Greg threw an arm around Clarice’s shoulders and said, “Drank too much coffee and had to get inside in a hurry. Bull is in the trailer. I’m starving. Can we eat before we turn him loose?”
Clarice stood back and scanned him from toes to head. “I’m glad you are home. How were your folks? Emily agreed to stay on for a month.”
“I’ve been after Nana for a year to hire someone to help her. Folks are just fine, Nana. They send their love and hugs. Stop worrying. I am home. I’m not going back no matter what they offer.” Greg smiled.
“You keep saying that, but I still worry that they’ll offer you a corner office, a six-figure salary, and an expense account for Italian-made business suits,” Clarice said.
“They do every time I go down there, but I turn them down because I love Lightning Ridge and you.” He smiled. “Supper looks good. Fried chicken is my favorite, Emily. They spoil me when I’ve been gone a few days. I should leave more often.”
“Bullshit!” Dotty rounded the end of the table with a platter of chicken. “Clarice frets every time that pickup of yours heads south. Even your notes don’t convince her that you’ll be back.” She set it down and gave him a quick hug. “Now let’s eat so she can go pass judgment on your new bull. I see you’ve met Emily. She’ll be stayin’ in the room across the hall from you, so you don’t have the whole upstairs to yourself anymore.”
Greg pulled out a chair for Clarice. “I stopped and had coffee with Jeremiah. He’s coming home for the church bazaar.”
Dotty seated herself before Greg could get there. “He’d damn sure better. I’m getting homesick to see my kid. It’s been six months.”
But he did make it to Emily’s chair before she could get seated. His hand brushed her shoulder, and warmth spread from there to her heart again.
Dotty sipped at her sweet tea and explained, “Jeremiah is my son. I got him when he was thirteen and his mama died. I worked with her at the school lunchroom and they were going to put Jeremiah in the foster program, so I took him in and adopted him the next year,” she explained. “Y’all best get after this food. Cold gravy and mashed potatoes ain’t worth eatin’. Does he look all right, Greg? I worry about him down there in that big place doin’ what he does, carryin’ a gun and all.”
Greg dipped into the mashed potatoes and handed the bowl across the table to Emily. Their eyes caught for a split second, then they both looked away, but not before Emily got yet another flutter in her chest. What in the hell was wrong with her? She’d seen sexy cowboys before. She’d dated sexy cowboys before. They’d kissed her and there had been a couple who had gone beyond that, but none of them sent her into a tailspin just by holding her hand in his.
That picture above the mantel didn’t do him justice. In real, three-dimensional life he was so much more. His dark brown hair had been flattened by a cowboy hat with a slight horizontal indention on his forehead as further proof. His smile was genuine, and his eyes were piercing, as if they could see to the bottom of her soul and beyond. Jeremiah—they were talking about Jeremiah before Greg handed her the bowl of potatoes. She blinked several times and forced herself to listen rather than daydream.
“Is Jeremiah a policeman?” she asked.
“No, he’s a private investigator. I swear to God, if I’d known he was going to go into that field, I would have never let him watch all them cop shows,” Dotty said. “I thought if I sent him to college he’d change his mind. He’s real good with computers, and Clarice offered him a job here, but oh, no, he had to go to the city and work at something that worries a mama to death.”
Clarice put a chicken thigh on her plate and passed the platter to Greg. “Emily has taken the job I offered her. We’ve spent the day in the office. She’s done more in one day than I could get done in a week. She’s really good at organizing things. When she’s not doing book work or driving me and the girls, she’ll work on the ranch.”
Greg forked a chicken leg onto his plate. “She don’t have to do that. Y’all can find something for her to do in the house.”
“I’m used to hard work, and with spring comin’ on, an extra hand might come in useful,” Emily said. “I’ve had to be inside more than outside the past few weeks and I don’t mind gettin’ my hands dirty.”
“I’m sorry about your grandpa,” Greg said.
