Page 17 of Out of Bounds
“Let’s get y’all set up in your lodges,” Daddy says, gesturing down the hillside from the ranch. “Then we can have a picnic lunch. Y’all must be hungry, right?”
The kids give a resounding yes and while I’m chuckling at their excitable response, I’m also stunned. Daddy,mydaddy, took the lead, played the role of extrovert and emotionally available.Who? What? Where? When? How now?
Bear gives a gentle bark of giddiness and Daddy ruffles the fur on his head. “This here’s Bear and he’s soft as a teddy, but he might be excited to see y’all. If he licks and you don’t want it, you sayno, Bearand I assure you he’ll leave you be.”
Daddy turns to me and beams from beneath his dusty cowboy hat. I’m as discombobulated as if I’d been playing dizzy ducks.
He hooks his thumbs behind his belt buckle as he leads the way to the lodges, calling back to the kids following him, “Now, my name’s Sonny and this here is my ranch. It’s been in the Quinn family for?—”
“We’ve got this, Annie,” Jenny, one of our coordinators, and Mama’s friend, tells me. “Why don’t you go freshen up while Nelson’s sleeping?”
I grab the collar of my coveralls and sniff. “Are you politely telling me I stink?”
She smiles as she plants a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve earned a break, darlin’. Take it.”
I feel a peculiar mix of heavy and light as I trudge the stairs in the house. It’s nice being back at it. I love what we offer here. But I can’t deny there’s an ever-present sense that something,someone, is missing. My mama. My best friend.
I finally understand the saying that losing a person you love is like losing a limb. That’s exactly how I feel, as if part of me, an integral part, is gone.
8
PACE – MID-SEPTEMBER
Home Sweet Home
I make it to the ranch on this fine Sunday morning before Colton and Sas, which is remarkable given I’m driving an Audi A1 and those two are in a Range Rover sport. It’s all quiet when I park the car by the white picket fence and kill the engine. Only half the ten horses usually in the corral are out grazing and there’s no sign of the others in the barn.
The Quinns’ collie, Bear, briefly barks before he recognizes me, the bearded giant, and I guess he’s getting used to me because he nudges into my leg for a scratch behind his ears.
“Where are Annie and the others, Bear?”
Oddly enough, the dog doesn’t answer with words, but he does encourage me in the direction of the house.
I don’t call out my arrival at the porch in case Nelson’s sleeping. I’m here for a social visit, not a driving lesson, tagging along with Colton and Sas, who’ll need to give me a ride home later, after Annie has seen the gift I’ve brought for her.
Since Colton and Sas haven’t arrived yet I hesitate before heading through the skeeter guard into the house, but Annie always tells me,The door to this ranch is never closed.
As quietly as an elephant bull can do, I step into the kitchen, where I’m instantly hit by the smell of fresh coffee, cinnamon and baked bread. There’s a tempting stack of sliced sourdough on the kitchen side, which I’ll happily gorge on when I’m invited to do so because the Bears have got a Monday night game this week, which means I’m perfectly entitled to carb load today and tomorrow.
Hell, I’ll take home-baked carbs any time if I can get away with it.
I hear the murmuring of Nelson coming from the lounge-diner and round the corner to see the source of the sound is not the baby himself but a monitor set up next to Annie on the dining table.
She’s face-planted in what looks like a college text, forehead resting on her arms, deeply sleeping and doing the kind of tiny snores that are more insanely charming than grizzly.
Her hair is braided in two even parts that meet in a hair tie at the top of a very delicate neck. She looks young, which serves as a reminder that I ought not to be considering wrapping those braids around my hands as I nibble the skin beneath her lobe, no matter how fucking sexy she looks, even sleeping, in a short denim skirt and a pearl snap shirt.
Evans was dead right on the pod; there’s something about a cowgirl’s get-up.
But notthisone. Not Quinn’s sister who is Gen Z to my Millennial. Twelve years this veteran’s junior. My teammate’s sister. Who must have more shit going on in her head than the CIA could figure out.
Out. Of. Bounds.
Nelson murmurs again, which finally causes me to stop ogling the woman I have no business ogling.
Not wanting to wake her, I take the liberty of kicking off my sneakers and climbing the stairs to find Nelson. I’ve only ever been upstairs in the ranch one time, when Caroline a.k.a. Mama Quinn showed me and a few of the guys on the team where we could shower and change ahead of the spring dance, so I’m wandering aimlessly around the second floor, searching for the baby.
The walls are papered with floral patterns that feel homey and on every square yard of the walls there’s a family photograph. A mom, a dad and a couple kids. Dogs, horses and longhorns. In some there are more people who look like Sonny or Caroline, their siblings perhaps, and in others, kids that I’d guess are fosters based on the ages of Annie and Colton in the same photographs.
