by Tara Janzen
Her lips tightened, and the barest blush of indignation colored her cheeks. The cowboy had fallen asleep. She could tell by the soft snores emanating from her library corner and by the quiet chuckles of his nearest neighbors. As more people noticed, the tittering increased until every person in the room had taken a moment to crane his neck to see what was going on.
Victoria did not take this final insult in stride. He was making a mockery of her teaching skills, and in front of the very people she needed to impress. They would no doubt all go home and wonder if their children were sleeping through her lectures too.
With her chin up she forged ahead, ignoring him as best she could. A lady in the middle of the room raised her hand, and Victoria gratefully gave the woman her undivided attention and a thorough answer to her question.
Maybe too thorough, she thought when no other hands went up. Resigned, she concluded her speech, and people immediately started getting up and leaving. Her husband had often lectured her on the importance of thoroughness when speaking, but he’d also insisted on the speaker not taking liberties with the audience’s time. One should never bore, Charles had always said.
Her gaze slid again to the cowboy in the corner. She took in the relaxed slump of his broad shoulders beneath his worn plaid shirt and the lazy sprawl of his legs stretched out into the aisle. Dust caked his soft jeans and his boots, none of it stirred by so much as a twitch. His gray hat, worn and creased from years of wear, dangled from the fingers of one large, rough hand. Truth be told, he looked like she’d bored him to death.
She turned and set her lecture notes on her desk, and a small, irritated sigh escaped her. No one had ever fallen asleep during one of Charles’s presentations. They wouldn’t have dared.
She cast another glance at the man in the corner and was relieved to see one of his neighbors stop and give him a shake. Thank goodness she’d been saved the humiliation of having to wake him. She’d surely done enough by putting him to sleep in the first place.
“Miss Willoughby,” a familiar voice called behind her. “Oh, Miss Willoughby.”
Stifling another sigh, Victoria turned, a halfhearted smile on her face, to see the school principal bustling into her classroom. Mr. Frazer was bald and portly, cheerful and kind, and usually in need of a favor. She was too tired to grant favors this evening. Teaching children was the most exhausting thing she’d ever done in her whole life.
“Mr. Frazer.” She greeted him with polite formality, her smile holding steady. “How kind of you to stop by.”
“Nothing kind about it at all, Miss Willoughby. I wanted to check on—Ah, there he is.” Mr. Frazer waved at someone behind her. “Ty, come on over here.”
Victoria glanced over her shoulder, and her smile faded. Her pulse picked up in speed. Whatever Mr. Frazer wanted, she preferred not to be involved if it included that man. He’d caused one scene by arriving late and two more by falling out of his chair and falling asleep, and she didn’t even want to think about the start he’d given her heart when he’d straddled the desk. Given his age, she was sure there wasn’t any reason for her to officially recognize him. They couldn’t have a student in common.
“Excuse me,” she said. “I think I’ll—”
“Ty, good to see you,” Mr. Frazer interrupted, pulling the younger man into the conversation while he was still a few steps behind her. Victoria attempted another escape, but Mr. Frazer effectively trapped her with his next words. “I wanted to make sure you met our Miss Willoughby.”
“My pleasure, ma’am,” the cowboy said, coming to a stop in front of her and extending his hand.
Forced by convention, Victoria returned the courtesy and found her palm and fingers engulfed in a warm, firm handshake. She glanced up and was startled to find him smiling down at her as if nothing had happened, as if he hadn’t embarrassed her in front of the whole town. She was even more startled to realize his smile was generating as much heat as his hand, and that her heart was fluttering again. His teeth were very white against his darkly tanned face, giving his mouth a clean and inviting look. And that was the most startling thought of all.
Mr. Frazer finished the introductions. “And this is Ty Garrett, Corey’s father.”
“How do you do,” Victoria managed to say in spite of her surprise at the information and at herself. Inviting mouth, indeed. Whatever did she mean by such a thought? As to Mr. Frazer’s news, the only thing she could think was that Mr. Garrett must have married very young, and that Corey must resemble his missing mother. She knew the boy and his father lived alone, but no one had filled her in on the details.
