The Bride Wore Denim (16 page)

“We were good friends. I think we still are. But what if your friend wants more of this?”

He didn’t kiss her slowly this time. He pressed his way into her mouth without waiting for an invitation, bracing for her to shove him away but prepared to stand his ground. She gave a squeak of surprise but then met his insistence with her own demanding tongue. Sparks flew across his scalp and down his spine.

Her mouth was hot and sweet with chocolate, cream, and wine. Her tongue slid against his expertly, playful and stunning. The flying sparks gathered in his stomach. His body hardened so quickly, his lack of control shocked him more than Harper did. He’d meant to act the macho cad for a few teasing seconds to divest her of any memories of them as kids. Instead, she banished their childhood ghosts all by her little lonesome.

When she did push him away, he was no longer braced for it. She held him at a literal arm’s length, her tongue on her upper lip, her breath loud enough for him to hear it, and unsteady as a newborn filly.

“Stop. This is so not smart.”

“Felt pretty smart to me. Would it help to go someplace less public?”

“After I finish my cheesecake.”

“I’m glad to know where I stand in the hierarchy.”

“Pretty far below chocolate. But above almost everything else.” She touched his lip with a soft fingertip.

“And tell me again,” he said. “Where’s your good old friend now?”

“Still right here, I hope,” she whispered. “Although he’s shocking me. No matter how much I keep fearing he’s going to kiss like a . . . well, a brother, he—”

“Doesn’t. You’d better be about to say ‘doesn’t.”

“He absolutely, unequivocally,
so
doesn’t.”

B
Y THE TIME
she and Cole got back to Rosecroft, Harper’s brain was in a state of agitated confusion and guilt. Her sister’s ex-boyfriend could kiss like an angel, and then turn her on like nobody she’d ever been with—and she’d been with more guys than she wanted anyone to know about. She felt like she’d sold out to the devil himself. The bottom line was, a person simply didn’t go after her sister’s old boyfriend.

Still, she didn’t pull her hand away when Cole held it on the way home. And she managed to live with the cocktail of bliss, guilt, and worry that made up her roiling emotions even though they consumed every thought all the way home. She wasn’t expecting Skylar to nearly bowl her over as she stepped through the door.

“You’re back! How’s Miss Joely?” Skylar all but ran into her in the foyer, stopping short and scooping up the black-and-white pup that was three times bigger than when Harper had first seen it.

“Hey, Skylar.” Cole answered for them both. “If nobody’s called here with other news, things are pretty much the same.”

“Nobody called.”

“Skylar! Hi.” Harper gave the girl a one-armed hug and set her suitcase on the slate tile so she could pet the dog. “This little girl has sure grown. Congratulations on getting to keep her.”

She scratched the puppy behind its perked-up ears, and each of her fingers got thoroughly doggy kissed. Skylar flushed with pleasure and pride.

“My mom made me make signs to put around town, and I had to report her missing to the sheriff. But after ten days, nobody called or anything. I named her Asta.”

“It’s a beautiful name. Cole told me you named her after one of your dad’s old dogs.”

“Yeah. She’s really smart. She’s pretty much house trained, and she can already herd the chickens, but she doesn’t know why she’s doing it.”

“They’re incredible dogs. So, how are you?”

“Okay. It’s nice you’re back again.” As soon as the words were out, she looked as if she wished she hadn’t said them. “I mean. I wish you didn’t have to come back. You know?”

“I know, sweetie. I know. I hate this.”

“Are they going to be okay?” Skylar bit her lip.

“Amelia says she’s very hopeful about our mom. Joely’s not doing as well. All we can do is pray she stabilizes, and then the doctors can figure out more.”

“They won’t let me go see them.”

“Do you want to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Yeah, kind of. Like I should tell them to get better myself. Mrs. Crockett—your mom, I mean, she’s always been cool to me. But my mom says it’s best if no kids are there.”

“Skylar, honey, if you want to go, you tell me. I’ll take you. You’re not a kid. But you don’t have to, either. It’s not very much fun to see them. They got pretty badly hurt.”

“My dad said they . . . ” She stopped and shook her head.

“They what?”

“Miss Joely especially doesn’t look like herself.”

Tears pricked Harper’s eyes, but she held them at bay. All the excitement over Asta had faded from Skylar’s features, replaced by sadness and worry that she’d say something to get herself in trouble. Harper wasn’t about to let Skylar think she’d made anyone cry.

