Front Range Cowboys (5 Book Box Set) Read online

  “Dad is absolutely set on me getting Jesse to sign over her ranch to us. He keeps telling me that the woman should know better than to think she can run it.” Laredo threw back that second whiskey and poured a third. His speech was slower now and most definitely less tense. “I don’t think we need the Collins ranch. I don’t understand what the big deal is.”

  “And Dad won’t explain?” Darren didn’t really need confirmation of that. Joe Hernandez rarely explained himself to anyone.

  “He just keeps saying that we need to keep Jesse away from that place and that no good will come of her being there.”

  Darren thought back over the years to the time when Jesse had just come to live with them. “Do you remember how her folks died? I can remember her showing up on our doorstep with Mom. I can remember the boxes that came along with her moving in. I think the basement was full of them for years until some stuff finally got purged.”

  “Sort of.” Laredo shrugged as though he hadn’t really thought it mattered. “She was a brat.”

  “She was grieving the loss of her parents, you ass.” Darren had never thought Laredo treated Jesse particularly well. “You acted like she needed to be grateful that we were letting her move in.”

  “She should have been!” Laredo shot back. “We took her in. We didn’t have to.”

  Darren lifted his glass and tipped it toward his brother. “And yet she came with a dowry fit for a princess. The Collins ranch is a hundred thousand acres of prime grazing land, good water, and excellent winter forage. You’ve said even now that Dad doesn’t want to let it go. The federal grazing leases in addition to the actual owned land are what? Another two hundred thousand acres? Dad brags all the time that that Hernandez Land & Cattle Company boasts over six hundred thousand acres, but half of that isn’t even ours. You tell me if Jesse should have been beholden to us, or if Dad should have been beholden to her.”

  Laredo opened his mouth but snapped it shut without speaking. It was plain that in a decade’s worth of time, he had never viewed Jesse’s situation quite like that. Then Laredo tilted his head to one side and turned around to pace from one side of the room to the other. “If something happened to me and someone else—God forbid—took in my kid, I would want them to make her inheritance lucrative and keep it going.”

  “But would you want them to keep it once she was old enough to take up the reins and run it herself?” Darren asked his brother. There was no doubt in his mind what Laredo’s answer would be.

  “I suppose I would want anything that kept my hell bitch of an ex-wife from taking Bella’s inheritance from her.” Laredo sounded so bitter that for just a moment Darren wondered how much money he’d had to pay his ex to get custody of their daughter.

  Darren could not resist. Not given his current circumstances. “How did you do it?” Darren asked Laredo. “How did you manage to get full custody?”

  “Her mother didn’t want to stay in Denver. If she had been willing to stick around, there was no way the court wouldn’t have given her at least partial custody.” Laredo sat in his leather executive chair and leaned way back. He set his empty glass on the desk and laced his fingers behind his head. “That bitch wanted money from me. That was it. She wanted enough for her new husband to buy a spread of his own so he could be his own boss instead of being a ranch hand.”

  “Did she try to take part of our ranch?” Darren could only guess what another woman like Carly would try to get from someone like Laredo who actually stood at the helm of the Hernandez Land & Cattle Company.

  “Actually, she tried to take the Collins ranch.” Laredo was chuckling to himself. “She claimed it was a perfect settlement because it already has a house on it.”

  “But that’s not even ours.” Darren wondered how the woman could be that stupid.

  Laredo tilted his head. “That was the first time Dad started to get upset about the Collins ranch. The judge told my ex-wife that he could not award her land that did not even belong to the Hernandez family. I think it startled Dad. He’d thought of the Collins place as his own for so long that to have a legal official like a judge literally laugh off the suggestion that that land belonged to us was throwing the truth in poor Joe’s face. He did not own that land. It was in trust for Jesse. And that was when Dad started having me very quietly start checking into why officially adopting Jesse into our family hadn’t changed anything about the way that ranch was inherited.”

  “So, that’s why he was so insistent about the adoption thing,” Darren mused. “I always wondered.”

