“If only the men around here could read at all,” Abby had joked, nodding toward a middle-aged guy at the bar with a potbelly and three days of stubble. The man’s eyes had been ping-ponging between her butt and Bridget’s for the last two hours, until he’d gone nearly cross-eyed with the effort.
“Oh, Abby. So picky. Nobody’s ever good enough for you.” Bridget winked.
Even Wolf? she’d wanted to ask. But she knew better than to bring his name into the conversation. Bridget would answer, “Best friends don’t let best friends date rodeo cowboys. And they definitely don’t let them date their brothers.”
Abby glanced at her watch. It was nearing ten a.m. She’d agreed to meet Bridget at ten fifteen to check out the slim pickings among the dress shops in Kalispell. Stella licked her paw and circled twice before settling on the seat beside her.
Abby hated shopping. She wore T-shirts and a snug-fitting pair of Wranglers every day of the week. Driving down Main Street looking for the dress shop Bridget had talked about, she muttered to Stella, “This is a waste of my precious time.” The dog stuck her tongue out and panted sympathetically.
She pulled into a parking place and drained her cup of Mountain High coffee. There were two clothing stores in Kalispell and both of them had ridiculous names: The Toggery and Blue Lagoon. Abby felt much more at home in the aisles of Ranch & Home or Cabela’s. Never mind. She could do this, with Bridget’s help. What was keeping her, anyway?
“Send a rescue squad for me if I’m not back in fifteen minutes,” Abby told Stella, who yawned and turned her face toward a spot of sunshine on the passenger seat. So much for sympathy. Abby swung her legs onto the street.
A block away she spotted Wolf springing out of his father’s truck. His height and wide-legged stance were unmistakable, but he looked out of place on the paved street, with a thumb hooked into his belt loop and an expression of bored distraction on his face. This was a man born to straddle the wide breadth of a horse, who appeared foreign and out of sorts when his boots weren’t in a pair of stirrups. His hair full and wavy, blue eyes sparkling in the sun. It was as if Abby had conjured him from nothing, or from the deep well of her hidden hopes and fears. Just as it had yesterday, her heart began to race. Without thinking, she pulled her unruly hair from its lazy-morning ponytail and shook it around her face. “Wolf,” she whispered to herself.
Sneaking up behind her on the sidewalk, Bridget surprised Abby with a wrap-around hug.
“Look who’s here,” she said, wriggling from Bridget’s grasp and nodding toward Wolf, who still hadn’t noticed her.
“Ugh, I know. He’s taking Dad shopping—Mom’s idea. God knows they both need a serious wardrobe update.” Bridget turned Abby around to face her. “Anyway, you saw him yesterday for a few minutes. Got past that awkward moment, right?”
Abby gave her a look, like, you can’t be serious.
“Well, you can rest easy because they’re headed for Hansen’s. We’re going here.” She grasped Abby’s elbow and steered her through the double doors of Blue Lagoon.
Nonsensically, Abby pouted in disappointment. Did she want to run into Wolf or didn’t she? How was she going to get her act together when she couldn’t even be honest with herself?
She sat in the dressing room while Bridget and a saleswoman picked out dresses for her. “Nothing strapless,” she called out.
“Don’t listen to her,” Bridget told the woman. “Bring out the bling!”
Ten minutes later, Abby was in midnight-blue chiffon with a beaded top, turning on a podium in front of a three-faced mirror. “I look like a tricked-out rodeo queen,” she said.
“It’s the perfect color for you.” Bridget laughed. “And it’s very sophisticated.”
“I hate the low cut. If I dance two steps with Dad I’m going to burst out of it. How embarrassing would that be?” In the back of her mind, an image began to form of wearing a dress this sexy in front of Wolf. “Forget this one,” she said. “Do you have anything in pink, or peach?”
Bridget shook her head. “You want to look like a Sunday school teacher?”
“No, I want to look like I’m not trying too hard.”
Bridget whirled from the dressing room and, after a whispered conversation with the saleswoman, appeared once more at the dressing room door with a short white-linen dress. “This one’s a sleeper,” she said. “Check out the back.” She turned the dress on its hanger. The bodice was draped and had two modest straps, but the back dipped so low that only a single rope of tiny rhinestones connected the two sides.
