by Dixie Cash
He marched to the rear end of the—what was it, a Cadillac? “Gimme your keys,” he said.
She went to the cab, returned with the keys, and placed them in his hand. “I’m sorry. It’s just that I thought—”
“I know what you thought. It doesn’t matter. Look, Scarlett, you’re not the only one who’s got to be somewhere, so just step out of my way and let me get this done.”
She watched in silence, thank God, as he dug tools and a spare tire from the back of the Cadillac and set about changing her tire. In less than half an hour, he finished and laid the flat tire and the tire tools inside the back end of the SUV. “That does it. You’re all set.”
He looked down. Shit. His shined boots and his jeans were covered with white caliche dirt. And black grime. He began to dust the front of the jeans with his dirty palms, making the situation worse. Mumbling and cussing, he yanked his clean handkerchief from his back pocket and began to wipe his hands. “You shouldn’t drive on that phony tire any longer than you have to. And you shouldn’t drive fast.”
She approached with his shirt. When he reached for it, their fingers touched for a second. She jerked her hand back and stared at him as he shrugged into the shirt. He stared back as he buttoned it. He turned then and headed for his truck, undoing his belt and fly and tucking in his shirttail as he went.
“Thank you so much,” she said behind him. “I really appreciate it. Maybe we’ll—”
He shut her off by climbing into his truck and slamming his dented door. Pulling away, he threw one last look in his rearview mirror. She was still standing in the middle of the highway on those mile-long legs. A part of him felt uncomfortable leaving her out there all alone. He couldn’t keep from thinking about one of his sisters being left in the same predicament. He would drive slow, he decided, and watch out for her.
Paige McBride. Her name was engraved on a pink piece of notepaper stuffed in his wallet. She was the last person he expected to ever run into again. She was the last person he should feel drawn to. Wasn’t she the epitome of everything that disgusted him in women? Wasn’t she way out of his league?
Of course, she was.
He had bigger fish to fry anyway. A dream was within his grasp. Getting tangled up with a ditzy blonde and screwing up everything just wasn’t going to happen.
He watched in his rearview mirror as she pulled onto the highway and drove behind him.
five
Drying her hands on a paper towel, Debbie Sue Overstreet walked outside the Styling Station. Her best friend and business partner, Edwina Perkins-Martin, was yelling directions up to her husband, Vic Martin, who worked at mounting an additional sign alongside the Styling Station billboard atop the building. When Vic started this project, the biggest problem, as Debbie Sue could have told anybody, was his dogged determination to do it his way, thereby ignoring Edwina’s instructions.
Edwina, who had given up Marlboro Lights a few months back, shoved a stick of gum into her mouth and called out, “Vic, honey, please remember how much I love you when I say this, but if I had a gun right now, I’d shoot you off that roof. Why are you so stubborn? I keep telling you what you need to do and you just go right on like I don’t have good sense and do it a different way.”
Vic Martin and Edwina had been married a year, after living together several years prior to the wedding. Vic was a retired navy SEAL, now given to the independent solitude of driving big rigs across the country. He would take guff from only one living person, and that was the skinny, long-legged brunette now handing him just that. He gave her a devilish grin. “It’s my stubbornness that’s kept us together so long, Mama Doll.”
Debbie Sue squinted up at Vic and the sign. “How’s it going?”
Vic’s attention swung to Debbie Sue. “Hey, cowgirl, how’s this look?”
DOMESTIC EQUALIZERS the sign read. Debbie Sue still had a hard time believing that the beauty salon she had owned and operated for the past five years was now a private investigation agency as well as a salon. “Super,” she answered.
Vic stepped down the ladder and came to stand beside them. Edwina used her hand to block the sunlight as she peered upward. “Well, I’ll be damned. It does look great. I take it all back, sugar-foot.” She raised on her tiptoes to plant a kiss on Vic’s cheek. “You’re the best.”
Besides being the best, he was the only man Debbie Sue had ever seen with whom Edwina could wear her high-heeled platform shoes and still have to tiptoe to kiss him.
Debbie Sue stared at the new sign, still in awe over what it represented. And all that had transpired in the short year since Alex Martinez had been arrested for Pearl Ann Carruthers’s murder.
