Authors: Carolyn Brown
Milli Torres spotted the binoculars by the glint of the sun’s rays reflecting off them. Things must have changed over at the Bar M. He acted like he owned - or at least operated - the ranch. But where was Alice Martin? Poppy hadn’t mentioned anything happening to her, but if she was able to run the Bar M, she sure wouldn’t hire a foreman. Especially an egotistical male chauvinist who jumped to conclusions and let his dump-truck mouth get ahead of his bicycle butt. And besides, just how did Beau Luckadeau get from Louisiana to Oklahoma, anyway? The last time she’d seen him he was drunker than Cooter’s owl. Thank goodness for that. At least he had been so drunk he didn’t remember meeting her that disastrous night, which seemed like eons ago. The episode couldn’t have affected him like it did her. If it had, he would have noticed the smoke rising from his hand when she slapped his pointing finger away from her face. His insides would be something akin to warm, quivering jelly and he wouldn’t be watching her from the back side of that little rise. He’d have gotten a soft look in his eyes and gathered her in his arms so tightly she could hear his heart beating too fast through his chambray work shirt. No, sir, Beau did not remember and that was a good thing.
She finished the job, checked the wire for tightness so he would see she was able to do exactly what she set out to do, mounted her horse, Wild Fire, and rode back to the house, leaving only a cloud of dust, a herd of white-faced heifers, and a million unanswered questions in her wake.
She rode hell-bent for leather into the barnyard at the ranch. “Slim? Would you please unsaddle Wild Fire and rub her down? I’ve ridden her hard and…”
Slim, the tall, lanky ranch foreman with graying hair and gaunt cheeks grabbed the reins. “You’re right about one thing, Miss Milli; you rode this horse too hard. A kid from over on the Spencer place called and said some young fellers were out last night letting their dogs run the coyotes. Said he thinks maybe they cut the fence between us and the Bar M. It’s over there where Beau keeps that prize bull of his, and you know Jim would rise up out of that bed and kick that bull to hell and back if it got next to one of his cows. Not to mention what Beau would do if he thought someone was trying to get a free standing out of his bull. Brags all the time about how much money he makes in a year off stud fees with that bull. Says the critter is the same as ownin’ a good pumpin’ oil well. Thought maybe you’d want to check it out, or at least send one of the boys.”
She made a beeline toward the house. “I already fixed it.”
“Granny?’ she called out at the door. ”Where are you?
A small, lightly brown-skinned lady with gorgeous brown eyes, short graying black hair, and a spry step that belied her sixty years, peeked around the door into the utility room. “Right here, child. What do you need?”
“What is Beau Luckadeau doing on the Bar M?” Milli asked bluntly as she plopped down on the tiled floor and removed her boots.
“Beau? Why, he’s the owner. Alice Martin got Alzheimer’s disease a while back and when she realized what it could do to her, she willed everything she owned to Beau, since he’s her favorite nephew, and then when things started getting bad, she checked herself into a nursing home over in Ardmore. Smart woman. I see her every so often, but she doesn’t know me anymore. How did you know Beau?” Mary Torres asked.
“Didn’t ‘til now,” Milli lied. “Sony sumbitch thought he was going to order me off the land until I dusted up the gravel in front of his boots with my rifle. Treated me like I was some kind of hired hand who didn’t know straight up from backwards on a sunny day.”
“You shot at Beau?” Mary exclaimed. Why was Milli lying to her? Three signs always gave a liar away: breathlessness, high color, and shifting eyes. Nothing got past Mary Torres. “Why in the world would you shoot at Beau? He’s the easiest-going one of all those Luckadeau boys. That’s why Alice liked him best. He’s got green thumbs when it comes to growing things and a sixth sense when it comes to cattle. Lord, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Now why would you shoot at him?”
“Because he made me mad. He yelled at me.”
“He’s one of your Poppy’s best friends. He used to visit Alice in the summertime. Surely you met him at a barn dance or something when you come back here to visit?”
