Lori Wilde - [Cupid, Texas 02]

by All Out of Love

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about that, Dad.” Pierce put out his arm for Abe to lean against, but his father waved him away and took a halting shuffle toward the back door. “How come our relatives stopped here when there’s so many greener places in the world?”

  Abe met Pierce’s eyes. “Free land. Homestead Act of 1862.”

  “That would do it.” Malcolm nodded.

  “You gotta suspect anything that’s free.” Pierce swept his hand at the desert surroundings. “Case in point.”

  Malcolm pointed at the Davis Mountains to the north. “You look there and tell me that’s not beautiful.”

  “Compared to the Rockies, those are anthills.”

  Abe lost his balance and both Malcolm and Pierce leaped to stabilize him. Their father pulled away. “I’m all right. Quit yer fawnin’.”

  Pierce and Malcolm exchanged a look. The doctors in Cupid might not have been able to find anything wrong with Abe, but he was far from well.

  “Malcolm,” Abe said sharply, his gaze fixed on the sweet potato patch that was looking kind of droopy.

  “Yessir.”

  “Why haven’t you planted the pumpkins?”

  “I’ve been pretty busy what with you being in the hospital and all.”

  “You should have had the hired hands do it.”

  “The hands work cattle, Dad. They’re not farmers.”

  A sour-pickle look puckered Abe’s face. “We gotta get them pumpkins in the ground.”

  “Would it be the end of the world if we didn’t have a pumpkin crop this year?” Malcolm asked.

  Abe stared at Malcolm as if he’d just announced he wanted to slaughter all the puppies in Cupid. “Boy, that talk there is almost blasphemy. Hollisters have been supplying Jeff Davis County with pumpkins ever since there was a Halloween. It’s tradition. We have an obligation to fulfill.”

  “I’m behind on vaccinating the cattle and that’s a two-week job; by the time I can get around to planting pumpkins, it’ll be too late. We’re just going to have to let the good people of Cupid go to another pumpkin supplier this year.”

  Abe made a soft whooshing sound of a man who’d gotten gut-slammed with a medicine ball.

  Pierce took hold of his father’s elbow. “Don’t worry, Dad. I’ll plant the pumpkins.”

  Malcolm let out a whoop of laughter.

  “What’s so funny?” Pierce glared.

  “You?” He hooted. “Mr. Fancy Pants, I-got-a-million-dollar-condo-in-Las-Colinas, planting pumpkins?”

  “I was born on this ranch.”

  Malcolm’s nostrils flared. “When did you ever work the land?”

  It was true. While Pierce had helped with the cattle a few times, mainly because he enjoyed riding horses and being outdoors, he’d never done any farming. As soon as Abe realized Pierce had a talent for slinging a football, he hadn’t wanted him to do any work that could harm his hands—no digging, tilling, planting, or harvesting. Plus, with all the practicing and going to school, it left little time for anything else, especially when he got old enough to start chasing girls.

  “I’m perfectly capable of planting a crop of pumpkins.”

  “Uh-huh.” Malcolm was grinning like it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.

  “How hard can it be? Stick seeds in the ground, water and feed them, watch ’em grow.”

  “You really didn’t pay much attention to what goes on around here, did you?”

  Pierce shifted his weight, rubbed his achy leg, felt a pearl of sweat bead at his throat. Guilty as charged. Plenty of times he’d come home from football practice to find Abe with the bills scattered over the table, a calculator crunching numbers that didn’t add up, a worried frown on his face. Ranching in the Trans-Pecos was hardscrabble, but Pierce had managed to float above that reality. He wasn’t about to admit that to Malcolm, however.

  “I’m gonna plant those gourds,” Pierce promised. “In fact, it’s going to be the best damn pumpkin crop ever grown on the Triple H.”

  “I thought you were off the DL in October. You won’t be around to harvest this bumper crop of pumpkins.” Malcolm sniggered.

  That gave Pierce pause. “The October date is just a ballpark figure. I could push my return back a couple of weeks. Stay to harvest the pumpkins and get them to market.”

  Malcolm looked surprised. “You? Putting off football? This I gotta see to believe.”

