Life After Wife (6 page)

“What are you thinking about so seriously?” he asked, so close to her neck that the warmth of his breath brushed across the tender skin.

“My name,” she said. She’d thought that he was out for a run.

He should be shot between his pretty blue eyes for sneaking up on her like that and asking a question that she didn’t
have time to think about. Thank goodness he didn’t ask her anything important. She would have blurted the answer out like an honest, little three-year-old that hadn’t learned to lie.

“Sophia Lauren McSwain. What’s wrong with that?” he said. “Where are we starting this tour of the ranch?”

She took two steps forward in pretense of checking the tires on the four-wheeled vehicles. “Not one thing is wrong with my name, but it’s not something that you tag on a little girl in today’s world. I’m not ashamed of it, but I wouldn’t name a kid something that would get them teased at school,” she said.

“Why were you thinking about your name?”

“Full of questions aren’t you? You thinkin’ you will file away any information I give you and use it to coerce me into letting go of my half at a later date?” she asked.

“Later date? I was hoping to do so today,” he answered.

She giggled.

The sound of her laughter sent his anger level up a notch, but true to his heritage he kept a stone face. “Is this going to take all day, or will we be back for lunch?”

“We’ll be back. First of all, I’m mean when I’m hungry, and even Aunt Maud didn’t keep me out on a job without making sure I got food. Two, it’s going to get almighty hot by noon.”

“You got the work narrowed down to where you don’t have to do anything when it’s hot or cold? Can’t take the weather?” He mounted a vehicle and turned the key to start the engine.

She did the same. “I can do anything that keeps this ranch going. Don’t get your hopes up, chief.”

“I thought we’d settled that business of racial slurs,” he growled.

“OK, then don’t get your hopes up, period. Want me to lead?”

“I know the layout of this place as well as you do. Maybe better. You can follow,” he said.

“Not me. I don’t follow anyone anymore,” she yelled over the roar of the engines.

They rode side by side down the west side of the ranch, checking the fence as they went. Only once did she stop and fix a broken barbed wire with the equipment she kept in the saddlebags behind her seat. He watched, prepared to step in and finish the job when she broke a nail or scratched her hand, but she did the job expertly, with no problems.

“You can take care of the next one,” she said when she was ready to ride again.

“You think I can’t fix a fence?” he asked.

“I think you can do anything on this ranch. If you’d been lazy, Aunt Maud wouldn’t have let you come back after the first summer. Seems I remember you bein’ here every time Momma made me come spend a week or two. Only then Aunt Maud called you Bud, not Eli or Elijah,” she said before she started the engine.

He threw one leg over the seat like he would if he’d been sitting in a saddle on the back of a horse. “Uncle Jesse called me his little buddy when I was little. I grew into Bud when I was a teenager. So there’s a bit of information for you.”

“I remember you being a hard worker. That’s a good thing. I can always use a good hand on the place,” she said.

A sly grin tickled the corners of his thin mouth. “I remember you being sassy and bored to tears, which isn’t a good thing. But you can fix a fence and keep pretty good records, and I can always use a person like that on the ranch.”

“So are you making fun of me or hiring me? I didn’t even know there was a position open,” she said coolly.

“Right back atcha, darlin’. You tryin’ to hire me? I don’t work cheap,” he said.

“Touché, darlin’! We each got a point and lost it. Let’s go check on the rest of the place,” she said.

It was eleven thirty when they completed the tour. Elijah was pleased with what he saw. The war against the prolific mesquite trees hadn’t been won, but Sophie and Maud had kept it in check. The cattle were fat and well fed on pastures that were still producing. The calf crop for the fall looked good and profitable. He’d already begun a mental list of the bulls and the cows that should go to the sale.

She parked her vehicle beside the yard fence. He did the same.

“We’ll clean them up and refuel after we eat,” she said.

He nodded in agreement.

Things were the same as the last time he’d been to Baird, Texas. That was a good sign in his books. Steady and sure. Peaceful and home.

She washed up at the kitchen sink and dried her hands on a tea towel, wasting very few motions. He watched as she removed containers from the refrigerator and opened them.

She motioned toward the cabinet top. “You are a big boy and know how to use a microwave. Fix yourself a plate from the leftovers. We don’t waste much around here.”

“It’s good food. Be a shame to waste it.” He remembered many times when he would have given half his bank account for leftovers from Aunt Maud’s refrigerator.

Their hands brushed when they both went for a slab of ham at the same time. Sparks flew, but she attributed it to
anger. He figured it was the result of looking at her long legs too much that morning.

She pulled a can of Pepsi from the refrigerator while her food heated in the microwave and set it on the kitchen table at one end. No way was she conceding the head of the table to him on the first day.

He fixed a plate and set it beside the microwave to wait his turn and got a can of soda pop from the fridge. He set it on the other end. He wasn’t about to take a lesser place and sit on the side.

“So tell me, who are you dating? That preacher man from over in Albany?” Elijah asked.

Her jaw began to work in a fit of anger. “What makes you think I’d date another preacher? Or that I’m dating anyone? This ranch takes all my energy and time. Keeping it running smoothly and taking care of Aunt Maud didn’t leave time for men.”

“I understand it left Sunday afternoons. You have time for those two girlfriends of yours; you’d have time to date. Unless you like the girls better than you do men folk?”

“You are not going to fire up my anger, Mr. Jones. I like men just fine. I might even like one well enough to date someday. But not now,” she said.

“Why? You aren’t that ugly that no one would want you. You landed that television preacher easy enough,” he said.

That ugly!
So that was his opinion of her.

The microwave buzzed. She removed her plate with hot pads and carried it to the table. “Matt taught me a hard lesson. Don’t trust.”

He set his food inside and turned the dial to three minutes. “So what’s it going to take for you to trust?”

