Coop glanced at the chair, then back at Lenore.
“Sit,” she said.
He sat.
She poured them each a measure of whiskey, then raised hers silently in toast. Swallowing his questions, Coop clinked glasses with Lenore, and took a long, slow drink. It burned his throat and brought tears to his eyes, but he never took his gaze off Lenore.
“All right, Coop. Let’s have it.”
“It?” He swallowed, then wiped his suddenly sweaty palms down his pants legs.
“It.” She smiled sweetly, but Coop knew that smile. It was an
I want to know what the hell is going on here
smile. He’d never had it aimed at him before, but he’d seen it often enough.
Generally she was shootin’ it directly at Tag.
“It,” he said, then he sighed. “Just what is it you want to know, Lenore?” He cupped his hands over the glass of whiskey, looked her straight in the eye, and wished he was a whole lot better at lyin’ than he was.
“I want to know who that girl is, and just what you and Tag think you’re trying to pull on me. I may be old, but I am not stupid. Neither are you, Cooperton Barlow Jones. You are about as stupid as a red-tailed fox.” She smiled, but for some reason this time it reached her eyes. “That wedding was a setup, Buck’s no preacher and I want to know exactly why Tag pretended to marry that girl.”
Coop cleared his throat and took another swallow of whiskey. “Well,” he said, drawing out the word. “Tag only thinks he pretended to marry that girl. Truth is, Lenore, Buck’s a real preacher, empowered to perform real weddings, those two young’ns signed a real license, and them two’s as married as a couple of folks can be.”
He stared down at his whiskey, at the old man’s hands tipping the glass of amber liquid this way and that, and wondered how he’d gotten so old so fast. He remembered Lenore as a young bride like it was only yesterday, remembered the pain he’d felt when she married Big Ed. He recalled Tag’s first steps, Jim and Maggie’s funeral, the cold winters and hot summers, droughts and storms, all of it flown by in a heartbeat.
He smiled ruefully at Lenore, and wished she could sit there, across the table from him, every day for the rest of their lives. Sleep in his bed at night, work beside him during the day.
“Yep,” he said, wondering what was going on behind that straightforward gaze of Lenore’s. The woman always had been able to see right through him. That was a big part of the attraction. He grinned like a damned fool, thinking of the consequences of what he’d done today. “Them two’s definitely married,” he repeated. “Only problem is, Tag don’t know it yet, and I’m not quite sure how to tell the boy.”
Chapter 5
TAG STOOD next to the kitchen table arranging plates and silverware on woven place mats. Lee studied his strong back and broad shoulders for a moment. He appeared so engrossed in his domestic task he was unaware she’d entered the room. She watched him take a loaf of sliced bread out of the basket, then arrange a couple of platters of sliced meats and cheese and a bowl of fresh fruit in the center of the table.
He paused a moment, grabbed a bouquet of flowers off the sideboard and set them off to one side of the table, appeared to study the arrangement, then moved them closer to the center.
“It looks nice.”
Tag spun around the moment she spoke. He stuck his hands in his rear pockets, like a small boy who’d been caught touching things he shouldn’t.
Or a man decorating a table for a woman’s appreciation.
He’d changed into a worn pair of jeans and a red flannel shirt that hung unbuttoned and open from his shoulders. His chest was magnificent, broad and muscled, smooth except for a pattern of dark hair surrounding his navel and trailing downward to disappear beneath the waistband of his jeans.
Lee caught herself mentally following the trail and shifted her gaze to the floor. His feet were bare, like hers.
Why did that feel so intimate, the fact they were both barefoot? Lee almost turned around and ran back into the bathroom. If she was already noticing such irrelevant things, it was going to be a long night. She’d be better off noticing the table, especially since he’d obviously arranged it for her benefit.
