Running Blind Read online

  When she got back to the truck with her new boots, Spencer was there, waiting, with a smile and a small brown paper bag from the hardware store. The only errand remaining was the grocery store and a honking huge list.

  “What did you buy?” Spencer asked as he stepped into the passenger seat.

  “Boots.” Carlin placed the green boots in the backseat, making sure they were secure so they wouldn’t migrate onto the pies.

  “Oh yeah, you’ll need plenty of warm clothes before the end of the month.” He started to list all the things she’d need. In addition to the boots, a heavy coat—or two; hats, gloves, scarves to cover her nose and mouth because otherwise her lungs could freeze. Carlin didn’t tell him that she planned to glom onto Zeke’s leftover coats; if she did, he might wonder why she was being so chintzy with her money—or, even worse, he might feel sorry for her and start taking up a collection to buy her clothes. She could so see Spencer doing that.

  And she could see people giving, out of the goodness of their hearts.

  She was so lucky to have found Battle Ridge, Kat … even Zeke. By the time spring arrived she’d have a good amount of cash to get her to wherever—a good amount of cash, some warm memories, and an ugly-ass pair of cheap green boots.

  Chapter Fourteen

  ZEKE AND SOME of the men were just pulling up to the house for lunch when the back door crashed open with a force that sent it slamming against the wall, and Carlin burst out at a dead run, carrying a flaming pan and screaming, “Gaaaaa!” at the top of her lungs. Zeke slammed on the brakes and shoved the gear into park as he leaped out of the truck. He rounded the hood and raced toward her, his heart in his mouth. Those flames could blow back into her face—

  “Drop it!” he roared.

  Startled, she did, right there at her feet. It was sheer luck, but the pan landed upside down. A few little flames licked out from under the edges, then died away.

  She stood there staring down at the pan, breathing hard. Warily, the men were climbing out of the other trucks, wondering if it was their lunch they had watched crash and burn—well, burn and die. Zeke reached her and whirled her around. “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said, still breathing hard. She glared down at the pan. And then she kicked it. The first kick sent it tumbling a couple of feet; something black and gooey came out. The second kick got better distance, maybe because it wasn’t as heavy now. Evidently unsatisfied, she advanced on one of the pickups and grabbed a hammer from the back. Going down on one knee, she swung the hammer for all she was worth and beat the hell out of that pan, then she got up and kicked it one more time for good measure.

  “Damn,” Walt muttered. “I’m not ever going to say a single bad thing about her cooking.”

  “Yeah,” Eli muttered in return. “No matter what it is, I’ll eat it or die. Even that cake.”

  “More like, eat it and die,” Patrick put in.

  Zeke would have laughed, if his heart wasn’t still pounding with fear. “Damn it,” he yelled at her, “you don’t run with a flaming pan—”

  “You do when you can’t get the damn fire extinguisher to work,” she snapped back. She was evidently finished taking out her frustration on the pan, because she returned the hammer to the truck and grimly surveyed the men standing around eyeing her with more than a little trepidation.

  Spencer knew her better, so he gathered his courage first. “Uh … what was that, Miss Carly?”

  “An experiment,” she said, and her tone told them all not to ask another question. “Don’t worry, it wasn’t lunch. Y’all get inside and eat. Now.”

  One and all, even Zeke, they turned and filed into the house.

  Lunch was sometimes served in shifts; the men came in and ate when they could. It wasn’t ideal, but Carlin could see the reasoning behind it so she’d learned to go with the flow. After the incident with the flaming pan, she was glad she had to deal with men coming and going today, because it gave her time to settle down. Damn biscuits. Not that they’d looked like biscuits; they’d resembled flaming hockey pucks more than anything, but she’d figure out what she’d done wrong. She was fairly sure biscuits weren’t supposed to flame up like that.

  Finally the last two hands, Darby and Patrick, were finishing up while she took a break in the kitchen, sipping on a glass of tea. Once they were out of the way she’d clean up and get to the laundry that never seemed to get completely finished. At least there was no longer a quarter mile of dirty clothes piled in front of the washer and dryer; the chore was much more manageable these days. She had a laundry basket devoted to her clothes, and so did Zeke, as well as a separate one for towels. None of the baskets ever overflowed. There were times when it might’ve made sense for her to wash his clothes and hers together, but she never did; shared laundry would indicate an intimacy they didn’t have.

  Patrick made his way through the kitchen, thanking her for lunch—he was always so polite—and heading out and back to work. That left only Darby, finishing up in the dining room. Great. She wondered what he’d find to complain about when he left. With him, there was always something. If he’d been one of Snow White’s dwarfs, his name would have been “Bitcher.”

  A few minutes later Darby came out and said, “That casserole was damn good.”

  Carlin almost dropped her glass of tea. A compliment? From Darby? He was the one who’d complained that he wanted to know exactly what he was eating, and in a casserole he couldn’t always be sure. Something was up. The hairs on the back of her neck stood up in warning when he stopped by the small kitchen table and just looked at her for a long, uncomfortable moment.

  “I won’t be here much longer, you know,” he said.

  How was she supposed to respond to that? It would be an out and out lie to say she’d be sorry to see him go, and rude to say “good riddance.” So she managed a noncommittal hum, and got up from the table to put a little more space between them, just in case. She didn’t like him, and she didn’t trust him.

  He didn’t take the hint and move on. Instead he said with a hint of cockiness, “After October market, I’m going down to Texas to rodeo. I’m a bull rider in the winter rodeo, and I’ve done some bronc riding as well. Want to see the buckles I’ve won?”

  God, was this his version of “want to see my etchings”? If she’d been sipping her tea right then, she’d have snorted it out her nose.

  “No, thanks,” Carlin responded, wishing he’d just move on. “But, uh, good luck.” She could hardly say she hoped he’d get gored in the ’nads, now could she? For a split second she felt bad that she’d even had the mean thought.

  “Are you sure?” He drawled the words, gave her what he might have thought was a sexy look but struck her more as a smirk. “I keep ’em in the bunkhouse. You ever been to a rodeo? A lot of women are turned on when they see a man control an animal the way I can.”

  He made that statement sound more suggestive than it should’ve, and that was saying something. Her bad feelings about having mean thoughts evaporated in an instant. There was no way he could interpret her carefully bland responses as intense interest, or even casual interest, in anything he said or did.

  It wasn’t her. She couldn’t let doubt undermine her. When Brad had first started stalking her, after just two dates, she’d felt guilty and gone over and over those two dates, looking for anything she could have said or done that made him think he was her one and only. She’d liked him okay on the first date, but only okay, just enough that she’d said yes to a second date. The second date had turned her off, though; there hadn’t been anything horrible about Brad, just a general feeling that she didn’t want to go there. As it turned out, her instinct had been right on the money, but too late where Brad was concerned, because he’d already fixated on her.

  She got a similar feel about Darby, an uneasiness that made her not want to be alone with him. Stalker? Nah, she didn’t think so. Asshole? Oh, yeah.

  “Rodeos never appealed to me,” she said flatly, which w