Milly had looked at Jake, dozing in her arms, and probably would have gone home right then, but Dori suddenly appeared to take him off her hands.
"I would have brought him home," Milly had protested.
"I know. But I had my break," Dori told her. "I didn't expect you to keep him all night. Besides, there are plenty of better prospects here than a two-year-old." She'd surveyed the sea of dancing and grinning cowboys and wannabes, then given her little sister a shove. "Enjoy."
Milly hadn't enjoyed—until she'd set eyes on the cowboy she'd insulted earlier that evening. Then she'd felt compelled to go up to him and apologize, to make amends for causing him discomfort.
She hadn't counted on enjoying her conversation with him. But then he'd grinned … and explained … and she'd seen him as a person.
And, well, that was when she'd sort of … let herself get carried away.
And now he was sitting next to her as she drove home!
What have you done, you idiot? she asked herself, shivering slightly in response to the heat that seemed to emanate from him, though he sat a respectable six inches away.
Nothing, she answered just as promptly. She hadn't done anything—except finally take a step toward having her own life.
Are you sure you can trust him? She could almost hear her mother asking the words.
Well, no. She hadn't exactly known him long enough for that. But Gladys Deal, the older lady who lived downstairs, would undoubtedly be keeping an eye on things. Gladys lived other people's lives for them. It was her only means of entertainment. And it was quite enough. She even found Alexis's life a bit more than she could handle.
She had told Milly just yesterday that it was "restful" having her around.
If ever there was a goad for a nineteen-year-old woman to do something about her life, being told she was restful had to be it!
I'm all done being restful, she said silently to Gladys's twitching curtains as she pulled up in front of the apartment. Then she turned to Cash and pasted on her very best confident-woman-in-charge-of-her-own-destiny smile. "We're home."
* * *
Three
« ^ »
It was easy. Too easy.
Of course Cash had had girls invite him home with them before. He'd had them bat their eyelashes and smile seductively and wiggle their hips when they led the way more times than he could recall.
But Milly Malone hadn't really done any of that.
She'd turned down his offer of a second Coke, then countered it with her own offer—of a meal.
He'd been offered meals before—that hadn't turned out to be only meals, either. But Milly hadn't batted her lashes once. And her smile had seemed more nervous than seductive.
Still, it had worked.
He'd said yes. And not so much for the meal. For once in his adult life he didn't feel as if he could eat a two-pound T-bone in thirty seconds flat. In fact, he didn't really care if she fed him at all. He just wanted to spend some more time with Milly Malone.
And maybe not entirely for the sex, either, though he sure as hell wasn't going to say no when the time came. Still, there was more to it than that.
No girl had ever taken him to task for swearing before, then worried about a horse stepping on him and then looked as if it was her personal responsibility to fatten him up!
It made him feel sort of warm inside. Cared for. He liked that. He liked her.
He'd like to know her better.
He figured he had the night to get to do it.
That's what nights were for, weren't they? And Rod could have the truck. He'd made a point of finding him and telling him so before they left. "Pick me up in the morning," he'd said, and he'd given him the address that Milly gave him.
He didn't ask himself what he'd do if she threw him out before then. She wouldn't throw him out. Cash knew that. He was an expert on such things.
How much of all this Milly herself realized when they set out for her place, he didn't know. But he figured that, innocent as she seemed, she must know the score. She wouldn't have invited him home otherwise, would she?
He didn't know about that. But the women he'd met since he'd started going down the road had taught him one thing that rodeo hadn't—that slow was always sure and if he just remembered that, he'd end up where he wanted to go.
"Looks like a nice place," he said as he followed her up the stairs.
"It's not mine, really." She looked back at him. "It belongs to my friend. I'm just sharing it with her for the summer. I just moved in a few days ago."
"From where?"
"My parents'." She shot him a quick smile as she unlocked the door.
Instinctively Cash looked over his shoulder. "Your parents?"
