Summertime on the Ranch

by Carolyn Brown

  The Dollar General was right next door to the Dairy Queen, so it only took a couple of minutes to walk over to it. When they were inside, Becca latched onto a cart and pushed it right back to the baby section. Dalton followed behind her and located a rack with packages of three baby blankets in each.

  “Pink,” she reminded him when he picked up the first one and it had a blue striped one in it.

  He hung it back and riffled through the rest of the packages until he found two that had all pink ones. “Will this do? Some are striped and some are plaid.”

  “If it’s got pink on it, Grammie will be fine with them,” she answered.

  “Well, well, well!” Lacy Ruiz came around the end of the aisle with a cartload of merchandise. “So, this is why you…”

  “We’re buying these for…” Dalton started to try to explain, but then he figured that telling his old standby with the credenza in her living room that they were buying blankets for cats would sound totally crazy. “A gift for a couple of new babies.”

  “Yeah, right.” Lacy started at Becca’s toes and slowly let her eyes travel up to the top of her red hair. “I guess I’ll lose my five dollars.”

  “I’m Becca McKay,” she introduced herself. “How are you going to lose five dollars because we’re buying blankets for new babies?”

  “Lacy Ruiz,” she nodded. “We’ve got a pot goin’ at the Broken Bit about what kind of woman will finally rope Dalton, and I sure didn’t bet on it being a tall redhead. I guess there’s more than one way to get a cowboy to the altar.” Her eyes shifted from Becca’s stomach to the blankets in the cart. “I’ve got several things to get before the store closes.” She paused and patted Dalton on the cheek. “I just can’t see you as a daddy. I guess this will keep you away from the Broken Bit, but if it goes south, darlin’, you know where I live.”

  “Sweet Lord!” Becca gasped when the woman had gone.

  “I expect they’ll all be disappointed in nine months.” Dalton shrugged. “Let’s go find the cat toys now.”

  “Why didn’t you tell her we were buying these for kittens?” Becca asked.

  “You think she would have believed me? That sounds like a lame excuse,” Dalton said.

  Becca giggled. “It does, doesn’t it? I guess I’d better tell Grammie about this as soon as I get home. I bet that hussy is calling everyone she knows on her cell phone right now, and I sure don’t want to have Grammie yelling at me because she heard it first from one of her friends.”

  “So…” Dalton dragged out the word. “Are you going to marry me and make a decent man of me?”

  “Nope.” She shook her head slowly as she tossed half a dozen cat toys into the cart. “I’d never rope a guy in by getting pregnant. Marriage should be for love, not necessity, and there should never be regrets.”

  “How did you get so smart?” he asked.

  “It’s the Irish in me.” She started toward the checkout counter. “Grammie says we’re born smart.”

  “I believe it.” Dalton’s eyes glanced at Becca’s flat stomach behind the waistband of her jeans, and he wondered what she’d look like pregnant. If they ever did establish a permanent relationship, their children would be tall for sure. With him standing at six foot two inches and Becca almost kissing six feet, there was no way they’d be short. Would they have dark hair like his or red like hers? Would their eyes be blue or green, or maybe even brown like his maternal grandfather’s?

  “Earth to Dalton.” She poked him on the arm.

  “Sorry, I was off in another world,” he said.

  “What world would that be?” she asked.

  “I’ve got to deliver some rodeo bulls down to a ranch rodeo in Haskell, Texas, on Friday.” He said the first thing that came to his mind. “Want to ride along with me? We’ll be back by suppertime.”

  “Depends on what’s going on in the wine shed,” she answered.

  At least she didn’t say no, he thought as he pushed the empty cart away from the counter for her.

  The trip back to Terral seemed to go by in a flash, and suddenly, they were parked outside Greta’s house. There wasn’t a full lover’s moon hanging in the sky, but it was a three-quarter one with stars dancing around it. He could think of all kinds of come-on lines, but not a single one of them seemed appropriate for a woman like his Becca.

