Frisco Joe's Fiancee

by Tina Leonard

  AT NEARLY THE SAME TIME Mimi made her announcement, Annabelle was making one of her own. “I’d like to speak with Tom, please,” she said to the receptionist of the Never Lonely Cut-n-Gurls Salon.

  It was true what she’d heard. The chairs were red, the lights were dim. The infamous slogan was on the wall in gold letters. Every mirror had a lavish sign with a woman’s name painted on it: Dina, Lola, Sapphire, Ruby, Silk, Emerald, Marvella, Satin and Valentine. Every chair had fresh-cut flowers beside it; the towels were purple. Fragrant candles burned here and there. In the back of the salon, a raised spa bubbled away, big enough for ten people to fit into.

  It was all Annabelle could do not to gasp. And no telling what secret pleasure grottos awaited upstairs. No wonder the men brought their business to the salon!

  “Tom’s not here,” said the receptionist, who happened to be Valentine, according to her tight red T-shirt lettered with the name.

  “His car is around back,” Annabelle said, expecting the excuse. “And either I see him now, or I call the police and let them know you’ve a lice infestation of biblical proportions. The police and health department will be out on the double, and they may not find lice but from the looks of things, they’ll find something else to cite you for.”

  Valentine snatched up the phone, staring at Annabelle rebelliously. “You’re just jealous because Tom left you. And we’re putting your salon out of business.”

  “We don’t conduct your kind of business. And as for Tom, I’ve got a cowboy asleep on my bed, waiting for me, who makes Tom look like the Pillsbury Doughboy with an itty-bitty jelly roll, if you get my drift.” She snapped her fingers. “Either you make a call, or I do. Your choice.”

  Valentine punched the button. “Tom’s got a visitor,” she said into the phone. “No, I don’t think she’ll wait.”

  She hung up, her eyes snapping sparks at Annabelle. Examining her long fingernails, she said nonchalantly, “How’s the baby?” in the tone of someone who thought babies were living hell.

  “Going to grow up to be a lady,” Annabelle shot back. “You’ll have to look that word up in a dictionary. Tom, thanks for sparing me a moment of your time,” she said, as he came down the stairs, his light hair awry and his trousers unzipped, though buttoned.

  Dina followed behind him a second later, bearing a furious expression and no lipstick, since Tom had it on his fly. Note to self—red lipstick shows big-time on khakis.

  Thank heavens Frisco preferred blue jeans, one-legged as they were right now due to his cast. Red wouldn’t be quite as startling on denim—although as Tom had said, she was a sensible girl. She knew where to leave her lipstick, and it wouldn’t be on the fabric.

  “What happened to you not wanting to get your trousers dirty proposing?”

  “Huh?” he asked, clearly hoping to play dumb.

  Well, that wasn’t too hard for him. “I’ve thought over your marriage proposal,” she said to Tom, “and I—”

  “Marriage proposal?” Dina demanded.

  Tom’s guilty expression gave away the wrong answer. Dina slapped the guilt and maybe two layers of skin clean off his face. “You slimy turd!” she screamed.

  “Oh, that was painful,” Annabelle said sympathetically, silently applauding Dina. Now Tom’s cheek matched his crotch, and it was all good in her book. “I can’t accept the proposal, of course. But my lawyer will be contacting you to arrange the paperwork for visitation, should you want it, and, of course, for child support payments.”

  “Child support payments!” he howled. “You’ve got a lot more money than I have, Annabelle. Millions! I’m going to sue you for…palimony or something! I have rights in this, too.”

  “How do you know about my financial situation?” She hadn’t expected him to want to pay—that had been a bonus jab for fun—but she was curious as to why he thought he deserved palimony. Ridiculous, since no court would consider such a stupid claim, but all the same, she wanted to know.

  “You’re Annabelle Turnberry of Turnberry Wines, and you just came into your father’s entire fortune and estates.” He shook his finger at her. “I don’t have to pay you a dime.”

  “You’re not paying me,” she said quietly. “You’re living up to your responsibility by seeing to your daughter’s future. If you choose not to do that, I’m certain that my lawyer could work out a deal with you. No child support, no visitation.”

