Red's Hot Cowboy (37 page)

Farris’s voice quivered when he answered, “Yes, missy, I sure do. Me and Momma made us a deal when we married. We wouldn’t never borrow no money for nothin’ and we wouldn’t buy on time. We saved a long time to buy our first tractor. It was a used John Deere and Momma worried that the mules we’d been plowin’ with would get their feelin’s hurt. We raised up four kids and times got hard sometimes, but we never went to the bank. I lost her three months ago. Ranch ain’t the same without her.”

“If the ranch don’t produce it, you don’t need it?” Pearl said.

“Don’t never go against that and you’ll be fine. I was askin’ fifty-five for the big one, fifty for the middle one, and forty for the little girl. I’d made up my mind to take a hundred thirty for all three but if you kids want them, I’ll take a hundred and twenty-five and be glad they’re goin’ to a good home. Crazy, ain’t it, how you get attached to equipment just like they was animals.”

“We’ll take them,” Pearl said without hesitating.

Wil’s eyes widened. He’d been prepared to part with sixty thousand that day but not a hundred and twenty-five thousand.

“You don’t think we’d better talk about it?” he asked Pearl in a tight-lipped, hoarse voice.

“No. It’s a good deal and I like that little girl real well. I think I’ll enjoy plowing up the fields with her and hookin’ up a hay fork on the front to take the big round bales to the feed lot,” she said. “You want to write Farris a check out of your account or should I?”

Wil almost swallowed his tongue. Was she willing to bankroll him?

“I’ll write a check. I can probably get over here Saturday with a truck to take them out of your way,” Wil said.

“That will work out just fine. Not that I don’t trust you kids, but that way I’ll be sure your check clears the bank by then.”

“I understand.” Wil reached for his checkbook inside his coat pocket. “I appreciate the good deal.”

“You kids keep up that business about not goin’ into debt and you’ll do just fine. I’ll go on in the house and bring the books out so you can see I’m not blowin’ smoke up your under britches about the hours and the maintenance.”

When he was in the house and the door was closed, Wil turned to Pearl. “Why did you do that?”

“Because it’s a helluva deal. I was a loan officer at the bank in Durant. I know farm equipment. You should be dropping down on your knees and askin’ for forgiveness for stealing those tractors from Farris. His kids may put out a contract on you when they find out that you rinky-dooed him right out of them.”

“Maybe I didn’t want to spend that much money today. Maybe I don’t even have that much in my account,” he said.

“Then I’ll write half of it out of mine and claim the little girl as mine. I’ll pay you room and board for her and come visit her when I get a hankering to drive around in the fields.”

“Where did you get that much money?”

She pointed a long, slim finger at him. “Darlin’, don’t you worry about my bank account. If I wanted to buy those tractors and set them in the middle of the gravel parking lot at the Longhorn Inn just to look at, I could do it.”

Farris returned with the paperwork all neatly filed in folders. “Momma took care of things proper.”

He and Wil exchanged folders for a check.

“Thank you for doin’ business with me. I think you’ll be right happy with them and I feel like Momma is smiling down from heaven.”

“I’m sure she is,” Pearl said. “Let’s go on home, darlin’. I can’t wait to tell Lucy and Jasmine about the tractors.”

“Them your daughters?” Farris asked.

“No, just my good friends,” Pearl said.

“Well, you kids have a good day and I’ll see y’all on Saturday.” Farris put the check in his bibbed pocket and sauntered back toward the house.

The temperature hovered around one or two degrees above freezing and it rained all day on Sunday. Three guests were all that checked into the Longhorn on Saturday night and they’d left early that morning, so Lucy and Pearl had the rooms cleaned by mid-morning. Jasmine had driven back to Sherman for the weekend to tell her mother that she was buying a café in Ringgold, Texas. Lucy had borrowed Delilah and gone to her room with a book for the rest of the day.

At noon Tess called the first time.

“Hello, Mother,” Pearl said.

