And suddenly Ally wished herself back into that truck.
But it was too late now and all she could do was tough it out.
“How come it takes a mare in heat to get you over here for a visit?” the sultry voice kidded Jackson as she reached them.
He laughed, but Ally couldn’t tell if there was a sensual undertone to it or if she was just imagining it.
“Hello, Marilyn. How’s it going?” was all he said in answer.
“Goin’ good. Goin’ real good,” she said in a slow bedroom drawl that somehow appraised, approved and devoured him, leaving no doubt things hadn’t been nearly as good before his arrival.
“This is Ally Brooks. Ally, this is Marilyn Mercer.” He finally introduced them.
Marilyn Mercer’s gaze hung on Jackson for a long moment before it swung away to take Ally in. “Ally Brooks—the whole town’s talkin’ about you,” she said with a friendly enough smile, as if she didn’t consider her any threat at all.
“What did I do to be so interesting?”
“The mystery woman Shag Heller left part of his holdings to, finally showing her face? Why, that’s fresh fodder. And small towns live for gossip,” she informed. “We’ll all be discussin’ you until somethin’ juicier comes along.” Then her eyes slid back to Jackson and her voice turned even sultrier. “Won’t we?” she added as if the subject might come up as pillow talk between them.
And that was apparently the extent to which Marilyn Mercer was going to be distracted from him, because she acted as if the two of them were suddenly completely alone, and proceeded to flirt outrageously.
So outrageously that it was embarrassing to watch. Without saying anything—though she didn’t think either Jackson or Marilyn would mind or even notice that she’d left—Ally went to the horse trailer to watch Josh instead.
But the horse was fairly cooperative, the teenager surprisingly adept using only one arm, and Ally didn’t really have any interest in the process. Which made it difficult for her to keep her gaze from wandering back to the scene at the foot of the porch steps again and again.
Were Jackson and Marilyn Mercer more than just neighbors?
Certainly the overtures the blonde was making were not merely friendly. She was in shameless pursuit. Nearly predatory.
But what about Jackson? Was he encouraging it?
It was hard to tell. He didn’t seem to be trying to escape. And that crooked smile on his face wasn’t from pain. But did he look enamored?
Maybe.
Maybe not....
He lifted his hat then, finger-combed his hair and put it back again. At a more rakish angle.
That added a few points to the enamored column. He might not be as obvious as Marilyn Mercer, but he was flirting back, all right. With that hat of his.
Except that he also took a step away from her at the same time.
Hmm. Mixed messages? Maybe he was enjoying the strokes to his ego even though they embarrassed him a little.
Or maybe something really was going on between them and he just didn’t want it going on with Ally watching. Maybe it was something too personal and intimate to be paraded out here for her or Josh to see.
Then Ally watched him snatch a quick eyeful of the cleavage that peeked out of that V neckline, and she took it as confirmation of the latter of those possibilities.
“I think I’ll wait in the truck,” she told Josh as he closed the rear of the trailer when he had the horse settled inside. Not that she needed to explain to the boy, who went about his business in bashful silence as if she weren’t there and headed for the barn again.
Ally barely noticed the pain that shot all the way up her arm from her abused palm when she grabbed the handle to the passenger door. Or the sting of landing heavily on her rear end on the seat inside. Or the loud sound she made as she slammed the door after herself.
She just wondered how long she was going to have to sit in that hot truck after a long day of taking that man’s orders and putting up with him when she’d earned the right to go home to her daughter and a cool shower and some food to fill the ache in her stomach.
Maybe she’d honk the horn to remind Jackson Heller that he and his neighbor weren’t the only two people in the world and that he needed to get those buns of his over here, take her home and save this little tête-à-tête for a time when he could do it without an audience!
But just as her hand snaked across the cab to the wheel, she caught sight of him touching his hat brim with a two-fingered goodbye and stepping around Marilyn to come to the truck.
When he climbed in a moment later, she bit back an it’s-about-time.
What she couldn’t seem to keep herself from saying as he pulled away from the front of the property was, “So, is that a backdoor romance like you said Shag had, or a front-door one?”
Very slowly, Jackson turned his head until he was staring straight at her. “Excuse me?”
She wanted to stop herself from the course she’d tripped onto, but she seemed to have lost the ability. Instead she nodded over her shoulder at the house they were leaving behind. “Your involvement with your neighbor.”
“With Marilyn? I’m not involved with Marilyn. Though she’d like it if I was,” he added with a slight chuckle that said he was flattered if not interested. “What’s it matter to you, anyway?”
Matter? What did he mean matter? Of course it didn’t matter to her.
But that question was like a bucket of water that brought her back to her senses enough to manage an elaborate shrug and some forced calmness into her voice. “It doesn’t matter. I was just wondering if she was the woman in your life.”
He went back to watching the dirt road they were on. “No, she’s not.”
“Who is, then?”
This time he shot her one of those sidelong glances. “Well, let’s see. Women in my life...there’s Beth, of course. And Kansas. And I guess now I’d have to say you and Meggie—for the time being, anyway—wouldn’t I?”
