The Cowboy's Mail Order Bride

by Carolyn Brown

  “Do you play dominoes?” he asked.

  “I’ve played since I was a kid. Gramps loved his dominoes,” she said.

  “Marvin told me that he played with his grandparents when he was a boy,” Clarice said.

  Greg removed his glasses, wiped them clean on his T-shirt, and put them back on. “Did your grandpa let you win because you were the fair-haired daughter?”

  “Darlin’, I’ve never been called fair-haired, and believe me, I come from competitive gene stock. We don’t let anyone win anything. If I won, it was fair and square. Did your grandpa let you win?” Emily asked.

  “Hell, no! I was fifteen before I beat him. Thought I’d done inherited the moon and stars.” Greg chuckled.

  “Me too. I danced around the living room like I’d made a touchdown for the Dallas Cowboys. Do y’all play for beans or money?” Emily asked.

  “Big bucks,” Greg said.

  “Do I need to make a trip to the bank?”

  “Buy-in is fifty dollars. No bets less than five,” he answered.

  “Greg!” Clarice shook her finger at him.

  Emily smiled. “I think I can scrape up fifty dollars. Does it have to be in bills or can I use pennies?”

  ***

  Greg was on his way out of the house when Emily pushed away from a porch post. “Hey, I’d begun to think you were going to primp all day.”

  He tilted his freshly shaven face up to the rising sun. The light reflected off his glasses, making a halo above his head. “Did it do any good?”

  “You look just like you did when you left the breakfast table, except you are now wearing boots and a coat,” she said.

  “Well, dammit! I thought at least I smelled better. I used my best shaving lotion to impress you.” He grinned.

  Her heart skipped a beat. Was he serious or was he joking? Had he felt the attraction that morning at breakfast too? If he did, maybe she’d find a note on the fridge just for her some morning.

  She sniffed the air. “It’s okay, but I really did like the smell of bacon better.”

  “Well, then I’ll have to see about some bacon-scented shaving lotion. Hey, not to change this exhilarating conversation, but thank you for staying on, Emily. Nana’s got a new bounce in her step this morning. I think that computerized stuff really weighs heavy on her mind. I’m hoping by the end of the month she’ll let me hire someone on full-time when she sees how nice it is to have some help,” Greg said.

  “It seemed like the right thing to do. Gramps used to tell me that when I’ve done made up my mind about something and it doesn’t feel right, then I should try on a different decision to see how it feels. I tried to think about spending my month on the beach, but it just didn’t feel right. Then I thought about Clarice’s offer and there was peace in my heart,” she admitted. She didn’t say a word about his pictures being a big part of the decision. Hell’s bells, she hadn’t even told Taylor that part, and she sure wasn’t speaking it aloud right then.

  “I’m glad it didn’t. Now tell me, how much do you know about horses?” he asked. “I hate to ask you to do this, but the fellow who takes care of the horse barn called in sick a few minutes ago. I’ve got a full day lined up. I’m behind because I’ve been gone a week.”

  She didn’t give him time to finish. “I love horses. I’ll take care of the stables. Will I have time to exercise them?”

  He pointed to a pickup truck. It might have been pea green at one time, but nowadays rust covered more than paint and it was a toss-up as to whether the green was lichen or actual paint. The tailgate was gone, and the fenders looked like they’d been whipped with a baseball bat several times.

  “Hop in and I’ll drive you out there. You know how to handle a stick shift?”

  “I can drive anything that has four wheels,” she said. “Gramps said that I had to learn to drive everything on the ranch.”

  “Okay, then I’ll leave the truck with you and you can bring it back at dinnertime. Max can pick me up at the barn, and you’ll be on your own until noon,” he said. “Don’t worry if you don’t get the stalls all done this morning. I can help finish up after dinner. Albert and Louis both have the flu bug today. Just do what you can and we’ll play catch-up later. It won’t hurt the horses to go without exercise for one day.”

