“Be right back,” she said to Garth, and she marched up to the door and stuck the note on it. She’d written, “Bunny and/or Delilah, I came to get my babies. Please call,” and she’d signed it and written down Garth’s cell phone number.
“Now what?” Garth asked impatiently when she climbed back into the front seat.
Lacey sighed. “I don’t know, Garth. You’ll just have to leave me be while I figure out where I would go right now if I were Bunny.”
Where would Bunny go? She really had no idea.
DELILAH WASN’T HOME, and Bunny was hacked. Maybe he should have called before he showed up, but he hadn’t wanted to spend his next-to-last bit of change on a pay phone. The key to the house that his mother had given him in case of emergency was long lost. Briefly he thought about breaking into the house, but his mother had installed a security system a few months back, and he didn’t know the code for the keypad. With that minor arrest record back in Abilene, all he needed was the sheriff’s department showing up and finding him with two stolen babies. So he got back in the truck and started driving.
Michele Two started yelling her head off about seven miles away from his mother’s place. “Hush up,” he said experimentally, but she didn’t. He tried a more courteous approach. “Would you please be quiet?” That didn’t work, either.
He figured the baby was hungry, and he had nothing to feed her except for an old piece of beef jerky. He knew there was a small town three miles up the road, so he told both babies to sit tight, and rammed the accelerator to the floor.
When he got there, the only place open was a pool hall and domino parlor in a long low cinder-block building.
“Don’t worry,” he said to Michele Two, who was red-faced and furious by this time. “I’ll get you something to eat.”
Michele One, by this time eager to get into the act, commenced wailing almost as loudly as Michele Two.
“You, too,” he said. “Wait here and I’ll be right back.” Then it occurred to him that it wouldn’t be a good idea to leave two crying babies in the pickup, so he growled, “All right, all right. We’ll all go in.”
He went around, opened the door on the other side of the cab and laboriously unbuckled Michele One from the car seat, then Michele Two. Michele One stopped crying, grabbed hold of his ear and twisted. Hard.
“Ow,” he howled, because he was gripping one kid in each arm and didn’t have a free hand with which to pry loose Michele One’s fingers. His shout only seemed to make the kid pull harder, so he called some of his rodeo experience into play and stoically ignored the pain.
With a twin under each arm, both of them having a tantrum, he couldn’t open the door of the building, so he had to wait until somebody came out. It was a big hefty guy with a shaved head who was wearing a motorcycle jacket, and Bunny said a polite, “Excuse me,” as he shouldered his way past and into the dark depths of the establishment, which smelled like spilled beer and greasy hamburgers and sweat. The babies, perhaps taken aback when they found themselves in this dark, foul-smelling place, became suddenly and blessedly quiet.
“Hmm,” said the perky blond waitress who appeared from the direction of the mechanical steer as he entered. “I suppose you know we don’t serve minors.”
Bunny had to speak loudly so that he could be heard over the twang of country music blaring from an ill-placed speaker. “I ain’t fixing to buy these kids a drink unless it’s milk. You got some milk?”
From the direction of the pool table, a loud laugh, soon joined by other laughter, greeted this request. Bunny glared at the six or seven men gathered at that end of the room. They were clearly buddies of the motorcycle guy, themselves tough customers bearing an array of tattoos and pierced body parts. While he contemplated all the likely potential problems that could develop between himself and this motley group, he shifted Michele One lower on his hip in case she got any ideas about renewing her hold on his ear. After a rustle of conversation, the pool game continued, a development for which Bunny felt absurdly grateful. He didn’t need any trouble from motorcycle guys, no sir.
“Do we have milk? Shoot, I don’t know.” The waitress called over her shoulder. “Lefty? We got any milk?”
A skinny guy wearing a bandanna wrapped around his head stuck his face out from behind the screen in the corner. “We got milk. If it isn’t sour.” He withdrew his head.
