She recalled Betty’s reaction to getting the copy Paige emailed her. As subtly as possible, the woman basically told her, “You’re a tad overqualified for the position. The dogs don’t care if you speak French as long as you feed them every day.”
“Betty mentioned that. She was impressed.”
Doubtful.
He leaned back in his chair. “Change of plan.”
“Pardon?”
He nodded toward her suitcases huddled by the hallway door. “You haven’t even had time to unpack. That high end cooler won’t keep your perishables cold forever. And I bet you’d like a shower.”
A shower. God, yes.
“So, I’ll feed Miss Valentine those carrot bits and take a look at Betty’s Jeep. My friend, Sam, is sending his ace mechanic out this morning to see if we can get it running. There’s no way your Jag can handle this road for three weeks.”
“You’re a mechanic, too?”
“Gotta be a little bit of everything when you live as far out as I do.”
She admired that flexibility. When did I get so complacent?
She finished her plate and started to gather up their dirty dishes, but TJ stopped her, his hand lightly touching hers. The chain reaction that took place inside her body caught her off-guard. She froze—her gaze pinned on the sight of their two hands—as different as possible for being the same species. “I’ll clean up. Betty’s rules. The cook never cleans, the dishwasher never cooks.”
He stacked the plates and added their silverware and his empty cup. She watched him turn on the water at the sink and reach into the cupboard below for a container of liquid dish soap. He moved with speed and precision. He knows his way around because he grew up here, of course.
“Thank you. I really do need a shower.”
He glanced over her shoulder. “Go for it.” His smile turned to a grin. “But, personally, I kinda like the straw in your hair. Makes you look like a country girl.”
She dragged her fingers through her messy locks. Sure enough, she pulled out a long, golden piece. “Thank you. But, FYI, you might want to find a comb, too.”
His laugh made her feel normal. And good about the day ahead. About her choice of coming here. About…life.
How long has it been since I felt this way?
She knew the date exactly. Since the day she buried her baby girl.
Her Cowboy Valentine: Chapter 7
“Looks like something’s been snacking on these plug wires, wouldn’t you say?”
TJ leaned into the engine compartment of Betty’s Jeep. The Beast, as she lovingly called the twenty-five-year-old Wrangler, had been outfitted with a two-piece hardtop to handle the weather, but other than that was purely stock.
“What’s she got holding that hose on? A zip tie?”
TJ shifted to see where Murdock, Sam’s mechanic, was pointing. Hot pink, no less. So Betty.
“Betty would tell you the engine’s held together with baling wire and bubblegum…and plastic cable ties.”
Murdock—the only name TJ knew him by…first or last? he couldn’t say--was a grizzled, antisocial veteran of Vietnam, who did a stint in prison and claimed three failed marriages. “It ain’t gonna be pretty but with a few parts, I should be able to get it roadworthy for your girl.”
My girl? TJ started to set the record straight but decided maybe having Murdock invested in the repairs wasn’t a bad idea. She could be my girl if she were sticking around.
And I was anybody but me.
“Thanks, Murdock. I really appreciate your help.”
“Thank Sam. He said this one is on him.”
TJ opened his mouth to object, but stopped. Arguing with Murdock would be a waste of breath. “That sounds like Sam. I’ll owe him one. Hey, just out of curiosity, have you heard of anyone around here who’s missing a donkey?”
Murdock’s shaggy salt-and-pepper eyebrows met above his nose. “Nope. But I heard a couple of the youngsters—” Murdock’s name for the under-thirty cowboys who drifted through—“talking about a guy on FacePlace or whatever it is offering a reward for a lost donkey.”
“Really? I haven’t been on social media since…” His throat tightened. “For a long time. I’ll have Paige check that out when we get to town.”
Murdock’s bushy mustache wiggled back and forth. “Paige, huh? Your city girl? The one who drives that Jag…u…ar out there?”
TJ had expected a bit of razzing. “Her mom’s an old friend of Betty’s. Hate to think how much it’ll cost to replace the oil pan when she bottoms out on one of the ruts. Or has to hire someone to fix it. Above my pay grade. And she can’t be stranded out here without wheels.”
