Rugged Cowboys (Western Romance Collection) Read online

  But that wasn't why he was there. He was there because he wanted to stay. Because every part of his life, old and new, lived in that house. The ranch around it, well, he needed something to do.

  He slips into the truck and waits for the boys to show up. How much work they're going to do with him away is debatable. But that's already factored into the plan. He's not planning on them doing a whole hell of a lot if he's not there to follow behind and check on them.

  "Everything alright, boss?"

  Their truck pulls up next to him, and the middle-boy, Michael, has his head out the passenger-side window. He looks almost concerned, the poor boy.

  "Yeah. Going out for a bit."

  "You want us to keep digging those post holes?"

  Philip's eyes shoot wide open, and he makes a face as if the idea had just occurred to him for the first time. "Hey, good idea! Why don't you do that? Don't kill yourselves. I'll be back in a few hours."

  He slips the car into reverse and before he knows it, Phil Callahan's on the highway, headed out to some factory in the middle of nowhere.

  Some property where someone used to have a ranch, just like his. Somewhere where someone had put down roots. Now those roots had been dug up, and in its place they were putting a big concrete pre-fabricated building with a parking lot all around it.

  What the hell kind of trade was that? Not the kind that he'd make himself. Not in a million years.

  But if she wanted to make it out like he was doing her a favor, then fine. He'd do her a favor and come out to look at the job site.

  Callahan was pulling into the site twenty minutes later. A dozen identical white trucks are parked all in a line, all of them with "Lowe Industrial" decals on the doors.

  He parks his truck next to them. As he walks away, onto the job site, he looks back with pride at the way his red truck sticks out like a sore thumb against the sea of white.

  The girl looks as good as she did the day before. Callahan sucks in a breath through his teeth. She's got a vest on that draws attention to one of the many places a married man shouldn't be looking.

  Instead he looks over her shoulder. Even through the narrow gap, at least a dozen guys are walk by as he watches.

  "Mr. Callahan. Thank you so much for coming out."

  "Yeah," he says. Not sure what to say other than that. She's got her hand out. He takes it reluctantly. It's supposed to be a professional gesture, and he doesn't want to take it any other way. There's no reason to take it any other way.

  But his body knows that it's touching a woman's hand, and it reacts accordingly, in spite of his best intentions to the contrary. He gets an unpleasant pleasure out of their contact.

  "Do you mind if I show you around?"

  "I don't know what good it's gonna do you, but go right ahead. Lead the way."

  She strikes off at a brisk pace. Nothing like the pace that he would have used at the ranch, tour or not. There's no reason to hurry, unless someone's about to get hurt. That doesn't seem to be how Miss Lowe sees it.

  She takes a hat from a bin and tosses it back to him. Philip catches it. "Put that on. Could be dangerous. You probably have nothing to worry about, but it's better to be safe than sorry."

  "Yeah," he says. He puts the hard hat on. It's a snug fit right out the gate, which is a comfort at least. She heads up a couple of steps into an aluminum box that might have been an office. Inside, a guy with two days of growth in his beard sips on a cup of coffee.

  "Mr. Callahan, this is my crew chief, Brad Lang. Brad, this is Mr. Philip Callahan, he owns the Callahan ranch."

  Brad puts a hand out. He's got a firm grip, and he looks Callahan in the eye. "Mr. Callahan. Good to meet you."

  "You always hanging out inside when your boys work, Mr. Lang?"

  His face goes a little red. "Was waitin' for you, sir."

  Philip looks over at the girl beside him. She's got an impassive expression, looking up at both of them. "Well, don't wait for me. I can walk. Already a long way off my ranch, you might as well make me walk ten more feet to get your job done."

  "Yes, sir."

  Now she's got an expression on her face. It's not one that says 'thanks for setting that straight.'

  He looks over at Miss Lowe like he's waiting for permission, or something. If he needs permission, then why the hell did she hire him?

  "You heard the man, didn't you? Go on."

  "You got it."

  He heads off. Morgan waits until the door slams behind him to turn to Callahan.

  "You think you're more qualified to tell my guys what to do than I am? That it?"

  He hadn't meant to step on any toes, but now that he's in the situation, it's fairly obvious that he's managed it anyways.

  "I didn't mean any disrespect, Miss Lowe."

  "No, of course you didn't." Her face is hard and angry. It makes her look cute. "You just thought maybe I couldn't handle him, that it?"

  There's a point where an edge becomes frustrating, and she's approaching it fast. But at the same time, it's hard to fault her. Callahan could imagine the explosion he'd have if someone were marching around giving orders to his boys. So he swallows his frustration.

  "You're right. I shouldn't have stepped on your toes like that."

  She shuts her eyes and takes a breath. "Yeah. Thanks. You're right. You shouldn't have. I'm sure you didn't mean anything by it."

  "Not a thing, ma'am."

  "Don't call me that."

  "What?" He heard her just fine, but it seems strange. Just manners, isn't it? Or would she prefer 'miss?'

  "Don't call me 'ma'am.'"

  "Sorry. Miss?"

