Life After Wife by Carolyn Brown Read Free Book Online

establishment and handed him over to them.
    It made more sense than a little boy starting kindergarten and telling his newfound friends (named things like Kyle and Mark and Jimmy) that his name was Elijah. That could be what made him so edgy—having to take up for himself when the other kids picked on him about his name. Well, she hadn’t had it so easy either with a name like Sophia. It sounded like an old-maid schoolteacher with a gray bun and a hook nose with reading glasses perched on the end of it.
    “What are you thinking about so seriously?” he asked, so close to her neck that the warmth of his breath brushed across the tender skin.
    “My name,” she said. She’d thought that he was out for a run.
    He should be shot between his pretty blue eyes for sneaking up on her like that and asking a question that she didn’thave time to think about. Thank goodness he didn’t ask her anything important. She would have blurted the answer out like an honest, little three-year-old that hadn’t learned to lie.
    “Sophia Lauren McSwain. What’s wrong with that?” he said. “Where are we starting this tour of the ranch?”
    She took two steps forward in pretense of checking the tires on the four-wheeled vehicles. “Not one thing is wrong with my name, but it’s not something that you tag on a little girl in today’s world. I’m not ashamed of it, but I wouldn’t name a kid something that would get them teased at school,” she said.
    “Why were you thinking about your name?”
    “Full of questions aren’t you? You thinkin’ you will file away any information I give you and use it to coerce me into letting go of my half at a later date?” she asked.
    “Later date? I was hoping to do so today,” he answered.
    She giggled.
    The sound of her laughter sent his anger level up a notch, but true to his heritage he kept a stone face. “Is this going to take all day, or will we be back for lunch?”
    “We’ll be back. First of all, I’m mean when I’m hungry, and even Aunt Maud didn’t keep me out on a job without making sure I got food. Two, it’s going to get almighty hot by noon.”
    “You got the work narrowed down to where you don’t have to do anything when it’s hot or cold? Can’t take the weather?” He mounted a vehicle and turned the key to start the engine.
    She did the same. “I can do anything that keeps this ranch going. Don’t get your hopes up, chief.”
    “I thought we’d settled that business of racial slurs,” he growled.
    “OK, then don’t get your hopes up, period. Want me to lead?”
    “I know the layout of this place as well as you do. Maybe better. You can follow,” he said.
    “Not me. I don’t follow anyone anymore,” she yelled over the roar of the engines.
    They rode side by side down the west side of the ranch, checking the fence as they went. Only once did she stop and fix a broken barbed wire with the equipment she kept in the saddlebags behind her seat. He watched, prepared to step in and finish the job when she broke a nail or scratched her hand, but she did the job expertly, with no problems.
    “You can take care of the next one,” she said when she was ready to ride again.
    “You think I can’t fix a fence?” he asked.
    “I think you can do anything on this ranch. If you’d been lazy, Aunt Maud wouldn’t have let you come back after the first summer. Seems I remember you bein’ here every time Momma made me come spend a week or two. Only then Aunt Maud called you Bud, not Eli or Elijah,” she said before she started the engine.
    He threw one leg over the seat like he would if he’d been sitting in a saddle on the back of a horse. “Uncle Jesse called me his little buddy when I was little. I grew into Bud when I was a teenager. So there’s a bit of information for you.”
    “I remember you being a hard worker. That’s a good thing. I can always use a good hand on the place,” she said.
    A sly grin tickled the corners of his thin mouth. “I