Meet Me at the Chapel

by Joanna Sims

  * * *

  Every day, weather permitting, Casey went for a ride. To be riding again, especially such a beautiful palomino mare like Gigi, was beyond any of her original hopes for her summer vacation in Montana. To be given a horse for the summer—well, it was the greatest gift Brock could have given her and he had done it without having the faintest clue how much it would mean to her.

  It was the day after her visit with her sister and she couldn’t seem to get the conversation out of her mind. She was hoping that a long ride on Gigi would clear her head.

  It was obvious why this was still bothering her—Taylor had a front-row seat to her developing affection for Brock. Just what were her feelings for Brock and was she getting too close to the rancher? It would be one thing if he were single and emotionally stable—but he wasn’t single and the impending divorce from Shannon, understandably, had him shaken.

  And yet, she couldn’t stop herself from liking him. He was a tall, burly man who liked to cook and was a good father. He wasn’t her physical type necessarily, as she often gravitated to more metrosexual kinds of guys—and Brock was the polar opposite of that. But that was just the outside. On the inside, Brock was exactly her cup of tea.

  Casey swung the saddle onto Gigi’s back after she groomed the quarter horse and picked out her hooves. After Gigi was saddled and bridled, Casey led her through the gate and then closed it behind them. She mounted and walked Gigi toward the open field, leaving the reins long so the horse could stretch her neck down while her muscles warmed.

  Once Gigi’s muscles were nice and loose from the heat of the sun and the walking, Casey clucked her tongue a couple of times to signal to the mare that she wanted her to start into a nice, easy jog.

  “Good girl, Gigi!” Casey sunk down into the saddle to stabilize her seat. “Nice jog!”

  Casey took Gigi through her paces, working her out at each gait, until Gigi was allowed to do what the mare loved to do: gallop. Casey stood in her stirrups, taking weight off the saddle, gave the mare her head and pressed the mare’s barrel belly with her calves. Gigi jerked forward into a gallop, her legs churning, her hooves pounding on the hard earth. They galloped across a wide-open field, kicking up clumps of dirt and sending birds, who had been grounded in the bush, flying into the seemingly endless blue of the cloudless sky.

  Paradise. I’m in paradise.

  At first, when she heard a pounding noise nearby, she thought it was the sound of her heartbeat thumping in her ears. But the louder the pounding got, the more she realized that the pounding was coming from behind her. She looked back quickly and saw Brock galloping toward her on Taj. The powerful Taj was twice as fast as Gigi, so it wasn’t hard for Brock to catch her.

  “Hey!” She smiled at him when they were side by side. “What are you doing?”

  “I thought I’d join you for a ride.”

  They both slowed their horses to an animated walk. Gigi threw her head and nipped at Taj when he got too close to her.

  “Man—does she look good. She’s lost weight. Her muscle tone is rock solid.”

  Casey patted the palomino’s neck. “She’s such a great horse. I can’t thank you enough for letting me have her for the summer.”

  Brock smiled at her. “Like I said—you’re doing me a favor.”

  “Some favor.” Casey laughed.

  They rode together until they reached the end of Brock’s land. Her face felt windburned, her thighs hurt from riding every day and she had more freckles on her face than she had had since she was a kid. But she really couldn’t care less. This was an exhilarating way to live—and even though she genuinely missed going downtown to Water Tower Place with her friends and shopping the eight-level mall of fabulousness, it wouldn’t hurt her feelings to ride like this every day of her life. Even if she did divert some of her shopping budget to renting a horse or buying a horse and stabling it on the outskirts of the city, there was no way she’d ever have the freedom to gallop across a flat, open field until the horse was dripping with sweat. The best she would be able to do was ride in an arena—it just wasn’t the same.

  They headed back to the barn—Brock needed to cool Taj down, rinse him off and then get on the road to pick up Hannah from school. The easy silence between them carried them back to the gate. Brock leaned down, unlatched the gate and pushed it open for Casey to ride through first.

