Good Time Girl (17 page)

The Padre wheezed delightedly.

R
OXANNE WAITED
until she and Tom were in the truck and on their way back to the Second Chance before she pounced. “Well, that was a nice little ambush you arranged.”

Tom cast a wary glance at her out of the corner of his eye. “Ambush?”

“You didn’t tell me your mother was going to be there.”

“Because I didn’t know she was going to be there.”

Roxanne uttered an inelegant little snort. “Uh-huh.”

“I swear, it was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. The last time my mother was in Bowie was when I had that concussion a year ago last May.”

“Are you saying she only comes to visit when someone is sick?”

“Yeah, I guess that about sums it up,” Tom conceded. “Since she left, nothing much less than a medical emergency will get her to set foot in Bowie.”

“Not your birthday? Thanksgiving? Christmas?”

“Oh, my birthday, sure, when I was a kid. And holidays, too, sometimes, when she could get off work. After I got old enough to drive, though, I’d usually go to Dallas to see her. It’s easier on everybody that way.”

“Everybody who?”

“My mother, mostly,” he admitted. “Bowie doesn’t have a lot of good memories for her.”

“It has you,” she said, beginning to form a very poor opinion of Tom’s mother.

It was one thing to turn him over to the care of someone who could do a better job of raising him. It was quite another to abandon him entirely to that someone else’s care, even if that someone was the Padre. A child needed to know his mother loved him.

Tom took his eyes off the road a minute to look at her. “Don’t make it into something tragic, Slim. It isn’t. She did what she had to do, for her and for me, and we’re both okay with that. She just hates it here, is all.” He reached over and patted her thigh. “And I’m okay with that, too.”

“I’ll tell you something else she hates,” Roxanne said. “Me.”

He flicked another glance at her. “What makes you say a thing like that?”

“Oh, please.” Roxanne rolled her eyes. “She thinks I’m a loose woman out to snag her baby boy and she doesn’t like it—or me—one little bit.”

Tom shook his head. “You must have misunderstood something she said.”

“Oh, it wasn’t anything she
said.
Not directly. It was more the way she looked at me. As if I had just strolled in off of the street.”

He reached sideways and placed his palm on her forehead. “You feverish?”

“I’m serious.” She grabbed his hand between both of hers. “Your mother thinks I’m going to corrupt you. So—” she brought his hand to her mouth and sucked his index finger inside, and pulled it out, very slowly “—how am I doing?” she said, and grinned at him.

12

T
WO DAYS LATER
—fully three days ahead of schedule and against his doctor’s advice—the Padre checked himself out of the hospital and demanded to be taken home. Tom agreed to the plan only if a nurse came with him and stayed for what would have been the remaining three days of a standard hospital stay for a triple by-pass patient. The Padre grumbled, declaring his boys could provide all the care he needed, but Tom was adamant and the nurse and her equipment were bundled into the truck for the ride to Second Chance.

And Roxanne, against all her better judgment and the resolutions she made in the middle of the night after Tom left her to sneak back to his own bed before the boys woke up, was still there. Since it would be churlish to leave before the Padre’s welcome home party—planned for three days hence, when he would have returned to the Second Chance had he been inclined to follow doctor’s orders—she decided to stay for just that much longer. Besides, Rooster would be there for the party, too, flush with his success in Cheyenne and Wichita and Oklahoma City, and she wanted to say goodbye to him before she left. They’d gotten to be good friends on those long rides between rodeos. She owed him a personal goodbye.

But then she was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt, leaving.

She’d gotten what she came for, after all. She’d found her good-looking dangerous cowboy and had her Wild West adventure. It was time to bow out, to retreat with good grace, while the Welcome mat was still out. She didn’t want to wait around until the end, to see him wondering when she was going to pack up and go so he could get on with the nice little life he had planned for himself. She didn’t want to wait until he had—God forbid—“gotten his fill of her.” She wanted to leave while she could still see the want in his eyes, while that nice little life full of kids and cows—and the wife, let’s not forget the wife, she told herself sternly—was still only something he was thinking about as a part of his future.

She wasn’t going to be heart-whole when she left—any possibility of that had disappeared somewhere on the road between one rodeo and the next—but she was going to go in style, with her head held high and her dignity intact.

It helped, a little, that the only place for the Padre’s nurse to bunk while she was at the Second Chance was up in the little attic room with Roxanne. It cut down considerably on the opportunity for her to dissolve into undignified tears and declare her undying love to a man who, by no stretch of her imagination, wanted to hear those words from the woman who was his “last fling.”

She’d come dangerously close a couple of times, up in that little attic room in the middle of the night. The sex was sweeter between them in that room, more gentle and tender. Maybe it was the narrow bed, which limited their more wild sexual antics, or the need to be quiet so as not to alert the boys to what was going on over their heads. Maybe it was the fact that he got up and left her when the loving was over that made her want to cling and cry. Whatever it was, the room was dangerous.