She had collected a fifty-thousand-dollar reward for solving the murder and facilitating his arrest. She tried to split it with Edwina, as had been their original agreement, but her partner in crime solving had refused to take half.
“We put a lot of the pieces together,” Edwina told her at the time, “but our jigsaw turned out to be the wrong puzzle. It was you alone, girlfriend, who figured out the killer’s identity. It was you who risked your life to catch the bastard.”
Though Debbie Sue had remarried her former husband Buddy, who now had a job as a Texas DPS trooper and a regular paycheck, Debbie Sue still sought additional income.
Building on the publicity generated from solving Pearl Ann’s murder, she dragged Edwina kicking and screaming into the private detective business. With Debbie Sue’s daring and keen eye, Edwina’s experience with three cheating, no-good ex-husbands, and opportunity to pick Vic’s brain—after all, he was an expert in surveillance and covert techniques—the success of the business was guaranteed.
Edwina had extracted a promise that they would never get involved in anything life threatening. Debbie Sue agreed because Buddy wouldn’t stand for the mother of his future children to do something dumb and dangerous.
Buddy had been the sheriff of Salt Lick back when Pearl Ann’s murder occurred. Now, working toward his lifelong goal of becoming a Texas Ranger, he was not happy about the Domestic Equalizers and watched both equalizers with as close an eye as his DPS trooper job allowed.
Debbie Sue had never thought the detective gig would catch on, really. She was stunned to find the Domestic Equalizers’ phone never stopped ringing. Both men and women sought them out to spy on philandering love interests.
“This calls for a drink,” Edwina announced, giving a thumbs-up to the job Vic had done with the sign. “And a toast. I’ll make the margaritas.” She headed for the storeroom in the back of the Styling Station.
THE REMAINING DRIVE into Salt Lick proved uneventful for Spur. He twisted the radio knob until he came to a clear signal, a country music station. He appreciated the music and the chatter filling the truck cab’s emptiness.
As he entered the town, he remembered he had been to Salt Lick as a kid of no more than thirteen. To his astonishment, except for a single hanging traffic light, little had changed. Small businesses still lined the two-lane main street. A metal awning bleached white by the sun still shadowed the store windows. Some new paint might have been added in places to the storefronts.
Spur had lived in several towns like Salt Lick. Small, dusty communities had once thrived in an oil and agriculture economy all over West Texas. Many had declined to almost ghost towns, but Salt Lick appeared to be different. It showed no boarded-up store windows, no run-down, abandoned buildings on the main street. A giant footprint of a Wal-Mart Super Center had yet to be stamped in the sand. The quaint mom-and-pop stores still ruled. That obvious fact, as much as anything, made the place appear to be frozen in time.
Yep, the decision to buy the veterinary practice and move here had been the right one.
Dr. Miller had given up his career for a woman. His assistant of the past fifteen years, Virginia Pratt, was relocating to Nashville, following her own career as a country music composer. Dr. Miller aimed to go with her. Amazing. Where did love of that depth and dimension come from?
�
��Not me, buddy,” Spur mumbled. No how, no way.
Ahead loomed a squatty, pumice-stone square building on the corner of Main and Spanish Trail. A sign hung on a post out front. SHERIFF’S OFFICE. A tall, thin cowboy was throwing a lariat loop at a fire hydrant huddled on the corner of the sidewalk.
As Spur stopped to watch, the black Cadillac sped past him. “Thank God,” he mumbled, continuing to watch the cowboy, whose rope slipped and knocked his hat to the ground. When the guy bent to pick it up, leaning too far, he lost his balance and fell forward, ensnaring his boots in the slack loop. He hit the ground, throwing his arms up and out in front of himself to cushion his fall and in the process, pulled the rope into a tight noose around his ankles. Within a matter of seconds he had hog-tied himself, and his hat lay crushed between him and the sidewalk.
Instead of being a testimony to the spirit of the West, the episode was a caricature of the lack thereof.
Sighing and shaking his head, Spur rolled down his window, set to ask if the guy needed help, when a frantic, plump woman waddled from the sheriff’s office doorway.
