How to Marry a Cowboy (Cowboys & Brides)

by Carolyn Brown

  “I’ll enhance the audio so we’ll be able to hear what they are saying,” he whispered in a deep drawl. Much more of that, and he’d be filming her as she pushed him backwards into the box elder hedge and jumped on top of him.

  The sound came through as well as the picture, and she focused on the pens to keep the blush from her wicked thoughts at bay.

  “Shit! Gabby, this damn goat is strong as Superman,” Lily said.

  “Well, you’re bigger than he is, so hold him down tighter. You said you was going to be a roper last week. Djali ain’t nearly as big as a calf, and you don’t even have to sling the lasso to bring him down. I done got him on the ground. All you got to do is hold him still,” Gabby said.

  “Do you think Daddy kissed Mama-Nanny when they were in the swimming pool?” Lily grabbed Djali around the neck and held his forehead with her hand. He kicked and squirmed, but the rope around his legs kept him from doing too much damage.

  “I hope he did. We did our best, leavin’ them alone for a whole afternoon. It ain’t fair that they got to float down the river and we had to listen to Kenna’s singin’. That girl sounds like O’Malley with his tail caught in the door.” Gabby picked up a bottle of rubbing alcohol, poured it on Djali’s ear, and quickly jabbed a big darning needle through the bottom.

  “Smart little devils, even at nine years old.” Mason’s words were audible enough that there was no doubt the recorder picked them up. “We might want to edit this part out before we make discs to share with their grandparents.”

  “Oh, my God! You wouldn’t share that with your folks, would you? They’ll think I’m a hussy and not fit to be a nanny,” she gasped.

  “Yes, I will, but I’ll edit that part out,” he said.

  “Yes, please, Mason. I’d be mortified,” Annie Rose whispered. “Omigod! They’re trying to pierce those goats’ ears.”

  Lily’s voice rose above the din. “Would’ve been easier if we could have found the tag applicator in the barn, but Daddy must’ve hid it from us.”

  “Yes, her Daddy did hide it,” Mason said. “That’s because he said they cannot have pierced ears until they were older and he is afraid they’ll use the tag applicator to pierce each other’s ears.”

  Annie Rose looked over her shoulder to find him staring at her, the camera pointed at the ground. Several seconds passed before Gabby’s worried voice jerked their attention away from each other and back to the filming business.

  “I was watching your expression instead of filming,” he said as he whipped the camera back up to catch Gabby’s words and actions.

  “There was blood, Lily. Do you think he’ll be all right?”

  “Don’t you get all crazy over a teaspoon of blood. We still got to do Jeb’s ear. He’d be jealous if Djali got a gold hoop and he didn’t get one,” Lily said sternly.

  Gabby’s face skewed up in a frown. “What if he gets infected and dies?”

  “Then we get another goat or else we don’t and we don’t have to feed them and train them to be good at the stock show next fall,” Lily said.

  “I guess Gabby isn’t going to be a nurse,” Mason said.

  Annie Rose glanced over her shoulder again, and the camera was still held at the right position to film the girls, but his eyes were on her. She could feel the kiss about to happen right there in the bushes and moistened her lips with the tip of her tongue. But suddenly his focus shifted and he was staring at the screen. She felt so cheated that she wanted to pitch a fit and cuss like Lily.

  “Hey, there’s O’Malley, sittin’ on the fence post. You reckon he wants an earring too?” Lily’s voice came through loud and clear.

  “Let’s get Jeb done and then we’ll see about the cat, but I do have a diamond if we can catch him,” Gabby told her.

  Mason’s breath smelled like coffee and maple syrup from the morning pancakes when he looked at Annie Rose and breathed out, “Let’s see if they’re mean enough to pierce a tomcat’s ear.”

  Lily sat down on the edge of the hay bale and started talking to the goat. “Jeb, darlin’, it’s like this. I’m putting a gold hoop in your ear, and you can like it or not. I don’t give a damn which one you choose.” She made a dive and grabbed him by the legs. “I got him, Gabby. Bring the rope and tie him up.”