  My Becca, he thought. Someday, maybe—if I’m as lucky as Rye was when he fell for Austin at first sight.

  He got out of the truck, helped her out, and carried the bag of their purchases to the door for her. “I had a great time today, and thanks for helping me with chores.”

  “Thanks for supper.” She locked eyes with him.

  He dropped the bag on the porch and tipped up her chin with his fist. Her eyes fluttered shut, and her thick lashes fanned out on her cheek. He wanted to kiss her eyes, but that could come later. Right then, he craved the taste of her full lips.

  When the kiss ended, he politely picked up the bag and put it in her hands. “Good night, Becca.” His voice sounded strange in his own ears.

  “Good night, Dalton,” she whispered.

  “I’ll call you tomorrow,” he said.

  “Okay,” she said.

  * * *

  “I guess it was a date,” she muttered as she took the blankets and toys into the house.

  “So?” Greta raised an eyebrow.

  Becca held up the bag. “Six pink blankets and toys. Where’s Loretta and Dolly?”

  “I made them a special bed out of a laundry basket, and they’re sleeping soundly in my room,” she answered. “I’m not talking about the baby stuff. I got a phone call from Mavis a while ago. She says that you’re pregnant. Am I going to be a great-grandmother, and is Dalton the daddy?”

  “Gossip travels faster than the speed of sound.” Becca plopped down on the sofa, removed her boots, and propped her feet on the coffee table. “We were buying baby blankets when Lacy Ruiz came into the store… No, that’s not right.” She drew her brows down and then snapped her fingers. “Lacy Ruiz…that’s her name. Do you know her?”

  “Oh, yes,” Greta nodded.

  “She got the wrong impression, and did you know there’s a bet about what kind of woman Dalton will finally wind up with?” Becca asked.

  “I’m not surprised. That boy has a reputation like my Seamus had before he fell in love with me,” Greta said. “So, you were buying baby blankets and Lacy got the wrong idea. Did you tell her it was for our new kittens?”

  “Think about it, Grammie,” Becca said. “Would you have believed a story like that?”

  Greta’s giggle even had an Irish accent. “I don’t guess I would. It does sound a bit like bull coodle. I guess when you don’t swell up like you’ve swallowed watermelon seeds, they’ll realize that Lacy’s full of…”

  “You’re in America, Grammie,” Becca told her. “You can say bullshit.”

  That made Greta laugh even harder. “The one way you could get around this mess is to marry the boy, you know, and let him make an honest woman of you.”

  “We’ve only been out on one date, and it could hardly be considered a date,” Becca gasped.

  “Then he did kiss you good night,” Greta raised an eyebrow. “Did it send a shot of heat all the way to your toenails?”

  “I don’t kiss and tell,” Becca answered.

  Chapter 5

  Monday was a long day for Becca. The harvesters brought a pickup load of melons to the shed, and she spent the whole day squeezing the juice from them. She wanted to get all of them ready for the next step, so she didn’t go home until after eight that evening. Dalton called and said that he and the hired hands had been hauling hay all day, and since it was supposed to rain the next day, they’d be working by the headlights of the trucks until the job was done.

  “Watermelons and hay,” she said.

 
“We must love it, or we wouldn’t stay with it, right?” he asked.

  “Ain’t it the truth,” she sighed.

  “I’m at the barn with this load, so good night. Maybe I’ll have time to come by the wine shed tomorrow,” he said.

  “Good night.” She looked forward to seeing him. Lord only knew how often she’d thought of him that day, but maybe it was better if they both had a little space after that steaming-hot kiss they had shared the night before.

  His voice sounded almost as tired as she felt that evening. She was glad to see a note from Greta saying that she’d gone to the movies with her friends and wouldn’t be home until late. The kittens came tumbling out of the living room, purring and rubbing around Becca’s ankles as she made her way to the bathroom and ran water in the old claw-footed tub.

  “Sorry, Loretta and Dolly,” she said as she slipped out of her clothing and sank down into the warm water. “Cats don’t like baths, so you have to just sit there and talk to me. So, how was your day?”

