The Texas Kisses Collection

by Jenny Schwartz

  “It’s in eight days, next Thursday.”

  She nodded, sipping coffee.

  “I didn’t get a brief or anything, just Mikal saying to cozy up the house and hide Jezebel.”

  “Jezebel?”

  “My donkey. No one wanted her at the auction and I thought she’d be company for my horse, Hercules. She is; company, that is. But she’s also evil-tempered with strangers.”

  “Still, in the distance, donkeys are cute and a bit different.” Clear gray eyes looked straight at him. “Different is good, but not too different. You need to show everyone what they dream country living is like and add a few quirky touches. Quirky because you’re an artist.”

  “I’m not quirky.”

  She grinned at him. “We’ll pretend.”

  Her smile punched him in the solar plexus, knocking the air out of him. It was so unexpected, radiant and hinting at complicity. We’ll pretend. “So, you’ll help me?” he managed.

  “Like Mabel is giving either of us a choice.” But Rachel didn’t sound annoyed. “I’ll come and see your house, tomorrow, if that works for you?”

  He nodded fervently. “Any time.”

  “Nine o’clock. We can walk around, I’ll get a sense of things, and sketch you some ideas. If you like them, we’re in business.”

  “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” She stood, gathering up her shopping bags.

  “Do you need my address?” He patted his pockets, hoping for a magically-appearing pencil.

  “Gramps will know it. I’ll ask him.”

  Wyatt smiled. Alan Cruft was a good man and a good forester. “Yeah. He’ll know it.”

  He was still standing when the door closed behind Rachel. He let out a huge breath and crashed back into his chair. Then his shoulders jerked. “Pie! I forgot to buy her pie.”

  Chapter 2

  Gramps had known Wyatt’s address, and he’d given his approval of the man and Rachel’s new project, along with directions. So as she slowed for the turn into Atfield Road, she also turned over what she’d learned of her new client.

  Wyatt Allenjo was twenty eight, single, well-respected, good with wood and a hard worker. He’d also stepped up two years ago, coming home from a trip to Los Angeles with a recently discovered teenage half-brother courtesy of their wandering, no-good father. According to Gramps, the kid had graduated from surly and rebellious into a decent enough young man who’d recently entered the marines.

  Rachel thought that said good things about Wyatt.

  And thinking about Wyatt and the photo shoot took her mind off her troubles. She needed to look for work, but she was wary. Once bitten, twice shy. Could she work in an industry where standing your ground got you fired? Should she try for a government job? Where should she work? She had contacts in New York, but looking around the woods, seeing the leaves just beginning to turn color with the cool weather, did she want to return to the Big Apple?

  She’d missed Texas, missed the space and freedom, and her family.

  “Oops.” She almost over-shot Wyatt’s driveway. There was only a faded green mailbox to mark it. “He needs a sign.”

  She turned the old boat of a car Gramps had lent her into the driveway and rattled down it. At least she needn’t worry about the car’s suspension. A retired but still active mechanic, Gramps aimed to restore the 1970s classic car, one day.

  The driveway ended and there stood the house.

  It could have been worse. In fact, the house had the potential to be charming. She’d expected something in wood, but the house was gray stone, square and cottage-y. A porch across half the front suggested the Arts and Craft movement of the early twentieth century. The windows were wood-framed, painted white, crisp and sparkling. In fact, anything that could be cleaned or renovated, had been, but the result was stark functionality. It was a house, not a home.

  The barn was better. Red and snug, it stood to the left of the house. Timber lay behind and to the side of it, seasoning. There was a strip of cleared field before the woods returned, the yellowing leaves of oaks intermingling with the solid green of pines and marching up the hill, beautiful against the clear blue sky.

  “Hi.” Wyatt crossed the porch. “Do you mind dogs?”

  Two massive beasts accompanied him, one rusty brown, the other dark gray.

