Chapter Ten
You think Bonnie and Shiloh will get out a shotgun and make me marry you?” Cooper teased as he parked the truck near the yard gate.
“I haven’t reported to anyone since I was eighteen years old. I’m not starting now. Good night, Cooper, and thank you for the drive and the ice cream. But most of all for talking to me about Ezra.”
He leaned across the console and brushed a soft kiss across her forehead. She would have liked very much for the next one to hit her lips square on, but the living room curtain pulled aside, framing two faces peering out, and she was glad she and Cooper were both sitting upright in the truck cab.
“Please don’t walk me to the door. They’ll think it’s a date,” she groaned.
“And that’s bad?”
“No, but it is personal. And after less than a week, I’m not ready to share any more of my personal life with them,” she said.
“I understand.” He nodded. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then. Got any idea what’s on the dinner menu?”
“It’s Shiloh’s day to cook and I have no idea what she’s planning. She likes the kitchen better than outside, but I got to hand it to her, she’s pulls her fair share on the ranch as well as in the kitchen,” Abby said.
“And you?” Cooper asked.
“I don’t mind cooking or cleaning, but I’d rather be outside. I’d best get on inside or they’re liable to come out here,” she said.
He brought her hand to his lips and kissed her knuckles. “Good night, Abby.”
“Good night, Cooper.”
Martha’s old head popped up from Ezra’s chair where she’d been sleeping and she hopped down to the floor with a fluid movement, ambled across the living room, and stuck her cold nose into Abby’s open hand. Her tail wagged and Abby could’ve sworn the dog grinned when she dropped down on her knees to pet her.
Bonnie held out her hand. “Give me your phone.”
Abby shook her head. “I don’t think so. I’m thirty years old. That’s too damn old to get my phone taken away because Cooper took me to Silverton for ice cream.”
“I’m not taking it away from you. I’m programming your number into my phone and then I’m putting mine into yours.”
“And”—Shiloh piped up from the sofa—“Rusty went through the roof when I said that about him killing us off to get the ranch. I might have given him an idea, though, so we have to watch out for each other.”
Abby handed the phone to Bonnie. “Y’all are paranoid. Rusty isn’t capable of murder.”
“But Cooper might be, or maybe Jackson. I can see them coveting this place, and what better way than to offer Rusty a big price after we all disappear,” Shiloh said.
“I thought you read romance books,” Abby said.
Bonnie put the phone back in Abby’s hand. “What’s that got to do with anything? I read romance, too.”
“It sounds like you’ve been reading murder mysteries. I’m going to bed now and FYI, ladies, I will not tell you I’m leaving every time I step out the door. We are grown adults, not teenagers, and I do not answer to either of you.”
Martha followed Abby as she started toward her room.
“No attention for Vivien and Polly?” Shiloh asked.
“No,” Abby answered.
“Why?”
“I like Martha better, and those two dogs belong to y’all, not me. Martha is mine. You want them to have attention, then it’s your job to provide it. I’m going to take a long, warm bath. Y’all have permission to use my half bath if you need it while I’m in the big bathroom. Just don’t knock on the bathroom door.”
“The queen gives orders but we can’t,” Bonnie said.
“Oldest child rights,” Abby said.
“And we get permission to enter the holy quarters.” Sarcasm dripped from Shiloh’s tone.
“Don’t get bitchy. Neither of you have invited me into your rooms,” Abby threw over her shoulder on the way down the hallway.
Ranching was never done.
Period.
No one ever said, If we get this fence fixed, it will be done for a week. Not once had she heard someone yell, And we finished plowing half the state of Texas, so we get to sleep until noon tomorrow.
But didn’t exist in ranching, not even for a nice excuse like, but I broke my fingernail and I have blisters on my toes. And no one ever uttered the words when I get the barn cleaned and the cows milked and the eggs gathered, I can read for the rest of the afternoon.
