Love Drunk Cowboy (13 page)

Austin smiled at Maddie. “I’ve got to get back to the house and pack some more this afternoon but I wanted to thank you for a lovely meal and all the fun. Can I help with anything before I go?”

Maddie hugged her. “No, honey, not a thing. Come on back with Rye anytime. We’ll look for you next Sunday.”

“Thank you. I’ll get my purse from the house.”

Maddie motioned with her hands. “Gemma put all the purses on her bed. Upstairs. First door to the left.”

When she’d retrieved her purse she went straight for the bathroom. If someone made Austin mad, she talked to her reflection in the mirror as if she were the therapist and the woman in the mirror the patient. She’d barely shut the door when she heard voices outside in the hallway. She heard her name so she forgot all about the therapist session and pressed her ear against the door.

“He’s smitten with her. I’ve never seen him act like he did today. He can hardly keep his hands off her and she’s not the right one, Dewar. We’ve got to do something,” Colleen said.

“She’s not country material and he’s smart enough to realize it.”

“But he’s never had that look in his eyes. Not even with Serena. Lord, can’t you just see her on the ranch? She wouldn’t last a week. Rye can’t live in a city or work in an office. He’s a rancher and a cowboy.”

“Don’t you like her?” Dewar asked.

“She sees a good lookin’ rich man.”

“Colleen, think! She comes from money. She’s inherited three sections of land and a wine business. She’s not looking at him for what he’s got. And he’s only known her a couple of days, Colleen.”

“He fell hard for Serena too.”

“That was ten years ago.”

“And he hasn’t brought home another woman until now.”

Austin wondered who in the devil Serena was, and why it even mattered.

“He should have married Serena,” Dewar said.

“He would have but she left him and this one will too.”

“It was that big fight they had over living in Oklahoma and then that other guy…”

Colleen didn’t let him finish. “You don’t have to remind me. I was fifteen and thought all love ended like in the fairy tales.”

“Well, he’s a big boy. He can take care of himself.”

“They’ll fight and his heart will get broken and he’ll never find anyone else.”

Dewar chuckled. “You don’t have to wait on him to get married. That’s just a family joke.”

“It would take a special man to ever put me in a corral,” Colleen said.

And me,
Austin thought.
I’d like to walk out of here right now and tell you both that I’m not interested in your brother so you can stop worrying. I like the way he kisses. I like the way he fills out those jeans and the way his shirt is stretched over that broad chest but…
She couldn’t think of any buts other than Rye’s and the way he filled out those Wranglers.

“Amen to that, sister,” Dewar laughed.

“You won’t tell Rye that I’m not too impressed with his woman, will you?” Colleen asked as their voices faded.

Austin stepped back and looked at the blushing woman in the mirror. “Don’t look at me like that. They were talking. I just listened. So the family is divided in their opinion of the new girl in town. Well, it’s a Scarlett O’Hara situation here. Quite frankly, I don’t give a damn.”

But I do. I loved being here today among all these people. I loved the teasing and the sibling rivalry and all of it. Even if it was a one-day thing never to be repeated, I wanted it to be one of those memories that I can pack away and get out every so often and think about and now I’ve spoiled it with my temper.

She slowly went downstairs and out onto the porch. Grandma was coming in the door so Austin held the door for her.

“Don’t hold whatever he said or did against him. He gets them high temper genes from his dad. That man always did say the wrong thing at the wrong time. It’s a wonder he ever talked Maddie into marryin’ up with him.”

Austin looked at Rye sitting on the blanket with his friends.

“It’s the O’Donnell pride,” Grandma whispered.

Austin smiled. “Well, tell that proud O’Donnell jackass when he gets finished with his important conversation that I’m walking home.”

Grandma cackled. “I’ll do that, honey.”

She went straight to the truck where she changed back into her running shoes and put her high heels inside her purse. A nice long jog might work some of the humiliation out of her system.

What were we fighting about other than he called Mother a hussy? It had to have been important but I can’t remember. Whatever it was didn’t cool the physical attraction one bit because he’s still sexy as hell sitting out there with his cowboy friends.