When she looked across the table at him, his expression said that he understood her pain. “Thank you. He was sick for a long time, so it wasn’t a surprise.”
“But we’re never ready to let go of those we love.” His deep drawl was sincere.
“No, we are not,” Clarice said.
“Nana, I can’t wait for you to see this new bull,” Greg changed the subject abruptly.
Emily understood his pain in that moment. Something had happened in his past that had been difficult to face. The death of his grandfather? A lost love?
Clarice inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. “Greg is like his grandpa. Lester was all business.”
“Grandpa was a man’s man,” Greg said.
“Yes, he was. I loved him deeply, and we had a lot of wonderful years together, but he was not a romantic soul,” Clarice said softly.
“He brought you wildflowers,” Dotty piped up. “Every spring he brought you wildflowers.”
Clarice smiled brightly. “Yes, he did, for my birthday. Lester loved deeply, but he wasn’t one much for speaking his mind about all that folderol and payin’ endless compliments, as he used to say.”
Max, the ranch foreman, peeked inside the dining room from the kitchen. “Lester was a businessman. That’s where Bart got his business sense. How much chicken did you fry, Dotty?”
“Enough to feed you if you want to eat, but you’re going to go get your own plate,” she answered.
“Good-lookin’ bull out there in the trailer,” Max said over his shoulder.
“See? The men on this ranch are all business,” Clarice said.
“Nana, you are just as business-minded as I am,” Greg told her.
Clarice passed the chicken platter back to her. “You’d best get what you want. When Max gets started it looks like a dead chicken yard by the time he’s finished.”
“Don’t be tellin’ tales on me.” Max carried a plate, napkin, and silverware to the table. “Greg can outdo me any day when it comes to fried chicken.”
“But not steak. I love steak, but Max could eat a whole bull,” Greg teased.
“Not in one sitting, but hey, like the wise man said, a person could eat an elephant a bite at a time.”
***
Emily smiled at the banter. She’d loved that part of holidays and Sundays at Taylor’s place most of all. The big family and all the noise left her knowing that she belonged right there in Happy. But the sicker that Gramps got, the fewer trips they made from one ranch to the other, and she didn’t even realize how much she had missed it until that very evening.
“So you have a ranch and you’re on vacation?” Greg asked.
She dabbed at her mouth with a napkin. “I have a hundred acres. It used to be three sections back before Gramps got sick. It’s hardly enough to be called a ranch, but it’s a starting point to rebuild it. I was born on that land and it’s my home, but right now I’m glad to be away from it for a few weeks.”
He stretched his legs out under the table and his knee bumped hers. “Sorry about that. I’ve been driving all day and feel like I could stretch to the stars.”
“No problem. I felt like that yesterday when I drove all the way from Happy to Sherman,” she said.
Her mouth was dry so she took a couple of long drinks of her sweet tea. Greg Adams might be business on the outside, but those eyes and his smile said there was a sweet, sensitive man down underneath that tough exterior. One that had known pain and suffering as well as joys and happiness and who loved his big ranch as much as she loved what was left of hers. No one could endure the hard work of ranching without loving what they did.
“I’m glad that we’ve got someone to help us,” Dotty said out of nowhere. “Clarice’s eyesight ain’t what it used to be, and that computer screen gives her headaches. When she’s got a headache she’s plumb bitchy. I hate computers. They’re all going to fall apart one of these days and everyone is going to wish they had their old ledgers back like how we used to take care of things with an ink pen and lined pages.”
“I’m not bitchy,” Clarice argued.
Max filled his plate and laid a napkin over his knee. “I agree with Dotty about all this technical crap, but it’s the way of the world. Can’t whip it so we might as well join up with it. So tell us more about this Marvin fellow, Clarice.”
“Marvin was stationed over in Korea during the war. I think they call it a conflict now, but it was a war back then,” Clarice said. “I was still in high school when we first started writing back and forth. The church ladies were given names of servicemen who would like to have pen pals. That was way back before cell phones, computers, and all this other stuff you kids have today. So I started writing to him when I was a senior in high school. And then the letters stopped coming and I didn’t know if he’d been killed in action or if he’d come home or what happened, until Emily brought the letters to me.”
