Sophia could feel the new ranch hand watching her again. And not in the I’d-like-to-buy-you-a-drink kind of way she was used to.
That, she knew how to handle. In two languages. She could send a midlevel exec in a suit packing before he’d even rounded the bar with that expectant, hopeful expression on his face.
This ranch hand business was something else. Something she needed to figure out how to handle. Stat. Especially since this was the third time and he’d just started yesterday.
Plus, she was technically his boss. As soon as she figured out how to boss cowboys, she’d be the bossiest boss in East Texas.
As she walked toward the barn, the back of her neck heated, then the warmth spread right down between her shoulder blades. Jeez. Had this guy come equipped with lasers instead of eyes? The skin on her arms prickled and all her senses blipped into high alert.
Whipping around, she let her gaze flit along the scarlet siding that made up the barn, searching for the now-familiar battered hat the color of beach sand. Sure enough, the cowboy her ranch manager had called Ace leaned against the split-rail fence, casually looping a rope with gloved hands.
His eyes stayed locked on his task. This guy was good. But he was faking it, plain and simple, because she knew he’d been staring at her five seconds before, while she’d skimmed the report her accountant had emailed her.
The fact that she could never catch him in the act made not one bit of difference. He had a lot of practice hiding his avid interest in his boss, that was for sure. Why he chose to study her on the sly—that was the million-dollar question.
Maybe he was quietly plotting whether to use an ax or his bare hands to murder her. He had that hard, dangerous look about him. As if he’d seen things people didn’t talk about in polite company. Perhaps he’d done some of those things too.
Or, more likely, he was just a regular ranch hand trying to reason out why a woman wearing a designer dress was running a place like Hidden Creek Ranch. For the record, because she didn’t have any other type of clothes to wear while running this ranch. Run being a generous term, especially if you didn’t look too carefully behind the curtain.
If she’d known the nebulous verb called ranching would be so difficult, she might have reconsidered this cockamamie idea of turning Grandpa’s property into a luxury dude ranch. Folks who paid a lot of money to hang out for a rustic weekend expected horses to be a part of their experience. Horses meant ranch hands.
Ergo, Sophia now employed ten or twelve of them. She’d lost count, but the number was part of a long list of details that woke her up in a cold sweat at night.
She couldn’t do it all. That was what she kept telling herself, even as she continued to spread herself thinner as the clock crept toward midnight, then turned over to a new day. A day where she still didn’t have anyone she could lean on when it all got to be too much.
That’s fine. It was fine. She could handle this and anything else life wanted to throw at her.
“Jonas,” she called as she caught sight of the ranch manager and double-timed it across the hard-packed earth that led to the barn’s south entrance. “How highly recommended did that new ranch hand come?”
Jonas’s face resembled a statue 90 percent of the time, and the other 10 percent didn’t count because you couldn’t tell what he was thinking anyway. The man never registered a blessed thing in his expression, a trick Sophia would like to learn. So, if he thought the question was weird, she’d never know.
Jonas spat on the ground, but she refused to jump as she assumed he meant for her to. It was no secret that her ranch manager didn’t truly consider himself her employee. He let her act like the boss and accepted the paycheck that her accountant issued, but that was the extent of his concession toward the illusion that Sophia was in charge of Hidden Creek Ranch—a name she was still testing out in her head but liked.
“Didn’t come recommended at all,” Jonas finally said after an eternity of silence that she suspected was meant to scare her off.
Except she didn’t scare easily. If she could shoulder the probing stare of Ace, the Ranch Hand Who Had Zero Recommendations, she could handle Jonas.
“Curious why you hired him, then.” She crossed her arms in a show of stubbornness—the same flaw that had gotten her into this situation in the first place. “I thought I made it clear that you could only hire experienced ranch hands.”
“You didn’t ask about his qualifications. You asked if he came with a recommendation.”
They stared at each other for an entire sixty seconds. Which she knew because she counted. It was a trick she’d learned at a corporate retreat, where you use the rhythm of counting to soothe yourself before you blew up at an employee.
It didn’t work.
She caved first. She had to. The to-do app on her phone beckoned, the one she never closed because she was always doing something on the list while rushing to get to the next item down. When cell service worked. Which wasn’t always.
“I don’t have time for semantics,” she informed Jonas frostily, wondering yet again if that was his first name or last. “That guy bothers me.”
Unlike Ace, the ranch manager had come recommended by her housekeeper, who knew everyone in Gun Barrel City. Sophia had hired Jonas on the spot, too pressed for staff to be choosy. So far, he’d done a stellar job getting the rest of the personnel lined up.
Ace notwithstanding. And the irony didn’t escape her that she’d yet to learn the name of any of the other ranch hands. The rest of the nondescript guys in cowboy hats roaming the place barely registered with her.
The back of her neck prickled again but she refused to glance over at the sandy-colored hat or the face underneath it.
“If he’s bothering you, I’ll fire him,” Jonas said blandly as if it didn’t matter to him one way or the other.
Guilt. Okay, that was her least favorite emotion and it tasted sour in her throat. Jonas made it sound like Ace had cornered her in the barn and made inappropriate comments. In the corporate world, yes, that was grounds for termination. And probably on a ranch too.
But that wasn’t the situation. You couldn’t fire an employee because you had a feeling that he’d checked you out a couple of times. Could you? Besides, what if he had a family he was trying to feed with this job? She’d be taking food out of a baby’s mouth all because a ranch hand had her spooked.