“Would you like champagne?” Tag held up the opened bottle. Two champagne flutes, one empty, the other half full, sat on the place mats. He seemed hesitant, unsure of himself. Lee hadn’t pictured Tag as awkward in any situation, but she found his unpolished demeanor oddly attractive.
“I would have waited,” he said, “but under the circumstances I . . .” He grinned at her, shaking his head from side to side, then let out a deep whoosh of breath. “I really don’t know what to say. Can you imagine a bigger mess?”
“I don’t know. I don’t remember.” Lee returned his grin. “And yes, I’d love a glass of champagne. I’d also like some of that food. I’m starving and it looks delicious.” Tag pulled Lee’s chair out for her, then sat in the one across the table, opposite hers. He poured champagne into the extra glass and handed it to her. Lee raised the crystal flute in a silent toast. Tag did the same.
“Are you ready to delve into your past?”
“Where do we start?” Lee asked. She stabbed a piece of sliced turkey with a serving fork and put it on her plate. An image tickled her memory. She stared at her hand holding the fork as she repeated the motion, this time arranging some cheese and fruit next to the serving of turkey.
Something about a fork? Stabbing? With a fork? That was a gruesome thought. She blinked. The image fled.
“We start at the beginning. Where else?” Tag finished his champagne and refilled the flute. When Lee held hers out, he filled it as well.
“My beginning isn’t all that long ago.” She stared at the pale bubbles rising to the top of the crystal flute. “In fact, for all I know, I dropped out of a spaceship around eight o’clock this morning.”
“I think we can discount the spaceship.”
“I guess so.” Lee took a piece of sliced turkey and wrapped it around a chunk of aromatic cheese. “Mmmmm, Gorgonzola! It’s one of my favorites . . . this all tastes wonderful.” She closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure. “So much better than the place I went to last week with . . .”
“With?” Tag leaned forward.
Lee struggled with the memory. Like the image she’d had a moment before, she felt the teasing, tantalizing fragment of familiarity there, just at the edge of knowledge.
“Try, Lee. You can remember. You went out and ate with . . . ?”
She knit her brows and concentrated. Nothing. At least her head didn’t hurt when she tried to remember. Frustrated, she shook her head. “Nothing. There’s absolutely nothing there.”
“Okay, not with. You went out to eat . . . where? Where’d you go, Lee? Was it a restaurant in Durango? Montrose? Denver, maybe?” he prodded.
“I don’t know,” she wailed, slamming her palms down on the table. The dishes rattled. “It’s almost there, then it’s not. I have no idea who I am, I don’t know what I’m doing here, I . . .”
“Okay. It’s okay.” Tag grabbed her wrists. His thumbs massaged her flesh with a tender stroke. “Calm down. Have some more champagne. Another piece of Gorgonzola.” He laughed. “Food seems to jump-start your memories. You remembered you like that stinky cheese. It just doesn’t keep ’em going long enough. Maybe more’ll come back to you if you’re relaxed.”
He let go of her wrists and filled her empty glass once more. She couldn’t remember drinking the last glass. Maybe that was her problem. Maybe she drank so much she was having some kind of alcohol-induced blackout.
Nah. She couldn’t remember much, but she knew she wasn’t an alcoholic. She took another bite of sliced turkey and cheese, then a piece of chilled melon, and tried to open her mind.
Impossible. Not with Tag sitting so close, not with his shirt hanging open and all that perfect, cover-model chest on display. Even if he buttoned his shirt, she’d seen his chest. She’d know it was hiding in there, teasing her.
The same way she knew his bare feet were under the table right now, his naked toes mere inches from her naked toes. The possibilities were mind-boggling.
“Let’s start with what we know,” Tag said, interrupting her incorrigible thoughts.
Thank goodness. She honestly couldn’t recall ever getting turned on by toes before. Maybe she had a fetish?
That didn’t sound right either. “Okay. I’m game,” she said, sipping at her champagne. “What do we know?”
