Downhome Darlin' & The Best Man Switch

by Victoria Pade

  “It’s too late, Bill.”

  “It can’t be. Not after all the years we’ve known each other. Not after everything—”

  “It’s too late.”

  “You don’t mean that. You’re just mad. I understand that But we can work through it. You can have your mad for a while, and I’ll jump through some hoops to make amends and we can—”

  “No, I’m not just mad. I’m not mad at all. In fact, in a way, I’m glad this happened. Certainly I’m glad it happened before we were married. But I don’t want to turn back the clock. Or start over with you.”

  “Come on, Ab,” he wheedled as if she were just playing hard to get and he was losing his patience for it.

  She shook her head. “No, Bill.”

  “Then it’s true,” he sneered at her suddenly. “My brother picked me up at the airport and he said rumor had it that you’ve been hanging around that shiftless, no-good, redneck cowboy who won the old Peterson place in a poker game.”

  “Shiftless, no-good, redneck cowboy?” she repeated, laughing slightly at the derogatory description of Cal. It was yet another of Bill’s categorizations—Cal was the shiftless, no-good, redneck cowboy and she was shy, quiet, steady, predictable and provincial. For a fleeting moment she wondered what tags Bill might put on himself.

  Then he broke into her musings. “Do you think he’ll be faithful to you? Because you’re kidding yourself if you do. Love ‘em and leave ’em—that’s what guys like him do. That’s what he did to Cissy Carlisle and who knows how many before her—you’ve heard the talk the same as I have. And he’ll do it to you, too.”

  Abby may have contemplated that same thing herself, but the way her former fiancé said it made her bristle anyway. “Maybe. But what I’ve been thinking is that the love part of it might be worth experiencing anyway. Which is more than I can say for what I had with you.”

  Bill drew himself up in what looked like righteous indignation, as if that simple statement were more out of line than anything he’d done or said.

  But at that point Abby didn’t care one way or another if she’d made him angry. She just wanted him to leave so she could get home to dress for her evening with Cal.

  “He’ll make you a lot sorrier than I ever did,” Bill shouted.

  Abby considered saying that that wasn’t possible but refrained. She wasn’t interested in slinging any more arrows. Instead she said, “I’ll take my chances.”

  “You weren’t enough woman to keep me around. You’ll never keep a guy like him.”

  “I think you should just go now, Bill. We’ve said all we need to.”

  He didn’t budge. “You’ll come running back to me. We both know it. Only I might not be waiting.”

  “Goodbye, Bill.”

  “He’ll ruin you!” her former fiancé shouted again.

  Cal had already ruined her for the likes of this man. And she was only glad of that.

  But Abby merely said, “Please leave now.”

  Her former fiancé still stood there, sputtering for a few minutes before he finally turned around and stormed out of the bakery, slamming the door so hard the bell above it clattered even after he was out of sight.

  Abby took a deep breath, rounded the corner, turned the Closed sign and locked up.

  But as she did, her former fiancé’s words haunted her, reinforcing every self-doubt she’d had since meeting Cal. Every concern that he was only toying with her. That there couldn’t be any kind of future for them.

  But she’d spent the whole day looking forward to this date tonight and she reminded herself that she’d already decided to indulge in the moment’s rapture even if that was all she was going to get.

  “Don’t let Bill Snot-grass wreck it,” she advised out loud as she headed for the kitchen to finish what she’d been doing so she could go home.

  And since it seemed like good advice, she took it.

  AFTER A FAST DRIVE HOME, a shower and a shampoo, Abby scrunched her hair into a mass of full curls, applied a scant touch of mascara, blush and lip gloss and lightly spritzed herself with a perfume that smelled like a field of wildflowers. Then she put on a short-sleeved denim dress that buttoned from a deep-V shawl-collar neckline through body-hugging princess seams to midway down a full skirt that ended at her ankles.

  The whole time she was getting ready for her date with Cal she tried not to think about Bill Snodgrass or any of what he’d said to her. But the thoughts kept following her around anyway.

  It was good to realize that her feelings for Bill were not as strong as she’d thought they were. That the truth was, what she’d felt for Bill was more the kind of love a person had for a brother than for the man she married.

  What didn’t help was that a big portion of what proved that to her came in comparing not only the way Cal and Bill looked, but also in the way she felt about the two men. It served to open her eyes to the fact that she had never had an overwhelming passion for her former fiancé, the way she did for Cal. That never had she experienced what was running rampant through her now.

  In fact it suddenly occurred to her that what she was experiencing now could well be the kind of love she should have had for Bill.

  Which made what she was indulging in with Cal all the more dangerous. Because there was the potential to be hurt more by him and by this relationship not working out than she’d been hurt before by Bill’s rejection. And that was no laughing matter.

  Yet as she heard the Corvette pull up out front and glanced once more in the mirror, her desire to be with Cal couldn’t be daunted.

  Maybe she was being shortsighted and foolish, but the end of what she and Cal were sharing now seemed like something too far in the future to be concerned with at that moment. And she just couldn’t let the possibility of future pain take away the pleasure of the present, any more than she could let the past do it.

