Sweet Return (16 page)

Dalton came up behind her, tore off more paper towels and knelt beside her. His arm and hands touched hers as together they wiped up the soup and heaped the soggy paper towels onto the tray. He made no attempt not to touch her, and every time his skin brushed hers, a new wave of nervousness washed over her.

When they finished, he stood up and placed a hand under her elbow, aiding her getting to her feet. For some weird reason, she felt a new desire to get along with him. “Thanks for helping out,” she said.

He gave her a smile that made her knees tremble. “Least I could do for the cook.”

Firmly shaking off that weakness, she managed to smile back. “It would be a mistake to call me a cook.”

They stood only inches apart. He braced a hand on the counter no more than two feet away, those eyes drilling her, his mouth still tipped into that smile. “How about hot?” he asked in a soft rasp. “Can I call you that?”

And speaking of heat, they were close enough for her to feel his body heat. She could smell his breath, yeasty and warm, and she could see the dark late-day stubble on his jaw. An odd tension traveled through her lower belly. “I wish you wouldn’t. I wasn’t impressed when you said it last night.”

“Why not? Don’t like guys, huh?”

The words drove away the seductive moment. “Oh, please,” she snapped and moved back a couple of steps.

His eyes widened and he opened his palms. “Hey, look, what do you expect me to think? Mom says you’re not married. Says you don’t go out.”

Joanna winced inside, wondering just how thoroughly Clova had discussed her with him.

“You don’t have any roosters in that flock of chickens,” he went on. “Is that symbolic of something? Without a little sex, how do you keep all those hens content?”

She made a tiny sigh of indignation. “The hens don’t care about sex.”

His brow arched again. “How do you know? Does that blue-egg-laying chicken whisper it in your ear?”

She hesitated a few seconds, stumped for a reply. “I’m sure we’d disagree on what’s important to chickens.”

She might not know what he was up to, but she knew she shouldn’t encourage him. He had a predatory gleam in his eye that, for some damned reason, she found alluring. So alluring, in fact, that if she wasn’t careful, he would be sharing her Tempur-Pedic with her faster than she could change the sheets. She turned away, picked up the tray and raked the wet towels into the trash. “You’ve had too many beers. For your information, roosters cause trouble and try to dominate the flock.”
Just like men,
she thought. “They’re worthless for egg production.”

“Is that a fact? I have to admit, I’ve never seen chicken sex. Actually, I’ve never been interested in looking for it, but I know it goes on.”

Joanna’s stomach lurched again. “Really.”

“Yep. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be any new chickens. And no eggs. Common sense. It’s the same with everything and everybody, darlin’. Even chickens. Takes two to tango.”

“And you’re an expert.”

He grinned. “I know a little about sex, yeah.”

Joanna couldn’t look into his face. Determined not to react to his goading, she began to stack the soiled dishes. “I don’t know you well enough to be discussing sex with you.”

“But you do, darlin’. Hell, you’ve taken over my mother and this whole damn place. I’ll bet you know me better than I even think you do. You might even know me better than I know myself.”

Enough was enough. She straightened, picked up a dish towel and began to dry her hands. “You know, I’ve had a long day. I’ve cooked the soup. Why don’t you do the dishes?…And I’m not your darling, so don’t call me that.”

She threw the dish towel onto the counter in a heap and walked out of the kitchen and through the dining room, then the living room, forcing herself to keep a steady step and not look back.

Dalton stood on the front porch watching Joanna Walsh walk to her truck and climb in. Yep, a body like an athlete. Sleek as a gazelle. Nice. Very nice. Imagining those finely toned thighs hugging his hips sent a tightening straight to his lower belly.
Shit
. The beast in his pants had never been able to tell the difference between a smart-ass who was dangerous and an empty-headed bimbo who just liked to screw.

He couldn’t keep from wondering, despite what Miss Uptight said about going home to her mattress, what she might really have planned for a Saturday night in a small Texas burg. From what he remembered, a night on the town in Hatlow could be a trip to the Dairy Queen.

