After he ended the call, Hudson gathered up the photos. He’d email Miles the digital photos, then he’d package up the glossies and mail them on his way to the school for his meeting.
He really did think the photos were something special. He hoped Miles did, too.
He decided to keep the whole gallery query a surprise. After all, he didn’t want Bella to be disappointed if nothing came of it. For now she would be happy photographing moms and babies.
An hour later, before he left for his meeting with the pageant director, he went looking for Bella. He wanted to make sure she didn’t need anything before he left. He found her in Sarah Palmer’s classroom, where she was still helping with the art project, and what a project it was.
The four-year-olds were having a stupendous time with the art supplies. They were gluing and coloring without knowing they were practicing hand-eye coordination and fine motor skills. Sarah concentrated on that with every art project as well as burgeoning young talent. There were turkey heads and feathers cut out of construction paper, and feet, too, made of some fuzzy cord. Bella and Sarah were helping the children paste them all down on a plate that served as the turkey’s body. The kids talked and laughed as they wielded crayons as if they were true artists, drawing faces on the plates.
Tommy, one of Hudson’s favorites, pushed back his chair and came running over to him. “Mr. Hudson, Mr. Hudson, look at what I’m doing.”
His turkey had black eyes and a mouth, and Tommy was coloring his body purple.
Hudson crouched down to Tommy’s eye level. “So you’ve seen purple turkeys?”
Tommy looked at his turkey and the pictures of turkeys that Sarah had attached to the bulletin board.
“I didn’t see a purple turkey,” Tommy admitted. “But there could be purple turkeys.”
At that Hudson laughed out loud. Anything was a possibility in a child’s mind.
Hearing his laughter, Bella looked up. Their gazes met and Hudson could swear he felt the room shake. But no feathers scattered, mock or otherwise, so he knew it was his imagination. Purple turkeys could give a man delusions.
The curly-headed blonde four-year-old next to Bella tapped on her arm. Hudson remembered her name was May.
“Miss Bella, I made a mistake. My line went crooked.”
Hudson walked over to where Bella was seated, and he could tell the little girl’s picture was supposed to resemble a house. A purple turkey. A house in a turkey’s tummy. What was the difference? he supposed.
Bella rested her arm around May’s shoulders. “A crooked line doesn’t have to be a mistake. Let’s look at what you’re trying to do.” She gave the plate a quarter turn. “What if we made your crooked line part of the fence that goes around the house? Sometimes they’re straight and sometimes they’re crooked. Your line will fit right in.”
“But it can’t be red. Red is for the bricks on the house,” May insisted.
Bella picked up a brown crayon. “Here, give this a try on top of the red. It will make it look just like wood.”
May did as Bella suggested and then looked up at her. “It does.”
“You’ll have a fine fence there,” Hudson encouraged her. “I see you have a house with a second floor. Does it have windows on the second floor?”
No windows were showing now.
May put her finger to her lips, and then her eyes sparkled. “My house has windows. I can put in windows.”
Bella said to May, “You work on that for a little while. I’ll be right back.” She pushed her chair away from the table and stood.
Even so, Hudson was still a head taller. For some reason, Bella made him feel ten feet tall. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was just this “thing” between them. He felt their breathing almost synchronized as they stared at each other. He wasn’t sure why that happened when he thought about kissing her, but it did.
How could he think about kissing her when they were in the middle of a room with four-year-olds?
He waved at the table and the projects spread out everywhere. “Do you think you’ll ever get this cleaned up?”
“Maybe with the custodian’s help,” she joked. “But it’s amazing how little ones like to help when you ask them. They’ll pick up their scraps.”
“Their feathers, you mean?” Hudson said with a straight face.
“So you got sucked into a world of purple turkeys and green feathers?”
He laughed. “It’s hard to resist. Maybe that’s why I like being around the kids so much. It makes the real world go away.”
“Or they take you back to when you were four.”
“I don’t even remember when I was four.”
“I bet if you and your brothers got together you would. No clubhouse, jungle gym, forts made out of a blanket on the sofa?”
“Are you kidding? A blanket on the sofa? Our mother would have called the maid.”
Bella blinked. “I forgot.”
“Forgot what?”
“You grew up very differently than I did.”
What Bella meant was, he’d grown up with money. Yes, his family had been wealthy. There had been maids and housekeepers and nannies.
“Maybe I did,” he said. On the other hand, though, maybe their worlds hadn’t been so different after all. “But that fort you speak of...my brothers and I escaped to the woodpile now and then and rearranged it. It was a grand fort. What my mother didn’t know didn’t hurt her.”
Bella studied him. And maybe in the atmosphere with four-year-olds around, and Sarah not too far away, she felt brave to delve into his life a bit because she asked, “How else did you escape?”
“Riding did it the most, or just wandering the pasture with the horses. How about you? How did you escape?”
“Books. Books took me anywhere I wanted to go, with anyone I wanted to be with. They still do. When I get the chance to settle down with one.”
One of the kids dumped a canister of crayons onto the table. The scattering noise took Bella’s attention for a moment. Then she asked, “Are you leaving now?”
