How to Marry a Cowboy (Cowboys & Brides) (12 page)

“You want to go to Nicky’s funeral for closure?”

She jerked her head around to stare at Mason. He looked normal. He hadn’t grown two heads, and there weren’t alien tendrils coming out of his head. So why did he ask a damn fool question like that?

“You’d be sure that it was over if you saw the casket going into the ground,” he said.

“Hell, no! I do not want to go anywhere near him or his family.”

“Well, that’s definite enough.”

He turned off the highway and parked in a crowded lot next to a building with a big sign on the front announcing that it was Huck’s. Sunday-afternoon crowds usually marked the best places to eat, and her mouth watered at the thought of good fried catfish and maybe some decent hush puppies on the side.

“Table for two for Mason Harper,” he told the hostess.

“Right this way, sir,” she said.

“You made reservations?” Annie Rose asked.

“We’d have been waiting in line for an hour if I hadn’t. I called when we were at the house. I haven’t been tubing down the river since the girls were born. I don’t want to waste time waiting to eat when we could be enjoying the sun and water,” he answered.

The hostess seated them in a booth and handed them menus. “Your waitress will be Lori. She’ll be with you in a moment. Could I get you something to drink?”

“Sweet tea,” Mason said.

“I’ll have the same,” Annie Rose said.

She nodded and rushed off to seat a family of four who also had reservations.

“Now it’s your time to hang things on the clothesline,” Annie Rose said.

“Guess it is.” Mason nodded. “The first time I kissed a woman after Holly was gone I felt guilty. The second time not so much. It got easier until you came into the picture. You remind me of her. Not in looks, but in actions. The way you hold a spoon. The way you walk, but believe me, I don’t think about Holly when I kiss you. Then it’s just me and you and the world disappears. It’s the first time I’ve felt like that in a long time. And I don’t know how to handle it, Annie Rose. I want to move on, but I feel guilty doing it.”

Annie Rose picked up the menu and hid behind it, trying desperately to sort out her own feelings. Nicky was dead. She’d only known Mason a week, but if the time was factored in, it had been twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, which meant if she’d been dating him, this could be about the tenth date.

Lord, what am I doing? I should be dancing a jig in a pig trough that I’m free at last, not thinking about a relationship.

“And for you, ma’am?” the waitress asked.

“How big is a full order?” Annie Rose asked.

“It’s huge,” Mason answered. “I get half an order.”

“Then that’s what I’ll have. Half order of catfish. French fries and coleslaw. And could I get an extra order of hush puppies?”

“Yes, ma’am. Appetizers?”

Annie Rose looked over the top of her menu at Mason.

“I ordered a combination platter to munch on before the food gets here.”

“Can we share?” she asked.

“Oh, yeah.” He grinned.

Why did he have to be so nice? One big, hellacious fight where he told her that she was a crazy bitch would make leaving so much easier.

The waitress arrived with a tray in her hand. She set one glass of tea in front of Annie Rose and took half a step toward the other side of the booth, stumbled on her shoelace, and dumped the whole glass on the table. Annie Rose popped up in the booth like a preacher about to deliver a Sunday-morning sermon. Mason scrambled to the other end but still got a few drops on his shirt before he joined Annie Rose, standing up with a hip propped on the back of the tall booth seat.

The mortified little waitress turned as red as her hair, apologized profusely, and saturated two napkins before she finally covered her face and ran to the kitchen. The manager came out with a mop and a thick towel, quickly cleaned up the mess, and apologized again.

“We will definitely make this right on your ticket,” he said softly.

The restaurant had gone as quiet as a funeral and all eyes were on Annie Rose, standing up, holding her dress tail up above her knees. Mason had a brilliant grin plastered on his face, and his green eyes twinkled. A man who didn’t get angry at an incident like that was well worth trusting, even if she had to help him get past his guilt issues.

“Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, the beautiful river,” she singsonged.

A deep chuckle came from the far corner and Henry stood up in his chair and picked up where she’d left off. “With its crystal tide forever… flowing by the throne of God.”

Instantly the whole restaurant turned into a mob singing the old hymn with others bringing their voices to the mix. Annie Rose caught Mason’s eye on the last verse as they sang together, “Soon we’ll reach silver river… soon our happy hearts will quiver with the melody of peace.”

Henry led the applause when the last note died and everyone, including Annie Rose and Mason, sat down. He reached across the squeaky-clean table and covered her hand with his.

