Page 8 of Beside the Rolling Waves
Should he let it go? He couldn’t exactly force her to ride with him, but…
He probably should pick his battles. He too had made a promise to Rita before she had let him know that she wanted him to do something with Becky. Something along the lines of, “You’re like a sister to me. I’ll do whatever you ask.”
Well, what was the saying about repenting at leisure? It looked like he was going to have a good long while to wish that he had been a little bit more inquisitive about what exactly she was going to want him to do.
Becky was obviously not in the mood to deal with him. But maybe the fact that they were going to have to do something with these babies together would help heal the hurt he’d inflicted on her. She was loyal to a fault. More loyal than anyone he’d ever met. But obviously he had broken her trust, and there was a flipside to that loyalty: her ability to hold a grudge longer and deeper than anyone he ever knew.
Of course, as a Christian, she knew that wasn’t right, and she’d tried to moderate that side of her personality back when she was younger. He wouldn’t be surprised if by Wednesday, her anger had dissipated and she was a lot more reasonable. Probably it was a good idea to wait to talk until then.
“All right. I’ll meet you at the diner in Blueberry Beach. Twelve okay?”
“Two.” Now he thought she was just being contrary.
But he knew how to handle contrary people. After all, Ford had taught him the art of negotiating since that had an awful lot to do with a person’s ability to make money.
“All right. Two. At the Blueberry Beach diner. I’ll be there.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before.”
He had started to turn away. He knew her jab was designed to hurt him. It succeeded. She was right. She had heard him make promises before, heard him say that he would besomewhere for her. And he’d broken those promises. He thought he had good reason, but… Becky probably wouldn’t agree.
“You can count on it, sweetheart.”
“I am not your sweetheart,” she said, throwing the manure she had on her fork into the wheelbarrow so forcefully some of it spilled out the other side.
He looked at it, then looked up at her, but she had already spun on her heel and stomped away.
He’d thought for a while that his life was full and busy, and he wanted it that way, because he only gave himself two more years to make whatever money he was going to make so that he could come back to Becky, wealthy and successful, and ask her to marry him, finally.
He had a feeling he hadn’t known what busy was.
Four
Becky was so steamed she could hardly stand it. The idea, the nerve, the absolute gall of Rodney to show up at the barn and think that she wouldn’t have anything to say about the fact that he’d been radio silent for five whole years.
Despite the pleading texts she sent to him. The letters that had been returned unopened, the phone calls she made that had gone to some kind of recording saying that the number had been disconnected.
And now, andnowhe decides to come and talk to her?
Ha. Like she would ever.
Except she had to.
The one nice thing about horses, well, one of the many nice things about horses in her opinion, was they forced a person to calm down. To be deliberate in their movements, to not allow their emotions to affect their actions.
Becky remembered this as Velvet, the least calm of all of her horses, trotted around the round pen.
She was lunging her, as she did almost on a daily basis, to keep her horses in shape and to get a little exercise. She wished she could put them out in the pasture, but currently there was a crust on the ice. Her horses would most likely break throughbecause of their weight, but she didn’t want to chance the fact that if they didn’t, they could slide and break something.
She personally had made sure that the round pen had been cleared of ice as well as snow. Her horses were too valuable to her for her to chance allowing them to get hurt. Of course, it made extra work for her, but it was worth it.
She had as many house-cleaning jobs as she could, and she picked up any extra jobs that were available anywhere near Raspberry Ridge.
Her pickup was not very reliable, and she couldn’t afford to fix it if it broke down, so the only time she ran it was when she had to go to Blueberry Beach to pick up feed. She added groceries to that, because she thought it made more sense for her to make one trip, rather than one for the horses and an additional one for food for herself. But the beans and rice she bought last month were holding out nicely. Even if they were getting rather old with nothing else to go with them.
Although she got coffee, too. She did splurge for that. She felt like she needed it though, in these cold temperatures. She had to do something to help keep herself warm. She’d lost twenty pounds over the winter, and she hadn’t had that much extra to begin with.
Still, she had to calm herself down in order to work with horses properly and not upset them. So she tried to think rationally about the situation.
