Unforgettable (The Dalton Gang #3)

by Alison Kent

  “What’re you doing here?” Boone’s voice broke into her reverie, derailing her rather disturbing musings and startling her as he approached from the direction of the barn. His tone broadcast his surprise, the smile breaking across his face declaring his happiness that she’d decided to visit.

  “Enjoying the view and the evening,” she said, feeling a thrilling rush at his reaction, then adding as he drew near, “And waiting for you.” She watched his eyes flash as he walked, his nostrils flare as he reached her. And then he was there, looping an arm around her neck and bringing her close for a kiss.

  It was a sweet kiss, a tender kiss, his mouth tasting of salt and a day spent in the sun, his lips dry as he pressed them to hers, lingering, though not as long as either of them would’ve liked. But oh, what a welcome. As if he’d been waiting all day to see her. As if she were his reason for coming home.

  How easy it would be to get used this . . . this . . . joy. Utter joy. His at finding her waiting. Hers at being what he wanted, what he needed, at giving him what no other woman could because she was meant to be his.

  And, good grief, what a ridiculous train of thought to be traveling, just because his kiss had her bones melting and her heart swelling in the cavern of her chest.

  He was slow to pull away, asking as he did, “What did I do to get so lucky?”

  Stepping out of his embrace, she circled the SUV, reaching into the backseat to bring out the picnic basket she’d packed. “I brought you supper.”

  “Yeah?” His grin grew at least two sizes. “I’m just about hungry enough to eat a side of rhino.”

  She opened the top and peered inside, fighting a grin of her own. “Well, I’ve got grapes. Dried cherries and apricots. A baguette. Gruyere and Camembert and Danish blue cheese. And a bottle of CapRock Roussanne.”

  He screwed up his face. “Then what you meant is that you brought you supper.”

  His disappointment made her surprise that much better. “I also have a double brisket platter with all the fixin’s and a whole pecan pie from the Hellcat Saloon. It’s not quite a side of rhino, but . . .”

  “Now that’s what I’m talking about.” He reached around her and grabbed the big basket. “C’mon. Let’s go in.”

  Hooking her arm through his when he offered, she fell into step beside him, wishing they could spread out a blanket in the closest pasture and share their meal as the day fell away. “I felt bad after lunch took the turn it did yesterday. Not the . . . part where we ended up in bed. But the stuff before. When we were talking. And the decided lack of anything filling to eat.”

  “Nothing there to feel bad about,” he said, frowning as he looked down at her. “Man can live by grilled cheese alone if he has to. I should know.”

  “You didn’t eat much,” she said, feeling even worse about that.

  “You didn’t eat much either. Of your lunch anyway.”

  She stopped, squeezing her thighs together as she looked around the ranch yard. “Could we eat out here? Do you have a table? Or we could let down the tailgate of your truck?”

  He laughed, a big loud guffaw that made its way up from his chest to spill from his mouth. “Afraid if we go inside I’ll want dessert first?”

  “Actually, I’m more afraid I will,” she said, the admission fluttering in her belly.

  “Then your wish is my command,” he said, leading her to the far side of the house where an old picnic table sat beneath the huge spreading oak that shaded the structure. He started to set the basket on top, then stopped. The surface was covered with dried acorns and bird droppings and cicada shells, and looked like it hadn’t been used in a decade or more. “Well this wasn’t such a good idea.”

  “Hang on a second,” she said, opening the basket and pulling out the blue and green plaid blanket packed on top. She shook it out and covered the table, realizing too late the benches were just as filthy. Of course if not for her heels . . .

  “Here, help me up,” she said, bracing a hand on his shoulder as she stepped onto the bench that was worn but still solid, then turned to sit on the table. Boone did the same at the other end, leaving the basket of food between them. “Perfect.”

  “If your idea of perfect is you being down there, me being over here. But since I’m about to keel over from lack of rhino,” he said, setting her bread and grapes on a plate on the table, “I guess it’ll do.”