“She doesn’t. She looks very beaten up. And she needs all the good thoughts and prayers she can get. You tell me anytime what you want to do.”

“Okay.”

“Come on. I want to see my grandma. Is she still up?”

“She’s waiting for you. And I’m supposed to go home now that you’re here.”

“Oh.” Harper looked at her watch. “It’s only eight thirty. What if I call your mom and ask if you can stay? I want to ask you something.”

The girl’s eyes brightened. She glanced from Harper to Cole, flushed a little—so the crush hadn’t diminished—and nodded. “Okay. What do you want to ask?

“Let me get my stuff put away and give Grandma Sadie a kiss hello, then we’ll talk.”

S
OMEONE HAD BEEN
working overtime in the kitchen. The room gleamed like one of Amelia’s ORs. And the cookie jar, which had never been empty when they’d all been kids, was filled to rim with some kind of amazing chocolate shortbread something. Chili simmered in a Crock-Pot, and bowls of creamy cheddar cheese and thick sour cream were covered and waiting in the refrigerator.

“I wish we’d known about this,” Harper groaned, as she lifted the lid on the aromatic chili. “Who’s the wonderful elf that did all this?”

“Grandma Sadie and my mom,” Skylar said.

“You want some?” Harper asked as she got out mugs for coffee.

“No. I ate some earlier.” She sat at an empty spot at the kitchen table. “Oh, but, thank you.”

The manners she’d been drilled in again. Cole set a glass of milk and the cookie jar in front of her.

“Eat up,” he said. “Get your strength for Harpo’s grilling.”

The teen frowned. “About what?”

“Stop teasing her.” Harper admonished Cole. “There’s no grilling. I want to talk to you about your art. I’ve been thinking about it ever since I was here last month.”

“Really?” Skylar picked up a thick, rectangular cookie as if this were no big deal, but her hands shook. “I’ve been drawing as much as I can. Cole showed me pictures of your paintings. They’re amazing.”

“Thank you, sweetie, that means a lot. What I really want to know is if you ever asked your mom about that art show and competition that’s coming up in two weeks.”

She looked genuinely surprised. “You remember that?”

“I do.”

Her features closed up. “I told her about it. She barely paid attention. She said she’d heard about it, and it was only a fund-raiser for the public school district. It’s not something she wants to support—didn’t I tell you that’s how she’d be? I’m pretty sure she thinks public schools are where the devil teaches or something.”

“I doubt she thinks that.” Harper reined in a smile. “She wants to make sure about the quality of what you and your brothers are learning that’s all.”

“Well she’s not a good art teacher, I’ll tell you that. She lets me get art books and books on photography from the library, but she thinks that’s all I need. I have a friend, Christy, who goes to our church, but she’s in the regular middle school. They have painting class, and drawing class, and even a pottery class for art. Our co-op for homeschooling has an art class or art activity once a month. It’s completely lame.”

From the way Skylar’s voice ramped up in volume and frustration, Harper knew she’d pulled a cork out of a dam. Her heart went out to the teen again.

“It sounds frustrating. But I don’t see why the people running this competition wouldn’t let some students from outside the public school join. It’s more money for them.”

“My mom says the co-op needs her money, and she’d rather spend it there. She already pays taxes to the school district.”

A tidal wave of sympathetic frustration rushed over Harper. How many times had she heard her father complain about the cost of materials for her extra-curricular art classes because he’d “already paid taxes, so why don’t the schools use their money with more discretion if they were going to offer these kinds of courses?”

She’d hated that argument. She still hated it.

At least someone was trying to raise money to help fund the arts. School districts all over the country—certainly in Chicago—were struggling to hang on to any art and music programs.

“Do you have anything you would want to put into the exhibit if you could enter?” she asked.

Skylar sat back in her chair and bit her lip in sudden uncertainty. “I don’t know. I didn’t let myself think about it.”

“If I talk to your mom,
will
you think about it?”

“Uh, yeah. But I don’t have anything framed or with a mat on it even.”

“That’s pretty easy to fix. I’ll bet the rules will say what kind of finishing you have to do.”

“It would be cool to have my picture hanging in the VA center.”

That confident wish told Harper all she needed to know. Deep inside, Skylar thought maybe she was good, and that was all any artist needed. The feeling wouldn’t always be there—in fact, most of the time it would be replaced by towering doubt. But like with faith, all a person needed was a mustard seed’s worth of belief in herself.

