“Maybe it’s time you tried again,” Tex suggested.
Zach did a double take. He looked into the cook’s friendly dark eyes. “Me, try again? Have you been into the cooking sherry?” Zach asked. “As if I didn’t have enough problems. As if I didn’t have goals which don’t include anything but raising the best beef cattle in the state. Now you want me to go out looking for romance?”
“Not go out looking. Just, you know, don’t fight it.”
Zach stared at the man. In all-these years he’d never had a personal talk like this with him. Now all of a sudden Tex was talking to him like a Dutch uncle. Though Zach’s real uncle had never talked like this, either. He was a cool, tough rancher who hadn’t known what to say to the boy he’d raised.
“If she’s not a housekeeper, why’d you hire her?” Tex asked.
“I don’t know.” Zach raked his hand through his hair. “I was desperate. I thought she’d been sent.”
“Maybe she was,” Tex suggested. “By the angels.”
“I meant by the agency.” He didn’t say that he’d had a strange, irrational urge to protect her. Because when he heard she’d fallen for the likes of Joe, he somehow knew he had to keep her from falling for the next randy cowboy who came along.
“Maybe it was a mistake hiring her,” Zach said. “I’m probably gonna have to let her go.”
Tex frowned and stood up. “Don’t do anything till you read your horoscope tomorrow,” he warned. “Or you’ll be sorry.”
The next morning Mallory stood at the entrance of the walk-in closet and realized she had nothing in her wardrobe that vaguely resembled what a housekeeper would wear. Couldn’t the super-wonderful Diane have left behind one housekeeper outfit? One powder-blue polyester shirt and pants would have done it, preferably with an elastic waist. Along with a set of instructions as to how to be a housekeeper. But the closet had been cleaned out. And Mallory’s clothes were either trim skirts she’d worn while teaching that didn’t seem to fit anymore or warm pants for stargazing. So she dug out a pair of baggy cotton shorts from the bottom of her duffel bag and a T-shirt to wear to the ten o’clock meeting.
Not that it mattered. He wasn’t there.
“He’s going to town to raise a little hell with the job agency,” Mike the mechanic told her. “Feels he’s not getting enough attention from them. Said he’s not coming back till they find him a foreman. Can’t run a ranch without a foreman. Boss’s getting impatient. He’s got no foreman. So, no meeting today.”
“But...” She looked around in desperation. What was she supposed to do? How was she supposed to do it? She thought he’d brief her today.
“Boss said he wants to see you this afternoon.”
“This afternoon? I’m not waiting around until afternoon to talk to him. I want to see him now.”
Mike pointed out the window where Zach was cleaning the windshield of his racy black sports car. “There he is. Don’t blink or you’ll miss him.”
Mallory dashed past the mechanic and out the front door. Zach was just easing his tall frame into the front seat. “Wait a minute,” she yelled. She didn’t wait for him to answer, she went back in the house, grabbed her purse and jacket from her room and went back outside.
He turned to look in her direction, his face expressionless, as if he’d never seen her before, never heard her yell at him to wait, and started the motor. She yanked the passenger door open.
“Wait a minute. I was expecting a meeting. I need to talk to you.”
“Later,” he said brusquely.
“No, now. I’m the housekeeper, right? I’m supposed to housekeep, but I don’t know what to do or how to do it.”
He exhaled loudly and impatiently. “Don’t do anything. Relax. We’ll talk about it when I get back.”
“I can’t relax. I’m a believer in the Puritan work ethic. If I’m working for you I’m going to work. But I can’t work if I don’t know what to do. I want to talk about it now.”
“I’m going to town now.”
“Then I’ll go with you,” she said, climbing into the seat next to him. “I have some shopping to do. We can talk along the way.”
He shook his head. She fastened her seat belt with a loud click.
“Okay,” he said, racing the motor. “But when we get there, you’re on your own. I’ve got business to attend to.”
“I know. At the job agency.”
He headed down the driveway without speaking. She looked out the window. She’d said she wanted to talk, but now that she was sitting next to him, the smell of leather upholstery mingling with his citrus aftershave, she couldn’t think of anything to say. Her mind was blank. The questions that were burning to be asked were all forgotten.
Her body was buzzing with awareness. Awareness of his oxford cloth shirt with the sleeves rolled up revealing muscular sun-bronzed arms. His strong, capable hands on the steering wheel. This idea of riding into town with him was not a good one. Sitting so close she had goose bumps on her bare arms. She was acting too much on impulse these days, unable to think logically. She had half a mind to tell him to stop and let her out, that she’d walk back.
But he distracted her with a question. “So who’s responsible for laying this work ethic on you?”
“My grandparents.”
“They lived with you?”
“No, we lived with them. They were wonderful. Hardworking, old-fashioned in some ways, but understanding, too.”
“What about your parents?”
“My father was in the foreign service. Two years here, two years there. At first they sent us back in the summers to Grandma Annie and Grandpa Ted’s, my sister and I, but the schools were iffy and Mimi and I were tired of moving all the time, making new friends, changing schools. So finally we came back to live with them yearround in Arizona. Grandpa had a small telescope set up in the backyard. I guess that’s where I got the idea I wanted to be an astronomer.”
He nodded.
“But that’s not what I wanted to talk about,” she said. “It’s about the job.”
“Must have taken a lot of hard work and study to get the job, and years of graduate school.”
“That’s where the work ethic came in handy,” she explained. “But that’s not the job I mean.”
“What classes do you teach?”
“Three sections of Astronomy 101 and an advanced seminar. I really like the freshmen best,” she said, turning to face him, enthusiasm spilling from her voice. “Taking them out the first night with a map of the sky. We plot the stars and the planets. The best part is to see the students get excited.”
“The way you did when you looked into your grandfather’s telescope.”
She studied his profile, the high cheekbones and the broad forehead. She didn’t expect someone who’d seemed so self-centered to also be intuitive. “Yes. How did you know?” she asked.
He shrugged and asked some more questions, which she answered. But she never got a chance to discuss her duties at all. When they arrived, he pulled into a parking space on the main street.
“Meet you back at the car, in what...two hours?” he suggested.
“Fine,” she said.
Zach burst into the placement office on the third floor of the only high-rise