Countess in Cowboy Boots

by Jodi O'Donnell

  Both men looked up with the same expression of interest. “Don’t mind if I do,” Hank said, reaching for a glass.

  “Sounds good,” Lee agreed.

  It occurred to Lacey as she watched them down their lemonade in gulps that these two were so alike in temperament they could have been father and son. Both were forthright men who dealt with people straight on and didn’t require a lot of figuring out.

  She wondered how Will had gotten to be such an uptight, opinionated...enigma.

  She hadn’t seen him since she went into his office to give notice. He’d been characteristically tight-lipped as she’d explained how she had never been suited to the job on the Double R, and how now that he didn’t have to worry she was going to take a job from Lee, the reason for her working for him was moot.

  But she didn’t tell Will about her resource center.

  It wasn’t as if he wouldn’t find out. Satellite communications had nothing on Abysmal’s grapevine. But because of its personal significance, her venture made her vulnerable. She simply wasn’t ready to put it out there for Abysmal—and especially Will Proffitt—to come and take a peek at it.

  She set the pitcher on a nearby table. “I’ll just leave the rest of the lemonade here for seconds,” she told Lee and Hank, and winced as she turned to go.

  “You all right, darlin’?” her father asked.

  “Yes.” Leaning a hand on the table, Lacey slid her boot off and massaged her foot. “I think these ropers were intended for looks, not going up and down those stairs a hundred times a day. I’ll be fine. Nothing a hot bath won’t fix later.”

  “Whyn’t you leave off early and go hop into that fancy Jacuzzi outside?” Hank suggested.

  Didn’t that sound heavenly! Lacey thought regretfully. She’d already given Jenna the rest of the afternoon off.

  “But, Daddy, Lee’s been taking off from the tack and feed each afternoon specifically to help out, and I wouldn’t feel right about not doing my part.”

  “Shoot, you’ve both been workin’ like dogs.” He glanced at Lee, who’d risen with a prodigious cracking of joints. “Go on and join her, kid. You look like you could use a hot soak, too. You can wear the pair of trunks Rachel bought me when we first moved in here. Don’t think I’ve worn ’em but twice.”

  “I’d be obliged,” Lee responded, obviously needing no coaxing. He must have seen she still needed convincing, though. “Come on, Lacey. It’ll be like old times. Remember how you used to be a fool to swim in the stock tank on the Double R?”

  Lacey grinned. She had indeed used to beg Lee to sneak her out to the stock tank to find some relief from the incessant heat. “All right. I guess someone may as well get some use out of that cement pond in the backyard.”

  Ten minutes later Lacey slid into the hot, frothing water with a half sigh, half moan. Lee had already made himself at home, arms resting outstretched along the Jacuzzi’s tiled edge, the brim of his Stetson covering his face down to his nose.

  Yes, Lee was every bit a loose-walking, slow-talking, live-and-let-living, hard-loving cowboy. Right then he seemed the dead opposite of Will. The thought made her sober. She’d been meaning to ask Lee something, and now seemed as good a time as any to bring the subject up.

  “I was wondering, Lee. Did something happen? With you, I mean.” She shaded her eyes against the setting sun. “I’ve gotten the impression from a couple of people it had to do with me.”

  He didn’t say anything for a few minutes, and Lacey wondered if she would again be left in the dark, when Lee lifted the brim of his hat with one finger and peered at her from beneath it, a look of chagrin on his face.

  “I’d wondered if you knew,” he said on an embarrassed laugh. “I guess you’ve got a right to know the whole story. Might explain a few things about me—and Will.”

  Now she was really curious. “Lee Proffitt, you tell me right now what happened here while I was gone!”

  “Don’t get your back sulled up,” he said good-naturedly. But he made a bit of a production of lifting his hat and setting it back square on his head as he sat up straight.

  “It was actually what happened when we got word back here that you were all set to marry Nicolai Laslo. Y’see, we’d barely had time to absorb the news when this buncha media folk came around lookin’ for stories about you, especially what kind of kid you’d been, anything they could hang a fresh angle on. You know what I’m talking about.”

