Rodeo Nights (7 page)

Fighting an urge to swallow, she hitched her skirt for a better look at the boots and concentrated on the mirror.

Walker put down the boot with enough force to rap the heel against the wooden shelf.

“I’ll take these, too.” She added defiantly, “And let me look at the ropers.”

She quickly agreed with Esther on a workmanlike pair in saddle-leather brown. Then, while Esther instructed Walker on tending the store— “Answer the phone, check the tags for prices if anyone wants to buy and write them down, but don’t take their money because I don’t want you messin’ with my register” —Kalli selected a pair of basic jeans.

“Shirts are back in that corner,” Esther told her. “We got in a new one with a pleated cape-type yoke. It’s a nice cotton. The green would look real good on you.”

Kalli spotted the jade shirt and knew Esther was right. But she opted for a plain white oxford cloth shirt and a soft rose blouse with minimal same-colored piping, both neutral enough to blend with her casual clothes in New York.

“You take those things on back, Kalli,” Esther instructed as she gathered her purse and the parcel for the Carmodys. “Trying-on room’s around to the left.”

“Thanks, Esther. I’ll leave a check for the boots and whatever else.”

“That’s just fine, as long as you don’t let this cowboy here try to work my register.”

With a laugh, Kalli slipped behind the curtain to the dressing room. But she could hear their voices.

“You could use some shirts, too, Walker. How long’s it been since you bought decent ones? You’ll look like one of those clowns dressed in rags instead of a champion bull-rider if you keep puttin’ off spending some money on your appearance, boy. A champion ought to look like one.”

“Esther Lodge, if you had the outfitting of me, I’d have spent all my time and money on looking like your idea of a champion and none of it being a champion.”

“False economy to wear your clothes to rags. You need shirts, boy.” The sound of a door closing told Kalli that Walker had been allowed no time for a rejoinder.

Slipping off her jacket and unhooking her skirt’s side closure, Kalli mulled over the exchange.

Had Walker put off Esther for a reason other than he didn’t feel like buying shirts? She laid the blazer, then the skirt across a bench.

Granted, rodeo champions weren’t in the same income bracket as million-dollar baseball players or football stars, but the national title was worth a good bit. Enough to not be short of money for shirts.

If he’d held on to it.

Could Walker have blown his winnings? Others certainly had.

He’d been careful with money when they were married, but he’d had no choice. She’d never known him when he had money. How had he reacted?

Unsteady fingers slowed pulling on the new clothes. Images of Walker struggling financially stirred too many possibilities. Had he let money trickle through his fingers? Or had it gushed away in generosity and wild times? If she’d been there...

She let out a settling breath as she tucked the rose blouse into the jeans and turned to the mirror. A younger woman looked back. A woman with less armor against the world. A woman with tangled hair and cheeks blushed by sun and wind instead of cosmetics.

The woman she used to be.

A woman who didn’t have the strengths she had now. Who hadn’t learned the things she’d learned. Who hadn’t lived the life she’d lived.

A woman who loved Walker Riley.

The eyes of the woman in the mirror widened and glistened with gathering tears. She shook her head, shattering the illusion and banishing the past.

With clear eyes, she looked at her reflection, and saw the woman she’d become. Not perfect by any means, but not a naive girl, either. Not even the clothes of yesterday could keep it from being today.

She gave herself a little shake and started unbuttoning the blouse.

“Kalli?” An elbow hooked the curtain, shoving it aside.

“Hey!” Kalli’s hand closed the throat of the blouse.

“Ain’t nothing I haven’t seen before.” But he didn’t look at her. “Brought you some things.”

“
Some
things? Looks like half of Esther’s stock.”

“Only in your size.” Walker dumped an armload of blouses on the bench, spilling jeweled colors, bandanna-print yokes, Aztec embroidery and color-blocked shoulders.

“Hey, my clothes are under there.” Kalli started toward the haphazard stack that threatened to iron creases into her two-piece dress and blazer.

“Won’t need ‘em.” Walker snagged her arm.

For an instant, as she faced him in the constricted dressing room–close enough to smell the sun and dust on him, near enough to see the groove from nose to mouth that lifted so distinctively when he smiled–the possibilities of not needing clothes around Walker sizzled through her blood.

