How to Marry a Cowboy (Cowboys & Brides) (23 page)

His fingertips grazed her bare arm, traveled on up to her neck, and outlined her jaw from ear to chin. Oh, hell, yeah! He could start a fire and he could put it out… for a little while, and then the embers flashed and another one started. It could be a long, wonderful night for sure.

Lily and Gabby were stretched out on chaise lounges, arms behind their heads, sunglasses on, and blond pigtails dripping water onto the tile around the pool. O’Malley had found a sunny corner and had curled up for a long nap.

“I’m in Hawaii. Where are you?” Lily asked Gabby.

“On the beach at Granny’s house. We’ve got to take Mama-Nanny down there before school starts,” Gabby answered.

The big round thermometer hanging on the fence boasted one hundred degrees. But when Gabby mentioned taking her to Lorraine’s place in Florida, a cold chill came across the patio right at Annie Rose in the form of a long, dirty look.

What in the hell had she done wrong? The woman was definitely ready to stake Annie Rose out on a fire ant bed and leave her to die a slow and painful death.

“Let’s get back in the water. Bet I can beat you to the end of the pool and back,” Lily said.

Gabby took off her sunglasses, laid them on the end of the lounge, and smiled at Annie Rose. “Count, Mama-Nanny, so she don’t get a head start.”

“Okay. On your mark.”

Both girls hopped up and got ready to dive into the pool.

“Get set.”

They bent at the waist and put their hands out like professional swimmers.

“Go!”

Water splashed all over Annie Rose’s bare legs.

Maybe Lorraine didn’t like the bathing suit she was wearing or maybe she didn’t like the way that Mason was stealing lusty glances her way. Or maybe she didn’t want anyone to ever take Holly’s place at the ranch.

“We should talk,” Lorraine said.

“Kitchen?” Annie Rose asked.

Lorraine tipped her head down in a terse nod.

“You guys watch the girls. We’re going inside for more sunblock,” Lorraine said.

Sam waved over his shoulder to let her know that he’d heard.

Mason did the same thing. A wink would have been nice. Annie Rose felt like she was entering the lion’s den with nothing. A smile from him would have really helped.

“I’ll be there in a minute. Bathroom,” she told Lorraine when they were inside the house.

“I’ll pour two glasses of tea,” Lorraine said.

Annie Rose went straight into her quarters, hoping that positive energy among her things would give her confidence. She read through all three of her how-to books that were spread out on her nightstand. She stared at her reflection in the mirror above the bathroom vanity and gave herself a pep talk.

“If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit,” she whispered as she pulled a sheer cover-up over her bathing suit.

Lorraine Harper, with all her iciness, couldn’t hold a candle to Nicky Trahan. Still, a cold shiver chased down her backbone when she headed back to the kitchen.

Lorraine was sitting on a bar stool with a half-empty glass of sweet tea in front of her. Another glass had been set in front of a stool at the other end. Battle lines had been drawn with two stools between them. Annie Rose settled in her bunker and picked up her tea, took a long gulp, and got ready for the bullets to start flying.

“I do not like this,” Lorraine said.

The catfight had begun.

Two little girls splashed in the pool.

Two men talked about a cattle sale and the price of feed and hay.

Neither had any idea that the house could be nothing but a pile of rubble and ashes in half an hour.

“You care to explain?” Annie Rose asked.

“My granddaughters were hellcats. Nobody really wanted to be around them and keeping a nanny was a damn nightmare. But I’ll take that over this newfound fear that they have of losing you. They’re terrified that they’ll do something wrong or if you aren’t in their sight, that you will leave and never come back. I don’t like it one bit. It would break their little hearts if you left, but I’d rather you do it now than wait six months. Every day will make it that much tougher, and after all, you are just a nanny, not a mother.”

“Mama-Nanny, can we have a fudge bar?” Wet feet slapping on the hardwood floor preceded two little dripping girls into the kitchen.

“Of course, you can.” Annie Rose smiled.

It wasn’t their battle, and their grandmother had a legitimate gripe. It wasn’t that Annie Rose’s bathing suit was too skimpy or that she’d slept with Mason, but an honest-to-God worry for her granddaughters’ happiness.

“Are you coming back out to the pool?” Gabby asked.

“Sure we are. It’s hot out there and we wanted to cool off,” Annie Rose answered. “Take your daddy and grandpa a fudge bar too. I bet they’d like one.”

“I like this day. I’d rather be right here than any place in the world.” Lily took out four ice cream bars and handed two to Gabby. “You give one to Grandpa and I’ll give one to Daddy.”