“Sheriff, are you all right? Are you hurt?”
Sheriff? Spur grinned.
Yep, this was a place he could grow fond of.
REACHING SALT LICK, Paige was dismayed at how dilapidated and dingy the town looked. She had been here years ago accompanying Daddy on a cattle-buying trip to the Carruthers ranch. Back then, the town hadn’t seemed so dinky and dirty. Of course her impression had been prejudiced by her opinion of the Flying C Ranch, which was larger than the McBride spread just outside the city limits of Fort Worth.
What appeared to be the only traffic light in town turned red, allowing a John Deere tractor to cross in front of her. The driver looked to be twelve. He nodded as he passed, his demeanor atypical for an adolescent boy. Paige had forgotten that kids in this part of the country, out of necessity, drove at young ages. Why not? What was there to run over?
Her gaze swerved to what, at first glance, appeared to be a service station on the corner—except that a tall, skinny brunette was busy draping belted trench coats on the two antique gasoline pumps in front. The upturned collars, the fedoras perched on the rounded tops and slender pedestal bottoms made perfect mannequins. What was that about?
The sign atop the building read THE STYLING STATION & DOMESTIC EQUALIZERS.
The woman dressing up the gas pumps looked familiar. Then, Paige recognized her. Edwina Perkins. Her picture had appeared in an article in Texas Monthly. She was one of the two Salt Lick hairdressers who had solved one of the most infamous murders in the history of West Texas.
Paige made a note of the salon’s location. She prayed they did nails, dared not hope they also did massages.
As she left Salt Lick, motoring toward the Flying C, thoughts of the rugged cowboy who had fixed her flat and hefted the tire and tools around as if they were toys refused to leave her mind. Crossing paths with him again was so strange. He must live in this part of Texas. Otherwise, what would he be doing here? Why would anybody—besides her desperate self—be roaming this desolate part of the world if he didn’t live here?
No wonder she continued to think of him. How could any normal woman not have stared at those muscular arms as he worked? Who could forget such a finely sculpted chest and abdomen? He had a six-pack all right and it wasn’t the drinking kind.
Only two types of activity would develop a body into such good shape—hours in a gym or manual labor. In this part of Texas, the bodybuilding regimen had to be manual labor—working in the oil fields or cowboying for some ranch. Phooey! She knew, and had spent too much time, with both types.
She had been in a near swoon by the time he finished changing her tire, but he had given the dirt on his hands—and her—the brush-off. Why, he hadn’t even talked to her. No conversation. Period. He grabbed his shirt and drove away as if she were some object in the road that had to be moved before he could move on.
All at once she realized her speed had reduced to a crawl. God, what was wrong with her? Instead of the cowboy’s good looks, she should be considering his rudeness. A combination of sex appeal and bad-boy behavior had lured her to men like him in the past. Thank God, he didn’t seem the least bit interested in her. That had to be a good thing. With a new life to plan, she didn’t need any distractions.
Twenty minutes beyond downtown Salt Lick, Paige crossed the cattle guard entrance to the Flying C Ranch and roared up the caliche driveway. At the adobe-style main house a petite blonde woman crouched on her hands and knees digging among profuse blooms in one of the flower beds.
The woman got to her feet and came forward with a big smile. She had a red bandanna on her head, denim coveralls rolled to the knees, and an undeniable tummy bulge.
“Hi, you must be Paige? I’m Carol Jean Carruthers. Come on in and let me fix you some iced tea.”
Was this the new—and improved—Mrs. Carruthers? It was common gossip that the only digging the former Mrs. had done was for gold. Except for beauty, Harley Carruthers’s current wife appeared to be the polar opposite of his previous one. Paige slid out of the Escalade. They walked toward the house and Mrs. Carruthers looped her arm inside Paige’s as if they had known each other forever.
“I’m sorry you caught me digging in the dirt,” the new Mrs. Carruthers said, opening the front door and gesturing Paige inside. They stepped into a large, cool foyer with a red tile floor and golden walls on which hung the several Charles Russell originals that Paige remembered seeing before.
