it’s almost seven. If we don’t want to be late our first day of school, we really should get going.”
Wynona nodded in agreement as she felt her butterflies go into high gear. “Okay, Shania. Let’s do this.”
Clint Washburn wiped the back of his wrist against his forehead while crouching down and holding the stallion’s hoof still with his other hand. Seven thirty in the morning and it was already getting hot.
This was fall, he thought. It shouldn’t be this hot, certainly not this early in the day. These days it felt as if things were making even less sense than usual.
A movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. Clint frowned when he saw the skinny little figure entering the corral. After closing the gate, he was walking toward him.
Ryan.
The boy wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be on his way to school by now.
Clint stopped working on the stallion’s hoof. The tiny rock or whatever had worked its way under the horseshoe, causing the animal to limp, was just going to have to wait until he sent his son on his way.
He squinted. The sun was directly behind the boy, making Ryan’s fine features as well as his expression momentarily difficult to see. Clint’s frown deepened.
“Shouldn’t you be on your way to school by now, boy?” Clint asked.
There was no warmth in his voice, only impatience.
Rather than answer immediately, the small boy looked at his father with wide eyes, his fine, light brown hair falling into his piercing blue eyes. He turned a slight shade of red before answering.
“I...I thought I’d stay home and help you with the horses today.”
“You thought wrong,” Clint replied flatly. “I don’t need your help with the horses. That’s what I’ve got Jake and your uncle Roy for,” he reminded the boy crisply, referring to the ranch hand and his brother. “What you need to do is go to school.” Shading his eyes, Clint scanned the area directly behind his son. “Lucia is probably looking for you right now. Don’t give her any extra work,” he instructed his son briskly, then ordered, “Go.”
The answer, although not unexpected, was not the one his son was hoping for.
Summoning his courage, Ryan tried to change his father’s mind. “But—”
“Now.”
A stricken look came over Ryan’s thin face. His shoulders were slumped as he turned on his heel and made his way back into the house.
“Kind of hard on the boy, aren’t you, boss?” Jake Weatherbee asked. He’d waited until Ryan had left the corral and was out of earshot before he raised the question. “He just wanted to help.”
“He just wanted to skip school, like any kid his age,” Clint replied gruffly.
“So let him once in a while,” Roy Washburn, Clint’s younger brother, told him, adding his voice to the argument. “Nothing wrong with that. If you let your son work with you, he’ll get to see just what it means to be a rancher. It’s what Dad did.”
Clint’s expression hardened. This was not advice he welcomed. “Dad didn’t do anything. He was too drunk half the time to work the ranch. That’s why we did. The boy has to learn discipline before he learns anything else, not to mention what they can teach him at school.” Clint’s eyes swept over the two men standing before him. “I want that kid to be able to pick his future, not be stuck with it the way you and I were,” he told Roy.
Clint brushed his hands off on the back of his jeans. “Now, if you two bachelors are through debating whether or not I’m raising my son properly, maybe you can get back to doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”
“Didn’t mean no disrespect, boss,” Jake told him. “I was just remembering what it felt like being the boy’s age.”
Clint’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe you should try remembering what it’s like being your age and working for a living.” He turned to look at his brother. “Same goes for you.”
“Yes, sir,” Roy answered with just a slight hint of mocking in his voice. He turned his attention back to the recently purchased stallion he was preparing to break.
Clint’s frown appeared to have been chiseled into his features. He was more dissatisfied with his own behavior than with the behavior of either his brother or his ranch hand. He knew that ultimately, the men meant well even if he hadn’t asked for or welcomed their opinions.
Clint blew out a breath. Maybe he’d gone a little too far. “Look, I didn’t mean to go off like that,” he told Jake and Roy. “I’ve got a lot on my mind right now and this thing with the boy isn’t helping any.”
Given a reprieve, Roy decided to take the opportunity to reach his brother. “Don’t you think you’re making more of this than you should, Clint? At least Ryan was offering to help. He wasn’t just running off—”
“Yet,” Clint interjected seriously. “But if I don’t force him to do what he’s supposed to, it’s only going to get worse. I’ve got to nip this sort of behavior in the bud,” he insisted. A distant look came into his eyes. It still haunted him. Seven years and the wound still hadn’t healed. “I missed what was right in front of me once. I’m not going to let that happen again,” he stated firmly.
Roy paused to look at his brother. Though Clint had shut down again, Roy could see the glimmer of pain in his eyes. He knew that he wasn’t referring to his son when he talked about missing what was right in front of him. Clint was talking about Susan, Ryan’s mother. He was talking about the bomb she had detonated in the center of his life.
He had come home late one evening to find a crying baby and a note pinned to the sheet in his crib. Susan was nowhere to be seen and he had no idea how long she had been gone. When it finally dawned on him that she wasn’t home, he was absolutely devastated. The woman he adored and had been married to for almost two years had left without warning.
The short, terse note she’d left in her wake stated that she realized that she wasn’t cut out to be a rancher’s wife and even less to be a mother. She went on to tell him that he needed to cut his losses and forget about her.
According to her note, they had never been a proper “fit.”
That had probably hurt most of all, the antiseptic words Susan had used to describe what to him had been the most wonderful part of his life.
What he had thought of as his salvation had turned into his personal hell.
From that moment on Clint had sealed himself off from everyone and everything.
He hired someone to care for his house and his son—in that order. He didn’t feel that he was up to doing either for a long, long time. To keep from falling into an apathetic abyss, Clint forced himself to run the ranch and to look after the horses that he bought and sold as well as the cattle on the ranch. It gave him a purpose.
