Good Time Girl

by Candace Schuler

  He grinned evilly, but she was too agitated to notice. “Said he wanted to make sure I hadn’t introduced his boys to some loose woman who’d exert a corrupting influence on their developing psyches.”

  “I’d say it’s probably too late to be worried about that, since we’ve already been introduced,” Roxanne said. The words were nonchalant, but her palms were sweating.

  She had a pretty good idea of what the Padre would see when he looked at her. Tight jeans, red boots, a snug little eyelet camisole top with too much cleavage showing for the middle of the day, topped by a deliberately tangled mop of flyaway blond hair. And the nails, she thought, catching sight of them as she rubbed her damp palms up and down her jeans-covered thighs. Let’s not forget the man-killer nails. He was going to think she was some kind of Jezebel, for sure.

  “You scared?” Tom said.

  “Scared? Me?” She lifted her chin. “Of course not.”

  But she was. Scared to death. She’d built up an image of him in her mind. This saintly man they all called the Padre. This selfless paragon of virtue who had studied for the priesthood, then gave it up to minister to lost boys instead. She kept picturing someone like the late Spencer Tracy in his priestly garb in the movie Boys Town or, even scarier, Charlton Heston in any one of his biblical epics, stern and condemning and regal.

  Instead, she found a grizzled old lion of a man in a faded green hospital gown, a little plastic bracelet around his left wrist. His hair was thick and dark, heavily sprinkled with gray. His face was brown and leathered with age, sagging a bit at the jowls, but still strong and craggily handsome in a patriarchal kind of way. He looked a little tired, a little frail, even to someone like Roxanne, who was unfamiliar with his normal appearance. He was leaning back against the sharply elevated head of the hospital bed, drinking a Dr Pepper through a straw, and carrying on a quiet conversation with a very attractive woman sitting in the visitor’s chair in front of the window.

  Tom checked in the doorway, as if in surprise, then dropped Roxanne’s hand and hurried forward. “Hello, Mom,” he said, bending down to kiss the woman’s smooth cheek. “I didn’t realize you were in town. How are you?”

  Mom? This lovely, soft-eyed woman, who didn’t look more than forty years old, was Tom’s mother? What kind of setup was this? Not only was she going to meet the man who was, to all intents and purposes, her lover’s father, but now she had to face his mother, too? Was she being checked out? Roxanne wondered, resisting the urge to tug the front of her camisole a little higher on her chest. Were they going to gang up and warn her away before she could corrupt their darling boy? She lifted her chin, determined to brazen it out.

  And rather enjoying the prospect, too, she realized. She’d never been warned away before. It made her feel like a dangerous woman. She’d never felt like a dangerous woman before. It was kind of exhilarating.

  “I had no idea what had happened until Hector called me himself last night,” Tom’s mother was saying plaintively. “I wish someone had thought to let me know sooner.” She looked up at Tom, her expression gently reproachful. “I would have gotten one of other nurses to take my shift at the hospital and come immediately.”

  “Now, now, Molly, don’t fret,” soothed the Padre. “There was no need for you to be here any sooner. There was nothing you could have done, except sit around and wait like everyone else. It’s much better that you’re here now, so we can visit. And isn’t it nice that Tom’s brought his new friend so you get a chance to meet her, too?”

  He turned suddenly, his gaze pinning Roxanne where she stood, still hovering in the doorway. His eyes were brown and alive and knowing. His teeth, when he smiled at her, were strong and white, more than capable of taking a bite out of anything that got in his way.

  “Come on over here, girl,” he said, and held out his hand, motioning her forward with an imperious flick of his fingers, reminding her, suddenly, of Charlton Heston at his most imposing biblical best. This man, too, could have parted the Red Sea with a flick of his hand, even lying on his back in a hospital bed. “Let’s have a look at you.”

  Roxanne crossed the room and put her hand in his. His grip was warm and firm. “Well, introduce us,” he said to Tom, without taking his eyes off Roxanne.

