I Love This Bar (24 page)

   "What in the hell for?" She dropped her bag.

   "This is Tuesday. The sun is already up and it's going to be a hot day. We've got cattle to get into the corral and get ready for the sale. You promised Uncle Emmett, remember, and I need a vet? Evidently you remembered something about it, you picked up your bag on the way to the door."

   "Good God, Jarod. He's lyin' in his coffin. We shouldn't be working. We should be down at the funeral home greeting guests or at least you should be," she said.

   "He told me not to sling snot over him when he was dead. To get on with life. You going to help me or do I need to call another vet?"

   "Give me two minutes to get dressed. I'll drive my own car."

   "I'll take you and bring you back," he said.

   "Wait for me outside. Cathy is a bear when she wakes up."

   "You won't go back to sleep?" he asked.

   "I'll be there in five minutes or less. I've got to get my supplies out of the garage. Pull around there," she said.

   He handed her a biscuit stuffed with scrambled eggs, cheese, and bacon when she was in the truck. "Thought you might be hungry so I brought leftovers."

   "Your momma already got up and made breakfast at this ungodly hour?"

   "Yep, she did. Coffee is in the thermos right there at your feet. My brothers are already in the pasture rounding up every white face they can find and corralling them. We figured we'd rather be working as sitting around on our butts all day doing nothing. Besides, there's a lot of decisions that will have to be made and getting the white face cattle to the sale will help," he said as he drove south.

   She bit into the biscuit and chewed slowly. "So when are you going back to Oklahoma?"

   "It'll be a few weeks. We've got a lot to do to get the place ready. I'll stay until it is."

   Her heart did one of those little half jumps. "Like what do you have to do? Sell the ranch?"

   "Cleaning it out before my nephew moves down here. That'll take forever."

   "How old is your nephew?" she asked.

   "Twenty-three. He graduated from college and has been helping his dad on the ranch already. He's achin' for his own place. Got a girlfriend and it looks serious."

   She poured coffee into the lid of the thermos and sipped it. "Is he helping corral cattle?"

   "No, he and the rest of that generation will be here tomorrow. Someone has to run the business up there. They'll drive down tomorrow though and be at the funeral on Thursday."

   She'd finished every drop of the coffee and the biscuit by the time Jarod parked the truck at the corral. Cattle were milling around, bawling at being penned up. Two men rode up on horses and tethered them to the railing. They met Jarod and Daisy halfway from the truck to the corral.

   "Daisy, this is my brother Stephen. And this is my brother Mitch."

   "Pleased to meet you. I understand you're the vet?" Stephen said.

   "My pleasure," Daisy said. "I'm a vet tech but I can make sure they're all ready for the sale. I brought the records with me."

   "Well, hot damn. We couldn't find anything to tell us when they'd been vaccinated," Mitch said.

   "I've been doing it for a few years and I keep records. Jarod, you can read and I'll get out the supplies," she said.

   "We'll run them into the chute." Stephen nodded.

   They were both good looking men, older than Jarod, and not as striking as he was, but then few men were. She dug into her kit and handed Jarod the paperwork. He studied the top chart and pointed out the white face that went with it.

   "That one," he pointed.

   His brothers herded that particular cow into a narrow chute. Daisy loaded up the needle and reached through the rails. The cow didn't even flinch when she shoved it into her flank.

   "That'll fix that old girl. Who's next?"

   It went like that all morning until they reached the last piece of paper in the stack.

   "You havin' dinner with us?" Stephen asked.

   Daisy shook her head. She was dirty, sweaty, and in no shape to meet the McElroy women. Besides, Jarod wasn't the one who'd invited her.

"No thanks. Jarod is taking me back home."

"You'd be welcome," Mitch said.

"Thanks, but I'll take a rain check," she said.

   Jarod didn't press. "Okay then, vet. Let's take you home and figure up the bill. I'll need a receipt." He'd love to introduce her to his family, but he wasn't stupid. Even though she looked wonderful to him in her stained jeans and work boots, she wouldn't want to meet his parents for the first time looking like that.

