Red's Hot Cowboy

by Carolyn Brown

  Chapter 4

  Sleet still hid in the shaded areas on the north side of Highway 82 from Ringgold to Henrietta, but the roads were dry and clear. Stars twinkled around a full moon but Pearl didn’t see any of it. She couldn’t get away from how handsome Wil was in that black shirt. And just thinking about his hand on her back on the way to the kitchen gave her a warm, oozy feeling all over again. She was glad she’d gone to the O’Donnells’ for a few hours and really felt as if she’d had an outing. She deserved it after a whole month of work and classes. Wil was just the icing on the cupcake, and knowing those were his headlights right behind her put a warm glow all over her body.

  When she turned off at the motel she expected him to honk but he followed her, parking the truck between the garage and the back door that led into her apartment. By the time she got the Caddy situated and the garage doors down he was out of his truck and leaning on the fender.

  “After last night and today, I figured you’d be eager to get home,” Pearl said.

  “I told Austin I’d get you home safely.” Wil grinned.

  “Austin worries too much. Who saw to it she got home safe last spring?”

  “Hey, Rye was right across the road the whole time. From the time he first laid eyes on her that man was love drunk as hell.”

  “Love drunk?” Pearl asked.

  “Yeah, he was besotted with that woman. How come you weren’t at their reception? I’d have remembered you if you’d been there.”

  “I had to be out of state for a training seminar for the bank.”

  “You going to invite me in for a cup of coffee?” he asked.

  “No, I am not. I’m going to open the lobby and get ready for customers,” she answered.

  “Then I’ll walk you around the motel and make sure you get inside all right.”

  “Wil, I’m a big girl. I’m not afraid of the dark. I can take care of myself.” She talked as she walked.

  He fell into step right beside her.

  She unlocked the door, didn’t look back as she went straight for the counter, and flipped on the cowboy neons. If she decided to go with quaint and romantic the old cowboy was going to have to retire his bowlegged stance to the garage. Or she’d sell him on eBay… could be that he’d bring a fortune since he was getting right up there close to being a bona fide antique.

  Last night she’d had a full house; tonight she probably wouldn’t have one customer. It was Christmas! No one, not even Santa Claus, was out on Christmas. She hoped he was tired to the bone and sick of cookies and milk. It would serve him right for not bringing her a nice quiet night like she’d wanted. Hell’s bells, she hadn’t been a bad child that year but he’d damn sure treated her like her name was right up there on the top of his shit list when he dumped all those people in her lobby at one time.

  Wil stopped on the lobby side of the counter and leaned on it. “Austin tells me you were a big-shot banker. What happened?”

  “I quit because I wanted to be my own boss and Aunt Pearlita left me the motel. Mother said I was making the biggest mistake of my life. My friend, Jasmine, said she was jealous of my spunk. Austin encouraged me to move here, but I got to admit sometimes I wonder if I bit off more than I can chew.” She talked fast and kept her eyes away from his lips. She stepped out around the counter and straightened the few magazines on the table between the two recliners. If it had been a real date he would have kissed her good night at the door. She turned around to find him right behind her.

  Already in motion with a step forward, she couldn’t stop and ran right into his chest. His arms wrapped firmly around her and she looked up. One second she was sinking into his dreamy eyes, the next she was melting into a steamy kiss that sent waves of liquid desire shooting through her body.

  He broke away but kept her in his embrace for several seconds. “Well, good night, Red. Thanks for being my date for the night.”

  “Date?”

  “Yep. It felt like a date. You looked like a date. And a good night kiss sealed it. It was a date. I’ll call you later.” He walked across the floor and out the door. She had to lean on the counter to keep her jelly-filled knees from collapsing, but she watched that sexy strut until it disappeared into the darkness.

  “Dammit, Austin! You started this whole thing when you moved to Terral. I figured if you could make a drastic change then I damn sure could,” she muttered as she rounded the end of the counter and sat down at her computer. But she couldn’t keep her mind on her work. She kept thinking of how much fun she’d had at the party and how she’d missed flirting and dating and kissing and the whole nine yards.

