in a way that’d make it rude if she didn’t. Besides, her father had always taught her to be polite. He was the new owner. She should be nice to him.
New owner.
Her hand clenched the card, twisting the paper.
He must have seen it because she thought she saw his face lose some of its spark. Well, too bad. She’d find another way to get the place back, that she vowed. She crossed her arms in front of her, telling him with her eyes that he should just leave.
They stared at each other for a full ten seconds before he finally said. “Okay. Well, then. I guess I’ll be going.”
“Well then, see you later.”
“Bye.”
But he still didn’t leave right away. Instead he looked at her kind of strangely. As if he was memorizing her or something.
“Have a nice day,” he said.
Have a nice day? Was he playing a scene from Leave It to Beaver?
She watched him turn and walk away.
Scott Beringer wanted to be a cowboy.
She should teach him how to be one. And make sure he hated every moment of it.
He climbed into a brand-new Mercedes, which, by the looks of it, probably cost more than all the back taxes he must have paid. The thought depressed her. How could they possibly hope to pay the man back?
“What’d he say?”
Amanda turned to her father, a man nearly as tall as she was, but who seemed to be shrinking daily. His blue eyes had gone rheumy in recent years, but they were still bright. Beneath a cap of gray hair his face looked red, though whether caused by drink or disappointment, she couldn’t say. “He said you have a week to get out.”
“He what?” Roy Johnson asked, straightening his stooped frame, the belly he’d had since before she could remember hanging over a tarnished belt buckle he’d won back in his rodeo days.
“Kidding, Dad. But it’d serve you right if he did.”
Her father squinted his eyes at the departing car, his hands hooking into his leather belt. “He’s younger than I thought he’d be.”
“He wants cowboy lessons.”
“Cowboy lessons?”
She eyed the man she loved more than any person on Earth. Her only family, and yet a man who’d managed to disappoint her more times in life than she cared to admit. She added today’s fiasco to the list. “Yeah. Ranching lessons. Horse lessons. The whole bit.”
“Are you going to teach him?”
“I told him to find someone else.”
He blinked gray lashes, still staring at the car. “Humph. I wondered why he wanted to buy that horse.”
“That horse could have killed him.”
“Nah. He was safer than a tick on a deer.”
She shook her head in disgust. She almost left it at that; experience told her that trying to make her dad accept responsibility for anything was a task best left alone. But she couldn’t keep quiet.
“You should have told me what was going on, Dad.”
“I never wanted this life for you, Amanda,” he said, still not meeting her gaze. “You know that. It’s why I sent you to that fancy college.”
Fancy, in her dad’s opinion, was anything away from the small town they lived in. Los Molina was fifty minutes from the Bay Area, but you’d never know it. Nestled in a small valley, the town enjoyed mild winters and cool summers. Perfect ranching country with rolling green hills and shady oaks.
“Dad, I happen to like this life.”
“I think you could do better. Heck, I didn’t let you go off to Cal Poly and get a degree in business agriculture so you could come home and use it.”
“But I want to use that knowledge.” Even though that hadn’t always been the case. When she’d first realized she’d need to come home because of her father’s failing health, she’d been bitterly disappointed. She’d wanted to use her degree to find her dream job: working for a thoroughbred breeding farm. Instead she’d been forced to come back home. But that was ancient history. She’d learned to love this place in the past few years.
“It’s a hundred thousand dollars.”
“What?”
“You asked me earlier how much I owed. One hundred thousand dollars.”
She just about fell over. Lord, how the heck was she going to get the place back?
I want to learn to be a cowboy. The words bounced off the inside of her head as if she were in a drum. But she couldn’t do it. She just couldn’t.
Could she?
Chapter Two
She could. And a week later—a week during which she regretted agreeing to the ridiculous scheme the day after he’d proposed it—Amanda woke up to the buwap-wap-wap-wap of helicopter blades, which rattled her bedroom window and shook dust off her ceiling.
She knew immediately who it was.
“Give me a break,” she muttered, tossing back the antique-ivory lace cover her grandmother had made almost seventy years ago. Leave it to Scott “Mr. Billionaire” Beringer to arrive in a helicopter.
She’d been dreading this day for a week, and so she took her time crawling out of bed. The hardwood floor felt cold beneath her bare feet as she crossed to the window and looked up. Sure enough, a white-and-black helicopter glided into view, the Global Dynamics logo visible against the gray-and-red sky of an early morning dawn. Pique made her jerk the lace curtains back as she moved to turn away, but just as quickly, she moved back to the window.
It looked like—
“No.” She shook her head in disbelief. “No. Don’t land in the bull pasture,” she murmured. “Not the bulls.”
But the spring grass in the pasture had already compressed from the pressure of the helicopter blades.
She turned around—the chilly morning air smacking her hard—then quickly pulled on rubber boots. Her blue-and-white-checkered flannel nightgown barely hung past her knees, but she paid it no attention as she squeaked along the hallway’s hardwood floors…no, ran along the hallway.
“Not the bulls,” she murmured again.
The outside morning air was cold enough to make her eyes water, the door swinging wide just in time for her to see the helicopter drop a passenger, then begin to lift off again.
“Not the bulls,” she said, watching as Scott Beringer, wonder boy of the techno industry,
