Wrangled (16 page)

“No, Cody. It’s over.”

He sat all the way up with a gasp, then his
face darkened and drew together in a menacing frown. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do. It’s what I’ve been trying to tell
you all evening. Let me up, I’m going in the house. You need to leave me alone,
Cody.”

“Go on then,” he said in a low snarl. “But
I ain’t plannin’ to leave you alone. You’re mine, Annalee.”

~~~

The following Monday I dragged myself out
of bed and got ready for work. I
’d left Tali crying in
Amber’s arms on Sunday night and had driven straight to the hospital, where I
found Al feeling a little better and in better spirits. Since he was able to
stay awake longer, we had a nice long visit and he was fine with it when I told
him I had to get home and go to sleep so I could work in the morning.

“I’ll be okay, Mommy,” he said, with a
brave little smile on his face that just about broke my heart. One last kiss
and hug, and I tore myself away to drive home and collapse from my emotional
weekend. In bed, I cried myself to sleep, wondering if my little family would
ever be normal again.

When I got to work Monday morning, it felt
like I’d landed on a different planet. After being there only about six weeks,
and taking the last of them off to stay with Al in the hospital, it was like I
needed to start training all over again. Mr. Clark wasn’t in yet, so I went to
work putting the files in order that he’d left on my desk, and reviewing them
so I’d know what closings were coming up and when. When he still wasn’t in
after I’d finished that, I opened my training manual to review. Part of my
duties were to hold open houses for some of Mr. Clark’s listings, and the only
compensation I’d receive for the overtime would be the opportunity to pick up
buyers of my own and earn commissions if I could sell them a house. With an
enormous hospital bill looming over my head, I was eager to get started on
that.

It was nearly noon when Mr. Clark arrived,
bearing a huge bouquet, which he set down on my desk. “Oh, Mr. Clark, those are
just beautiful! Who are they for?” I puzzled for a minute, not remembering a
closing that was set for today.

“Why, they’re for you,” he said. My mouth
dropped open and I gawked at him, unable to summon a thought to utter. “I’m
sorry I didn’t get down to the hospital last week, my assistant was out you know,”
he said, winking. “So I brought the get well flowers to you. Not sure they
would allow them in PIC anyway.”

I knew for a fact they wouldn’t. Pediatric
Intensive Care was even more strict than the adult unit, and fresh flowers were
banned because of the potential for allergic reaction on top of whatever the
kids had wrong.

“Th-thank you!” I stammered. “They’re
beautiful.”

“Yes, you said that,” he laughed. “Now, if
I’m not mistaken, it’s your lunch hour, and I’d like to take you to lunch.”

“You what…? But, who will answer the
phones?” I asked, inanely, because I simply couldn’t process this turn of
events. Mr. Clark had never taken me out to lunch before, and
no
one had
ever brought me flowers. I wondered if I were dreaming a fairy tale. I secretly
pinched myself, and found to my amazement that I wasn’t dreaming.

“They’ll go to voicemail like they used
to,” he said. “Clients think we’re on call 24/7, but you’ll drive yourself
crazy in this business if you don’t set some boundaries. Come on, let’s go get
a burger.”

Still in a bit of shock, I retrieved my
purse from the knee hole in the desk and stood up to go. “You look very nice
today, Annalee,” Mr. Clark said shyly. If I hadn’t already suspected it, that
would have convinced me that I was dreaming. Except the delicious, juicy burger
and fries from a local diner certainly tasted real.

With the exception that Mr. Clark continued
to pay me more personal attention than before, the rest of the week passed
peacefully. I’d go to the hospital as soon as I was off work, and whichever of
the girls was there that week would race home to take care of Daniel while I
sat with Alma and Celeste went to work. When Al went to sleep for the night,
I’d go home and more often than not fall asleep before I even had a chance to
eat. I was losing weight, but I didn’t care. Al was definitely on the mend,
though it would prove to be a slow process. We were planning on trying to bring
Tali home at the end of the week, if she didn’t get too upset at Al’s continued
absence.

