| |
Ingrid had to give him credit. Ryder pitched in right away with the grunt work, mucking out the corral, hauling hay. It was late June and tourist season was in full swing. They had two trail rides on Friday, six guests going on an all-day ride—the same ride that culminated in Brady’s broken leg and helicopter evacuation—and four guests going on the shorter ride to the lake and back. Ryder volunteered for the long ride, and Ingrid was relieved. She wasn’t eager to go back to Bridge Creek.
Friday morning promised a beautiful, sunny day. The temperatures were still cool enough to be enjoyable with predicted highs in the midseventies. Ingrid went for an early breakfast before the dining hall opened to guests. She grabbed a cup of coffee from one of the oversized coffee pots on the hearth, set her cup on a corner table for two, and walked up to the counter.
“Morning, Greta,” she called back into the kitchen. Greta emerged, sleepy-eyed, bird’s nest hair, and mumbled something that might have been a ‘good morning.’
“Gret,” Ingrid said, looking her friend over from head to toe. “You actually still have your slippers on, girl.”
Greta, a wooden spoon in one hand and a measuring cup in the other, looked down at her feet in pink, fluffy slippers. “Huh. Not quite awake yet today.”
A blast of morning air blew in as the back door opened and Ryder walked inside. Spotting Ingrid, he smiled and said, “Good morning.” Then he spotted Greta. A different smile played over his face at the spectacle of Greta in the morning. “And good morning to you, sunshine,” he said, then headed toward the coffee pots.
Instead of beaming sunshine, Greta’s expression turned sour. “And where are you two off to today?”
“Ryder’s taking the all-day ride, I’ve got a morning only. Hey, Gret, any chance of scrambled eggs and hash browns?”
“Make that two,” Ryder called from the fireplace hearth.
“Greta!” Sam’s voice called from deeper in the kitchen.
“Coming,” she called over her shoulder, then back to Ingrid. “Duty calls. I’ll be back in a few with your breakfasts.” She padded away.
Ingrid returned to her table where Ryder had joined her. “We’re lucky we don’t have the jobs your friend has,” Ryder said. “To be indoors, cooking and cleaning when it’s so spectacular outside would be torture. Helping Sam with the cooking wouldn’t be bad, but not if you had to do it every day, three times a day, for so many people.”
“You like to cook?” Ingrid sipped her coffee.
“Yeah. Gotta eat, right? May as well enjoy cooking.”
She glanced at his left hand. No ring. She guessed that meant no one was doing the cooking for him. “What do you do that you could pack up and leave for two months at such short notice? Are you in college? Summer off?”
“I’m an accountant.” He gave a crooked smile. “The ultimate indoor job, right? But I like it, and it pays the bills.”
“How’d you get the summer off?”
“I have two brothers, and we’re all accountants. We own our own business. Two of us, Hunter and I, still live on the ranch with Dad, or what’s left of it, where we grew up. I’m the youngest, Hunt’s the middle brother, and our older brother, Rory, is married and has two kids. They live a few miles away.”
“Where do you all live?”
“Ellensburg. That’s where I went to college, too. Central Washington University.”
“That’s kind of a cowboy town, right?” Ingrid had driven past Ellensburg a couple of times on I-90 on her way to somewhere else.
“Yeah,” he said.
“And why do you say, what’s left of your ranch?”
Ryder’s eyes seemed to darken a shade, and he frowned. “We grew up on the ranch that my grandparents had owned and run, with the help of my dad. When they got old, they turned it over to my dad, and we moved in. Dad, Mom, my brothers, and me. We grew up working the place. Cattle and sheep, plus we always had horses. We owned over three hundred acres. I spent my childhood repairing fences, herding cattle, all the cowboy stuff.”
Greta made a special trip to serve them two plates full of eggs, potatoes, and bacon. “Here you go.” She set their breakfasts on the table before them.
Ingrid reached up and took her friend’s hand. “Thank you, Greta.”
Greta contemplated Ryder longingly for a moment. “Yeah. Welcome.”
“This looks great, Greta. Thank you,” Ryder said.
The dining room was now officially open. The first guests arrived, a family of four chatting happily.
Greta sighed. “You are welcome, Ryder. You two have a good day now, outside in the sunshine.” She trudged back to the kitchen.
Ingrid stared after her friend. “Poor Greta. She’s not having the best summer. I feel bad for her.”
Ryder dug into his breakfast. “Well, if she made this, she’s a great cook.”
