“I can help,” Madison offered.
“Sure you can,” Opal agreed.
The woman was the soul of patience. Kendra smiled at her, mouthing the words “Thank you.”
“But first I need to say good-night to Ruffles,” Madison said.
“After supper,” Kendra answered.
Hutch came in then, rolling up the sleeves of his shirt as he stepped over the threshold in stocking feet, having left his dirty boots outside on the step. His hair was rumpled, and there were bits of hay on his clothes. Kendra was struck by how impossibly good he looked, even coming straight from the barn.
He nodded a greeting to Opal and Kendra in turn, then spared a wink for Madison as he used an elbow to turn on the hot water in the sink. He lathered his hands and forearms with a bar of pungently scented orange soap, rinsed and lathered up again.
To look at him, nobody would have guessed that less than an hour before he’d kissed Kendra as she’d never been kissed before—even by him—and thrown her entire being into sweet turmoil in the space of a few heartbeats. He’d plundered her mouth with his tongue and she’d not only allowed it, she’d responded, no question about it.
He’d said it was inevitable that they’d make love. Dared her to ride up the mountain with him, to that cursed, enchanted meadow where heaven and earth seemed to converge as their bodies converged.
Stop it, she told herself sternly.
“I made the biscuits,” Madison was saying to Hutch as he turned away from the sink, drying his hands on a towel. “Well, I helped, anyway.”
Opal chuckled. She’d gotten out a rolling pin and a biscuit cutter. “Get back up on this chair, young lady, and I’ll show you what to do next.”
Madison scrambled to obey.
Opal gave the child’s hands another going over with a damp cloth.
Together they rolled the dough out flat, used the cutter to make circles, placed these on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper.
Hutch crossed to the oven and reached for the handle on the door.
“Don’t you open that oven,” Opal immediately commanded. “You’ll let out all that good steam.”
For a moment Hutch looked more like a curious little boy than a man. “Whatever it is, it sure smells good,” he said.
“It’s my special tamale pie, like I said I’d make,” Opal replied briskly, “and I’ll thank you not to go messing with it before we’ve even sat down to say grace.”
Hutch grinned, spread his hands in a conciliatory gesture. “Yes, ma’am,” he said. “Far be it from me to mess with supper.”
“And don’t you forget it,” Opal said, evidently determined to have the last word.
It was a mundane exchange, but Kendra enjoyed the hominess of good-natured banter between people who cared for each other as if they were family. When she was growing up, meals had been catch-as-catch-can affairs, and if her grandmother did bother to cook, she slammed the pots and pans around in the process, letting Kendra know it was an imposition. That she was an imposition.
Those days were long gone, she reminded herself. She’d come through okay, hadn’t she? And she was a good mother to Madison, at least partly because she wanted things to be different for her.
“I’d sure like to know what’s going on in that head of yours right about now,” Hutch said, surprising her. When had he crossed the room, come to stand next to her, close enough to touch? And why did he have to be so darned observant?
“I was just thinking how lucky I am,” she said.
He grinned, watching as Madison “helped” slide the biscuits into the extra oven built into the wall beside the stove. “You definitely are,” he said, and there was something in his voice that took a lot of the sting out of things he’d said earlier.
That was the thing she had to watch when it came to Hutch.
He could be kind one moment and issuing a challenge the next.
Most of the time, he was impossible to read.
Soon enough, they all sat down to supper, Opal and Madison, Kendra and Hutch, and it felt a little too right for comfort. After struggling so hard to regain her emotional equilibrium, Kendra was back on shaky ground.
She was hungry, though, despite her jumpy nerves, and she put away two biscuits as well as an ample portion of Opal’s delectable tamale pie.
Madison had had a big day, and by the time supper was over, she was fighting to stay awake. “Mommy said I could say good-night to Ruffles,” she insisted, yawning, when the table had been cleared and the plates and silverware loaded into the dishwasher.
