Honky Tonk Christmas (17 page)

Holt wiped one side of the table and she got the other. More than once their hands met in the middle and white heat passed between them. “Do I need to put Judd and Waylon in the truck and point it south with the pedal to the floor? Sounds to me like what’s about to hit the fan is going to stink really bad.”

Sharlene wiped fast and furiously at the mud stains on the table. “Don’t know just yet. Momma can work wonders when she wants to. She didn’t want to when I joined the army. I’m not sure if she’s got a big enough miracle up her sleeve to get me out of trouble this time. We might want to tear out of here if Daddy comes outside with steam coming out his ears.”

“Did your momma take it well?” Holt asked.

Sharlene tossed him the paper towels when his got too wet and dirty to use anymore. “Surprisingly, yes. If she hadn’t I was going to blame it on you.”

Holt caught the roll mid-air. “Why me?”

She sprayed a heavy layer of cleaner on a dirt smear. “Because you made me feel guilty because your family is all gone.”

“They’re going to crucify me right along with you because they asked several times what I was working on and I evaded the issue,” he said. He liked her family and her brothers. It had been a wonderful afternoon and he looked forward to more of the same the next day but it could be coming to an abrupt halt.

Matthew joined them and winked at Sharlene. “Clara filled me in on the skeleton of why you haven’t been home in eight months. She said I can have details later tonight.”

“Daddy?” Sharlene asked.

Matthew yelled at the children to come wash their hands and get ready for supper. “Momma’s still talking. I heard something like ‘looks like shit’ and ‘a beer joint’ but that’s all I can tell you. Fire isn’t shooting out the top of his head yet. It would be mine if one of my girls grew up to be a bartender in Texas, let me tell you.”

“Why are you so afraid of your dad? Good grief, Sharlene, you are a grown woman,” Holt said.

“Thank you for that reminder. It just makes me feel so much better,” she snapped.

“You are
so
welcome. Now I’m going back inside to see what else I can do,” he said as they smoothed the last tablecloth. “Are you coming with me?”

“Yes, I am. You are my buffer.”

Holt shot a look across the table at her and grinned. “Well, damn! Those hayloft kisses were just mercy kisses because you brought me here to stand between you and your folks if they threw a fit?”

“If you think that, then they might have been.”

Claud looked up from the picture album and cocked his head to one side. “That has got to be the ugliest house I’ve ever seen, Sharlene. I don’t like you running a beer joint but you are a grown woman and if that’s what you want to do then I can’t stop you. Don’t expect me to come down there and go inside that place though. And the book? Congratulations on that. You’ve always had a way with words. Momma says you made a bunch of money already with it and that’s good. Now let’s eat supper,” he said.

It was more words than he usually spoke at any one time and Sharlene was very grateful to hear every one of them.

“Thank you,” she said.

Holt slipped an arm around her waist and she trembled at his touch. “Now that wasn’t so difficult was it?”

“How do you feel about your woman running such a place?” Claud asked.

Holt let his arm fall away from her. “Sharlene and I are just friends. I guess it’s her business what she does for a living.”

“I see. Well, you kids all ready for some supper?” Claud nodded seriously.

“Yes!” Yells from all the kids echoed through the house.

Claud reached down and took Molly’s hand. “Momma, you say the blessing and we’ll let these young’uns get after it.”

Holt noticed that Matthew was holding Clara’s hand and Jeff had an arm around Lisa’s waist. He held his hands behind his back and wished he had the same right to Sharlene.

***

The pillow was too firm. The bed was too soft. The air conditioner made too much noise. A lonesome old coyote howled in the distance. All of it combined to keep her awake. She looked at the clock. It was ten thirty. No wonder she couldn’t sleep. She was just catching a second wind at two in the morning most nights. She was never in bed before three. If she was in the Honky Tonk she’d be hustling around drawing up beers, making buckets and pitchers full of mixed drinks.

It didn’t help that Holt was in the next room. Right through that wall. She looked at it as if she could see through the two layers of sheet rock and into the other bedroom. His bed was no more than five feet from hers but a solid wall separated them. Not totally unlike the wall that would always keep them apart. Fathers and bartenders did not mix.