Murdock nodded solemnly. “Ain’t that the truth? Don’t normally have time for flatlanders, but something tells me this one is special.”
She’s beautiful, kind, complicated, and makes the best flapjacks on the planet. Does that qualify as special?
“Damn right.”
Murdock laughed. “That’s what I thought.” Then he rubbed his hands together and motioned toward TJ’s phone. “Let’s get some parts ordered so I can finish this today.”
Half an hour later, TJ’s truck bounced across Betty’s rock-’n’-roll driveway and turned toward town. His passenger leaned forward to look out the streaked windshield. “So, tell me about Prospect Creek.”
He regretted not getting the truck washed after last week’s snow and sleet, but with another storm on the horizon, he’d figured why bother?
“I heard somebody say it’s more rustic than quaint, and just unpretentious enough not to care.”
She sat back, smiling her drop-dead-gorgeous smile. “Oh, I like that. I live in a place where people aspire to be unpretentious, but it just doesn’t happen.”
She’d changed into dark blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater that reminded him of photos of his mother when she was a young girl. Willowy. Long, straight hair. A smoke in one hand even as a teen. Paige brought lightness and good health to the look.
“The town was settled in the Gold Rush era, wasn’t it? I vaguely remember climbing on some mining equipment in the town park or something when we passed through.”
“The mining and mineral supporters got their act together a few years ago and created an honest-to-goodness museum in the center of town. Better commercial value, I’m told.”
“After I talked to Betty, I looked at the Prospect Creek website. Half a dozen streets wide with about the same number spreading out in the other direction. Sounds like a nice size—and, given it’s not tourist season, I won’t have to worry about accidentally running into old friends.”
“Especially the ones who sided with your ex?”
The look she gave him showed surprise.
He didn’t open up often about his love life. No call to share, really. But he knew she’d be exposed to the rumors once he introduced her to some of the locals. “Small towns talk, too, you know.” Wasn’t that how he heard that Josh and Jenny were trying to get pregnant?
Heck, Gloria Harrison Hughes—the Prospect Creek Ledger’s staff gossipmonger—was probably writing a column about Betty’s new house sitter as they spoke. The old hag had done a real number on his and Mindy’s split. “You may hear some gossip about my breakup. It was public and ugly.”
“Define public?”
“Is that a challenge? You show me your scars and I’ll show you mine?
“Maybe.”
“Mindy and I were sort of the golden couple of the circuit for six…almost seven years. Then, I got hurt. It’s bull-riding. Everybody gets hurt at some point. I guess I thought I was smarter and luckier than most. But after four back surgeries, Mindy had had it up to here.” He made his palm level with the top of his head. “I wasn’t the best patient in the world.”
She made a face. “My mom was in a car accident not long after we moved to California. Had two vertebrae fused. It took her a full year to feel like herself again.”
His gut muscles contracted, lending
support to his posture. He’d finally learned what exercises worked and what didn’t. Sleeping on a pile of hay? Great idea…not.
He tucked away his discomfort to address it when he was home and alone. “Luckily, when I was on top of my game, I put my winnings into dirt.”
“Dirt?”
“Sixty acres. About twenty miles up the hill.” He pointed over his shoulder with his thumb. “Fenced. Had a well and a pad where I could build my dream home. And the best part? An old gold mine.”
“Gold? Really?”
“I started working to rebuild my muscles. Betty calls it my ‘escape.’ I get a little color now and then. But no sign of the mother lode.”
She turned toward him, drawing her left ankle under her. “I have a feeling there’s a ‘but’ coming up in this story.”
“I paid cash for the land. I didn’t pay attention to the taxes or how much building costs had skyrocketed. I also didn’t read the fine print in a contract I had with my girlfriend, who was my agent at the time.”
“You trusted her.” Her overly neutral tone told him she understood what came next.
