Rancher's Deadly Risk. Rachel Lee

go to the school.”

      She sensed he wanted to be out of her house and into a more neutral environment as quickly as possible. Again she felt that sting, but did her best to ignore it. No point creating a Shakespearean tragedy in her own mind.

      “Sure, if you want,” she said quickly. “Let me get my jacket.”

      Five minutes later, with a couple of her travel mugs filled with coffee for the two of them, they stepped outside into a brisk morning. Fluffy white clouds raced overhead in a cerulean sky.

      “God, it’s beautiful here,” she said.

      “Really?”

      She glanced at him. “Don’t tell me you don’t notice.”

      “Well, I actually do, especially out at my ranch.” For the first time he cracked a genuine smile.

      It almost took her breath away. Of course she’d seen him smile on occasion around school, but never had the full wattage been directed her way. Warmth drizzled through her all the way to her toes, and she had to fight to collect her thoughts.

      “What do you raise?” she asked as he helped her into his battered pickup, a truck that might have once been a bright red, but now was dulled with age and liberal applications of touch-up paint.

      “Actually my dogs do the raising,” he said humorously as he climbed in behind the wheel. “They do a damn good job of looking after my sheep and goats. And I have a few horses. It’s not much, but it’s all I can handle while I’m teaching.”

      “Why do you keep on doing it?”

      “I enjoy it, for one thing. For another, that place has been in my family for over a hundred years. I’m not going to be the one to give it up.”

      She could understand that, although it was hard to imagine. “You must feel a lot of loyalty.”

      A faint smile this time, directed out the windshield as he drove toward the school. “My family invested a lot of sweat in that place. It was their place in the world, and now it’s my place. Maybe some day I’ll have kids and they won’t want it, but fact is, I’m rooted here until I die.”

      “That must be a good feeling.”

      “Sometimes.” He hesitated. “You?”

      “Rootless. I have no way to really understand how you must feel about your ranch. My mom moved us around the country a lot. I was lucky to finish high school in the same town where I started it.”

      “And you’ve continued the gypsy tradition?”

      “You mean because I came here?”

      “For one. But what about the past?”

      “I’ve moved a lot, too. You want the truth? It’s getting old. I’ve never known anyone for more than a few years, and then they get left behind. I started thinking about that, and it struck me that’s a really lonely way to live.”

      “So you’re looking for a place to stay permanently?”

      “If I can find one.”

      “Why this place?”

      “Because it feels right. Because after I’d spent a week here considering the job, I got the feeling that if I stayed long enough to become a part of the community, I could put down some really deep roots. People wouldn’t be strangers on a busy street. They’d have names, and I’d get to know them at least a bit. That maybe someday I wouldn’t be an outsider anymore.”

      “So you’ve always been an outsider?”

      “I’ve never been anything else.”

      He fell silent, pulling into a faculty parking spot near the west wing door. From here she could see the freshly painted and repaired roof and side wall. “Someone said a tornado hit the building?”

      “Yeah, last spring. What a mess, but at least no one was killed. It just grazed the town, but the thing was a half mile wide. If you get out into the countryside you can still see the scars where it passed. At least no one was killed, although we had some injuries.”

      “Is that common here? Tornadoes?”

      “It’s really rare. I won’t say never, but what we saw last spring was one for the record books.”

      “Nobody told me how bad it was.”

      He gave her an amused glance as he turned off the ignition. “They probably didn’t want to scare you away.”

      “I’ve lived in tornado country. It wouldn’t panic me. I just prefer it if they’re not common.”

      “They certainly aren’t here.”

      As they climbed out and headed inside, she could hear sounds from the athletic fields on the other side of the building. “Practice today?”

      “Not until later. I think some youngsters must be playing on the outdoor basketball courts.” He unlocked the door and held it open for her.

      “Why would the school have outdoor courts? I never got that.”

      “Only the team and supervised students get to play basketball in the gymnasium. Outdoors is for fun and practice.”

      “That’s really a nice idea.” But she couldn’t help thinking he had brought her to this side of the school in case some of the basketball players were out there. Or some of the kids she had interrupted yesterday. She doubted he was afraid of any of them, so he must be trying to avoid giving her a moment of discomfort. A generous thought, but really not necessary. She liked to believe she was tougher than that.

      They wended their way through virtually empty hallways. In the distance they could hear a janitor working with a buffer, but other than that the place seemed abandoned.

      He took her to his office just off the gymnasium, not to his homeroom. She guessed it made sense that he’d have two offices given that he wore two hats at the school.

      It wasn’t a huge space, but it contained enough room for maybe half-a-dozen students to gather with him, and a counter where he had a coffeepot and microwave.

      “This is positively homey,” she tried to joke.

      “Given their age, high metabolism and activity level, it takes a lot of effort to keep those young men fed. That microwave gets a megaworkout.”

      “I bet.”

      He cleared a stack of papers to one side, pulled a chair around so she could see his computer screen and turned on the machine.

      “Okay,” he said. “You’ve worked in a lot of different places. How familiar are you with antibullying programs? How much do you already know about the dangers of bullying?”

      “Some,” she admitted. “In one of the schools where I worked, the program had been in place for at least ten years. It started in kindergarten, actually, and was covered every single year.”

      “What were the important mechanisms?”

      “First, faculty and administration. It’s so important for teachers not to ignore bullying, to listen to student complaints about it and do something, and for the administration to be fully involved. You get nowhere if the adults in the school brush it off.”

      He nodded, his blue eyes touching lightly on her face before returning to the computer screen. She wondered, half-humorously, if he would have liked to dive into the monitor to escape. “And the students?”

      “We tried to create a culture where bullying was frowned on. You know as well as I do that peer pressure is more important to youngsters than anything adults do or say. So if you can persuade the students to self-police, to look down on bullies, you can stop a lot of it.”

      “That’s going to be the hard part.”

      “No kidding. Changing a culture