One Thanksgiving in Lusty, Texas

by Cara Covington

  “I’m sure everything will be perfect.” She knew, intellectually, that her new husband—her new husbands—were well off. But that was no reason to just spend money, willy-nilly. As long as the furnishings were decent, and the bed comfortable, she’d be happy.

  Bed. Wedding night. Adam and James.

  Pamela hadn’t been at all nervous up to this point. She couldn’t say that any longer.

  She looked out Adam’s window in time enough to see the city of Dallas rushing up to meet her. And then the plane jostled as the wheels made contact with the tarmac. The brakes came on, and she felt the reverse thrust, as the seatbelt did its job of keeping her from flying forward.

  The plane had landed, and her new life was about to begin. One moment of hesitancy, maybe insecurity swept through her. And then she dug deep, breathed deep, and mentally revisited the main thing.

  She was hopelessly, deeply and irrevocably in love with Adam and James Jessop. She hoped—no, she believed—that they would soon come to love her, too.

  Everything was going to work out fine.

  While the plane taxied to the gate, she looked from Adam to James. “Your cousin is driving all the way to Dallas to pick us up?”

  “No. He works in the Dallas area. He’s a cop—a Texas Ranger—and he’s getting off a bit early today in order to take us home.”

  “Caleb spends a couple of nights a week in Dallas. He says he doesn’t mind commuting. He and Jonathan, his brother, married Bernice a couple of years ago. Weekends especially, he heads home.”

  “I guess there are a lot of people in the New York area who spend a long time on the road, even though they don’t live that far from where they work. I’ve even heard of people stuck in traffic for a couple of hours or more at times.”

  “We were in New York City for a week, and I can tell you a few times we almost left the taxi and walked instead,” James said.

  “The traffic here isn’t anywhere near what you’re used to,” Adam said. “We each have a car at home. You can use either one of ours until we get you your own.”

  “Oh! Well, you don’t have to buy me a car.”

  Adam grinned. “Yes, we do.”

  “Absolutely, we do.” James’s grin matched his brother’s.

  Pamela liked the way her husbands saw to it she was protected as they deplaned. Adam held her hand as he led the way toward the luggage carousel.

  “I still can’t believe you only brought two suitcases.” James shook his head. “We each have one that’s about as big as your two combined—and we’ve got clothing where we’re going!”

  Pamela laughed. “I left my winter wardrobe in Maryland. I didn’t think I’d need it here.”

  “We do have some cooler days in December and January,” Adam said. “But nothing like what happens up north.”

  Pamela giggled at the shiver Adam gave just then. There’d been a few cold days this past winter, but nowhere close to what she’d experienced when she’d visited her cousins in upstate New York. She recalled now how both of these Texan men had reacted to that bit of cold in February. It had been hard at the time not laughing at them.

  James motioned to a skycap to give them a hand with their luggage. The man had just loaded the bags onto a cart when another man approached, his blond hair just barely visible beneath the white cowboy hat he wore. Adam noticed him immediately, and the two men greeted each other warmly, which included hearty handshakes with a bit of back pounding. Pamela didn’t have to guess because Adam called the man Caleb.

  Then Caleb spotted James, and the whole vigorous shake and back-slapping ritual was repeated again. Adam stood beside her, grinned, then slipped his arm around her.

  That got the man’s attention. He looked directly at her, his blue eyes revealing his intelligence, and his curiosity.

  “Sweetheart, this is our cousin, Caleb Benedict. Caleb, I’d like you to meet Pamela Franklin Jessop—our wife.”

  * * * *

  James escorted Pamela to the ladies’ room while Adam followed Caleb to the bank of telephones.

  “Your wife seems like a lovely woman,” Caleb said.

  “She’s beautiful, inside and out, and we both love her very much.” Adam sighed. He and his brother were both looking forward to having some private time later that evening to let her know exactly how they felt about her and what she meant to them. “I married her yesterday evening, in a small ceremony in her father’s living room. All legal, of course.”

