Читать книгу Home To Texas - Bethany Campbell - Страница 10

TARA YEARNED TO GO BACKWARD in time and start the morning over. She wished she hadn’t acted so high-handed with Grady.

True, he was a flirt, but she’d dealt with flirts before. True, he was handsome and masculine as hell. But the world was full of handsome, sexy men, especially where she’d come from in California.

Why was this one different? He’d stricken her breathless, heated her blood and shaken her thoughts. Then, because her response shamed her, she’d taken it out on him.

She had forbidden herself to have sexual urges. Some of her reasons were complex, but one was simple. In California, Burleigh Hastings had had her watched. When he learned she was here, he’d do the same. She would walk the straight and narrow path.

Grady had the air of someone who’d departed from that path long ago. He probably had a series of flings that stretched from Texas to Tasmania.

But whatever his faults, he was a demon worker. From time to time, she stole glimpses of him as she passed Del’s room.

Like a magician, Grady had spirited Del’s furniture and toys into the spare bedroom. With uncanny speed, he’d unscrewed switch plates and hardware, detached the light fixture. He taped what needed to be taped, patched what needed to be patched and covered the floor with the tarps. He did it all without wasted motion.

Tara had made it clear she wanted him to stay out of her way, and he did, almost supernaturally well. At noon, when she fixed Del lunch, Grady went out on the makeshift back porch and ate out of a paper bag, alone.

When he came in, he asked her if he could give the cookie in his lunch to Del.

Del looked at Tara, then Grady, then the cookie. Tara doubted he would take it; strangers made him bashful. But the cookie was beautiful, large and chocolate, with darker chocolate frosting, and Grady offered it with such simple generosity, that Tara found herself urging, “Go ahead, sweetie,” and Del accepted.

He bit into it, and his eyes widened. “This is good,” he said. After he finished it, he slipped off to follow Grady. This amazed Tara. She moved softly to the bedroom door and peeked inside.

Del, chocolate crumbs on his chin, was looking up at Grady with scheming interest. “Can you bring me more cookies like that?”

Grady was starting to paint the last wall. “I can try. A lady gave it to me. I’ll ask her if she’s got more. I can’t promise, though.”

“What lady?” prodded Del.

“The lady who works at my father’s house.” Grady smoothly rolled on the sky-blue color. “Her name’s Millie.”

Del frowned and pondered this. “She works for your dad—like you work for my mom?”

“That’s right, champ.”

“Do you live with your dad?” Del asked.

Tara saw Grady’s brows knit, as if he was choosing his answer carefully. “No. I don’t live with him. I’m just visiting.”

“We don’t live with my dad,” Del volunteered. “He left us for another lady. She can’t make cookies, though—”

Good grief, Tara thought in humiliation, and sprang into the room to stop any further revelations. She seized her son’s sticky hand. “Del, don’t bother Mr. McKinney. Come with me.”

But Del was a child with great powers of concentration. He wasn’t about to have his line of thought derailed. “She can’t do much but lay by the swimming pool in her bik-bik-bik—”

“Bikini?” Grady supplied helpfully.

Tara wished to die, to shrivel up and blow away like the lowliest bug.

“That’s it.” Del sounded relieved. “In her biknini.”

Pretend he didn’t say that, any of it. Squeezing Del’s hand more firmly, she tried to draw him away. “Come and wash up. Then you and I and Lono’ll go for a walk.”

Del tried to tug away. “Me and Mr. McKinley are talking.”

Tara’s grip tightened. “Mr. McKinney and I. I said don’t bother him. He’s trying to work.”

“He’s no bother.” Grady seemed absorbed in his painting. He didn’t say anything else, for which Tara was grateful.

She injected false cheer into her voice. “Come on, Del. Let’s explore. We haven’t really seen much of this place.

“I don’t want to see more of this place,” Del said with a wounded expression. “I don’t like it.”

Grady turned and gave him a mild look over his shoulder. “You don’t? I did when I was a kid. I used to love this place.”

“I want to go back to California.” Del strained harder against Tara’s hold. “Texas is no good for nothing.” His heels were dug into the tarp as firmly as if he had spurs.

Tara gritted her teeth. She didn’t want to yank the boy away as if she were a tyrant. But neither did she want him rebelling against her.

Grady, drat him, came to her rescue. “California’s fine. So’s Texas. Now, why don’t you mind your mother? A walk sounds good. There’s lots of stuff to see around here.”

“Like what?” Del demanded.