“I am. I just wanted to remind you to call me if you need anything.”
“Will do. And if I may, I’d like to remind you of something. With the pageant being held the Sunday after Thanksgiving, we don’t have a lot of time to get costumes together. I’m definitely not a seamstress, and I don’t know if any of the teachers are. So if we have to do any type of costumes, we need to keep it simple.”
Hudson nodded. “I’ll talk to Eileen about that. You should definitely sit in on the next meeting. Or maybe you should be going instead of me.”
“I can go to the next one if you’d like me to. We’ll have to get permission slips from parents, work up the PR for the kids being in the pageant and get that out in emails and on the website so the parents know exactly what we’re doing, too.”
“All good points.”
Tommy waved his turkey at Hudson. Hudson went over to the four-year-old and pointed to the turkey’s neck. It was still white. “Are you going to color that?”
“Maybe I’ll make his neck red.”
“You’ll have a colorful turkey,” Hudson proclaimed with a straight face.
“Maybe Miss Sarah will hang mine up high so everybody can see it.”
Bella came to stand beside Hudson. “She’s going to hang everyone’s turkeys so when your parents come to pick you up, they’ll see what a good job you did.”
“And we can take them home for Thanksgiving?”
“Yes, you can.”
Thanksgiving. Hudson still had no idea what he was doing for the holiday next week. He supposed Bella was planning to spend it with Jamie. Maybe in their next conversation he’d ask her. He’d spent many holidays alone, and he’d told himself he liked it that way. Memories of long-ago holidays w
ere faded and ghostly. He almost had a hard time imagining what a real holiday would be like surrounded by family and friends he actually cared about, and who cared about him.
He should be more grateful about what he’d had growing up. After all, look at everything Bella had lost.
“Is something the matter?” she asked him.
He was going to say no, but decided to tell the truth. “I was just thinking about holidays and families and expectations that aren’t usually fulfilled. Look at these kids’ faces when they study their turkeys. They’re totally in the present. Maybe somehow that’s what we have to do to appreciate Thanksgiving and Christmas.”
“When you learn how to do that, you let me know,” she responded, then added, “Maybe this year the triplets will teach me their secret.”
“I’m always open to hearing secrets,” he said.
Bella looked startled for a moment, and then she backed away from him. “I’ll see you later,” she told him. “I have to get back to pasting on those feathers.”
The word secret seemed to have spooked Bella. He supposed no one got to adulthood without a few of them.
Just what was Bella Stockton’s secret?
Chapter Eight
Bella sat at her desk that afternoon, composing letters to send to parents explaining about the photos she wanted to take and the child care tips they might want to contribute. Usually moms were eager to share everything they knew about kids. She’d certainly gotten experience helping Jamie with the triplets.
Despite the work, she found herself missing Hudson. The place just wasn’t the same when he wasn’t there. Yes, she’d resented him when he’d first moved in, so to speak, to check up on her. But now they worked in tandem. Not only that, she missed his physical presence, the sparkle in his eyes, the energy he projected. Cowboy or businessman, he was one difficult man to ignore.
When the phone rang, she picked it up. “Just Us Kids Day Care Center, Bella Stockton speaking. How can I help you?”
“Is Hudson Jones there?” a gruff male voice asked her.
“He’s not available at the moment. Can I help you?”
There was a pause. “No, I need to speak to Jones. If I leave a message, will you make sure he gets it?”
“Of course I will. Or I could put you through to his voice mail.”
“I don’t trust that stuff. I’d rather you hand deliver it.”
She smiled and wondered how old this man was. She pulled a pink message pad and a pen from her desk. “As soon as he comes in, I’ll hand it to him.”
“Tell him this is Guy Boswick from Pine Bluff Ranch. He can reach me at...” And he rattled off a number. “I have a problem for him to handle.”
“Can I tell him what this is in regards to?”
“No. I need to talk to him. Don’t worry. He’ll know who I am when you give him my name.”
That was a cryptic message if she’d ever heard one.
“All right, Mr. Boswick. I will do that.”
“If I don’t hear from him today, I’ll call back tomorrow,” he assured her.
“That’s fine. I understand.”
She hardly had the words out when Mr. Boswick said “Goodbye” and hung up.
A half hour later, Hudson blew through the door along with the wind and a few snowflakes. He had a smile on his face.
Bella couldn’t help but smile back. Hudson Jones was infectious. She just hadn’t figured out if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
As he took off his jacket and hung it in his office, she followed him inside, the message in her hand. “You look as if you had a good meeting.”
“I did. We figured out how to keep things easy for the babies.”
“I’m not sure anything is easy with babies,” she warned him.
He chuckled. “Probably not. But how’s this for an idea? Reindeer antler headbands for the babies, and we put them all in carriages. That way, volunteers at the school can decorate the carriages and we don’t have to worry about costumes.”
“I think that’s brilliant,” she agreed. “Did you come up with that or did Eileen?”
“A little bit of both. Eileen knows kids and what will work and what won’t. I’m sure some parents must have carriages. If they don’t, I’ll buy a few and we’ll use those.”
“Is that in the budget?”
