Joanna set the tray down on the table. "Clova's asleep. She must be feeling really bad. I've never seen her just go to bed like this."
Dalton looked at her, his spoon poised in the air, then returned to eating.
Joanna cocked her head and gave him a pointed scowl. "Aren't you worried about her?"
He put down his spoon and opened his palms. "What is it you think I should be doing?"
Joanna opened her mouth to scold him but stopped herself. There wasn't much to be done, by him or anyone else. Clova probably just needed a good rest. "I suppose you should keep an eye on her."
"I will." He shrugged. "If she's not okay in the morning, I'll take her into town to see a doc. If that's what she wants."
If he suggested that Clova see a doctor, she probably would. Satisfied, Joanna picked up the tray. "Even if she says she doesn’t want to, you should make her go."
"Soup's good," he said, changing the subject and making it obvious he didn't want her advice or recommendation. "We did a pretty good job cooking it. Why don't you have some?"
Joanna gave him a wary glance. He had done another about-face in attitude. What was he up to now? "I need to get home."
"Oh, yeah. Saturday night. Got a hot date?"
She huffed a laugh. "Only with my Tempur-Pedic mattress."
The minute the words came out of her mouth, a tiny lurch zipped through Joanna's middle. She turned her back and walked into the kitchen carrying the tray, wishing she had said yes, she did have a hot date. In her distraction, she banged the edge of the tray against the counter, clattering dishes and spilling soup on the linoleum floor. "Dammit!"
She grabbed some paper towels, dropped to her knees and began mopping up the mess. Fortunately, the soup was no longer hot.
Dalton came up behind her, tore off more paper towels and knelt beside her. His arm and hands touched hers as together they wiped up the soup and heaped the soggy paper towels onto the tray. He made no attempt not to touch her and every time his skin brushed hers, a new wave of nervousness washed over her.
When they finished, he stood up and placed a hand under her elbow, aiding her getting to her feet. For some weird reason, she felt a new desire to get along with him. "Thanks for helping out," she said.
He gave her a smile that made her knees tremble. "Least I could do for the cook."
Shaking off that weakness, she managed to smile back. "It would be a mistake to call me a cook."
They stood only inches apart. He braced a hand on the counter no more than two feet away, those eyes drilling her, his mouth still tipped into that smile. "How about hot?" he asked in a soft rasp. "Can I call you that?"
They were close enough for her to feel his body heat. She could smell his breath, yeasty and warm, and she could see the dark late-day stubble on his jaw. An odd tension traveled through her lower belly. "I wish you wouldn't. I wasn't impressed when you said it last night."
"Why not? Don't like guys, huh?"
The words drove away the seductive moment. "Oh, please," she snapped and moved back a couple of steps.
His eyes widened and he opened his palms. "Hey, look, what do you expect me to think? Mom says you're not married. Says you don't go out."
Joanna winced inside, wondering just how thoroughly Clova had discussed her with him.
"You don't have any roosters in that flock of chickens," he went on. "Is that symbolic of something? Without a little sex, how do you keep all those hens content? They could be plotting a mutiny right now."
She made a tiny sigh of indignation. "The hens don't care about sex."
His brow arched again. "How do you know? Does that blue-egg-laying chicken whisper it in your ear?"
She hesitated a few seconds, stumped for a reply. She might not know what he was up to, but she knew she shouldn't encourage him. He had a predatory gleam in his eye that, for some damned reason, she found alluring. So alluring, in fact, that if she wasn't careful, he would be sharing her Tempur-Pedic with her faster than she could change the sheets.
"I'm sure we'd disagree on what's important to chickens." She turned away, picked up the tray and raked the wet towels into the trash. "You've had too many beers. For your information, roosters cause trouble and try to dominate the flock." Just like men, she thought. "They're worthless for egg production."
"Is that a fact? I have to admit, I've never seen chicken sex. Actually, I've never been interested in looking for it, but I know it goes on."
