By noon she had swept and mopped the front porch, talked Pete into repairing the swing, and dragged an ugly square table from an unused room at the back of the house out onto the porch. A handful of wild daisies and some decorative seedheads made an attractive bouquet. She arranged them skillfully in the syrup vase and placed it on the table.
Stepping back, she admired her handiwork and told herself that perhaps she had hidden talents after all. All her life it had been drummed into her head that there were people who were hired to decorate houses and landscape grounds, to design and make clothes, or to decorate a cake—and then there were those who were in a position to hire them. And she should consider herself fortunate that she was among the latter.
Instead, she had considered herself useless. And frustrated.
Taking classes in horticulture at the local community college, which was what she’d really wanted to do, had been out of the question. Obediently, she had earned herself a liberal arts degree from her mother’s college in Virginia. The wildest, most exciting thing she had done during her four years there was to audit a class in French literature without written permission.
It had been mostly in French, which she didn’t speak, and exceedingly boring, but because she wasn’t supposed to be there, she had stuck it out.
Her first real rebellion had come after she had graduated, when she’d stated her intention of looking for a job in Dallas. From the reaction, it was as if she had threatened to go to work waiting tables at a topless bar and grill.
So she had fumed and waited, meanwhile taking over a small portion of her father’s huge estate and turning it into a Japanese garden, Texas-style, with boulders, raked gravel, a bench, and a variety of cacti.
Gradually she had started dressing to please herself instead of wearing the well-bred little classics her mother insisted on buying her. The more her parents had protested, the more she’d go out of her way to defy them. It had given her, for the first time in her life, a feeling of power.
By the time her mother had been diagnosed with a rare, inoperable form of cancer, her father was already in deep financial trouble, if the increased consumption of Scotch whiskey and the steady parade of grim-faced accountants was anything to go by.
Priss had drifted through the following period like a ghost in her own home, afraid to speak above a whisper, feeling grossly inadequate, ignored by her father and shunted out of the way by a regiment of nurses whenever she tried to sit with her mother.
It was during that awful time that she had renewed her old friendship with Faith Harper and Sue Ellen Rainey. Sue Ellen was years older than Priss and had been divorced three times, but she was one of the wisest, kindest women Priss had ever known.
It was Sue Ellen who was responsible for Priss’s volunteering at the hospital in the children’s ward. When a daughter of one of her regulars had come down with a staph infection, Sue Ellen, in her usual kindhearted mode, had been anxious to visit the child, to sit with her while her mother was at work. Rather than possibly ruin Sue Ellen’s business by trying to fill in at the diner, Priss had offered to visit little Callie Ann, herself.
Thus she had discovered a whole new world where the few things she really did well counted for something.
Jake stayed down at the training pen a lot longer than his presence was required. Evidently, Pete had passed the word to the two other hands that there was a woman up at the house. He took a ribbing he could just as well have done without.
About half-past noon, the two hands, Rico and Joe, broke for dinner and headed home. They were both married, with half a dozen kids between them, both ex-cons who’d showed up broke and hungry, looking for work about the same time Jake had been getting started. After sizing them up, he’d taken them on, worked with them to fix up a couple of bungalows on the other side of the creek, and never once had cause to regret it.
Because he wasn’t ready yet to deal with the situation up at the house, Jake stayed out all day. By late afternoon he was hot, tired, dirty and hungry, having taken delivery of the Trowbridge lot, looked them over, and worked with a filly who’d taken an immediate dislike to her new quarters. A couple of the mares were past prime breeding age, but he figured he could sell them to one of the dude ranches he supplied, and made a mental note to call.
Then, because nothing else that day had presented him with any real challenge, he had saddled up the roan and gone a few rounds.
“You and me, boy—I reckon we’re still fighting old battles,” he murmured as he rubbed the stud down and turned him into the paddock.
Jake didn’t know much about the horse’s past, other than that he’d had more owners than Jake had trophies and that he’d tried to kill at least one of them.
Jake’s own past, he knew about. Having decided a long time ago that his chances of making a go of another marriage were about as good as his chances of coming in top money at Pendleton, Cheyenne or Calgary, he had his future all mapped out. It didn’t include a permanent arrangement with a woman.
He could tell right off when he parked the truck in the shade of the shed roof that she’d made some more changes. For one thing, the swing was no longer dangling from a single chain. For another, she had dragged a table out onto the porch and set a bunch of weeds on it. Damned if it didn’t look right nice.
Pete’s vegetable garden was gone. The old coot had read this piece in the Fort Worth paper about patio gardening, and thought he’d give it a try on a small scale. Jake had known all along from his mother’s limited gardening that it wasn’t going to work.
Pete and Priss were in the front parlor again. Evidently, supper was going to be an event tonight. Jake only hoped Pete was doing the cooking.
Or if he wasn’t, that they weren’t having sausage.
“Come on, now, P.J., I done it just the way you said.” He heard Pete’s plaintive voice as he headed upstairs to wash some of the real estate off his carcass.
“The knife blades are supposed to be turned this way, not sharp edge out, and the—”
Grinning, Jake shook his head. Next thing he knew, she’d have him wearing a necktie to supper. Which he would no doubt spill gravy on, and she would toss in the washing machine and then burn a hole in with a hot iron.