“Give me a couple of days, okay? Things are crazy here—I’ll talk to your mom as soon as I can.”

“She won’t say yes.” Skylar’s dejected face proved she believed the verdict had already come down. “But I can’t believe you’re willing to ask her. It’s . . . thanks.”

“Don’t be so pessimistic.” Harper smiled. “This is a good little battle for us to take on. It’ll keep our minds off of the bad things.”

She didn’t let herself think that if the worst happened, this whole conversation would be moot.

T
HAT THOUGHT HIT
at two o’clock in the morning when Harper’s eyes flew open in the wake of a nightmare that left her gasping and certain her sister had died in the horrible crash. She thrashed in her covers for a few seconds before coming fully awake with a pounding heart.

“Keep her safe. Keep her safe. Please, please keep her safe.” She repeated the prayer like a mantra until her pulse calmed and she could make herself remember that a nightmare wasn’t a prophecy. She buried her head in her pillow, letting the ghostly remnants of the dream fade.

She might have succeeded in forcing herself back to sleep but for the faint sounds of movement in the house below. Curious, she flipped to her back and listened. The slight squeaking of hinges, a drawer rolling out, and definitely footsteps, sent her swinging out of bed.

She slipped on her favorite pair of woolen Haflinger shoes and threw a sweatshirt over her pajama top. The weather had been unseasonably cool in Chicago, and now she knew it was because they’d been getting blasts of Wyoming’s early chilled September air. She shivered and grabbed the extra quilt off her bed to wrap around herself. The person downstairs maybe didn’t want company, but she worried it might be her grandmother, unable to sleep. Not that their super-matriarch couldn’t fend for herself, but she was ninety-four.

The comfort of tiptoeing through her house, following the dim light from the kitchen, drove the last of her dream away. She’d lived in more apartments, with more different roommates, in more different states than she could count. But none of her houses, apartments, or shared living spaces in the past ten years had replaced the home Paradise and Rosecroft still were. The insight surprised her.

The sight of Cole in the kitchen surprised her more.

He stood at the stove, stirring something in a pan, his plaid sleep pants not so baggy she couldn’t get an appreciation for his strong butt muscles and bare feet. A box of hot chocolate mix sat on the counter beside him. She smiled.

“Want a little peppermint schnapps to go with that stuff?”

He started slightly and turned, his slow grin turning her sleep-deprived joints to something soft and weak like Play-Doh. She swore his hair didn’t look a whole lot more disheveled in the middle of the night than it did during the day. It gave him even more of the rakish appeal that had been affecting her cool so strongly in the past weeks.

“Is that your remedy, alcohol?”

“Remedy for what?”

He looked a little sheepish. “Kinda had a nightmare. Poor Coping Skills R Us.”

“Oh, hardly. I’m sorry, Cole. My dream wasn’t so hot either.”

“Then maybe schnapps is the answer.”

“Nah. Virgin hot chocolate is good enough for me.”

“There are so many, many places I want to go with that line.”

Her use of the line had been half purposeful. She wrapped her quilt more tightly around her shoulders and shot him an evil smirk. “Typical. Stupid boy humor again. But in the interest of full disclosure—since we’ve kissed and all—if I’d meant a drink
for
virgins, I’d have to pass.”

“Not me. This boy is pure as little lamb’s wool.”

“Oh, kill me now.” She laughed.

“Never. I’ve chosen you to teach me the ways between a man and a woman.”

Her heart pounded up into her throat. “You really don’t want that,” she said. “The things I know might scare you.”

The words didn’t feel quite as funny as she’d intended. Suddenly she’d reminded herself of the all the bad things he didn’t know about her past.

“I don’t think a little bitty thing like you scares me much.”

The unexpected touch of his hands on her shoulders sent ripples of pleasure cascading for her fingertips and toes and the tips of her ears. She shrugged into his hands.

He pushed back the quilt and drew her into his arms. “This isn’t a very romantic way to say the words ‘I want to start something with you,’ but they and hot chocolate are all I have.” He kissed her slowly and then turned back to the stove, dumped two packages of the mix into each of two mugs and added the water he’d boiled. He handed her a mug and added a spoon. “Here, a virgin drink for a new start.” She stirred the cocoa numbly. “Harper, you have to notice, too, that whatever this new thing is between us feels like way more than just something.”

