She nodded and turned away from him. “Yes, that is my daughter, Katy.”
“Your husband here, too?”
“No,” she said over her shoulder as she took Katy out of the swing and started toward the house with Mary following close behind.
Beau didn’t want her to leave. “Is he coming later?”
She pretended she didn’t hear him.
“She hasn’t got a husband,” Jim said. “Set back down here, son, and keep an old man company for a little while. Womenfolk think they’ve got to help Hilda put dinner on the table. Why don’t you stay and eat with us? Hilda always makes plenty.”
Beau shook his head seriously. “Can’t, but thanks for the invitation. Rosa would have my hide tacked to the smokehouse door if I didn’t show up for dinner today. She’s made apple dumplings and they’re my favorite dessert. Milli’ s divorced, then?”
“Nope, never married. Folks were upset at first, but Katy kinda wins everyone’s heart so they got over it pretty quick. Milli’s a top-notch hand. She can work hard as any man and cook good as any woman. Her brothers can’t hold a candle to her when it comes to cattle. She got a sixth sense about it from her granny. Mary’s always been smarter than me about ranching, but she’s a good enough woman to let me think everything is my idea. Milli was engaged to a fellow who did her dirty and then she went away to college and got pregnant. Wouldn’t ever tell who the father was. Just said the baby was hers and she was a single mother.”
“I see,” Beau said, a whoosh of air escaping from his lungs. Relief filled him. He didn’t want Milli to be married, and yet couldn’t understand why. Amanda, his current girlfriend, the woman he intended to propose to
the very next night, was everything he needed in a wife. Tall, blonde, feminine. A kindergarten teacher at the Wilson school. He’d dated her for six months and it was time for him to settle down and raise a son to take over the Bar M someday. So why did he care whether or not Milli Torres was married?
“Well, I better be gettin’ on back. If I’m late Rosa will complain for a week. Looks like you’ll be back at the head of the poker table before long,” he said.
“Sure hope so. Don’t be a stranger, son. Come back soon. Guess we’ll see you at the Spencer barn dance tomorrow night? Mary says I can go if I’ll sit in the wheelchair. Won’t be easy for an old twostepper like me. Reckon I could beg you into askin’ my wife to dance one time? Doe says it’ll be a few weeks before I can do much dancin’,” Jim said.
“Be honored, sir. See you there. And listen to the doe. You can dance later.”
“That’s hard for an old feller like me to do.” Jim waved as Beau disappeared around the front of the house.
“Now, what was that all about?” Jim muttered as he drew his eyebrows down into a solid black line over his brown eyes. “Something is brewing around here. I can smell it, and by damn, Mary knows something, too. And I think it might have to do with Beau. Milli acted like she’d rather touch a rattlesnake than shake Beau’s hand, and she ain’t never even met him. Well, Mary better get ready to tell me what’s going on or I’ll get out of this wheelchair and throw a stompin’ ravin’ fit.”
******
“Nice man, that Beau,” Mary said. “Hilda, don’t you think Beau is a nice man?”
The gray-haired cook nodded as she stirred a pot of pinto beans boiling on the back of the stove. “Yes, I do. Always been polite and a downright nice gentleman. Don’t know what he sees in that Amanda girl, though. She’s uppity if you ask me. Course, it ain’t a bit of my business. Rosa says when she comes to the ranch she’s got her nose so high in the air that if it rained, she’d drown. But if that’s who he’s got picked out, guess we’ll have to live with it. Like I said, it ain’t a bit of my business if Amanda turns the whole ranch into some kind of social club, and you mark my words, that’s exactly what she’ll do. Anyway, that’s Beau’s business. It sure ain’t mine.”
“Who’s Amanda?” Milli asked, then was instantly angry for caring. Whatever Beau did or didn’t do wasn’t any of her concern. She’d only met him one time before and that was a strange situation that he wouldn’t ever remember, and every day, she wished she didn’t either.