“Let’s assume we know your name. When you said your name was Lee Stetson, you said it felt right. I can’t imagine anyone completely forgetting their name, so, for now at least, you’re Lee.”
“Agreed. What do I do?”
“I’d say, from the clothes in your suitcase, you probably do something with the rodeo. Real cowboys, or girls,” he amended, “don’t dress that fancy unless they’re in a show or a parade. That or they’re working at a dude ranch and want to impress the tourists. Or, they are tourists, staying at a dude ranch.”
Dude ranch? “Didn’t you say Columbine Camp was a dude ranch?” Why did that ring a bell?
“I might have. Will, the guy who called? He and his sister Betsy Mae own Columbine Camp. It’s a working cattle ranch, a lot like the Double Eagle except they also cater to an exclusive clientele of wannabe cowboys. You know, mostly Easterners with more money than brains who want to experience the, quote, Real West?” Tag laughed, giving Lee the distinct impression he had a pretty low opinion of Easterners in general, and Will’s clientele in particular.
“Betsy Mae doesn’t have much to do with the business,” he said, “since she’s got the patience of a two-year-old, so Will runs the place. Will was planning to come to the wedding, but the storm must have kept him home. You’ll meet him. He and Betsy Mae are the only ones, other than me’n Coop, who know about our, um, marriage.”
Lee tried to imitate Coop’s slow drawl. “You mean the one Coop refers to as a ‘marriage of convenience’?” She giggled and held her glass out for another refill. “It’s so funny to listen to him talk like that, about marriages of convenience. That’s not cowboy talk.”
Tag leaned forward, as if to impart a deep, dark secret, and whispered, “Don’t let on I told you, but Coop reads romance novels. You know, those sexy paperbacks for women? According to Coop, marriages of convenience are a common plot device. That’s what he calls it. A plot device. He should know. He’s got hundreds of books stashed away, so I consider him an expert.” Tag laughed, leaned back in his chair and stretched his legs out alongside the table. “He hides ’em in the barn, says they belong to Gramma Lenore, but we all know he buys ’em for himself.”
Lee thought about old Coop, sneaking out to the barn to read his romances. She swirled the champagne in the narrow glass and covertly studied Tag’s feet. They were long and narrow, with just a dusting of dark hair across the tops. It didn’t seem fair. The man even had beautiful feet. Lee sighed. “He’s in love with your grandmother, you know.”
“Coop? In love with my grandmother?” Tag’s look of astonishment gave way to uncontrollable laughter. He had an absolutely wonderful laugh. Lee propped her elbows on the table, rested her chin on her folded hands and grinned, watching him.
Finally, Tag pulled a clean handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped his eyes. “I don’t think so,” he said, still chuckling. “Coop’s never been interested in women. Doesn’t have time for ’em. He’s a cowboy. He’s only got time for his horse . . . and his romance novels.”
“You’re dead wrong, Tag.” Lee took a swallow of champagne, then met Tag’s laughing gaze and stilled, abruptly mesmerized by the depths of color in his dark eyes. A woman could drown in those eyes. She could drown in those eyes. Especially when they focused so intently on hers. Lee wondered what he saw when he looked at her like that. Wondered what he thought.
She cleared her throat and glanced away, breaking the spell. She concentrated on Tag’s feet, one propped on top of the other, visible just beneath the table. “When Coop came to get me right before the ceremony, when he stepped into the room and he and Lenore saw each other, I swear you could feel the sizzle between those two.”
“They’re a little old for sizzle, don’t you think?” Tag swung his legs back under the table, hiding those long, narrow feet out of sight.
“No, they’re not too old to sizzle,” Lee declared. “I fully intend to be sizzling when I’m their age.” She propped her elbows on the table and rested her chin on her folded knuckles. “It’s just sad, you know. What with Gramma Lenore dying and all.”
“What do ya mean, Gramma Lenore dyin’? She’s not dyin’, she’s healthy as a horse. Why would you say that?” Tag snorted in disbelief, shook his head in denial. “That’s not true.”
