Moonglow, Texas

by Mary McBride

  His belt was already unbuckled and the snap on his jeans undone. She couldn’t help but appreciate the muscular curves of his chest and shoulders as he reached up once more to the showerhead.

  “I believe I’ll have a run at the Pleasure Pulse, Molly.” He winked. “I’ll let you know if it’s appropriate for you or not.”

  “I’d appreciate that no end, Dan.”

  Molly hastened back to her office but couldn’t really concentrate for the sound of rushing water and the wet, reverberating choruses of “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary.”

  Even though the Pleasure Pulse had been a disappointment, Dan considered himself a fairly happy camper as he dried off after his shower. Sobriety didn’t feel half bad, he had to admit, and even being back in Moonglow had its advantages. Molly Hansen, for one. Maybe he’d just retire from the Marshals Service and set up here permanently as Dan the Handyman. He’d done all right on the showerhead the second time around. No telling what he could accomplish if—

  “Dan!” Molly’s voice came from the kitchen. “You need to come out here. Right now.”

  From her tone, he knew at once that it was important. Even dire. He wrapped the towel around his waist and beat a limping path in the direction of her voice.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked, coming through the kitchen door.

  Molly was standing with her back to him, her hand gripping the inside handle of the screen door, keeping it from opening out. “There’s somebody here who wants to talk to you,” she said.

  When Molly stepped a few inches to her left, Dan could see the barrel of a revolver waving wildly on the other side of the door.

  “Get back,” he said, immediately angling himself between Molly and the open door. “Lady, put that gun down before you hurt somebody,” he said to the woman standing just outside.

  “You don’t know who I am, do you, Danny?”

  He looked at her short, almost mannish salt-and-pepper hair and at the wet lines of black mascara that stained her cheeks, then he looked back at the gun. It was an old Colt Peacemaker. He hoped to hell the damned thing didn’t misfire.

  “Put the gun down now and then tell me who you are.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t recognize me after all this time. How is it that you look the same after all these years and I look like some old used car? It just isn’t fair.”

  Instead of putting the gun down, she sighted it directly at his heart. Right at that moment, it was beating so hard Dan thought a .45 caliber bullet would have a tough time penetrating it.

  “Just put the gun down,” he said as calmly as he could.

  “Gil Watson told me you were back,” she said in a voice that was increasingly high and tight. “He told me you were living with the East Coast slut.” Her wild eyes focused over his shoulder at Molly. “Are you?”

  Dan pushed the screen door out a fraction, preparing to grab for the Colt. “No, I’m not living here. I’m just doing some repair work.”

  “Sure.” Her gaze strafed him from bare shoulder to knee. “And I’m Cinderella, waiting for my prince to come.”

  “Why don’t you just go ahead and tell me your name.” He edged the door another quarter inch, praying it didn’t squeak.

  “My name’s Ginny Hoke.” The woman’s mouth twisted viciously. “Ring any bells?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact…” Dan could feel his eyes widen perceptibly. “Ginny Hoke? Terry Hoke’s little sister?”

  “That’s right. Doesn’t surprise me you’d remember my brother better than me, either, since the two of you were thicker than thieves. Me, I was just somebody you took to the drive-in every now and then when you couldn’t find anybody else. Isn’t that right, Danny?”

  To the best of his recollection, that was true. Dan was hardly proud of it, but he wasn’t about to confess his youthful sins and beg the pardon of a woman who had a revolver pointed at his heart.

  “I remember you, Ginny. You had long, pretty hair that came almost to your waist, right? And you sang the National Anthem at the baseball games. See, I remember.”

  “And do you remember that last night at the drive-in?” She started waving the gun again.

  “Well, I… Not exactly.”

  “It’s too damn bad you don’t, Danny.” Tears welled in her eyes and spilled over. She dropped the Colt against her leg, as if it were suddenly too heavy to hold. “It’s just too damn bad you don’t remember because that’s the night your daughter was conceived.”