“That was before you met Grandpa, right?” Greg asked.
Clarice smiled. “I’d met Lester. We lived on adjoining ranches, but he was off to college during the time I wrote to Marvin. The letters had stopped coming long before Lester started courting me. Marvin and I might not have even liked each other in person. It’s easy to make a soldier out to be a hero when all you have is words, one small black-and-white picture, and an imagination. We’ll never know because a letter got lost and we both took a different path.”
“Crazy, ain’t it?” Max said. “After all these years, you find out that y’all were just a hard day’s drive away from each other.”
“Fate,” Dotty said.
“You think fate kept them apart and then brought them together again with that bunch of mail, Dotty?” Max asked.
“That’s exactly what I think. Now Clarice won’t go to her grave thinkin’ that Marvin was a son-of-a-bitch who just used her for mail call and then threw her away,” Dotty answered. “And now it’s time for chocolate cake.”
She disappeared into the kitchen and brought out a triple-layered chocolate cake with fudge icing.
***
Greg took a shower, donned gray lounging pants and a T-shirt, and sprawled out in his recliner in front of the television in his room.
NCIS
entertained him for an hour before he switched it to CMT and watched several videos, but his mind stayed on the woman who’d been dropped out of nowhere onto his ranch and was now staying across the hall from him. He tapped his fingers on the chair arm while the Pistol Annies sang “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On.”
“I wonder if Emily has sins in her past,” he muttered.
Before his inner voice could remind him that everyone had a past, his phone rang. He pushed the remote button, checked the ID, and answered on the third ring. “Hey, Jeremiah, old man. What’s goin’ on?”
Jeremiah chuckled. “I couldn’t leave it alone, Greg. Must be my line of business, but I’m not as trusting as you or as Clarice. There’s no charge. I was only on the phone thirty minutes. Talked to several people under the pretense of vetting Clarice’s new assistant girl for a job. She’s pure as the driven snow. Not a stain on her anywhere. Lived on the Shine Canyon Ranch her whole life. It’s not nearly as big as Lightning Ridge, but it wasn’t a two-bit, one-horse operation either. She had to sell off a lot of it to keep money coming in for her grandpa’s chemo, but there’s still some acreage left in the ranch. Only time she was away from Happy, Texas, was when she went to college, and then she was home every single solitary weekend and worked on the ranch during summers and holidays. She’s honest as God and has a reputation of a saint. She ran the ranch and took care of her grandfather, Marvin, who died last week with cancer.”
“She comes off as that sort of woman,” Greg said.
“Sassy or shy?” Jeremiah asked.
“Confident. She knows ranchin’, but like you said today, she’s got this notion that she can make a livin’ on a hundred acres in west Texas. That will just barely support five cows, not a herd big enough to make a livin’. It’s that sentimental stuff we talked about.” Greg laughed.
“And she ain’t but what, twenty-eight or so?”
“That’s about right. Thanks for checking up on her, but I’m not surprised at what you found.”
Jeremiah’s tone changed. “Just thought you’d want to know. Don’t tell Mama or Clarice. They’d say that they already knew she was bona fide, but I had to have some solid proof. Got to go. Stacy and I are catching a late dinner together.”
“I wouldn’t dream of telling anything. Have fun.”
Emily threw off the covers and slid out of bed with a yawn. Ranch work was never done, and it always, always started before daybreak. She started toward her closet and ran into a chair before she realized that she was not in her bedroom at Shine Canyon. She plopped down in the chair, turned on the lamp beside it, and put her hands over her eyes.
She’d been caught up in the moment when she agreed to this job. Gramps had said that she needed time away from ranching so she could sort out what she should do with her life. Working on a ranch, even as a glorified assistant, would put her right back where Gramps didn’t think she should be. If she wanted hard work, she could do it on Shine Canyon. Staying on Lightning Ridge was pure crazy, but she’d given her word and a Cooper’s word was as good as a signature on an affidavit.