  “You should take Gigi to one of the local shows—put her through her paces. The two of you have an unusual look that would grab the attention of the judges.”

  Casey halted the horse and swung out of the saddle. She loosened the girth before bringing the reins over Gigi’s head.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Why not?”

  Why not?

  Performance anxiety. Abject fear.

  “It’s not really my thing.” She shrugged off the suggestion.

  “Well, let me know if you change your mind—I could get a friend of mine to hook you up with some Western pleasure show clothes.”

  “Mmm. Nah.” Casey wrinkled up her face at the thought. “Not even for new pretty clothes.”

  Brock pulled his saddle off the Friesian; Casey knew two things for sure about Brock—he loved Hannah and he loved Taj. Every morning before the sun came up, Brock was in the barn grooming Taj. Almost every night, Brock was riding Taj—keeping him limber and fit. After the night Brock had confided in her that Shannon wanted Taj, she had never questioned him further about it, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t thought about it. Of course, she could understand why Shannon would want the stallion. He was beyond magnificent. But he belonged to Brock—he belonged with Brock. Ever since he had told her about it, she had silently prayed that he won that battle with Shannon.

  She took care of Gigi, went to go get Hercules from the loft and then, since it was her night to cook, she headed to the kitchen while Brock headed out to get Hannah. She was going to make gluten-free lasagna—one vegetarian pan and one with Italian sweet sausage because it was Brock’s favorite—but it had a long prep time so she needed to get started right away. The kitchen as usual was a disorganized mess. The dishes were all washed, but were piled in the dish drain and on the counters—everywhere but where they should be. Her desire to have everything in its place made it very difficult to work in the kitchen. She had been sucking it up because she was a guest on Brock’s ranch. But she’d been around long enough to begin to make some changes to the inside of the house. And she had the autism research on her side—this chaos was not helping Hannah’s anxiety or behavior. Hannah needed order and structure and a clean, organized environment. She wasn’t just trying to meddle for no good reason. She was meddling for a very good reason.

  “I’ve got to get a handle on this.” Casey stood with her hands on her hips, feeling overwhelmed by the stacks of dishes and pots and silverware scattered about.

  In fact, when she looked beyond the kitchen to the living room, everything in the house felt congested. The flow was bad. The colors were bad.

  “Brock and Hannah need feng shui in their lives,” Casey decided aloud. “This whole house needs to be rearranged, reworked and decongested.”

  It was decided. Now all she had to do was get Brock on board and figure out how to completely unclutter and unclog the dilapidated farmhouse without sending Hannah into a tailspin.

  * * *

  Later on, over piping hot plates of gluten-free lasagna, Casey broached the subject of changing the interior of the house. It made sense that the work she had already been doing with Hannah would continue, but it would continue within the context of having the preteen take control of her own environment. Instead of her feeling that the changes were happening to her, she would be the one in charge of the change. Brock surprised her by being open to the idea.

  “What do you think, Hannah? Are you up for a little renovation?”


  Hannah was eating her second helping of the vegetarian lasagna. “I hate the carpet.”

  Casey couldn’t disagree with her—the carpet was a hideous throwback from the seventies. It gave her the heebie-jeebies just thinking about what might be living in that gnarly shag.

  “It’s definitely got to go,” Casey agreed.

  “Well.” Brock dropped his napkin on his plate. “Make a list and we’ll get started.”

  That was all the encouragement Casey needed. At home, her apartment was basically the size of the kitchen. It was tiny and she had already feng shui’d it, rehabbed it and decorated it several times over. Now she had an entire house with which to go crazy? Heaven.

  Hannah and Casey spent the next hour writing a priority list for the house while Brock watched TV. They both agreed that the living room was the first room to be tackled. Even though Hannah wanted to be there for every inch of the demolition fun, they decided that it would be better if Casey got started first thing in the morning before Brock had a chance to think about it and change his mind.

