Sweet Return (10 page)

He started up the limestone pathway toward the porch with a get-out-of-my-way swagger. His face might not be clearly visible, but the shape of his body—square shoulders and slim hips—couldn’t be mistaken. A schoolgirl giddiness skittered around inside her. She didn’t even try to resist letting her starved eyes feast on his total maleness.

Though she was wearing her worst clothing, she was glad she hadn’t been out to feed the cattle this morning, glad he wouldn’t see her dripping with sweat and covered with hay dirt and cow manure. In fact, for some reason this morning, she had taken extra pains with her makeup, and she was glad of that, too.

Still wiping her hands on her apron, she slipped through the screen door onto the plank porch. Feeling strangely insecure and trembly, she didn’t say anything.

He didn’t, either. His sunglasses were the mirrored aviator type, so she couldn’t see his eyes. He peeled them off, hung them in the neck of his T-shirt, planted his hands on his hips again and looked up at her with the most intense eyes she had ever seen on a man. They were the color of strong coffee, like Clova’s eyes. They seemed to touch her everywhere at the same time, from her face to her feet, jolting her at a keenly visceral level. Hearing him accurately quote her bra size wouldn’t even surprise her.

Months, even years, had passed since she had seen that lean and hungry look in a man, a look that had always stirred her blood and sent her skulking to a dark corner to give herself a constructive lecture on men. As clear as the blue in the sky, she saw it today in Dalton Parker. She might not be an expert when it came to the human male, but that mysterious allure that shimmered off Dalton Parker in waves charged through her system like a raging river.

“You the one who called?” he asked.

His speech was sharp and clipped. Her ear detected no sign of a Texas twang. At the same time, his voice was deep and soft, with an almost smoky rasp. The sound zoomed straight to the same deeply buried part of her that her first glimpse of him had gone.

A gentle breeze sent strands of hair across her face. Grateful for the distraction, she reached up and tried to tuck them back into place, forcing herself to look him in the eye and fighting for a smile. “You must be Dalton.”

Two wooden steps led from the porch down to the stone path. For the first time ever, she looked down to make sure she didn’t miss one of them as she stepped down to where he stood. She stuck out her right hand and he took it.

“I’m Joanna Walsh.” She pumped their hands up and down, still looking into his face, not daring to let her gaze drop to where her aberrant thoughts had taken her. “I was a sophomore when you were a senior. When I was in school I went by my whole name, which is Joanna Faye, after my grandmother. But I shortened it because…Well, for obvious reasons. I remember you, though. I used to go to the football games with my big sister, Lanita, and see you playing. You might—”

“Yeah, you’re right.” He freed his hand from hers and continued to look around. “I don’t remember.”

“Oh. Well, you’ve been gone a long time.”
Shut-up,
she told herself and drew a breath.

“Where’s my mom?” he asked.

“Uh, one of the neighbors called about a break in the fence. She’s gone to feed and to check on it.”

“Which one?”

“Excuse me?”

“Which neighbor?”

“Oh. Uh, Hulsey. August Hulsey. Do you know him?”

“Not anymore.”

“Oh. Of course you used to know him.” She lifted her open palms and let them fall. “I mean, he’s been around here forever. He’s old now.”

It was eleven o’clock on a Friday morning in September in the Texas Panhandle. The sun was already a ball of fire in a blue sky dotted with mushrooming white thunderheads, and the temperature was over ninety. “It’s hot,” she said. “There’s some fresh sun tea. Would you like some?”

“Yeah.”

She stepped back up onto the porch and reached for the screen door handle. As she pulled, the old wooden door stuck. She jerked and it came loose with a pop. The edge whacked her right between the eyes, knocking her head backward and causing a shot of pain that almost blinded her.

He was suddenly standing behind her, his thick arm to the right of her face, holding the door open. His scent, woodsy and masculine, surrounded her. “You hurt?”

“Uh, no. I’m fine. Sorry. It needs work done on it. The porch has shifted and…well, anyway.” She shrugged and walked on into the house. The spot just above the bridge of her nose throbbed with every quick pulse beat, but she resisted rubbing it.

The Parker ranch house had been built before homes had entries, so the front door opened into the living room. He stopped just inside and looked around, no doubt reacquainting himself.

