His grin turned victorious, and he leaned across the seat as if to kiss her again.
Only she leaned back farther and faster than he leaned forward, avoiding his lips.
“But don’t get any ideas,” she warned as she got out of the car and closed the door behind her.
“Too late. I already have plenty of ’em.”
He pulled away from the curb then, and she could hear him laughing devilishly as he did.
What’s gotten into me? she asked herself, watching his car as long as she could see it and knowing she should not have plans to spend any amount of time with the man again. Not when she couldn’t hold her own with him. And what did he want with someone like her, anyway, when even the town accountant hadn’t found her exciting enough?
So call the man and tell him you won’t go after all, she ordered herself.
But she knew she wasn’t going to do that. Crazy as it seemed not to.
And it did seem crazy.
Because here she was, shy, quiet, predictable, provincial, prudish Abby Stanton.
Playing with fire.
3
“FINALLY.”
“It’s about time.”
The voices of Abby’s sisters came from inside the house as she turned from the curb after watching Cal Ketchum drive off. Bree was apparently on the lookout upstairs at the bay window in one of the four bedrooms—the one they’d used as a guest room since their brother, Lucas, had left. Emily was standing at the window downstairs that opened onto the round turret that wrapped one corner of the two-story white clapboard Victorian house.
Abby just waved without calling any kind of answer back to her sisters because she didn’t want to draw any more of their neighbors’ attention than she already had.
She headed for the house, struck as she always was by how beautiful the old place was, how much it looked like a dollhouse. Wide porches followed the line of the multicantilevered and gabled front and the turret on both levels, with spindled railings and poles making the turret look like a double-decker, attached gazebo.
A steep roof topped the house, and an octagonal roof finished off the turret, keeping it from being stark. Gingerbread latticework accentuated all the overhangs, and beveled glass surrounded the carved entrance door.
But in spite of how inviting her home was, there was no speed in Abby’s climb up the six steps that lifted her into the cool shade where white wicker chairs, a swing and two settees all with flowered cushions waited for someone to while away the early-summer days. She wasn’t anxious to face her sisters and so, rather than going right in, she plucked a few wilting leaves from the bright red geraniums that grew in a pot hanging beside the door.
But that only bought her a moment before Emily appeared just inside the wooden screen.
“First—are you all right?” Emily demanded, sounding as if she, not Abby, were the oldest sister when, in fact, she was the middle one.
“I have a splitting headache, but other than that I’m okay,” Abby answered as she crossed the threshold into a large entryway with a center table occupying a fair share of the space.
“I can’t believe you did this,” Bree said from directly overhead. Voices tended to echo slightly in the entryway because it was open to the ceiling of the second floor, surrounded on the upper level by a banistered walkway off which the bedrooms opened. The echo lent power to Bree’s disapproval.
“Which part can’t you believe?” Abby asked her youngest sister as Bree came around to the oak staircase and descended it to join her and Emily in the entry.
“All of it,” Emily said as if the question had been directed at her. “What were you doing letting that guy carry you out of that bar last night? And where did you go with him? And why didn’t you call so we didn’t have to sit up all night wondering if you were okay or in trouble or sick or who knows what?”
Bree picked up where Emily left off. “We take you out to get your mind off the wedding and Bill, and the next thing we know, some stranger is carting you off like a sack of potatoes. By the time we got through the crowd in that place, all we saw was him driving away with you.”
“And then when you weren’t here when we got home and didn’t come home all night, ” Emily continued, “we didn’t know what to think. Or if we should call the sheriff or if calling the sheriff would end up with him finding you boinking that cowboy somewhere.”
“Bree!” Abby said with an embarrassed laugh.
“Looks to me,” Emily contributed, “as if it’s a good thing we didn’t call the sheriff because boinking that cowboy is just what he’d have caught you doing.”
Emily was as conservative as Abby, so it was an indication of how put out she was that she’d even say a word like boinking.
“I was not boinking anybody,” Abby informed them.
“Oh, no? You spent the whole night with him and here you are now, with your clothes all messed up as if you were wrestling around in them. Your hair has gone crazy. And you’re reeking of men’s cologne,” Bree declared.
“Maybe it isn’t only her hair that’s gone crazy,” Emily pointed out.
They were concerned about her but they were also peeved and goading her, too, to find out what had really gone on in the past twelve hours.
Continuing in that vein, Bree said, “Geez, Abby, this isn’t like you.”
“Yeah, we didn’t think you’d carry the wild-woman thing this far. We’ve been scared to death that our getting you drunk made you do something dangerous.”
When all else fails, try guilt.
“Okay, okay. I’m sorry,” Abby said, finally moving from the entryway.
She was badly in need of an aspirin and something to drink that would remoisten a desert-dry mouth. She could have gone to the kitchen at the back of the house by heading straight down the hallway from the foyer. But her sisters were blocking that path, so it was easier to take a left and go through the formal living room, pass under the yellow-stained-glass-lined archway that connected the dining room and finally to the kitchen from there.
Bree and Emily trailed her like ducklings.
“So what happened?” Bree finally asked outright.
