Cowboy Seeks Bride (7 page)

“What’d y’all do after you graduated?” she asked, since he was evidently in a much more talkative mood than the day before.

“We signed up for the army and wound up in the Gulf War. Said if we ever got back into Montague County we’d never leave it again. This is our first time to break that vow. Oh, we scoot around the north part of Texas on Saturday nights doin’ some two-steppin’ and pool shootin’ at the bars, but we stay pretty close to home, which is the Double Deuce, where we both work for Ace Riley.”

“Married?” she asked before he could barely draw another breath.

Coosie shook his head. “Hadn’t found the right woman yet, but neither one of us is dead yet either, so there’s still a chance. You’d be amazed at how many women think that stutter of Buddy’s is cute. He says why settle down with one heifer when he can have a whole herd.”

Haley laughed and asked, “So you came home from the army and went to work at the Double Deuce?”

“Yep, Ace’s granddad hired us and we been there ever since. We were both raised up on ranches, so we knew about cattle and tractors. Looks like Dewar is calling a halt and the sun is straight up, so it must be dinnertime.”

“What are we havin’ today?” Haley asked.

“Beans. I set them to soakin’ last night and boiled them an hour this morning while I was makin’ flapjacks. Got some leftover spoon bread to go with ’em and I made too many pancakes on purpose so we could roll them up around some honey and peanut butter for dessert.”

Dewar kept his distance while they ate dinner, barely even acknowledging that she was part of the crew. Damn his sorry old cowboy hide anyway! His kiss made her want more, lots more, and he acted like it never even happened.

Haley had had relationships, but never before had a kiss created such a hot spot of lingering liquid desire. And the man who’d delivered the hotter’n hell’s blazes kisses was over there acting like he didn’t even know her.

Well, if that’s the way he wanted it, he could damn sure have his aloofness. She wasn’t interested in anything past a diversion from the boredom of a month on a cattle drive anyway. So there, Dewar O’Donnell with the sexy strut and the hottest kisses in the whole universe.

She turned her attention to the cattle lined up at the edge of Cow Creek. Getting them from Ringgold to Dodge City was the issue, not whether Dewar could set her ablaze with his kisses. When that was done, her job was over and Joel could do the actual reality show. And she’d be damn glad to have him out of the office and out of her hair for the weeks that he was out in the woods. And she was not sending a single roll of toilet paper with him, either.

After dinner they moved on north through the rolling hills again, keeping the herd going through long stretches of pastureland, sometimes through gates, across a section line road, and through another gate. Sometimes they had to cut a fence. Then Buddy and Finn hung back to repair it and catch up later.

In the middle of the afternoon Dewar steered the cattle to the west. Haley could hear the traffic before she actually saw a vehicle. The first one was a white pickup truck speeding down the road toward the south. The next was a pretty red sports car that made her long for her own car. Dewar rode toward a wide gate opening out onto the road and opened it. The cowboys flapped their hats and headed the big longhorn bull through the gate with the rest of the cattle following along behind, then yee-hawed them into a ninety-degree turn back to the north with the chuck wagon bringing up the rear.

“Y’all ready?” Dewar yelled.

“Might as well be,” Sawyer hollered back.

He crooked his finger. “Haley?”

She slapped Apache’s neck with the rein and he trotted right up the right edge of the cattle formation to Dewar. “So I’m the rodeo queen, right? Do I have to wave at the crowds?”

“The
Comanche
Times
newspaper has already done this big spread about Carl Levy sending H. B. McKay up here to check things out for a reality show. Since you are H. B., then yes, you are the rodeo queen. They’re having this big sidewalk sale and the ladies are setting up tables with food to sell. It’s a fundraiser that’ll bring in folks from all around.”

She grinned. “Ahh, shucks. I forgot my diamond hat band and my hair spray to get my hair all big and fluffy.”

“You’ll do.” He quickly scanned her from boots to hat. “If the cattle start to get restless, we’ll hurry them up a bit. If they get too wild, you might have to help corral them. Think you can do that?”

“I can do anything I set my mind to do,” she said. “You aren’t much for compliments, are you?”

“What?” His dark brows became one long line across his green eyes.

“Nothing. Let’s get through this,” she said shortly.

