His Forever Valentine

by Marie Ferrarella

  “We’ll get you something to go,” Miss Joan told him, patting his arm as if the wrangler was a petulant child who needed to be reminded of the boundaries. “And a big piece of my peach pie, as well,” she whispered. “On the house.”

  Rafe wouldn’t have overheard the bribe if he hadn’t been standing right next to the complaining wrangler. “Seems to me you got the better end of the deal,” he told the man called Bill.

  Bill muttered something unintelligible under his breath.

  Ignoring him, Miss Joan turned and seemed to see Rafe and the woman with him for the first time. Her ordinarily sedate features lit up considerably. She was almost beaming. It was an expression most in town weren’t familiar with.

  “Rita,” she called out to one of the waitresses she’d put on extra shifts to handle the overflow of customers. “Take care of Bill here.” Returning her attention to the two people standing beside her, Miss Joan slipped one arm through each one of theirs and announced, “No need for the two of you to stand around, waiting. Come with me. I’ve set aside a table for two just in case either one of you decided to come in.”

  Rafe and Val exchanged looks, but neither of them was more in the know than the other.

  “What’s the occasion?” Rafe asked Miss Joan. While he didn’t mind getting preferential treatment once in a while, he didn’t like the idea of just pushing his way past other people in order to be served first. That was just plain unfair.

  “No occasion,” Miss Joan replied. “I’m just expressing my gratitude to the young lady who made all this extra business and change in my pocket possible.” Her usually thin-lipped, small smile was spread to its ultimate stretching point as she added, “At the very least, this’ll allow me to buy a really nice gift for the grandbaby who’s coming.”

  It took Rafe a second to replay her words in his head. When he did, he stared at Miss Joan, stunned. “What grandbaby?” he asked.

  Miss Joan had married Harry Monroe a while back and Harry’s grandson, Cash Taylor, had returned to Forever for the wedding. Once Miss Joan married Harry, Cash became her step-grandson. Rafe recalled that Cash and his sister, Alma, had once been sweethearts until Cash had gone away to college. Alma was supposed to have attended the same school, but because the family ranch was facing possible foreclosure at the time, she’d stayed behind to help out by taking on a job.

  When Cash came back for his grandfather’s wedding, the romance reignited. The upshot was that Cash wound up staying and marrying Rafe’s sister. Cash would be Miss Joan’s only source of a grandchild—which in turn meant—

  Rafe’s eyes widened so far that they all but fell out of his head. “Alma’s pregnant?”

  “She didn’t tell you?” It was hard to judge by Miss Joan’s expression whether the woman was surprised, or if she knew that she was among the first to have the news and was just teasing him in her droll way. “Guess it must have slipped her mind. She’ll tell you in her own time,” Miss Joan promised, then winked. “When she does, don’t let on that you already know. Now then,” the woman continued as the pair seated themselves at the table she’d brought them to, “you two know what you want or should I come back?”

  “Is Angel cooking today?” Rafe asked, referring to Gabe’s fiancée.

  “Angel is always cooking,” Miss Joan replied with a throaty laugh.

  “Great, then I’ll have whatever her special is today,” Rafe replied. His future sister-in-law had the ability to make a stone taste tempting.

  “That would be the pot roast,” Miss Joan told him after glancing over her shoulder at the counter where a sign informing her customers of that day’s special was posted.

  Angel’s cooking had gained such favor that had she said her special was a pile of nails swimming in water, she would have received the same enthusiastic response. In a very short amount of time, people who frequented Miss Joan’s diner had fallen under the spell of the magic that Angel performed every day in Miss Joan’s kitchen.

  “Make that two,” Val told her. “And I’d love a cola if you have one.”

  “For you, anything,” Miss Joan said with all due sincerity. Her business had always been decent, but what had been going on lately was close to unbelievable. And she was a woman who always paid her dues and made sure she expressed her gratitude. “And by the way, it’s on the house.”

  “No,” Val protested. “You can’t get money for a special gift for that grandbaby of yours if you give the food away.”

  When she made up her mind, Miss Joan never changed it. “Trust me, I can. Besides, it’s only in your case. And Harry’s of course.”

  “Harry’s?” Val asked, curious.

  “Harry Monroe. My husband,” Miss Joan told her. “I told ’im there were advantages to sleeping with the owner. Free food being one of them.”

  “The woman is really something else,” Val said to Rafe with a laugh. Miss Joan had only taken a few steps away from their table but already the wall of noise had swallowed up her words, so that Val felt fairly certain that the owner of the diner couldn’t hear what she’d said.

  Rafe leaned forward for the exact same reason, so that she could hear him. “She’s a regular pistol, according to Harry,” he said.

  Sitting forward like this, leaning into Val so that she could hear him, made Rafe acutely aware of all the things that made her so attractive to him. The scent of her hair, the way her eyes seemed to smile with some secret joke all their own, the creamy complexion that tempted him to reach out and touch her just to prove to himself that she wasn’t some fanciful dream he was having. A dream that would break up into so many pieces the second he did reach out.