  Jeb fought them like a drunk on drugs, but when they untied him, he had a gold hoop in his ear. He joined Djali in the far corner of the pen, and the bawling duet they did was enough to break a grown man’s heart.

  Annie Rose had an almost overwhelming urge right then to turn around and make Mason put the camera down and talk to her about this thing that was between them and decide what they were going to do about it before her thumping heart jumped right out of her chest. It’s a wonder the noise of it didn’t come through the audio on the film.

  Gabby grabbed the tomcat off the fence post and said, “Okay, O’Malley. It’s your turn.” She reached into the pocket of her cutoff jean shorts and brought out a sparkling diamond stud.

  Lily grinned. “O’Malley will be the biggest, meanest-assed tomcat in the whole state of Texas with a diamond in his ear. You think we ought to put it in the top or the bottom of his ear?”

  “In the bottom. If we put it in the top, it’ll make his ear sag, and he’ll look like a sissy. If we put it in the bottom, he’ll be real cool, like them guys on television,” Gabby said.

  The camera wiggled again and Mason laughed out loud. “This is fun, but I wish I had two cameras. I can hardly keep this one trained on them because I keep wanting to watch you, Annie Rose. Your expressions are priceless.”

  “Well, you’re getting a big kick out of it too,” she said, glad that a camera couldn’t record thoughts and visions or she’d be in big trouble.

  “You bet I am. Here we go again. Now it’s time for the tomcat.” He whipped the camera back around to the girls.

  O’Malley came alive when he smelled alcohol, but Gabby held him tightly even when he tried to climb over Lily’s frame. Then quick as a wink, the tomcat had a diamond flashing in the morning sun as he tore out in a streak toward the barn.

  “Shit! Shit! Shit!” Gabby yelled.

  “What?” Lily held on tighter.

  “That sorry little shit done scratched me.”

  “And that, folks, including you, Damian, is the reason you do not try to win a fight with my girls,” Mason said. “Any kid who can pierce a tomcat’s ear is not someone you want to cross. Way to go, Lily Harper.”

  Anyone crazy enough to have visions of sleeping with a cowboy they’ve only known a short while has less sense than those silly little girls, that niggling voice said inside Annie Rose’s head.

  “Oh, hush,” she whispered.

  “What did you say?” Mason asked.

  “I was arguing with myself, not you,” she answered honestly.

  “There you have it, folks, another day in the lives of Gabby and Lily Harper, with short clips of what Annie Rose now realizes she’s let herself in for. They have horns and little spiky tails, not halos and wings.” He laughed.

  “They are coming this way, and I didn’t think they were angels, not for one minute,” Annie Rose whispered.

  Mason turned off the recorder and they hurried back into his office, where Annie Rose pulled the drapes back and peeked out. The girls fell into two lounge chairs.

  “I guess that was hard work,” she said.

  Mason’s arms went around her waist and he buried his face in her hair. She turned slowly and wrapped her arms around his neck. “It was harder work for me, Annie Rose. I couldn’t keep my eyes off you.”

  His fingertip traced her jawline and then her lips before his mouth covered hers in a solid, hard kiss that weakened her knees. That was followed by a quick, sweet kiss and then he said hoarsely, “I’ll see you at noon.”

  She barely had enough sense to nod and then he was g
one, leaving her hanging onto the drapes for support.

  ***

  Mason pulled up a chair to the supper table and bowed his head. “Gabby, will you say grace tonight?”

  “I will, Daddy. Gabby got to say it last time, and it’s my turn,” Lily said.

  Lily quickly bowed her head and said in a loud voice. “Dear God, we are glad for this day and we’re glad that Mama-Nanny is here to cook our food and be our mama. And if Daddy kissed Mama-Nanny yesterday, then we ask your blessin’ on that too.”

  Mason’s eyes popped open so fast that it took a minute for the spinning room to right itself.

  “Fried chicken?” Annie Rose handed him the platter filled with crisp home-fried chicken.

