The Rancher's Texas Twins

by Allie Pleiter

  Gabe stared after the older man. “The boys ranch has a lot of turnaround stories to tell, but that one may just about top them all. Was a time we all thought Fletcher would fight the ranch to his dying breath.”

  That nice old man? “What happened?”

  “It’s a long story you’d best get from Darcy, but I’ll just say he changed a lot once he discovered she was his daughter. Sometimes people just need to know there’s someone they belong to, you know? Belonging here is mostly what turns these boys around. That, and a little care and a lot of hard work.”

  A sensible-looking woman with brown bobbed hair came out of the house’s front door to meet them. “I’m delighted to see you here,” she said, waving them up onto the porch. “I can’t wait to show you what your grandfather’s house is doing for these boys already.” She looked down at Debbie and Dinah. “And I bet you little ladies don’t want to wait to see what Miss Marnie might have for you in the kitchen.”

  “Avery Culpepper, meet our director, Bea Brewster. She knows everything there is to know about this place.”

  Bea smiled. “And then some.” She pointed down a hallway. “Kitchen’s just in there, girls. Follow the yummy smells.” The house did smell delicious, with the scent of baking cookies. A lump rose in Avery’s throat to be standing in her grandfather’s house, where she should have been but never was. She took a moment to stare around the foyer, lost for words.

  Bea’s voice was tender as she lay a hand on Avery’s elbow. “It’s a beautiful place. So big for one old man to be rumbling around alone for all those years.” Avery found it funny how Bea’s words echoed what Marlene had said about Five Rocks. The two women seemed a lot alike to her—friendly and oh-so capable. “We’re ever so grateful to be able to put the place to such good use.”

  One house tour, four cookies, one absurdly crazy and adorable goat-feeding session, and a top-it-all-off pair of pony rides later, Avery stood at a fence with Gabe, the girls between them, watching the horses wander about their pasture. Today she’d felt her heart lose some of the steely bitterness she’d held for this place. No, it hadn’t been her home, but it was home to a lot of other people and a lot of good work.

  “I’ll stay,” she said quietly.

  Gabe turned to look at her, astonished gratitude lighting his eyes. “You will?”

  “Just until the party. Then I have to get back to my life.”

  “Of course you do.”

  “I do have a life and job back in Tennessee, you know.” She had an urge to keep saying that. “I can only do so much of my work from here and it isn’t fair to uproot the girls.” Even as she spoke them, the words rang hollow. No one had missed her in Dickson. She’d gotten only three calls from people who weren’t decorating clients, and one of them was the preschool wanting to know if the girls should be registered for the coming year. Too much of that was her own doing—isolating herself in the eighteen months since Danny had decided life in Memphis suited him better than his family in Dickson. She should go back with her head held high and try to make Dickson the home it ought to be. At least she had a house and a business back there—one worth fighting to grow. Why on earth would she dabble in the idea that she could start over here, where she had only a run-down shack and where Culpepper was a dirty name?

  * * *

  Gabe was finishing up an agenda for the next Lone Star Cowboy League meeting Tuesday morning when Avery pushed open the door to his study and stared at him, wide-eyed.

  “Gabe, I’m so sorry.” She had on some kooky old hat that must have been Marlene’s from years ago, with what seemed to be paper flowers poking out of it in all directions. Her parade-float accessory was alarming enough, but it was her genuinely mortified expression that turned his gut to ice. “I tried to stop them but...”

  “Mr. Boots!” a pair of high, giggly voices called from the hallway, giving Gabe an irrational urge to duck under his desk and hide. Whatever was about to burst through his study door, Avery clearly predicted he wouldn’t like it. “We have a surprise for you!”

  Avery’s face took on a helpless apologetic cringe. Gabe held his breath and made plans for a dead bolt on his study door.

  Within seconds, two small girls in ridiculous dress-up clothes burst into the room. Debbie and Dinah sported frilly frocks twice their size cinched in at the waist. They also wore enormous wobbly hats with just as shocking a collection of paper flowers piled on top, gloves, pearly beads and bracelets. Debbie carried a handbag twice as big as her head.