Joanna's stomach lurched again. "Really."
"Yep. Otherwise, no new chickens. And no eggs. Common sense. It's the same with everything and everybody, darlin'. Even chickens. Takes two to tango."
"And you're an expert."
He gave a lopsided, smart-aleck grin. "I know a little about sex, yeah."
Determined not to react to his goading, she began to stack the soiled dishes, deliberately not looking into his face. "I don't know you well enough to be discussing sex with you."
"Oh, but you do, darlin'. Hell, you've taken over my mother and this whole damn place. I'll bet you know me better than I even think you do. You might even know me better than I know myself."
Enough was enough. She straightened, picked up a dishtowel and began to dry her hands. "You know, I've had a long day.” She threw the dishtowel onto the counter in a heap. “I've cooked the soup. Why don't you do the dishes?”
She walked out of the kitchen, speaking as she went. “And I'm not your darling, so don't call me that."
She passed through the dining room, then the living room, forcing herself to keep a steady step and not look back.
* * *
Dalton stood on the front porch watching Joanna Walsh walk to her truck and climb in. Yep, a body like an athlete. Sleek as a gazelle. Nice. Very nice. Imagining those finely toned thighs hugging his hips sent a tightening straight to his nether regions. Shit. The beast in his pants had never been able to tell the difference between a smart-ass who was dangerous and an empty-headed bimbo who just liked to screw.
He couldn't keep from wondering, despite what Miss Uptight said about going home to her mattress, what she might really have planned for a Saturday night in a small Texas burg. From what he remembered, a night on the town in Hatlow could be a trip to the Dairy Queen.
He would lay money that she kept herself off-limits, but no doubt most of the horny dudes around Hatlow had tried with a woman who owned a body and a face like hers. An image formed in his mind of her and some local yokel humping in a fancy bed. For some reason, he found that perplexing.
Her truck engine roared to life, her lights came on and just as she had left the kitchen without looking back at him, she drove away, toward the highway, also without looking back. He stood and watched until she reached the county road and her taillights disappeared.
Aw, to hell with it, he told himself. While he would like some female company during what looked more and more like an extended stay, even if he wanted to spend the time playing games with Miss Uptight or try to coax her into bed, he couldn't. She was his mother's friend and putting the make on her would be a chickenshit thing to do.
Chapter 11
Dalton walked back into the house and to his mother's bedroom door. He eased the door open, looked in and saw her sleeping. He stood there a few seconds, studying her.
She looked frail and small buried beneath a tattered old quilt that some ancestor had no doubt made by hand. He had never thought of her as a vulnerable person. In truth, he had never known what to think of her. Even now, after all these years, she was an enigma, a wheel within a wheel. He gently closed the door and returned to the dining room.
Cool air from the open windows had chased the day's heat from the house. Fall was like that in West Texas. Hotter than Hades in the daytime and cold as a desert grave at night. He could hear the steady tick of the old mahogany mantel clock, the mellow sound emphasizing its age and the silence that stole through the house like some friggin' ghost.
Tick… tick... tick.
The unrelenting sound, an echo from childhood, brought back a shitload of unwanted memories.
The old timepiece had sat there on the mantel ticking away forever. It had been ticking the night he realized he had become his own man. He was seventeen. He had driven the work truck to town to see a girl whose name he no longer remembered. When he returned home, he met his stepfather, drunk and raging, waiting for him in the living room with his belt in hand.
The old clock ticked through the fight that ensued.
You got no goddamn right to use that fuckin' truck for anything. I'm gonna whip your ass.
Dalton was had been six-feet-two and weighed one-ninety. He had taken his last whipping from a puffed up drunk like Earl Cherry. Before the sonofabitch could land a blow with the belt, Dalton doubled him over with a belly punch, then flattened him with a right to the jaw. Then he walked out, climbed back into the truck and returned to town.
He slept in the truck in the city park,Cherry had carried a facial bruise and been on a liquid diet for weeks.