Hutch lifted the child into his arms, though he was looking at Kendra when he spoke. “And your mommy,” he said, “is a woman of her word. Let’s go.”
What was that supposed to mean? Was there a barb hidden somewhere in that statement?
Kendra decided not to invest any more of her rapidly waning energy wondering. She thanked Opal for supper and for letting Madison help with the preparations, and followed Hutch, Madison and the ever-alert Daisy out the back door. They crossed the yard, headed for the barn, and Madison, half-asleep by then, rested her head on Hutch’s shoulder.
Hutch flipped on the light as they entered, and carried Madison to Ruffles’s stall.
Kendra watched, stricken with a tangle of bittersweet emotions, as Madison leaned over the stall door to pat the pony’s head.
“Good night, Ruffles,” she said, keeping her other arm firmly around Hutch’s neck. Solemnly, she instructed the little horse to sleep well and have sweet dreams.
Kendra’s heart turned over in her chest and her throat tightened.
Too late, she realized that Hutch was watching her and, as usual, seeing more than she wanted him to see.
“We’d better go now,” she said, forcing the words out.
Hutch nodded. Still carrying Madison, he led the way back outside, setting the child in her car seat as deftly as if he’d done it a thousand times before, chuckling when the dog joined them in a single bound.
Kendra resisted the urge to double-check the fastenings on the car seat, just to make sure he’d gotten it right.
Of course he’d gotten it right. He was Hutch Carmody, and he got just about everything right—when he chose to, that is.
“Thanks,” Kendra said, standing beside the car, hugging herself even though the night was warm. Since she didn’t want him jumping to the conclusion that her thank-you included that soul-sundering kiss beside Whisper Creek, she added, too quickly, “For letting Madison ride Ruffles, I mean.”
A slow grin spread across Hutch’s face as he watched her. Overhead, a million gazillion silvery stars splashed across the black velvet sky and the moon glowed translucent, nearly full.
“Anytime,” he said easily, Leviticus waiting quietly at his side.
“Right,” Kendra said, at a loss.
Hutch opened the driver’s door for her, waited politely for her to slip behind the wheel, fumble in her bag for the keys, fasten her seat belt and start the engine.
Madison was already asleep—if she hadn’t been, Kendra knew, she would have been asking when she could come back and ride Ruffles again.
When Hutch remained where he was, Kendra rolled down her window. She had her issues with the man, but she didn’t want to run over his feet backing out. “Was there something else?” she asked, hoping she sounded casual.
He leaned over to look in at her. “Yeah,” he said. “You planning on coming to the rodeo? You and Madison?”
She nodded, smiled. “There’s no way I could get out of it even if I wanted to,” she said. “Madison’s never been and she’s looking forward to the whole weekend, rodeo, fireworks and all.”
Speaking of fireworks, she thought, as the memory of that kiss coursed through her, hot and fierce, causing her heart to kick into overdrive.
“I’m entered in the bull-riding on Saturday afternoon,” Hutch said, “but I’d sure like to buy the two of you supper and maybe take Madison on a few of the carnival rides be
fore taking in the fireworks.”
All she had to do was say no, take time to step back and regain her perspective.
Instead she said, “Okay.” Immediately.
Hutch grinned. “Great,” he said. “I’ll be in touch, and we’ll work out the details.”
She nodded, as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened that day.
Maybe for him nothing had.
Dismal thought.
Kendra murmured good-night, Hutch stepped away from the car and she put the Volvo in motion.
At home, she unbuckled Madison, awake but sleepy, and carried her into the house. She helped the child into her pajamas, oversaw the brushing of teeth and the saying of prayers, tucked her daughter in and kissed her forehead.
“Good night, Annie Oakley,” she said.
Daisy, probably needing to go outside, fidgeted in the doorway.
“Who’s that?” Madison asked, yawning big again, but she was asleep before Kendra had a chance to answer.
Leaving Madison’s bedroom, she followed Daisy back to the kitchen and stood on the porch while the dog did what had to be done.