  Gabe could not form an appropriate greeting to his two guests as they clomped toward him in far-too-big high heels that held their little white sneakers with inches to spare. He could think of no safe or pleasant outcome of this invasion—not with Avery looking like that.

  “Hello,” they greeted him in unison, giggling the word in singsong, fancy-pants voices.

  It was then he noticed Dinah held something behind her back. Debbie fumbled with the clasp on the big handbag and produced a large colored piece of paper. “We’ve been baking like Miss Marnie at the ranch. And now we’re having a tea party,” she declared as if it explained everything.

  “Good for you,” he spit out, his own mortification growing. This was not heading anyplace he wanted to go.

  “It’s a thank-you tea party,” Dinah said with great importance. “And you get to come.”

  Gabe shot his glance up to Avery, who was shrugging and cringing and giving him a “it couldn’t be helped” look that was as infuriating as it was charming. Are you sure about that? he hoped his gaze conveyed.

  “And,” Dinah went on, “you’re the guesty honor.”

  “The guest of honor,” Avery amended, as if that made it any more palatable. “To say thank you for the swings and the pony rides. It was the girls’ idea.”

  That wasn’t hard to guess. “And clearly Marlene helped.” Oh, he could just imagine how Marlene took that particular ball and ran with it. A woman who’d launched this granny-housekeeping stint with hot-dog octopuses couldn’t be counted on for moderation in anything, much less dress-up tea parties.

  “We helped her make gingerbread cookies and she helped us put flowers on our hats,” Debbie said as she laid what Gabe assumed was an invitation—folded paper covered in crayon pink hearts and yellow flowers and something he could only assume were tea cups—on his study desk. Someone had doused the girls with a hefty dose of the perfume Avery usually wore. His stomach produced a wiggling sensation at his recognition of the scent, overpowering as it was at the moment.

  Gabe was cornered as neatly as if the girls had roped and tied him at the rodeo. They were thanking him—granted, in the worst possible way a busy cowboy could think of—and it would be mean to refuse their gratitude. After all, Avery had consented to stay as long as the anniversary celebration.

  As if to test his resolve, Dinah produced what she’d been hiding. It was a dusty old gray top hat—from where, he couldn’t hope to guess—with one enormous red flower tentatively stuck lopsidedly to the brim. Gabe fought the urge to gulp.

  “This is yours,” Dinah explained. “Everybody gets ’em. We’re being fancy.” She set it on the desk and wiggled her gloved fingers. The unfilled fingertips where her small fingers couldn’t yet reach flopped absurdly as she did.

  “A well-mannered cowboy knows he takes his hat off in the presence of ladies,” he said, hoping to avoid the inevitable.

  “That’s not a cowboy hat,” Dinah retorted. “You get to wear it specially.”

  Gabe raised an eyebrow directly at Avery, who was looking far too much like she was about to burst out in laughter. Oh, no, he thought as he pushed his keyboard drawer back under the desk. You do not get to enjoy this. You could have—you should have—prevented this.

  “Those had better be the best gingerbread cookies in the world,” he said with the nicest tone his rising rel
uctance would allow.

  “Oh, they are,” Debbie assured him. “They’re splendid.” She worked hard to get the fancy adjective out. Avery lost her fight to the giggles and he barely avoided chuckling himself.

  Gabe scratched his chin as he eyed his new accessory. “So I’m to wear this hat, am I?”

  Dinah nodded so vigorously her giant hat tipped down to hide her face until she pushed it back up again.

  “Does Mr. Frank have one just as...fancy?”

  “Oh, no, he had to go into town for something,” Debbie said. I’m sure he did, Gabe thought darkly. Let’s hope it wasn’t a camera.

  “The party’s right now,” Dinah said, pointing to some scribbles on the card. “So you hafta come right away.”

  Gabe stood slowly. Very slowly. “Condemned man going to his death” slowly.

