his hand and made him almost jump out of his chair. “Are you trying to tell me something, Vivien?” he asked the mutt.
She whimpered and wagged her tail on the floor.
“Is the woman you’re named after as bullheaded as her daughter?” He took another long drink of tea and then picked up his sandwich. “I’d rather be eating with her, you know. I’ve always looked forward to an hour in the middle of the day when we could talk about anything and everything. She’s always been the easiest one for me to visit with.”
Vivien laid a paw on his foot and yipped.
“Why is she bein’ so damned hard to get along with? Is it because she misses her sisters? Or maybe because she’s been havin’ to work so hard? Well, that’s ranchin’ in a nutshell, and if she don’t like it, maybe she should sell out,” he said between bites.
He finished his meal and headed back to the field, driving slowly because all three dogs were running along beside the truck. Dust floated across and through the barbed wire fence from where Bonnie was already back at work. When he got out of his vehicle, he sneezed twice on the way to the tractor, but the dogs stayed right with him. He opened the cab door, and they all three got inside. Two shared the passenger’s seat, and Vivien curled up in the floorboard.
“Hmmmph!” Rusty said as he started the engine. “She’s got rocks for brains if she thinks I’m leaving a single one of you behind. We’ll go to court if we have to.”
Chapter Six
Any other time, Bonnie would have suggested that she and Rusty ride over to the Wildflower Ranch together, but not that Tuesday evening. They hadn’t even spoken to each other since the day before, and she wasn’t going to take the first step toward reconciliation. Not when he threatened her with the dogs.
She had spent a restless night, and that morning when she awoke, she had trouble separating reality from the visions she’d had in her sleep. Tears ran down her cheeks as she sat up in bed and wondered if she’d gotten the sign she’d asked for in the form of dreams. In the first one she’d crammed all her clothing into one big black garbage bag and the other small things she’d accumulated since she’d been on the Malloy Ranch into a box. She’d put them in the back of her truck and was driving past the cemetery when she saw Ezra sitting on the top of his tombstone. With a big grin on his face, a wicked mean look in his eyes, he waved goodbye to her.
Ezra had won. All three girls had lost. Plain and simple.
She couldn’t let him win. She just couldn’t.
In the second dream, there was snow on the ground, and both sisters, Abby Joy and Shiloh, stood on the porch as she drove away. She watched them in the mirror and realized that they would grow closer and closer to each other, while she’d just be a stranger who dropped in every few months or years to say hello.
Ezra had won a second time. He’d put the sisters together only to split them up again.
Bonnie punched her pillow several times. She couldn’t let him win, and she damn sure couldn’t leave her sisters behind. What if they needed her? What if she needed them like she had several times in the past months?
“Dammit!” she muttered as she wiped even more tears away with the edge of the bedsheet. “When did I put down such deep roots?”
About half angry with herself for letting herself become so vulnerable that she’d let other people deep into her heart, she threw back the covers and crawled out of bed.
She spent the entire day going back and forth from trying to convince herself that she was crazy for letting two dreams affect her whole life, to being honest with herself and admitting that they had been signs. She wasn’t a lot closer to making a final decision when the day ended, and she went back to the ranch house that evening. She took a long shower, dressed in clean jeans and a sleeveless shirt, and carried her baked beans out to the truck. The vehicle looked like crap on the outside, but it had new tires, bought with her first couple of weeks’ paychecks back in the winter. “You’ve been a faithful old friend. No way I’m goin’ to turn my back on