She tugged off her socks. “Nope, I did not. I didn’t even know he was kin to Alice until right now.”
“Maybe you better get in your truck and drive over there and make things right,” Mary suggested.
“Me? I didn’t do nothing. It was his stupid bull in our pasture, and he started the fight, yelling at me like some kind of idiot. Come through that cut fence like somebody died and made him God. Called me a bitch, even,” Milli said.
“Have it your way.”
Something wasn’t right. Mary felt as if she was looking at the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle and had no idea where to start fitting them together. There had been questions Milli would never answer, not when all three of her brothers pitched a fit that could be heard all the way from Amarillo to southern Oklahoma. Not even when her mother threatened to throw her out on her ear if she didn’t tell them who the baby’s father was. Mary didn’t know the details, but the first piece of the puzzle glowed brightly.
Milli knew Beau, and that was the corner piece to the whole puzzle.
“Where’s Katy?” Milli asked. She padded across the room in her bare feet, untucking a blue chambray shirt to let it fall on the outside of faded blue jeans that fit her so tightly she looked as though she’d been melted and poured into them. Mary remembered a time many years before when she filled out a pair of jeans like that: when all the male eyes in a room followed her as she walked across a room. Milli might look like her mother, but she was sure built like Mary had been at twenty-three: full bosom, tiny waist, rounded hips. Evidently Beau really had let his temper get ahead of his hormones if he yelled at her, instead of admiring all the curves under her jeans and shirt.
“Katy is entertaining your Poppy. I put her in the playpen and she’s been throwing her toys out over the top. He picks them up with his cane and tosses them back inside. It’s a good game for both of them,” Mary answered.
Milli headed for the den, where a hospital bed and lift chair had been installed for her grandfather when he came home from the hospital, and where he ruled the ranch with an iron fist even yet. At least Mary let him think he was king of the Lazy Z. Mary had as much of the ranch sense in the Torres family as her husband. They worked as a team and she was wise enough to let Jim wear the crown.
A pretty little toddler with a head full of gorgeous blonde curls looked up and squealed, “Mommy! Ride, peas?”
The baby raised her chubby little arms. Milli picked her up, squeezing her tightly to her chest. She talked fast to hide the quiver in her voice and the tears welling in her eyes. “We’ll go for a ride later, Katy Scarlett. Have you been taking good care of Poppy while Momma’s been out checking the cows?”
Katy wiggled down into her mother’s embrace and giggled.
“Course she’s been taking care of me,” Jim said from his recliner. “Best nurse a Poppy could have. If she wants to ride, then take an hour and go ride with her. We have to encourage her to keep her a cowgirl.”
A smile lit his weathered brown face and his soft brown eyes glittered as he watched his only granddaughter. He enjoyed having them both at the ranch so much that he’d begun thinking in terms of healing slower so they wouldn’t go home at the end of the summer Perhaps he could offer to build them a home of their own. Give Milli a hundred acres or so and bring her herd of cows out from west Texas. The ranch needed the laughter of a child again, and Katy fit the bill just right.
“Poppy, that’s all I hear: ‘Ride, peas.’ She’d keep me on a horse twenty-four seven if I’d let her. She loves to ride.”
“I think it’s cute the way she says it. ‘Body didn’t know better they’d think she was wanting to ride peas rather than a horse. Wasn’t that her first words? Stands to reason she’d say them often. It brings her something she likes and it’s easy for her to say.”
Mary stood in the door and that funny feeling rose again. Milli’s long black hair covered Katy like a natural blanket when she hugged her tightly. Katy’s blonde curls bounced as she wiggled in her mother’s arms and it was the second that she looked at Mary that it became so evident. It was those steel blue eyes that everyone noticed when they first looked at Katy. They looked so out of place with her lightly toasted skin from generations of Mexican blood on both sides of the family. Why hadn’t she seen the resemblance before?
Milli hugged Katy even closer. “Ride was actually her first word. I wanted her to have manners so I said, ‘Say ride, please.’ Turned into ‘Ride, peas.”
