Page 11 of Devoured

"You hired her on purpose."

"I hired the most qualified applicant who answered the ad." John shifted against the pillows. "Why? She not working out?"

"That's not —" Dean stopped. Started again. "She walked in here a stranger and inside of a day she's got the office running and the kids fed and the whole house turning around her like she's been there ten years. On the worst day we've had since —" He didn't finish that one. "It's fast. You don't think it's fast?"

"I think it's competent," John said. "I think you've forgotten what it looks like, because nobody's run that office since your mother."

That landed where the old man had aimed it. Dean looked at the floor.

"You can't blackball a woman just because she's an attractive woman who's good at her job, Dean," John said. "That's not a reason. That's the opposite of a reason."

"I can if she's some fake-ass city woman come out here to look down on us all." It came out harder than he meant it. "If she's so fuckin' good, Dad, why'd she want to work here? End of the map, family she's never met. What's she running from, and what's she think she's gonna find?"

The monitor beeped its steady idiot rhythm into the quiet.

John let it sit a while. Then he looked at his son the way he looked at a gate hung crooked, with a kind of patient disappointment that had been correcting Dean's work for thirty-three years.

"That's your problem to figure out," he said. "Not your reason to be cruel to a woman who hasn't earned it. I hired her. If she needs firing, I'll fire her." A pause, to make sure it landed. "Understand me?"

It was the card the old man almost never played — not I'd prefer, not think about it, but the flat fact that this was still his ranch and his hire and his call, stroke or no stroke. Dean hadn't heard that voice from a hospital bed and it knocked something loose in him to hear it now, the proof that his father was still in there, still the biggest thing in the room even flat on his back.

"...Yes, sir," Dean said.

"Good." John closed his eyes. "Now go home. And Dean…" without opening them "bring me a real coffee tomorrow or I'm leaving the whole ranch to Lara Baxter and you can explain that to your brothers."

He drove home with his jaw tight and his father's voice riding shotgun the whole way.

That's your problem to figure out. The hell of it was the old man was right, and the further hell of it was that the problem wasn't really whether she was a grifter. He'd known, somewhere south of his pride, that she wasn't, since about the second she'd come around that desk this morning and told him she had standards and his filing system didn't meet them. A grifter flattered. A grifter agreed with you. A grifter didn’t stand in a man's office on her second real day and inform him, dry as chalk, that she'd aim higher than a cattle operation held together with rubber bands.

He kept coming back to that. Not how she'd looked — though that was its own problem, filed under do not — but the way she hadn't given an inch. He'd swung at her, hard and unfair, and she'd stood there and swung back and made him feel like the small one. He wasn't used to that. He didn't know where to put it.

He was still not knowing where to put it when he came in through the mudroom and heard his children laughing, and the sound stopped him flat.

It wasn't a sound he heard much lately. Not like that — easy, unguarded, the particular shriek of Levi when something had genuinely got him, no grief under it and no carefulness on top.

He came down the hall and stopped in the doorway to the den, and he did not announce himself, and for a long moment nobody knew he was there.

She was on the floor.

That was the first thing, that she was down on the rug with his kids instead of above them, cross-legged with her shoes off and her hair coming down out of whatever she'd put it in that morning, and Levi was showing her something, some treasure out of his pocket, a rock or a bottle cap or one of the thousand small worthless things the boy carried like currency. And she was looking at it. Turning it over in her fingers with the exact gravity the thing required, asking him a question about it, and Levi, who didn't talk to people, who had taken the better part of a year to talk easy even to Helen, was answering her in a flood, the whole story of the rock or the cap or whatever it was, his hands going, his face wide open.

Giana sat on the arm of the couch with the studied indifference of a girl who has decided not to be impressed and is failing. She lobbed something into the conversation, a test, the kind of barbed little eight-year-old gambit she used to find the edges of a new adult, and Dean watched the city woman field it without even slowing down, light, unbothered, handing it back with enough of a return on it that Giana fought a smile and lost.

He stood in the doorway and felt the floor of something he'd been standing on for two days quietly give way.

This was the woman he'd accused of moving fast. This was the grifter, the angle, the fake-ass city import come to look down on them all — sitting on his den floor in her socks with his son's pocket-junk cupped careful in her hand, earning the kid's whole heart without trying, without knowing anyone was watching, without a single thing in it for her. Nobody performed this. You couldn't. He'd have known. He'd spent four years learning to tell the difference between people who were kind to his motherless kids because they meant it and people who were kind because it played well, and this wasn't playing to anyone. She didn't know he was there.

It went through him like weather. The wrongness of how wrong he'd been, first, sharp and shaming. And then, right behind it and tangled all up in it so he couldn't get one loose from the other, something a great deal more dangerous, the simple animal pull of watching a soft-voiced woman be tender with his children on the floor of his own house, and wanting, with a suddenness that took the air out of him, to be down there on the rug with the three of them.

He hated it. He hated it precisely and completely. It was the single most disloyal thing his body had done to him in four years and it had done it in about nine seconds flat, and he was still standing there hating it when Levi looked up and saw him.

"Dad!"

And the spell broke. The boy was up and across the room, the rock or the cap forgotten, and Dean caught him on reflex and swung him up and the moment on the floor folded itself closed. Lara was already getting to her feet, already gathering herself back in, the easy open thing in her face shuttering over into the careful neutrality she wore around him, and he watched her do it and understood, distantly, that she had two faces too, and that he'd only ever earned the closed one.

"They've been fed," she said. "Helen's got dinner in hand. I was just —" She gestured at the floor, the kids, the whole afternoon, and didn't finish it, because there was no version of the end of that sentence that didn't say I was just loving your children a little, and she wasn't going to say that to him. "I'll get back to the office. There's still the month's invoices."

"Helen," Dean said, because Helen had appeared in the kitchen doorway with the radar she'd always had, "take the kids and wash up for dinner."