One Texas Cowboy Too Many (Burnt Boot, Texas) (13 page)

The guys were still building sandwiches and eating supper when Rhett got the first text message:
At the beauty shop. Thank God it stays open late and takes walk-ins. Won’t be at the bar tonight. I had no idea Granny wore a hairpiece. This is worse than the school getting blown up.

Rhett quickly wrote back,
Me either. I’ll be building fence until midnight. Is Mavis buying another wig?

The answer,
No, she’s getting her long hair cut really short and a new color put on. She doesn’t look like Granny with thin, short hair.

Rhett’s answer was,
Time for a lot of changes.

He got back one word:
Amen!

Hoping she’d found a way to call rather than text when his phone rang, he snatched it from his pocket so fast that it slipped out of his hands and went skittering under a big bull’s hoof.

“Better grab that in a hurry. If he takes one step forward and lets go, it’ll be covered in shit!” one of the boys yelled.

“Yeah, but that’s okay. There’s a shit war going on in Burnt Boot, so it would fit right in. I heard you already got in the middle of one storm when it rained shit,” another one shouted.

Their laughter rang through the rolling hills and echoed off the mesquite trees. Rhett chuckled and very carefully reached under the bull, picked up the phone, and said, “Hello.”

“What took you so long? I was about to hang up,” Gladys said. “I heard that Naomi scalped Mavis and she’s got the pelt to prove it.”

“It’s not Mavis’s real hair, but that’s the truth.” He went on to explain what had happened, including the part about Dammit trying to stop the fight by hanging on to Naomi’s jeans.

“Good dog you got there. When Mavis thinks about it, she’ll spread the news that Naomi might have scalped her but that Dammit bit Naomi’s leg and now gangrene has set it. I know those two old farts.”

“Do you think my dog going for Naomi will buy me any points on the Brennan side?”

“Don’t get your hopes up. She might try to buy Dammit, but your fate was set in stone the day she heard about that motorcycle,” Gladys answered.

“Dammit isn’t for sale.” He chuckled.

“Keep him close by your side. She might steal him. Or then again, Naomi might have him shot for ruining a pair of jeans.”

“Holy shit!”

“That’s the Sunday term for this new phase of the war. I’m glad I hired you, Rhett, and I hope you make a lifelong home here in Burnt Boot, but it won’t be with Leah. If you’d set your sights on Betsy, you might have had a chance. She’s wild and independent. Leah is the sweet girl who does what’s expected of her. Bye now. I’ll drive down and look at that fence tomorrow.”

The hired hands took another break at ten o’clock and polished off the last of the sandwich makings, then went back to work. Dark clouds had begun to drift over the moon when they tightened the last strings of barbed wire and called it the longest day of their lives. They rode in the back of the old truck back to the bunkhouse, where they moaned and groaned all the way to their own vehicles and drove away in a cloud of dust.

Dammit hopped out of the passenger seat when Rhett opened the door, bounded up the steps, and came to a halt on the bottom step. The hair on his back stood up like a punk rocker’s, and then it flattened as he wagged his tail. He tucked his chin down shyly and walked into the shadows, where he could now make out Leah’s outline in the rocking chair on his porch. He approached her slowly and rested his head on her lap.

“Tired?” Leah scratched Dammit’s ears and looked up at Rhett.

Rhett pulled a rocking chair close to hers and sat down. “Tired and sweaty but glad to see you.”

She reached across the distance and laid her hand on his. “I wanted to see you too.”

“How long have you been here?”

“An hour at the most, but the night breeze is nice, and this is a perfect place to think,” she answered.

“Is Mavis still fuming?”

“Smoke will be coming out her ears until way past Christmas. There was a meeting tonight of the boy cousins to talk about revenge. I’m so sick of this feud that sometimes I dream of running away.”

“Give me time to get a quick shower and we can be two hundred miles down the road in any direction you want to go by the time the sun comes up.”

She smiled, and he held his breath.

“I can’t do that. Burnt Boot is my home, but I wish I’d been born a Cleary instead of a Brennan.”

“Then you would have grown up in a bar or a general store.” Rhett pulled his hand free from under hers and laced their fingers together. Her hand was so small and delicate that his dwarfed it, but her fingers felt so right curled between his.

