?”
“If Hank wants me.”
“I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Travis said with a grin. “In fact, I think you’d have to stick a knife in his heart to get away from him.”
Alex smiled her thanks. “Why don’t you sit down in here? That way when you continue the discussion I can hear what you say and finish lunch at the same time.”
Travis settled into a chair at the kitchen table but Claire pulled a stack of plates from the cabinet. The burgers in the pan began to sizzle as Travis rubbed his shoulder thoughtfully.
“What I want to know,” Claire began as she set the plates on the table, “is what Hank was planning to do after he sold the ranch.”
Travis shrugged. “I guess he planned to get a job.”
“Right,” Claire scoffed. “Can you see Hank working for anybody else?”
Their banter jarred Alex’s memory and words Hank said at the rodeo dance in Lander came back to her. As she realized their significance, her heart skipped a beat and she froze with salt upended over the pan.
Travis shrugged. “He could be foreman on a big spread. That—”
“I know what he planned to do.” Alex realized she was making a salt lick out of one of the burgers and set the shaker beside the stove. She turned to find their eyes on her. She swallowed with difficulty. “Rodeo.”
“Rodeo?” Claire cried.
“Are you sure?” Travis asked.
Alex nodded. She leaned heavily against the counter as pieces of the puzzle that made up Hank Eden fell into place. As each piece fit, her happiness melted like snow swept by a warm Chinook wind. She’d thought he’d learned how to communicate, that he was opening up, letting her and his family know what was going on. He hadn’t learned a damned thing. The news about selling the ranch told her that. The realization that he’d only told her part of the truth about returning to rodeo made her certain.
“Hank told me he wanted to return to the rodeo. I thought he meant weekend trips, and I... I told him he should go back because he seemed to love it so much. I didn’t know he meant full-time.”
Travis’s eyes widened, then glazed over as if he remembered his own pieces of Hank’s puzzle. “Sweet mother of—” He trailed off, staring down at the checkered tablecloth.
Claire looked between them, clearly puzzled by the pall of gloom that had suddenly descended. “So? Now he won’t rodeo.”
Alex felt like her throat had been tied in knots. “Oh, yes, he will.”
“What are you talking about?” the girl cried. “He’s going to train horses.”
Travis’s brows came together. “I suggested that. He didn’t. We don’t know if he really wants to do it, or if he’s agreeing to it just for us.”
“But we’re not going to sell the ranch now, right? Who else would run it?”
He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. But we have to let him go.”
“We have to
make
him go,” Alex corrected softly.
Travis lifted sympathetic eyes to hers. “
You
have to make him go.”
His words stabbed her. “Me?”
“You’re the only one who has the power to do it. I’ve never seen anyone matter more to him than you.”
Alex tried again to swallow the knot in her throat. She remembered what Travis had told her outside the rodeo office in Lander. Marriage and National Finals Rodeo Championships don’t mix. Married cowboys who tried to go after a national title usually failed at one or the other.
“I can’t do it, Travis. I love him too much.”
“Do you love him enough?”
Claire slapped both hands on the table. “Will you please tell me what you two are talking about?”
Travis shifted his gaze to his sister. “Don’t you see? He’s been aching to get back to the rodeo ever since he left eight years ago.”
“Bull hockey!” Claire spat. “He could’ve gone to any number of rodeos in the past eight years.”
“But he couldn’t contend for a national title—not and run the ranch, too.” Travis’s good fist pounded the table. “How could I have been so blind? Why didn’t I see this years ago?”

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