  She held his gaze steadily, without flinching, the same way she’d held Tom’s at Ed Earl’s in Lubbock. Her chin was elevated, her eyes full of silent challenge and bravado. No way were they going to see her sweat.

  The Padre chuckled approvingly.

  Tom couldn’t hide the surge of pride he felt. “Mom. Padre. I’d like you both to meet Roxy Archer. Roxy, this is my mother, Molly Steele. And this—” the pride showed through, here, too “—is Hector Menendez. Better known as the Padre.”

  “Ms. Steele,” Roxanne said crisply, dipping her head in her best finishing school fashion, as if she were standing there clad in a demure linen shift and graduated pearls instead of blue jeans and dusty red boots. “Mr. Menendez. A pleasure to meet you both.”

  “No need to stand on ceremony with me, girl. You can call me Padre like everybody else does around here. Sit yourself down—” he tugged on her hand “—right there on the edge of the bed is fine. You won’t hurt me—and tell us about yourself. Tom, here, has been pretty scant on the details. How’d you two meet?”

  Roxanne flicked a glance at Tom, silently asking for directions.

  He smiled back blandly, leaving it up to her.

  “I picked him up in Ed Earl’s Polynesian Dance Palace in Lubbock after the rodeo,” she said, letting them make of it what they would.

  Molly Steele pursed her lips disapprovingly.

  The Padre looked as if he were turning over her answer in his mind, reserving judgment until he knew more.

  “Anything else you’d like to know?” she said to him, with the air of a smart-ass child pretending to be helpful.

  “Well—” his dark eyes twinkled “—what do you do with yourself when you’re not chasing cowboys?”

  Tom smothered a laugh.

  “Hector, really! What kind of a question is that?” chided Tom’s mother.

  “It’s a perfectly legitimate question. I want to know what she does. Girl’s a grown woman. She must have something that keeps her busy. She can’t chase cowboys all day, can she?”

  “I’m a teacher,” Roxanne said.

  “A teacher!” That was Tom, expressing his surprise.

  “And for the record,” she said, ignoring him in favor of addressing her remarks to the man in the hospital bed. “I’ve only chased one cowboy.” She paused for effect. “So far,” she said, and batted her lashes flirtatiously, blatantly intimating that she might be persuaded to broaden her horizons for him.

  The Padre wheezed out what lately passed for his version of a laugh. “Girl’s a real firecracker,” he said, slapping his knee through the bedclothes. “Just like Rooster said.”

  “Where do you teach?” Tom said quietly, drawing her attention back to him.

  “St. Catherine’s Academy in Stamford, Connecticut. It’s a fully accredited private school,” she said, in case he doubted it. “Kindergarten through twelfth, both boarders and day students. I teach fifth grade English Lit and Latin.”

  “That where you’re from?” the Padre asked. “Connecticut?”

  “Born and raised.”

  “Got family there?”

  “My parents and three brothers. One older and two younger,” she said before he could ask. “A sister-in-law and two nieces, with another on the way.”

  “Any beaus?”

  “Dozens,” she lied.

  “Then what in blazes are you doing down here in Texas?”

  “Why, I thought you knew—” she slipped into her cornpone-and-molasses accent “—I’m down here chasin’ cowboys on my summer vacation.” She batted her eyelashes again, tilting her chin down so she could look up at him through her lashes. “You interested, sugar?”

  The Padre wheezed delightedly.

  ROXA
NNE WAITED until she and Tom were in the truck and on their way back to the Second Chance before she pounced. “Well, that was a nice little ambush you arranged.”

  Tom cast a wary glance at her out of the corner of his eye. “Ambush?”

  “You didn’t tell me your mother was going to be there.”

  “Because I didn’t know she was going to be there.”

  Roxanne uttered an inelegant little snort. “Uh-huh.”

  “I swear, it was as much a surprise to me as it was to you. The last time my mother was in Bowie was when I had that concussion a year ago last May.”

  “Are you saying she only comes to visit when someone is sick?”

  “Yeah, I guess that about sums it up,” Tom conceded. “Since she left, nothing much less than a medical emergency will get her to set foot in Bowie.”

