Her Right-Hand Cowboy (Forever, Tx Series Book 21) Read online

“I could,” Mitch agreed. “But I like looking around the general store for myself, in case there’s something I forgot to put on the list. Besides,” he said honestly, “I like mingling with people. It allows me to stay in touch with what’s going on in town.”

  “So this isn’t your way of getting me to swing by the church cemetery?”

  “You made it sound like you didn’t want to, so why should I do that?” he asked her.

  Her eyes narrowed. “You’re playing mind games with me.”

  “I think you’re overthinking this and giving me way too much credit. I don’t have time for mind games. I’ve got a ranch to run—for you,” he added pointedly. “Now, if you like, I can bring you back to the stable or the ranch house,” he added, “before I go into town for those supplies.”

  He was good at playing the innocent man, she’d give him that, Ena thought. She debated which way to play this for a moment, then made up her mind. This could work out after all.

  “No, that’s all right. I’ll come into town with you. It might not be such a bad idea to look around for a bit,” she told him.

  He wasn’t about to get sucked into a discussion over this. “Whatever you say. Like I said before, you’re the boss.”

  If that was true, she thought, slanting a glance in his direction, why did she have this feeling that she’d somehow been played?

  Maybe Mitch was right. Maybe she was guilty of overthinking everything. Even so, she couldn’t shake the feeling that the man was somehow very subtly manipulating her.

  Lost in thought, she really hadn’t done very much by way of helping him to secure the tools into the back of the truck. They went to stock up on supplies. Since Mitch was driving the pickup, it gave Ena a real opportunity to look around as they approached town.

  Nothing had really changed in Forever, she thought. Oh, there were some new additions and perhaps there was a slightly busier air about the small town than there had been ten years ago. But for the most part, it still felt like the tiny town that half the more mournful country songs were written about. The kind of town it was good to be from but definitely not one to be living in at the present time.

  She was just asking herself what she was doing back here when Mitch pulled up to an open spot right in front of the general store. The engine made a stuttering sound as he turned it off.

  She could feel his eyes on her. When she turned toward him, he said, “You don’t have to come in if you don’t want to.”

  Was he trying to tell her something? Her years in the business world had made her suspicious of everything, unable to take anything at face value.

  “Why wouldn’t I want to?” she asked him.

  “I was only thinking that you might not want to have to put up with a whole bunch of questions fired at you. You remember what people are like in Forever,” Mitch reminded her. “Always full of questions because nothing much goes on in their lives without gossip. They’d want to know if you were going to stay on now that you’re back—and they’d probably ask you why you took off the way you did. They might even—”

  Ena shut her eyes as she put up her hands to block the onslaught of words. “Stop. You’ve made your point. You might have thought of this earlier,” she told the man in the front seat next to her.

  His expression was easygoing and totally devoid of guilt. “You’re right. Sorry,” he apologized.

  “Well, we’re here now,” she said with a sigh. “You talked me into it. I’ll just stay in the truck,” she decided.

  Maybe he should have been more forceful about taking her back to the ranch house, Mitch thought. “I’ll hurry,” he promised.

  Ena shifted in her seat. The truck’s seat was definitely not made with comfort in mind. “You do that,” she told him.

  So much for reverse psychology, he thought as he walked quickly to the general store. He’d thought if he’d told her what she would be facing coming into the general store with him, Ena would have come with him just to prove that she could put up with a shower of questions and emerge unscathed.

  Maybe he should have just let her get out of the truck and come with him without saying anything to encourage her to hang back. He had been certain that her desire to be the one in control would have had her coming into the store with him.

  Well, he’d gambled and lost. No big deal, he told himself. Now all he could do was just hurry down the shopping list he’d brought with him and hope that Ena wasn’t going to be in an irritated mood when he got back with the supplies.

  “You in a hurry, Mitch?” Wallace Page asked.

  The owner of the only store of this kind in Forever, Wallace, watched the foreman from the Double E Ranch move through the store, grabbing items and piling them all up on the counter. He didn’t recall ever seeing Mitch move around so fast.

  “You might say that,” Mitch answered, depositing another large item on the counter, then heading back to the shelves for a sack of something else. “I’ve got someone waiting in the truck.”

  “Oh, so it’s that way, is it?” Wallace said with a knowing laugh.

  “No,” Mitch denied patiently as he went to fetch another item on his list. “It’s not any way, Wallace.” Done, he quickly surveyed everything he’d picked up. “Just total all this up for me, please.”

  “Sure thing.” The man’s fingers flew over his almost ancient cash register keys, an item he had inherited from his father. “Need help getting these things to your truck?”

  “All I need is to use the wagon to get it all out there,” he told the owner.

  “You want me to put it on the Double E’s account?” the storeowner asked once he had finished totaling it all up.

  “Like you always do, Wallace,” Mitch responded.

  “Hey, is that the O’Rourkes’ girl with you?” Wallace suddenly asked. He craned his neck, trying to get a glimpse of the interior of Mitch’s truck from his vantage point through the store’s front window. The man’s thin, pinched face fell. “Guess not,” the man said, disappointed.

