“Apparently not enough.” He narrowed his gaze. “What are you doing out here?”
“Just finishing up.” She slammed the hood shut and wiped her hands. “It’s all yours, Earline. It should last you at least a couple of days, enough time to get a new one.”
“Thanks so much. You’re wonderful She’s wonderful,” Earline added, turning to Tyler. “A real —”
“— honey, I know,” he finished for her.
“I thought I told you to behave,” Tyler said once Earline and her pink Cadillac had left. “You call playing town mechanic when you’re supposed to be a refined nanny behaving?”
“Helen saw me,” Lucky declared, guilt in her eyes.
He nodded and watched her chew on her bottom lip. The sight did nothing to feed his anger and everything to stoke the fire spreading to certain parts of his body.
“I was afraid of that,” she said.
“Dammit, Lucky, why didn’t you let Hank fix his own car?”
“Because he couldn’t. Not all men are mechanically inclined, you know. Gender doesn’t predispose you to certain interests. The battery connectors were corroded and I cleaned them. I was just being nice.”
He reached out and wiped a smudge of oil from her cheek. “Don’t be so nice next time. I need you to look and act like a lady for the next few days. Just until Saturday. Then Helen leaves.”
“I didn’t get a speck of dirt on my blouse,” she quickly told him, motioning to the spotless cream silk she now wore.
He smiled, drinking in her impeccable appearance. “I have to hand it to you. No one would be able to tell you’d just been fixing someone’s fan belt —” The words stalled in his throat as he glanced down at her shoes, one black and one navy.
“Geez,” she said, her gaze following the direction of his. “I could have sworn those shoes were both the same color. Must’ve been the bad lighting.”
“Bad lighting?”
“I already told you I’m not much of a morning person. I can’t see clearly before 8:00 a.m. and I’ve been up since seven. So shoot me.”
“Don’t tempt me.” He turned to stalk toward the Jeep. “Helen came at me last night with her guns blazing, so don’t give her any more ammo.”
“Wait —” She followed and grabbed his arm before he could climb into the Jeep.
“I’ve got fences to fix,” he said.
“But I need to talk to you.”
Here it comes,
he thought. She wants to talk about the other night. To get into his head, pick his brain on everything from his feelings, to what china pattern he’d like. Damn, couldn’t women get it through their heads that sex was just sex sometimes? Did they always have to talk everything to death?
“Hank had some news about your runaway nanny.”
Whew, that was close.
“Thanks for telling me,” he said after she repeated everything Smokey had told her. “I’ll go into town later today and ID the pictures.”
“Good.” She started to turn away. “Happy fence-fixing.”
“Lucky, wait. I... About the other night.”
Hey, who was that?
Oh, God, it was him. He shook his head. Stop that. “You have to understand that it was just...”
“A mistake?”
“I was thinking temporary insanity, but mistake works, too.”
“That’s what I thought you’d say.”
“And you agree?”
She smiled. “Fat chance, Tyler Grant. I’ve been waiting my whole adult life for what happened the other night, and I won’t let your guilt mess this up for me. I’m basking.”
“Basking?”
“And glowing, so stop feeling guilty.”
“I took your virginity. How am I supposed to feel?”
“You didn’t
take
anything. I gave it to you, buddy. My choice. You don’t owe me anything. So stop worrying about me slipping a noose around your neck.”
And just what did she have against slipping a noose around his neck? He was an attractive guy. A good catch. Only he didn’t want to be caught. He was already caught between a rock and a hard place with Helen and the ranch and life in general.
“Stop beating yourself up,” she told him. “Just forget it.”
“I don’t want to forget it. I
have
to. Can you understand that? No, I guess you can’t. You were close to your dad. But me...” He shook his head. “I could kick myself now for tagging along after my mother and leaving my father. I try to picture how I’d feel if Bennie up and left me for Helen. It would kill me.”
“You were just a kid then and Bennie would never do that.”
“No, because I won’t see her backed into a corner. I want to stay here with my dad, and that means keeping Helen happy, and that means giving Bennie every opportunity to be the lady her mother was. She can have that right here in Ulysses. She
can
.”