  Caleb made a great show of trying to look at Adam’s ass. When Adam just raised his eyebrow at his cousin, Caleb grinned. “I was just trying to see if there were any imprints of a shotgun barrel remaining on your ass, cousin.”

  “No, of course not. It wasn’t like that. We haven’t even…” Adam shut his mouth. Perhaps telling his cousin that he and James hadn’t even made love with their woman yet was more information than Caleb needed.

  “Since I didn’t receive any phone calls from home this morning telling me I’d be picking up a new cousin, am I to assume that Aunt Maria doesn’t know you’re married?”

  Adam closed his eyes. “Oh, hell, I forgot. We tried to call home this morning before we left for the airport, but we couldn’t get through.”

  “May I suggest you do so, now? Your house hasn’t been lived in for a while, and of course, there’s the matter of the unprepared master suite. It would be nice, don’t you think, if your bride didn’t have to make up the bed up herself, first?”

  Adam cursed under his breath. “Yes, of course, you’re right. We’ve both been so anxious to marry our woman, to bring her home with us, we didn’t think beyond the very basic details of getting it done.”

  “Does Pamela know how inept the two of you are when it comes to daily life and social interaction?”

  “We did confess that to her when we proposed. She didn’t appear to be bothered at all by the news.”

  Caleb chuckled. “The woman must be crazy in love with you both, then.”

  Adam really hoped that was so. “From your lips to God’s ears.”

  Adam picked up the receiver and began the process of calling his parents’ house, and this time, the call went through. At the sound of his mother’s faintly accented hello, Adam smiled.

  “Hola, mi madre querida.”

  “Adam! You are in Dallas, sí?”

  “Yes, we just landed a few minutes ago.”

  “Caleb is on his way to get you and your brother. James is there?”

  “He’s not right here but has also arrived safely. At the moment, he’s just down the concourse, and Caleb is standing beside me. Mother, we have a surprise for you. You recall we mentioned Pamela? Pamela Franklin?”

  “Since she was practically all you spoke of when you would call over the last few months, yes, of course.”

  “She came with us. Mother…I married her last night. It was a small ceremony, at her father’s home.”

  “Oh! Oh, I think I’m going to cry! That’s…oh, Dios mío! She is there, and you are leaving now to come here! I will gather your aunts, and we will go to your house. We need to air it and tidy it, and we must put sheets on the bed in the master suite…and we must plan the ceremony, sí?”

  “James and I want to hold off on the ceremony. We…we rushed her into this, and now…now we need to court her properly.”

  “Ah, mi tonto hijo, I know how you sometimes are…”

  “Ham-handed? Clumsy?” Adam might wince at having his mother call him foolish, but he really couldn’t deny the charge.

  “And yet, she said yes, your Pamela. To you both?”

  “She did, and yes, to us both. But it’s a bit complicated. She knows that we’ll have a ceremony and that in the eyes of the family we’re both of us her husbands.”

  “Perhaps you need the counsel of your fathers. Sí, you must speak with Warren and Douglas. You will come here for supper tonight. Just the family—us and your grandparents. Now, travel safe. We have much to do here. Tell Caleb to take his time, sí? Adios!
”

  Adam blinked. He looked over at Caleb, who was grinning. “It sounds like Aunt Maria is excited,” Caleb said.

  “She told me to tell you to take your time.”

  “That’s easy enough to do. Have you had lunch? How about a stop at Annie’s?” Adam knew the small restaurant not far from the airport. On the route to Lusty, it wouldn’t take them out of their way, and it would be a good way to take a few moments, some coffee or sweet tea, before heading home.

  “Good idea.” Hopefully that stop, and Caleb’s usual careful pace behind the steering wheel, would give his mother and his aunts and cousins enough time to do whatever it was they needed to do. Other than putting fresh linens on a bed that currently only held a bedspread and pillows in shams, he didn’t know what the big deal was.

  No one had been living there, making a mess, after all.

