Just a Cowboy and His Baby (Spikes & Spurs)

by Carolyn Brown

  Damian glared at her.

  Fiona threw up a hand and high-fived her partner.

  Gemma smiled.

  Trace looked the other way.

  Gemma sat with her girls at breakfast and listened to Jessie and Fiona plot about how to get ahead of the boys even more. Little did they realize that on Friday night they’d want those same boys, even Damian, to dance with them—but then, maybe not! Jessie and Fiona were a force when they walked into a room. They might just form a big circle like Gemma and all those rodeo ladies did after the St. Paul rodeo and dance by themselves.

  But who will I dance with if Trace is still acting like a jackass over me calling him cowboy instead of his name?

  “Why are you having breakfast with us? You and Mister Sexy Cowboy fightin’?” Jessie whispered across the table.

  “He is a sexy hunk, ain’t he?” Fiona said out of the corner of her mouth.

  “Oh, yeah, if he wasn’t so old I’d kiss him,” Angie said in her deep Southern drawl.

  Katy poked her on the arm. “Angie!”

  “Don’t be actin’ all high and mighty. You were the one who said he was sexy last night, and besides, I know he’s too old for me. But if he had a son that looked like him then I’d kiss him for sure, chérie,” Angie said.

  “My name is Angie, not Sherry.”

  “I didn’t say Sherry, I said chérie. That’s what we say in New Orleans instead of darlin’,” Angie told her.

  Gemma caught Trace’s movement from the corner of her eye. He’d loaded his plate with sausage and pancakes and was headed toward her, but then he made an abrupt turn to the right and went into the kitchen.

  “See, he’s avoidin’ you. What happened? Yesterday he couldn’t keep his eyes off you,” Jessie whispered.

  “We had an argument,” Gemma said. These were street-savvy girls who’d smell a lie a mile away and call her on it. If she wanted their trust she had to be honest.

  And you have to be honest with Trace if you want his trust too.

  “What about?” Jessie pried.

  “I’m not a counselor all the time. I’m a hairdresser in Ringgold, Texas, and I grew up on a horse ranch, not totally unlike this one. But I also ride broncs in the rodeos and I’m on the rodeo circuit right now. So is Trace and we are in competition with each other for the right to ride in the finals in Las Vegas in December,” she explained.

  Jessie nodded. “And you can’t let him get under your skin or you might let him win.”

  Gemma nodded.

  “But he wants to get under your skin, don’t he? He was lookin’ at you yesterday morning like he could kiss you,” Angie said.

  “That’s tough,” Katy whispered.

  “Well, I say forget the sorry sucker. There’s lots more cowboys in the world. Come on to Nashville if you want to find one even sexier than him,” Jessie told her.

  Hill appeared at the end of the room and shook a cowbell to get everyone’s attention. “Hey, listen up. Here are the picking chores.”

  Trace joined Hill at the end of a long table and looked over his boys. “For the contest, Damian, you are with Tyrelle.” And he went on to pair them into five different groups.

  “Ahh, man! I don’t like the idea of a new partner,” Tyrelle said in a heavy Boston accent.

  “I’ll trade with him,” Chipper, a kid from Texas, said.

  “No trading,” Trace said sternly.

  “But—” Damian started to argue.

  A look from Trace ended the whole thing before it went one word further.

  Gemma bit the inside of her lip to keep from smiling. He was teaching the guys to accept change. She thought about that, but her girls were doing so well that she didn’t want to upset the apple cart. Trace would make an excellent father someday. A pang of jealousy flared up hotter than pure acid at the idea of another woman bearing his children.

  She looked at Hill with his blond hair and sparkling blue eyes. Not one hormone even wiggled. She looked back at Trace and her whole body hummed.

  “Okay,” Hill said. “I’ve got the chores in this hat. Each team picks one and then they can decide how they’re going to go about gathering supper. My suggestion is that one partner picks vegetables and the other one carries the harvest bucket to fill up, but you can figure out how to get them from the garden to my kitchen. Be sure and put your slip of paper on the top of your bucket when you bring them in. Points will be taken off for unripe vegetables or for broken plants when Harper takes a walk through the garden. Be gentle, kids. That’s your supper out there.”