She also thought Ty Garrett’s eyes were even more intriguing up close, a most unusual color, a soft, clear gray of the rarest purity, and she was surprised to realize the observation wasn’t purely academic. The exhaustion of long hours and long days must finally be taking a toll on her emotions, she decided.
“I’m doing better after my nap,” he said in answer to her polite greeting. A definite, teasing light brightened the depths of his eyes.
She pulled her hand free, suddenly piqued, and told herself gray eyes weren’t the least bit unusual. She didn’t know what had come over her. The man was too rude, too irreverent, and too rough-edged for her tastes.
“I’m sure Corey is looking forward to the dance tomorrow night,” Mr. Frazer said. “All the kids are, though most of the boys won’t admit it.”
“The children do seem excited,” Victoria agreed, doing her best to hold up her end of the pointless conversation. Ty Garrett was also much too young for her tastes, she reminded herself. She liked mature men who had made a place for themselves in the world. Inviting mouth, indeed. What unadulterated silliness.
“We have had a small problem crop up with the chaperones,” Mr. Frazer continued. “Bob and Jessie Claypool were scheduled to chaperone, but his mom has come down sick, and they went to Denver last night. I was hoping I could count on you two to pick up the slack.”
Not that she was looking for a man, for goodness sake. Poor Charles was barely cold in his grave, gone just two years.
“Miss Willoughby?”
She had continued with his work and would do so again as soon as she was over her current financial predicament. She certainly didn’t need a man to guide her any longer. She’d had quite enough of guiding.
“Miss Willoughby?”
“Yes?” she replied with a start, realizing she’d been staring at the plaid pattern in Ty Garrett’s shirt. Cowboy shirts were tapered and yoked, made to closely fit a man’s body, a fact she’d been noticing in another surprisingly nonacademic manner.
“Great. I knew I could count on you.” Mr. Frazer reached for her hand and pumped it up and down a few times as he turned his attention to Ty. “Ty, I hope you won’t let me down. This little lady is going to need an escort, and you’re about the only bachelor left, except for Harper, and I wouldn’t let my oldest dog go out with Harper, or Lord forbid, get in that truck of his.”
Victoria was embarrassed, and she was sure she should be offended, but things were moving a little quickly. She wasn’t at all clear on what she’d agreed to do, or what Harper’s truck and Mr. Frazer’s old dog had to do with her.
Ty knew, and he could have kicked himself for getting so easily taken in by Glen Frazer. The man was wily, and he’d put Ty in a most awkward position.
He slanted a glance down at the “little old widow lady from back east.” She still looked overwhelmed, lost, and tired, but she wasn’t nearly old enough not to get her feelings hurt. Women never were.
She’d agreed to Glen’s request, and Ty had been brought up to be God-fearing, honorable, and polite to women. He’d been thinking of heading over to Ault or Fort Collins for a few drinks and a good time tomorrow night, but going to the dance wouldn’t be so awful, not even with the owlish Miss Willoughby. He’d certainly suffered through worse Friday nights, and he was sure he’d had worse dates.
He gave her another quick glance. Well, he was pre
tty sure anyway. He hoped she didn’t talk about her dead husband all night.
“Glad to help out, Glen.” He shook the other man’s hand and turned to his son’s science teacher.
“Miss Willoughby, I’ll pick you up about five-thirty, if that’s okay. The dances always start at six, and that’ll give us enough time to make sure the sound system is set up.”
She gave him a blank look, which pretty much mirrored his own level of enthusiasm, regardless of her nice ankles. Chaperoning a bunch of junior high school kids didn’t make for many opportunities to admire a woman’s legs.
“It’s been real nice meeting you, ma’am,” he added, and touched the brim of his hat, making his getaway before the principal came up with any more ideas.