  “Watch close, ’cause it’s happening.”

  “Care to put your money where your mouth is?” Malcolm challenged.

  “You’re on.”

  “Five grand says you’re full of shit.” Malcolm thrust out a palm.

  “Why stop there?” Pierce clasped his brother’s hand and squeezed it so tight Malcolm winced. “Let’s go double or nothing.”

  Chapter 5

  Habit: the overall appearance of a plant.

  PIERCE had shot off his big mouth, and now here he was at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, zipping past the colossally dusty grain silos of Angus Feed and Grain, pulling into a parking lot and feeling like he was doomed to end up ten grand lighter. Malcolm was right. He didn’t know the first thing about raising pumpkins, but he’d never let a lack of knowledge stop him from doing what he wanted to do.

  He caught a glimpse of himself in the rearview mirror. “C’mon, you lead football teams to victory. You can do this. The paneled van that was parked beside him pulled out, revealing a blue Toyota Corolla in the space on the other side.

  His pulse did a strange two-step. Was it Lace’s car?

  Pierce hopped out of his truck, rushed inside the feed store through the side exit. The desiccated smell of dried grain mingled with the vitaminy scent of the animal care medicine hit him head-on, stirring memories of the time he was courting Jenny Angus. Her uncle owned the business and she’d worked here as a clerk during the summers. The persistent smell had invaded her hair, and every time he kissed her, he’d thought of livestock.

  What did Lace’s hair smell like? Flowers most likely. And sunshine.

  His boots made a shuffling sound against the big-planked hardwood floors that constituted the store area. To the left was a teller’s cage. To the right, the wooden flooring ended as cement steps went down to the storage area and loading dock. A hallway to the side of the teller’s cage led to the front of the store with an entrance on Main Street.

  A haze of perpetual dust—sawdust, deer corn dust, barley dust, hay dust, peanut dust, all kinds of agricultural dust—floated in the air, stirred by the lazy spin of the old-style industrial-grade ceiling fans mounted overhead.

  He tasted grit on his tongue and his stomach tightened. He hadn’t been in the feed store since he’d gone off to college. Hell, who would’ve thought he’d feel nostalgic over a friggin’ feed store? Except for when he was chasing Jenny, he’d hated coming in here with Abe when he was a kid. Bored out of his skull, he’d spent his time perusing the bulletin board that had pictures of local animals for sale—Australian cattle dogs, donkeys, a llama or two, free barn kittens to anyone who would come and get them.

  Pierce scanned the warehouse area through the haze, looking for Lace. One side of the warehouse was stacked almost to the ceiling with sacks of feed, salt for water softeners, pesticides, and potting soil. At the other end of the warehouse a tall, wide door was rolled up all the way and a couple of cowboys stood on the loading dock jawing with the teenage boys loading feed into the beds of their waiting pickup trucks.

  Quickly, Pierce tugged the brim of his hat lower and ducked his head, not wanting the men to recognize him and stroll over for a chat. Constant attention could get tiresome.

  “Can I help ya?” asked the blond girl sitting in front of an aged PC at a desk in the rear of the teller cage.

  She sent a text message on her cell phone, stuck the phone in her cleavage, jumped up from her rolling swivel chair, and came toward the window. She was all of sixteen, had a tiny diamond stud in her nostril and a hickey on the side of her neck the s
ize of a Krugerrand. She wore a baby doll T-shirt emblazoned with The Band Perry logo and jeans so tight he could make out the denomination of the change in her front pocket—two quarters, a penny, and three dimes.

  Still glancing around for any sign of Lace, he sauntered up to the window. “I’d like to buy some pumpkin seeds.”

  She pulled down a pad of the same order forms that Jenny had once used. Apparently, Angus Feed and Grain was going kicking and screaming into the digital age. Kind of nice, actually, that some things never changed. You could count on small towns for that and the fact that most everybody knew who you were.

  “How much do you need?” she asked.

  Pierce rested his elbow on the thin wooden ledge that extended out from the teller cage, crooked his grin out of habit, not an attempt to seduce. “How much should I need?”