  “Dogs are fine.” She got out of the car, suddenly awkward. In the store, he’d seemed much less impressive, but on his own land Wyatt was breath-takingly right; a man who’d found where he belonged—and that was immensely attractive. He was as strong and resilient as the trees around him, but also warm, and watching her with a shy yet ready welcome that knocked her off balance. For a woman unsure of her place in the world, knowing herself welcome, even valued, made her unexpectedly emotional. She bent to hide her too-expressive face. “Hi. And who are you?” she addressed the dogs.

  “Sunny and Beau.”

  The dogs were friendly and wonderful ice-breakers. By the time Rachel had fussed them, she’d recovered herself. “Will you show me your house?”

  “Come in.”

  The dogs escorted her inside, while Wyatt held the door.

  Men hadn’t held doors for her in New York, and the courtesy underscored her welcome. “Thank you,” she murmured as she moved past him.

  She paused just inside the small hall and inhaled deeply. She caught the scent of Wyatt—man, timber and the fresh outdoors—and of the house. It smelled cool and faintly of paint and cleaning products.

  “The living room is through here.”

  Rachel flushed. She must have looked stupid, freezing in the hall. She hurried to explain. “I was trying to pick up how your house smells. Scent influences us all subliminally. The magazine readers won’t be able to smell your house, but the journalist and photographer will. We want to influence their mood so that it slants the article in your favor.”

  Wyatt inhaled. “I can’t smell anything. Except violets, and that’s you.” Approval rumbled in his voice.

  She shivered. “You smell of new wood, like a carpenter should.”

  They stared at each other an instant. Scent was an intimate thing. It was disconcerting to both be so aware of each other. They weren’t on a date.

  She cleared her throat. “You said the living room is through here. Oh.” She should have been prepared for it. After all, the outside of the house had shown her Wyatt’s high standards of maintenance, but the lack of softening attention to detail, especially color.

  “That doesn’t sound like a good ‘oh’.” He trailed her into the room.

  “The fireplace is lovely.” The stonework was particularly fine, its gray color threaded with silver and sepia.

  “It needs curtains.” He paced to the window. The sun brought red highlights out of his dark hair. “I never bothered with curtains or blinds because there’s no one to see in and…”

  “Curtains aren’t a guy thing,” she finished, smiling.

  “Yeah.” He grinned.

  “I’ll fix the curtains. As for the furniture.” It stood on a lovely polished wood floor, but the two recliners and sofa were about ten years old, gray and ugly. “Did you say you made furniture?”

  “Sometimes. Do you think I should bring some into the house? I wondered if that would be too obvious.”

  “Obvious can be good, but let me think about it.” She looked up. The room had a high ceiling. “Nice light.”

  “It was there when I bought the house.”

  Oval, opalescent and brass-trimmed, it had a 1950s vibe. “Probably original. The proportions in here are really good.” She could make the living room work.

  They moved on to the kitchen.

  “Flat-pack?” she asked, appalled.

  He hunched his broad shoulders. “The old kitchen cupboards needed replacing and this was easy to install.”

  “Uh-huh.” Gray, white and horrible, it was a crime in what could have been a lovely country kitchen. The large window framed a gorgeous view out across the field,
and on, through a gap in the trees, to the cobalt glint of the river flowing placidly down the contour of the land. “We’ll emphasize the view from the window and I’ll bring in some color.” The walls were an uninspired white.

  “I could paint the walls?”

  He sounded so tentative and apologetic that she reached out and put a comforting hand on his arm. “It’s not that bad, and I don’t want you spending loads of money.”

  “It is that bad,” he said flatly. “What color?”

  “Yellow,” she responded instantly. “Pale daffodil.”

  “Pale daffodil?” he repeated, doubtfully.

  “I’ll come with you to the hardware store. But you’ll have to go with me to the homewares store next door to buy the curtains and maybe some pillows.”

  “Deal.” He shifted and her hand slid down his arm. He caught it, squeezing gently, before releasing her.

  Her fingers tingled. His hand was warm and calloused, the fingernails rough but clean. Not like the carefully manicured nails of the men she’d worked with at the New York ad agency. She shoved her hands into the pockets of her jeans and sought a distraction.