  “So you really are going to play with fire,” she said to her reflection, confirming an earlier thought she’d had about having anything to do with Cal Ketchum.

  As if in answer, into her mind flashed the memory of being with him on the football field during the middle of the night. Of his kiss. Of being held by him. Touched by him. Of wanting him to make love to her.

  Oh, yeah, she was going to play with fire, she thought. But at least she was doing it with her eyes wide-open.

  “Maybe forewarned is forearmed,” she muttered, hoping that when the end came she’d be bolstered for it.

  But whether or not she was, as the doorbell rang she knew it didn’t matter.

  Ahead of her lay an evening with Cal.

  And nothing was going to stop her from enjoying it.

  He was standing outside the screen when Abby went down the stairs. He was dressed all in black—black boots, black jeans and a black Western shirt with white pearl snaps forming a line from his narrow waist up the widening grandeur of his chest to the solid column of his neck.

  His oh-so-handsome face was clean shaved, his hair shone with freshly washed bittersweet-chocolate highlights and, as she reached the screen, she caught a whiff of that aftershave she’d spilled on herself once upon a time. It made her knees weak. He made her knees weak as he let his gaze do a slow roll from the top of her head all the way to her toes and back again.

  By the time eyes the color of a clear lake on a summer’s day settled on her face, they were glistening with appreciation.

  “All this for me?”

  All this and honeymoon underwear, too...

  “What? This old thing?” she joked of the dress she’d just bought on her lunch hour.

  “You’ll make my franks-and-beans dinner look shabby,” he said, pushing open the screen for her to join him on the front porch.

  “Franks and beans?” she asked, not sure if he was teasing or warning her.

  He just smiled and swept his arm in the direction of the black car at the curb, leaving her wondering. Not that it mattered. She’d eat just about anything if she could sit across from him to d
o it.

  Once they were on their way to his house, he glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Get any sleep last night?”

  Being turned on and left unsatisned—again—made for a prickly bed. “Some,” Abby answered vaguely. “How about you?”

  “Some,” he responded just as vaguely but with a half grin that said he’d suffered the same problem and not found much rest himself. Then he said, “So now that I have you on this official date, how about we make another one for Saturday night?” he said as he drove smoothly out of town toward his property.

  Abby looked at him curiously. “What if this one turns out badly? It’s only just begun, you know. You might not want a second.”

  “Don’t kid yourself,” he said with a suggestive undertone to his voice.

  “What’s Saturday night?”

  “My sister and brothers should all be in by then, and I’d like you to meet everybody. Give ‘em a face to go with the name I’ve been bandyin’ about.”

  He wanted her to meet his family. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Bill! she thought as a warm wave washed through her. “I’d like that.”

  “Even if I serve you franks and beans tonight?”

  “Even then. And how have you been bandying my name about?”

  “Just lettin’ ’em know what I’m up to.”

  “What are you up to?”

  With a sly glance at her out of the corner of his eye again, he said, “Enjoyin’ myself. I keep tellin’ you—and everybody else—that. I’m just up to enjoyin’ myself.”

  He turned onto the private road that led to his house, grinning like a Cheshire cat. But he didn’t say any more as he hit the gas hard and went up the driveway fast enough to spew dirt and gravel out from behind them like a dust storm.

  He hit the brakes at just the right moment as they drew near the house, spinning the car into a half turn that ended with them stopped as neatly in front of the porch steps as if he’d parked with care. Then he hoisted himself exuberantly out of the car without opening the door and came around to her side.

  It all had the feel of someone anxious to get this evening under way, to be alone with her in the privacy of his home.

  As anxious as Abby was for those same things.

  “Drive like that in town and you’ll be the first person in five years to see the inside of Clangton’s jail,” she cautioned as he opened her door.

  “But nobody can touch me on my own land. Unless I want ’em to,” he said with a suggestive wiggle of his eyebrows.

  He ushered her inside then.

  She got as far as the foyer and paused to look around—unlike the last time she was there when she’d been in such a hurry to leave that she hadn’t so much as caught a glimpse of what she was running through.

  The stairs she’d fled down before were straight across from the front door. To her left were double doors that opened to an empty room no doubt intended to be a den or formal library since all the walls were lined with bookshelves. Beside the staircase was a long, long hall with several other doors opening off it, ending at a swinging door that was ajar enough to see the kitchen beyond that.

  To Abby’s right was a huge formal living room with a stone fireplace big enough for a grown man to step into and stand erect. That room held dozens of oversize, fluffy pillows on the floor around an overturned egg crate set with two plates, napkins and silverware. On every flat surface that could accommodate them were candles waiting to be lit, and floating up among the rafters of a vaulted ceiling were lustrous black, white, silver and gold metallic balloons like clusters of pearls.

  “You don’t have any furniture,” she said to hide the appeal she found in what was a very inviting, imaginative and sensuous setting in which to eat.

  “The house needs so much work I figured it was easier to leave it empty until I get it into shape. Do you mind eatin’ your beans and franks on an old crate?”