  Carly and Deanna drew out a paper that had beans on it and Deanna looked at Gemma. “Do they grow on trees or what?”

  “They grow on low vines. You pick the ones about the size of your index finger or larger,” Gemma said quietly.

  “Do we measure every one of them?” Carly asked.

  “No, just do a guesstimate,” Gemma answered.

  Beth touched Gemma on the arm. “We’ve got tomatoes. Will you show us what to do?”

  Gemma nodded.

  “Okra! What is okra?” Fiona’s eyes widened.

  “It’s this stuff that is wonderful fried, but I never saw it in anything but a plastic bag from the freezer at the grocery store,” Carly explained.

  “I’ll show you how to harvest it,” Gemma said. She hated cutting okra. It made her hands itch and there were always bugs around the plants. Big old flat ones that hung on the leaves and wanted to crawl up her arms.

  “Is it horrible? You are snarling your nose,” Fiona said.

  “We’ll have a huddle-up after breakfast and I’ll explain,” Gemma said.

  “Like in football?” April asked.

  Gemma nodded.

  All ten girls finished their food, carried their disposable plates to the trash can, and headed for the front porch. Gemma followed right behind them and stopped on the front porch of the girls’ cabin. The boys were still polishing off pancakes so she didn’t have to whisper, but she did huddle them all together just like a football team right outside the dining room door.

  “Okay, here’s the deal,” she said.

  “Blue forty-two?” Carly whispered.

  “No, bugs eight million,” Gemma said. “Gardens have bugs. They try to keep them under control, but they are still there. If you scream and stomp around like you are afraid, those boys will be in heaven. They’ll catch them and throw them at you and they’ll act all superior and macho. So if you see a bug, kill it and be quiet about it.”

  “How?” April’s eyes widened.

  “There is no wrong way to kill a bug,” Gemma said.

  “Stomp the sumbitch like a cockroach,” Carly said.

  Gemma started to fuss at Carly for using foul language, but it was the same thing that she was thinking so she held her tongue and nodded. “And there could be a little snake or spider.”

  “Wow, this is more dangerous than gang territory,” Kelsey said.

  “In its own way, it is. Now are we ready to show those boys we’re not afraid of anything?” Gemma asked.

  They all put their hands in a pile and Jessie yelled, “Pick beans!”

  As the luck of the draw would have it, Damian and his partner, Tyrelle, had drawn the job of cutting okra and Trace set them to work on the row right beside Jessie and Fiona. Once Gemma showed them what size pods to harvest and how to use the knife to make a clean cut, she went to check on her other four teams, but the arguments over in the okra rows could be heard halfway to Ringgold, Texas.

  “Boy, I’m holding a knife. You don’t want to be givin’ me no smack,” Fiona told Damian.

  “You think I ain’t got a knife too?” Tyrelle asked. “Oh, oh! There’s a bug. Jessie, I swear it’s big as a dollar bill. You girls better run. It’s goin’ to jump right down your shirt.”

  “Where?” Jessie asked.

  “Right here.” Damian held up the leaf.

  Jessie took a step over to his row, flipped the bug off, and ground it into the dust. “The
re, boys. Just call me if you see another one.”

  “She’s tough as my momma,” Tyrelle said.

  Jessie pointed a long slender finger at him. “And don’t you forget it.”

  Gemma was proud of her girls. Jessie might be the head she-coon in the mix, but they were standing their own ground. She’d even bet that after a couple of lessons Jessie and Fiona both would be able to manhandle a bronc.

  Then the air split wide open when Chantelle set up a screaming howl over near the squash plants. “It’s a rat!”

  Gemma’s blood ran cold. She hated spiders and bugs, but she really hated rats and mice. Damian took off in a dead run and grabbed up the varmint by the tail, holding it out at arm’s length.

  “Funniest rat I ever saw. It’s blind.” He cocked his head to one side and his straight black hair fell over his eyes. “Look, Tyrelle. I ain’t never seen no blind rat.”