  "Look. Just don't patronize me." She slips the hard hat off finally. Her hair's cut a little short for Philip's taste, only to the jaw. Any longer and it might not be safe for the job site, though, and it's good that she's taken that into consideration. "Woman in construction, I get enough of that as it is."

  "I didn't mean anything by it," he says.

  She smiles with a resignation that says that either she already knew that, or it didn't matter in the first place.

  "Shall we continue?"

  Chapter Six

  Morgan Lowe's heart is pounding in her chest. She's got to impress him somehow, and she can't see a single way that she's going to do that. Not after the colossal screw-up that she just got to walk in on.

  First they'd walked right in on one of her guys, slacking on the job, and then, as if to make matters worse, Philip had decided to step in.

  If she calls him on it, she's a bitch. If she lets it go, she's a wimp who lets outsiders talk down to her employees. Well, one of those is a quality she can live with. So she called him on it.

  But that immediately puts them on the wrong foot. Immediately and irrevocably. And that's a whole mess of its own.

  "This area here is going to be where the line starts," she begins. The sun's shining just wrong on them, getting in her eyes no matter where she looks, it seems. She starts walking back, the entire routine practiced. "It opens up into a few different areas, next. You get a few pieces of machinery that handle jobs that are too dangerous. Too hot, too big a risk of getting crushed by something heavy falling…"

  "If there's such a big risk, couldn't you find another way? You don't need machines to do it where a person can't."

  Morgan stares at him dully. Sure, they could completely retool their entire line. They could do everything by hand, double their costs, and for their clients, knowing it all had the human touch might be worth an extra dollar per unit.

  They'd think it was a real big deal, too. They'd be bragging about how they ate the massive over-cost of human labor, when in fact that only goes to cover maybe a third of the difference.

  Two more dollars per unit just comes out of profit. And while she's always been pleased with how well the company does for itself, two dollars per unit takes it from 'narrow margin' to 'razor-thin margin.'

  If the price of a single item on the line went up, they'd have to
raise prices, or they'd have to go out of business, because they wouldn't be able to eat the price of aluminum going up like the price of, say, copper had the past decade or so.

  "We'll think about it, definitely." Morgan tries to smile in a friendly way, but it's probably not working, and she doesn't much expect it to. She's not going to think about it any more than she already has.

  They could have a completely automated factory, these days. With the level of complexity machines can work at, she's already putting as many people to work as she can afford. The truth is that they've already got the human touch.

  Human assembly, humans work the line… but the metal cutting, the heat-treating… it could all be done by hand, at one one-hundredth the speed, and at several multiples of difference to the cost.

  "Over here, we have assembly. It goes through several different stages, of course." The entire demonstration works better when you're inside a building. They've got girders up now, and in a few days they might start putting up walls.

  But as it stands right now, they're standing in a big pile of dirt, surrounded by steel beams. It's hard to say that this area is assembly, because first of all, no it isn't—it's a patch of dirt. Second, they just don't see it in their heads, the way you do when you're standing on a factory floor, the machines silent for the night…

  They don't see it the way she sees it. The way that she's always seen it, since she was five years old. They don't know these buildings.

  They don't know the work. And quite frankly, whether they're an investor, or a corporate buyer, or a rancher who won't sell his land, they don't care. Not the way that she cares.

  Morgan Lowe doesn't expect any miracles. She knows the type of guy who doesn't sell is out there. Someone who doesn't view money as all that valuable compared to other things in life.

  There are plenty of people like that, and as much as she doesn't like to think that she's a bad person, no more than anyone else, it's not hard to hear people talking about how when a corporation comes in—corporations like Lowe Industrial, though they're still not big enough to be the first thing that comes to mind—everything goes to shit.

  That's completely, patently false. She has seen towns prosper because Lowe came in. But facts don't matter, not in the long run.

  Not when you're standing up there on a stage and you're trying to convince a hundred people to sell you their homes so that they can move into new homes, and get one of the five hundred new jobs that you're going to bring with you.

  Not when you get off the stage, and the next speaker they've got on is a community leader who tells them a bunch of stuff about how she's going to bring in foreigners to work the factory, about how she's just like all the others, about how they're not going to see a nickel of that money returned to the community.

  Lowe Industrial has always prided itself on giving back to the community, wherever it could feasibly be done. And Morgan has always been careful to uphold that, even forward it where she could.

  But none of it matters to people, because in their minds, corporate factories like Lowe are all the same. Morgan takes a breath and looks around.

  "Any questions?"

  He seems to think about it for a minute. He looks around.

  "You hiring local, or are you just bringing your boys up from Colorado or wherever?"

  That's a question that she's always hoped someone would ask, but the second she hears it, for an instant, she freezes up. Then the words start to come back to her, and she's back in her element.

  "We've got a policy of hiring as many local workers as possible. However, it often proves necessary to provide on-the-job training to make sure that our new locations offer the same high standards of quality and the same high efficiency as our prior locations.

  "It can be difficult to do that without having management end up as overbearing and controlling. We aim to have a high rate of manufacture because our workers are driven to work harder, rather than simply threatening their jobs if they don't work hard enough.

  "For that reason, the first year or two, we will have to have previously-trained Lowe Industrial management staff working alongside local workers, until the management style has, you know, rubbed off on them."

