Ria pressed the speaker button on her cell and plunked the device down on a counter before zipping over to the refrigerator, in search of supper prospects.
Meredith’s recorded voice filled the small kitchen, educated and shrill, and Ria’s back molars automatically locked together.
“Are you there, darling?” Meredith chirped. “I was hoping you’d pick up.” For once.
Ria sighed again, decided on a grilled cheese sandwich and canned soup for her evening meal, set the makings out on the counter in an orderly row.
“Listen, sweetie, this is important,” Meredith went on brightly. “I’ve had to fire another manager—at our Seattle branch, this time—and the result is complete and utter chaos. I’m talking possible embezzlement here. The feds might even be a factor. If you don’t get over there and straighten out the situation—well, we’ll have to close that office, and there will be government audits and all sorts of bad publicity, and you know how Daddy would feel about that.” Meredith paused to drag in an audible breath, then launched into the big finale. “Call me when you get this message, pretty please. No matter what time it is. You have my numbers.” A beat passed. “Love you!”
And Meredith hung up.
Love you!
Right, Ria thought, wishing she could ignore her sister’s request to call her back and already fully aware that she couldn’t. She was just too damn responsible, that was her problem.
Still, she intended to eat first. She’d been working hard all day, weeding and watering, making preparations for Saturday’s farmers’ market over in Parable, and she was hungry. Not to mention tired.
Ria grilled her sandwich, heated her soup. Her tea was brewed by then, and cool enough to drink. She served her food up in pretty dishes, using the good silverware she and Frank had received as a wedding present, trying to invoke some semblance of a family meal.
Frank. He’d been her mainstay, the only man she’d ever truly loved—or could even imagine loving. Now, when he’d been gone for just two and a half years, she occasionally forgot what he’d looked like and had to study their wedding pictures to reacquaint herself with his features. She’d memorize his angular jaw, his strong mouth, his thick, dark hair, his brown eyes and his quick smile.
And then forget again.
Although Ria knew the phenomenon of not being able to recall a departed loved one’s face wasn’t unusual among the bereaved, she always panicked a little when it happened, and the guilt could last for hours, if not longer.
Why was she so bereft now, though?
It was the time of day, Ria reminded herself silently, sitting down to her lonely supper, spreading a napkin over her blue-jeaned lap and taking a deep breath in an effort to restore her equanimity.
She’d been hungry before, but now, suddenly, her appetite was iffy. She nibbled at one half of the sandwich and spooned up some of the soup, then gave up and cleared the table. Methodically—because Ria Manning was nothing if not methodical—she tossed the leftovers into the trash and rinsed off her plate and bowl in the sink before wandering into the front room, taking her cup of lukewarm tea with her.
The face, dark brown, hairy and horned, and roughly the size of an armchair, loomed suddenly in the center of the picture window. And even though Ria knew, on one level, exactly what she was looking at, she was startled enough that she gave a little squeal of alarm, leaped backward and nearly dropped her china cup and saucer.
The creature at the window made an awful, plaintive sound, a sort of forlorn bellow. The drapes, still open, of course, gave the impression of stage curtains, as though Ria made up the entire audience at a horror show.
Recovering slightly, Ria set her tea aside on an end table, her hand shaking all the while, and pressed splayed fingers to her pounding heart.
Bessie. As the shock subsided, Ria’s temper kicked in.
“Not again,” she said, coming to a simmer. “Damn it, not again!”
By contrast, the cow buffalo standing in Ria’s flower bed seemed to have calmed down considerably. After that one harrowing cry, Bessie ducked her massive head out of sight, and when she raised it again, she was chewing on a big clump of freshly planted petunias. In the near distance, Ria spotted Bessie’s yearling calf, now nearly as big as its mama, making a meal of the bright orange poppies growing in an old wheelbarrow.
For a moment or so longer, Ria was frozen where she stood. Bessie looked quite content now, but that didn’t mean she wouldn’t get riled again. Since she probably weighed as much as a farm truck, the prospect was terrifying. With one swing of that gigantic head, she could shatter the picture window to smithereens. Why, she might even scramble through the opening and run amok in the living room.
Get a grip, Ria admonished herself. This is not an emergency.
It didn’t help much.
Walking backward, she fled to the kitchen, dived for the landline receiver on the wall above her computer desk and speed-dialed.
“Sutton residence,” Highbridge intoned formally. “May I help you?”
“They’re out again,” Ria announced. “Those—creatures—”
“Oh, dear,” Highbridge commiserated. “I do apologize. Have they done any damage?”
“Besides scaring me half to death and eating my flowers, you mean?” Ria knew the situation wasn’t Highbridge’s fault—he was a butler, not a ranch hand—but since he was directly in the line of fire, he got the worst of it. “Do you realize, Mr. Highbridge, that Oriental poppies don’t bloom until the second year after they’re planted?”
“Just Highbridge, if you don’t mind,” he interjected mildly. British to the core, he managed to convey both concern and carefully controlled amusement.
“And one of these animals just pulled them all up?” Ria went on.
“Mr. Sutton will be right over to collect the beasts,” Highbridge replied. “And I’m sure he’ll be happy to compensate you for any damage, as usual.”
Mr. Sutton will be right over.
Well, that was something, Ria thought, simmering down slightly. When Landry arrived, she’d simply pretend she wasn’t home.
CHAPTER TWO
RIA DID NOT like Landry Sutton, did not like him one bit—never had, never would—which was why she intended to make herself scarce when he came to round up his smelly, flea-bitten, poppy-scarfing buffalo.
Landry had arrived in Parable County at about the same time as Ria, a little over a year before, and, from the very beginning, he’d struck her as bullheaded, full of himself and, for the most part, insufferably stubborn. Only his impossibly good looks—the classic square jaw, those perfectly sculpted features and blue eyes that changed, according to his mood, from periwinkle to cornflower, that shock of shaggy, wheat-blond hair, a lean but powerful build, not to mention innate masculinity—kept him from being entirely unendurable.
Physical qualities were genetic, after all, accidents of birth; it wasn’t as if the
