A Cowboy Christmas Miracle (Burnt Boot, Texas Book 4) (19 page)

She giggled. “By what I’m seeing over there in those boxes, that is totally possible.”

They had it looking as good as possible when Lottie joined them again. “It was Verdie, and she had to know what all was going on over here. I told her about the barn and the decorating today, and she told me that she’s having a hard time keeping Callie on bed rest. Lord, you’d think that was her blood grandbaby the way she goes on about it. And those other kids have flat-out put some new giddyup in her step. Me and Leland wanted kids but the good Lord didn’t see fit to bless us, so we just had each other. But Leland said once we taught our Sunday school classes that he was kind of glad that we didn’t have to deal with all the problems that people have with their kids.”

She stopped for a breath and Betsy pointed at the tree. “What do you think? Is it ready for decorations?”

“Looks beautiful. You did a fine job of pulling out the branches to make it look all full and pretty. Now we’re ready for the lights. Declan, you can wrap them around your arm and Betsy can fix them on the tree. I still use the big lights. Them little twinkly things never did appeal to me and Leland. We checked them every year before we stored them, so they should be good to go.”

Betsy spoke up before Lottie went off on another tangent. “Checked them for what?”

Lottie’s giggle reminded Betsy of a little girl with playground secrets. “If one burns out, then the whole strand won’t light, so you have to check each bulb to see which one is out. But we already did that. Let’s get them on the tree. I’ll sit back here on the sofa and give y’all advice about where they need to be.”

Every time Betsy unwound a three-foot strand from the roll on Declan’s arms, her hands brushed his. Heat made her think of a hell of a lot more than frivolous sexual activity. It made her yearn for that hotel room again and for pure, old, unadulterated sex with Declan Brennan.

If her grandmother could have read her mind over at Wild Horse, she would’ve dropped from cardiac arrest right there on the foyer floor. If Mavis Brennan could have read it, Betsy would’ve been a dead woman within twenty-four hours.

“This ain’t y’all’s first rodeo, is it?” Lottie asked.

“No, ma’am. We decorated the Burnt Boot Bar and Grill for Rosalie and our job was the tree,” Declan said.

“You work real good together. Too bad you come from the feuding families or you might make a nice couple. But I don’t suppose you could ever get past that fizzlin’ crap and date each other, could you?”

“Creative cussin’,” Declan whispered.

Betsy bit back a grin. “Probably wouldn’t be a healthy idea if we dated each other, would it, Miz Lottie?”

“And if you did, you’d wind up exiled forever. I was like that when I married Leland. My daddy didn’t like him one bit and my mama wasn’t too fond of him either. They said he’d been one of them kind that sow wild oats on Saturday night and go to church on Sunday to pray for a crop failure. He usually sat in the back pew, and I fell in love with him when I was only fifteen. We ran off and got married when I was sixteen and he was nineteen. Mama said I’d made my bed and I had to sleep in it.” She paused and cocked her head to one side. “You got a saggin’ one there, Betsy. Mama was so mad at me that she didn’t let me come home for a whole year. Then she wrote me a letter, even though we both lived right here in Burnt Boot. I wrote her back, and we did that for another year, and then we both got a telephone. She called me one day out of the blue and asked me to come to Sunday dinner. I did, and after a couple of weeks, she called me again and asked me and Leland both to come to Sunday dinner.”

“Did she ever learn to like Leland?” Betsy asked.

“I don’t think so, but me and her made up after about five years. We’d go to Sunday dinner once a month, and my mom and I would talk while we washed the dishes, and I guess she finally figured out how happy I was with him, and those last years, things was good. I loved my Leland, so it was worth it waitin’ on her to come around. But a girl needs her mama and a mama needs her daughter, so it was good to be able to talk to her.”

“Would you have regretted marryin’ Leland if she’d never come around?” Declan asked.

“Lord no! I loved him with my whole heart. I just had to give Mama some time to get her thinkin’ all straightened out. You’d be surprised at how much a little patience helps.” Lottie smiled.

Betsy finished the lights and Declan plugged them in. Sure enough, every one of those big suckers lit up. Red, blue, green, and yellow, they reminded her of one of those silly Ring Pops that kids buy and suck on all day. Would she be willing to never see her mother again until she was on her deathbed if she could have a life with Declan Brennan?