“Ride, peas, now!” Katy drew her eyes down.
“And you shall, after lunch,” Mary said.
She eyed mother and daughter. Two years ago Milli had broken up with her fiancé when she’d caught him in a motel with another woman. Then she’d gone back to college at Waco that fall, only to return home at Christmas with a baby on the way. When her brothers had wanted to square off with her ex-fiancé, she had told them the baby wasn’t his, and when Katy was born there was no doubt she was telling the truth. Her fiancé was from an old Mexican family and didn’t have a drop of Caucasian blood in him. His hair was black as a raven’s and his brown eyes were like two lumps of coal set in his well-chiseled, fine-boned face. He had been handsome and rich from the day he was born, with a bank account only slightly smaller than his ego.
At the end of April, when she gave birth to Katy, Milli declared the baby was hers and didn’t have a father. Even when her mother threatened her, she stood by her decision not to tell, but now that Mary looked at the baby, she wondered if she really didn’t know what gene pool Katy Scarlett dipped into to inherit those blue eyes and blonde curls. As she stared at the child with a puzzle piece now firmly in place, she saw other features that supported her theory. Curly blonde hair. Tall for fourteen months. Sweet natured. The exact replica of her father, with only a little of her mother’s skin color, determination, and temper showing through. Oh, all of it could have come from Milli’s other grandmother, but somehow, Mary Torres didn’t think so.
“What are you staring at so intently, Mary?” Jim asked. “It looks like heaven just opened up and you got a glimpse of an angel.”
Mary smiled sweetly. “That’s exactly what happened, sweetheart. Milli, bring Katy out in the yard and we’ll put her in the swing for a while before dinner. She needs to get some fresh air, and your chores are done for the morning. We’ll put old crip here in his wheelchair and push him out to watch her giggle. That’ll probably heal the hip quicker than any medicine the doctor can prescribe anyway.”
Jim and Mary sat side by side in the backyard, him in a wheelchair, her in a rocking chair, as Milli pushed the baby in a swing that hung from the first limb of a tall hackberry tree. “What happened back there?” Jim whispered.
Mary shot a look toward the swing. “Shhh, she’ll hear you. When I get it all figured out, I’ll tell you,” Mary leaned over and whispered in Jim’s ear.
“Is it about Katy?”
“Yes, and you’re going to love the story when it all gets worked out. She’s lovely, isn’t she?”
“Yes, she is. Sure you don’t want to tell me a little bit of it? You know I’ve always trusted your sixth sense,” he teased.
She took his hand in hers, kissing his fingertips. “Not now. Later.”
Milli sent up a silent prayer as she listened to Katy’s squeals. Lord, help me to pretend I don’t know him if he’s ever in my presence again. I need about ten thousand angels right now just to help me keep my sanity, Lord, so f you’ve got any to spare, send them to southern Oklahoma. Just touching his hand about made me melt in a puddle at his feet - again. I’d be grateful for a miracle, because that’s what I’m afraid it’s going to take f I have to stay here all summer.
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BEAU DRAGGED A FOLDING LAWN CHAIR ACROSS THE YARD and melted into it. “Momin’, Jim. Looks like we’re going to have another hot one, don’t it? How’s that hip? Been meanin’ to get over here all week, but things has been hectic over at the Bar M. How you been, Miss Mary? Keeping everybody in line with this old codger out of your way?”
“Oh, he still takes care of most things. He and Slim can boss from anyplace on the ranch.”
“And I’m better now that my granddaughter and her baby are here to help me out. Slim could probabl do the work. Goodness knows he bosses the boys around as much as I do. But Milli needed a break from the Lazy T and she’s almighty good help,” Jim said.
Beau nodded. “I see.”
So that T listing off to one side was the brand from her father’s ranch. Beau remembered Jim mentioning his son ranching somewhere out in the panhandle of Texas. He’d married a woman from that area and they’d located out there. Beau wrinkled his brow in a frown, trying to remember all that Jim had mentioned about the ranch while they played poker, but nothing else rose to the surface of his memory pool.