Since the nurse had been sharing it with her, though, they’d had to rely on quickies at odd times and out-of-the-way places, which neatly precluded the trappings of romance that weakened her resolve. Roxanne had approached the lack of privacy with a positive attitude, seeing it as both safeguard against embarrassing confessions and an opportunity to fulfill as many of her remaining sexual fantasies as possible and store up memories for what was sure to be the coming sexual drought.

“W
AIT, WAIT
—” she was panting and wet, her jeans and panties on the floor of the truck, her blouse and bra pushed up around her neck, trying to maneuver so she could straddle his lap “—the steering wheel is in the way.”

Without removing his mouth from her breast, he shifted position, edging over into the passenger side of the cab, and cupped his hands around the backs of her bare thighs to guide her legs to either side of his.

“Now the gearshift is in the way,” she moaned.

“That’s not the gearshift,” he said, and slid into her.

“S
TOP IT
!” She giggled and slapped at his hands, trying to wriggle away as he burrowed down the front of her jeans. Since he had her pressed up against the wall in the tack room, she couldn’t wriggle very far. And she wasn’t trying very hard. “Stop it right now,” she said again, sucking in her stomach to make it easier for him to find what he was searching for. “I think someone’s coming.”

“That’d be you,” he said, as he found the swollen little nubbin between her legs and began to massage it.

“G
OOD
G
OD
A
LMIGHTY
, woman! You’re going to get us killed.”

She raised her head from his lap, peering up at him through a tangle of hair. “Do you want me to stop?” she asked, and ran her tongue up the length of his rock-hard penis as if it were a great big peppermint stick. “I’ll stop if you want me to.”

“No, don’t stop.” He clutched the steering wheel in his fists, struggling manfully to keep his attention on the road while she drove him over the edge with her hot mouth and clever little tongue. “Don’t stop.”

A
ND THEN
, suddenly, before she was ready for it, the day of the party dawned, bright and hot and sunny, and she realized her Wild West adventure was just about over. Roxanne almost cried, then, as she lay there, staring at the whitewashed ceiling, but the presence of the nurse in the other bed saved her again. She blinked the tears back and got up, determined to enjoy what was going to be her last day with her good-looking dangerous cowboy. One more day—and one more night—that’s all she had, all she was going to allow herself.

And she was determined to make it the best night of her life.

And his.

T
HE PROPOSED PARTY
had somehow evolved from a simple welcome home potluck supper with a few close friends into a lavish barbecue that apparently included everyone in the entire county, and the kitchen was a beehive of activity when Roxanne finally made her way downstairs. Jo Beth and her mother, as the official hostesses of the event, were already there, overseeing the food preparation. So was Tom’s mother, Molly Steele. Apparently, she had decided to lift her ban on Bowie, except in cases of emergency. Although, in Ms. Steele’s mind, anyway, Roxanne was pretty sure she qualified as such. So maybe the ban hadn’t been lifted, after all.

The three women were working together in the big, old-fashioned kitchen, a companionable trio with no room for a fourth—especially a fourth with man-killer red nails, questionable morals and possible designs on one of the most eligible bachelors in town.

“Can I do anything to help?” Roxanne asked, even though she already knew what the answer would be. There was no way any of the three women was going to allow her to show off whatever culinary expertise she might possess if Tom Steele was anywhere in the vicinity.

“We’ve about got it covered in here,” Mrs. Jensen said. “They might need some help out back, though, getting the picnic tables set up and into position.”

Which meant, Roxanne knew, that Tom was either in the front yard, doing whatever needed to be done out there or, more likely, down at main corral, seeing that the arrangements for the junior rodeo were progressing apace. Molly Steele and Jo Beth Jensen weren’t the only women who were set on bringing Tom into the Jensen family fold.

Roxanne poured herself a cup of coffee, and pushed open the screen door to the back porch. It screeched loudly.

“Someone really ought to put some WD-40 on that,” she heard Jo Beth say to the two older women.

She let it the door slam behind her—a petty gesture, but deeply satisfying—and strolled down the steps and across the struggling patch of lawn to where the Padre sat in a rocking chair under a copse of cottonwood trees, his trusty nurse by his side to make sure he didn’t overdo, supervising as Jared and Augie set up the barbecue pit.

An entire side of beef—more raw meat than Roxanne had ever seen in one place before—lay on a tarp on top of one of the picnic tables, waiting to be hoisted onto the spit. She tried not to look at it.

“You ever seen a more beautiful side of beef?” asked the Padre as Roxanne approached. “Raised right here on Second Chance.”

“Beautiful,” she said admiringly, while privately thinking that she might never eat another steak for as long as she lived.

The Padre caught the flicker of distaste in her eyes. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you?” he asked, as if it were a perversion of the worst sort.

“I wasn’t,” she said dryly.

He laughed and slapped his knee. “A real firecracker,” he chortled gleefully.

Roxanne gave in to impulse and bent down to kiss his leathery cheek. “Try not to give your nurse too hard a time today,” she said.

