Kitabı oku: «Shoulda Been A Cowboy»

Chapter One

“Have you finished everything on your list?” Agnes Tuttle asked.

Glancing up from the kitchen island countertop she was scrubbing, Caroline eyed her mother with a mixture of affection and exasperation. Caroline loved her only parent, without doubt, but Agnes’s expectations sometimes suffocated her.

Today was one of those days.

Agnes, a soft, plump woman in her late fifties with hair artificially colored the hue of ripe apricots, hovered in the hall doorway, ready to take flight. She wore her best summer dress and patent leather pumps and a matching purse draped over her arm, all in the same subdued orange shade as her tight curls and the bright swaths of rouge on her cheeks.

Caroline pushed a strand of blond hair off her forehead and straightened, easing the muscles in her back. “I’ve scrubbed the bathrooms, changed the linens in all six bedrooms, dusted and vacuumed. And I’m almost through with the kitchen. I still have to do the laundry and run errands.”

Sheesh, sometimes she felt like Cinderella. Except there were no pesky stepsisters, no upcoming ball and no Prince Charming waiting in the wings. No nasty stepmother, either. Just a mother who loved her and had relied on her totally for too many years.

“Don’t put the sheets in the dryer,” Agnes said, as she invariably did. “Hang them on the line. I want them to smell like sunshine and fresh air.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

It did no good to argue that by Friday, when the next wave of weekend guests arrived at the Tuttle Bed and Breakfast in Pleasant Valley, South Carolina, the linens’ scent of sunshine would have long since dissipated. Her mother had always had her standards, although Caroline often wondered if Agnes had to do the work herself to live up to them whether her requirements would have remained as stringent.

“I’ll be at Aunt Mona’s until tomorrow,” Agnes reminded her.

Caroline nodded. Every Monday, her mother made the trek to Walhalla, less than an hour away by car, to spend the day with her sister. Because Agnes didn’t drive after dark, she stayed overnight. Caroline welcomed the regular respites. Agnes, who claimed to suffer from a long list of ailments that none of the doctors at the medical center had been able to confirm or cure, depended on Caroline, her only child, to keep the massive old Victorian house in immaculate condition for their guests. Only when Agnes left town did Caroline feel that her life was her own.

“Have a good time, Mama, and kiss Aunt Mona for me.” She held her breath, praying her mother would leave before thinking of more items to add to the to-do list.

A FEW HOURS LATER, reveling in her brief freedom, Caroline lay on the thick grass of the lawn of the deep backyard, folded her arms behind her head and followed the progress of a single wispy cloud across the brilliant blue sky. The heady fragrance of roses, the thick sweetness of honeysuckle, and the pungency of recently mowed grass, distinctive smells of summer, filled her nostrils and lifted her spirits. The late June sun warmed her like a blessing. Only the drone of bumblebees, lumbering through the Queen Anne’s lace and black-eyed Susans in the meadow beyond the back fence, and the snap of freshly laundered sheets on the clothesline behind the garage broke the drowsy silence.

Caroline had been at work since before sunup, preparing breakfast for departing weekend guests. After the meal, she’d finished the cleaning and prepared the week’s shopping list. Errands to Paulie’s Drug Store to refill her mother’s numerous prescriptions and to Blalock’s to buy groceries had taken most of the afternoon. Now, except for retrieving the sun-dried linens from the lines and folding them away, Caroline was finished with work for the day. The B and B had no reservations for the night, and she was contentedly free to do anything she wanted, or nothing, if she pleased.

“You’re thirty-three and need a life of your own, Caroline,” her friend Eileen Bickerstaff had told her for the umpteenth time last week as they’d enjoyed a cup of tea at Eileen’s kitchen table at Blackberry Farm, ten miles out of town at the west end of Pleasant Valley. “Your mother’s perfectly capable of taking care of herself. And she can hire a girl from town for the housework she has you doing. Maria Ortega’s younger sister Rosa would be happy for the job.”