  Caleb nodded behind him, and Adam turned to see James and Pamela approaching. He felt the smile that took up residence on his face. He’d never been a dour man, but he knew he’d been smiling more in the last few days than he had for all his life.

  Pamela walked right up to him, and he didn’t care that they were out in public. He put his arms around her and brought her close. He kept his kiss light. He didn’t want to neck in public the way he’d seen some of today’s teenagers do. But he’d needed this contact.

  He raised his head, and his smile widened in response to her blush. He reached down, took her left hand, and brought it to his lips.

  “Caleb suggested we make a stop at Annie’s, a restaurant run by a friend of his mother’s. It is nearly a three-hour drive to Lusty.”

  “I haven’t been to Annie’s in a while,” James said.

  Adam looked at Pamela, who looked from him to Caleb. “That sounds good. I could use a good cup of coffee.”

  Caleb proved he was the smoother of the cousins. “Well then, let’s do that.” He offered his arm to Pamela, leaving Adam and James to gather the luggage from the sky cap and follow out to the car. “While we head there, I’ll tell you about when Jonathan, my brother, and I, made a special trip to this very airport two years ago to pick up our Bernice, who’d flown in from New York City. That was our first stop, then, too.”

  “Sounds like a family tradition,” Pamela said.

  Adam knew her well enough to know that her bright smile meant she was a little confused but willing to go along with the plan.

  He and his brother collected their luggage from the sky cap and muscled the bags into the trunk of the car. Then James climbed into the back seat with Pamela while Adam took the front with Caleb. He’d more or less had their wife to himself since they’d arrived at the airport in Baltimore that morning. It was only right to give James some time with her.

  He turned and looked at them both, smiling when he saw the way they’d laced their fingers together. “I called Mother to let her know we’d landed safely. She’s excited to meet you, sweetheart. We’re going there for supper tonight. I hope you don’t mind I accepted the invitation?”

  “Of course, I don’t mind. I’m looking forward to meeting your family. Is there a grocery store in your town?”

  “There is, yes. It’s not like some of the bigger supermarkets they have in Maryland. But there is a larger grocery less than an hour away, in Gatesville. I thought we could visit the store in town tomorrow, if you’d like. And if you need anything that’s not there, well, we can head on into Gatesville.”

  “That sounds like a plan. We’ll need to stock up, and I enjoy cooking.”

  Adam met James’s gaze. He didn’t have to lay things out for his brother. He’d been very well aware they’d been unable to reach their mother that morning.

  Caleb put the car into gear, and Adam faced the front and prayed that everything over the next several hours would go well. He didn’t want Pamela to regret that she’d said yes to a future with them.

  Chapter Four

  One of the things that Pamela had recalled from her school days was the assertion by one of her teachers that the farther south one traveled in the U.S. in the spring time, the further along toward full bloom the trees and flowers would have come.

  The trees had buds and some leaves when she’d left Baltimore. Here, the trees were in full leaf, and the fields were dotted with pretty flowers of a type she’d never seen.

  “Those are bluebells,” James said. He leaned in closer to her and pointed out the side window to a veritable carpet of blue. “You’ll also see fields that sport orange and yellow blooms. There’s one closer to home. Those are called Indian paintbrush.” He nodded to the field. “Both of those wildflowers bloom in the spring, from March through April. Actually, I think they’ll be reaching their peak in another week or so.”

  “They’re beautiful! The trees are different here, too.” She was familiar with the foliage of the land of her youth. She wouldn’t even think of Baltimore as home from here on out. She was now in Texas, a wife, about to settle down in the hometown of her husbands.

  She’d start out as she meant to go. Texas, in general, and Lusty, in particular, was home to her now.

  “Because we have such hot weather, the trees don’t tend to grow as tall—at least, that’s what I’ve always believed. I’ve heard my Aunt Madison talking about having to learn what the soil would adopt and nurture and what it wouldn’t.”

  “She’s not from Texas?”

  “No, she’s from Ireland.”

