Christmas Cowboy Duet

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Well, you’re still an outsider so that’s understandable. You’ll have to experience it for yourself.”

  Whitney laughed shortly, waving the idea away.

  “I’ll pass on that, thanks. The second my car is back on solid ground, I’m out of here.” She glanced at her watch and frowned. She was really behind schedule. “I should already be on my way.”

  “Maybe you should call whoever you’re going to see and let them know that you’re being held up,” Liam suggested.

  Her eyes widened as she looked at him warily. “Held up?”

  “Delayed,” Liam amended.

  “Oh.”

  Whitney chewed on her lower lip, thinking. She really didn’t want to call to say she’d be late, but she had to grudgingly admit that the cowboy had a point. With that, she shrugged his jacket off, letting it rest against the back of her chair, and dug into her pocket for her phone.

  Pulling it out, she began to tap out the phone number of the band she was on her way to audition. When nothing happened, she tried the number again—with the same result. Frustrated, she took a closer look at her phone and realized that it was completely dormant. The light hadn’t really come on.

  Why was it acting as if it was drained? “I just charged the battery,” she complained.

  Liam leaned over and placed his hand over hers, turning her phone so that he could get a better look at it. The diagnosis was quick and succinct.

  “I think it’s dead.”

  “Dead?” Whitney echoed. “How can it be dead?” she challenged.

  He had an answer for that, as well. “That’s not a waterproof case, is it?” He’d phrased it in the form of a question, but he already knew the answer.

  “No,” Whitney snapped. And then she remembered something. “But you dived in to pull me out of the water and you had your phone in your pocket,” she recalled. “I saw you take it out to call that mechanic and whoever sent over that cherry picker.”

  Rather than say anything, Liam took out his phone and held it up to let her see the difference between his and the one she had in her hand.

  “Mine’s sealed in a waterproof case,” he told her. She looked as if she was about to protest, so he explained rather matter-of-factly, “Things happen out here. All you can do is try to stay as prepared as possible.”

  Of course, he thought, he definitely wasn’t prepared to be as strongly attracted to this woman as he was. But then, he’d never saved anyone from drowning before and maybe that had a lot to do with it.

  Whitney was torn between actually liking the fact that he was this prepared and resenting the fact that he was taking charge like this while she couldn’t. What was even worse was that she was having all sorts of feelings about this man that had absolutely nothing to do with any of this—except that he had saved her.

  “Like a Boy Scout,” she commented.

  “Something like that, I guess. Want to borrow my phone to make that call?” he offered, holding it out to her.

  “I guess I’m going to have to,” she muttered, less than thrilled about this turn of events. She glared at her unresponsive phone. “I guess this is just an expensive paperweight now.”

  “Not necessarily,” Miss Joan said.

  Whitney nearly jumped out of her skin. The woman had seemingly materialized out of nowhere again. Didn’t anyone else find that annoying? she couldn’t help wondering.

  Taking a breath to steady nerves that were becoming increasingly jumpier, Whitney turned in her seat and focused on what the older woman had just said rather than the fact that she was beginning to view Miss Joan as some sort of a resident witch.

  “Do you think you can fix this?” she asked Miss Joan, allowing a trace of hope to enter her voice for good measure.

  Miss Joan looked at the phone in question. “Depends. This just happened, right?” she asked, raising her eyes to look at Liam’s companion.

  “Right,” Whitney answered quickly.

  Miss Joan put out her hand. “Let me take your phone apart and put it in a container of rice.”

  “You’re going to cook it?” Whitney asked warily.

  Miss Joan laughed. “Hardly. Rice draws the moisture out. Doesn’t work all the time but it’s the only shot your phone has.”

  With a sigh, Whitney handed her phone over to the woman, although she was far from confident about what was about to transpire.

  “Okay.”

  Taking the phone, Miss Joan pocketed it for a moment. “By the way, these are for you,” she said, offering the younger woman what had caused her to return to the table before Angel had finished preparing their orders.

  Whitney then noticed that the older woman had brought over a couple of items of clothing with her—a light blue sweatshirt and a pair of faded jeans.

  Instead of taking the items, Whitney stared at them. “What am I supposed to do with these?”

  Miss Joan pursed her lips, a sign that she was banking down a wave of impatience. “Well, this is just a wild guess on my part, but if it were me, I’d put them on. In case you didn’t know, the clothes you have on will dry a lot faster without you in them—especially if I put them in a dryer. Unless, of course, you like looking like something the cat dragged in,” Miss Joan added whimsically.

  “Ladies’ room is right through there,” she told Whitney, pointing toward the far side of the diner. And then she held the defunct phone aloft. “I’ll go get your orders after I put this baby into the rice container.”

  Whitney felt as if she’d just been doused by the flash flood a second time, except that this time around, it had come in human form.

  After a beat, she gazed at Liam. “I think I’m beginning to see what you mean about Miss Joan.”

