Free Tell Me When It Hurts by Christine Whitehead Page B

sheep to provide the best wool around, for the good of mankind. Must be my destiny, right?”
    Now it was Archer’s turn to shrug. “There are worse ways to spend your days. It sounds as if you like what you do and you do it well.” She took another bite of tomato salad.
    “ I do like it in a lot of ways. Sheep aren’t as dumb as most people think—at least, my sheep aren’t. They have personalities, and I like the life. It’s simple. I mean, we’re always busy, between foot trimming, tail docking, ear tagging, and shearing. And except for lambing season, my days are pretty predictable, and I’m only answerable to me. Before the ranch, I worked for a bunch of corporations, traveled a lot, put mergers together, things like that. I had stockholders, comptrollers, everyone and his brother with their hands in my pockets, ready to pounce if profits weren’t good enough, and ready to see if I could sustain the growth if they were. I can tell you, I don’t miss it.”
    “ Yeah,” Archer said, nodding, “I practiced law for a while, and it was pretty dog-eat-dog. I was into it myself at the time, just as bad as everyone else. It’s only since I moved away that I can see what it was doing to me—and what it does to everyone who’s part of it.”
    “ So what do you do now if you’re not practicing law?” Connor asked. “Or are you doing mountain law out here?”
    She stiffened. “I don’t do much, I guess. My daughter died six years ago, and I needed to get away. I found this place, quit my job in Connecticut, and moved here.” She seemed a little surprised and added, “I . . . I don’t usually talk about that. It’s something of a conversation stopper, as I guess you can imagine. It’s customarily followed by an awkward silence, an unwanted question, and then a comment about the weather.”
    Connor looked up. “Well, I’m not silent a lot and I won’t ask you any questions. I’m just real sorry. That must have been horrible. You must have had the mean reds bad for a long time then.”
    Archer glanced up, holding a forkful of pasta. “ Breakfast at Tiffany’s, ” she said, smiling just a little. “Yeah, you could say I had the mean reds real bad for quite a while. And how do you know the film so well that you remember that bit of trivia—Holly calling her black moods the ‘mean reds,’ I mean?”
    “ Well, for about twenty years the only way I escaped my work was by going to the movies. It was the only way I could stop my mind from racing, at least for a few hours. I became a real movie buff. I saw my favorites over and over—can quote whole passages of dialogue from them. Weird, huh?”
    “ Not really,” Archer replied. “I did the same thing after Annie died. I’d go just so I wasn’t alone with my head—spent hours at the movies. “Sometimes I’d go in at two o’clock and go from theater to theater until they closed. And the ones I liked, I saw again and again, too. I guess there was some comfort in knowing what’s going to happen next.”
    For a few minutes, they ate in comfortable silence.
    “ Do you know how to use that thing?” Connor asked, nodding toward the Winchester propped behind the kitchen back door.
    Archer’s eyes followed his gaze. “Yeah, I do. I took some self-defense after Annie died, and learned to shoot a bit.” No need to add that she was such a crack shot that when the Group had gotten an appeal for help and the client asked for the best man available, Gavin chuckled and replied that the best man was a woman. Archer had flown to Hong Kong and returned four days later, mission accomplished.
    Archer looked down and quickly changed the subject. “So, do you have any children?”
    Connor hesitated. For years he’d answered yes or no to this question, depending on the circumstances. No outnumbered yes by a huge margin, since a yes required a hell of a lot more explanation. “Yes, a daughter—Lauren. She’s . . . uh, nine, I guess. I’ve never met