Bunny couldn’t pull the kids’ baby bottle from his hip pocket because he needed both hands to hang on to the twins. “Would you mind getting the bottle out of my pocket for me?” he asked as he winked at the waitress, who had a nice set of gazongas on her. Although this winking tactic in times past had never failed to produce results, it was like this woman couldn’t see past the babies to the man he was—a sexy, desirable guy.
“I don’t do that,” the waitress said before turning to walk away. So much for sexy. So much for desirable.
“Say, wait,” he said urgently, and then Michele Two started to whimper. The waitress turned around, hands on hips, a solicitous expression on her face.
“What’s wrong, honey?” she crooned at the baby, suddenly all interest.
“You could—you could hold her for a minute,” Bunny said in desperation.
Bingo! “Come to me, darlin’,” said the waitress. Michele Two began sobbing in earnest as she tumbled into the woman’s arms, but now Bunny had one hand free so that he could yank the baby bottle out of his pocket. “Lefty?” he hollered.
The guy wearing the head rag stuck his head out again. “Yeah?”
“One bottle of milk, please,” he said.
Lefty gave him a skeptical look, but he took the bottle behind the screen. Bunny heard a refrigerator door open and close.
The waitress approached. She was jouncing the baby with a practiced air. “What’s her name?” she said over the wailing of Michele Two.
“Michele,” he told her.
“Here,” Lefty said, returning to hand the full bottle back to him.
“And what’s the other one’s name?” the waitress asked.
“Michele,” he said, distractedly trying to force the bottle on Michele One, who seemed distinctly more interested in her pacifier than in food.
“I thought you said the other one’s name was Michele,” said the waitress with an air of befuddlement.
“They’re both Michele,” he told her as he handed the bottle of milk over to the baby she held. Michele Two promptly stopped crying and stuck the bottle in her mouth.
“I can see they’re twins, but naming them both Michele seems, well, slightly bizarre,” said the waitress into the welcome silence.
It occurred to Bunny that now that he had her attention, maybe he could make some points. “Honey, what’s your name?” he asked chummily, turning the full megawattage of the famous Bunny Shaw smile upon her.
“Wanda.” She aimed a jaunty grin up at him, and he thought for the first time that this situation had its possibilities, considering the gazongas and all.
“Well, Wanda,” he drawled, infusing his voice with a hint of mystery, “you don’t know the half of this story.”
GARTH PULLED THE CAR OVER into a grove of trees at the side of Delilah’s driveway. From there they could see the front of the house without being seen, and since the Honda was dark green, it blended perfectly with the surrounding leaves. “You want to wait here to see if your ex shows up?”
“I guess,” said Lacey. “Although right now I’m trying my darnedest to figure out where he’d go.”
“Does Bunny have friends around here? Relatives?”
“His friends are mostly scattered around the state. There are maybe a few I could call.” She and Bunny had been especially friendly with Rick and Darla, another bull rider and his wife. Rick had been sidelined with an injury six months ago, and the couple had moved in with Darla’s parents. For the life of her, Lacey couldn’t recall where the parents lived.
“Lacey, I think we might as well call the authorities. We can’t handle
this on our own.”
“You may be right, but if Bunny finds out the law is after him, no telling where he’ll run to.”
“You appear mighty sure of that.” Garth seemed ever more weary of what was beginning to seem like a wild-goose chase.
Lacey stared straight out the front windshield. Crickets were singing in the shrubbery, and moonlight filtered down through the tree branches. This scene reminded her of a lover’s lane. Things, however, were anything but romantic. “Bunny was arrested one time and got thrown in jail. He swore he’d never see the inside of a jail again.”
Garth’s retort was exasperated. “If that’s the case, Lacey, why would he be taking things that aren’t his?”
She turned and blinked at him. “But the babies are his, Garth. He’s their biological father. Oh, I know he’s not much of a father, and I have legal custody of Michele, but in Bunny’s mind, that must be what he thinks.”
Garth let out a sigh of forbearance and jockeyed his seat back so that his long legs would have more room to stretch out. “Why,” he said with what sounded like the utmost patience, “did he get arrested?”