Victoria was stunned. Mr. Frazer shook her hand one more time, but she barely noticed. She had a date. It was the most ridiculous thing that had ever happened to her. She’d never had a date in her life. Charles had taken her out to dinner the night he’d proposed, but the occasion had hardly seemed like a date. They’d been eating dinner together since her childhood, and after her father had died, it had usually been just the two of them anyway.
But this was different. She had a date with a male of the subspecies Western americanus cowboyius, and she wasn’t at all sure she was up to it.
Two
“Ridiculous,” Victoria muttered, hanging up the phone for the hundredth time. Ty Garrett’s phone number had been reduced to a smear of ink on the paper clutched in her hand, but that was the least of her problems. She’d memorized his phone number hours before.
She glanced down at her dress, a blowsy silk thing she’d never been sure looked right on her. The dress had been expensive—all of her clothes were—but this particular piece of her wardrobe was flouncy and bouncy, not at all her usual more tailored style. The colors seemed all right, white with orange poppies outlined in black, and a beige trellis pattern splashed willy-nilly in the background. She still kept getting the feeling the dress would look better on someone taller.
She needed to call Mr. Garrett and make a polite excuse for that night. He could probably handle forty-three junior high school students with one arm tied behind his back. He didn’t need her help. He probably didn’t want her help. She was sure he wasn’t looking forward to her company any more than she was looking forward to his. They didn’t even know each other. What in the world had Mr. Frazer been thinking to pair them as chaperones? It must be obvious to even the most untrained eye that they had absolutely nothing in common.
Was the dress as awful as she feared, or was it just her nerves making it look lopsided?
She had to call Mr. Garrett. That’s all there was to it. She had to call Mr. Garrett before he showed up on her doorstep. She refused to feel guilty about going back on her word. She hadn’t even known what she was agreeing to do. Or was it that she hadn’t actually agreed to do anything and Mr. Frazer had taken undue advantage of a moment’s confusion?
That was it. She was positive.
She gripped the telephone receiver with renewed determination, and it rang in her hand. She sucked in her breath and stepped back. The phone rang again. It had to be him, Mr. Garrett. What was happening to her life? she wondered in dismay. Everything had always been so safe and predictable. Men had never called her before, not strange men with teasing eyes and inviting smiles, not men who were so unsettling, so unknown, so—so unabashedly masculine.
She pulled the receiver off its hook and held it to her ear, answering the call before she worried herself out of her last ounce of courage, or her last ounce of sense. She wasn’t sure which.
“Miss Willoughby?”
It was him. The lazy drawl and timbre of his voice were unmistakable.
“Speaking,” she said, enunciating both syllables despite the breathlessness she felt.
“This is Ty Garrett. I’m real sorry, ma’am, but I’m going to be late picking you up.”
“Oh.” The small word was more a breath than a comment.
He went on to explain about a cow, and a fence, and what can happen when the two get all tangled up in each other. His voice was nicer than she remembered, older sounding, deep and soft like the pull of a slow-moving river, but without the soothing effect. Her heart was pounding so hard, she could barely decipher his story.
“Goodness,” she said in an appropriate place, more by instinct than design, and sometime later she managed to add, “Certainly, I understand.”
It was only after he’d hung up that she realized she’d forgotten to mention she wouldn’t be able to make it to the dance. Still holding on to the phone, she looked once more at her dress. Was it really as bad as she thought?
* * *
Ty was no fashion expert. The most he usually noticed about women’s clothes was whether or not they highlighted something particularly intriguing underneath.
Standing on Miss Willoughby’s front porch, he realized there was no way to tell with her dress. It was the ugliest thing he’d ever seen on a woman, bar none, and there was a lot of it, yards of orange splotches, beige grids, and black squiggles. Somebody should be shot for making such a dress and then hanged for selling it to Miss Willoughby.
“Evening, ma’am.”
“Hello, Mr. Garrett.” She stood in the doorway, her eyes wide and innocent behind her glasses, her voice polite and uppity, and her dress looking like something the cat had dragged in. He was having a hard time figuring her out.