“Kate, Fancy, and I had this conversation a year ago. Kate said a man had to ride up on a white horse and be her knight in shining—and then she couldn’t think of the right word, so she said ‘whatever’—and make her truly believe in the words ‘I love you.’ Well, it took Hart a while to convince her that he was her knight in shining whatever, but he did finally. And Fancy said that someone had to offer her a forever thing.”

“What in the devil is a forever thing?” he asked.

“It’s a thing that lasts way past attraction and saying the vows in front of a preacher. It’s something that endures the fights as well as the good times right up until the last breath is drawn. That’s a forever thing,” she answered.

The buzzer went off again, and he took his food to the table. “I didn’t ask about your two best buds. I asked about you,” he said.

“I thought Native Americans had the patience of Job. That they could sit beside a tree for six weeks waiting on a deer to come by.” She picked up her fork and began to eat.

“You trying to psych me out by making me wait. You might be surprised,” he said after a few minutes.

“No, just deciding whether I want to share even this much about me with you. Evidently you already know more about me than I do you.”

“Aunt Maud wrote to me every week. I did the same unless it wasn’t possible for security reasons. Last letter I got was a week before she died. She told me exactly what to do and what she planned.”

Sophie filed that bit of news away with the intention of turning Maud’s room upside down for those letters. Maud never threw a thing away, so they’d be stuffed somewhere, and Sophie fully intended to find them and read them!

“OK, we called them our three magic words. Mine was
life after wife
. That’s what it’ll take for me to ever trust a man again. So I don’t have to worry about ever marryin’ another fellow. Because there’s not one out there who can give me that,” she said between bites of ham, candied yams, and cranberry salad.

“What do you mean by those words? Life after wife? Doesn’t make a bit of sense to me,” he said.

She sighed. “‘Life’ as in living and breathing and companionship and trust. ‘After’ as in after the wedding ceremony. ‘Wife’ as in opposite of husband.”

He looked up with questions written on his face.

“A man would have to prove to me, beyond a doubt, that he was giving me a life after the wedding. My dead husband showed me that the title of wife doesn’t necessarily mean much. I want the courtship and the dating and all that romance. But then I want a promise that it will go on after I get the wife title. I want the romance to extend past the day when I stand up before the preacher and vow to love some old boy forever, amen.”

“I think I understand,” he said.

“I doubt it. Men do not have the ability to understand that.”

He smiled for the first time. “Oh, I understand all right. You want the absolute impossiblest thing in the world. No one can give you that promise, and if they did they’d be lying through their teeth.”

“‘Impossiblest’ is not a word.”

“Life after wife isn’t a possibility.” His tone hung in the air like frost even though it was over a hundred degrees outside.

“That’s what I’ve been telling you, moron. I’m not marrying again ever.” She accentuated each word with a poke of her fork toward him.

“Ever?”

She ignored the one word question.

“You going to answer?” Elijah asked.

“I was thinking about Kate. Get Hart to tell you how they got together. She said never ever, and it came back around to bite her on the fanny. I was just trying to be sure that I meant it, and I really do. So there, Elijah Jones.”

“Tell me about Hart and Kate,” Elijah said.

“Not me. No, sir. You want to know how they got together, you ask Hart. I already know. You ready to look at the rest of the books?”

“Don’t start without me,” Kate yelled at the door.

Fancy grabbed her arm and hurried her to the kitchen where Sophie sat at the bar with a glass of tea in her hand. “There’re cookies that Dessa made before she left on Friday. Tina is taking a nap, and Theron is at the church with the preacher interviewing a new youth minister. Sophie wouldn’t say a word until you got here, and I’m dyin’ to hear. Your tea is already poured, so sit down.”

Kate downed half the glass of tea, picked up a cookie, and bit off a healthy chunk. “Dessa is a godsend. Don’t ever let Theron fire her.”

“Dessa isn’t going anywhere.” Fancy looked at Sophie. “OK, now tell us what happened since the funeral.”

Kate picked up another cookie and turned around to face Sophie too. “Shoot,” she said.

“Nothing much. Just the expected. He made this big to-do about getting up early and making a lot of noise, so if I didn’t like it, I could sell out to him right then. So the next morning I was up and had breakfast ready before he even crawled out of bed. I hope it shocked the dickens out of him, because it wasn’t easy getting up at four thirty or lying about it either,” Sophie said.

Kate giggled and her pecan-colored eyes lit up. She wore cut-off jean shorts that were frayed at the hems and stopped mid-thigh. A bright orange tank top stretched over her frame like a second skin, and her black hair was pulled up with a big plastic clip.

“I told you that she’d get ahead of him on the first rattle out of the bucket,” Fancy said.

She was almost five feet tall and eight months pregnant. Her pale blue maternity top was stretched out to the last thread. She had clipped her blonde hair up to keep it from sticking to her neck. She had blue eyes, but they weren’t the same color as Elijah’s. Fancy’s had the warmth of a summer sky. Elijah’s had the chill of a mountaintop capped with a layer of snow.

To take her mind off Elijah, Sophie reached out and touched Fancy’s stomach about the time the baby kicked. “She wants out of there. Why don’t you have her early?”

“Believe me, I would if I could. The doctor says if she’s not here in two weeks he’s going to induce labor,” Fancy said.

“You absolutely sure it’s a girl?”

“Looked like it on the ultrasound. Lord help us if it’s not. Tina is expecting a sister. She might toss a brother in the trash can,” Fancy said.

“If it’s a mistake and a boy after all, I’ll take Tina,” Sophie said. “I can raise her as my own and not have to worry with a man.”

“I don’t think so,” Fancy singsonged.

“And besides all that, you are changing the subject, and you don’t get to do that. Is that tall, good-lookin’ Native American goin’ to be your life after wife?” Kate asked.