Page 45 of Lawbreaker

“She’s not like that. Not snobby. None of our kids are.” She grinned. “Cole and I came up hard, too. Ranching isn’t everybody’s cup of tea. You might have noticed the thing about free labor...? Anybody who shows up here at regular roundup or bull roundup or any other labor-intensive time gets impressed, as in pirate ships?”

He burst out laughing. “Well!”

“Get Cole to tell you about the government inspector who turned up one year. It’s a doozy.”

“We can talk all day without mentioning the feds,” he said in a mock low tone.

“Right! Got you. Sorry.” She grinned.

He grinned back.

Odalie, glancing at them, thought how well Tony fit in here. It was as if he’d been born on a ranch. He was comfortable with most everybody. With the notable exception of herself. Ah, well, she thought, she was young and there was time. She hoped.

Heaping plates of food were carried from the serving line. Odalie, for all her slenderness, could eat with the best of them. Tony watched her put away enough beef to feed a family of three.

She saw him watching her and grinned. “I’m still a growing girl,” she pointed out. “God forbid I should get skinny and weak, so I wouldn’t have to help throw calves when Dad brings home another lot of them!” she added in a loud voice so her father, nearby, would hear her.

He raised a fork. “You live here, you work here!”

“Communist!” somebody yelled.

“That will give you two weeks of mucking out the stables!” Cole called back.

A white napkin was raised in the air and waved back and forth.

“Good enough for you,” Cole said, and went back to eating.

Tony was chuckling. “Never a dull moment around here,” he mused.

“We’d get dull if we just talked about heritability traits,” Odalie mused.

“You hush about that,” Cole called to her. “That’s family secrets!”

“Is it really?” she chided. “You told that reporter from the cattle magazine all about it just last week!”

“He promised me that he wouldn’t breathe a word of it.”

Odalie rolled her eyes. “John, did he promise that?” she asked her brother.

“I can’t say,” John chuckled, glancing at his dad.

“Why not?”

“He found my worm bed,” he said, pointing his fork at his father.

Everybody burst out laughing. Tony was remembering what Odalie had told him, about John washing a bucket of earthworms clean and dumping them in her bed before she got in it.

“They should have given you a medal for that,” Tony told him. “That’s original thinking.”

“I know where a lot of worms are,” Odalie told Tony with a frown.

He raised his hand. “I take it back. Sorry,” he told John. “I’m scared of worms.”

“Like fun,” Odalie laughed.

“No, really,” he protested. “My grandad used to feed them coffee grounds. Anything that will eat coffee grounds has got to be dangerous!”

Odalie laughed softly and dug into her dessert.