“Since we’re running late and all, I thought we should get right over to the school,” he said, holding his hat in his hands and trying to keep from staring at her dress. “I had Corey wait in the truck.”
“Of course.”
“Let me help you,” he said when she reached for her coat, a sturdy brown thing that looked as if it would outlive both of them. He wondered if she had anything pretty in her closet, or if everything she owned was either oversize, ugly, or brown.
He put his hat back on, then held her coat for her, thinking the night hadn’t gotten off to a very good start. He was certainly feeling his share of awkwardness, and if the stiffness of her body was any indication, she wasn’t comfortable with him either. Glen Frazer was going to owe both of them for this night’s work.
When she was ready, he slipped the coat up her arms. Ugly dress, big brown coat, and all, she’d probably been a comfort to her husband, even a pleasure. No man could live with a woman and not notice how the light caught in her hair like the lamplight was catching in Miss Willoughby’s. Her hair had a lot more auburn in it than he’d realized, giving her wild curls an overall chestnut color, not brown. She had pretty skin, too, more like cream than peaches, except for the faint color blooming on her cheeks.
The surprising evidence of emotion stymied him for a moment. Was he doing something to make her blush? He checked his hands and his distance and found both acceptable, much more acceptable than the thought that followed: Miss Willoughby’s cream-colored skin being caressed by his own dark hands. The idea came out of nowhere, visually erotic and full-blown, and then it wouldn’t go away.
He was privately embarrassed and a whole lot surprised. Lord, if he needed any further proof that he’d been too long without a woman, he sure didn’t know what it would be. All it took was getting close enough to one to put on her coat, and he got to thinking in the craziest directions.
But Miss Willoughby did have pretty skin. Another look sent the fact home without a doubt. From her brow to her cheek to her chin, from the slope of her small nose to the slender column of her neck, she looked creamy-soft and silky, every square inch of her. He liked the way her upswept hairstyle and ineffective bobby pins left a few chestnut curls falling across her nape, but if he remembered correctly, it used to take more than the glimpse of a woman’s neck to turn him on.
In his own defense, he added the fact that she smelled .good, not like flowers and nothing as sensual as musk, but like sunshine-warmed woman, and he liked the scent. He liked it a lot. He was beginning to
wonder just how tired he’d been the previous night. He seemed to have missed quite a bit when it came to the new science teacher. Of course, he hadn’t been this close to her on Parents’ Night. A good thing too, considering the effect she had on him when they did get close. He wondered if she knew it was Talbot tradition for the chaperones to dance the first dance together.
“Oh!” Her sharp gasp brought his wanderings to an abrupt halt.
“Excuse me,” he muttered, feeling his own blush heating up to match hers. While slipping her coat over her shoulders, he’d somehow snagged the sleeve button on his suit jacket in one of her curls. He tried to untangle her hair by winding it one way, then the other. Both attempts made the situation worse.
“Oh!” she gasped again.
“Excuse me.”
“Ouch!”
“I’m really sorry, ma’am.” He felt like a total fool, and he was hurting her. Of the two, the last was the worst. “Maybe if I take my jacket off, I can get you free.”
“Please do try, Mr. Garrett.”
He did try, but found he couldn’t get out of his jacket without her help.
“Would you pull on my other sleeve, please? I’ll try not to let the button pull your hair anymore.”
“Certainly,” she replied, sounding breathlessly hopeful, which only made him feel worse.
Keeping the tangled sleeve close to her neck, he stepped around her so she’d have better access to his other sleeve. The result of all his maneuvering and her helping was to have them practically wrapped in each other’s arms. The fact was lost on neither of them.
“Oh, my.” Miss Willoughby breathed the words in near silence.
“We should have it in a minute,” Ty promised, noticing how nicely she would fit against him if they got a little closer. “If you could just hold your sleeve tight while I try to get my elbow . . .”