“Uh, that tea’s in the kitchen.” She wound her way through the dining room into the kitchen. He followed.

She grabbed a bowl from the cupboard, pulled a plastic ice tray from the refrigerator and began to twist it and break out ice cubes into the bowl. “Uh, your mom doesn’t use the ice maker. The well water isn’t fit to drink, as you may remember. It corrodes plumbing so bad, Clova has to battle it all the time. The cistern got a crack in it last year and quit holding water. She buys drinking water in town now.”

He continued to look at her intently as she prattled like a twit. Under his scrutiny, just preparing a glass of iced tea seemed like a Herculean task, but she finally succeeded and handed it to him. He took it and sipped, then looked down into the brown liquid for a few seconds. He looked back at her. “Got any sugar?”

“Sugar? Oh, yes. Certainly.” She could have sworn she had put sugar in that tea. She strode across the kitchen as if it were her own, lifted a china sugar bowl from the cupboard and a spoon from a drawer and handed both to him.

He sauntered into the dining room carrying his tea and the sugar bowl. He took a seat at the round oak dining table, dumped three heaping teaspoons of sugar into the tea and stirred. When he caught her staring, he said, as if she had asked, “I got used to the way they drink tea overseas.”

She nodded and sank to a chair adjacent to his. Now, with him no more than three feet away, she let herself take in his square jaw, the dark shadow of his beard, the defined cleft of his upper lip that perfectly fit against a full, square lower lip. She stopped herself; she never stared at men’s mouths. “I see. Where, um, would ‘overseas’ be?”

“The Middle East.” He nodded toward the glass she had poured for herself. She wasn’t even conscious she had brought it from the kitchen. “Aren’t you drinking?” he asked.

“Yes. Yes, I am.” She picked up her glass and sipped. “I take mine straight,” she added with a silly giggle. Her forehead throbbed like hell and she could feel the sting of broken skin. No doubt a bruise would greet her in the mirror tomorrow.

He picked up his glass and she watched as he drank deeply, his throat muscles working rhythmically. The temperature in the old house was probably eighty, but she felt an urge to shiver.

The glass had made a ring of condensation on the table. The round table, an antique, had been refinished recently and Clova was careful about marring it. Joanna grabbed a paper napkin from a holder in the middle of the table and swiped away the moisture.

He gave the tabletop, then her, a look. “Do you live here or something?”

“Uh, no. I’m just…” She stopped. How could she come up with a short explanation for why she was in someone else’s house making herself at home. Whatever explanation she concocted, she suspected this guy wouldn’t believe her. “I live in town. It’s like I said in the phone message I left you. I’m a friend helping out.”

His forearms, tanned, with ropey veins standing out against defined muscle, came to rest on the tabletop. “Then you must know when my mother started raising chickens.”

Chapter 7

“Oh.” Joanna sat up straighter and blinked. “Well, uh, those are mine. I’m in the egg business. You know, free-range eggs?”

“Are you kidding?”

The words came at her sharp as knives. “No. I’m not. It’s—it’s part of the organic food craze that’s going around these days. What it means is the hens aren’t kept penned up. They live freely and feed on bugs and grass and stuff, like they used to in the old days. I still have to feed them some, but—”

“I know about free-range eggs. You’d have to sell a helluva a lot of eggs to make that worthwhile. So you’re what, leasing land from Mom for that?”

She almost told him that she used the land for free, but the tone of his question and a gut instinct stilled her tongue. Clova’s statement of a few days ago flew into her consciousness.
If somethin’ happened to me, I know them boys wouldn’t let you keep these chickens or these donkeys here. They’d prob’ly run you clear off
.

Dammit, she didn’t want to have this conversation with him without his mother’s presence. And she certainly didn’t want to end up in a confrontation with a friend’s son whom she didn’t even know. Wounded by his antagonistic tone, she stammered, “Uh, well, um, not really. We’ve kind of got a deal we both like. It’s, um, hard to explain.”

“I’m beginning to see that. And those jackasses are part of this egg business?”

“Actually, they’re supposed to keep predators away.” His mouth didn’t smirk, but she could see the disdain in his eyes. As quick as lightning, that look turned her anxiety into irritation, if not downright anger. She had done nothing wrong. Why should she feel so intimidated by him? After all, he was the one who had ignored his family. “They
do
keep the predators away,” she added more firmly.