  They’d been outside an awfully long time, Molly thought, peeking unobtrusively out the kitchen window, watching Dan and Ginny Hoke sitting in the lawn chairs in the afternoon shade of the live oak. Every once in a while they leaned their heads toward each other and the sounds of soft laughter carried across the yard.

  That was somewhat reassuring, Molly decided. At least the woman didn’t feel like killing him anymore. She glanced over her shoulder at the nasty-looking revolver left behind on the kitchen table. The six shiny bullets that Dan had extracted from the weapon were in a little circle right beside it. Ginny Hoke’s shaking fingers had arranged them that way while she sat at the kitchen table with Molly, waiting for Dan to get dressed.

  “I’m sorry I called you a slut,” Ginny had said. “It’s not your fault that Danny’s got loose morals.”

  Loose! Glaring out the window again, Molly was thinking Dan Shackelford was a little more than just loose. He was two steps lower than an alley cat. A rat of the first order. How could he have fathered a child with Ginny Hoke and then simply gone away? It was unconscionable.

  Her feelings for him—and Molly had to admit that those feelings had been growing these past few days like glorious, unexpected wildflowers—seemed to shrivel now. She could never knowingly give her heart to a man who’d abandon a pregnant lover. Family was far too important to her. It wasn’t something she obsessed about, but because her own small family had been taken from her so violently when she was a freshman in college, the idea of family had great significance for her. Thirteen years ago, barely an hour after waving goodbye to Molly at the university, her parents and younger sister had been killed in a car accident.

  Like Dan, Molly had pretty much been on her own since the age of eighteen. But, unlike Dan, she’d never, ever walked out on an obligation.

  Ethan, her fiancé, didn’t count, she told herself. They hadn’t even set a wedding date, and there were no children involved. In fact, Ethan had made it very clear that he didn’t want to be burdened with rug rats, as he called them, until both he and Molly were comfortably ensconced on Wall Street. While Molly had accepted that, she wondered, somewhere deep in her heart, if she hadn’t been perversely grateful for the terrorist bomb that had all but broken the long engagement she hadn’t been able to break herself.

  She edged back from the window when Dan and Ginny rose and began walking toward the driveway, his arm looped lightly around the woman’s shoulder. The fact that Dan was still limping painfully didn’t bother Molly at all. He deserved sprains and worse for what he’d done. She hoped Ginny was going to make him pay an arm and a leg for abandoning her and their little girl.

  That little girl, she realized all of a sudden, wasn’t so little anymore. In fact, she was one of the children Molly had philosophized about at the hardware store when she suggested to Dan that an entire generation had been born and grown up during his absence from Moonglow. Little did she know then that she was talking about Dan’s very own daughter.

  She heard the thunk of Ginny’s car door, followed not long afterward by the squeal of the screen door as Dan entered the kitchen.

  “Ginny didn’t take her gun,” Molly said almost tonelessly, postponing the angry, inevitable confrontation. Her heart felt flattened. She was so disappointed in Dan, and even more disappointed in herself for misjudging his character.

  “I’ll see that she gets it back eventually.” He palmed the bullets, shook them in his hand like dice a second before he let them fall into the breast pocket of his shirt. The
n he gave a long sigh, accompanied by a brief chuckle. “Phew. That was close.”

  “Close!” Molly shrieked. “Close!” She thought the entire top of her head was going to explode. “How dare you make a joke out of something like this, Dan? How dare you snicker about letting a young girl grow up without a father? About having a twenty-year-old daughter you’ve never once laid eyes on?”

  He had picked up the big Colt and was rolling its cylinder down his arm when he said quietly, “You don’t think a lot of me, do you?”

  “At the moment, no,” she said. “I don’t. I think you’re irresponsible and shiftless and slimier than pond scum.”

  “Well, that might very well be, but she’s not my daughter.”

  “She’s not…?” Molly’s exploding head stopped in mid-eruption while her jaw loosened a notch or two. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean Ginny’s daughter isn’t my kid.”

  “But how is that possible?”

