Читать книгу Midnight Faith - Gena Dalton - Страница 11

Clint showed the Tollivers to the door when they got ready to leave, and stood on the porch talking to them for a minute. Then, as soon as they said their last goodbyes, he headed for the barn.

“Hey,” James Tolliver yelled as he wheeled his Escalade around the circle drive, “need some help with the chores?”

“No, thanks.”

Clint waved him off and kept going. If he didn’t get a few minutes alone, he was going to smother. And if he was checking the horses, his mother couldn’t fuss at him about neglecting his duties as host. After all, she was the one who had insisted on giving every hand on the Rocking M the evening off for Christmas Eve.

He had to get away from her. And from his sisters, who were trying to make it be Christmas. They had worried about holiday celebrations for two years now, ever since Dad had died of a sudden heart attack.

He had to get away from them.

He had to get away from everybody.

He had to get away from Cait.

The truth of it shocked him. He surely wasn’t leaving the house to avoid Cait.

But he was, and that brought an ironic grin to his lips. Cait wasn’t exactly chasing him around the Christmas tree.

And he couldn’t say that he blamed her.

Once inside the refuge of the big barn, he walked slowly down the aisle, looking into the stalls on each side, checking to see that no one was looking colicky and no one was out of water. Halfway down the show-horse side, he heard footsteps behind him.

Uneven footsteps. Finally. Jackson was here. Clint stopped and turned around.

“Well, it’s about time you showed up!”

He ought to be angry with his tardy brother, but these days it was hard to be anything but glad whenever he saw him. Since he’d met Darcy and married her, it was as if the real Jackson had come back to life.

“Did you miss me, big brother?”

It was still a shock to get a response from Jackson, much less a cheerful one, after being accustomed to him staying locked in his own gloomy, reclusive little world for months and months after his terrible wreck.

“I could use a little help keeping the festivities going,” Clint said in the same light tone. “Right now I’m in trouble for refusing to line dance.”

“Then let me at ’em,” Jackson said. “I’ll dance ’em right into the ground.”

His limping gait brought him nearer, and Clint saw that he not only had a wide grin on his face, he had a twinkle in his eyes.

“I’m gonna go get the thermometer,” he said. “I think you’ve got a fever.”

“I do,” Jackson said. “A fever named Darcy.”

Clint threw back his head and laughed and laughed, which made him feel much better all of a sudden.

“You’re over the edge, man, you’re downright besotted. I never thought I’d see you in such a pitiful shape.”

Jackson turned his hands—his bare hands—palms up.

“What can I say? I’m all hers. I live to please her.”

“Hey, hey, get a grip,” Clint said, grabbing his arm in mock panic. “Be sure not to tell her that!”

Jackson just grinned at him and Clint grinned back. Then he got serious and searched his face.

“No foolin’, Jackson,” he said. “You think she loves you as much as you love her?”

Still smiling, Jackson nodded.

“I know she does.”

“How do you know?”

“I can tell. By the way she acts. By what she says.”

When Clint just stared at him without saying any more, Jackson nailed him with a sharp look.

“How come you wanna know? You fallin’ for somebody?”

He thought for a minute, then snapped his fingers as best he could.

“Lorrie Nolan! I heard you took her to Hugo’s for breakfast the other day!”

Clint snorted.

“Are you and Lorrie…”

“No!”

“She’d be a good match for you—she’s got a mind of her own.”

“Yeah. A mind to be a McMahan.”

Clint turned and started past the last half of the stalls.

“Check ’em on that side for me, will ya?” he said.

“Yeah. And you tell me what you’re talkin’ about, then, if it’s not you and Lorrie.”

Clint shrugged.

“Women in general, I guess,” he said. “When they act like a different person than they ever did before, how d’you know which one’s real?”

Then he snapped his jaw shut. He wasn’t saying any more, no matter what, because this whole conversation was nothing but a stupid waste of breath. Jackson couldn’t be a bit of help, anyhow, blindly in love with Darcy as he was.

But Jackson was silent, thinking about it.

“Well,” he drawled at last, “I’d say, Clint, ol’ bro, if she’s actin’ like she never did before, she might have changed her mind. She may be trying to tell you somethin’.”

By the time he and Jackson got to the house, only the immediate family, which included various relatives of Bobbie Ann’s, was left. At least the evening was passing.

Everybody was standing around talking in the dining room or going in and out of it, bringing in food and lighting candles, and Aunt Faylene was at the sideboard taking the cover off one of her famous cakes. She turned and smiled at them as they walked in.

“My favorite nephews,” she proclaimed. “I want a hug.”

They gave her hugs and listened to her chatter for a minute, then she said, very low, “Any word from Monte?”

“Not that I know of,” Clint said.

“You’d know,” she said, her lips tightening. “Poor Bobbie Ann’d be walking on air if he’d called.”

Her gaze went to her sister, just coming in from the kitchen with a huge crock of chili. Clint went to help her with it.

“Places, everyone,” she called. “Time for dinner.”

Clint set the crock in the middle of the long table and glanced around.