He shrugged. “Betty said I’d been operating with blinders on for years. Only saw what I wanted to see. And that makes sense in a way. When you’re on the back of a bull, a ride lasts eight seconds if you’re lucky, but you’re so focused on keeping your seat, hearing the buzzer, and making it off the damn bull in one piece, the world around you is a blur.”
“And you think love is like that, too?”
“A crazy ride where you wind up broke, broken, and alone? Yup. Pretty much.”
She sat back, head cocked in a way that made him think she’d taken his theory seriously. “Interesting. I’ve never met a bull rider. Or a cowboy, for that matter. And I honestly would never have made any parallels between our lives, if you hadn’t just said that.”
He eased his foot off the gas as they entered the outskirts of town. “Really? How so?”
“When Brad and I were at the pinnacle of our business success, everything felt hyper. The glamour. The noise. The energy around us. In some ways, it felt liked eight breaths and the ride of a lifetime. But when we decided to have a child, I stepped back and the glue holding our lives together began to crack. Those fractures were always there…I was just too busy to notice.”
Fractures. He knew all about those—the kind on an X-ray and the kind that made a relationship implode.
“For a long time I was emotionally broken. And while I’m not financially broke, I feel like I’m starting from scratch again. Alone.”
A knot formed in his throat. Her honesty disarmed him.
Could he see a parallel between their stories? Yes.
Were they both veterans of bad love affairs? Apparently.
Did that mean a damn thing going forward? No.
He couldn’t afford to get sucked into any kind of emotional connection. Not happening. Not again.
He turned on his blinker and hit the brakes to turn into the Old Bordello’s parking lot. His grip on the steering wheel tightened.
He’d fallen for Mindy with no premonition about how things would turn out. He was older and wiser this time around. Only a masochist fails to learn from his mistakes.
He avoided the two cars in the lot—Ida Jane’s pink Caddie and Jenny’s small brown Honda—to pull up close to the front gate. “Would you mind if I drop you here while I run to the automotive place? Murdock’s gonna need those parts ASAP. So, I’ll do the errands while you use Ida Jane’s Wi-Fi to track down Miss Valentine’s owner. Murdock told me someone was offering a reward for his lost donkey on Facebook.”
Paige looked surprised by the sudden change of plan. She studied his face a moment. What does she see? Fear? Cowardice? Panic?
He faked a smile. “Two birds, one stop.”
“You’ll get the donkey food?”
“Feed store is just down the street from the parts place.”
She picked up her purse and opened the door. “Okay. I’ll be here when you get back.”
He knew he’d thrown her for a loop. But, hey, she’d as much as admitted she wasn’t in the market for romance, either. They both needed space. She’d thank him for this later.
♥ ♥ ♥
Paige tucked the hand-crocheted red wool scarf she’d borrowed from Betty’s collection into the gap above the top button of her thick flannel jacket—also Betty’s—as she watched TJ’s truck shoot out of the Old Bordello Antiques’s parking lot.
“Well, that was interesting.”
One minute they’d been having an in-depth conversation about love and loss, and the next, he’d practically tossed her out of his truck in an effort to distance himself from her.
“Men,” she muttered as she stomped her feet to get the circulation moving. The truck’s heater couldn’t compare to the Jag’s, but the truck certainly handled Betty’s road better.
A shiver passed down her spine as a gust of chilly air swept across the mostly empty parking lot. Slow day?
“It’s off season in Prospect Creek,” Betty had mentioned in their texts. “Locals only around this time of year.”
Locals that include a handsome cowboy with boundary issues.
She tucked her purse under one arm and started toward the large white two-story, turn-of-the-century home with an intricately crafted twisted wire fence—partly overgrown by some kind of vine that looked like it had been there forever.
“Oh! Hello!” a woman’s voice called out from the foot of the stairs of the building a few yards from Paige. She advanced quickly—her gaze searching the parking lot for a car. “It’s always a surprise to see a new face here in winter. Most of the time we feel like we’re hibernating. Did you walk from one of the motels?”
