Be My Texas Valentine (3 page)

When they reached her father’s big box of a wagon, Brody hesitated and Valerie laughed. “My father is the local carpenter. He thinks he has to take his tools with him everywhere he goes, just in case he’s needed. You’d be surprised at how many people bring broken furniture for him to haul home and repair. The dance saved them a trip into town.”

Brody looked in the back. “Looks like business is good.”

He offered his hand to help her up. “How long have you been a widow, Mrs. Allen?”

“A little over three years.” She didn’t look at him as she gathered her shawl tightly across her shoulders.

“And you still wear black.”

She couldn’t tell if it was a statement or a question. “I’ve little hope to marry again. The black serves me well, even though I doubt I’d have a male caller after all the rumors spread about me.”

“You have land. There are some who might ignore the rumors and marry you for it.”

Valerie shook her head. “Would you?”

She had the feeling she’d embarrassed him and was glad she couldn’t see his face. “I’m sorry. Everyone says I speak my mind too quickly for it to be ladylike. I didn’t mean—”

“I’m not the kind of man you’d want,” he broke in. “I got nothing to offer any woman.”

She recognized the hollowness inside him. Like her, he had nothing to give. He just wanted to live out his days. Maybe like her, he was afraid even to dream.

“Thank you for sitting with me, Mr. Monroe.”

On impulse she rose to her tiptoes and planted a light kiss on his cheek. “I wish you peace.”

“The same to you, Mrs. Allen.” Then he took her hand and helped her up into the wagon. While she waited, he checked the harnesses and made sure the wagon would be ready when her father arrived.

She sat in the darkness listening to the last song and wishing she were already home. As the barn dance broke up, people spilled out into the night. Couples who’d been dancing together were now hugging as they moved through the shadows whispering farewells. A few families had brought bedding to sleep in the loft, and Mrs. Molly Clair told the single girls they were welcome to spend the night at the house.

She hadn’t included Valerie in the invitation. Valerie told herself it was simply because Mrs. Molly Clair knew her papa would pass by her place on his way home. He’d see she was safe and Valerie knew she didn’t belong with the young women.

She suddenly felt very old.

She wouldn’t have stayed even if she’d had to ride home alone. The women who had once been her classmates and friends were now little more than strangers. She feared they avoided her because, for a girl looking for a man, she was a reminder that happily-ever-after existed only in fairy tales.

Valerie looked in the direction Brody had gone toward the corral. She knew, without thinking why, that he was standing in the night watching her.

Most people were driving toward the road when her father appeared at her side of the wagon. “There you are, my Valerie. I was thinking you’d probably sneak out early. If you don’t mind waiting, I got to go to the main house and pick up Mrs. Molly Clair’s sewing machine. It won’t take me but a few minutes and it’ll save coming back out to get it.” He must have seen her look, for he added, “Now don’t you worry, she’s already told two of the men they’ll be hauling it out and putting it in my wagon.”

“I don’t mind waiting.” The thought of going into a house full of giggly girls, some only a few years younger than her, frightened her. At times the whole world frightened her. For as long as she could remember, all she’d ever wanted was a home and family of her own, but the goal kept slipping through her fingers like sand.

Suddenly sorrow smothered her and all the what-might-have-beens pushed against her lungs like an anvil’s weight on her chest.

She swung down from the wagon and ran into the blackness near the corral. Part of her wanted to dive into the shadows and drown. She wasn’t ready for all the rest of her life to simply be just a vase for the keeping of a few memories and the shattered fragments of what might have been.

A strong arm caught her suddenly and swung her around.

She jerked, pulling away for a moment from the man who held her. The outline of a fence and the low sounds of horses circling just beyond registered a moment before the man pulled her against him. “Take it easy,” Brody whispered. “You’ll startle the horses and get hurt.”

Valerie gulped for air. She expected him to let her go, but he stood near, not holding or moving away.

Before she let reason rule her life, she whispered, “Hold me. Just for a minute, please would you mind holding me?”

