Willow felt the tension build in her, but she tried to tamp it down. She also made a quick decision not to deny too much. After all, she’d wanted the ice broken between her brothers and Tyler, she’d wanted to lay some groundwork, and to pretend she and Tyler were merely friends now would not aid that cause.
With that in mind, she said, “I’ve seen him a couple of times and I’m getting to know him a little.” Okay, so that wasn’t an outright admission that they were dating, but it was still something.
It just didn’t fool her brother.
“Sounds like dating to me.”
So much for soft-pedaling.
Still, Willow returned Bram’s stare without backing down.
“You like this guy?” her brother asked, as if he couldn’t believe it.
Again Willow held her ground. “He’s nice. He’s interesting. He’s fun to be with. He’s—”
“You like him.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that, Bram.”
“Depends.”
“On what?”
“On a lot of things,” her brother said vaguely. But apparently he didn’t want to expound on it, because then he said, “Carl says that he has to work late just so he can deliver you to this guy along with the feed order.”
Maybe she shouldn’t have had so much patience with Carl’s attitude.
“Carl doesn’t have any business complaining to you. I asked him to do this, I didn’t order him to, and he agreed. Plus I’m paying him double time.”
“To deliver you to Chadwick.”
“To deliver Tyler’s order to him. We’ve made after-hours deliveries before. It just so happens that I’m going along because I have dinner plans with Tyler and this kills two birds with one stone. It’s no big deal.”
“I don’t know about this, Will,” her brother said with a solemn shake of his head. And then, as if he just couldn’t resist telling her what was wrong with liking Tyler, after all, he said, “The guy just moved to town. We don’t know him or anything about him. He could have wives and kids in six other states.”
“He doesn’t.”
“How can you be sure? Because he told you he doesn’t?”
“He doesn’t.”
“We just don’t want to see you get in over your head with somebody and get hurt.”
Too late for the getting-in-over-her-head part. Maybe for the getting-hurt part, too, if things didn’t pan out.
But she didn’t say that.
She said, “We being you and Ashe and Logan and Jared.”
“Who else?”
Willow took a deep breath, then sighed, making an effort to hold on to her temper. “Look, I know you guys mean well. I know you care about me and you think you need to look out for me and protect me, but I’m going to say this one more time—I’m a big girl, Bram. I can take care of myself. You and Ashe and Jared and Logan have to stop. If I need your help, I’ll let you know. I’ll scream it from the rooftop. But unless I do that, please, please, please stop this big brother routine you guys have always done. Especially with other guys. Or I’m liable to end up your poor, lonely, pitiful spinster sister who comes to holiday dinners wearing Fruit Loop jewelry.”
That made him smile in spite of himself. “Fruit Loop jewelry?”
“That part got through to you, but you don’t care about the poor, lonely, pitiful spinster part?”
“Of course I care about it. But that’s not going to be you.”
“How isn’t it going to be me if you and Jared and Ashe and Logan scare off any guy who looks twice at me the way you’ve always done? I’m not a kid anymore, Bram. I’m a full-grown woman and I brought a perfectly nice man to a barbecue yesterday and my brothers treated him like he had a contagious disease he was about to infect me with. You have someone—you have Jenna. Jared has Kerry. Before long Ashe and Logan will have women in their lives. But what will I have if my brothers keep standing as a barrier between me and anyone of the opposite sex?”
Bram’s expression had wrinkled up into a frown again, this one darker than the last one. “Have you been talking to Jenna about this?”
“Why? Because she said the same thing? No, I haven’t been talking to Jenna about this. I don’t have to talk to anyone about this to feel the way I do. I love you guys, but sometimes…sometimes you smother me.”
For a long moment Bram stared at her with that familiar scowl, and she wasn’t too sure she hadn’t said too much. That she hadn’t hurt his feelings or made him mad.
But then he took a deep breath of his own and exhaled slowly. “So you want me—us—to butt out, is that it?”
“Butt out and be nice to people of the male persuasion who I might happen to bring around or be with when you meet me on the street. Is that asking so much?”
“Yes,” he said frankly. But then he added, “I guess we could try, though. A little. Except if we see you doing something we know is stupid. Then we’ll have to butt in.”
Too late for that, too. She’d already done the most stupid thing she could have done.
But she didn’t say that, either.
Instead she said, “All I’m asking at the moment is that you be polite and friendly to Tyler. I’m not doing anything stupid with him right now, I’m just getting to know him and letting him get to know me. No big deal.”
Bram didn’t look convinced.
But he did finally pull his feet off the coffee table and stand.
“You’re a big deal to us,” he said seriously.
“Well, I don’t want to be.”
“And we’re never going to stop looking out for you. But maybe we could back off some. Give you a little space with this guy, if that’s what you really want.”
“That’s what I really want.”
“But we’ll still be watching.”
Willow rolled her eyes and tried to be happy for even a small victory. “Of course you will be.”