  She shrugged. “I dunno. How big is the area you’re planting?”

  Hell, he didn’t know. He turned up the wattage on his smile. Surely she recognized him. “I’m planting for Abe Hollister. He buys his seed here every year. Do you mind looking up how much he buys?”

  The girl wrinkled her nose. “I haven’t been working here long and I’m from Whistle Stop. Don’t know Abe Hollister. He any kin to Malcolm?”

  “Malcolm’s my brother. Abe’s our dad.”

  Her eyes lit up. “You are so lucky to have such a great brother. Malcolm is the sweetest thing. He brings us doughnuts every time he comes in.”

  Malcolm? Sweet? Maybe to the women at Angus Feed and Grain. “Yeah, he’s a good guy.”

  “Lemme go ask Toby.” She turned around, walked to the back of the teller cage, and knocked on the wall. “Toby!”

  “Yeah?” a man’s voice called back from the other side of the wall.

  “Some old dude wants to know how much seed he’ll need to plant Malcolm’s pumpkin patch.” Her cleavage dinged, letting her know she had a text message. She fished the phone out of her bra and went back to texting.

  Pierce blinked, swallowed, and shook his head. Old dude? Wow. Talk about a smack to the ego.

  Footsteps sounded to his left and he turned to see one of Malcolm’s former classmates, Toby Mercer, emerge from the corridor that led to another part of the building. Lace had to be in there.

  Toby was shaped like a drinking straw, long and straight and thin. “Pierce!”

  Pierce extended his hand, cast a glance at the corridor, and almost called the pale man by his schoolyard nickname, Casper. “Toby.”

  Toby ignored his hand and instead clamped him in a back-pounding hug. With one arm slung around Pierce’s shoulder, he turned him back to the teller window. “Aimee, you dumb-dumb. This ‘old dude’ is Pierce Hollister, quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys.”

  Using her thumbs in rapid texting mode, she never looked up from her phone screen, just shrugged and said, “Whatever.”

  “She’s into swimmers. If you were Michael Phelps she would have known who you were,” Toby reassured him.

  Aimee glanced up long enough to smile dreamily and murmured, “I love the way that man moves through the water. Like a dolphin.”

  Pierce stepped back, waved at the warehouse. “You working here?”

  Toby puffed out his chest. “I’m the general manager.”

  “No kidding?”

  “Hey, I saw the Super Bowl.” Toby hissed in a breath through his teeth. “Rough break.” He paused, laughed. “No pun intended. How’s the leg?”

  “Healing. Thanks for asking.”

  “I heard rumors …” Toby shook his head. “Never mind.”

  Pierce widened the smile he wanted to drop. Hell, he could just imagine what kind of spiteful stuff was being said behind his back. That was part and parcel of being famous. You had to take the good with the bad. If you put yourself out there, folks felt free to say any damn thing about you that they wanted whether it was true or not. “No, go ahead. You can tell me what people are saying behind my back.”

  Toby made a dismissive face. “It’s nothing. You know how people like to talk.”

  “They’re saying I’m washed up.” Pierce said it so Toby didn’t have to.

  “It’s just the contrary folks that are upset because the Cowboys lost the Super Bowl.”

  “I wasn’t happy about it either.”

  “No one thinks it was your fault, but with the leg and comparison to Theismann, gossip takes on a life of its own.”

  “You can tell everyone that you heard it from the horse’s mouth. I’m fine. I’ll be back on the roster by mid-season. My career is going great guns.”

  “Why, I sure am glad to hear that and not just because I have a Jackson riding on your return.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  Toby clapped him on the back again. “Now, let’s get you those pum’kin seeds.”

  They went down the corridor and into the garden supply part of the building. A green water hose lay snaked over the cement, and trays of young plants were growing in cheap black plastic containers. The big picture windows, with the blinds drawn up, fronted North Main. To the far side of the room was a large carousel of seed packets, and beside the carousel sat big plastic bins like those in the supermarket that held gourmet nuts and candies sold by the pound, but here the bins contained a wide variety of seeds.

  But Pierce wasn’t really paying much attention to any of that. He was on the lookout for Lace.

