Second Chance Ranch Chapter 22

Chapter TWENTY-TWO:

Kelly arrived at Three Rivers, without Finn, without a limp, and without her pride. She was sure the story of her falling off that blasted horse would be all over the ranch, and she held her head high as she entered the administration building.

The cowhand who’d delivered her to her interview sat at the desk. He had a calm air about him, a welcome change from Clark’s narrowed eyes and gruff voice.

“Good morning.”

“Ma’am.” He tipped his hat, giving her a glimpse of brown hair and gray eyes. “Squire’s in your office already.”

Her heart somersaulted at the same time her defenses went up. “Thank you….”

“Tom,” he supplied.

“Tom, right.” She should’ve been able to remember that. She smiled at him before she hurried through the trailer. Tom had started as the new controller when Frank made Clark the foreman. 

That had allowed Squire to become a regular cowhand as he prepared to leave the ranch and continue his education. 

Her stomach flipped at the very idea of starting something with him only to have him leave. She’d thought about it all night after she’d returned to her parents’ house, and all the way to work this morning too.

She wasn’t sure what was going on with Chelsea, and she didn’t want to add her lame love life problems on her, especially since they involved her brother. The situation felt awkward enough without adding that layer to it.

Squire stood at her small window, his hands in his pockets. “Morning,” she said, entering her office and putting her lunch and purse in her bottom desk drawer.

He slid his hands around her waist, and she turned into him. “Oh, okay. So it is a good morning.”

“No lasting damage from yesterday?”

“I think we’ll both heal.” She laughed as she put her hands on his shoulders and leaned into his strength. It felt good to do fun, easy things with a man again, and she grinned up at this handsome cowboy. 

He never went anywhere without a cowboy hat, and Kelly wondered how many he owned. She didn’t ask, though, as he gazed down at her.

“You think he’ll ever come out to the ranch again?” Worry skimmed through his eyes, like he really thought a scraped knee was something new for Finn.

“Are you kidding? All he’s talked about since we left is the baby horse, the fences he got to climb, and that dog.” She looked toward her door. “I really need to get that kid a dog.”

“Mm.” Squire lowered his face into her hair and took a deep breath. He tipped her back a few inches so he could kiss her.

The hair on her arms and neck rose, though that could’ve been from Squire’s fingers along her jaw. It could’ve been from the tender way he touched her, kissed her. It could’ve been from the obvious care and adoration he felt for her. 

Still, she couldn’t relax into his embrace, fully enjoy the taste of coffee and sugar on his breath.

He pulled away, concern in his tone when he asked, “What?”

“I just….” Her super-hearing continued as she heard Clark call the cowboys to order. “I’m just not used to this being okay in my office.”

“Well, it is okay.” He released her and stepped back, dropping his chin so that blasted hat hid his expression. Cowboys. “But I get it. I’ll keep looking for any records, and you keep putting everything into the computer.” He gave her a quick grin and picked up a stack of folders they hadn’t touched yet.

She glanced around, feeling sluggish at the thought of diving back into the thousands of sheets of paper in her office. “We can probably finish this soon.”

He stood there with those folders in his arms, watching her, a look of absolute adoration on his face. She felt like she was viewing him through glass. She saw past his Army-trained mask and into his soul. He was kind and heroic—exactly the kind of man both she and Finn needed.

He was good and hard-working—someone who would take care of her and Finn.

He was tall, dark, and handsome—the perfect compliment to her lighter features—and the type of man Kelly gravitated toward. Attraction sparked through her right now, and she really wanted a partner who was as crazy about her as she was them.

Someone who could be a good step-dad to Finn. She’d seen her son clasp Squire’s hand yesterday. She’d felt a blanket of love for the two of them, for her son, and for Squire then, just as she did now.

The trailer vibrated, shaking Kelly from her thoughts. “Squire?”

“Hm? What?” He shook himself as if he hadn’t realized he’d gone into staring mode.

“I said, we can probably finish soon.” She stepped around her desk to turn on her computer. “That is, if you don’t stand around, staring at me all day.” She didn’t let on that she’d done the same and enjoyed the redness that colored his neck.

The office suddenly felt too hot and too small, but Kelly forced herself to sit down and wait for the machine to come to life. “I think I have a stack from yesterday to go through. You best get lookin’ through those.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He took the chair opposite her, sighing mightily when he opened the first, thick folder.

Though she didn’t catch him staring at her while she worked, something had shifted between them. Something good. Something hopeful. The soft leafing of pages punctured the silence in her office. The words on her papers started to blur as the minutes passed. Her mind wandered to what Squire had said under the oak tree. I don’t want to leave you here.

She didn’t want to stay here without him. But her life wasn’t all about what she wanted anymore. If she didn’t have this job, she couldn’t provide for Finn. She and Squire needed to talk through a lot more before she could actually follow him to College Station.

Please guide me, she prayed.

Squire triumphantly lifted a page. “Houser Cattle Auctions.”

Kelly blinked and took the paper from him. “From two thousand twelve.” She located the correct folder on the edge of her desk and placed the paper on top. “Nice work.”

She’d get to entering it in the computer when she finished with the stack she’d already started. He focused on his task again, and Kelly admired him again. His broad shoulders, his mouth set in a determined line.