Tyler was waiting for Willow and the delivery when they arrived at his ranch. He was dressed in work clothes that he’d obviously been in since morning, because his jeans and his chambray shirt were soiled, and his face was shadowed with a full day’s growth of beard.
The fact that he looked good to her in spite of it all let Willow know she was in trouble with this man. Well, more trouble than being pregnant by him.
But she tried not to think about the fact that even with him sweaty and dust-covered and bewhiskered, she could still have jumped his bones without a qualm.
Don’t move too fast, she told herself, recalling her own comment to him the night before, when she’d stopped him before they’d actually made love.
She knew it was good advice and that she needed to follow it. But one look at him was enough to do her in, and watching him hoist feed sacks out of the back of the truck alongside Carl, watching his impressive muscles tensing under the weight, watching his tight derriere as he bent over to pile the sacks inside the big red barn was enough to weaken her knees and her will at once.
“She used to help with this,” Carl pointed out crankily as they worked, hinting for her to lend a hand the way she would have several months earlier.
But Tyler said, “I wouldn’t let her even if she wanted to,” and that just left Carl to more grumbling.
Grumbling that continued right up until they were finished and Carl got back behind the wheel to drive off without so much as a goodbye to either of them.
But if Tyler noticed, he didn’t seem to care. He removed his work gloves and then his cowboy hat, wiping dampness from his brow with the back of his arm and settling his gaze on Willow as if for the first time.
“Hi,” he said in a tone that held an intimacy she was beginning to believe he reserved for her alone.
“Hi,” she answered the same way.
“Sorry about this,” he apologized, nodding down at himself to let her know he was referring to the way he looked. “I didn’t want to clean up and then get all dusty from the feed sacks again so I figured I’d have to wait t
o shower. Do you mind?”
“No,” she answered, not telling him she actually liked him all rugged and rustic and masculine.
“I promise I won’t take long. And I made you fresh squeezed lemonade for the wait.”
“Sounds good.”
Tyler motioned toward the house, and that was where they headed. He held the back door open for her when they reached it, following her up the three steps into the mud room, where he hung his hat on a hook just inside the door. Then he washed his hands in the laundry basin and they went into the kitchen.
He filled two glasses with ice and lemonade from a pitcher in the refrigerator, handing her one and then nearly guzzling his before he said, “Make yourself at home. Turn on the television or the radio if you want. Or sit on the porch swing—it’s shaded at this time of day and usually catches a breeze. Or whatever you feel like doing. I’ll be back before you can miss me.”
She doubted that, but she said, “Don’t rush. I’ll be fine.”
She watched him go, and wondered at herself for thinking he even looked great with hat-hair.
But then he was gone and she was left to her own devices.
Sitting on the porch swing had been the most appealing of his suggestions, so Willow headed for the front of the house.
But halfway through the living room the fireplace mantel caught her eye. Unlike when she’d been there previously, it was no longer bare, but was now lined with framed photographs. She made a detour to be nosy.
There were pictures of a couple on their wedding day, and from the dated look of it and the resemblance between Tyler and both the bride and the groom, Willow had no doubt it was a portrait of his parents.
There were a few other family photographs of vacations and horseplay, of graduations and other school events. One snapshot was obviously taken at Christmas, of Tyler and his brother in footed pajamas.
There were also pictures that chronicled Tyler’s and his brother’s careers in rodeo.
It was easy to tell Brick was Tyler’s brother because they looked so much alike, too. But Willow thought Tyler was the more handsome. There were shots of them riding bucking broncos and roping calves. There were photos of them celebrating victories with a wave of a hat in the air, with grins from ear to ear, with belt buckles held as trophies.
Tyler had loved what he’d done for a living before coming to Black Arrow. Before meeting her in Tulsa and taking that last ride. If he hadn’t already told her that she would only have had to look at those photographs to know.
And yet he seemed to have accepted the ending of it all with aplomb. With grace and good humor.
She thought that said a lot about him. About the kind of man he was. A lot that she liked.
And she wondered whether, if and when she told him about the baby she was carrying, he would react the same way. If, once the shock had passed, he would accept it and adapt. Embrace it the way he appeared to have embraced his new life here.
She hoped so.
But that was really all she could do—hope. Because while somewhere in his thinking he had to have always known his rodeo days would come to an end, he wasn’t likely to have planned for a woman he didn’t even remember having met announcing she was pregnant with his child.
And there was no way to gauge how anyone would react to that.
Fear caused Willow to press a protective hand to her stomach, as if to shield her unborn baby from any negative response. And she couldn’t help wondering if she would ever find the courage to actually tell Tyler at all.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Willow hadn’t heard Tyler come down the stairs and the sound of his voice startled her.
“Great, now I’ve scared you, too. I’m sorry,” he added, coming into the living room.
“It’s okay.” She quickly pulled her hand from her middle and put it in her pocket.
“Did my lemonade make you sick?”
“No, why?”
“You were holding your stomach.”
“I’m fine. I was just snooping and you caught me at it,” she said, as if that explained the hand pressed to her middle.