  She pulled out the bottle of wine and two glasses. “I read once that Michael Phelps burned something like ten thousand calories a day while training.”

  “Not sure I’ve ever had ten thousand calories’ worth of food in the house, but I could probably give him a run. Eating. Not in the pool. Never got in much swimming time.”

  “You weren’t born in Crow Hill, right?” she asked, handing him the corkscrew when he reached for it. “I seem to remember Faith saying your family moved here when you were kids.”

  “We did. We were. We came here for my dad’s job at the high school.” He pulled down on the corkscrew arms, worked the cork free, and poured her a glass, pouring himself one as well instead of heading to the house for a beer. “Been coaching for about thirty years. Mom waited until Faith and I were both old enough to enroll, then went to work at the middle school. She moved to the high school the same year I did. They’ve both been there long enough that they’re as much an institution as the bronzed hurricane in the school’s courtyard.”

  “Is that what that is? A hurricane?”

  He snorted, found a fork and the pie. “Looks like a big turd, if you ask me.”

  “Was that what you thought when you played football?”

  “I did.”

  “I’m guessing you didn’t make your feelings known to the sculptor. Or to your coach.”

  “The Coach got to hear me make fun of it over the dinner table for years.” He said it around a big bite of pie, then set aside the dessert and found the aluminum to-go pan of brisket.

  “How did that go over?” she asked, pinching a grape from the cluster, a gust of wind lifting her hair from her neck.

  “I think he held the same opinion, but wasn’t about to say so. He just stared me down anytime I opened my mouth about it. And then I closed my mouth, and waited until I could come out here and laugh about it with Dave. He didn’t work for the school, so he didn’t mind that particular disrespect.”

  “But he minded others.”

  “Oh, yeah. As laid-back as he was, Dave was not an easy man to work for.”

  “Really,” she said, because nothing could’ve surprised her more. The three Dalton Gang members had done nothing but sing the other man’s praises. “I’ve never heard anyone else say that about him.”

  “Did you ever meet him?” he asked, digging a spoon into a container of charro beans. “He was still alive when you moved here I think.”

  “He was. But, no. I didn’t meet him. I did see him in passing. And he was always scowling. But I see that a lot on you rancher types.” Another grape, then she tore off a hunk of bread, and found a knife to spread the cheese. “I figured it was all that time spent squinting into the sun.”

  “Part of it, yeah, but I think Dave did that on purpose. He was a gentle kind of guy, I’d guess you’d say. Didn’t like raising his voice. The scowl probably helped when he wanted things done a certain way.”

  “His way?”

  He nodded as he moved to the potato salad. “It was always a way that made sense. I never stopped to wonder if another way or method might be better. I guess that’s why I had so much trouble after Casper and Dax left.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “They both took off not long after graduation. Pretty much back-to-back, leaving me the only one who knew Dave’s routine, his preferences, his rules, if you will. He brought in some hands, but they didn’t like taking orders from a seventeen-year-old who’d only been ranching part-time for a little over three years.”

  She reached for an apricot slice. “Was it hard after they left? Dax and Casper
?”

  “On the ranch? Or just in general?”

  “Both.”

  “Is this going into your story?” he asked, his eyes finding hers over the pan of brisket he’d returned to.

  “Some of it might,” she said, popping the fruit into her mouth. “I’ll have to rely on my memory. My notebook and my digital recorder are both in the SUV.”

  He snorted. “I’d say you were really letting your hair down tonight, except here you are with the buttons and the shoes.”

  She straightened her legs, turned her feet this way and that. “Until you tell me to come with boots and jeans for that horseback ride, you’ll get me as me.”

  “I never did ask if you could ride.” He stopped, taking in her skinny black pants and long sleeveless swing top. “A horse, I mean. Can you ride a horse?”