She touched his arm, her fingers warm and soothing. “She does. She’s learning tons of stuff, and I think she’s even starting to like it. I don’t have to nag to get her to put on a dress or do her studies, and she hasn’t burped or snorted tea through her nose not once. She’s even mastered Beethoven’s Fifth on the piano, and she’s a whiz at conjugating French verbs.”
He gave her an incredulous look. “French?
Bennie
?”
“Mais oui, mon cher
. Bennie taught me. I can say it in Italian, too. Want to hear?”
But he’d heard enough.
My beloved.
He smiled. Then frowned. Then he kissed her.
11
I
T WAS A KISS straight out of a steamy romance novel. Lots of clutching and grasping. Plenty of panting and moaning. Heaving chests and racing hearts. And then it was over.
“I—I guess that was a mistake, too,” she said, gasping for a breath as Tyler staggered backward a few feet.
“Yes.” His eyes were dark and desperate, riveted on her parted lips. “No... Hell, I don’t know.”
“We could try it again. Then maybe you could make up your mind.”
He stared at her long and hard before he grinned. “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Why’s that?”
“Because I’d have you spread-eagle on the front of this Jeep, making an even bigger mistake than a kiss.”
Speaking of bigger... Her gaze dropped to the prominent bulge in his jeans and her eyes widened. “Did I...do that?”
“Damn, woman,” he growled, his gaze going to the sky. “What did I do to deserve this? Kick a cat in a past life?”
Her eyes narrowed. “I just asked a simple question. You don’t have to fly off the handle.”
“Simple?
Simple?
” He glared at her. “Do you know what those simple questions, those simple, wide-eyed, innocent questions do to me? They turn me on, that’s what Hell, Lucky. I’m only human.”
“I really turn you on?”
He threw up his hands. “I give up. I’d better go before...”
“Before...” Her gaze went to the front of the Jeep and her cheeks heated.
“Before,”
he growled, sliding behind the wheel.
“YOUR RADIATOR’S busted,” Lucky declared the next day as she stared through a thick layer of steam at Doris, Earline’s assistant. “I can patch it up, but you’ll have to replace it.”
“Can’t you replace it?”
Lucky smiled. “I’m fresh out of radiators, but any gas station should be able to order one.”
“There’s only one station in town, and that’s Jess Mangrum’s place. The man’s three sheets to the wind most of the time. That’s why, when Earline said what a great mechanic you were, I raced right out here.”
Lucky patched the radiator while Bennie stood lookout. Tyler’s new shipment of cattle had kept him away from the house most of the day, and Helen had moved on from hiring a band to redesigning the promotional materials to reflect the changes she’d been forced to make. At the moment she was poring over typestyles and various layouts, but Lucky wasn’t taking any chances.
Guilt shot through her and she forced it aside. It wasn’t as if she was breaking her promise to Tyler. Of the cars she’d fixed, not one of them had had a faulty belt.
“Thanks so much,” Doris said, handing Lucky a box of homemade pralines. “Just a token of my appreciation.”
“Can you teach me how to fix a car?” Bennie asked later as she and Lucky munched on warm pralines.
“Your daddy would have my hide. Fixing cars isn’t very ladylike.”
“What about fixing tractors?” Bennie asked when they walked around to the front of the house.
Lucky came up short, her gaze fixed on the green monster sitting in the driveway, a very frantic-looking teenager perched in the driver’s seat. The teenager turned out to be Johnny Simmons, the oldest son of a neighboring rancher. “It’s hard to steer and the lift doesn’t work,” he told her.
“This is way out of my league. It’s a
tractor.”
“Come on, Miss Lucky. Earline told Charlotte Webster who told Billy Jenkins, whose little brother is in 4-H with my kid brother, that you fixed her Cadillac.
And
Bud Shiney’s Buick and Ray Michaels’s Impala and...”
“But I don’t know beans about tractors.”
“They’re just like cars,” Bennie said, surveying the tractor. “That’s what Jed says.”
Lucky peered inside. “Well, it’s got a steering wheel, but there’s no gas pedal. That’s not like a car.”
“You don’t have to drive it,” Johnny said. “Just fix it. Please, Miss Lucky.” He sounded so desperate, and Lucky was a sucker for desperate.
Ten minutes later, they’d pushed the tractor behind the garage. Lucky went to work under the hood while a nervous Johnny went inside for a piece of Mabel’s pie.