  “Seems appropriate,” she answered, beginning to believe him.

  “Come on out to the kitchen so I can get things goin’ and pour us some wine. Then I’ll give you the nickel tour of the place—or maybe you’ve already seen it in one of its other incarnations.”

  “Actually, no, I haven’t. It’s been vacant, locked up tight as a drum and off-limits except for the two years it was an unsuccessful dude ranch. And I was in college during those two years, so I’ve never had the chance to go through the house. I’d like to see it.”

  “Great.”

  He led the way down the hall beside the stairs to an enormous kitchen with outdated appliances, oak cupboards in need of polishing and little else other than a butcher’s block in the center of a U-shaped work space. There was room enough for a table and chairs at the other end of the kitchen, but yellowed linoleum was left bare there.

  The kitchen had plenty of light, though, from three sets of French doors that all opened onto a back patio where weeds and grass had grown through the cracks between the glazed Mexican flagstones that made up the patio floor.

  As promised, Cal poured wine into two crystal goblets, handed one to Abby, then took a tray with three foil-wrapped bundles from the refrigerator and carried it out to a big brick barbecue where hot coals already glowed.

  “That doesn’t look like franks and beans,” she observed when he’d set the foil bundles on the grill and returned to the kitchen.

  Cal only smiled, picked up his wine and began his tour of the rest of the house.

  The place was very large, but not terribly sophisticated. Also on the lower level was a dining room that would probably seat thirty people comfortably, a room Cal used as an office—which explained the floor being strewed with blueprints of the house and outbuildings. The remainder of the main floor featured two bathrooms, a laundry room, a mudroom and a large game room where dartboards hung on the walls and a pool table sat beneath a long, narrow Tiffany lamp hanging from chains from the ceiling—holdovers from the dude-ranch days, Cal informed her.

  Upstairs there were five bedrooms, all complete with their own baths and some with smaller rooms connected only to them that could either be sitting rooms or nurseries.

  On both levels there were signs of disrepair. Peeling paint. Chipped moldings, sills and door frames. Torn carpets or scuffed hardwood floors. Dangling light fixtures. Drooping drapes or no window coverings at all. Cracked switch plates. Doors off their hinges. Bathroom tiles missing altogether. Tom screens. And any number of other bits and pieces in need of repair or replacement.

  There was no doubt about it—the house needed a lot of work. But from what Cal described of his plans as he showed her around, it had the potential to be a beautiful home.

  And he had plenty of plans. For the house. For the outbuildings he pointed to through upstairs windows. For adding to the land he already owned so he could turn the place into a working ranch again.

  His heart seemed to be in all of it. Exuberance and enthusiasm infused his voice as he talked. His eyes were alight, and even his gestures were more elaborate than anything she’d seen from him before.

  She had a vague memory of his telling her on the night they’d met that he was putting down roots here and it occurred to her that he’d been very serious about it. Deep roots that he had no intention of pulling up again.

  “Is your family staying with you or in town when they get here?” Abby asked as they finished the tour and returned to the kitchen at the same moment the timer Cal had set went off.

  “I suppose you’re asking that because there’s no furniture, but yeah, they’ll be bunkin’ here,” he answered on his way out to the patio.

  Abby watched through the French doors as he removed the foil packages from the grill and brought them inside. “Do they know they’ll be roughing it?” she asked.

  “We Ketchums have slept in worse,” he assured with a laugh. “I have some beds ordered. They’ll be delivered tomorrow. As long as my family has those, nobody’ll mind that there isn’t much in the way of anything else. If they stick around
and help with the work to whip things into shape, then we can do some shoppin’ to decorate the place and make it their home, too.”

  “Have any of them said yet if they’ll stay for good? I mean don’t they have jobs to get back to, families?”

  “Not a one of us has planted ourselves for any amount of time. Everybody could pick up without much trouble and move.”

  “And if they don’t stay to help you with the work around here?”

  “I’ll do it all myself.”

  He’d piled the wine bottle, his glass, salt and pepper and a dish of lemon wedges on the tray alongside the foil bundles, and nodded toward the living room. “Ready to eat?”

  Abby answered by going through the swinging door into the hall, then across the wide foyer into the only spot in the house other than his bedroom that was actually outfitted for use.

  Daylight was dwindling by then, and after setting the tray on the egg crate, Cal took a book of matches from his pocket and circled the room to light each of the candles. When he’d done that, the room was aglow with soft golden illumination that was multiplied by the shimmering reflections in each balloon.

  “No lamps,” he said simply as he rejoined her where she stood near the egg crate watching him.

  “This is a lot better,” she said, letting her delight show this time.

  He winked at her, smiling as broadly as a young boy happy to have pleased a girl he was trying to impress.

  Then he bent over and pulled off his cowboy boots. “If we’re gonna eat like we’re playin’ Arabian Nights, we’d better do it comfortably,” he suggested with a glimmer of mischief in his eyes.

  But so far that mischief was only in his eyes since he hadn’t even held her hand or placed a palm against her back as he’d guided her through the house. He was being a perfect gentleman. Damn him anyway...