Teaching the Cowboy by Holley Trent Read Free Book Online Page B

giving his side a little nudge.
    He swiveled his head microscopically in her direction, an action which seemed to cause him great pain and distress judging by the way his lips peeled back from his teeth. “Do you know what time I got in last night?” he rasped.
    “Nope. I went to bed and you weren’t back. I woke up, you were .”
    “I got back an hour before you woke up.”
    Ronnie did the math. That would have put his return at around two, two fifteen. No wonder he’d been so hard to rouse. “What the hell were you doing out in the dark all that time?”
    He cleared his throat and winced. “Carousing.”
    “With who, the cows?”
    “No.” A long sigh escaped his lungs as he rubbed his eyes beneath the sunglasses. “Bunch of the Ericksons’ ranch hands. Someone brought out a jug of rotgut and I didn’t want to back down from a challenge, so…”
    Landon snorted. “I’ve heard about that shit. Dad made a ranch rule last year that the staff couldn’t have it on the premises. Before that, it’d laid a bunch of guys out and screwed up production for a couple weeks. I’m surprised you’re upright as much as you are.”
    “I’ve got an efficient liver and hardcore kidneys,” Phil said and leaned his head against the window.
    Ronnie laughed and sung with exaggerated cheer, “You’re going to have such a great day.”
    Phil covered his face with his summer-weight jacket and hissed from behind it, “I don’t want to be your friend anymore.”
    Once the aching lush dragged his one bag into the airport, moaning all the way, Landon took his abandoned seat in the front of the car and drummed percussively on the dashboard. “So, what do you need?”
    “Aren’t you enthusiastic?” Ronnie pulled her phone out of her denim jacket’s pocket and queued up her to-do list. “Well, there’s a homeschooling supply store here in Cheyenne I need to check out for some workbooks.”
    Landon made a face.
    “Some of those will be yours. Big thick ones, too.”
    His enthusiasm waned a bit more. That made Ronnie grin. “You’ll be fine once you get back into the swing of it. Let’s see.” She brought up her mapping application and searched for a nearby super-store. “And if there’s a Target with a pharmacy around here somewhere, I need some things. They should be able to pull my records.”
    “Like what? There’s a little mom and pop pharmacy in Storafalt if you want to have your prescriptions transferred. It’d be an easier drive.”
    She cleared her throat. Yeah, as if she was going to have a conversation with her client’s nineteen-year-old about her contraception requirements. She rooted in the console for her AUX cord and plugged it into the phone’s jack, queuing up the map’s turn-by-turn voice command feature. Her phone had a 4G signal again, at least for the moment.
    She chose her words carefully. “Oh, well, my doctor prescribed a Vitamin D mega-dose at my last physical. Apparently I don’t get enough sunlight.”
    He seemed to buy it, relaxing into his seat and picking up Ronnie’s phone to study the cardinal pattern on the case. “Not a problem we ranch types have. How do you manage to have a D deficiency if you go to the beach so often?”
    She pointed to her brown forearm. “Pale people absorb it more easily, and I’m lactose intolerant so I don’t get it from milk, either.”
    “You can’t drink milk? Are you serious? That must suck.”
    She shrugged. “I can drink substitutes, but they leave a bit to be desired. Either the taste or the consistency is off-putting. I only know that because my body didn’t really give up on dairy until I was around fourteen. Waged an admirable battle, but lost. Anyway, it was bound to happen. My people really aren’t built to digest cow milk.”
    “Your people?”
    “Yeah. Neither side. My mom is Lumbee, like Phil.”
    “Lumbee?”
    “Yeah, you probably wouldn’t have heard of that. It’s a small Native American group in eastern North Carolina.