Sweet Talk Boxed Set (Ten NEW Contemporary Romances by Bestselling Authors to Benefit Diabetes Research plus BONUS Novel) (51 page)

Thinking about the slow, plodding horseback ride ahead of her, all five dusty, sweltering miles of it, Cassidy didn’t reply right away.  She’d just have to bite the bullet, she guessed, open one of her suitcases, slip into the rest room, and swap out her tailored beige crepe pantsuit and matching strappy shoes for jeans, a tank top, and a pair of sneakers. 

And mount up.

It wasn’t as if she had any other choice; there were no taxis in Busted Spur, since it barely qualified as a wide spot in the road, let alone a town.

Annabelle had a car, but she couldn’t be expected to close up shop, even for the fifteen or twenty minutes the trip out to the ranch would take.  The Gas & Grab was a one-woman operation, and customers were few and far between these days.  Every sale counted, however small.

Cassidy’s best friend, Shelby, would have been glad to provide transportation, except that she was in Nogales for the day, buying folk art and silver jewelry for her online shop.

The reality: Pidge was parked outside and the poor horse had to get home somehow.

No doubt about it, Cassidy loved her uncle, but right about then, well, she could cheerfully have strangled him.

Annabelle’s voice drifted her way.  ““I guess that would fix him,” she was saying.

Obviously, while Cassidy was letting her mind wander, Annabelle had gone right on talking.

Though she’d missed the middle part, it didn’t take a psychic to fill in the gap.  Annabelle had been pondering the mystery that was Duke McCullough.

So Cassidy simply agreed.  “I guess it would,” she said, with conviction.

Annabelle stood with one shoulder braced against the door frame now, her arms folded.  She had muscular biceps and a small, colorful tattoo of a dragonfly just above her right wrist.  “You reckon Duke’s ever gonna change?” she asked, and it was clear from her tone that she didn’t really expect an answer.

Cassidy gave her one anyway.  “No,” she said breezily.  “Would you want him to?”

Annabelle pondered for a few moments, looking solemn, then shook her head.  “Probably not,” she admitted.  “If he was different, he wouldn’t be Duke.”

“There you have it,” Cassidy replied.

Just then, the bell over the front door jingled, and Annabelle’s whole face brightened.  “Customer,” she chimed. 

Cassidy waved her off with a grin.  “Take care of business,” she said.  “I’ll be fine.”

Annabelle nodded in an of-course-you-will kind of way, returned Cassidy’s grin, and disappeared.

Cassidy opened a suitcase, took out a change of clothes, and ducked into the ‘staff’ bathroom, a cubicle with a sink and a toilet, and swapped out her pantsuit and pricey shoes for denim, cotton and sneakers.  She’d worn her shoulder-length brownish-blonde hair in a loose chignon for the trip; now, she let it down, did a little finger-combing, folded her dressy jacket, pants and sleeveless top, and packed them, along with the heels.  Within moments, she’d tucked her luggage and laptop case into a corner, and picked up her shoulder bag, which contained the main necessities of life: her cell phone, an electronic tablet, a hairbrush, a wallet, a small bottle of hand sanitizer, and a travel-size package of tissues.

Good to go.

She called a cheerful “see you later” to Annabelle and went out the back door.

Pidge raised her big head from the water bucket, nickered a greeting, and waited.

Cassidy reached her, threw both arms around the animal’s sweaty, horse-scented neck, and hugged.  “I’ve missed you,” she said, in a murmur, feeling strangely tearful.

Pidge nickered again and head-butted Cassidy a couple of times, though gently, as if to ask,
Where have you been?

Cassidy untied Pidge, pressed her shoulder bag against her side with one arm, gripped the saddle horn with her free hand, shoved one foot into the stirrup, and swung up into the worn saddle.

She’d forgotten how good it felt, sitting on a horse’s back, and she took a few moments to savor the sensation and allow muscle-memory to kick in.  Then she said softly, “All right, girl.  Let’s go home.”

Pidge didn’t need further urging.

She snorted, let her belly swell and then contracted it again, and set out, her movements as slow and steady as if she’d been pulling a plow.

“Well, now,” said G.W. Benton, straightening his back and then adjusting his hat, when his seven-year-old son, Henry, tugged at his shirt sleeve and pointed out the horse and rider coming up Duke’s driveway.  “Would you look at that?”

