How to Marry a Cowboy (Cowboys & Brides) (9 page)

“I’d like that,” Lily said. “It’ll be the perfect ending to a perfect day. Both parents saying good night.”

***

Mason sat down on the stairs. He wanted to go outside and talk to Annie Rose on the swing. He’d looked forward to that part of the day from the time he got up in the morning. The concert had been wonderful and it was so nice to come home to happy kids and routine. And tonight of all nights, he should go talk to her, tell her again how much he appreciated the way she had turned his life around for the better in a week.

But hugging her had felt strange, again as if he was disrespecting Holly. Maybe it was because he was breaking both of the first rules he’d set up when he decided he could run a ranch and raise two girls all alone. He stood up slowly and made it halfway down the staircase before he stopped. He went to the kitchen to get a couple of bottles of beer and found her sitting at the kitchen table, her knees drawn up under her chin, a pot of hot tea in front of her.

“It’s steeping. It’ll be ready in one more minute if you want a cup,” she said.

“No swing tonight?” he asked.

“Nope. My friend isn’t calling my name tonight, so I decided to have a cup of tea.”

“Mosquitoes?”

She checked the clock and poured tea into her cup. “Get a cup if you want some.”

He pulled one from the cabinet and set it on the table. She filled it and handed it to him.

“Have a seat and relax,” she said. “And it’s not the mosquitoes.”

“Then what is it?” he asked.

“It’s this thing between us. The thing that we’ve been sidestepping all around rather than talking about it.”

He set his cup on the bar and hiked a hip on a stool. “Kind of hard to talk about something that neither of us can even define.”

Annie Rose stood up, walked over to him, wrapped her arms around his neck, rolled up on her toes, and kissed him hard right on the lips. It didn’t feel strange and there was nothing but a tingling feeling in the pit of his stomach when she pulled away.

“Now we’ve talked about it,” she said. “Good night, Mason. See you at breakfast.”

“Good night, Annie Rose,” he said.

When he heard her door shut, he said, “Well, I’ll be damned. She sure don’t kiss like Holly did. Not better. Not worse. Just a hell of a lot different. And I like the way she talks about things.”

Annie Rose had never shopped so fast and furious in her entire life. Flutters danced in her gut like they had the night before when she closed the door to her apartment. The old Annie Rose, the one who trusted her own judgment, had kissed Mason and enjoyed it immensely. But then that morning at breakfast he’d acted like it had never happened, and now she wondered if she’d made a colossal mistake by breaking every rule she’d set up for herself after the Nicky episode in her life.

She didn’t have time to analyze and pick apart every nanosecond of the impulsive kiss. She had to shop for something to wear to the ranch party. The girls were dashing from one thing to another, and her head swam trying to make decisions.

Finally, she bought two maxi dresses in bright summer colors at the little eclectic dress shop, and she let the girls each pick out a bracelet to wear to the picnic. She was about to pay out when she saw a gorgeous soft, light blue shawl that would work to tie around either dress for church. The owner of the shop told her how to get to the Dollar Store so she could purchase hair spray, a curling iron, and a few makeup items. She and the girls dashed through the store in less than twenty minutes, where Lily picked out a new lipstick for Annie Rose and Gabby picked out just the right hair spray.

“Next year it’s at our ranch and we’ll be ten years old and Daddy says that for our tenth birthday we can get our ears pierced,” Lily said as Annie Rose drove back toward the ranch.

“Oh, no!” Gabby gasped.

“What? It won’t hurt but only for a minute. Kenna got hers done last year,” Lily said.

“No, I’m not afraid of needles. You are, but I’m not. I remembered that Damian is going to the picnic and I almost drowned him last week. He’s going to be out to get even, and he called you a liar, so I might have to whup him,” Gabby said.

“You know what Daddy says. Ladies don’t throw the first punch. But if he hits one of us, you can bet your Texas ass we will finish the job,” Lily said.

Annie Rose didn’t think those were the exact words that Mason used, but she had to agree with Lily. That little red-haired shit would do well to cut his pride losses and stay away from her girls or she might help them finish the job.

***

Mason had never had to wait on the twins before. They usually whined at him to hurry up, but that morning they were closeted in the nanny’s apartment with Annie Rose and it was already five minutes past eleven.

The foyer held three pieces of furniture. A mirror hung above a semiround table that caught everything from mail to car keys. All that had been pushed aside that morning and a boxed cheesecake waited to be taken to the picnic.

Farther down beside his office door was an antique hall tree with hats on every hook, boots lined up on both sides and sitting on the bench seat, and two pairs of pink flip-flops in front of it.

In between the two was an old wingback chair that was seldom used for anything except another catchall. He pushed a plush throw and a jump rope to one side and sat down to wait. Brad Paisley’s old song about waiting on a woman came to mind and put a grin on his face. Brad talked about one woman; Mason had three and for the first time he could possibly be late to the picnic.

