A Small Town Thanksgiving

It certainly did his.

The next moment, Mike cleared his throat and said, “Then I guess if we have everything, we’d better get going.”

“I guess so,” she agreed, doing her best to keep a straight face. She didn’t want this man to think that she was laughing at him or having fun at his expense.

But she did flash a smile in his direction.

Without a word, Mike took possession of her suitcase from her and claimed the black faux-leather briefcase with his other hand.

Mike took exactly two steps before he abruptly stopped walking and turned around to look at her. Not expecting the sudden halt, Sam managed to just barely catch herself just in time to keep from plowing straight into him.

“Is something wrong?” she asked him, doing her best to appear unaffected by this whole venture. Her tall, handsome driver had no way of knowing how many knots currently resided in her stomach and she was going to keep it that way.

“Do you know what you’re getting into?” Mike asked.

Until he’d just said the words out loud, it hadn’t even occurred to him to ask. But this Sam woman appeared delicate to him. Moreover, she looked like someone who was accustomed to having all the amenities that places like New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and cities of that size had to offer a woman like her.

Forever didn’t even have a hotel and there was just one movie theater in town, known simply as The Theater, and it ran second-run movies. And while they weren’t exactly backward here in Forever, they certainly weren’t considered cutting-edge, either. Not by a really long shot.

A “crime spree” here meant that Donnie Taylor and his younger brother, Will, carved their initials on the sides of two barns, or spray-painted those initials on the sides of someone’s garage.

There was nothing modern or even noteworthy about a town like Forever. And most of the people who lived here liked it that way.

“Yes, I’m going to be reading and organizing some journals and diaries written by one of your ancestors. Your father said that this woman had been carried off by some Native Americans and spent a year with them before managing to escape. I’m assuming that she couldn’t write anything down in a journal while it was happening, but once she was able to return home, she put everything down on paper as best she could, doing it in such a way as to make it seem that it was happening as she wrote.” She looked up at the cowboy’s tanned face. “Did I get that right?”

The wide shoulders rose and fell in a careless shrug. “I don’t know, I didn’t look at the books.”

Maybe it was his imagination, but Sam seemed both surprised and a bit confused by his answer. “Oh, but how could you help not looking through the books?” she asked him. Had she stumbled across something like that herself, she knew she wouldn’t have closed her eyes until she’d read all—or at least most of it—herself.

But then, she had always been hungry for family connections, something she’d never really had outside of her mother.

The next moment, realizing that her question might have sounded somewhat condescending or judgmental, Sam quickly withdrew it.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by that,” she apologized.

He shrugged off both her apology and the question that had come before it. “That’s not what I’m referring to,” Mike told the young blonde.

“Then what are you referring to?” she asked him pleasantly, giving every indication that she wanted to hear him out no matter what he had to say.

“I just wanted to make sure that you knew what this place was like. Forever, I mean,” he clarified in case she wasn’t following him. He was still tripping over his own tongue, he thought in disgust. “We don’t have a hotel,” he began.

Sam nodded. “I gathered that,” she replied. “Your father very generously invited me to stay at the ranch while I worked. But then you’re probably aware of that,” she realized, thinking out loud.

“Yeah, I am,” he told her, then went back to listing the town’s shortcomings. He honestly didn’t know if he was trying to chase her away with the facts, or telling her this so that she was forewarned as to what to expect now, while she was still fresh and hot on the idea of pursuing this restoration project. “There are no fancy restaurants here.”

“I didn’t come here to eat, I came to work,” she pointed out simply.

Mike found himself being reeled in by the woman’s smile, despite his best efforts not to be. He wondered if she even knew how magnetic that smile of hers was. The next moment, a mocking voice in his head asked, How could she not?

“All we’ve got is a diner,” Mike told her, continuing to list what he assumed a stranger would see as Forever’s shortcomings.

“That sounds more than adequate for anything I might want,” Sam assured him.

Since he’d mentioned Miss Joan’s—how could anyone spending more than ten minutes in Forever be oblivious to Miss Joan’s?—he felt it only right to give a little equal time to the only place in town that served alcohol.

“There’s a saloon if you feel the need to unwind,” he heard himself telling her. He slanted a glance in her direction to see if this piece of information would be welcomed, or barely registered. It turned out to be the latter.

“Good to know,” she murmured. “Although I probably won’t be visiting it,” Sam speculated. “I’ll be too busy with the journals.” She looked up at him again, waiting. “Anything else?”

He thought for a moment, then said, “There’s no nightlife here.”

She didn’t know what he was getting at. She could only make an educated guess that he thought she was something she wasn’t. That she required entertainment and special treatment, like she was “high maintenance.”

Nothing could have been further from the truth—and Sam was proud of that fact.

But for now, she tried to set his mind at ease as best she could.

“Mr. Rodriguez, I’m not exactly sure what it is you’re saying or what you expect me to be, but I was raised in a small town in Maryland where they rolled up the sidewalk at seven-thirty every night. I don’t require a ‘night life.’ What I require is a comfortable work atmosphere and an occasional conversation with friendly, decent people, something I’m assuming won’t be difficult to encounter here.

“Now, if you find any of that objectionable or believe that any of it wouldn’t be to your father’s liking, tell me now so we can iron all this out before I get down to work.”

Mike frowned as he listened to her, unable to believe that a woman who looked the way this Sam person did would be satisfied with so little.

“You’ll be bored,” Mike predicted.

Sam smiled at him in response. A wide, amused, guileless smile that sent ripples of unnamed anticipation through his gut.

“I am never bored, Mr. Rodriguez,” she told him. “If need be, I make my own entertainment. Now, is there anything else?” she asked.

He blew out a breath and picked up the suitcase handle again.

“No,” he told her, then added as an afterthought, “You can call me Mike.”

“Mike,” she echoed with a pleased nod of her head. She’d found the first chink in the wall. Sam considered it her first victory.

The first of many, Sam promised herself.

Chapter Three

“This is really beautiful country,” Sam commented as she stared out the window of Mike’s truck.

They’d been driving for about half an hour and in that time, the rather stoic cowboy behind the steering wheel had said nothing. Oh, he’d grunted a couple of times in acknowledgment of something she had said, but only after she’d deliberately addressed the remark or question to him.

As far as forming actual words on his own, he’d stubbornly refrained from that.

Obviously, the man had used up his less than vast supply of vocabulary at the airport. Determined to get more than a noise in response, she tried again, hoping that commenting on a preferred topic would get the taciturn man to speak.

“It probably hasn’t changed all that much since the first settlers came out here in their covered wagons,” she speculated when he still said nothing. “It looks untouched,” she added, glancing in Mike’s direction. When he still gave no indication that he was going to comment on her observation, she piled on another word. “Pristine, even.”