The question was rhetorical, of course, but Henry answered it just the same.  “I
am
looking, Dad,” he said, since, like most kids, he was a literalist.  Then, just as unnecessarily, he added, “Cassidy’s back.”  There was a note of wonder in his voice.

Duke came out from under the hood of his beat-up old truck, smeared with motor oil and grinning like a fool.  Wiping his hands on his pant legs, he strode off toward Cassidy, took hold of Pidge’s bridle, and waited for his niece to step down from the saddle.

“Where’s her stuff?” Henry wanted to know.  He looked and sounded worried.  “Duke said Cassidy would be sticking around here for a while.”

G.W. ignored the odd tightening in the pit of his stomach as he watched Cassidy land, as nimble as ever, let out a laugh, and accept Duke’s greasy hug.  “I don’t imagine she wanted to ride all the way from town with a suitcase in each hand,” he told the boy.

Henry didn’t reply; he just bolted in Cassidy’s direction, full-tilt.  She saw him coming, dropped to one knee, right there in the dirt, and opened her arms to catch him.

While Duke looked on, still grinning, Cassidy laughed and practically hugged the stuffings right out of the kid.

G.W. didn’t move a muscle at first; he just looked on.  The hitch in his stomach moved to the back of his throat, and he wondered what it meant, if anything.

He’d known Cassidy McCullough all her life.  She didn’t look much different than the last time he’d seen her, back at Thanksgiving, but
something
had changed since then.  It was unsettling, felt almost like an ambush.

In the next instant, he decided the idea was crazy and shook it off.

He joined the welcome party, put out a hand to Cassidy just as she got back on her feet, one arm still looped around Henry’s skinny, little-boy shoulders, holding him close to her side.

She looked at G.W.’s hand, then his face.

A smile quirked at the corner of her mouth, but she didn’t move otherwise.  “Hello, G.W.,” she said, very quietly.

G.W. let his hand fall back to his side.  That sensation of being taken by surprise washed over him again, and he didn’t like it one damn bit.  “Hello,” he replied, and the word came out sounding dry as sawdust.

What the devil was wrong with him, anyhow?  Sure, Cassidy was all grown up, and she was beautiful, too, but both those things had been true for some time now.  There was no good reason for his reaction.

She inclined her head toward Duke’s ancient pickup, with its raised hood, rusty patches, and broken tailgate.  Except for a good set of tires, the rig was a wreck.

“Next time I visit,” she said, “I’ll rent a car.”

The next time she visited, G.W. reflected, nonplussed, she’d be married.

Since that thought didn’t set well with him for reasons he didn’t care to explore further, G.W. swung a glare Duke’s way.  The man wasn’t poor, for God’s sake.  He could afford a decent truck—a whole
fleet
of them, if the notion struck him.  After all, Duke had enjoyed more than his fifteen minutes of fame during the three seasons his reality show, “Man Seeks Monster”, had been on the air.  He was still making money in his sleep, now that the thing was being streamed on the internet at five bucks a pop, and then there were the fees he collected for speaking engagements and personal appearances at various conventions.  On top of all that, Duke wrote a popular blog, posted a weekly podcast with listeners numbering in the tens of thousands, and collected advertising revenues on both fronts.

The man had plenty of money.

What he
didn’t
have, it seemed to G.W., was the sense God gave a fence post.

If he had, he’d have met his niece at the airport, like a normal human being would have done.  Instead, he’d left Cassidy a horse.

Why all this ought to piss G.W. right off the way it did was anybody’s guess.  It just did, that’s all.

“Now why would you want to rent a car?” Duke asked Cassidy blithely, already leading Pidge toward the barn.

Cassidy made no reply; she just watched them go, her uncle and the tired horse, shaking her head and smiling a little.  Henry was still clinging to her, both arms wrapped around her waist, his blond, buzz-cut head tilted back so he could look up into her face.

G.W., still exasperated and not having a clue why, since he’d grown up with Duke and nothing the man did ever surprised him, no matter how off-the-wall crazy it was, slapped his hat against his right thigh and then slammed it back on his head. 

“Is that truck going to be running anytime soon?” Cassidy asked mildly, indicating Duke’s disabled pickup with a nod of her head.  If she’d noticed G.W.’s fractious mood, she gave no sign of it.

“God knows,” G.W. said, thrusting the words out on a long breath, like a sigh.  Then, somewhere inside himself, he stumbled across a smile and dredged it up to the surface.  “I didn’t know about the horse,” he said.  In fact, though Duke had mentioned that Cassidy was coming home to plan her big-city wedding, G.W. hadn’t known when she was due to arrive, either.  “If I had, Henry and I would have met your bus.”

