Life After Wife (Three Magic Words Trilogy, #3)(6)

“Ask him, not me. Elijah would have his reasons. It’s the only year he didn’t come see her, and most of the time he came around two or three times a year,” Tandy said.

Fancy motioned for Sophie to follow her. “We’ve set up out on the deck. Come on out and join us. Tina has saved you a seat.”

Tandy’s old eyes twinkled in a bed of wrinkles. “Go on. We’ll take this up later.”

Sophie added a deviled egg to her plate and followed Fancy out to the deck.

“You waddle,” she told Fancy.

“Are you picking a fight? I’m pregnant. All pregnant women walk like ducks. It’s the forward momentum. Besides, I’m short and—why am I telling you all this? I don’t have to explain to you, even if I do love you like a sister. What did that man say to you back in the hallway? You came out of there ready to chew up railroad spikes and spit out staples,” Fancy said.

Sophie grimaced when she noticed that Elijah was already seated at the table with the rest of her friends. “I’ll tell you later. Why did y’all invite him to sit with us?”

“Hart did it. Shoot him, not me,” Fancy said.

“Why would he do that?” Sophie hissed.

“Hart’s known him for a long time, and Elijah is Superman, Batman, and God all rolled up into one being. I ain’t never seen Hart so happy to see a feller in my life.”

“That’s just great,” Sophie said.

Elijah looked up. “What’s so great?”

“Nothing you would understand,” Sophie said.

“Hey, Sophie, do you know who your better half is?” Hart asked.

She bristled and blushed at the same time. “What did you say?”

“Just a pun on words. You two each get half the ranch, so he’s your better half and you are his,” Hart chuckled.

Sophie set her plate on the table and melted into the chair. She’d expected it to be one of the most difficult days in her life. Putting Aunt Maud to rest and having the full responsibility of the ranch on her shoulders would be tough. But then toss Elijah into the mix, and it turned into her worst nightmare. “I don’t know anything about Mr. Jones other than he was Uncle Jesse’s great-nephew.”

His blue eyes clashed with hers across the table. “Don’t call me Mr. Jones. It’s Eli to my friends. You can call me Elijah until you get to know me better.”

She rudely ignored him. “You were saying, Hart?”

“Eli is the best bull rider I’ve ever seen. He taught me a lot when I was a kid. I used to come down here with Dad. Uncle Jesse knew more about farm equipment and Angus cattle than anyone this side of the Mississippi. Anyway we’d come to visit, and Eli got me started riding bulls. If he’d decided to follow the rodeo route rather than enlisting, I wouldn’t have stood a chance at winning all those championships,” Hart said.

“Boy, you were a natural. What you got, you did on your own. It wasn’t none of my doing,” Eli grinned.

Sophie gripped the chicken leg hard to keep from shoving it up Elijah’s left nostril.

Sorry, God! I didn’t mean to cut all his air off. I just thought he’d look cute with a chicken leg sticking out his nose. I didn’t know it would kill him dead on the spot and solve all my problems. Sophie continued to ignore him.

“I can’t imagine the military letting him go without a fight. He’s trained more men to get in and out of tough places than you can imagine. When I was in the Guard, his name was legend,” Hart said.

Everything went silent as a tomb.

Eli’s gaze met Sophie’s again. “Doesn’t impress you much, does it?”

“Takes more than riding a bull for eight seconds or teaching a man to crawl through the jungle to impress me,” she said.

“Sand,” he said.

“That don’t impress me much either,” she said.

“It was sand we crawled through. I’m not old enough to have been in Vietnam. I did my time in the sand. Spent the last year and a half in Central America, but I didn’t crawl through the jungle. Believe me there was plenty of jungle, but I didn’t have to do much crawling,” he said.

“There ain’t no machine guns in Baird, Texas. No land mines. And no drug cartels. So frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn—as the cliché goes—what you’ve crawled through,” Sophie said. “Just let me write you a check and you can leave.”

Elijah chuckled again. “Ain’t happenin’. Don’t want to listen to you saying that every day so let’s get it straight right now. It. Ain’t. Happenin’. Lucifer will sell snow cones on the backside of Hades before it does. Subject closed.”

He looked over at Hart. “Good chicken. Can’t nobody in the world cook chicken like a Texas woman gettin’ ready for a funeral. I missed southern cookin’ this past year. Got tired of rice. Give me potatoes any day of the week and lots of them. Fry ’em. Mash ’em. Bake ’em.”

“You got that right,” Hart said.

Kate kicked him hard under the table.

“What…” he started.

“Honey, would you please go get me some of that blackberry cobbler? And I want whipped cream on the top,” she said.

“Theron, would you get me a slice of pecan pie?” Fancy asked sweetly.