The sprawling old house creaked and groaned in the afternoon heat. Its cedar siding expanded with reluctant moans, while the steep, gleaming metal roof snapped impatiently beneath the relentless July sun. Such was summer in south central Oklahoma.
Having grown up here on Straight Arrow Ranch, Ann Jollett Billings found the heat of mid-July no surprise. She was used to worse, frankly, and better, having spent the past six years in Dallas, Texas, being a manager in the finest hotel that city had to offer. Despite the opulence of her usual surroundings, however, what Ann now found difficult to bear was not the utilitarian inconveniences of her childhood home but the silence.
She couldn’t recall the last time that she’d had more than a few quiet hours to herself, let alone two whole days. Managing a hotel meant being on call virtually around the clock; managing a ranch, not so much, even apparently during the “busy season.” At least her brother had claimed this to be the busy season before he had taken off to Tulsa with his new wife and adorable baby girl to settle personal business and put his condo on the market, leaving Ann in charge of the family ranch during his absence. She’d taken the time to fully computerize their bookkeeping, which would allow Rex to track everything online. Their sister, Meredith, a nurse, had left the afternoon after Rex, on Sunday, to take their father, Wes, to Oklahoma City for his second chemotherapy treatment. The house had been as silent as a tomb ever since.
So who was pushing a chair across the kitchen floor? That noise, Ann suddenly realized, could not be anything else.
“Oh, Lord,” she prayed softly, “please don’t let this be happening. Not here. Not now.”
Rising from the battered old desk in her father’s study, Ann crept to the door that led into the foyer and listened. The screeching stopped, but other sounds ensued. She was definitely not alone in the house. Her imagination, fueled by her years in Dallas, conjured numerous scenarios, none of them innocent. Reason told her that theft was a rare thing around the small town of War Bonnet, Oklahoma, which lay five miles or so away. Rarer still in the outlying rural surrounds, but perhaps one of the employees of the custom cutter hired to install the new feed bins and harvest the oat and sorghum crops had assumed that, with Wes and Rex gone, the house would be empty and, therefore, easy pickings.
Well, she was no helpless female. Never had been; never would be. At five feet eight inches in height and a hundred thirty-five pounds, she had enough heft to do some damage, if necessary, though more than once she’d wished otherwise.
“All right. If this is how it has to be,” she whispered, “then give me strength, give me wisdom, give me courage, and send that thief running.”
Moving quietly in her expensive Gucci flats, black jeans and lace-trimmed, jade-green silk T-shirt, she eased open the door of the coat closet at the foot of the front stairs and reached inside for the baseball bat that had been stored there since her brother had left home for college twenty years earlier. She could have taken the shotgun or the rifle from the high shelf, but it had been too long since she’d used a gun. Besides, she knew how to swing a bat for maximum effect, having played four years of fast-pitch softball in high school and three in college.
Holding the bat at her side, she slunk in long, silent steps across the foyer, through the living room and dining room to the door of the kitchen, glancing out the windows as she went. She saw no new vehicles parked alongside the dusty, red-clay road that ran between the ranch house and the outbuildings that sheltered machinery, fodder and livestock, primarily the horses used to work the two-square-mile Straight Arrow Ranch. The regular hands—Woody, Cam and Duffy—lived off-site and would have simply come to the front door if they’d needed to speak to her.
She lifted the heavy wood club into position and darted through the door into the kitchen. A dog—a mottled, black-masked blue heeler with brown markings, one of the better herding dogs—wagged its tail expectantly beside a kitchen chair pushed up to the counter, atop which kneeled an impish redheaded boy with his arm buried up to the elbow in the owl-shaped cookie jar.
“Hello!” sang out the boy, his bright blue eyes hitting a chord of familiarity within her. Completely unrepentant to have been caught stealing cookies, he turned onto his bottom, pitched a cookie to his dog and crammed another into his mouth. “Mmm-mmm.”
Stunned, Ann let the bat slide through her hands until she could park the butt on the floor and lean against the top. “Thank You, Lord!” she breathed. Then, in as reasonable a tone as she could muster, she demanded, “What do you think you’re doing?”
He blinked at her, his freckles standing out in sharp contrast to his pale skin.
“Eatin’ cookies,” he answered carefully as if any dummy could see that.
His eyes were the brightest blue she’d ever seen, far brighter than her own pale, lackluster shade. He had eyes like sapphires. Hers more closely resembled the sun-bleached sky of a hot, cloudless summer noon. Suddenly she remembered where she’d seen eyes like them before, and to whom they belonged. Dean Paul Pryor. The very reason she was stuck in this dusty backcountry.
