Larissa led the way to a booth toward the east end of the restaurant. She slid into one side and Hank did the same on the other. She held up two fingers when the waitress looked up and nodded when she mouthed “pie.”
“So what are you cooking today?” Hank asked.
“Chicken fried steak, mashed potatoes with gravy, salad with garlic bread on the side, hot rolls, and coconut cream pie. Sweet iced tea. Speak now if you don’t like ranch dressing or sugar in your tea and I’ll tell the waitress to make a couple of changes.”
He shook his head. “Both are fine. That all they serve in here? It’s quaint, but it’s not the Brasserie Bofinger on the Rue de la Bastille, is it?”
“Nope, but I don’t expect you’d get a Texas-sized chicken fried steak there, would you? Or that you’d go there in paint-stained overalls either,” she smarted off. She leaned across the table and whispered, “As far as what else they have or serve in here, I have no idea. I’ve never seen a menu.”
He frowned. “Why?”
“Because I came here first with Cathy and Amos and they never ordered from a menu. The chicken fried steak is so good I can’t imagine ordering anything else. I’ve got another confession. I’ve never been fishing.”
His smile erased the frown. “Are you serious?”
“Do I need to go buy any equipment?”
He shook his head. “No, Dad keeps enough fishing stuff out at the ranch for an army to use. He loves to fish on Sunday afternoon.”
“Is he going with us?”
“No. He’s going to Whitesboro to a gospel singing. Would you rather go to that?”
She shook her head. “I hear singing every night. I’d rather go fishin’.”
The waitress brought iced tea and salads. Hank downed half his tea before he came up for air. “That’s almost as good as Oma’s.”
“What do you do when you aren’t at the ranch? I remember you said once that you didn’t live there all the time.” She sipped at her tea.
“I work in an office in Dallas. Love the ranch in the summertime so I spend as much time as I can in this area.”
“Even better than the Café de la Paix?” she asked.
“Now that’s a hard question. Which one do you like best?” he asked right back.
“Like you say, it’s a hard question. I don’t get over to Paris nearly as often as I did back before I inherited the Honky Tonk,” she said. But her thoughts went to that café while she looked out the window at heat waves rising up from the concrete parking lot.
“I never know when you are joking or telling the truth,” he said.
“Keep ’em guessing.” She giggled.
A man in a three-piece suit that was definitely tailor-made, a red polka-dot power tie, and shoes with tassels stopped beside their booth. Hank’s face changed drastically when he looked up.
Larissa watched his expressions after she gave the man a quick glance.
“Hello. What brings you to this area?” Hank asked. The look on his face said to answer the question and get the hell out of Thurber.
“Had some business in Abilene. Love their cheeseburgers here so I stopped for lunch. Who’s this pretty lady?”
“Larissa, meet W. J. He works in the same firm I do in Dallas. This is Larissa, the lady I told you about that owns and operates the Honky Tonk,” Hank said. His eyes were shifty and trying to relay a message for W. J.
“Right pleased to meet you, Larissa,” W. J. said. “Well, I’ll be on my way. Got to get back to the firm by closing time to finish off some reports. Anything you want me to tell the boss lady?”
“Just that I’ll be back the first Monday in September.” Hank’s smile was forced.
“With good news?” W. J. asked.
“Never know. The boss lady will have to be patient.” A stone statue had more expression than Hank did.
“That ain’t going to happen in this lifetime.” W. J. walked away.
Larissa watched his face and wished she could read him better. “It was very nice to meet you,” she called out.
“My pleasure to finally meet you, Miss Morley,” W. J. called back and disappeared out into the heat.
Hank mentally patted himself on the back for getting through that meeting without stumbling all over his nerve endings and emotions. Damn the luck anyway. Who would have thought his assistant would be in the Smokestack at three o’clock in the afternoon on a Saturday.
“Who is the bitchy boss lady that has no patience?” Larissa started on her salad.
“My mother,” he said.