“I think she mostly does dishes and helps out,” Ingrid took a bite of potatoes and onions, dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “Back to the ranch,” she prodded.
Ryder ate silently for a few minutes then set his fork down. “My mom got sick when I was twelve. Breast cancer. They thought they got it, and we were all relieved. But it came back pretty fast, and spread to her bones, brain, and lungs.”
Ingrid set her fork down. “I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. It was rough. She died when I was fourteen. It was hard on Dad, but luckily Hunt was sixteen and Rory eighteen, so the three of us got self-sufficient fast. But cattle prices fell, and Dad didn’t buy more sheep after we sold the last flock. By then, people from Seattle were starting to buy up property on this side of the mountains for vacation homes. Central Washington became trendy, and Dad started selling off acreage to pay the bills.
“After a few years we were down to twenty acres, which we still have, and Dad quit running cattle altogether. The fight just seemed to go out of him. He heard about this job, and decided he needed a change of scenery and less responsibility. My brothers and I convinced him that we could take care of ourselves and the ranch for a few months in the summer, so he took the job, and has come back every year since. I’ve come up to visit him and lend a hand for a couple of weeks every summer. When Dad broke his leg, my brothers said they’d cover me in the business so I could come up and help out. Summer’s our slow season anyway. Only now, instead of helping my dad, I’m helping you.”
He grinned and started eating again.
They finished breakfast, bused their dishes, called goodbye to Greta, and pushed out the back door, heading down the trail to the corrals.
“How about you?” Ryder asked as they ambled through the meadow.
“Me?” Ingrid worried that her life would sound pampered and easy. Because all her life she had been pampered, and her life was easy. Her parents were healthy, middle-aged, and well-to-do. She lived in a neighborhood where several neighbors owned million-dollar vacation homes on the Puget Sound. When she was six, she asked for a pony, and lo and behold, she got one. Then a private girls’ school, Forest Ridge School of the Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic all-girls middle and high school in Bellevue. If she told him that, he would think she was a nun, for God’s sake.
Then she would tell him about Stanford, which was her dad’s idea. He was an alumnus, and he had attended alumni parties and football games and made generous donations to make sure she would be one, too. Of course, her grades were impeccable, so it wasn’t like they cheated or anything.
“Yes, you,” Ryder smiled at the troubled look on Ingrid’s face. “What? Did you rob a bank or something?”
She let out a half laugh. “No. My life is kind of boring. I have a horse, Pumpkin, and I just graduated high school.”
Ryder stopped walking. “High school? I thought you were older. How old are you?”
“Seventeen. I turn eighteen in September.”
“Where’d you go to high school?”
“Bellevue.”
“Oh, Bellevue High School? I have an aunt who went there.”
“Uh, no, Forest Ridge.”
“Never heard of it,” Ryder said. “But then I’m just a country bumpkin from Ellensburg.”
It might have been her imagination, but it looked like he frowned and seemed a tad more distant. He was the one who was old, she thought. Well, not exactly old, just old-ish. The conversation ceased awkwardly when they arrived at the corral and started saddling up the horses.
Then their guests started arriving, and he soon left with his group and she with hers.
She arrived back at the corral at noon, her guests all sweaty and chatty as they departed to the cookhouse for lunch. Ingrid wasn’t hungry so she stayed and mucked out the place and fed the horses some fresh hay.
At the end of the day, after Ryder finally returned with his group and got them safely off their horses, everybody said their thanks and goodbyes. She and Ryder untacked the horses, and she helped him carry saddles into the tack shack. Inside the dusky building, she hoisted a saddle onto its stand and glanced at him sidewise. “So, how old are you?”
“What?” He had just reached the doorway when he turned to look at her. The sunny day outside backlit him so he appeared to be a dark, shadowy figure. She couldn’t make out the expression on his face.
She cleared her throat. “How old are you?”
“Me? I’m twenty-eight. I guess about a decade older than you.” And he turned and left.
While older men usually seemed so old, Ryder didn’t seem too old at all. Even though twenty-eight sounded old, it really wasn’t. For some weird reason she couldn’t even crystallize, she worried he would think she was too young. That he would think she was a spoiled little debutante, when urgently, for no reason at all, she wanted him to think of her as a tough cowgirl, wizened by trail rides and tending to broken legs and wild horses.
She wanted him to admire her. She had never wanted a boy to admire her before. Not even in middle school.