Cassidy’s smile seemed to wobble a little.  She looked tired, overheated, and pretty dusty, too.  “That’s okay,” she said, very quietly.  “I kind of enjoyed riding Pidge again.  It’s been too long.”

Henry finally released his hold on Cassidy’s middle, but immediately grabbed her hand and started tugging her toward the house.  He had a thing about women, Henry did; his mother had been gone almost three years by then, and he still missed her.

So did G.W., of course, though the raw ache had worn off at some point.  Now, when he thought of Sandy, the memories were almost always good ones, from before she got sick.

Cassidy allowed Henry to haul her over to the side porch, and the door that led into the kitchen, and G.W. just naturally went along.  He and Henry washed up at the sink, while Cassidy slipped away to the downstairs bathroom, ostensibly to do the same thing.

By the time they all reconnected in the kitchen, Duke was back from the barn.  Once he’d scrubbed the grease off his hands and forearms, he opened the fridge door and rummaged around until he came up with two cans of beer, a soda for Henry, and a bottle of store-bought iced tea, the kind Cassidy liked.

At least he’d made
some
kind of preparation for company, G.W. thought, still a mite sour.  Unless, of course, the stuff was left over from Cassidy’s
last
visit, in which case it had to be way past its expiration date.

“How was your flight?” Duke asked his niece, joining the rest of them at the round oak table that had been sitting right where it was for the better part of a hundred years.

Cassidy unscrewed the cap on her iced tea and raised the bottle as if making a toast.  “Can’t complain,” she replied.  “Security was a total pain, like it always is, but I had an aisle seat and there wasn’t much turbulence.  As for the bus ride from Phoenix, well, I
could
complain about that, but I’m not going to.”

Duke chuckled, raised his beer in acknowledgement of her gesture, and said, “Well, it’s over now.  You’re here, safe and sound.”

“Not to mention saddle-sore,” G.W. observed dryly.

Duke slanted a glance his way.  Temper sparked in his dark gray eyes.  He opened his mouth, remembered Henry’s presence, and shut it again, but G.W. had a pretty good idea what his friend had been about to say—something along the lines of,
What’s
your
problem?

Since G.W. couldn’t have said what his problem was, precisely, he was glad the question hadn’t been put to him.

“I’m going to be in second grade when school starts again,” Henry announced, after taking a long slug of cola.  He never got the sugary kind unless Duke gave it to him; at home, he drank milk, water, or unsweetened fruit juice, so he was making the most of the opportunity.

Cassidy widened her eyes—they were blue, her eyes, thick-lashed and bright as a star-spangled sky, in spite of her obvious fatigue—and gave a low whistle of exclamation.  “
Seriously?”
she replied.  “Why the last time I saw you, Henry Benton, you were still in
first
grade.”

“That was way last year,” Henry said soberly.  “At Thanksgiving.”

“Right,” Cassidy said, drawing out the word.

“You hungry?” Duke asked, all solicitous now that Cassidy had made her own way home. 

Was there no end to Duke’s hospitality? G.W. wondered irritably.  What other grand surprises awaited Cassidy—clean sheets on her bed?  Freshly laundered towels in the upstairs bathroom?

Not that it was any of his business, one way or the other.

Duke’s unasked question suddenly had merit.

What the hell
was
his problem?

Actually, he knew what it was, but he wasn’t ready to admit that, even to himself. 

“I’m starving,” Cassidy said, with feeling.  “The six pretzels I was served on the plane wore off a long time ago, and I had to hurry to catch the bus.”

The bus.

That, to G.W.’s mind, was even worse than the horse.

Why hadn’t Duke at least borrowed a rig, if he wouldn’t buy one, and met Cassidy’s flight down in Phoenix? 

Stop it,
G.W. told himself silently. 
You’re acting like an old lady.

“Well, then,” Duke said, pleased with himself, “I guess it’s a good thing I whipped up a batch of my special chicken-and-wiener spaghetti casserole a while back and shoved it in the freezer.  Half an hour in the oven, and supper’s on the table.”

Cassidy laughed, and the sound reminded G.W. of the bell in the country church down the road, back when it still had a clapper.  Used to float on the air, the peal of that bell, beckoning the faithful—or the merely resigned--from far and wide.