TO BELIEVE
Other books by Carolyn Brown:
The Broken Roads Romance Series:
To Trust
To Commit
The Drifters and Dreamers Romance Series:
Morning Glory
Sweet Tilly
Evening Star
Love Is
A Falling Star
All the Way from Texas
The Yard Rose
The Ivy Tree
Lily’s White Lace
That Way Again
The Wager
Trouble in Paradise
The PMS Club
The Dove
TO BELIEVE
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Carolyn Brown
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Text copyright ©2009 by Carolyn Brown
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.
Published by Montlake Romance
P.O. Box 400818
Las Vegas, NV 89140
ISBN-13: 9781477813072
ISBN-10: 1477813071
This title was previously published by Avalon Books; this version has been reproduced from the Avalon book archive files.
In memory of my father
Forest Vernon “Bud” Gray
Dec. 28, 1929–Oct. 18, 2006
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter One
Roseanna was cussing mad. Kyle Parsons did not own her—not in any way, form, shape or fashion. He had never hinted at marriage or even engagement and if he had, he still wouldn’t have the right to play lord and master over her. The prehistoric days when a man grabbed a woman by the hair and dragged her home to his cave to cook and clean for him with no questions asked were long gone and forgotten.
Her dark green eyes shot blazes across the table. “You’re crazier than Lucifer if you think I’ll stand still and let you tell me what to do! You don’t own me, Kyle, and I’m free and well past twenty-one, so if I want to stand in for Jodie tonight and sing, I’ll do it if it causes the devil to install air conditioning in Hades.”
Kyle’s brown eyes flashed just as much anger as Roseanna’s green ones. “No woman of mine is going to that dive and let all the men in Murray County make passes at her. I expect you think you’re getting on that stage in skin tight jeans and some kind of sexy get up like that hussy sister of yours wears. The drummer can sing for her tonight and you can stay your butt at home where you belong. And I mean it Rosy. Dang it woman, use your brain to think about something other than what color eye shadow to wear. I’m a cop, too, and the youth director at the church. What’ll it say about me if I allow you to sing in that dive? You know how many times we’ve both had to go out there to bust up fights in the parking lot and what kind of example would that set before the teenagers I work with?”
“I’m not your woman and you can take your pompous male attitude and go to hell with it, Kyle. And don’t you ever call my sister a hussy again.” Her nose was barely an inch from his.
He would have liked to lean forward and kiss her soundly. But this time Kyle simply had to win the war. Everyone knew the Cahill women were a hand full, and several of his friends warned him that if he intended to lasso Rosy, he’d better get ready to give up the pants in the family. Today was the day when he stopped wearing the pants or taught her who was boss. No one was ever going to say that Kyle Parsons was hen pecked so it was all coming to a dead end halt right then; she was going to listen and obey.
She slapped the table so hard the sugar bowl and salt shakers clinked together like ice cubes in a tall glass of iced tea on a hot summer day. When the noise settled, silence lay between them, as thick and heavy as a deep fog. Finally, she threw up her hands in dismay and stormed out of the trailer. She slammed the back door hard enough to rattle dishes in the kitchen cabinets and kicked through the gravel to her red pickup truck. She tried to vent some of her frustration by hitting the steering wheel, but it didn’t work, so she stomped the clutch, threw the truck into reverse and slung loose gravel all over the back side of Kyle’s new Dodge pick up truck and the front of his trailer. She hoped it pitted the paint and when the next rain came, rust spots showed up everywhere a chunk of rock had hit.
So what if they had dated for six weeks. He wasn’t about to start bossing her around. If she wanted to sing at the Arbuckle Ballroom tonight, she’d dang sure do it, and he could squat and fall backward in it if he didn’t like it. Jodie said that Kyle was an egotistical male chauvinist pig. Well, she didn’t know the half of it. That man was a full-grown, full-fledged male chauvinist boar hog. There wasn’t a woman alive who could live with him more than six months without putting a bullet right between his eyes.
She drove south into the park at Sulphur, Oklahoma like the devil was chasing her red truck. She shifted into third and slowed down just enough to make the right turn at the ranch road, kicking up a cloud of dust and fishtailing the back of the truck on the gravel at the edges of the cattle guard. Halfway down the dead end dirt road was a sharp turn back to the right and then she was on the Cahill Ranch and Lodge property. Her temper was still flaring hot when she parked in the back yard.
Her father, Bob, opened the back screen door just as she reached the house. “What’s the matter with you?”
“Kyle Parsons can rot in hell,” she said without missing a step.
“Whew!” Bob Cahill shook his head. What ever poor old Kyle did, he’d better get his wallet out and find a flower shop with fresh roses. The only two things that could begin to calm a woman’s hissy fit are flowers and a really pitiful look in the eyes—kind of that hang-dog, I’m-sorry-as-hell-and-I’ll-never-do-it-again look. Not totally unlike the look in his ten-year-old cow dog’s eyes when Bob went to town without him.
