They met Sally coming out of the room where Laura planned to put Janet. “It’s all ready. Bed is turned down. Towels are under the vanity in the bathroom, and I put out that special soap you like, Laura.”
“Thank you, Sally. This is my sister, Janet. We couldn’t run this place without Sally. She’s an angel,” Laura said.
Sally beamed and batted the air with one of her big hands. “Listen to you go on. We’re just glad Mr. Colton is happy. Y’all need anything, I’ll be back tomorrow and Sunday. Don’t usually work on the weekends but Miz Maudie, she needs extra help this weekend. Ain’t every week that we have a big old party on the ranch.”
“Double wow!” Janet said when Laura opened the door into her room. “This is all mine?”
“All yours. And mine is right next door,” Laura said. “Colton said that I should move into the big house while you are here so we can visit more. We’ll have our own space and yet be able to run back and forth without crossing the lawn. Later, you can see my apartment out over the carriage house.”
“What does the master suite look like?” Janet asked.
“It’s not a lot different than these rooms,” she said.
How was she supposed to know what the master suite looked like? Though she’d been invited, she’d never been in Colton’s room. She had no idea if it was a suite like they’d had in the hotel or if it really was like the other bedrooms.
“Luggage on the way up,” Colton yelled.
“We aren’t talkin’ about you,” Laura yelled back.
“Just makin’ sure you know there are men folks in hearing distance,” he drawled and then laughed.
“I like him,” Janet said.
“I heard that.” Colton’s head appeared at the top of the staircase and then the rest of his body followed with suitcases tucked under both arms and in his hands.
“Good lord, Janet, did you bring everything you own?”
“Yep, and what you left in the closet, too.”
“Why?”
“You might as well have it here as there and I need the room.”
“But,” Laura started and then clamped her mouth shut.
“And where do these go?” Rusty asked.
Janet pointed to the room next to hers. “If it’s not a pink suitcase, it goes in Laura’s room.”
“How in the devil did you get so many on the plane?” Laura asked.
“Easy. I paid for them, or rather, Andy did,” Janet said.
“Janet, this is Rusty. He’s my right-hand man on the ranch. I don’t even have to tell you that this is Laura’s sister because they could be twins,” Colton made introductions. “My Aunt Maudie and Roxie are off doing some last-minute shopping. I bet Roxie will join the hen session wherever y’all are having it and you can meet Aunt Maudie tomorrow. We’ll get on out of your hair and let you alone now. See you later, darlin’.” He gave Laura a pat on the shoulder and it didn’t feel as wrong as his attitude on the porch.
“Are you hungry? Want a beer or some iced tea?”
“I’d take a beer, but I stopped and got a burger on the way so I’m not hungry,” Janet said.
“Get comfortable and I’ll bring some right up.”
***
Colton and Rusty did a workout in the gym then a thirty-minute swim before they came back to the house. He kicked his boots off at the back door, picked up a beer from the refrigerator on his way through the kitchen, and padded up the staircase in his socks.
“I will not!” Laura’s voice came through the door.
He stopped and leaned against the wall.
“You’ve got a sweet setup here, Laura. You’d be a fool to let all this slip through your hands. You can love a rich man as well as a poor one.”
He held his breath.
“You are just seeing the money,” Laura said.
“Oh, I see the cowboy too. It wouldn’t be too tough to crawl into bed with him, and just think of half this ranch on down the road. It’s the best opportunity that’s ever come your way.”
“No, thank you. I respect him and this whole family too much to pull any kind of scam.”
He exhaled slowly.
Respect.
It wasn’t love but it was a start.
“You’re crazy. It’s too bad that Andy brought you to work here to pay off my debt instead of me. I’d have already had him wrapped around my finger and then I’d have taken care of both of us for the rest of our lives,” Janet said.
“I am a grown woman and I’ve always taken care of myself. Speaking of which, did you make your meetings this week?”
“One of them. And I did place a two-dollar bet on the ponies but I lost. So I figure I’d best make two meetings next week,” Janet said.