She did a couple of deep knee bends, slammed the pickup door, and took off in a slow run down the lane toward the highway.
I’ve never felt so stupid or done anything so silly in my life but it feels pretty damn good.

“Where is Austin?” Rye asked his grandmother when she returned with a glass of iced tea.

“I guess she’s gone home. She said to tell you that you are a proud O’Donnell jackass and that she was walking home. I wouldn’t date her no more, Rye. She’s done lied to you on the first date. She ain’t walkin’. She’s runnin’.”

“Well, shit!” Rye ran to his truck, fired it up, and caught up to her midway down the lane.

“Get in the truck, Austin. It’s seven damn miles back home. Stop your pouting and get in.”

She shot him her best go-to-hell look and kept running.

He drove another ten yards and hung his head out the window again. “Come on, Austin. You are acting like a spoiled teenager.”

She picked up the speed.

She reached the end of the lane and turned left out onto the highway and heard the truck engine stop. She glanced over her shoulder to see him coming after her, making pretty good time in those boots. She put it into high gear and ran faster and then in a whirlwind of motion, he spun her around and threw her over his shoulder. Her butt was in the air. Her legs were pinned down by strong arms and her head was dangling so close to his rear end that she had a view that made her mouth water. She braced her hands against the backs of his thighs and felt the most amazing muscles she’d ever experienced flexing against her palms. She thought she might pass out right then and there.

“Put me down!” she yelled.

“Yes, ma’am. I will do that as soon as we get back to the truck.”

I’ve never been so turned on in my life.

“You are a jackass,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, it’s the Irish. You are a smart-mouthed Frenchie. Hell of a combination, ain’t it?”

He turned his head slightly and kissed her right on the fanny and thought he’d die of lust and embarrassment and he’d never be able to face her again. A thirty-two-year-old man shouldn’t be carrying a thirty-year-old woman down the road like a sack of chicken feed. And it shouldn’t be as intoxicating as a double shot of rye whiskey.

He opened the passenger door to the truck and plopped her down in the seat. She folded her arms across her chest and stared out the window. He fired up the truck, slung gravel when he stomped the gas pedal, and parked in her front yard in four minutes. If there had been a highway patrolman out that Easter, he’d have had a ticket for sure but it would have been worth every dime it cost him.

She opened the door, let herself out, and leaned back inside. “That was uncalled for, childish, and rude. Where’s the wine business?”

He pointed at the new truck sitting under the makeshift shed roof. “Pull out her new truck. She built the shed over an old cellar where she keeps her wine. There’s a trap door under the truck. Pull it up. And I wasn’t the only one who was childish.”

She slammed the door with enough force to rattle the angels out of heaven. She stormed through the house, tossed her purse on the kitchen table, picked up the truck keys, and stomped the whole way to the carport or shed or whatever to hell the thing was called.

Rascal followed her and sat next to the far wall while she backed out the year-old Ford Ranger truck. Didn’t anyone in this area drive a Silverado? If Austin had known that Granny was in the market for a new truck she could have gotten her a fantastic deal on a Chevrolet at the dealership.

Sure enough there was an old cellar door right there under where the truck had been. She vaguely remembered it being in that part of the yard and playing jacks with Granny on the concrete top a few times when she was a little girl. She pulled the door up and looked down into the dark abyss. She didn’t like basements, dark cellars, spiders, or mice so she stood at the top of the stairs a long time before she took the first step. Nothing squeaked or crawled off the wall onto her leg. The second step built a little confidence but the third one sent her scrambling to the top of the stairs brushing spiders from her face.

“Shit! Shit! Shit!” Feeling like a contortionist, she checked everywhere for a black hairy varmint crawling on her but found nothing. She peeked down the stairs and sunlight reflected off something dangling in the air at about the third step. She leaned in but didn’t take a step and studied the thing until it moved again.

Feeling like a fool she figured out the wicked thing that had attacked her wasn’t a spider but a wooden spool hanging on a long length of twine. She caught the spool on the third step and gave it a good solid yank and the whole cellar lit up. At the bottom she stopped and stared. It was shiny clean with rows of bottles on three sides and a small desk with a computer right in the middle of the room. She sat down in the comfortable chair and opened the laptop. It came up with a window asking for her password. She typed in watermelon but it refused it. She tried dozens of words and it refused them all. Standing up and looking around she tried to think of what Verline would use as a password and nothing came to mind.