Through his youth, Dalton had borne the brunt of many of Cherry's fits of violence, but from that night forward, his stepfather hadn't hit him again or even threatened him. Until the day Dalton left home for boot camp, a forced and chilly truce prevailed whenever he and the hateful bastard happened to be in the same room.
The old clock had been ticking the night two football scouts from Texas Tech appeared at the door and were turned away by Cherry. Later Dalton came to realize that being eighteen, he could have dealt with them himself. But by then he was in the marines and far away from Hatlow. The marine recruiters hadn’t required a meeting with his parents. He had liked being a marine better than playing football. The Marine Corps had given him a sense of purpose.
The thing that had been stuck in his craw all these years was that through all of it—the tantrums, the beatings, the meanness—his mother had rarely raised a voice in his defense. For a few years, he spent a lot of his time wondering why, but he never found an answer. He came to believe that she had been glad to see him leave. And he had thought, if that was what she wanted, then that was what she could have.
Tonight, the house had a dark and familiar loneliness about it. Generations of Parkers before him had hunkered inside its walls, hoping not to draw attention to themselves and risk the small-town society's condemnation or ostracism.
Only his great-grandmother had worn her Comanche relatives proudly. She hadn't worried about what the neighbors might think or say. He remembered her as a skinny, bark-tough woman who feared nothing living or dead except Earl Cherry. Dalton's mind spun back to the night Cherry, in one of his drunken tantrums, had left her shaking and crying after threatening to burn her house to the ground. If his mom had had any balls, she wouldn't have lived with a bullying sonofabitch who had heaped abuse and intimidation on the whole family, especially when he targeted an aged widow who didn't weigh a hundred pounds.
Through Dalton's life, no matter where his thoughts of family wandered, at some point, they had always come back to his animus for Earl Cherry. When he was away from here, it no longer felt important. He could and did avoid thinking about it. But here, in the place where he had spent his most miserable years, on a dark and silent night, memories rose all around him like demons lumbering up and out of a swamp. He hadn't suffered unease and vulnerability so profoundly in a long time, even in the savagery of the wars he had recorded for history.
“This damned old house is haunted,” he mumbled and forced the blackness from his mind. He sat down at the dining table with his computer and took himself to the place where he was happiest—immersed in his work.
* * *
I know a little about sex, yeah.
Something told Joanna he knew more than a little. Jerk!
She yanked off her clothing and pulled on her knit shorts and T-shirt. Prick!
At the bathroom sink she scrubbed her face harder than usual with a rough washcloth, carefully avoiding the tender bruise between her eyes. Conceited bastard!
She rubbed her face dry with a hand towel, leaving her cheeks and chin rosy. She threw down her towel, leaned in closer to the mirror and examined the injury to her forehead, dabbed on more antibiotic cream and applied a Band-Aid to the wound. She studied the fine lines forming at the corners of her eyes. Crap. She needed to wear more sunscreen. And a hat.
She generously slathered on anti-wrinkle cream, then stamped up the hallway to her bedroom. In her sixty-year-old house, the bathroom wasn't attached to the master bedroom. In truth, her little house had no master bedroom. What it did have was two small bedrooms just alike, with one bathroom between them. But she made no complaint. The house was perfect for her. How much room did a person who spent very few hours at home need? She flopped back on the bed, spread her arms wide and with a huge groan of pleasure, closed her eyes.
So just how the hell long would Dalton Parker be here? And how could she avoid running into him?
And she did have to avoid him. Good grief, every time she saw him, something weird happened to her insides and he made her so nervous she couldn't function.
And now he had brought up sex, for crying out loud.
Sex. Was the idea of sex responsible for the weird thing that happened to her insides? The word came to her every time she saw him. If there had ever been another time when just seeing a man automatically brought sex to mind, she couldn't recall it.
Well, she had no intention of ever letting something so perverse escape the confines of her innermost musings. And for a very good reason. For her, sex hadn't been so great. She had never known a fantastic lover like those she sometimes read about in romance novels. She doubted such men existed in real life.