Roseanna’s mother, Joann, was unloading the dishwasher when she stormed through the kitchen. “Lord, girl you look like you just ate a toad frog. Jodie called and said to tell you ‘thanks a lot’ for standing in for her tonight. She’s made the finals. Looks like she might really bring home the big gold buckle. Too bad she had this gig tonight or all the band members could be off at the rodeo rooting her on, too. We thought about flying to Las Vegas but there’s just too much to do right now with the calving season on us and the lodge is booked solid so we’ll be busy with that, too.”
“Wish I could be there, too, Momma. You know what Kyle did? He ordered me not to sing tonight. He didn’t just ask me. He ordered me. He said no woman of his was going to play at the Arbuckle Ballroom. Then he called Jodie a hussy.”
“And what’d you say to that?” Joann’s eyes twinkled. She had been a Weston before she married Bob Cahill, and the Weston women were known throughout the whole state of Oklahoma for their independence. She loved Bob Cahill with all her heart, mind and soul, but if he dropped dead tomorrow, the Cahill Ranch wouldn’t be neglected for a split second. She could take up the reins and run it, even in her grief, as well as he did. And she’d raised all four of her daughters to be full of spit and vinegar. It took a specia
l man to even come knocking at their back door. She’d thought Kyle might be the right fellow for Rosy, but evidently he was only interested in breaking her like he would a horse; not taking advantage of the strong will and determination to make a happy relationship.
“I told him where he could take his pompous attitude, but I would have felt a whole lot better if I’d have slapped him backward out of that kitchen chair before I left,” she headed up the stairs to her room. She peeled out of jeans, a faded T-shirt and her work boots, and popped a background tape into the karaoke machine beside her bed. She turned the music up so loud it could be heard all the way to downtown Sulphur on a clear day and sang along as she curled her long brown hair and applied makeup. She outlined her full, sensuous mouth with crimson and filled the inside with a lighter color and deliberately put on more blush on her angular cheeks than normal.
An hour later she drove five miles west of Davis to the Arbuckle Ballroom where she promised to sing with her sister’s band, The Gambler’s, that night. She didn’t care if it hare-lipped the governor of the great state of Oklahoma or caused Kyle to drop stone cold dead of a heart attack, she would be on the stage singing until the last drunk danced the last two-step he could force out of his tired old feet, and the doors were finally shut for the night.
Roseanna called to the band members when she walked in, “Hey, she made the finals, so ya’ll are stuck with me tonight.”
“Well, save me from a fate worse than death,” the drummer said. “I knew she’d make it. If she can stay on that mean bull of Charlie Tucker’s for eight seconds, there ain’t one in the rodeo rounds who’s got a chance of buckin’ her off.”
The lead guitar player struck a chord. “Ready for a practice song to warm us up? Folks will be knocking down the doors in an hour. Been a long, dry week and they’ll be ready for a little drinking, singing, dancing and maybe even a brawl or two.”
“Testing, testing,” the drummer said into the microphone with red tape around the holder. He raised his thumb toward the ceiling. The man adjusting the mechanical brain pushed a button and instantly there was more amplification.
The fiddle player came out of the bathroom and whistled. “Whooo wheeee! You look fine tonight, Roseanna. If I was your feller I’d park my Wranglers at that front table over there and wear a sign around my neck that said you belonged to me.”
“Thanks,” she nodded. She wore the tightest pair of low slung black jeans in her closet and Jodie’s white lace blouse, cut to fit every curve from her ample bust to her curvy waist. A black belt, laced on the edges with silver leather and sporting a buckle with two interlaced sterling hearts showed off well rounded hips. Black boots shined when she hopped up onto the stage and grabbed a microphone. “What do you want to practice with?”
“ ‘Strawberry Wine,’ ” Buddy, the bartender, called out from the back of the room where he was taking chairs off tables, and brushing dust away with a damp cloth. “I’ll be so busy in an hour I won’t even get to listen to the songs.”
“Oh, Buddy, you get so busy watching all the ladies flitting around in those tight jeans and telling tall tales to the boys bellied up to the bar, you just forget to listen,” Roseanna teased.
“I’ll get even one of these days. You’re always joshing me and one of these days, I’m going to make you pay,” he laughed.
“Okay,” she grabbed the red mike and started to sing. Buddy sat down in a chair, shut his eyes and swayed with the music. Roseanna could make goose bumps on his arms just as well as Deanna Carter, the artist who had made the song popular a few years back. Every one of those Cahill girls could sing. Jodie could sit a bull for eight seconds, barrel race, play a rodeo clown and then doll up in a lace dress or a pair of tight fitting jeans and make a man’s mind do crazy things when she crooned into the microphone. And Roseanna didn’t take a shabby second place, either. She didn’t do the rodeo rounds but she could sure stand in for Jodie with the band any day of the week, and although he didn’t know the older two girls, folks said they could both sing the horns off a billy goat, too. He’d heard the four of them could harmonize so well it took a man’s breath away.
The house was packed by ten o’clock. The regulars were all there and Joe Bob Timmons danced every two-step with any woman who still had leather on the bottom of her boots. Roseanna was singing something that had everyone on the floor, when the doors swung open and two men swaggered inside like they owned the place. She saw them from the stage, but how could she miss them? They looked like big shot Mafia bosses who’d made a wrong turn in Chicago and wound up in Davis, Oklahoma—population two thousand five hundred and eighty six. The guitar player struck a chord and Roseanna sang, glancing toward the bar and the door every few seconds, wondering what those men were doing in a honky tonk in southern Oklahoma.
