Seth. “But I will need another set of hands while I’m doing the repair work. I figured the kid could work off the damages by helping me out with the repair work and around my ranch with my horses until the bodywork is done.”
Cole straightened. “I’m no stupid-ass cowboy.”
Seth Dalton gave him a measuring look. “No, from here you look like a stupid-ass punk who thinks he’s living out some kind of video game. This isn’t Grand Theft Auto, kid, where you can always hit the restart button. You broke it, now you’re going to help me fix it. Unless you’d rather serve the time, of course.”
Cole subsided back into his customary slouch as Jenny considered his proposal. Her gut wanted her to tell him to forget it. She didn’t want her son to have anything to do with Pine Gulch’s busiest bachelor.
Cole had had enough lousy male role models in his life—he didn’t need a player like Seth teaching him all the wrong things about how to treat a woman.
On the other hand, her son stole the man’s car—not only stole it, but wrecked the blasted thing. That he wasn’t in police custody right now seemed nothing short of a miracle.
What choice did she have, really? Seth could easily have called the police. Perhaps he should have. Maybe a hard gut check with reality might be just what Cole needed to wake him up, as much as she hated the idea of her son in juvenile detention.
Seth Dalton was being surprisingly decent about this. From what little she knew about him—and she had to admit, most of her biased information came from overheard conversations and breathless comments in the teacher’s lounge about his many flirtations—she would have expected him to be hot-tempered and petulant.
Instead, she found him rational, calm, accommodating.
And extremely attractive.
She let out a slow, nervous breath. Was that the reason for her instinctive opposition to the man’s reasonable proposal? Because he was sinfully gorgeous, with that thick, dark hair, eyes a stunning, heartbreaking blue and chiseled, tanned features that made him look as though he should be starring in Western movies?
He made her edgy and ill at ease and that alone gave her enough reason to wish for a way to avoid any further acquaintance between them. She was here in Pine Gulch to help her little family find some peace and healing—not to engage in useless, potentially harmful fantasies about a charming, feckless cowboy with impossibly blue eyes and a smile that oozed sex.
“I’ll know better after I tow the car out to the ranch and take a look at her but from my initial look, I’d estimate there was about fix or six hundred dollars’ damage,” he was saying. “The way I figure it, if he worked for me a couple afternoons a week after school and Saturday mornings, we should be clear in a few months. Is that okay with you?”
She looked at Dalton and then at Cole, his arms still crossed belligerently across his chest, as if everyone else in the room was responsible for his troubles but himself.
He disdained everything about Idaho and would probably consider being forced to work on a ranch every bit as much punishment as going to juvenile detention, she thought.
“Yes. That’s more than fair. Wouldn’t you agree, Cole?”
Her son glared at both of them—and while Jenny felt her own temper kindle in automatic response, Seth met his look with cool challenge and Cole quickly dropped his gaze.
“Whatever,” he muttered.
“Thank you,” Jenny said again, walking with him to the door. “As tomorrow is Saturday, I’ll drive him out to the Cold Creek in the morning. What time?”
“How does eight work for you?”
“We’ll be there. I’m very sorry again about this. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.”
His smile was slow and wide and made her insides feel as if she’d just done somersaults down a steep, grassy hill.
“He’s a teenage boy, so I’d guess he probably wasn’t thinking at all. See you in the morning.”
Jenny nodded, wondering why that prospect filled her with an odd mix of trepidation and anticipation.
Chapter Two
“This is totally lame,” her son muttered the next morning. “Why do I have to give up a whole Saturday?”
Jenny sighed and cast Cole an admonishing glance across the width of her little Toyota SUV. “You prefer the alternative? I can call Mr. Dalton right now and tell him to go ahead and file charges if that’s what you’d rather see happen here.”
Cole sliced her a glare that told her quite plainly he considered her totally lame, too, but he said nothing.
“I don’t think it’s fair, either,” Morgan piped up from the backseat. “Why does Cole always get to do the fun stuff? I want to help with the horses, too. Natalie says the Cold Creek horses are the prettiest, smartest horses anywhere. They’ve won all kinds of rodeo awards and they sell for tons of money. She said her uncle Seth knows more about horses than anybody else in the whole wide world.”
“Wow. The whole wide world?” Sarcasm dripped from Cole’s voice.
Morgan either didn’t pick up on it or decided to ignore it. Judging from past experience, Jenny was willing to bet on the latter. Her daughter tended to ignore anything that didn’t fit into her vision of the way the world ought to operate.
Even during her frequent hospital stays after bad asthma attacks, she always managed to focus on some silver lining, like a new friend or a particularly kind nurse.
“Yep,” she said eagerly now, with as much pride in Seth Dalton as she might have had if he were her uncle instead of her best friend’s. “People bring their horses to the Cold Creek from all over the place for him to train because he’s so good.”
“If he knows more than anyone else in the world, why is he stuck here in Buttlick, Idaho?”
Morgan’s enthusiasm faded into a frown. “Just because you don’t like it here, you don’t have to call it mean words.”
“I thought that was the name,” Cole said with a sneer. “Right next to Hairy Armpitville and across the holler from Cow’s Rectum.”
“That’s enough.” Jenny’s hands tightened on the steering wheel and she felt familiar stress weigh like a half-ton hay bale on her shoulders. She wasn’t at all sure she was going to survive her son’s adolescence.
“I hope you treat Mr. Dalton with more respect than you show me or your sister.”
“How can I not, since apparently the man knows more about horses than anybody in the whole wide world?” Cole muttered.
Who was this angry stranger in her son’s body? she wondered. Whatever happened to her sweet little man who used to love cuddling up with her at bedtime for stories and hugs? Who used to let her blow raspberries on his neck and would run to her classroom after school bubbling over with news of his day?
That sweet boy had been slipping away from her since the year he turned eleven, when Richard
