Home Is Where Hank Is (Cowboys To The Rescue 1) (4 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 told her Hank had a reputation on the rodeo circuit for the roping horses he trained. Derek had come all the way from Texas to work with Hank and learn from him.
Alex could feel Hank’s gaze on her as she scraped the dinner dishes. She darted a glance at him. The heat in his eyes made her drop the stack of dishes she was moving from one place to the next too quickly. They clattered loudly in the quiet room.
The look on his face meant trouble. Big trouble. It made her feel like a kettle boiling on the stove—steamy hot, with insides that wouldn’t keep still. It made her wonder what those unsmiling lips would feel like against hers.
No!
she told herself sharply. She was not looking for a man—not even one as handsome as Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt and Mel Gibson all rolled into one. No one—not even a blue-eyed, square-jawed cowboy—was going to stop her from getting to San Francisco. She’d wasted half her life waiting for someone wonderful to walk in and give her a home, a connection. First at the orphanage, then at all the places she’d worked. She was through waiting. She had a plan and the determination to see it through.
To distract herself and him, she asked, “Did you enjoy supper?”
“Didn’t you notice he had second helpings of everything?” Claire asked as she returned from carrying empty platters into the kitchen.
“I had three helpings of potatoes,” Hank added. “So, yes, you could say I enjoyed supper.”
Alex felt as if her bones were spreading across the floor as relief flooded through her. She didn’t know until just then how important it had been to please him. Her hands halted for an instant as the realization sunk in. But wanting to please an employer was natural, wasn’t it? She always wanted people to enjoy her cooking. Her livelihood depended on it.
She didn’t want to listen to the inner voice reminding her that pleasing someone’s palate had never left her weak in the knees, so she pushed it away and scraped harder.
“Might as well get our little chat over with now.” Hank’s deep voice resonated through the room.
“Okay, chat away,” she said as she picked up another plate.
“Not here,” he said firmly. “The tax papers are up in my office.”
Alex’s hands stopped in mid-scrape. The last thing she needed right now was to be alone with this man. Maybe later, when she wasn’t so on edge, when the air between them didn’t crackle with tension. “I need to clean up first.”
He rose to his full six feet. “Claire can finish.”
“But I should—”
“Go on, Alex,” Claire urged. “I can do this.”
Alex tore her eyes away to survey the table. Claire nearly had it cleared. Looked like there was no way to avoid this. Damn. She placed the plate she held on top of the stack, untied her apron and turned to Hank.
He swept his arm toward the door. “After you.”
Claire had given Alex a tour of the house when they had supper well under way, so she knew the second floor of the ranch house consisted of three large bedrooms, plus a bathroom and the ranch office that had been carved from the fourth bedroom. As Alex climbed the straight flight of stairs past pictures of Edens dead and living, she was vividly aware that the man ascending behind her was so close she could feel the warmth of his hard, lean body. There was an intimacy in climbing the stairs together. Alex didn’t want to think about the way their bodies moved in concert—right foot, left foot, right—but she couldn’t help it.
She paused when she came up into the hallway that bisected the second floor. The layout of rooms echoed the four-square pattern of the first floor. To her left, the door to the office, which was directly over her bedroom, stood open. Claire. referred to it as the sanctuary. Hank retreated there after training sessions every night, wrestling with the paperwork the ranch required.
Alex took a deep breath as Hank stepped up beside her. He placed his hand on the small of her back, and heat spread through her. Though he didn’t push, he exerted enough pressure to urge her on.
“It’s not a torture chamber.”
Alex gave him a weak smile, then turned away as heat stung her cheeks. Why did she feel so apprehensive? Hank was just another boss in a long line of bosses. This was not the first time she’d sat with one alone in his or her office. But she couldn’t push the feeling away.
Hank moved behind a desk cluttered with papers and magazines. A lamp stood at one end. As he reached to turn it on, dust fell from the shade. He didn’t seem to notice. Behind the desk, a small table held a computer. Two chairs sat on this side of the desk, but both were stacked with magazines so she made no move to sit down. Two walls were covered with bookshelves crammed with books on everything from gardens to quilts to turn-of-the-century animal husbandry. As she scanned the titles, one of them twitched.
“Sugar! So this is where you ran off to hide.” Strength surged back into Alex’s muscles, and she reached behind a row of books on quarter horses to pull the cat from the shelf. Sugar was familiar. Comforting him in a new place was familiar. She touched her nose to his before she faced Hank. “I’m sorry. I hope he didn’t disturb anything. It always takes a week or so for him to feel at home in a new place. But he won’t spray or claw anything.”
“He’s okay.”
She nodded and to keep from looking at him, she glanced around his desk. “You writing a novel or something? Sure are a lot of papers.”
He shrugged. “Ranches aren’t just cows and horses. I spend as much time on paperwork as I do on horseback—paying invoices, keeping up with correspondence, checking on beef prices, reading about farm legislation.”
“You must work late at night, then.”
“Sometimes. Why?”
“Well, my bed is right below your desk and I’m a light sleep—” She trailed off at the blazing look in his eyes. Why did she have to bring the word
bed
into the conversation?
Hank cleared his throat. “I’ll try not to disturb you.”
“Oh, don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. You just do what you need to do. You’re the boss, after all, and your work is very important. I’m just—” She stopped abruptly. “I’m babbling, aren’t I?”
His lips twitched, but didn’t quite form a smile. “Yep.”
She took a deep breath. “Then I’ll shut up.”
“Why don’t we sit down and get this over with?” he suggested.
She eyed the stack of
Western Horseman
magazines filling the chair.
