Daisies in the Canyon(35)

“I reckon we can feed cows and gather eggs without you lookin’ over our shoulders,” Bonnie answered.

“Think you could get those two pastures plowed on Saturday without tearing up the tractors?” Rusty looked down the table at Shiloh and Abby.

“If we do tear up a tractor, I’ll get out my toolboxes and have it all fixed by the time you bring your drunk ass home,” Bonnie told him.

“Oh, yeah?” Cooper raised a dark eyebrow.

“Saturday is my day to cook, but we can always eat leftovers if Bonnie needs me to help her fix a tractor. Which reminds me, you will owe us big-time for not being here to cook dinner or take us out on Sunday, but I’m sure you will make it up to us the next week, right?” Abby said.

“Sure, I will.” Cooper smiled.

“Then I vote that Sunday after church we go to Amarillo for shopping. We will have our paychecks before you leave, right?” Shiloh asked Rusty.

“Cash or check?” he asked.

“Cash,” they all three said in unison.

“Pass the bread and salad. What kind of dressing is this anyway?” Cooper said.

“Homemade Italian,” Shiloh answered for Abby. “And a good cook never gives away her secrets. This has a touch of something I don’t recognize, but it’s awesome.”

Cooper bumped his shoulder against Abby’s. “It’s not bad for chili pie.”

She bumped him back, not a bit surprised what it created. “Some days I get it right. Some days, the pigs wouldn’t touch it.”

His hand on her knee said that he didn’t believe a word she’d said.




The boxes under her bed nagged at her all afternoon as she cleaned out the barn, sweeping each stall and putting down fresh hay in case it was needed for calving season, which Rusty said would start any day. She hoped to hell Bonnie knew something about being a cow’s midwife in an emergency.

She leaned the rake against the gate and sat down on a bale of hay to catch her breath. Why hadn’t Rusty taken those boxes out of the room? He’d removed everything else but one ashtray and the telephone. The bed had even been stripped down, and there were no towels in her tiny little half bath. He had been thoughtful and left a couple of dozen hangers in the closet, and the place did smell like it had been sprayed down with a mixture of disinfectant spray and that stuff that takes away odors.

Switching thought tracks from her bedroom and the boxes back to the barn, she picked up the hoe and rake and carried them back to the tack room. Sucking in deep lungfuls of barn scents, she instinctively reached for a piece of hard candy. It was a trick she’d learned in the war zones, and it came in handy with her snack habit. If she was eating something, then her sense of smell wasn’t so acute. But her pocket was empty and it was all Cooper’s fault.

If he hadn’t set her hormones into overdrive, she would have remembered to make a side trip back to the bedroom for her normal pocketful of anxiety prevention after dinner.

Think of the devil, and the cell phone will ring.

She fished it out of her pocket and hit the “Talk” button. “You are in trouble.”

“What’d I do?” he chuckled.

“It’s your fault I didn’t put candy in my pocket and this barn smells like cows and rat piss,” she said.

“What’s candy got to do with that and how is it my fault?”

“We were talking about Italian food and I forgot to get my candy. Candy dulls the smell,” she said.

“It does not. That’s a psychological trick that they tell you over there to keep you from puking when you smell bombs and dead bodies.”

“You are full of shit,” she said.

“Not me, darlin’. I was in the National Guard for ten years and they pulled our unit for a nine-month tour in Iraq five years ago. I was not impressed enough with my extended vacation in the sand and sun to want to reenlist. But if you’d been there to cook lasagna for me, I might have.”

“Five years ago I was in Afghanistan. Are you flirting with me? I thought we were just friends,” she said.

“If I’d have known you were that close, I would have popped over for a beer.” He laughed. “I called to fuss at you for lying about not being able to cook. And what would you do if I was flirting?”

“I’d tell you that you were making a big mistake,” she said.

“Why? Flirting isn’t falling into bed with each other again.”

“Because it could lead to that, and you have roots and I have wings. I’m not sure they work too well together,” she said.

“Maybe you could put down roots.”

“Maybe you could grow wings.”

“I’ll never leave this ranch,” he said.

“And I don’t know if I’ll stay on this one.”

A long pause preceded his next statement. “The canyon has a way of getting into folks’ blood. Loretta could tell you all about that. Once you’ve been here for a while and then leave, it haunts you and beckons you to come back home.”

“Only if you left something behind,” she said. “Loretta left Jackson behind and that’s what haunted her.”

“Be careful, Abby. It can sneak up on you. Want to go to the Sugar Shack with me some weekend for a beer?”