“Why, that’s his girlfriend. Talk has it that he’s about to propose to her,” Mary said. “She’s a schoolteacher up in Wilson. She’s a tall blonde and pretty as a picture, but so snooty and snobby, no one around here thinks much of her. Beau brought her to the last barn dance over at the Spencers’ place and she acted like she was afraid she’d step in something nasty all evening. Barely would even twostep with Beau.”
Milli fought a batch of tears damming up behind her eyes. She didn’t shed a tear the day the doctor told her she was pregnant. She didn’t cry when she told her parents and her mother ranted and raved for an hour about how she’d disgraced both the Jiminez and Torres names. She didn’t even cry when she was in labor for sixteen hours and delivered an eight-pound daughter. So where in the hell did a bucket of tears come from now?
Hilda talked as she cooked. “Rosa says that Beau is as lucky as they come. Says he can make a cow have a healthy calf and the alfalfa grow tall as a barn, but he’s just plain stupid when it comes to women. She says he’s lucky in everything - but he ain’t lucky in love. So I guess if he really asks this Amanda to marry him, he’ll have a pretty showpiece for his ranch, but she won’t be worth much more than tits on a boar hog. She might be a good teacher, but she’s worthless when it comes to ranchin’.”
Mary saw her granddaughter’s big brown eyes swimming in tears. Maybe it was just the stress-filled morning. It couldn’t have been easy to find that big, black bruiser of a bull in her grandfather’s pasture. It would have been hard to face Beau out in the yard after she’d yanked out her gun and shot at him - to realize he was indeed a good friend of the family. But Mary really believed that her granddaughter, Camillia Kathryn Torres, was facing something bigger than her pride today.
“I think Katy needs her diaper changed,” Milli choked out a few words and disappeared up the stairs of the farmhouse with her daughter.
She set Katy on the bedroom floor to play and Plopped down on her bed to stare at the swirls in the textured ceiling. If she’d known Beau Luckadeau Was anywhere near southern Oklahoma, she certainly Would not have accepted the offer to work for her grandparents all summer. Now that she was here, how in the world would she ever be able to go back home without an excuse? The only thing she could do was endure the summer, hopefully with her emotions and senses intact.
Katy picked up a pyramid of brightly colored rings stacked on a rocking base. Milli continued to stare at the ceiling, remembering the summer two years before.
She’d fallen in love with Matthew the first day she laid eyes on him at the Lazy T cattle sale. His grandfather and father had come from the Rio Grande Valley to look at a Torres bull for his grandfather’s ranch. She could envision that day even yet. She had walked into the barn and his eyebrows had raised a full inch.
“Well, is someone here going to introduce me to this lovely lady?” Matthew had asked softly. “Or did an angel just fall out of heaven and no one knows her?”
“My daughter, Camillia,” her father had thrown over his shoulder and went back to talking with the elderly gentlemen about the bull.
He’d bowed deeply and kissed her fingertips. “And I am Matthew. I’m sure they can decide whether this bull is of the quality they need for our ranch. Come, walk with me and show me your ranch. This country is very different than our valley.”
She was smitten from the moment he bent over her hand and heard his soft Texas drawl with just the faintest trace of Spanish accent. They bought the bull and before they left, she had a date with Matthew for the next week. He flew into Amarillo from south Texas and took her to a steak house. Her mother said they made the cutest couple in the world, and Matthew treated her like a China doll.
Two months later he’d proposed, drawing a threecarat diamond solitaire from his pocket. “My
darling, I love you with my whole heart,” he whispered seductively and kissed her passionately. “I want things to be right between us, but I don’t want to wait forever to hold you in my arms and make love to you.”
She almost told him at that very moment that he didn’t have to wait any longer than it would take them to drive to the nearest motel, but his family and hers wanted one of those old-fashioned real weddings where the bride wears white and deserves it. “I know. Let’s have a short engagement and get married soon. A huge wedding with satin and roses and the whole works. Our mothers will love it and we’ll be so busy the time will go fast.”
He’d wrapped his arms around her. “With a reception afterwards at the Lazy T. We can leave at dark, just as the sun is setting, and go to Amarillo, where we will fly to an island paradise and stay for days in a cabin. Just the two of us making wonderful love.”