She almost choked. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. Mother can be bitchy when she doesn’t get her way, and once she’s decided she wants something, she’s not pleasant until she gets it,” Hank said. His jaws and eyes had relaxed and he was almost normal again.
Larissa swallowed hard. “Sounds like my mother.”
But your mother is backwoods trailer trash and mine is a multi-millionaire entrepreneur with a grudge against my father.
“What’s your mother’s name?” she asked.
“Victoria. And yours?”
“Doreen, and she has red hair just like the little girl in the movies.”
“Well, now that’s a surprise. I pictured her with black hair and brown eyes,” Hank said as he ate his salad.
“That’s my father. He was Indian. Mother is pure Irish. Red hair, green eyes. Think Sharlene only taller. Think someone who doesn’t look much older than Sharlene too.”
“Oh, come on. If she’s your mother she has to be fifty,” he said.
“Yes, she is and if you ever meet her and say that, you will have a red dot between your eyes within a week.”
Hank cocked his head to one side. “What?”
“Think sniper and a red laser dot. Think hit man and big bucks. So is your mother tall and dark-haired like you?” she asked.
“Was your father a sniper in the war or something and he’s got this vendetta against anyone who thinks your mother looks fifty? And my mother is a tall blonde with blue eyes. They say I look just like my father did at my age.”
Larissa finished off her salad and swiped the remaining salad dressing up with the last bit of garlic bread. “Don’t remember my father. He left before I was a year old. Mother would simply put out a hit on you and no one would ever know that Hank Wells died because he thought she was fifty and not thirty. They’d think he was in the wrong place at the wrong time and got hit by a shell probably meant to kill a deer. You do know they kill them with guns instead of cars sometimes, don’t you?”
“It was a truck, not a car, thank god,” he said.
Doreen Morley. He wrote that name on his memory. As soon as he got home he’d make a call to have her investigated. Information was vital in his line of business. Come morning he’d know if Doreen Morley still lived in the same trailer, if she was a pole dancer in a nude bar, or if she was a Sunday school teacher in a religious commune. Yes, sir, Hank Wells was about to find out exactly where Larissa Morley came from and what she’d done in the past thirty years.
Victoria Wells. Larissa said the name six times so she wouldn’t forget it. One phone call and tomorrow she’d know everything about the woman. She’d know if the woman inherited her business or if she’d built it from scratch and exactly what kind of business it was, why she and Henry weren’t married anymore, and what it was that she wanted so badly that she was bitchy these days. And her investigator would find out what it was that made Larissa wary of the best looking cowboy she’d ever seen.
Chapter 6
Jo Dee Messina was singing “My Give a Damn’s Busted” when Luther opened the doors that evening and started checking IDs.
Sharlene’s cowboy boots were tapping out the rhythm on the floor as she waited for the first rush to the bar. The dark green halter top was the same color as her eyes and flipped out over the top of a denim miniskirt that showed off muscular legs.
“This is my song,” she said when Larissa joined her behin
d the bar.
“Why?” Larissa had barely had time to take a shower and wash the dried paint chips from her dark hair. She had run a hair dryer through it a few times, flipped it back with a wide red headband that matched her tank top, and hoped it didn’t look too bad. She wore capri length jeans and red boots.
“Because it is. Describes my last boyfriend to a T. He filled my head with lies and twisted my heart until it snapped, just like the song. Be careful of that cowboy who’s flirting with you. He might do the same thing,” Sharlene warned.
Larissa topped off the pretzel and peanut bowls and set two blenders on the back workstation. “I thought you were interested in a big story about me and the cowboy falling in love so you could have the office with a view.”
“Something ain’t right about this one. Might be that he will break your give a damn. I’m not in a hurry with my story. I want it to be real when I write it, not contrived. Besides, I like it here at the Tonk. I don’t care if it takes a couple of years to write your story.”
“Two buckets of Coors and a pitcher of tequila sunrise,” a customer said. She was a twenty-something woman with black hair that hung to her waist. She wore denim shorts and a halter top that covered enough to keep her out of jail but wouldn’t flag a freight train.