  “I’ve ridden before,” she said, reaching for her wine before she reached for him, because that’s what the look in his eyes had her wanting to do. “It’s been a while, but I guess it’s like a bicycle? Or . . . riding other things after a long hiatus? It kinda all comes back.”

  “About that.” He swallowed more potato salad, downed half the wine in his glass like it was water. “Would’ve been hard pressed to tell you were out of practice. If that’s what you’re saying here.”

  She nodded, leaned down to dust off the bright fuchsia toes of her Prada pumps. “Until the other morning, it had been a while.”

  “How long is ‘a while’?” he asked and stopped chewing.

  “Four years.”

  He blinked, blinked again. “So . . . all the time you’ve been in Crow Hill—”

  “Celibate as a nun,” she said, meeting his gaze over the rim of her wineglass.

  “Why didn’t you come see me sooner?” he asked, his expression awash in disbelief.

  She smiled at that. “Sooner, I wasn’t ready to come see you. Or anyone. And you haven’t been back that long for me to come see.”

  “What happened?”

  “You danced with me.”

  “I know that part of what happened. I was asking about what happened to make you close up shop.”

  Those weren’t things she was ready to talk about. Not in any kind of detail. And not with him. “I had just ended the relationship I told you about. I wasn’t ready to get involved in another.”

  “But now you are.”

  Was that where they were headed? Into a relationship? Was that what all her earlier thinking about living here had been? Was that what he wanted?

  She started to tell him she wasn’t averse to things between them becoming something more, but she held off, biting back a truth it surprised her to acknowledge. She needed time to come to grips with what she was feeling.

  With the fact that she was feeling. In the meantime . . .

  She gave a noncommittal shrug and sipped at her wine, then. desperate for a change of subject, asked, “Was leaving hard because your family was here? Or hard because you were abandoning Tess and Dave?”

  “A whole lot of both,” he responded after a long pause. “But it got to the point that I just couldn’t stay.”

  “Faith missed you a lot, when you were gone. When she found out you’d be coming back for the ranch . . . She wore this smile for weeks. It was like a kid finding out Santa Claus was real after all.”

  He grunted. “Too bad I couldn’t have put that smile on her face by coming home for her and the folks instead of for an inheritance.”

  “You can’t think that way.”

  “I can. And I do. I visited during the holidays every year, but it’s pretty shitty to say you don’t want to move back, and then do it because someone left you a ranch.” He poured more wine, for him, for her, drank his, then grabbed a handful of her grapes. “I’d told myself when I left that I was never going to live here again. Except for my family, everything that had made Crow Hill home was gone. The boys. Then Dave passed. Finally Tess. There wasn’t anything left. Nothing.”

  Her reporter’s antennae were twitching, and she wanted to know what he’d skated over, what he’d left out; but she knew to get what she wanted, she had to keep quiet, to let him talk while she listened.

  “I hadn’t even known I wanted to cowboy until the folks sent us to work here. I didn’t want to go to college. I had the grades. Had killer SAT scores. Hell, I even got recruited by some smaller schools’ football programs. If I hadn’t sabotaged a blow-off economics class I took my senior year, I could’ve gone to any school I wanted.”

  That didn’t surprise her. He was a very smart man. What did surprise her was that he would throw away such a gift. “Why didn’t you want to go?”

  “School bored the shit outta me,” he said, putting the top back on the brisket and crimping it closed. “I knew Casper wasn’t going, and things had already gone south for Dax with his old man. Dave didn’t pay enough to call those wages a living, so even if the boys could’ve stuck out their family shit, they needed more money than they could get working here. So did I.”

  “I can’t imagine he wouldn’t have understood that. Dave, I mean.”

  “He did. I still felt like a dick for walking out on him.” He closed up the potatoes, beans and pie, finished off his wine. “Can you stick around for a while? Let me go in and get cleaned up? It’s a nice night. Be great to sit out back with someone besides myself and my beer cooler.”