It was perfect. Not one thing could ever go wrong.
Until one of Milli’s friends called one evening.
She had been coming home from a dinner date in Canyon when she saw Matthew slipping into a motel on the outskirts of town. A tall blonde was hanging on him as they opened the door to a room. At first Milli didn’t believe a word her friend told her, but the friend was adamant. So, more to appease her than anything else, she drove fifteen miles to the motel. She parked beside his Mercedes and must have sat there an hour, staring at the motel door. Her wedding dress hung in the guest bedroom from a hook in the ceiling - the train falling from a bow in the back and reaching all the way across the room.
She wiped the sweat from her forehead just like she had when she had slipped into the dress in the bridal shop. She had giggled with her sisters-in-law that day about how hot satin could be.
“It’ll be hot in the church. Can’t get it cool enough for a bride. Must be the thoughts of what is going to happen later that night,” one of them had teased with a twinkle in her eye.
Anger replaced numbness in front of the motel as Milli looked at her engagement ring, an emerald-cut diamond solitaire. Without love, it was nothing but a glass cutter. It sparkled by the light of the moon, but glitter didn’t bring trust. She moaned. Her mother was going to crucify her. Just yesterday her engagement picture had been in the newspaper. Now everyone in the panhandle of Texas would know that she was engaged and then, suddenly, not engaged. Maybe she should forgive this indiscretion. After all, they weren’t married yet. She hadn’t gone to bed with him when he mentioned not waiting forever to get married because he wanted her so badly.
What was the matter with her? Great God in Heaven, was a diamond and a newspaper article worth going through life without trust? No sir! It was not.
She would not marry a man and pledge to love him until death parted them, if she couldn’t trust him. She wanted the kind of marriage her grandparents had - both her Torres grandparents in Oklahoma and her Jiminez grandparents in Rio County, Texas. The kind her parents had. She didn’t want to wonder every time Matthew called to tell her he was working late, or every time he left for a few days on business, if he was in a cheap motel with some other woman.
She knocked on the motel room and listened to the giggles and heavy breathing, then knocked again, this time louder.
“Who is it?” Matthew’s voice was breathless.
She called loud and clear, “Room service.”
“Just a minute,” he said.
She heard shuffling and imagined him finding his expensive pants among a pile of tumbled clothing on the floor.
His eyes were big when he opened the door and zipped his pants all at the same time. His chest was bare and dark circles showed on his neck where the blonde had marked him during sex.
“What in the hell are you doing here?” he demanded roughly.
She handed him the ring. “I came to bring you back your property.”
“Damn it, Milli,” he said. “This don’t mean nothing. We can’t do anything until we’re married. You can’t expect me to do without for six months.”
She looked him right in the eye and didn’t blink. “It means something to me, Matthew. It means a lot to me. Don’t call me. I never want to see you again.”
“It’s a deal!” He slammed the door.
It was the last time she had seen the man. His father called her father with an apology, but Matthew never called. The dress went back to the bridal shop and most of the gossip mongers quit talking a few weeks later.
Two weeks after the engagement was broken, she received an invitation to attend a high school friend’s wedding in Texarkana, five hundred miles away on the other side of the state. She and Lisa had been friends from junior high until graduation two years before. Lisa had gotten a scholarship to East Texas State University and Milli was enrolled at West Texas State University. Milli RSVP’ed the very day she got the invitation. It was exactly what she needed to get over the Matthew doldrums. She would fly into Texarkana for the wedding and stay in a motel for a couple of nights.
Lisa Thomas married Darrin Luckadeau, an air force captain, on Saturday night, and Milli envied her the wedding, the love, and the marriage. After the reception another party was held at the Luckadeau ranch and Milli went with a whole group of Luckadeau cousins, their relatives and friends. Sometime during the course of the evening a tall, goodlooking cousin glued himself to her side. He was drinking too much champagne and talking much too loudly, but he was the exact opposite of Matthew Sanchez.