Thursday and Friday were long, exhausting days on Malloy Ranch. Two forty-acre fields were now planted in ryegrass and by spring the cattle would be eating green grass rather than hay. Two more fields were planted in winter wheat and next week the place where they’d burned the brush would be planted in a different kind of rye.
Cooper had been so busy with the sheriff’s job that he missed dinner on Friday and that made her cranky.
You are acting like a hormonal teenager, she fussed at herself.
Abby and her sisters had finished the evening chores and she’d sat down on the porch with Martha at her side when her phone rang. Haley started in the minute she answered it.
“Sorry I haven’t called sooner but the twins had a stomach bug and all I’ve gotten done for the past three days is change stinky diapers and rock them. Tell me what’s going on and don’t stutter around. I feel something in my bones,” Haley said.
“And your bones never lie?” Abby laughed.
“Not when it comes to you they don’t,” Haley answered. “Trust me. Well, shit! Got a baby waking up. I’ll call later and we’ll talk some more about it. Big hugs,” Haley said.
Abby shoved the phone back into her pocket and said, “Well, Martha, at least I don’t have to change your stinky diapers.”
She reached out to pet the dog and the phone rang again. “That didn’t take long,” she said.
“What?” Cooper asked.
Just hearing his voice put a smile on her face. “I thought you were someone else.”
“Oh, got another boyfriend who calls often?”
“Another?” she said slowly.
He chuckled. “I called to tell you that I missed you at dinner, but I had to forget the lunch break if I was going to get through by five and get this pasture seeded.”
“Bonnie made fried chicken.”
He groaned. “I’d just about kill for good homemade fried chicken.”
“Then you should have taken a lunch break,” she said.
“Is your other boyfriend there now?”
“No, he is not and no, I do not have a boyfriend. How about you, Cooper? How many girlfriends have you got who are just your friends?” she said.
“I haven’t done a head count lately, but I will tell you that not a single one is here right now offering to help me plow until midnight when the rain is supposed to reach the canyon.”
“How many tractors do you own?” she asked.
“Two big ones and a little one that Grandpa bought for Granny to use when she got the urge to help. It hasn’t been driven in years, but I can’t bear to sell it.”
“Since you were good enough to teach me how to drive a tractor, I’ll drive one of them for you tonight. Tell me how to drive to your place. I don’t have any idea how to get there except over the fence. But why don’t you ask Rusty to help you?”
“I’m not attracted to him,” Cooper said.
“And you are to me?” she asked.
“Honey, that question doesn’t even need an answer. I’ll pay you if you’re serious about plowin’,” he said.
“I’ll take it in ice cream instead of dollars.”
He told her exactly how to get from Malloy Ranch to the Lucky Seven. She pulled her boots back on, tucked the laces into the tops, and then braided her hair into two ropes that hung down the sides of her shoulders.
“What are you doing? Going for another walk?” Shiloh came out of the bathroom with a towel around her head and a long terry bathrobe belted around her waist.
“Actually, I’m going for a drive, and I won’t be back until midnight or after, so don’t wait up for me. And if my phone rings, somebody better be dead.”
“Surely to God you aren’t going on an ice cream date looking and smelling like you do. Don’t you own anything other than camouflage?” Shiloh asked.
“I don’t think I smell bad enough to fog the inside of a tractor cab. The rest is none of your business,” she answered.
Bonnie came out of her room and stopped in her tracks. “Where are you going?”
“She hasn’t had enough of tractors. She’s going to go plow up something until after midnight,” Shiloh answered.
“And I’m taking the leftover fried chicken with me,” Abby said.
“Sounds like a midnight picnic to me.” Bonnie smiled.
“Sounds like a woman who’s lost her mind to me. Not even Cooper Wilson would be able to talk me into getting back into a tractor cab, especially at night,” Shiloh said.
“Maybe I want to get that field ready where we cleared off the mesquite. Or maybe”—she wiggled her eyebrows—“I’m on my way to the bunkhouse to seduce Rusty.”