She dressed in jeans and a knit shirt and unzipped a duffle bag holding all her shoes: sandals, platform heels, a pair of sneakers, and her comfortable cowboy boots. According to the television meteorologist it was forty-five degrees, so she pulled on her boots.
She needed coffee, at least two cups to even open her eyes in the morning. Why wasn’t anyone up and around? It had to be close to daylight.
“Bunch of sluggards. Out in west Texas, we have to work to make a living. We don’t get to sleep until noon,” she mumbled as she made her way to the kitchen.
She opened several doors before she found the coffee and filters, started a pot to dripping, and sat down at the bar to wait. The sticky notes took her attention. She knew Clarice’s handwriting from the envelopes in the box and most of them belonged to her. Some had a reply at the bottom in a tight, stingy script that had to belong to Dotty. And then there were some with the same masculine scrawl as the ones on the two pictures.
We
will
be
working
on
bazaar
tomorrow.
No, shit!
Emily giggled.
Think
up
something
different
for
us
to
make
for
the
bazaar.
I
need
drugs
to
do
that.
Emily laughed out loud and searched until she found the ones with Greg’s handwriting. They were mostly in plain yellow and were reminders.
You
promised
you’d hire someone this month, Nana.
Month
ain’t over yet.
And another one.
Haircut
on
Friday.
It’s about time!
They lived in the same house, talked to each other all the time. Why in the hell would they stick notes to the refrigerator? Her eyes were drawn to a yellow note from Greg in a bunch of green ones.
Glad
to
be
home.
Her heart did a flip and she leaned over to study it more. If he was all business, then why in the devil did he participate in the sticky note campaign? Gramps would have called it a bunch of sentimental bullshit.
The coffeepot gurgled at last. While she was filling a mug she noticed the clock on the stove.
“Ten minutes to five,” she groaned. She’d set the alarm wrong on the clock beside her bed. No wonder no one was up and around. It was too early.
She filled a mug with hot steaming coffee and drank it as she watched out the kitchen window for the first signs of a brand-new Texas sunrise. A rooster crowed and she could see the outline of the chicken house to the south. In the opposite direction a lonesome old bawling heifer joined in the barnyard noises.
Like she’d thought when she first awoke, ranch work was never done. She borrowed a work coat from the rack beside the back door and slipped outside. The morning air was brisk with a hint of oncoming moisture, and it was good to have eggs to gather and a cow to milk. She would have started breakfast, but Clarice had whispered that Dotty was very territorial when it came to the kitchen, and no matter what, not to interfere with her cooking.
A heifer had been penned up in the corral at the back of the barn. The old girl had a bulging udder, and a clean milk bucket waited beside a three-legged stool inside the first stall. Emily had never liked that job, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t squirt milk into a galvanized bucket. Some jobs were downright fun; others were just hard work. When Emily opened the door the cow bawled and headed toward the big sliding doors on the back side of the barn.
She dumped feed into the trough and the heifer had her head in it when Emily drew the stool up to the side, leaned her head against the cow’s flank, and set the milk bucket under her udder. The first few squirts made a pinging noise when they hit the galvanized bucket, but after a while it was mundane work and Emily’s mind wandered back to those sticky notes. What did they do when there was no more room? Did they throw them away and start over or just take a few off at a time?
When she finished the job, she picked up the bucket, hung the stool back on the nail, and sweet-talked the heifer back outside. There was a thin orange line on the horizon, and the sun’s warmth burned off a few of the gray clouds. It might be a nice day after all.
The rooster was doing his best to talk the sun up when she got back to the house, set the milk on the counter, and picked up the egg-gathering basket from a hook in the utility room. She noticed a cluster of bright yellow daffodils blooming right beside the henhouse and squatted to get a better look at them. The petals were soft on her fingertips and made her think of Aunt Molly. She adored yellow flowers of any kind. Maybe that morning Taylor was picking daffodils out in Happy, Texas, for his granny.