  So, first thing after breakfast, right after Brock and Hannah left for school, Casey did what she had wanted to do since the very first moment she had walked into the dreary living room—she began to pull down the awful brocade curtains that must have been hanging there since the house was first built. One by one, the curtains were yanked down, leaving plumes of dust hanging in the air and flying up Casey’s nose.

  “Achoo!” Casey started to sneeze. “Achoo!” She sneezed again and again until her eyes were watering and her nose was running.

  She left the pile of curtains in a heap in the center of the living room and ran to the bathroom.

  “Oh, lord.” Casey looked at her reflection. Her eyes were swollen from the dust; the end of her nose was red from her itching it. She splashed water on her face, hoping to get the dust out of her eyes and her nose. It was in her hair, on her shirt, inside her shirt, on her pants—the fine dust that had accumulated for years had landed on her.

  She came out of the bathroom only to hear the faint noise of a micro-poodle sneezing.

  “Oh, not you, too, Hercules!”

  The teacup poodle had been sleeping contentedly in his carrier—but he wasn’t sleeping now. She had thought that she had put him out of range and out of danger from the dust, but she had miscalculated the sheer quantity that had been collected on Brock’s curtains.

  Hercules sneezed once, twice and then again and again, until she lost count.

  “I’m so sorry, sweet boy!” Urgently, she got the poodle out of the house and up to the loft where she kept a bottle of liquid Benadryl to control Hercules’s allergies.

  She was just finishing tending to her micro-poodle and he had just stopped sneezing, thankfully, when she heard a truck pull up. Assuming it was Brock returning to the ranch because he had forgotten something, she hurriedly went downstairs to meet him. But when she reached the bottom of the stairs, she saw that the truck stopping in front of the house didn’t belong to Brock at all.

  “Howdy!” Wyatt, the flirtatious cowboy from Bent Tree, hopped out of his early model Ford truck.

  “Hi.”

  Wyatt met her halfway. “I took a chance that you’d still be here.”

  Taken aback, Casey’s eyebrows lifted and then drew together. “You’re looking for me?”

  Wyatt adjusted his brown cowboy hat on his head. “I’m looking for you.”

  “Why?”

  The stark confusion in her single-word question made the young cowboy laugh. Man, oh, man was Wyatt easy on the eyes. So handsome—golden skin, dark gold hair, good nose, straight teeth, deadly dimples... Wyatt must have been leaving broken hearts and broken dreams all over the state of Montana. He wasn’t of a settling age, but she had no doubt that female after pining female had given it their best shot to wrangle him.

  “I’ve been trying to catch you at Bent Tree, but I keep missing you. I was starting to wonder if you were avoiding me.” Wyatt smiled at her. “But then I thought—that’s not possible.”

  Now it was Casey’s turn to laugh. It was a foreign concept to Wyatt that a female wouldn’t be swooning at the thought of his baby blues—she didn’t have the heart to tell him that she had forgotten about their brief meeting in the barn.

  Wyatt reached out and pulled some chunks of dust out of her hair. “You look like you’ve been rolling around in a dustbin.”

  “Close.” Casey laughed. “I was trying to get rid of Brock’s curtains. I’m afraid I lost that battle.”

  “Do you need a hand?”

  She actually did need a hand. But it struck her as weird that the cowboy had stopped by to see her in the first place.

  “No. I’ve got it.” She put her hand up to shield the sun from her eyes. “Why’d you say you were looking for me again?”

  Chapter Eight

  Wyatt didn’t get to answer that question, because Brock pulled up and parked his truck right next to the Ford.

  Brock didn’t look happy to see Wyatt. The ranch foreman’s strides were long and determined, and he covered the distance between them quickly and with purpose.

  “I wasn’t expecting to see you here, Wyatt.”

  “I was just stopping by to see Casey.” The young cowboy held his ground, which impressed Casey. Brock was a big man with a big presence, and he was this cowboy’s boss.