  A long-eared one waited, looking at the kitchen window from the fenced field. “Is that your donkey?”

  “Jezebel. Would you like to meet her?” He opened the fridge door before she could answer.

  “I guess,” she said to his back.

  “Carrots!” He emerged, triumphant. “You can buy Jezzy’s friendship.”

  Rachel laughed.

  They walked out the back. Like the front of the house, the rough grass was neatly trimmed, approximating a lawn, but there was a dearth of garden. “Did you ever think of planting flowers?”

  “Deer,” Wyatt said briefly. “I plowed in the garden beds and…you think that’s a mistake.”

  “Not a mistake.” Heavens! The man would think she did nothing but criticize. The truth was, she could see the amazing possibilities of the house as a raw canvas, and she itched to make it really cozy. “I was just wondering about color…but that’s okay.” She reminded herself that she was here to prepare for a photo shoot, not makeover the man’s home. “The view is stunning. We’ll make it all about the amazing setting and your wood sculptures. They need to be center stage, anyway.” She paused, eyeing the donkey. “Is she unhappy?”

  “Jezzy? No. She’s curious.”

  The donkey’s ears were up, flicking slightly, as she stood back a fraction from the fence.

  Not so the big bay horse sharing the field. He leaned into the fence, eager to meet a visitor—or more likely, to have first dibs on the carrots she carried.

  “If you feed Hercules first,” Wyatt advised. “Jezebel will get miffed that she’s missing out. Let her come to you.”

  So Rachel fed the gentle horse and talked nonsense to him, while Wyatt stood by with the two dogs. “Are they rescues, dogs that needed new homes?” she asked.

  “How did you guess?”

  Because she suspected a theme. Wyatt didn’t turn away from a person or animal who needed help, not from his half-brother and not from homeless animals.

  “They’re ugly and scary to look at.” He tugged at Beau’s floppy gray ears as the huge dog sat beside him. Sunny wandered off to investigate something in the field. “Wouldn’t hurt a mouse.”

  The donkey nudged in, still suspicious of a stranger but determined to snaffle her share of the carrots. When they finished, so did Jezebel’s tolerance. She brayed loudly.

  “Good grief.” Rachel clapped both hands to her ears. “Thank goodness you don’t have near neighbors.”

  He laughed. “They wouldn’t appreciate the noise from my workshop either. Would you like to see it?”

  “Yes, please.”

  Walking Rachel through his house, Wyatt had gradually lost his nervousness, especially when she bargained for his company in the homewares store. He had friends who complained about wives and girlfriends forcing them into wasting afternoons at the homewares store, but Wyatt had never done so. He’d like to stand with Rachel while she chose curtains and cushions and anything else she wanted.

  The barn doors stood open and he let Rachel precede him into his workshop.

  Unlike the house, he wasn’t nervous about her response to his sculptures. He trusted that she would “get” them.

  And she did. She turned to him with an awed look.

  He felt ten feet tall.

  “They’re beautiful.” She ran her hands over the owlets he’d carved into a coat rack.

  His own fingers twitched, remembering the feel of the wood as he’d worked it.

  She admired a sculpture of a boy carved stretching up.

  “I think he’s picking apples,” Wyatt said. “I saw it in the wood.” The young boy stood on tiptoes, happiness and eagerness in the lines of his body.

  “Do you always get your ideas from the wood?”

  “No. Often it’s the design first.” He walked over to his desk and she came with him, her shoulder touching his as she looked through his sketchbook. The scent of violets wove with the familiar smell of fresh timber.

  “The drawings are lovely. You could frame some.”

  “No.” He reared back. “They’re working sketches.”

  “They’re adorable.” She studied the owlets he’d sketched, apparently absorbed in how those multiple sketches were worked into the design of the coat rack. “We’ll include these in the scene-setting for the photo shoot. Have them open on the desk here, the coat rack nearby.” She turned, her butt resting on the edge of his desk, to assess the workshop. “It’s all so organized.”