  “Not your birthday? Thanksgiving? Christmas?”

  “Oh, my birthday, sure, when I was a kid. And holidays, too, sometimes, when she could get off work. After I got old enough to drive, though, I’d usually go to Dallas to see her. It’s easier on everybody that way.”

  “Everybody who?”

  “My mother, mostly,” he admitted. “Bowie doesn’t have a lot of good memories for her.”

  “It has you,” she said, beginning to form a very poor opinion of Tom’s mother.

  It was one thing to turn him over to the care of someone who could do a better job of raising him. It was quite another to abandon him entirely to that someone else’s care, even if that someone was the Padre. A child needed to know his mother loved him.

  Tom took his eyes off the road a minute to look at her. “Don’t make it into something tragic, Slim. It isn’t. She did what she had to do, for her and for me, and we’re both okay with that. She just hates it here, is all.” He reached over and patted her thigh. “And I’m okay with that, too.”

  “I’ll tell you something else she hates,” Roxanne said. “Me.”

  He flicked another glance at her. “What makes you say a thing like that?”

  “Oh, please.” Roxanne rolled her eyes. “She thinks I’m a loose woman out to snag her baby boy and she doesn’t like it—or me—one little bit.”

  Tom shook his head. “You must have misunderstood something she said.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t anything she said. Not directly. It was more the way she looked at me. As if I had just strolled in off of the street.”

  He reached sideways and placed his palm on her forehead. “You feverish?”

  “I’m serious.” She grabbed his hand between both of hers. “Your mother thinks I’m going to corrupt you. So—” she brought his hand to her mouth and sucked his index finger inside, and pulled it out, very slowly “—how am I doing?” she said, and grinned at him.

  12

  TWO DAYS LATER—fully three days ahead of schedule and against his doctor’s advice—the Padre checked himself out of the hospital and demanded to be taken home. Tom agreed to the plan only if a nurse came with him and stayed for what would have been the remaining three days of a standard hospital stay for a triple by-pass patient. The Padre grumbled, declaring his boys could provide all the care he needed, but Tom was adamant and the nurse and her equipment were bundled into the truck for the ride to Second Chance.

  And Roxanne, against all her better judgment and the resolutions she made in the middle of the night after Tom left her to sneak back to his own bed before the boys woke up, was still there. Since it would be churlish to leave before the Padre’s welcome home party—planned for three days hence, when he would have returned to the Second Chance had he been inclined to follow doctor’s orders—she decided to stay for just that much longer. Besides, Rooster would be there for the party, too, flush with his success in Cheyenne and Wichita and Oklahoma City, and she wanted to say goodbye to him before she left. They’d gotten to be good friends on those long rides between rodeos. She owed him a personal goodbye.

  But then she was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt, leaving.

  She’d gotten what she came for, after all. She’d found her good-looking dangerous cowboy and had her Wild West adventure. It was time to bow out, to retreat with good grace, while the Welcome mat was still out. She didn’t want to wait around until the end, to see him wondering when she was going to pack up and go so he could get on with the nice little life he had planned for himself. She didn’t want to wait until he had—God forbid—“gotten his fill of her.” She wanted to leave while she could still see the want in his eyes, while that nice little life full of kids and cows—and the wife, let’s not forget the wife, she told herself sternly—was still only something he was thinking about as a part of his future.

  She wasn’t going to be heart-whole when she left—any possibility of that had disappeared somewhere on the road between one rodeo and the next—but she was going to go in style, with her head held high and her dignity intact.

  It helped, a little, that the only place for the Padre’s nurse to bunk while she was at the Second Chance was up in the little attic room with Roxanne. It cut down considerably on the opportunity for her to dissolve into undignified tears and declare her undying love to a man who, by no stretch of her imagination, wanted to hear those words from the woman who was his “last fling.”