“Probably a good thing that Nicky is gone,” he said softly.

She raised an eyebrow.

“I saw at least a dozen phones filming the singing.”

Her eyes popped wide open so fast and furious that it gave her a pain right in the middle of her forehead. “I don’t know why I even started that. All those people were staring, and it was funny as hell. I’ve never been on a date and wound up standing in the booth.”

It was his turn to raise an eyebrow.

“Oops! Is this not a date?” she asked.

His smile lit up the whole noisy restaurant. “My pickup line worked.”

She pulled her hand free and the red-haired waitress carefully set two more glasses of sweet tea on the table. “I’m so sorry, but I could hug you for the way you handled that. You could have gotten me fired.”

“Mistakes happen,” Annie Rose said.

“Well, you are a blessing and I’ll never forget you.”

“I agree with what she said,” Mason whispered.

Getting undressed and into a bathing suit in the backseat of a pickup truck was no easy feat, but in minutes Annie Rose was wearing a cute little neon blue-and-black polka-dotted, two-piece suit that looked like it came right out of
I
Love
Lucy
. All she needed was one of those turban swim caps, and she’d be thrown back fifty years in time.

She carefully wrapped her underwear inside the dress, shoved it into the plastic bag that her swimsuit came in, and stowed it in the backseat of the club-cab truck. She slipped a pair of cheap rubber flip-flops on her feet and stepped out of the truck into blistering hot sunshine.

Mason’s face lit up in a brilliant smile. “Oh, yes, you certainly do need sunblock.”

“Are you saying that I’m not a tanned beauty?”

“No, ma’am, I’m saying that you are not tanned. Darlin’, anyone that says you are not a beauty is stone-cold blind or dumber than a box of rocks.”

“You are a charmer, Mason Harper. I bought a big tube of sunblock. Will you please do my back and then I’ll do yours? I reckon we can both get to the other parts just fine.”

His sigh was heavy, but the grin didn’t fade. “I guess the day can’t be absolutely perfect or else we wouldn’t believe it was true.”

She handed the sunblock to him, turned around, and shut her eyes to enjoy every second of his hands on her bare skin.

“I’d say that the sweet tea incident already fixed that perfect issue,” she said.

His hands started at her neck, smoothed the cream down over her shoulders, and then traveled down her back, reaching under the strap of the bra top and on down to the waistband of the bottoms. She had to remind herself to breathe in through her nose and out through her mouth or she would have gotten light-headed.

She could testify, with her right hand raised up to heaven, that the swoon had not died with the ending of the Civil War, and it was still a very, very real word and should have a place of honor right there on the dictionary page. Maybe they should even put a picture of her right beside it.

Her hands trembled when it was her turn to put the sunblock on him, but she vowed, by damn, that he wasn’t getting ahead of her. She squirted a healthy amount of white cream onto his bare back and followed his lead. Starting at the nape of his neck, she massaged the tense muscles as she applied the sunblock. Working her way down his back to the two dimples below his waist right above where his cutoff jeans rode low on his hips, she made sure that there was not a single square inch of skin left to the ravages of sun rays.

“My God, Annie Rose, your hands are like silk,” he said hoarsely.

“Feel good?” she whispered.

He groaned. “Let’s forget the river and you can do that all afternoon.”

She squirted out another handful and sat down on the tailgate of the truck. “Oh, no, cowboy! I’m going tubing right after I take care of the rest of my body.”

“I could do that for you,” he offered.

“If you did, we’d spend our afternoon doing something other than floating down the river.”

He wiggled his dark eyebrows. “Sounds like a wonderful plan to me. I have a quilt and I see a really nice shade tree.”

“And I see chiggers in those pretty weeds under that shade tree,” she said.

“Party pooper.”

“Maybe so, but I avoid chiggers like the plague.”

“How about a fancy hotel room? Do you avoid those too?”

She handed him the sunblock. “Don’t see one right now. I do see two big inner tubes and a lot of river water. But to answer your question, yes, I do avoid fancy hotels. They cost too much.”

“You are a hard woman, Annie Rose Boudreau. Maybe the hot sun will soften you up this afternoon and you’ll change your mind about the quilt when we get to our destination.”

“Which is where?” she asked.

“On down the river.” He flashed another beautiful smile.