Shari was the only woman she knew who appeared to have a fantasy sex life. But different strokes for different folks, Joanna figured. What Shari thought fantastic might be awful for someone else.
She got to her feet, pulled back the covers and slid between them with a great sigh, thinking of her last relationship that had included sex. It had been with Scott Goodman and would have to be classified as spotty at best. Much of the time their encounters had been clumsy. Embarrassing, even. She didn't know if that was her fault or his, but she suspected the problem lay with him.
The experience had been so awkward, so juvenile, she was embarrassed to discuss it even with Shari, with whom she discussed everything that had anything to do with sex. She had been relieved when she learned that Scott was seeing someone else because at that point, she had begun to consider that she could get just as pregnant with a lousy lover as with a great one.
The brief fling with him was all in the past. And just as well. No lover was the answer. She had given up.
But as she drifted toward sleep, a filmy image of the swarthy Dalton Parker without his clothes evolved in her trouble-making imagination.
The next morning, Joanna drove toward the Parker ranch hoping not to run into Dalton. After he had spent a good part of the night in her head; she didn't want to be around him the whole of today. Hadn't he said he intended to start work on the fence? A project that big should cause him to leave early and return late.
Arriving at the ranch, she saw all of the ranch's vehicles in place—the blue beat-up Ford pickup, Clova's newer Dodge Ram dually and the ATV. So Dalton must still be inside the house. Good. She hoped he stayed there.
She went directly to the barn and picked up two slabs of hay to feed the donkeys, placed them on her pickup’s tailgate, then stepped into the egg-tending room. She donned her cap and gloves, picked up her egg baskets and bucket and drove over to the chicken yard.
She had just put the hay in the donkeys' manger and returned to the gate to pick up her baskets and bucket when Dalton approached. He had on work clothes—faded jeans, a chambray shirt and suede vest and a faded cap. He wore the typical ranch garb so well he looked at home in it. The only item that conflicted with his cowboy appearance was his mirrored aviator sunglasses. He came to the fence.
"Watch the hot wire," she warned him, pointing to the low electric fence wires.
He looked down at his feet, and she did, too. He had on well-worn Ropers. She wouldn't have guessed he even owned a pair of Ropers. But of course he was a cowboy. He might no longer be directly involved with ranching, but he had grown up on this ranch.
He looked up. "What, this place is wired?"
"The two bottom wires are hot. To keep out the predators."
"Hunh," he grunted.
His sunglasses hid his eyes, but the usually cocky smirk was missing from his mouth. "I think Mom's got a fever," he said solemnly. "She's feeling pretty bad. Says she can't get her breath. I'm gonna take her into town to the doc. I thought you might help her get dressed and go with her."
Joanna had been the one to admit Clova to the hospital back in the spring. Without a word, she walked out of the chicken yard and set her egg baskets on the pickup’s tailgate. She peeled off her gloves and stuffed them into her pocket. Then she hurried to the house and walked on into Clova's bedroom.
She found Clova still in bed, her dark eyes bright from fever. Her skin had a pasty pallor. "Hey," Joanna said softly. "Dalton says you've got a fever."
"A little bit," Clova replied. "He called up Doc Russell's answering service and left a message to meet me in his office. I feel like I got the same thing again." She threw back the covers and turned to sit on the edge of the mattress.
Joanna rushed to her. "Let me help you get dressed. You should go on in to the emergency room now and see whatever doctor is there. It's Sunday. Dr. Russell might not get the message for hours. Just stay right there. Let me find you some clothes."
She pulled clean clothing from Clova's closet, glancing toward the doorway, where Dalton stood with his hands on his hips. His sunglasses dangled from one finger. His face held an expression of helplessness and concern.
"I think I told you she had pneumonia in the spring," she said to him. "It's better to be safe than sorry and take her on to the ER."
A small frown tented his brow and he nodded.
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