“He got drunk in Abilene and picked a fight with the local police chief’s brother.”
“That was dumb.”
“I couldn’t agree more, but it’s not like Bunny knew the man’s brother was police chief when he decided to punch his lights out.”
Garth looked unconvinced. “I’m going to take a nap,” he announced. “You wake me up if Bunny’s truck starts down the driveway.”
Lacey didn’t answer, but she thought it was unfair of Garth to go to sleep. She herself wouldn’t be able to sleep a wink with those babies out there. She thought about Michele and hoped that Bunny had managed to take her out of that playpen when her pacifier was in her mouth. Michele had to have her pacifier or she wouldn’t go to sleep. Ashley, on the other hand, had her thumb at the end of her hand, and she could pop it in her mouth anytime and doze off.
Which Lacey wished she could do. She studied Garth, whose face was illuminated by a stripe of moonlight beaming in the side window. His mouth hung open as he slept, and his arms were folded across his chest. Other men might look less than attractive with their mouths hanging open, but not this one. Garth Colquitt was a handsome man. Not that she cared, but…
…but she did so like looking at handsome men. She didn’t mind studying Garth in some detail right now, mostly because it afforded her a break from thinking about Bunny and the babies. For two cents she would reach out and slide the tip of her finger across Garth’s lips just to see those eyes fly open all blank at first only to widen in surprise as he realized what she had done. She knew exactly how they would look because she’d seen that expression when she took care of him while he was sick. Why, she’d had her hands on his body, his nude body, then. Her palms tingled with the thought of it, and she clasped them together tightly in her lap.
Garth shifted, then turned his head sideways so that she couldn’t see his face so well. Didn’t matter. She knew exactly what it looked like. It was a face with character, bespeaking a man of substance.
She must have sat wide awake for a couple of hours, but Bunny didn’t show up. Around eleven o’clock it started to pour down rain, a real thunderboomer. The racket woke Garth, and he sat up straight and stretched. He cast a look at Lacey, who was huddled in her corner feeling sad and lost and lonely and bereft.
“We’re going to need a decent night’s sleep to deal with whatever happens tomorrow. What do you say we go along to that motel at the Navarro blinker and see if we can get rooms?”
“I guess that’s a good idea,” she said reluctantly.
“Do you have a better one?”
Lacey shook her head.
“All right, then,” he said, and he started the car.
It was only a hop, skip and jump to the motel, and although they had to rouse the owner, a middle-aged man with a handlebar mustache, from his sleep, he checked them into two adjoining rooms at the end of the building. On the way to their rooms, passing parked cars and darkened windows, Lacey trudged silently beside Garth through the lingering drizzle and worried about not having a toothbrush. She also wished that she wouldn’t have to wear the same dress again tomorrow. She didn’t share these thoughts with Garth because she realized that he wouldn’t want to hear them. He was becoming increasingly uncommunicative, and she supposed she couldn’t blame him. She was asking him to trust her judgment about Bunny, and for Garth that must be a long stretch.
“Good night Lacey,” Garth said after he had unlocked her room and stepped inside to have a look around. She thought his purpose for coming in must be to make sure that the room was safe and comfortable, which was more than he would have had to do. Her heart warmed to him for having her welfare in mind, though.
“Good night Garth.” She moved toward the door to close it after him.
He kept one foot inside the room. “I’ll be awake early. We should go back to Delilah’s, see if Bunny shows up there in the morning.”
She nodded, feeling suddenly very tired.
It surprised her when Garth reached out a hand and gently brushed her rain-wet cheek with his thumb before he went to his own room. She put her hand to her face, to the place where he had touched it. It had been a gentle touch, one of caring and concern, and more than she had expected from him, considering.
The walls of the motel must have been especially flimsy because she heard Garth running water in his bathroom as she shed her clothes. She noticed that she’d spilled iced tea down the front of her dress earlier and hadn’t even realized it until now. Tea stains were notoriously difficult to get out, but she ran the spot under the water faucet anyway and rubbed the tiny bar of motel soap over it.