She pulled a bottle of wine from the rack. It had a parchment colored label with a picture of a watermelon entwined with crawling vines and leaves. Lanier Wine was written in fancy script lettering with the year 2006 written down the side. She slid it back into its slot and opened the desk drawer searching for recipes or notes. The first thing she picked up was a small notebook and the first page yielded the password:
Austin
.

The password opened the wine world up to her on a wireless connection. She flipped through folders that were organized beautifully by year, by recipes, and by distributors. Evidently there were a lot of people who loved Lanier Wine.

On Monday morning Austin awoke to the sounds of nothing in her house.

“Praise the Lord, and I’m not blaspheming, Granny,” she said aloud. She hopped out of bed and stuck her nose out into the short hallway. No coffee and bacon aromas wafted down the hallway. No pots and pans rattling or whistling. All of a sudden the house felt very empty.

She made a pot of coffee, stuck two slices of bread in the toaster, and decided to pack Granny’s room that day. Daylight filtered through the kitchen window and across the table in a wide streak while she ate a piece of buttered toast and drank two cups of coffee.

She looked around at all the junk and sighed. “Why didn’t Granny have a garage sale and get rid of this? I don’t know what to keep and what to get rid of.”

Your granny was sick and she wanted to leave this world with all her things around her. Look around. A whole lot of this crap is what you bought her because you knew she liked knickknacks. You think she would have given away a single hair from your hair that got left behind on the bathroom sink?

Then she felt guilty. She finished her toast and wandered into the living room. Used to be there was at least a spot big enough to set a coffee cup on the end tables but not anymore. An anorexic flea couldn’t find a place to land if it hopped off Rascal and tried to light on a table. She should have stayed home from the egg hunt and dinner at the O’Donnell’s the day before but that was water under the Red River Bridge.

The more she looked around at all the crap the angrier she got. There was no way in hell she’d bought all of that junk. She would have never bought that butt ugly duck wearing a grass skirt and sunglasses.

A hard knock on the front door startled her so that she sloshed coffee out on her pajama top. She dabbed at it with the kitchen towel on her way to tell Rye that she wasn’t interested in anything he had planned that day, but it was Felix and the other five hired hands standing on the porch.

“Miz Austin, I just thought I’d let you know that even though we always plant on the first Monday after Easter that I think we’d best put it off this year because it’s going to rain. Weather says we might get up to two inches today and tonight. The seeds would be washed away if we plant now and the tractors would be stuck in the mud,” Felix said.

“Whatever you think is best.”

“Then we will wait a week. The weatherman says it will rain most of this week. We’ll spend our time working in the implement shed getting the tractors tuned up and ready for next week’s planting.”

“You take care of it. I’ll use this week to pack up the stuff in the house and we’ll plant next week.”

“You want me to send Lobo in here to help you?”

“No, thanks, I can manage this part.”

“Okay, then we will talk each morning and start to plant next Monday.” He settled his straw hat on his head and barely made it to the truck before it started to rain.

She poured another cup of coffee and started in her grandmother’s room. Clothing that she had no interest in wearing went into a big black garbage bag with a yellow tie on the top. She slapped a strip of masking tape on the outside with a brief description of what was in the bag so she wouldn’t get it mixed up with the trash.

She found a half written letter to her father in one of the nightstand drawers. It was dated fifteen years before and mentioned how proud she was of Austin’s achievements in school that year. She put that in a box with a small snow globe she had brought her grandmother from a skiing trip to Italy and other things too precious to toss out.

The rain subsided and the sun came out in the middle of the afternoon. She opened the windows to let the sunshine and fresh air flow into the room. It was near midnight when she shook pillows down into fresh cases and finished re-making the bed. All total, she’d found four hundred dollars in ones, fives, and tens stashed in drawers, coat pockets, and stuffed down into boots. She’d have to go through every envelope and shake out every single piece of paper or she might actually throw away money.