  He glared at her. “I don’t want to see her anyway.”

  For Emmie’s sake, her heart broke, but she’d expected no less. She’d been prepared. The truth was, she’d fallen for Tom when she was in pain from her father’s death. She’d thought he was someone he wasn’t, but her innocence was spent. She wouldn’t make that mistake again.

  Emmie had her, and that was enough.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Tom. I’ll have my lawyers send you the paperwork—to this address, I guess?”

  “Hell, no!” Dina shrieked. “You get out of here, you two-timing, lying, bellycrawling shyster! And you’d better pay me the thousand dollars you borrowed, or…or—” She glanced at Annabelle for inspiration. “Or you’ll be hearing from my lawyer!”

  He stared at both of them, his mouth gaping open.

  “Tom, your fly is open,” Annabelle said.

  MASON SHOOK HIS HEAD like a big bear, trying to clear it from what Laredo had just said. “Mimi’s engaged? Who would marry her? I didn’t even know she was dating anyone.”

  He was babbling. He certainly didn’t want to hear any more than he just had. “Maybe you heard wrong.”

  “No, she came over to tell us first, she said. And she was wearing a huge rock, though none of us recovered fast enough to ask who’d given it to her.”

  “Maybe it’s a fake,” Mason said.

  Laredo shrugged. “I doubt it. It sure was catching the light. Anyway, why would she fake having an engagement ring?”

  “Fake engagement,” Mason clarified, the last hope available to him sounding odd even to his ears. “Don’t think she would. She seemed very serious. Like I’ve never seen her this serious.”

  Mimi had clearly been swept off her feet by the Ferrari city dude. “Well,” he said slowly, “I wish her all the best. Guess I’ll get to meet him sooner or later.”

  “Probably not until the wedding. And after that, she’s moving to Houston with him. At least that’s what Sheriff Cannady said.”

  “Houston!” Mason thought that sounded highly unlikely. “Mimi doesn’t belong in Houston.”

  “Well, she’s been here all her life. I think she’s probably ready to move on. Raise her own family and all. She’ll be a good mom, although I have a hard time seeing her driving a van in car pools and dragging snacks to soccer games. Sitting on the sidelines with the cheerleaders and doing booster club stuff. Actually, I don’t have a problem seeing that at all,” Laredo said thoughtfully. “Mimi will do awesome. She’s got all that energy she’s never known what to do with.”

  “Mimi…raise a family?” Mason’s heart slid somewhere below his boots, right into the very ground he stood on. He couldn’t imagine her pregnant, had never thought of her in that manner. “What for? I mean, why would she do that?”

  Laredo smirked at him. “Because everybody who doesn’t live at the Malfunction Junction usually wants one, bro.”

  “I suppose.” He didn’t. He’d thought she felt the same way. For some reason, he felt a bit betrayed. “I never knew she wanted children.”

  “Don’t worry about it.” Laredo slapped him on the back. “You’ll make a great uncle.”

  DELILAH HUNG UP HER cell phone with a smile. “Jerry said he dropped Frisco Joe off in town to visit Annabelle,” she told her staff. She was happy about that, because she had a funny feeling those two had something to talk about and maybe a little more, but she had something sad to tell the rest of her girls: Beatrice, Carly, Daisy, Dixie, Gretchen, Hannah, Jessica, Julie, Katy, Kiki, Lily, Marnie, Remy, Shasta, Tisha, Velvet and Violet.

  She
was going to miss them.

  “There’s something I have to tell you all. This week has been a vacation of sorts, or at least that’s what I told you. Actually, it was my last chance to be part of a big family. I’m going to have to cut back, girls,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, because you are all like daughters to me. Unfortunately, I’m not making what I was at the salon, and now I’m barely covering the rent.”

  The women sitting and drinking coffee with her in the highway-side coffee shop stared at her with trepidation.

  “Cut back?” Katy Goodnight asked. “How much?”

  “I’m going to have to reduce my staff by fifty percent.”