  She finishes the speech breathless and with a practiced smile. That might have won him over. It's a good speech and she's only had a few chances to use it. The past four months, she's been to a half-dozen town-halls and almost nobody asks her to her face if they're going to hire locals.

  They either believe her when she says they plan to, or they believe the guys who say that they absolutely won't. So she doesn't get a chance to give the more-details version of the little speech.

  But in reality, it gives a great overview of how Lowe Industrial differs from their competition. As far as Morgan's concerned, maybe they should be using it as the beginning of all their corporate speeches.

  Then she looks at Phil Callahan's face, and the way he looks so thoroughly unconvinced…

  She lets out a sigh. This was a mistake.

  She should just give up, but she can't afford to now. Not after two days of work. If she doesn't get the Callahan ranch, she'll tear her hair out.

  She's going to get it, if it's the last thing she ever does as President of the company.

  Chapter Seven

  Phil Callahan closed the truck door and got onto the highway before he knew what he was doing again. Talking about a damn factory? What interest did he have in anything to do with it?

  He knew it would be a waste of his time. It always would be, because it wasn't moral opposition to the project that stopped him from selling his land. She must have decided that was it, though.

  The truth was, it was a lot of little things. There's no way around it—yes, he needed the money. He needed to keep the property renovated properly. He needed to keep the horses fed.

  But he wasn't going to leave the place that his wife had loved, the place where she'd been buried, so that he could get a paycheck.

  He wasn't going to give up ranching just because of some financial difficulties. If he could get some of these horses sold off, like he should have already done, then… that would be different.

  But he hadn't been able to so far. Every time that he reached for the phone and tried to set up a meeting, tried to get something moving with the Stallion, he hadn't been able to do it.

  A three-year-old horse is already old enough to be making money on the track. Now he's got to be broken, trained up, they've got to find him a rider… there's probably another year's worth of getting him ready for racing.

  Which means that by then, he's a four-year-old horse, and only five or six years of racing ahead of him. That will hurt the price, no doubt about it. Which is why he should've been gone already. Should've been sold off. It was Philip's own stupidity.

  He takes a deep breath and holds it a little while. Eases off the interstate and then five minutes later he's pulling into the big yard out front of the ranch. Looking at the clock tells him before he even needs to ask why the boys are all piled into the bed of their old, beat-up Ford.

  "How'd your whatever-it-was go, boss?"

  "Waste of time. Should've been here."

  "That's a nice shirt. You wearing your church clothes?"

  He looks down at the shirt. Not especially nice. When Sara had been alive, if he'd been caught wearing anything to church that wasn't starched and pressed he'd be skinned alive after.

  "I guess it is," he says, finally. Sara wasn't alive to skin him for wearing it, and nobody was starching his shirts for him any more, either.

  "What was it about, anyway?"

  "Just going to meet somebody."

  They share a look. He's ducking the question because he doesn't want to bother with it any more, but they're reading into it and he can see it on their faces.

  "Somebody female? Somebody who's a girl?"

  For a second he considers telling them that she wasn't. Because if he tells them that Morgan Lowe is a girl, yes, then they'
re going to read into it in all the wrong ways.

  On the other hand, one couldn't spend more than a few moments looking at the woman to know that she's exactly a woman. She's about anything a man could want out of a woman, with the single exception that she wasn't Sara, and she wasn't going to be any time soon.

  "You boys talk too much, you know that?" He scowls.

  Too much free reign, these brothers. James very pointedly and very openly looks from one of his brothers to the other, before announcing in the loudest 'quiet' voice that Philip's ever heard that that meant 'yes.'

  "You boys didn't go out to lunch and not bother getting your boss anything, did you? Lunch, without calling to check and make sure I didn't have more work for you to do? You wouldn't have done that, would you?"

  "You don't like Mexican food, boss. You wanted a Burrito, you shoulda said something."

  Philip puts his foot up on the tail of the truck and steps up into the back alongside them. Michael's already reaching down into a big white paper bag.

  "You're right, I shoulda said you three were on thin ice." He can't keep up the act, but he can sure keep talking like he was fooling somebody.

  "We're sorry, boss. Would a burrito make you feel any better?" James takes the burrito that Michael surreptitiously passes him. "We got an extra, for nobody in particular, but we made sure it didn't have any tomatoes, just cause we know how particular some people can be."

  "I'm not particular." Philip takes it. James cocks an eyebrow. "I just know what I like."

  "Of course."

  The boys continue eating. They've got a little head start on him, but Callahan's not an old man yet, and he can still eat. He might have taken a few weeks off, after everything went south, but he'd realized not long after that it was either eat, or die, so he decided to eat.

  "I'm thinkin'," he says after a while. The boys get quiet. There's a time to play, and a time to work, and he's got the working face on, this time. "It's about time we get rid of that Black."

  The boys exchange glances. "Well, sure," James says finally. "What's your point?"

  "He'll need to be saddle-broken, 'course." He takes the last bite of the burrito, and then balls up the aluminum foil that had been keeping it warm. "I could call someone, have them do it, but if one of you boys wants to get a good bonus, I'd rather give you the money than some stranger."