As soon as she was back inside the house, Daisy headed straight for Madison’s room.
Kendra, a little too wired to sleep, tidied up the already tidy house, watered a few plants and finally retreated to her home office and logged on to the computer. She’d check her email, both business and personal, she decided, and then soak in a nice hot bath, a sort of preemptive strike against the saddle soreness she was bound to be feeling by morning.
She weeded out the junk mail—somehow some of it always got past the filter—and that left her with two messages, one from Tara and one from Joslyn. Both had attachments—forwards, no doubt.
She clicked on Joslyn’s, expecting a cute picture of the new baby.
Instead she was confronted with a page from a major social-media site, a photo someone had snapped of her and Hutch running the three-legged race at the cemetery picnic the previous weekend. Both of them were laughing, pitching forward into the fall that sent them tumbling into the grass.
The caption was short and to the point. “Up to his old tricks,” it read. “Already.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
KENDRA STIFFENED IN her chair, staring at the computer monitor and the picture of her and Hutch, feeling as though she’d been slapped across the face. She clicked back to the main body of Joslyn’s email and read, “Now they’ve gone too far. This means war.”
The second message, from Tara, was similar.
The anti-Hutch campaign was one thing, as far as Kendra’s two closest friends were concerned, but dragging her into it was one step over the line. Clearly they were prepared to do battle.
She sat back, drew a few long, deep breaths, releasing them slowly, and reminded herself that this wasn’t such a big deal—the page was a petty outlet for people who apparently had too much free time on their hands, not a cross blazing on her front lawn or a brick hurled through her living room window.
She answered both Tara’s and Joslyn’s emails with a single response. “I’ll handle it.” Then, calmer but no less indignant at some stranger’s invasion of her privacy, she printed out a copy of the webpage, folded it carefully into quarters and took it back to the kitchen, where she’d left her purse. She tucked the sheet of paper away in the very bottom, under her wallet and cosmetic case, looked in on her daughter once more and retreated to the bathroom for that long soak she’d promised herself.
The warm water soothed her, as did the two over-the-counter pain relievers she took before crawling into bed. She hadn’t expected to sleep, but she did, deeply and dreamlessly, and the next thing she knew, sunlight was seeping, pink-orange, through her eyelids.
Her thighs and backside were sore from the horseback ride, but not sore enough to matter.
She threw herself into the morning routine—getting Madison up and dressed and fed, making sure Daisy went outside and then had fresh water and kibble. She skipped her usual coffee, though, and sipped herbal tea instead.
“You look pretty, Mommy,” Madison said, taking in Kendra’s crisp linen pantsuit. Lately, she’d been wearing jeans.
“Thank you,” Kendra replied lightly, pausing to bend over Madison’s chair at the breakfast table and kiss the top of her head. “I have an appointment this morning—a client is coming to see the other house—so hurry it up a little, will you?”
“About my boots,” Madison began.
So, Kendra thought wryly, she’d been right to suspect that, while genuine, the compliment on her outfit had its purposes.
“There will be all sorts of vendors—people who sell things—at the rodeo this weekend. We’ll check out the boots then.”
Madison beamed, but then her face clouded over. “But I still have to say sorry to Miss Abbington and Becky,” she recalled.
“Absolutely,” Kendra said firmly. “Suppose Becky had taken your boots, without permission, and then refused to give them back. How would you feel?”
“Bad,” Madison admitted.
“And so?” Kendra prompted.
“Becky felt bad,” Madison said. Then something flashed in her eyes. “But I didn’t wear Miss Abbington’s shoes. Why do I have to say sorry to her?”
“Enough,” Kendra said, softening the word with a smile. “You know darn well why you need to apologize to Miss Abbington.”
“I do?” Madison echoed innocently.
Kendra simply waited.
“Because I was misruptive in class,” Madison finally conceded.
“Bingo,” Kendra said.