He heard the door open, and there they were. If he would’ve had to speak or drop dead, it would have been lights-out. His mouth felt like he’d packed it with alum and his eyes grew dry from not blinking.

Shit! Shit! Shit! And dammit, too!

She wore a long, flowing dress with splashes of light yellow, green, and baby blue the exact same color as her eyes, and she’d done something with her hair that made it all soft and curly. By the end of the day she’d have a date for every Friday and Saturday night for the next ten years and all because he’d dragged his feet.

His eyes started at her hair and traveled slowly down to pale pink toenails peeking out from the ends of sandals. And then they started back up again, stopping a few seconds at the slight cleavage, and stopped dead at her lips.

“Too much?” she whispered. “Maybe my jeans and boots would be better.”

“You are gorgeous,” he managed to spit out hoarsely.

“And look at us,” Lily said.

Clones of Annie Rose! They wore sundresses that they usually reserved for Sunday morning, white sandals with pink polish on their toenails, and their hair had been styled exactly like hers.

“You are both beautiful,” he said.

“Smell us. Mama-Nanny let us use some of her perfume and her hair spray so we’d smell like her. What are we waiting for? Let’s go and, Daddy, if Damian throws the first punch, he’s toast,” Lily said.

They ran out the front door in a gallop, long, skinny legs reminding him of newborn colts instead of princesses in their finery.

He held out his arm to Annie Rose and picked up the cheesecake with the other hand. “Don’t let any of those other cowboys steal you today.”

“Is that a pickup line, Mason Harper?” Even her voice sounded like the old Annie Rose, the one that had confidence and loved a good time.

“It might be. Is it working?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think you have to worry about any of the other cowboys. They’d have to go through Lily and Gabby, and no one is that brave, not even if he wears size-thirteen cowboy boots and his cowboy hat would hold ten gallons of water,” she said.

“They sure look pretty today. You’ve done wonders with them. Even that little shit Damian might be so awestruck, he’ll forget to be a mean little bastard.”

Annie Rose looped her arm in his. “I do believe his mama and daddy are married. But I could agree with you if you called him a sumbitch.”

A deep chuckle came out of Mason’s chest. “His mama is that. Sometimes I feel sorry for poor old Frank.”

“Amen,” she said.

“Daddy! We’re going to be late, and Kenna is already there. She called fifteen minutes ago,” Lily hollered from the pickup window.

“And it’s hot in here,” Gabby said right behind her.

“Far be it from me to keep the two tomboy princesses from their friend,” he said.

“Or to cause them to sweat off their lip gloss,” Annie Rose whispered. Her arm in his made him feel like he was ten feet tall and wore size-fifteen cowboy boots.

***

If it walked like a duck, it was a duck. If it meowed like O’Malley, it was a cat. If it got into everything like a mischievous goat, it was probably Djali and Jeb. So if it felt like a date, then why wasn’t it?

Because,
her inner voice said,
you
are
not on
a
date
even
though
you
flat-out laid a kiss on him last night just to see how it would feel.

She didn’t feel nearly as spicy when she got into the truck and Mason shut the door behind her. Gabby reached over the seat and patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t be nervous, Mama-Nanny. It’s a big old ranch like we live on and you done already met some of the folks that will be there. Just remember the book we gave you about bein’ a rancher, and you’ll be all right. Doc Emerson and Damian’s mama and a lot of them were at the birthday party.”

She inhaled deeply and let it out slowly. Through the rearview mirror she could see Mason putting the cheesecake in the toolbox in the bed of the truck. He wore a green-and-yellow plaid, Western-cut, short-sleeved shirt that morning, brown boots, and a brown belt with a big silver buckle.

Everything that she liked in a man. Everything that Nicky Trahan was not. Lord, why couldn’t she stop comparing Mason and Nicky? It was apples and oranges and could not be put in the same basket.

One minute her inner voice was lecturing her about liking Mason too much. The next it was fussing at her for thinking of Nicky. She wished it would pick a side and stick to it. Life could be so damn confusing!

It was the shortest ten-minute drive that Annie Rose had ever had in her entire life. It scarcely gave her heart time to settle down from the compliment Mason paid her and the way it felt to loop her arm in his. There sure wasn’t time to get calmed down from the way his arm brushed accidentally against her breast when he opened the truck door for her and the masculine scent of his shaving lotion wafting through the truck when he reached across the seat and buckled her in.

Listening to the girls’ lively chatter in the backseat about the story they were going to tell Kenna about the pesky goats took her mind off Mason for a few seconds at a time. It didn’t last long, because every time she glanced across the console where his summer straw hat rested, the flutters in her stomach started up again.