  “Dad was insistent about a lot of things that didn’t make sense unless you thought about them with his brain.” Laredo’s sarcasm was almost bitter in nature.

  Darren had often wondered what the cost was of being their father’s favorite. Apparently, the position came with a full set of anxiety and depression symptoms. That was really nice to know. Now Darren didn’t feel like he was at all jealous of his brother’s position in their family at all. Wow. What a load off.

  “You’re laughing at me,” Laredo said suddenly. “I can see it on your face.”

  “You can’t see anything on my face,” Darren lazily argued back. “It’s dark in here.”

  “Okay. I can feel it.”

  “I’m not laughing at you.” Darren sighed. Laredo was obviously paranoid. What a nice thing to experience. “I was actually thinking that I’ve always assumed being Dad’s favorite put you in a better position than the rest of us.”

  “Yeah. Right.”

  “Exactly.” Darren held out his hand and made a careless gesture with his empty glass. “Now I know that having Dad’s admiration isn’t what it’s cracked up to be and that having him count on you is even worse.”

  “I don’t think you ever had to worry about that,” Laredo said bitterly. “He just enjoyed watching you play football and telling people that his son was a pro player.”

  “I was like the bottom of the pro food chain,” Darren snorted. He thought about the Super Bowl ring in his bag. “I was so far down on the list that the only reason I got a ring that year was that even the janitors get one.”

  “I heard that.” Laredo was gloating, but Darren did not begrudge him that. “I heard they give them to every single member of the team’s staff. Even the towel boy gets a ring.”

  “They’re slightly different, but yes. That’s pretty much how it goes.” Darren shrugged. “I still have a Denver Broncos Super Bowl ring.”

  Laredo pointed at Darren as he got up and poured himself another drink. “Maybe you can trade that to Carly for visitation rights with your son.”

  “You’ve had worse ideas,” Darren told his brother. He didn’t want to think about Carly or Jaeger or anything else right now. He was ready to end the day and just move on. And maybe if he was lucky he would dream about Maggie.

  Chapter Ten

  Maggie tapped a pencil impatiently against her desktop and stared at the clock for what felt like the millionth time. It was exactly ten minutes until noon. There were four PE classes scheduled that afternoon. Was Darren Hernandez going to show up? Was he going to actually substitute teach for their school? Or had all of that been nothing more than smoke blown up her skirt—so to speak, of course.

  Sighing deeply, Maggie turned around in her chair to stare out the window. What was wrong with her? She had done nothing but think about Darren all night long! It was absolutely insane. She hadn’t gotten any sleep. She’d been too busy thinking about how wonderful Darren’s smile was and how genuine it seemed compared to the other men she’d known.

  Maggie didn’t date much. As an only child of much older parents, she hadn’t been very great in social situations during her lifetime. She had spent far too much time focused on academics when she was in college to worry about finding a husband. And by the time she had finally felt ready to get out there and start dating, it seemed like everyone else had paired up. The only guys left were losers living in their mother’s basements and trying to find a career in vi
deo gaming, or super-controlling jerks that had already been married and divorced once or twice. Or there were the ones like Maggie’s one failed engagement. The guys who thought there was something to get from being with a woman who had older parents. Unfortunately, that hadn’t turned out quite the way Maggie’s failed fiancé had anticipated. But Darren certainly wasn’t one of those.

  “There has to be something wrong with him,” Maggie muttered. “What’s his fatal flaw?”

  The school secretary stuck her head in Maggie’s office door. “Did you say something?” Rhonda had a broad grin on her face. “Or are you just in here talking to yourself?”

  “Totally talking to myself,” Maggie returned pleasantly. “But I’m a mental health professional, so it’s okay. I promise. I’m not insane. I’ve already diagnosed myself.”

  “Good to know.” Rhonda started to walk away but then seemed to remember something. She backed up and stuck her head inside Maggie’s office again. “I forgot to tell you that there’s a man here to see you.”

