Heaven, Texas (Chicago Stars #2)(26)

He replaced the phone and began to hum “Luckenbach, Texas.”

Gracie struggled to speak evenly. “The Baron?”

“A classy little turbo-charged twin. I keep it at an airstrip ‘bout half an hour from my house in Chicago.”

“You’re telling me that you fly?”

“I didn’t mention that to you?”

“No,” she said unsteadily. “You didn’t.”

He scratched the side of his head. “Shoot, I must have had my pilot’s license—let’s see…I guess it’s going on nine years now.”

She clenched her teeth. “You own your own plane.”

“Sweet little thing.”

“And a pilot’s license?”

“Sure do.”

“Then why did we have to drive to Telarosa?”

He looked wounded. “I just had it in my mind, is all.” She dropped her head into her hands and tried to conjure up a picture of him staked out naked in the desert with vultures eating his maggoty flesh and ants crawling in his eye sockets. Unfortunately, she couldn’t make the image gruesome enough. Once again, he had done exactly what he wanted without regard for anyone else.

“Those women don’t know how lucky they are,” she muttered.

“What women are you talking about?”

“All of them who were fortunate enough to fail your football quiz.”

He chuckled, lit up a cigar, and launched into the chorus of “Luckenbach, Texas.”

They headed southwest out of Dallas, driving through rolling pastureland dotted with grazing cattle and shady pecan orchards. As the land grew hillier and rockier, she began to see frequent signs for dude ranches as well as glimpsing some of the local wildlife: quail, jackrabbits, and wild turkey. Telarosa, Bobby Tom informed her, sat on the fringes of the Texas Hill Country, a hundred miles from nowhere. Because of its relative isolation, it had missed the prosperity of towns like Kerrville and Fredericksburg.

In her conversation with Willow that morning, her employer had ordered her to bring Bobby Tom directly to the Lather spread, a small horse ranch located several miles east of the city limits, where they would be doing much of the shooting, so Gracie wouldn’t actually see the town until that evening. Since he seemed to know the location Willow had described, Gracie refrained from reading the directions aloud.

They turned off the winding highway onto a narrow asphalt road. “Gracie, this movie we’re making…Maybe you’d better tell me a little something about it.”

“Like what?” She wanted to look her best when they got there, and she reached into her purse for a comb. She had put on her navy suit that morning so she’d look professional.

“Well, the plot for one thing.”

Gracie’s hands stilled. “Are you telling me you didn’t read the script?”

“I never got around to it.”

She closed her purse and studied him. Why would a seemingly intelligent man like Bobby Tom accept a part in a movie without having read the script? Was he that undisciplined? She knew he wasn’t very enthusiastic about the project, but even so, she would, have thought he’d take some interest. There must be a reason, but what could it possibly—

At that moment she was overcome by a horrible suspicion, one that made her feel almost ill. Impulsively, she reached out and curled her hand around his upper arm.

“You can’t read, can you, Bobby Tom?”

His head shot around, eyes flashing with indignation. “Of course I can read. I did graduate from a major university, you know.”

Gracie understood that colleges gave their star football players a great deal of latitude when it came to academics, and she was still suspicious. “In what field of study?”

“Playground management.”

“I knew it!” Her heart filled with sympathy. “You don’t have to lie to me. You know you can trust me not to tell anyone. We can work on improving your reading together. No one would ever have to know that—” She broke off as she saw the gleam in his eyes. Belatedly, she remembered his laptop computer, and she gritted her teeth. “You’re teasing me.”

He grinned. “Sweetheart, you’ve got to stop stereotyping people. Just because I was a football player doesn’t mean I didn’t learn the alphabet. I managed to struggle through U.T. with a respectable grade point average and earn myself a degree in economics. Although I’m usually too embarrassed to admit it, I happened to be an NCAA Top Six scholar athlete.”

“Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“You’re the one who decided I couldn’t read.”

“What else was I supposed to think? No one in his right mind would sign a movie contract without reading the script first. Even I read the script, and I’m not even in it.”

“It’s an action adventure movie, right? I’m supposed to be the good guy, which means there’ll also be a bad guy, a beautiful woman, and a not of car chases. Now that we don’t have the Russians to kick around, the bad guy’ll either be a terrorist or a drug runner.”

“A Mexican drug lord.”

He gave her an I-told-you-so nod. “There’ll be a bunch of fights, all kinds of blood, gore, and cussing, most of it gratuitous, but still protected by the First Amendment. I’ll be running around looking manly, and the heroine, movies being what they are, will prob’ly be running around naked and screaming. Am I pretty much on target so far?”