I went out to the ranch on Saturday morning
to get my baby girl, but Charity begged me to stay at least until lunch. We
hadn’t had much of a chance to catch up, between Al’s injury and my drama with
Cody the week before. I hoped there wouldn’t be a repeat of that. I was
exhausted, and I knew I didn’t have much in the way of reserves to fight with
him. It was a relief when Charity told me he was off at another rodeo.

“How’s he doing at that, by the way?” I
asked.

“Thought you had no interest,” Charity
said, her eyebrows arched.

“I don’t. Just making small talk,” I
claimed.

“Oh, then you won’t want to hear that he’s
not doing all that well. Just holding his own, making enough at one rodeo to
enter the next,” she said casually, though her eyes were sharp on me. A small pain
went through me on his behalf. Poor Cody. And he thought that the rodeo would
be his ticket off the ranch. It looked like it might not work out.

After lunch, Tali and I went home and I
spent some time cleaning the house. I’d seriously neglected my half of that
duty lately, but someone was keeping it up. There wasn’t much to do. I was
teasing Tali with the feather duster and flicking non-existent dust off the
living room furniture when the doorbell rang. I took a quick glance in the
decorative mirror on the wall, smoothing my hair back into its neat bun, then
opened the door. For the second time that week, I stood in front of my boss
with my mouth hanging open like a fish out of water. “Mr. Clark!” I exclaimed.

“Annalee, I’ve come to take you and your
little girl out for ice cream,” he said. “Would she like that?”

In the background, I could hear her eager
assent. “Tali. Want. Ice. Cream,” she said.

Ruefully, I invited him in. “Looks like I
don’t have a choice in the matter.”

“That’s what we call a preemptive strike,”
he informed me. “By the way, Annalee, would you please drop the Mr. Clark?
Makes me feel I’m my father’s age. Just call me Jason, if you don’t mind.”

“Jason. All right, thank you Jason.” He
wasn’t really that much my senior, but I’d been raised to call people in
authority by formal address. I guessed he was perhaps in his early thirties.
Too old for me, though why that thought should have crossed my mind, I couldn’t
say.

“Just let me get Tali spruced up, and then
we’ll be ready, if you don’t mind me in jeans,” I called as I walked Tali down
the hall chanting, “Ice. Cream. Ice. Cream.”

“Not at all; you look sensational,” he
called back.

At the ice cream parlor, Tali sat in a
blissful sugar trance, stirring her bowl of ice cream into mush, as Jason and I
talked. It turned out he was younger than I’d thought, only twenty-nine. His
face was always set in serious lines, making him look both older and more
focused, but I learned that day that he was also capable of joking and
laughing. By the time I insisted on going home because it was time for Tali’s
nap, we were bantering like old friends, and trading good-natured insults about
our quirks at the office. Jason asked if I would mind if he came to the
hospital with me to meet Al, and I felt I couldn’t refuse. After all, he’d been
very kind and very generous. The least I could do was let him meet the object
of all the fuss.

Al was much better by now, though the
doctors wanted to keep him for another week to be sure there would be no
permanent effects from the venom. They were still giving him IV antibiotics,
too, which would be too difficult at home with our work situation. But it was
getting difficult to keep him in bed. He was beginning to resemble the curious
little boy who’d gotten too close to an interesting snake. Jason and Al got
along famously, with Jason asking questions that had Al chattering about
anything and everything, especially his opinion of snakes that bite. By the
time Jason took me home, I was dazzled by his attention, and grateful beyond
measure for his kindness to me and the kids.

On Tuesday of the following week, Al’s
neurologist pulled me aside and said, “We think it will be okay for Al to go
home on Friday. Do you have support at home, so that he won’t be unsupervised
for the next couple of weeks?”

A little stung, I replied, “He’s never
unsupervised. There’s an adult with him at all times.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it to sound that
way. I just meant that he’ll require careful monitoring. If he starts to spike
a fever or exhibit signs of unusual behavior, he’ll need to come back right
away.”

