Milly ran her tongue over her lips. "It wasn't quite like that, Alexis."
But Alexis wasn't listening. "Which one was he? The one with the cute butt? Oh, they all had cute butts! Was he the cute one in the blue and purple shirt? Or the one in black and white stripes?"
Milly shook her head. Cash's shirt had been red. Plain red. Vibrant red. Eye-catching red. Like Cash. And yes, she'd noticed his butt, and she'd approved.
Still, she couldn't quite believe he'd been here. Even though she—and Gladys downstairs—had watched the battered blue truck until it disappeared around the corner, Milly felt, once Cash was gone, as if she'd imagined the whole thing.
It was so unlikely that she, Millicent Margaret Malone, virgin grocery clerk and college student, had spent the night in a cowboy's arms.
Who'da thunk it? as her sister Dori would say.
Well, Dori wouldn't, that was certain. But Alexis seemed to.
She was still giggling and dancing around the living room. "What was his name? What event was he in? Did you meet him at the dance? How did you ever get him to come back with you? You never say peep to anyone."
"He was, um, the one who climbed over the fence and swore."
Alexis gaped. "The one you said…" She covered her mouth with her hand. Then she burst out laughing. "Well, I guess you had something to talk about, didn't you?"
"Sort of." Milly's fingers knotted. "He was very nice."
Alexis gave her a knowing grin. "I'll bet."
"Not like that!"
Alexis's face fell. "No? Oh, what a shame."
"I mean we didn't—" Milly broke off. She didn't want to just come right out and say that nothing had happened. Except, knowing her, Alexis probably knew that, anyway. Still … it wasn't something you just went around admitting.
"He had cracked ribs," she said without thinking.
"And did you bandage them?" Alexis asked sweetly.
Milly nodded.
"Volunteered, I bet."
"It would have been hard for him to do them himself."
"Of course it would." Alexis gave her a butter-wouldn't-melt-in-my-mouth smile. "And then I bet you gave him a back rub."
"How did you know?"
Alexis rolled her eyes. "You're a natural. I can't believe this. My God, Milly, you've been hiding under a bushel basket for how many years? Men everywhere have been missing out and—"
"Stop it! He is not men everywhere! He was just one man. Cash! And I wouldn't do it for just any man, either," Milly said hotly.
Alexis stared at her. "Ohmigod."
Milly scowled. "What's that supposed to mean?"
"It means you're in love with him."
"Of course I'm not in love with him! I barely know him. I just met him!"
"Is he coming back?"
"Probably not." Oddly, having to say the words hurt. Maybe there was a tiny bit of truth to what Alexis had said.
No, of course there wasn't! Milly wasn't in love with Cash Callahan. A woman didn't fall in love overnight. Did she?
What Milly knew about love—real love—would have filled a thimble with about a finger's worth of room left over.
"So you're saying it was a one-night stand, then?" Alexis followed Milly into her bedroom. Fortunately she had straightened the bed after Cash left, though she hadn't been able to bring herself to fluff up her pillow, the pillow Cash had used. If you looked closely you could still see the indentation where his head had lain. Milly brushed her fingers lightly over it now.
"It was not a one-night stand," she said sharply.
Alexis beamed. "I didn't think so! Well, I had a good time with my cowboy, too. In fact, I'm meeting Tony for a picnic later. Gotta grab a shower now." She waggled her fingers at Milly, then tripped down the hall and shut herself in the bathroom.
Milly stood unmoving, contemplating the empty afternoon that stretched before her—contemplating life after Cash.
It wasn't any big deal.
It might not have been a one-night stand, but apparently it had been a one-off. Milly assured herself that she'd always known that. So what, if in the first week or so after Cash had blown through her life, she might have had a few fairy-tale daydreams in which he came back and swept her off her feet. When days turned into weeks and weeks into a month, she adjusted.
By the middle of August, she no longer reached for the phone hopefully every time it rang. By the end of the month, she didn't come home from the grocery store every evening and look around the street to see if there just might be a blue truck somewhere in the vicinity—a blue truck that had seen better days and had a dent all along the passenger side.
