by Fran Baker
He looked down at the map, then up at her. “What are you doing tomorrow?”
She frowned. “Taking Grandpa to the doctor.”
“What about Sunday?” Damn, but she had a sexy mouth—wide and curvy, with a lower lip that said she gave as good as she got.
Her frown segued into a smile. “Making a buttermilk pie.”
“Sounds good to me.” He flashed her a grin, revealing a set of strong white teeth, and they both laughed.
An ear-splitting hiss followed by a chorus of ribald curses told them he was needed on the rig floor.
He returned her card and reached for his hard hat. “No rest for the wicked.”
She stuck out her hand. Catching sight of her chipped nails and chapped skin, she promptly withdrew it. “See you Sunday.”
His beer bottle sat full and forgotten on the desk as he watched her walk to the door. It’d been a long time since a woman had captured his imagination and challenged his intellect. Longer still since a woman had commanded his respect.
“By the way, Mrs. Fletcher …”
Joni turned back reluctantly.
Chance surveyed the exquisitely feminine body beneath the man’s shirt, rousing feelings between her blue eyes and jeans that she’d thought she’d buried forever.
“You were saying, Mr. McCoy?”
He cocked his hard hat at that rakish angle and gave her his rogue’s gallery smile. “Remind me to show you just how much we have in common.”
Three
“Hi.”
“Hi.”
Chance took off a pair of aviator sunglasses and stuck them into his jacket pocket as he crossed the porch. “It just occurred to me that I’m probably interrupting your dinner.”
The clock in the entryway chimed the noon hour as Joni unhooked the screen door. “On the contrary, we decided to eat a little later today, thinking maybe you’d like to join us.”
His swift stride slowed. “I hope you didn’t go to any extra trouble on my account.”
She made a tsking sound. “This from the man who tricked me into baking a buttermilk pie?”
His answering grin was totally unrepentant. “What do you say we skip dinner and go directly to dessert?”
Laughing now, she held the door open for him. “Come in and meet Grandpa.”
He nodded. “Great.”
Joni stood with her back against the doorjamb as he wedged himself past her. But still his body made brief contact with hers, and every cell went hot and cold with excitement.
At the same time, air raid sirens went off in her head. In a raw silk jacket, pale salmon polo shirt, and jeans, he looked no less dangerous than if he’d stormed her house wearing a curved scimitar in his belt and clutching a long-barreled rifle.
For his part, Chance was hard-pressed to reconcile this vision in soft blue jersey with the woman who’d visited him at the drilling site.
Her wild Irish hair had been tamed into a topknot, which made her freckles seem more pronounced and her eyes even larger than before. The open collar of her simple shirtwaist dress paid homage to that Botticelli neck, while its gently full skirt draped those fine filly legs.
And considering the state of her hands, it came as a real surprise to find toenails the color of pink tea roses playing hide-and-seek with the straps of her white sandals.
Which reminded him …
Joni saw that he’d zeroed in on her wedding band and she began fiddling with it, turning it round and round on her finger as she said, “Grandpa’s waiting for us in the living room, Mr. McCoy.”
Chance knew damned good and well she was hiding behind that ring, but he let it ride for the moment. “After you, Mrs. Fletcher.”
The peeling paint on the exterior of the farmhouse had spoken with sad eloquence about her struggle to make ends meet, but inside she had created an environment seemingly untouched by either tragedy or time.
Sunshine streamed in through two leaded glass windows that wore a vinegar-and-water sparkle. Between them, and behind a cherry settee that looked as if it dated from the Civil War era, a crazy quilt hung artfully on the wall. Pine plank flooring added its own glow. A ceiling fan provoked a cool breeze; come winter, the fieldstone fireplace would provide warmth.
A scarecrow of a man in Big Smith overalls and a faded plaid shirt pushed himself up by the armrests of an overstuffed club chair that had been the ultimate in comfort in the 1930s.
