Marry Me, Cowboy (Copper Mountain Rodeo) (6 page)

“Horrible!” Tegan said. "And you knew them?”

“I still think about Gordon now and then. He was two years younger than me at school.”

“When did this happen?”

“About sixteen years ago.” He paused. “Dad carried a gun around with him for a couple of years afterward, even into the bathroom when he took a shower, but nothing more ever happened, so people relaxed eventually. Sorry, not the best subject. I’d make a terrible tour guide.”

“Please. Cross it off your list for a career change right now.”

He laughed. “So I should stick to ranching, after I finish with rodeo?”

“Breaking it to you gently, yes, you should.” They weren’t looking at each other, but they were both smiling a little. Jamie could feel it on his face, and hear it in her voice.

The closer they got, the more he managed to let go of the head-exploding feeling Chet’s revelation had given him. It would be okay. Might take a little time.

Tegan’s thoughts had obviously been traveling the same track. “I’m really impressed by how you handled the - the stuff with Chet back there, Jamie.”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Why?”

“Because that’s not a compliment.”

He could feel her thinking. “Okay, I guess it’s not. Sorry.”

“Don’t apologize,” he told her. “Just... you know... try to at least
pretend
you don’t have such a poor opinion of me. And take the next left. Slow down, because it’s dirt.”

“Right.” She added almost aggressively, “My opinion of you is improving a tiny bit, just so you know.”

“Yeah?”

“Don’t get too excited about it.”

“I won’t.”

The air crackled, and his groin went tight. Was this kind of sniping
supposed
to be so hot?

She slowed the vehicle to a crawl before she made the turn, so the horses could keep their balance. You could put a good horse off trailering for life if you gave them a bad experience. “How far up this road?” she asked.

“About a mile. Then a right, and that’ll be the track that leads up to the house. There’s a cattle guard, and then a gate. We’ll unload the horses by the house and there’s a fenced area we can put them in, while we visit with my mom for a bit. Hope that’s okay with you.”

“No,” she said with heavy sarcasm, “I’m not going to let you say hi to your mum.”

“Really?” he drawled at her. “We’re turning this into an argument, too?”

She was going so slowly, she could afford to look away from the road. She met his narrowed stare with a spark-spitting glare of her own, and it was totally clear to both of them what this was really about.

Her voice suddenly went small, “Maybe we like it, Jamie.” She sucked nervously on the plump, delicious pink of her lower lip.

His breath caught, and the burgeoning erection cradled behind the denim wall of his jeans began to throb. “Yeah. Maybe we do.”

The pickup crawled forward up the sloping road, engine grinding away with the weight of the gooseneck and the horses, and the only reason he didn’t make her stop driving so he could pull her against him, then and there, was that this was too huge... too big a shift... too sudden of a new thought.

They both needed time to think - and breathe - before they worked out what it really meant.

They didn’t hate each other. They wanted each other. And after nearly two years of sniping, it was just too much.

Within fifteen minutes of meeting Jamie’s mother, Tegan understood what he meant about her being different. They put the horses into the small paddock he’d mentioned, leading them in then unhooking the ropes from their halters but leaving the halters in place so they’d be easy to catch again. If Mrs. MacCreadie had heard the sound of the vehicle, it didn’t prompt her to come out, so the two of them were alone.

Tense with each other.

Not daring to look.

Almost more shocked about the sudden overpowering and openly acknowledged heat between them than Tegan had been by the revelation from Chet that had thrown the two of them together so powerfully this morning.

Inside the house, they found Jamie’s mom sitting in a chaotic sea of fabric scraps, which she said she was sorting, but she looked helpless about it and there was no evidence that any progress had been made, just pretty colors everywhere.

She had dark hair scraped back in a ponytail, a petite build softened by a little middle-aged padding, and a sweet, vague sort of face. She must have been the prettiest thing when she was young, and in many ways she still was.