“Met your granddaughter this morning out in the pasture. Some fool kids cut the fence and my bull got over on your land. Don’t think he did any damage. Just ate a few bites of your grass,” he said casually.
Jim grinned. “Guess I can spare that, son. Milli didn’t mention meeting you.”
One minute Milli was pushing Katy in the swing and listening to her squeal. At least she could enjoy the exuberance of her daughter, the sweetness of her grandparents’ love, and the mid-morning summer breezes. By afternoon it would be so hot the horny toads and grasshoppers would be carrying parasols and canteens. Granny and Poppa were holding hands and had their heads together as they whispered like newlyweds. Someday she was going to have a marriage just like that. Someday when she found a man she could trust. One who didn’t say the words, “I love you,” the same way he asked, “Do you like white wine?” That’s about how much the three words meant to Matthew. He said the right things at the right time - and didn’t men love women before they proposed to them?
Apparently not all of them.
She shook off the bad memories and lifted her eyes toward the cloudless blue sky to thank the Almighty she’d found out just what kind of man Matthew had been before she married him. A flicker from the sunlight dancing on Beau’s blond hair caught her attention before she could even phrase a quick word of thanks. When she looked over her shoulder at her grandparents, expecting to see Granny either blushing or Poppa whispering sweet words again - there was Beau sitting in a lawn chair beside them.
The heavens had opened up and dropped him down in her sight again, for the second time in one day. Heavens,
nothing. If anything had dropped him, it would be the pure old devil himself. Maybe he was the devil incarnate. With clear blue eyes and tight-fitting jeans that made her blush when her eyes went from his sexy mouth, down his hard chest rippling with muscles beneath a skin-tight T-shirt, to his belt buckle and below.
His gaze traveled from her bare feet up to her face, blushing crimson - but there was no recognition in his eyes. Not a single blink and then a slow smile to say, “Hey, I remember you. I remember that night when…”
Good grief. She’d come to Oklahoma to get away from everything. This wasn’t going to be a summer of peace; it was going to be a summer of pure turmoil straight from the bowels of hell’s furnace.
“Milli,” Jim called. “Come over here and say hello to our neighbor.”
She had the sudden impulse to grab Katy, load Wild Fire back in her red and white horse trailer, and make a beeline back to west Texas. Or forget the horse trailer and just get in her little airplane out on the north forty and let one of the hired hands bring Wild Fire home next week. She was sitting on top of a keg of dynamite with a short fuse and the explosion was going to rock the world. On second thought, even an airplane couldn’t get her out of Oklahoma and back into Texas fast enough. She wished she could twitch her nose like that witch on television when she was a little girl, and presto, Beau would be a toad frog or an Angus bull. He could be the best-looking cowboy in the whole world twenty-four hours after she was gone, but just let him be a bull long enough for her to get Katy out of southern Oklahoma. Suddenly, a ranch in
Australia looked good. Or even in South Africa. She’d raise chickens in a Louisiana swamp if she could just get away from Beau.
Louisiana, she moaned silently. She didn’t ever want to set foot in that state again. They could give the whole state to the Cajuns and make it a separate country for all she cared.
Not a single one of these options had a foot in reality, and if she didn’t want to upset Poppa, she’d have to go over there. However if that man went and recognized her, she was going to grab Katy and run. She gave Katy one more push to keep her swinging and crossed the yard to where Beau was sprawled out in a lawn chair like he belonged to the Lazy Z Ranch.
“This is Anthony Beau Luckadeau,” Jim said. “He inherited the Bar M from Alice. Does a fine job of running it. We just call him Beau - he’s not too fond of Anthony.”
“Mr. Luckadeau?” She tried to smile but it came out more like a grimace. Lord, Almighty, but he was good looking. Those clear blue eyes and all that blond hair, not to mention the way he filled out his blue jeans or the way his chest and arm muscles strained the seams of his faded blue T-shirt. The last time she saw him he was dressed up for a wedding, but even in his work clothes, he’d make any woman’s panty hose crawl down to her ankles.
