Long, Hot Texas Summer

by Brown, Carolyn

  “Maybe.” She fanned harder. If he didn’t remove his hand pretty soon, Jesus was going to catch on fire. “What are you doing back at the house in the middle of the morning?”

  His thumb made lazy little fiery-hot circles on her arm. “Ran out of ear tags and came to get some more. Bored yet?”

  “Oh, yeah, but I’ll suffer through it. The end result will justify it all,” she answered.

  “Rosie run you out of the house?”

  She nodded. “She says a guest doesn’t help clean or cook. Truth is, I don’t like to do either one, so it’s no big deal.”

  “You could sit in an air-conditioned tractor and plow up about forty acres and give that fan a rest,” he offered.

  She eyed him carefully. “What do you pay the hired help?”

  “In your case, I don’t charge you room and board.”

  “What does the room and board cost me if I don’t drive a tractor?”

  He wiggled his eyebrows. “Sex three times a week.”

  She pushed out of the rocking chair and headed for the front door. “I’ll change into my boots and jeans.”

  He slapped a fist over his heart. “Ouch. You are mean to hurt a hardworking old cowboy like that.”

  “Life’s a bitch, ain’t it?”

  “I’ll wait five minutes. After that you’ll walk or drive that fancy van out to the west bank. And you only get paid for the time you’re in the tractor seat,” he said.

  She just smiled and took her time getting into the house. But once inside, she took the steps two at a time and tugged off her clothing the second she was in her bedroom. She’d show him that she could get dressed in five minutes and that she’d damn sure not forgotten how to drive a tractor.

  She donned faded jeans and her worn cowboy boots from the closet floor. She quickly braided her red hair into two ropes that hung to her shoulders and made a trip through the kitchen before going back outside.

  “Rosie, I’m going to do some plowing to pay for my room and board and I need a . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence before Rosie picked an old straw hat from the row of nails beside the back door and handed it to her.

  “Keep it on. That sun and heat is hell on a fair complexion and you’ve still got that same peaches-and-cream skin you had as a kid. Don’t ruin it,” Rosie said.

  “Thank you.” Loretta smiled.

  “Why are you plowing for room and board, anyway?”

  Loretta did something that she hadn’t done in years: she blushed scarlet. “Ask Jackson next time you see him and you’ll understand I don’t have a choice.”

  Jackson checked his watch. “You’ve now got four minutes, thirty seconds. I’ll drive you out to the field where you’ll be working. Sure you don’t want to change your mind? The other option is a lot easier. We could make a quick trip to the bedroom right now. That would be number one of the three times this week.”

  “Looks to me like either one is going to make me sweat,” she shot back at him. “I’ll drive the tractor. You got plenty of CDs in the glove box?”

  “Still listenin’ to country or has the big city changed you?” Jackson asked.

  “It changed me but not my music preference,” she answered.

  She reached the truck with him right on her heels and quickly crawled inside before he could play the gentleman. She wasn’t his date, his woman, or even his friend. She was a hired hand and the mother of his daughter. She could open her own damn truck door.

  The rutted path out across the canyon floor jarred her backbone and could scarcely be called a road. Red dust boiled up all around them and settled so thick on the windshield that he turned on the wipers to brush it away.

  Jackson stopped at a corral where half a dozen cowboys were riding horseback and herding cattle into and out of the fenced area. He laid a hand on Loretta’s knee and said, “Wait here. I’ll drop off this stuff and be right back.”

  She swung the door open and followed him to the weathered wood fence. She breathed in the dust hanging like smoke in a cheap beer joint. It was every bit as intoxicating as it had always been. Did alcoholics feel like this when they walked into a bar? Did the fumes from the beer and liquor make their mouths water as much as the canyon made her soul want what it couldn’t have? Could there be truth in that old song about coming home?

  Hell, no, I’m not home, she argued with her thoughts. Home is my cute little house a few blocks from the real estate agency in Mustang, Oklahoma, not this godforsaken canyon where the red dirt settles on everything whether the wind is blowing or not.

  A dark-haired cowboy tipped his hat toward her. The kid couldn’t be a day over eighteen and his whole life would be nothing but backbreaking work from daylight to sundown. She looked at the whole lot of them out there—wiping sweat, wrangling calves—and remembered doing the same thing. She wanted so much more for her child than that. Nona was brilliant; she had finished the first three years of college in the top 10 percent of her class and could be anything she set her head to.

  A blonde kid swept off a hat and wiped sweat with a red bandanna as her hair tumbled down her back.

  That was Nona?

  She’d dressed her in lace and ribbons and there she was, looking like a field hand until she took off her hat. Loretta’s heart hurt just looking at her daughter with dirt streaks on her face and a farmer’s tan on her arms.

  “Mama, what are you doing out here?” Nona came to the fence and crawled up the side like a monkey. “I didn’t expect to see you out here in the heat.”

  “I’m going to plow. Your father says I have to earn my room and board,” Loretta said.

  Nona slapped him on the arm as he opened the gate. “Daddy!”

  Jackson frowned at Loretta. “I told you to wait in the truck.”

  “I heard you, but, darlin’, you didn’t tell me what to do before we were divorced. What makes you think you’ve got any power over me now?”