  Brock looked at his watch. “Last I checked, you’re supposed to be saddled up and heading up to the north pasture to move the herd.”

  Wyatt grinned sheepishly—he winked at Casey. “Busted.”

  “You’re late,” Brock snapped.

  The cowboy tipped his hat to Casey. “Have a nice day.”

  Wyatt gave one last wave of his hand before he disappeared down the driveway.

  Brock stood watching him for a minute; he turned to her. “What was all that about?”

  Casey shrugged. “Beats the heck out of me.”

  “Huh.” Brock’s jaw was tense—his lips thinned. “I expected to find you tearing apart my living room.”

  “I was!” Casey explained. “But I caused poor Hercules to have an allergy attack. I had to give him a shot of Benadryl and left him in the loft so he can get some rest.”

  “Let’s go take a look.”

  Once inside, they both stared at the lumpy pile of heavy brocade curtains she had left in the middle of his living room. She looked between the curtains and Brock to see a reaction—she was pleased to discover that he wasn’t upset.

  “Well...” He took his hat off and hung it on one of the hooks in the entryway. “It is much brighter in here. I’ll say that.”

  He rolled up his sleeves and started to haul the curtains outside. The minute he started to move the curtains, the plume of dust was back, and they both wound up coughing and sneezing out on the porch. Somewhere in the middle of coughing and sneezing, Casey started to laugh and so did Brock.

  “I think I’m going to need a hazmat suit!”

  Still coughing a little, Casey wiped the tears from her eyes. “I can’t go back in there. I really can’t. I’m allergic to dust.”

  “You stay out here,” Brock said, and she was only too happy to oblige. An allergy attack, once started, could last for days.

  Brock covered his nose by tying a bandana around the lower half of his face. He dragged the curtains outside, down the porch steps and away from the house. She let the dust settle a bit and then she braved the inside of the house.

  “Seriously,” Brock told her when he came back inside, “it’s a lot better. What next?”

  Casey looked up at him. “Don’t you have to go to work today?”

  “I can take a day off. I’ve got time on the books.”

  Casey looked around the room—the one place her eyes kept landing o
n was the carpet. “Carpet?”

  “I’m game. I’ve actually been wanting to get rid of this for years—you’ve motivated me to do it now.”

  “Well, the question is then—what’s going to take its place?”

  Brock gave a small shake of his head. “I’ve always wanted to go with wood.”

  “You could consider something sustainable—like cork.”

  He smiled at her with an amused smile. “Let’s not get crazy.”

  Several hours later, Casey was amazed by what they had accomplished. The carpet had been torn out of the living room, the hideous curtains were gone and there was now a nice rug on the living room floor to cover the cold concrete until new flooring could be purchased and installed.

  “I’d really like to get rid of the wallpaper—paint the walls with a fresh coat of paint and, of course, paint all of this dark wood white so it’s not such a downer in here.”

  “It’ll all get done,” he reassured her. “It’s started now.”

  * * *

  Brock took the rest of the week off from work, and because he never called off from work or took time for himself, Casey’s uncle gave him the time without question. Hannah helped them pick out flooring and paint and much of the work got done while she was at school. Casey was relentless when it came to projects—she didn’t like to slow down and she didn’t like to take a lot of breaks. Brock matched her work ethic and, because of that, by the end of the week the living room had been transformed. Brock removed the wallpaper—a tedious job she was glad to hand over to him. She was in charge of following behind him with a fresh coat of paint. They had picked a pretty light green for the walls that looked soft and inviting, but not too feminine.

  “I am beat.” Brock slumped down onto the couch.

  She had to give the man credit—he didn’t give up and he didn’t give in. He just kept on working until Humpty Dumpty had been put back together again. Casey joined him on the couch. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that the furniture really needed to get taken to the dump with the curtains and the carpet. Baby steps.