“I’ll race you. Whoever gets there first gets to give one to Grandpa.” Gabby didn’t wait for the count but made a beeline for the foyer.

“Competitive little imps.” Annie Rose smiled.

Lorraine didn’t.

“I told you yesterday, I love the girls,” Annie Rose said seriously.

“But what happens if this infatuation between you and my son bombs? You think I’m old and too blind to see that you two are flirting right here in the house with the girls underfoot?” Lorraine’s tone was coated with a thick layer of frost.

“I understand your concern, but disappointments are part of life. Their lives haven’t been perfect, and face it, they won’t ever be. Perfect is like magic. It doesn’t exist. If it did, I’d beg, borrow, buy, or steal it for Lily and Gabby. And what I feel for your son has nothing to do with infatuation and everything to do with plain old love. We can be friends or we can be enemies, Mrs. Harper. You can choose whichever one you want, but I’m going for friendship,” Annie Rose said.

It did have a hell of a lot to do with infatuation, since she’d spent the whole day lusting after his body, but she wasn’t admitting that to Mason’s mother. That was need-to-know, and Lorraine didn’t. Granted, she was Mason’s mother and the girls’ grandmother, but that didn’t give her rights into what went on between Mason and Annie Rose in the bedroom, or under the stars or in a hayloft.

Sam stuck his head in the back door. “Y’all want to go for a ranch tour on the four-wheelers? The girls are tired of swimming. We’ll go get ’em fired up and ready. Gabby says that she’s riding with me and Lily is going with you, Lorraine.”

“Give me five minutes to change into jeans. Tell the girls they might want to do the same,” Annie Rose said.

Thank God for bored girls.

“Mama-Nanny! Are you going in your bathing suit?” Lily almost ran into Annie Rose in the foyer.

“No, I’m going to change into old jeans and my boots. How about you?”

“Daddy says we got to change, too,” Gabby said from right behind her. “Rocks and dirt flies up on four-wheelers. You ever been ridin’, Mama-Nanny?”

“Many times, so I’m sure not wearing a bathing suit.”

They raced, like always, up the stairs, with Lorraine behind them taking the steps a whole lot slower than they did. Annie Rose was the first one to make it to the backyard where three four-wheelers waited. Skip leaned against the yard fence with a cowboy heel hooked in the bottom rail. Sam was already seated on the red machine. Mason propped an elbow on the fence beside Skip.

“Hello, Annie Rose.” Skip waved. “When are you and the girls bringing cupcakes to the bunkhouse again?”

“We’ll try to get some made next weekend,” Annie Rose said.

Mason shook his head. “Not next Saturday. We’ve got a rodeo on Saturday and we’ll be taking the girls down on Friday night so they can have the whole day.”

“Are they singing at the rodeo?” Skip asked.

Gabby mounted up behind her grandfather and waved. “Not this year. We won’t be opening for Miranda until next year, but we’re hoping that she and Blake tour together then and we can be there for both of them.”

“Then I think I’ll stay home this weekend,” Skip teased.

“Is Mama-Nanny going with us?” Lily got seated behind her grandmother.

“I don’t know. Haven’t asked her yet. Maybe she’d like the weekend off to go see her friends,” Mason said.

“Well, I’m damn sure not going if she’s not. I’ll go with her to see her friends,” Lily declared.

“Daddy, I try and try to make her stop talking ugly, but does she listen to me? No, sir, she does not. Does that mean we don’t get to go see Carrie Underwood?” Gabby whined.

“It means that your grandmother is not a good influence on her.” Sam laughed.

“Oh, hush! Janie cusses worse than I do and she’s around her every single week,” Lorraine argued.

“Lily, watch out. You are on probation,” Mason said.

“What does that mean?” Gabby asked.

“It means that if she doesn’t watch her mouth, I’ll take you and she will stay home,” Mason explained.

Lily stuck out her tongue at her sister. When Mason pointed at her, she shrugged and said, “Well, I didn’t cuss at her. And you sure have gotten to be tough since we got a mama-nanny.”

Lorraine cut another one of those chilly looks at her, but Annie Rose settled in behind Mason and put her arms around him, instantly feeling the chemistry flowing from his chest through her hands and into her heart and soul.

The first leg of the journey took them down a two-rut path to an old trailer house sitting in a copse of mesquite trees. At one time it had been turquoise, but nowadays it had more rust than paint covering the outside. Chickens pecked in the yard and a south breeze brought the distinctive smell of a nearby hog to Annie Rose’s nose.