  “Molly, darlin’, for a professor, you’re not all that bright. What did you do, skip Birds and Bees 101?”

  “I need to sit down,” she said, pulling out a chair at the table. “This isn’t funny, Dan, and it’s way too much for one person to process.”

  Dan twisted a chair around and straddled it. “No kidding,” he said. “And you’re not even the accused.”

  “You never slept with Ginny?”

  He shook his head, moving his hand over his heart. “Never.”

  Molly narrowed her eyes. “Then how did she just happen to come up with you as the likely suspect?”

  “Well, now, that’s where the plot thickens,” he said, grinning. “It didn’t take me too long to remember that I did, indeed, take young Miss Ginny to the drive-in not too long before I left town. And I probably would have ravaged her, too, if she hadn’t drunk too much and passed out in the back seat.”

  She was still skeptical. “You remember that particular night all that clearly after twenty years?”

  “Oh, clear as a bell once I started thinking about it. You see, before Ginny had the good grace to pass out, she threw up all over the damned car. Miss Hannah’s car. Did I mention that? That old woman just about flayed me wide open the next day when she caught a good whiff of the night before.”

  “Well, I suppose that would leave an indelible impression on your brain if not your backside,” Molly said. “But that doesn’t explain what happened to poor Ginny.”

  He sighed and leaned forward, bracing his forearms on the back of the chair. “Ginny just acknowledged that a wily young fellow named Cody Johnson stopped by her house that night and wound up taking advantage of her sorry state. They got married, Ginny and Cody, a few months later, as it turned out, and the little girl bore a striking resemblance to the Johnson clan, which Ginny chose to ignore once she and Cody split up.”

  Molly’s narrowed eyes grew wider. “You mean she knew she was falsely accusing you?”

  “At some level, I guess. Hell, I don’t know.” He upped the wattage of his grin. “Maybe it was just wishful thinking on her part.”

  Molly uttered something like a snort.

  Dan looked decidedly aggrieved. “What? You don’t think I’d make good daddy material?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” she said. “I don’t think anybody who lives like a gypsy and drinks like a fish is the world’s best candidate for fatherhood. Not for a child of mine, anyway.”

  But even as she said the words, Molly was thinking— heaven help her—that she didn’t really mean them. She’d known Ethan for years and never really pictured the children they might have together. How could she possibly be visualizing a family with Dan after knowing him just a few days?

  Being sexually attracted to the man was one thing. But thinking about having his babies?

  My Lord, what was happening to her?

  Not for anybody’s child, Dan thought as he sat on Molly’s bed attempting to read the instructions with the roll of wallpaper. She’d gotten that gypsy-fish thing right, but she didn’t know enough about the real Dan Shackelford to add that anybody who lived so close to danger didn’t have any business being a father, let alone a husband.

  Not that he’d ever cared for a woman enough to marry her, but he’d always considered it pretty senseless to ask someone to become his widow and raise his children by herself. Miss Hannah, despite her independence, hadn’t done so well with his father in that regard, nor had his old man with him.

  It fairly dumbfounded Dan that he kept thinking of Molly that way. If not exactly as a wife, then as a long-term, forsaking-all-others lover. He had to keep reminding himself that she was already spoken for, that whatever longing he read in her eyes was just because she’d been alone so long. She was looking for sex, not love.

  He’d been alone a long time, too. My God. The two of them, if they ever came together, might generate enough pure heat to burn three square blocks of Moonglow right down to the ground. That was a thought that definitely didn’t warrant pursuit. He was already way too preoccupied with notions of ravaging this woman’s body when it was keeping her body alive and intact that should have been his prime concern.

  He had to start from the beginning, rereading the damned wallpaper instructions, and even then the words struck him as English translated to Chinese then back again, losing all sense in the translation. Selvage? What the hell was that?

  Coming so close on the heels of the incident with Ginny Hoke, it gave him a headache. Dan leaned back on the mountain of pillows on Molly’s bed and closed his eyes. Maybe he didn’t know the first thing about wallpaper, but he certainly knew the score when it came to sex. Zero to zero at the moment. And, too bad for him, he was currently forced to stay on the bench.