Milly nodded. "They live across the river." She stepped back and ushered him in. "My dad owns a grocery store in town."
"Ah." He grinned. "Bet you don't go hungry, then."
Milly laughed. "No. I never have." She hung her jacket on a hook in the kitchen. "And you won't, either, tonight. What would you like?"
Cash shrugged off his jacket and hung it next to hers, then hung his hat beside it. "Whatever you've got. Reckon I could eat most anything. But you don't have to feed me," he added conscientiously. "I'm not starvin'. I just … wanted to come with you."
Milly, halfway to the refrigerator, stopped abruptly and turned her head to look at him, her eyes wide, then suddenly wary, like a deer caught in headlights.
He gave her a lopsided grin meant to be reassuring. "What's wrong with that? You're nice," he said simply. "I like you."
"You don't know me."
"Not yet," he agreed. "But I'm tryin' to. I know you don't like swearin'."
She blushed a little. "I had Jake with me," she explained. "My nephew."
"Ah." He grinned again and looked around. "I wondered where you'd stashed the kid."
"He belongs to my sister. She's raising him by herself and she … wanted him to see men in action."
"But not swearing." Cash grinned.
She colored just a little. "That was my idea," Milly admitted.
"You were right. I shouldn't've said it."
"You'd nearly been stepped on! You were frightened!"
"I was not!" Cash was affronted at the very idea. "I was mad 'cause I wasn't gonna win anything!"
"Oh." Milly looked like she was digesting that.
"I didn't mind that you told me off for swearin'," he said quickly. "Eventually," he added. Then, "Nobody ever has. And not a lot of women have ever cared if a bronc stepped on me, either, even if you did think I was scared."
"Sorry," Milly said.
Cash shrugged. "Just so's you know, I wasn't. But I figure it makes you pretty special for carin'. So that's why I'm here. No meal. No ulterior motives." He spread his hands and did his best to look like he hadn't just taken off a black hat.
Milly just looked at him, assessing, weighing, concluding. And then, finally, a slow happy smile dawned on her face. "Good."
Cash blinked. Good?
She was glad? She didn't want him to have ulterior motives? She was going to be happy just to cook him a meal?
"But I'll make you a meal, anyway," she said. "Eggs and bacon and toast?" Milly turned away to poke her head into the refrigerator.' "Hash browns with cheese?"
Cash couldn't say no. His stomach was always willing. "Sounds good."
Milly got out the bacon and the eggs. She got out potatoes and cheese and bread. She moved with the easy efficiency of someone completely at home in the kitchen. Cash could burn himself boiling water. He leaned against the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room-dining room and watched. It wasn't just her efficiency he admired. He liked the gentle curves of her body, the way her breasts lifted when she reached up to get a plate out of the cupboard, the inch of bare midriff he glimpsed when her shirt pulled out of her jeans. He liked her rounded bottom and imagined how it would feel snug against him.
Not the way to go slow, he reminded h
imself. He cleared his throat.
"You lived in Livingston all your life?"
"Forever. My whole family has been here forever," she said with a smile. "My great-grandparents came from Illinois a hundred years ago. Great-grandpa started working for some mercantile store, then he bought a place of his own. A grocery. He ran it. My grandfather ran it. Now it's my dad's. As soon as we kids were able to see over the counter, we started working there, too. I still do when I'm not at school."
"You're in school?"
"Montana State. I just finished my sophomore year."
"A kid," Cash said with a grin, relieved at least that she didn't mean high school! He wasn't into cradle snatching.
"I'm almost twenty," she said.
His tongue traced a circle on the inside of his cheek. "Ancient."
"How old are you?"
"Twenty-four." Lately, with all his aches and pains when he got up in the morning, eighty-four felt closer to the truth.
"That's pretty old, all right," Milly said, nodding seriously as she laid out slices of bacon in the frying pan.
Cash scowled until he saw that, despite her grave face, there was a twinkle in her eyes. "I've been around," he admitted.
"I haven't."