“You’ve got to try it on,” said the saleswoman. “Somebody from Whitefish ordered it for a May wedding, then never picked it up.”
“A bad luck dress, you mean?” Abby laughed morbidly.
“No, girl,” said Bridget. “It’s never been worn because only a certain kind of person can pull this off. And that person is you.” She slipped the dress off its hanger, and dangled it toward Abby. “Come to Mama.”
Abby closed her eyes and put her hands over her head like a swimmer taking her first plunge into an unknown body of water. The dress fell easily into place.
Bridget turned her around slowly in front of the mirror. “You sure don’t look like a horse whisperer today,” she said softly.
“What’s a horse whisperer look like, Bridge?”
“Like Buck Brannaman. Not like…” She whistled, long and deep, and held Abby’s hair up. “Jennifer frickin’ Lawrence!”
“J-Law.” Abby smiled.“I can live with that.” The front view of the dress was deceptively modest. Abby’s mom or, heck, even her great-grandmother Eunice (were she alive) would approve of it. The back, however, looked like a thumbnail on TMZ.com. It curved around Abby’s butt so perfectly that any seams were erased, and the single line of rhinestones adorned her bronzed, muscled back. Her neck looked longer, her shoulders strong and straight.
“But this was somebody’s wedding dress,” she said. “There’s no way I’m going to my dad’s birthday party looking like I’m about to walk down the aisle.”
The saleswoman rushed to Abby’s side. “I may have a solution,” she said, returning moments later with a pair of fuchsia cowgirl boots. The toes were embellished with rhinestones and pearls, the stitching intricate and authentically Western.
Bridget grabbed for them. “They’re perfect. Nobody would ever mistake you for a bride in these.”
Reluctantly, Abby sat on the sofa and pulled on the hot pink boots. They, too, fit perfectly. “God, they’re even comfortable,” she said without realizing she’d spoken out loud. She stood up on the podium and struck another pose. Against the short dress, her long brown legs ran like a river, a river that ended in a shock of bright pink.
“Don’t bother thanking me,” said Bridget. “The dress is on sale, you know.”
“Half of wholesale,” the saleswoman said.
“And the boots?” asked Abby.
“Free,” shouted Bridget. “I just bought them for you.”
“Bridge,” she said. “You can’t.”
“Sure I can. Don’t worry, I’ll be borrowing them real soon.” She reached up to embrace Abby, and pulled her off the podium. Abby hugged her back, hard. She wasn’t about to tell Bridget, but she couldn’t wait for Wolf to see her in this outfit. She was going to blow his mind.
Chapter Four
Wolf was back home for his dad, just as he’d left home for the old man six years earlier. Not that his dad had actually asked Wolf to come back for his best friend’s sixty-fifth. He was too proud for that. No, it was Wolf’s mom who had posed the question, practically begging him to come back for the “party of the year.” But the request had his dad’s stamp on it. He was a tough old man, but sentimental, too, far more soft-hearted underneath his gruff exterior than his mom. He was the one who wanted the whole family together again. Wolf had been away for too long. He had his reasons, but it had been far too long.
As he browsed indifferently through the clothing racks
at Hansen’s, he gazed out the window. Nothing much happening in Kalispell. Nothing much had ever happened in Kalispell, though the town continued to grow and expand as the big-box stores bought up ranch land north and south, creating shopping mall upon shopping mall.
When he’d been in high school, the lack of attractive women in the Flathead had been a regional joke. With the exception of Abby, who had come back home, all the cute girls either left for Seattle or stayed and had three kids by twenty-five. Still, he hadn’t given up hope that he’d run into somebody worth pursuing. Ah¸ the pursuit…outside of the ring, it was his greatest God-given talent.
All he had to do was flash a certain look—his mom called it his Elvis Presley sneer—and he could reel in nine girls out of ten. The trick was to show interest, make eye contact, and then immediately turn his attention to something, or someone, else. If the girl he wanted thought he didn’t care too much about her one way or another, she’d start chasing him, and closing the deal was a cinch.