He leaned in and kissed her, only their lips touching. His hands did not snake around her body to draw her closer and his fingers didn’t tangle themselves into her ponytail to steady her head as his tongue slipped inside her mouth. It was the beginning of a trip that promised an adventure beyond her wildest dreams, and she looked forward to it with a racing heart.

When he took a step backwards, she had to catch herself and open her eyes quickly or she would have fallen on her face.

“About that quilt?” he murmured.

“About those chiggers.” She giggled.

“Guess there’s nothing to do then but get into the water.”

“Guess not.”

***

Mason hooked an arm into each of the two big rubber doughnuts and carried them to the edge of the water. He’d envisioned Annie Rose in a skimpy bikini, but what she had picked out was so damn cute he couldn’t keep the grin from his face. And it felt damn fine to be smiling like that.

The Red River was calm that day, flowing along slowly like an old man stopping to smell every rose on his way to church. The sun was high in the sky and only a few white puffy clouds dotted the clear blue canvas.

“Okay, m’lady, you want to get wet first or fall into the tube?” he asked.

She waded out into the water until it was knee deep and reached for the first inner tube, did a cute little bounce, and landed in it perfectly; legs and arms dangling over the sides, butt in the water, and head using the black tube as if it was a feather pillow.

“How long until we reach that destination?” she asked.

He had pushed his tube out into the water and flipped his body into it. “Well, shit! I forgot something.”

In his haste to get into the water, he’d forgotten the rope and the floating cooler. No way could they spend the whole afternoon in the heat without something to drink, and if he fell asleep, he wanted to be damn sure that their tubes were tied together. What if she got into trouble and he couldn’t hear her?

“Hold on to my tube and paddle so you don’t float away.” He rolled out of the tube, getting thoroughly wet when he splashed into the water. Then he jogged back to the truck, grabbed a rope and a red-and-white cooler, and ran back.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“Hitching us together. Don’t you want to be hitched to me?”

“I’ll have to think about it. We’ve only known each other a week,” she teased.

Most women would have screamed and thrown a fit at the sweet-tea incident, but she’d turned it into a party. Not many women would have darted in and out of a clothing store to buy a bathing suit in five minutes. And now there she was, holding his inner tube close to hers and paddling with the other hand to keep from drifting away with the current. He waded out into the water and quickly tied the two tubes together with the rope, leaving enough room between them to hook the tail of the rope through the handle of the floating cooler filled with ice, beer, and water bottles.

Waves slapped against their legs and arms as the flow carried them downriver in a slow, lazy fashion. The sun’s rays were warm. Mason had eaten a big dinner of fried catfish and all the trimmings, and soon his eyes were shut behind his sunglasses. Instinctively, he held on to the sides of the tube as the river gently rocked him to sleep.

***

Annie Rose listened to the soft regular snores coming from the other side of the rope. She carefully opened the cooler and removed a bottle of icy-cold water, took a few sips, and put it back. The sun was downright hot on her face and she knew that if she didn’t remove her big, bug-eyed style sunglasses she’d get a tan around them. She tucked one of the ear pieces into the waistband of her bathing suit bottoms and shut her eyes.

Thousands of memories of Nicky flashed in bright colors against the backside of her eyelids. That first time she’d met him, when he’d checked into the hospital and she had served as his nurse. He’d been charming in those days. Flowers, little presents, phone calls, text messages by the dozens. Afterwards she’d realized that was the tip of the iceberg in his seductive and controlling skills. As the time went by, incident by incident, month by month, until that last time when he was so violent. She should have gone to the emergency room, but every time he hit her it was worse than the time before. She feared that if he found out that she’d gone for help, he’d kill her for sure.

The final picture of the charred remains of a small private plane flashed and then it all ended, leaving nothing but a black screen like the end of a movie when the credits have finished rolling. It was over and now she was free. She started to open her eyes, but they were so heavy that she didn’t even fight sleep. Deep, calming peace filled her heart and soul as she gave herself to dreams of the twins romping in the pen with their pesky goats, of them helping her cook in the kitchen, and their music lessons in the afternoon. That segued off into a video of Mason joining her on the front porch swing after the sun had gone down.

As if in a time machine, she shot backwards through the years to her childhood. Her mother was in the kitchen and it was the last day of school for the year. It must have been when she was in the third grade, because she was carrying a report card with a big number three on the front. Surprisingly, she looked so much like Lily and Gabby that it was amazing. Her mother gave her a hug, poured a glass of milk, and put half a dozen still-warm chocolate chip cookies on a saucer and set it all in front of her.