Laura’s voice shot up. “Dammit! I didn’t bail you out of trouble just so you could fall back into it. I’m finished, Janet. I mean it. If you go to those loan sharks again, I’m not paying them off for you.”
“With all this, darlin’, you wouldn’t let me sink, now would you?” Janet’s laugh was brittle.
“I could always have you committed,” Laura threatened.
“But you won’t. I’m the needy, clingy little nobody who makes you feel all good about yourself. You’d better think about your unstable big sister before you walk away from this sweet little deal in the boonies.”
He clenched his fists.
“I am thinking about you. I’m not coming back to west Texas when I leave the ranch. I’m going to disappear for a long time and you aren’t going to know where I am. As long as I’m enabling you, you’ll never stop your gambling and getting into trouble. I love you, Janet. But I’m finished bailing you out. Good night, sister,” she said.
“You wouldn’t dare,” Janet said.
“Consider it already done.”
“But I love you and I need you. We can whip the world as long as we are together.” Janet laughed.
“I can whip the world all by myself and so can you. You just got to figure that out on your own. We are grown. We aren’t little girls anymore. See you in the morning at the games. My team is going to beat your team,” Laura said.
“In your wildest dreams you couldn’t beat me. You never could,” Janet said.
“We’ll see.”
Colton moved away from the wall quickly when he realized the conversation was over. At that same time, the front door shut and Roxie came up the stairs carrying a thick book.
“What? Laura gave me permission to go to her apartment and pick out any book I wanted to read. There’s nothing on television tonight and Dillon has to help his daddy get in the hay or he can’t come play tomorrow.”
“I thought you’d be bitin’ at the bit to get in there with those two women and gossip,” Colton said.
“She’s here? Laura’s sister is here?” Roxie asked.
Laura closed the door to Janet’s room behind her. “She’s here and she’s tired so I’m going to grab a book and read a while, too. You sure you’re all right with this thing tomorrow night, Colton? You’ve had time to think about it and…”
Colton took Laura’s hand in his. “I’m fine with it. Good night, Roxie. See you in the morning.”
Roxie went straight to her room and shut the door.
“Come to my room and I’ll make you a drink. I can’t believe you aren’t going to talk to Janet all night. You were so excited all week that you couldn’t be still and you’ve already finished talking? Something must be wrong.” He led her to his room and threw open the door. “Welcome to my part of this monster big house.”
“I’d like Jack Daniel’s, two fingers, neat,” she said.
He went to the bar in the corner of the sitting room and poured two drinks, adding a cube of ice to his. She slumped down in the corner of the massive leather sofa and reached for the tumbler when he sat down beside her. She sipped it and sighed.
“Good?” he asked.
“You’ll never know how bad I needed this. So you do have a suite.”
“Sitting room and you can see the bedroom through the archway. Over on that side is another smaller room with a nice big window.” He pointed to the right.
“What’s that for?”
“The former owners used it for a nursery. I understand four kids started out their lives in that little room,” he said. “You ever think about kids?”
“I’d be a terrible mother, Colton.”
“What makes you say that?” He moved close enough that he could toy with her hair.
“Look at what I came from. Would you trust me to have your children?”
“Yes, I would, Laura. I’ve seen you with Roxie and with Daisy and Donald. You have loving, kind instincts. You’d be a great mother.”
“Anyone can love a cat and a duck. You can ban them to the barn. It’s kind of hard to do that with a kid,” she said.
“I see what I see and I think you’d be a good mother, Laura.”
***
The weight of the conversation with Janet lifted from her heart and she smiled. He trusted her enough to have children with her and Janet wanted her to fleece him? She tossed back the rest of her whiskey and crawled into his lap.
“Please hold me. I don’t even want to have sex but I want you to hold me and I want to wake up with you beside me tomorrow morning.”
Roxie stood on the back of a pickup truck and called out the names of the teams. One woman and one man—a total of ten teams. They came forward, some with smiles and some shaking their heads, to stand beside one of the pickup trucks lined up in a row.
