Tears welled up in Natalie’s eyes, but she kept them at bay with several blinks.
“And now for the crowning glory,” Jack said. “I searched everywhere to find a bunch big enough to hang pretty this year.” He held up a ball of mistletoe as big as Lucas’s head. “The hook is still there from last time, and I tied a pretty red ribbon on it. It ain’t holidays without mistletoe.”
“Hell, you wouldn’t ever get a kiss if you didn’t put that up there for the holidays.” Grady laughed.
“Don’t I know it, and just think, Saturday night is the night.” Jack laughed with him.
Lucas was standing under it when Jack hung it on the hook. He looked down at his son and motioned toward Natalie. “He’s in the right spot, girl.”
“Dad!” Lucas exclaimed.
Natalie walked right up to him, smacked a kiss on his cheek, and looked up at Jack. “Is that the way it’s done?”
“It’ll do for starters.” He nodded seriously, but his expression was anything but serious.
“And now it’s about Josh’s nap time, so Natalie can put him to sleep while we take care of the lawn stuff,” Henry said.
She and Joshua watched from the window for a while, but he got fussy, so she gave him a bottle and he went right to sleep. He didn’t even wiggle when she laid him in the crib. While the guys argued about the outside lights and the right place to put the blow-up decorations, she cleaned up the kitchen and put a load of laundry in the washer.
She’d never had a problem throwing her underpants in the same washer with her brothers’, but that day she blushed when her things and Lucas’s all went into the washer together. It seemed far too personal even though they had shared kisses and bumped into each other dozens of times.
She thought about leaving and not looking back. Then she thought about staying. The work wasn’t any more or less than what she did at her folks’ ranch and the pay was a hell of a lot better. She and Joshua had a single-wide trailer on the back of the cotton farm out there; here they had a bedroom with a rocking chair and a nice view of trees and cows at Cedar Hill. The only con about the setup was that they had to share a bathroom with everyone else in the house whereas they had their very own in their small trailer.
She fished her phone from her shirt pocket and slowly poked in the numbers rather than hitting speed dial. It barely finished the first ring when Debra said, “Did I miss something else? I don’t think you should stay at Leah’s all week. The weatherman says that it’s clearing off tomorrow, and if Joshua does something else that Leah gets to see before I do, she’ll never shut up about it.”
“Are you sitting down, Momma?” Natalie asked.
“Yes, I’ve spent the morning cleaning up the tack room and I just now made a pot of coffee,” Debra rattled on.
“Get a cup of coffee and don’t say a word until I’m finished,” Natalie said.
“You are scaring me. Are you all right? Has something happened to Leah or to Joshua?” Debra’s voice was filled with panic.
“Everyone is fine. I should have said that first. I’m sorry,” she said.
“You scared the hell out of me. What could be so damned important that I have to sit down? You didn’t take a job out there in Arkansas, did you? I swear, I won’t have it! I wasn’t happy that you had a baby without a husband, but I got over it and I love Joshua. Please don’t tell me you found a coaching job and you are moving in with Leah. All you have to do is wait a couple of years until the stink dies down around here and you’ll have a job at the school again.”
“Momma! I said you couldn’t say anything until I finished telling you what I have to say. I did not take a job in Arkansas, and I have no intention of living with Aunt Leah.”
“Well, halle-damn-freakin’-lujah!”
“But I’m not coming home next week.” She went on to tell her mother the whole story, from the time that Lucas first appeared on the computer screen with Drew and how that it was Lucas who’d kept her sane after Drew died.
She ended with, “I’m staying here until Hazel comes home.”
A long, pregnant silence made her wonder if her mother had fallen off the stool in front of the worktable in the tack room. She could be lying dead on the barn floor with the phone stuck to her ear and an expression on her face even the mortician couldn’t erase.
“Well?” Natalie asked.
“You’ll be home by midnight or I’m sending your father and all three of your brothers to get you,” Debra whispered.
Natalie was twenty-six years old. She was a grown woman who could make her own decisions, but cold chills chased down her spine as if someone had filled her shirt with sleet. Debra could yell, rant, and cuss, but when she whispered, the devil covered his ears and whimpered.
“Mother, I have been talking to him every night for almost a year. I know him as well as I knew Drew. And I know Hazel, Henry, Jack, and Grady as well as I know Lawton Pierce and Widow Presley. They’ve become my friends, and I’m not going to a motel.”
“The hell you do! The folks around here are real. Those people could be fakes. He could have told you anything over that damn computer. I read every day where some woman goes to meet a man she met on one of those dating sites and is never seen again. You go pack your things back in that truck and get to the nearest motel right now. And call me as soon as you check in.”
“Momma, I’m going to hang up, but I want you to look at the pictures I just sent you. You’ll see that Henry Allen is not a serial killer and that Lucas Allen is just a cowboy on a ranch. It’s just candid shots of them while we were decorating the tree this morning. Call me back as soon as you look at them.”
“Shit!” Debra yelled as Natalie hit the end button.
Natalie watched the second hand inch its way around the clock three times before her phone rang. She answered on the first ring.