Strong arms came around her and pulled her so tightly against him she could barely breathe. For a while, he just held her; then he leaned down and kissed her forehead.

She felt herself shaking, but she didn’t pull away. She needed, more than air, to have someone hold her like he’d never let her go. She wanted to believe in forever between two people if only for one more moment.

Slowly, his hand moved along her spine, pressing her against the length of him. His warm breath moved in her hair as she leaned her cheek against his throat.

She wasn’t sure if they held each other for a few minutes or more, but when she heard her father and a few other men coming, she pulled away and he vanished back into the night as if he’d been no more than smoke.

She was beside the wagon by the time her father opened the back and told the men where to put the machine. All the way home Papa talked as she tried to remember every second she’d had in the darkness with a man she barely knew.

People might not want to have much to do with her, but they all loved visiting with her papa. From making cradles to caskets, he was in their lives, and his favorite thing to do when all the others had gone was to repeat to Valerie everything they’d said to him. So he talked and she remembered as they rolled down the road.

When he was within sight of her farm, he finally said something about her. “You know, Boss told me tonight that he’d buy Venny’s place if you want to sell. Couldn’t pay much, but it would be cash. Then you could move to town and live with me. I’d build you a little house out back with lots of glass so you could grow a garden year-round.” He slowed the horses. “I’d enjoy your company, and a woman shouldn’t be living alone way out here.”

Valerie had lived at the farm since she married Venny eight years ago, but her father still saw the place as her first husband’s. When Venny left for the war after the first year they were married, her father wanted her to come to town. When her first husband had been killed six months later, Papa had tried again but without success. She’d lived alone for three years before Samuel, a doctor serving with Terry’s Rangers, was home on leave and asked her to marry him. They’d married a day before he’d left to go back, and he’d laughed, trying to sound like her father as he said she’d have to move to town with him as soon as he returned.

Only his body was all that came home months later and her father talked of her moving back even as he built Samuel’s coffin.

“I’m not selling, or moving, Papa.” She wished she could add that she was happy where she was, but they both knew that wasn’t true. What her father didn’t understand was that she would be no happier in town. At least with all the work of the farm, she was usually too tired to even cry herself to sleep most nights, and when she did, there was no one a room away to hear her sorrow.

As she climbed down, she patted her papa’s hand and said, “Thanks for making me go. I enjoyed the music.”

“Was everyone nice to you tonight, dear? ’Cause if they weren’t, they’ll be rocking their babies in shoe boxes and be buried in a blanket when they die.”

“Everyone was fine.”

“And the cowboy who sat down next to you? He didn’t say nothing wrong, did he?”

“No.” She thought of adding that he didn’t say anything much, but then she remembered the way he held her and decided it best not to talk about him at all.

She went inside her little house and crawled into bed trying to remember exactly how it had felt to be held by someone again.

Chapter 3

Brody Monroe stood in the moonless blackness by the corral for over an hour thinking that if he didn’t move, maybe, just maybe he could keep the memory of how Widow Allen had felt in his arms. Wind whirled around the barn as if trying to blow any feelings away.

Finally, he turned and headed to the bunkhouse. Within three steps, he tripped over a downed fence post. Like a tumbleweed, he rolled in the dirt until he hit the barn wall.

Brody swore at himself for being so careless. He was still dusting himself off when he stepped into the bunkhouse five minutes later.

Most of the men were still up talking about the dance. Earl Timmons glanced at him. “See you survived meeting the widow.”

Brody nodded once and kept walking.

“Lucky you didn’t touch her, Yank, or we’d be picking up the pieces of you. I once heard a fellow say he got a blister the size of a silver dollar on his hand from just pointing at her.”

“He wouldn’t touch her,” one of the men behind Brody commented. “He don’t even shake hands if he can help it. The Yank don’t have a friendly bone in his body.”

Brody kept walking. They didn’t need him there to continue talking about him. He pulled off his good clothes and crawled into his bunk. For once, it was a long time before sleep found him.