Shiloh popped her hands on her hips. “I’m not blind. I can see the way Cooper looks at you and you aren’t doing one thing to discourage it. Yes, he’s interested in you, Abby, but have you ever stopped and considered maybe he’s even more interested in this ranch? It would sure be a nice addition to his place, now wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not having this conversation right now. Good night, girls,” Abby said.
Bonnie stepped around them and said, “Take the rest of the cookies if you want to. Tomorrow you have to cook and you can make more.”
Shiloh set her full mouth in a firm line and shook her head slowly, muttering the whole way into her bedroom. “Don’t you dare take all those cookies. I’m having a few for a bedtime snack.”
“Nosy little shits. Can’t even sneak out without telling them,” Abby told Martha as she slipped out the front door.
Abby had been raised in a tiny apartment with her mother; Ezra had lived like a king. She figured Cooper must have a similar setup on Lucky Seven, but when the big two-story white house came into sight, she gasped. Several turned porch posts supported a sleeping porch that wrapped around three sides of the house, with doors that opened out of bedrooms on the second floor. Several cats lazed against the railings.
Cooper was sitting in the first of a line of rocking chairs lined up on the wide porch. He waved and said, “Welcome to this side of the barbed-wire fence.”
“You scared the shit out of me,” she said breathlessly. “I figured you’d be in the field and I’d have to call you to tell me how to get there.”
He chuckled. “Sorry about that. I waited on you so we could take my old farm truck. Come on with me and we’ll drive out to the back of the ranch. It’s on the southwest corner of the property and I’d hate for you to drive your good vehicle down the rutted path.”
She held out a paper bag. “Chicken, cookies, and half a dozen leftover biscuits stuffed with strawberry jelly.”
“You are an angel straight from heaven,” he groaned.
“You might have trouble convincing Shiloh and Bonnie of that.” She laughed. “Show me the way. I’m still a rookie, but I’ll do my best.”
“Long as the seed gets in the ground, I’m not complainin’.” He helped her into the old truck with a blanket thrown over the wide bench seat. No console between them. No fancy dash or CD player. It looked like it might fall apart any minute, but when he started the engine, it purred like a kitten.
“Radio doesn’t work, either,” he said when he caught her scanning the inside. “Grandpa bought it used in the sixties. It’s like an old mule. Still got a lot of good in it, if you baby it just a little and don’t use it like a hot rod. And Abby, you don’t have to work until midnight. When you get tired, just call me and I’ll drive you back to the house. Weatherman says it’s going to rain cats, dogs, and baby elephants tomorrow, so I wanted to get the seed in the ground. It’ll be too muddy to get the tractors in the fields if it does rain.”
“A wise man I know told me once that friends help friends. I think his initials are CW.” She smiled.
“Imagine that,” Cooper said.
They were both quiet on the way to where the moonlight lit up two big green tractors sitting at the edge of a freshly plowed field. With darkness surrounding them, they looked like monsters instead of machinery.
“Here we are. We’ve got about five hours and that should get the job done with both of us working,” he said.
She turned toward him and nodded. “Just tell me what to do and I’ll do my best.”
She was in the tractor cab making the first round exactly like Cooper told her when she realized what he’d said about the weather on Saturday. He and Rusty would be in a patrol car transporting a prisoner to San Antonio. She and her sisters—when did she start thinking of them as sisters, anyway—would be doing chores. If it was raining all that hard, there was no way they’d be able to plow or plant that last field that Rusty mentioned. That meant a day off and she planned dozens of ways to use the time as she drove the tractor up and down the field by the scanty moonlight.
All the light disappeared behind clouds after a couple of hours and she had to depend on the headlights, instinct, and hope. She could see the lights of Cooper’s tractor across the fence from where she worked and he seemed to be going faster than she was. Afraid that she’d mess up, she kept her speed steady. She’d seen the cost of the seed they’d planted on Malloy Ranch and there was no way she’d waste that much money by not doing the job right.