  A gasp of dismay met that announcement.

  “I couldn’t feel worse about this. But since my sister opened her salon across the street, my life has changed in many ways, and I don’t think I have to tell you that.”

  Kiki nodded. “We understand, Delilah. You took most of us in when we had no place else to go, and we’ve been grateful for that. When will you tell us who has to go?”

  “I’d as soon know now,” Shasta said.

  Delilah nodded. “Fair enough. Was anyone planning on turning in their notice to me any time soon?”

  No one spoke up. She hadn’t expected them to. They’d been a family for a while. Most of these women had no place else to go. Or they chose not to. Sighing, she tore paper strips off the place mat. “I’ve thought about this every which-a-way. I could go on a seniority basis. I could go on a most-earned basis. None of these ways strikes me as particularly fair, because I love all of you, and that’s not a business emotion. They say not to mix business and pleasure, but you girls have been my pleasure, and without you, I wouldn’t have had a business. So. I’m going to draw names.”

  Her heart bleeding, she wrote each name on a paper. Every stroke of the pen made her hand shake more. She didn’t think she’d be able to write the last name; the pen felt as heavy as an executioner’s blade. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered.

  “It’s all right,” Kiki said. “We know you did your best, Delilah. We all did.”

  Delilah nodded, taking a deep gulping breath. She put the papers all together in a pile she’d rather have burned than use for its intended purpose and covered it with her hands, prayer-like, with her eyes closed. “Ready?”

  “As we’ll ever be,” Shasta said.

  “All right.” Behind closed eyes, she held back tears. Her business, these women, were all she’d ever had in her life that gave her pleasure. These were her sisters the way Marvella never would be; these were the daughters she would never have; these were the friends who shared her happiness and tears.

  These girls were pieces of her soul.

  “Annabelle,” she said, reading the first piece of paper she pulled from underneath her other hand. The other girls gasped and some began to sob. Annabelle had a baby and a broken heart. It would kill her to tell her she had to go.

  “Beatrice, Gretchen, Jessica, Lily, Marnie, Tisha, Velvet, Violet,” she read, pulling names as fast as she could to get it over with before she broke down and cried.

  “Carly, Daisy, Dixie, Hannah, Julie, Katy, Kiki, Remy, and Shasta remain employed at the Lonely Hearts Salon. Now, if anything should change, anything at all, I—I—” She couldn’t hold back any longer. Putting her head down on the Formica table in the roadside restaurant, she cried as she’d never cried in her whole life.

  Except maybe when Marvella had accused Delilah of stealing her husband. That had been the knife driven into her heart.

  The wound had never healed, and today, it started bleeding all over again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  It was near evening when Frisco awakened—evening of the next night. “I think the winter weather is making you and Emmie hibernate,” she told him.

  “Have you been in this bed?” he demanded.

  “Yes, and Emmie’s been up for feeding and playtime. You never moved.”

  “Jeez. I’m so sorry.” He sat up, running his hand through his hair so that it stood straight up.

  “I think you were very tired,” she said with a smile.

  “I was more tired than I’ve ever been in my life. Did I tell you about Helga, the hellish housekeeper Mimi hired?”

  She shook her head, jealous already, especially if she was the cause of Frisco not getting any sleep. Although hellish didn’t sound like he was that crazy about her.

  “She nearly drove me out of my skull. Imagine having someone staring at you twenty-four-seven, waiting for you to move, trying to give you pills, cleaning your room—you’d think a seventy-year-old woman would want to sit down occasionally, wouldn’t you?”

  “Seventy.” Annabelle nodded as if she’d automatically known that, but warmed to the core that Mimi hadn’t hired some sweet young thing. “Maybe she’s over-compensating. She could really need the job.”

  “I don’t know. I just knew I had to get out of there or I was going to jump out my window. Hope you don’t mind me running to you. But this was the only place I knew where there’d be some serious sleeping going on. Emmie sure does like her snooze time. And so does her Uncle Frisco,” he said, looking down at the baby who was too asleep to care about Uncle Frisco at the moment.

