The Quiet Seduction

“You mean a hangover,” she’d retorted. “That’s no excuse not to show up for work. I was counting on you two to repair that section of fence today.”

“Tell the truth, ma’am, he weren’t feelin’ no pain a’tall last time I seen him.” Clyde had smirked at her. He did that a lot, and it invariably drove her up a wall, but what could she do? She had to have someone. With Pete in school five days a week, she simply couldn’t keep up alone.

“Hi, Mom, where’s Storm?” Pete banged in through the kitchen door, stepped back, kicked off his boots, then reentered, smelling of sunshine, horses and little boy.

“Watching the noon news. I piled up pillows on the couch so he could keep his leg elevated and—”

Both turned at the sound that came from across the hall. A thud and a muffled moan. “Oh, Lord, what now?” Ellen muttered. Drying her hands on her shirt-tail, she hurried into the living room, colliding with Pete in the doorway.

Storm was on the floor, blinking awake. “What happened?” she cried, rushing to kneel beside him. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“No, this is my idea of a good time,” he said, his voice like crushed gravel. “I fell asleep and rolled off the damned couch!” Pete squatted beside him and he closed his eyes. “Sorry, son. Forget I said that.”

Pete, with one hand under the man’s arm and the other reaching for the crutch, said solemnly, “I know stuff lots worse than damn. You ought to hear what Booker calls that old Zeus! He calls him—”

“Never mind,” Ellen said repressively.

Together they managed to get him on his feet again, and Ellen suggested he move into the kitchen, as it was time for lunch. “I can pull up a stool so that you can sit and prop your foot on it.”

“I don’t need the stool, but thanks,” he said. They’d argued about it before. She made suggestions that he ignored for the most part, but he invariably apologized for putting her to so much extra work.

Ellen didn’t mind the extra effort, she really didn’t. It was nice having another adult in the house. Pete seemed to enjoy him, as well.

He hobbled into the kitchen just as the back door opened and a scruffy-looking individual wearing ragged jeans and a dirty shirt came in. “This is Clyde,” Ellen said, tight-lipped. “Clyde, this is Mr. Storm. Clyde, you might want to wash up.” She looked pointedly at his grimy hands, then busied herself pouring iced tea, leaving the decision up to him.

“Yes’m,” he said, disappearing into the washroom off the kitchen, where he stayed for all of five seconds.

“Don’t think I seen you around these parts before,” the hired hand said with a smirk, looking from Storm to Ellen and back.

Pete said gruffly, “Storm’s visiting.”

“That so?” Clyde had tracked mud into the kitchen, which Ellen made a point of sweeping up. “Sorry ’bout that, ma’am,” he said, leering at Ellen’s backside as she leaned into the cleaning closet to hang up the dust-pan.

Storm’s eyes met Pete’s. The boy was furious and embarrassed, but being a boy, there wasn’t a whole lot he could do about it. Storm might be impaired in a lot of ways, but that much he picked up on easily.

“This looks mighty good,” he said with a smile that was patently false. Change the subject. You’re in no shape to take on the bastard in hand-to-hand, much less to take his place if he quits.

But he was getting there. One more day and she wouldn’t have to depend on that pair. Even with a sore head and a bum leg, he could shovel manure and push a wheelbarrow.

“I haven’t had time to shop for groceries this week,” Ellen apologized. “I heard part of the roof was torn off the warehouse next to the IGA.”

“And the church steeple,” Pete said with boyish excitement. “Man, it was busted to pieces! Joey said they found the pointy part way over by Mrs. Williams’s house.”

They made sandwiches from the ingredients she’d set out and drank iced tea and talked about the storm damage, reports of which were still coming in. Clyde didn’t have much to say, but he made the little he did say unpleasant by taking a big bite of bologna, onion and cheese on white bread and talking while he chewed. As far as Storm was concerned, that alone was a firing offense.

“Man, that sure is a ugly knot on your head,” Clyde said admiringly.

Storm wondered what he was supposed to say—thank you? If he’d been Pete’s age, he might have said, “That sure is an ugly knot on your shoulders. What is it, your head?”

Irritated, he excused himself and stood, picking up his plate and glass. Ellen frowned at him, and he got the message. He wanted to say, “I’m not totally helpless. Let me at least do this much.”

But with both Pete and Clyde watching, he remained silent. Before he left he was going to have to find a way to repay her for hauling him out of that ditch, feeding him, giving him a bed, not to mention binding up his knee and ankle and doctoring his assorted minor scrapes. Even in the shape he’d been at the time, the feel of her cool hands on his hot, swollen flesh had damn near finished him off. Under the circumstances, his reaction had been just plain crazy.