She had first met Pryor at her brother’s wedding reception, when Rex had identified him as the custom cutter who would be harvesting their oat and remaining barley crops and installing the new feed storage and mixing station while Rex, his new bride, Callie, and her baby daughter were in Tulsa on a combined honeymoon and business trip. Pryor had presented himself again that morning when he’d reported for work.
Dean Paul Pryor was everything Ann disliked in a man: tall, gorgeous, confident, masculine. She suspected he stood taller than her brother, who was at least six foot two. Dean might even be as tall as her dad, at six foot four. Solidly built, he outweighed her by at least fifty pounds. Add the short, thick, wheat-blond hair, gem-like blue eyes and the square-jawed perfection of his face, and he had everything he needed to make most women melt at his feet. But not her.
He’d mentioned that morning that he had his son with him. She hadn’t expected the boy to be so young, however. This child couldn’t be older than six or seven.
“Where is your father?” she asked icily, taking a choke hold on the bat again.
“Workin’,” came the laconic answer.
Obviously the father, as well as the son, needed to be taught some manners. Well, this wouldn’t be the first spoiled brat who she’d had to deal with or the first lazy, uninvolved parent she’d had to set straight. This was why she didn’t have children, why she never intended to have children. One of the reasons.
“Come.”
Shrugging, the shameless imp helped himself to several more cookies. What he couldn’t stuff into his mouth, he crammed into the pockets of his baggy jeans before hopping down onto the chair and then the floor. As she had no intention of eating the cookies or anything he’d touched, she allowed it. He began to push the chair back toward the table, its feet screeching across the wood planks.
“Leave it!” Ann ordered, her eyes crossing at the high-pitched noise.
The dog barked sharply as if in agreement, and the boy again shrugged. Ann again pointed to the door, and he happily set off, the dog falling in at his side.
“Mmm, Mizz Callie mawkz ze bezz cookeez,” he said around the mass in his mouth as Ann escorted him through the house.
“Didn’t anyone ever tell you not to talk with your mouth full?” she scolded, stopping to put the bat back in the closet.
Nodding, he looked up at her with those big blue eyes, gulped and said, “You sure are pretty. And you got red hair like me.” He grinned suddenly, displaying an empty space in the front of his mouth where a tooth should be. “Come and meet my dad, why doncha?” With that, he turned, opened the front door and ran outside, the dog scampering after him.
Her mouth agape, Ann snatched a faded ball cap from its wall peg, a shield against the relentless summer sun and the possibility of freckles, crammed it onto her head and went after the miniature thief.
* * *
From the corner of his eye, Dean Paul Pryor caught sight of his son in the field just south of the big red barn. As previously instructed, Donovan stopped at a safe distance to watch as Dean used the small, rented crane to drag a cone-shaped steel bin on stilts from a flatbed trailer and carefully, painstakingly stand it upright. Dean let out a sigh of relief as four workers in white hard hats guided the stilt legs of the bin to the concrete base. Donovan, meanwhile, munched his cookies and watched, rapt, as the workers settled the five-ton bin, one of several, and began bolting it down.
Smiling, Dean shook his head. He should’ve known that nothing, not even chocolate chip cookies, could keep the boy away from the construction zone. What red-blooded boy could resist the lure of heavy machinery and risky maneuvers? At least Donovan had sense enough to keep his distance.
Just then one of the workers dropped a fist-size nut meant for an enormous bolt. The nut bumped across the uneven ground.
The boy darted forward, yelling, “I’ll get it!”
Dean’s heart leaped into his throat. Abruptly letting out the clutch, he killed the engine on the old crane and bailed out of the cab, waving his arms and shouting over the sound of screeching metal as the full weight of the bin suddenly came to rest.
“Donovan! No! Get back! Get back!”
The boy froze in his tracks then began creeping backward. The worker who had dropped the nut quickly retrieved it and began threading it onto the bolt sticking up from the concrete base. Pocketing his mirrored sunglasses, Pryor strode toward the boy. To Dean’s surprise, Ann Jollett Billings got to Donovan before he did, pulling the boy backward several steps. Dean temporarily ignored her.
“Son, I meant it when I told you that you couldn’t help with the feed bins,” he said firmly. “It’s too dangerous. That’s why I sent you to the house.”
“You sent him to the house?” Ann demanded.
Dean swept off his hard hat. He never could ignore her for long, and as always she was a sight for sore eyes, especially with that familiar old baseball cap on her head.