“Well?”
“Shit!” Debra said again.
“Does that mean you don’t think they’re going to steal Joshua and sell me into slavery?”
“It means that I know those folks. My dad and Henry were friends a long, long time ago. They were in the Lone Star Angus Association together when I was a little girl. He and his wife came to Goodnight and bought a bull from my dad just about the time that I got engaged. I remember showing my ring to his wife. After your dad and I married, we joined the Panhandle Angus Association, so I didn’t see Henry again. I recognized him by that mop of white hair. I’m not afraid of that family, but I damn sure don’t have to like the idea of you being there.”
“Small world, ain’t it?”
“Hell, no! It’s a huge world and a bigger state when I think about you and Joshua that far away. Girl, you will be home for the New Year’s Eve party. You can bring your Internet boyfriend with you, but by damn you will be here,” Debra said. “I ought to make you tell your dad.”
“But Momma,” she whined.
“Oh, hush! I’ll tell him because I can ease into it gently. He’d have a heart attack if you told him like you did me.”
Joshua was still sleeping soundly when Natalie finished talking to her mother, so she called her Aunt Leah to tell her that the fan was turned on high speed, and if she didn’t want to get covered up, she should duck.
“Hmmmph,” Natalie all but snorted. “I thought you were turning off your phone, Aunt Leah!”
Chapter 6
A few snowflakes had survived Joshua’s warm little cheeks by sticking to his thick dark eyelashes while he snuggled down in the sling around Natalie’s body. He’d fallen asleep as she’d gathered eggs that morning, which was unusual. Most of the time, she could set her clock by when he wanted a bottle and when he took his nap. Natalie hoped he wasn’t coming down with something. She tiptoed into the house, set the basket of eggs on the counter, and held her breath all the way to the bedroom.
“Normal,” she whispered after a few seconds.
He made sucking noises in his sleep but didn’t open his eyes when she transferred him from bed to crib. She touched his mouth with his favorite pacifier and he latched right on to it.
She was tiptoeing down the hall when she heard a ruckus out in the front yard. She rushed to the front door, threw it open, and stepped out on the porch.
A tall, lanky man with a rim of brown hair circling a bald head had a shotgun trained on Lucas’s chest. “I swear to God, Lucas, you better not…”
“And I swear to God, Mr. Crankston, that I don’t want these damned goats. They’ve already eaten my blown-up Santa Claus, and Gramps is going to have a fit when he sees what they’ve done to Frosty the Snowman. So shoot ’em or take ’em home.”
“I’ll shoot your sorry ass instead. My grandson will whine and carry on like a little girl if one of them is hurt. And my wife will have a fit and burn my biscuits for the rest of my life. I didn’t know I was going to have to keep every damn goat born for five years when I bought that old ram and them two females. So they are yours,” Mr. Crankston said. “I’ll tell them that they ran off and I couldn’t find the sorry critters.”
The puppies came dashing around the house, falling over their feet and yelping at each other. Natalie sighed. She should have shot those damn dogs and kissed the coyote right on his sharp nose.
She whistled for the dogs and they looked her way but only momentarily. They took off after the goats, nipping at all that gorgeous winter wool on their underbellies. One goat ran right through Frosty, hooking one of its horns in the thin fabric that was filled with a warm air pump inside the thing. The torn black and white material flew out behind the goat like Batman’s cape. One of the puppies grabbed it and hung on with his teeth, the goat pulling him along on the slick surface like the hound dog was skiing.
The second goat tried to climb Mrs. Claus, knocking the hot air right out of her and making her collapse in a heap in the snow.
“Damn Pashmina varmints. I wish I’d never bought a damn one of them. I planned to shoot every one that had jumped the fence, but I couldn’t when I got here. My wife would leave me for sure.” Mr. Crankston yelled as he chased goats around the yard behind Lucas who was busy chasing puppies.
The noise woke Joshua and he set up a howl that Natalie could hear even without the monitor. She rushed back in the house, picked him up, and threw a blanket around his little body. When she got back to the porch, the scene hadn’t changed much. Men were still cussing. Dogs were still running after goats, and goats were trying to climb anything in sight to get away from the dogs.
But wait. There were three goats and now there were only two. She heard a noise above her and stepped out into the yard and looked up. Evidently goats could climb ladders because that’s the only way that critter could have gotten up there and he was feasting upon the Christmas bunting that Grady had hung.
What did roasted goat taste like? Was it pretty good with barbecue or did she need to cook it in a soy-based sauce and serve it with rice?
“Hey, Lucas,” she yelled.
When he looked back over his shoulder, she pointed up.
He threw up his hands and sat down on the porch step. “You should have shot the dogs instead of the coyote,” he huffed.
“I already thought of that.”
Mr. Crankston fired into the air and the puppies stopped in their tracks, peed in the snow, and slunk over to Lucas. Then they saw Natalie, bounded up the stairs, and pawed at her legs until she stooped down. One of them grabbed the edge of the baby blanket and the others licked Joshua’s hands.