“Try this on. You won’t go back to city clothes. Not as long as you’re here.”

“What makes you so sure?” Her tone was defiant, but she accepted the jade pleated-yoke shirt.

“ ’Cause you’re more comfortable in these.” He started out, then paused in the doorway to toss her another instruction. “Better get started because I’m coming back soon as I pick out jeans. And I’m not knocking.”

She frowned, but shrugged out of the rose shirt and traded it for the jade. It did look good. The shoulders’ slight extension made her waist look small where the shirt tucked into the jeans. And Walker was right— She wouldn’t get back into her New York clothes until she had to. She’d forgotten how comfortable these clothes were. Designed for a day in the saddle, they ranked comfort over fashion.

She turned her back to the single mirror, then twisted to try to see that view.

“Nice.”

Walker’s single, drawled word had her flushing the way flowery compliments hadn’t in years.

Beyond her image, the mirror showed a long, lean cowboy propping a shoulder against the doorjamb, holding a pair of jeans. She untwisted herself. “Thanks.”

They looked at each other, and she could almost feel years peeling away.

No. No.
Nothing could take away the years.

“For the jeans. Thanks for the jeans.”

At her tug, he released his hold on them but didn’t budge otherwise.

“Now get out of here so I can start trying on all this.”

She raised a hand, prepared to give him a slight push on his way, then thought better of it.

He raised an eyebrow at her aborted gesture, but obligingly pivoted a quarter turn so his shoulder still rested against the wooden frame but was now outside the dressing room. She pulled the curtain across behind him.

She started unbuttoning the shirt.

“It’s going to take most of the afternoon to try on all these clothes,” she said, willing to say almost anything to break a silence that screamed of awareness.

“Buy it all and you’ll still be behind Belle Grissom.”

“Belle! How is she?” She hadn’t thought of the diminutive barrel racer for years. Two years younger than Kalli, Belle had already been a veteran of the circuit and had shown the newcomer the ropes. Since Belle’s solution to any crisis was to buy clothes—preferably with rhinestones, sequins or both—her wardrobe was legendary.

“She’s doing fine. Got divorced couple years back and went on such a shopping spree, she had to get a bigger place. I knew that marriage was doomed when he gave a bunch of her things to the mission. Belle didn’t miss them. But then she saw this mite outside the mission wearing a shirt decorated with a big glittery horse’s head. Seems it was one of a kind. Boy, did it hit the fan then.”

Kalli laughed, Walker’s words and her memories of the people making the scene as vivid as if she’d been there. As she tried on clothes, she prompted his stories of people she’d known with questions and comments. Ten years, covered in the time it took to put on a dozen outfits.

“And Sailor—remember Sailor Anderson?”

“Sure.” A charmer, the Lothario of the rodeo circuit, who’d earned his nickname with a girl in every “port.” And she remembered Pammy, the unglamorous daughter of a stock contractor who adored Sailor with every fiber of her being, yet accepted being his sole unmarried female “buddy.” “How is Sailor?”

Finished trying on, she opened the curtain as she stacked her selections and folded or hung the rejects. She’d decided to wear jeans and the rose shirt.

“He’s fine. Finally got smart.” Walker resumed his position against the frame. “Opened his eyes and saw what he had in Pammy and married her seven years back. Two kids and a third on the way. Sailor’s settled down. His winnings bought a couple radio stations in Texas, so he’s using his gift of gab for something more’n charming ladies.”

Two children and a third on the way...That could have been her and Walker. Kalli put on a smile. “Sailor settled down? How in the world did that happen?”

He straightened. “You ’bout ready? Jasper oughtta be here any time.”

“Yes. I sure hope Jasper will take a check for all this.” Her gesture encompassed five shirts, three pairs of jeans and a denim skirt.

“And this one.” He added the jade pleated-yoke shirt.

“No. It’s not practical, Walker. You were right. I need clothes that can stand up to the rodeo. But this is dressy. And I have plenty of dressy clothes.”

“Then I’m getting it for you.”