“The plan is in the passenger’s seat. The name of the game is winning, and Dillon and I plan to do just that. Aunt Maudie has the gun. Leave your window down so you can hear the shot that lets the games begin. Oh, and the winning team will get a five-thousand-dollar check to split between them however they want.”
Ten truck engines rumbled like horses snorting to get out of the chute at a race. The envelope had “Colton and Laura” written on the outside and just holding it made her hands shake. She’d wanted to tell Janet in the middle of the argument that she and Colton weren’t really dating, that it was a ruse to keep him free from gold-digging women like Janet. She wanted to come clean but she’d promised Andy and the family and she couldn’t go back on her word.
“Good lord!” she yelled above the noise of the trucks.
“What?” Colton looked around at her.
“Games, my ass. You are going to get a helluva lot of work out of these folks today.”
He grinned. “What’s first on the list?”
“Hay, and our field has been marked with the white flags.”
“Teamwork, darlin’, that’s what this is about. And someone is going home with a pretty good paycheck for today’s work,” Colton said.
Maudie raised the pistol and fired a shot in the air and all ten trucks sped out, leaving nothing but a cloud of dust in their wake and dozens of people cheering them on.
“Read to me. What are the directions for our field?”
“Right there, turn left,” she yelled and pointed. “We almost missed it. We’re supposed to follow the white flags. But you knew that, Colton, didn’t you?”
He crossed his heart with one hand and tapped the brake. “I did not. Since I’m a contestant, I didn’t get in on the game plan or the directions. Aunt Maudie, Ina Dean, and Patsy planned it all. She don’t abide cheatin’ in any form, so I don’t know any more than you do. Dammit!”
“What?” She looked around.
“We took off like everyone else without thinking.” He turned the truck around and headed back toward the house.
“There are no white flags this way. I’m not forfeiting just because you are the boss. Give me the keys! I’ll load this truck myself.”
Five thousand dollars was a lot of money in her world and be damned if she’d let it slide through her fingers because he changed his mind about playing—even if playing was really working.
“We need hay hooks and gloves. The time we spend going back to get them will put us ahead in the end. What’s next on the game?”
“Fences,” she said. “You can get those tools too and save time.”
She read the directions and slapped her thigh. “Well, shit!”
“I bet it says that if you are caught with fencing tools in your truck you are disqualified, right?”
She nodded. A bright red truck passed them and Roxie waved from the passenger’s window. Colton took off like a rocket and kept right beside them until they slowed down and veered off to the left.
“Why did they do that?” Laura asked.
“Directions, please!” he shouted.
“Equipment is in the barn with the red flag waving from the top. They saw the flag first. It’s over there.” She pointed.
He whipped the steering wheel in that direction and the big black truck felt as if it was flying. The kids had already grabbed their tow sack full of tools from the table that Maudie, Ina Dean, and Patsy manned.
“I’ll get the stuff. You turn this truck around.” She unfastened her seat belt and threw the truck door open when he slid to a stop. Maudie handed her a burlap bag with a white ribbon fastened to the front with a safety pin. She sidestepped when she saw Janet coming at her in a dead run. The hussy was planning to trip her so that she’d get a slight advantage.
“You’re gettin’ smart, sister.” Janet laughed.
“I just know you and you aren’t going to win by cheating,” Laura threw over her shoulder. She tossed the sack in the bed of the truck and off they went for the second time, passing the rest of the trucks coming back for their tools. “Follow the white flags. Right here, turn right, now left, and there it is. The first three bales mark our space and would you look at that? Roxie and Dillon are right beside us.”
“They’re young and strong but we’re experienced. Real quick, run down the list. When is fishin’?”
“Right after dinner.”
He smiled. “That’s where we will catch up if we get behind.”
“Oh, are you a fish whisperer?”
He chuckled. “Damn straight! I could whisper a big old catfish out of a sand pile. You going to drive or load the first time?”
“Load. You can have the next one. Four trips?”
“That’s the way I figure it. I bet the rules say if you lose a bale on the way, you have to forfeit that part of the game, right?”