“It’s not snooping to look at pictures that are out on display.”
“They’re nice,” she said, to change the subject.
“Thanks.”
“But you look so happy in the rodeo ones I’m surprised you’ve adjusted so well to not being able to do it anymore.”
“Who says I’m well adjusted?” he joked.
“You’re not pouting.”
He laughed. “I’d get my rear end kicked if I was. Brick would never let me get away with that.”
“And you’re always in a good mood.”
“Maybe it’s the company I’m keepin’,” he answered with a half smile that dimpled his cheek.
She wanted to accept the compliment, but her pleasure in it was dampened when she began to wonder one more thing. She began to wonder for the first time if being with her would help his attitude so much if he knew the truth about her. If he knew that they’d met before, spent the night together, and she was leaving him in the dark about it, leaving his memory blank when she could fill it in.
She was afraid he wouldn’t be.
And worse yet, she was afraid that now, since she’d kept the truth from him, he might resent it when he realized it. When he realized that those good feelings she was helping him to have, those feelings she thought she might be arousing in him, were caused by someone who was essentially lying to him. Lying to him through omission if nothing else.
“Are you sure you’re feeling okay? You don’t have a drop of color in your cheeks. Maybe you should sit down,” he stated, taking a closer look at her.
“I think I just need food,” she said with forced brightness.
But apparently he bought it, because he just said, “Then we’d better get you some.”
Tyler took her glass and set it on a nearby table before he ushered her out the front door to his waiting truck.
But after he’d handed her up into the passenger side, closed the door and was headed around the front end, Willow had trouble shaking the anxious, foreboding sense she had.
Because the bottom line was that she’d deceived him the night they’d met, and she was deceiving him again now.
Which was hardly a good basis on which to begin a relationship.
And even noticing how wonderful Tyler looked all cleaned up and dressed in jeans and a pale-blue Western shirt didn’t help chase away her concerns about the course she’d embarked on with him.
And the very real possibility that it might all blow up in her face.
Dinner did nothing to calm Willow’s nerves.
Tyler took her to a local steak house that was packed to the brim, and no sooner had they walked in the door than she heard her name called.
She scanned the crowded restaurant and finally caught sight of who it was trying to get her attention.
And of all the people in Black Arrow who it could have been, she was not happy to find it was her brother Bram.
He and Jenna were sitting in the center of the place, and Willow and Tyler had no choice but to go over and say hello.
Which was when Bram invited them to join him and Jenna rather than waiting for another table to open up.
Willow and Tyler didn’t have much choice, so they took the two empty seats at the table and began what was essentially a grilling of Tyler by Bram.
It left Willow wishing her brother would have done more of what he’d done the previous evening, when all of her brothers had spent more time glaring at Tyler than talking to him. As it was, the meal couldn’t end soon enough for her.
“I think the ice cream is going to have to be my treat to make up for that,” she said when they finally got away from Bram the Interrogator and were back in Tyler’s truck, headed away from the restaurant. “I didn’t know my brother would be there tonight. I saw him just before I came to your place, but he didn’t say anything about going out for dinner.”
>
“It’s okay,” Tyler assured her, still in good humor and not nearly as ruffled as Willow was. “And the ice cream idea was mine, so I’m still buying. But what do you say we just get a pint to go and hide out at your apartment to eat it?”
“So we don’t risk running into any more of my brothers and having to spend the rest of our evening with them? Good idea.”
Tyler didn’t confirm or deny her assumption, he just drove to the local ice cream parlor, where they decided on chocolate mousse ice cream with swirls of peanut butter through it, and counted themselves lucky to have run into only three people Willow knew, none of them her brothers.
The ice cream was melting badly when they finally reached the Feed and Grain again, and since church choir practice had left no parking spots nearby, Tyler let Willow off right at the foot of the steps to her apartment, while he went in search of an opening farther away.
Willow was just glad to be back without any further encounters with her brothers, and climbed the stairs in a hurry to get her cold confection to the freezer.
She fumbled with her keys, keeping the dripping container away from her as she did.
Then she stepped into her kitchen.
It was dark by then and she reached for the light switch.
But before she could flip it on, a beefy arm came around her neck from behind, clamping back on her windpipe and yanking her up against an unyielding body.
The ice cream container hit the floor as she grasped the arm at her throat with both hands. But the man was stronger than she was, and even clawing at his arm to pull it away didn’t faze him.
“Just give me the documents and you won’t get hurt.”
His hot breath smelled of onions and cigarettes, and her stomach lurched.
Willow didn’t understand. Not what was going on. Not what he was saying. Nothing. She only struggled to breathe while her own pulse pounded like a jungle drum in her ears.
“I don’t know—” she barely managed to gasp.
“The inheritance. I heard you found the papers for it. I want them. Now.”
His voice was low and threatening. His arm was still tight across her throat. And Willow’s legs felt as if they might buckle at any moment.
Willow in Bloom Page 14