“Here’s another one.” He turned the page. “And another one. These are in order.” He flipped until he had several pages, all from the years they needed.

“And it looks like we sold at Houser’s more than once each year.” He handed the papers over so she could examine them.

She honestly wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but sales receipts meant cash coming into the ranch, and since that was what was missing, disorganized, or hidden, she wanted it all out in the open. Organized. Easy to sort through and see.

Kelly despised lies and secrets. She’d endured enough of those in her marriage, and she rather liked working with numbers. She always had, thus the accounting degree. Numbers didn’t lie. They either lined up or they didn’t. 

“What else have you got?” she asked as she sorted the financial documents into their correct years. The piles were getting thicker and thicker, further confirming to her that Hector—or someone—had purposely misfiled these documents.

“Nothing,” Squire said. “The rest of this folder is from ages ago.” He put it in the stacks against the wall and retrieved another pile to search.

She barely had time to pick up the first receipt he’d found to enter it into the computer before he said, “Oceanview Cattle Company.” He flipped pages nearly as fast as he could look at them. “All in the same place. In sequential order.”

She felt like laughing; she felt like crying; she felt like dancing around and yelling. Their progress over the past week had been slow, tedious. But finding so much at once felt like progress. Like an answer to a prayer. Kelly closed her eyes and gave a brief word of thanks.

Then she did jump from her seat and hurry around the desk to Squire. He grabbed onto her, both of them laughing. As the sound faded and the euphoria wore off, Kelly stepped back to look at him. “This is going to be okay.”

“I’m starting to agree with you,” he said, pure joy shining from those glorious eyes. “But we still need to figure out who did this, and where the money is. And getting it back….” He shook his head and ran his hand up the back of his neck.

“I’ll keep praying,” Kelly told him.

“Yeah.” He sank back into his chair. “Let’s keep praying.” 

* * *

Crystal brought her car to a stop in front of a red brick house that Kelly eyed like it had done her a personal wrong. “I don’t know, Crys….”

She liked looking at houses online, but it was hard to tell the layout of them or how big they really were. Camera angles and wide-frame shots made everything exaggerated.

Going to see houses in person gave her anxiety. It felt like someone had dropped a live coal in her stomach and told her not to move. It burned and burned, boiling everything she ate or drank, and made her queasy all the time. 

“What don’t you know?” Crystal asked.

“I don’t know.” She wasn’t even sure she could afford a house right now. Finn loved living with her parents, and with Squire’s position at the ranch so up in the air…. 

If he left town for college, she wanted to go with him. It was July already. What was the point of buying a house if she would be moving in two more months?

She said none of that though, because she didn’t know anything. She couldn’t tell the future, and she honestly did not know what this summer would bring.

“If you say that one more time, I’m going to call Squire and tell him you love him.”

Kelly swung her attention from the house to her cousin. “You wouldn’t dare.”

By the playful look on Crystal’s face, Kelly knew she wouldn’t. “No, I wouldn’t. But you’ve said ‘I don’t know’ about everything. I don’t see how you can’t know if you like Squire. Or how things are going with him.”

“Fine, I like Squire.”

“And how are things going with him?” Crystal nestled into the driver’s seat, as if she was getting ready for a juicy movie. If she’d had popcorn or a drink, she’d take a huge slurp and wait for the gossip to land.

Kelly thought about the kiss in her office, the adoration she’d seen on Squire’s face. The picnic that had been cut short, the tender way he’d taken care of her, the absolutely perfect kiss behind that oak tree.

“He said he didn’t want to leave me here in Three Rivers while he finished his medical degree, and I freaked out because I hadn’t seen Finn in five minutes.”

Pure unhappiness filled her. Being a single mom wasn’t easy, but trying to date at the same time only complicated everything. Perhaps she shouldn’t even be seeing Squire at all.

Crystal’s brow furrowed. “So you never answered him? Told him you’d gladly accept his diamond and move out of your parents’ basement? You want to go with him, right?”

Kelly covered her face with her hands. “I don’t know?”

“No!” Crystal pulled Kelly’s hands down. “You know. Listen to your heart. Or your gut. Better yet, listen to God. But you know.”

Kelly turned away, staring at the house she’d come to see. “I’d go with him,” she whispered to the glass. She twisted back to her cousin. “And how stupid is that? It sounds even worse saying it out loud.” She barked out a laugh. “I mean, I only met him a few weeks ago!”

Her cousin covered Kelly’s hand with her own. “You’ve known him your whole life, baby. That’s a lot longer than a few weeks.”

An insane amount of hope flooded Kelly. She took a deep breath to steady herself before her imagination bled into her reality. Crystal had met and married Scott at a very young age. They hadn’t dated long before the proposal, and they’d been together for a decade now and had three children.

Kelly would never have that same life, but that was okay. She was getting more and more used to the path her life was on, and she absolutely knew she needed to be here in Three Rivers. At the same time, leaving for a few years and coming back would be fine too. 

To get off this loop which she’d been on before, she said, “Let’s go look at this house.”

She wandered through the rooms, imagining her table and chairs in the dining room, Finn’s race car bed in the second bedroom. But it didn’t feel like home. The only place that had felt like that lately was the ranch.

The ranch….

Or maybe it felt like that because of Squire. Maybe no matter where he was, she needed to be there too, because he was beginning to feel like home.

Her home.