She ran a finger down the list of rules. “It says each team gets one hundred points for each event. Ten points gets deducted for the first bale that falls off; twenty for the second; and fifty for the third. Good lord, we could lose eighty points of our hundred if we aren’t careful.”
“Twenty-five to the load it is, then. Any more over this rough terrain would be asking for trouble.” He jumped out of the truck and dumped the bag of tools in the back of the truck.
“Gloves, hay hooks, and half a dozen bottles of water. No tie-downs. That means we don’t stack them very high.”
Laura dropped the tailgate, grabbed a pair of gloves, and said, “Drive.”
She jogged to the first bale, picked it up by the wire holding it together, and threw it over the side of the truck. When she got five bales she’d ride to the next one and organize them. It wasn’t her first rodeo in the hay field and she’d be damned if Janet and Rusty beat the white team.
“Hey, I just read the rules a little more. The one who gets their bales stacked in the barn the quickest gets fifty extra bonus points.”
She tossed another bale over the side. They were a lot heavier than they’d been when she was Roxie’s age. She glanced over at the red truck and Roxie waved from the driver’s seat.
“And,” Colton yelled back, “one member of the team is not allowed to drive the whole time. They have to switch off.”
“Read the rules,” she yelled as loud as she could.
“I am,” Colton said.
“I’m talking to Roxie,” Laura said.
Colton’s laughter echoed across the fields like deep rolling thunder.
On the last load, she and Colton stacked hay with Roxie and Dillon on one side and Janet and Rusty on the other. Sweat stuck Janet’s blond hair to her face in limp strands and she panted as if she’d just run a mile.
“I remember now why I’m a hairdresser instead of a rancher.” She swiped a gloved hand across her forehead. “But for one day I do remember how to do this stuff and I will beat you.”
“You’d better put your hair up in a ponytail and prepare to work hard. I’ve got the fish whisperer on my team. And I do know how to assemble a wheelbarrow.”
“So do I,” Rusty said. “I’m the king of wheelbarrows.”
“See. Blue team wins,” Janet said.
“Only if you whip the white team. Last bale. Time, Maudie!”
Maudie held up a hand. “Too late. Red team gets the bonus points for stacking but several teams get the full one hundred hauling points. Blue team lost two bales so they lost thirty points on that. That puts them ahead by twenty points. Read your directions for the fencing, and good luck, everyone.”
***
They had to drive all the way to the backside of the farm to get what they needed to put in twenty fence posts and string the barbed wire for the next part of the game. Metal fence posts had been set inside the old wooden posts and sagging barbed wire fence on the very back of the ranch. A white flag flew from the last post that Rusty and his crew had reached when they were working the day before. From there to the next post looked like a mile, but it was really only eighty yards, which was less than the length of a football field.
Colton and Laura worked between the blue team, which was Janet and Rusty, and the purple team, which was Preacher Roger and Cynthia. Distance prevented taunting, so that was probably why Maudie planned it that way. Still, Colton couldn’t help but keep an eye on the blue team. He didn’t really care if he won but he damn sure did not want Janet to beat Laura.
“You take that tape measure and measure twelve feet from right here while I get a post,” he said.
She hooked the end of the tape around the post that was already there and walked out twelve feet with it and set her foot where the post should go. He brought the T-post driver and two posts from the back of the truck with him and set the first one where her foot had been. She jerked on her gloves and held the post steady while he began to pound it into the ground with the driver.
“Two feet into the ground and four strands?” she asked.
“That’s right. Thank goodness for that last rain. The ground isn’t too hard,” he said.
“That is good and steady,” she said and went running back to the truck.
She hooked the measuring tape to her belt, grabbed two posts from the back of the truck, and jogged toward the end of their section. By the time he was finished, she had measured and laid the posts where they would go, taped off the next one for him to set, and had it ready for him to pound into the ground. When it was steady, she picked up two more posts and carried them down the row.