“Keep your seat, sir,” Chance said as he crossed the room.
Bat Dillon’s breath came hard and fast and difficult, but he didn’t know the meaning of quit. “The day I can’t stand to greet a guest is the day they can lay me in my grave.”
Chance laughed and stuck out his hand, feeling an instant kinship with the feisty old codger. “You must be Grandpa.”
“What’s left of him,” the old man confirmed, proffering his own knobby hand.
After making the introductions, Joni excused herself and went to the kitchen to fix them all some iced tea.
The pork steaks she planned to cook for dinner were thawing on the countertop, and the buttermilk pie she’d baked that morning was cooling on a wire rack. Much to her surprise, she caught herself humming a tune she’d heard on the radio as she arranged their glasses and spoons and the sugar bowl on a japanned tray.
She paused in the living room doorway, her heart as full as her hands when she saw how well the two men were getting along. Most of Grandpa’s friends were either dead or dying, and except for his weekly appointment with Dr. Rayburn, he rarely left the house.
Even if Chance McCoy decided not to drill for oil, Joni thought as she rejoined them, the ear-to-ear grin on Grandpa’s face right now more than rewarded her efforts to bring them together.
Chance looked up when she came in, then leapt up from the other club chair and reached for the tray. “Here, I’ll take that.”
Their eyes met during the exchange, and she stood there, flushing beneath his heavy-lidded regard, short of breath and totally flummoxed by her schoolgirl reaction.
He turned away and set the tray on the marble-topped table that separated the chairs, then turned back and gave her a glass.
This time they bumped hands, and she felt a growing warmth spreading up her arm, thawing nerves that had lain as dormant as seeds under the frozen earth.
“Chance was just saying that he likes to restore antique cars.” Grandpa took a sip of his tea, seemingly oblivious to the high-octane tension building between the widow and the wildcatter. “I told him how I’d kept my tin lizzie, thinking Larry might want to tinker with it, but that he wasn’t much of a car buff.”
The use of her late husband’s name knocked Joni for a loop. Knowing that if she didn’t sit down she’d probably fall down, she perched on the edge of the settee and said the first thing that came to mind. “That’s a fairly expensive hobby, isn’t it?”
“Depends on how you define expensive.” Chance reclaimed his chair and crossed an ankle over a knee, his polished Lucchese boots a galling reminder that not everybody in the room had a foreclosure notice hanging over their head.
“What do you think that old tin lizzie is worth today?” Grandpa asked.
“A damn sight more than you paid for it,” Chance said, his smile on full beam now.
Joni looked at Grandpa, aghast. “Surely you’re not considering selling such an important link with your past?”
He shrugged those coat-hanger shoulders. “What good’s it doing me, sitting in the machine shed and going to rust?”
Chance let his head loll sideways. “I’d be glad to take a gander at it and give you an estimate.”
“Is this how you acquire your antique cars, Mr. McCoy?” Joni glared accusingly at him.
His gaze skimmed over her in swift appraisal, making her feel defensive when she had absolutely nothing to feel defensive about. “When I see something I want, Mrs. Fletcher, I let my checkbook do the talking.”
“Money doesn’t always say the right thing,” she repl
ied with a touch of asperity.
“The only thing my money ever says is good-bye,” Grandpa grumbled.
Chance’s face was solemn, his eyes dancing as he raised his glass in a mock toast. “I’ll drink to that.”
Joni didn’t even crack a smile. “Which brings us back to the original purpose of this meeting.”
Chance explained the criteria he used for selecting a drilling site. He also discussed the rock and soil samples he planned to send to the state for analysis, but he made no mention of his long-held dream of redeeming his grandfather’s name. That was nobody’s business but his own.
“Any questions?” he asked a few minutes later.
Grandpa cleared his throat. “How about some more tea?”
“I’ll second that,” Chance agreed.
Joni left the living room with three empty glasses and a headful of fantasies about how she was going to spend all that money when her oil well came in. On returning, though, she realized one of her worst fears.