By the first of September she had pretty much forgotten what he looked like. She scarcely remembered the tiny mole by his left ear. And she had almost forgotten those thirteen stitches in his jaw. He wouldn't have those anymore anyway, so there was certainly no point in remembering them.
She wasn't even sure anymore if his sideburns stopped just below the top of his ear or crept down half an inch or so.
She wasn't even staring off into space the way she did the week right after the rodeo. She almost never mismarked the canned goods anymore. And if her father was short-tempered with her, it was because he was cranky, not because she was woolgathering when she ought to be sorting through the produce for fruit that was beginning to turn.
She was fine. Perfectly fine.
But she kept turning down dates with very nice men.
Dori didn't understand it. "Why?" she asked, when she heard Milly turn down an invitation to the Sweet Pea Festival with Tom Rosser.
"Are you out of your mind?" she demanded when a week later she heard her sister decline a chance to go to Billings to a concert with Jeff Conover.
"You're crazy," she said when Milly said "no, thanks" to a chance to go to a movie with Mike Dutton.
"You're not waiting on that cowboy, are you?" she asked, eyeing Milly narrowly across the kitchen of their parents' house.
Milly shrugged. She'd never been much good at lying. And if she wasn't exactly "waiting for" Cash, she wasn't all that eager to go out with anyone else, either.
"You're insane if you are," Dori said frankly. "You'll never see him again."
"She's right," said Milly's mother, Carole.
It was the first thing Dori and her mother had agreed on in years.
"They never settle down," she went on firmly. "They're here today, gone tomorrow. Undependable, every last one." Carole Malone thumped the frying pan she was drying down on the stove for emphasis.
Dori looked at Milly and raised her eyebrows. "Do we have a little experience talking here?" she asked her mother.
Carole rounded on her daughter. "Yours, not mine," she said flatly.
Dori bristled, and Milly, out of habit, stepped between them.
"I'm not 'waiting,' Mom," she said, placating things as she always did. "I just … don't care."
"Well, you ought to care," Carole said sharply. "If you don't start caring pretty soon, you're going to be an old maid. What about young Ted Weston? What was wrong with the Conover boy? I can't believe you said no to Mike Dutton. He's gorgeous."
One by one she managed to tick off all the boys who'd ever asked Milly for a date, all the boys in whom Milly had been interested—or had been interested in her—B.C. Before Cash.
But Milly wasn't interested in any of those boys now. Because compared to Cash, they were boys—not men.
Cash was a man. He'd been around, seen the world. Cash had fought a few battles in his time. You could see it in his face and in his eyes, in his broken ribs and stitched-up jaw.
But Milly didn't say any of that to her mother. She knew that, like Jake's father, Cash was not the sort of guy who thrilled mothers. Mothers wanted their daughters to be safe.
There was nothing safe about Cash Callahan, and hearing that Milly thought of Cash as a man, would only make her worry.
To be honest, it wasn't entirely true. Cash wasn't exactly a man, either, come to
that. He was more like an exotic species. Wild as the broncs he rode. Restless as the wind. Rootless as a tumbleweed.
More things her mother wouldn't want to hear.
So Milly kept her mouth shut. Even though she never expected to hear from him again, she had her few thin memories.
She dragged them out more often than she ought to have, and she knew it. It wasn't hard at all to lie awake at night and remember that one time his head had lain next to hers on the pillow. It was easy to call up the feeling of his arm, warm and hard around her, no trouble at all to recall the rough, scratchy feel of his whiskery cheek under her touch, the Jake-like softness of his hair against her face.
And in the darkness, when no one else could remark on her blushes or the look of longing on her face, it was all too easy to remember—and savor—the taste of Cash's lips on hers.
She was the fish that got away.
There was sure as heck no other way to explain why he kept thinking about Milly Malone.
She wasn't the prettiest girl he'd ever gone home with. She wasn't the liveliest or the friendliest or, God knew, the best in bed.
That was it, in a nutshell. God might know, but Cash didn't! And he wanted to.