The older one was as tall as Joe Bob Timmons, which put him over the six foot mark. Where Joe Bob looked like he had an inner tube under his bright, hot pink western shirt, this man didn’t have an ounce of fat on him. He stood there like a marble statue in his three pieced suit and steel gray hair with his arms crossed over his chest, as if he was waiting for someone to try to leave the joint. Maybe they were revenuers and were checking the place out to see if Buddy was selling booze to under aged kids. The other man was younger, shorter but still near the six foot mark, and wore a suit tailored to fit his wide shoulders and narrow waist. His thick hair was shiny black and feathered straight back with no part. They were as out of place as a hooker in a revival meeting and she wondered again what they were doing in a dance hall in southern Oklahoma and what they were talking to Buddy about.
“Help you?” Buddy asked when the shorter man made his way to the bar.
“My limousine has a problem. I’m afraid to go on to Oklahoma City and I need a mechanic. Is there one anywhere around at this time of night, or is there a taxi I could call?”
Buddy chuckled. Sure. A taxi in Davis at near midnight. He didn’t even think there was a taxi at eleven o’clock at night in Pauls Valley and it was the next fairly big place up the highway.
“Well, son,” Buddy said, “we got a cracker jack good mechanic and he’s right over there in that pink shirt hugged up to Miss Scarlett Mason. He’s been trying to get her to dance with him all night, and she’s just now got enough beer in her to say yes, so unless I wanted to loose a couple of teeth, I wouldn’t think about bothering the man until she got tired of dancing. Just perch yourself up here on this stool and wait a spell. It won’t take her long to get enough of him stepping on her toes.”
Roseanna kept right on singing even though the two misfits piqued her curiosity. Surely Kyle hadn’t sent them to cause trouble. The band broke into the first strains of “Redneck Woman,” by Gretchen Wilson. She didn’t miss a single beat and all thoughts of Kyle disappeared.
The steel guitar pulsated. The drums kept a steady beat and the fiddle whined. The people stopped dancing and clapped in time with the song. Roseanna strutted. She sang. She smiled. She enticed the people until their hearts and souls pounded right along with the strong beat as they tapped their feet and swayed their bodies in time with the steady rhythm of the drums and sang along with her.
Everyone, that is, but the man sitting at the end of the long bar. He stared at the brazen hussy and wished he were anywhere else on the face of the entire earth than here. He’d rather be in Siberia in the middle of December than in this low-down, low-life, white-trash dive. The only thing he hated worse than Oklahoma was Texas. There wasn’t enough money in the whole wide world for him to live in Texas or Oklahoma permanently and there would be a blizzard in Dallas in August before he would be enticed back here again once he straightened out all the company problems in Tulsa. He would be ready for a straight jacket by the time he got back to San Diego and civilization.
When he didn’t think things could get any worse, his father phoned last week to tell him to drive from Tulsa to Durant, a little southern Oklahoma town where his grandfather gave an endowment to th
e college each year. Either his grandfather, Colin, or his father, Vance, sat on the stage at their graduation. It was an honor for the contribution they gave the school each year to be used for business scholarships but neither of them could make it this year. So he’d done his duty and he’d even smiled and nodded when his family’s name was mentioned but it sure wasn’t worth the price he had to pay as he sat in this dive and listen to music he despised.
Buddy’s eyes sparkled in a square face full of wrinkles as he wiped the bar. “Get you a beer while you wait?”
The man’s nose snarled at the thought. “No, do you have bottled water?”
Buddy shook his head. “Hell no. Got beer but I ain’t got no bottled water.”
“Is the mechanic tired of dancing, yet?” The man asked.
“Nope, don’t reckon he is,” Buddy shook his head. Joe Bob was the mildest drunk around. When he drank too much, he laid his head down on the nearest table and fell asleep. But that night Joe Bob was drinking straight Coke because he just came to dance with the women. It wouldn’t matter if he’d been dancing with Dolly Parton, herself, he would’ve stopped and went outside to look at the car, but Buddy didn’t like this rude dandy, so he could just sit there and wait a spell. Besides, waiting might teach him a little patience. Limousine! Hells bells, who’d he think he was, riding around in a limousine in Davis?
“When will he get tired?” The man asked.
“In an hour or two. I wouldn’t push it if I were you. He’s got a helluva a mean streak when he gets a beer or two under his belt, and I think he’s had two six packs already tonight. Maybe he’ll dance a little of the alcohol out of his system. Just give him some time, son,” Buddy lied blatantly and then disappeared to the other end of the smoky bar to get a drink for a lady with dyed burgundy hair, bright red lipstick, crimson jeans stretched to the point of ripping, and a T-shirt fitting tight around her barrel shaped stomach.
Ten minutes later the bartender slowly made his way back down to where the man waited impatiently and checked his watch every sixty seconds. “Pretty lady down at the other end with them tight red jeans on said she’d buy you a beer,” Buddy whispered conspiratorially.
To Believe Page 1