She was about to stand up when something cold touched the bare skin on her neck and her squeal quieted the rooster for a whole minute. She wound up flat on her back, staring at what was left of a few faint stars in the sky, with a Catahoula dog slurping right up across her chin and cheek, not stopping until he got his tongue tangled up in her hair. His tail wagged furiously, and when she tried to sit up, he put his paws on her chest.
“Hey, now!” She shoved back at him. “Cold nosing a woman and scaring the bejesus out of her is rude. Don’t you dogs up here in north Texas have any manners at all?”
When she was sitting, the dog plopped down in her lap and she rubbed his ears. “Where have you been? I didn’t see you yesterday. Did you get out of the pen and go visiting the neighborhood girl dogs?” she asked.
The animal’s tail thumped in the grass.
She pushed him off her lap. “Hey, I see a light in the house. That means I need to get the eggs and take them in or we might not have breakfast.”
The rooster flapped his wings and set about his daily chore of waking up everyone who could hear him. She gathered thirteen eggs. Thirteen had always been her lucky number. That had to mean she’d made the right decision to stay on at Lightning Ridge.
The aroma of bacon wafted through the air and her stomach growled. She opened the back door to find Dotty staring at the milk bucket. “Girl, what are you doing up so early? Did you bring this milk in? I was wonderin’ if that cow had milked herself this mornin’. What have you got there?”
She handed the basket to Dotty. “I gathered the eggs.”
“Well, that’s right nice of you. I was just fixin’ to either go or send Greg. There wasn’t enough in the fridge to make breakfast. Wipe your boots and hang up your coat on the rack over there,” Dotty said.
Greg entered the kitchen through the foyer at the same time she came in the back door. He took one look at the basket of eggs and Dotty and asked, “Where did that come from? I would have gone to get them. You didn’t need to get out this early.”
Dotty pointed at Emily.
“I’m a witch. I knew that Dotty needed eggs so I snapped my fingers.” She snapped and a loud popping noise made him blink. “And presto, a baker’s dozen eggs floated down from the sky and filled that basket.”
“Why didn’t you snap your fingers and milk the cow?” He smiled.
“I did. You going to strain it or should I?” she asked.
“You really do know about the ranching business, don’t you?”
“Most of it. Gramps made me learn from the ground up and from the time I was a little girl. I never liked milkin’, but I can do it. How about you? Can you milk a cow?” she asked.
“Nana made me learn from the ground up too. I was milking cows before I was a teenager,” Greg said.
“Are the children up and around already? Are they arguing?” Clarice breezed into the kitchen. She wore jeans, sneakers, and a bright blue knit shirt. Her hair had been brushed back, and her eyes twinkled.
Dotty smiled. “Oh, yeah, and I think the girl child is ahead of the boy child this morning. He’s going to have to get up earlier than usual to beat her.”
Emily held up a palm. “Confession. I set my alarm clock wrong or I’d still be asleep. I won’t be up this early every morning unless Miz Clarice writes it into my job description, and I’m sure hoping she doesn’t make me milk cows. That’s my least favorite job on a ranch.”
“So you aren’t brownnosing?” Greg teased.
“No, sir. I like my sleep as well or better than anyone else,” she answered. “Now what can I do to help with breakfast?”
“Stay out of my kitchen,” Dotty said. “You got the milk and eggs. That’s enough help for breakfast.”
Clarice poured a mug of coffee and added two teaspoons of sugar. “Looks like I hired a good hand, right, Greg? Me and Dotty are going to be busy in the kitchen all day fixin’ dinner and finger foods for the domino party tonight. Emily, you are to go with Greg. He’ll put you to work doing whatever needs to be done. Greg, don’t you dare make plans for the evening. Madge and Rose are both coming and we need you.”
“Why?” Greg asked.