His buddies sure thought he had.
"Had a good night, did ya?" Rod had asked when Cash had stood by the chutes at Wolf Point and stared off into space that first afternoon.
"Um, er, yeah," Cash had lied, because he sure wasn't telling them he hadn't got anything at all! "Great," he added firmly.
Rod and Pete exchanged glances. "Lucky dog," Pete muttered.
"Cash has got the touch," Rod agreed.
But the truth was, Milly was the one with "the touch." Only moments after she'd begun rubbing his back, he'd fallen fast asleep!
Cash couldn't believe he'd dropped off that way. But it was true. If his still-zipped jeans and fastened belt buckle hadn't attested to it, the persistent ache in his loins would have.
It was that lack of fulfillment, he told himself, that nagged him as the days passed—and not the memory of his night with Milly Malone.
The ache he could take care of—and did. Desire assuaged, he should have forgotten her.
He didn't.
Cash, to whom all women—blondes, brunettes and redheads—were equally interesting and tempting, found that none of them was as interesting as Milly Malone.
He was annoyed as hell.
When he couldn't forget her, he tried to figure out why. Maybe it was because she'd given him a back rub. No other girl had ever given him a back rub. So he talked a girl in Deadwood into giving him a back rub.
But it wasn't the same.
He thought maybe it was because Milly had such sparkly green eyes. He'd never known any girl with such lively eyes. But in Oregon he met a girl whose eyes sparkled even more than Milly's, and two days later he couldn't remember her name.
So it had to be because he fell asleep before anything had happened. It had to be.
It was like two years ago when he'd drawn that nasty sorrel Thunderfest three times running and got tossed each time.
He'd obsessed about Thunderfest after that—thought about him, talked about him, dreamed about him—until the fourth time, when he'd ridden him to the buzzer and nailed a fourth-place seventy-five.
Thunderfest turned out not to be that memorable after all.
It would be the same with Milly Malone.
All he had to do was go back to Livingston—and prove it.
He began looking for reasons to go through Livingston. It shouldn't be that hard. It was right on Interstate 90. Thousands of cars and trucks hurtled up and down the highway everyday. But none that Cash was in.
"What the hell do you want to go up there for?" Pete asked him every time he suggested they head Livingston way.
Cash always shrugged. "Good rodeo in Kalispell," he'd say. Or, "Thought maybe we should head up to Miles City this year. You could stop in, say hello to your folks."
"Next month," Pete always said. "We can make better money in Coffeyville." Or, "Would you look at this? Good prize money in Rapid City this year!"
So they went to Coffeyville and Dodge City and Rapid City and Abilene. And the one time they got as far north as Okotoks, Alberta, they went right back down to Dillon and on to WallaWalla without even turning east.
"What the hell d'you want to go there for?" Rod and Pete took turns asking him every time he mumbled the word Livingston. They never remembered Milly Malone.
No reason why they should. Cash sure as shootin' didn't talk about her! They'd never stop teasing him if he ever let on he was a little bit interested in some girl.
And he wasn't really interested. He was just … well … just curious.
But his curiosity was growing, and there was no telling how big it might have got if that September night, as they were heading out of Pendleton after the performance, Pete hadn't said, "You're so interested in Livingston, why don't you catch a ride with Shane?"
Cash paused, his foot halfway up into the topper of the truck. "What?"
"Nichols broke his arm last night," Pete reminded him. "He's goin' to his brother's for a little R and R. Mace lives near Elmer. I was figurin' maybe you'd want to catch a ride."
"Elmer? Where's that?" Cash asked, surprising himself by not dismissing the notion out of hand.
"Not too far from Livingston. Not far from Bozeman, either."
Cash's insides did a funny flip-flop at the thought of it. Milly lived in Livingston. She went to school in Bozeman. Both were on the interstate. It would make perfect sense if he just happened to drop in. Did he dare?
When did Cash Callahan ever not dare?
He grabbed his rigging bag and the duffel in which he carried the rest of his worldly belongings. "Not a bad idea. Reckon maybe I will."
