by Jodi Thomas
He offered his hand and she laced her fingers in his.
A good sign, he thought. She was proving she wasn’t afraid of him.
As they reached the porch, he pointed to the sky. “See that quarter moon? That’s called a rustler’s moon. Enough light for rustlers to slip onto a ranch and steal cattle, but not so much that anyone on guard would see them clearly.”
She leaned back and stared up at the sky. “And what would you do, Wilkes, if you could move unseen beneath the rustler’s moon?”
“I might steal your heart, pretty lady,” he answered, halfway kidding.
She laughed. “Not likely.”
“Then I’d settle for a kiss.” The words were out before they’d passed through his mind. “I don’t know why, exactly, but there is something about you, Angie, that I find downright kissable.”
To his surprise, she met his stare. In the shadows he couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Maybe something like they didn’t fit together or she had enough problems without getting involved. He didn’t want any complications, because it wouldn’t take long for her to figure out that his heart had shriveled up and died a long time ago.
“I’m not interested in playing games, Wilkes.”
“I’m not asking for forever, Angie, or even tomorrow. I just thought it might be a nice way to end the evening.”
She frowned. “So the kiss is just the after-dinner mint?”
“Something like that.” It was amazing how quickly she could make him feel like an idiot. “Never mind.”
Her hand reached out and brushed his shoulder, stopping him in his tracks.
“All right. If it doesn’t mean anything. No forever or even tomorrow. One friendly kiss.”
She wrapped her arms around him. The fact that holding this woman always felt like an attack registered in his mind about the time the softness of her pressed against him.
He realized he’d been waiting for this moment all day, maybe all his life. To kiss a woman for no reason other than it might feel good. No strings. No promises. Just the pure pleasure of holding Angie.
Her lips were one inch away, but Wilkes couldn’t move in to claim the kiss. The sudden realization that he did want more made him hesitate.
He laughed as he carefully lifted her off the ground. They were almost the same height now. For once they weren’t so mismatched.
“One kiss,” he whispered to himself. One kiss.
He set her feet on the first step and pulled her tighter against him, wanting to see her face in the moonlight until the moment their lips met.
She smiled and tilted her head in invitation.
When his mouth lowered over hers, he kissed her slow, taking in the waves of her feelings moving from surprise to a hesitation at his boldness to passion. He didn’t know much about her past, but he had no trouble believing that she was naive to this kind of kiss.
And surprisingly, he felt the same.
* * *
WILKES PULLED AWAY, kissing across her cheek to her ear before he whispered, “That was unbelievable, Angie. Maybe the best kiss I’ve ever had.”
She looked shy as she moved away and climbed up the steps of the cabin. “Where’d you learn to kiss like that?”
He was so busy trying to get his head around what had just happened, he didn’t think to answer. The touch of her lips hadn’t set off fireworks. No chills or light-headedness. Just a slow hunger he feared might take a lifetime to satisfy.
“I don’t think I’ve ever kissed anyone like that. Never. Usually a kiss is just something moving on to the real action, but this...this was...” He had no ending to the sentence.
She didn’t say a word. She moved a few feet away and sat very still on the porch railing with her hands in her lap.
He couldn’t stop staring at her. Maybe she couldn’t figure the kiss out, either. Hell, for all he knew she was praying the night would end.
Without a word, she stood and went in the cabin.
He waited on her porch hoping she was packing a bag and loading her cat in a carrier. If she was ending the evening, surely she would have closed the door.
Wilkes stared into the night wondering if it was too soon to ask to kiss her again. Or, maybe he wouldn’t ask, he’d simply kiss her. After all, they were two adults, not kids on a first date.
He looked up at the rustler’s moon. “I’ve gone brain-dead. I’m sounding like a teenager. Maybe I should go home and ask Vern to shoot me before I lose the three brain cells I have left.”
The light went out in the cabin and Wilkes ended his one-sided conversation.
“We’re ready,” Angie said as she stepped out of the cabin and handed him Doc Holliday.
The cat hissed, and Wilkes growled back. They were off to a great start.
On the drive back Wilkes talked about Yancy’s house that called to him. They even drove past it, but in the black of night there wasn’t much to see.
“I’m not afraid of ghosts,” she announced.
He pulled away from the house and headed back to his place. “What are you afraid of, then?”
She laughed. “Pretty much everything else.”
Thinking about it for a mile, he finally said, “Promise you’ll never be afraid of me, Angie. I never want to see the fear I saw in your eyes that first day we met.” He’d startled her. She’d jumped, falling into the display. He’d only meant to stop her tumble, but it had frightened her.
“I’ll try not to be.” She grinned in her shy way. “I am getting used to you, Wilkes.”
A few minutes later when he showed her to the bedroom farthest from his, Wilkes was polite and funny. He even swore Doc Holliday would love all the dust bunnies under the bed.
As he left her to unpack, he said, “Coffee will be on in the kitchen by seven. Uncle Vern will be sitting at the table waiting for a cup, so don’t let him startle you.”
“Thanks for everything,” she whispered.
