“Can’t you just come to my place?”
“I don’t want the phone to ring and me not be where I can answer it. Mama usually goes to bed by eight thirty or nine.”
He turned her in his arms and smiled down at her. “I’ll be here.” He kissed her, so soft and so sweet and so impossible to resist.
On shaky legs and smelling like sex, she left Pecos Belle’s with good-looking, rich—and horny—Terry Ledger waiting in the apartment behind the café. This was the stuff fairy tales were made of. Or porno movies.
She had just reached the singlewide when Ben’s pickup pulled up outside.
Oh, crap.
Soon she heard his footsteps on the deck and rapping on the door. “I brought some barbecue from Freeman’s in Midland,” he said when she opened the door. “I got Raylene a CD and I’m in a dancin’ mood.”
Oh, hell
. From the sound of him, he was back on the Jack.
He came in, dropped a greasy sack on the dining table and went straight to the CD player. Along with the smoky, pungent smell of barbecue, something loud and country filled the small living room.
Mama had already risen from her chair. She began to clap her hands and stamp one foot. “Get yourself over here, Clyde, and swing me around this floor.”
Goddammit!
Great. Just great.
Chapter 21
A man shouldn’t raise his expectations when it came to women. Terry had learned that from his mother and had lived by it all his life.
And it ain’t been proven wrong yet
, he told himself this as he shaved.
Last night, he had waited like a dumbass in the café apartment until Marisa came and told him her mom and Ben were dancing and she had to stay with them. Terry had come home with a case of blueballs like he hadn’t suffered since he was a teenager.
He stepped into the shower muttering a string of oaths.
Hadn’t he already lectured himself a dozen times on the stupidity of getting involved with Marisa? Jesus Christ, he wasn’t that far from forty. Hadn’t he matured past letting his libido drive his behavior? What he needed to do was make sure he had food in his kitchen so he didn’t even have to go to that café to eat. Ever again.
He didn’t have long to worry about it
, he thought with satisfaction. The damn thing would soon be gone. He had already gotten bids from a couple of construction companies out of Odessa for the cost of razing the whole building.
And if the café was gone, Marisa and her mother would be gone, too. On that alarming thought, he turned off the water and stepped out of the shower.
Fuck
. He didn’t want Marisa to be gone. He didn’t want her mother to be gone. Her nearly marrying Lanny had been a close enough call.
Fuck.
He didn’t know what the hell he wanted.
He should stall before accepting one of the demolition bids on the Pecos Belle’s building.
But this morning he didn’t have time to stew over Marisa and her business. This morning he had to catch up with the surveying crew, to whom he was paying a hefty sum to lay out lots and streets for Ledger Ranches. No doubt they had started at the crack of dawn to get in a few hours of work before the heat wiped them out.
In his fridge he found a package of hot dogs. Good enough. Since when did he think he needed eggs over easy, cooked to perfection, sugar-cured bacon or buttered biscuits that melted in his mouth? He tore open the package of wieners and placed four in the microwave. He made two sandwiches by folding a slice of bread around two hot dogs and washed them down with a quart of orange juice. The breakfast of champions. A meal he had eaten a thousand times as a kid.
Leaning a hip against the counter and chewing, he reviewed his behavior toward Marisa. Last night he had gone at her like a horny teenager, an approach that had been all wrong. He had watched guys put the old full-court press on women, but until Marisa, he had never done it. His style had always been subtler--lunch, dinner, good wine, good entertainment, conversation. And things had always evolved in a positive way toward the bedroom and in the bedroom. Testimony to the fact was that even when he and a woman parted, they usually remained friends.
He might as well face it. What he wanted just as much as he wanted Marisa’s body was to get to know her. Sex would naturally follow, but for now, he should spend his time learning what made her tick, what made her happy or sad. He didn’t know her likes and dislikes, didn’t know how it must have been for an only child growing up in the isolation of an outpost like Agua Dulce. True, he was an only child himself—they had that in common—but he, at least, had grown up in a real town around ordinary people.
He had heard from Ben that she and Lanny had gone out on dates several times, with Lanny hiring a sitter for her mother. Terry could do the same. If he could get Marisa out of Agua Dulce, they could at least have a conversation without something in the café interrupting or one of the town’s citizens showing up with a new problem.
He picked up the phone and punched the café’s number, which he now had on speed dial. When she answered in her soft alto, words refused to form on his tongue. “Hi,” was the best he could think of.
“What’s up?” she asked. He heard wariness in her tone, yet he couldn’t keep from chuckling at the double entendre. “You really wanna know?”
A pause. He suspected she rolled her eyes as he had seen her do a dozen times. “Well, you know what I mean,” she said in an I’m-in-no-mood-for-jokes voice. “What’s going on?”
“I was just thinking, why don’t we go out?”
“Out where?”
“Ben told me you went out with Lanny. We could go over to Odessa or Midland for dinner.”
Another pause. He imagined her cussing Ben for gossiping. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s a hundred miles. And it was a hassle for Lanny. Finding someone to stay with Mama isn’t that easy.”
“What if I take care of it? What if I find someone? You won’t have to do anything but dress up and look pretty.” He couldn’t believe his ears. He was negotiating taking a woman out to dinner.
He heard shuffling noises in the background, muffled voices. “Be with you in just a minute,” Marisa said. She obviously wasn’t talking to him.
“Listen,” he said in frustration, “I’ve got to catch up with my surveying crew, but I’ll work on it. I’ll let you know what I come up with.”
“Sure. I gotta go.” She hung up.
He stood there staring at the phone, thrown off balance by what had just happened. The positive thinker in him wanted to feel good because she hadn’t said no, but he couldn’t get past the distinct feeling he had been brushed off anyway.