“What happened?” Her heart plunged sickeningly to her stomach when she found Chance standing solicitously over a wheezing Grandpa.
“Coughing spell.”
“I’ll get his medicine.”
Guilt stalked her to the downstairs bathroom and back. “I should have known this would be too much excitement for him,” she said to Chance after she made sure Grandpa swallowed his pills, and his breathing returned to normal.
But Chance was having none of that. “A little excitement never hurt anyone.”
“This spell could have killed him.”
“Then he would have died a happy man.”
As much as Joni wanted to argue the point, she couldn’t. The wildcatter’s presence was the shot in the arm that Grandpa had needed for months. As for her own needs …
Elbowing the thought aside—a move she’d perfected during four years of marriage—she said, “Maybe he should rest a spell before dinner.”
“All right.” Chance didn’t press his advantage. He just picked Grandpa up with the ease of a man used to physical labor and followed her into the dining room.
“I moved the sofa sleeper in here so he wouldn’t have to climb the stairs,” she explained as she closed the shutters at the windows and folded back a top sheet that smelled of fresh air and sunshine.
Chance laid Grandpa on the bed, his gentle hands belying his hardbitten reputation, then took a good look around him. The huge mahogany table stood flush against the far wall to make room for the sofa, while the matching Windsor chairs stood stolidly in the four corners.
“Don’t tell me you moved all this by yourself?” he asked incredulously.
“Don’t tell me you still buy that old saw about women being the weaker sex?” she countered querulously.
“Let me put it this way,” he said, a slow smile kindling in his eyes when she leaned over to place a kiss on Grandpa’s weathered cheek. “I’ve yet to meet a woman who didn’t have it in her power to bring a man to his knees.”
Joni could feel the heat of his gaze moving leisurely up the backs of her legs and over her jersey-clad derriere. She straightened, spun around, and caught him staring at her.
“Dinner will be ready in an hour, Mr. McCoy.”
As she led him from the shuttered dining room into the sun-splashed living room, he noticed she wasn’t wearing a slip. What she didn’t realize, and what he was in no hurry to point out to her, was that when she passed in front of the window her skirt was entirely transparent.
“I want to talk to you, Mrs. Fletcher.”
She checked to be sure Grandpa was resting comfortably before closing the doors between the two rooms. “What about?”
He hitched his chin toward the porch. “Let’s go out there.”
The instant they stepped outside, that devilish wind whipped Joni’s jersey dress high above her knees. Chance drank in an eyeful of thigh as smooth as Tennessee whiskey. He’d known her legs were good.… He just hadn’t known how good.
“Don’t you have anything better to do than to stand there gawking at me?” she fumed as she fought her whirling skirts.
He lazed back against the porch railing as if he had all the time in the world and crossed his arms over that acre of chest. “Nope.”
“You said you wanted to talk to me,” she reminded him starchily.
His eyes glided up her body, revealing none of his thoughts while seeming to take in everything about her. “How long has your grandfather had farmer’s lung disease?”
Mercifully, the wind died down at that moment. Joni stopped battling her skirt and sought refuge in the old oak porch swing that Grandpa had built with younger, stronger hands. “How did you know?”
Chance shrugged, those strapping shoulders straining the seams of his silk jacket. “I’ve drilled some water wells for farmers, and about half of them have his same symptoms.”
She stared off into the distance. But she was looking backward now, not forward. “I remember his spells starting the year that black dust covered our wheat. We had a really good stand that year, but the dust ruined …”
Her voice snagged on the memory, and she coughed to clear it. “I took care of all the chores around here while Grandpa and Larry worked day and night, trying to save what they could. But with no cab on the combine, they’d come in from the fields just coated with the stuff.”
“Did Larry die of farmer’s lung disease?”
“No,” she answered shortly, and that was all she intended to say.
