The Cattleman (Sons of Texas Book 2) (45 page)

“
Thank you for saying that. Actually, I do have a job offer from a larger school.”

“
You should take it, ma’am.”

“
I’m having a hard time deciding to stay or go. I’ve got a couple of girls I’ve been grooming to get scholarships.”

“Lucky girls. And Mr. Lockhart’s lucky to have you in his life. Hope he appreciates that.”

She stopped and looked up at him. He was a good-looking guy. He was almost as tall as Pic. She had rarely seen him without sunglasses, but she knew he had blue eyes like Pic’s, had calculated he was about Pic’s age. For the first time, she wondered if he were single. “Can you tell me where Pic has been?”

“Yes, ma’am. Until a few days ago, he was out at an area called Crowfoot overseeing some cowboys rounding up cattle.”

That sounded like a rehearsed answer. “I meant the last few days.”

“I don’t know that, ma’am.”

“Did one of your people go to Crowfoot with him?”

He opened the door to her backseat and placed her gym bag on the seat. “Marcus was with him, ma’am
and a couple of our guys. Mr. Lockhart took an extra horse. Marcus knows how to ride a horse if he has to.”

Small relief. She nodded. “Thank you.”

He moved a few steps, opened the driver’s door for her and she scooted behind the wheel. As he closed the door, he lifted his sunglasses, smiled and said, “Drive safely.”

Oh, my gosh!
Male attention. The first she’d had outside of Pic’s for a very long time. Was Chris attracted to her? Her spirits felt a little boost. She had an urge to straighten her hair, wished she were wearing makeup.

She stopped off at the grocery store and picked up a few needed items. Chris trailed along with her
without his sunglasses. More than one woman gave them a long look. She had read about some of the military types having groupies. Was he one of those guys?

At home in her driveway, just as she was stepping out of the car, a florist’s delivery van
with a Fort Worth address on the door pulled in behind her. Instantly, Chris’s black SUV came to a stop behind it with a squeak of tires and he exited, his hand on his belt where she knew he carried a pistol inside his waistband just like Pic did. For a fleeting second, she thought about how she used to be afraid of armed men. Nowadays, almost every man she knew carried. Since school violence had become a campus concern, a few teachers carried guns. Even Gail was contemplating taking gun-owner classes and shopping for a small weapon to carry in her purse.

The van’s driver looked out at Chris wide-eyed,
as if a mad dog confronted him. Indeed Chris was a dangerous-looking guy. With mirrored sunglasses that hid his eyes, a short-sleeved polo shirt that showed his wide shoulders and heavily muscled arms, he looked as if he could break a skinny florist delivery truck driver in half. Before he reached the driver, Amanda hurried to the van and said, “It’s okay. You can get out. What are you delivering?”

The driver eased the door open and cautiously stepped down, sidled his way alongside the van to the backend and opened the double-doors, keeping a wary eye on Chris. He pulled out a tall vase holding the most incredible roses she had ever seen. Blood red, perfectly shaped, barely-opened buds.
Their fragrance permeated the air around her. She quickly counted two dozen. Adrenaline shot through her and her heartbeat went wild. Of course they were from Pic. Who else did she know who could afford such an extravagant bouquet?

She swallowed the tears that sprang to her throat and eyes. “Thank you,” she said, accepting the flowers with trembling hands.

Chris climbed back into his SUV and backed up, allowing the van to leave the driveway. Then he parked in the driveway himself and got out. “Sorry, ma’am, but no way to tell if that delivery van was a ruse. Pretty flowers. Those from Mr. Lockhart?”

Him confronting the florist truck driver was
uncalled for. She looked up at him. “I’m sorry, Chris, but I just don’t think I’m in any danger. As you might or might not know, I’m no longer a part of the Lockhart group. I’m giving you and your partner permission to stop guarding me.”

“Can’t do that, ma’am. You’re not the one who hired me or set my agenda. And I haven’t been informed that you
’re not a part of the group we’re protecting. Besides, that bouquet doesn’t look like you’ve been extracted from the group. Would you like for me to carry those for you?”

His words had left her unable to speak without bawling. She shook her head, hanging onto the vase more tightly.

Inside the house, she set the roses in the middle of her small dining table. They almost touched the light fixture that hung over the table. She plucked the card from the greenery and read the note:

I’LL BE IN TOWN AT 2. HOPE YOU’RE GONNA BE HOME. PIC.

She sank to a chair, overwhelmed and worn out by the emotional roller coaster she had been riding for more than a week. Chris’s words came to her:
…Until a few days ago, he was out at an area called Crowfoot overseeing some cowboys rounding up cattle….

So
he had been back at the Double-Barrel for a few days. He’d had time to call her. He could have sent her a text. He had chosen not to communicate. She thought about the many times he had chosen to do something else rather than spend time with her. For two and a half years she had been available at his beck and call and at his convenience. Being a take-charge kind of man who had more than his share of self-confidence, he had always determined their schedule and activities.

Stop it, Amanda!
You’re being as juvenile as your teenage students.

She glanced up and caught the time on the oven clock. After one o’clock.
She was a mess. Bad hair, no makeup. Running shorts and a holey T-shirt. A part of her had an urge to dash to the bathroom and try to put herself together.

Instead, she
dug her cell phone out of her purse to send Pic a text. She typed in a few letters, then deleted the message. Started over. Deleted the second message.
Damn.
She had to come to grips with her emotions. But first, she had to figure out what they were.

Well, she had to see him. After waiting anxiously for his call, she was thrilled to hear from him. After a few beats, she texted him back:

FLOWERS R BEAUTIFUL. THANK U
.
I WILL BE HOME. A.

