Evan moved toward the kid. He had no intention of hurting him, would be satisfied to throw a scare into him good enough that he’d be an old man in a rocking chair before he ever messed with another man’s truck.
But for a moment, his eyes locked on the boy’s and he saw something. Something he didn’t want to see. He skidded to a halt, and stared at those large gray eyes.
There was defiance in them, for sure. And a little deeper than that, fear.
And a little deeper than that…there was need. Need so raw and naked it killed the anger dead within Evan.
He ran a hand through his hair, and looked at the woman, a mistake, since it only confused him more.
“You just passing through?” he asked her, hopefully. She couldn’t possibly be planning to stay here—a tiny spec on the map, an equally long distance from either Medicine Hat, Alberta, or Swift Current, Saskatchewan.
She dragged her gaze away from the boy who was sullenly inspecting the toe of his sneakers. “Actually, no. I’ve been hired at the Outpost. Of course, I’ll pay for the damage to your truck. Right now. I’ll—” She started fumbling with her pocketbook. “I’ll write you a check. If you’ll accept one from an out-of-town bank, for now. I—”
“No.” Evan almost had to look over his shoulder, so dumbfounded was he that the emphatic no had issued forth from his mouth.
Because he knew, absolutely, that the thing to do was take her check.
Or let the cops handle it.
He needed to be in his nice new truck, driving away from her. Fast.
“No?” she repeated, the pocketbook hanging open, her hand frozen in its desperate search for a checkbook.
“No,” he repeated, knowing he was going to do it. The good thing, the decent thing. Damn, sometimes it was hard. The easiest thing in the world was to be a self-centered SOB. He knew; he’d had lots of practice.
But if Dee had run forever with Jesse, if she hadn’t died in an accident, this could be his boy standing here, nine or ten years in the future. If Evan was going to be the father his son deserved, he had to learn to do the right thing. Every time.
He suddenly felt calm and detached and like a voice deep within him, a voice he had learned to respect long ago, when the bull charged, when the brakes failed, when the thermometer registered thirty below and the cows still had to eat, when his son was gone and he just needed to get through one more day without losing his mind, that voice was telling him what to do.
He addressed the boy, low and firm, like he talked to a green colt, who was rebellious and scared, but wanted, in his heart, to know nothing more than he could trust you and you would never hurt him. “That five seconds of fun you just had is going to cost you about two weeks of moving manure. School’s out for the year, right?”
“What?” the boy sputtered. “Why would I move manure for you?”
“Because you owe me, and that particular subject apparently holds some fascination for you since you feel inclined to write about it on the sides of people’s trucks.”
There was a murmur of surprise from the assembled crowd. Evan knew he was considered a man of few words, and most of those unprintable. But he heard the approval there, too, in the way he’d handled it.
“I’m not moving no manure.” Only the boy didn’t say manure.
Evan knew he had enough on his plate. His own son was just about to turn three, a stranger to his daddy, still in diapers, still sucking a soother, still crying himself silly if he got separated from his toy purple truck. Add to that a farm to run, doing his best to cook nutritious meals, laundry to do…how could he even be thinking of taking on anything else?
“Yes, you are.” That was his voice, all right. His horse breakin’ voice. Calm. Steady. Sure. A voice that did not brook defiance, from animal, nor man. Nor child.
“Make me.”
“All right.”
The boy’s aunt finally spoke. Evan hazarded a look at her and saw, to his relief, her bottom lip had stopped quivering. Hopefully she wasn’t going to cry. Her voice was soft, like velvet, the kind of voice that could bring a weak man to his knees.
Something he had learned his lesson from already, thank God, being weakened by feminine wiles.
“Moving manure?” she said uncertainly. “But we don’t even know you.”
He stuck out his hand. “Evan Atkins,” he said.
“Kathleen Miles,” she returned, accepting his hand with some reluctance.
Her hand in his was about the softest thing he’d ever felt, and he snatched his out of her grasp after one brief pump.
“Now we know each other,” he said. He heard the cold note in his voice, turning it to ice, and recognized it was a defense against the sudden racing of his heart. Wouldn’t do for her to know about that, no sir. She looked as if she was going to protest, but he cut her off. “Where’s the boy’s folks?”
“I’m his folks,” she said stiffly.
“And you’ll be working at the Outpost, for the Watsons?”
“Yes.”
“You can ask them if it’s safe for your boy to come work for me. They’ll tell you.”
“Oh.”
He turned again to the boy. “And your name?”
“None of your business!”
“Okay, none-of-your-business, I’ll pick you up right here at five-thirty tomorrow morning. If you make me come looking, you’ll be sorry, you hear?”
He noted the boy’s aunt looked astounded when he offered a sullen “I hear.” Apparently thinking he’d given in too easily, the boy then added the word he had nearly succeeded in printing on the side of the truck.
She gasped again, but Evan just smiled and leaned close to the little delinquent. “If I ever hear you say that word again, I’ll wash out your mouth with Ma Watson’s homemade lye soap. You can’t believe how bad it tastes.”
Ma Watson, five foot one, in a man’s shirt, with her gray hair neatly braided down her back, had appeared on the sidewalk. She chortled now, and said, “And if anyone would know it would be you, Evan Atkins. Seems to me we went through a little stage where I felt it was my personal obligation to this town to have you spitting suds every ten minutes or so.”
Her comment broke the tension, and a ripple of laughter went through the assembled crowd, or as close as Hopkins Gulch ever came to a “crowd.” They began to disperse.
“Evan,” Ma said, sweetly, “can you show Kathleen over to her house? I just had a customer come in.”
Evan glanced at the store, pretty sure the door had not swung inward in the last ten minutes or so. Still, he couldn’t very well call Ma a liar in front of her new employee, and besides, for all she sounded sweet, she had just given an order, drill sergeant to buck private.
The old gal had really done more than anyone else in this town to try to show a boy going wild the difference between right and wrong, and enough of her tough caring had penetrated his thick skull to keep him out of jail over the years.
Once, when he was sixteen, she had said to him, “Evan, each man has two knights within him, a knight of lightness and a knight of darkness. The one you feed the most will become the strongest.”
At sixteen, he had found the words laughable, thought they had gone in one ear and out the other. But in actual fact, those words had stopped somewhere between those two ears, and for some reason now, ten years later, he found himself contemplating them, embarrassed almost by his longing to choose the right one.
“Evan?”