At ninety-eight, decades older than Agnes Tuttle, Eileen had managed quite well by herself for more than sixty years, with only occasional help the last few years from Caroline with the heavy cleaning. The spry, elderly woman could literally run circles around Agnes with her hypochondria and self-professed weak heart.

“I’ll have a life of my own soon,” Caroline had assured Eileen. “You know I’ve been saving my pay from both you and Mother for years. When I have enough, I’ll make my move.”

Now, basking in the sun, Caroline felt a smile of satisfaction tugging at her lips. In another year, she’d have the nest egg she needed. She loved her mother and she loved Pleasant Valley, but she loved the prospect of freedom and being responsible to no one but herself more. Next year, with her savings in hand, she’d tell her mother and friends goodbye and head west. Maybe to Colorado or Montana. Or more likely Texas, New Mexico or Arizona, where she’d find a temporary job until she could locate a small piece of land she could afford, buy horses and a few cattle, and live out her dreams.

She closed her eyes and pictured the scene. Wide-open spaces, rugged mesas, high chaparral and lonesome piñon pines. Quaint little towns with a single main street lined with stores with wooden facades, plank sidewalks and hitching posts out front.

And cowboys.

She sighed at the prospect. She’d always loved cowboys.

Her dreams hadn’t really changed in the fifteen years since she’d graduated from Pleasant Valley High. They’d only become more focused. In college, she had pursued a business degree and hoped to use those skills to escape the valley where she’d lived all her life. But her father’s untimely death had ended her college career during her junior year. Wallace Tuttle had left an insurance policy, but it wasn’t enough to pay college tuition or even to support Agnes through her remaining years. With Caroline’s encouragement, Agnes had turned the enormous family home into a thriving bed-and-breakfast. At the time, Caroline had volunteered to help.

She hadn’t intended that offer to become a life sentence.

Only her goal of moving out west and having her own place had sustained her through the years of her mother’s unceasing demands and bouts of so-called illness. To avoid the harsh reality of her mother’s complaints and bossiness while she planned and saved for her move, Caroline had escaped into fantasy. Immersing herself in Western culture, she’d devoured Louis L’ Amour and Zane Grey novels and watched classic movies like Silverado, Lonesome Dove and Clint Eastwood’s spaghetti westerns until she could quote the dialogue by heart. The books and movies had whetted her appetite for all things cowboy.

Her eyelids drooped against the bright sunlight. Soon, she assured herself, she’d shake the dust of the valley from her feet. Even if escalating real estate values meant she had to take a temporary job out west before she could afford her own place, she would make her break by next year or find herself smothered by Agnes’s expectations and tethered to her mother’s apron strings forever.

Soon, she promised herself.

She sighed, nestled deeper into the soft grass, and closed her eyes.

A keening wind howled down the deserted main street, scattering tumbleweeds and spawning wind devils that spewed dust in their paths. The relentless sun beat down with thin warmth, casting the tall shadow of a lone figure in the middle of the street, six-guns strapped to his hips, determined eyes vigilant beneath the shadow of his Stetson. The only hope for the frightened citizens against the outlaws who terrorized them, the lawman lifted his steely gaze toward the edge of town, where riders approached in a thunder of hooves and a swirl of dust. Without taking his eyes from the oncoming desperadoes, he called to the people cowering behind closed doors.

“Hello?” the deep voice said.

Caroline’s eyes flew open, but she had to be dreaming still. The tall man with broad shoulders and narrow hips stood between her and the sun, so that all she could see was his silhouette. The town was safe. At well over six feet with an imposing build, he was a bulwark against all outlaws. His hands rested on the butts of his six-guns, ready for action.

“I knocked on the front door.” His voice, while rich and pleasing, held no distinctive Western twang. “When no one answered, I came around back. I need a room for the next few nights. Do you have a vacancy?”

His words finally registered in her sleep-numbed brain, and Caroline came fully awake and leaped to her feet.

