Sweet Talk Boxed Set (Ten NEW Contemporary Romances by Bestselling Authors to Benefit Diabetes Research plus BONUS Novel) (52 page)

“Sounds good to me,” she said.  “In the meantime, I could use a shower.”

Duke was already out of his chair, turning stove knobs, cranking up the oven.

Cassidy got up, too, ruffled Henry’s stubbly hair as she passed him, and headed for the back stairway.

“You two are welcome to stay and eat with us,” Duke told G.W., once she was gone.

“Gosh,” G.W. said.  He’d been standing since Cassidy rose from her chair.  “Much as I enjoy your amazing culinary skills, old buddy, Henry and I have other plans.”

Henry looked downright discouraged.  “
You
have other plans,” he said, leveling his gaze at G.W. for a moment before turning his attention to Duke.  “Dad has a
date.”

“It’s not a date,” G.W. said, too quickly.

Duke’s mouth twitched.  He opened the freezer above his refrigerator and rooted around until he’d managed to extract a casserole dish wrapped in tin foil and secured with a few strips of duct tape.  “Your loss,” he told G.W.

“If it’s not a date,” Henry persisted, “how come I have to be
babysat
?”

“You’re spending the evening with your grandma,” G.W. reminded his son.  “That doesn’t qualify as being ‘babysat’.”

Henry rolled his eyes dramatically.  “She’ll make me watch
Dancing with the Stars,”
he protested.  “She has a whole huge bunch of episodes saved up on her DRD.  And most of the dancers aren’t even
stars—
not really.  They’re just people who get their pictures on the covers of those little newspapers at the supermarket all the time.”

“Life is hard,” G.W. said, suppressing a smile, “and then you die.”

“I hate it when you say that,” Henry replied.

“I’ll save you some chicken-and-wiener spaghetti casserole,” Duke promised the kid, all sympathy.  In a good-cop-bad-cop scenario, he would have been the good one, while G.W. got to be the mean guy.

“Thanks,” Henry answered, ignoring his dad.  Then he stomped outside, slammed the screen door behind him.

G.W. sighed.  Squeezed the bridge of his nose between a thumb and forefinger.

“You could use some sensitivity training,” Duke remarked affably, peeling the duct tape off the casserole.

G.W. opened his mouth, closed it again, and followed the trail Henry had just blazed.  Only difference was, he didn’t slam the screen door.

***

Revived by hot water and soap lather, barefoot and clad in a faded pink and white polka dot sundress she’d found in the back of her bedroom closet, Cassidy returned to the kitchen, drawn by the scent of supper.

Duke hadn’t heard her coming down the stairs, so she paused at the edge of the room, watching as he lifted the spaghetti casserole from the oven.  The concoction, innovative as it was, would probably taste even better than it smelled.

Standing there, unnoticed as yet, Cassidy let her thoughts drift back over the years she’d lived in this sturdy, roomy old house, and the people with whom she’d shared the space—Duke, of course, and her late grandmother, Molly.

Twelve years Cassidy’s senior, Duke had always been more like a big brother to her than an uncle.

Molly, widowed young, had been strong, forthright and beautiful, through and through.

The situation had been complicated, right from the beginning.

Cassidy’s mother, Heather, hadn’t planned on getting pregnant at the age of eighteen, but it happened.  Already on her own, she’d married Cassidy’s father, Jack McCullough, Duke’s older brother, who was barely twenty at the time. 

In short, it didn’t last.

One day, Heather had written a single word—good-bye—on a scrap of paper and taped it to the refrigerator door.  Then, leaving her child and most of her belongings behind in the cramped apartment above the abandoned movie house, she’d simply left.

Maybe she’d caught the bus.

Maybe she’d hitchhiked.

Nobody knew for sure.

For a while, Jack had been sure she’d come home.

Instead, she’d stayed gone.

There had been postcards now and then, always mailed from a different place.  The last one—Cassidy had found it among her grandmother’s things, years after Molly’s death—had simply announced that she’d remarried and wouldn’t be getting in touch again.

True to her word, she hadn’t.

Jack had tried, in those early weeks after Heather’s departure, but in the end, he couldn’t hold down a job
and
look after a small, baffled child, constantly crying for her mama.  He’d taken Cassidy to his mother, enlisted in the Air Force, and gone away.