It wasn’t too far off from a normal car engine, but it had a hydraulics system unlike anything Lucky had ever seen. She spent a good half hour studying Jed’s tractor for comparison.
“I think the hydraulic lines were crossed,” she finally determined. “It looks like the lift line was going to the steering, and vice versa.” For the next hour, she unfastened the connectors and reran the lines.
“Let’s try it out,” Bennie said once Lucky had finished.
“No.” Lucky wiped her hands on a rag.
“Come on, Lucky.” A mischievous light glittered in Bennie’s eye. “How will you know it works if you don’t start her up?”
Lucky shook her head and walked over to her cab. “Johnny can do it.” She leaned into the trunk. “Bennie, can you hand me that wrench —” Her words drowned in the roar of a tractor.
She jerked up, her head banging the trunk lid. “Ouch—” The word caught as she swiveled around and saw Bennie sitting in the driver’s seat of the tractor. “Bennie, get down from there.”
“Let’s take a little ride. Come on, Lucky.” She gunned the engine. “It’ll be fun—oops!” Bennie’s foot slid off the clutch and the tractor lurched forward.
“Bennie!” The tractor jerked and launched across the backyard, headed out to pasture. Lucky bolted after it. She ran beside the tractor, grabbed the edge of the seat and tried to pull herself up. “Turn it off!”
“I can’t. I —” Bennie wrestled with the steering wheel. The tractor made a sharp right and nearly took Lucky’s arm out of its socket. “Lucky! Help me. I can’t stop it!”
The back door burst open and Mabel rushed through. “What the sweet Jesus is going on? Oh no! Bennie, Lucky! Hold on. I’ll get some help.”
Hold on. Was she kidding? Lucky fought for a grip and barely managed to pull herself onto the seat of the speeding tractor. “Over,” she shouted above the engine’s roar as she grabbed hold of the steering wheel.
“Let up on the gas!” Bennie screamed from the seat beside her. “Hurry eeeeeeeeee!” Bennie jerked at Lucky’s sleeve. “Watch where you’re going —” They rolled over a stretch of barbed-wire fence, across the pasture toward a small duck pond.
“Come back here, dadblasted city gal!” Lucky twisted to see Ulysses dart off the back porch in hot pursuit
without
his shotgun. There was a God—
“Lucky, watch it!” Bennie screamed and Lucky swung back in time to see the edge of the duck pond. She swerved, and found out that big bulky tractors didn’t actually swerve. She fumbled with the brakes, and lurched to a stop just as the tractor plunged into the water. She and Bennie pitched forward, straight over the nose of the machine, into the murky pond.
“You gals all right?” Ulysses asked when he and Mabel reached the pond.
Lucky spit out a mouthful of water and gasped for air as she struggled to her feet.
Ugh
. She plucked a lily pad from her dripping hair and trudged around the submerged tractor, her pumps sinking two inches with each step.
“That was great!” Bennie followed her, not the least bit upset that she was soaking wet and covered with some kind of slimy green weed. “Mega cool, wasn’t it, Lucky?”
“Cool?” Lucky took a deep breath and tried to calm her pounding heart. Water trickled down her face and she wiped her stinging eyes with the edge of her sleeve. “You almost got us
killed,
Bennie. I could be duck food right now —”
“You’re responsible for this, Bernadette?”
Lucky’s eyes snapped open to find Helen in front of them.
“I didn’t mean to —”
“To get caught on the tractor with me,” Lucky cut in. “But I needed her to show me how to start this baby up.” She patted the tractor’s rear bumper. “Then my foot slipped and off we went.”
“You.”
Helen turned her narrowed gaze away from her granddaughter and the look of relief on Bennie’s face was almost enough to ease the dread churning in Lucky’s stomach. If only Helen hadn’t been steaming as bad as the half-submerged tractor.
“Now, now,” Ulysses said. “Let the girl be.”
Wait a second. Ulysses taking up for her? Maybe she’d hit her head during the dive into the pond. Maybe she was even dead.
“It was an accident,” he went on and Lucky pinched herself. Pain radiated up to her head. Definitely alive. Unfortunately. “It’s over. No harm done.”
“An accident? You call my granddaughter trapped on a runaway tractor and thrown into a nasty swamp an
accident?
