Mack swore. It wasn’t something he normally did, but the situation in this case seemed to warrant it. He was not only worried about his sister and her safety, but come on, he had her two little girls. What was he going to tell them?
“Robert?”
“Yeah?”
“I think you need to come back here to Oklahoma. Your dad and I can’t keep the girls, of course, but we should be involved in their care.”
He couldn’t disagree with that.
“After all, what do you know about children and girls in particular?”
His mother didn’t mean it as an insult, and she was right. He’d never spent time with kids. Never wanted to. Gina, Clay’s daughter who’d been with the harvest crew this summer, didn’t really count since she was older. Old enough to take a shower on her own and help with the cooking and cleaning. Old enough to speak in full sentences. Old enough to go to school during the day so he could get something done.
“I’m finding out how much I don’t know.” He probably should have helped Angela with the baths, rather than showering himself. She’d promised to do the bathing every night, but he did know there were no guarantees in life.
“That’s why you need to bring them home, honey. Plus, it’s almost Christmas. We want to spend the holidays with our grandchildren.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You know what I meant.” She sighed, a worried sound that said so much more than her words were saying. “With us not knowing what’s going on with your sister, I’d just really like to have you and the girls close.”
“I understand, Mom, and I’ll do my best. But I can’t cancel the plans I’ve made just because Robyn disappeared.” He didn’t go into the business he was thinking about purchasing. That was a whole different conversation that he didn’t want to have. “Maybe you guys could come up here for a few weeks.”
The boardinghouse cost wasn’t high, and he would help with it, since his parents didn’t have much extra.
“I’ll talk to your father.”
He didn’t laugh at that, although he wanted to. He knew as sure as the sky was blue that his parents would do whatever his mom decided. She said she’d talk to his dad, but his dad didn’t get a vote.
His dad seemed okay with their arrangement, and so Mack didn’t say anything, but he’d decided long ago he wasn’t getting fitted for a nose ring himself.
Didn’t mean he wasn’t getting married. Just meant he wasn’t getting married to someone who thought she got to make all the decisions and he’d be a “yes” man. Not happening.
He hung up with his mom shortly after and slipped down the stairs. Mr. Swanson was in the living room, reading a book, and didn’t look up as Mack went by.
He had on clean jeans and a t-shirt, but he’d not put his boots back on, so Angela didn’t hear him until he’d stepped into the light.
Her head yanked up, and it took her eyes a minute to focus. They ran from his toes to his chest and seemed to get stuck there. Then she shook her head, like she’d been thinking of something else, and gave him a friendly smile.
“Your seat,” she said, pointing to an end chair where the cookie container sat.
“Really?”
“Sure. The girls are in bed, and you don’t have to be a good example anymore.”
“Oh. So I can chew with my mouth open and talk with it full?”
“Um. No?” She scrunched her face up and looked so cute he had to laugh.
His laugh faded out, and he sat in the chair she’d designated for him.
“Did something happen?” she asked softly.
His mouth tightened as he opened the lid of the cookie container. “Not really. Talked to my mom some.”
She didn’t move, and he had the feeling she’d allow him to let it go if he didn’t want to share. But she’d helped him with the girls, so he kind of felt like he owed her the info.
“She hasn’t heard from my sister. At all. When I brought the girls with me, I thought it’d be a few days, maybe a week.” He shrugged his shoulder and held a cookie in his hand. “Maybe it still will be. I don’t know. I don’t know what to think. Not sure I understand how a person can just walk away from their kids, their life, and ditch their responsibilities, and...” He waved the hand with the cookie before making it a one-bite job.
“I can’t believe you just stuck that entire thing in your mouth.”
He snorted. But he did swallow before he said, “I’ve spent the last ten springs, summers, and winters living in a camper with nine other guys.” He held up another cookie. “This is nothing.” He ate that one in one bite, too.
“I don’t think I want to talk about that.”
“I guarantee you, you don’t.” He smirked. “If me eating a cookie in one bite offends you, I could speak three sentences and have you running out of the room, screaming, with a dish towel over your head.”
“That should not be a point of pride.”
“Oh, but it is.” He gave her the smile that made his dimples pop, wanting her to notice him and not because of the bet.
She looked back down at her papers and didn’t seem to notice the dimples. He told himself it didn’t matter to him anyway.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” she said, her pencil doodling along the edge of the paper.
“Yeah. Well, I’m worried about her, I admit. But I’m annoyed with her, too. My parents want me to go back home, but if I’m going to take over Clay’s business, I need to be here.”
“Home is which state?” she asked, looking up. He couldn’t read anything but general curiosity in her eyes.
“Oklahoma. Southwest part. Grew up in a trailer park there.” Didn’t see any reason to sugarcoat his childhood. “Graduated high school and got a job right out of the gate on Clay’s crew. Best thing that ever happened to me.” He put the lid on the cookie container. “I don’t blame him for wanting to settle down, though.”
“I see.”
And it seemed like she did. She didn’t ask any more questions anyway.
“So, what are you working on? I promised to help, and I don’t even know what you’re doing.”