  “Jumping out your window would be bad with your busted leg,” Annabelle reminded him.

  “Don’t I know it. Jerry is a man of principle, honor, duty and integrity, you know it. And any other complimentary word you can think of.”

  “That about covered it,” she said. “Can I get you something to eat?”

  “My treat. What’s in this town?”

  “Whatever you want. Prepared questionably.”

  “What’s the local specialty? That can be delivered? No cabbage, though.”

  She shook her head. “I hate cabbage.”

  “Wait a minute. I want to see what’s across the street.” He staggered to his feet, hopping over to the window. Staring out at the Never Lonely Cut-n-Gurls Salon, he whistled. “Bet I know what they cook over there. Look at those T-shirts walking in, would you?”

  She went behind him and snapped the blinds down. “T-shirts are cheap.”

  “Uh, yes. Yes, you’re right about that. A dime a dozen.” He gave her the most mischievous grin she’d ever seen on a man. “I just wanted you close to me, Annabelle. Gotcha.” He reached out and snaked an arm around her before she could protest, pulling her tight against him. “Now, that’s worth a two-hour drive and an Italian dinner, complete with candles. What do you think?”

  “That I love spaghetti,” she said, loving the feel of him holding her in their first real embrace. “It might be akin to sauerkraut in visual effects, though.”

  “No. Trust me, they are not even distant cousins. I missed your cooking, Annabelle.”

  “You did not. I’m not a good cook.”

  “But you tried hard. That matters.” He looked at her, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight streaming in from behind the blinds. “In fact, I’m beginning to think just about everything about you matters.”

  She held her breath, surprised. So he kissed her, and she didn’t move anything except her lips, until her body took over her fears and she slid her arms around his neck, pulling him close the way he’d done her.

  This time, there was nothing about their kiss that was friendly. It was hot and hungry and passionate.

  “This is just friends,” she gasped. “Right?”

  He propped her against him so that he bore her weight as he leaned against the wall, and she leaned into him, willing to move with him.

  “What else would it be?” he asked between searching kisses.

  “Nothing that I can think of.” Her hands moved across his chest, back over his shoulders to slide under his Western shirt. “Except maybe best friends. You shouldn’t sleep in all your clothes.”

  “The very best of best friends. I had to sleep in all my clothes. We’re alone together in this big salon. You might get wild ideas about my cowboy body.”

&n
bsp; He nipped at her earlobe, and she tilted back her head, sighing. “I never had wild ideas before. I think I like it.”

  A groan escaped him as her hands wandered. “I saw you going into the competition’s den over there.”

  She leaned her head again to look at him. “You couldn’t have. You were asleep.”

  “I have acute hearing. The sound of unfamiliar doors opening and closing had me peg-legging to the window.”

  She smiled at him, pulling his face down so that she could nuzzle his chin. “I’m sorry. If I’d known that, I would have told you.”

  “Not that it really matters, because we’re just best friends, but—”

  “The change in Tom was due to discovering that I had money of my own.”

  “I should whip his hide.”

  She shook her head and ran her hands around his waist. “Dina already did.”

  “Dina? Good woman.”

  “Probably not, but it was okay by me if she did the dirty work. So, you already knew who my family was?”

  “A little birdie told me. But that’s not why I’m here.”

  She laughed low and husky, moving her hands from his waist down inside the back of his jeans. “I didn’t think so.”

  “I just think we should get that straight. I’d rather cut off one of my appendages than be a kept man, and even if we didn’t need to get that drastic, I’m not hurting financially.”

  “I know.” She kissed his chin. “You wanted to shack up with me so you could sleep.”

  “Yes, but I’m wild-eyed and bushy-tailed now.”

  She slid her hands from the back of his jeans to the front. “Something like that.”

  “Annabelle, honey, you’re heaping flames onto an already raging fire.”

  Her gaze went to his eyes. “I want to be so sophisticated about this, Frisco, but it’s just not in me.”

  “I know.” He kissed her forehead.

  “Um, remember what you said about needing five minutes of squeaking my springs to give Tom the impression that we were making love properly?”