Warmth flowed through her stomach and her heart before she’d taken a single drink of the chocolate.

“Yeah,” she said quietly. “Doesn’t mean I know what it is, or if it’s okay.”

He grinned but didn’t touch her. She tingled inside anyway and sipped the chocolate.

“Potent stuff here, cowboy. I saw how much mix you put in here.”

“Don’t question expertise. I’ve been drinking this stuff since before you were born.”

“I didn’t say it was bad. I learned this was the way to go in a lot of cold, basement apartments over the years.”

“I think I’d like to hear about Harper Lee Crockett: The Lost Years.”

“No. Really. They aren’t anything to write home about. Which is probably why I rarely did.”

She led the way into the living room, carrying the quilt and her mug. She set the blanket on the back of the overstuffed sofa, and then put coasters on the glass-topped coffee table. Cole settled into one end of the sofa and held out an arm. Gratefully, she snuggled beside him and hugged her mug between her palms.

“Harper Lee,” he said. “Why did your parents name you after her? And why don’t I know this?”

“Because my mother would not let Dad name me Scout from the book, so he named me after the author. He said it was his favorite book of all time. And I never talked about my name at all when I was a kid. I hated people asking me if I’d read the book, if I liked the book, if I’d ever met Harper Lee, if I’d ever written to her. Would you believe, I didn’t read
To Kill a Mockingbird
until I was twenty-five?”

“Seriously? You didn’t have to read it in school?”

She shook her head. “No. I’m glad, though. I wouldn’t have appreciated it then. On any level. I was too pie in the sky for such a weighty subject.”

“And what did you think once you read it?”

“I was blown away. I think I cried for two days after finishing it. But now I never, ever tell people it’s my favorite book because they all say, ‘oh, isn’t that sweet?’ I’m a walking cliché. But it is my favorite book.”

“Another thing you have in common with your dad.”

“Another? Maybe the only.”

“Are you kidding? You’re so much like him it’s eerie sometimes.”

She pulled away, slightly wounded, and looked at him critically. “That’s not funny.”

“Come on. Why do you think you used to butt heads so often? You’re opinionated, but you know exactly why you hold those opinions. He was very much that way. You love beauty. Your appreciation of it comes out in your painting. His came out in weirder ways—his chicken coop and his exacting office décor. The way he directed the orientation of this whole house so he could see the view. He had to find acceptably macho ways to express it, but he liked beautiful things.”

“Then he must have thought my art was anything but beautiful.”

“He was always afraid he’d lose you if he encouraged things that would take you from the ranch.”

“Yeah, how’d that work out for him?”

“Not well. He was an idiot about that. But don’t think he didn’t love you. He talked about all his daughters the last three years—probably before that, too, I didn’t work for him then.”

She settled back into the crook of Cole’s arm and sipped the chocolate.

“You said you needed a year to buy back the Double Diamond. If we keep Paradise, is it really an option?”

“Getting the ranch back into the Wainwright name is what’s driven me since we sold it, I guess, but sometimes it seems a little hopeless. Big loans for little guys like me are pretty much impossible. My only strategy is to be debt-free, build a strong four-year work history, and have a decent down payment. That part is up to the famous Crockett sisters now. I know what your father set as the selling price—it may be more reasonable than what you six will need.”

“What makes you think we’ll
need
any particular amount? The biggest thing for you is the same thing it is for us—can you make the ranch viable even if you can afford to buy it back? We’re all in the same leaky lifeboat here.”

“Which is why it sometimes feels hopeless.”

Harper reached around him to set her mug down and rested her cheek against the soft, white V-neck T-shirt that constituted his pajama top. “I don’t like to think of you feeling hopeless. You’ve always been unflappable. How can I be freaked out about things if you already are?”

His chuckle vibrated sexily beneath her head. “There’s a difference between feeling down and being freaked out. It’s not like we’re talking spiders here. I won’t die if I can’t buy a ranch.”

Laughter, welcome and healing, spilled from her, and she clung to him even harder. “You have to be the only person on the face of the planet who would compare running into spiders to losing a family ranch and have the spider end up as the worse outcome. Who tortured you with spiders when you were in your formative years?”

“I don’t know. I was born with a fear so deathly I can’t look at a realistic picture. You know that kid’s song about the spider in the water spout?”