She’d even washed his shirt, his shoes and his underwear. Silk underwear. What kind of man wore silk underwear? What was he, anyway, some kind of freaking Hollywood type? A drug lord?

No way. He might not know who he was, but he sure as hell knew who he wasn’t.

At the moment he was wearing a pair of her late husband’s jeans, which were a few inches too short in length and slightly too big at the waist. Instead of bunching them up with a belt, he’d let them ride low on his hips. Pete said he looked cool.

Cool or not, it was the best he could do for now. His own pants were beyond help. He’d looked them over, hoping for a clue—hoping for something to jar his mind loose. A tailor’s label—anything.

There’d been nothing. Nothing other than the fact that they were flawlessly tailored of an excellent worsted, cut to hang just the way a pair of pants should hang, although just how the devil he knew that, he couldn’t have said.

“Do you always invite your hired hands to eat in the house with you and Pete?” he asked Ellen when they were alone together in the kitchen. Ellen had stayed behind to wash the dishes. He put away the mustard and mayonnaise and opened cabinets until he found where the salt and pepper belonged.

For a moment he thought she wasn’t going to answer, but then she shrugged. “The last man did. Mr. Caster was a thoroughly decent man. Pete liked him a lot. When we bought the place, the old bunkhouse had already been turned into storage, but we were planning to clean it out and add a bathroom so he wouldn’t have to commute. We never got around to it.”

She didn’t have to explain. There hadn’t been enough time then, and there wasn’t enough money now. He was getting pretty good at sizing up situations from insufficient evidence, or maybe he’d always been good at it. There was no way of knowing…yet.

“Booker and Clyde have only been working here a few weeks. Mr. Caster left toward the end of September, as soon as his social security kicked in. His arthritis was getting pretty bad, not that he’d admit it. I started advertising for a replacement as soon as he gave notice, but it didn’t take long to discover that anyone even marginally competent was already working. By the time that pair of…of—”

“Bums,” Storm supplied.

“To put it delicately.” She spared him a fleeting smile. “Anyway, by the time they showed up, I was at my wit’s end. I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t even bother to check their references.”

She was an easy mark, he concluded. She’d proved that much by dragging home a man she had never before laid eyes on. A vulnerable woman, living alone with her son, yet she had brought him into her home, taken care of him—even lent him her late husband’s clothes and shaving gear. He could’ve been a proverbial ax murderer for all she knew. There were no rules that said ax murderers couldn’t get caught in a tornado.

“You should have called nine-one-one and let someone else drag me out of that ditch.”

She shrugged. He decided on the spot that the least he could do in return was to see that those two scoundrels who were supposed to be working for her didn’t take advantage of her. The kid was willing, but at eight years old, he simply wasn’t up to the task. “Ellen, a woman needs to be careful about the kinds of people she brings home with her, especially when there’s a kid involved.”

She looked at him, started to speak, and then bit her lip. It occurred to him that green eyes could look both clear as glass and opaque as moss, depending on the light. Or perhaps on the lady’s mood.

“If you’ll excuse me, I need to go turn Zeus into the large pasture. The grass there isn’t nearly as good, but he gets restless in the small pen.”

When the going gets uncomfortable, the uncomfortable get going. The words came to him, a paraphrase of something or other. Apt, though, he mused. “Sure, go ahead. You need some help?”

“No thanks. If you’re smart, you’ll get off that leg.”

Whether he was smart remained to be seen. He was tempted to follow her just to prove he wasn’t totally useless. He could open and shut gates, if nothing else. However, knowing that the best way to help was to stay out of the way, he spent several minutes scraping together the scant evidence he had and trying to weave it into something more solid.

Judging from the look of his hands—not to mention his clothes—he was probably a white-collar worker of some sort. Banker, broker… “Doctor, lawyer, Indian chief,” he finished out loud. The situation might even have been amusing if only it weren’t so damned frustrating. Just because his nails had been relatively clean when he’d been found and dragged here to the Wagner ranch, that didn’t mean he was a respectable businessman. He could just as easily be a professional gambler, an embezzler, a pimp—the possibilities were endless.

And endlessly chilling.

“Think, man—concentrate! Speech patterns. Words, images—they don’t come out of a vacuum.”

Judging from certain speech patterns and word images that seemed to come naturally to him, while he might not be a crook, he was no stranger to the criminal life. Best case scenario, he was a cop.