  Home? Even though she owned the motel and had moved into the apartment it still didn’t feel like home. Austin had said that when she had first inherited the watermelon farm she had thought of it as Granny’s place until she’d made up her mind to keep the farm, plant and harvest watermelon crops, and make watermelon wine. After that she felt like she was going home every time she started toward Terral from Tulsa and that she was leaving a part of her heart when she had to leave Terral.

  Pearl had one advantage over Austin, who’d been thrown in the middle of Small Town, USA, like a chicken in a coyote pen. Austin hadn’t known anyone. She had no friends other than Pearl’s Aunt Pearlita. Pearl had Austin and the O’Donnells and in a pinch she could call on Rosa if she needed anything. She couldn’t remember when Rosa hadn’t been a fixture at the Longhorn Inn. She had tried to talk Rosa into staying on when she took over, but Rosa told her that she had only worked the past five years because of Pearlita, and it was time for her to retire.

  Thank God for Austin, Rosa, and the O’Donnell family or she’d have been out in the cold just like Austin had been. The O’Donnells were 100 percent Irish on both sides of the family. They loved and fought with passion and if they were your friends, nobody messed with you and got away with it. She had no doubt the whole bunch would come to her aid if she needed them.

  Her thoughts went to the O’Donnell brothers.

  Dewar was shorter than Rye but just as handsome. His face was more angular and he had a scar across his cheek, a gift from busting a bronc when he was a teenager. He’d flirted with Pearl a few times, but nothing he’d ever said made her giddy like a wink from Wil Marshall.

  Raylen was the pretty boy. Cash said that God made it up to him because he was the shortest one of the lot. He had dark hair that turned chestnut red when he got out in the sun and the prettiest blue eyes this side of heaven. His voice was deep and resonant and eyelashes so long and sexy that one wink would cause a virgin’s underpants to slide down toward her ankles. But he’d never caused Pearl to need to change her underpants, not like Wil Marshall had done.

  “It’s what I get for letting that man get under my skin,” she said as she kicked off her shoes and heard a vehicle motor at the same time. She looked up half hoping that Wil had remembered something else and she’d get one more look at him or maybe another searing kiss. But it wasn’t Wil and the car didn’t stay. It backed up in the parking lot and the red taillights disappeared out onto the highway. Then a woman slipped inside the lobby and stopped midway across the floor.

  “May I help you?” Pearl asked.

  “The lady that brought me here said you might be needin’ help,” the woman said softly. She wore a stained gray hooded sweatshirt with the hood up, shading most of her face. Her jeans were white at the knees and not in a fashionable way. They hung on her slim hips like a flapping towel out on the clothesline.

  “Who brought you here?” Pearl asked.

  “Rosa. She said that I was to come in here and tell you that I’m lookin’ for work,” she said in a deep southern accent. Pearl was very familiar with a Georgia accent since her mother was born and raised there and Texas had not taken a bit of it away from her in the past thirty-three years. But this skinny woman sounded more like she came from backwoods Tennessee.

  She pushed the hood away from her face and Pearl gasped. It was a motley green and purple me
ss of bruises. One eye had started to heal, but it was still sporting a mouse under it half the size of Pearl’s fist. Her crystal clear blue eyes looked everywhere but at Pearl. Her limp brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail at the nape of her neck. Her delicate face looked like an amateur artist’s dirty palette.

  “It don’t hurt like it did at first,” the woman said. “I just need a job. I’ll do anything, ma’am.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Lucy Fontaine. I come from up in the Kentucky hills. Little bitty town you wouldn’t even know. I used every dime I had to get this far away from there and my husband. I got a ride from Gainesville with a nice lady. She said you might be needin’ some help because she used to work here.”

  “What happened to you?”

  “Husband whooped me for the last time. I been savin’ for five years and figured if I didn’t leave, the next time he’d plumb kill me. I can clean rooms for a place to stay and some food.”

  “Have you eaten lately?” Pearl asked. She couldn’t turn anyone away on Christmas.