  He shrugged. “You want to work cattle or plow? It all pays the same, room and board—unless you’ve changed your mind about my former offer.”

  “What offer is that?” Nona asked.

  Loretta patted her beautiful daughter on a dirty shoulder. “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to plow, not work cattle. You go on and learn all you can about ranchin’, honey. If this kind of work doesn’t make you realize the need for an education, then nothing can.”

  “It’s more like play than work.” She hopped down from the fence and helped a tall, lanky cowboy herd a bull calf into the calf table.

  Poor little bawling fellow didn’t know what hit him. One minute he was romping with his Angus buddies, the next he was penned into a contraption that looked like a gate on two sides. Once the calf was herded into it, it hugged him tightly and then with the flick of a cowboy’s wrist it could move the animal every which way. Within three minutes he had ear tags, bands on his testicles, and vaccinations and was back out in the pasture with his mama, tattling on all the cowboys.

  “She’s good,” Loretta said.

  “Yes, she is. Almost as good as her mother. Give her a few years’ experience and she and Travis will be ready to put me out in the pasture. For years we had the system built to clamp a calf inside two panels, but she came up with the idea to make it tilt. Then she designed the pens so that the calves can be brought in one at a time. We are working twice as many calves in half the time. She’s smart, Loretta.”

  Loretta headed toward the truck. “I know she’s smart. That’s why she needs to get this last year of college done. Let’s go to work. I have to pay for room and board, remember.”

  “Don’t get all pissy with me. You can go back to the porch and pass plumb out with boredom or better yet, get in that van and take your feisty little ass right back to your fancy office in Oklahoma. I’m just telling you that Nona is a natural-born rancher and she’s not afraid of work,” he s
aid.

  “You are the one who is all pissy. And just because I’m not interested in sex three times a week. I bet you aren’t used to women telling you no, are you?”

  Hell, she didn’t want it three times a damn week. She wanted it three times a damn night.

  He kept in step right beside her. “You are the most exasperating woman on the face of the earth, Loretta Bailey. Which reminds me, why didn’t you ask for your maiden name back in the divorce?”

  “I didn’t want Nona to be confused when she started to school. Tell me what you want plowed and I’ll drive your truck.” She held out her hand for the keys.

  “Yeah, right,” he snorted. “I’ll take you out there. You might have forgotten how to run a tractor and I haven’t got time to fix what you could tear up.”

  “I could outplow you when we were kids and I haven’t forgotten a blessed thing about ranchin’, even though I’ve tried. And honey, if I tear up a truck, you can rest assured I can fix it better than you can,” she snapped.

  Her mama said that first loves were always difficult to forget. What she should have said was that some cowboys, like Jackson Bailey, were totally and completely unforgettable.

  Jackson had no doubt that Loretta was telling the gospel truth. She really could run that tractor as well as anyone on the ranch. And she could tear down the engine and repair it if something did go wrong.

  They rode from the corral to the back wall of the canyon in silence with the dust trailing along in their wake. Jackson stole long glances at her, wishing that he could reach over and touch all that silky smooth red hair, trace her jawline with his finger, and kiss her. God, he wanted to kiss her lips so badly that he actually ran his tongue over his own in anticipation.

  “It snowed last year. Got so deep that they closed the roads,” he said. “You used to have nightmares that it would fill up the canyon and we’d be buried alive in snow.”

  “Must have been an omen for me to get out of this place. Hotter’n hell in the summer. Cold as Siberia in the winter. And I remember the snow. Nona couldn’t get out to come home for Christmas Day. It’s the first time I ever had Christmas without her,” she said.

  “It was the first time I ever got to spend Christmas Day with her.”

  “You got her for a whole week up through Christmas Eve, though, so don’t bring that up.”

  He set his mouth in a firm line and changed the subject. “She is going to keep asking. Do we need to get our story straight?”

  She jerked her head around, with eyebrows knit together over those sexy green eyes and a frown on her face.

  “You are even more beautiful than you were as a kid,” he said in a low voice.

  “And wiser,” she said.

  “I hope we both are. So about Nona? I know you saw me and Dina in the barn. It was the first and only time. I couldn’t go through with it, Loretta. Bossy kept popping up in my mind reminding me that I had a wife and a child. But when I went to pick the toy up off the bale, it was gone. She cried for it and you found it, right?”

  “It’s water under the bridge, Jackson. Can’t change it. Is that the tractor? It can’t be the same old cantankerous machine that you and I . . .” She stopped.

  “No, it’s not. But we put in some good hours workin’ on her, didn’t we? That one has gone on to the big tractor dump in the skies. This is a John Deere like the old one. This one has an air-conditioned cab and a decent radio, but we still don’t get good reception down here in the canyon, so there’s CDs in the glove box.”

  She got out of the truck the minute it stopped and in a few long strides was beside the big green machine. She slung the door open and looked over her shoulder at him, a smile on her face. “Remember when we had a race to see who could plow the most ground by suppertime and that old tractor started smokin’?”

