by Alison Kent
Threading his fingers into her hair and holding her head in his hands, he looked down into her eyes, stopping the motion of his body anytime she closed them. He could tell by the tightness in her jaw that she hated it, but when he used his eyes to ask her to trust him, she did, relaxing beneath him, her breath beginning to puff against his cheek in short hot bursts that felt like steam.
He reached down with one hand, pulled her knee high along his side, riding more closely against her, as close as he could get without climbing completely inside. Her softness tempted him because his life was hard, and it was so easy to forget all of that when she gave him this.
He lost himself in her, forgot the weight of the morning, the work left waiting to take up the rest of his day. He forgot about having gas in only one tank of his truck, about the fridge at home and its single stick of butter, its last three eggs, about the new hole in the sole of his best pair of boots.
Nothing existed but the woman beneath him, her hair spread out like waves of corn silk and wheat, her eyelashes as long as Sunshine’s. This was what he’d thought about when he’d started thinking it was time to come home. And he was going to do his damnedest to keep his history from screwing things up.
FOURTEEN
THE NEXT MORNING, Boone slid into the Blackbird Diner’s corner booth, nodding at Teri Gregor when she lifted a coffeepot to ask if he wanted a cup. The early rush had thinned, meaning the coffee would be fresh, and not a lot of people would be stopping to shoot the shit. Exactly what he’d been hoping for.
He was here for a reason. And that reason didn’t have anything to do with revisiting the crimes he’d committed in high school and taking a lot of heat for his past.
He’d been wondering when those transgressions would come back to bite him in the ass. Hell, he and Dax had talked about it just the other day. He wasn’t surprised it was Les Upton’s teeth clamping down, but he’d never expected Everly would get caught in the middle of that particular piece of ugly.
And he sure hadn’t been eager to tell her all that had come to pass that night, but with Les prowling, it couldn’t be helped. She deserved to know, even if before he’d left Crow Hill, and after graduating from high school, things with the Uptons had been settled. Or so he’d thought.
Les, apparently, thought otherwise. Though what he was expecting from Boone after all these years wasn’t exactly clear. Les was the one who’d stirred things to the point of involving the law, not Boone. Les was the one who’d tried to take his wife’s head off with a rolling pin, not Boone.
Les was the one who’d come through the door, not liked the scene he’d walked into, and used it as an excuse to loose a festering rage. Boone might’ve helped set that off by banging his girl, but Penny had been eighteen and old enough to decide rights and wrongs for herself.
Why the attempt at intimidation now? Unless Les ending up broken and alone, a convicted felon, a local pariah, had left him steeped in hurt needing an outlet, and that outlet needing to be Boone.
There’d been no sign of the other man Monday night as Boone had followed Everly home from Fever Tree. He’d waited in front of her house while she’d parked and gone inside, his truck idling, his farewell no more than a wave when he’d hoped to end the evening tying her to her bed.
Her return wave had seemed hesitant, as if she were reconsidering having him stay. But she’d shut the door, her front porch light remaining on, the one above her garage and kitchen entrance coming on, too. Instead of leaving, he’d circled the block, shutting off his headlights as he’d rolled to a stop farther down Pineycreek, idling there for twenty minutes while watching to see if Les was going to show.
Les hadn’t shown, and Boone would’ve stayed longer if Clark Howard hadn’t come out with his shotgun to run him off. And no doubt that story had circulated the next morning in this very place, ordered up with coffee and eggs by the diner’s regulars.
Fortunately, things had gotten back on track yesterday, and damn if that hadn’t been the best grilled cheese of his life, but he had to admit that earlier in the week he’d been doubtful. Nothing anyone did in Crow Hill went without notice. And he hated having put Everly in the spotlight when the hurt of her past had her preferring a quiet sort of life.
Still, it was no different for anyone else. Didn’t matter if that anyone was a member of the Dalton Gang, the local high school football coach or guidance counselor, a retired loan officer from the First National Bank. Boone’s entire family had spent time under the microscope the residents used to judge who fit in and who didn’t.