"You've been to Bozeman."
She laughed. "Yes, and Billings. And once I went as far as Denver." She sighed as she cracked the eggs into a bowl. "I liked Denver."
"Me, too. Especially the stock show in January. I won there three years ago." It was one of the better wins in his career so far, so he reckoned he was allowed to brag a little.
"Won?"
"The saddle bronc title. At the rodeo," he explained when she looked blank.
"Oh. Of course." Her laugh was self-conscious. "Tonight was the first time I've ever been to a rodeo."
"Ever?" Cash was shocked.
Milly shrugged. "My father's a grocer, not a rancher."
"But still! This is Montana."
"We didn't ever go. He's not exactly … Western. And he's not very big on, um, cowboys."
There were people like that, people who judged you before they met you. It wasn't Milly's fault her father was one of them. "His loss," he said lightly.
Milly looked almost sad. "Yes," she agreed, her voice quiet. She took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then raised her eyes and smiled at him. "Not mine," she said with equally quiet firmness.
Their eyes met. Cash felt the same almost primal attraction he'd felt the first time he'd looked at her. His mouth was as dry as dirt, his palms as damp as a kid's.
And then Milly said, "The bacon's burning!" and turned back to take care of it, just as if she hadn't left Cash on fire as well.
It was okay, he told himself. He needed a little breathing space. Milly didn't look like the type who'd take to being swept off her feet. Cool it, he told himself, and hoped to hell he could.
"What about you? Where are you from?" she asked, her attention on the bacon.
Cash rubbed his palms against the sides of his jeans. "Oklahoma. That's where I was born, anyhow. We moved around quite a bit."
An understatement if there ever was one. Cash had been to a dozen schools in a dozen years. Stability was not his old man's long suit. According to Len Callahan there was always going to be a better job or greener grass or a finer place just the other side of the river or the state line or the rainbow.
There never had been. But it hadn't stopped the old man from dragging them all over the Southwest looking. The most Cash could say was that, now that he was grown and his brothers and sister had all taken off, too, his old man had settled some. The folks had bought a little place in Texas about three years back, and they were still there—as long as Cash remembered them being anywhere.
There was sure no multi-generational allegiance to anything like the grocery store Milly's family seemed attached to.
"How long you had this store, anyway?" he asked.
"Since 1903."
It boggled Cash's mind. He shook his head. "In my line of work, eight seconds is a long time," he said wonderingly.
"In your line of work it definitely is." Milly started grating potatoes. "How long have you ridden broncs?"
He told her about the first time he'd ever ridden—on a dare from his best friend when they were twelve. "Plowed the pasture with my forehead," he said with a wry grin.
Milly winced, then said admiringly, "But you stuck with it."
"Oh, yeah. I liked it. Still do. There isn't anything I've ever liked better." He warmed to the topic, basking in her interest. Cash wasn't used to talking about himself quite so much. Rod and Pete knew all there was to know about him and had for years. When you traveled day in and day out with the same guys, they knew you better than they knew their own mothers.
But nobody else knew him well. Not even the girls who clamored around him after the rodeos. Especially not them. They rarely seemed to want to. All that interested them was what was below his belt buckle.
Usually that was about all he cared about, too. But he didn't mind telling Milly more. She seemed genuinely interested. Whenever he stopped for a breath, she asked another question and he talked on. He was still talking—telling her about his greatest triumph, a win at Cheyenne that just happened to fall on his twentieth birthday—when she set the plate on the table and gestured for him to dig in.
He did. She sat down across from him, sipping a cup of coffee and smiling at him. Cash smiled back and, between bites, he asked about her.
She told him about the two years she'd spent at Montana State so far. She told him about her family—the sister and nephew and an older brother. Then she talked about her accounting classes, about her plans for the future.
"I won't stay here," she said firmly. "I'm going to see the world." There was an eager light in her eyes that made him smile.
"Good idea," he said. "Everybody ought to."