  “You’ll find, sweetheart, there are a lot of people living in Lusty now who weren’t born there.” Adam turned slightly in his seat and smiled at her.

  “I’m looking forward to meeting everyone.”

  “There are quite a few folks living in and around Lusty now. Have these cousins of mine told you the history of our families?”

  “There’s a history?”

  “Oh, indeed there is.” Caleb sent Adam a scowl. “One that most of us are very proud of.”

  “If you mean to imply, cousin, that we’re not proud of our family history, perhaps we should stop off somewhere and discuss the matter in greater detail?”

  Pamela giggled. “My mother used to have a hard and fast rule that if there were more than two males in a vehicle with her, she’d have to have the window open. Inevitably, she claimed, someone’s brain wouldn’t be getting enough oxygen.”

  Caleb grinned. “That sounds like something my mother would have said.” He sounded downright pleased with that fact, too.

  “Sweetheart, Caleb is right about one thing. We really should tell you the story of how Lusty, Texas, was settled. It all started with a couple of gunslingers named Benedict.”

  “Gunslingers of the righteous kind,” Caleb immediately put in. “They didn’t commit crimes but often helped their closest friend, who was with the Waco division of the Texas Rangers—the first of our family to be a member of that illustrious law enforcement agency.”

  “So you’re a law man, just like your forefather’s friend?”

  “I claim Adam Kendall as a great-grandfather, too,” Caleb said. “As do your husbands.”

  “So…gunslingers?”

  “Indeed. And as gunslingers, Adam Kendall told them about an opportunity to collect a new bride and bring her home to her husband who had a ranch not too far outside Waco. Along the way, they discovered the bridegroom was a man whose heart was as black as sin…”

  All three of the men took turns narrating. She learned of a young woman named Sarah Carmichael, sold into marriage by her father as much to please his own new, younger and greedy bride as any desire to see his daughter settled—happily or otherwise.

  She heard of how two very famous lawmen—Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp—played a pivotal role in seeing to it the killers sent after Sarah by her new husband were foiled.

  She learned of an ahead-of-her-times young woman, Amanda Dupree, who came to visit her cousin Sarah and fell in love with two lawmen—Adam Kendall and his lover Warren Jessop, a lawyer.

  She heard of Amanda’s mother,
a demimonde, being escorted from Virginia to the newly founded Lusty by a friend of Warren’s and Amanda’s, Terrence Parker, Terrence’s lover Jeremy Jones, and her mother’s friend and companion Phyllis MacNab—and how those three escorts stayed and made a family of their own.

  “So now, you see, you have your Benedicts and your Kendalls and your Jessops and your Jessop-Kendalls. You have your Parkers and your Joneses and your Parker-Jones.” Caleb sent a grin her way through the rearview mirror. “We also have Mendez and Sanchez in the family, and they go back to the beginning, as well.”

  “Our mother is Maria Sanchez Jessop,” Adam said. “And we’re all very proud of our ancestors.”

  “That is all so much more interesting than my grandmother’s stuffy claim about our descendants coming over on the Mayflower.” The Young side of the family—her mother’s ancestors—loved to wave the flag of the Mayflower as a status symbol.

  How nice to be amidst people who were proud of their ancestors for their accomplishments instead of their pedigree.

  Caleb turned onto what appeared to be a country road. It curved around and then ended. He turned the car right and then, just a few moments later, left.

  “That’s our new airfield. The Town Trust has designated that part of family land, with a view to purchasing a private plane or two.”

  “Caleb’s fathers were both of them majors and pilots in the Second World War,” James said.

  “My mother was a major, too, with the Army Nurse Corps.” Caleb sounded proud as hell.

  Growing up, Pamela had listened to her Grandfather Young speak of his service during that same war.

  “Actually, the dads had their own plane, which they purchased with their own money, well before the war. Then, when hostilities broke out in Europe and the call went out from England for pilots, the dads volunteered. They went over and became members of an Eagle Squadron. There were a lot of American fliers who answered England’s call, enough to form three squadrons. They were called pursuit pilots, then.”