Oh, he’d sent home most of his pay.  After more training and a brief visit home, he’d been “deployed”, sent to North Africa.  He wrote often, and the allotment checks arrived on schedule.

A little over a week before Jack’s tour of duty would have ended, he was killed in action.

Naturally, Molly had been devastated, but she’d carried on.  She’d had a ranch to run, a young son, and a granddaughter to raise.

Stoic in that way country women often are, especially when they’ve been raised on the land, Molly had simply kept on keeping on.  She bought and sold cattle, helped to mend fence lines, repaired leaky roofs and broken pipes, raised a garden in summer, and still managed to smile a lot more often than she cried.

Cassidy was seven when Molly came down with a case of pneumonia, entered the hospital, spent nearly two weeks there, and finally came home to recover.

Instead of getting well, though, she’d gotten sicker.

Duke had taken her back to the hospital.

This time, though, she never came home.

So many people attended her funeral that the services had to be held outside, since the church couldn’t hold them all.

After a while, letters started from the county began to arrive, then phone calls, then visits.  Social workers had scoured the country for Heather, it turned out, but they’d had no luck finding her or any of her kin.  That was when they’d started making noises about putting Cassidy in foster care.

Duke—he’d been christened ‘Pernell’, but he’d refused to answer to any variation of that from day one, so everybody had finally given up and let him name himself after John Wayne—was nineteen when his mother died.

Too young, certainly, to take proper care of a seven-year-old niece.

One thing about Duke, though: he was bone-stubborn.  He and Cassidy added up to a family, by his calculations, and nobody was going to split them up.

Somehow, he’d prevailed against the system and, with considerable help from Annabelle, neighbors and friends, he’d raised his niece to adulthood.

Back in the day, he’d helped Cassidy with her homework every night.

He’d sat through every school program, every Christmas pageant at church, every dance recital, dressed up, smiling wide, and proud as all get-out.  He’d combed the tangles out of Cassidy’s hair, bandaged her skinned knees, seen her through her teenage years.

When she earned a full-tuition scholarship and went off to college, Duke had taken a night job as a mechanic, in addition to his ranch work, and helped with her living expenses.

And when she’d graduated with a degree in Media Arts and promptly landed an entry-level job at a Seattle TV station, he’d been thrilled for her.

So, she thought, re-entering the present moment, standing there in that familiar kitchen, with the linoleum floor cool beneath her feet, if he’d left her a horse as transportation that day instead of coming to fetch her himself, it was no big deal.

Suddenly, Cassidy’s eyes burned, and she sniffled.

Alerted by the sound, Duke set the casserole dish in the middle of the table, turned to her, and smiled, his handsome head tilted slightly to one side.  “Hey,” he said.  “You’re not crying, are you?  Because there’s no crying in baseball.”

She laughed moistly at the old joke.  “This is baseball?” she countered.

“Might as well be,” Duke replied.  Then he put his arms out wide, and Cassidy went straight into them, held on tight.

He’d had a shower of his own, and exchanged his work clothes for a clean white shirt and jeans that looked new.  He smelled of spray starch and sunshine and his chicken-and-wiener spaghetti casserole.

He propped his beard-stubbled chin on top of her head and said, “I’m glad you’re home, Little Bit.  I am surely glad you’re home.” 

“Me, too,” Cassidy said.

The hug ended, and she pulled back a chair at the table to sit.

Duke sat down across from her.

“Guess we’d better say grace,” he said.

“Grace,” Cassidy said, straight-faced.

They laughed again. 

And that was the moment Cassidy truly came home.

G.W. felt uncharacteristically awkward, standing on the bumpy sidewalk outside Becky’s Coffee Bar, on Main Street, with his hat in one hand.  Five minutes before, he’d dropped Henry off at Sandy’s mother’s place; the boy had sulked all the way into town, his accusation occupying the space between father and son like a third person.

Dad has a date.

“This,” G.W. protested now, under his breath, “is
not
a date.”

True, he’d asked Alice Fletcher to meet him at Becky’s for coffee at a specific time—tonight.  He liked Alice; she was new in town, would be teaching fifth grade at the local elementary school in the fall.  They’d met at the social gathering following a schoolboard meeting a few days before and G.W. had to admit, to himself if no one else, that he’d been attracted to the woman; she was pretty, she was smart, and she seemed like a good sport.