Besides, you want to please him, right? It was Haley’s voice in her head that time and Abby’s eyes were too heavy to even argue with her friend.
She reached into her pocket and pulled out a ziplock bag full of candy, opened it with one hand, and dumped all the pieces on the seat beside her. The sugar rush woke her up, but talking to Cooper on the phone for an hour was what really helped.
“So what is your favorite kind of music?” he asked.
“Country.”
“I’m shocked. I figured you for a hard rock girl like Bonnie.”
She laughed. “Then prepared to be double shocked. Bonnie listens to country music, too.”
“Your favorite artist?”
“Travis Tritt and Blake Shelton. It’s a toss-up,” she answered.
“And female artist?”
“Miranda Lambert and or the Pistol Annies. How about you?”
“Male artist is George Strait. Female would be a tie between Martina McBride and Patsy Cline.”
“Did your grandpa introduce you to Patsy?” she asked.
“Oh, yeah. He loved her and Loretta Lynn. We’ve still got a turntable in the living room and dozens of vinyl records that I play sometimes.”
His roots really did go way, way down into the ground.
“Favorite food?” he asked.
“Don’t laugh at me, but I love good old greasy hamburgers made on a charcoal grill. Not one of those gas ones, but real charcoal,” she said. “Your turn.”
“Steaks on a charcoal grill.”
A few rain sprinkles dotted the windshield, but they didn’t last long. Maybe the weatherman had been wrong or perhaps the storm blew right over the top of the canyon and went on its merry way.
“Got to take this call. If I lose you, I’ll call back,” he said.
She waited a couple of minutes before his voice returned. “That was the dispatcher. She knows that I’m plowing and wanted me to know that the bad weather is comin’ in the next twenty minutes. If we want to get out of here before it hits, we’ll have to stop now. It’s pouring down in Silverton and we could get stuck in the mud if we don’t leave. We’ll leave the old truck and take the tractors back to the barn. Just follow me.”
“I’m on my last round. Let me finish it first,” she said.
“Hurry. The dispatcher said it’s got some power behind it. They are blowing the sirens to warn folks in town to take shelter,” he told her.
She finished that round, whipped around the corner, and saw red taillights coming across the end of her field. The lights stopped and Cooper was suddenly out of his tractor running to open the gate for them to pass through. When both tractors had cleared enough space, he stopped and jogged back to shut the gate, waving at her on the way.
Lightning split the dark sky and thunder rolled off the edges of the canyon. The old work truck would be stuck out there until the mud cleared up, but there was no way they could drive three vehicles back to the ranch.
She pulled in beside where he’d parked and could see him coming toward her. In the semidarkness, with the eerie aura of a storm surrounding him, his swagger was even more pronounced than usual. He’d removed his coat and the plaid shirt he’d worn over an oatmeal-colored thermal undershirt was unbuttoned, flapping in the wind like Superman’s cape. The sleeves were pushed up to his elbows and his broad chest stretched the knit shirt so tight that she could see the ripples of stomach muscles.
“Thank you, Abby. You are a lifesaver.” He threw an arm around her shoulders and together they walked the short distance to her truck.
The big rolling black clouds brought more bursts of lightning and deafening thunder, but she felt safe with his arm around her. She shivered and he drew her near as he opened her door.
“Cold?”
“I hate storms. The static in the air reminds me of a hurricane.”
He drew her closer. “We don’t get hurricanes in this part of Texas. Maybe a tornado, but never a hurricane. You seen many?”
“Not a lot. I was deployed when that big one hit several years ago, but the one I do remember hit us when I was about fourteen. We lived on the strip above the store in an apartment. The wind damaged our roof and the water got into the shop, but it didn’t ruin any of the equipment. After the power was restored we were able to get opened up in a couple of weeks, but it was pretty scary.”
“At that age, you probably thought the sky was falling.”