“That’s hard to believe. Your message said my mother’s sick. What’s wrong with her?”

“I can’t imagine that you don’t know, but she had walking pneumonia back in the spring. It really got a grip on her and she hasn’t been able to stop working long enough to get well. She’s better, but still not a hundred percent. She waited too long to go to the doctor.”

He said not one word, just looked at her, picked up his glass and finished off his tea.

She abandoned hope of congenial conversation. “Did you drive here, uh, Dalton? I can call you Dalton, right? Or would you prefer Mr. Parker?”

“You can call me Dalton.”

Ass!
She held her tongue, but her eyes bugged.

He turned his attention to the dining room’s picture window and the view of the fenced pasture where the hens lived. In the sun-brightened area, they were strutting and clucking and scratching the ground for bugs.

Gray, life-size plastic owls perched on posts at strategic locations. Her two donkeys grazed beside the short flagpole from which thin, silky Asian flags fluttered and flicked pointed ends in the breeze, all of it her effort to protect the hens from flying predators. She didn’t have to be told that a source even more fatal than a chicken hawk suddenly jeopardized her business. She had no idea whether Clova would resist if her oldest son insisted the hens be removed.

She cleared her throat. “So, um, did you drive all the way from California?”

“Flew to Lubbock. That piece of shit in the driveway’s a rental.” He got to his feet. “There’s usually a work truck around here. Where is it?”

“Your mom took it. To feed the cows and check on the downed fence. Her dually’s parked in the shed, but she doesn’t usually drive it out into the pasture. There’s an ATV, but it isn’t working.”

He mumbled a cussword.

She made up her mind to try again. Miss Congeniality. “Look, my truck’s here. Your mom’s all the way at the back of the south pasture. I—I could—I’d be glad to drive you down there. There really isn’t a road, but my truck’s got four-wheel drive.”

His head turned her way and he stared at her. “I know where Hulsey’s place is.” Then a smirk tipped up a corner of his mouth. “But, yeah, you can take me down there. Let’s go.” He walked to the coat tree in the corner, helped himself to a bill cap and walked out, letting the screen door slam behind him.

Asshole!
She sat at the table a few more seconds, collecting herself. She had met all kinds of people in her various enterprises, but she couldn’t recall ever meeting someone she wanted to throttle at the same time she imagined jumping his bones. On a deep breath, she got to her feet, picked up the two glasses and took them to the kitchen, then followed him outside.

She found him standing on the porch, staring across the driveway at her hens. Without looking at her, he lifted the cap, pushed his fingers through thick, but short, graying hair, then shoved the cap down on his head. “Just exactly how many chickens have you got here?”

She hesitated, debating whether she should fib about the number. Horse sense told her not to. “At this moment? Two hundred. Sometimes a few more, sometimes less.”

He turned his head her way. The look that came at her was a cross between anger and incredulity. “Two hundred? Goddamn…chickens?”

Oh, dear God.
She did a mental eye roll. “Look, Mr. Parker—”

“I said you can call me Dalton.”

She mustered a glare of her own. “I think I prefer Mr. Parker.”

He shrugged a shoulder. “Suit yourself. Let’s go see about that fence.” He left the porch in a long stride, trekked toward her Chevy pickup and climbed in on the passenger side as if the vehicle were his.

Now Joanna was so put off she didn’t know if she could even drive, but she trailed after him and hoisted herself into the cab. She cranked the engine and away they went.

They soon reached the road that led to the south pasture. It was nothing more than two parallel tire tracks that traveled over grassy humps and bumps and through sandy gullies and arroyos. She set her jaw. Her pickup was her only vehicle, and she kept it clean and shiny. Though it was a four-wheel-drive pickup, she didn’t drive it on rough terrain or through bushes. Unfortunately, it was too late to unvolunteer for this ride. Shifting into four-wheel drive, she steeled herself to ignore what the sagebrush branches and mesquite tree thorns would do to her paint job, not to mention that she could end up with mesquite thorns in all four tires.

At five miles per hour, the five-mile trip took almost that long—an hour.