“Want to tell me what is going on?” Mason asked out the side of his mouth when they stopped. “Lily whispered that you and my mom might be fighting.”

“Nothing I can’t handle,” Annie Rose answered. “What is this place?”

Lily jumped off the back of the four-wheeler and ran up on the porch to knock on the door. “Uncle Nash! Where are you?”

“It’s where Skip’s grandfather lives. A long time ago he was the foreman on this ranch. He hasn’t been off his five acres in years. Loves company but never leaves his place,” Sam explained to Annie Rose.

“Is that my girls I hear?” A wizened little man stepped out on the porch. He had gray hair that curled on his head like he’d had a fresh perm, brown eyes set in a bed of wrinkles, and a wide smile.

“It’s us, Uncle Nash. You got any baby chickens?” Gabby asked.

“No, but there is a litter of kittens in a bushel basket out by the well house. I put them inside when it rains. I thought you might come see me soon, so I been pettin’ them so they’d be tamed up,” he said.

“Hello, Nash.” Sam waved.

He leaned on the railing around the tiny porch. “Glad to see you, Sam and Missus Lorraine. Y’all ever goin’ to move back to Texas?”

“No, sir! We like it in Florida,” Sam answered.

Mason turned around on the four-wheeler seat and whispered, “He’s a little paranoid and a lot eccentric since he moved up here.”

“And you’ll be Miz Annie Rose,” Nash called out.

“I’m pleased to meet you.” She waved. “You should come to Sunday dinner.”

“We’ll have to wait and see about that. Y’all want a glass of sweet tea?” Nash asked. “I can make some up.”

“No, we just stopped so the girls could say hello,” Mason said.

“You got some fine-lookin’ kittens. One looks like O’Malley,” Lily told Nash.

“I reckon there’s a reason for that, like there’s a reason you look like your grandma,” Nash said. “Thank you for comin’ by to see me. Y’all come back anytime.” He disappeared into the house and shut the door.

Annie Rose settled in behind Mason again and whispered, “That was weird.”

“He’s grown to be an old hermit. You’ll get used to him. We try to come back here once a month when the weather lets us. In the winter, he doesn’t come out on the porch and invites us into the trailer,” Mason said.

Annie Rose patted his muscular chest. “Well, I’m going to invite him to dinner every time I see him, and one day he’ll say yes to keep from turning me down again.”

“I like the way you hug up next to my back,” Mason said.

“I don’t think your mama does.”

“She’ll come around. Give her time,” Mason said.

The next stop was to what was left of an old house foundation with a chimney still standing.

“That’s the first house that my great-grandparents built on the place. It was horse-and-buggy days, and their nearest neighbor was about five miles away. They lived here until they died and never saw the new house up closer to the road,” Sam explained.

“Those neighbors were my ancestors,” Lorraine said. “We knew each other our whole lives, just like Holly and Mason did.”

Annie Rose flashed her most brilliant smile. “That is so sweet.”

“Granny!” Lily rolled her eyes. “We’ve heard that story. Let’s go home and you can listen to us practice reading our books for story hour next week. Mama-Nanny said we can go back and she even lets us stay all by ourselves while she runs errands.”

“Is that right? I thought you didn’t want to be away from her,” Lorraine said.

Lily sighed loudly. “It’s only an hour, and we’re big girls.”

“But you didn’t want to go to Houston this morning.”

Gabby clapped her hands over her cheeks. “Do you know what chicken pox does to a girl’s face? We’re going to be country music stars. We can’t have nasty scars on our faces. Mama-Nanny understands that.”

“But…” Lorraine started.

“And if we went, you might make us get a shot just in case,” Lily said.

“What is going on here?” Mason asked.

“A mother who overthinks things, evidently,” Lorraine said.

“I don’t know what that means,” Lily said. “But I’m ready to go home and eat supper. I’m hungry enough to eat a bear.”

“Would you eat O’Malley?” Gabby asked.

“Hell… heck, no! He’s a cat, not a bear.”

“Would you eat Jeb?”

Lily narrowed her eyes at her sister. “No, I would not, but if you don’t be quiet, I will barbecue Djali, earring and all, and eat him.”

“Daddy, we should leave her at home when we go see Carrie Underwood. She’s too mean to go. She said she’d eat Djali.”

“Looks like you two aren’t as nice as I thought you were,” Lorraine said.

“Ah, Granny, we’re nice. We just ain’t nice all the time. That would be boring. Remember? That’s what Grandpa told you this morning on the way home from the airport when he told you not to start a ruckus. What is a ruckus anyway?” Lily asked. “Is it something like a hissy fit?”