  She nodded. Unfortunately, she did.

  “Then when they ran out of those stories,” Lee continued, “they started diggin’. Asking about old boyfriends, of which there was me. They surrounded me like a swarm of fire ants, askin’ what it was like to’ve been sweethearts with America’s Cinderella. One wanted to know what it felt like to have gotten kissed by you and stayed a frog!”

  Lacey put a hand to her mouth. “Lee, I’m so sorry! I can’t believe you had to go through that just for having dated me!”

  “Well, it was partially my fault,” he admitted, throwing her another of those abashed glances. “See, I’d been poppin’ off at the mouth for months about how you were gonna come back from Europe—and we were gonna tie the knot ourselves.”

  Her breath left her in a whoosh of air. “But...but, Lee, did I ever give you the impression we were going to be married?”

  “No, Lacey, not once.” He stretched an arm out and squeezed one hand as she clutched her drawn-up knees. “I was able to appreciate that fact later, but at the time...well, at the time I was howlin’-at-the-moon crazy in love with you.”

  Lacey didn’t realize her mouth had dropped open until Lee leaned toward her with a tolerant smile and gave it a nudge shut.

  “I didn’t know,” she said, mortified. “I mean, I know everyone thought we were sweethearts, but we used to laugh at that, remember?”

  Simply thinking about it now brought a smile to her face. But her smile died at Lee’s bemused expression. “You only laughed because I did, didn’t you?” Lacey asked.

  He gave a shrug, then nodded. “It wasn’t your fault, Lacey. I was ripe as a cow chip to get my heart hung up on some girl, and if it hadn’t’ve been you, it would have been some other sweet young thing. But I didn’t see that then.”

  She didn’t entirely believe him. He was such a dear man. A dear friend, then and now. She asked gently, “What did you do?”

  “What else could I do?” Water sluicing off of him, he hoisted himself up to sit on the edge of the Jacuzzi. “I faced the music—or the reporters, as it were—and admitted we hadn’t been anything but friends. Thankfully everyone in Abysmal backed up my story, even when they knew different. I’ll never forget their support—that and how not a word has been said since in this town about the situation.”

  Arms locked at the elbow on either side of him, he stared into the bubbling water. “I have Will to thank for that. And more, because a week or so after the reporters lost interest and left, I worked myself into a blue lonesome and took off without a word. Will found me I don’t know how many days later.”

  Lee heaved a sigh. “I think up to then Will thought I didn’t have anything more wrong with me than a rash of foolishness. But that scared him. I don’t know that it didn’t scare me, too.”

  Lacey put her hand out over his, and he gave her a rueful look. “At least now you can understand why Will’s been protective of me, and why I allow it, to a point. Like him giving you a job on the Double R so I wouldn’t hire you.”

  “You knew what he was doing?” she asked, surprised.

  “Oh, sure.” A certain gleam entered his eye. “But I think the time’s come for him to learn a thing or two about Kid Brother taking care of himself. I mean, we’ve never talked about it, but I know he pretty much engineered the whole situation those years ago to keep the lid on my predicament.”

  Naturally he would,
Lacey thought. Will Proffitt reigned in this town. Yet if Will had used his influence to help his brother, then she was grateful to him.

  “What about Will?” Lacey asked abruptly.

  “What about him?” Lee asked back.

  “I get the impression something happened to him, too. Something...that hurt him, too.”

  Lee’s scrutiny was penetrating. She avoided it by boosting herself up next to him. It was awfully hot out here in the sun, she noticed of a sudden.

  “I’m not asking just for curiosity’s sake, you know,” she defended herself in a tart voice.

  “Well, if not for curiosity’s sake, then why?”

  “Just...just...oh, never mind.” To pursue the subject now seemed foolhardy, although she was dying of curiosity. But maybe the entire town had taken another oath of silence, this one on the subject of Will Proffitt.

  The thought brought her back around to the subject at hand. “Does it hurt still, Lee?” she asked softly.