  “I ain’t here for a handout. I got some crackers left in my purse. What I need is a job.”

  The phone rang before Pearl could tell her that a frozen dinner was going to waste in the kitchen. “Longhorn Inn. May I help you?”

  “This is Rosa. I dumped a stray puppy on your doorstep. Hire her. You need help. She needs a place to heal and work.”

  “But what if—” Pearl started to argue valid points.

  “She’s broke. If you are anything like your aunt, you’ll help fix her.”

  “You sure?” Pearl asked.

  “Yes, I’m sure. Put her on for a month. She’ll work hard and heal slow. Check the books. You’re going to have a very busy season during duck hunting season. You can’t run it by yourself. If Wil Marshall hadn’t got his ass in a bind, you’d have still been cleaning rooms tonight, and you’d have missed out on Maddie O’Donnell’s Christmas supper.”

  Pearl gasped. “How’d you know about that?”

  “Honey, whatever happens in Henrietta is all over town before the clock strikes the next hour. So?”

  “Okay, okay!”

  “Feed her too. She’s been living on crackers for three days. Call me sometimes and let me know how she’s doin’.”

  Pearl set the phone down and looked up to see Lucy munching on a saltine cracker that she’d taken from her purse. “Is your husband going to chase you down and cause trouble?”

  “My husband thinks I’m dead. I fixed it that way. I took his truck and left him a note.” She looked Pearl straight in the eye and didn’t blink.

  “Okay, do you have a social security card?”

  “Yes, ma’am, I do. It’s still in my name, Lucinda Fontaine. I never changed it because he wouldn’t let me do no work outside of the house. He lived by the old ways that said a man was the head of the house and the woman obeyed him. It was the way we was both raised up.”

  “What was your married name?”

  “Molly Brooks.”

  Pearl frowned.

  “My name is Molly Lucinda Fontaine Brooks. He wouldn’t call me Lucy because he hated them old television reruns with Lucy and Desi.” She swallowed hard and went on, “I’m makin’ a clean start so I want to be Lucy, not Molly. I ain’t never again goin’ to be Molly.”

  “Okay then, Lucy Fontaine, have you ever done any work at a motel?”

  “No, ma’am. All I did was some waitress work and a little cooking for the café when the fry cook called in sick. And that was twelve years ago when I was just sixteen. But I can learn right fast. You show me one time how you want it done and I’ll learn it.”

  Hire her right now before she changes her mind. You can date if someone is here to watch the lobby. And having someone help cleaning rooms would be an added bonus. You just won the lottery. Don’t tear up the check.

  Pearl didn’t even argue with the voice in her head. “Here’s the deal I can offer. I’ll pay you minimum wage and give you a room to live in as long as you want it. After thirty days we’ll sit down and decide if you want to stay. If we are both happy, I’ll give you a raise. I got one question. Are you sure your husband thinks you are dead?”

  “Cleet ain’t too smart but I fixed it so there wasn’t no doubt. I waited ’til a day when he rode with his daddy to work and took his truck to the river in the middle of the mornin’. I left it in the middle of the river bridge with my good purse settin’ on the seat. I left my best shoes and my coat on the bridge. I ate a candy bar and was so nervous that I puked it up, but I was careful to do that over the side of the bridge. Then I crawled up on the railin’ with my messy hands so there’d be fingerprints.”

  She hesitated and then went on. “Then I walked five miles to the next town. Bus comes through there once a week after the station closes. You got to buy your ticket ahead of time but I begged the driver to let me buy one from him to Memphis. If he hadn’t of done it I’d have kept on walkin’ but he did. I reckon he put the money in his pocket but I really don’t care. When I got to Memphis I counted out what I had left and got another ticket to Little Rock. From there I made it to Dallas, but I was almost out of money so I asked the man how far I could get on what I had left. That took me to Gainesville and I started walkin’ west and that lady picked me up on the side of the road right outside of town. That’s a lot of words but I reckon if you’re goin’ to hire me then you oughta have the whole thing.”

  Pearl was amazed. “Why didn’t you leave sooner if he beat you?”