She mulled that question over as she and Declan wrapped red and green tinsel around the tree, looping it the way Lottie said, in all the right places.

* * *

At noon, Lottie served barbecued chicken, fried potatoes, baked beans, and hot biscuits with pecan pie for dessert. The woman was pure magic in the kitchen, cooking a few minutes and coming back to tell them what she wanted done next, disappearing for a bit and returning, and not one thing burned or even scorched.

According to her, they were going to put the lights around the house that afternoon, and then Lottie would tell them where else they could string up the rest of the lights. From the half-dozen boxes still left of nothing but lights, Betsy figured they’d be able to put them on the barbed-wire fence all the way around the whole ranch.

“Now I’m going to stay in the house and y’all kids can do the work. When you get it all finished, I will come out and see it. I’ll make a fresh batch of Christmas cookies and some hot chocolate, so you can come in every hour and warm up,” Lottie told them. “There is a plug for the ones around the house up under the eaves at the back of the house, so you want to end there. Me and Leland found out that if you start at the south corner, chances are you’ll come out at the exact right place. We just left the hooks up from one year to the next, so you don’t have to worry with those things.”

When they were outside, Betsy shook her head involuntarily.

“Mosquito at this time of year?” Declan asked.

“No bugs. My brain is trying to get rid of so many words. I don’t think I’ve heard so much talking in my life. Even church ends in thirty minutes,” she said softly.

Declan had one foot on the ladder, but he came back down, checked the windows, and backed Betsy up against the house, his strong arms trapping her in a cage of masculinity.

“Poor Leland. The writin’ on his tombstone should read ‘Here lies Leland Miller. Poor old cowboy was talked to death.’” He brushed a soft kiss across her lips and climbed up the ladder. “We can do this without talking, darlin’.”

“Thank you,” she mumbled.

* * *

After supper, Declan declared that it was poker night and disappeared without a backward glance. Betsy said she was going to read a book and escaped to her room. Lottie grabbed the telephone and was busy telling Gladys all about how her house looked when Betsy shut herself into her bedroom, fell back on the bed, and put a pillow over her ears.

“I need a beer so bad,” she said. “Or better yet, a whole bottle of Jameson.”

Betsy was too restless to sit still after Declan had left that evening, and lying on the bed with a pillow muting the sound of Lottie’s chatter wasn’t helping. Finally, she threw the pillow on the floor, sat up, and made a decision. She had to get out of the house. Maybe sitting on a bar stool, sipping a single beer would help. She grabbed her purse and coat and waved at Lottie on the way out of the house.

“I’ll be back by bedtime,” she called out.

She heard Lottie telling Gladys that both her hired hands were gone for the evening so she would be over to her house in thirty minutes for a hand of canasta with Gladys and Polly.

Fearing that Lottie would try to flag her down for a ride into town, Betsy jogged to her truck, fired up the engine, and only slid once when she started too fast.

Shame on you! How are you going to feel if that poor, sweet soul has a wreck and hurts herself on the way to Gladys’s house? You should go back there and offer to take her to town.

“Hush! I’m not listening to anything you have to say and I’m really tired of anything that has to do with listening, period,” Betsy growled.

She shed her coat inside the front door of the bar, hung it on a rack right beside Declan’s, and almost gave thanks that there was a whole row of empty bar stools to choose from. She hopped up on the one at the very end and Rosalie held up the Jameson.

Betsy shook her head. “Just a good, cold beer tonight.”

“I’ve missed you, but I’ve also heard the gossip about the Double L,” Rosalie said when she pushed the beer across the bar on a coaster. “How’s that going?”

“Lottie talks—a lot!” Betsy said.

Rosalie chuckled. “You should’ve visited with Polly before you agreed to stay out there.”

“Didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

“You could come live in my spare room,” Rosalie said.

“I want that ranch and to get it I have to live there and beat Declan.”

“Feud again?” Polly set the beer in front of her.

“Not so much the feud as it is…” She paused and sipped the beer slowly. “I don’t know what it is, so I can’t tell you. He wants the ranch for the same reasons I do. We want out of the feud and we want a small place that is ours and not a part of the empire.”

“Maybe you ought to pool your resources and buy it together. That would shake the empire,” Rosalie suggested.

