by Sharon Sala
Case grinned as he answered.
“It’s kind of an annual tradition. Neighbors come bringing everything good to eat and I furnish the meat. Duff, my foreman, is an expert when it comes to outdoor cooking. Usually we help him with the calf fries, but the side of beef is his priority.”
“Calf fries?” Lily hadn’t heard the term before but the answer she received did nothing to assure her that she was ever going to let a morsel of it pass her lips.
“You mean you eat...you cook what was...people actually want to eat what was once...” laughter was rising around the table as she continued in shocked horror. “...the reproductive organs of poor unfortunate animals?” Lily gasped and pressed her fingers to her lips.
“Oh God! Lily, you’re priceless.” Case couldn’t contain his mirth. “That’s the most ladylike description I ever heard put to...”
Lily interrupted him before he could finish.
“I don’t eat such things, and I can’t imagine anyone else doing so either.” Her indignation was rising.
Case leaned back in his chair in full view of everyone in the restaurant and let a full belly laugh flow forth. He couldn’t help it. His L.A. woman was suddenly out of her depth in more ways than one.
“Remember when I was afraid you’d feed my men sunflower seeds?” Case said, trying to pull himself together. “Well, why don’t you just look at calf fries as...hamburger seeds? After all, if they’d stayed where nature intended, somewhere down the road they’d have been responsible for hamburger. What do you think?”
“I think you’re all full of bull,” Lily said distinctly, as she rose and excused herself from the table. “And I think I should go powder something...or,” she mumbled as she walked away from the table, “take a powder. It might be safer. I’m definitely outnumbered tonight.”
* * *
The next few days saw increased activity as the roundup got back in full swing and preparations for the barbecue began. Lily was relieved that the night would amount to an evening off for her. She didn’t have the usual mountain of food to prepare, only some fruit pies as her contribution to the buffet. She’d refused point-blank to have anything to do with cooking the small, oval, milky-white slices that would ultimately result in the famous calf fries.
Just remembering their origin made her wince. Poor animals! It did no good to listen to Case’s patient explanations about the futility of having too many bulls on the same ranch and the dangers of inbreeding that could result. It just wasn’t something she was comfortable discussing. Now if they’d wanted to discuss the stock market instead of the beef market, she’d have been more confident. But she was in the wrong place and the wrong state for such matters. Oklahoma was definitely more than a state of the union, it was a state of mind.
“Lilleee!” Buddy’s bawl echoed down the long staircase and throughout the downstairs area with persistent pathos.
She rolled her eyes, dusted the flour from her hands, and eyed the fruit pies. They were at a safe stage to leave for a few minutes. From the sound of her brother’s call, he was in some sort of difficulty. However, with Buddy, it wasn’t always easy to tell.
She started through the wide, spacious downstairs, letting her eyes feast on the old-fashioned, almost Victorian look the house wore and knew that nothing had been changed or redecorated since Case was a child. But she liked it. It was always clean, open and inviting, and she wished she had an excuse to venture through it more often. Case had a professional cleaning crew who came weekly. They did their job, stayed out of Lily’s way when she was busy, and disappeared as quietly as they appeared.
At first the presence of two men and one woman who moved throughout the house in their crisp green coveralls like garden shadows was disconcerting. But now she took them as a matter of course and was grateful for the fact that all she had to do was cook. The house was enormous and almost more than one person could have managed. It was a shame that Case lived in it alone.
“Lilleee!” Buddy repeated, only louder and longer.
She took the stairs in double-time.
“Coming,” she called, and met him ambling out of his room with a shirt in one hand and a string tie in the other.
“What’s wrong now?” she asked with a grin, as her beloved Buddy shoved both objects toward her with a panicked look on his face.
“The top button is off, and I don’t know how to tie this tie.”
“Lord love a duck, Buddy. I thought you were being killed or something.”
Buddy grinned helplessly and shrugged.
Lily’s sigh was one of loving disgust.
Buddy was the second oldest, but the least able to cope with problems. He lived in a world of computers and machines that didn’t allow the human connection. He was a computer programmer and just shy of brilliant. But he was the least likely to ever marry. He evaded personal relationships like the plague and the only female allowed in his world was his baby sister, Lily.
“Something wrong?” Case asked, as he burst through the bathroom door with nothing on save an oversized bath towel.
Oh God! I didn’t need to see this. I know I wondered if he was brown all over, but I really didn’t want to know. Now how am I going to forget?
“Ooops,” Case grinned, and grabbed at the twist of towel at his waist, just to make sure that it was still secure. “I didn’t know you were up here, Lily. I was in the shower and heard someone yelling over the racket the water was making. Thought someone was in trouble.”
Yes, someone is in trouble now, if they weren’t before, and the someone is me, Lily thought.
“Sorry,” Buddy said. “Button off, can’t tie my tie.”
Case grinned at the look of shock Lily was wearing and then swallowed the seed of hope that burst forth as he saw something more spreading across her face. If he wasn’t dreaming, it looked a bit like interest. In fact, it might even be described as...intrigue.
