Without a backward glance—at the store clerk or at Real Vintage Cowboy—the shop was located down the street—Cody climbed into the cab of his truck, pointed it in the direction of his ranch and drove off.
Driving past Catherine’s shop, there was a part of him that actually toyed with the idea of walking right back in and getting that damn kiss out of the way.
Another part of him—the part that wound up winning—thought it might be a better idea if he slept on his impulse first.
Then, if he still felt that he needed to get this whole thing out in the open and out of his system, he could always come back another day and do whatever he felt he had to do.
But right now, he decided, it was better for all concerned if he just kept driving and ignored any and all impulses—sharp or otherwise—that telegraphed themselves through him.
Cody frowned.
Deeply.
He’d never cared for complications, and this definitely felt like one hell of a complication in the making.
With effort, he forced his thoughts to focus on what needed to be attended to next on the ranch. After all, his ranch was the really important thing.
He had horses to train and ranch hands to pay, Cody reminded himself. Beyond that, nothing else mattered.
Or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to.
* * *
It was just by accident that Cody was in the house two mornings later to hear the phone ring. Most days, he’d already be out, either helping to clean the stables or in the corral, working with and training the quarter horses.
For the most part, he looked upon a phone as strictly a convenience for him in case he had to call a vet for one of his horses. Otherwise, he looked upon it as just another decoration hanging next to the calendar on the kitchen wall.
He didn’t really like being on the receiving end of a phone call.
There was a reason for that.
The ringing phone brought back bad memories. It reminded him of the time someone from the hospital had called to tell him that there’d been an accident and that his parents wouldn’t be coming home.
Ever.
He’d been eighteen at the time, an adult by legal standards. But it had hit him hard, right in his gut, stripping him of his years and making him feel like some helpless kid again.
Suddenly, just like that, he found himself orphaned. Orphaned and yet catapulted into the scary position of being head of the household. And if that hadn’t been intimidating enough, he also became—just like that—Caroline’s legal guardian since his sister was four years younger than he was and, at the time, still a minor.
Cody had always been his own person, but suddenly, without warning, he’d been thrown headlong into the deep end of the pool. It was up to him to make all the decisions. Decisions about his parents’ funeral arrangements, about whether to sell the ranch or try to make a go of it. Most frightening of all, he had to make decisions involving his sister’s welfare. Quick decisions. If he hadn’t been willing to become her legal guardian, Caroline would have become a ward of the court for the next four years of her life.
As far as he was concerned, that part really required no debating at all. There was no way on earth that he would have allowed his sister to be swallowed up by the system.
One isolated early morning phone call and his entire life had changed. Cody had aged at least ten years in the small space of time between when he picked up the receiver and when he hung it up again.
Maybe Caroline would have been better off if he had agreed to let the court take her and place her in a foster home, he thought now. At least then she wouldn’t have met that loser of a husband of hers and Rory wouldn’t be controlling her the way he did.
All this shot through Cody’s mind as he stared at the ringing phone on his kitchen wall. He debated just letting the phone go on ringing until whoever was on the other end hung up, but ultimately that was the coward’s way out. He’d never been a coward.
With a sigh, Cody picked up the receiver and said, “Hello?”
“Cody?”
The high, female voice on the other end was timid. Despite the fact that he was hardly ever on the phone and that he hadn’t heard from her in more than a year, he recognized the voice immediately.
“Hi, Caroline.” He glanced at the calendar next to the phone to verify the date before saying, “Happy Birthday.”
“Thank you,” she responded warmly. “Your present came in the mail yesterday. I just called to tell you that I really love it.”
“You weren’t supposed to open it until today,” he told her.
Caroline laughed softly and just for a moment, she sounded the way she used to, before reality had sliced through her life.
“I couldn’t wait.”
“Well, that hasn’t changed any,” Cody noted.
He recalled that when Caroline had been a little girl, his sister couldn’t wait to open her gifts. No matter how meager they might have been, she was always excited, always appreciative, acting as if she’d received spectacular treasures instead of the mundane, practical gifts that she found under the tree each year, Cody remembered.
“I’m sure you have better use for your money than to spend it on me,” Caroline was saying. “A card would have been more than enough.” She paused for a moment, then added in a soft, almost shy whisper, “Thank you for remembering.”
Cody didn’t know how to respond to that. Moreover, he couldn’t shake the feeling that something was off, was wrong. He knew he couldn’t pry. That would only lead to an exchange of words that would make him lose his temper, and he didn’t want to get into an argument with his sister today, not on her birthday.
His sister was a lot more loyal than that scum, otherwise known as her husband, deserved, Cody thought darkly.
He really wished there was a way to convince her to leave the no-account, wasted piece of flesh. But there wasn’t.
“Why shouldn’t I remember?” he finally asked. “You’re my sister and it’s not like I’ve twelve others to keep track of.”