Twenty minutes later he came back downstairs, his hair still wet from the shower, his chin nicked in a couple of places where he’d scraped off his late afternoon growth of beard.
He’d put on a clean shirt, clean jeans, and his best boots, which was all the concession he was going to make. Give the woman her head and she’d be serving him a saucerful of those little pretty things he’d heard her telling Pete about, while Pete balanced a cup of tea on his knee.
Supper was chicken-fried steak, mashed potatoes and gravy and canned peas, which was about his most favorite meal of all, except maybe for Little Joe’s Five-Alarm Chili.
It might as well have been dried oats.
The table had been spread with what he suspected was a sheet. Pete’s ugly dishes sparkled like the finest china, and she had used her own silverware instead of his mismatched stainless steel.
But it was the woman herself who plumb squeezed the wind right out of his barrel. She wasn’t wearing jeans. Instead, she’d dressed up in something soft and floaty that reminded him of sunset on a dusty day. Layers of colors. Pinks, oranges, and a shade of brown that was a perfect match for her eyes.
The shape of her body didn’t really show, but Jake had never been more aware of what was underneath all those wispy layers than he was when he stood in the doorway and watched her lean over to light a candle.
Her hair, as usual, was piled like loose-stacked hay on top of her head, with little bunches of it sliding down around her ears. It just plain drove him wild with wanting to wind it around his fingers.
Sure enough, she served him some of those little square things that looked like samples of layer cake that had been left out in the hot sun too long. “Petits fours,” she told him. “They’re frozen. Pete and I drove i
n to the WinnDixie.”
“That’s spelled p-e-t-i-t-s,” Pete put in smugly. “It’s French.” He’d gussied himself up like a cheap hoodlum on a Saturday night in a purple satin shirt and a bolo set off by a chunk of fake coral.
“I know how to spell, dammit,” Jake grumbled.
“Yeah, you spell near ’bout as good as you read.”
“Which is a damned sight better than you write.”
“More coffee?” Priss put in. She claimed it was something called espresso. It tasted more like Pete’s pan-boiled coffee after the third day, but Jake held out his cup. Anything to keep from what he was afraid was going to come next.
Which was dancing. A tape player had been playing Vince Gill and Allison Kraus real low while they’d eaten supper. It occurred to Jake that he didn’t even own a tape player. That must’ve been some shopping trip, he thought sourly.
Except for the table and chairs, the furniture had been shoved back against the wall. A cloud-soft voice came from the tape player.
Talk about a man knotting his own noose. What the hell had he been thinking about, challenging her to teach him how to dance? He already knew how to dance.
Leastwise, he knew how to wrap his arms around a woman and hold her up real close while the music played. That was just your basic he-ing and she-ing. He’d learned how to do that kind of dancing before he’d ever left New Hope High.
But if she had any notion of getting him out in the middle of the floor to twist and shake his butt and wave his hands in the air, then she was flat out of luck.
Inevitably, the moment came. Priss stood and nodded to the tape player while Jake wondered if he should show her his scars and plead incapacitating injuries. Like the complete absence of a brain.
“Pete, you want to turn the tape over while I clear up these dishes?”
Jake could feel the sweat forming on his back start to trickle down to his waist.
“Nah…you go ’long and get started showin’ the boy how to dance. I’ll take care o’ this mess. But just fer tonight, mind ye. Cook never—”
“I know. Cook never washes up afterward.”
“You’re a-learnin’,” he said.
“I’m trying,” she replied with a smile that could melt pig iron.
As for Jake, he was long past the age of learning anything. If he’d needed proof, it was the woman holding out her arms to him, daring him to put himself in her hands.
Eight
Once in a small rodeo down near Amarillo, Jake had drawn a palomino that had earned the name of Goldie From Hell. Before he was even out of the chute, he’d known why. He’d lasted four seconds. The minimum was ten. The record on Goldie was six.
He figured this time he might even last seven, but not much longer.
“You put this hand right here,” Priss instructed, taking his hand and placing it on her back, slightly above the curve of her waist. Jake curled his fingertips into the shallow valley of her spine and took a deep breath. Inhaling her perfume, he started to sweat.
“Now. Take my other hand—like this.” She demonstrated, and he wished she’d given him time to wipe his palm off on the seat of his pants first. She looked so serious and so damned sweet. “Now, when I count three, slide your left foot to the left. One, two—like this.”
Separated by an arm’s length, they slid to the left, they slid to the right, and Jake slid deeper down a slippery slope that he recognized but refused to put a name to. He tripped over his own feet a couple of times, but he didn’t trip over hers even once.
Priss wondered if this had been such a good idea. She had always liked music, had taken years of piano lessons before her teacher had given her up as a lost cause. As a musician, she remained only a talented listener.
But for once the music failed to capture her imagination. The lyrics went right over her head. She was deaf to the melody, her senses too full of the man who was holding her.
Somehow the arm’s length had shortened to a few inches. Her sense of touch registered the rocklike shoulder where her hand was resting, the leathery palm enclosing her fingers. Her sense of sight soaked up every detail of his face, from his wide, thin mouth with its full lower lip, to the tanned hollows under his high cheekbones, to the squint lines at the outer corners of his silver-gray eyes.