Sure enough more than one little boy darted out to slap a cow or a bull on the rump and then ran back to the safety of his parents. Cameras were out by the dozens, maybe even hundreds, to record the modern-day cattle drive through the small town. A pay phone attached to the side of a convenience store caught Haley’s eye and she entertained notions of making a call to end the whole thing. But that kiss kept her moving.

If it was a spur-of-the-moment thing, then the second one wouldn’t fry holes in the toes of her socks.

If it wasn’t, she was in big trouble.

She pulled up reins at a mailbox on a corner and dropped an envelope in it with all her notes for the past two days. It might be a week before her father got another letter, so he could just chew on her discoveries up until then. Besides, he didn’t deserve news more than once a week. Until she could mail him another batch of notes, he could be looking for a chuck wagon, preferably a Studebaker, and he could be thinking about buying a donkey right along with a hundred head of cattle.

Something whirred beside her ear, and she jerked her head around to see a blur that looked like a baseball or a rock. It hit Apache square on the flank and he reared back on his hind legs. The first crazy thing that went through her mind was “Hi Ho Silver.” His front feet came back down, hitting the ground with enough force to jar her teeth.

Suddenly, the saddle felt like it had been greased down with Coosie’s bacon grease. She was cussing and screaming at the kid who was running like the devil poking his butt with a pitchfork. Apache threw his head back, and his mouth opened and screamed right along with her. The cows joined in the concert, and the old bull lent his deep voice to the mix.

Cows were on both sides of Haley and it definitely was not like the running of the bulls. Apache got ahead of the whole herd and led the charge, like General Custer himself, right down the sidewalks festooned with merchandise for the annual spring sidewalk sale. The horse sideswiped a table of leftover valentines, and paper goods went flying through the air. The bright red tablecloth landed on Apache’s saddle horn and the old bull must’ve thought Apache was a bona fide bullfighter, because he gave a bellow, lowered his head, and charged.

One of the bull’s horns caught on a straw hat and the other one snagged a lady’s black lace camisole. Apache veered to the left with the bull so close behind him that Haley could feel his snorts. Two cows managed to get flannel nightgowns over their heads in such a way that only one wild eye was visible and they were giving the bull a real run for his money.

Hell’s bells, the running of the bulls didn’t have a thing on a stampede in southern Oklahoma. A lady was cornered between a rack of jeans and the door into a store by a big heifer that still had horns. The woman was shooing at the cow with her handbag. The cow tossed her head back and bawled, then stomped through a round rack of blue jeans and one of bras. She went tearing down the street with a hot pink bra strap stuck firmly on one twitching ear.

Women were screaming like wounded coyotes and fighting so hard to get their kids to safety inside stores that they were stampeding worse than the cattle. Haley saw the whole thing in a blur of flashes as Apache ran full out ahead of the whole herd. Lord, what a show it would make, but nothing could ever be staged to look like the real thing.

The red tablecloth flipped up over Haley’s eyes about the time that the stampede reached the edge of town, so she couldn’t see what was going on when Apache came to a long greasy stop. She tumbled out over his head to land right in the middle of a table full of cupcakes. The table collapsed and cupcakes went sailing through the air like miniature Frisbees. As luck would have it, she landed smack in the middle of dozens of chocolate cupcakes and the red tablecloth floated right down on top of her. She fought her way out, slinging chocolate every which way. Once she was free, she found Apache nibbling away at the cupcakes, with chocolate icing in his teeth.

Haley licked chocolate icing from her fingers, remounted, and gave thanks that she’d landed in that rather than shit—for a change. She slapped Apache on the rear end and they raced on ahead, this time behind the herd instead of in front of it. The cowboys were all still working their asses off trying to turn the bull and cows around. If they could get the first ones turned and head back toward the rest, the oncoming cows would slow down and they’d stall out the stampede.

Dust boiled up all around her, but she and Apache kept to the side as the cattle finally came to a stop half a mile out of town in the middle of a corn patch. A withered-up little old man with a shotgun trained on Dewar’s chest stopped cowboys, cows, bulls, and even Apache quicker than six cowboys on horses had been able to do.

“You the revenuers?” he asked.