* * *
AN HOUR LATER, with Madison at preschool and Daisy minding the office, Kendra showed the mansion to the second client, a representative of a large investment group with an eye to turning the place into an apartment complex.
Kendra knew right away that there would be no actual sale, but that didn’t matter. The real estate business was all about showing places again and again, until the right buyer came along. Generally, she had to bait a lot of hooks before she caught a fish.
Work was the furthest thing from her mind anyway, with that printout of the webpage burning a hole in the bottom of her purse.
At lunchtime, she locked up the office, loaded the always adventuresome Daisy into the Volvo and headed for the neighboring town, Three Trees.
She didn’t know Brylee Parrish well—the two of them were barely acquainted, with a five-year gap in age, and they’d grown up in separate if closely linked communities—but she knew exactly where to find her. Brylee, with her flourishing party-planning business, was the original Local Girl Makes Good—she had a large warehouse and offices just outside Three Trees.
During the drive, Kendra didn’t rehearse what she was going to say, because she didn’t know, exactly. She doubted that Brylee personally was behind the webpage photo and the remark about Hutch being up to his old tricks, but she’d know who was.
Arriving at Brylee’s company, Décor Galore, Kendra rolled down one of the car windows a little way, so Daisy would have air, and promised the dog she’d be back soon.
A receptionist greeted her with a stiff smile and several furtive glances stolen while she was buzzing the boss to let her know that Kendra Shepherd wanted to see her.
“She’ll be here in a couple of minutes,” the receptionist said, hanging up. Now, for all those sneak peeks, the young woman wouldn’t look directly at Kendra. She nodded toward a small and tastefully decorated waiting area. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand, thank you,” Kendra said politely.
When Brylee appeared, opening a side door and poking out her head, Kendra was immediately and oddly struck by how beautiful she was, with those huge hazel eyes and that glorious mane of chestnut-brown hair worn in a ponytail today.
“Come in,” Brylee said, and her cheeks flared with color, then immediately went pale.
Kendra followed Brylee through a long corridor, through the busy, noisy warehouse and into
a surprisingly plain office. The furniture—a desk, two chairs, some mismatched file cabinets and a single bookcase— looked as though it had come from an army surplus store. There were no pictures or other decorations on the walls, no knickknacks to be seen.
“Sit down—please,” Brylee said, taking the chair behind her desk.
Kendra sat, opened her purse, dug out the folded sheet of paper and slid it across to Brylee.
Brylee swallowed visibly, and her unmanicured hands trembled ever so slightly as she unfolded the paper and smoothed it flat.
Kendra felt a brief stab of sympathy for her. After all, losing Hutch Carmody was a trauma she well understood, and it had probably been worse for Brylee, all dressed up in the wedding gown of her dreams, with all her friends and family there to witness the event.
Brylee, meanwhile, gave a deep sigh, closed her eyes and squeezed the bridge of her nose between one thumb and forefinger. Then, rallying, she squared her slender shoulders and looked directly at Kendra.
“I don’t expect you to believe me,” she said with dignity, “but I didn’t know about this.”
“I have no reason not to believe you,” Kendra replied moderately. She drew in another deep breath, let it out and went on, feeling her way through her sentence word by word. “Some people—maybe a lot of them—would say it’s just a harmless photograph and I ought to let it go at that. If this is as far as it goes—fine. I can deal with it. But I have a four-year-old daughter to think about, Ms. Parrish, and—”
Brylee put up a hand. She still looked wan, but a friendly sparkle flickered in her eyes. “Please,” she interrupted. “Call me Brylee. We’re not enemies, you and I—or, at least, I hope we’re not—and I totally get why this bothers you.” She paused, bit her lip, studying Kendra’s face with a kind of broken curiosity. “Really, I do.”
“Then we don’t have a problem,” Kendra said, wanting to be kind and at the same time picking up on just how much Brylee wanted to ask if she and Hutch had some kind of “thing” going. “Just ask whoever put this up on the web to take it down, please, and leave me alone.”
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