He arched his brows. “If I have to make a purchase outside the budget, we just won’t tell anyone, right?”
“I don’t know. Walker could mark me down for being a coconspirator.”
“Not if we pull off the pageant with a big kick.”
When their gazes met, Bella experienced that shaken-up feeling all over again.
Hudson hung his Stetson on the hat rack. With his flannel shirt open at the collar, dress jeans and brown boots, he was as tempting a man as she’d ever seen. But that’s all he was at this point—a temptation.
She broke eye contact first, remembered the message in her hand and held it out to him. “You had an odd phone call, a Mr. Guy Boswick. He wanted me to hand deliver this to you.”
Hudson took the message and studied it. “He has a problem?”
“He wouldn’t tell me what it was. He just said you knew him and you should call him back. He warned me that if you don’t call him back today, he’ll call again tomorrow.”
“And keep calling until he gets me. That’s Guy, all right.”
“So you do know him.”
“Yes, I do. I worked on his dude ranch a couple of years back. He became a father figure to me for a while. He’s a tough old cowboy, but he has a good heart. I can’t imagine what he wants now, though. I’d better give him a call.” He looked back up at her, and she thought she could be wrong, but it seemed his eyes twinkled when he thanked her.
“Anytime,” she said, meaning it.
As she went back to her desk, she realized she hadn’t closed Hudson’s door, nor had he. Apparently he didn’t expect the conversation to be private. She liked Hudson’s transparency. He said what he felt, and he meant what he said.
Bella couldn’t help but overhear the beginning niceties of the conversation. After all, her desk wasn’t that far away from Hudson’s open door. She wasn’t trying to listen, not at first. But then she heard, “You want me to accept a position in Big Timber with you at Pine Bluff? Why would I want to do that?”
He was being offered a job? Now Bella was all ears.
“I understand you have a problem you want me to solve,” Hudson said. “But public perception can’t be swayed easily. I have a commitment right now. Any PR firm can help you.”
Bella supposed Guy Boswick was raging a powerful argument to sway Hudson to Big Timber, away from Rust Creek Falls. Maybe an emotional argument if he’d been a father figure. After all, Hudson didn’t really need a job. He was wealthy.
“All right, I’ll agree to that.” Hudson listened, then asked, “How soon do you need an answer?”
Boswick must have told him and said a few more things because Hudson ended with, “It was good talking with you again, too, Guy. Take care,” and he set down the cordless phone.
Hudson looked Bella’s way, and she couldn’t pretend she hadn’t heard. Rising from her desk, she went into his office. “Maybe I’m sorry I gave you that message. I couldn’t help but overhear. Did he offer you a job?”
“Yes, he did. But I don’t know all the details yet. Someone from the ranch is going to be contacting me. Then I’ll know more.”
“When would it start?” she asked hesitantly.
“Bella, there’s really nothing to talk about. Everything’s supposition at this point.”
“But when we talked about putting together the child care book, I was under the impression you were going to stay until Valentine’s Day, right?”
<
br /> “I don’t want to talk about this now, Bella. I have a lot to think about and information to get. I will tell you I’ll be out for a couple of hours tomorrow. Actually, maybe I’ll just take the whole day. I need to clear my head, go riding, maybe work some colts. That will probably be the best thing for everyone. If you need me, you can reach me on my cell.”
Bella decided not to mope. She’d known what kind of man Hudson was when he’d arrived. He’d told her point-blank he was a traveling man and not one to remain in one place. So she certainly hadn’t been weaving dreams about him staying, had she? Valentine’s Day or sooner, he was going to be leaving again, and she’d better get used to the idea.
She raised her chin when she replied, “I won’t need you, Hudson. I managed Just Us Kids just fine before you got here. I can certainly handle it tomorrow.”
As she turned to leave his office, he called her back. “Bella?”
She stopped but kept her shoulders squared and her back rigid, her head held high.
“Life is about choices, and they happen every day. This is just another one of those choices.”
“Commitments happen every day, too,” she returned, then went to her desk and ignored Hudson for the rest of the day.
* * *
The atmosphere between Bella and Hudson remained excruciatingly strained after his phone call to Guy Boswick. This was one time when she had no idea what he was thinking. Could he seriously be considering taking a job in Big Timber? Riding the range again? Training horses? He was a man of many talents, that was for sure.
As she worked at her desk all day on Thursday, she couldn’t stop herself from wondering where he was and what he was doing. Couldn’t stop herself from missing him. It was odd when you got used to a person’s presence. When the individual was gone, a piece of your heart was, too. No, not her heart, she told herself. She couldn’t care that much about Hudson. Could she?
She thought about the days and weeks and months after she and Jamie had been split up from their other siblings. Each minute at first, and then each hour, and finally each day, she’d wondered where they were and what they were doing. She and Jamie had been too young and hadn’t had the means to keep track of them. Their grandparents had made it clear their sisters and brothers were no longer their concern. Were Liza, Dana, Bailey, Daniel and Luke bitter and resentful? Was that why they never called or returned...because Rust Creek Falls had nothing but bad memories of the split-up after their parents’ deaths? And sadness. All good reasons not to return, she supposed.
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