The Mitchells hadn’t been a part of the town since its founding, the way the Campbells had. They’d moved here for his father’s coaching job when he’d been three and Faith one. His mother hadn’t gone back to work until they were both in elementary school, making Crow Hill the only home either of them had known.
Yet they still got the third degree—him for his long-ago hell-raising ways, and his sister, most recently, for leaving her banking position to take up with Casper Jayne. Here they were, he mused, bringing his mug to his mouth, pillars of the community, yet still thought of as fresh blood by those who’d been here since God was a pup.
Faith had been right to remind him, in her roundabout way, of all the things their parents had gone through, and how dealing with the heartache he and his sister had caused had tightened their bond. It had been because of their folks that the two of them had turned out as well as they had. And they had turned out well, Faith having more to show for her years and education, though he hadn’t done too badly.
Now that he was back with dreams of settling down, it would be nice if he had something of worth to offer a woman. The ranch was a fucked-up mess, but apparently was sitting on a mighty nice oil prospect. And then there were the antiques Tess Dalton had used every day, as if she’d bought the furniture at Drury Hardware instead of it coming down to her from the generations of her family.
Hard to believe he and the boys had been walking right past the kind of money that would make a difference in the running of things. Even harder to think about actually selling the pieces Tess had so dearly loved. As dire straits as she’d been in before passing, even she had preferred leasing grazing land to Henry Lasko over parting with the antiques.
He’d have to see what Nora had to say, then go to the boys with her offer. He wasn’t making this decision on his own. He might be the only one living on the ranch, the one these days with the most at stake as far as their shared possessions, but that didn’t mean he could dispose of anything without their say.
“Boone Mitchell,” Nora said, cutting into his reverie as she stopped at his side, the gray bob of her hair swinging to a stop, too, her eyes above her tiny reading glasses twinkling. “Finally. I didn’t think I’d ever get one of you boys to talk to me.”
Boone pulled off his hat and stood, accepting her warm hug and returning it. “Mornin’ Mrs. Stokes.”
“Sit. Sit. And call me Nora,” she said, letting him go to slip into the seat opposite. “You’re not in high school anymore, and as much as I appreciate the Coach instilling manners in you, ‘Mrs. Stokes’ makes me feel about a hundred years old, and I’ve got another forty to go before I get there.”
“Let me heat that up for you, Boone,” Teri said, arriving to top off his mug, then leaning down to kiss her mother’s cheek. “You want a cup, Momma?”
“I’d love a cup of hot Lipton, sugar. If you don’t mind.” She looked from Teri back to Boone. “Switching from iced to hot tea is a sure way to get the weather to cool off. Or so I try to convince myself every year, when autumn arrives and it still feels like summer.”
Boone smiled, and Teri rubbed her mother’s shoulder before saying, “Be right back with it.”
Nora watched her daughter walk away, then laced her hands in front of her on the table and leaned toward Boone. “How are your parents, Boone? I guess they’re plenty happy to have you home again.”
“Yes, ma’am. So they say. And it’s nice t
o be back for my momma’s Sunday pot roast.”
“Oh, I can’t remember the last time Gavin and I ate supper after church with your folks. I’m going to have to invite us over real soon,” she said, laughing.
Boone laughed, too. “Momma’s cooking’s one of my favorite things about being back.”
“You’ll have to try and get to church with them one morning. Your mother would love that.”
“Yes ma’am,” he said, knowing she spoke the truth, knowing, too, he wasn’t much of the churchgoing sort. “I’ll do my best.”
“I know you will,” she said, reaching across the table and squeezing his hand. “Now, are you able to talk to me about the antiques Tess left to you boys? Or do I need to wait till Casper and Dax can join us?”