“Hello, Jolly,” he said around a grin.
She gasped. “Jolly!”
The nickname, a reference to her middle name, Jollett, had once been used by those closest to her, but Dean had momentarily forgotten that particular circle had never included him. The look she gave him said so in no uncertain terms, the message coming across loud and clear. He sucked in a quiet breath.
“You really don’t remember me at all, do you?” he asked on a wry chuckle, scratching his nose to hide a hurt that he had no real right to feel.
She tossed her long, wavy hair off her shoulder with a flick of her hand. “Should I?”
“We went to school together.”
“We did not.”
“Oh, we did,” Dean insisted lightly. “I was ball boy for the softball team all four years you played.”
Ann stiffened. “That was you?” Obviously she didn’t like being reminded of those she had once considered beneath her. “Ah. Well, you’re younger than me, then.”
“Not that much younger. Three years.”
“A lifetime in high school,” Ann retorted dismissively.
“High school,” Dean said drily, “doesn’t last forever. Three years makes a difference at thirteen and sixteen. Not so much at twenty-five and twenty-eight.”
She lifted her pert little nose. “Matter of opinion.”
Stung, as he had so often been in the past by her, he switched his attention to the boy. “Get your cookies?”
“You sent him to the house to steal cookies?” Ann yelped.
“How is it stealing,” Dean asked, frowning as he plunked his hard hat onto his head again and pulled his son to stand against his legs, “when Callie left the cookies for him and told us where to find them?”
He saw the shock of that roll over her, deflating her anger, but then she lifted that stubborn chin again.
“He should at least knock.”
Dean looked down at the boy. “Donovan, did you knock?”
“Yessir.”
“I was sitting at the desk in the study, right next to the front door,” Ann argued.
“I sent him to the back door,” Dean Paul pointed out, “because his shoes were dusty.” He looked down at Donovan again. “What did Miss Callie say you were to do if no one answered?”
“Go in and he’p myself.”
Dean looked to Ann, who colored brightly even as she sniffed, “Well, no one told me.”
He lifted his eyebrows to tell her that wasn’t his problem. Then he looked down at his son and said, “Why don’t you and Digger go explore the corrals while I take care of the big feed bin.” He speared Ann with a direct, challenging look then. “If that’s all right with you.”
“Yes, of course,” she muttered.
“Just don’t go into the stables,” Dean warned his son.
“Mr. Wes said it was okay.”
“Yes, he did, but you’re not to go in there alone. I’ll take you inside to look at the horses later. Understood?”
“Yessir.” The boy reached into his pocket and produced a cookie for his father. Despite the boy’s grimy hands and the melting chocolate, Dean took it and bit off a huge chunk.
“Yum.”
“Don’t tell Grandma,” Donovan said in a husky whisper, “but Mizz Callie makes the best cookies.”
Dean held a finger to his lips, but the boy was already running toward the big red barn and the maze of corrals beyond it. Smiling, Dean polished off the remainder of the cookie in a single large bite.
“He may be right,” Dean mused after swallowing. “All I know is that they’re really good. Don’t you agree?”
Ann jerked slightly. Then she nodded, shook her head, nodded again. “I’m sure they are.”
He swept his gaze over her. “You haven’t even tried them.”
Was she that vain now, this polished, sophisticated version of the fun, competitive girl he used to know—and admire? Did that svelte figure and the fit of those pricey clothes matter more to her now than a little sugar, a moment’s enjoyment? Oddly, it hurt him to think it, but it was none of his business. Nothing about her had ever been any of his business, much as he might have wished it otherwise.
“He’s awfully young to be out here with you, isn’t he?” she asked pointedly.
“Donovan’s been coming into the field with me since he was toilet trained,” Dean informed her. “I figure he’s safer with me than anywhere else. I always know where he is and what he’s doing. Besides, I want him with me. The day’s fast coming when he can’t be.”
“I see. Well, it’s your business.”
“It is that.”
“And I don’t care for sweets,” Ann called defensively as he turned away and began to trudge toward the newly installed feed bin, plucking his sunglasses from his shirt pocket.
“It shows,” he drawled, and not just in her trim figure. Her attitude could use some sweetening, in his opinion, but he couldn’t fault her shape.
Telling himself to put her out of mind as he had so often done before, he strode to the feed bin, climbed the attached metal ladder and began releasing the chains with which he had hoisted the heavy, white-painted steel bin into place. Tomorrow he would begin harvesting the oats that would be stored in this particular bin.