She looked younger than Tegan had expected, quite a few years younger than Tegan’s own parents, maybe mid to late forties. Jamie was the same age as Tegan, twenty-six, so his mother must have been young when she had him. She knew he had siblings, but wasn’t sure where he fit in the birth order, or how many siblings there were.

Mrs. MacCreadie gave a cry of pleasure at seeing Jamie, and scrambled to her feet for a big, warm hug. “Dad and RJ are out on the range. Somewhere about. We’ll have to call them and get them to come in. My phone is...” She waved a hand. “Oh, this is so nice. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming? And this is Tegan? She’s from Austria? Well, sweetie, if it’s anything like how beautiful it looked in “The Sound of Music” it must be a gorgeous place.”

“Oh, no, Mrs. MacCreadie, not Austria, Australia.”

“Oh, well, I get those two places mixed up, because they’re both...” Again, she waved a hand vaguely, as if to link Austria and Australia in some thematic way that Tegan couldn’t guess at. “Now, should we have coffee? Or lunch? Or...? And you have to call me Melinda. What’s the time? Is it early?”

“Coffee,” Jamie suggested. “Too early for lunch, and we had a pile of pancakes for breakfast. Let me help, okay?”

It was good seeing his mom. It allowed both of them to let go of what had begun to happen in the truck. Tegan was dizzied by it. Half horrified, half light-headed and fizzy and full of need. Did she want it? Wasn’t it just out-there impossible and ridiculous and wrong? Her and
Jamie?

And she was leaving the country in less than six weeks.

“Well, no, I can do it perfectly well,” Melinda said to her son, “but you can come keep me company in the kitchen, both of you.”

They followed her, keeping a safe distance from each other. Jamie stepped back and let both his mom and Tegan go first. She could almost feel him behind her, feel the warmth and weight and movement.

She imagined in another sudden rush of heat where his eyes might be focused on her body. Was he looking at her butt? Her hair?

She wanted to stop dead in the corridor so that he would come up against her. The thought of feeling that hard male body cannoned into her made her weak at the knees. She would turn into his arms. She wouldn’t be able to resist. She wouldn’t care what he did to her, where his hands and mouth went, what they said to each other.

They needn’t say anything at all.

Ever.

Thank heaven there was his mom here, because Tegan needed to think about this, and give it time. Her and
Jamie?

The kitchen was a big farm-style one with lots of bench space and a wooden table at one end and gorgeous vistas of land and sky out the windows, similar to the kitchen Tegan had grown up with, and it gave her a stab of homesickness so strong she had to sit down and live through it till it ebbed, like waiting for a stomach ache to go.

Similar kitchen, she decided, but not the same. Mum was a pretty efficient house-keeper.

Here, there was a mess of dishes covered in soapy water in the sink, and a large, half-chopped onion on a chopping board on the counter. The dishwasher was partway open, with dishes inside that might have been clean or dirty, you couldn’t tell. Pinned to the refrigerator with promotional magnets from local stores was a typed sheet of paper headed, “Do one thing at a time!” Then there was a list:

1) Empty dishwasher

2) Empty drain board

3) Stack dishwasher

4) Wipe down counter and table

The list of simple tasks went on down the page. There was a second list on the fridge, too, headed in a fancy printed font, “Things to remember.” But the good intention hadn’t been followed through on, there, because there was nothing on the list.

On the table where Tegan sat was another sheet of paper, hand-written this time, with the heading, “What I am going to do today.” Then in brackets, the same instruction as before. “Do one thing at a time!”

In a different hand, there was more writing. “Do kitchen, sort fabric, make a salad.”

“Now...” said Jamie’s mom, looking vaguely around.

“You sit,” he said. “I’ll get coffee on.”

“Maybe I should finish that onion? I got distracted...”

“Sit, Mom,” Jamie said, brief but patient, while Tegan wondered what kind of a salad required that much onion.

“Maybe I should see if I can bring the fabric in here.”

“No, don’t do that.”

“Sort some of it while we’re having our coffee.”

“How’re you going to sort it?”

“Oh, you know. What I want to keep. What might make a good project.”