  “Wife is supposed to be good. Momma said that if I was good I wouldn’t get them whoopin’s. Took me five years to save the money and to figure out that some men is just plain mean and it don’t matter how good a woman is they’re goin’ to beat on them. Savin’ the money had to be slow or he’d have found out and he had to think I was dead so he wouldn’t come after me so I had to plan it down to the last thing.”

  Pearl opened the gate at the end of the counter. “Get your things and I’ll take you to your room.”

  Lucy looked down at her sweatshirt and jeans. “This is my things. I bought ’em at a garage sale and didn’t tell him. If he goes through my stuff he won’t find a thing missin’.”

  “Okay, then. I’ve got a frozen dinner in my apartment that you are going to take to your room and heat up in the microwave. The room has a small refrigerator with a microwave on top.” Pearl headed through the back door when the crunch of gravel took her attention to the parking lot.

  Headlights lit up the lobby and in a minute a young man rushed inside out of the cold. He removed his cowboy hat and looked from Lucy to Pearl and back again. “You go on. You were here first.”

  “We’ve already gotten her taken care of. What can I do for you?” Pearl said.

  “I need three rooms,” he said. He wore his jeans right. His eyes were a soft brown and he held his black Stetson in his hand as he talked. An evening shadow of a beard gave him a rakishly handsome look, and his dark hair was just a little too long. So why didn’t he jack Pearl’s blood pressure up like Wil Marshall did? Why didn’t she have the sudden impulse to drag him off to bed? He was a cowboy, wasn’t he?

  Nothing made a lick of sense.

  Pearl watched him fill out the card. “Each room has two double beds.”

  “I know. Me and the guys stay here every Christmas. We ought to make reservations but there’s always room. But them other two snore and there ain’t no way I’m stayin’ in the same room with either of them so we get our own rooms. And if you can I’d just as soon there was an empty room between me and them. Where’s that other lady? She knew what we liked.”

  Pearl pulled out three cards. “That was my aunt and she passed away back in the fall.”

  He nodded his head reverently. “Sorry to hear that, ma’am. She was a sweet old gal.”

  “Thank you. Got a preference on rooms?”

  “Over on that other side. It’s quieter.”

  Pearl handed him the keys. “O
kay, then here’s twenty-four, twenty-two, and twenty. If it doesn’t fill up tonight like last night there’ll be a space between all of you.”

  The cowboy grinned. “Great!”

  He put his hat back on and tipped it at Lucy before he left. The headlights lit up the lobby again and the noise of the truck moving slowly let them know that the men had turned around and parked in front of one of the rooms on the other side of the gravel lot.

  “I’ll grab that dinner and take you up to your room,” Pearl said.

  “Thank you,” Lucy told her. She would have been grateful for a bologna sandwich right then. Soul and body was about to split up from hunger and she’d just eaten the last of her crackers. But she was a long, long way from Cleet and his anger spells and she’d starve plumb to death before she went back.

  Pearl put the TV dinner, a two-liter bottle of Coke, a package of Oreos, a banana, orange, and apple into a plastic grocery bag. She added a fork, knife, and spoon from her silverware drawer, a plate, cup, and saucer from the cabinet.

  Lucy was still standing in the middle of the floor when she went back out.

  “You could have sat down,” Pearl said.

  “I didn’t know what to do.”

  Pearl set the food bag on the counter. “I forgot something. Go on and sit down and if anyone comes in tell them I’ll be right back.”

  She grabbed another bag on her way through the apartment and carried it to her bedroom. She put in two sweat suits and followed that with a nightshirt and a lined denim jacket, a couple of pairs of socks, and she hesitated for a long moment but then shoved in three pairs of underpants. There was no way that Lucy could wear one of her bras so she’d just have to keep hers washed until they could make a run to a store.

  Lucy sunk down into one of the comfortable recliners. She thought of Cleet sitting in his chair in front of the television, yelling at her to bring him a beer or a piece of cake or pie. Always yelling at her and yet being so nice to everyone else. She’d tried to be good. Where had she gone wrong?