The man’s hands weren’t resting on six-guns, but tucked in the back pockets of his jeans. She shifted to see his face in the sunlight, and his resemblance to the perfectly handsome Western hero of her dreams faded, although the stranger’s chiseled features would have looked terrific beneath a broad-brimmed cowboy hat. Dressed in jeans, work boots and a faded navy T-shirt that sculpted the well-developed muscles of his chest and arms, he wasn’t handsome in the classic sense, but his rugged looks were very easy on the eyes. His hazel irises, deep brown flecked with grass-green, reflected both tranquility and an underlying pain, and his tanned face crinkled in an engaging smile that exposed perfect white teeth. She guessed he was in his early thirties, close to her age.

“Sorry if I woke you,” he said.

“I was only daydreaming.” Caroline, suddenly conscious of her tousled hair, grass-stained shorts and rumpled shirt, combed her fingers through her hair and tugged at her blouse in a futile attempt to straighten it. “You said you need a room?”

He nodded, hands still tucked in his pockets as if he were hiding them. “If you have one.”

His warm grin was contagious, and she returned it with a smile of her own. “I have six. You can take your pick. Follow me.”

Rather than take a guest through the back door, she circled the house, navigating the brick walkway through the wisteria arbor, draped with fragrant lavender blooms. The stranger’s gaze burned between her shoulder blades, and she chided herself for noticing. Even though he was the best-looking man to hit the valley since attorney Randall Benedict’s arrival from New York last year, he remained a stranger, merely passing through. With plans for her move west still buzzing in her brain, she needed a man like a fish needed a bicycle, no matter how appealing he appeared, so his good looks were a moot point.

She entered the foyer, its coolness a welcome contrast to the summer heat. In a corner beneath the massive staircase with its polished newel post, a small writing desk held the guest registration book. She handed the stranger a pen. “I’ll need your name, home address, and car license tag number.”

When he reached for the pen, she stifled a sympathetic cry. Scar tissue, raised welts of pale skin, covered the backs of his large, powerful hands that looked as if they’d been horribly burned. She turned quickly to the board behind her to grab a room key and hoped he hadn’t noticed her reaction.

“Headed for the mountains?” she asked in a neutral voice.

Most of the visitors at Tuttle’s B and B considered Pleasant Valley a way station on their trips to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in western North Carolina and eastern Tennessee. A few, however, came to fly-fish in the rapids of the Piedmont River that bisected the valley. And, occasionally, business travelers stayed overnight. But this man didn’t seem to fit any of those categories.

He signed the guest book in bold, flowing strokes with only a slight hesitation in the movements of his damaged hand. “I’m moving to a new home.”

She lifted her eyebrows. “Here in town?”

Still concentrating on his registration, he shook his head. “I’m stopping off here so I don’t arrive at my new place ahead of my furniture.”

He finished his entry, and she swiveled the book to read what he’d written.

Ethan Garrison. Baltimore, Maryland.

So he was headed to Maryland, a full day of driving from Pleasant Valley. Headed east, not west. Too bad. He had the build and, from what little she’d observed, the quiet, stoic temperament of a cowboy. But instead of wrangling cattle, he’d probably be working in some stuffy office in the city of Baltimore, where his deep tan would soon fade. Even a boring business suit, however, wouldn’t hide his magnificent physique or dim his killer smile.

With a mental shake, she reminded herself that the man might be married, although his scarred left hand bore no gold band. She handed him a key.

“Your room’s at the top of the stairs on the left. Our best view. Overlooks the valley and the mountains in the distance. It has an adjoining bath. And if it’s not to your liking, I can show you others.”

“I’m sure it will be fine.” His expression was friendly, but a residual sadness flickered in his eyes. “Okay if I leave my truck out front?”

“Sure. Or you can park it in the lot on the east side of the house. Your choice.”

“Thanks.” His gaze held hers for a beat, as if he wanted to say more but didn’t. He pivoted and headed for the entrance.