Because she had already wet nearly half the dress, she went ahead and plunged it all the way into the basin, then rinsed it out since she’d have to wear it tomorrow. Draped over the shower rod, the thin fabric would dry overnight. After a few seconds’ thought, she stepped out of her bra and panties and sudsed them in the sink, too. This meant that she’d have to sleep in the altogether, but that was okay.
Once she’d hung the clothes to dry over the bathtub, she did the best she could to brush her teeth with the washcloth wrapped around her pointer finger and afterward fell into bed, exhausted.
Despite her weariness, she didn’t fall asleep immediately. Her mind kept rerunning the events of the day, and over and above all that had happened, she kept thinking how thoughts had flowed so freely between her and Garth, especially after they learned that the babies were gone. It was as if the babies’ absence had broken down the barriers between them, uniting them in the common cause of finding their children.
When Lacey finally slept, it was the sleep of the exhausted, but her dreams were not restful. One was of the ranch, of the empty playpen on the porch, of the hanging plants swinging above in a breeze that whipped into a tornado and swept the playpen away. That one woke her up, but she was so tired that it didn’t keep her awake.
She dreamed again, this time of Bunny riding in his truck, the two babies beside him on the seat. And she was there, too, begging Bunny to bring them back, but he only laughed and said he had to be at a rodeo, the sooner the better. They argued, and Bunny kept driving, and she was so infuriated that she grabbed the steering wheel and tried to turn the truck around. Too late she saw the Winnebago in front of her, and she thought, Why, we’re going to crash, but there wasn’t anything she could do to avoid it and when they hit, there was a big explosion.
Lacey sat straight up in bed. She half expected something to hurt, but her arms and legs seemed intact, and she realized she was in the motel. Muffled shouts and a door or two slamming let her know that something untoward had happened, and the explosion that she’d heard seemed too real to have been part of a dream.
Completely awake now, she glanced at the bedside digital clock, but the red numerals had gone out. A power failure? What had brought that on? Frightened, she slid
out of bed, momentarily forgetting that she wasn’t wearing clothes. She heard someone pounding on Garth’s door and someone else shouting near the motel office. Pulling the sheet along with her and wrapping it around her as she walked, she crept to the window and cautiously parted the draperies.
A few people, fellow guests in states of undress, were milling around the parking area, and she heard Garth talking with someone, presumably the person who had knocked on his door. At first she couldn’t see who was standing there, but when the man moved away, she saw it was the owner. He loped back through the parking lot, and after a few words with him, most of the people wandered back into the building.
It was only a minute or so before Garth rapped softly on the door between their rooms.
“Lacey?”
She went to the door and opened it. Garth stood there wearing only his jeans, his hair mussed and his eyelids at half-staff. The top button on his jeans wasn’t fastened, nor was the zipper closed all the way to the top. She noted that his flat stomach was punctuated by ripples of muscle, something she’d never paid attention to before. Lordy, but he looked sexy.
“The manager says that noise was a transformer down the road that blows sometimes when there’s lightning. He says the power is out but should be back on by morning.”
She stared at him. Her mouth had gone dry as dust, and the beat of her heart echoed in her ears like thunder. This reaction wasn’t because of the power failure or the loud noise of the transformer blowing. It was because he was a man and she was a woman and she was standing there in front of him stark naked under the sheet. She was also having ideas that had nothing to do with the babies or any of the other things going on in her life at present.
“Lacey?” he said again. His eyes smoldered under their lids, and she wished in that moment that Garth Colquitt were mud-fence ugly. But he wasn’t. And she, so help her, was putty in his hands. She didn’t want to be. A physical relationship with him would only complicate things. But if he insisted on taking her in that moment, pulled her to him and ground his body against hers, she would let the sheet fall away from her body and he could have his way with her.
Rancher's Double Dilemma Page 17