“Like you can go to the creek.” Grady had stripped off his chambray work shirt and his muscles rippled under his white T-shirt. “You can see animal tracks. Coyotes. Mountain goats. Wild pigs. I used to find arrowheads in that creek. Once I found a dinosaur tooth there.”

“A dinosaur tooth?” Del’s eyes widened in fascination.

“Only once.” Grady dipped the roller in the paint. His tanned biceps flexed and his chiseled wrist moved expertly. “Still, you never know what you might find around here. Nope, you never know.”

“How big a dinosaur tooth?”

Grady paused and held out his thumb and forefinger three inches apart. “About yay big. Now. Mind your mom. Go see what you can see. Or I don’t ask the cookie lady for any more cookies.”

Del’s decision was quick. “Come on, Mom. Let’s look for dinosaur teeth.” He practically dragged her from the room.

“You probably won’t find one the first time,” Grady called after them genially. “You have to go back and look again and again.”

Tara threw him a parting look, trying to say thanks.

Grady’s dark eyes met hers. He smiled as if to say, happy hunting. I meant it. You never know what you might find around here.

ALL DINOSAUR TEETH STAYED HIDDEN. But Del did find a broken deer antler, a perfect squirrel skull, a wishbone, a small blue feather, an enormous black feather, approximately seventeen pebbles that looked as if they might be diamonds, a dead fish and a live toad.

He wanted to take everything back to show Grady. Tara said he could take all except the fish and the toad. She used the time-honored excuse that if they carried off the toad, it would miss its mother.

Lono, whose greatest passion was rodents, chased a ground squirrel, a rabbit and some sort of bounding rat. He tried to dig up a mole, barked at a garter snake and studiously avoided confronting a lone Canada goose that patrolled a section of the creek, looking possessive and militant.

All in all it was a successful walk, although Tara ended up carrying all the rocks, tied up in the scarf she’d worn. For the last hundred yards she also had to carry Del, who’d worn himself out.

Grady must have seen them from the bedroom window, for he came out to meet her. A chill haunted the air, but he’d put nothing on over the T-shirt. It was flecked with blue paint. “Hi,” was all he said to her, then took Del from her arms. Grateful, her arms aching, she let him.

He turned all his attention to Del. “What’d you find, champ?”

Del was blinking sleepily, but he tried to tell Grady of his treasures. He proudly showed the broken antler.

“Wow,” Grady breathed. “That’s a fine one. You’ll want to save that.”

Del fumbled in the pocket of his denim jacket and produced the skull. “And this. My mom says it’s a squirrel.”

“Then it must be.” Grady nodded with conviction.

“This blue feather—”

“Ah. An indigo bunting.”

“And this e-nor-mous black one—”

“Vulture. Outstanding.”

“No,” Del insisted, fighting a yawn. “It’s a eagle feather.”

“You could be right.” Grady wiped a smudge from the boy’s chin with his thumb. “Could be. Eagle.”

Del lost his fight and yawned. “And all these rocks that might have diamonds in them—”

“I used to bring those home myself. Mighty sparkly.”

“Mom says they’re not diamonds.” Del sighed. “They’re quart crystals.”

“Quartz,” Grady told him. “That’s right. That’s why they call it Crystal Creek.”

“Not diamonds?” Del sounded disappointed.

“Quartz is good, too,” Grady reassured him.

Del sighed more deeply in resignation. Then to Tara’s surprise he laid his head on Grady’s shoulder. The gesture touched her, yet it also sent a ripple of wariness through her. Del seldom trusted people this fast, and she wasn’t sure why he’d taken to this man so quickly.

But she said nothing. She shifted the scarf filled with pebbles to her other hand. The wind had loosened her hair, and she felt it blowing, untamed, around her face. Her cheeks tingled from the cool, fresh air.

Del’s eyes fluttered shut, and he fell silent, breathing deeply. She said nothing for fear of rousing him. Grady, his hair ruffled by the breeze, also stayed silent. He walked beside her as if she wasn’t there, keeping his eyes on the house.

He held Del as if he had often carried a sleeping child. They mounted the steps and she held the door open for him.

They communicated by glances, not words. She darted a look toward the hall. He nodded. She led him to her room and again met his eyes. She looked at her empty bed. So did he, and then at her again.

Too conscious that they were together in her bedroom, she nipped at her lower lip and shook her head yes. He lowered the boy to the faded bedspread. Del sighed, stirred, then sprawled, limp with sleep. His grasp on the antler weakened. It fell silently to rest beside him on the mattress. So did the two feathers, the blue and the black.