“You’re welcome.” He glanced over his shoulder and found her staring.
“And for the best kiss I’ve ever had.” The words were so low he felt as if he read her lips more than heard.
He took a step back toward her as she slowly closed her door.
“Anytime,” he said, knowing she could no longer hear him.
Part of him wanted to pound on her door and grab her in another kiss, but he couldn’t rush this. It was too special for him and maybe for her.
He was coming alive again and he wanted to enjoy every minute for as long as it lasted. A day, or forever.
Wilkes walked to his end of the hall and whispered what he’d been thinking since he’d held her for a few minutes beneath the rustler’s moon. “One kiss is never going to be enough, Angie. Not by a long shot.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Carter
BY THE TIME Yancy dropped Carter Mayes off at the campsite a quarter mile from the museum, Carter was almost too tired to walk up the three steps into his mobile home.
Mid-October’s wind whispered of winter moving closer, and the old man knew his time in West Texas was almost up for the year.
“You all right?” Yancy yelled from the open window of his car. “Maybe Wilkes’s chicken enchiladas didn’t agree with you.”
“I’m fine. My old bones just ache when the temperature drops. Come sunrise, I’ll be ready to go again.” He unlocked his door, and Watson met him. “My dog will keep me company for the rest of the night.”
Carter watched Yancy drive off, and the night became inky black. He turned on one reading light over his bed and told Watson all about the dinner party. The shaggy old shepherd didn’t seem all that interested.
He stripped down to his underwear, crawled into his blankets and called one of his daughters. He knew it didn’t matter whic
h one because whomever he called would notify the other two. His girls were close, and their main hobby, since their mother died, was worrying about him.
“I’m sorry I’m late, sweetie,” he began. “I had dinner with some friends.”
He closed his eyes and listened for a few minutes. Like her mother, his daughter April had the habit of listing, in order, everything she’d done all day. Finally she ended with a question. “What friends did you have dinner with, Dad?”
“Oh, I know lots of folks here, you know. I’ve met the new curator of the museum, nice girl, and an old fellow I went to school with seventy years ago. You’re not going to believe this, sweetie, but he’s got more maps of this area than I do.”
He wiggled deeper into the covers. “I’m having a great time as always. I swear the canyons get more beautiful every year. Tell your sisters not to fret. I’ve been coming out here so many years half the people in town know me by name. I like to move the RV around now and then so as not to wear out my welcome in one spot.”
He listened to his daughter talk about his grandchildren. All together he had seven granddaughters under ten years old. He called them the seven dwarfs and couldn’t have named all seven if his life depended on it, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love every one.
Almost dozing off, Carter broke into his daughter’s account of her youngest. “I’d better call it a night. I’m tired tonight, but I’m close to finding the cave. I can feel it. Another week, maybe two. After that it’ll be too cold here, and I’ll come home for the winter.”
Carter pulled the covers close around him feeling the season’s change all the way to his bones. “Good night, sweetie. Tell your sisters that I’ll call one of them tomorrow night.” He laughed. “You know, I almost said to tell your sisters and mom that I’ll be home soon. Sometimes, when I’m really tired, I forget that she’s gone. In my mind, most days I think that maybe she’s home waiting for me when fall is over.”
He smiled as his dear daughter said good-night, then Carter laid the phone down and turned off the light as he added, “I love you all, too.”
When he passed into dreams, the stick figures with huge round heads and hollow eyes walked beside him. He never spoke to them, but they no longer frightened him.
The sound of a car pulling up behind his little mobile home was the last sound that registered in his thoughts before he slept.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Angela
WALKING OUT ONTO Wilkes’s ranch house porch at dawn, Angie felt as if she were floating on her own private cloud. Somehow Wilkes and she had discovered something totally new. She had no doubt they’d both been rattled to the core by that one kiss last night.
They’d stepped on an uncharted planet at the same time. This new feeling wouldn’t be all that unusual for her, she’d had a very sheltered life, but Wilkes was one of those men who’d been around. He’d probably had a dozen girlfriends and flirted with hundreds. Surely he’d kissed someone before as he’d kissed her last night.
Yet when he’d looked down at her after the kiss, he looked as if he wasn’t sure what had happened. She might have dreamed about that kind of kiss, but she knew Wilkes never expected to be so shaken by it.
He left a note by the coffeepot saying he wouldn’t be able to take her into work. He was sorry, but the sheriff would drop by about eight thirty to pick her up.
She sighed. Maybe she’d read too much into last night. So much for any feelings growing out of one stolen kiss under a rustler’s moon. It was time she stepped back into the real world. Fairy-tale endings don’t happen to practical girls like her. Wilkes was simply offering to help out.
Shy women like her didn’t have romantic encounters or passionate love affairs. She was like her mother, or at least she always thought she was. She’d find someone one day who shared the same interests, wanted the same things. They’d marry and have a good partnership. No drama. No complications. No passion.