The minute the truck came to a stop out in a pasture with dozens upon dozens of other vehicles, Kenna dragged the girls off toward a shade tree in the front yard. They quickly put their heads together to whisper about goats and their concert and whatever else little nine-year-old girls giggled about behind their hands. Dinah and Frank parked three trucks down, and a red-haired streak that Annie Rose recognized as Damian created a blur as he ran toward a group of little boys.

“Hey, Mason,” Frank called out. “Did you bring your famous cheesecake?”

Mason held up a hand. “Stayed up all night making it. Dinah make potato salad?”

“Oh, yeah! Straight from the Walmart deli section.” Frank laughed.

Dinah covered the distance from their truck to Mason’s quickly, and Frank was right behind her, carrying a big container of potato salad.

“How does this work?” Annie Rose whispered to Mason.

“I’ll take the cheesecake to the dessert table and come back for our lawn chairs,” he said.

“How about I take the cheesecake and you take the lawn chairs right now? Something tells me I don’t want to get too close to that woman. We may have a fight later if Damian hits one of our girls and it’ll be easier to snatch her bald-headed if she’s not my friend,” Annie Rose said.

“They’re wearing pretty dresses and have their hair all done up, so I’m hoping they’ll act like ladies, but that might be too much to ask. Maybe they’ll wait until another day to wipe up the dirt with Damian.” His words came out of the side of his mouth as Dinah got closer and closer.

Our
girls?
Her inner voice yelled:
Since
when
are
they
our
girls?

She argued back:
Since
I
had
to
do
nails
and
fingernails
this
morning
and
since
I
had
to
put
up
with
pesky
goats
and
since
I
could
name
dozens
more
things.

Annie Rose put an end to the internal argument and flashed her brightest smile. “Good morning, Dinah. You look lovely today.”

“So do you. So you’ve lasted a week. Gawd-almighty, that will put a gold star on your resume at the Dallas office,” Dinah said.

“Come on now!” Mason picked up four green webbed lawn chairs from the back of the truck. “Lily and Gabby aren’t that bad. Hell, they aren’t a bit worse than that red-haired demon of yours, Dinah.”

Dinah tucked an errant strand of red hair behind her ear and nodded. “Don’t you bring my son into this. At least the church house doesn’t hold its breath when he walks through the doors on Sunday morning.”

“If it could hoist itself off the foundation, it would run like hell when it sees him coming,” Mason teased, but there was an icy edge to his voice.

Annie Rose fell into step beside Mason, cheesecake in her arms. Dinah was on the other side, keeping up as if she was a long-lost friend.

“He’s a boy, for God’s sake. You’re raising girls. There’s a difference, and your two girls make him look like a saint with a halo,” Dinah said.

There were two long tables of desserts with women behind them cutting pies and cakes into slices or wedges. Dinah clapped her hands and everyone stopped talking.

“Folks, this is Annie Rose. She’s the new nanny over at the Bois D’Arc Bend Ranch for those of y’all who didn’t make it to the twins’ birthday party last week,” Dinah said loudly.

“She is not!” Lily yelled from across the yard. “She’s not a nanny. She’s our new mama, so don’t you be calling her a plain old nanny.”

Annie Rose nodded toward the women. “I’m pleased to be here today and to meet all of you. Maybe in a little while I’ll even get names sorted out with faces. The girls call me Mama-Nanny. One of y’all is the lady of this ranch?”

A blond-haired, very pregnant lady raised a hand. “That would be me. I’m Natalie Allen, but I’ve only been the lady of the ranch since Christmas.”

“Well, I want to thank you personally for hosting this. It’s not easy, especially when it’s hot summertime and you’ve got a baby due soon,” Annie Rose said.

“Thank you for that. But I’m not due until October,” Natalie said.

Annie Rose handed her the cheesecake. “Bless your heart!”

Natalie patted her round stomach. “It’s twins. Came as a shock to us, since our son, Josh, will just be a year old when they’re born. But we’ve got lots of help and we’re excited about having twins. They’re girls. I’m hoping they’re blond-haired like Mason’s girls.”

“Maybe you can steal Annie Rose from Mason to be their nanny,” Dinah whispered.

Gabby had left her friends and was standing right behind Dinah. “Ain’t nobody stealing Mama-Nanny from us, but we know all about how to take care of twin girls and we’d love to take care of the babies for you.”

Dinah rolled her eyes and headed toward the salad-and-casserole table.

Gabby threw her arms around Annie Rose’s waist. “You aren’t going to let Miz Natalie steal you, are you?”

Natalie laid a hand on Gabby’s shoulder. “Darlin’, I’d have to fight with the grandpa, great-grandpa, and foreman of this ranch to ever hire a babysitter, but I appreciate the offer. And another person might be able to steal a nanny, but never a mama, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”