Tara picked them all up and set them on her dresser with the wrapped pebbles. She did not want to look at Grady again. She stepped out into the hall, and he followed wordlessly. She could feel him watching her.

She didn’t let herself meet his gaze. “Thanks. He was getting heavy.”

“I could tell.” His voice was low.

“I should get back to work.” She’d tried to sound brisk. Instead she sounded breathless.

“You don’t want to take off his jacket or shoes?”

“I’ll wait till he’s sound asleep.”

His hand was on the doorknob to her room. “You want this shut?”

“No.” She could hear Lono lapping thirstily from his water dish in the kitchen. “The dog will want to go in and out of the room. And I need to hear Del. Sometimes he has—bad dreams.”

“Oh.” He left the door ajar. “I’m almost finished with his bedroom. What do you want me to do now?”

I want for you and me to get out of this narrow hallway, she thought. It’s too close for comfort. She could still feel the chill from outside radiating from his body.

Uneasily she moved to the living room. “I ordered a temporary paddock and stalls.” She pointed out the window. “The hardware store delivered them, up in that meadow. Can you set things up?”

“Sure. It’s only a two-wrench job. Where do you want it?”

She moved to the table and pointed at a map. It showed the original layout of Hole in the Wall. Grady stood right behind her and looked over her shoulder. “The dude ranch had the paddocks here.” She pointed out the spot on the map. “When you walk out there, you’ll see the outline of the foundation of the stables.”

“Yes.” His breath tingled her ear, and the back of her neck prickled. The vibrations from his body no longer seemed cold, but warm.

She tried to ignore it and pointed to a second map. “This is the way the property is now. I’ve thought and thought about it. They had it right. The stable should go there.”

“Why’s it gone?” he asked, still just as close, just as disturbing.

“It didn’t suit the man who bought the place. That Fabian person. He had almost everything torn down.”

“And it’s your job to put things back together?”

Yes. She thought of her life and Del’s shaken into pieces. It’s my job to put things back together.

She put her finger on a dotted line. “The fencing goes here for the time being. The stalls here. I have our horses coming in a few weeks. I want Del to know we’re ready for his pony.”

She moved sideways, out of the almost electric aura he radiated. “So the sooner it’s done the better,” she said with more authority than she felt.

“You want to step outside and show me, just to make sure?”

She welcomed the chance to shake off the closeness of the house. His presence was too powerful; the enclosed space seemed to sing with it.

“Yes. But we’ll have to be quick. I don’t like leaving Del alone.”

“I understand.”

They both looked out the window, saw the golden leaves falling swiftly from the oaks, the elms. The sky had turned gray. He turned to her, eyed her thin jacket. “Wind’s coming up. Will you be warm enough?”

She crossed her arms, a defensive gesture. Against the growing cold? Or against him? She didn’t know. “I’ll be fine.”

“Let me get my shirt.”

She didn’t want to wait. “I’ll meet you outside,” she said.

GRADY SHRUGGED INTO HIS SHIRT and buttoned it, standing again by the same big window. He watched her striding gracefully down the slope toward the site of the old stable.

He put on his hat and went after her, leaving the dog in the house to guard the sleeping boy.

He heaved the toolbox up from the ground near the faucet, grabbed the post-hole digger out of the truck and followed her to the big plateau where she waited. The wind had grown stiffer, and although it didn’t bother him, she huddled deeper in her denim jacket.

Her hair, so severely controlled, so perfectly in place before her hike, was growing still more tousled. More strands had slipped from the silver barrette and danced, multicolored, in the breeze.

Her oval face, left so carefully uncolored by any artifice, was burnished by the cold. Her cheeks were pink, making her unusual eyes seem more vivid. Her full mouth looked riper.

He thought, I wish I had a picture of you like that. Hair like autumn, eyes gray as the clouds. Like you came right out of the clouds, part of the sky itself…

His own fancy shook him. He was not given to poeticizing. Still he looked at her and thought, Some man left you? He was a fool.

He said, “Some guy pulled down a perfectly good stable? He was a fool.”

“He wanted something else,” she said, and he wondered if the words applied to her ex-husband as well.

“I hate to see good things abused,” he said. “I hate to see them wasted.”

He studied the play of her hair in the wind, wondered what it would feel like if he touched it, then cautioned himself, Slow down, boy.

The look in her eyes grew far off, her expression stoic. “What’s done is done,” she said. “We deal with it.”

