A Love to Call Her Own (24 page)

Picking up her bottle of water, its label commemorating the day, Lucy raised it to her girls. “Here's to Carly and Dane and to the happiest day in the last six years of my life. Let's keep the celebrations coming, okay?”

With laughter and responses ranging from
hear, hear
to
you bet!
, they tapped bottles, then drank. In that moment, not one of them looked as if she had a care in the world. The grief and the sorrow were gone—not forgotten, but not so near the surface, either—and they were just dear friends being friends.

She was so lucky to be a part of them.

Dalton thought he was just about free to go when the photographer called the wedding party back for pictures, first in the sanctuary, then outside in the warm sun. He hadn't had to hold a smile for such a long time that his face muscles were starting to protest when the guy decided ten thousand shots were enough.

Finally he could slip out of his jacket. His cattle's black-and-white coats might keep them warm in winter and cool in summer, but he was about to dissolve into a giant drop of sweat. As the rest of the guests came out of the church to say good-bye to the happy couple, he loosened his tie, then saw Jessy, standing in the shade of an oak, arms folded over her middle, watching him.

God, she'd been watching him all through the reception, and him her. He couldn't say why he hadn't approached her, asked her to share a piece of cake, talk with him, dance with him. Then his gut clenched hard, his chest tightening, and he remembered: because he would have spontaneously combusted, and wouldn't that have been an ugly page in Dane and Carly's wedding album? From the moment he'd walked into the church and seen her sitting there all beautiful and sexy and focused on him, all he could think was,
Is it time? Please, can it be time?

He was surprised God hadn't struck him down where he stood.

It was stupid, he thought as he walked to her. He was thirty-two years old. He'd been married. He'd had sex with his share of women. Hell, he'd had sex with
this
woman. But he hadn't known then what he knew now. Then it had been horniness and loneliness, and any woman who persisted until he was drunk would have satisfied. Now it was…

Well, he didn't know what it was, exactly. Important. They had something special, a second chance for both of them to make things right, to make each other right. Something to not screw up.

Good job of giving yourself a case of performance anxiety, buddy.

Then he got close enough to catch a whiff of her perfume, and his entire body reacted with a jerk. The only anxiety there was what if it was too soon for her and then how long would he have to wait.

“Didn't I tell you not to steal attention from the bride?” he murmured when he reached her.

“Nobody noticed.”

“Yeah, the four scientists from Utah were struck dumb through the entire reception.”

“It was probably just the shoes. They were trying to figure out the whole height of the shoes, shape of the feet, impossible to balance thing.”

“Yeah, honey, they weren't looking at your shoes.” One hand lightly touching her back, he nudged her forward. “Go join your friends. I don't know about Carly, but Dane's anxious to get going.”
And so am I.

Her eyes, the exact perfect shade of green for her red hair and delicate skin, locked with his. “Frankly, I prefer to have flowers handed to me, preferably already in a container with water. Not lobbed in my direction like a live grenade.”

“I'll make a note of that.” He nudged her again. “Go so you can get in on the group hug.”

“How do you know there'll be a group hug?”

He rolled his gaze to the clear blue sky. “You women hug. A lot.”

With a wry look, she handed him her purse, then wound through the guests to join the margarita girls. Keegan, holding his daughter and trailed by a teenage girl and a boy a few years younger, moved over to share the shade. “You understand the point of throwing perfectly good flowers?”

“Nope.”

“Me, either,” Keegan replied. Taking a cue from him, the little girl shook her head vigorously. “Me, neither,” she added. “We
plant
flowers.”

While the women got set up, joking and calling, Keegan shifted the girl to his other arm. “These are Therese's and my kids, Mariah, Abby, and Jacob. This is Dalton Smith. You can call him Mr. Dalton or Mr. Smith.”

Dalton vaguely remembered kids calling his grandfather Mr. Doug. It felt old-fashioned, but he liked the connection.

“Where's your uniform, Mr. Dalton?” Mariah asked, playing with the ribbons attached to her father's jacket.