Men like Wilkes were the stuff of fantasies and dreams. She had a feeling she’d relive that one kiss a million times in her mind. Wilkes, on the other hand, would move on to one of those model-thin girls with perfect hair and cute shoes. Either he was avoiding her because he feared lightning might strike again and he’d be tempted to do something foolish, or the kiss had meant nothing and, as he said, there was no tomorrow.
She was still trying to figure it out when the sheriff arrived at Devil’s Fork to pick her up. He was easy to talk to, but she couldn’t imagine discussing a kiss with him. So all the way to the museum he told her about his daughter, Lauren, and how she’d come up with this half-baked plan to bring her crazy roommate home to the lake to recover.
“The girl streaks her hair,” Dan complained. “I can’t tell if her natural color is brown and the red is painted on or if it’s red and she paints in the brown. Polly doesn’t look old enough to be in college, but once I saw her eyes, I swear she’s one of those old souls people talk about. Only apparently, she’s a slow learner and has to keep coming back again and again to learn the same lessons. Proving not all old souls are bright.”
Still focused on Wilkes, Angie wasn’t really paying attention. She’d probably never meet the girl. Simply smiling and nodding now and then seemed to be enough for the sheriff.
“We’re running early, Angie,” Dan said as he pulled up in front of the county offices. “Mind if I check to see if a report has come in?”
“No, of course not.” She planned to stay in the car, but he pointed to the keepsake shop a few doors down.
Angie got the hint. “I’ll be in there when you’re ready.”
She wandered into Forever Keepsake as they unlocked the door for business and met the Franklin sisters.
Angie wasn’t surprised they knew who she was. The sisters might be in their midforties and as wide as they were tall, but they reminded her of the two aunts she’d lived with outside of Washington. There wasn’t a topic the sisters weren’t prepared to talk about, whether they knew anything or not, and they never met a stranger. They swallowed her up in conversation as if she were an old friend.
When the door chime sounded, they were laughing. Angie turned expecting to see the sheriff, but a tall woman with long black hair to her waist stood at the door grinning as if she expected a round of applause for showing up.
The sisters seemed to have turned to stone.
Angie had no idea what to do. From their stares, the Franklins could be looking at an armed robber. Only, the lady’s perfectly tailored dress was far too tight to allow for a concealed weapon.
Her red-lipped smile never slipped as she held out her arms. “Hello, Miss Franklin and Miss Franklin! Or should I say Rose and Daisy? After all, I am all grown up now.”
Neither woman answered.
The beauty didn’t seem to notice. “I just had to stop by and give you two a hug while I was in town. It’s been years and years since I’ve seen you, and I swear neither of you has changed a bit. The boring life in a dead town must slow aging.”
Angie moved out of the line of fire. The taller Franklin, Rose, Angie guessed, since she wore a rose pin on her collar, looked as if she might explode.
Daisy, the shorter Franklin, glared as if fearing the beautiful woman might kill them at any moment.
Rose recovered first. She waddled forward, no smile but a sweet voice. “Why, child, I didn’t recognize you. It has been years. We used to see you when you came home from college, but when your parents moved away, I think you only came back to see your aunt once in the past six or seven years. It was while Wilkes was in the army if I remember right.”
At the mention of Wilkes, Angie doubled her interest in the new customer.
The tall lady gave Rose an air-kiss, kind of like what movie stars give each other. Almost touching. Almost caring.
Daisy stepped forward and got her almo
st hug, too. “You’ve been gone a long time, Lexie. What brings you back?”
Angie seemed to have become invisible, so she simply watched.
The woman called Lexie brushed an invisible tear off her porcelain face and said low and sad, “Since dad died, it’s hard for me to return to Crossroads. My mother moved into a senior living home near me in Dallas and swears she’ll never come back here.”
Both the Franklin sisters nodded like dueling bobbleheads.
Lexie lifted her chin, putting on a brave front. “Only now my aunt is very ill, and I’m afraid I’m her only relative. It’s my duty to be with her during her last days, no matter how busy I am in the city.”
Daisy Franklin nodded, but added, “’Course, your aunt has had dementia for three years, so she don’t remember you. Last I heard, when they moved her to the nursing home in Bailee, she thought she was going on a cruise. Thinks her doctor is the captain. She told someone the waitresses dress in white and serve her an afternoon drink on the deck along with appetizers and her pills.” Daisy smiled sweetly. “They also say she plays bridge with old lady Wilson, who has been cruising since she was ninety-three. Apparently, they’re both party animals, even at the home.”
Angie watched Lexie frown. Obviously the “poor me” act wouldn’t work with these two. She tried another approach. “Still, I’m visiting her every day while I try to clean out that enormous house of hers. I was wondering if you two ladies would like to help me appraise some of her things. I’d give you first option to bid on anything.”
Angie wanted to yell “bingo.” Lexie had finally gotten down to the reason she’d walked in the door.
Before the women could answer, the door chimed again and the sheriff rushed in with a gust of wind.
Angie almost laughed as he took one look at the beautiful woman with the midnight waterfall of perfect hair and froze. Angie had no doubt that if he thought he could step backward and disappear before anyone noticed, he would.