A ten thirty bedtime was one of the reasons she’d left Corn. Granted, it wasn’t the major one but it did contribute. Get up with the chickens, go to bed with the cows, and start all over the next morning before dawn. Sharlene was not cut out to be a farm wife. Besides, if she shut her eyes the nightmares would start and she hated them worse than anything.

She eased out of bed, checked the children, and pulled the sheet up over each of them, then carefully went down the hall to the kitchen. Maybe a glass of milk or a piece of pecan pie would make her sleepy. If not, she’d turn on the kitchen light and look at magazines and catalogs until she couldn’t keep her eyes open anymore. That beat flipping from one side of the bed to the other.

There was one piece of pie left so she ate it in the dark with her fingers instead of dirtying a fork. She looked out the kitchen window while she washed her hands. It was hard to imagine that just hours before kids had been yelling and screaming as they tried to touch the tree branches in the old swing set. That she’d sat beside Holt and his leg had brushed against hers sending heat flowing through her body like hot lava. She wandered out to the backyard, tucked the tail of her mid-thigh knit nightshirt up under her rear end, and sat down in a swing.

She pushed off with one foot and let the motion take her mind back to when she was a teenager and couldn’t sleep. She often worked out her problems in the night air on the same set of swings. It was there that she decided she was not going to marry her high school sweetheart. It was there that she decided to join the army. And when she came home, she was swinging when she made up her mind to go to Dallas, rent an apartment, and look for a job.

When she was a little girl the swings were bright red and shiny. By the time she was in high school they were dark green. When she left for Iraq the first time her father had painted them yellow. Now they were red again. The chains had rusted and been replaced several times and the original metal seats had rusted years before and were now wooden.

Did Holt grow up on a farm or a ranch? There was so much she didn’t know about him and she wanted to know everything. If she did would it make it easier to find a chink in his armor? One little rusty hole called a major fault that would be something she couldn’t stand? Maybe when he got angry he slapped his women around? No, that wouldn’t hold water. Holt was the kindest, most decent man she’d ever met.

***

Holt laced his hands behind his head and stared at the bizarre patterns on the wall and ceiling created by moonlight drifting into the room through lace curtains. It had been a strange day with Sharlene finally coming clean with her parents and two of the brothers being hauled home by their wives. He remembered family life when his sister and parents were alive and missed it. Not that they’d ever had the big booming family with kids and food everywhere but it was exactly the atmosphere he’d always wanted when he was a child. If he had the privilege of choosing a family for Judd and Waylon, he would pick one exactly like the Waverly bunch. Grandparents who cared about their children and grandchildren; lots of kids to play and argue with at family gatherings; aunts and uncles who weren’t perfect but had love in their hearts.

He shut his eyes tightly to force sleep but it didn’t work. He kept seeing Sharlene in those tight jeans and boots stomping out across the pasture toward the barn; in the hayloft with a good dose of mad all over her; sitting in his lap and sharing those hot, passionate kisses.

Finally, he crawled out of bed, checked the kids, and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. He caught a movement out in the yard while he was standing at the sink. One glance told him it was Sharlene on the swings. It was barely eleven o’clock and she wasn’t used to finishing up her night until two and then there was wind-down time before she could sleep.

He eased out the back door and pulled up a chair not far from her. The moonlight framed her in silhouette against a sky of sparkling stars. If a painter could catch a woman’s profile on a child’s swing with a big lover’s moon hanging in the sky he would have a true masterpiece. It was a good thing an artist didn’t create a picture like that because if they did, Holt would have to own it and it would bankrupt him.

The stars were just beyond her reach when she was on the swing. She was a little girl again with no worries about relationships or problems. She caught a movement off to her left and felt someone watching her. She stuck her bare foot down and skidded to a stop with her heel. The same feeling that she had in Iraq when the enemy was close behind her flooded over her. She turned slowly and saw Holt sitting not ten feet away in one of the folding chairs they’d used around the tables.