The Carrutherses’ main house befitted a ranch located in the outreaches of West Texas—rugged leather furnishings, woven Santa Fe rugs, original western art hanging on the walls. It was everything a real ranch house should be, unlike the baroque antiques and frilly, silly decor her stepmother had filled Daddy’s house with. From the day Margaret Ann moved in, Paige had felt like an interloper in that house and hoped she never had to live there again.
“I wanted to take advantage of this beautiful weather we’re having,” Mrs. Carruthers said. “I was hoping to make the place more, um, homey.” She led Paige to a rustic red suede sofa in the giant living room. “Don’t you think flowers are a wonderful way to be greeted?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Paige said shyly.
“Ma’am? Oh heavens, don’t call me that.” A bubbly laugh erupted from the second Mrs. Carruthers. “Call me C.J. or Carol Jean. I answer to both. So tell me, how are things in Fort Worth? My girlfriends and I used to party in the Stockyards sometimes. We had so much fun. But that was a long time ago. I love your dress. You look like Career Girl Barbie. Has anyone ever told you, you look just like a life-size Barbie doll?”
Hoping the woman didn’t mean to be hurtful by making the comparison, Paige smiled tightly. “Did you mention iced tea before? I would really love something to drink. I had some car trouble on the road—”
“Oh, no! You didn’t!” Carol Jean’s brow tented. “Are you okay? You should have called us. Were you out there long? Did anyone help you?”
Paige explained about the cowboy lending his assistance, including a detailed physical description. “Does that sound like someone who lives around here?”
Carol Jean tilted her head back and laughed. “That sounds like most of the men in these parts. ’Scuse me, I’ll get you that tea.”
Paige watched as her new friend left the room. She wanted to ask if a baby was on the way, but felt the question to be too forward. Harley entered with a huge grin on his face and Paige rose from the sofa to meet him. He briskly crossed the room, but instead of shaking Paige’s extended right hand, he wrapped her in a big bear hug that threatened to smother her.
He set her away and looked her up and down. “Paige McBride, you’re all grown up. I knew you’d be a beautiful woman one day and just look at you. Yep, a real beauty. You look just like—”
“I know. Barbie.”
“Well, no, I was going to say you look just like your mother. I had a big crush on her when I was a ki
d. All of us knuckleheads did. She was an extraordinary woman. I’ve never seen anyone, man or woman, any better with horses. And she always smelled like an angel would if you ever met one.”
Paige felt the sudden smarting of tears. The visual image of her mother had dimmed with time, but one thing she still remembered clearly was indeed her mother had smelled heavenly. “Thank you so much, Harley. That’s nice of you to say. Congratulations on your marriage. I know it’s been a year, but this is the first time I’ve seen you.”
Carol Jean returned with a tray of tall drinks. Harley was quick to meet her and take the tray. “I guess you met my angel,” he said, turning his head Paige’s way.
“Isn’t he just awful?” Carol Jean said. “Here I am, pregnant and big as a heifer, with dirt all over me, and he calls me an angel.” She gave an affectionate push against his shoulder.
“When is the baby due?” Paige asked her.
“Four months.”
“We can hardly wait,” Harley added.
Carol Jean turned to her husband. “Look, sweetie, I’m going to leave you two to conduct your business. If you need anything, just holler. I’ll be out in the kitchen.” She turned back to Paige with a dimpled smile. “Find me before you leave. I want to show you the nursery.”
Harley looked down at his wife with obvious pride. “She designed it herself.”
After Carol Jean left the room, Harley took a seat on one end of the sofa and motioned for Paige to sit on the other. “Buck said you’ve had some problems finding a job in the Metroplex.”
Funny how polite and tactful those words sounded. Much less stinging than so you’ve been tossed out on your ass in everything you’ve tried. “I’ve run into some bad luck, that’s for sure. I appreciate you talking to me. I don’t have a lot of office skills, but I’m a hard worker and I’m willing to start at any level.”
Harley’s expression turned quizzical. “Buck didn’t tell you what I’ve got in mind for you?”
Fearing she was the butt of a joke, Paige smiled weakly. “He just said you thought you had something for me. Not much else. Just that.”