Marie Ferrarella - Cavanaugh Cowboy

She opened her mouth, and he had a feeling she was about to say something less than flattering, but then she closed it again. Regrouping, the woman said, “You’re serious.”

“Yes.”

Blowing out a breath, she spread her hands wide and said, “Here.”

Sully stared at the shapely woman, dumbfounded. So much for the sanctity of old Westerns. “ You’re the foreman?” he questioned in disbelief.

It wasn’t the first time one of the down-on-his-luck drifters Miss Joan had decided to take in looked appalled at the idea of having a woman giving him orders.

“I am. Something wrong with that?” Rae asked.

“No, no,” Sully denied, trying not to trip over his own tongue.

He had grown up in a house of capable females. He had no problem with the idea of a woman running the ranch and issuing orders—he just really wished he’d been briefed about that ahead of time so he wouldn’t have come across like a dolt.

Belatedly, he said, “I’m fine with that.”

Rae took a deep breath, silently telling herself not to get on her soapbox. Scrutinizing the man in front of her, she decided that he didn’t really look as if the idea of having a woman telling him what to do went against his grain. But the guy did look stunned.

She came to the only conclusion she could. “Miss Joan didn’t tell you, did she?”

Sully allowed himself a hint of a smile. “That she did not.” Then, because he could be seen as partially to blame, he said, “In all fairness, I didn’t ask. She just said to go find the foreman, Ray Mulcahy.”

And therein lay the problem, Rae thought. “Rae’s short for Rachel,” she told him.

“Oh. Never thought of that,” he confessed.

And then, for the first time in a while, Sully started to laugh.

Rae’s eyes narrowed, and she felt her back going up again. She’d worked hard to get and keep this position. Miss Joan was charitable, but the woman was also tough and gave nothing away that hadn’t been earned.

“What’s so funny?” she asked.

It took Sully a second to catch his breath. “My sisters are really going to get a kick out of this when I tell them about how I put my foot in my mouth.”

“You have sisters?” she asked.

The drifters who came through professed to be loners and kept to themselves for the most part. They hardly ever volunteered any details about themselves, and certainly never this soon.

Maybe this one wasn’t just a drifter, she thought.

“And brothers,” Sully told her.

Somehow, it felt comforting to mention his family. That surprised him, because all he’d wanted to do in the last few weeks was just detach himself from everyone and everything.

“And a whole bunch of cousins,” he added, “almost half of whom are female.” He offered her an apologetic smile. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound like I was insulting you before.”

“You weren’t,” Rae replied.

Even if he had, it wasn’t the sort of thing she admitted. To do so would have been to expose her own feelings, and she never did that.

Rae examined him more closely. He had a tired look about him, she decided. But he didn’t appear as if he’d been knocked down one too many times or lost one con too many. That raised questions for her.

“Why are you here again?” Rae asked.

He wondered if she was trying to trip him up. “Miss Joan sent me.”

“To work?” she questioned.

Sully thought for a second, wanting to get the wording just right. “She said something about earning my keep.”

Rae studied the man next to her, trying to work this out in her head. He didn’t look like a wrangler, but then, neither did Rawlings or Warren, the men who were currently working on the ranch.

But there was something different about him, something she couldn’t quite put her finger on. She didn’t like not knowing. Not knowing made her feel as if she wasn’t fully prepared for whatever might come down the road.

“Where are you from?” she asked.

“Aurora. California,” Sully added when the young woman who was Miss Joan’s unlikely foreman continued looking at him blankly.

“California,” she repeated. “And you worked your way here?”

“I flew,” Sully told her, not really sure just what the woman was asking him.

This was still not really making any sense to Rae. “To Forever?” she asked skeptically.

Sully still didn’t see what the problem seemed to be. “Yes.”

Rae’s eyebrows drew together over penetrating blue eyes. “On purpose?”

He nearly laughed at the disbelieving expression on her face but instinctively knew that would not go over too well with this woman.

So instead, he told her, “Seamus, my great-uncle, thought I might like it here.”

“This great-uncle of yours, Uncle Seamus,” she said, wrapping her tongue around the man’s name. “He doesn’t like you very much, does he?”

The way she said it, it wasn’t a question—it was a conclusion.

Sully looked at the woman, wondering if Rae was trying to goad him or if this was actually her opinion. He couldn’t help wondering what Seamus would have thought of this feisty five-four embodiment of womanhood.

He probably would have liked her, Sully decided. His great-uncle liked women with fire in their blood who weren’t afraid to speak their mind.

“Never had a reason to believe that before,” Sully finally replied.

Rae shrugged, her shoulders moving carelessly beneath her checked work shirt.

“Have it your way. Anyway, you’re in luck,” she told him. “Early this morning I found a whole length of fence that needs to be replaced and you look more able-bodied, like you could probably do a better job of it than the two wranglers I’ve got here working on the ranch now.”

Leading the way to her truck so she could drive him over to the location, Rae stopped walking for a moment. She decided it would be more prudent for her to ask rather than just to assume. “You do know how to dig post holes and swing a sledgehammer, don’t you?”

There was a fifty-fifty chance she wasn’t trying to insult him, Sully thought. In either case, he answered, “I think I can manage.”

Rae nodded. She’d thought as much. “Good. At any rate, you probably can’t be any worse at it than Rawlings and Warren are.”

“Rawlings and Warren?” he echoed. He was trying to keep all the names straight, having a feeling that Rae Mulcahy wasn’t much for repetition.

Rae nodded. “Those are the current two drifters that Miss Joan okayed to work on the ranch. Actually,” she reflected, “Mr. Harry was the one who gave the okay in this case.”

“Mr. Harry, that would be Miss Joan’s husband?” Sully asked.

He was fairly certain that Miss Joan’s husband and Mr. Harry were the same person, but he didn’t want to take anything for granted and make a mistake. He had a feeling that people around here were pretty touchy. He wasn’t really familiar with the names and dynamics of this hamlet yet, and he didn’t want to step on any toes if he could help it.

This time Rae didn’t stop walking as she spared him a quick glance. “Is that just a lucky guess on your part or are you bucking for sharpest tool in the tool box?” she asked.

He got the feeling that he was attempting to maneuver across a chasm walking on a tightrope and trying not to lose his balance—while his foreman was rooting for the rope.

“Why don’t we split the difference and just move on?” Sully suggested diplomatically.

“Get in,” she told him, indicating the truck. When she got in behind the steering wheel, she waited for him to sit down on his side before she asked, “What’s your name, anyway?” Rae had suddenly realized that while this new man knew her name, she hadn’t bothered finding out his.