The Cowboy's Mail Order Bride (9 page)

Dotty settled into the corner of the sofa with a cup of coffee in her hand. “You were both young. You would have grown up and grown old together, but that wasn’t what your destiny was. Mine and Rose’s and Madge’s was to come to Texas so we could grow old together after we lost our husbands. Yours was to marry Lester and have a wonderful son with him. Which reminds me, have you told Bart about all this?”

Clarice shook her head. “Not yet. He calls on Sunday afternoon, which is tomorrow. I’ll tell him then, but only because I have to explain why Emily is here. Dotty, do you really think that everything happens for a reason?”

“Damn straight tootin’ I do. It might not work out between Emily and Greg, but it was their destiny to meet to see if it would. We can like it or not like it, but when it comes down to the final period on the letter, the choice is theirs,” Dotty answered.

“But Marvin and I didn’t have a choice,” Clarice said.

“Sure you did. You could have hunted him down in person when the letters kept coming back to you. He could have swallowed his pride and come looking for you. He had your address and knew exactly how to find you. Ravenna isn’t Dallas, darlin’.”

Clarice dropped the letter back into the boot box in her lap. “Kind of like two paths in the forest, right?”

Dotty nodded. “That’s right, only a big oak tree had fallen across one path and you didn’t want to climb over it and ruin your stockings. They were expensive in those days, remember?”

Clarice giggled like a little girl. “You always make it easy to understand.”

Dotty changed the subject. “Do you remember those stockings and the garters?”

“Of course I do, and the garter belts and those little fasteners that felt like we were sitting on rocks during Sunday morning church services,” Clarice said.

“I thought God had sent us a miracle when the first panty hose came out.”

“He did! And now down deep in my heart I think he’s sent us another one and her name is Emily.”

Dotty leaned forward and whispered, “Don’t say that out loud. If Greg hears you, he’ll run like a scalded hound.”

“It’s time. He’s thirty,” Clarice said.

“The banister is getting dusty,” Dotty said with a wink.

“Needs some kids to slide down it. We’re workin’ on it. Do you think Emily was jealous today?” Clarice’s eyes twinkled.

Dotty slapped a hand over her mouth to keep the laughter from exploding. When she had it under control she asked, “Oh, hell, yeah, she was jealous. You got your four candidates picked out?”

Clarice shook her head. “But I’m going to decide before the end of the week. And I’m going to pick out the wildest ones of the lot just so they’ll go after Greg and make her more jealous.”

“You tell Greg yet that he’s going to be auctioned off like a prize bull?”

“You can tell him. I’ve got to figure out how in the devil I’m going to tell this whole story to Bart,” Clarice said.

“The hell I will! I’d rather tell Bart about Marvin as that.”

***

The walls of the bedroom closed in around Emily. Dusk was settling early with clouds rolling down from the north. Greg had disappeared after supper. Dotty and Clarice had gone to their rooms, most likely to pretend to be Greg on their dating sites. The weather site on her laptop said that there was a cold front coming from Oklahoma and that it could dump up to two inches of snow on them. More than likely north Texas would get a layer of ice and sleet instead of pretty snow. If she’d made a different decision at the first of the week, she’d be sitting on the beach. True, it wouldn’t be hot and sunny, but it wouldn’t have a coat of ice on the sand.

She pulled back the curtain and looked out. Were the horses out there in the stable so far, that she couldn’t see them, as restless as she was?

Gramps always said that when something was troubling the soul, even when a person had no idea what was doing the troubling, that good old hard work would bring it to surface. She’d mucked out stables at midnight, stacked hay in the barns in the middle of the night, even scrubbed the kitchen floor lots and lots of times, trying to make sense of the antsy feeling.

There was no way she was going to scrub the floor at Lightning Ridge. It would offend Dotty if she found Emily on her knees working on an already clean floor. Or else Clarice would think she was crazy and send her packing. The thought of leaving Lightning Ridge put a painful catch in her chest.