He would lay money that she kept herself off-limits, but he had no doubt most of the horny dudes around Hatlow had tried with a woman who owned a body like hers. An image formed in his mind of her and some local yokel humping in a fancy bed. For some reason, he found that perplexing.

Her truck engine fired, her lights came on and just as she had left the kitchen without looking back at him, she drove toward the highway, also without looking back.

Aw, to hell with it,
he told himself. While he would like some female company during what looked more and more like an extended stay, even if he wanted to spend the time playing games with Miss Uptight or try to coax her into bed, he couldn’t. She was his mother’s friend.

Chapter 11

Dalton watched until her truck turned onto the highway and disappeared. Then he walked back into the house, to his mother’s bedroom door. He eased the door open, looked in and saw her sleeping. He stood there a few seconds, studying her. She looked frail and small buried beneath an old quilt. He had never thought of her as being a vulnerable person. In truth, he had never known what to think of her. Even now, after all these years, she was an enigma, a wheel within a wheel. He gently closed the door and returned to the dining room.

Cool air from the open windows had chased the day’s heat from the house. Fall was like that in West Texas. Hotter than a furnace in the daytime and cold as a desert grave at night. He could hear the steady tick of the old mahogany mantel clock, the mellow sound emphasizing its age and the silence that stole through the house like some friggin’ ghost.

Tick…tick…tick.

The unrelenting sound, an echo from childhood, brought back a thousand memories.

The old timepiece had sat there on the mantel ticking away forever. It had been ticking the night he realized he had become his own man. He was seventeen and had taken the work truck to town to see a girl whose name he no longer remembered. When he returned home, he met his stepfather, drunk and raging, waiting for him in the living room with his belt in hand. The old clock ticked through the fight that ensued.

You got no goddamn right to use that fuckin’ truck for anything. I’m gonna whip your ass.

Before the son of a bitch could land a blow with the belt, Dalton doubled him over with a belly punch, then flattened him with a right to the jaw. Then he walked out, climbed back into the truck and returned to town. He had slept in the truck in the city park, and Cherry had carried a facial bruise for weeks.

Through his youth, Dalton had borne the brunt of many of Cherry’s fits of violence, but from that night forward, Cherry hadn’t hit him again or even threatened him. Until the day Dalton left home for boot camp, a forced and chilly truce prevailed whenever he and the hateful bastard happened to be in the same room.

The old clock had been ticking the night two football scouts from Texas Tech appeared at the door and were turned away by Cherry. Later Dalton came to realize he could have dealt with them himself, but by then he was in the marines and far away from Hatlow. He had liked that better than playing football.

The thing that had been stuck in his craw all these years was that through all of it—the tantrums, the beatings, the meanness—his mother had rarely raised a voice in his defense. For a few years, he spent a lot of his time wondering why, but he never found an answer. He came to believe that she had been glad to see him leave. And he had thought, if that was what she wanted, then that was what she could have.

Tonight, the house had a dark and familiar loneliness about it. Generations of Parkers before him had hunkered within its walls, hoping not to draw attention and risk the small-town society’s condemnation or ostracism.

Only his great-grandmother had worn her Comanche relatives proudly. She hadn’t worried about what the neighbors might think or say. He remembered her as a skinny, bark-tough woman who feared nothing living or dead except Earl Cherry. Dalton’s mind spun back to the night Cherry, in one of his drunken tantrums, had left her shaking and crying after threatening to burn her house to the ground. If his mom had had any balls, she wouldn’t have lived with a bullying son of a bitch who had heaped abuse and intimidation on the whole family, especially when he targeted an aged widow who didn’t weigh a hundred pounds.

Through Dalton’s life, no matter where his thoughts of family had wandered, at some point, they always came back to his animus for Earl Cherry. When he was away from here, it no longer felt important, and he could and did avoid thinking about it. But here in the place where he had spent his most miserable years, on a dark, silent night, memories rose all around him as if to swamp him. He hadn’t suffered unease and vulnerability so profoundly in a long time, even in the savagery of the wars he had recorded for history.