“You’ll laugh, but I thought the ocean was coming to get us,” she said.
Actually, a hurricane hadn’t been a lot different than the feeling she had when he touched her or kissed her, or even shared pecan pie with her. Different circumstances arranged the nerves in different ways, but when it was all said and done, it took her breath away and made her heart race.
“Good night, Cooper.”
He leaned into the truck and cupped her face in his hands. Thumbs rested on her jawbones. One of his pinky fingers traced her lips, sending jolts of electricity far greater than the lightning through her body. His eyes closed slowly as if he wanted to look at her and kiss her at the same time, and then his lips touched hers, gentle at first. His hands moved to the back of her head to hold her steady as he deepened the kiss. Ripples went from her scalp to her toes and, defying gravity, traveled right back up her legs to her spine and right up to her lips. She wrapped her arms around his neck and moved closer to him, biting back a moan the whole time.
“Good night, Abby,” he said hoarsely when he broke the kiss. “See you Sunday when we get home. I’ll call you over the weekend.”
He slammed the door and the first drop of rain hit the windshield. She slapped the steering wheel and fussed at herself for not stopping this thing in the beginning. Now it would be ten times—no, a thousand times—harder to end.
“Friends, my ass. Friends don’t kiss like that,” she said.
Years ago, with raging teenage emotions and desires, she had known the excitement of that first kiss, that first sexual experience with the boy she’d thought she’d marry someday, and the misery of the first major breakup. On her first deployment, afraid of being killed in a foreign country, there had been a tall, dark soldier whom she’d thought she was in love with for a brief time. The sex had been better; the breakup hadn’t been as devastating. But the sex with Cooper was a thousand times hotter.
She started the engine and turned the truck around. When she reached the end of the lane and turned north, the rain got more serious. As she drove under the Malloy Ranch sign, the wind picked up and a streak of lightning split the pregnant clouds wide-open. Forget about raining cats and dogs or even baby elephants, this was hurricane-quality wind right there in the middle of the canyon.
Visibility was so limited that she slid to a greasy stop mere inches from the yard fence. There was no doubt she would get wet from truck to house, so she opted to go through the back door. She could leave her wet boots and clothes in the utility room and not track mud all over the living room carpet.
The cold rain, blown with gale-force winds, stung her eyes and face and even her underpants were soaked by the time she grabbed the doorknob—only to find it locked.
“Well, shit!” She turned to jog around the house to the front door. The porch would offer some protection while she picked that lock. The stoop at the back didn’t stop a bit of the rain from pelting the hell out of her.
A sudden burst of light blinded Abby and the door flew open. She blinked several times before she could focus.
“Shiloh?”
“You look like a drowned rat. Surely you’ve got enough sense to come in out of the rain. There’s clean towels in the dryer. See you in the morning.”
Standing on the rug just inside the door, Abby shucked out of her coat and hung it on one of a line of nails. “Did you wait up for me?”
“I did not! A clap of thunder woke me and then I saw a couple of headlights through the rain. Looked like aliens. I got up to be sure we weren’t about to be abducted,” she yawned. “You do look a little like E.T. Are you sure you are Abby Malloy?”
“Right now I’m not sure about a damn thing, but thank you for opening the door,” Abby said.
Shiloh waved off the comment with a flick of her wrist. “See you in the morning for chores. It’s going to be so much fun in the rain.”
Martha was lying in the hallway beside her door when Abby reached her bedroom. The dog wagged her tail and stood, meandered inside the room as soon as Abby opened the door, and went straight for the gold rocking chair, where she curled up.
“Do you want a blanket?” Abby laughed.
Martha laid her head down and shut her eyes.
Abby pulled a small throw from the back of the chair and wrapped it around Martha’s body. Then she dropped down on her knees and scratched her ears. “I’m going to take a quick shower. He kissed me again, Martha, and I’m not sure what to do with all these emotions,” she whispered.