Sharlene had the buckets filled at the same time Larissa set the pitcher on a tray with six empty pint jars.
The woman handed Sharlene a fifty dollar bill and waited for change. “So when did Larissa hire you to help?”
“Last night,” Larissa answered.
“Where’s Julio tonight?”
“He usually comes in about nine on Saturday nights. Should be here before long,” Larissa answered.
“Then I’ll make do until he gets here.” She motioned for two of her friends to help carry the buckets and tray back to their table.
“Is she a hooker?” Sharlene whispered.
“No, honey, she’s a Chigger.”
“What’s that?”
Larissa laughed. “Chigger is a woman who came to the Honky Tonk for at least seven years, maybe more, every single weekend. Way I heard it is that she said sex was too damn much fun to charge money for it.”
“Was Chigger her real name?” Sharlene asked.
Larissa set out the ingredients to fill an order for two pitchers of pina coladas. “No, it was something like Willa but everyone called her Chigger.”
“Why?”
“She said she was like a real chigger, that she could put an itch on a man that was unbearable until she took him to bed,” Larissa said. “Hey, I forgot to ask. How’d you like the apartment?”
“It’s great. Wish I had something that nice in Dallas. I made a grocery store run this morning after I cleaned up the beer joint. Picked up some staples that’ll last several weeks.”
Larissa filled a bucket with Coors and added two scoops of ice. “That sounds good. So it’s going to take a while for you to get this story written?”
“However long it takes you to find a husband.”
“Then you’d best load up enough to last more than a few weeks,” Larissa said with a laugh.
A prickly sensation on her neck said that Hank was in the joint. It grew hotter and hotter the closer he got to the bar. By the time he was on a bar stool she wanted to shovel a scoop of ice down the back of her tank top.
“Martini,” he drawled when she looked at him.
Her mouth felt like she’d crossed the Sahara without a drop of water.
“Could I get two pitchers of margaritas and a pitcher of Coors?” The woman who’d cornered Julio the minute he arrived poked her head between Hank and the woman sitting next to him.
“I can make margaritas,” Sharlene said.
The woman shoved between Hank and the customer next to him, pressing every part of her scantily covered body as close to him as she could. “Whew! Where’d you come from, darlin’?”
Larissa set the martini in front of Hank.
“I would’ve pictured you as a beer man, not a sissy martini man.”
“Looks can be deceiving.” He grinned.
She leaned in close to whisper seductively. “I can think of places to put that drink that would be a hell of a lot more fun than a Mason jar.”
“Crystal glass?” he asked in fake innocence.
“We’ll start with that sitting between my boobs and go on to other places,” she flirted.
Larissa fought the urge to reach across the bar and snatch all that long black hair out by the roots. Did Hank always draw women to him like flies on a fresh cow patty?
Of course he does. With those muscles, that drawl, and those damn sexy eyes, you are crazy to think you’d be the only one interested in him.
“Here’s your order,” Sharlene said. “You find that rancher who likes to dance?”
“I did but I’d trade him in on this package.” She gave Hank a long, sideways wink.
“His wife would jerk those hair extensions off and choke you to death with them. Then she’d feed your eyeballs to the feral cats that come up from the woods at night. I wouldn’t mess with him if I was you,” Sharlene said.
The woman cut her eyes around at Hank. “Shame on you! You should wear a wedding ring.”
“Against my religion,” he said.
“Religious man don’t belong in a beer joint.” She huffed off toward the table where her friends waited with the hired hands from Garret’s ranch.
Larissa giggled and then it turned into full-fledged laughter. “How’d you know those were extensions?”
“When I left Iraq the second time I decided I wanted an inside job working with women. Didn’t care if I ever dealt with a man again. So I started a six-month course in cosmetology. Figured out the first six weeks that working with bitchy women wasn’t a bit better than working with arrogant men so I quit and went to find something else,” Sharlene said.