  He shrugged. “No more’n the heartburn I get after I’ve had a bowl of chili down at the café.”

  But somehow she knew it did still hurt. Impulsively, Lacey leaned to the side and gave Lee a kiss of thanks on the cheek, very schoolgirlish and innocent. And there was nothing wrong with feeling those feelings for him, she thought. Especially when Lee broke out in his aw-shucks smile and put an arm around her in one of his old, affectionate hugs, which she enjoyed immensely for the reassurance it gave her in simply being free to feel such honest emotions again.

  Until she looked over Lee’s shoulder to see Will standing half a dozen feet away with a thunderous look in his gray eyes. And it was leveled straight at her.

  At the sight, all the doubt, qualms and misgivings Lacey had briefly hoped herself shed of at last sprang up in her like a house afire.

  * * *

  THIS IS IT, Will thought.

  He had always held a secret suspicion—or dread—that the tight control he kept over himself came with a price, meaning there were certain inciting incidents waiting to happen which would inevitably act like a match to the fuse on his powder keg of restraint. Normally, he could detect such situations in the making and take action to defuse them or himself. But the sight of his brother with his arm around Lacey—skin all rosy and dewy and her looking nine-tenths to a million bucks in that pale-yellow bathing suit—was not one of those times.

  “What is goin’ on here?” Will asked, not realizing until the words were out of his mouth how he sounded like a stern father—or a jealous boyfriend. Strangely, he did feel betrayed, although not by his own brother, but by Lacey.

  Her gaze certainly held an element of trepidation, which Will had come to despise himself for arousing in her.

  With all his might, he tried to moderate his reaction. But the lid on his temper gave another threatening rumble as his brother not only kept his arm around Lacey but dropped his hand to her waist and gave it a chummy squeeze, all with the same innocent look with which a five-year-old Lee had given his older brother while pouring maple syrup into Will’s good boots.

  To her credit, Lacey tried prying his fingers off her ribs, but Lee was having none of it. “Goin’ on?” he asked blandly. “Why, nothing’s goin’ on, Will.”

  “Oh, that’s abundantly obvious, believe me. Yancy and I came into town to do some business and thought we’d stop in at the tack and feed to see how my kid brother’s doing. But wouldn’t you know, Jimmy Ray says you haven’t seen four o’clock around the store for the past week. Says you head for here each day to ‘help out’ Lacey McCoy.”

  He’d been so angry at hearing that he’d instructed Yancy to go on without him while he walked over here so as to find a little perspective—an apparently pointless ambition, because he was even more aggravated.

  “So what if I take off early? It’s my business to run how I see fit, isn’t it—or is it?” Lee asked pointedly.

  “We’ll see about that, won’t we?” Will retorted with as barbed an emphasis.

  At least that got Lee to drop his arm from around Lacey’s waist so he could rise to his feet. “And just what’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means you’ve still got some provin’ to do, and this episode today has sure enough set you back a spell.”

  Lee’s features flushed with anger and he actually took a step toward Will. “Not if I’ve got anything to say about it!”

  “Stop it now!” Lacey interjected, scrambling to her feet as well. “I won’t have you two scrapping in my backyard like a couple of rowdy cowboys!”

  “Right,” Will agreed. “Come on, Lee, let’s leave the lady here to the important matter of gettin’ a tan. Unless, of course, your idea of ‘helping out’ includes your own pursuit of such shallow concerns, in which case I’d be glad to wait while you go on toastin’ your backside.”

  Lee’s jaw bulged with his restraint. “I’m ready right now,” he said evenly.

  “Ready for one of those rodeo beefcake calendars, you mean?”

  Lee seemed to remember only then he was dressed in nothing but a pair of trunks and his Stetson. “Fine! My clothes are over in that thing called a cabana, if you can hold your horses one minute while I change.”

  Will watched him stalk off before turning back to Lacey.

  She looked like a daffodil, golden and perfect. Make that one indignant daffodil. Fists clenched at her sides, chest rising and falling with her wrath, she looked set to go off like a case of fireworks herself.