  She’d come dangerously close a couple of times, up in that little attic room in the middle of the night. The sex was sweeter between them in that room, more gentle and tender. Maybe it was the narrow bed, which limited their more wild sexual antics, or the need to be quiet so as not to alert the boys to what was going on over their heads. Maybe it was the fact that he got up and left her when the loving was over that made her want to cling and cry. Whatever it was, the room was dangerous.

  Since the nurse had been sharing it with her, though, they’d had to rely on quickies at odd times and out-of-the-way places, which neatly precluded the trappings of romance that weakened her resolve. Roxanne had approached the lack of privacy with a positive attitude, seeing it as both safeguard against embarrassing confessions and an opportunity to fulfill as many of her remaining sexual fantasies as possible and store up memories for what was sure to be the coming sexual drought.

  “WAIT, WAIT—” she was panting and wet, her jeans and panties on the floor of the truck, her blouse and bra pushed up around her neck, trying to maneuver so she could straddle his lap “—the steering wheel is in the way.”

  Without removing his mouth from her breast, he shifted position, edging over into the passenger side of the cab, and cupped his hands around the backs of her bare thighs to guide her legs to either side of his.

  “Now the gearshift is in the way,” she moaned.

  “That’s not the gearshift,” he said, and slid into her.

  “STOP IT!” She giggled and slapped at his hands, trying to wriggle away as he burrowed down the front of her jeans. Since he had her pressed up against the wall in the tack room, she couldn’t wriggle very far. And she wasn’t trying very hard. “Stop it right now,” she said again, sucking in her stomach to make it easier for him to find what he was searching for. “I think someone’s coming.”

  “That’d be you,” he said, as he found the swollen little nubbin between her legs and began to massage it.

  “GOOD GOD ALMIGHTY, woman! You’re going to get us killed.”

  She raised her head from his lap, peering up at him through a tangle of hair. “Do you want me to stop?” she asked, and ran her tongue up the length of his rock-hard penis as if it were a great big peppermint stick. “I’ll stop if you want me to.”

  “No, don’t stop.” He clutched the steering wheel in his fists, struggling manfully to keep his attention on the road while she drove him over the edge with her hot mouth and clever little tongue. “Don’t stop.”

  AND THEN, suddenly, before she was ready for it, the day of the party dawned, bright and hot and sunny, and she realized her Wild West adventure was just about over. Roxanne almost cried, then, as she lay there, staring at the whitewashed ceiling
, but the presence of the nurse in the other bed saved her again. She blinked the tears back and got up, determined to enjoy what was going to be her last day with her good-looking dangerous cowboy. One more day—and one more night—that’s all she had, all she was going to allow herself.

  And she was determined to make it the best night of her life.

  And his.

  THE PROPOSED PARTY had somehow evolved from a simple welcome home potluck supper with a few close friends into a lavish barbecue that apparently included everyone in the entire county, and the kitchen was a beehive of activity when Roxanne finally made her way downstairs. Jo Beth and her mother, as the official hostesses of the event, were already there, overseeing the food preparation. So was Tom’s mother, Molly Steele. Apparently, she had decided to lift her ban on Bowie, except in cases of emergency. Although, in Ms. Steele’s mind, anyway, Roxanne was pretty sure she qualified as such. So maybe the ban hadn’t been lifted, after all.

  The three women were working together in the big, old-fashioned kitchen, a companionable trio with no room for a fourth—especially a fourth with man-killer red nails, questionable morals and possible designs on one of the most eligible bachelors in town.

  “Can I do anything to help?” Roxanne asked, even though she already knew what the answer would be. There was no way any of the three women was going to allow her to show off whatever culinary expertise she might possess if Tom Steele was anywhere in the vicinity.

  “We’ve about got it covered in here,” Mrs. Jensen said. “They might need some help out back, though, getting the picnic tables set up and into position.”

  Which meant, Roxanne knew, that Tom was either in the front yard, doing whatever needed to be done out there or, more likely, down at main corral, seeing that the arrangements for the junior rodeo were progressing apace. Molly Steele and Jo Beth Jensen weren’t the only women who were set on bringing Tom into the Jensen family fold.