Colton was amazed at her organizational skills. But what astounded him even more was that working with her felt so right. When the posts were set, he picked up the roll of barbed wire and she got the bag of fencing clips, the wire cutters, and pliers. He stretched the wire. Together they tightened it, cut it with the cutters, and used the pliers to rope it down with the clips. It made for slower progress than setting the posts, but they made it to the end before the blue team got the last of their wire strung.
“Good job,” Ina Dean called from inside the truck that she and Maudie used to patrol the fencing test. “White and purple are in a tie which will probably put them in a tie with the red team for the morning’s tests. When these others finish up we’ll serve dinner back at the ranch.”
“Good job.” Preacher Roger shook Colton’s hand.
Colton threw an arm loosely around Laura’s shoulders. “I’ve got a good helper.”
“So do I,” Roger said.
“I don’t like ranchin’ but I can do it,” Cynthia said honestly.
“See you back at the ranch,” Colton said.
He opened the door for Laura and she settled into the passenger’s seat. He whistled as he checked the truck bed to make sure the driver, the rest of the barbed wire, both sets of gloves, and two tape measures were all there. If anything got left behind, points would be deducted. Right now the white team was tied for first place. Rusty would not make a mistake and leave behind so much as one fence clip, so he had to stay on his toes.
“Did you see that?” Laura asked.
“I saw twenty fence posts and a lot of barbed wire. And I saw the most beautiful woman in the world tame them both,” he said.
“Well, thank you for that compliment, but it wasn’t what I was talking about. Cynthia blushed when Roger said that about her. And when she took her gloves off, her nails were just as beautiful as they were on Sunday. Damn, Colton. She can fence and not even break a nail. And she didn’t even have barbed wire bite marks where she let the wire get away from her.” She held up her arm to show two long scratches.
He applied the brakes and turned off the engine before he brought her arm to his lips and kissed the scratches. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I’m going to beat my sister. It will be the first time I’ve beat her. She always pouted if she lost a game, so I let her win, but this time she’s going down. It’s only scratches and they’ll heal, but I’m jealous that Cynthia can tie me with no bite marks and keep her pretty nails.”
“Maybe Roger will be so excited about her that he puts a bite mark on her neck tonight.” He unfastened both seat belts and drew her close to his side. He bent and the kiss was hard, hungry, and filled with passion. “I liked waking up to you beside me this morning.”
“Me too.”
“What happens if we win? What’s my reward?” he teased when the kiss ended.
She rolled up on her toes and kissed him again. “Win, lose, or draw don’t make a bit of difference in what happens next between us.”
***
Laura was amazed at the transformation of the backyard when they arrived. Tables had been set up with chairs around them. Mason jars full of wildflowers with empty pint jars beside them graced the tables. Maudie was standing on the back of a flatbed truck with a microphone and waving at them to join her.
“Y’all have a flat tire? We was about to send out a rescue team to find you.”
“No, we stopped for hanky-panky,” Colton yelled across the yard.
Everyone applauded except Janet, who smiled and gave Laura the thumbs-up sign.
“Well, I guess that’s to be expected,” Maudie said. “I just want to introduce Laura to everyone. Some of you folks have already met her. But to those who haven’t this is Colton’s lady friend, Laura Nelson. And for those of you who might be just now arriving, I’ll remind you that the kids had a contest going today too.” She motioned toward all the children gathered beside their parents.
“They’ve picked wildflowers for the table decorations. The empty jars beside their bouquets are for dimes. No pennies, nickels, or quarters. Just dimes. The team who has the most money gets a twenty-five dollar gift card to Hastings over in Sherman. Guess I need to make that clear, twenty-five for each member of the team. The money in the jars goes to the library fund at the Bells Elementary school. So dig into your pockets, folks, and bring out your dimes.”
“Don’t forget the casserole contest,” Ina Dean hollered.
“That’s right. The ranch supplied the fried chicken for today’s dinner. But the fine ladies of the community brought casseroles. Anyone who wants the recipe for one of their dishes can talk to Patsy Talley. She has copies for one dollar each and the money will be given to the Ladies Auxiliary Scholarship Fund to help pay one Bells High School senior’s way to college. Anything else before I ask Preacher Roger to bless this food?”