She tried reading, but that didn’t work. She turned on the television and it bored her. She checked the clock. Only fifteen minutes had passed since she first came up to her room. Lord, it was going to be a long night if she didn’t find something to do.

Finally she put on her boots and work coat and slipped out into the hallway, down the stairs, out the back door, and to her truck. She remembered the way to the horse stables, and there was always leather that could be cleaned in the tack room.

The north wind rattled through the bare mesquite branches and seeped through her coat, chilling her from the inside out as she ran from truck to stables. A few horses snorted as she passed their stalls, but a quick check said their stables had been done that day and were in good shape. Down the center aisle she could see a sliver of light coming from under the door of the old tack room. Had she left it on when she returned the wheelbarrow and shovel? That was days and days ago.

She peeked inside the window and there was Greg sitting at the old weathered table in the middle of the room. She rapped on the window and waited for him to look up. He motioned her inside, so she opened the door.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Had trouble sleeping and thought I might find some good hard work to wear me plumb out. What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Making peace.”

She pointed. “Is that your grandpa’s saddle?”

He nodded.

“You should be whupped for letting it get like that.” She removed her coat and gloves and rolled up her sleeves, stuck her hand down in the bucket of water beside the saddle, and brought up an extra cleaning sponge. She squeezed out most of the water and then rubbed in the saddle soap until it was lathered up.

He fished a second sponge from the bucket and started working on the stirrup leathers. “I couldn’t make myself come back in this room until tonight. And I told the hired help not to touch his saddle when they took things from here to the new room.”

“I’m surprised it’s in as good a shape as it is.” She made sure she got soap into all the nooks and crevices of the saddle. “I would have expected it to be dried and cracked.”

“He’d treated it before he put it in the closet over there. He rode the day before he died,” Greg said.

She gave the saddle a once-over and then picked up a dry rag to wipe all the excess lather away, then stood back and looked at it again. “Where’s the oil sponge?”

He tilted his head toward cabinets on the left side of the tack room. She quickly found it and poured a generous amount of oil into one of the old sponges. He did the same and together they rubbed enough into the leather to make it just slightly damp. Their fingers got tangled up and the touch of his warm, wet fingers brushing against hers shot delicious shivers through her veins.

“And now the conditioner,” he said.

Did that bit of hoarseness in his voice mean that he was affected as much as she was? She looked across the table and their gaze met, but he quickly blinked and picked up a couple of clean rags.

She started the final step while he conditioned the stirrups and then he joined her, rubbing the conditioner all over the saddle. The air in the tack room reminded her of the way it felt right before a tornado struck out in west Texas. Everything would suddenly go so still that it was downright scary. The next sound would be an electrical crackle in the air like power lines falling. And then all hell would break loose.

The hair on the back of her neck prickled. The stillness was eerie and the quietness deafening as she waited for the storm to hit. The air fizzed around them. She wanted him to say something, anything to fill up the weird emptiness in the room, but he just stared at the saddle.

The fabric of his thermal knit shirt stretched across his chest and biceps. He’d pushed the sleeves up to his elbows to keep from getting them wet, and the dark hair on his arms was plastered against his skin. His fingers were long and his hands broad, like a working man’s should be.

Emily had never wanted to touch a man more than she did at that moment, but the timing wasn’t right. His thoughts were on his grandfather, not the woman in front of him.

Finally, he cleared his throat and said, “Thank you.”

“Gramps used to say that hard work would help a person figure through their problems,” she said.

“Grandpa said the best way to get to know a person was to work along beside them.” He smiled.

“Couple of wise old men, weren’t they?”

“Wonder what they would have thought of each other, what with them both loving the same woman at different times in their lives?” he mused aloud.

“Shows they both had good taste in women.” She smiled.

“Guess it does. Want to go for a moonlight ride?”

“Horses or four-wheeler?” she asked.

“Four-wheeler. Easier to get out and put back and we wouldn’t have to rub it down or saddle it up,” he said.

“You sure you’re ready to leave this room? Want some more time alone? I can go on back to the house.”