“Either one would have been better than River Bend with all the secrecy and plotting and feuding.”

“Did you get anything settled about your mother?” he asked.

She shook her head slowly. “I’m planning to talk to my dad about that tomorrow.”

“Is Leah or Eve going to talk to him?”

Leah squeezed his hand. “Both.”

“Then I’m glad I’m not your dad. You and Eve together will be a formidable force.”

“You think?”

“No, ma’am. I know.” He smiled. “Underneath all that sweet is a core of steel.”

“You keep telling me that, I might start believing you.” She squeezed his hand.

“You don’t have to do what everyone expects of you. You can get out the machete and make a path right off of River Bend if you want to,” Rhett whispered.

Her laughter was as soft as butterfly wings. “You are the only person on the face of this great green earth who believes that.”

“Then everyone else on this great green earth is crazy.” He laughed with her.

“I should go. You are tired and morning comes early for ranchers.”

“Where’s your truck?”

“At the store parking lot. I walked from there.”

“I’ll drive you if you don’t mind dog hair on the seat. I’d offer to take you on the motorcycle, but it’s so noisy, it would wake up Sawyer and Jill.”

She stood up. “I don’t mind dog hair and I’d love a ride.”

When they walked off the porch, hand in hand, he noticed that she was wearing cutoff jean shorts, cowboy boots, and a Western shirt that hung over her shorts. She looked like she was about to stroll onto a country music video set.

“You take my breath away,” he mumbled.

“Ditto.”

“But I’m dirty and sweaty and…”

“Sexy as hell,” she finished for him.

“In that case,” he said as he settled her into the passenger seat of the old truck. He tipped her chin up with his knuckles and ran the palm of his other hand from her jawbone to her neck, where he splayed out his fingers in her blond hair. When his lips met hers in a searing kiss that sent all his senses spiraling up toward the moon, he knew he was falling for Leah. Tanner Gallagher could damn well step down, step aside, and get the hell out of Dodge, because Rhett O’Donnell would fight to the death for Leah Brennan.

“Don’t get out,” she said when they reached the store.

“I’m tired. I’m not dead.”

She scooted across the seat and cupped his face in her hands. “Rhett O’Donnell, one more kiss and Eve is going to take over my body forever. I have to be Leah for a little while longer to get things sorted out. Thank you for the ride, for being you, and for having faith in me.” She gently touched her lips to his and then quickly left the truck.

* * *

Leah awoke the next morning with a smile on her face. She reached for her phone and there were six messages from Rhett—short, sweet notes that she read through at least a dozen times before she slung her legs over the side of the bed, kissed the mimosas in the bud vase on her bedside table, and headed toward her bathroom.

Noises in the kitchen and dining room told her that dinner was being prepared when she started down the stairs at eleven thirty. Her father shot her a look and a quick nod toward the kitchen when she passed through the dining room.

“It’ll take some getting used to. I didn’t even know she wore fake hair,” Leah said quietly.

“No one did. She’s kept her hair fixed like that since I was a kid,” Russell whispered. “What’s got her in a stew is what Naomi has done with it.”

“Leah, you can set the table for eight, not six. Honey and Kinsey are still where they’re supposed to be.” Mavis’s voice carried into the dining room. “If you’d been with them, this would have never happened.”

“Now it’s my fault?” Leah raised her voice.

Mavis appeared in the doorway, eyes flashing and new, short haircut making her look like a different woman. “Yes, it’s your fault. If you hadn’t wanted to go to the store for a pound of bologna, it wouldn’t have happened. Now I’m humiliated, and Naomi has the upper hand, but not for long. I swear to God, she’ll regret saying that she scalped me.”

“I’m not even going to ask what you’re going to set in motion,” Leah said.

“Good. You’ve caused enough trouble. Ever since that damned Rhett O’Donnell showed up in town, you’ve been a different woman—defiant and willful.”

“And that’s bad? I guess I could start hanging out with Tanner Gallagher. He’s interested in me,” Leah said.

“You’re acting like your mother,” Mavis said, smarting off.

Russell raised a palm. “That’s enough. Don’t lay everything that’s happened in this feud on Leah’s shoulders.”