Stop it. This is a crucial time and if he looks up and says anything about Texarkana two years ago, I’m in deep trouble.
He stood up, towering above her five foot four inches, and stuck out his hand. “Just call me Beau. I really don’t like Anthony. Guess we got off on the wrong foot this morning. I should have introduced myself instead of assuming you knew me.”
A jolt of electricity glued her to the ground when she put her small hand in his big one, and a new burst of anger boiled in her heart. She had been determined never to let anyone make her feel like this again. Men weren’t to be trusted. They were all fickle and few cared what happened when the good time was finished.
She nodded coolly, ignoring the hot, fiery emotions. “Beau, it is, then. I should have introduced myself, too. It was just a crazy mix-up. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to take Katy inside.”
“That your little girl?” Beau hated to let go of her hand. Those brown eyes were familiar. He’d met lots of women in his thirty years and he was a complete sucker for brown eyes, especially since an experience at a wedding a couple of years before. But that woman was just a figment of his overactive and drunken imagination. She didn’t really exist, or so his relatives said. If she did, she might have looked a little like Milli. That’s probably why he felt so drawn to her. She was physically like his Amelia: the lady who had stolen half his heart one hot, steamy night in Louisiana. Amelia had had a soft southern voice like pure clover honey with just a faint hint of good whiskey to cut the sweet taste. She’d lain in his arms and taken his soul to paradise and then disappeared: an angel no one remembered and he couldn’t find the next morning.
She nodded and turned away from him. “Yes, that is my daughter, Katy.”
“Your husband here, too?”
“No,” she said over her shoulder as she took Katy out of the swing and started toward the house with Mary following close behind.
Beau didn’t want her to leave. “Is he coming later?”
She pretended she didn’t hear him.
“She hasn’t got a husband,” Jim said. “Set back down here, son, and keep an old man company for a little while. Womenfolk think they’ve got to help Hilda put dinner on the table. Why don’t you stay and eat with us? Hilda always makes plenty.”
Beau shook his head seriously. “Can’t, but thanks for the invitation. Rosa would have my hide tacked to the smokehouse door if I didn’t show up for dinner today. She’s made apple dumplings and they’re my favorite dessert. Milli’ s divorced, then?”
“Nope, never married. Folks were upset at first, but Katy kinda wins everyone’s heart so they got over it pretty quick. Milli’s a top-notch hand. She can work hard as any man and cook good as any woman. Her brothers can’t hold a candle to her when it comes to cattle. She got a sixth sense about it from her granny. Mary’s always been smarter than me about ranching, but she’s a good enough woman to let me think everything is my idea. Milli was engaged to a fellow who did her dirty and then she went away to college and got pregnant. Wouldn’t ever tell who the father was. Just said the baby was hers and she was a single mother.”
“I see,” Beau said, a whoosh of air escaping from his lungs. Relief filled him. He didn’t want Milli to be married, and yet couldn’t understand why. Amanda, his current girlfriend, the woman he intended to propose to
the very next night, was everything he needed in a wife. Tall, blonde, feminine. A kindergarten teacher at the Wilson school. He’d dated her for six months and it was time for him to settle down and raise a son to take over the Bar M someday. So why did he care whether or not Milli Torres was married?
“Well, I better be gettin’ on back. If I’m late Rosa will complain for a week. Looks like you’ll be back at the head of the poker table before long,” he said.
“Sure hope so. Don’t be a stranger, son. Come back soon. Guess we’ll see you at the Spencer barn dance tomorrow night? Mary says I can go if I’ll sit in the wheelchair. Won’t be easy for an old two-stepper like me. Reckon I could beg you into askin’ my wife to dance one time? Doe says it’ll be a few weeks before I can do much dancin’,” Jim said.
“Be honored, sir. See you there. And listen to the doe. You can dance later.”
“That’s hard for an old feller like me to do.” Jim waved as Beau disappeared around the front of the house.