“You better start early because it’s raining and the weatherman says it could freeze.” Tess went right into the conversation without a hello.

“Mother, it’s only rain. We’ll be there in plenty of time. How’s Aunt Kate?” Pearl said, but there was still a little doubt hiding in the back of her heart. One that said he’d change his mind at the last minute. He’d said they needed to slow the wagon down after that fantastic week of sex. Maybe after the week apart he’d put the brakes on the wagon and stop it completely.

When she tuned back into her mother’s ranting Tess was saying, “Kate is cantankerous! She’s trying to bully me into going to Savannah for a week with them. She’s using the excuse that she and Mother shouldn’t be traveling alone at their age, and please tell me that he’s your boyfriend. It’s bad enough that you spent the night at his ranch without a chaperone but if he’s not your boyfriend that makes it even worse,” Tess said.

“I don’t know what he is right now.” Pearl could see Tess going up like a bonfire if she knew about the week of sex every night.

Tess groaned. “I heard that you’ve had dinner with him and his family and then with his mother at the first of the week. That sounds serious to me. Did you shave your legs?”

“What?”

“Did you shave your legs and wear fancy underpants when you went to dinner with him?”

“What has that got to do with anything?”

Tess sighed. “You did, didn’t you? I really, really did not want you to get mixed up with a rancher, but I suppose it’s better than the alternative. Drive careful. I’ll see you at cocktails.”

“What’s the alternative, Mother?”

“An ex-con biker who murdered his mother might be worse, but I’d have to think about it.” She hung up, leaving only a guilt trip in her wake.

Pearl had talked to her mother six times by four thirty. She was about ready to sign the motel over to Lucy and run away to the Sahara Desert with nothing but a canteen. No cell phone. No computer and no way for her mother to get in touch with her. Lucy had the right idea when she faked her death and got the hell out of Dodge or Kentucky or wherever the hell it was. Would Wil leave his cows and ranch and go with her if she promised him wild sex every night?

She opened her closet doors and took out a pair of skin-tight jeans, a Western cut lacy blouse that she’d worn to the rodeo the spring before, and her ivory eel cowboy boots. She chose a silver pendant with a crossed set of pistols over angel wings and snapped it onto a chunky necklace of graduated silver beads and went out into the lobby to see what Lucy had to say.

“Wow! You look like a cowgirl,” Lucy said.

“I’m hoping my mother thinks the same thing. It’s payback for her drivin’ me crazy all afternoon,” Pearl said.

“If that’s payback, then what were you going to wear?”

“A green cocktail dress, but she has pestered the shit out of me all day so she gets the cowgirl me and she hates that.”

“Why?”

“Because she wanted me to be Miss America. Beauty pageants, fluffy dresses, world peace, and flaming batons.”

“What did you want to be?”

Pearl cocked her head to one side. “Did anyone ever tell you that you’d make a wonderful therapist?”

“Not me. I didn’t even finish high school and them kind of people have to go to college. What did you want to be?”

“Truth?”

Lucy nodded.

“I wanted to be just like Aunt Pearlita. Be my own boss and do my own thing, say what I wanted and to hell with everyone else.”

“Looks like you got your wish.”

Pearl grinned. “I did, didn’t I?”

Wil walked in and caught the last sentence. “You did what? You are stunning.” He crossed the lobby in a few long strides, picked Pearl up, and swung her around several times. “I’ve missed you so bad.”

“Thank you.” Pearl blushed. “You look pretty damn good yourself and you are right. This separation shit is for the outhouse.”

He tucked her arm into his.

“Don’t wait up, Lucy. We might be late.”

“No, we won’t,” Pearl said. “We’ll be home by ten at the latest, maybe earlier.”

Lucy waved them both off and went back to the computer where she was reading a Kentucky newspaper. Every day she checked to see if there was any more news about her, and every day she was relieved when nothing happened in her hometown.