  With effort, he kept his hands where they were, resting on the table. He didn’t want to risk spoiling the moment, even though he could feel a growing ache inside of him that had nothing to do with eating.

  “I guess Miss Joan is really happy about all this chaos,” Val assumed as she looked around the filled-beyond-capacity diner.

  The makeshift commissary, which could accommodate more than twice as many people as the diner, was all but empty when she’d passed by it earlier.

  “Chaos means money, so yes, I’m sure Miss Joan is happy. I heard that the man who runs the grocery store as well as the couple who own the town’s only clothing store are all beside themselves with all this extra business you brought into this town.”

  “I have nothing to do with it,” Val protested. “Those photos of your ranch and of this town are what lured Jim and his film company out here. They deserve all the credit.”

  “Yes,” he said, raising his voice again as the crowd grew even noisier, “but you’re the one who took the photographs,” he reminded her. “If you hadn’t had such a good eye for what your boss wanted, none of this would be happening,” he concluded very simply.

  Miss Joan returned, carrying a tray with two complete pot roast dinners. Rather than turning the order over to one of her waitresses, she made a point to wait on them personally.

  “You be sure to let me know if there’s anything else you want,” the woman reminded them before hurrying back to oversee her section of the counter.

  As Miss Joan retreated, Rafe caught a little of her triumphant smile. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen the woman this happy, even at her wedding.”

  Val smiled, pleased. “Full coffers have a way of doing that to a person,” she told him.

  He nodded his agreement. There was definitely no arguing with that.

  “Tell me,” he said as he began to make short work of a pot roast that all but melted in his mouth, “how did you wind up being a location scout? Or was that something you always wanted to be?”

  Val refrained from laughing at the question. To her knowledge, no one ever woke up one morning and decided to become a location scout. It was just one of those things that just happened.

/>   “Actually,” she said out loud, “I majored in photography in college.”

  “With an eye out to work on a film crew?” Rafe guessed.

  Because Miss Joan wasn’t letting them pay for this, Rafe knew he wasn’t about to ask for seconds, so he savored what he was consuming, doing his best to eat slowly. It went against the grain of his usual behavior. For the most part, he usually ate fast so he could get to the next thing he was supposed to be doing.

  “With an eye out to take photographs,” Val corrected. “I wasn’t sure where I’d go from there, be a photojournalist or just someone who wanders the world, snapping interesting photographs that eventually turn into an oversize book that sits on a coffee table, collecting dust.

  “But photography in general is rather an uncertain way to make a living and I had been raised to pull my own weight. I used to babysit for Jim Sinclair, and when he happened to see some of my work,” she continued, “he offered me a job scouting out locations for him on the project he was developing. I got along well with Jim—he was a friend of my parents’ long before I worked for him—and the job sounded interesting.” She grinned. “It also paid a lot better than babysitting, so I said yes.”

  “And the rest is history,” Rafe concluded with a grin, uttering the time-old cliché.

  “Or at least a footnote to it,” she allowed with a self-depreciating laugh that he found both enticing and endearing. “By the way,” she said, easing into a related topic, “your brother Ray is working out very well. Jim’s even giving him a line of dialogue to deliver.”

  He was almost finished with his meal. It amazed him how fast it could disappear. Or maybe it was the company he was keeping that made time feel as if it was whizzing by.

  “A whole line, huh?” he marveled with amusement.

  She knew that he was unaware of the way the pay scale worked. “Hey, the pay jumps if you have a speaking part,” she told him. “I heard he was hamming it up a little in the beginning, but it seems Ray got the hang of it pretty quickly.”

  “One line is hardly a speaking part,” Rafe couldn’t help commenting.

  “Oh, but it is. That’s the criteria they use.”

  “Criteria?” he asked.

  She nodded. “One line and you go from being an ‘extra’ to a ‘supporting actor.’”

  “Just like that?” He couldn’t help marveling. Strange rules they had in her world, Rafe thought.

  “Just like that,” she confirmed.

  “Well, good for Ray,” Rafe told her. “But, to be honest, I’m more interested in hearing if my father has become a problem yet.”

  The question, coming out of the blue, mystified her. “Why would your sweet, wonderful father become a problem?” she asked. There were times, when she was growing up, that her own father had seemed too driven, too wrapped up in his work to realize that he was neglecting his relationship with his only daughter.

  Those were the times when she would have killed to have a father who was so involved in his kids’ lives, who apparently, from what she’d gathered from Rafe and from Alma when she and the deputy had occasion to talk, put his children first every single time. “Your dad’s a sweetheart.”

  “Well, ever since you introduced him to your mother, he’s like a teenager with a huge crush. I was just afraid he might have, you know, gone a little overboard, started following her around like a faithful puppy—or come across like a potential stalker,” he added, watching her expression.

  “Don’t worry,” she assured him. “Mom said he’s a perfect gentleman, courtly and charming every time they interact. And between you and me,” Val confided, “it does my mother’s ego good to meet such a devoted fan, especially since he flatters her the way he does. It helps my mother relive her glory days—no pun intended,” she quickly added, afraid it sounded like a play on her mother’s first name. “As a matter of fact, I thought I’d drop in on her after lunch, see how she’s doing. Maybe bring her a sandwich from here.” Val smiled, recalling something. “She’s still talking about the Reuben sandwich she had last Friday. The fact that someone here could recreate something so typical New York-y right here in Texas really impressed her.”