“Where’s Cait?” he said.

No one knew.

“I’ll get her,” he said, and left the room.

First she wouldn’t dance, then she wouldn’t mingle and now she wouldn’t come to dinner. What was she doing, anyhow? Bobbie Ann didn’t need another worry, nor another absentee right now. He would say something to Cait. If she was going to accept an invitation, then she had an obligation…

The sight of her stopped him in his tracks.

She sat beside the Christmas tree with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, staring at it as if she were a little girl. Lost in its magic.

As he watched, she lifted one hand and fingered the glass bead on the simple necklace at her throat. She was gone someplace else, that was for sure. Dinner at the Rocking M was the furthest thing from her mind right now.

A thought came, unbidden. Was she thinking about John? Remembering times with him? Had they shared a mighty love like Darcy and Jackson’s seemed to be?

His gut told him no. Darcy and Jackson were a matched pair. Anybody could spend five minutes with them and know that. John and Cait had been a whole different story.

She laid her head against her knees for a long moment, then lifted it and looked up at the angel at the top of the tree. The white profile of her face and throat was so pure and beautiful it made him swallow hard.

Slowly he walked across the room. She didn’t even hear his boot heels on the tiled floor. He reached the circle of light made by the tree and looked down at her sitting in its shadow.

“Cait?”

She started as if he’d waked her from sleep. A quick flash of fear crossed her face, then surprise. Was that a sheen of tears in her eyes?

It moved him. Against his will.

It made him want to protect her, somehow. Which was a laughable thought, for sure.

What was she afraid of? The Caitlin he knew wasn’t scared of anything.

“Dinner’s ready.”

Cait wanted to get up. She really did. But Clint was so close she could smell his aftershave.

His gray eyes were so intense they seared her skin.

The heat rose up in her neck and her entire body tilted to feverish.

Just like early this morning when she’d walked in on him riding that colt.

Just like the moment, dear Lord help her, that she’d looked at him across the back of the black horse and told him, “Christmas Eve gift.”

“Time for dinner,” he said, as if she spoke a foreign language and he should try another phrase to convey the same information.

But she was frozen there, despite the blood pulsing through her veins hot enough to melt her.

He took a step closer, as if to see what was wrong, and for one instant she thought he was going to hold out his hand to help her up. For that same instant, she was ready to reach for it.

But he kept his hands at his sides.

“We’d better get in there,” he said, in a tone so neutral she couldn’t find his feelings in it, “or else Jackson will eat up all the tamales.”

Her pulse was pounding so hard she was afraid he’d hear it and she stood still for a moment the instant she was on her feet. Trying to slow the blood in her veins. Trying to deepen the breaths in her body.

Even in that split second, though, while they stood near enough to touch, a deeper thrill went surging through her, the thrill of his closeness, the warm scent of him and the look in his eyes that tightened the unspoken tension that invariably vibrated between them. She cleared her throat and tried to speak normally.

“So,” she managed to say in her coolest tone, “is that another family tradition I don’t know? Last one to the table gets no tamales?”

He did have the grace to let her see his chagrin.

But he didn’t apologize. Actually, she couldn’t imagine Clint apologizing to her. Not for speaking his mind about his strong, true feelings that she didn’t belong here.

She had to remember that. He thought she didn’t belong here. He didn’t want her here, no matter how gallantly he’d called her to dinner. He was the host, she was the guest.

Of his mother.

She walked past and left him to follow as she headed toward the rest of the family gathering around the table in the dining room. Delia’s voice came to her clearly as she and Clint approached the door.

“…that time John was trying to steal my sopaipilla and I tried to spear it with my fork and stabbed him in the hand instead? That’s what started the water fight of all time!”

“Ooh, yeah!” LydaAnn chimed in. “That was in Tulsa at the Fourth of July show. We had everybody at the stalls soaking wet before it was all over.”

Jackson added something, too, but Cait barely heard it. She felt she was the one stabbed. That was a story John had never told her, had never even mentioned, and everyone else here knew all about it. Everybody in the family, judging from the number of voices recalling more details.

“I remember,” Faylene said, “when Johnny was little and he’d string honey all over his sopaipilla and his plate and the table and everything else and refuse to pass it on and—”

She stopped talking the minute Cait stepped into the room. So did everybody else. No more talk about John. Or anything.

Just for one heartbeat.

“Ah, Cait, there you are,” Bobbie Ann said, and indicated her place.

Clint held the chair for her before he went around to what must be his regular seat at the end of the long oak table.

“Let’s hold hands and say the blessing.”

They did. Cait had never heard that blessing. She didn’t know the words.

Then Bobbie Ann began filling the brightly colored bowls with chili, one by one they passed them around the table, and everyone started talking at once. Faylene served the tamales from the pottery platter; they all passed around the huge salad and the salsas and quesos, chips, corn bread, tortillas, red, yellow and blue corn and flour ones, too, pico de gallo and guacamole.

Cait concentrated on the beautiful sight of the table and its bountiful, colorful food. She tried to fix her mind on what Faylene was telling her.