He was teasing her. He knew exactly what she’d been asking him and he’d purposely skirted it.
But this calm, better-natured side of him was such a nice change from what she’d been dealing with all day that she didn’t mind a little teasing. In fact, it actually helped ease some of what was itching at her from the inside and let her tease back.
“What does that mean? That you’re a monk or something?”
In profile she saw his eyebrows shoot up and disappear under his hat. “A monk?” he repeated in mock affront at the very idea.
“Well, if you don’t have a lady friend...” She let that trail off into a challenge.
“Not having a particular lady friend doesn’t make me a monk.”
“So there isn’t any one particular lady friend?”
Again the glance from the corner of his eye. “Is there a reason you’re fishin’ in this pond?”
“Just curious. Back there I didn’t know whether to rescue you or give you some privacy.”
“What did you decide?” He actually grinned at her and suddenly Ally had a vivid image of what she hadn’t even noticed in her behavior before—huffing into the truck, slamming the door, nearly honking at him...
And she knew that while she may not have been conscious of what she was doing at the time, he had been.
“I...I just didn’t know what to do,” she hedged, embarrassed. And inexplicably warmed by that wide, white-toothed grin of his, too.
Once more he went back to watching his driving, but his tone turned ruminative. “There are times when I feel the need to be rescued from man-hungry females around here, all right. I like Marilyn well enough, but she can be one of the worst. Trouble is, it’ll take a whole lot more than a little door slammin’ to save my neck from her noose.”
Ally was beginning to realize that he dropped the gs at the end of his words only when he chose to. And he seemed to choose to either in anger or at moments like this when he was very nearly charming. Even if he was still goading her.
“I didn’t slam the door. It slipped,” she lied.
He laughed. And unlike the laugh she’d heard from him in response to Marilyn, this sounded more genuinely amused.
Ally liked it. Although she would have liked it better if it had also had that sensuous ring she’d thought the earlier one had had.
“I guess it would go a whole lot further in protecting me from the Marilyns of Elk Creek if I just hooked myself up with a particular lady friend, wouldn’t it?” he said reflectively.
“If you could find one who would have you,” Ally countered.
Her reward was that laugh again.
“Think that’d be hard to do, do you?”
“As mean and ornery and cantankerous as you are?” she answered, tempering the words with more of a teasing tone.
“Mean and ornery and cantankerous, am I?”
“On your good days.”
“Guess you better hope you never see a bad one.”
“With all my heart—you can bet on that.”
He chuckled at her then, a low rumbling from his chest that seemed to mingle devilish delight and enough sensuality to let her know what the real thing sounded like—not what she’d heard before with Marilyn Mercer.
That knowledge went a long way in making her feel better. In fact, it sent sparks skittering up her spine.
“Scarin’ you, am I?” he asked, clearly enjoying this.
But then, so was she. “I’m terrified,” she said with enough facetiousness to disabuse him of the notion.
“Want to take my offer to buy you out and save yourself?” he challenged, for the first time almost making it sound as if he didn’t really want her to accept it.
“I’m not that terrified.”
He laughed once more, filling the cab of his truck with a rich masculine noise that swirled around her, found its way into her pores and sluiced through her veins to make those sparks dance everywhere this time.
They’d made it home by then, and as Jackson pulled around the ranch house to the garage, Meggie came running from Hans and Marta’s place to greet her.
When he stopped the truck, Ally got out to meet her daughter without another word to Jackson.
But even as she focused on the little girl, she took with her a secret pleasure at what she’d just learned about Jackson Heller.
He could be charming.
He could be pleasant.
He could even be funny in his way.
And he didn’t have any one special lady friend that he was involved with....
* * *
“...and Mutt came home all muddy and smelly, so me ‘n’ Hans gave him a hose bath and Mutt stayed real still while I got him soaped up good and then all of a sudden he shaked and shaked and suds went everywhere on me and Hans, and Hans looked so funny and...”
While Ally stood in the spray of the shower a few minutes later, Meggie sat on the clothes hamper and regaled her with tales of her day.
Every muscle in Ally’s body ached. Her hands were a mess of raw flesh and angry blisters. And she was so exhausted she was leaning against the wall, letting the water rain over her and trying not to fall asleep standing up.
But every bit of it was worth it to her to hear her daughter chattering the way she was. Meggie was turning back into a little girl, and no amount of work or misery or fatigue was too high a price for Ally to pay for that.
“I have to wash my hair now, honey,” Ally called through the shower curtain, forcing herself to straighten away from that wall. “I won’t be able to hear you with my head under the water, so hold on a minute.”
“That’s okay. I better go downstairs and set the table for dinner anyhow.”
Ally heard the bathroom door open and close as she reached for the shampoo. The image of her daughter scurrying off to do a chore made her smile.
In the past three years Ally had jumped through hoops trying to bring Meggie out of her divorce depression. She’d gone into debt for a vacation to Disneyland and for every toy her daughter had seemed even remotely interested in. She’d taken her bike riding, camping, hiking, to every kids’ movie, museum, amusement park or entertainment that had come along. She’d gone after the job as camp cook and slopped more oatmeal and boiled more hot dogs than she hoped to see the whole rest of her life. She’d done anything and everything imaginable to brighten Meggie’s spirits.