  “Well, once Angel found out the ingredients, throwing it all together wasn’t exactly a Herculean feat,” he pointed out. His brother’s fiancée was one of the most soft-spoken, mild-mannered women he’d ever known, but she had a fierce competitive streak and hated admitting defeat in anything, even something so simple as recreating a sandwich she’d never heard of.

  “Still, my mother appreciated it,” Val told him. “Especially since she knew it had taken some effort on Angel’s part.”

  Her mother wasn’t one of those people who just accepted things or took them for granted, she made it a point to delve into them, to find out how things came about.

  A fond look came over her features as she thought of her mother.

  “I found out that she grew up in a little town in Idaho that wasn’t much bigger than this one,” she told Rafe. “Seeing her now, it’s hard for me to imagine that her roots go back to some place so down to earth.” Like here, she added silently. “My first memory of my mother was seeing her in a sparkling, floor-length silver gown. I thought she was some kind of a queen—which of course made me a princess,” she added with a mischievous grin.

  “Of course,” he echoed. “And I bet you made one hell of a princess.”

  “Actually, I lasted about seven seconds as a princess. I was more of a tomboy type,” she admitted. “I made my mother crazy,” she confided. “She’d get me all dressed up in frills and laces for church and I’d get dirty in record time once the service was over.”

  He leaned back in his chair for a moment, his eyes skimming over her appreciatively. “Well, you certainly cleaned up nicely.”

  Val laughed. “Don’t let the skirt and high heels fool you. Beneath all this camouflage still beats the heart of a tomboy.”

  “Beneath all the clothes, huh? I’d like to find that out for myself,” he murmured under his breath, thinking she couldn’t hear him because of all the surrounding noise and the fact that he was leaning back.

  He thought wrong.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Val made no comment. Nonetheless, she could feel her pulse rate increasing. She hadn’t reacted like this to anyone, she realized, not since Scott.

  Oh, there’d been a number of flirtations, but that was all they ever amounted to, just casual flirtations. Not a single one of those flirtations ever went beyond that initial, shallow stage. Not because the other party hadn’t been willing, but because she hadn’t.

  In all this time, she had been neither willing nor ready to move on. Val remained emotionally immobile because she still loved Scott, but more than that, she didn’t want to ever, ever hurt again the way she had when she’d learned that Scott was dead. That he wouldn’t ever be coming home to her again.

  Whoever it was that had said it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all wasn’t speaking for her. Because for her, the “lost” part involved a feeling that was akin to having her skin stripped away from her without the benefit of an anesthetic.

  It was too painful even to contemplate. She missed being loved, but as far as she was concerned, the pain associated with it was far too great to deal with.

  So she heard Rafe’s rather personal comment, gave it her own interpretation and while it sped up her heart rate, it still had her keeping steadfast to her flirt-but-don’t-follow-through rule.

  And this time around, she felt it was better to pretend that she hadn’t heard Rafe’s slip than to comment on it and perhaps begin something whose ending might just be one that she wasn’t able to control or cope with in her usual fashion.

  As if to cover up his words in case she had heard him mumble them under his breath, Rafe asked, �
�How long do these movies usually take to make?”

  That, she thought with relief, was more like it. “Why?” she asked him. “Are you trying to get rid of us already?”

  No, the exact opposite, he thought. He’d been serious when he’d told her that he couldn’t imagine living anywhere else except for Forever, but Val and her crew had brought a measure of excitement to Forever and there was nothing wrong with that. Excitement served as a great contrast to the peace and quiet that usually prevailed in his sleepy little town.

  “And chase away all the business that Miss Joan and the rest of the town merchants are seeing? No way. I’ve got no desire to be lynched. I was just curious,” he confessed.

  That part was true. He was curious, but the added business that store owners were seeing had nothing to do with it. He wanted to know how much time he had left to spend with her. If he knew how many more weeks she would be here—he assumed she was staying for the duration—then he could utilize that time accordingly and make the most of it.

  “Well,” she began after giving the matter a little thought, “schedules usually depend on the movie being made and the director. Some movies take six months to film, others take half that time and then there are the directors who trust their performers and do one take instead of half a dozen. Jim belongs in that last group, by the way.”

  Rafe had already been on the set and observed the director in action, so this was nothing new to him. From what he could see, everyone associated with the movie seemed to get along with the tall, unassuming director.

  “And just how long does it take for a one-take director to complete shooting a movie?” Rafe asked.

  “If there are no unforeseen problems on the set—unexpected weather changes, equipment breaking down, performers coming down with food poisoning or the flu,” she elaborated, “it usually takes about six weeks. And that’s only because Jim doesn’t drive his people.” She knew of other directors who demanded nothing short of perfection. They usually got it at the cost of the cast and crew’s respect and loyalty. That wasn’t Jim’s way.