  She crawled into the passenger seat of the truck and watched him trot around the front to the driver’s side. The visual that popped into her mind almost put her to fanning her face even though there was a cool breeze still blowing that morning out of the north.

  Nothing made sense. She’d only known the man one day, and she’d never, not one time, had such a hot attraction to a man—any man, not just cowboys. And she had sure never envisioned doing what she just did sitting in his lap bumping along the rutted pathway at forty miles per hour.

  Greg stopped the truck in front of a long horse stable and was on the phone when he slid out of the truck seat and slammed the door. “Yes, that’s right. Pick me up here and we’ll get busy with that.” He shoved the phone back into his pocket.

  She crawled out of the truck and looked at a long horse stable, not totally unlike the one that used to be on their ranch until Gramps had sold that section to Taylor.

  “You got a phone? You sure you don’t mind doing this?” Greg asked.

  She held up her phone. “I don’t mind. Keys to the truck so I can get back to the house at noon? And yes, I have a phone, and yes, I have the number to the house if I get into trouble.”

  “The keys are in the front seat, and thank you, Emily. I didn’t plan on whoever we hired for Nana’s helper to be able to do ranchin’ work too.”

  “I’m a girl of many talents.” She smiled.

  “Well, this morning I’m grateful. Now, I’ve got a ton of business to take care of. Hopefully I’ll see you at noon.”

  A dusty cloud followed Max’s truck to the barn. He’d barely stopped when Greg got in and waved as he shut the door.

  She slipped inside the horse stable, determined that she’d work her way through the emotions surging around through her body. Greg was too damned nice, and that was a fact, jack. If he’d come to Gramps with an old boot box full of letters, she would have thought he was a con man deluxe. She might have been watching too many reruns of NCIS and CSI in the past couple of years, but she would have figured he was out to get something other than closure from delivering a box of letters.

  And yet, he’d accepted her on face value and his grandmother’s say-so. She found a hoe, wheelbarrow, and shovel in a room so messy that she wanted to cry just looking at it. It was pitiful considering how many people worked on the ranch. Dotty said that Max and Greg always had their meals in the house but that Max had a small apartment in the bunkhouse that housed twenty permanent hired hands. Then there was another twenty who worked full-time on the ranch and lived in Ravenna or the surrounding areas. That meant a work crew bigger than the one at Taylor’s place, and he’d fire someone if he found a tack room looking like this one.

  On the way back to the first stable, she passed another room with a small window in the door. Peeking in, she saw a second tack room that was organized and fairly clean. The scent of clean leather and old coffee greeted her when she opened the door. The floor needed to be swept, and upon closer inspection there were a few things out of place.

  According to the sign above the stall door, the first horse was Glorietta, a gorgeous buckskin mare with a dark tail and mane. Emily kissed the horse on the nose and told her how beautiful she was before she led her outside the stall and tied her bridle reins to the gate.

  “Did someone clean out your stall yesterday, darlin’? This looks worse than my college suitemate’s room. Surely someone as pretty as you didn’t do this all by yourself,” she talked as she worked.

  When she’d finished scraping the last of the wet straw from the floor, she pulled the garden hos
e in from the end of the barn and hosed down the floor and the walls until it was sparkling clean. After that she sunk hay hooks into a small bale of hay, carried it to the stall, and cut the wire holding it together with snips. She spread it over the floor and led Glorietta back into her new clean digs.

  “Now isn’t that much better? You’ve been a good girl. I’d love to ride you, but I’ve got two days’ work to get done in half a day to prove that I can do anything that Greg can do.”

  After one more kiss, Emily moved down the row to the next one. It took two solid hours to do the whole stable, including the center aisle. Her back muscles were whining by the time she wound the hose up and tossed the hoe and shovel into the wheelbarrow.

  She finished the tack room with an hour to spare and remembered that the old truck smelled hot when Greg parked it, so she rolled up her sleeves and lifted the hood. It didn’t take much poking around before she found the problem, but it took the whole hour to fix it.