“You can talk to me, but I will need to run things by them before agreeing to anything.” He wrapped his hand around his mug, frowned down into the brew. “Though with me being the only one living at the ranch anymore, I’m going on the idea that I’ve got more say with these things than they do.”
“Then I’ll let you work out all of the particulars with the others.” She sat back as Teri returned with her tea. “I just want to tell you what you’ve got in that house, because I don’t think you know. Tess kept her private business private when it came to those precious possessions.”
She certainly had that. Neither Tess nor Dave had treated the furniture like anything special at all. “What I don’t get, if these antiques are as valuable as you say, is why she didn’t sell them herself, use the money for what she needed instead of making a deal to lease grazing land to Henry Lasko.”
“Well, now, that I can’t speak to with any authority, but my guess would be that she’d come to the end of her life and knew they might be worth more to you boys. That you could sell them as you needed to, or hold on to them for later should the economy turn around.”
Which it hadn’t, and was beginning to look like it wouldn’t in Boone’s lifetime. Maybe Tess had been prescient after all, giving him and the boys a bit of a safety net. Of course if not for Darcy pointing it out, none of them would’ve known they were sitting on what to them was a possible fortune.
Once Nora had fixed her tea to her liking, she spent the next fifteen minutes describing the pieces of furniture he lived with daily. The pieces he didn’t think twice about when walking by, except to remember watering down the liquor bottles Dave kept in the sideboard, the same sideboard where Tess filed clipped recipes she rarely used, rustling up old favorites instead.
The memories made it hard to think about getting rid of anything that had belonged to the older couple. But if he was going to make the ranch his home, and come hell or high water that’s what he wanted to do, turning the house into a shrine to Tess and Dave didn’t make a lot of sense.
Sure, he’d always see them there, caught off guard by the picture of Tess in the kitchen, standing at the stove frying up chicken legs, or sitting at the table patching Dave’s shirts. Dave reading his paper in the living room, the old TV that didn’t pick up but two channels on rabbit ears flashing in green, red, and blue against his white hair.
But he needed to make new memories, his own memories with his own family, though whether or not that would ever happen was up for grabs. Hell, he couldn’t even find time to sit down with Everly for the interview he’d promised her. Finding a woman, raising kids . . . He’d had to back-burner both of those things almost the minute he’d hit town and realized the truth of his shared inheritance.
Except he couldn’t deny that for the last week he’d been imagining Everly in the role of the woman to give him his family. No, that wasn’t right. He’d been thinking she was the woman he wanted to make a family with. There was something about her—her totally inappropriate footwear and impractical buttons aside—that made it easy to see her rounding up their brood. He was thinking four, at least, maybe six—
“Boone? Have you heard anything I’ve been saying?”
He blinked up at Nora. “Yeah, sorry. Just letting some of those numbers sink in.”
“Once they have, and I can’t imagine it will take long, I think you’ll see the worth in letting me set up this auction. I’ve mentioned the pieces to several people, and there is a lot of interest, let me tell you.”
But Boone only caught half of that because through the window behind Nora’s head, he caught something a whole lot more pressing than her take on selling his furniture.
“Would you excuse me for a moment?” he asked, but he didn’t wait for an answer, bolting from his seat and to the diner’s front door. He pushed out into the morning’s climbing heat just in time to see the tail end of Les Upton’s tow truck cruise by, the blinker stuttering as the wrecker slowed then turned toward downtown Crow Hill.
It was a coincidence, he was certain, the other man showing up in the same part of town at the same time of day as Boone himself. Except it was hard to accept it as such since the chance of his being here at all was as slim as a half of a toothpick.
FIFTEEN
PARKING IN THE main yard of the ranch house, in the same spot she’d chosen when she’d come for Monday’s interview, Everly waited for the dust stirred up by her tires to settle before opening her door. The October evening was still warm, though not uncomfortable, the sun setting sooner these days than it had just a week ago.
Autumn was her favorite time of year. The arrival of the cooler air, the crisp early mornings, the short evenings spent enjoying the sunset and the arrival of the dusky chill, one holiday after another leading into the new year.