The kitchen was very large, divided in half by a low row of cupboards so the appliances and butcher’s block were on one side, and a breakfast nook big enough to seat eight on its U-shaped bench seat was built into the wall on the other.
Abby took a bottle of aspirin from a narrow cupboard beside the sink. “Is there any lemonade left?” she asked rather than answering Bree’s question.
Emily poured her a glass from a pitcher in the refrigerator, handed it to her and, with emphasis, repeated, “What happened last night?”
“Nothing,” Abby said simply, making a face after swallowing the white tablets with the lemonade Bree always made too sour.
“Nothing, my foot,” Bree said, a note of anticipation for a juicy story creeping into her voice.
Abby felt boring again, knowing she was going to disappoint her youngest sister. With all the worrying and waiting up they’d done, they deserved at least a titillating tale. But they weren’t going to get it. Unless she lied. Which she considered doing for their sakes. And maybe for her own, too, so she could liven up their image of her.
Only in the end Abby couldn’t bring herself to make something up.
“I hate to admit it, but Bill was right about me. I left the bar with Cal Ketchum because I came out of the bathroom and couldn’t stand the thought of going back to the table with those other people who had joined you guys.” She went on to outline how Cal came to not only carry her from the bar, but also take her to his house, and what had gone on from there.
And when she finished she took a good long look at her sisters, almost hoping they might doubt her bland story and think it was only a cover-up for something deliciously scandalous. That they might say You don’t expect us to believe that’s all that happened, do you?
But they knew her too well.
They both visibly rel
axed. Clearly not even entertaining the notion that she and the rear-end cowboy had spent a night of mindless passion because he couldn’t resist her and she’d been more than just pretending to be a wild woman. Somehow it was demoralizing to think that her reputation as shy, quiet, steady, provincial, predictable Abby Stanton was so ingrained that even a whole night spent with Cal Ketchum couldn’t heat it up.
“It looked like he tried to kiss you in the car just now,” Bree said then, proving she had been watching from the upstairs window.
“He did,” Abby admitted.
“And you didn’t let him,” Emily guessed as if that were a given.
It pricked something in Abby and made her decide on the spot to give them a little shock. “Not that time I didn’t let him, no.”
“There was another time that you did let him kiss you?” Bree asked.
“Just once. Earlier. At his house.” And didn’t it feel good to let them know that! Almost as good as the kiss itself had felt.
“Then something did happen?” Emily said, perking up hopefully.
But that was as far as Abby could take it. She just couldn’t lie. “Only the one kiss. It was next to nothing.” To him, anyway. She was certain of that. Sure, it had curled her toes, but to a man like Cal Ketchum? He probably gave away kisses like that every day of the week.
She brought her lemonade to the breakfast nook where both her sisters were sitting and slid in, too.
“So what’s up with him anyway? Where did he come from? What’s his story?” Emily was anxious now for details.
“I don’t know. Unfortunately I slept through most of the time with him and this morning I was too interested in finding out what I couldn’t remember about what went on last night. I didn’t ask about anything more than that. But maybe I’ll find out about him tonight.”
“Tonight?” Bree repeated. “What’s tonight?”
“He’s picking me up at eight so I can show him the best place to watch the sunset,” she said matter-of-factly.
“And you’re going? With someone you don’t even know? Without being drunk?” Emily was finally shocked.
“I owe him. For all he didn’t do last night,” she admitted, not going on to let them know that she was as nervous about it as if it were her first date ever.
“So do you like him?” Emily asked.
Abby shrugged. It wouldn’t do to like him. And she wouldn’t admit that she did. Not to her sisters. Not to herself.
“He’s nice. Nicer than you’d expect for as good-looking as he is. He isn’t arrogant or conceited. But it doesn’t really matter. I’m just going to pay him back for taking me home last night and not doing anything while I was nearly passed out in his bed and at his mercy. And then that will be that.”
“What makes you so sure?” Bree asked, her voice full of possibilities.
“Cal Ketchum isn’t interested in someone like me. He acts like he saw through the wild-woman thing, but I’m sure he still thinks that a little of it was real. You know when he realizes the truth he’ll be on to someone exciting.”
“What are you? Dull as dishwater?” Bree asked.
Abby shrugged again. “Let’s be honest, Bill wasn’t off the mark when he complained about me. I am shy and quiet and steady and predictable and provincial. Even last night I couldn’t pull off the wild-woman thing. And this morning I was terrified I might have done something I couldn’t face. Or promised something I couldn’t follow through on. Maybe I’m not dull as dishwater...I hope I’m not. But I’m also not the kind of woman a man like that bothers with. I’m just not the type a world-class ladies’ man wastes his time with.”
“Oh, Abby,” Emily said in a moan. “I’d like to chop Bill Snot-grass into tiny pieces for making you doubt your appeal to anybody.”
“Bill Snot-grass?” Abby repeated with a laugh.
“Well, that’s what he is. Among other things. I still don’t buy his reasons for calling off the wedding. I think he just got cold feet, chickened out and then laid the whole thing on you because he wasn’t man enough to admit it.”
“Or worse,” Bree said under her breath.