   "Yes, you will," she said.

   "What's that supposed to mean?" he asked.

   "That you will need a receipt. What I did doesn't come cheap and it's tax deductible."

   "You sounded pretty curt."

   "So did you."

   "Are we fighting?"

   She shrugged her shoulders as she organized her equipment and put the bag in the backseat. She figured the bill as he drove and handed it to him when he parked half an hour later in the Honky Tonk lot.

   He pulled a checkbook from the glove compartment. "That's reasonable enough. Did you figure in your time or just the supplies?"

   "I don't work for free, cowboy."

   He wrote the check and handed it to her. "Can I see you tonight? Would you come out to the ranch for supper with the family?" He felt as if he'd done something wrong but couldn't think of a single thing.

   "No thank you. I'm going to sleep until time to open the doors of the Honky Tonk. Don't bother getting out."

   "Remember my badge of honor." He opened the truck door at the same time she did.

   She was halfway to the Honky Tonk before he caught up to her. He grabbed her hand and held it all the way to the porch where he spun her around, wrapped his arms around her, and kissed her hard.

   "God, you feel good in my arms. I wish you could be there all the time. Sleep tight, darlin'," he said and whistled all the way back to the truck.

   "After that, I doubt it," she muttered as she watched him pull away from the parking lot.

   She slept until six that evening and was amazed that her cell phone hadn't woke her with an animal emergency before that. Cathy tried to shoo her out of the Honky Tonk at midnight, but she stayed until Tinker told everyone that the doors were closing in five minutes. Then she and Cathy sat down, propped their feet up, and had a beer.

   "I'm sleeping until noon tomorrow no matter what. We have to get up early on Thursday," Daisy said.

   "Anyone comes knockin' on the door, I'll shoot them for you," Cathy said.

   "I'm holding you to that promise," Daisy said.

Jarod pounded on the door at seven o'clock the next morning and Cathy didn't move a muscle. Daisy opened the door with a frown on her face. Some watchdog Cathy was. Her snores sounded worse than Jim Bob's fishing wagon.

   "What are you doing here?"

   "It's time to get on the road." He motioned toward a huge cattle trailer pulled by a semi truck.

   Daisy wondered how in the hell Cathy was still sleeping with all those cows bawling in the back of the trailer.

"Are you crazy?"

   "Last time the therapist checked he said I was in remission."

   "I'm not going to a sale today." She wore a pink sleep shirt that barely reached her knees and she rubbed the sleep from her eyes with her knuckles like a little girl.

   "Why not? You did promise him that you'd help me get rid of these sorry white face cattle. Didn't you tell him Angus made better steaks?" Jarod asked.

   
Promise? She remembered his last word. The one sh
e hadn't answered.

   "I'll be ready in ten minutes. Come on in. Sit at the table."

   He sat down and looked around. Her apartment was tiny but furnished with nice pieces. No clutter and clean, simple lines. If an apartment described a woman, then Daisy was a no-nonsense lady. The sofa took up most of the living room when it was pulled out into a bed. The flat screen television rested on a plain black case surrounded with books. He looked at the titles. Mostly romance with a few Evanovich and Grafton thrown in among them.

   The kitchen was a small galley, room for one in the aisle between the cabinets. Refrigerator and stove on one side surrounded by white cabinets. Sink with a window overlooking the woods behind the joint with the same white cabinets around it on the other side. No dishwasher or trash compactor. He made his way to the sink and looked out the window to see two deer and a fawn grazing at the edge of the trees. A cottontail wasn't far away and a 'possum lumbered across the yard in that direction.

"Sorry, Ruby," she whispered as she jumped into a pair of jeans and pulled her boots on. "I let a man into the apartment but… hell, there's the word again… it's only for a few minutes and I'm not taking him to bed."

   She pulled her hair up into a ponytail, grabbed her purse, and went into the kitchen to write a note to Cathy explaining that she'd be back in time to help open that evening. Jarod motioned for her to look out the window at a deer grazing between the treeline and the Honky Tonk. She wanted to lace her fingers in his as they shared the wonder but picked up a pencil instead and wrote a quick note.

