The Rancher's Homecoming. Arlene James

cutie.”

      “She just started doing that,” Callie informed him with a smile. “She won’t say ‘mama’ yet, but she’s suddenly saying, ‘hi.’ Of course, she has no idea what it means.”

      “Mmm,” Bodie hummed against her mother’s leg.

      Rex walked around them both and sat down in the metal lawn chair next to Callie. It sagged and creaked ominously. He held his breath, but the chair seemed stable enough. With dusk settling around them, the stifling heat had begun to abate, but the only breeze stirring was that pulled in by the ceiling fan in the living room.

      “I’ll get someone out here to look at the AC unit tomorrow,” he said. “According to Dad, it just needs coolant.”

      Callie nodded beside him and softly said, “Wes is going to need air-conditioning to get through his chemo. He doesn’t think so, but I do. We’re two hours farther south here than Tulsa. You know how brutal these summers can be. I hate to think of him being sick to his stomach in hundred-degree heat.”

      “I appreciate that,” Rex said. “I should’ve taken care of it already.”

      “You’ve had other things on your mind.”

      “I have. There’s something on my mind now.”

      “You want to know why my dad is so upset about me working for you.”

      “Yeah.”

      “Ben Dolent.”

      “Who?”

      “Ben Dolent. He runs Dad’s grain silo, and Dad has him picked out as his next son-in-law.”

      “I take it you’re not in favor of the idea.”

      “No.”

      “What about your first husband? Did Stuart pick him, too?”

      “Oh, no,” Callie said, shaking her head and chuckling. “Bo was the exact opposite of the sort of man my dad wants me to marry.”

      “What sort of man would that be?” Rex asked.

      “One he can control, I guess,” Callie answered. “The kind who will do as he’s told and be glad for it.”

      “And Bo wasn’t that kind of man?”

      “He wasn’t.” She curved her hand around Bodie’s little head, smoothing the baby’s pale hair. “Bo didn’t care about money. He didn’t care about status. All he cared about was me, us and serving God. He had a campground ministry over at Turner Falls. Didn’t pay much. I had to work to make ends meet, but we had all we needed. For the little while we were together. We were only married a few months. He hadn’t had time to put away anything for us.”

      “I’m sorry you lost him,” Rex said.

      She cleared her throat, her gaze on the baby. “I’m still trying to figure out what God’s doing,” she admitted softly, shaking her head. “I just don’t understand yet. I worked and saved every penny right up until my labor started, but when Bodie was nine weeks old she got sick and couldn’t go to day care, and that’s all it took. We had to go back to my dad’s. I know it was God’s will. I just don’t believe it’s His will for me to marry Ben Dolent.”

      Rex didn’t know what to say to that. His own marriage had imploded because his wife’s father had wanted a son-in-law who would “do as he’s told and be glad for it” and his wife had been only too happy to try to provide the same. When Rex had balked, the marriage had suffered. He’d sought refuge in work, thinking that if he could prove himself professionally then she would take pride in him. Instead, she’d gone to another man. He couldn’t help thinking that they’d still be together if she’d had Callie’s strength of character or if she’d loved him as much as Callie had apparently loved her husband.

      He smiled at Bodie. “You named her after her father, didn’t you?”

      “Yes. Her father and my mother. Bodie Jane. It seemed appropriate. She’ll never know her daddy, and I was only four when my mother died. I barely remember her.”

      “It’s a good name,” he said, getting to his feet, “and it’s good that the two of you are here.”

      “I’m glad you think so, especially after the way my father acted today.”

      He did think so. A strong urge to put his hand on her shoulder seized him. He did it before he could stop the impulse, and the rightness of it shook him. Looking at his hand as it cupped her slender shoulder, he suddenly felt as if he hardly knew himself. The frayed cuff of his father’s old work shirt and the sheer size of his hand against her smooth, firm, woman’s frame rattled him. It was as if he’d never really seen his own hand before, never really touched a woman. He thought of Amy, and for a moment he wondered if she’d even been real. Shaking his head he took his hand away, thinking that he really needed to get some rest.

      As for Callie Deviner, he was glad to have her help, but their arrangement was temporary, and even were it not, he had no intention of allowing history to repeat itself.

      Pretty little Callie Deviner had the wrong sort of father.

      Besides, once Wes was able to take over the reins of Straight Arrow Ranch again—or if it should be determined that Wes could never do so—Rex would be heading back to Tulsa. That’s where his life and his career were based. For as long as Rex could remember, he’d dreamed of leaving War Bonnet and the Straight Arrow Ranch. He’d wanted no part of the backbreaking drudgery that was his father’s life here, always at the mercy of the weather and whatever new disease befell the livestock or the crops.

      No, this life, and any woman so obviously comfortable with this life, was not for him. That meant he would be wise to keep his distance from Callie.

      “I’ll say good-night,” he told her.

      “Good night.”

      “I’ll, um, find that high chair in the morning.”

      “It’s not important.”

      “I promised Dad.”

      “All right.”

      He reached down to smooth a hand over Bodie Jane’s head. “Good night, precious.”

      “Hiii,” she said.

      Callie laughed and instructed her. “Bye-bye. Bye-bye.”

      “Buh-buh-buh-buh-buh.”

      Chuckling, Rex went into the house, said good-night to his father and climbed the stairs to read and wait for the dark that would bring him rest for another arduous day.

       Chapter Four

      The air conditioner repairman had to come all the way from Ardmore, so it would be late afternoon before he could reach them. Naturally, Friday turned up scorching hot before lunchtime. Wes fretted about the horses in the paddock beyond the stable barn.

      “They need fresh bedding and the water troughs have to be cleaned, but I don’t want to plague Rex with anything more just now,” he told Callie when she brought him a tall glass of iced tea.

      “Can’t one of the ranch hands see to it?”

      “There’s only the three of them, and Rex has them working cattle today. Looks like a bumper crop of bull calves this year, and they’ve got to be castrated before the end of the month.” He shot an embarrassed glance at Callie. “Sorry. That’s blunt talk for a town girl.”

      Callie chuckled. “You forget that I grew up in the Feed and Grain. I’ve heard worse, believe me.”

      “All the same,” he mumbled.

      Callie puzzled on the situation for a moment, then asked, “Do you have a cell phone?”

      The