The screen door slammed behind him, and Caroline took the stairs two at a time to the third floor and raced to her room at the back of the house to change clothes and comb her hair. With an unexpected guest, she had more shopping to do and hoped that Jodie was still open.

ETHAN SAUNTERED down the front walk of the B and B toward his pickup, parked at the curb. He paused, inhaled a deep breath of the summer air and with it the faint aroma of smoke. At the scent, his chest constricted, and in a rush of panic, he struggled to breathe. Sweat beaded his brow, and he clenched his hands to stop their trembling.

Just someone burning brush nearby, he assured himself, but only several minutes of deep breathing and regimented self-control enabled him to slow his galloping pulse and relax the all-too-familiar tightness in his chest. The scars on the back of his hands itched with an intensity almost as painful as his initial injuries.

Concentrate on something else, anything else.

He refused to experience an emotional melt-down, especially not on the quiet street of a strange town. He focused on the giant maples, thick with summer foliage, whose arched branches shaded the broad avenue from the summer heat. The neighborhood, with its century-old homes on oversize lots and surrounded by colorful beds of flowers, was a throwback to a different time, a perfect setting for The Andy Griffith Show. Ethan half expected to see a barefooted Opie come whistling down the street with a fishing pole slung over his shoulder.

The image, conjured from television reruns he’d watched during his recuperation, calmed him. With his panic conquered, at least for the moment, he recalled another pleasant image. The pretty woman he’d found sprawled asleep in the grass behind the bed-and-breakfast had been a delightful surprise. He should have awakened her immediately. Instead, he’d taken a moment to appreciate the gracefulness of her bare arms and legs, her short, thick hair the color of sunshine, and her cheeks flushed as pink as the roses that rambled along the split rail fence at the back of the yard. And he wouldn’t have been human if he hadn’t noticed the nip of her narrow waist and the seductive curve of her breasts beneath the snug fit of her shirt. Best of all, however, had been the startling cornflower blue of her wide eyes when she’d awakened, a hue as deep and magnificent as the Carolina sky. His quickened interest and the burst of heat in his groin at the memory gave him hope.

Ethan, old buddy, maybe you’re not dried-up and dead inside after all.

His panic defeated and his outlook more optimistic than it had been in months, he whistled a Montgomery Gentry tune, climbed into his pickup, started the engine, and backed his truck into the parking lot. He doubted the crime rate was high in this small Southern town, but he didn’t want to risk his belongings, securely stowed under a tarp in the bed of his truck, by leaving them on the street, ripe for picking.

After positioning his truck in the space directly beneath the security light, he shut off the engine, grabbed his duffel bag from the passenger seat, climbed out and keyed the lock.

On the front porch, a screen door slammed. The pretty woman—hell, maybe he was dead, or at least his brain—he hadn’t even asked her name—scampered down the wide front stairs, hurried down the front walk with a delightful sway of her perfect hips and took the sidewalk that led to the town’s main street. She’d changed into a floral dress that hugged her attractive curves and showed off her long, tanned legs.

Down, boy. She’s probably married and runs this place with her husband.

Disappointment engulfed him at the thought, because he couldn’t get over the impression he’d had from the first time he saw her that this woman was someone he’d been waiting for, for a long, long time.

He hoisted his bag to his shoulder and headed for the entrance. He’d be at the B and B a few more days. Plenty of time to learn her name.

And more.

CAROLINE CUT THROUGH the alley between Jay-Jay’s Garage and Fulton’s Department Store and hurried across Piedmont Avenue, the town’s main street, to Jodie’s Mountain Crafts and Café. It was past the café’s four o’clock closing time, but Caroline was counting on Jodie’s still being there to let her in. Otherwise, she’d have to return home and do her own baking for her guest’s breakfast tomorrow.

The Closed sign hung in plain view inside the double front doors, but when Caroline pressed her face to the glass, she spotted Jodie Davidson, the owner, sitting at the counter beside the cash register and figuring up the day’s receipts. Caroline rapped on the glass with her knuckles. Jodie looked up, spotted her and smiled. In less than a minute, she had the door open and was motioning Caroline to a seat at the counter.