Finally noticing the mess, Hank came around the desk and picked up the magazines. He looked around and for lack of a better place, plopped them on top of another stack of magazines on the corner table. A cloud of dust billowed up, but Hank ignored it like he always did.
“Sit,” he commanded. He waited as she frowned down at the seat, then sat gingerly on the edge. While she settled the cat on her lap, he sank into his own chair and cleared his throat again. He noticed he was doing that a helluva lot around this woman. “The first thing I want to explain is that we don’t stand on ceremony. Everybody’s the same as everybody else. No exceptions. That clear?”
She nodded.
He stared down at his desk, then picked up a pencil. “Like I said, we need to get things clear on the front end.”
She stared at the pencil his hands twirled. He shifted in his seat, wondering if she knew that he played with the pencil to keep his hands from doing what they really wanted to do.
She broke the silence with “Okay.”
He glanced up, then down, then began to twirl the pencil again. “You’re the cook. That’s it in three words. We eat breakfast at sunrise and supper at six. We have lunch at noon if we’re working around the place. If we’re out on the range, we do without.”
“No.”
The pencil stopped twirling. “No? No what?”
“I mean, while I’m the cook, you won’t do without lunch. You work hard and need your nourishment. I’ll either pack you a lunch, or I’ll bring it to you.”
Hank stared at her until she fidgeted in her seat. He’d never had a cook care whether he ate lunch or not. Even his mother never packed them a lunch. He realized his gaze was making her nervous when she amended her declaration.
“That is, if you don’t mind.”
He pushed the pencil between his fingers, lead down, then eraser down. For some reason her suggestion touched him on a level so elemental that he felt warmth blossoming deep inside, but he didn’t understand what it was or why. All he knew was an overwhelming urge to touch her. He had to clench his fingers around the pencil to keep them from reaching across the desk.
Hell, she surprised him, that’s all. People usually avoided extra work. They didn’t seek it out.
“Can you...” He cursed inwardly when he had to clear the huskiness from his throat. “Can you ride?”
“Well, no, I’ve never been on a horse. Never had the opportunity. But I’m sure I can learn.”
He gave a brief nod, though his mind dwelled on the pleasurable prospect of teaching her. “I’ll see that you do. I’m sure the boys would appreciate grub at noon. It’s a mighty long time between meals otherwise. I’ve just never had a cook that I’d ask to make the trip.”
“Well, you didn’t ask, did you?”
He felt one side of his mouth twitch. “No, ma’am, I didn’t.” When he realized she was squirming under his stare, he looked away.
“Anything else?” she asked.
He drew a deep breath and tried to think. “Nope. That about covers it.”
She cleared her throat. The sound told him she felt the charged atmosphere in the room as much as he did That knowledge sent pricks of excitement over his already-raw nerves.
“If that’s everything, I’ll get out of your way,” she said.
He stared at her so long and so hard that her eyes fell to the cat. He shook his head to clear away the image of the slender hands that massaged the orange fur. “That’s it.”
As she softly padded down the stairs, he realized he forgot to have her sign the tax forms. The pencil in his hands snapped.
 
Alex walked out onto the back porch and took a deep breath of the cool March air. She couldn’t stand it. This was her third day at the Garden and if she didn’t find something to do with all the hours between cleaning up the breakfast dishes and starting supper, she’d go absolutely bonkers. When she agreed to take the job she expected to spend the mornings fixing lunch, but because the men were working so far from the house she’d packed their lunch while they ate breakfast.
A meow at the screen door behind her brought her attention to Sugar, who rubbed against it.
“No, you’re not used to the place, Sugar. If I let you out, you might run off and get lost. Then where would I be? I wouldn’t even have a cat to talk to.”
Alex sighed heavily, then wandered back into the house. She trailed her hand along a heavy linen chest, then tsked to find the tips of her fingers black.
“I can’t believe they treat this beautiful old house so shabbily,” she told Sugar, who rubbed against her leg. “Why, if I had a home like this, I’d keep it shining like a new penny. I’d—” She sighed deeply. “Why are you letting me talk like that? This isn’t my home, and I don’t care if the dust is waistdeep.”
Alex wandered through the downstairs rooms, desperate to find something to occupy her time and determined to ignore the dirt. But the more she told herself she didn’t care, the more the rooms called out to her. The heavy oak furniture in the dining room would be so beautiful if it just had a coat of wax. The curtains in the living room were dingy with smoke, and the colors of the rug were muted by dirt.
Finally she could stand it no longer.
“Like Sister Mary Clara said,” she told Sugar as she gathered cleaning supplies from the mud room. “Idle hands are the devil’s workshop.”
Three hours later, she flipped off the vacuum and stood back to survey her handiwork. Stripped of its dingy coat, the parlor looked like an entirely different room. It gleamed with soft highlights and smelled of wax and flowers.
“What’s going on?”
Alex squealed and spun around to see Hank standing in the wide doorway. His hands were planted on his hips, and he glowered at her.
Feeling like she’d just been caught with her hand in the cookie jar, Alex pulled off the bandana tied around her hair. “I was just doing a little cleaning.”
“That’s Claire’s job,” he said harshly.
“Well, it doesn’t look like she’s doing it.”
“No, it doesn’t, and she’s going to hear about it when she gets home.”
“Look, I don’t want to cause Claire trouble, I just want something to do.”
“You’re the cook, not the maid.”
Alex threw her hands in the air. “Cooking takes up less than half the day, since I fix your lunch in the morning. I’m bored stiff the rest of the time.”
“I’m sorry. But if you start doing Claire’s chores around here, she’s going to get as spoiled as a lady’s mare. I don’t ask her to do much, but I do expect her to keep up the house. She needs to learn responsibility.”

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