“I don't wear a uniform. I'm a rancher.”

Abby shifted her gaze his way. “You have horses?”

“Palominos. Their coat's about the color of your hair.”

Her features narrowed as if she were plotting a way to wrangle an invitation to see them. Kids and horses…some things never went out of style. If it was okay with her mother, sometime he'd have Jessy invite them out.

Raised voices from the gathering on the lawn drew their attention to the women. Carly stood a few yards from them, arm drawn back, then she threw the flowers directly at Jessy. Instead of ducking—or catching—them, Jessy bounced them into a high arc straight at Dalton.

Keegan and the kids backed away, leaving him no choice but to catch them. When he did so, Jessy smiled smugly before diving into the group hug. After crying, laughing, and whispering, they freed Carly to join Dane in his pickup, then Jessy strolled toward him. “Did I mention I used to play volleyball? I may have been short, but my spikes were deadly.”

He passed her purse over, claimed her hand, and started toward his own truck. She waved good-bye to her friends as they passed, grinning when one of them called, “Ooh, a man in a hurry. She'd better be smiling real big when we see her again, cowboy.”

Face heating, he asked, “Is there anything your friends won't say?”

She pretended to think about it as he helped her into the seat. “Some of them are quite proper. Some of us, if it crosses our minds, it crosses our lips. Where are we going for dinner?”

He closed her door, then went around to the driver's side, tossing his jacket in the backseat and laying the bouquet on top of it before climbing in. “We've got three options. We can drive to Tulsa, or we can go to Luca's.”

“Or?”

Though his tie was already loose, he tugged at it, then ran his fingers through his hair. His throat suddenly swelled like a bad case of mumps, and his palms were as damp as if he'd dunked them in a tub of water. “We could, uh, get takeout or—or see what's in my freezer and, uh, just have dinner, uh, alone.”

After a long still moment, her gaze intense, managing both sensual and innocent in one look, she asked, “Are you thinking about getting me out of this dress?”

Her voice was husky, her accent pronounced, her question enough to raise his temperature to wildfire level. His fingers tightened and loosened on the steering wheel before he swallowed hard and gave voice to his own husky words. “Yeah. From the first moment I saw you in it.”

Her smile came slowly, teasing and satisfied. “Good. Let's explore your freezer.”

With another hard swallow, he pulled out of the parking lot and took the backstreets to First, where he turned north out of town. Beside him in her pretty dress, Jessy rested one arm on the door and softly hummed a melody. Dalton didn't recognize it, though he didn't know whether it was because he didn't know the song or her rendition was pretty awful. A gorgeous, incredibly hot woman who couldn't hit a note solidly even with a hammer. Damned if he knew how that was endearing, but it was.

When he turned off the paved road at the pasture where she'd mistaken a bull for a cow, her sigh echoed. “Poor cows. They look so content. They don't have a clue that they're going to end up on a dinner plate at Holy Cow.”

“They're born, they graze, they breed, they give birth, they die. They're not that much different from us.”

Her eyebrows arched when she looked at him. “No one grills us up and charges fifteen bucks a cut.”

“If they could get fifteen bucks a cut, someone would try.” Wanting contact, no matter how little, he reached for her hand, rubbing his thumb over her pink nails. The day they'd met, her polish had been bright, screaming-in-your-face purple. He'd never known a woman who considered that an appropriate color past second grade. “I saw how you inhaled that ribeye. However much you don't like looking your food in the eye, the beef industry's in no danger of losing you as a customer.”

“No,” she agreed. “It's just that cows are
cute
. I mean, a chicken or a pig—bless their hearts, pigs are just fat and ugly and rooting around in the mud. Cows could be pets.” Her hair gleamed as she shook her head. “That sounds shallow, doesn't it? ‘Save the pretty animals. Eat pork.'”

“If your livelihood depended on pigs, trust me, you'd think they're the most beautiful animals in the world.”

“Did you always want to be a rancher?”

