Cathy Mcdavid - The Rancher's Homecoming

“Mom! How can you say that?”

Fiona went slowly to the table, pulled a chair out for herself and dropped into it. “He’s one of our own.”

“Because he lived here two years?” Annie was aghast at her mother’s calm acceptance. “He’s going to turn it into a working guest ranch.”

“I’m not sure that’s such a good idea.”

Finally! Reason had returned. “I agree. A bed-and-breakfast makes more sense.” Like her own plans for the place.

“I like the idea of a working guest ranch. Not sure why someone didn’t think of that before.”

“But you said—”

“What I meant was the fire’s discouraged people from coming to Sweetheart. Bed-and-breakfast or working guest ranch, both need customers.”

“Fine with me. When he flops, we’ll buy the ranch from him.”

“Sam was always a hard worker. If anyone can pull it off, he can.” Fiona talked as if she hadn’t heard Annie.

“He’ll be in competition with us. Once we rebuild.”

“If we rebuild,” Fiona said tiredly.

Annie didn’t listen to her mother when she got this way. “Did you have a chance to make Nessa’s immunization appointment at the clinic?”

Fiona shook her head. “I was busy.”

Biscuit making? Annie thought grouchily. Did that take all afternoon?

She tried to be patient and understanding with her mother. Really she did. Fiona’s fragile emotional state made the task of rebuilding too overwhelming for her to bear. But once they broke ground, she and Annie’s grandmother would be their old selves and life would return to normal.

Annie had to believe that. If not, she’d be overwhelmed herself, and she couldn’t afford to let that happen.

Long before they finished rebuilding, however, Sam’s working guest ranch would be up and running. Damn him! Annie wanted their inn and not Sam’s ranch bringing the honeymooners and tourists back to Sweetheart.

“Mrs. Rutherford mentioned Sam has a little girl.”

“He does.” Annie made herself eat a biscuit half in case Nessa noticed.

Normally, her daughter would be pestering her to leave. Instead, she’d become interested in a puzzle she was supposed to be putting away.

“I heard she looks like him,” Fiona said.

The food stuck in Annie’s throat. “No need for DNA testing. She’s Sam’s child through and through.”

Except for the sorrow in her eyes.

Annie was no psychiatrist, she didn’t have to be. The girl was obviously troubled—which might not be Sam’s fault. Her mother had died and, as Annie could attest, life-altering events changed a person.

“I bet he’s a good dad.”

She rose from the table, not wanting to talk about Sam or his daughter. “Come on, Nessa. Find your shoes so we can go get Granny Orla.”

Nessa abandoned the puzzle and went on the hunt for her shoes.

“It was a shame things didn’t work out for you and him,” Fiona said from the table. “You must have really broken his heart.”

“Let’s not forget, he left me.”

Fiona sighed. “Bound to happen. Can’t fight the inevitable.”

Her mother’s words stayed with Annie as she and Nessa walked hand in hand to the Rutherfords’.

Ask anyone in town, and they’d say the Hennessy women were cursed. All of them, grandmother, mother and daughter, had loved their men, only to be abandoned by them. In Granny Orla and her mother’s cases, they’d been left with a child to raise alone. Not Annie. Sam had simply taken off—which was practically unheard of in a town renowned for couples marrying.

Rather than be thought of as the third Hennessy woman to suffer unrequited love, Annie had rushed out and wed the first man to show an interest in her.

Can’t fight the inevitable.

It hadn’t made a difference. The Hennessy curse had continued with Annie. For here she was today, abandoned by not one but two men.

She squeezed Nessa’s hand.

Please, please, she silently prayed, don’t let my baby be as unlucky in love as the rest of my family.

* * *

SAM GAZED OVER AT LYNDSEY and mentally kicked himself. She—and he by default—were now foster parents to Porky Pig and Daffy Duck. Lyndsey had named their new charges while in Dr. Murry’s office, after he informed her the pair were both males.

“Did you know baby raccoons are called kits?” Lyndsey struggled to buckle her seat belt while balancing the cardboard boot box containing the kits on her lap. Tube-fed, hydrated and vaccinated, they’d fallen into a deep sleep atop an old towel. “And when they get older, some people call them cubs.”

“Is that so?”

Sam hadn’t heard everything Dr. Murry told them and listened intently as Lindsey repeated the instructions. He’d received not one but two phone calls while at the vet’s. The first from the moving company confirming the arrival of their furniture tomorrow. The second call was from a cattle broker regarding a shipment of calves.

Sam added hiring a livestock manager and locating a string of sound trail horses to his growing task list.

“Chicken’s one of their favorite foods,” Lyndsey said. “And sunflower seeds.”

“Well, we should get along just fine as chicken and sunflower seeds are some of my favorite foods, too.”

She giggled.

Giggled! Sam almost swerved off the road. He hadn’t seen his daughter this happy since before her mother’s accident.

Trisha Wyler had been pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital after a drunk driver ran a stop sign and T-boned her Buick. Her passenger, on the other hand, lived long enough to confess Trisha’s secret.

Sam didn’t just lose his wife that day—his entire belief system was destroyed in one fell swoop.

His father-in-law was responsible for Sam keeping it together, reminding him daily of Lyndsey and the twenty employees at their three-thousand-acre cattle ranch who depended on him.

Sam went through the motions for six months, a huge, empty hole inside him that no amount of whiskey, angry rages, sympathy from friends and a seven-figure settlement could fill. Then, over a year ago, he returned to the Redding California Hotshots, a seasonal volunteer job he’d loved during the early years of his marriage. Within a few months, he was promoted to crew leader, then captain.

Long, grueling, sweat-filled days battling fires on the front line returned him to the world of the living.

Until the day the fire they were fighting in the Sierra Nevada Mountains jumped the ravine and bore down on the town of Sweetheart.

It was his fault. Had he disobeyed his commanding officer’s orders like he wanted to, he might have saved the town. Saved Annie’s family’s inn. His superiors didn’t hold him responsible but Sam did. Enough for ten people.

He quit the Hotshots a week later and found a real estate agent in Lake Tahoe who knew the Sweetheart area, his plan to return temporarily and assess how he could best help the town recover already in motion.

During one of their phone conversations, the agent mentioned the Gold Nugget Ranch. Sam made the offer the next day sight unseen and paid the full asking price without quibbling. As of tomorrow, he was officially in the hospitality business.

And, apparently, in the baby raccoon business, too. He’d foster a hundred of them if Lyndsey would only giggle again.

While Sam had immersed himself in wilderness firefighting as a means to conquer his grief, his daughter grew further and further apart from him. He hoped their time together in Sweetheart would remedy that. Still, one summer of being an attentive father couldn’t wipe out eighteen months of neglect.

“We need to buy canned cat food,” Lyndsey insisted. Her hand lay protectively on Porky and Daffy. “Dr. Murry said they’re old enough for solid food.”