Except given her chores to do.
Who’d have thought that would have done more good than anything?
Or that Jackson Heller, of all people—whip cracker, taskmaster and sometime nice guy—would have been the one to accomplish it?
* * *
It was still Meggie’s voice that Ally heard as she approached the kitchen half an hour later when she’d finished her shower, dressed in a pair of cutoff jean shorts and a T-shirt, and dried her hair. Only her daughter’s audience now was Jackson.
Rather than revitalizing Ally, getting cleaned up had sapped what little was left of her energy and for a moment she paused outside the door, closed her eyes and reveled in her daughter’s voice while she tried to summon the stamina to get through the evening.
What she heard surprised her.
The conversation that was going on on the other side of the door could have been one between herself and Meggie. Not only was her daughter telling the same stories, but with as much warmth and spirit and lack of inhibitions—as if she felt almost as relaxed with Jackson as she did with Ally.
And for his part, Jackson laughed in all the right places and asked just enough questions to show he was interested, to encourage her, to pave the way for Meggie to open up even more.
Gratitude to him for all of that made Ally forgive him a lot at that moment. It also made it occur to her that maybe, like his father, beneath the gruff exterior he had a pretty soft interior.
Just then she heard her daughter say in a conspiratorial voice, “Let’s set it all up before Mom comes down so she can’t say no.”
And with that Ally decided it was time to join them in the kitchen.
“Can’t say no to what?”
Meggie made the face of someone caught in the act. “Me and Jackson want to eat on the coffee table, in front of the TV tonight,” the little girl said as if the idea were already doomed.
“I can’t see the harm.” Jackson added his support.
“I usually like for us to have dinner together, at the table.”
“Oh, ple-eease,” Meggie begged. “Just this once?”
Indulging Meggie always came easier than sticking to the rules, and tonight Ally was too tired not to take the easy way out. Plus, with Jackson throwing in his encouragement, she didn’t want to be the bad guy. “I suppose it would be okay just this once.”
Marta had left them food again—meat loaf, potatoes, peas and bread—and they all took what they could carry and headed back the way Ally had just come, putting it on the square coffee table in the center of the three sofas that formed a U around the big-screen television.
It was the call of those overstuffed couches that did Ally in.
When Jackson and Meggie went for drinks, Ally eased her exhausted bones and sore posterior onto the downy cushions of one of them.
Just a little rest, she told herself. She could lay her head on the sofa back and close her eyes for only a minute while Jackson and Meggie were out of the room and then she’d feel so much better....
Ally was sure not more than a few seconds had passed when she felt her right hand being lifted gingerly from her lap.
Meggie, she thought. Meggie was probably going to pull her arm around those narrow shoulders and cuddle up to her side the way she did sometimes when they were watching television.
That would be nice. In fact it made Ally smile. But only with her eyes closed. Her lids were too heavy to raise, so she granted herself a moment’s more rest and stayed where she was, waiting to feel that tiny body against hers before she’d tell Meggie to go ahead and eat, that she’d join her and they could snuggle later.
But no tiny body curled up under her arm.
Instead a big, callused hand cradled the back of hers and four long, thick fingers began to rub something cool and smooth over her palm.
This was not Meggie.
And the realization of that fact forced Ally to drag herself from a deeper sleep than she’d thought she was in.
When she finally managed to open her eyes, it was to find Jackson sitting crossways on the couch beside her, holding her hand while he rubbed some sort of ointment on her blisters.
Without moving, Ally glanced around the room. Meggie was nowhere in sight, the coffee table that had been laden with dishes and food was now clear of everything, and she sensed that the hour was much, much later than when she’d sat down.
But she was still so weary, so weighted with the deep sleep she’d just come out of, that she couldn’t make herself do more than stay the way she was.
Of course, helping to persuade her was the fact that Jackson was concentrating on what he was doing and didn’t seem to know she was awake. And his ministrations felt so good she couldn’t resist letting them go on.
Carefully. Very carefully, he dabbed the ointment and then smoothed it around with a gentleness that amazed her.
As she basked in the slow, steady strokes, she watched him.
The man was almost too good-looking to be real there in the dim glow of a single lamp that dusted the hollows of his cheeks with shadows and gilded the chiseled crests in gold.
His features were relaxed—a state she hadn’t seen them in much since she’d arrived—and the lack of furrows in his brow only enhanced his handsomeness.
His hair was combed in a careless way that said it had seen more action from his fingers than from a comb; his mustache was neatly trimmed, and he smelled pretty terrific, too.
But more than with the way he looked, he was enrapturing her with his touch. Warm, tender, almost loving—though of course, that was a silly thought.
Finished with her right hand, he set it on her lap and picked up the other.
Ally was just tired enough to remain sleep-limp without effort, so still he wasn’t alerted to the fact that she was awake.
Cowboy's Kiss Page 9