“We need an extra hand tonight. Emily is going to play and we’re going to do partners,” Dotty said.
“Call Prissy,” he said.
“I already did and she has other plans.”
Clarice sat down at the table. “We love domino night, Emily.”
“Maybe Emily doesn’t want to play,” Greg said.
Emily looked at Greg and the heat in the room raised by twenty degrees. Did he feel it too, or was the physical attraction just on her part?
Greg tilted his head to one side. Lord, even that was sexy. What was wrong with her? Sure, it had been a long time since she’d had a date, a long time since she’d been kissed, and even longer since she’d done anything else. But Greg Adams wasn’t the right cowboy for her to entertain such notions about. His roots were in Ravenna, Texas, and hers were eight hours away in Happy.
“Do you play dominoes?” he asked.
“I’ve played since I was a kid. Gramps loved his dominoes,” she said.
“Marvin told me that he played with his grandparents when he was a boy,” Clarice said.
Greg removed his glasses, wiped them clean on his T-shirt, and put them back on. “Did your grandpa let you win because you were the fair-haired daughter?”
“Darlin’, I’ve never been called fair-haired, and believe me, I come from competitive gene stock. We don’t let anyone win anything. If I won, it was fair and square. Did your grandpa let you win?” Emily asked.
“Hell, no! I was fifteen before I beat him. Thought I’d done inherited the moon and stars.” Greg chuckled.
“Me too. I danced around the living room like I’d made a touchdown for the Dallas Cowboys. Do y’all play for beans or money?” Emily asked.
“Big bucks,” Greg said.
“Do I need to make a trip to the bank?”
“Buy-in is fifty dollars. No bets less than five,” he answered.
“Greg!” Clarice shook her finger at him.
Emily smiled. “I think I can scrape up fifty dollars. Does it have to be in bills or can I use pennies?”
***
Greg was on his way out of the house when Emily pushed away from a porch post. “Hey, I’d begun to think you were going to primp all day.”
He tilted his freshly shaven face up to the rising sun. The light reflected off his glasses, making a halo above his head. “Did it do any good?”
“You look just like you did when you left the breakfast table, except you are now wearing boots and a coat,” she said.
“Well, dammit! I thought at least I smelled better. I used my best shaving lotion to impress you.” He grinned.
Her heart skipped a beat. Was he serious or was he joking? Had he felt the attraction that morning at breakfast too? If he did, maybe she’d find a note on the fridge just for her some morning.
She sniffed the air. “It’s okay, but I really did like the smell of bacon better.”
“Well, then I’ll have to see about some bacon-scented shaving lotion. Hey, not to change this exhilarating conversation, but thank you for staying on, Emily. Nana’s got a new bounce in her step this morning. I think that computerized stuff really weighs heavy on her mind. I’m hoping by the end of the month she’ll let me hire someone on full-time when she sees how nice it is to have some help,” Greg said.
“It seemed like the right thing to do. Gramps used to tell me that when I’ve done made up my mind about something and it doesn’t feel right, then I should try on a different decision to see how it feels. I tried to think about spending my month on the beach, but it just didn’t feel right. Then I thought about Clarice’s offer and there was peace in my heart,” she admitted. She didn’t say a word about his pictures being a big part of the decision. Hell’s bells, she hadn’t even told Taylor that part, and she sure wasn’t speaking it aloud right then.
“I’m glad it didn’t. Now tell me, how much do you know about horses?” he asked. “I hate to ask you to do this, but the fellow who takes care of the horse barn called in sick a few minutes ago. I’ve got a full day lined up. I’m behind because I’ve been gone a week.”
She didn’t give him time to finish. “I love horses. I’ll take care of the stables. Will I have time to exercise them?”
He pointed to a pickup truck. It might have been pea green at one time, but nowadays rust covered more than paint and it was a toss-up as to whether the green was lichen or actual paint. The tailgate was gone, and the fenders looked like they’d been whipped with a baseball bat several times.