The goat on the roof came down the ladder in a flash and all three goats—one with red and green bunting still hanging from his mouth, one with a limp cape, and the last one with a bit of Mrs. Claus’s apron fabric stuck to his horns—cowered on the porch with the puppies.
Mr. Crankston looped a rope around each of them and led them to his truck. “I’ll have to remember to fire next time before they tear up everything in sight. I’ll be replacing those before the party, but I swear, Lucas, I’m going to hold a grudge against you for not taking these critters off my hands. Clearly they like it over here.”
Natalie almost offered to trade the puppies for the goats, but puppies couldn’t climb ladders.
***
Lucas put the pups back again, but he could not find the place where they were digging under the fence. He’d had an acute case of severe conscience all day and he’d decided it was time to tell her his secret. It wasn’t going to be easy after the fit he thrown there at first over Joshua, but better he tell her than it slip from one of the old guys’ lips over supper sometime.
He pushed into the kitchen and said quickly before he changed his mind, “Hey, I have a confession.”
“What? Did you let those mutts out again? If Josh is cranky all day because he didn’t get a nap, it’s going to be your fault.”
“I have a secret, but it’s a hell of a lot bigger than those damn pups. I believe that they could crawl their way up from hell if I shot them and buried them ten feet deep,” he said.
“Oh, ho! So you kept something from me, did you? You aren’t as innocent as you pretended. Well, I’m not so sure I want to know your secret.”
Their gaze met in the middle of the living room. Sparks hit the walls and fizzled out as they landed on the hardwood floor. The sizzle sounded like fireworks and the heat put a crimson glow on her cheeks.
He leaned against the kitchen cabinets. “I’m going to explain whether you like it or not.”
It took several seconds before he spoke, and when he did, it came out in a hoarse drawl. “I had a girlfriend, actually a very serious girlfriend, before I went to Kuwait, but a year over there can clear up the mind real good.”
He pulled out a kitchen chair and sat down. “We split up for several reasons. One was that I was going to Kuwait. The second was that she was determined we would not live on the ranch. And the third is my confession. She has a brother with a mental disorder and we went for genetic testing before we set a date. She was fine but I…” He paused.
God, it was hard to say the words out loud even after a year.
“What?” Natalie asked.
“I can’t have children. Well, maybe that’s not the way I should say it. There’s a one chance in ten million, the doctor said, that I could make a baby. I just thought you should know.”
“So you could have adopted if you’d really loved each other,” Natalie said.
“She didn’t want any children at all and that’s what really split us up,” he said.
Natalie busied herself cutting shortening into flour for piecrusts.
He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Her name is Sonia and she’s engaged now to one of our ranch hands, Noah. She is very high-maintenance and she will be at the party. You should know the background.”
Natalie stopped what she was doing. “Will Noah be here too?”
He sighed. “Yes, he will.”
“Well, then I guess we’ll worry with that when the time comes. We’ve got to tell Henry about those things the goats ate before we have to worry about that.”
“I was devastated because I’ve always wanted children. Gramps built this house for a dozen. I wouldn’t care if I had that many.”
Natalie stopped what she was doing and sat down at the table with him.
She covered his hand with hers. “I’m so sorry. That had to have been a shock.”
The sound of her voice was soothin
g and her blue eyes floated in tears. Finally, one got loose and rolled down her cheeks. He brushed it away with his free hand.
“I’ve accepted it. The line ends with me. Don’t cry.”
She pulled her hand back and wiped away the free flow of tears dripping off her cheekbone. “I never cry, not even when I’m angry or sad, but I’ve gotten emotional since Joshua’s birth.”
“I got the news about Kuwait the same day we got the test results. She said she wasn’t giving up a year of her life to wait for me to come home and that she wasn’t ever going to live out in the boonies with bawling cows, anyway,” he said.
Natalie stood up and went back to the pie dough. “If she’s going to marry Noah, then I guess she might be living on a ranch whether she likes it or not.”
“Maybe so. Are all our secrets covered now?” he asked.
“I don’t have any more. Do you?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know if it’s a secret, but a bunch of guys will show up at the party that I played basketball with in high school. Some of them kind of got stuck in that era, so I’m forewarning you.”
“And Sonia’s cheerleader friends?” Natalie asked.
“They’ll all be here too. It’s a small community. Most of them didn’t stray far from the place where they were raised,” he answered with a shrug. “How did you know she was a cheerleader?”
“I came from a small town too. I bet she was the head cheerleader, wasn’t she? And you were the star basketball player,” Natalie answered.
Baby sounds came from the monitor sitting on the cabinet.
She wiped her hands on a towel and hurried down the hallway.
***
When she returned with Joshua, Lucas was gone.
She pulled the baby’s swing into the kitchen and put him in it. “There we go, cowboy. Now you ride this pony all the way to the back forty and back while I make a pecan pie and a peach cobbler. Tonight you get rice cereal. Your granny said that you are ready for it and that’s why you are fussy at night. You aren’t full. So yum-yum. Get ready for something brand-new.”
The Cowboy’s Christmas Baby Page 9