  Molly didn’t really need a haircut, but when she saw that Dan was sound asleep on her bed, she got her handbag, tiptoed out of the house and walked into town in the hope that Raylene wasn’t booked solid for the day. If she was starting to think about Dan Shackelford and babies, she needed to ask a few questions, even if the answers did nothing more than bring her to her senses. Who better to ask than Raylene?

  As it turned out, Barb Fyler, the mayor’s wife, had just called to cancel her permanent.

  “I figured she would,” Raylene said, gesturing Molly into the chair and whipping the plastic cape around Molly’s neck. “That woman keeps one appointment for every six she schedules and breaks. She must be off her medication again.”

  “You know just about everything about everybody in Moonglow, don’t you, Raylene?” Molly asked.

  “Pretty near.” She dragged a brush through Molly’s curls.

  “I guess you know Ginny Hoke, then, huh?”

  “Ginny? Oh, sure.” The hairdresser gave Molly a quizzical look in the mirror. “Don’t tell me she’s been after Danny with that cock-and-bull story about Sarajane being his daughter. My Lord. Her imagination’s more fertile than a cow pasture. One little look at Sarajane and you wouldn’t take her for anything but Cody Johnson’s child.”

  “That’s what Dan said.”

  “I should think so.” Raylene gave a tiny harrumph and rolled her perfectly made-up eyes. “Danny was a wild one, but he wasn’t stupid, if you know what I’m saying. My Lord. If he hadn’t been careful, half the graduating class a couple of years ago would have looked just like him.” She lifted a hank of Molly’s hair. “Now, ’bout how much do you want me to take off, hon? An inch? Two?”

  “Just a little,” Molly said. “Tell me more about Dan, Raylene. What was his grandmother like?”

  Raylene had reached for a spray bottle to mist Molly’s hair, but she held her finger still on the trigger with the bottle itself perched on Molly’s shoulder. “Miss Hannah? My Lord, honey. That was one slitty-eyed, mean old woman. I was scared to death of her, right along with half the town.”

  Funny, Molly thought. Dan had described his grandmother as strong and staunchly independent, but he hadn’t given the impression that she was mean or the female scourge of Moonglow.<
br />
  “What was scary about her?” she asked, closing her eyes while Raylene liberally misted her hair as well as her face.

  “She was never mean to me personally. Come to think of it, not to anybody else I knew, either. I guess maybe it was just the stories I heard about her taking after Danny with whatever weapon happened to be at hand that scared me. My Lord. It’s little wonder Donna Liggett lasted as long as two years, having to live in the same house with that old witch.”

  “Donna…?”

  “Danny’s mom. I guess I should have said Donna Shackelford, but she wasn’t married all that long before she took off. She and my mother were distant cousins, somehow. I never really did quite get the connection.”

  “Did she ever come back?”

  “Not that I know of.” The hairdresser took a few practice slashes in the air with her scissors before she started on Molly’s hair. “Mama and I were just talking about Donna the other day, wondering whatever happened to her.”

  “What about Dan’s father? What was he like?”

  Raylene rolled her eyes again while she kept snipping. “He had a worse reputation than Danny’s, that man did. I suspect that’s how Miss Hannah got so slitty-eyed and mean. Those fellas must’ve just plain run her ragged with all their carrying on.”

  “It must be hard,” Molly said, “raising a child all alone.”

  “It’s not easy even when a person’s not alone.” Raylene measured a lock of uncut hair against a cut one. “You’ve never been married, have you, Molly? Seems like you would’ve mentioned it if you had.”

  “Married? No. Never.” That didn’t seem to be giving away any classified information, she thought, or any dark secrets that were likely to filter back to the Red Millennium and get her killed. Molly cautioned herself, though, not to get so comfortable that she started to divulge too much. Especially to Raylene, who seemed to be Moonglow’s version of the National Enquirer.