It’s a disaster, a travesty. A shameful display of adult supervision. You can bet Tyler’s going to hear about this, and you, Miss Myers, will be looking for a new job.”
And Lucky had no doubt that it was true. Driving a tractor into a pond was sure to classify as a breach of her promise to Tyler. Even though she was fairly certain the tractor didn’t even have a fan belt.
IT WASN’T HELEN who met Tyler at the door when he returned that evening. It was his father.
“Is Helen mad?” Tyler asked after he’d heard the story.
“Are you .kidding, boy? She’d be waiting here right now, ‘cept Mabel gave her something for her migraine. A little of Jed’s moonshine. Told her it was medicinal tea.” He chuckled. “Best medicine around. She’s been sleepin’ like a baby for the past hour, and she’s sure to be out all night. Look, boy, I know this puts you in a bind, but don’t be too hard on Lucky.”
“She was fixing cars and tractors when I told her not to.”
“She was helpin’ folks out, and the tractor wreck was an accident.” When Tyler shot him a look. Ulysses cleared his throat. “Uh, not that I seen it, mind, but Mabel relayed every detail.”
“Do you mind telling me what brought on all the sympathy for Lucky? I thought you didn’t like her.”
“Never said that.”
“Not in so many words, but you nearly shot her the first day, and you’ve been griping about her ever since.”
“She ain’t so bad.”
“She’s got a big mouth,” Tyler said.
“The gal speaks her mind. Cain’t fault her for that.”
“She’s stubborn.”
“Just standin’ up for herself. ’Sides, she’s mighty handy with her toolbox.” He chuckled. “She even fixed my old projector.” When Tyler’s gaze narrowed again, Ulysses added, “Not that I’ll be watching any movies in the near future, not with my dadbumed eyes being out of commission. Still, it’s the thought that counts. Nice gal.”
Later, as Tyler showered and changed, he thought over his father’s sudden about-face. His father had always been a fair man, but since the breakup with Tyler’s mother, he hadn’t taken kindly to outsiders, especially females. He’d been hostile to all of Bernadette’s nannies because he feared one of them would steal his son away. But Tyler wasn’t going anywhere. He was staying until Ulysses made a complete recovery, and so was Bernadette, and Lucky was going to behave herself. Or else.
A HALF HOUR LATER, Tyler found her sitting on the front seat of her cab, her toolbox beside her.
“My dad gave me this for my sixteenth birthday.” She touched the worn red metal. “I really miss him.”
Something softened inside him, and he stiffened. He was mad, he reminded himself. Mad and out for blood. “Is that why you put a tractor in the duck pond? A tractor you shouldn’t have been fixing in the first place?”
“Okay, get it over with,” she said, closing her eyes.
“You promised me, Lucky.”
“I know, and I broke my promise, though I didn’t really break it, not technically. I didn’t fix any fan belts. But I did work on a few cars, though Helen didn’t see me. She only saw the tractor, so did your dad and Mabel. I figured he’d be getting the rope ready for Helen to string me up.”
“Dad’s stubborn and can be mean when he wants to be, but you fixed his projector. That old thing means a lot to him. He would have staged a standoff with the whole damned town on your behalf.”
“He did seem excited when I showed it to him.” She grinned. “He actually opened the glass case and let me touch the esteemed cowboy hat and boots. Boy, your father really liked James Dean.”
“My father
was
James Dean. That was the trouble. My mother wanted a Rock Hudson and she got James Dean. A Jett Rink instead of a Bick Benedict. My parents met for the first time at the premiere of
Giant
at the Austin Palladium. My father had just finished working his way through Texas A&M, as an agricultural science major, and my mother had just returned from a boarding school in London. They met during intermission.
“She had romantic notions about huge cattle ranches and lots of money,” he went on. “My father had a ranch, all right, but only a few acres and a small shack right here where this house is. He’d just bought the land and was barely starting out. The reality of ranch life didn’t quite meet her expectations, and neither did my father, but it was too late by then. They were already married, and she was already pregnant with me, and divorce wasn’t an option as far as her parents were concerned.” He shook his head. “It didn’t work. My mother was used to lots of money, servants, city life. My father worked hard for her, built this place up, but it wasn’t enough. Her parents died in a car accident, she inherited the family money and left when I was sixteen, and I went with her.”