  Mitch turned to look toward his truck. He was surprised to see that the passenger seat was empty. They were too far from the ranch for Ena to suddenly decide that she was going to walk home.

  So where had she taken off to? When he’d left her, he hadn’t gotten the impression that she wanted to go see anyone.

  “I thought you said you had someone waiting for you in the truck,” Wallace said, confused.

  Still not willing to identify who he had brought with him, Mitch shrugged. “Guess they got tired of sitting around and waiting and decided to take in the local color.”

  Wallace cackled. “That’s a good one, son. We all know that Forever doesn’t have any local color,” the general store owner declared with a shake of his head. “But maybe someday...”

  “Yeah, maybe someday,” Mitch agreed absently, hardly hearing what Wallace had said. “I’ll see you next week, Wallace,” he said.

  Trying not to appear as if he were in a hurry—or worried—Mitch quickly unloaded the various boxes and sacks in the giant-sized wagon, then pushed the cart over toward where the other carts were lined up.

  He debated driving around to look for Ena, but he didn’t want to move his truck in case she had just gone for a walk and was returning to the vehicle. The idea of a walk, however, was highly doubtful.

  “Where are you?” Mitch murmured under his breath, scanning the immediate area.

  He thought of going to the diner, but if Ena hadn’t gone there, Miss Joan would somehow intuit that there was something wrong and launch into her own version of the third degree. He didn’t want to have to go through that unless it was absolutely necessary and he had no other recourse.

  Standing there, looking up and down the streets of Forever, Mitch studied the various buildings in the area, thinking.

  And then it occurred to him where Ena must have gone.
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  Still leaving the truck parked in front of the general store, he quickly hurried past the medical clinic and Murphy’s, as well as a few other familiar places, until he reached the church.

  Instead of going inside the recently renovated building, he went around it until he came to the back end of it.

  The cemetery was located a small distance way.

  Mitch walked quickly toward it. At first, it appeared that there was no one inside the gated area. And then, as he came closer, still scanning the area, he saw her.

  Ena.

  Mitch quickly lengthened his stride until he was inside the gated area.

  For a moment, he debated whether or not he should withdraw and leave her alone before she saw him. He knew that she had to have gone through some rather deep soul-searching before she had talked herself into coming over here.

  But he did want to be there for her in case Ena suddenly felt she needed him.

  Looking around, he found a large tombstone that, if he stood just right, would block him from her sight. So he stood off to the side, observing her. Watching for some sort of sign that she suddenly desired him to be there for her, or to talk to. Whatever it took, Mitch wanted to be ready. He knew what it felt like to suddenly find himself all alone, the way she did now with her father’s passing.

  Being very careful to be as quiet as he could, Mitch realized that she was talking to the small headstone he had put up.

  “Still calling the shots, aren’t you, Dad?” Ena was saying to the headstone that had her father’s name on it. “I see you moved Mom. At least you picked a better place for her this time than you did the last time. She never did like that old oak tree, you know, not that you cared about something like that.

  “I guess this means that Mom’s going to have to listen to you talk for all eternity.” Ena shook her head. “That’s not fair, you know. The poor woman earned her rest after having to put up with you for all those years. But then, you were never all that interested in what was fair, were you?”

  Ena fell silent for a moment, searching for words. “I want you to know that you lucked out. That guy you took under your wing, the one you probably wished was your kid instead of me, well, he turned out to be a good man. He’s running the place and doing a really good job. You would have been very proud.” She pressed her lips together. “Maybe you should have left the ranch to him. He certainly earned it. But then, you probably never made him feel the way you made me feel.”

  “He regretted that, you know.”

  Startled because she was so engrossed in talking to the spirit of her father, she hadn’t realized that someone was there, listening to her.

  Ena turned around to find herself looking up at Mitch.

  Chapter Ten

  Ena’s defenses instantly went up. How long had the man been standing there, listening to her “talk” to her dead father?

  Annoyed and embarrassed, she could feel her cheeks growing hot.

  Her eyes blazed as she looked at him. “Are you spying on me?” she demanded.

  “No, I went out looking for you,” he explained calmly. “When I came out to the truck with the supplies, you weren’t sitting in the cab. You’d told me that you were going to wait in the truck until I got back, so when I didn’t see you, I got concerned.”

  She supposed that if she weren’t so embarrassed because Mitch had overheard her “talking” to her father, she might have found his concern to be almost touching. But she was embarrassed, and right now, she just wanted to move past this whole incident and forget that it had ever taken place.

  “There was no reason for you to be worried,” she told him gruffly. “It’s not like I could have been kidnapped by some drug lord or something. This is Forever, for heaven’s sake. Nothing ever happens in Forever,” she maintained flatly.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure if I were you,” he told her. “Things happen here.” He saw the skeptical look on her face and pressed on, “Life happens here. The sheriff met his wife here because Olivia came searching for her sister when Tina ran off with the father of her baby. Everyone wound up here,” he told her.