  “Only way I know how to be.”

  “Otherwise it would be chaos,” she said, comprehending. She inhaled. “I love the smell of new wood. Most people do. We’ll need to leave some wood shavings on the floor. What project are you working on now?”

  “A commission. A guy in Dallas wants a rearing horse.”

  “Cliché.” She grinned.

  He shrugged. “I don’t mind. I’m going to interlock three pieces of pine. Get the grains running different directions. It’ll work. Add energy to the horse.” He touched the pieces of pine, feeling the strength and weakness of the wood.

  “You really are an artist.”

  “I’m lucky enough to be doing something I enjoy.”

  She nodded. “It shows.”

  They walked back to the house and he made coffee and got out the cherry turnovers he’d gone into town for that morning.

  Cherry turnovers! Rachel looked at the box of pastries and couldn’t help but remember Mabel’s advice to Wyatt yesterday, buy her cherry pie. He hadn’t, but he had remembered her preferences.

  She smiled as she took a cherry turnover. “Yum,” she said around a mouthful.

  He beamed at her. “So, what do you think we need to do to the house?” His strong fingers curled around a large black mug.

  Her own mug was a mismatched blue one. She made a mental note to borrow a matching set from her mom, who had loads. Her mom liked to buy new dinnerware every spring, but couldn’t bring herself to throw away her old set, so the attic had boxes of it. And speaking of attics…

  “I plan to raid Gramps’s attic.”

  “Why?”

  “There’s old furniture from the 1950s up there. It would suit your living room and we could mix your work in with it. Synergy.”

  “Synergy?”

  She blushed. “Advertising-speak. Jargon. Sorry.”

  “You really like the work, don’t you?”

  “Yes. A lot of people are critical of advertising and think we’re con artists, manipulating people into parting with their cash. But advertising is, at heart, storytelling, and I adore it. I love showing people the best of a product or how they can improve their lives. Advertising is how we remind people of the value of intangibles like education or good health practices.”

  “Or politics.”

  “Smarty.” She loved his smile. It started in his eyes and curved his mouth
. She blinked, wondering how long she’d stared at his mouth. “Political advertising, yeah, that’s over the top. I wouldn’t want to do that.”

  “Is that why you quit your job? Did they ask you to do something you disliked.”

  Her relaxed enjoyment of chatting with him died. Even with the horrible flat-pack kitchen, she’d felt comfortable. Now, she didn’t. She finished her last bite of cherry turnover. “I didn’t quit. They fired me. But yes, it was because I refused to do a job—or to do it the way they wanted.”

  “What did they want?” he asked quietly.

  She sighed and sat back in her chair, cradling her mug of coffee. “I had a few small accounts that were just mine. Mostly I worked on other projects, under direction, but these were mine. This one in particular I really enjoyed. It’s a line of healthy food targeted to teenagers. Neroli, the creator of the line, survived an eating disorder in her teens, and now with her own children, she passionately wants to provide healthy options.”

  “Sounds good.”

  “It is. I had a ton of ideas. I worked up a whole campaign ready to present to her. Instead of models selling the products, I intended to use young athletes. I wanted them to be real role models and showcase—promise kids—that strength, discipline and success were all achievable. But the head of the ad agency discovered that Neroli wasn’t simply a dedicated mom. She’s the daughter of the sole owner of a national supermarket chain that’s on the verge of going international. That made her important. So he pulled the account from me and gave it to a…”

  “A…?”

  “I try not to swear.”

  Wyatt grinned. “Okay. I’ll imagine it. What happened?”

  “I was told to continue working on the account, to introduce the…new guy to Neroli. But he threw out my draft campaign and wanted one that focused on sexualizing the female teenage body; all flirty, languishing looks at the camera, skimpy clothes and skinny bodies. I hate that the fashion industry uses thirteen year old models. I refused to do the same myself.”

  “Neroli can’t approve of it if she’s had an eating disorder, and she’s the client.”