Mavis glared at him for a few seconds, then whipped around and went back to the kitchen, where they could hear her barking orders at the ranch cooks.

“We’ve got half an hour. Let’s go to my office,” Russell said.

“I should set the table.”

Russell looped his arm through hers and led her out of the dining room. “She pays people to do that. I think it’s time we had that talk you’ve been asking for.”

He closed the door to his office and sat down on the edge of his desk, motioning for her to take one of the leather chairs facing him. “You’ve contacted or at least tried to contact your mother, haven’t you?”

“How did you know?”

“Honey told Declan and he came straight to me. He did the same thing when he was a teenager.”

“Does that make you sad, Daddy?”

Russell touched her cheek like he had when she was a little girl. “No, it makes me sad that you never knew her. She was quite a woman, but things got twisted up when we came back to Burnt Boot after we finished college.”

“She had an affair with her old boyfriend. Granny told me.”

Russell’s smile looked tired. “It’s a deeper story than that. I told Declan last night, and now he can make up his own mind about getting in touch with her.”

He circled around behind his desk and sat down. “It all started when we were kids. I was about seven, and she was six and I think we fell in love that summer at Bible school.”

“But my mother didn’t come to Burnt Boot…oh!” She slapped a hand over her mouth. “It wasn’t her that you fell in love with, was it?”

“No, her name is Joyce. She’s a cousin to the Gallaghers on the maternal side, but that was enough that your grandmother threw a fit and forbid me to bring her on the ranch.”

“Oh. My. Lord.”

Russell pinched his nose between his fingers. “Now you are beginning to understand. We snuck around and saw each other when we could, but I knew it could never work. Then your mother moved to town and we started dating. I picked your mother in a fit of rebellion because I couldn’t have the woman I really loved. It was complicated, as you kids say today.”

“You married Mama, but you still loved Joyce, right?”

Russell dropped his hand. “I tried to forget her, but then we moved back here, and those were hard times for me and Eden both. Our marriage suffered and so did you kids. Mama hated Eden and made life miserable. Eden wanted us to build our own house. Mama said if we did, she’d disown me.”

“Granny ruled the roost like she still does today,” Leah said.

“Yes, she did. Joyce had never left the area. She worked at a bank over the line in Oklahoma and spent a lot of time at Wild Horse. She was at church, at the bar when I’d drop in for a beer, at the store when I went in for supplies. Hell, she was even down at the river on Sunday afternoons when I went fishing.”

“And you started the affair?” Leah asked.

Russell nodded. “We did, and Eden found out. To retaliate, she got in touch with her old boyfriend. Mama found out, and you probably know the rest.”

“What happened to Joyce?” Leah asked.

“She never married, and we’ve been seeing each other for more than twenty-five years now. She works in a bank over in Saint Jo these days, and I see her as often as I can.”

“And you never married her?”

Russell shook his head. “Not because I didn’t ask. She refuses. I don’t blame her. She knows Mama. Someday, when I’m in full charge there, maybe she’ll say yes. But we have a good thing, Leah. Neither of us is unhappy with our arrangement. Like I said, it’s complicated, but it works for us.”

“I can’t believe you kept this a secret,” Leah said.

“I didn’t. Mama knows. Naomi knows. Joyce isn’t welcome on Wild Horse anymore, even if she is shirttail kin. But there’s been a lot of battles since that one, and no one cares about it anymore.”

“I’m sorry, Daddy. I wish this damn feud had never gotten started, and I wish it would end.”

“So you could fall in love with Tanner?”

“So I could fall in love with whomever I please.”

“Leah, don’t follow in my footsteps. Let your heart guide you, not your head.”

She leaned across the desk and hugged her father. “Thank you, Daddy. That couldn’t have been easy to tell me all that.”

“You should have been told years ago, but days run into years and years into decades, and suddenly my little girl was all grown up. Speaking of being grown and standing your ground for what you believe in, I don’t think it was Tanner that you were out with until the wee hours of this morning, was it?”

She shook her head. “No, it was Rhett O’Donnell. I used to have a crush on Tanner, and we talked about it when he showed up at the school a few days ago. Now he’s flirting and trying to get me to go out with him. I think Naomi is behind it, thinking that if she can tear down the Brennan family through me that it would be a feather in her cap.”