  Loretta meowed pitifully.

  Dolly gave Becca a dirty look, picked up a pair of socks in her mouth, and carried them out into the hallway.

  “Well, my day was crazy. I juiced a whole truckload of melons, checked the progress of all the wine in the place, and loaded the rinds in the back of the work truck to take to the chickens over on the ranch. I saw Dalton from a distance once and got a hot flash just looking at him with no shirt on out there in the hayfield. I’m glad you can’t talk, because I have no doubt you’d go tell Grammie what I just said,” she told the kittens.

  * * *

  Tuesday morning went just fine except that it poured down rain most of the time. Becca stopped working long enough at noon to prop her feet up and eat a sandwich she’d brought from home. She had tossed the plastic baggie and the napkin in the trash and was headed back across the room to begin scooping out more melons to juice when she heard the first bump against the wooden door.

  Her heart skipped a beat and then raced ahead with a full head of steam. Dalton had arrived, and she hadn’t seen him up close since he had kissed her good night on Sunday. Would things be awkward between them?

  The second bump was followed by a bellow, and the walls of the metal shed rattled. That wasn’t a cowboy—it was a bull! If he knocked the door down, the old saying about a bull in a china shop wouldn’t begin to describe the damage he could do. Becca grabbed her cell phone and called Dalton.

  “Do you have a bull out of the pasture? I’ve got one trying to get into the wine shed,” she said.

  The noise of another loud bellow echoed through the roar of the rain beating down on the metal roof, and then a big horn poked right through the wooden door.

  “That sounds like Big John,” Dalton said.

  “Well, you’d best come get him or he’s going to be Dead John,” Becca said. “I keep a five-shot thirty-eight in my purse, and if another horn comes through the door, I’m going to start shooting until it’s empty. Then I’ll reload and keep it up until he’s ready to go to the dog-meat factory.”

  “Don’t shoot,” Dalton said. “I’m on my way. The crazy bull loves watermelon. He was probably headed to the field and caught a whiff of what’s in the shed.”

  The call ended and the horn disappeared from the door. Becca picked up a butcher knife and deftly halved a melon, scooped out a little of the middle, and then stuck it up to the hole in the door. “I’m willing to share if you’ll back away from the door and let me open it.”

  Her original plan was to toss the melon out into the yard and then slam the door, but when she peeked out, the bull took a step forward. “Oh, no! You will not come inside, and you aren’t eating this on this side of the road.”

  The animal lowered his head and rolled his eyes. She stomped her foot, glared at him, and took the first step out of the shed. She held the melon out so he could smell it, and then jerked it back. “You can follow me to your pasture, or I’ll take it back inside and you can do without.”

  She had dealt with cattle all her life, and Big John didn’t scare her one bit. If he turned malicious and came at her, she could always throw the melon down and run like hell. Rain soaked her to the skin, and her long, red hair was hanging limp before she had taken half a dozen steps, but the bull followed behind her like a lost puppy.

  Dalton drove up in the ranch work truck about the time she made it to the middle of the dirt road. He rolled down the window a few inches and yelled, “Are you crazy? Big John is the meanest bull at the rodeos. He could kill you in a split second.”

  “Not as long as I’ve got a watermelon in my hands. Turn the truck around and show me which pasture to put him in.” She took another step, and her foot sank down in mud that came up over the top of her shoes. Not even the rain could mask the sucking noise when she pulled the shoe out and kept walking. There was no way she could go across the cattle guard with the bull, but she saw where he had broken down the fence on his way to the watermelon field.

  “Okay, Big John,” she told him. “We’re going in the same way you came out. If you rip up a leg on the barbed wire, I’m not going to feel a bit sorry for you.”

  The bull threw back his head and bellowed louder than ever before.

  “If you want this watermelon, then you can quit your belly-achin’ and get over one little strand of barbed wire,” she told him.