“Son,” his dad called to him. “Pick something, anything. Let’s get this over with.” Here goes nothing, Wolf thought.
A few minutes later, he stood in front of the dressing-room mirror and tried on a crisp blue houndstooth-checked Roper shirt with pearl snaps, the kind of shirt that would likely bite you in the face if you landed on the wrong side of a bull. But on the dance floor, no worries. He zipped up the midnight-blue bootleg denims. With their powerful glutes and overdeveloped haunches, rodeo guys like Wolf were notoriously hard to fit, but these jeans felt like softly aged leather caressing his muscled thighs. The jacket was dark-gray corduroy with black suede patches on the elbows and unusual triangular buttons on the pockets. The kind you’d see in a movie about Switzerland, one with singing children and milkmaids and mountain men who yodeled in their sleep.
Okay, not so sure about the jacket. Too professor-y? He turned back to the mirror and took a good long look at himself. Would Abadabun like the way he looked in this? The thought just popped into his head, and he did his best to shake it off.
From the next dressing room, he heard his father laughing at himself.
“Let’s see, Dad,” he said.
They emerged together. His dad had on a black version of Wolf’s Swiss mystery coat, a maroon bolo tie with a steer skeleton, and a light-blue denim shirt. Perversely, he wore the same jeans with holes in the knees he’d worn to the barn at dawn. Oh well, thought Wolf. That’s Mom’s department.
“Let’s do it,” his dad said. “And get the hell out of here.”
“My treat.”
“Can’t let you do that, son.”
“I’m rolling in it this month. I insist.”
“What we do for the ladies in our lives.” His dad sighed, patting Wolf on the back.
Wolf handed the clerk his debit card and waited for the purchases to be bagged.
“Heck, you didn’t tell your sister where we were shopping, did you?” The old man, even though he was back in his day clothes, couldn’t have sounded more embarrassed if he’d been caught at a strip club.
“No, sir. Why?” Wolf glanced casually out the window to see Bridget and Abby walking down the street. His heart started kicking around in his chest like a freshly roped steer. Only problem was, he couldn’t tie the damned thing into submission the way he could an animal in the ring. Luckily, the girls hadn’t spotted them.
“I thought it might be awkward with Abby, you know,” his dad said. “Figured you’d want to meet up with her alone, without any of us around to bug you.”
“That’s real nice of you.” Wolf was so surprised that he could hardly form the words in his mouth. It had always shocked him that his family knew every detail of his past with Abby, and that it was still on their minds so many years later. But that was small town life for you. “Abby and I already had a talk, though, yesterday in the barn, when she was working over your endurance mare.”
“Okay.” He looked skeptical.
“What?”
“Well…you sure about that?”
“How do you mean?”
His dad cleared his throat, and Wolf could swear the old man’s pink face turned a shade darker. “Well, it’s just that I overheard your mom talking to Marcie Macready. She’s of the opinion that this whole, uh, prom thing still hangs pretty heavy on Abby.”
“Dad…” Wolf warned. But his dad was no meddler, and this subject, the subject of why Wolf had needed to change his plans the night of the prom, was normally one he would have been all too happy to ignore. No, Wolf’s mom had to have put him up to this—or worse, his sister. He couldn’t believe something as silly as the prom could still be this big of a deal after so much time. But a small town was like a soap opera: you could leave it for years, and when you came back, nothing had changed.
“I’m sorry, son. If you cleared things up, you cleared things up. None of my business.”
Okay, maybe he hadn’t addressed his issues as directly as he should have. And he didn’t want these awkward scenes between them to cast a shadow over his whole visit. As much as he dreaded it, they needed to have an actual talk.
“That’s okay. ‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ right?”
His dad smiled and winked, obviously relieved to be done with the topic.
Outside, he found the girls a half-block away. Abby was wearing a pair of form-fitting jeans and a khaki shirt with rolled-up sleeves—not her usual horse-trainer outfit—and her hair was loose, floating around her shoulders. Good God, she was gorgeous. She looked embarrassed, though, and for a minute, Wolf was grateful that he wasn’t the only amateur actor who’d forgotten his lines.