He’d often thought, because there was just the two of them after their parents were killed, that when he’d gotten married, Caroline had followed suit not long afterward because she was very vulnerable and Rory had used that to his advantage. He was attentive and sweet to her just long enough to get her to marry him.
He felt responsible for his sister’s unhappiness even though both he and Renee had invited Caroline to come live with them. Caroline had turned them down, saying that newlyweds needed to be alone.
Only the look in her eyes had told him how truly lonely his sister actually felt. He shouldn’t have listened to her. He should have insisted that she come live with them. But he’d been selfish. He’d wanted to be alone with Renee.
And Caroline was the one who wound up paying the price for that.
Rory had taken advantage of her loneliness. That alone would earn the man his place in hell. And the sooner the better.
“It was very sweet of you,” Caroline told him. He could have sworn Caroline sounded as if she was about to say something more, but then her tone suddenly changed. A nervous uneasiness all but vibrated in her throat. “I’ve got to go. Thank you,” she said again, the words rushing out of her mouth.
The hell with tiptoeing around because it was her birthday. Something was definitely not right here.
“Caroline, what’s wrong?” he asked. But there was no answer. He strained to hear something, a telltale sound. But there was nothing. “Caroline?” Cody called, more loudly this time.
His sister had hung up. But just before the connection had gone dead, Cody could have sworn he had heard a male voice yelling Caroline’s name in the background.
Cody scowled.
Caroline jumped every time her husband so much as snapped his fingers. Was she just being skittish or was there more behind her behavior than that?
Did that loser abuse her?
Cody clenched his fists at his sides in frustrated, impotent
anger. There wasn’t anything he could do. Caroline wouldn’t listen to reason. Wouldn’t listen to him when he’d all but begged her to leave that miserable excuse for a human being.
The last time he had gotten between Caroline and her husband, Rory had taken her and moved to another state. Cody had an uneasy feeling that if he turned up on his sister’s doorstep, this time Rory would make sure that they completely disappeared without leaving so much as a forwarding address. Rory wouldn’t put up with any interference. The man acted like a malevolent dictator who was exceedingly possessive of his tiny kingdom. Everything had to go through him.
Trying to convince Caroline to leave her husband wasn’t going to work. She had to come to that conclusion on her own for it to actually take root and happen. He was powerless to do anything except pray that somebody would mistake Rory for a bear and shoot him.
He would have gladly volunteered to be the one.
But knowing he was powerless to do anything and living with it were two very different things. There were times when he was convinced that he could easily kill Rory with his bare hands. The man brought out the very worst in him.
Restless, Cody found himself pacing around the kitchen after he’d hung up. As the feeling kept building rather than dissipating, Cody decided that maybe a trip into town might help calm him down.
For some strange reason, Catherine and that ridiculously named shop of hers—what the hell was a Real Vintage Cowboy, anyway?—had a calming, almost peaceful effect on him.
When she wasn’t stirring him up, he added with a bemused smile on his face.
Making his decision, Cody took his car keys off the peg where he kept them when he was home and went to get his truck.
* * *
The smile Catherine flashed at him when he walked into her showroom an hour later told him that he’d made the right decision.
The fact that it ignited a fire in his gut was beside the point.
What he needed right now was a little distraction. Fortunately, that was exactly what happened each time he came into the store. He got distracted.
And maybe a little lost in those chocolate eyes of hers, he added silently.
“I was hoping you’d come in today,” Catherine told him, quickly crossing over to Cody.
She didn’t strike him as someone who just stood around, wishing for something to happen. The woman was a doer.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he wanted to know. After all, it wasn’t as if he hadn’t given her his number.
The answer Caroline gave surprised him. “Because I didn’t feel I had the right to disturb you if you were busy working. After all, your ranch does have to come first.”
A person who didn’t think that the world revolved exclusively around them, he thought. If someone would have asked him, he would have said that he thought that was an attribute that only his late wife and his sister possessed. For the most part, he found people to be more and more self-centered.
He looked at Catherine for a long moment, debating whether or not to tell her that he came into town because he wanted to see her.
His underlying need for caution had him saying instead, “I needed a break for a while.”
She nodded, not questioning his reasons for coming, just happy that he had.
“I’ll try not to overwork you,” she promised with a wink, then grew serious. “But I did want to ask your opinion on a few things that I found online.” Tugging a little on his arm, she drew him over to the counter where she had set up her laptop. Turning the laptop so that it faced him, she said, “Take a look at this.”
But rather than looking at the screen, Cody glanced around the shop first.
She’d done a lot of work on it since he’d been here two days ago. Didn’t the woman ever sleep? Or did she have a legion of helpers when he wasn’t around?
“How do you manage to do it all?” he wanted to know, allowing a note of admiration to slip through.
Catherine wasn’t sure she was following him. “Excuse me?”