  She left a cloud of dust behind her when she braked and jumped out of the truck near the kitchen door. She hurried into the house as the clock on the mantel struck twelve times and headed straight for the kitchen sink to wash her hands. She could see across the hall into the dining room. The table was set. Max, Dotty, and Clarice all peered into the kitchen. She dried her hands on the dish towel and hurried to her place at the table.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said.

  Greg slid into a chair seconds before she did. “I’m late too. Got caught up with the veterinarian who was checking out the new bull.”

  Clarice smiled. “We had just barely got settled. Hope you like your steak medium rare. I forgot to get your cell phone number or I would have called and asked. Oh, and meet Prissy. She’s been helping me to understand the computer business a little better. She works in Bonham, but she had a couple of hours this morning that she could come by.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Prissy. And the steak is fine any way you cook it. Medium rare is fine. Rare is fine. I like steak,” Emily answered.

  A woman with a name like Prissy brought images to Emily’s mind of a petite little thing with big blue eyes and blond hair. But the woman who settled into a chair beside Dotty was six feet tall without the spike heels. She had brown hair and brown eyes, made even bigger and darker with lots of eyeliner and shadow. The pencil-straight red skirt barely touched her knees, and the black-and-red geometrically printed sweater dipped low in the front to reveal two inches of cleavage.

  Maybe she was the one who’d started the sticky note war on the fridge. Back when Shine Canyon went computerized, Emily had given her grandfather a stack and told him to make notes about the computer and stick them to the wall above it. He had hated the notes because they reminded him of the computer, which he never did master.

  Emily had the sudden desire to drag that tall woman out to the kitchen, point at the refrigerator, and ask her if she’d hauled in those notes in a wheelbarrow.

  “How much did you get done? I could help finish this afternoon. Got a call from Albert and he said that he and Louis will be back tomorrow morning.” Greg passed the bowl of foil-wrapped baked potatoes across the table to her. Their hands brushed in the transfer, and the heat had nothing to do with the warm bowl.

  “There are two tack rooms. One doesn’t look like it’s been touched in years. I got the wheelbarrow, shovel, and hoe out of it, though, before I found the second one. Your horses are sweethearts. I jet-sprayed their stalls before I scattered fresh hay and fed them good. I thought about exercising a couple of them with my spare hour, but then I remembered that the truck smelled hot when you parked it, so I looked at the engine. It had a leak in the radiator. I found the little welder in the tack room. I reckon you’ve got a bigger one somewhere else on the ranch? Anyway, I fired it up and put a patch on the radiator and refilled it with water. Couldn’t find any antifreeze, so you might want to check that since we could get another freeze before spring. Sometimes February can get downright temperamental and shove a late freeze in on us,” she said between bites. “Dotty, this steak is wonderful, and the hot rolls are out of this world.”

  Greg’s eyes were big as cow patties by the time she finished telling him what she’d done that morning. She wanted to giggle, but she bit it back.

  “What? Was I not supposed to play with the welder?” she asked innocently.

  “You are welcome to use whatever equipment you know how to operate,” Clarice said.

  “What’s my job for the afternoon? Am I assistant or hired help?”

  “We’re still getting ready for the party tonight, so you can be hired help. We’ll get into the computer business later in the week,” Clarice said.

  “Are there any more like you out there in Happy who might be looking for a job? You know how to drive a tractor?” Greg asked.

  “I told you this morning, I can drive anything with wheels. And I don’t know of anyone lookin’ for a job,” she said with a smile.

  “You can have a choice. Rake hay or plow forty for a new alfalfa crop, or hell’s bells, Emily, after the morning you put in, you might want to take a nap.”

  “I don’t care which job I do, but I don’t want to take a nap,” Emily said. “It’s all sitting in a tractor. Open cab? Do I need my stocking cap under the cowboy hat? Gramps always said that good hard work will cure most everything, so I reckon that’s what I need more than anything these days.”