  Boy, but the fire in her eyes was a powerful temptation to him! It was all he could do not to kiss her, just to witness the flame shoot higher.

  Funny, but right then his mood changed from rankled to chipper, just like that.

  “Don’t you dare come down on Lee for being here and helpin’ me!” she snapped.

  “Actually, he looked like he was helping himself.” Will raised his eyebrows. “Or was that the plan?”

  Her green eyes sparked. “You don’t know a thing about what’s going on!”

  “Then why don’t you enlighten me? I’m all ears.”

  She opened her mouth, ready to answer him, but something stopped her. Of a sudden, the wariness returned to her eyes, that drawing back and closing off to protect herself, and he got nettled all over again that she did.

  Lee came out of the cabana, shirttails dangling and boots in hand. He gave a polite nod of goodbye to Lacey. “Thanks for the hot tub. I’ll see you tomorrow, same time as always.”

  The last was obviously said for Will’s benefit. Lee spared him not a glance but stalked past him as if he didn’t exist. The effect was completely spoiled by the soles of his bare feet making contact with the hot brick decking around the pool, so he had to hop-skip his way to the grass on the front lawn.

  Will gave a parting nod of his own to Lacey before striding to Lee’s dually pickup parked in the drive. He got in the driver’s side and held his hand out the window for the keys.

  Lee’s chin jutted obstinately.

  “Just give ’em to me,” Will said mildly. “Your driving’s bound to be erratic since you’ve got your shorts in a twist.”

  His brother didn’t say anything, just dug into his jeans pocket and slammed the keys into Will’s palm. He got into the passenger side, yanked on his socks, and shoved his feet into his boots, all without a word.

  When they were out on the road and halfway home with the air still thick as mud in the cab, Will decided he’d better get this out and over with.

  “Look, Lee, I’m not tryin’ to run your life. But you gotta see you can’t go on neglecting the tack and feed.”

  “For your information, I’m not neglectin’ the tack and feed!” Lee reached into the back seat of the extended cab and pulled out a manila file, which he waved in Will’s face. “Have you taken a look at the month-end numbers, Will? Have
you?”

  “Of course I’ve looked at the numbers!” Will said, tight-lipped.

  “Then you’ll know the business is doin’ just fine! I’ve not just met projection but I’ve bettered it six months in a row.”

  It was true; in the nine months he’d managed the store, Lee had been keeping up a steady growth with relatively minor setbacks and adjustments.

  When Will said nothing, Lee tossed the folder on the seat between them. “I should have known you wouldn’t give me credit.”

  Will’s fingers clenched on the steering wheel but he kept up the poker face. “That’s because now’s the time when you need most to keep up your momentum—take a look at what’s selling and what’s not, make changes to inventory.”

  “But I think now’s the perfect time for me to start implementing some of those management techniques you sent me to U.T. to learn.” He set his hat on his knee and pulled a comb out of his back pocket. “I mean, you’re the one who said I’d need real soon to train Jimmy Ray on how to hold down the store so the place would still get run if I was sick or took vacation.”

  Pausing in combing his hair back, Lee shot him a keen glance. “And while we’re on the subject, have you done the same at the Double R, dividing up your responsibilities and settling each on different people?”

  “Oh, for the love of...of course I have!” Kid Brother was beginning to tick him off. “It wouldn’t be fair to the men and their families who depend on the Double R continuing not to have every aspect of the operation backed up.”

  “But do you know the place could go on without you?” Lee persisted. “Because let’s face it, Will, you haven’t taken a day off in the past ten years!”

  Will slammed on the brakes and shoved the gearshift into park before turning to his brother with a cutting glare. Lee’s eyes shot daggers right back at Will. “And I won’t get to in the next ten if you keep up your habits of givin’ away your time and energy like they’re batches of biscuits you can just go into the kitchen and whip up more of!”

  “That’s it.” Lee thrust open the pickup’s door and headed around the front of the truck. Will was out of his seat in a split second so as to meet him halfway. They squared off right there in the middle of the road.