  Gabby snagged a biscuit from a bowl and passed them to her sister. “We put earrings in our goats’ ears today and in O’Malley’s. It’s all right, Daddy. We used alcohol.”

  “And we borrowed our real mama’s earrings from your room. We had some that we got for our birthday, but they are for our ears when we get them pierced. They aren’t for goats’ ears,” Lily said.

  “Oh, my God!” Mason said through clenched teeth.

  Annie Rose wished she had the camera when she saw the look on Mason’s face. She would never have believed he could go from suppressing laughter to curtailing pure rage in the blink of an eye.

  “You took those earrings without even asking me?” Mason didn’t raise his voice, but the tone said that the whole goat episode wasn’t nearly as funny as it had been when he was filming. “I gave the hoops to your mother the last Christmas she was alive. And the diamond stud was one of a pair I gave her for our first anniversary. She lost the other one, and it upset her really badly.”

  Gabby tucked her chin down to her chest. “We’re sorry, Daddy, but our real mama wouldn’t care. I just know she wouldn’t.”

  Lily inhaled deeply. “We’ll ask next time. I promise. We didn’t know that the earrings would make you all mad.”

  “Not mad,” Annie Rose said. “It makes him sad.”

  “Then we’re real, real sorry, Daddy.” Gabby jumped up and hugged Mason.

  “I’ve got a poker game tonight,” he blurted out. “We’ll talk about this later, but it will involve a punishment.”

  “Don’t make me weed the flowerbed. I hate to pull weeds,” Lily groaned.

  “Or straighten the tack room. Last time we did that, I saw a mouse and I hate mice,” Gabby said.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Okay. Mama-Nanny, after we take a bath and you put more of that anti-whatever stuff on Gabby’s arm, can we please watch The Hunchback of Notre Dame in your room?” Lily asked without a worry on her face. “O’Malley didn’t take too kindly to us piercing his ears and we got scratched up pretty good.”

  ***

  The little pewter jewelry box on his chest of drawers was open and empty. He’d bought it the day after they buried Holly and put the three earrings in there. Hardly a week went by that he didn’t look inside and remember her. Beside it was a picture of her on their wedding day, wearing her white dress and smiling into the camera.

  He started to shut the jewelry box and accidentally knocked the picture to the floor. The frame hit the baseboard and broke into two pieces. The glass covering the picture shattered and the picture fell out on the carpet.

  He opened his bottom dresser drawer and took out a Texas Longhorns T-shirt. At least those ornery girls hadn’t decided they needed his lucky poker shirt for the goats.

  He was on his way down the stairs when O’Malley passed him. The diamond looked downright ridiculous in the big tomcat’s ear, and the girls would be pulling weeds and cleaning the tack room tomorrow for their stunt. And they couldn’t help each other, either. They’d spend the day apart, each one doing a chore she hated. They needed a real good lesson this time.

  Chapter 12

  Piercing ears must have been some really hard work, because the girls were yawning by the end of the movie. Annie Rose expected their showers to energize them right back to full power, but for the first time since she’d been in the house, they didn’t even want to read. Their little eyes were shut before she closed their bedroom doors.

  She sat down on the top step of the staircase and O’Malley rubbed against her hip and she instinctively scratched his head. “Holy shit! That thing has to be a full carat. There is no way you are losing something that valuable.” She kept petting the big old tomcat and eased the stud out of his ear. He shook his head as if he was glad to be rid of the weight and stretched out beside her. When she stopped stroking his fur, he opened his eyes, stood up, and ambled toward Mason’s bedroom.

  Diamond in her hand, Annie Rose tiptoed inside the room right behind O’Malley. In one leap the big cat jumped up on the bed, smashed the pillow into the right amount of softness with his big paws, turned around a couple of times, and wound himself into a ball. She turned on the light, but it didn’t bother him at all.

  Something glimmered in the moonlight on the floor, and she flipped the light switch. Glass cluttered the floor, and there was an empty pewter jewelry box on the chest of drawers. The satin lining inside showed where the edges of the diamond stud had rested, and two small circles gave testimony to having been home for a couple of hoops.