“I’m not married. Never have been,” Hank said. Sharlene grinned. “Thank you, Sharlene Waverly, for saving me from having to drink a martini from a chigger’s belly button.”
That set Larissa off on another fit of giggles. Sharlene was good behind the bar, had a sense of humor, and worked her butt off. She wondered if she might change the woman’s mind about the newspaper business and put her to work full time.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Hank asked.
Larissa wiped her eyes with a bar rag. “I’ll tell you about Chigger tomorrow. I don’t have time tonight. Here they come again, Sharlene. I swear three line dances and they’re so thirsty they’d lap up warm beer from a pig trough.”
“Four and we’d have to learn how to sink an IV,” Sharlene said.
Sara Evans was singing “Suds in the Bucket.” Sharlene did a couple of wiggles as she drew up a pitcher of Miller. “I love this song. It’s the story of my life. Soon as I finished high school I left the suds in the bucket and didn’t look back.”
“Ever been back?” Hank asked.
“Oh, yeah. Ten days into boot camp I thought I’d made the biggest mistake of my life but my name on the line said they owned my ass four years. So I sucked it up but yes, I went home. My momma damn sure learned a lot in those years.”
“It happens,” Hank said.
“Sounds like you walked a while in my boots. You been in the army?” Sharlene asked.
“Oh, no! Not me,” Hank said.
Sharlene pointed to the jukebox. “Oh, listen! Don’t you just love country songs? They tell the whole story. You don’t know how many times we used the title of this song over there. ‘Did I Shave My Legs For This?’ was our theme song!”
Hank breathed a sigh of relief that she’d gone off on another tangent and stopped asking him questions.
Larissa could have strangled her. She didn’t care if the women in Iraq never shaved their legs. She wanted to know what he’d done if he hadn’t gone to the military and she had the distinct feeling that he was about to say more when Sharlene butted in. Damn! Damn! Damn!
&nbs
p; “You sure you don’t dance with the customers?” Hank asked.
A slow two-stepping song by George Strait put several dancers on the floor. Larissa remembered the first days when she came to the Honky Tonk and had no idea how to do the country dances. She wanted to dance with Hank so badly that her heart hurt from the yearning.
“Not when we are this busy. Maybe later,” she said.
“Then I’ll stick around. When you get ready for a dance, you let me know. I’m going over and watch Merle and Patrick shoot pool.” He carried his martini with him.
“What’s that about not dancing?” Sharlene asked.
“It was a rule back in Ruby Lee’s day. I may change it tonight. You seein’ someone you want to do a little two-steppin’ with?” Larissa said.
“Not me, but if you’re ever goin’ to make up your mind about that chunk of sex in cowboy boots you’d best dance with him,” Sharlene said.
“Why?”
“What better way to get right up close and personal? What other rules did Ruby have?”
“No letting the customers buy you a drink and no men in the apartment.”
Sharlene fanned her face with her hand. “Whew! Did she hate men or what?”
“No, I think she loved them, maybe too much. They tell me she was a hellcat, a preacher’s daughter. I heard that she didn’t put a bar in close to her old stomping grounds because she was afraid her daddy would stand in the parking lot and preach her customers out of hell and into heaven. Oh, I do like this song,” Larissa said.
The first notes of a lonesome piano started “To Make Me Feel Your Love” by Garth Brooks.
“Go dance with him. You ain’t goin’ to get nothing any slower than that tonight. The crowd’s been playin’ fast stuff,” Sharlene said. “Besides, how you goin’ to know if he’s the one or not if you don’t give him a chance?”
Larissa looked across the bar. Hank had leaned against the wall and was staring right at her. She nodded and he met her in the middle of the floor. She wrapped her arms around his neck and he looped his around her waist. They barely moved around the edge of the floor but she understood what Sharlene meant as two hearts, only physical inches apart, beat in perfect unison while they listened to Garth sing one of the greatest love songs of his career.
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