“Walker, no—”

“I’m getting it for you.”

“If I want it, I can afford it. You don’t have—”

“I may not have a high-power job, but I can afford a damn shirt.”

She put a hand to his chest, instinctively trying to soothe his harshness. The gesture seemed to shift his mood. He put his hands on her shoulders, not gripping, just smoothing over the fabric of her shirt. His voice dropped and slowed to his usual deliberateness.

“Dammit, Kalli. I couldn’t get you things before. Not even what you needed. I’m buying you this.”

“Walker.” It wasn’t a protest this time.

He ran his hands down her arms to her elbows, then up again. Through the fabric that covered it, the heat of his chest seeped into her palm.

“Let me give you this, Kalli.”

The shirt was forgotten. There was only Walker. The boy she’d worshiped. The young man she’d loved. She moved her hand higher, so cloth no longer separated her palm and his skin. Heat seemed to leap from him, firing her blood.

He stepped in, one hand moving to cup the back of her head.

In the first instant, his lips on hers felt strange. But it was only a flash, immediately lost in heat, in sensation’s explosion as his mouth pressed against hers.

“Walker.” She managed the word of caution; he made it something else. Sliding his tongue inside her mouth, he opened her to deeper expressions of need.

She stepped back under the onslaught of emotion, but held on to his shoulders, as if he might not follow. He did. That first step and then a second, pressing her against the smooth cool surface of the mirror. He slipped his arm behind her, drawing her tighter and tighter against his body.

Her hands reacquainted themselves with the curve of his skull under the thick hair, the harsh bones of his jaw, the width of his shoulders, the line of his collarbone, the power of his back.

They kissed and kissed again. Moving, adjusting. Exploring faces and throats, only to return, hungry mouth to hungry mouth.

Not as if the ten years had never existed, but as if they were being relived through these kisses. Kisses of discovery. Kisses in the pouring rain. Kisses lit by the sun. Kisses of apology. Kisses in celebration. Kisses in consolation. Kisses to shut out the cold. Kisses heated from the fire that flared from one to the other. Kisses started in anger and pain. Kisses ended in joy.

Kisses almost desperate with loss.

She felt the growing tension in him. She knew what was coming. She knew... Yet, when Walker pulled away from her, she couldn’t stop a whimpered gasp at the coldness. His hands gripped her shoulders, holding her at arm’s length.

He stilled his face, as if without movement his emotions couldn’t be read. But those emotions concentrated into eyes that burned and crackled with intensity.

A bell announced the opening of the front door.

Walker eased his hold on her until they stood separate. But his look didn’t change, even when he finally turned and strode out of the dressing room.

She’d first seen that look before she’d understood the strange, insistent urgings of her own body.

But now she understood. Now she understood what it could do to her.

“WALKER? KALLI?”

Jasper Lodge’s voice grated across Walker’s nerves. God, he hadn’t wanted to let her go. What he’d wanted to do was take her right then and there. To drive into her softness until they melted into each other. To claim her and possess her and never again let Kalli Evans out of his sight or his hold.

Which was exactly why he’d had to let her go.

Thank God and a lifetime of discipline, he’d still had the crumb of sense that told him he couldn’t afford—physically or emotionally—to let that situation go any further. Any moment Kalli would have realized the extent of his emotions and would have run due east, not stopping until she hit the Atlantic Ocean. Just like she did last time.

“Walker, you in here?”

“Yeah, Jasper, we’re here.”

Walker was aware of Kalli smoothing her clothes, pushing her hair back, but he didn’t risk looking at her.

He took another breath before walking out into the main part of the store, sparing a moment to thank Providence that Esther made the most of floor space by building displays good and high. They came in as handy as a tablecloth. He took his time joining Jasper at the register.

No sense advertising to Jasper—and thus to all of Park and a good percentage of Wyoming—that Walker Riley still desired the woman who’d once been his wife with every atom of his body. Especially certain atoms.

He wasn’t sure if it was any consolation that her body hadn’t been exactly neutral, either.

Physical desire for each other had most definitely survived the past decade. He wasn’t particularly surprised.

But what did it mean if the body survived and the heart didn’t?