   When she finished she started for the door with Jarod right behind her.

   "Think Cathy wants to go?" he asked.

   "I wouldn't wake Cathy up unless her bed was on fire," Daisy said.

   "Then I'm sure not," he whispered. He slung his arm around her shoulders, pulling her close to his side as they walked toward the truck. Before he opened the door he kissed her firmly and hugged her tightly.

   The noise of the bawling bovines was wiped out by the roar of the truck's engine. The air conditioning worked, but the inside of the cab looked like it had survived a tornado. The seats were so ripped and torn and had been covered up with one of Mavis' worn quilts to keep the springs from poking. The vinyl dash had cracked and dust had settled into the crevices. The shocks were so worn that every time the wheels turned she bounced halfway to the ceiling.

"Rough ridin' sumbitch, ain't it?" Jarod laughed.

"If you can hang on, I can," she said.

   They were out on the interstate before he asked, "You hungry?"

   "Starving. Do they serve breakfast at the sale?"

   "Yes, but if you're hungry we'll get something before that. Eastland has a Dairy Queen. We could get you a sausage biscuit there," he said.

   "I'd like that and a tall iced tea. We can take it to go and I'll eat on the way," she said.

   "Ever notice that just about every Texas town has a Dairy Queen?" he asked.

   "Ruby said that in order to be classified as a town, a place had to build a beer joint and a church. Then they had to get a post office and put in a Dairy Queen. Population didn't make a damn. If it had fifty thousand people and was minus any one of those four things, it didn't qualify. But if it had five people and all of the above, it was a town."

   Jarod laughed and it felt good. "She was every bit as opinionated as Emmett. How'd you live with her all those years, then?"

   "Easy. I stayed out of her way and she did the same. Mostly we agreed on things, especially about the Honky Tonk. Only thing I ever had to fight her for was that new jukebox. Until I came into the picture she'd refused to update at all. She had the one with the old 45 records still on it and a stash of the same records in the storage room. When one wore completely out on the jukebox she'd have the maintenance man change it out. The clientele loved the old honky tonk, beer drinking, crying in your drink songs, but I thought they needed something more. The fits Emmett threw were mild compared to what Ruby pitched over that notion. We finally compromised. I got a new one. She kept the old one. Only one could be plugged in at a time and Monday nights were for the old one, exclusively, because that was the major trucker night."

   "Why?" Jarod asked.

   "Because even that much was a chore to get done."

   "No, I mean why are there more truckers on Monday?" Jarod asked.

   "Have no idea. It's the night when a lot of the regulars stop by and they like the old music so that's what they get."

   "And besides, Ruby had to win part of the fight, didn't she?"

   Daisy nodded slowly. "She and Emmett didn't give up power easily. How about you, Jarod? Do you give up easily?"

   "Hell, no," he said.

   She had no idea that he was answering his own question about if he wanted to convince her to leave the Honky Tonk and live with him. But he did and he made up his mind to pursue her until he won.

   Daisy was everything he wanted in a woman. She was so pretty that he compared every other woman to her. She was smart enough to be a full-fledged vet and did the work of one. She was hardworking. Lord, she ran the Honky Tonk and kept up with at least two counties' worth of animals. She was funny and witty and she kept him on his toes every minute he was with her. He enjoyed being with her so much that when she wasn't around he kept wishing she was. Yes, surprising enough after his first impression of her being nothing but a barmaid, he was flat out in love with the woman.

There wasn't a white cloud in the expanse of blue sky and the breeze was so slight it barely shook the tree leaves. Daisy wore her basic sleeveless black dress with a knee-length hemline and a scoop neckline and plain black pumps. Her dark hair was twisted up the back and held with a clamp with a few curls flipping back down to her neckline. She chose a simple herringbone gold chain necklace and small loop earrings. Cathy wore a dark blue sundress and matching sandals accented with silver and turquoise jewelry. When they crossed the church lawn several men stopped to stare, including Billy Bob and Joe Bob Walker.