A Small Town Thanksgiving

Mike snorted.

“What?” she asked, eager to prod him. “Did I say something wrong?”

He made another noise and she thought that was all the interaction there was going to be, in which case she had gotten more of a response from a squeaky floorboard. But then Mike surprised her.

“Pristine,” Mike repeated with a mocking tone. “All except for the electrical wires and the phone wires that’re buried underground,” he pointed out crisply.

“All except for that,” she agreed, doing her best to keep a straight face. But her tone betrayed her when she told him, “Some progress is actually a lovely thing, Mike.” Was he the type who had little patience with any kind of modern advancements?

“Never said it wasn’t,” Mike replied, keeping his eyes on the road despite the fact that there was nothing moving in either direction and most likely wouldn’t be for most of the drive back to his ranch. They were twenty-five miles into their journey and the only thing on the road was more road.

After the sparse exchange between them, there was more silence.

Sam suppressed a sigh. This man would have no trouble with solitary confinement, she thought. As for her, she didn’t relish silence.

She gave conversation another try. Eventually, the man would have to do some talking, if only in self-defense.

“So, is it just you and your father on the ranch?” she asked him.

He spared her a look that was completely unfathomable. “What makes you say that?”

“No reason,” Sam said with a careless shrug. “I don’t have anything to go on, really, so I thought I’d make a guess.”

He glanced back at the road. Questions about this woman were beginning to pile up in his mind, but he deliberately shoved them to the side, telling himself he didn’t care one way or another.

“You guessed wrong,” he told her in a monotone.

“Obviously,” she allowed good-naturedly. “Okay, why don’t you fill me in?”

It seemed to her as if he turned his head in slow-motion to look at her. “On what?”

Since she knew nothing about him or his family, that left the door wide-open when it came to subject matter. She spread her hands wide to underscore her feeling.

“On anything you want to. Family dynamics. The average annual rainfall around here.” She continued making suggestions since she wasn’t getting any kind of a reaction from him. “What your favorite animal is—”

“What?” Mike turned to look at her again, his brow furrowed. “Why would you want to know that?”

Finally! she thought in triumph. She’d gotten a reaction.

“Because it would be a start,” she told him honestly. “I’m not picky, Mike. I like to get to know the people I’ll be dealing with and,” she continued with emphasis, “I’m a good listener—but you’re going to have to talk for me to have something to listen to.”

Mike blew out a long breath and the silence continued. Just as Sam was starting to think that she’d completely lost him, she heard the tall, silent cowboy say in a low voice, “I’ve got four brothers and a sister, all younger. Only Ray, the youngest, still lives at the ranch—besides me,” he amended. “I’m partial to my horse and I have no idea what the ‘average’ rainfall around here is. I just know if it’s been a good year or a bad year. Anything else?” he asked, although, for the most part, he expected that what he’d just volunteered would be enough to satisfy her.

Looking back later, he realized that he should have known better. It was true that he hardly knew the woman, but he’d always been fairly good about picking up clues and nothing about this woman had suggested that she was the quiet type, given to meditating and being content with her own thoughts for company. He had a feeling that she was the type who probably thought that a brass band was understated.

As suspected, he didn’t have long to wait for the torrent of questions to begin.

“What are your brothers’ and sister’s names? If they don’t live on the ranch with you and your father, what line of work do they do? Are any of them married? What do they think of your father wanting to have his great-great-great-grandmother’s journals and diaries turned into a memoir? And how could you not at least look through one of the journals once you knew about them?”

Overwhelmed by the questions and the speed with which they were emerging and flowing from her lips, Mike pulled the truck over to the side of the road and turned the engine off.

“Hold it!” he ordered.

The command jolted Sam into a moment of silence. But only for a moment. The next moment, she was back asking questions.

Or at least a question.

“Is something wrong?” Sam asked. She assumed that there had to be something wrong with the truck because why else would he have pulled over so abruptly?

“When I asked if there was anything else, I was being—” The proper word eluded him for a moment.

“Sarcastic?” Sam guessed as the situation suddenly dawned on her.

He supposed he had been, but he hadn’t expected her to actually say it. Nor had he expected the tidal wave of words that had come at him. It had completely overwhelmed him.

“I didn’t think I was sending out an invitation for the Spanish Inquisition,” he countered.

“I wasn’t expecting you to answer all the questions,” she told him. “I was giving you a number of questions to choose from.”

No, she wasn’t, Mike thought. She wanted answers to all of them. He could tell by the look in the woman’s eyes—eyes that were unnervingly blue and hypnotic.

As for answering her questions, the hell he would. All answers did for someone like Sam was create more questions.

“Shouldn’t you have a career that would be more in keeping with that insatiable curiosity of yours?” he asked the woman. “Like a journalist, or better yet, a TV reporter?”

She had no use for the latter, not after what she’d lived through.

“You mean someone who sticks a microphone into people’s worst moments and tries to shatter their privacy by asking the most invasive questions?” she asked, thinking of the reporter who had camped out on her doorstep, hoping to capture her reaction for the viewing public when she first heard about Danny’s accident.

Ordinarily, she wasn’t a violent person, but she’d hit the woman’s microphone out of her hand before escaping to her car and driving away. She’d cried for almost half an hour after that.

“Not exactly my cup of tea,” she told Mike stoically.

“Why an invisible writer?” he asked her.

Sam looked at him blankly for a second, then realized that he’d gotten his terms confused. “You mean ghostwriter?”

He shrugged as he turned his key in the ignition again and drove back to the road. “Invisible, ghost, same thing,” he told her glibly.

She supposed that in a way, it was. Besides, he didn’t strike her as a man who liked to quibble over definitions while hunting for the appropriate word to describe something.

Sam addressed the gist of his question instead. “To answer your question, I like to write and more than that, I like to be able to delve into another person’s life, find out what made that person who and what he or she was,” she said honestly. “I like that they share their memories, their childhood, the special moments of their lives. Once I finish, I’m a part of them and they’re a part of me. It gives me roots,” she concluded.

He glanced in her direction. “Don’t you have roots of your own?” he asked.

Maybe she’d said too much, Sam thought. But then, this cowboy probably really wasn’t listening and what she said to him would be forgotten by morning. She risked nothing by sharing and maybe it would even do her some good, she speculated.

“Well, yes, sure,” she acknowledged. “But they’re very sparse roots. My father took off before I was born, so I never got to know him. For all I know, he was an orphan. My mother was hardly ever around, she was too busy earning a living and keeping the wolf from our door. And when she wasn’t doing that, she was looking for Mr. Right.