He had wispy gray hair that the wind blew every which way. His overalls were unbuttoned on the sides, and from Haley’s vantage point, it was evident that those and a pair of scuffed-up cowboy boots were the only things the man wore.

“No, sir. We just drove this bunch of cows through Main Street and we had a stampede.”

“Smart-ass kid threw a rock and hit my horse and the little shit caused the whole thing,” Haley said.

The shotgun lowered and the old man grinned. “I keep tellin’ Mama that folks don’t raise their kids right no more. I swear to God that I’d kick that kid from here to next week if I caught him. Damn kids ain’t got a lick of sense. It all comes from all them damn things that they keep plugged in their ears. God only knows what the hell they’re listenin’ to…”

A voice from the house shut him up. “Clovis, shut up your bitchin’. I got two big pans of corn bread cooked up and my bathtub is full of moonshine. If that damn sheriff comes out here, and you know he will to see if any of them crazy fools got hurt in town, he’s going to put us both in prison. So bring them people in here and I’ll give them a chunk of fresh corn bread and a jar of shine to take with them.”

“I made that to sell, not give away,” Clovis yelled back at the little house with peeling paint.

“You’d try to sell a coffin to a dead man. It won’t be worth a damn if we’re in prison and can’t spend the money. Get them people on here to help me get it in jars. Miz Gertrude just called and said the sheriff is on the way. He was down near Terral, so he’ll be a little bit makin’ his way up here.”

Coosie drove the wagon up into the yard, heard the last of the conversation, and said, “Y’all dismount, tie your horses to the wagon, and get on in there.”

“Well, hell!” Clovis dug a cell phone out of his pocket and listened for a minute, jammed it back in the bib pocket, and yelled, “Momma, grab a jar of that shine and hide it in with your under-britches. Lawman is comin’ from the north to help put things to rights. He ain’t but five miles up the road. Pull the plug on the tub.”

The gun went back up. “I oughta make y’all pay for that shine.”

“We didn’t cause it. That red-haired kid did,” Haley said.

The gun lowered again. “Red-haired? ’Bout ten years old?” He squinted against the sun and pulled his brows down over his deep-set eyes.

She nodded.

“Yep, that’d be the preacher’s kid. Mean little shit. Well then, I’ll just tell the police and they can go fuss at the preacher for raisin’ up a kid like that. I bet they can take up an extra offerin’ this Sunday down at the church to pay for the damage done in the town and for my shine that’s goin’ down the drain.”

“You ought to fix up an underground cistern in the backyard and let it drain into it if you nearly get caught again,” Haley said.

“Smart girl. Mama, bring on out that corn bread. Police car is pullin’ into the drive right now,” Clovis yelled.

A rotund woman opened the door and handed Coosie a paper sack, already showing grease marks where she’d slid a whole pan of corn bread into it.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Coosie said.

“They’re calmed down enough to move them on out of here now,” Clovis said. “And y’all ought to thank that little lady for your hides tonight. She’s the smartest one in the whole bunch of y’all. Movin’ cows through town. What the hell was you thinkin’?”

Haley breathed a sigh of relief when they headed back to the west and out into the open ground. The bull had shook free of the black lace teddy, but he still trotted along with his straw hat impaled in a jaunty slant on one horn. The flannel nightgowns on the two cows had flown off into the ditch, but the old horned heifer still sported her pink bra proudly. Haley swiped a finger across a chunk of chocolate on her shirt and licked it from her finger.

She turned to say something to Dewar and a woman in a little red pickup truck pulled up beside Dewar’s horse.

“Hey, Dewar, darlin’, you ready for a party?”

Didn’t the broad know that they’d just survived a stampede and a double-barreled shotgun? She should be whispering, not yelling. Damned idiot! If those cows stampeded again, Haley hoped that they ran right over her big hair and flattened those enormous boobs.

Dewar grinned and waved at her. “Not today. Got cattle to herd.”

Leave it to a man to eat up all that attention.

Apache snorted and Haley wished she had the energy to do the same.

“Come on, now! Betcha I can stay on that bull at the club down at the Resistol Rodeo longer than you can. Winner gets the prize. I’ll be callin’ you when you get home,” the woman hollered.