“Mommy?” Katy said, breaking into her thoughts.
Milli opened up her arms and Katy toddled toward her. “Come here, baby.”
Katy laid her face on Milli’s chest and stuck her thumb in her mouth. In a few seconds she was sleeping soundly. Milli sat down in the big, comfortable rocking chair in the corner of the room and let her thoughts go back again to the night of Lisa and Darrin’s wedding.
******
“Who is that man?” She’d asked a girl when the goodlooking stranger left her side for a few minutes.
“That’s Beau Luckadeau. Cousin of the groom. Handsome old thing, isn’t he? All them Luckadeau men are goodlookin’. They come from down around Shreveport. Big family of them. His daddy is one of about six or eight boys and only one girl. And there’s a whole scad of Luckadeau brothers in Beau’s family. Lord, it’d be impossible to remember all their names. But they’re all damn goodlookin’, blond and blue-eyed. All except for Griffin, the one with the white streak in his black hair. He’s the oddball. Beau usually doesn’t drink much. Somebody said his latest girlfriend dumped him for another man. Guess he ain’t so lucky when it comes to love,” the girl said and headed toward the champagne fountain.
“Understand your name is Jiminez,” he’d said when he sat back down in the chair beside her. “Lady over there told me your last name. But I don’t know your first one.”
“Camillia,” she said softly. “And they call you Beau and your family is from Shreveport.”
“My dad’s family is. I’m from wherever the wind takes me. I might just be from Timbuktu next week.” He slurred his words. “Why don’t me and you get away from this place and go over to my cousin’s trailer where I’m stayin’, and talk where it’s nice and quiet?”
She was playing with fire. She was using the man to get even with Matthew, who didn’t give a damn if she got revenge or not. She didn’t ever know him. He could be a prisoner on parole. He could be married, despite what the girl had said. Right then she didn’t care. She tipped back the champagne he’d handed her and smiled up at him.
“All right. It is pretty noisy here, isn’t it? I can’t even hear myself think.”
He’d handed her the keys to his truck. “You better drive. I don’t usually drink and I never drive when I do. Trailer is a mile down the highway. First turn to the right and second trailer on the left.”
“Okay,” she’d said.
Memories continued to tumble around her as she nuzzled her face into her sleeping daughter’s soft hair. Sometimes at night when she awoke, her body ach
ed for his touch, her mouth wanted to be kissed like that again, but it was all a fairy dust night. He hurt because he’d been dumped. She hurt because Matthew couldn’t be trusted. In their pain they’d found each other for one night only.
He’d used a key to open the trailer door and when they were inside he wrapped his arms around her and kissed her passionately. She remembered feeling a jolt unlike anything she’d ever experienced before or since, until today when he shook her hand out in the backyard. Matthew’s kisses hadn’t affected her like that, and neither had any of the other boyfriends she’d had along the way.
She’d shaken her head when the kiss ended. “Whew, that champagne is some potent stuff.”
He led her to the sofa and pulled her down to sit on his lap. “I think! saw some stars. Don’t know if it’s the liquor or the kiss.”
A hundred kisses later, they found their way to the bedroom at the back of the trailer, where he threw his white western shirt and freshly starched and ironed jeans in a heap on the floor with her off-white, lace dress. An hour later he was snoring loudly beside her and she was staring at the ceiling wondering what she’d just done.
Sex. It was more than she’d ever expected. Even the pain of the first time didn’t dull the glow all around her. She pulled the sheet up to cover her nakedness, as if he could see through shut eyes and a drunken haze. He looked more like a little boy than a grown man, with blond ringlets framing his angular face. Heavy eyelashes brushed the top of his cheeks, which needed to be shaved again. She ran a finger over the rough beard, an anomaly for a blond man. Most of them had little facial hair. She was about to tangle her fingers in the fine curly brown chest hair when she heard the front door rattle and someone, presumably another cousin, came in. That jerked her into reality so quickly she drew back her hand as if she’d been scalded.
Lucky In Love Page 3