  Dalton drove across the cattle guard and headed toward the gate into the pasture nearest the gap in the fence. He stopped the truck and Becca saw a flash of yellow. She cradled the chunk of melon like a baby and wiped the rain from her eyes. “You’ve got a rain slicker and I’m wet to the hide,” she grumbled. “Thank God, you don’t have a camera.”

  Dalton opened a gate and she carried the watermelon through it with Big John right behind her. When she was twenty feet into the pasture, she set the watermelon down on the ground and slowly backed out through the gate. Big John lowered his head, and Becca could have sworn the bull sighed.

  Dalton slammed the gate shut and started to take off his slicker.

  She shook her head. “No sense in both of us being soaked.”

  “At least, come up to my house with me and let me throw your things in the washer and dryer,” he said.

  “All right.” She wiped water from her eyes and glanced at the house, a good twenty yards away. “But I’m not getting in your truck. It’s only a little way, so I’ll walk. I’m not ruining the seats.”

  “They’re well-worn leather. I can dry them with a towel with no problem,” he argued. “And it’s warmer in there. If you get a cold from enticing my prize rodeo bull home, Greta will kill me and never ask me to Sunday dinner again.”

  Becca walked through mud puddles over to his truck and climbed inside when he swung the door open for her. Water dripped from her hair, her clothing, and her body and saturated the seat while he drove up to his small house. She left a puddle behind when she stepped out into the still pouring rain. A quick glance at the driver’s seat told her that it didn’t look a bit better than hers.

  “You’re going to need a lot of towels to clean that up,” she said as she headed toward the porch.

  Tuff came out from under a lawn chair and shook from head to toe. Any other time she might have fussed about the spray, but what were a few more drops when she was already saturated?

  Dalton rushed up the steps, slung open the door for her, and apologized for Tuff. “I would have brought him along to help corral Big John, but the bull hates him. He’s the only critter on the ranch that Tuff doesn’t have his bluff in on. Let me show you to the bathroom.”

  Becca dripped water on the hardwood floor all the way from the living room down the short hall. The place was even cleaner than Grammie’s house, and that woman had never met a speck of dust that she couldn’t conquer. The aroma of his woodsy shaving lotion lingered in the bathroom. She was surprised to see a big, claw
-foot tub on one side of the tiny space and a walk-in shower on the other.

  He pointed to a hook on the wall. “You can use my robe until we get your clothes washed and dried. Toss them out in the hallway, and I’ll put them in the washing machine. In an hour, you’ll be all dry and ready to go back to the watermelon shed.”

  “You don’t have to wash my things. I can do that,” she said.

  “I don’t mind. I’ll put on a pot of coffee. You could use something warm to take the chill off that chilly rain. Crazy, isn’t it, how that even in the summer, the rain can feel cold?”

  “Yep,” she agreed.

  “Big John doesn’t like most people. I’m surprised he didn’t just run you down and take that melon away from you,” Dalton said.

  “Maybe I’m a bull whisperer,” Becca suggested.

  “I can believe it after what just happened,” Dalton nodded. “Just follow your nose to the kitchen when you’ve taken a shower.” He finally closed the door and left her alone.

  The air conditioner kicked on, and cold air flowing down from a vent in the ceiling sent shivers up and down Becca’s body. She turned on the water in the shower and quickly slipped out of her clothing.

  “Of all the days for me to wear faded blue cotton underpants,” she groaned as she peeled them down from her hips. When she was completely naked, she threw her jeans, socks, shirt, and underwear out into the hallway and fought the urge to cuss when the panties landed a foot from the rest of her things.

  She stepped into the shower and was surprised to find a bottle of lavender-scented shampoo and matching conditioner. “Well, that proves he keeps things ready for the women he brings home with him,” she muttered as she worked some of the shampoo into her hair.

  When she’d finished, she slid back the glass door, stepped out of the shower, and wrapped a towel around her long hair and used a second one to dry her body. Then she slipped on the white terry robe and wondered how many other women had worn it while they had breakfast with him. Just as he’d suggested, she followed the smell of coffee down the hall and into the kitchen.