Daisies in the Canyon(36)

“Maybe. If you don’t find a little brown-eyed doll in San Antonio this weekend who takes your eye. If you get a new girlfriend, she might not understand your friendship with the neighbor,” she said.

“Jealous?”

“Not even a little bit!” she lied.

“I’m hurt,” he chuckled. “I just knew you’d be all jealous and that would give me my ego trip for the whole day.”

She crossed her fingers behind her back. “To be jealous would mean I am more than a friend.”

Cooper’s chuckle turned into laughter. “Now I’m really hurt. I might even be bleeding from a cutting remark like that.”

“I’ve got another stall to clean and I’m sure you’ve got a county to save from drug dealers, cattle rustlers, and outlaws. See you tomorrow at noon. It’s Bonnie’s turn to cook and she might be making Italian too,” Abby said.

“I’m not complainin’ one bit. See you then.”

Holy shit! She’d just agreed to go on a date with him. Her hands actually trembled at the thought of dancing with him.

You are going to the local bar for drinks. You’d go with Haley and not think a thing about it, so why not with Cooper?

Because, she argued with her conscience, I’m not attracted to Haley and I am to Cooper. I’m going, but . . .

She stopped and thought about all the thousand buts she should consider before she opened that can of worms.

Number one, the biggest but in any equation, was never start something that couldn’t be finished. It showed poor judgment. It didn’t matter how his touch made her feel—nothing could last between them. Her fault, not his. She had a deep fear that she’d be like Ezra when it came to a permanent commitment and parenthood and another fear that she’d demonstrated exactly the latter when she blew up that building with the little girl inside. Cooper deserved better than that.

But number two stated that it was better to nip something in the bud. If she stayed in the canyon, Cooper was and would always be her neighbor.

“But the flirting and the bantering is so much fun,” she whispered. “I like him. I really do. He’s a decent man.”

She finished the last stall seconds before she heard two tractors and a truck pulling up outside the barn. Rusty’s glasses fogged over when he left the cold and came into the tack room.

“Time to call it a day,” he said.

Without the glasses, his eyes weren’t nearly as big and there was a softer look about his face. His lips weren’t as firm and hard looking, yet his chin was stronger. Standing with his feet apart, his jeans tight, his boots scuffed from work, wearing his standard mustard-colored work coat, he’d make any woman take a second look. Yet not one single spark flickered between them. She felt like she was looking at a cousin.

“What?” he said as he put his glasses back on.

“Nothing. When do we get to see the bunkhouse?”

“Anytime you want to after you’ve been here a year and run me off the ranch,” he said. “Until then, by the will Ezra left behind, it belongs to me. I will tell you that it’s small and only houses six men at the most. Oh, and when it’s my time to host poker, we play down there.”

“Rusty, I don’t think any of us will be firing you. As far as I’m concerned, you’ll have a job on the ranch as long as you want it,” Abby said.

“Thank you. We’ll have to see how long I want it. Now, let’s call it quittin’ time. Even old slave driver Ezra knew a body needed rest after long days of hard work.” Rusty smiled.

She stopped long enough to make a ham sandwich out of yesterday’s leftovers, put it and a handful of chips on one plate, and use a second one for a huge slab of coconut crème cake. With a can of beer under her arm, she made her way to her bedroom with barely a nod at Shiloh, whose head was thrown back on the sofa, or Bonnie, who’d let all three dogs into the house to lie on the rug in front of a cold fireplace. When she started down the hallway, Martha got up and meandered toward the bedroom with her.

“Let me grab a shower first,” Bonnie groaned. “No, I’m having a bath—a long one to get the aches out of my poor body.”

“I’ll go second. I’m halfway into a romance book I want to finish tonight,” Shiloh said.

“See y’all in the morning.” Abby carried her food to her room.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, her food spread out around her. Martha plopped down beside her and she fed her bits of cake, sandwich, and even chips. Bonnie hadn’t said that anything but chicken bones would hurt the dog, and the old girl seemed to really like cake.

She could see the corner of one of the boxes. They probably contained exactly what was advertised on the end: three sets of Corelle dishes in that old modernistic gold pattern that was popular when the dishes first came out. There were even a few of them left in the mismatched set of plates in the cabinet. But right there in bold Sharpie letters on the end of each box were her initials—AJM—and she wanted to know why. How in the world had he even known her name? Her mother had said that he hadn’t wanted to see her or to know what she’d been named.

She pulled all three boxes out to find numbers on the tops. One, two, and three—evidently she should start with one, since Ezra had made it easy. It had to be his handwriting, but the perfect numbers and letters had an almost feminine slant to them.