“Long time, no see, Abby,” he said in a voice that was confident and loud. Maybe a little too loud.
“Look, I had no idea we’d all be converging like this.” She splayed out her hands, a beautiful filly, mistakenly caught in the roving spotlight of a nighttime rodeo.
“I didn’t, either,” Wolf said. His sister shot him a threatening look before hustling his dad toward the other end of the store. “But what would you think if we ditched these two and got a quick cup of coffee, just you and me?”
He stared at her face as if he were seeing Abby, the twenty-two-year-old Abby, for the first time. Had her eyes always been so big?
“I have a lot of chores to get back to,” she said.
“Me, too. Come on, just a quick cup.”
“Well…okay, one cup. And I don’t think much of those cookie-cutter, five-dollar latté places.”
A woman after his own heart. “We’ll go to Norm’s. Bet you haven’t been in ages.” She smiled, thank God, a wordless acceptance.
“Great,” Wolf said. “I’ll tell Bridge and Dad. Meet you there in a couple?”
“Sounds good.”
He watched her walk down the street, her heart-shaped ass perfectly outlined in worn denim, and reminded himself he needed to mend fences, not chase skirts. Not this particular skirt, in any case.
Chapter Five
Norm’s News was one of those rare survivors of the previous century, even in quiet Northwest Montana. An ice-cream parlor with red-and-white-striped awnings, a long counter filled with glass jars of candies, and a real soda fountain with locally made ice creams in round cardboard bins. The espresso machine was a recent addition, but the local kids barely seemed to notice it. The burgers, floats, and shakes were just too tempting. It was the parents who stopped in for a caffeine fix while their children dangled their legs from the counter stools and elevated their blood-sugar levels the good old-fashioned way.
Abby sat in a booth near the back and wondered what the hell she was doing there. What had her mom told her half a lifetime ago, even before Wolf appeared on the horizon? Never seem too eager to be with a boy. If you turn him down the first time, he’ll be back for a second. But that strategy didn’t apply to Wolf. She didn’t need to play hard to get, because this was never going to go anywhere anyway.
She crossed her legs under the table and looked at the
menu, even though she’d memorized it at age eight. She’d come here countless times as a little girl with Bridget, Wolf, and too often, one of Wolf’s here-today-gone-tomorrow girlfriends. Too shy to talk to him face-to-face, and too jealous to watch as he kissed and cuddled with another girl only inches away, she would bury her nose in the menu, pretending to study her options even though she always got a cheeseburger and a mint-chip milkshake. Wolf used to tease her about her shyness—“Get your nose out of that menu, Abs!”—and labeled her a “mint-chip addict.” Surely, this was how he remembered her, if he thought of her at all. She was nothing more than a little girl, a child who couldn’t even maintain eye contact with an adult without collapsing into giggles.
Why was she wasting her time thinking about this? The truth was, she wasn’t a little girl anymore—she was a grown woman with a business to build, a mission to accomplish. She’d settle down one day, but not with a guy who got paid a boatload of cash to abuse horses, steers, and bulls. She’d wait for the right guy, someone grounded and mature, who respected and supported her, and her new method of treating the animals she loved.
“Just two coffees,” she told the waiter, declining the cream and sugar. If she was lucky, she’d be out of here in twenty minutes.
…
Wolf whistled as he headed down the street toward Norm’s. His second encounter with Abby in two days. And mere hours since he’d dreamt of her through most of the night. Pausing at the threshold, he tried to blink those dreams away. He’d invited Abby here so he could clear the air, not cloud it up all over again.
When he walked in, there was a hush. Two high school girls halted their chatter and swung around on the counter stools to stare at him. Being a local legend, a big fish in a tiny pond, could be a drag sometimes. He thought Norm’s might be the one place in town where he could stay anonymous, but apparently not. He walked purposefully past the counter, wishing the girls would drink up their shakes and stop gawking. He spotted Abby in a booth toward the back, and slid into the seat opposite her. Act natural, he warned himself. And keep it light.
Dances with Wolf Page 3