  He leaned against the tractor. “Oh, yeah! And we knew we had to fix the damn thing before my dad found out that we’d caused the problem. We stayed up almost until breakfast getting it repaired and then had to work all the next day. It’s a wonder that you didn’t lose the baby the way we carried on that summer.”

  “God protects the young and foolish,” she said.

  “Would you redo any of it?” he asked.

  “We don’t have that option, so there’s no use dwelling on it.”

  Chapter Seven

  LORETTA TURNED THE TRACTOR AROUND at the end of the field and started back toward the far side. Jackson waited at the end of that row and waved for her to stop. She parked and watched him crawl up the far side of the big machine and settle into the passenger’s seat.

  “George Strait or Blake Shelton?” Jackson asked as he joined her inside the cab.

  She tilted her head to one side. “I don’t need you to ride with me, Jackson. I know what I’m doing. Just because I haven’t driven a tractor lately doesn’t mean I don’t remember how to do it.”

  “Billy Ray it is, then,” Jackson said.

  “Whatever you say,” she said coldly.

  He put the CD into the player.

  She turned the machine around and headed toward the other side, her rows as straight as a plumb line. She’d forgotten how driving something as big and powerful as a John Deere tractor made her feel. It was an even bigger adrenaline rush than selling a million-dollar home in Mustang’s newest development.

  “That’s not George or Blake,” she said.

  “I guess Nona put the CD in the wrong case when she plowed last time,” he said.

  “That’s Miranda Lambert,” she said.

  “‘Hell on Heels,’” he said above the music. “Fitting.”

  “Oh, honey, you are right about me being hell on heels, but I’m not your sugar daddy like she’s singing about. And I’m damn sure not coming to take you for a diamond ring, a Caddy, or even a vacation home on a remote island,” she told him. “Now why are you in this tractor with me?”

  He let the song finish, removed the CD, and slid another one into the player. This time it really was Blake singing. Jackson pushed a button and nodded when the first chords of “Do You Remember?” started.

  Jackson started singing along, keeping time with his thumb on his leg. The scent of his shaving lotion combined with his deep voice in the small tractor cab drove her right up the walls.

  He sang that he still felt hope in her kisses and he could feel the sun on her skin and that he didn’t know he was holding forever back then. Well, he was the one who’d let go of forever, not her.

  “Okay, Jackson, answer me. I know how to run this tractor and insert CDs. What do you want?” she asked when she reached the other side of the field.

  “I want to get our stories straight. Nona is not going to let this business alone. She’ll be like an old dog with a ham bone. So what do we tell her?” he asked.

  “The truth,” she answered.

  “Are you really ready for that?”

  “It wasn’t my fault,” Loretta snapped at him.

  “Wasn’t it? Why didn’t you snatch that woman bald-headed and then fight with me until morning? Wasn’t what we had worth fighting for?”

  “You weren’t fighting.” She reached the other end and turned off the engine.

  “No, it was a weak moment, but you were a hellcat, Loretta. Why did you run?”

  He slid across the big bench seat, traced her jawline with his knuckles, and tangled his fingers in her hair. She braced herself against the kiss, but still when his lips touched hers, sparks danced around in the cab of the tractor. Her arms were suddenly around his neck, cupping the back of his head as the kiss deepened. Her pulse raced and her breath quickened.

  He held her for a moment after the kiss ended. Then he moved over, removed the CD and slid in another one.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  “It was a test. You passed. Did you study for it?” he
teased.

  “Test for what?”

  “To see if you would kiss me back or slap the hell out of me,” he answered. “Are we going to plow or sit here? If we’re going to sit here, maybe we should try that kiss again. What do you think?”

  She started the engine and at the same time Highway 101 started singing “Honky Tonk Heart.”

  Loretta nodded in agreement with the lead singer when she said that they were drifting apart because she wouldn’t play second fiddle to the beat of his honky-tonk heart.

  “You got a honky-tonk heart?” Jackson asked.

  “Do you?” she fired right back at him.

  “I still like to dance. Want to go Saturday night?”

  She shook her head.

  “Did you forget how to two-step?” he asked.

  She glared at him.

  “Bet you don’t even like a cold beer anymore.”

  “I can still outdrink you and outdance you too.” She wished she could grab the words and shove them back into her mouth.

  “Prove it!” he taunted.

  It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him to drop dead and go straight to hell, but she nodded and said, “Name the day. We’ll celebrate Nona going back to college.”

  “Or staying here with me and learning to run this big ranch. We’ll go to the Sugar Shack.” He grinned.

  She cocked her head to one side. “That thing should have fallen down years ago.”

  “But it didn’t. And they’ve got a good little local band that plays there on Saturday nights. Time to park this critter and go to lunch. Rosie don’t like it when we’re late. Listen to this song. Blake is singin’ about the good times. I think he’s lived through some of the same experiences that we have.”

  “So you didn’t really want to talk about what we’ll tell Nona, but you wanted to trick me into going out with you?”

  “Oh, there was that too. I intend to tell her the absolute truth and own up to my sin. You can figure out how to tell her your part however you want to,” he said.

  She geared down without a single grind and brought the tractor to a stop not far from where he’d parked the truck. She slung open the door and gasped when the heat hit her in the face like a blast from a furnace.