“It goes along with putting the decorations up.” She arranged her papers, then turned a couple to face him. “I’m in charge of the Christmas festival. I wanted it to be the best ever, but trying to get everything coordinated has been a nightmare.”
He pulled the papers toward him. “Food vendors.”
“Yes.”
“A giant gingerbread house to decorate. All-you-can-eat pancake breakfast. A run, run Rudolph 5K? Really?”
“Sure. Lots of people are running now.”
“In North Dakota? In December?”
“This is not helping.”
“This is tough love.”
“How about a ski, ski Rudolph? A cross-country ski race.”
“Maybe you’re joking, but that actually sounds like a good idea to me.”
The serious, concerned look on her face gave way as one side of her mouth tilted up. He liked that he was the cause of that.
They talked for another two hours, making several lists and organizing the tasks that Angela admitted felt very overwhelming to her, even though she’d been organizing things in her church for years.
Different people and different expectations, he figured.
It was late when she finally gathered her papers up and put them in her folder.
“What are you doing tomorrow afternoon?” He knew they were working with the bucket truck and decorations until lunch.
“I work the afternoon and dinner shift at Patty’s Diner.”
“That’s great. I’ll bring the girls in for supper. We’ll sit in your section.”
“It’s all my section.” She grinned.
He got the feeling that she enjoyed working at the diner.
She gave the papers a last tap. “I’ll bring you guys a pie home.”
“Isn’t that stealing?”
“Nope. I provide my own ingredients,
and Patty allows me to sell them in the diner because they bring people in.”
“That good, huh?”
“Yep,” she said with a cheeky grin, standing as he did.
Something pinged in his stomach, and he realized he’d enjoyed himself as much this evening with Angela as he had on any other night in recent memory.
She walked to the doorway. “Thanks for your help.”
He blew out a breath, wondering at the odd sensation that made him feel like he didn’t want her to leave.
“Sure,” he said. “Think I’ll take a walk around outside before I head up.”
“Okay.” Her shoulder lifted a little, and she turned, giving him the impression she didn’t care what he did.
He wasn’t sure why that bothered him so much.
Chapter 5
The next evening, Mack brought the girls into the diner as he’d said he would. Angela had been looking for them all evening, but he’d come in late. Just an hour until closing. Which was good, in a way, since the diner had pretty much cleared out and she would be able to sit with them.
She took their order and got their drinks, and it didn’t take long until their food was up. Ashleigh had ordered a pancake, while Holly, a year older and more mature, had ordered chicken fingers. Mack had ordered a full meal with mashed potatoes and gravy and a hamburger to go along with it.
She watched in amazement from the other side of the booth as he ate it all.
“Aren’t you eating?” he asked as he wiped the last of the ketchup up with his lone remaining fry.
“You just ate enough for both of us.”
“Didn’t have lunch.”
“I thought you were going to Clay’s? I can’t believe Mrs. Stryker didn’t feed you.”
“She fed the girls, and Lark watched them until they went down for naps, but Clay wanted to get about eight young bulls cut, and I went straight out to give him a hand.”
“Cut?”
His lips turned up, and they stretched even farther when her eyes tracked to his dimples. “Means exactly what you think it does.”
“I have no idea what it means. I assume you’re talking about using a knife on an animal?”
He must have realized she truly didn’t have any idea. “I’m sorry, lady. If you’d grown up in the Cities, I might cut you some slack, but seriously? You’re from corn country Colorado, and you don’t know about castration? Gimme a break.”
She gave a little gasp. Her eyes widened, then they flew to the girls who were still chewing on their food.
His eyes glinted as her cheeks turned pink. “Should we be talking about this in front of the children?”
“Good grief, woman. Those kids could watch the commercials on daytime TV and see worse stuff than castration.”
“Shh,” she said, with another concerned glance at his nieces.
He ignored her. “There’s two ways to do it. You can band ’em, but cutting’s quicker and easier. You just make a little slice and pop ’em—”
“That’s enough.” She put a hand up. “I don’t need to know the details.”
He nodded at her half-eaten hamburger. “You think they grow that in the grocery store? Don’t you want to know where your food comes from?”
“No.” It wasn’t a hard decision.
“Well, you were asking about my lunch, and I was telling ya that if everything had gone okay, we’d have been in and eaten, but Clay slipped with the razor blade, and one of the boys wouldn’t stop bleeding. We ended up banding him, but the size he was made that a chore in itself, ’cause ya band ’em when they’re smaller and cut ’em when they’re bigger. Anyway, it was a mess, and we ended up stringing up a makeshift electric fence to keep all eight of them down so we can keep an eye on that boy ’til we’re sure he’s not getting infected.”
At some point, she’d stopped squirming. She folded her hands primly. “I just want you to know I’m singing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ in my head and not paying the slightest bit of attention to you.”
His eyes glinted. “You can do lambs, too. Horses, roosters, pigs. Although pigs are a little touchy. You do ’em when they’re small, and you gotta watch the mamma. Those little things squeal like you’re killing ’em, and the mamma pig’ll take your leg off. After her baby’s safe, she’ll eat the leg, too.”