“Or worse?” Abby asked.
“I can’t help feeling he had something else up his sleeve. Maybe something he had a guilty conscience over and it made him feel better to pick at you.”
“But I am all the things he said,” Abby reminded, wishing she had more than last night and one kiss by the rear-end cowboy to refute it. “Anyway the good news is, being shy, quiet, steady, predictable and provincial isn’t fatal. It isn’t really bad at all. I’m okay with it. It just won’t keep Cal Ketchum coming around. And that’s good because I don’t want him coming around. I just want to get tonight over with so my debt is paid and I can go on with my own business. Without a man to confuse things. I need a break from men for a while. Like maybe the next ten years.”
“It’s good to take some time for yourself. Regroup,” Emily agreed.
“Besides, rebound relationships never work out,” Bree added.
“So let’s just not make a big deal out of what isn’t a big deal. I did something dumb last night, but luckily I was with a man who didn’t take advantage of the situation. Tonight I’ll pay him back by showing him the sunset. I’ll be home before ten without even a peck on the cheek to say good-night, and that’ll be that.”
Both her sisters nodded their heads as if they thought she was absolutely right.
She thought she was absolutely right
But somehow she couldn’t help wishing that she wasn’t.
Because for no reason she could begin to understand, the whole lily-white scenario she’d just laid out for the coming evening made her feel oddly downhearted.
“COME ON OUT, GIRLS,” Cal urged. “I have a date and you all can’t stay here while I’m gone. Sorry.”
It was seven-fifteen that evening, and he was just about ready to leave to pick up Abby to watch the sunset. He only needed to choose a shirt. And get rid of his houseguests.
“Come on, you three little vixens. I’m not kiddin’ around. We’ve had a good time all afternoon, but that’s it for now.”
He went into his walk-in closet and surveyed his options from among the shirts hanging there, wondering why it was so all-fired important to him to look good. He usually didn’t put much consideration into what he wore. Date or no date.
But there was something special about this date. About this woman. Something that made him feel there was a higher standard to be met. A level of respectability he hadn’t dabbled in before.
Strange to be feeling that way about a woman who’d gotten drunk in a bar and had to be taken home to his house because she couldn’t even tell him where she lived.
But he didn’t doubt for a minute that had been a fluke for Abby Stanton.
Nope. Watching her reaction to finding herself in his bed this morning, seeing her with her face scrubbed, talking to her, had only served to convince him that she was as wholesome as corn on the cob.
And he’d bet everything he had that he wasn’t the kind of man who usually came calling on Miss Abby Stanton.
He finally settled on a fire-engine-red Western-cut shirt. Maybe to warn her.
“Lady beware,” he muttered to himself as he slipped it on. “I’ve been around the block.”
He was still standing in the closet, buttoning his shirt, when one of his houseguests attacked him from behind. She landed on his shoulder, lost her footing and tumbled forward. Quick reflexes allowed Cal to catch her, and the furry ball ended up hanging half inside, half outside his shirt.
“Cats are supposed to be surefooted,” he told the tiny tabby, holding her up to look her in the eye. “Now, where’re your sisters? You all are supposed to be barn cats, not house cats, remember?”
He tucked her against his chest and held her there with one hand while he scanned the shelf from which she’d sprung. Wherever one of them was, the other two were likely not to be too far behind.
Sure enough
he spotted the other kittens—one perched atop the hatbox his newest Stetson had come in, and the other peeking at him from around the back of the box.
“Look, girls, I know this has been home since your mama passed on givin’ birth to you and you think you can just take over in here. But my turn at playin’ mother cat is about up, and you three are old enough to stake out some territory of your own in the barn. Got that?” he lectured as he lifted down the peeking kitten and held her against his chest with the first one, then took the hatbox kitten down, too.
While he cradled the first two in his left hand, he stared eye to eye with the hatbox kitten. “You’re the culprit, aren’t you?” he said to her. All three were nearly identical silver-gray in color. The two against his chest were hard to tell apart unless he turned them over to search for which of them had a white spot on her belly. But the hatbox kitten had one white ear. She was the mischief maker.
“You led the troops in here to hide, didn’t you?”
The kitten licked his nose.
“Kisses are not gonna cut it, honey.”
He stepped out of the closet and set all three cats on the bed while he finished buttoning his shirt and tucked it into his jeans.
Good thing none of his brothers knew he was keeping kittens, he thought as he watched the trio rolling around on the mattress, playing with each other. There’d be no end of unmerciful razzing if any of the Ketchums got wind of it. Especially if they knew that most nights since he’d found the kittens trying to nuzzle up against their dead mother in his barn, it had been these females with him between the sheets instead of any of the two-legged variety.
Things really were changing.
And that was what he wanted. That was what he’d set out to do—use his share of their good fortune to have a life he’d never had before.
“But that doesn’t mean you girls can stay in here,” he told his audience. “I have better things to do in that bed than share it with pets, you know.”
An image of Abby popped into his mind just then. Of how she’d looked sleeping there. Of how much he’d wanted to be in it with her. Not sleeping...
Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch Page 5