  “But with your hat on,” Debbie insisted. “You need to put your hat on like all of us.”

  Avery made a big show of adjusting her hat. She most definitely was enjoying this far too much.

  Gabe cleared his throat and reached for the thing. It smelled of the perfume, as well—one of them had sprayed the paper flower. These had better be the best gingerbread cookies in the whole universe, he thought to himself as he settled the silly thing on his head.

  Debbie and Dinah greeted his new look with enthusiastic, if glove-muffled, applause.

  There was nothing for it. The sooner he went, the sooner he got it over with. Gabe walked around his desk and held out an elbow to each of his flouncy escorts. “Well, ladies, I guess it’s time for tea.”

  “You’re a good sport,” Avery whispered as he and the girls clomped past.

  “I’m a dead man. Not one single photo or you’re out on the curb by sundown,” he whispered back, fully aware he didn’t mean it.

  “I’d never dream of such a thing,” Avery said as she pulled the study door shut. “And I did try to stop them.”

  “Not very hard,” he called over his shoulder. “Not nearly hard enough.”

  * * *

  “Gabe Everett? The Gabriel Everett I know?” Rhetta Douglass threw her head back and laughed with one hand on her chest. “What I wouldn’t give to see that man at a little girls’ tea party.” The children had made friends at church activity time and Rhetta had invited them for a playdate at the town library with Carolina and her two-year-old son, Matty. After checking out a stack of books, all three moms were sitting outside the library while the children played together blowing bubbles on the front lawn.

  “I kept my word.” Avery laughed alongside the woman, remembering the sight of Gabe’s tall limbs folded around the small fussy table Marlene had set in the front room. “There are no pictures.” She leaned in and lowered her voice. “But he never said I couldn’t tell someone. I expect I’ll have to swear you both to secrecy now that you know.”

  “We moms need to stick together. Some days I need someone who understands what it’s like to raise double trouble. Someone other than their father, that is. Honestly, I think Deron eggs them on some days.” Rhetta sighed.

  “I can’t fathom how you both manage twins,” Carolina said. “Most times Matty’s a sweet boy. Then other times...” She shook her head and made a weary sound Avery knew all too well. “How are you finding things over at the Five Rocks?”

  “I don’t know that I can rightly say. Some days are wonderful, and others make me want to pack up and head for the hills, where no one has ever heard of Cyrus Culpepper.”

  Rhetta looked at Avery. “You still have no idea what that old fool is up to? Making you wait on some celebration after waiting all those years?”

  “Grandpa Cyrus has—had—a taste for the dramatic, don’t you think?” Avery shrugged. “When I’m feeling generous, I think Gabe is right—Cyrus is just trying to make up for all the years he didn’t know me.”

  “And when you’re not feeling so generous?” Carolina asked.

  Avery scowled. “I think he’s a mean old man who died alone because he manipulated everyone around him and I’m just the last one in line.”

  “Now you know why everyone believed the other Avery. She acted like a Culpepper.” Rhetta shook her head again. “That woman. She ought to be ashamed of herself for how she acted, coming here trying to take what’s rightfully yours. She thought she was waltzing into the high life, that’s for sure.” Smiling, Rhetta handed Avery an envelope. “I’m glad no one gave her this.”

  “What is it?”

  “Lana gave it to me to give to you. It’s a photograph of your father and your grandparents.”

  Avery pulled open the envelope to see an old color snapshot. Dad. He looked so young and hopeful—barely a teenager, from the looks of it. Too many of her last memories of Dad in his decline had drowned out the possibility of him youthful and happy. She touched the image.

  “Lana found it one afternoon tutoring at the ranch. It’s how we started to realize that the first Avery wasn’t the real one.”

  “Well, that and her charming disposition and money-grabbing tactics,” Carolina added. “She never looked anything like the family she claimed.”