"I'm going to start at my brother's," she told him. "Deke lives in New Mexico."
He was part cowboy, part photographer, she told him. When Cash heard his name, he said he thought he remembered seeing some of Deke Malone's work displayed at Prescott or maybe it was Albuquerque.
Milly nodded eagerly. "Both probably. He's very good."
From what Cash could remember, that was true enough. "And my sister writes," Milly told him. "She does wonderful children's stories."
"Books?"
"She'd like to. She has, actually, but she never sends them in. She doesn't think they're good enough. They are, though," Milly said stoutly. "They're wonderful."
Cash believed her. There was a sincerity about Milly when she spoke of her family that defied you not to believe her. "How 'bout you?" he asked. "What do you do?"
"I paint," Milly said.
His brows lifted. He glanced around the room, but didn't see anything beyond the general travel poster decor.
"Walls," she added with an impish grin. "No, really," she said when he started to protest. "I don't do anything. They're the creative ones, Deke and Dori. I'm not. I'm the audience. I sit on the sidelines and cheer. Somebody's got to do it." She shrugged.
Cash looked at her closely, trying to detect a hint of bitterness, some glimmer in her gaze that betrayed her dissatisfaction. But she seemed totally sincere.
He had the fleeting feeling that he wouldn't mind having her sitting on the sidelines cheering for him. He wondered if her family knew how lucky they were.
"Nobody else sits on the sidelines?"
"My mother, I guess," Milly said. "She's always been very supportive of all of us."
"Not your dad?"
"Dad is … Dad. He doesn't cheer, he just tells us what to do."
There was something in her voice that made Cash say, "But you don't?"
"I do," Milly said. She made a face. "I've always done everything he said." She sounded disgusted.
"But not your brother and sister?"
"Not … always." She ran her tongue over her lips and didn't say anything else.
Cash didn't probe. It wasn't any of his business. Milly wasn't any of his business, he reminded himself. He didn't usually ask questions like this. Of course, he didn't usually just sit at some girl's kitchen table and do nothing but talk!
But he didn't mind talking with Milly. Still, it wouldn't do to get too interested. He finished off the eggs she'd put in front of him and mopped up the yolk with a piece of toast. "This is awful good."
She beamed. "Would you like more? How about more coffee?"
"Just coffee, thanks." He settled back in his chair and pushed his empty plate away. He was stuffed, sated. Sleepy. His myriad aches and pains seemed to have receded into a vague fog of faint discomfort. Nothing unmanageable. He folded his hands across his flat belly and watched while Milly carried his plate to the sink, then topped off his coffee mug.
Again he was impressed by her easy efficiency. Her movements were fluid, graceful. She handled the kitchen the way he handled a bronc. But she was definitely prettier to watch. She reached up to put away the coffee, and the hem of her shirt lifted again and he got another glimpse of that inch or two of bare skin.
Cash had seen his share of naked female flesh. In wholesale quantities it didn't tantalize him anywhere near as much as these few inches of Milly did. He swallowed and shrugged into the seat of the chair trying to get a little more room in his Wranglers.
He'd eaten too damn much. That was why they were suddenly so tight.
Uh-huh.
"Lemme help you with that," he said, surging to his feet, adjusting his jeans as he did so. He stepped forward and just happened to reach around to help her with the plates as she turned around. Directly into—against—his chest. Her breasts brushed his ribs.
He sucked in a quick, sharp breath. And winced badly.
"What's wrong?" Milly spun out of the way.
Cash braced himself against the counter with his palms and dredged up a rueful grin to mask the lingering pain. "Nothin'. It's just those damn … er, darn … ribs again."
"Did I hurt you?"
He shook his head and straightened up slowly. "Of course not. I just … turned wrong. I forget sometimes and do somethin' stupid, and then they let me know."
He should have put that damned bandage back on right after his ride. But at the time, he'd figured he could last until he got back to Pete's house.
THE COWBOY CRASHES A WEDDING Page 4
