The Cowboy and the Lady. Marie Ferrarella

Sam merely gave him a long, penetrating look and said nothing. Any attempt to get information from Miss Joan went nowhere, as well. Miss Joan wasn’t one to talk about herself at all.

      Consequently, he’d never found out what had gone wrong, but whenever he did find time to stop by the diner for a cup of coffee, Miss Joan always told him it was on the house, adding that Sam would have disapproved if she charged him for it.

      “Why would I stay with her?” Debi asked.

      It didn’t make any sense to her. After all, the woman didn’t know her from Adam—or Eve. If she were in this woman’s place, she certainly wouldn’t take in a stranger. Things like that just weren’t done these days. There was trusting, and then there was being incredibly naive.

      She had a feeling that if she said as much to this cowboy, she’d offend him, so she kept her comment to herself. But it didn’t change her opinion.

      “I thought I saw a sign when I was passing by Forever that said something about a new hotel having a grand opening.”

      He’d forgotten about that. In his defense, he didn’t get to town very often these days and the hotel was practically brand-new, having opened its doors less than five months ago. What he recalled was that building the hotel had been a huge shot in the arm for a lot of his friends on the reservation, providing many of them with construction work.

      “It’s not just a new hotel,” he informed her. “It’s Forever’s only hotel, as well.”

      “You don’t have any other hotels in town?” she asked in wonder.

      That sounded almost impossible, Debi thought. Indianapolis had over two hundred of them. How could this town have just one—and recently built at that?

      Maybe she had made a mistake in bringing Ryan here after all.

      What choice did you have? she asked herself. And this wasn’t about how big or little the town was. This was about the ranch’s track record, which, according to Sheila, as well as the internet, was perfect so far.

      “If you’d have come here a year ago, we wouldn’t have had this one,” Jackson was telling her. “The people in Forever don’t exactly believe in rushing into things,” he explained with a soft laugh.

      Debi was unprepared for the sound to travel right under her skin, but it did, probably because she was vulnerable. Having the man she had once thought of as the love of her life walk out on her had sent her self-esteem crashing to subbasement level. It made her doubt all of her previous assumptions and had her feeling that she couldn’t trust her own judgment. Everything that she had believed she’d had turned out to be a lie—why would anything be different from here on in?

      “Apparently,” she agreed, feeling as if she was moving through some sort of a bad dream—a dream she couldn’t wake up from.

      She glanced down at the forms he’d just given her and tried to shake off her mood. “Do you want me to fill them out now?” she asked. It might be easier for her to tackle the forms tonight, after she checked in to this new hotel and went to her room.

      “If you don’t mind, I’d like that, yes,” he told her. “I learned that it’s better not to put things off,” Jackson explained. Rising to give her some breathing room while she filled the forms out, he asked, “Would you like something to drink? Coffee? Tea?”

       Or me?

      Now where the hell had that come from? Jackson upbraided himself. That had to be something he’d unknowingly picked up from a program that had been playing in the background, or that he’d seen as a kid. When his parents were arguing, he’d turn the TV up loud to block them out so he could pretend that everything was really all right and that they weren’t screaming all sorts of terrible things to and about each other.

      Jackson looked a little closer at Ryan’s sister. There was something almost appealingly vulnerable about her that brought out the protector in him. He was going to have to be careful to keep that under wraps, he warned himself.

      Debi stopped perusing the forms and looked up at him, clearly surprised. “You have tea?”

      “Yes. We’re not entirely barbaric out here in Texas,” Jackson told her, amused by her surprised expression.

      Realizing that she might have insulted the man, Debi did what she could to backtrack and remove her foot from her mouth.

      “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply anything. It’s just that, well, I can’t visualize you actually drinking tea.”

      “I don’t,” he told her, then answered the question he knew she was thinking. “I keep tea around for guests. I like being prepared.” He paused, waiting. But she didn’t comment or make a request. He tried again. “So, can I get you that tea?”

      Debi shook her head. “No, that’s okay,” she answered. “I’m good.”

       Yes, you are.

      There it was again, he thought. Unbidden thoughts popping up in his head. This wasn’t like him. Besides, the woman wasn’t even his type. Any woman he had ever socialized with either came from the reservation, or had ties to it.

      Maybe he’d been spending too much time with the horses in his off hours. Lately, he’d been devoting himself to the boys and the ranch to the exclusion of everything else. Maybe that had taken its toll on him and this was his body’s way of getting back at him. It was reminding him that he needed to get out and mingle a little bit with people who didn’t come with a list of problems and lives they needed to have turned around.

      It was getting to the point that he was forgetting that there were people like that out there. People whose souls weren’t troubled.

      Jackson forced his mind back to the woman who regarded him as if he was her last hope in the world. At this point in time, he probably was.

      “We’ve also got a couple of cans of diet soda and then there’s always that old standby, water.”

      But Debi shook her head to that as she started filling out the forms. “No, really, I’m fine. Nothing to drink for me, thank you,” she told him, sparing Jackson a quick glance before looking back at the questionnaire on the desk before her.

      “Would you know of anywhere that I could get a job?” she asked.

      If she needed a job, that was going to put an entirely different spin on matters, Jackson thought. Most likely, the woman wouldn’t be able to afford the down payment for her brother’s treatment.

      Since he prided himself on never turning away anyone in need, he was going to have to come up with a way to fix that situation.

      He approached the subject cautiously. “You’re out of work?”

      Her head popped up. “What? Oh, no, I have a job waiting for me back home. I just took a leave of absence so that I could be close by if either Ryan or you needed me.”

      Now that was a loaded sentence that he wasn’t about to allow himself to touch with a ten-foot pole, Jackson thought.

      “What kind of work do you do?” he asked her. “Because Miss Joan could always give you work at the diner. She’s got a lot of part-time waitresses and a good many of them come and go, especially the ones who work at the diner just to get some extra cash that’ll supplement their regular income.”

      “I’m a surgical nurse,” she replied. “You wouldn’t be hiding a regular hospital out here, would you?” She hadn’t seen evidence of one when she’d driven down the town’s Main Street, but that didn’t mean that there wasn’t a hospital around somewhere.

      Jackson shook his head. “It’s a real pity, but we don’t have one,” he confirmed. “The closest hospital to Forever is in the next town, some fifty miles down the road.”

      He made it sound as if it was just a hop, skip and a jump away—and it was a little more than