Chapter Fifteen
Dallas
Dallas got Hannah’stext a few minutes after the helicopter set down at Custer County airport the following Sunday. It was hard to say how urgent it was—she’d known he couldn’t be reached, so what did it mean that she’d left it?
He’d hoped to be home early enough to visit the nursing home with her, but they’d been delayed at one of the ranch’s many outposts. The men were overworked and short-handed, rounding up range cattle to get them ready for market. He hadn’t done any serious ranch work since he was a teenager, and other than he now had the sorest ass in Montana from riding an ATV over rugged terrain for two days, it had been fun.
He frowned at the text. She wasn’t one of those women who couldn’t let a guy down face-to-face, was she? He remembered the unreturned phone calls after their first brush with romance, and the way she’d dodged him for months before he finally wised up, and his frown deepened. His gut said the potential was there.
He skipped past her message and proceeded to the twenty-three voice mails also requiring his attention. He listened to them from the back of Dan’s county-owned work SUV as they drove the ten miles from the small county airport to the ranch. He got to the sixth message, the one from the nursing home, then sat up abruptly.
“What’s wrong?” Ryan asked from the front passenger seat, noticing the change.
“My friend Marsh passed away.” Hannah had to be devastated, too. The message said he’d passed away last Sunday—which might account for her text. The timing was right.
According to his phone, it was a few minutes past five o’clock. If she’d gone to the nursing home, even though Marsh was no longer there, she’d be home by now. He tried to call her, but the cell signal kept cutting out, which was just as well. He didn’t need his friends listening in on their conversation, particularly if he was wrong, and Marsh’s passing wasn’t behind the text message she’d sent him.
They passed under the sign for the Endeavour Ranch. Once inside the main house, he dragged his backpack and bedroll through the gigantic common room and stumbled into his private quarters. He dumped the whole lot in the laundry room off the kitchen, planning to deal with them later, and caught a whiff of himself. A week of scrubbing down in the Tongue hadn’t done much beyond the basics as far as personal hygiene was concerned.
He showered and shaved, then he called Hannah. Now that his initial paranoia had passed, he was hungry to see her.
“Hey, I just got your text,” he said when she answered. He put her on speakerphone while he got dressed. “It sounded urgent. What’s up?”
A long pause clenched his heart in a vice. “Marsh passed away last Sunday. I asked what arrangements had been made for him, and they told me he’d left instructions for cremation and no funeral.”
“I heard. The home left me a message. Look. I haven’t eaten yet and I’m starving. Are you hungry? Why don’t I grab us some takeout and bring it over?” He rummaged through a drawer in search of clean socks, working hard not to sound too relieved, because the knot in his stomach hadn’t gone away yet. Things were far from settled between them.
“I am.”
He couldn’t tell a thing from her tone. “I’ll see you in an hour.”
He placed an order for burgers at Lou’s Pub, and a half hour later, stopped in to pick it up. The pub was busier than usual for a Sunday night and Leila told him it would be another fifteen minutes.
He scanned the crowd while he waited, not really paying attention until he saw Tim Ryder, sitting alone, nursing a beer. He was already moving before his brain could advise he use caution.
“Mind if I join you?” he asked, then sat down before Ryder could answer.
This was someone Hannah had loved. Maybe still did. And he’d like to know why. All Dallas had heard about him were the negative things, but very few people were truly all bad and Hannah’s judgment was better than that. Misguided loyalty was her Achilles’ heel.
The other man picked at his fries. “Suit yourself.”
“How’d the job interview go?” Dallas asked, to let it be known that he and Hannah talked to each other. Their brief phone call hadn’t filled in any blanks and he was feeling a touch insecure.
“It’s mine if I want it. Thanks for asking.”
He detected sarcasm but no outright hostility. “I thought it might be a good idea to clear the air between you and me without Hannah around to interfere.”
“How do you suggest we do that? Pistols at dawn? Fisticuffs at the local gentlemen’s club?” Ryder asked, a glimmer of humor apparent in the wry twist of his mouth. “Is that how you rich people do it these days?”
Again, with the money—as if that was all he had going for him. “I’m a doctor,” Dallas said mildly. “We prefer talking before resorting to violence.”
“That’s a relief. You want to talk. Go ahead.”
Dallas went with what he was most curious about. “Tell me why you think you’d be better for Hannah.”
“You mean, justify why you’re better for her than me.” Tim dropped his fry and wiped his fingers on his napkin. “Okay. You have money and I don’t. I get it. You can take care of her and I’ve done a crap job of that. But all I need is a break. Besides, I know her a lot better than you do. She doesn’t care about money, you know. She and I argued over the original business plan for the brewery from the beginning because she wants it to be a community hangout and that’s not a moneymaker. We hit a rough patch right about then. She was working all the time, saving money for a project I didn’t believe in, and I was lonely and bored and ignored. Neither one of us is perfect. If you hadn’t happened along, we would have gotten through it.”
That wasn’t quite the way Hannah told the story, but Ryder was entitled to his own take on things, although he’d glossed over one other detail that was worth pointing out.