  “Miss Joan likes to look out for everybody,” he explained. “Like a roving den mother. Takes some getting used to for some people. Now, I’m not telling you what to do, but it might not be such a bad idea putting those on.” He nodded at the clothes she was holding in her arms.

  She’d felt rather uncomfortable in the wet clothes, despite the jacket Liam had given her. But she hadn’t felt it was worth drawing attention to the fact. After all, it wasn’t as if anyone could do anything about it. Except that obviously Miss Joan could—and had.

  Whitney rose without saying a word and walked to the rear of the diner, holding the clothes Miss Joan had brought her.

  She had definitely fallen down the rabbit’s hole, Whitney thought as she changed quickly, discarding her wet outer garments and pulling on the sweatshirt and the jeans Miss Joan had given her.

  Dressed, Whitney didn’t know what surprised her more, that the strange woman with the flaming red hair had brought her a change of clothing—or that the clothes that Miss Joan had brought her actually fit.

  “You look a lot drier,” Liam commented with a smile when she finally returned and quietly slipped back into her chair.

  Whitney’s eyes met his. He couldn’t quite read her expression. It seemed to be a cross between bewildered and uneasy.

  “How did she know?” Whitney asked.

  “That you were wet?” It was the first thing that came to his mind. “It might have to do with the fact that there was a small trail of water drops marking your path to the table.”

  He tactfully refrained from mentioning that both her hair and the clothes beneath his jacket were plastered against her body.

  She shook her head. “No, I mean how did Miss Joan know what size I took? The jeans fit me as if they were mine.” And she found that almost eerie.

  Liam laughed again. These were things that he had come to accept as par for the course, but he could see how they might rattle someone who wasn’t used to Miss Joan and her uncanny knack of hitting the nail right on the head time and again.

  “Like I said before, that’s all
part of her being Miss Joan. The rest of us don’t ask. We just accept it as a given.”

  The next minute, Miss Joan was at their table again. This time Whitney didn’t jump and her nerves didn’t spike.

  “You look better, honey,” Miss Joan said with approval. She’d brought their orders over on a tray and now leaned the edge of it against their table. She proceeded to divvy the plates between them. And there was more.

  “Figured you might like a hot cup of coffee with that.” Although she had brought two coffees, she directed her comment to Liam. “It’ll take the rest of the chill out of your bones,” she promised with a wink that instantly took thirty years off her face.

  The tray now emptied, Miss Joan deftly picked up the discarded blouse and tailored slacks from the floor next to Whitney’s chair. “I’ll just take care of these for you,” the woman said.

  “I usually have those dry-cleaned,” Whitney protested as the other woman was beginning to walk away with her clothes.

  Miss Joan paused, glancing down at the wet clothing she was holding. “I think we both agree that there’s really nothing ‘usual’ about this now, is there?” she said knowingly.

  With that, Miss Joan walked away.

  Whitney glared at the man who was responsible for bringing her here in the first place. “Was she ever in the military?” she asked.

  Liam laughed. It didn’t take a genius to see where Whitney was going with this. He didn’t want her wasting her time or her energy.

  “I think it’ll be a whole lot easier on you if you stop trying to figure Miss Joan out and just accept her as being a force of nature. That’s what the rest of us have done. It’s just simpler that way.”

  Whitney frowned to herself. If these people wanted to deceive themselves and think of the diner owner as some sort of a “chosen one,” that was their prerogative. But brand-new clothes not withstanding, she wasn’t about to have any of it. That was for people who couldn’t think for themselves and reason things out.

  Whitney suddenly turned toward him again and changed the subject entirely. “How long do you think it’s going to take your friend to get my car down out of that tree?” she asked.

  “Hard to tell since I’ve never known anyone to have gotten their car up a tree before,” Liam freely admitted.

  Maybe everything had finally gotten to her, or she was just getting giddy. Then again, perhaps it was the result of nearly drowning that did it, but Liam’s answer, offered to her with a completely straight face, struck Whitney as being funny.

  Not just mildly funny, but rip-roaringly, side-splittingly so.

  She laughed at what Liam had said and once she started laughing, the jovial sound just seemed to feed on itself.

  It was hard for her to stop.

  Because her laughter was the infectious kind, Liam laughed right along with her. After a minute or so of this, he stopped abruptly to look at her closely. He wanted to ascertain that she wasn’t tottering on the verge of hysteria. Laughter could so easily turn to tears.

  But in this case, the laughter was a form of letting off tension and nothing more than that. Even so, Liam had to ask. “You all right?”

  It took her a moment to answer because she had to get herself under control first. But when she did speak, she was truthful about it.

  “I really don’t know,” she admitted. “I almost drowned in water that hadn’t been there when I started out. For all I know, my car’s still up a tree, my phone might very well be dead, I’ve got on someone else’s clothes and I’m sitting in a diner run by a strange woman who acts as if she can read my mind, so I guess the answer’s no, I’m so not all right.”

  Liam listened to her intently and only when she was finished did he venture to speak. He gave her some age-old advice.

  “Maybe you should eat something. You might feel more up to dealing with all this on a stomach that’s not empty,” he suggested.