  “It’s a mole,” Trace said from the end of the garden. “Bring it on down here and we’ll take care of it. They can damage the roots of the garden plants.”

  Damian nodded. “I didn’t think it was no rat. You girls need saving again just call me and Tyrelle. We ain’t afraid of no rats. Heck, I’ve seen bigger ones than that on my way to school.”

  “Thank you.” Chantelle shivered. “I hate rats.”

  Damian puffed out his chest. “Any time.”

  Score one for the girls and one for the boys, Gemma thought. She looked up and caught Trace looking her way, but he deftly slid his gaze toward the boys and walked away.

  She’d looked forward to the hike toward the mountains ever since they’d seen the schedule for the week. But in her imagination she and Trace would bring up the rear, letting the twenty kids run on ahead to discover all kinds of nature items, some for the girls to take back to put in their treasure boxes. They’d have a whole afternoon together, but it didn’t work that way. Trace made sure he took the lead in the hike, saying that he was the tracker and he’d scare away the snakes and other varmints that might harm the hikers. And she brought up the rear all alone.

  Less than half an hour into the hike the girls and boys were mixed up together like a passel of newborn puppies. They didn’t need much supervision and the sheer noise of their laughing, bantering, and stomping around would put any kind of wild animal on the run so she had plenty of time to mull over all that had happened since she pulled into the Cody rodeo two weeks before.

  Looking back, it had been a hormonal roller-coaster ride from the time Trace reached out a hand to help her. From there it was all downhill with one coincidence after another throwing them together. She’d been around sexy cowboys her whole life, so why did this one make her juices boil? Maybe it wasn’t all coincidence but fate tossing them together time after time. And Liz said that you couldn’t fight fate.

  Well, Liz was wrong just like she was on the bit about her having a cowboy and a baby of her own by the end of the year. It wasn’t happening. She’d proven that she could fight with fate that morning when she spilled coffee on her favorite nightshirt. She’d damn sure fought with Trace, hadn’t she? And he was fate spelled with all capital letters.

  She kicked a pinecone out of the way and reached down to pick it up. A white feather was stuck in the scales of the cones. She turned it over several times and looked around the area for the tree it might have fallen from, but the only pine trees were far out in the distance.

  “Wonder if one of the guys want it for their dream catcher?” she whispered.

  “Did you say something?” Carly turned around and asked.

  “I was just talking to myself. Did you find something to go on your box?”

  Carly shook her head. “I’m still looking. Did you? I saw you pick something up.”

  “I found something,” Jessie yelled and held up a long slender feather. It glistened in the sunlight. “What’s it from?”

  “Looks like alien’s hair to me,” Tyrelle teased.

  Damian crossed his arms over his chest. “It’s a feather out of an Indian’s headdress.”

  Trace turned and walked back a few feet to where the kids had all gathered around Jessie. “It’s a hawk’s feather. It’ll look very nice on whatever your craft project is. Good eyes, Jessie.”

  At that point, Gemma thought he might stroll on back to where she was, but he didn’t. He completely ignored her. If he wanted to play that way then she could oblige him. And the truth of the matter, hurt or not, was that she knew why she called him cowboy and it didn’t have a damn thing to do with his name. It was because she really wanted him to be the cowboy and if she kept calling him that maybe Liz would read the cards again and tell her that there was a dark-haired cowboy in her future.

  Damn his sorry old hide anyway! A stubborn Missouri mule didn’t have a thing on him. Why she even wanted him in her future was a mystery.

  They returned at five o’clock with twenty kids still hyped up over their finds. The aroma of cooking food wafting out from the dining tent hit their noses. It was thirty minutes until suppertime and the kids were tired, cranky, and starting to bicker. She looked at Trace who just shrugged. Some father he would be in a crisis. He’d probably leave all the discipline to her. High color filled her cheeks at the notion of having his children. She turned around to face the kids so he couldn’t see the blush.

  “Okay, we’ve got a few minutes. Everyone gather up on our porch and let us all see what you found today,” Gemma said.