  Another room opened up off the one they were in. When he’d come to the feed store with his dad, that room had been part of a family-owned hardware store, long put out of business by the big box home improvement stores.

  “That’s new,” Pierce said.

  Toby laughed. “You’ve been away too long. Mr. Angus bought Carter Ivy’s building and expanded it over ten years ago. That’s where we keep the tillers and lawn mowers and weed eaters and such.”

  “Mind giving me a tour?”

  Toby looked surprised by the request. Hell, Pierce was surprised he asked it, but there was this overwhelming urge to see Lace running through him like a commercial jingle you couldn’t get out of your head. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was. He’d been thinking about her almost nonstop since Monday and the only thing he’d ever thought about that much was football.

  “Sure, this way.” Toby ushered him into the other room.

  Pierce skimmed his gaze over the John Deere lawn tractors, the Ryobi cultivators, terra-cotta patio chimineas, barbecue grills, and a metal cage of propane bottles, but he didn’t see her. The starch went out of his spine and his smile drooped.

  “Nice collection,” he said lamely.

  “It’s a tough market with them building a Home Depot in Alpine, but luckily we got a loyal customer base who’d rather spend the pennies right here in Cupid than drive. Isn’t that right, Lace?”

  Lace.

  A right nice tingly sensation spread throughout his body and Pierce went up on tiptoes trying to find her amid the gardening equipment.

  “That’s right, Toby.” Lace stood up from where she’d been facing away from them and crouched down beside a display of hedge trimmers.

  She dusted her hands on the seat of her jeans—and what a fine seat it was—and turned around. She wore an agreeable red cotton shirt that clung loosely to munificent breasts the size of ripe grapefruits. The color accented her dark hair and fair skin, giving her an otherworldly appearance. He’d had a girlfriend once who dragged him to art galleries. Hadn’t gotten much out of the experience, except now he remembered one of the artists because Lace resembled the heavenly women he painted. Rubens. Like the sandwich.

  Pierce tried to draw in a breath, but it felt as if his lungs had been frozen by liquid nitrogen and they could neither expand nor deflate. He sort of just gaped at her, mouth opening, trying to inhale.

  For one brief second a look of alarm passed over her face, but she quickly covered it up with neutral nonchalance. The band around his chest tightened. What did that look mean?

  “You need anything,
Lace?” Toby asked.

  “I’m good.” She waved a hand. “Go ahead and help your customer.”

  Your customer.

  Like she didn’t even know him. She wasn’t even going to acknowledge him.

  Pierce would have said something to her, should have said something glib and flirty, but his lungs still weren’t cooperating. Even so, he must have been breathing on some level or he would have passed out. Right?

  Speechless and confused about it, Pierce followed Toby back into the seed room. Toby got a paper bag from above the bins and started dishing seeds into the bag with a big stainless steel scoop. He paused after a moment to weigh it on a pair of scales.

  But Pierce was not paying any attention whatsoever because Lace had followed them into the room, the hedge trimmer in her arms, although she was pointedly trying to make her way to the exit as fast as possible.

  However, she did cast a quick glance at him and Toby and smirked. What was that about?

  “There you go,” Toby announced. “Give this to Aimee.” He handed him a piece of paper with his purchase written on it. “You can pay her on the way out.”

  “Thanks,” Pierce said, and grabbed the bag feeling as if he’d been zapped with a stun gun. What was it about Lace that grabbed him so forcefully by the short hairs?

  She’d already exited.

  He rushed to catch up to her, thought of—and discarded—a hundred different smooth-operator lines. Maybe he should start with an apology for the jerk-off thing he’d said to her in the hospital parking lot. But an apology would put him in a weakened position. Give her the upper hand.

  When he got back to the main warehouse, he was relieved to see she was at the teller cage, settling up her bill for the hedge trimmer. She wielded the thing like she knew what she was doing.

  “Hi,” he said breathlessly. Brilliant. That line will live in pickup infamy.

  She nodded at him, barely. “Thanks, Aimee,” she said, and she turned to leave.

  Pierce moved to block her way. “Aren’t you going to say something to me?”