“There’s needle and thread on the top of my dresser,” Case said, as he started back into the bathroom. “And a button box beside it. Help yourself, Lily. As for his tie, when he’s ready to put it on, I’ll help him. Can’t have this L.A. man out of step tonight. Too many pretty ladies coming.”
Buddy looked like he’d swallowed a worm. Women?
“Give me the darn shirt,” Lily grumbled, and yanked it out of his hand before he could think of an argument for not attending the barbecue.
Buddy ducked back into his room.
Lily let him go, but she knew it would take more than food to get him back out again. Case shouldn’t have mentioned the women. Lily knew all about Buddy’s nervousness because she felt it herself. She needed to get away from the sight of Case...and all that tan skin...those long muscular legs and arms...that damn towel...and what she couldn’t see.
She flew into his room and then stopped in midstep. She’d never been past the door, and the shock of his bed was more than she’d been prepared for. It was the biggest, tallest four-poster she’d ever seen. And the bedspread! It was black satin, and Lily had never been so entranced in her life. This dirt and no-nonsense cowboy slept beneath black satin?
Her hands were shaking as she grabbed the thread from the dresser and unwound a length from the spool before biting it from the bolt. The images that kept springing to mind did nothing to help her thread the needle she’d confiscated from the pincushion. She slipped the end of the thread into her mouth and then pulled slowly, carefully wetting the end of the fiber before trying to slide it into the tiny eye of the needle.
Case watched her look of intense concentration and growing frustration as she kept missing the eye. He couldn’t take his sight from the way she kept snaking her tongue out to catch the end of the errant thread and redampening it before trying to slide it back through the needle. My God, the thoughts that tongue evoked!
“Need any help?” he asked quietly.
Lily jumped. The needle fell to the floor and the button she was holding rolled under the dresser.
“Da
mmit,” she muttered in unladylike fashion, as she dropped to the floor on her hands and knees, retrieved the needle, and began feeling around for the button. “I wish you’d quit sneaking up on me.”
Lily felt the button about the same time she saw his bare feet and jean clad legs step up beside her. She grabbed it between her fingers, turned around and took the hand he offered as she pulled herself up. The problem she now faced was the fact that jeans were all he was wearing.
Lily was staring point-blank at the broadest, brownest chest she’d ever seen in her life. Her eyes kept trying to look upwards to Case’s face, but she couldn’t seem to get past all that bare skin.
“Find it?” he asked with a grin, knowing full well how much his presence was addling her.
“It?” Lily asked inanely.
“The button...or whatever it was you dropped,” he asked.
“Oh...button...here.”
She held it up for proof and then felt like crawling under that black-satin covered bed and never coming out again. He was laughing at her. Her hand went automatically toward her face, but the look that came in Case’s eyes warned her she should have thought before she touched.
“I told you never to hide your face from me again, didn’t I, Lily?”
She started to argue. She may as well have decided to run for president. Both were futile.
Case took the needle from one hand, the button from the other and replaced them on his dresser with overdone caution.
“No weapons,” he muttered, just before he swooped.
Lily was engulfed in warm skin, strength, and the sound of the wildest beating heart she’d ever felt against her cheek.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she managed to whisper.
“No talking,” he muttered again.
“Case?”
It was the last word Lily uttered.
He captured her hands and pulled them around behind him, coaxing her to hold on. She did, for dear life. His mouth marauded across her face until it came to her lips and fixed with precision across their softness like a drowning man searching for a pocket of air.
His body tensed, waiting for the explosion that never came. When he felt her arms wrapping around his waist, as she actually pulled herself closer against him, a low, agonized groan was all he could manage. She was kissing him back! He’d never wanted anything so much, or been so sorry he’d started something he couldn’t finish in his life. In less than an hour, people would start arriving for the barbecue, never mind the fact that Lily’s father and four brothers were just beyond his door. God in Heaven, this was going to kill him!
Case ran his hands lightly down her shoulders, letting them brush suggestively against the sides of the breasts that strained against his chest, and then he cupped the span of her waist before pulling them apart.
“You’re the first thing on my mind every morning, and the last thing every night, Lily, love. But as God is my witness, I can’t let this go any further or your family will hang me like a dog in front of all the company that’s coming.”
Lily shuddered at the ache she felt when Case released her, and ducked her head, suddenly ashamed that she’d welcomed him so openly without the slightest argument. He must think she was desperate.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
“Don’t you be sorry,” Case growled, and grabbed her hand before sliding it slowly down his belly toward the aching bulge behind his zipper. “As you can tell, I’m the one who’s sorry. But it won’t always be like this between us, Lily. Not if you’ll let me show you that some men can be trusted.”
Lily blushed, and started to snatch her hand away, when something made her hesitate. Instead she slid it back up the front of his belly to rest on the wild heart beating beneath her palm.
“Trust is not what this is about,” she said quietly. “It’s about what I see every time I look in a mirror and about the first thing you would see when you woke up with me beside you. That’s what this is about, Case.”
She turned away, carefully retrieved her needle, thread and button and her brother’s shirt, and walked out of the room without another word.