And he’d been feeling a mite lonesome lately.

Okay. 
He
wouldn’t call meeting for coffee a date, but it was possible Alice might be of another opinion entirely.

He swore silently.

He’d been looking forward to this evening—until Cassidy McCullough came riding back into his life on an ancient horse named Pidge.

Something had shifted, the moment he caught sight of her.  And that something, whatever it was, whatever it meant, had changed everything.

In the moment, all G.W. wanted to do was get back in his truck, drive over to Myrna’s place, rescue Henry from an evening of
Dancing with the Stars,
and head for home.  Once he’d wrangled the boy through the evening ritual: bath, pajamas, bedtime story, prayers, and, finally, an exchange of ‘good-nights’, he’d be able to
think. 

G.W. always thought more clearly on his own land—riding fence lines, fishing down at the creek, standing under that familiar patch of stars arching between one red mesa and another.

He squared his shoulders, reached for the door handle.  He couldn’t just walk away without an explanation; Alice had surely seen him by now.  He might make some excuse, say he had trouble out on the ranch—a sick horse, maybe.  Crazed cattle running amok.  The crash of an alien spacecraft.

He opened the door and stepped inside.

The place was full but, then, it only had six tables, each one topped with Formica and surrounded by mismatched chairs.  When it came to public gathering places, besides the churches and the schools, Busted Spur boasted one diner, three taverns, and Becky’s hole-in-the-wall java joint.

The aromas of freshly brewed coffee and baked goods greeted him right away, and, looking around, he soon spotted Alice.  She was sitting alone at a corner table, her head bent over a book, the fluorescent light catching in her sleek cap of dark hair.

As G.W. approached, she looked up, closed her book, and smiled.

He smiled back.  “Am I late?”

Alice shook her head.  She had navy blue eyes, high cheekbones and very good teeth.  “You’re right on time, G.W.”

He didn’t sit.  There were no waitresses at Becky’s; if you wanted something, you went up to the counter, waited your turn, and asked for it.

The tabletop was clear except for Alice’s book and a glass of ice water.

“What can I get you?” he asked, with a slight nod toward the chalkboard menu on the wall behind the cash register.

“Just plain coffee,” Alice said.  “I’ll doctor it myself.”

G.W. nodded again, made his way to the counter.

He ordered two coffees and, realizing he was ravenous, two good-sized cranberry scones as well.

Becky herself poured the coffee, placed the scones on separate plates, and asked if he wanted them ‘nuked’.  G.W. had gone to school with Becky; she’d been Sandy’s best friend, maid of honor at their wedding.

G.W. said no, he’d just take the scones as they were, thanks.

Becky, a petit force-of-nature with a headful of red dreadlocks, a turned up nose and mischievous green eyes, pretended to peek around G.W.’s right shoulder for a look at Alice.

“It’s about time you got yourself a life, G.W. Benton,” she whispered, with a grin.  “She’s pretty, that new teacher.”

Yes, G.W. thought, Alice was easy on the eyes, all right.  Lots of other good things, too, probably.

Unfortunately, she wasn’t Cassidy.

CHAPTER TWO

Morning sunlight slanted through Cassidy’s bedroom window, found her face, turned the insides of her eyelids bright pink.  She stretched, luxuriating in her girlhood bed, allowed herself to pretend, for just a few seconds, that she’d never left home in the first place.

A chirp from her cell phone wrenched her out of the brief fantasy; she sat up, scrabbled for the device on her nightstand, peered at the screen.

The text was from Michael Brighton-Stiles, the man she was going to marry.

Marry. 
The word fell through her brain like a dark meteorite, landed hard and spikey in the pit of her stomach.

She blinked a couple of times. 
Focus,
she told herself. 
Focus. 
Although Cassidy was a morning person, she usually needed at least half an hour to resurface from the depths of sleep.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” the message read. 

Using her thumbs and biting her lower lip, Cassidy fumbled out a response.  “Easy for you to say.  You’ve probably been up since the crack.”

After a brief pause, a line of smiley faces appeared inside a small comic-book style bubble on Cassidy’s phone.  Then more words appeared: “I miss you.”