The perky redhead with a peaches and cream complexion was probably in her late twenties to early thirties. Her practical leather shoes, gray slacks, and heavy woollen pea coat she hadn’t bothered to button would have made Paige think “teacher” even without the armload of books she was carrying.
“A friend…um…TJ Huey dropped me off. I’m house-sitting—”
“For Betty McFee,” the woman completed. “I should have guessed. Normally, I would have heard TJ’s truck’s engine, but my aunt had the music turned up.” She shook her head in a what’s-a-person-to-do way. “Do you know any eighty-year-olds who love PINK?”
Her laugh was refreshing and real.
Paige held out her hand. “Paige Jackson.”
“Jenny Sullivan-O’Neal. It’s a pleasure to meet you. Poor Betty was really fretting about not being able to go rescue wild mustangs. I know this means a lot to her.”
Paige hadn’t expected this sort of greeting. But, then, she’d never lived in a community like Prospect Creek.
Jenny’s pretty smile turned to a look of concern. “Wait a minute. TJ just dropped you off here without so much as a howdy do? Ida Jane won’t like that.”
“We have an injured donkey at the Refuge. And I made the mistake of thinking my city car could handle Betty’s road.”
Jennie winced. “Ooh, it’s a bearcat.”
“Sam…your brother-in-law, I believe? sent his mechanic to fix Betty’s Jeep. TJ is buying parts. And picking up donkey food. I’m hoping to use your aunt’s Wi-Fi to track down the donkey’s owner—who I may have to turn into the police for abusing Miss Valentine. And I need to buy some proper boots online…unless you have a local shoe shop.”
They both looked at Paige’s feet.
“Ooh. Those were nice.”
“Were being the operative word.”
“The hardware store carries rain boots, but I’d be surprised if they have your size. You’ll be better off ordering what you want. If Murdock can’t get the Jeep running, have TJ let Sam know and I’ll run your package up when it comes in.”
Wow. I wouldn’t get that kind of offer back home…not without a big string attached.
“Thanks. That’s really kind of you.”
“My pleasure. I ad
ore Betty. She’s good people, you know? Ida Jane was just telling me how relieved she was that Betty found you. And, don’t worry; you’re in great hands with TJ. He’s been taking care of Betty ever since he got back.”
She gave Paige a stern “school teacher” look. “Have Ida Jane give you my cell number. I know reception is sketchy up there—especially at the mine. In case you can’t get hold of TJ, call me. Now, I have to run. Sorry.”
Jenny turned sideways so the two could pass on the narrow path.
“Do you work with your aunt?”
“Weekends if she needs me. Ida Jane is actually my great-aunt, but she raised me and my sisters after our parents died in a car accident.” She glanced at the building with a tangible fondness. “We grew up here.”
The woman’s loss added to the feeling that she and Paige had more in common than seemed possible. “My dad passed away when I was young, too. I had my mom, but I really would have loved having a sibling.” Far more information than she usually shared with strangers. Was this what she got for spilling her guts to TJ? The dam is open, look out downstream.
Jenny shrugged. “It’s the only life we knew. What are you gonna do, right?” She blew out a breath. “Ida Jane can tell you the long and boring saga of the Sullivan triplets.”
Triplets?
“Although I beg you to take her version with a grain of salt, so to speak. She’s eighty-one and really sharp for her age, but details shift over time…if you know what I mean.”
She tapped the phone resting on top of the books. “Eek,” she cried when the info appeared. “Gotta dash. Believe me, you never want a room full of fourth graders to see you sweat.”
Jenny hurried to her compact car. It shot out of the parking the same way TJ’s truck had a few minutes earlier. Something akin to envy made Paige sigh. I remember when I had places to go, appointments to make, and people waiting on my decisions.
She mounted the steps of the six-foot-wide covered porch that stretched in both directions across the front of the building—a giant-size version of Betty’s. Each wing appeared stocked with interesting, if cobwebby antiques: a rattan patio set in need of a good wash, several appliances decades old, fishing regalia, and farm implements of every size and shape.
Cupid to the Rescue: A Tail-Wagging Valentine's Day Anthology Page 76