“If I ever get the chance,” Case muttered to himself as he stared at the closing door, “I think I just may have to break Todd Collins’s damn neck.”
* * *
Lily’s apprehension disappeared beneath the laughter and dust of the constant stream of people arriving and food being distributed to the various tables set up beneath the shade trees in the front yard. A hint of the cooking beef and the smoke of the hickory fire beneath it drifted through the waning heat of the day. Before long sunset would arrive and with it the welcome shadows of night that would give her some measure of security.
She and her family were introduced constantly to the people who kept coming in droves until finally Case left them to make their own introductions to the few stragglers who came late.
Lily saw several double takes toward her face, but not one snicker or unkind word drifted to her ears. It wasn’t horror, or shock, but merely a kind curiosity for the obvious tragedy she’d suffered. No one asked, and Lily didn’t offer an excuse and finally it was almost forgotten. Only now and then did Lily remember that she was branded just like those newly weaned calves still bawling in the corrals beyond the main house.
“Come and get it,” Duff bellowed, and his tiny stature disappeared in the melee that ensued.
The Brownfields were impressed by the open, friendly manner with which they were received and knew that no matter what else, Lily was definitely in the right place for her spirit to heal. They’d never met so many people who accepted them on face value.
Cole Brownfield watched with interest as even his reticent brother, Buddy, became engrossed in a conversation with a serious young woman who’d plopped down beside him to eat her meal. He was amazed. The woman must be something. Buddy wasn’t wearing his usual panicked look. If this had been a party back in L.A., Cole knew he would have already had to admit to being a police officer, watched the look of judgment come and go that always followed, and either been propositioned or ignored. Here nobody cared or judged. He was just accepted as Lily’s older brother. Or so he’d imagined until he was introduced to a little bitty piece of womanhood named Debbie Randall. With her, he’d been appraised and found wanting.
She’d enchanted Morgan, set Buddy at ease, and all but squealed with delight when she’d discovered that J.D. and Dusty were into acting. Women! It figured! She’d barely acknowledged his presence after that. And it was just fine with him. He didn’t need small, Oklahoma twister-type ladies on his heels. He had enough to deal with just worrying about his sister.
He kept one eye on the festivities, enjoying himself with the friendly banter, and the other eye on Lily who tried with little success to withdraw into shadows. Case Longren wouldn’t let her and for that, Cole was glad. He liked the big cowboy, and knew that if Lily would let it, a serious relationship could develop quite easily.
“What do you think, Dad?” Cole asked his father as Morgan wandered by in search of a refill for his quart-sized tea glass.
“I think I’ll be hunting antacid tablets about midnight, but I’ve never tasted so much good food in one place.” He grinned and patted his stomach.
“I mean about Lily,” Cole said.
Morgan turned and stared at his daughter. She was almost leaning against Case’s chest as she laughed at something Duff said, and then her laugh was stifled as one of the twins walked by and shoved a huge bite of barbecue in her mouth. The ruckus that ensued was a welcome sight. When Lily left California, she not only wouldn’t have been laughing in such a crowd, she would not have retaliated toward her brother as she had.
“I think she’s just about healed inside,” Morgan said quietly. “But I don’t know if she’s going to be able to live with the way she’s healed outside.”
“I think the man standing behind her can do it for her, Dad. When we leave, don’t give her any unnecessary words of advic
e this time. Let Lily make her own decisions without giving her any outs as to coming back and staying with us.”
Morgan turned and looked at his eldest son with a look of shock.
“Do you know what you’re saying?” he asked sharply.
“I not only know, I’m bucking for the guy,” Cole answered. “Just look at the way he watches her, Dad. If he doesn’t already love her, he’s so damn close it makes no difference.”
Morgan nodded and stared, yet he could not stop the little twinge of worry that crept into his chest. Lily had suffered so much. He couldn’t bear it if there was more to follow.
“I hear you, Cole. And I’ll follow your lead...this time. But God help the man who ever hurts Lily again.”
“You don’t have to tell me, Dad,” Cole said quietly. “I’m the one you had to stop from going to L.A. and rearranging Todd Collins’s face, remember. I don’t care how old she is, she’s still my baby sister.”
* * *
Case watched Lily slip away from the festivities and head toward the house. She hurried up the porch steps and entered the back door without looking back. He tossed his near empty plate in a trash barrel and followed just as the first strains of “Shenandoah” drifted through the air. Pete was playing his fiddle.
“Lily!” he called aloud, as he entered the kitchen.
Her quick reappearance surprised him. “What do you need?” she asked, as she entered the room carrying a lightweight jacket. “Are we out of ice? Should I make some more lemonade?”
Case stopped. “Where did you go?” he asked.
“I was getting chilly. I went to get a jacket.”
“Oh! I thought...never mind what I thought,” Case muttered. He didn’t want her to think he’d expected her to hide from all the strangers.
“What are we running out of?” Lily asked, and started toward the door.
“Patience,” came the quiet answer.
Lily blushed.
Case could see the flush spreading across her face and knew that he should resist. It was no use.
“Come here,” he urged, and wrapped Lily in his arms.