“Pretty much. It's what I knew. My dad always expected us to take over, and I always figured I would.” Though David had had the same expectations of Dillon, and look how that had turned out.

“The night we went to Walleyed Joe's, you mentioned your brothers and the family tradition of naming the sons.”

Damn, she'd caught his use of
us
. He released her hand to turn into the driveway but didn't say anything. That night, she'd asked,
So it's you and…
, and he'd replied,
Don't ask.
She hadn't. Now she would. They knew each other better. Hell, they were about to get intimate. Any woman would feel entitled to know little things like the existence of a worthless charmer of a brother.

But she didn't ask. She gazed ahead as he drove the narrow lane, parking under a big oak for shade. Soon the sap would start to drip, and he'd have to park elsewhere or risk getting stuck to the door handle every time he touched it.

They were home. Time to go inside, let Oz out, make small talk, eventually wander up the stairs to his room, or fix dinner and maybe make out a bit before moving upstairs, or…Or tell her what she wanted to know.

Talk about Dillon or get naked with Jessy. Damn, that was no contest.

“Someday I'll tell you about him,” he said after shutting off the engine. “But today's been way too good a day to ruin with talk about Dillon.”

She held his gaze for a moment, then nodded before getting out of the truck and strolling toward the front porch. Oz was barking at the living room window, probably delighted that Dalton had brought Jessy home for him. The horses were grazing in the pasture, paying the dog no attention, and fat bees buzzed around the white-flowered bushes growing along the west side of the house.

Definitely too good a day to ruin and promising to get better.

After giving Oz an enthusiastic greeting and a scratching that made his left back leg twitch, Jessy slowly straightened, a bad case of nerves practically making
her
twitch. How long had it been since she'd gone home with a man? Not counting the guys she'd hooked up with when she was drinking because, in the present, they
didn't
count. A long time. Aaron had been the last one. There had been guys before him, of course, but that was when she was young and single, looking to have a good time.

She was definitely single now, though
young
was a matter of perspective, and she wasn't looking for just a good time. She wanted so much more. A scary thought, hence the unsteady hands and the somersaulting stomach.

Then she looked at Dalton. He'd closed the door, tossed his jacket over the back of a chair just inside the living room, then taken the bouquet to the kitchen. After rattling through the cabinets, he came up with a quart canning jar, filled it with water, and stuffed the flowers inside. He carried it to her, offering it solemnly. His dark eyes were shadowed with the same uncertainty she felt, the same need, the same bone-deep desire.
I prefer to have flowers handed to me,
she'd told him at the church,
preferably already in a container with water.

She accepted the blooms, her nerves settling, her anxiety changing to anticipation. She'd made a lot of mistakes in her life, done things she wasn't proud of, things she dearly regretted, but this wasn't one of them. In fact, this man—having drunken sex with him, getting to know him, trusting him, loving him—just might be the best choice she'd ever made.

Blindly she set the flowers on the step and found the staircase newel post to hold on to. She lifted one foot, unfastened the delicate ankle strap, then let the shoe slide off. After removing the other, she left them lying on the wood floor, one standing upright, the other tilted against the first stair, their little bows cute and sexy, reclaimed the flowers, and slowly started up. She trailed her fingers along the rail that generations of Smiths had touched, felt the smoothness they'd worn into each step, noticed the temperature rising slightly as she climbed.

She could live in this house—coming down the stairs at dawn each morning, learning to cook in the big kitchen, helping with the livestock, going up the stairs every night to sleep in Dalton's arms. She could listen to its old creaks and groans, open the windows depending on which way the wind was blowing, leave her mark on it. She could belong in it. Belong
to
it.

At the top, the hallway ran west to east, two doors to the left, three to the right. The doors on the left were closed, so she turned right, where one open door revealed a bathroom, easily twice the size of hers, with white wainscoting beneath pale green paint, a mirror framed in barn wood that still showed traces of its original dark red color, a stand-alone shower, and a claw-foot tub.