Page 124 of A Shot at Love
There was unmistakable pride in his deep voice when he launched into a speech about the cattle ranch. The cursory description Teddy’s assistant had slipped into her binder had been adequate for her to get a picture of the business. But Beau was a wealth of knowledge about the intricacies involved in running it day-to-day.
“Now since we’re almost into July,” he told her after speaking almost non-stop for an hour, “most of our herd is out grazing, getting fat, and just waiting to either be sold or bred.”
“Who makes that determination?” Stacy asked, her tired brain now spinning with all the facts and figures he spewed as if he were merely reciting the alphabet.
“My father and our veterinarian, Doc Burns.” Beau tossed her a grin she was coming to think he was never without. “He’s quite the character. Him and daddy have been friends since they were boys.”
“That’s sweet.”
A sound remarkably like a foghorn blasted from him. “Don’t know that anyone has ever had the notion to call Cal Burns sweet, but he sure is entertaining.”
“My notes say you’ve got two older brothers and their wives, plus you and your father all living at the main house.”
He nodded. “Hopefully pretty soon that number will increase by one.”
“Oh?”
Something moved across his face while she watched him drive; something eager, expectant, slightly bashful.
“Well, you see, I’ve been planning—” He stopped and snuck a quick glance at her before turning his attention back to the empty highway.
“Yes?”
He took in a huge breath, pregnant with anticipation and then, after he expelled it, said, “There’s this girl. Jessie. Jessica. She’s…we’ve… well, she’s my girl, see? We’ve been together since high school.”
“Again, that’s just sweet.”
“Yeah, well, I’m gonna ask her to marry me.”
“Oh! Congratulations.”
“Thanks, but it’s not a done deal yet. I need a ring. I need to ask her daddy, ‘cause she’s old fashioned that way, you know?”
“I do.” Stacy smiled. Her heart sighed at the thought of being young and in love and having a shared future in front of you. Not that she considered herself old, but love wasn’t something she’d ever felt for a man. Instead, she’d concentrated on moving in and out of every day, secure in the knowledge she’d made it through another twenty-four hours without the dark and miserable thoughts of her younger years breaking through and overtaking her once again.
It had been a long, hard fought internal battle against her many demons to get where she was today emotionally, spiritually, and physically and she’d come to terms with the fact a lasting, happily ever after wasn’t in the cards for her.
Beau pulled the car off the highway.
“We should be at the main house in about fifteen minutes. All this land you see is Dixon land.”
Stacy’s view of the empty and never ending stretch of highway they’d just exited morphed into a length of road in front of them equally as vast, surrounded on both sides by fenced in fields of verdant, wind-blowing grass.
“We’ve got just shy of thirty thousand acres,” he told her.
True to his word, not more than fifteen minutes later Stacy got her first peek at the Dixon Ranch, or as Beau called it, the main house.
In her mind she’d pictured the house as resembling the one from the 80’s show Dallas. The Dixon house was nothing like that iconic structure.
Three stories high and filled from side to side with gabled windows, the house was composed of multicolored gray slab in a patchwork design, Ionic columns shooting up from the wraparound porch to the second story across the front of the building, and a set of double front doors made of solid, unstained oak.
Several American model trucks and cars littered the gravel road up to the house but Stacy’s gaze zeroed in on three huge box vans parked off to one side with the initials EBS blazoned cross them. Satellite dishes covered most of the three vehicle’s roofs. Several smaller box trucks surrounded them, all belonging to the network.
“The television trucks and crew arrived a week ago,” Beau said.