“Maybe you should have a yard sale. There’s a lot of it.”

“Well, that’s what your dad says. He says it doesn’t help having it around, because then I get stressed about the projects.”

“He’s right.”

“Jess finished a quilt for me. I thought maybe I could package up sets of quilting quarters for each of the girls....”

“Jess is the only one who quilts, isn’t she?”

“Yes, I guess, but - ”

“Have a yard sale,” he repeated.

“Maybe I could give most of it to Jess, and just keep a little. For a Christmas project.”

“Mom, I don’t think you have enough time to finish a Christmas project. It’s October already.”

“I guess...” she said again, even more doubtfully.

“Anyhow, let’s not talk about it now, because it’s not that interesting for Tegan, and it stresses you out.”

“I should do the coffee.” She looked around.

“I’ve done the coffee. It’s dripping through, don’t you smell it?”

“Oh, right, so you have.”

“Are there some cookies we could have with it?”

“Well, your dad went to the store...”

“I’ll check the pantry.” He went toward it, and Tegan helplessly watched the way his body moved.

CHAPTER SEVEN

“I’m sorry,” he said outside a little later, after they’d drunk their coffee, eaten a couple of the store-bought chocolate chip cookies he’d found, and talked over some bits of family news. His mom had stayed in the house, vaguely promising to try to reach his dad on his cell phone to tell him Jamie was here. Tegan had the feeling something would happen to distract her from the call. “She’s always like that.”

“She seems nice,” Tegan said truthfully.

“She is. She’s the nicest person in the world.” He let them both into the small, grassed paddock where they’d put the horses, leaving the gate closed against the gatepost but not fastened. The gatepost had dropped in the ground and the gate dragged, so he’d had to lift it, the action turning his forearm into a twisted rope of tanned muscle. “But she’s not... you know... strong, and she doesn’t cope with stuff, and she can’t focus.”

“Yes, I could see. That must be hard, on a ranch.” Tegan knew the work required on any piece of acreage. Successful farm marriages and ranching marriages had to be working partnerships as well as loving unions. Both the man and the woman needed to pull their weight, share the load.

“It’s frustrating,” Jamie agreed. “For years when we were little, Dad had her going to doctors and people, trying I don’t know what, but nothing helped. Or if it did, it was minimal, and she couldn’t take the effort, so she stopped. They were both such young parents. She was eighteen when she had my sister Rose, and nineteen when she had RJ, and twenty when she had my sisters and me.”

“Your sisters and you? All at the same time? You mean triplets?”

“Yeah, Jess, Jodie and me.”

“Five kids in two years?”

“Not surprising she couldn’t take the pressure, I guess. She just never... bounced back, or something. Aunt Kate lived with us for years, helping out, waiting for my mom to cope a little better, once we were in school. But nothing changed. Mom was still all over the place. She tries with stuff. Every week, still, she talks about new ways to manage or fresh starts or help from Dad, but everything she does ends up making more mess and chaos than if she hadn’t tried at all. She gets all excited and embarks on projects, or systems - like those lists on the fridge - but they peter out because they confuse her. She just can’t stay organized.”

“So your dad has to try to keep things together.”

“Yeah, pretty much. And my brother. Aunt Kate. My sisters. Any of us, when we’re around.” He hooked a lead rope through Faro’s halter and rested his hand on the gelding’s warm, satiny side for a moment.

Tegan hadn’t caught Shildara yet. The mare wouldn’t give any trouble about it. She never did. In fact, she was standing right there, nuzzling Tegan’s shoulder, as if to say, “You riding me or what? I’m ready...”

“When I was a kid,” Jamie went on, “I didn’t really notice how much Mom drifted around, how little she actually did, how much she depended on Dad and Aunt Kate. I thought everything was normal.” He paused again, leaned his forehead on the horse’s neck, this time, then rolled it against the smooth expanse of neck so he could look at Tegan with that narrow, thoughtful look in his blue eyes. “You know, looking back, I feel like I grew up with half a mom.”