“The shop’s a lot cleaner and neater than the last time I saw it,” he elaborated. “And you’ve obviously had time to go looking on the internet—”
There were a lot more items in the shop now than there had been the last time he’d been here. Unless she had a warehouse somewhere close by, this had all been bought and shipped in the last couple of days.
Looking on the internet. Catherine smiled at his terminology. “It’s called browsing,” she supplied helpfully.
“It’s called being superhuman,” he countered. Just cleaning the place up like this would have required a great deal of her time. Yet she didn’t look wilted. “Do you sleep at all?”
Catherine laughed. “Every day and a half I hang upside down in the closet for a quick nap.”
He looked at her for a long, long moment, then declared, “You are one very strange lady, Catherine Clifton. You know that?”
Her grin widened. “I just know what I want, that’s all,” she replied, then tugged on his arm again, this time a little more insistently. “Now come and look at these things and tell me what you think.”
What I think is that I have a tiger by the tail, he said silently.
“Might as well,” he said out loud, sounding not nearly as reluctant as he might have just a few days ago. “Since I’m here,” he tacked on.
“Since you’re here,” Catherine echoed warmly, her eyes crinkling as her smile deepened.
He did his best not to notice, but his best wasn’t quite good enough.
The warmth she generated inside of him could have toasted marshmallows if the need arose.
Chapter Six
Cody sighed.
He and Catherine had been going over various estate sale sites on her laptop for a while now and next to nothing had stirred his interest. Certainly nothing he would have gone out of his way to own.
While he did like having an excuse to be around this vibrant woman whose very presence sucked the solemnity out of his existence, he had to be honest with her. She was wasting her time having him do this.
“You know,” he began, turning away from the laptop. “I really think you should get someone else to help you with this.”
Catherine raised her eyes from the laptop screen and looked at him for a long moment. She tried to gauge what his thoughts were, but she could have saved herself the trouble. The man had an expression that totally defied penetration.
Having nothing to lose, she took a stab at his reasons for saying what he just had. “You don’t want to do this anymore?”
“It’s not a matter of not wanting to do it,” he corrected. Because, if he were being honest with her, he rather enjoyed these little impromptu sessions. He wouldn’t have come into town so often in the last week if he didn’t. He liked her company and, despite their different way of viewing things, they were comfortable with one another.
But that wasn’t the point behind all this, was it?
“Then what?” she prodded.
She wasn’t accustomed to dealing with someone who had to have words coaxed out of him. In her family, silence was something that only occurred if everyone happened to be asleep at the same time.
Otherwise, the air was filled with the hum of voices constantly crisscrossing one another. Sometimes several at the same time.
Her father had once referred to the boisterous exchange of words and opinions as a cacophony. She thought that was really an excellent word for it. There certainly was no denying that they were a noisy bunch of people.
Cody was the exact opposite. He had made silence into an art form. The man kept his peace inordinately long, sometimes not even speaking when he was spoken to. He didn’t even make any noise when he entered a room. If she hadn’t had a bell mounted against the front door, she would have never even heard him walking into the shop that first day.
“I just don’t think I’m doing you any good,” Cody confessed. She was trying to attract business and appeal to a certain age and income brac
ket. But while he fit the two requirements, he just was not into the kind of things that everyone else was. “I’m not your average guy,” he pointed out.
Amen to that, Catherine thought, suppressing the smile that rose to her lips.
“So if you’re trying to find things that appeal to most people,” he concluded, “I’m not your man.”
Ah, if only—
The thought caught her up short, coming out of the blue and utterly surprising her. It caused her to take a second—or was that a tenth?—look at this weatherworn cowboy who’d accidentally strolled into her shop.
There was no getting away from the fact that there was a certain undercurrent between them, a chemistry that she’d felt from the first moment she saw Cody and they began talking.
Or rather, she began talking. For the most part, Cody was just the recipient of her words, she silently amended, amused.
“When I bought the shop, I also wound up buying all the pieces that were still in it,” she told him, gesturing in a vague pattern around the area. “The antiques that Fowler hadn’t sold and probably had no intentions of selling.”
Calista, who’d worked there part-time while waiting for her position at the mayor’s office to go full-time, had told her as much. At the time, her sister had expressed confusion as to why the man would go to the trouble of owning and operating the store without any real interest in making a profit from the place.
That was before they found out that his focus had been elsewhere all along.
“So it’s not like I have nothing to sell once I officially reopen the shop’s doors,” she concluded. There was no point in getting rid of the inventory. She’d do better just holding on to it until she could find interested buyers and collectors. Time and patience were on her side. She wasn’t in this to score a fast profit. She was in for the long haul.
The long haul. That had a rather nice ring to it, she mused.
“Okay, then I don’t understand,” Cody confessed, confused. “If you’re planning on keeping this stuff and trying to sell it, just what exactly is it you want me for?”
Catherine pressed her lips together, struggling to keep both her grin and the accompanying words that his question generated under wraps. There was a raw magnetism about the man that appealed to her on a whole different plane than any she’d ever encountered.
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