  That brought the boys back to attention and stopped the girls’ whining. When they’d each had a turn at show-and-tell, Trace stepped forward with a small rock and held out his hand.

  “Is it an arrowhead?” Damian asked.

  “No, but the shape reminded me of one that I found down in the Palo Duro Canyon back when I was about your age,” he said.

  “What’s a palo whatever you said?” Damian asked.

  “I’ll tell you about it while we get cleaned up for supper. We’ll see you ladies later.” Trace tipped his straw hat toward the girls but didn’t look at Gemma.

  “Did you find something, Gemma?” Carly asked.

  She held out her pinecone with the white feather in it.

  “Wow! A white feather,” Angie said.

  “So what?” Jessie smarted off.

  “A white feather means good luck in Cajun. If you find one something wonderful will happen to you.”

  “That’s bull,” Jessie said.

  “Might be to you but I’m Cajun and it’s magic to me. Miss Gemma is going to find out that today was a lucky day. That it’s stuck down in a pinecone is even better. A pinecone means that love is coming her way.”

  Gemma looked at the pinecone. She might be weaving a tale, but Gemma liked it.

  “I hope she’s right,” she mumbled.

  “I am right. When you are an old lady you will remember today and your white feather and it will make you smile.”

  “Well, I don’t want to talk about love and feathers. I’m starving to death,” Jessie declared. “Let’s go get ready for supper.”

  They all took off for the bathrooms. Gemma made a mad dash through the fastest shower she’d ever taken, slipped into a white sundress, jammed her feet down into her lucky pink cowboy boots, brushed out her hair, and applied a little perfume. She’d show that stubborn cowboy what he was missing.

  “Wow! You look all fancy,” Fiona exclaimed when Gemma came out of her bedroom.

  “Thank you. Are we all ready?”

  “Two hours past ready,” Carly said. “My stomach was growling a long time ago.”

  “So you are going to make him sorry for being mean this morning,” Jessie whispered to Gemma on the way out the door.

  Not much got past a twelve-year-old kid from Nashville who evidently watched entirely too many chick flicks.

  “You bet I am,” Gemma said and changed the subject. “So tell me, do you like fried okra?”

  “Oh, yeah, and sliced tomatoes with it and fried chicken. My granny cooks like that when w
e go see her down south of Nashville. She buys it from the farmer’s market and it tastes so good. You think Hill can make it taste like Granny does?” Jessie asked.

  “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised.”

  The boys had clean hands, shining faces, and their hair was combed. Even Damian’s long dark hair was tamed back into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck. They quickly met the girls at the door and the dining hall was no longer segregated. The hike that afternoon had created friendships, and boys and girls sat together in groups around the table, waiting for Hill to call supper.

  Finally, he came out of the kitchen and rang the dinner bell, but there was no food on the buffet table. Carly moaned and rolled her eyes.

  “Tonight we’ll be having a big family dinner. Two tables with the food down the middle. Don’t matter which table you sit at because the same kind of food will be on both tables. So all you kids are responsible for coming to the kitchen and carrying a bowl to your table. You are to pick up whatever it was that you harvested this morning and take it to your table. We’ll be sitting at the table over in the corner with the counselors. When it’s all down the middle then you can sit down and commence to passing it.”

  “This is great,” Gemma said.

  “By the second night they are beginning to mingle and talk more. This gets them to visiting about what they harvested, how good it tastes or how much they hate it if they’ve never tried it and don’t like it,” Harper explained. “See how gently they are carrying bowls and platters.”

  Gemma smiled at him. “It’s sure not your first rodeo, is it?”

  Harper’s eyes twinkled. “No, ma’am, it is not.”

  “And I bet by Friday they are all exchanging phone numbers and email addresses,” she said.

  “Those who have such things. The others will be giving out snail mail addresses. At the dance we give each of them a small notebook with our logo on the front. They can put whatever they want inside. Most of them use it for phone numbers and addresses.”

  Hill carried out a platter of fried chicken and set it on the table he’d designated for the adults. “Y’all either carry or starve.” He looked at Gemma and Trace. “You don’t help, you don’t eat.”