Fuck.
“Women,” he mumbled.
Then he sighed. No, not
women
—
Marisa
.
****
Marisa stood in the café’s tiny kitchen, breaking eggs onto the griddle’s hot surface, appreciating each one’s sizzle not rising above a whisper. How many eggs had she cooked on this griddle, she wondered as she lifted the bacon press and checked the strips of bacon. The familiarity of doing it day after day had given her roots in a rootless world.
She had half expected she might not hear from Terry again. He had been mad last night. He didn’t say so, hadn’t thrown a tantrum, but she had seen anger in his eyes, in his tightly controlled body language as he left the apartment.
She hadn’t been in the best of spirits herself and the night had been forty hours long. And to compound her distress, today she had awakened from her few hours of sleep mortified beyond words by what had happened in the café kitchen. A matter of seconds and she had gone off like some damn rocket. He must think her a sex maniac. He had even called her “easy.”
And now he was asking her for a date? What was up with that? An old saying she had heard all her life came to her about a man not taking the cow when he could get the milk for free. She sighed and scooped breakfasts onto four plates. She wanted to cry, but she didn’t have time.
He must be serious about a date if he had volunteered to find a sitter for Mama. It was true that the woman from Pecos Lanny had hired to stay with Mama was available on almost any evening. Her day job was working as a home health nurse, so she was fully qualified to contend with a patient like Mama. Marisa could make Terry’s life easier by giving him her name. But a crotchety part of her didn’t want to make his life easier. Besides, he could also get the woman’s name from Ben. He seemed to get all sorts of other information from Ben.
She grabbed a couple of biscuits she had baked earlier and slid them into the microwave. She hated re-warming her light-as-a-feather biscuits in the microwave and turning them heavy-as-lead, but it was the best she could do with the equipment she had. Customers didn’t complain.
Besides being disgruntled with herself, she was unhappier than usual this morning with Ben. He and Mama had played music and danced for hours.
Marisa felt a nagging annoyance at Terry, too. Yet, where he was concerned, an even deeper conflict roiled within her. A tiny traitorous part of her supported his development and wanted him to succeed. In fact, she had come to worry over the financial risk he had taken in this desolate part of the world almost as much as she worried about her own future.
He came in at noon, took a seat at the lunch counter and ordered a hamburger. She had no time to sit, but managed to talk to him as she flitted back and forth cooking and waiting on customers. And overshadowing her every activity and even her conversation with total strangers ordering food was the picture of herself hanging on to the edge of the kitchen sink lost in an incredible orgasm.
“I found someone,” he said on one of her passes to the kitchen. “Ben gave me the phone number and the woman’s name who stayed with your mom before.”
She stopped and looked at him.
“She says she can stay from six to midnight,” he said. “That gives us enough time to drive to Odessa for dinner. Or we could skip dinner and see a movie if you like.”
Why was he doing this? Hadn’t she already proved that with her being “easy,” wining and dining were unnecessary? “Look, Terry—”
“This isn’t about just wanting a hot body, Marisa. I want to start over. I want to do this right.”
“And you think going out to dinner somehow changes something?” The response was a gotcha, for sure.
He sat there looking at her, his hamburger poised above his plate. She didn’t have to be a genius to decipher what she saw in his eyes. Nor was it necessary to give him a speech on raw animal attraction.
He shook his head once, then turned back to his burger. He bit out a chunk and chewed. “Okay, think about this. I want us to get acquainted, build some history.”
Ha. That was a new one. Men were so dumb. But bless his heart for trying to be gallant and trying to put a puritanical face on what they both wanted. She couldn’t keep from chuckling. “Okay, so we spend an evening lying to each other about our life stories. Then we fall into bed. Or the backseat. Or something.”
“No backseat. I don’t have a car and the crew cab’s too small.”
She chuckled again. “Haven’t you ever heard where there’s a will, there’s a way?”
He grinned. “C’mon. Stop giving me a hard time. I’m trying to be a gentleman here.”
Now that her daydreams about him loomed as a reality, in truth, she felt confused and not up to acting out the fantasy. “Honestly, I’m not trying to be difficult. I just feel like I need to say, ‘Why me?’ You must know a bunch of glamorous chicks who’ve got a lot more to offer than I do.”
“It’s true I know some glamorous chicks, but that’s all they are. It is not true that they’ve got more to offer than you. You’re one of the few women I’ve ever met that I trust.”
So who had broken his heart? She felt a frown tug at her brow. “You must have been keeping some pretty bad company.”
“I’m trying to change that. Let’s go to dinner tonight and enjoy an evening out. No strings, no obligations.”
After he had touched her intimately and driven her to fall apart in his arms, she didn’t believe the last part, but what did she have to lose by going to dinner? She lifted a shoulder. “Okay. But only if it’s somewhere the food is decent. I don’t want to see you pay good money for bad food. And I’m a tough critic.”
Terry grinned and the whole room grew brighter. “Lady, I wouldn’t have it any other way.”
Marisa’s heart melted. Damn him. He wasn’t just a devil. He was Satan himself.
****
Marisa closed Pecos Belle’s early. Before dressing for her date with Terry, she carried clean bed linen to the apartment and made up the bed.
Just in case one of her aunts might show up to spend the night
, she told herself.
Then she showered and shampooed and debated if she should just wear clean jeans and a shirt or one of her few dresses. She had shaved her legs in the shower.
Just in case it became important
, she told herself. As she creamed them, she checked the yellow rose showing on the outside of her left ankle, wondering how many women Terry had dated who had tattoos. On her olive skin, the tattoo wasn’t as obvious as the ones on Tanya’s pale skin, but it still could be easily seen.