Shame the Devil (Portland Devils #3) - Rosalind James Page 0,11

to use once it’s … whatever season is best to leave a ranch. Hawaii’s always pretty much the same, whenever you go. That’s why it’s Hawaii. And ask him whether he wants to take the kids or not. That way he doesn’t feel so guilty about not wanting to, because Amy can say no. I bet she wasn’t too excited about that ‘fun with the boys’ part. That woman wants romance.”

“Amy? She knows better. She’s got four boys. She’s married to a rancher. She’s married to Dane.”

“I know two things,” Harlan said. “Football and women. Yeah, she wants romance. She wants to be swept off her feet.”

“See,” Owen said, “that’s the kind of thing that makes people hate you. Why do you get women the way you do?”

“Because I like them,” Harlan said.

“Everybody likes women.”

“No, they don’t. Lots of guys are irritated by women. They tune out when a woman talks. You can see their brain clicking off behind their eyes, the moment when they start thinking about sex or cars or the game or whatever. They don’t pay attention, maybe because the stuff she cares about doesn’t seem important. They tell her what she ought to think, or how she ought to think. If you don’t like the way somebody thinks, you don’t really like them. And, see, I think women are awesome. Sure, they don’t necessarily think the same way guys do, straight line. They think more … laterally, too. They don’t just think about what you just said, they think about why you said it. They make more connections than men do. It’s interesting.”

He understood most women, anyway. Other than his mom. He’d thought he did, but it had never occurred to him that she’d leave her kids. Never in a million years.

Which was another thing he didn’t need to think about right now.

“I guess,” Owen said. “I don’t know. I like a logical woman.”

“Doesn’t mean she isn’t logical,” Harlan said. “She can be logical and lateral. Trust me. Three sisters here. I’ve had a lot of opportunity to observe.”

“God knows that’s true,” Owen said. “I’ve observed you observing. And your vast experience is saying: Hawaii.”

“Hawaii,” Harlan agreed. “She gets to buy that swimsuit, do all that body preparation, go someplace totally different, get him focused on her there. Oh—and tell him you’re actually glad he doesn’t want to go to Yellowstone, because now that we’re out of it, you kinda want to spend the day doing anything else but watching the game.”

Owen made a face, and Harlan said, “Yeah, you’ll be giving him the edge on this one. Man, don’t you know how much edge you already have?”

“It’s not that,” Owen said. “It’s that I’m going to have to admit that you’re right. I hate that. Fortunately, there’s the skiing. Which I know how to do, and you don’t.” He sighed. “I just hope my phone camera works in the cold. Can’t get enough shots of that.”

The next day, Harlan spent a riveting morning in and out of the calving shed, during which he considered the possibility of hypothermia, forked a whole lot of clean and nothing-like-clean bedding straw, and didn’t cut the heavies out of the herd on horseback or reach into any cows to hook a chain around a hoof, since he (A) didn’t know how to ride a horse, (B) didn’t know how to get a cow to go through a gate, and (C) in a stroke of extreme good fortune, didn’t know how to reach inside a cow. After that came a pause to wash up and eat a hot lunch prepared by Owen’s mom, Joan, which rivaled the size of any NFL training camp meal Harlan had ever seen. Once they’d worked their way through most of it, Owen’s dad, whose name was, believe it or not, Waylon, looked Harlan over and said, “You didn’t do half as bad as I expected.”

“Thanks,” Harlan said. “I guess. I figure I’ve got just about enough skills to dump a bale of hay out of the back of a truck, though.”

“Nope,” Waylon said. “More like you’ve got enough hard work in you not to wander off after an hour, since nobody’s paying you any ten thousand bucks to be there. Owen brought home this old boy once, kid from Seattle or someplace. A couple of the cows were having some real trouble, and he just about threw up. And then he went inside and took a shower.”

“He did throw up,” Dane said. “Nose tackle.