  “A man?” Maggie jumped up so quickly that her thighs smacked the underside of the desk. Ow! She was supposed to be composed. She wasn’t supposed to be knocking over furniture.

  Rhonda looked amused. “I’m going to guess this is a good thing?”

  “I’ve got a guy coming in to maybe substitute those PE classes until we find a teacher.” Maggie expected Rhonda to be thrilled. This had been a pressing issue in the school’s main office for months.

  “I don’t know,” Rhonda said dubiously. “This guy doesn’t look very PE capable. And looked for a substitute isn’t even in your job description. It’s not like you to go over Principal Witherspoon’s head. You’re liable to get yours lopped off!”

  “I know I normally don’t step out of line, but this man was perfect for the job!” Maggie frowned. “Huh? At least I thought he looked perfect for a PE teacher.” Of course he looked perfect. He was Darren Hernandez. But Maggie didn’t want to risk waxing poetic about Darren and tipping Rhonda off to Maggie’s schoolgirl crush on the new gym teacher. “No big deal. I’ll be right out to get him.”

  Rhonda shrugged and headed back out to her desk. Maggie smoothed out her plain black pencil skirt and her patterned peasant blouse. She would have liked to say that she hadn’t taken any extra care with her appearance today, but that would have been a lie. She’d been told more than once that the outfit was very flattering, and Maggie needed all the help she could get. Speaking of help, Maggie couldn’t resist pulling out her makeup compact. She checked in the reflection and shoved a few stray pieces of wild strawberry hair out of her face. She patted some extra powder on her face to get rid of that shiny look and then added some lip gloss to keep herself from looking too pale.

  Ha! Too pale? She was practically a redhead. She was always pale. There was almost no way to avoid that near zombie look. With a sigh of frustration, Maggie got up and headed out of her office toward the main part of the administrative wing that was centered around Rhonda’s desk. Maggie found herself getting more and more excited with each step she took toward the front. She could not wait to have an excuse to look at—no, wait—to work with Darren Hernandez every single day.

  “Darren!” Maggie gushed as soon as she spotted the dark-haired man looking out the windows. “I’m so glad you could make it.”

  The man turned around and gave Maggie a cold once-over. “At least I understand why my brother was so eager to play gym teacher.”

  Maggie instantly recognized Laredo Hernandez, Darren’s older brother and Bella’s father. She dialed back her smile and nodded to Laredo. “I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Hernandez. You and your brother look very alike. I was expecting him to be here at noon, so I’m sure you can understand my mistake.”

  “Darren isn’t going to have time to play gym teacher.” Laredo straightened up and took his hands out of the pockets of his trousers. “But I’m quite sure that for the amount of money I’m paying for my child to go to school here, you can find a gym teacher.”

  Maggie figured that it had been within the first week of dealing with the parents here that she had become tired of hearing that phrase. The amount of money I pay for my child to attend here. What they never seemed to realize was that there were no public school funds available to a private school like this one. There were no federal funds. There were no bonds. There was nothing but tuition to pay for building maintenance, salaries, books, supplies, materials, playground equipment, and everything else that went into making a learning environment for kids. That was a long laundry list of expensive items, and Maggie was pretty sure the ten thousand dollars a year that Laredo Hernandez chipped in was nowhere near that much money.

  Of course, none of this was actually within Maggie’s job description. She was the guidance counselor. The principal was supposed to be dealing with staffing issues. But their problem was that the principal didn’t really care. She was happy to sit in her office and churn out memos to staff and parents talking about how wonderful the school was and how amazing all of their programs were in comparison to a regular public school education. Normally Maggie was content to let Principal Witherspoon stay out of everyone’s hair. The woman was a lazy tyrant. But for some reason, this thing with the gym teacher had really hit home with Maggie. For once she was going to stand up for something!

  Right now, standing up for something meant she had to deal with Laredo Hernandez. With that in mind, she sucked in a deep breath and forced herself to smile. “I simply asked your brother if he would want to help out, and expressed an interest. He told me that he would meet me here at noon to get started. I have no idea what your family squabbling entails or how that affects things.” Maggie smiled sweetly and felt satisfaction when she saw Laredo squirm a little bit. “So, I apologize if I created tension in your home or your relationship with your brother, but he seemed far more interested in your daughter’s education than you ever do.”