  “Sure,” she said, waving a hand over their picnic. “I’ll pack this up. You go on in.”

  “Thank you. This was great. Really great.”

  “I’m glad you liked it.”

  She swore he started to say something more, but then he dropped another kiss on her mouth and headed toward the house, leaving her to wonder if her coming out here had sent him the wrong message.

  Then wondering what message she’d wanted to send, besides being neighborly and bringing supper to a friend, because even she wasn’t buying that one anymore.

  SIXTEEN

  WHILE BOONE SHOWERED upstairs, Everly stayed put on the first floor. The only other visit she’d made here she’d spent in Boone’s bedroom, and he’d hurried her up the stairs, leaving her no time to take in her surroundings. Now that she had time, she could see what he meant about the state of things.

  Old was the first word that came to mind. Worn was the second. Paint, floor tiles, blinds, appliances. All were in need of an upgrade.

  The place was more cluttered than dirty, though the kitchen floor could use a mop, the windows a swipe of Windex. There were dishes in the sink, but they’d been rinsed, and the stove surface was smeared with hastily wiped-away grease.

  She wondered as she walked through if the kitchen sideboard was one of Tess’s antiques. It was covered with a clutter of paper and tools and shop rags as if it had been picked up for ten bucks at yard sale.

  Remembering Arwen telling her about Tess having a piano, she headed for the living room. The old upright sat against an interior wall, a four-legged adjustable stool in front of it. She sat, spun, smiling as she rose to the height she needed, screwing up her face as she played a series of scales and realized how out of tune the instrument was. And how stiff her hands were.

  Still, it was lovely to run her fingers over the keys, and she settled on a rusty rendition of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” laughing each time she slipped up and the notes rang sour. Not that anyone would be able to tell, she thought, considering barely half the keys produced the sound they were supposed to.

  Boone came into the room as she finished the song, wearing only his socks with his clean clothes, and his steps lighter because of it. “I didn’t know you played,” he said after she’d stopped and swiveled the stool to face him.

  She caught the scent of his soap and shampoo, and wondered for no reason that made sense how many other women knew what he smelled like fresh from the shower, his hair brushed back, the ends snagged in his collar, his face razored clean. Why seeing him like this seemed so intimate . . .

  She tightened her core aro
und the longing coiling inside her, a longing that wasn’t about having him, but being with him, sharing moments like this one, so simple, so uncomplicated, drawing them incredibly, powerfully close. “It’s been a while since I have. I left my piano in Austin when I moved.”

  She didn’t want to think about what had happened to it. If Toby had pushed it off the balcony and watched it explode, then burned what was left in the street. Or if he’d just taken an ax to it in the middle of the living room.

  Whatever he’d done, she didn’t have a doubt that it was gone forever. Same with her beloved espresso machine. She needed to buy another. Four years, and she’d yet to replace it. She didn’t know why when she’d started every morning of those years in that condo with a double shot. Maybe that was the reason . . .

  “Must be like riding a bike,” Boone said, bracing an elbow on the top of the old upright. “Doesn’t sound like the time away has hurt you any.”

  Riding a bike. Piano playing. Sex. “It comes back. I’m kinda rusty, but not as bad as I’d thought.”

  “You take lessons as a kid?”

  She nodded. “Mostly against my will.”

  He laughed. “Why’s that?”

  “I was way too busy taking dance and gymnastics. Who wants to sit and practice piano when floor routines and Swan Lake are waiting?”

  “So you liked dance.”

  “I loved dance. I hated having to quit.”

  “Why did you?”

  “I hit puberty. My build was all wrong. I was short, and sort of . . . hippy. But I made a great cheerleader. And the gymnastics helped with that. Of course, with cheerleading comes football, and as you know, with football comes boys, and gymnastics went the way of dance.” She raised an index finger. “But I didn’t quit cheerleading, proving I do have it in me to stick with some things.”

  “Things that you’re built for.”