“Oh.” She looked absolutely stricken. Her eyes suddenly filled with tears, turning them into green jewels. “I thought you knew. Coop told me. He said Lenore was dying. I thought that was the reason she’s been pushing you to get married, why you were rushing this whole wedding thing, so she’d know you were married before she died.”
The tears were spilling from her eyes now, running freely down her cheeks. “I’m so sorry. I never would have said anything if I thought you didn’t know.”
“Aw, damn.” Tag took a deep breath, then sighed just as deeply as the truth of Lee’s words hit him. Suddenly it all made sense. He leaned over the table and rested his forehead against his hands. No wonder his grandmother’d been after him to hurry up and find a wife. She wanted to make sure he had someone when she was gone. It was her way of taking care of things.
“She’s always been there for me,” he said. His throat felt tight, like the muscles were tied in a knot. It was hard to get the words past. “She was there when my parents died. She made a room for me in that little house of hers in town and put up with all my hell raising in high school. She saved my hide more than once when Big Ed wanted to take me out to the woodshed for a whippin’. When I told her I couldn’t live in town anymore, she put me in charge of running the Double Eagle and never once questioned my decisions.” He looked up at Lee. She was sobbing outright, crying for a lady she barely knew.
“I was barely nineteen years old. Too smart for my own good, too cocky to think I needed more schoolin’. Then when I realized I needed an education to do right by the ranch, she helped me through college, even though she’d just lost her husband. Dammit, Lee. I can’t believe the old bat’s dying.”
“Old bat? How can you talk about her like that?” Lee demanded. She grabbed her paper napkin, blew her nose and dried the tears from her eyes. “I don’t believe you, Tag. She’s your grandmother. Show her some respect.”
“Hell, Lee. That’s practically a term of respect.” Tag grabbed his handkerchief and blew his nose, then wiped his eyes as discreetly as he could. Cowboys never cried. He remembered his dad telling him that when he was about eight. Big Ed had run over Tag’s collie with the farm truck, then pulled out his pistol and put the badly injured animal to death.
Tag’d never liked his grandfather much after that, but he’d never let Big Ed make him cry, either. He wondered if Big Ed ever made Gramma Lenore cry? He didn’t want to think about that too much. Especially not if what Lee said was true, that Coop had loved Lenore all these years.
Tag never would have guessed at such a thing.
“I used to call her the old bat when I first moved out to the ranch. I was homesick as all get-out. I even missed her meddling, which was the reason I moved in the first place. She’d call me up every day and say, ‘That you, Tag? It’s the old bat. I’m checking up on ya.’”
“I guess I can almost see your grandmother doing that.” Lee smiled and covered his hand with hers. He felt the warmth clear through him, turned his hand palm up and encircled her fingers with his. Her hands were small, dainty, soft and feminine. “She must not want you to know about her failing health,” Lee said. “I never should have . . .”
“How could you know?” He squeezed her hand, then turned it loose. It felt too damned good to touch her, any part of her. Especially now, when he felt like his pins had been knocked out from under him. “I haven’t called her that for years,” he said softly, thinking of some of the things he had called his grandmother, under his breath or behind her back.
“I won’t let on I know anything,” he added. “Don’t feel badly, Lee. It kinda puts a different spin on things, you know? I’m really glad you told me.” He touched her hand again, lightly. He didn’t seem to be able to help himself, not when she was sitting so close, dressed in that silky greenish-blue thing that draped and shimmered over her body. It had long sleeves and a high neck and hardly any skin showed at all, but whenever Lee moved, took a breath, even, his imagination went wild.
Material like that should probably be outlawed. Tag continued his slow caress over the back of her hand, thinking, remembering. So many memories, all jumbled together with regrets and dreams . . . and sensations. He took another sip of champagne, refilled his glass, then emptied the bottle into Lee’s.