  “I guess not.” Avery found herself lost in the atmosphere of the photo. The trio looked like a family. Cyrus’s hand was on her father’s shoulder. Her father—not yet her father but just young and dashing John Culpepper—looked up at his mother. June Culpepper. The grandmother she’d never known—Dad had left home after his mother died, so this photo had to be before that falling-out. Her soured image of these people, the one she carried in her head for years, didn’t match the people in the photo. It made her heart ache all the more for everything she’d never had.

  “Lana felt you should have it,” Rhetta said softly.

  “Thank you.” Avery touched the photo gingerly, wanting to feel them as real people instead of players in this game she’d been dragged into. “I’d like to keep it, I think.”

  “Grandparents can be good people—and not just for babysitting. Do the girls know their grandparents from your husband’s side?”

  “Ex-husband,” Avery amended, trying unsuccessfully to keep the bitter edge from her tone. “And no, not very well.” She sighed and tucked the photo into her handbag. “Danny was never much of a family man. We lived two hours from his folks and hardly ever saw them. That was fine when it was just us, but when we went from a duo to a quartet overnight...”

  “That’s a shame,” Rhetta said, commiserating. “Those girls are adorable. And they must be loaded with charm if they managed to get Gabe under their thumb.” Rhetta jumped up for a minute, waving her hand. “Get down off there, son, you stay away from that fence.” She sat down again. “That boy. I ought to buy stock in a first-aid company the way he scrapes himself up.”

  “The girls adore Gabe. Although, if I’m honest, I have to say I’m not really sure why. He doesn’t seem to especially like them.”

  Rhetta gave Avery a sideways glance. “No offense, but the man might be a bit short on the warm personality from where I sit. All alone up there on that huge ranch—seems to me a man with those looks and all that land is alone because he wants to be, not from a lack of female prospects.”

  “Certainly not with the way this town seems to match up folks,” Carolina remarked.

  “Marlene told me about the mystery matchmakers. Did they...?” Avery looked at Carolina.

  “They did. Some rather obviously false dance invitations for Wyatt to be my pick at a ladies’ choice charity dance,” Carolina admitted with a smile.

  “Not very original, but effective anyway,” Rhetta laughed. “I wouldn’t be surprised if our secret cupids matched you off—most likely with Gabe.”

  “He’s been very generous to us, but it’s because he needs to be.”

  “Needs? Darlin’, that man didn’t need to put you up in his own home,” Rhe
tta replied. “He could have paid to put you up in the next town if he needed to keep you here. You’ve seen the size of Five Rocks—that man is well off.”

  Carolina leaned in. “Are you sure something else wasn’t going on when he offered to take you in?”

  “Nothing is going on.” Even as she said the words, Avery knew they weren’t entirely true. There was something going on between Gabe and the girls, between Gabe and her. She just didn’t trust it or know what it truly was.

  “That man put a froufrou top hat on. Trust me, something is going on.” Rhetta sat back against the bench. “And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, you know. Have you decided you’re going to stay in Haven?”

  “I’ve told Gabe I would stay until the anniversary celebration.”

  Rhetta frowned. “But then you’ll go back to Tennessee.”

  Avery felt her hackles rise. Why did everyone assume she had so little life in Tennessee that it would be effortless to leave everything behind and come here? Leaving was what Danny had done—she wasn’t about to do that to the girls. And not only that. “I’m not eager for my girls to grow up in Cyrus’s long, cold shadow.”

  Rhetta crossed her arms. “You’ve given that man an awful lot of power from the grave. Not that I agree with what Cyrus did—I don’t, although I sure am happy to see the boys ranch get a larger spread. It’s a whole lot of manipulating nonsense, and you’ve a right to be annoyed. Only I don’t wonder if you’re letting the bad outweigh the possibility of a whole lot of good.”

  “You’re forgetting that a lot of people here really like you,” Carolina offered. “A whole lot more than that other Avery, that’s for sure. They want you to be happy, to feel welcome. Surely, that’s worth something. I know you didn’t come by it in the nicest of ways, but you’ve got a place here. The girls, too. If there’s nothing keeping you back in Tennessee, don’t let everything Cyrus wasn’t keep you from everything you could be here.”