  “No, our tractors have good heaters and air conditioners for the hot summertime,” Max said.

  She looked across at him. His graying hair was cut short, and the grin that covered his face erased part of the wrinkles.

  “That’ll be like a vacation on an exotic island,” she said. “Pass the rolls, please. I’ve worked up an appetite.”

  Clarice handed the basket of rolls to Greg, who sent them across the table to Emily. When his fingers brushed hers, she wasn’t a bit surprised at the sparks dancing around the dining room.

  “Thank you. One of your horses has thrown a shoe. I can fix that tomorrow after I muck out the stables if Albert is still sick.” She was amazed that her voice was as calm as a summer cucumber and not high-pitched like a rat in a trap.

  “Oh, no! Tomorrow you are driving me and Clarice into town for our hair appointments, and then we go to Braum’s for ice cream,” Dotty said.

  Emily nodded. “Well, since you said ice cream, I won’t pout too much because I’m missing all the ranchin’ fun.”

  “Ranchin’ fun.” Prissy sighed. “I never heard it called fun before.”

  “Gramps used to say that it’s all in how you study it. It can be work or play, dependin’ on how you approach it. So I take it that you don’t like ranchin’?” Emily asked.

  “Hate it. Hate cows. Hate the smells and hate living away from town,” she answered.

  ***

  Greg crawled up on the front of the broken-down tractor, opened the hood, and shook his head. Most men couldn’t have done the work that Emily did that morning. She must’ve really cut back on her hired help and done everything herself as her grandfather needed more and more attention and money for his treatments.

  Max climbed up beside Greg and handed him a wrench. “Hey, I just came from the stables. That woman is worth her weight in gold. You reckon if we drove out to the Panhandle we could find a dozen more like her? I swear she got more done than two men this morning.”

  “No wonder Nana likes her. She’s a power horse in the office and on the ranch,” Greg said.

  “I’ll be out at that north forty all afternoon. If you need me, holler.” Max chuckled. “You might do well to pay more attention to her, cowboy. She’s mighty easy on the eyes and has kissable lips to go with that work ethic.”

  “Hey, now, don’t go getting wedding cake on your mind. She’s only here for a month,” Greg said.

  “Clarice and Dotty are in there singing her praises.�
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  Greg dropped the wrench and it rattled its way down to the concrete barn floor. “Dammit!”

  “I don’t know why you don’t want to talk about her,” Max said.

  “Looks like I need another part for this job, and I’m not going back to town this afternoon. I’ll get it tomorrow morning. I’ll help you mend fence, but only if you don’t talk about Emily all afternoon. I tell you, she’s not interested in staying here. She’s going back to Happy in a month and by then Nana will be over this trip down memory lane, and Max, I’m not going to fall for someone who lives all the way across the state just because she has kissable lips and a pretty smile,” Greg said.

  “I knew if I stuck around long enough I’d get you to agree to help,” Max said. “I’ll pick up the guys at the bunkhouse and meet you there.”

  Greg had barely gotten settled into his truck when his phone rang. He knew from the ringtone that it was Jeremiah.

  He answered it on the second ring. “What’s goin’ on that you are callin’ again? Not that I’m not glad to hear from you, but you never call this often.”

  “Wait just a minute. Don’t hang up.” Suddenly he was listening to a damn marching mariachi band blasting his eardrums out when he was switched over to hold.

  He was about ready to hang up when Jeremiah came back. “Sorry, but that was a client and he owes me big bucks, so I had to talk to him. I did some more checkin’ into Miz Emily Cooper.”

  “Why would you do that? You said she was clean as a whistle,” Greg asked.

  Jeremiah whistled through his teeth like he did when they were young. “I might come see Mama just so I can meet this superwoman. Does she wear a cape? Is she eight feet tall and bulletproof?”

  “She barely comes to my shoulder. She’s got jet-black hair and big, clear cobalt-blue eyes that don’t match all that black hair.”