  “I expect they were real gold,” she whispered. “I shudder to think what Nicky would have done to me for not stopping them. I’m not comparing two men. I’m just being thankful that all men aren’t evil.”

  She carefully laid the diamond back in its place and pulled a small trash can over to the mess on the floor, fussing at Mason the whole time she cleaned it up. “I swear if you’d come home and stepped on a piece of this in your bare feet, your boots would have hurt your feet for weeks.”

  That brought on a picture of him stretched out beside her on the love seat, his body so close that she could see every feature, softened by the light of the moon coming through the window. She was crazy as hell to let herself get caught up in the moment when his heart still belonged to his dead wife, and yet there she was, thinking about his hard body sleeping beside her, his hand covering hers, and his thick eyelashes resting on his cheeks.

  She made sure every sliver of glass was in the trash before she picked up the picture and carried it down to the living room. A frame the same size as the broken one waited on the mantel to hold the girls’ birthday picture. She removed that glass and put it into the one in her hand, and held it up to get a better look at the luckiest woman on earth.

  “You were beautiful,” she whispered as she ran a finger over Holly’s gorgeous red hair. “Your daughters have your smile and the same twinkle in their eyes as you do here. You would have thought today was funny too. I just know you would.”

  When the picture was back on the chest of drawers beside the jewelry box, Annie Rose checked the girls one more time. They were sleeping soundly. Hopefully those pesky goats were doing the same.

  The hot night breezes must have carried her scent to the goats, because they were backed up into the corner of the pen and eyeing her like she’d come to butcher them.

  “You’d do well to hear me when I say this isn’t my first rodeo, boys. I’ve done some calf roping, and believe me, I did not come unprepared,” she told them in a soft tone. “You will be giving me those hoops, and you will be happy with the cheap ones I’m replacing them with. And you will be still while I make the change.”

  Djali’s eyes rolled when she grabbed him around the neck. He screeched and carried on like a hoot owl when she wrapped the rope around his front legs and tied them to his hind ones. He thrashed his head and flopped his ears, but she was fast and determined. The earring was changed out in seconds and she turned him loose to hide behind the hay bale in the middle of the pen.

  She and Jeb had a very different experience. The goat ran laps around the outer edge of the pen with her right behin
d him for three rounds. Then she abruptly turned and ran right at him. Poor old Jeb didn’t even know what hit him until he was on the ground, trussed up like a Thanksgiving turkey.

  “There now. Be still and this will be over in a split second,” she said.

  Jeb didn’t obey. He bit at her and tossed his head back.

  “It can be easy or hard. Your choice,” she said as she wrapped her arms around his neck. She managed to get the earring out and safely into the pocket of her jeans, but then that damned goat hopped up on his four tied-together legs and tried to run. She grabbed him, but in the dark, she couldn’t find the hole that Gabby had put in his ear.

  “Dammit!” She ran her fingers over his ear twice and couldn’t locate it before she realized she had the wrong ear. When she moved to the other side, Jeb took advantage of the situation and bit at her arm. His teeth grazed her skin, leaving a red streak but no blood.

  “You remember that you asked for this.” She sat down and felt a soft squish under her butt as she grabbed his beard. “Now be still and let me get on with this. I’m only changing one earring for another. There’s no way in hell I’m letting you lose that much real gold.”

  The smell of fresh manure wafted up to her nose, but she couldn’t rub it, not when she needed both hands to get the new hoop into Jeb’s ear. “I got to hand it to you. You’re the meaner goat and the most devious. I bet you even cuss in goat language like Lily does.”

  She stood up and untied Jeb. He took off like a streak to butt Djali off the hay bale. They were still playing king of the mountain when she let herself out of the pen and headed back toward the house. Without thinking, she brushed her butt when she stepped up on the back porch, and brought back a hand smeared with fresh goat manure.

  “Jeb, you win that round,” she said as she opened the door into the utility room with her other hand. She kicked off her boots and carefully removed her jeans, tossed them in the washer and washed her hand in the warm water as it ran into the machinery.