The second bin—this one painted green—was even larger and would contain the sorghum crop. This, too, Dean would harvest, but only after the oats were in, as much more heat would strip the oats of their protein content. After that, a blending plant would be built.
Rex and Wes Billings had decided to take the ranch onto an organic pathway. Wes had started the process months ago when he’d allowed Dean to plant and oversee the two forage crops without any pesticides. To Dean’s surprise, Rex had even given up his law practice in Tulsa to permanently move home to the Straight Arrow Ranch and oversee the transition, while his dad received treatment for his cancer. Wes imagined that Rex’s wife, Callie, had something to do with that decision.
If Rex was happy living on the Straight Arrow and practicing law in War Bonnet, the tiny Oklahoma town where he, Ann and their younger sister, Meredith, had all gone to school, then Dean wished him well, but he couldn’t imagine that Ann would follow suit. She had long ago let her disdain be known for this community and everyone in it, himself included, not that she’d ever seemed to know he was alive until now.
So why, Dean wondered, did he feel particularly slighted? Why had Ann Billings always had the power to wound him?
* * *
Ann marched across the pasture to the road. Red-orange dust settled on the toes of her buttery, pale leather flats as she crossed the hard-packed dirt road that ran between the big sagging red barn and the house. She told herself that Dean Pryor’s disdain meant nothing to her. Why should it? He was just another local yokel. She’d barely noticed him in high school—and yet now that she thought about it, he’d always been there on the periphery during what she thought of as her jock phase.
Memories of that time in her life made Ann mentally cringe. She hadn’t stopped to think back then that being able to compete with her brother, out-swinging half the guys on the baseball team and generally acting like a tomboyish hoyden would mark her as less than feminine. Her middle name, which she shared with her mother and grandmother, had been a source of pride for her, even when the coach who’d given her extra batting practice with the boys’ baseball team had shortened Jollett to “Jolly” and the nickname had stuck. It hadn’t occurred to her that being seen as “one of the guys” would literally mean being seen as one of the guys. Even now, though, all these years later, she couldn’t seem to outlive either the nickname or the impression.
Around War Bonnet and the Straight Arrow, she was Jolly Billings, the mannish, unfeminine daughter of Wes Billings, and nothing she could do would change that. No matter that she rose every morning at daylight and ran for miles to keep her figure. Never mind that she spent hours every day on her makeup and hair or wore the finest Manolo Blahnik shoes and Escada suits, not that the clodhoppers around here even knew the difference.
No, she didn’t belong here, could never again belong here. Suddenly she longed for the anonymous, frenetic energy of Dallas and the quiet, reserved presence of her fiancé, Jordan Teel. At 41, Jordan was thirteen years her senior, but then Ann had always been mature for her age. That, she told herself, was why she had forgotten Dean Pryor, the younger batboy for the softball team.
She heard the phone ringing before she got back to the house and hurried inside to find her brother calling. Pushing aside thoughts of Dean Pryor, she took notes as Rex advised her of the contractors who would soon be journeying from Ardmore and Duncan to bid on building a garage behind the house and remodeling the master bedroom for him and Callie. Ann promised to take the bids, scan them and email them to him.
As they talked, she heard Donovan’s high-pitched voice outside, speaking to his dog, Digger. Before long, Ann mused, her little niece, Bodie Jane, would be running around the place much like Donovan did now. That was what she and Rex had done. They’d run wild, practically living on horseback and knocking out every step their dad had taken around the place until school had intruded.
Being the youngest, Meredith had spent more time with their mom, Gloria, but Ann had desperately wanted to do everything that Rex and Wes had done. That, no doubt, had been her downfall.
Unbidden, other words ran through Ann’s mind.
You sure are pretty. And you got red hair like me.
At least Donovan thought she was pretty, and it seemed to matter that she had red hair like him.
Not that she cared one way or another what the Pryors thought.
She yanked off the ball cap and touched a hand to her long, stiffly waving locks, wondering when its shade had ever before been a plus for her. She wished Callie had told her that she’d given the kid free run of the house before she’d taken off to Tulsa with Rex and Bodie. Maybe then she wouldn’t have come off so...tough. Maybe she’d have had a chance to appear soft and womanly.
On the other hand, Dean Pryor had known her a lot longer than she’d realized. She’d probably never be able to overcome the image of her hard-slugging, hard-driving, super-competitive past with him.
Not that it mattered. Actually, it didn’t matter one whit what he or anyone else around War Bonnet thought of her.
Jolly.
She shook her head. It had been a long time since anyone had called her that.
Not long enough.