“How ’bout a glass of iced tea?” Jodie asked. “I was just about to pour myself one.”

“Sounds good.”

Caroline had known Jodie all her life, and, with her brown, sun-streaked hair, cheerleader-fresh face, and trim figure, the café’s owner looked remarkably like the teenager Caroline remembered. But her friendship with Jodie went back even further than their teen years to the days when Jodie had bird-dogged the steps of her older brother Grant, whom she adored. Jodie had slipped away from her mother’s watchful eye one bright fall morning and appeared at the door of Caroline’s second-grade classroom. Grant had been more worried about his little sister than embarrassed, causing Caroline to develop a crush on the boy that had lasted through high school. Now Grant was married to Merrilee Stratton and they had a child of their own. All her friends had moved on with their lives. Only Caroline was stuck in a Pleasant Valley limbo.

In a series of deft moves, Jodie scooped crushed ice into two glasses, filled them with sweet tea, garnished the rims with lemon wedges, and set them on the counter.

“I don’t know how you do it,” Caroline said.

Jodie laughed. “I’ve been working this counter so many years, I could serve beverages in my sleep.”

Caroline took a sip and shook her head. “I’m not talking about just the café. You run this business, raise Brittany, and help Jeff ride herd on the boys at Archer Farm. Don’t you ever get tired?”

The entire town had been abuzz when Jeff Davidson, the resident bad boy, had returned to Pleasant Valley after a hitch in the military. With four other former Marines, he’d opened his facility for at-risk teenage boys. Not only had Archer Farm proved a success, Jeff had married Jodie and adopted her teenage daughter.

“I doubt I work half as hard as you,” Jodie said. “How’s your mother?”

“In Walhalla with Aunt Mona. And I have an unexpected guest. Please tell me you have muffins so I don’t have to go home and bake.”

“Cranberry-pecan, apple cinnamon, or blueberry-walnut?”

“All of the above. If this guy’s size is any indicator, I’m guessing his appetite is huge.”

“Businessman?” Jodie asked.

Caroline shrugged. “Don’t know. He’s just passing through on a move to Baltimore.”

“You okay there by yourself?” Concern shone in Jodie’s hazel eyes.

“There’s a dead bolt on the door to our private rooms. I’m as safe as anyone is these days. And the police department is only a block away.” She rolled her eyes. “And nosy neighbors even closer.”

Jodie opened the door of a stainless steel freezer, removed three packages of frozen muffins, dropped them into a plastic bag, and placed it on the counter. “I don’t know why you buy these from me. Your baking’s better than mine.”

“Thanks, but yours take the prize. Besides, I have so little time to myself, I hate to spend it in the kitchen.”

The bell on the front door jingled, indicating a new arrival. A tall, good-looking man with dark brown hair and matching eyes closed the door behind him.

“Hi, Rand,” Jodie greeted the newcomer. “What’s up?”

Randall Benedict rented the office suite over Jodie’s café for his law practice. Last October, he’d married Brynn Sawyer, another of Caroline’s lifelong friends, and had made a permanent move from New York to the valley.

“Hi, Jodie. Caroline, I’m glad you’re here. I stopped by your house, but your guest said you’d gone to town.”

Rand’s eyes were troubled, and thin-set lips and a tightened jaw replaced his usual rakish grin.

“Is something wrong?” Caroline’s heart stuttered. Why would the attorney seek her out? Had her mother had an accident and he’d been drafted to break the bad news? “Is it Mama?”

“As far as I know, your mother’s fine,” Rand assured her quickly, “but I have some sad news.”

The skin on the back of her neck tingled, and, in a flash of precognition, Caroline took a deep breath and waited, knowing that what Rand was about to say would change her life forever.

“It’s Eileen Bickerstaff at Blackberry Farm,” he said. “She died last night.”