“Now, what was that all about?” Jim muttered as he drew his eyebrows down into a solid black line over his brown eyes. “Something is brewing around here. I can smell it, and by damn, Mary knows something, too. And I think it might have to do with Beau. Milli acted like she’d rather touch a rattlesnake than shake Beau’s hand, and she ain’t never even met him. Well, Mary better get ready to tell me what’s going on or I’ll get out of this wheelchair and throw a stompin’ ravin’ fit.”
******
“Nice man, that Beau,” Mary said. “Hilda, don’t you think Beau is a nice man?”
The gray-haired cook nodded as she stirred a pot of pinto beans boiling on the back of the stove. “Yes, I do. Always been polite and a downright nice gentleman. Don’t know what he sees in that Amanda girl, though. She’s uppity if you ask me. Course, it ain’t a bit of my business. Rosa says when she comes to the ranch she’s got her nose so high in the air that if it rained, she’d drown. But if that’s who he’s got picked out, guess we’ll have to live with it. Like I said, it ain’t a bit of my business if Amanda turns the whole ranch into some kind of social club, and you mark my words, that’s exactly what she’ll do. Anyway, that’s Beau’s business. It sure ain’t mine.”
“Who’s Amanda?” Milli asked, then was instantly angry for caring. Whatever Beau did or didn’t do wasn’t any of her concern. She’d only met him one time before and that was a strange situation that he wouldn’t ever remember, and every day, she wished she didn’t either.
“Why, that’s his girlfriend. Talk has it that he’s about to propose to her,” Mary said. “She’s a schoolteacher up in Wilson. She’s a tall blonde and pretty as a picture, but so snooty and snobby, no one around here thinks much of her. Beau brought her to the last barn dance over at the Spencers’ place and she acted like she was afraid she’d step in something nasty all evening. Barely would even two-step with Beau.”
Milli fought a batch of tears damming up behind her eyes. She didn’t shed a tear the day the doctor told her she was pregnant. She didn’t cry when she told her parents and her mother ranted and raved for an hour about how she’d disgraced both the Jiminez and Torres names. She didn’t even cry when she was in labor for sixteen hours and delivered an eight-pound daughter. So where in the hell did a bucket of tears come from now?
Hilda talked as she cooked. “Rosa says that Beau is as lucky as they come. Says he can make a cow have a healthy calf and the alfalfa grow tall as a barn, but he’s just plain stupid when it comes to women. She says he’s lucky in everything - but he ain’t lucky in love. So I guess if he really asks this Amanda to marry him, he’ll have a pretty showpiece for his ranch, but she won’t be worth much more than tits on a boar hog. She might be a good teacher, but she’s worthless when it comes to ranchin’.”
Mary saw her granddaughter’s big brown eyes swimming in tears. Maybe it was just the stress-filled morning. It couldn’t have been easy to find that big, black bruiser of a bull in her grandfather’s pasture. It would have been hard to face Beau out in the yard after she’d yanked out her gun and shot at him - to realize he was indeed a good friend of the family. But Mary really believed that her granddaughter, Camillia Kathryn Torres, was facing something bigger than her pride today.
“I think Katy needs her diaper changed,” Milli choked out a few words and disappeared up the stairs of the farmhouse with her daughter.
She set Katy on the bedroom floor to play and Plopped down on her bed to stare at the swirls in the textured ceiling. If she’d known Beau Luckadeau Was anywhere near southern Oklahoma, she certainly Would not have accepted the offer to work for her grandparents all summer. Now that she was here, how in the world would she ever be able to go back home without an excuse? The only thing she could do was endure the summer, hopefully with her emotions and senses intact.
Katy picked up a pyramid of brightly colored rings stacked on a rocking base. Milli continued to stare at the ceiling, remembering the summer two years before.
She’d fallen in love with Matthew the first day she laid eyes on him at the Lazy T cattle sale. His grandfather and father had come from the Rio Grande Valley to look at a Torres bull for his grandfather’s ranch. She could envision that day even yet. She had walked into the barn and his eyebrows had raised a full inch.