Before either of them could say anything else, Honey Brennan pushed her way into the bar and chose a bar stool. Her crystal-clear blue eyes started at Betsy’s boots and, inch by inch, traveled up to her red hair.

“Betsy.” She nodded.

Betsy held up her beer and nodded. “Honey.”

“I don’t like my cousin living out there on the ranch with you,” Honey said bluntly.

“That is your problem, not mine,” Betsy said.

“Why don’t you go back to Wild Horse and let him have that place? You can’t run it by yourself, and rumor has it that Naomi says she’ll shoot anyone who comes to help you. A beer, Rosalie,” Honey said.

“There’re always O’Donnells. I hear a cousin is coming to stay with Jill and Sawyer at Christmas. I bet I could get another one to live in my bunkhouse and help me out. You might want to wait and see who shows up before you get too serious about John,” Betsy said coldly.

“John and I are just fine, thank you very much,” Honey said. “Granny is happy. Naomi is pissed. The world is good. Rosalie, would you please draw up a pitcher? I’m going to treat Declan and Quaid at the poker table.”

Betsy really wanted to slap Honey for her smugness but even more because she could take a pitcher of beer back to the table to Declan without a problem.
Damn it to hell in a plastic beer pitcher
, Betsy thought.

Her phone set up a buzz in her hip pocket, and she made sure that she looked at the ID before she answered it. She didn’t want Gladys to be calling to ask her to come and get Lottie because she’d killed Polly with her constant chatter. It was Angela, so Betsy answered it.

“Hello, hello, where are you? What is all that noise?” Angela asked.

“I’m at the bar,” Betsy said. “Hold on. I’ll take it to the ladies’ room.”

She slid off the stool, carried the phone to the restroom, and locked the door behind her. She put the seat down on the only potty in the room and sat down on it. “Now can you hear me, Angela?”

“Yes, that’s much better. Why do you go to that place when it’s so noisy?”

“Because I like it and because Lottie doesn’t even have beer in her house for medicinal purposes,” Betsy said. “Did you get moved back into your house all right?”

“Yes, thank God. That big place intimidated me. I guess you heard about the feud over my brother. Why couldn’t you have liked him? It would have made things so much easier, and I really don’t want a Brennan for a sister-in-law.”

“He’s not my type, and if you’re calling to get me to step in and break him and Honey up, the answer is no.”

Angela took a deep breath, audible even through the filtered noise from the jukebox and loud conversations. “Dear Lord no! John is smitten with Honey, and I wouldn’t stand in the way of love, but he liked you and wouldn’t have looked at her if you’d been nicer to him. I’m calling to tell you to be very careful out there on the Double L with that weasel Declan Brennan.”

“Other than being a Brennan, what makes him a weasel?”

“Well, I overheard Tanner and Eli talking just before the big blow up at the ranch, when John went to the parsonage. And I’ve prayed and prayed about it, whether I should tell you or not, but it’s a burden on my heart. Besides, you’re living on a ranch with him, and you need to know what happened,” Angela said.

“And that was?” Betsy asked.

“Well, it was the week before Thanksgiving, and they—that would be Tanner and Eli and Quaid and Declan—were in one of those unholy poker games that they play,” Angela said.

“That’s what they’re doing tonight,” Betsy said.

“But that night Tanner and Declan got into a big argument about all their past loves or women or whatever they would be called. And they made this bet that whichever one of them lost the hand had to… Oh, this is so hard to tell you because it’s going to make you mad and I’m afraid you’ll blame the messenger,” Angela said.

“Spit it out.” A tingle had started on the back of Betsy’s neck and already had her hair standing on end.

“Whichever one lost the hand had to make the next woman who walked in the bar fall in love with him. He had to take her to bed and she had to fall for him, or else the loser had to give the winner a thousand dollars. Isn’t that horrible? Anyway, Declan lost, and you were the next woman to walk in the bar, and now I’m afraid he’ll try to seduce you out there on that ranch so he can win the money,” Angela said in a whoosh, as if she was afraid she would lose her courage.

“And why didn’t you call me before now?” Betsy’s heart landed somewhere down between the wooden floor and hell.

“I had to do some serious praying about it. I’m going to hang up now. Christian is crying, but I do feel better for getting that off my chest. You be careful.”