This damned old house was haunted, he decided, forcing the blackness from his mind. He sat down at the dining table with his computer and took himself to the place where he was happiest—immersed in his work.

I know a little about sex, yeah.

Something told Joanna he knew more than a little.

Jerk!
She yanked off her clothing and pulled on her knit shorts and T-shirt.
Prick!
At the bathroom sink she scrubbed her face harder than usual with a rough washcloth, carefully avoiding the tender lump between her eyes.
Conceited bastard!
She rubbed her face dry with a hand towel, leaving her cheeks and chin rosy. She threw down her towel, leaned in closer to the mirror and examined the injury to her forehead, dabbed on more antibiotic cream and applied a Band-Aid to the wound. She studied the fine lines forming at the corners of her eyes.
Crap
. She needed to wear more sunscreen. And a hat.

She generously slathered on antiwrinkle cream, then stamped up the hallway to her bedroom. In her sixty-year-old house, the bathroom wasn’t attached to the master bedroom. In truth, her little house had no master bedroom. What it did have was two small bedrooms just alike, with one bathroom between them. But she made no complaint. The house was perfect for her. How much room did a person who spent very few hours at home need?

The best thing about the house wasn’t a part of the house at all. The best thing was
in
the house,
in
her bedroom. Almost filling the room was a queen-size Tempur-Pedic bed that had cost her a fortune. With the hours she worked every day, seven days a week, she had reasoned when she bought it, the least she could do was reward herself with an excellent place to lay her weary body at night. Now she flopped back on the bed, spread her arms wide, and with a huge groan of pleasure, closed her eyes.

So just how the hell long would Dalton Parker be here? And how could she avoid running into him?

And she
did
have to avoid him. Good grief, every time she saw him, something weird happened to her insides and he made her so nervous she couldn’t function.

And now he had brought up sex, for crying out loud.

Sex
. Was the idea of sex responsible for the weird thing that happened to her insides? The word came to her every time she saw him. If there had ever been a time when just seeing a man automatically brought sex to mind, she couldn’t recall it.

Well, she had no intention of ever letting something so perverse escape the confines of her innermost musings. And for a very good reason. For her, sex hadn’t been so great. She had never known a fantastic lover like those she read about in romance novels. She doubted such men existed in real life.

Shari was the only woman she knew who appeared to have a fantasy sex life. But different strokes for different folks, Joanna figured. What Shari thought fantastic might be awful for someone else.

She got to her feet, pulled back the covers and slid between them with a great sigh, thinking of her last relationship that had included sex. It had been with Scott Goodman and would have to be classified as spotty at best. Much of the time their encounters had been clumsy. Embarrassing, even. She didn’t know if that was her fault or his, but she suspected the problem lay with him.

The experience had been so awkward, so juvenile, she was embarrassed to discuss it even with Shari, with whom she discussed everything that had anything to do with sex. She had been relieved when she learned that Scott was seeing someone else because at that point, she had begun to consider that she could get just as pregnant with a lousy lover as with a great one.

It was all in the past. And just as well.
No
lover was the answer. She had given up.

But as she drifted toward sleep, a filmy image of the swarthy Dalton Parker without his clothes evolved in her mischievous mind.

The next morning, Joanna drove toward the Parker ranch hoping not to run into Dalton. He had spent a good part of the night in her head; she didn’t want to be around him the whole of today. Hadn’t he said he intended to start work on the fence? That project should cause him to leave early and return late.

Arriving at the ranch, she saw all of the ranch’s vehicles in place—the blue beat-up Ford pickup, Clova’s newer Dodge Ram dually and the ATV. So Dalton must still be inside the house. Good. She hoped he stayed there.

She went directly to the barn and picked up two slabs of hay to feed the donkeys. She put them by the egg-tending room door as she stepped inside. She donned her cap and gloves and started toward the chicken yard, carrying the hay and her egg baskets and bucket.