Wil settled Pearl into the passenger’s seat of his pickup and rounded the front end on his way to the driver’s side. She stretched her neck to get a full view of him. Starched Wranglers that fit his sexy butt like a glove and stacked up over his shiny brown cowboy boots; chocolate-colored shirt that matched his eyes; and a deep brown Western cut corduroy jacket. His hair had been cut since they’d gone to Nocona to buy the tractors but it still looked like he’d combed it with his fingers into a devil-may-care look.

“Kiss me,” she said.

He leaned across the seat and kissed her hard three times. “Don’t be nervous. I promise not to eat with my fingers or pick my nose. Tell me about the folks I’m meeting tonight.”

“Mother. Tess Landry Richland. The sweetheart of Savannah and runner-up for Miss Georgia when she was in college. The real deal with a singing voice from heaven and big blue eyes. If the other girl hadn’t been a senator’s daughter, Momma would have had the crown and it would be mounted on her tombstone when she dies.”

Wil chuckled.

“It’s the God’s honest truth, Wil Marshall.”

“Okay, now your father.”

“Daddy is Texan. Cowboy boots. Tailor made Western cut clothes. Not as tall as you, more lanky. Good lookin’ enough to make Momma move to Texas and bitch about it every day. She loves him but nobody is going to ever forget that she left her beloved Savannah for him.”

Wil couldn’t keep the grin off his face.

“And Granny who is visiting from Savannah. In the first five minutes she’ll tell you that Momma was a runner-up for Miss Georgia and could have been Miss America. And that she comes to visit in the winter because the Texas heat in the summertime would melt her into her casket.”

Wil laughed out loud.

“Don’t laugh yet. There’s still Aunt Kate. That’s Granny’s sister who was the wild one in the family. We think she’s eighty-three because she’s older than Granny and Granny is eighty-one. She will try to seduce you so get ready for it.”

The laughter stopped. “You are shittin’ me.”

“Not even a little stink. She will and you’ll have to play along or else she’ll get her feelings hurt and I’ll never hear the end of it. Tell her she’s beautiful and flirt with her. Tell her that I saved your sorry ass from prison and you owe me for it.”

“Prison! I thought this was all about thanking me for staying up all night with you.”

“Well, there is that. Aunt Kate will want to really, really thank you.”

Wil slowed down for the red light in Nocona. “Now you are scaring me.”

She laughed. “I can’t do it. I thought I could. Aunt Kate is very prim and proper. She really is over eighty and none of us will ever see her birth certificate, and we’ve been told that if we put her age in the newspaper obituary when she dies she will haunt us. But she won’t make a play for you. She and Granny will bicker about how handsome you are right in front of you, but they are true blue old southern gals.”

“You are wicked, Red. I believed you just like I did when you said your name was Minnie Pearl.”

Pearl giggled and all the tension left her body. “Why don’t you call me Minnie instead of Red all evening?”

“Because Red suits you better.”

***

Tess met them at the door and ushered them through the foyer into the living room of the long, low ranch house that looked like it sprawled on forever from the outside. The foyer with its gold gilt mirrors and Victorian settee and tables was the exact opposite of the living room done up in buttery soft leather sofas, a stone fireplace, and hardwood floors.

“They’ve arrived,” Tess told everyone in the living room. “Pearl, darlin’, introduce us, please.”

“This is Wil Marshall. He’s a rancher over in Henrietta and y’all know how we met. Wil, this is my mother, Tess; my father, John Richland; my granny, Miz Audry Landry; and her sister, Kate Fornell. Now that’s done, Daddy, do you have Coors on ice?”

John nodded toward the bar.

“We are very pleased to meet you.” Granny held out a blue veined hand. Her hair was still the same color as Tess’s and her eyes as blue. Age had taken its toll on her face but her smile was breathtaking even at well past eighty. “We’ve heard so much about you and I do believe you are a Texan just like John. He stole my daughter away from Savannah and brought her down here to this hot country. I only visit in the winter because I’d suffocate and die in the summertime.”

Wil brought Granny’s hand to his lips and brushed a kiss across her fingertips. “It’s all my pleasure, Miz Landry.”