Granted, the holiday season in Crow Hill was a far cry from those she’d spent in Austin, but she loved the cookie exchanges, and the garland hung on the town’s streetlamps, the colorful lights adorning the windows of the local businesses, the popcorn balls and homemade fudge dropped at the office by advertisers and friends.
Exiting her SUV, she lifted a hand to shade her eyes, looking beyond the corral into the far pastures, their ragged fences like stitches quilting them together, the whole cloth vanishing into the distance like a sea of spun gold. She took a deep breath, blew it out slowly. Oh, but Boone must love the view from here.
What would it be like to wake up as light first broke over the horizon, turning the grass in the fields the colors of thick cream and buttered toast? To spend the day in the elements, skin baked by the heat, lips parched by the dry breeze, hair turned to straw by the sun?
To come home, to sit on the back porch and nurse a beer or a glass of wine, watching the sky, so blue throughout the day, going pink and orange and purple as night fell, as the stars appeared on the stretch of canvas the color of ink?
And . . . wow, she mused, laughing to herself, leaning against the front of her vehicle and soaking in the scenery and the absolute peace it evoked. That had certainly come out of nowhere. She was a journalist, not a poet, and she was certainly not the philosopher she’d seen in Boone. And, to boot, she was a city girl at heart. She’d only come to Crow Hill because Faith had made the suggestion.
Faith had also been the one to convince Whitey his personnel budget would be well served by new blood, a fresh perspective, and Everly’s experience. And that made Faith’s questioning of her intentions for the Dalton Gang story sting a bit. Faith should know better. Everly hadn’t grown up here. She had nothing to prove, no wrongs to right, no revenge to mete out in print.
After four years, Crow Hill felt like home as much as Austin ever had. And that surprised her. Oh, she still stuck out—driving a luxury hybrid SUV, wearing labels other than Wrangler and Tony Lama, doing much of her shopping online because she couldn’t find the brands she wanted in town. But she couldn’t remember the last time she’d thought it was time to leave.
Crow Hill was a close-knit community, family-owned ranches, family-run businesses. Her own family had long ago scattered across the Lone Star State. Missing them was made easier by friends who gave her life an abundance of riches, who were there when she needed them, always.
She wouldn’t want to stay here alone, however, and that had nothing to do with Boone; they’d only just started seeing each other, and she’d never believed in love at first sight. But from what she’d learned of him over the last week, he was the type of man she would want to spend her life with.
There would be hardships, of course. Making a living off the land never came without them. And she knew from her girlfriends what the three members of the Dalton Gang faced daily, the struggles they worked to overcome. Struggles made worse by their lack of money.
All of it was a viciously unrelenting cycle—raising stock, feeding stock, selling stock at a loss, yet having to sell to afford to raise and feed the next season’s calves, which depending on beef prices and the whims of Mother Nature, might have to be sold for even less in order to do it again.
Snagging a twist of hair and tucking it behind her ear, she wondered what it had been like here for Tess Dalton, no children of her own, the three Dalton Gang boys coming into her life as teens, her days spent at Dave’s side, or seeing to the homestead to free him from having to take care of those chores as well.
Could Everly do that? Be a rancher’s wife? Work dawn to dusk, see her husband doing the same, wondering each and every day whether the next would be easier, bringing good news or just more grief? Neither Faith nor Arwen had ever lived on a ranch. Their men were the ranchers, but Casper and Dax both left the job at the job when they went home at the end of the day.
Boone did not. He lived in the Dalton house and was rarely off the property. When he did leave, it was still work that most often brought him to town—though lately it had been her. And that had her feeling as guilty as it had her feeling, well, special.
What, besides taking him into her bed, had she done to deserve his attention? How had she managed to snag his affections? Why was he taking time for her? Surely he’d made arrangements for sex elsewhere, ones that didn’t involve any local women who might want more than his—