He caught her hand as she straightened. “Was that goodbye?”

“No,” she said. “That was a deep and abiding appreciation for a good-looking, dangerous man. I’ll tell you when it’s goodbye.”

“Fair enough,” he said, and squeezed her hand—just as Molly Steele came out onto the back porch with a pile of bright, checkered tablecloths over her arm.

“Don’t you overdo, now, Hector,” she called, frowning when she saw the two of them apparently holding hands. “You mind what your nurse says and don’t get yourself too excited. And, you—Roxy, isn’t it?” She motioned her forward with her free hand. “I’d appreciate it if you would come on over here and help me cover these tables. We can chat a bit while we work and get to know each other.”

Roxanne sighed. No way did she want a private tête-á-tête with Tom’s disapproving mother. Seeing no way to avoid it, however, she was about to do as she was bid, when she felt the Padre’s hand tighten on hers.

“I need Roxy to help me walk down to the barn.” The Padre rose to his feet, using the support of Roxanne’s arm for leverage.

“That’s what the nurse is here for,” Molly said. “And you shouldn’t be walking that far, anyway. It’s not good for you.”

“It is, too, good for me. The doc said walking is the best exercise I could do right now. And I want Roxy to walk with me.” He waved the nurse away. “You go help Molly cover those tables. I’ll call if I need you.”

“Thanks,” Roxanne said.

“The thing you got to know about Molly,” the Padre said, his head bent companionably to hers as they slowly ambled around the side of the house toward the barn, “is that she means well. She’s just become kind of narrow in her opinions and strict in her ways, is all. Comes of her background, I guess, just like it does with most folks. She was kind of wild as a girl, with parents who were too busy to be bothered. She took off with the first cowboy who said he loved her when she was barely fifteen and came home six months later with a full belly and no husband.”

“Yes, Tom told me some of the story,” Roxanne said, and sipped her coffee.

“She tried to make a go of it on her own but, hell, you know the story…a young unmarried girl, no education, no health coverage, no access to good child care, forced to take one minimum-wage job after another to make ends meet. She pulled herself out of it, though. Admitted she couldn’t do it on her own, and did what she had to do to make it right for her boy.”

“Tom said she saved him when she gave him to you.”

“She did. She saved herself, too. She worked hard, got a college education, and a good job. The thing is, though, instead of being proud of how far she’s come, she’s ashamed of where she’s been. She has no sympathy for the girl she once was, and— Can she see us from where she’s at?”

Roxanne glanced back over her shoulder. “No, I don’t think so.”

“Then let’s set a spell, shall we?” He indicated the steps leading up to the porch. “I need to catch my breath.”

“Are you all right? Should I call the nurse?”

“No. No, don’t call the nurse. I’m fine. Just haven’t got my stamina back yet, is all. Now—” he settled down onto the top step, under the shadowed overhang of the porch “—where was I?”

“You said Tom’s mom hasn’t got any sympathy for the girl she once was.”

“No, she hasn’t. And she’s got no tolerance for anyone else who strays from what she considers the straight-and-narrow, either.”

Roxanne looked up at him from where she stood at the foot of the stairs. “And I’m about as far off the straight-and-narrow as a woman can get, is that it?”

“That’s certainly what Molly thinks.” He gave her a sly, knowing smile from under his bushy gray eyebrows. “I have my doubts about that, though. I’ll wager Tom does, too.”

Roxanne shrugged. “I wouldn’t count on that,” she mumbled, and buried her nose in her coffee cup just as Petie came roaring around the side of the house, screaming at the top of his lungs.

“Rooster’s here! Rooster’s here!” He danced past her, heading down to the barbecue pit under the cottonwoods, then spied the Padre sitting on the steps and made a sharp left turn. “Rooster’s here, Padre!” he trumpeted in his piercing little-boy voice, and then changed direction again, heading down toward the barn at a dead run. “Tom! Rooster’s here, Tom. Come see. Rooster’s here!”

“I swear, that little fella has got more energy than ten bucking bulls,” Rooster said to no one in particular as he came around the side of the house. “Plum wears me out to watch him.”

He came to a dead stop when he saw Roxanne, a wide smile lighting up his plain, honest face at the sight of her. “Hey, Roxy.” He reached out as if to hug her, then stepped back indecisively, a little red around his ears at his presumption.

Roxanne set her empty coffee cup down on the porch step and solved his problem for him by stepping forward and wrapping her arms around his neck. “Hey, pardner.” She gave him a good, hard hug. “Congratulations on the big win in Cheyenne,” she said, and planted a big, noisy kiss on his cheek.

Rooster blushed to the roots of his hair.

“If you’re givin’ out your kisses for winnin’ rides, I’d just like to say, I beat his score in Wichita
and
Oklahoma City.”

Roxanne looked past Rooster’s shoulder to the man standing a few feet behind him. “My goodness,” she said, her accent as thick and sweet as honey. “Clay Madison. What are you doing here, sugar?”