And her dining table was where she still sat at precisely two o’clock when through the storm door, she saw him step up onto her porch. He was dressed in ironed and creased khakis, a starched white button-down and boots, his very definition of being dressed up, even if the temperature was a hundred and ten. A frisson snaked up her spine and scrambled her brain worse than it already was.

She opened the door and let him in. She was so glad to see him she had a hard time holding back from climbing his body. He lifted off his hat and set it on its crown on the table at one end of the sofa, where he always set it.
His blue, blue eyes held a troubled expression, but he smiled down at her. “How ya been?”

She strained to make her voice sound normal.
“Fine. How have
you
been?”

“
Good.”

But to someone who knew him as well as she did, his eyes
said otherwise. In a perverse way, that pleased her. “That’s good, right?”

He nodded and stood there, his hands resting on his hips as he looked around the room at the cardboard boxes. His gaze came back to her face. “You’re packing?”

“Yes, I—”

“Amanda, can we sit down a minute?”

Those tears had come back into her throat in a mushy ball. She cleared her throat. “Uh, of course.” She turned and led the way toward the kitchen. She gestured toward the roses in the middle of the table. “Those are beautiful flowers, Pic. You had them delivered from Fort Worth?”

She almost mentioned the cost of that, but bit her tongue. This
tête-à-tête wasn’t their usual fun-filled banter.

He shrugged. “Not much of a flower shop in Drinkwell.”

Had he been in Fort Worth since his return from Crowfoot. Was that why he hadn’t called? “Would you like something to drink? A beer?” she asked stiffly.

“Little early for me,” he said.

She knew that. Serious drinkers, Pic and his brothers were not. She nervously lifted a glass out of the cupboard, then turned to the refrigerator and fumbled with the ice maker for ice cubes. As she filled her glass with tea, she looked at him. “Do you want some tea?”

“No, thanks.” He dragged a chair back from her dining table and eased down to the seat. His size dwarfed her small table and chairs. He looked as if he were sitting on doll furniture. “Can you sit down with me a minute?”

She carried her own glass to the table and took the chair adjacent to him. “I was sorry to hear about the homeplace. Both Chris and Gail told me something about it, but I haven’t heard the details.”

He rested an elbow on the table, the opposite hand braced on his thigh. “Not much to tell. Everything inside was pretty much trashed. White paint all over. A damn shame. I sent a crew down there to clean it out and haul everything off. Don’t know yet what we’re gonna do about the paint.”

“Oh, my gosh. Who would do such a thing? Was that beautiful quilt your mom made still on the bed?”

“Torn all to pieces, along with the mattress. Remember that little red woodstove that was in the
corner?”

“The one you thought was so cute?”

He nodded. “They stole it.”

Looking into his troubled eyes, she slowly shook her head. “Is it true that you went down into the cistern to get a dead calf?”

His chin ducked and he gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah. You probably can’t believe I did that.”

“Oh, Pic. You must have been so scared.”

“Well….I don’t want to admit it to everybody I know, but I’ll tell
you
. I was scared shitless. I don’t ever want to do something like that again. But it had to be done. I got the calf out. Made Dad happy. He thinks I’m a hero. Now I’ve got to get a scientist down from Fort Worth to help me figure out how to purify the water again.”

“Is the water so important? If you removed the gutters from around the house, wouldn’t the cistern eventually dry up?

“It’s not that important to me and for sure not to Drake. He thought we oughtta take a bulldozer to the whole cistern and fill in the hole. But Dad wants it back like it was.”

“Did Drake help you?”

“He helped me get the calf out, yeah.”

Amanda’s brow tented. Drake was as much afraid of water as Pic was. “Oh, no. He was down in the cistern, too?”

“God, no. There was barely room for me down there. One thing I learned is I’m not only scared of water, I might be scared of tight places.”

“My God, Pic, that must have been horrible for both of you.”

Pic chuckled. “Believe it or not, my tough big brother was more scared than I was. He stayed up top and talked me through it, brave man that he is.”

For the first time, she found a chuckle, too. “Where were Troy and your dad?

“Dad was there. Don’t know where Troy was. He took off before we ever left the picnic.”

“What an awful thing to do, to kill a poor calf just to be mean. Does anyone have any clues at all?”

“Blake says at least two stout men. Maybe three. It was a spring calf, so it weighed about five hundred pounds. Unless he was Goliath, one guy couldn’t have gotten that much dead weight up off the ground and over the edge of the cistern without help. There wasn’t any evidence that equipment was used. We had to use the wench truck to hoist it out.”

“
Wow.”

He picked up her hand, his thumbs rubbing her knuckles. “I’ve been out of range, Amanda. I haven’t called.”

She nodded.

“I know you left the ranch mad. I thought maybe
you’d
call.”

She thought about telling him she had tried, but been unable to reach him, but at this point, why lie? Her brow arched, in spite of herself. “It didn’t seem like my turn.”

He nodded, his beautiful blue eyes homed in on hers like lasers. “Are you really leaving me, Mandy?” he asked softly.

Instantly, her mind reverted to the job at Odessa High School. Silence. The loudest silence she had ever heard. Was her relationship with Pic Lockhart on the verge of ending? For the second time?
You can do this
, Amanda, the voice in her head told her.

She looked down, stared at his big hand holding hers. “I—I
’ve waited for you a long time, Pic. I kind of put my career and my life on hold to stay in Drinkwell, first for my dad, then to be with you. I kept thinking you cared as much as I did, although I suppose I had no right to think that. You never told me you did.”

She wished he would grab her and cling to her, beg her to stay with him, profess undying love. But that wasn’t Pic. She heaved a great sigh and looked up. “Anyway, I have a good job offer.
For me, it’s a dream job. The best opportunity I’ve ever had. It’s something I almost can’t refuse.”