He was wearing a crisp, light cologne. She smelled the clean detergent smell of his shirt and the faint hint of some exotic essence that was pure, unadorned Jake Spencer. There was a scar, barely noticeable, high on his left cheek. Another one on the edge of his jaw. Pete had said he’d rodeoed in his younger days. She thought he must not have been very good at it.
Although there was that belt he always wore…
He’d won it in a calf-roping event, Pete had said. Or was it bronc-riding?
“Priss?”
But then, she couldn’t picture him failing at anything he attempted. He was too tough. Too determined. Too—
“Priss. Honey?”
He was entirely too—“What?” She blinked, suddenly aware that she was pressed up against his body and he was holding her there with both arms—and that he was sexually aroused.
Oh, for goodness sake. She gulped, forgot to breathe, remembered to try, and strangled.
Jake patted her on the back, but the pat turned into a caress, and that didn’t help matters at all. “Honey, the music’s stopped,” he said. “Are you all right now? You want me to turn over the tape or put a new one in?”
The music?
Oh. They were supposed to be dancing.
Carefully, Priss disengaged herself and attached a bright smile to her face. “Yes. I mean, no—that is, I think we’ve done enough for now. You’re getting the hang of it, don’t you think so? All you have to remember is step, slide, step, slide—one, two, three, four.”
“Yes, ma’am. Step, slide.”
His eyes—had she called them silver? They were the color of old pewter. There was a high flush on his cheeks, as if he might be coming down with a fever.
“Jake, were you out in the sun today without your hat?”
“My hat?” His voice sounded raspy.
He stared at her in a way that made her wonder if she’d worn too much makeup. He was no longer touching her, but it didn’t help. The whole front of his body was permanently imprinted on hers.
“Hat,” she blurted. “Oh, and by the way, it’s club soda. The fizzy kind. I remember reading it in a magazine once, or maybe it was Hints from Heloise, only I’ve never tried it—I don’t know if it works on mascara.”
Jake continued to stare at her as if she’d burst out speaking Swahili. Maybe she had. The way he was watching her made her nervous, and when she was nervous, she invariably started babbling, and when she babbled, there was no telling what might come out.
Then, right out of a clear blue sky, he started swearing. Priss thought at first it was something she had done—or said. It usually was. But when he grabbed her by the shoulders and hauled her into his arms, and then started kissing her, she was pretty sure it wasn’t just to shut her up, because…
Oh, my…
He kissed with his mouth and his teeth and his tongue—and his arms and his hands, and—oh, his body. Straining against her, grinding against her—his big brass belt buckle catching in her floaty gauze dress and tugging at the neckline. Or was that—
It was his hands. And then his lips. Her head fell back so that he could trace the tendon at the side of her neck with his lips, and then he was nudging her earrings, licking the lobe of her ear, and it tickled in places that weren’t even faintly connected with her ear…
Jake felt behind him for the couch. His legs bones, busted and mended too many times over the years, felt about as stable as wet spaghetti. If they were about to give out on him, he needed to know it, because while he wanted nothing more than to be lying beside her—or on top of her—damned if he wanted to do it on the floor.
“Let’s not rush into anything,” he muttered, wanting desperately to rush into som
ething.
The music had ended. Jake still couldn’t dance, but somehow he had managed to waltz her over to the couch, where he eased her down and collapsed beside her. He allowed his arm to settle accidental-like across her shoulder, but he held back on making his move. Once he did, it had to be good, and he figured he’d better wait until he could trust himself to kiss her again without disgracing himself.
Damn. He was as nervous as a snake eating razor blades. Jake the Rake, the man who had once bragged that he’d won more fights, drank more beer and had more women by the time he was sixteen than any man in Texas.
It went without saying that he’d also told more lies.
God, it was a wonder he’d survived to adulthood. He sure as hell didn’t deserve it.
Back off, man. This isn’t one of the girls down on Bent Street you’re dealing with.
It had been so long since he’d had any dealing with a woman like Priss—not that he ever had; not with a woman like Priss—that he didn’t know quite how to handle it.
Hearing a funny buzzing sound in his ears, he thought he must be finally falling apart. His past must be catching up with him.
Then he realized she was humming.
Humming?
Leaning back, his arm still around her shoulders, Jake peered at her through narrowed eyes. “Are you okay?” he asked, sort of worried.
She laughed. Man, if ever a guy didn’t want to hear laughter, it was when he was about to make his big move.
“I’m trying to remember how it went…you know? ‘Mama-as, don’t letcha babies grow up to be cow-bo-ooys…’”
She was as tone deaf as he was, bless her sweet little—
Yeah, well. It wasn’t her heart he was interested in, Jake reminded himself as he carefully disengaged his left arm. Good thing he’d remembered in time. This dancing business, what with the music and that fancy dress of hers—if a guy wasn’t careful he could get snookered in so deep he plumb forgot his priorities. If there was one thing Jake was flat-out set on doing, it was keeping his priorities straight.
The Baby Notion Page 11