“How did your day go?” her mother asked.

“I got in a fight with that mean girl again. She said you aren’t my mama and that you found me in a ditch.”

“Who won the fight?”

“I did. The principal made her sit in his office.”

“Did you hit her?”

Annie Rose smiled in her sleep at the memory. “I slapped her face and she pulled my hair.”

The picture faded and Annie Rose’s eyes snapped open. Good Lord! Her poor mother had had to raise a child just like Lily. She’d never realized what a chore her mother had taken on when she adopted a baby late in her life.

“Good mornin’,” Mason said.

His deep voice brought her back to present time in an instant. The past and bits of the past week had flashed in her mind, but no visions of the future. Did that mean that Mason wasn’t a part of it or that a higher power wasn’t letting her peek at what might happen? If not, she’d still be grateful for all he’d given her, beginning with letting her stay on the ranch and going right through to the kisses that proved a kiss could just be a kiss. It didn’t have to be a prelude to a bruise or a reward for doing something right instead of wrong.

“It’s late afternoon, not morning,” she said.

“I’m horrible company. I napped when we should have been talking.”

“I took a nap too, and it was wonderful, Mason. I’ve been enjoying the ride,” she said.

“Want a beer?”

“Love one.”

He opened the cooler, removed two bottles, and handed one to her.

She twisted off the top and tossed it back in the cooler.

“This ain’t your first trip to the river, is it?”

She shook her head. “No, and I’ve stepped on those things at the bottom of the creek too often to be the sorry culprit who throws a bottle cap in the water.”

“What time is it?” he asked.

“The beauty of a tube float is that there is no time. I’d guess four o’clock, but that’s only a guess by the sun’s position. How are we getting back to the truck?” she said.

“We aren’t. Skip drove it to our destination and parked it. We should wind up north of Telephone, with the truck parked right there waiting for us at the edge of the water.”

“Telephone?”

He tipped back the beer and took a long gulp before he answered. “It’s more like a community, but it still has a post office. About twenty minutes north of Bonham, and been there for more than a hundred years.”

“Why’d they name it that?”

“Rumor has it that the man who owned the general store had the only telephone in town and when he applied for a post office, he submitted Telephone, and they took it. You’ll see it if you don’t blink when we drive back to the ranch.”

She sipped at the icy-cold beer. “Thicket is like that. Just a wide spot in the road.”

“Population?” he asked.

“Little more than a thousand.”

“Telephone only has about two hundred.” He chuckled.

“Bet the people there are cut from the same bolt of denim,” she countered.

“Probably so.”

She trailed her free hand in the river water and said, “We should do this with the girls sometime.”

“You are a brave woman. Think about how bored they’d get. It would be a constant chatter of how far is it, when do we get there, I’m going to starve before we get out of this, why don’t we have a motor on these tubes so they’ll go faster.”

She splashed water on his bare belly. “But wouldn’t it be fun.”

He sucked air. “Damn, that’s cold on my hot skin.”

She peered over the edge of her oversized inner tube. “Holy shit, Mason! You missed a stretch of skin right above your waistband. You’re burned.”

“Are you going to kiss it and make it all better when we get to the truck?”

“Vinegar, not kisses, is what you’re going to get when we get home.”

“Well, dammit! No quilt. No fancy hotel. And smelly old vinegar. You’re worse than my mama,” he whined.

Her laughter echoed off the willow trees lining the banks of the river. “Come morning, you’ll be real glad that you put vinegar in a cool bath.”

“Your kisses would heal it.”

She wished she could see his eyes, but he still wore his sunglasses. “If my kisses didn’t make it hotter, I wouldn’t be a very good date, and you don’t want it hotter. You want it to cool off so you can wear your jeans tomorrow morning.”

“Maybe I want a good reason to go naked.”

“Are you flirting with me?”

“Maybe. Are you flirting with me, Annie Rose?”

“A woman doesn’t give away all her secrets, Mr. Harper.”

***

The thirty-minute drive to the ranch took forever. Dusk was settling when Mason opened the door into the ranch house for Annie Rose. The second it closed behind them, he pinned her against the wall, but her blue eyes went wide with fear and her whole body stiffened. She pulled backwards, slipped to the floor with her hands over her head. So much for that jolt of confidence she’d enjoyed for almost twenty-four hours. One little show of force and she went into the protective fetal position.