He picked up his cowboy hat, settled it on his head, and held the tack room door open for her. “I’m good now, and I really need some company.”

Her heart floated. Lord, it was good to be needed again, even if it was just for company. Until that moment, she hadn’t realized the big hole her grandfather’s passing had put in her heart simply because she was alone in the world.

***

The warmth of Emily’s body snuggled up against his back chased away the chill of the night air whipping around the speeding four-wheeler. At times the dark clouds shifted and stars popped out from behind them, but it didn’t take long for the clouds to cover them up again. The headlights on the four-wheeler showed a path that was little more than tire tracks and dead grass, but Greg knew exactly where he was going. He’d been there so often that he could have driven there blindfolded in the pitch-black dark with no lights at all.

When he braked in front of the old log cabin, Emily hopped off and clapped her hands together to warm them. Even with good lined leather gloves, they felt numb.

“What’s this?” she asked.

“Grandpa’s old hunting cabin. I haven’t been up here since he died either. Thought I might as well do up the evening right and get it over with,” he said.

“Are you going inside?” she asked.

“If you’ll go with me. I haven’t been inside since… well, you know. The hired hands come up here during deer season and stay a few days at a time whenever they want to, but…” He let the sentence dangle.

“Looks like the perfect place to set up a moonshine still back here in all these trees. No one could spot the smoke or smell it,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Moonshine?”

“Gramps kept one going on his place until he got sick. His dad made it during Prohibition and they used the money he made to buy the ranch out in west Texas. That’s why it’s called Shine Canyon Ranch. Gramps and I stilled off one batch every fall. Stump liquor, he called it,” she said.

He stepped up on the porch and opened the door. “And did you like that moonshine, Emily?”

“Not particularly. It burned like pure fire going down, but I sampled it with him and we always used it for a New Year’s toast.”

He picked up a box of matches and lit an oil lamp. The cabin was a sixteen-foot square with bunk beds on one side, a broken-down sofa facing a fireplace in the center, and a table with a few pots and pans and mismatched dishes on the other side of the room. Behind the sofa was one of those old red tables with chrome legs and four matching chairs.

He removed his hat and hung it on a nail beside the door. “Want to set up a still?”

“Oh, no! Not me! I could make a batch, but Clarice would throw me off the property if I led her fair-haired boy into temptation.” She sat down on the sofa and pulled her coat tighter around her body. She wondered just what those sixteen women would look like and what he’d do when he figured out that they thought they’d been chatting with him for all those months.

“I’m not fair-haired, but she might get mad at us if Dotty got into the ’shine. It’s cold in here. Let’s build a fire.”

“But then we’d have to stay until it went out. Did you come up here to hunt?”

Greg sat down on the other end of the sofa and patted the place beside him. “Every single year. We stayed for three days and went home the evening before Thanksgiving. Grandpa said that gave the women folks time to cook and fuss around in the kitchen without us underfoot and it gave us some time to eat beans out of the can and chocolate cupcakes whenever we wanted.”

She sat but kept a foot of space between them. One touch would kindle a fire that could only be put out one way, and as much as she wanted to be tangled up with him under the quilt on one of those bunk beds, her heart said the timing was still wrong.

“You hunted with your grandfather. I made ’shine with mine. Two different men altogether, but I think they might have liked each other.”

He stole glances at her while they sat in comfortable silence. He’d never brought another woman to the cabin, but if he had, he couldn’t imagine a single one of them waiting patiently for him to bury his ghosts and say good-bye to his grandfather.

“Good memories,” he said finally.

“That’s all we got when they are gone.”

“You ready?” he asked.

She turned toward him. “When you are. I’m not in a hurry if you need some more time. And all this brought back memories of my grandfather. We didn’t have a cabin, but we did have a campsite.”

He stood up and held out his hand. “Emily Cooper, you are one in a million.”

She put her hand in his and let him pull her up. “That could be a compliment if I’m the best gold piece in a million. But it could be something altogether different if I’m one in a million when they measure cow patties.”