Free Rancher at Risk by Barbara White Daille Page A

Already? The old man spent too much time running off at the mouth. “Is that so?”
    “Yeah. He told us Caleb had a new foreman.”
    “That’s right,” he confirmed, making a mental apology to Tony. “Ryan Molloy.”
    Lianne had reached the landing. “What did you say, Joe?”
    “Huh?” For a moment, he looked puzzled. “Oh, I said Caleb has a new foreman. ” He repeated the two final words in a louder tone.
    Lianne nodded.
    “You know, manager. Supervisor. Boss. ”
    “I think she got it the first time,” Ryan said. “And there’s no need to yell.”
    “Whatever.” He shrugged.
    Lianne turned her head from the kid to him and back again. “This is Ryan.”
    “Yeah.” The kid grinned at him.
    Ryan followed Lianne’s glance down a long hallway as littered as the porch had been.
    “Looks like you’re busy up here,” she said. “I’ll show him the offices another time.”
    He trailed her down the stairs and out to the porch again. “It also looks like they’ve got a way to go on these buildings.”
    “We’ll get there,” she said flatly.
    “In time for the scouts?”
    “Of course.”
    Frowning, he looked back into the building. “Mind telling me why we’re changing the agenda? We could work around the mess upstairs.”
    She settled onto the sawhorse he had shifted and stared up at him. “Would you mind telling me what that was about with Joe?”
    “What?”
    “‘There’s no need to yell.’”
    “He was getting carried away, repeating himself and raising his voice because you couldn’t hear what he said.”
    “I didn’t see what he said. I was watching my step climbing the stairs. He didn’t realize I had my head down.”
    Just as he hadn’t realized in the other building, speaking when she’d had her back to him. “That must happen a lot.”
    She shrugged. “It happens, yes. But he wasn’t getting carried away. Since he thought I just didn’t understand him, he was trying to help me. People do that—raise their voices with a deaf or hard-of-hearing person, thinking it will make a difference. Sometimes it does. Hearing loss covers a wide spectrum, and some deaf people can pick up a range of voices.”
    “Can you?”
    She pressed her lips into a firm line. For a moment, he thought she wouldn’t answer. Finally, she said, “No. I can’t hear anyone clearly.”
    She’d kept her voice so low he barely caught the blurred words. Her cheeks flushed pink and her eyes glittered. Not meeting his gaze, she stood and went down the steps.
    He followed, frowning again. Even with all those signals, he couldn’t tell what had just happened.
    Had she spoken so softly out of embarrassment because there was something she couldn’t do?
    Or to hide her anger because she’d had to admit it?
    * * *
    W ITH BREAKFAST OVER and the day’s assignments distributed among the men, Ryan got up from the table in the bunkhouse kitchen and followed Tony through the door. The old man had taken a while to cross the room. He’d hung back, not wanting to rush him.
    Outside, dawn had broken, and the sun had started to climb.
    “You came in a little early this morning, huh?” Tony asked. “I saw you’d already had the coffee on.”
    “Yeah.” As he had told Lianne he would do, he slept in the main house but took all his meals outside with the men…except for the night she had offered him brownies for dessert. What were the chances she’d do that again?
    After the conversation on the steps of the school building yesterday, their walk back to the ranch house had gone amicably enough. He still didn’t know how she felt about his question, but she seemed to have forgiven him for acting like a horse’s back end.
    Since then, he hadn’t been able to get her out of his thoughts. Not a good thing. Along with his breakfast this morning, he had hoped company and conversation would take his mind off her.
    “I took a spin to see the school yesterday,” Tony said.
    He smiled wryly. “Yeah, I think someone