“I’m sure we can handle it, Doctor,” I
said, still upset that he would imply I’d leave a four-year-old unsupervised.
Of course, I had taken my eyes off him for a moment at the ranch. Maybe that’s
what made the doctor act that way. Shaken, I wondered if the next thing to
upset our applecart would be DFS coming to check on our situation. Almost as
much as I feared the moment when Jed got out of prison, I feared the Division
of Family Services deciding I wasn’t a fit mother and taking my children. It
was irrational, I know, but it stemmed from the raid that had turned our lives
upside down almost two years ago.

I was still more upset than the incident
should have warranted the following morning when I got to work. Jason picked up
on my mood instantly.

“What’s up, Buttercup?” he said, in an
ill-fated attempt to make me laugh.

“Nothing,” I snapped.

“Hey, Annalee, it’s me, Jason. Have I done
something to upset you, or am I just in the line of fire?” he joked. I felt
guilty right away. Of course he’d done nothing to upset me, so it wasn’t fair
to take my black mood out on him.

“Just in the line of fire,” I said, trying
for the same light tone. “Sorry.”

“No problem. Want to talk about it?” It was
tempting. But, I’d never told Jason the whole truth about our background. I
didn’t know if I’d still have a job if I unloaded that on him now.

“No, I’ll get over it,” I sighed.

To my surprise, Jason came to my desk and
took my hands, twisting me around on my swivel chair and pulling me up. He put
his arm around me and walked me over to a comfortable sofa that he kept in the
lobby for clients, sitting down with his arm still around me so that I had to
sit, too. “I’m not going to let my best girl fight a worry alone,” he said.
“Come on, spill it.”

I didn’t know what he meant by ‘best girl’,
whether he was referring to me as a girl because he employed me, or what. If it
was that, I was his only ‘girl’. But, his arm still around me, I began to
wonder if he meant something else. I looked into his eyes, confused.

“Come on, honey, what is it?” Now I was
completely flummoxed. Had he just called me honey?

Almost involuntarily, the story emerged
reluctantly from my lips. The early marriage against my will. The Prophet, my
husband, and his church, the sister-wives and our children, Russ’s rescue of us
from a system that didn’t know what to do with mothers who were under eighteen.
The only thing I didn’t tell him about was Cody. That was too fresh, too raw,
to share. As my story arrived at current events, Jason gave a heavy sigh.

“Wow. I didn’t expect that,” he said. I
wondered what he
had
expected. I must have wondered out loud.

“Divorcee, probably, or maybe someone that
some jerk took advantage of and left,” he said.

Shocked, I asked, “Why were you even
thinking about it?”

“I wasn’t going to say anything for a
while. But you’ve gotten under my skin, honey. I was hoping we could date, you
know, get to know each other.”

“What? Is that even legal?” I’d never had a
job, but something our tutor had said about sexual harassment came to mind. Not
that I felt harassed, whatever that meant. I felt flattered, actually.

“It’s legal as long as you don’t feel
pressured because I’m your employer. You haven’t felt any pressure, have you?”
he asked, a little anxiously.

“Well, no! I didn’t realize we were dating.
I mean, I thought you were just being nice because I was going through a rough
patch,” I babbled, still trying to sort this out.

“Well, just so you know, I would never fire
you just because you say no to me, but I sure would like to take you out, get
to know you and your kids. If you’re going to be my girl, I’ve got to take the
whole package, I know.”

That statement struck me like another bolt
of lightning. Did that mean he was only being nice to my kids because he wanted
me? Did he even like kids? At the moment, I was too overwhelmed to ask. First,
I had to understand what he was offering, and what it would mean for my
employment.

“It won’t have any effect on your
employment, like I said. You don’t have to go out with me, and if you won’t,
why we’ll just stay friends and you’ll still be my assistant. But, if you do,
it’ll make me very happy. Say, why don’t we plan to go out to dinner tomorrow
night to celebrate you getting your license?”