  “Well, they weren’t from around here originally,” Ena stressed, as if that made her point.

  “Yes, but they live here now. At least Olivia and Tina do, along with Tina’s baby. And it might interest you to know that Tina is now married to one of the town’s doctors—Dr. Davenport, who also came from the Northeast. New York City to be specific. And theirs isn’t the only story like that.

  “My point,” Mitch continued, “is that we don’t live in some kind of bubble here. People from all over the country come through here, and when they do, they bring life with them. And they choose to stay here.”

  Ena closed her eyes and sighed, giving up. “Okay, you made your point. But nothing dramatic happened to me,” she informed him. Then, to explain why she’d left the truck, she said, “You talked about my father and my mother being buried in the church cemetery and I thought that I’d just come take a look at their headstones for myself. Mystery solved.”

  Her expression was almost stony, he thought, trying to guess what was going on in her head.

  “And now that you did?” Mitch asked. When she didn’t say anything in response, he tried to prod her a little. “Any thoughts?”

  Ena glanced back at the two tombstones that marked her parents’ graves.

  “Yes,” she said grudgingly. “You picked out nice headstones.”

  “Actually,” he told her, “your father picked those out. Since he knew he was dying, he wanted to tie up all the loose ends that he could while he was still able to get around. He went to that mortuary in the next town and made all the arrangements. Your dad was a very determined man. He kept on working until he was too weak to get out of bed.”

  Try as she might to block out the wave of intense guilt that had suddenly risen up, it managed to break through, drenching her. She hated feeling this way and attempted to deflect her guilt by blaming the man next to her.

  “You should have found a way to locate me and let me know that my father was dying.” There was unmistakable hostility in Ena’s voice.

  His answer was the same as Miss Joan’s had been. But it was prefaced with a twist she hadn’t expected. “He already knew where you were but he didn’t want to disrupt your life.”

  Ena stared at Mitch, stunned. “Wait, he knew where I was?” That wasn’t possible, she thought. She had moved twice since the last Christmas card she’d sent to her father years ago.

  Mitch hesitated. He was telling tales out of school, but he supposed at this point, what did it matter? She needed to know that her father did care about her despite whatever she thought she knew.

  “Your father had a private investigator track you down,” he told her.

  That just confused things further for her. “I don’t understand. If he went to such great lengths to have me found, why didn’t he come to see me?”

  That was simple enough to answer. “He went to such great lengths because he wanted to make sure you were still all right. The private investigator he’d hired told him that you had put yourself through college and that after graduation, you’d found an accounting position with a good, reputable firm.

  “The private investigator assured your father that you were doing well. But you know your dad, he wasn’t just going to accept the man’s word for that so the investigator produced pictures as well as written evidence to back up what he was saying. It was all included in the report he wrote up for your father. I can show it to you if you’d like,” Mitch offered.

  It still didn’t make any sense to her. “But if he had all that information, if he knew where I was, why didn’t he even try to come see me?”

  “My guess is that your father was a proud man. His feeling was that you left him. He didn’t leave you. He undoubtedly thought that the ball was in your court�
�meaning that it was up to you to come back.”

  She could see that under normal circumstances, but not in the end. “But when he knew he was dying, he could have gotten word to me—”

  “Again, he was a proud man,” Mitch repeated. “He didn’t want pity to be the motivating reason you came back.”

  Ena shook her head, frustrated. She glared at the headstone. “The man’s dead and he’s still making me crazy.”

  “I guess that was his gift,” Mitch told her with a quiet smile.

  She wouldn’t have called it a gift. “How did you put up with him?” Ena asked.

  “Oh, he had his good points.” Mitch looked at the headstone and thought of the man buried there. “He treated me fairly, gave me a roof over my head, became like a second father to me. A stern father,” he granted, “but to a kid without anyone, that was a lot.”

  For a moment, she felt a little jealous of the relationship between her father and the foreman. A relationship she would have given anything to have. “I guess he was lucky to have you.”

  “That went both ways,” Mitch told her. And then he added contritely, “Look, I’m sorry I intruded on your time here. Why don’t I go back to the truck and wait for you there? Take all the time you want, then come find me when you’re done. The truck’s still parked in front of the general store.”

  Now that Mitch had walked in on her, Ena felt awkward about spending any more time there. Anyway, she had basically said everything she had wanted to say to her father.

  “I’m done,” she announced.

  Mitch looked at her uncertainly. “Are you sure?”

  Ena shrugged. “There’s just so much a person can say to a headstone,” she answered glibly.

  “Your mother was there, too,” Mitch gently pointed out.

  “I don’t need to look at a piece of stone to talk to my mother. I talk to her in my heart,” she informed him. Turning, she began to walk toward the cemetery exit. “Didn’t you say you loaded up the truck with supplies?” she asked.

  “I did.”

  “Well,” she said impatiently, “isn’t there something in those supplies that’s melting or rotting or coming apart by now?”