He didn't know Shane Nichols well. He was a couple of years older than Cash. He'd had a run for rookie-of-the-year while Cash was still in high school, and Shane had been friends with bigshots like Noah Tanner and Taggart Jones while Cash had still been wanting to ask for their autographs!
But for all that, he was always easygoing and friendly.
And he was happy when Cash approached him about the ride.
"Matter of fact, you can drive," Shane said, tossing Cash the keys to his truck.
He didn't complain about his broken arm, but Cash knew it had to hurt. He'd seen Shane break it. The memory of the grotesquely snapped bone could still bring a cold sweat out on the back of his neck.
"Sure thing," Cash said. He liked driving, and if Shane wanted to sleep the whole trip, that was okay with him. It'd give him something to do—besides think about Milly.
What if she didn't even remember who he was?
Of course she'd remember who he was!
Still, he didn't call and say he was coming. No sense in warning her. Maybe he'd take one look and decide the memory of what might have been wasn't worth it. Maybe he'd toss Shane back his keys and take the next bus out!
He drove eight hours. Then Shane took over. He was awake, and his arm didn't hurt so much. He was ready to talk.
Cash had always known Shane was a talker. He didn't mind. He liked listening. It kept his mind off Milly Malone.
"Where do you want me to drop you?" Shane asked.
It was late afternoon. Cash had debated asking Shane to drop him in Bozeman, since Milly went to MSU there. But he wouldn't know how to find her, and he was pretty sure she'd have to turn up back at her apartment eventually. If he went there, he wouldn't miss her. "Right by the station," he said. "I'll walk from there. Sure do appreciate the ride."
"No problem. If you're still here in three weeks or so, we can head out together."
"I won't be. I'm just … visitin' a friend. Overnight is all."
"Overnight is good." Shane grinned and gave Cash a knowing wink.
Cash felt his cheeks burn. "It ain't like that." Yet.
Shane's grin broadened. "Whatever you say, pard." He pulled up to the curb. "Hav
e fun." He gave Cash a quick two-finger salute and drove away.
Cash stood on the corner, rigging bag in one hand, duffel in the other, and stared in the direction of Milly's apartment.
He hoped she remembered who he was. She wasn't there.
Didn't live there anymore. Some girl who sparkled and batted her eyelashes, and looked like she would be more than happy to let him come in and pick up where he'd left off with Milly, told him that Milly had moved out at the beginning of September.
"It was just for the summer," the girl said. "I guess she didn't tell you that?"
"I … haven't talked to her recently. I was just … passin' through an', well…" Cash gave an awkward shrug. "Don't suppose you know where I can find her."
"She's working right now. At the grocery store. Did she tell you about the grocery store?"
Cash nodded. "But I never was there. I don't even know where it is."
The girl told him, then looked doubtfully at his bags. "You on foot?"
"Yeah."
Her brows lifted. "You came to stay? With Milly?"
Cash felt heat creep into his cheeks. "Not if she don't want me," he said quickly.
The girl laughed. "That Milly! What a dark horse! And wouldn't I like to be a fly on the wall," she said speculatively. "Come on. I'll drive you. I'm Alexis, by the way."
"Pleased to meet you. I'm Cash."
"I gathered that."
She did? Had Milly mentioned him? Had she told Alexis he fell asleep? Cash devoutly hoped not.
He trailed after Alexis and slid into the passenger seat of a candy apple red Miata. It sure wasn't a car like the one Milly drove.
She didn't drive like Milly did, either. Gunning the engine and whipping out onto the street, Alexis shot him a grin. "Hang on to your hat."
He did. Literally.
When she deposited him outside the grocery store, he gave his hat a tug and Alexis a nod. "Much obliged."
But Alexis bounced out, too. "Come on," she said. "I wouldn't miss this for the world."
Cash frowned. Miss what? But he didn't have time to wonder. Alexis was opening the door and beckoning to him. Hefting his bags, Cash followed her in.
THE COWBOY CRASHES A WEDDING Page 6