  Oh boy. This was why Maggie stayed out of things. She inevitably stuck her foot in her mouth, and that last bit was most definitely a little over the top. The storm clouds started gathering on Laredo’s face, and Maggie braced herself for what was coming. She’d been doing so good too! Then she had to get right in his face and call him out for being a disinterested parent. This was not the right way to motivate him.

  “How dare you even comment on my parenting skills,” Laredo hissed. “Do you even have children?”

  “Personally?” She put her hand on her chest and felt strangely defensive. “No. I don’t. But I have a degree in child development, and I’m qualified to counsel both parents and children regarding parenting.”

  “That doesn’t mean crap.” Laredo pointed his index finger right in her face. From the corner of Maggie’s eye, she spotted Rhonda’s round look of shock. Of course, Laredo wasn’t done. “You can learn all sorts of things in a classroom. That much is obvious. But what’s also obvious is that you can be a complete imbecile when it comes to the application of such concepts. Look at you! You’re completely incompetent, and yet you hold a degree in child development without ever having helped to develop a child!”

  Maggie thought her head was going to blow off. She might have almost a redheaded complexion, but she sure as hell had the temper, and right now, this arrogant bastard was insulting her intelligence, her competence at her job, and her ability to be objective. It was high time someone took him down a few pegs.

  But no sooner had Maggie opened her mouth than she saw Darren Hernandez stride into the office. “Laredo!” Darren said sharply. “I want to talk to you outside. Now.”

  Maggie’s words died on her tongue as she gaped at Darren. His face was just as stormy as his brother’s. In fact, if possible, he looked even angrier than Laredo. Darren was pointing to the hallway with hands that shook.

  Laredo gave Maggie a derisive once-over and then stepped out into the hallway in front of his brother. Maggie felt as though her heart would claw its way out of her chest. She was practically gasping for brea
th as she struggled to keep her cool. Then she realized that Rhonda had jumped up from her desk and was pressing her nose to the windows in order to keep an eye on the men in the hallway.

  “Rhonda!” Maggie said in a stage whisper. “You can’t eavesdrop like that!”

  “Hush!” Rhonda fired back. “You’re making it so I can’t hear.”

  Maggie gave up. She wanted to know what they were saying. It was like two titans smashing each other to smithereens. You couldn’t not watch. It was just impossible to keep your gaze on anything else. Which, of course, meant that Maggie was now standing behind the blinds and peering out into the hallway.

  “Oh my God,” Rhonda whispered. “They’re going to throw down! I swear they are!”

  “No.” Maggie disagreed. The body language was all over the place, but it wasn’t aggressive like that. “But Darren is definitely reading Laredo the riot act. I wonder what he’s saying.”

  “Something about this being his choice and that he wants to do this for Bella and for you.” Rhonda could apparently read lips pretty efficiently. “Laredo Hernandez is a mean son of a bitch. You know that? He just told Darren that he’s been a loser all his life and if he wants to keep being a loser, Laredo isn’t going to stop him.”

  “That’s horrible!” Maggie breathed. She could not imagine saying something like that to a relative. “Darren isn’t a loser. He’s a really nice man. Laredo is the one who has personal success and zero personality. The guy is probably just jealous that people actually want Darren around.”

  “Whoa.” Rhonda reared back and turned to stare at Maggie. “You’re really into this guy. Huh?”

  “Oh? No. Of course not. He’s the uncle of a student. I just think he gets a raw deal sometimes with people complaining that he’s irresponsible and useless.” That sounded lame, even to Maggie. Could she be any more obvious about her crush on Darren Hernandez?

  “I think you and Darren would make a really striking couple,” Rhonda decided. “He’s got all of that curly black hair, and yours is so pale. It will be an irresistible contrast. I wonder what your kids will look like.”