“You’re trying to upset me now, and it’s not going to work.”
“You’re the one who brought up lambs. I just added pigs to the conversation.”
She laughed, shaking her head. “I’m never going to need to know this stuff. So you can stop educating me if that’s what you’re doing.”
“Just making conversation about my day,” he teased. “Tell me about yours, and I’ll shut up.”
“I did not cut anything except pie today. And I most certainly did not cut anything that was still alive. I made the calls that we talked about, but all that talk about blood and castration has taken me right out of the Christmas spirit.”
“Then you can help me work on putting more of those light pole decorations up with the bucket truck. If we work for three hours, we might be half done. That ought to get you back in the spirit.”
Her brows lifted. “Really? You’ll go work on them some more?”
“Sure.” He shrugged, the movement of his shoulders somehow emphasizing their width. She pulled her eyes away. “If we’re able to do the same tomorrow, we’ll be done, then the next night we can drive to Rockerton and pick up the supplies you needed, and we’ll have time to check out their Christmas lights. The girls would like that.”
“Better than castration, I would think.”
“Maybe they’ll be vets.”
He was as good as his word getting in the bucket truck, turning its flood light on, and working in the dark. She watched for a while, but her help didn’t really make things go faster, and when the girls started rubbing their eyes, she took them down the street to their boardinghouse, gave them baths, and read them stories until they fell asleep. No crying, thankfully. But it did make her curious if Mack had heard anything from his sister or mother. It hurt her heart to see the little girls and know their mother was somewhere far away.
She was sitting at the table with her Christmas festival papers neatly piled to the side as she made table favors, a hot glue gun in one hand and sparkly beads in the other, when Mack came in.
“Half done,” he said as he closed the door. His cheeks and nose were bright red.
“Want some coffee or tea to warm you up?”
“Nah. I’ll take a shower and be back down in a minute to...I was gonna say give you a hand, but maybe I’ll just watch. That looks dangerous.”
What was it about this guy that could make her giggle like a teenager?
“I’ll have some pie ready for you when you come down. Is pumpkin with whipped topping okay?”
“Sure. Throw some chocolate sauce on that puppy, and I’ll eat two.”
Her eyelids fluttered up and down. She had to force them to stop. “Chocolate sauce?” She tilted her head. “On pumpkin pie?”
“Ate it on a dare once. That’s one of those mistakes that worked. Stuff’s good. Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.”
He touched her shoulder with his hand as he walked past. Nothing he meant to do, probably. But it kind of shocked her. She told herself it was because she wasn’t used to being touched. Her parents were never demonstrative, and in the months since she’d left her husband, she really never touched anyone except the kids she worked with and now Mack’s nieces.
The shower had quit running before she realized she’d never gotten his pie out.
By the time he came down, she had two pieces on a plate with lots of whipped topping. She hadn’t been able to decimate the pie with the chocolate sauce, but she’d set the bottle beside it.
Her heart turned over when he looked at the pie and the chocolate sauce, then looked at her with a half-smile and a challenge in his eye.
“No,” she said automatically.
“You’re gonna make me do this by myself?”
“It’s what you wanted.”
“After I just spent my entire evening outside, putting up your decorations.”
“They’re not my decorations. They’re the town decorations.”
“Have you been outside lately? It’s like seven degrees out there. And the wind’s blowing.”
“And me eating pie is going to somehow make that all go away?”
“Mmm hmm.”
She pursed her lips. “Really?”
“Yep.”
“Fine. I’ll eat a piece of pie with you.” She started to get up.
“No. Just sit. I’ll grab another fork, and we can share, but you need to set your weapons aside.” He looked pointedly at the glue gun she still held.
“These beads are not weapons.”
“Kids get kicked out of school for less.”
“Not laughing.” Except she was.
He sat down at the head of the table where she’d set his plate. She sat on his right, watching as he squeezed about half the bottle of chocolate syrup over the pie.
“Pretty sure it’s already dead. No need to drown it.”
“Fellow can’t be too careful. I’ve seen what they do to pumpkins on Halloween. Not taking any chances.”
“Listen, if you want to have a little pie with your chocolate syrup, that’s fine. You don’t need to come up with an excuse.”
“I’m down for that. Next time, skip the plate and give me a bowl. Like pumpkin pie soup in chocolate broth.”
“If you make it too disgusting, I’m not eating with you.”
He put the bottle down.
They both reached for the same fork and ended up knocking it to the floor where it bounced under the table.
He laughed and put up a finger. “Just wait.”
He cut off the pointy tip of one of the pieces. “You don’t even know if you’re gonna like it. Try it first.”
He held it out, and she stared at it for what felt like long moments. Not because she didn’t want to try the pie. Chocolate on anything had to be good, right? It was more because of the shock of intimacy at taking it from his fork.
Cowboys Don't Stand Under the Mistletoe (Sweet Water Ranch Western Cowboy Romance Book 10) Page 4