She exhaled, burrowing her hands more deeply into her pockets. “So. Let’s pace the outline of the fence. Then I’ll let you get to your job, and I’ll get to mine.”

“Sure.” He fell into step beside her. “What kind of horses have you got coming?”

“An Appaloosa.” She kept her eyes on her boots as she paced. “And a Shetland pony.”

He found this interesting; he always found horses interesting. But there were other things he wanted to know. He jerked his head in the direction of the house. “The painting. You bought all the right stuff in town. You knew what you were doing.”

The unspoken question was you’ve done this before?

He didn’t know if she’d answer, but she did. “We grew up with our folks doing it. Buying one place after another. Fixing it up. Moving on.”

He tried another angle. “Cal? You know him well?”

She gave him the briefest of sideways glances. Her smoky eyes had the strange power to fascinate and shake him at the same time.

“Yes. Well.” She seemed lost in thought for a moment. Then she looked at the sky and said, “I’m sorry I was so unfriendly to you earlier.”

The remark threw him a bit off balance. “I didn’t notice,” he lied.

“Yes, you did. You took me by surprise.”

I could say the same for you. He stole a glance at her profile, the straight nose, the long lashes and the untrammeled hair.

She stared off at the far horizon. “People will ask you what’s going on over here. What’s becoming of this property. Each of the partners has a different vision. But they’re working together. My brother’s going to establish an equestrian community. It’s part of a bigger development. All of it committed to preserving the integrity of the land. I don’t know much more than that.”

He stopped, and she stopped, too. He pulled his hat farther down over his eyes. “An equestrian community? For people who own horses?”

“Own. Or lease. People who want enough space in the country to live and have a horse or two. Or who live in Austin but want to keep horses. To have a weekend getaway and place to ride.”

“And your brother’s put you in charge of start-up?” he asked. It was a big job for a woman, especially for one recovering from a bad marriage, but Tara was not an average woman. She nodded and started walking again. “He’s played with the idea for years. So that’s the story. I oversee reconstruction on the house and lodge. We’ve got to get the stable up and running. In Austin, architects and landscape architects are planning the rest of it.”

He kept pace with her. “Do you want me to keep quiet about it? I mean, folks are bound to be curious. But it’s your business and your brother’s.”

“No. There’s no need for secrecy. People will know soon enough.” She paused, her eyes sweeping the hills, then settling on the house. “I’ve got to go now.”

“Yeah. Well. I’ll move Del’s furniture back in before I head home.”

“Thanks.” She said it without smiling. She turned from him and walked away with long, sure steps. She did not look back.

IT WAS AFTER SIX O’CLOCK, and Del, full of energy after his nap, had decided to shadow Grady. He was an interesting man who did interesting things.

He had put up almost a whole fence where no fence had been before. He could take the light fixture out of the bedroom ceiling, then put it back. He’d turned the dirty walls a clean and comforting blue. He was strong enough to move even a big dresser, and that’s what he was doing now.

“Why’d you put tape on the walls?” Del asked. “Did they have a boo-boo?” He stifled a snicker.

“You don’t fool me.” Grady shoved the bulky steel dresser into place. “That’s a joke. Ha. A pretty good one.”

“It is.” Del laughed and fell on his bed, still giggling at his own wit. “So why’d you tape them?”

“So you don’t smear paint. The brush smears the tape instead.”

Del thought about this. As he thought, he wriggled down to the end of the bed and rolled over on his back, staring upside down at Grady. “Are you going to paint the whole inside of our house?”

“If your mother wants me to.”

Del hung a little lower because he liked the funny feeling it gave him in his head. “Will you paint anything outside?”

“If she wants.”

“Will you do whatever she wants?”

“Just about. I suppose.” Grady pushed the dresser the final inch so that it was even against the walls.

“Will you come with us on a walk tomorrow?” Del was getting dizzy upside down, so he rolled over on his stomach. “Maybe you could help me find a dinosaur tooth.”

“Nope. Your mom pays me to work. Taking a walk is play.”

“It’s kind of work,” Del reasoned. “It is if you walk so far you get tired.”

His mother came into the room. She carried his Buzz Lightyear curtains, hanging on the rods. “Infinity and beyond!” Del intoned Buzz’s motto and stretched out his arms, wriggling his fingers. Grady straightened up and wiped his face on his forearm.

Del looked up at him. “What’s infinity? And what’s beyond it?”

“Mmm,” said Grady. “Good question. Ask your mother.”

His mother gave Grady a funny look. Del sat up on the unmade bed. “Mom, what’s infinity? What’s beyond it?”