As the days passed, he tried to stop thinking of the woman he’d met at the dance, but she was never far from his thoughts. In a strange kind of way, she pushed away the loneliness he’d grown so accustomed to. She had a pride about her that he admired. What people said about her didn’t seem too important.

She wasn’t his, she never would be, but a part of her, for a moment in time, had been his, and one memory was enough to build daydreams on even though he knew there would never be more. It probably would have frightened her to know how few times in his life he’d held a woman. Those experiences had been before the war, and they seemed more a dream than real. After the war the only kind of woman who’d pay a drifter any notice wasn’t the kind of woman Brody wanted to hold.

Once, months after the war, he’d found a short job that had left him with money in his pocket. He’d thought about buying a three-dollar whore for the night, but he’d elected to build a supply of food instead. Now, thinking about holding Mrs. Allen, he was glad her memory didn’t have to blend with one he’d bought.

He’d overheard someone mention the carpenter and his daughter a few times. Brody knew she lived between the ranch and town, but he had no idea which place. Half the farms looked abandoned. The war had added a layer of poverty over almost every part of Texas, and taxes were drawing away any extra money for repairs. The cattle drives last summer had helped, but it would take years before people got back on their feet.

The next Monday, when he went to town, Brody tried to figure out which farm was her place. A wrong guess could end up getting him shot. Finally, two weeks after the party, Earl Timmons gave him the answer.

As usual, the men were playing cards and talking after supper.

Brody climbed into his bunk at the back and pretended to read a book he’d already read five times while he listened to their talk.

Two of the card players began to speculate on how the boss planned to enlarge his ranch. They talked of first one place bordering Double R land and then another with Brody only half listening until Earl said, “I tell you one place that Boss will never buy and that’s Widow Allen’s land.”

Brody closed the book and made no pretense of reading.

“Why wouldn’t he take her place on?” a new cowhand asked. “A widow without a man to run her farm would be easy land to pick up, I’d think.”

Earl leaned his chair back and stared at his cards. “Oh, it’s a good little farm, but a natural wall of rocks separates her land from the Double R.”

Montie Timmons nodded. “Boss likes his property to be as flat as possible for moving big herds.”

“Don’t matter anyway,” Caleb said. “Nothin’ getting her off her place. Not even her father can talk her into spending a night away. She’s tied to it as sure as if she’s a ghost haunting Venny’s farm.”

“You’re right, old man,” Earl added. “I remember years ago when Venny courted her. He was ten, maybe twelve years older than her and he didn’t waste much time courting before he asked her. She was still more kid than woman, as I remember. He promised her all kinds of things, but the minute he slipped the ring on, it might as well have been a yoke. He never let her off the place. Wouldn’t even let her go home to see her papa.”

“I remember him. Always thought he was a bull of a man, big and rough,” Montie, as always, added to his brother’s rambling. “He told me once he didn’t have any family and planned to keep her pregnant until she had an even dozen.”

Caleb laid down his cards and collected the pot as he continued the conversation, “That plan didn’t work. Five years of trying and not one kid. He left when the war started, knowing if he died, so did his family line.”

“He must have ordered her to stay on the farm ’cause folks hardly saw her in town all those years he was gone.” Earl frowned at Caleb for winning and dealt another hand. “I swear, after her second husband died, I would have offered for her if it hadn’t been for the curse on her.”

Caleb wiggled his eyebrows. “She’s one fine-looking woman, I’ll say that, but the risk is too high. I heard a while back a peddler stopped by her place and barely made it to town without bleeding to death. He claimed all he did was talk to her a minute and something flew out of the sky, nearly splitting his head open like a ripe watermelon.”

The new cowhand snorted. “The widow must not be a caring person, ’cause I heard that story in town and the peddler claimed she stood on the porch and stared at him as he left. He said she didn’t even offer to help.”

“That peddler’s nothing but trash if you ask me. Him losing his head wouldn’t be any great loss. I doubt I’d help him either,” Caleb added. “Boss’s wife says he gets a little too friendly with the ladies. She won’t even have him on the ranch.”