“You scared me,” she said.

“Sorry,” he said.

“What are you doing out here? You don’t usually stay up until two in the morning like I do,” she asked.

“Strange bed, maybe. Too many things on my mind. Want to take a walk and talk where we don’t have to whisper?”

“In our bare feet? There’s goat heads out there in the pasture,” she said.

“Then let’s go back in and get our boots,” he said.

She hopped out of the swing. “All right. You want a shirt?”

“No, I’m all right.”

But I’m not. That broad chest and knowing there’s probably nothing under those knit pajama bottoms is giving me hives.

She tiptoed to her bedroom and slipped her boots on without socks. His were sitting beside his bed when she peeked in the door. She checked on the kids one more time. They were both still covered and sleeping soundly. She could hear Claud snoring as she passed her parent’s bedroom door.

Holt startled her when she opened the kitchen door and found him waiting on the porch. “Don’t sneak up on me. It scares the devil out of me.”

“I wasn’t sneaking. I thought maybe you’d had a change of heart,” he said.

She handed him the boots and he jammed his feet down into them.

“Which way?” he asked.

“Out toward the barn where the kittens are. That should be far enough that we won’t have to whisper,” she answered.

His hand brushed against hers and he laced his fingers through hers. She led him to the fence where she opened the gate. The metal was still warm from the sun that afternoon but it wasn’t nearly as hot as the hand that Holt held.

“You think it’s all right to leave the kids? What if they wake up?” he asked.

“I’ll be surprised if they even turn over as tired as they are. They’ve run all afternoon. Judd almost went to sleep in the bathtub,” she said.

Sharlene used her free hand to point. “Look.”

The mother cat came out of the barn with a kitten in her mouth. She moved past them to the wood shed and went back again to fetch another baby.

“Guess she got tired of little girls handling her litter,” Sharlene said.

“She’d better hide them very good. Judd loves kittens,” Holt said.

“Tasha will turn the farm upside down looking for them.” Sharlene sat down on a hay bale just inside the door.

Holt let go of her hand and sat down beside her. He looked down at Sharlene at the same time she looked up at him. Their eyes locked and the world disappeared. The barn was the Garden of Eden. Holt and Sharlene were the only two people in it but there was a serpent. Only he wasn’t interested in pushing his apple tree; he had something far more exciting than a Red Delicious in mind.

Holt ran the back of his hand down her jaw. No makeup, bedroom hair, a sprinkling of light freckles across her pert nose, and a cute little nightshirt and cowboy boots. Yet, the fire in his gut and the ache in his heart said that she was absolutely stunning. He cupped her face in both his palms and leaned forward.

The soft touch of his rough hands on her face caused emotions deep inside her to quiver. His bare muscular chest, his broad callused hands, his square jaw with dark scruff created even deeper shivers but it was his lips that she focused on. Then suddenly, their lips were so close that she barely had time to shut her eyes before they met in a clash of passion.

The ever loquacious Sharlene Waverly had no words when he broke away and moved his hands from her face to hug her tightly. Face against bare chest made every nerve ending in her body hum with desire. She wrapped her arms around his neck and snuggled in closer, listening to his speeding heart for the second time that day.

“You are lovely in that getup, madam,” he whispered.

“Flattery will get you in trouble,” she mumbled.

He tipped her chin back up for another hard kiss that was as earth shattering as the first and held her close to his chest when it ended. “We’d better stop there or there’s no telling where we’ll wind up.”

The fast beat of his heart was like a drum beat in her ear. “You are so right. This is too fast, Holt. But I’m not ready to go back inside. Let’s go up in the hayloft and watch the moon come up out the loft doors.”

He nodded and started up the ladder with her right behind him.

She sat down where she could get a good view and he settled in a few inches from her. “Talk to me,” he said.

“About what?”

“Just talk. I love the sound of your voice and the way you put words together.”

“I talk too much,” she said.

“Not to me.”

She threw herself backward and looked at the moon hanging in the sky like a fancy queen with the stars as her subjects. “So what do you think of the Waverly clan?”