Chance hesitated, knowing his next question could open a real can of worms. But he needed the information for the purpose of drawing a contract if he decided to drill. “Whose name is on the deed to this farm?”
“Grandpa’s and mine, as tenants in joint.” Joni gave the porch floor a nudge with her heel, setting the swing in motion, then folded her hands in her lap. “You look surprised.”
“Curious is more like it.”
She saw a small patch of beard near his right sideburn that had escaped the morning razor, and it provoked an unsettling feeling of intimacy. “How so?”
His brows were pulled down into a low V over his eyes. “I’m just wondering why you haven’t put the farm in your name and put your grandfather on Medicaid.”
“Farmers want parity, Mr. McCoy, not charity.”
“That’s all well and good, Mrs. Fletcher, but it sounds like you’re letting pride get in the way of practicality.”
She lifted her chin a notch. “Meaning …?”
Looking down at her freckled face, seeing the soft violet shadows of fatigue that lay under her beautiful blue eyes, Chance felt something stir deep inside him. Something he chose to ignore in light of what had to be said.
“Meaning you could put your grandfather in a nursing home and get on with the business of making this place pay.”
Joni’s lips parted as if he’d just plunged a knife between her ribs. For a moment she didn’t speak, but only stared at him. When she did find words, her voice underscored her contempt for the root of her problems.
“And you called me a mercenary!” She stopped the swing and surged to her feet, advancing on him with the ferocity of a spring cyclone. “Well, let me tell you something, you—you money-grubbing bastard! Grandpa was born here and he’s going to die here.”
Standing toe to toe with the wildcatter now, she jabbed that Rock of Gibraltar chest with an emphatic finger. “This is the only home he’s ever known, and as long as I’ve got breath in my body, no one is going to take it from him. Or him from it!”
Chance took a real pounding as she blew her course. And when she’d spent her fury, he took her in his arms.
Joni tried to resist. She raised her hands to his shoulders, thinking to push him away, reminding herself that he was a rolling stone … here today, gone tomorrow.
But her need to be held overrode the restraints of her mind, and she latched onto him as if there were no tomorrow. He was here. And for now that was all that mattered.
; Chance gathered her close, expecting a deluge, but Joni came up dry-eyed and horribly embarrassed at having been caught with her defenses down.
“I’m sorry.” With a quick twist she slipped free of his hold and turned to look over the fields that should have begun greening with wheat and corn and milo by now. “I don’t know what got into me, lighting into you one minute and then throwing myself at you the next.”
“No harm done.” If she could shrug it off, so could he. But there was no denying that she’d felt more womanly than any other woman he’d ever held in his arms.
Oddly deflated by his indifferent tone, she took a deep, restorative breath. “Was there anything else you wanted to discuss with me, Mr. McCoy?”
“Chance.”
“I beg your pardon?”
He saw her shoulder blades draw pointedly erect under that clingy material. “My name is Chance.”
The wind picked up again, and she clamped her skirt down with palms suddenly gone clammy. “So?”
“So I want to hear you say it.”
“Why?”
“Come on, Joni.” His use of her name made her blood sing. As did his touch when he took her by the arm and turned her so that her back was to the wind, his face into it. “Just say Chance.”
She sensed that to give an inch with this man was to give a mile, but she relented anyway. “Chance.”
“Very good.” A smile tinged his tempting lips as he released her and reached into his jacket pocket for the recipe card that mapped their mutual dreams. “Now that we’re on a first-name basis, you can say ‘Good luck, Chance,’ and I can say ‘Thank you, Joni,’ and—”
“Mr. McCoy—”
“Chance.”
“Chance,” she repeated softly.
“Again,” he demanded.
She bowed her head as chills having nothing to do with the brisk spring breeze chased along her spine.
He slid a callused finger under her chin and brought her head up, forcing her to look at him.
Like magnets of opposite charge, their eyes met.
“Good luck, Chance.”
“Thank you, Joni.”
An emotion that neither dared name crackled between them.