  That almost drove her to another round of laughter. Whitney managed to hold herself in check at the last minute.

  “You sound like my mother,” she said, responding to his quaint advice. Before she ran off, she added silently.

  “All things considered, I think I’d rather sound like your father,” Liam countered, amused.

  Whitney raised her eyes to his. Her father had been the one who had all but bred competition into her and her siblings. Her mother, on the other hand, had been the dreamer, the one whose temperament could withstand anything—or so she had thought until the day she wasn’t there anymore.

  The day her mother had left a note on the kitchen table to take her place.

  “No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “Trust me,” she added when Liam looked at her somewhat skeptically.

  “I do,” he told her simply. “I trust you, Whitney.”

  She had no idea why that affirmation warmed her the way it did, but there was no denying that she was definitely reacting to it in a positive way.

  Whitney decided that Miss Joan had to have put something into her cheeseburger. That was the explanation she was going with since she had no room in her life for any more complications. And feeling any sort of an attraction for this cowboy was definitely a complication of the highest magnitude.

  Chapter Five

  Whitney glanced down at her watch for the umpteenth time. She tried not to be too obvious about it, but she had a feeling that she wasn’t fooling the man sitting across from her.

  With each minute that passed by, she was getting progressively antsy.

  She had never been one to dawdle over her food—there was always too much to get accomplished for her to eat leisurely—but she had deliberately forced herself to eat slower this one time, hoping that once she was done with the meal, there would be some news about the state of her car.

  But Liam’s phone had not rung and she had just popped the last French fry into her mouth.

  Now what?

  Trying to contain her impatience, she said to Liam, “Maybe you should check your phone, just in case you shut off the ringer.”

  “I didn’t,” he told her. The diner was usually a noisy place and he hadn’t wanted to take a chance on missing the mechanic’s call. He knew how important it was to Whitney. “But even if I had, I’d feel the phone vibrating.”

  “Then maybe you accidentally shut your phone off altogether.”

  She knew she was reaching, but it would be night soon and she was supposed to have been at the audition she’d set up in Laredo first thing in the morning. Now all that careful planning was about to fall through, though she’d called to say she’d be late. At the same time, she didn’t like falling so far behind in her schedule.

  Whitney could just see her brother Wilson’s smug face now, making no secret of the fact that he enjoyed watching her stumble and, even better, fall behind. Her position was technically lower than his within the company, but she still felt she was in competition with him. This sense of extreme competition was the way they had all been raised. Never once was the family unit stressed. For the Marlowes it was more of a case of every man—and woman—for themselves.

  She did not want to wind up on the bottom of the heap—demoted to territory off the beaten path as far as finding talent was concerned.

  “I definitely didn’t do that,” Liam assured her. To prove it, he dug out his phone and glanced at its screen before holding it up for Whitney to view. “See?”

  She saw, all right. Saw that there was no message across the front of the screen announcing a missed call or a missed text communication.

  “I see,” she acknowledged quietly, frustration bubbling up in her voice.

  “Don’t worry,” Liam told her. “Mick’ll come through. He always has before. No reason to think he won’t this time.” And then he grinned his lopsided grin as the door to the diner opened and Mick wa
lked in. “Speak of the devil,” Liam said with a laugh. “Mick, over here,” he called out, raising his hand in the air to attract the mechanic’s attention.

  Standing just a little past the threshold, Mick was scanning the diner’s occupants. When he saw Liam waving his hand, Mick’s lips parted in what could be viewed as an attempted smile, the kind that made small children and smaller dogs uneasy because the expression looked more like a grimace than an actual smile.

  Waving back, Mick quickly crossed to the table at the rear of the diner.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d still be here,” the mechanic blurted out as he approached them.

  Once at the table, instead of sitting down, he remained on his feet, as if he felt that he might have to dash off at any moment.

  At any other time, Whitney might have attempted to indulge in a little small talk, just to be polite. But at this point, she felt as if her nerves had been stretched out to their full limit—plus 10 percent more. She desperately wanted to be on her way, so she made no comment on the mechanic’s statement.

  Instead, she got right down to business and asked, “How’s my car?” Before he could respond, Whitney forced herself to ask another question, which she realized should have come first. “Did you get it down out of the tree?”

  “Oh, yeah, we got it down,” Mick told her with conviction.

  She wasn’t sure that she was comfortable about his tone of voice. “And the car’s in one piece?” she pressed.

  Her heart was speeding up a little as she braced herself—for what she wasn’t altogether sure, only that whatever it would be, something told her that it wouldn’t be good.

  “Pretty much,” Mick acknowledged. “One of the headlights is smashed, but that’s no big deal.”

  Liam read between the lines. “What is a big deal?” he asked, well versed in “Mick-speak.” The man was hiding something.

  Mick began slowly, working up to what he assumed the woman would think was the bad part. “Well, the engine’s flooded—I mean really flooded, so it’s gonna take some time to dry out.”

  “What else?” Liam prodded.