What a Texas Girl Dreams (Crimson Romance) (9 page)

“Lunch is around the corner, if you’re ready.” Trick’s deep voice was loud in the quiet room.

“Just a few more … ” Her words were cut off by a rumbling in her belly. Monica blushed.

Trick laughed. “We’ll come back in here after we eat. You can fill up my phone with as many pictures as you want.”

“It’s your fault I’m hungry, you know. You interrupted breakfast.”

Trick shrugged. “I’ll leave you to your eggs, then, the next time I come up here.”

She elbowed him lightly. “You’d better not.”

He led her around the corner, and Monica gasped. In the middle of the room, surrounded by stalactites hanging down from the ceiling and stalagmites reaching up from the cave floor, sat a wooden table covered with a white cloth. Wine chilled in a bucket to the side of the table and plates of fruit and cheese sat atop it. The room was filled with candles and paper lanterns, so that it glowed.

“You really thought this through, cowboy.”

A self-conscious grin split Trick’s face. “I thought going a little over the top was warranted. This being our first date and all.”

Monica cut her eyes to him. “We’ve been out before.”

Trick held out her chair and, when she was seated, scooted it closer to the table. “True, we’ve been to bars and watched movies and slept together. But we usually meet up at places. Dates happen when a guy picks a girl up and they go somewhere together.”

Monica spooned a bit of the fruit salad into bowls and then drizzled dressing over the top while Trick poured Chardonnay into their glasses. It
was
a date. Monica cut two slices of aged brie, placing them on the plates next. That date feeling should be a bit more stifling, shouldn’t it?

“I still don’t understand why it’s so important to you that we have an official, normal date.” She took a bite of fruit. She also didn’t understand why she was going along with it or why the thought of dating Trick Samuels suddenly seemed normal. Like something she wanted to do.

Her tummy growled again, and she took another bite. Trick forked some salad and ate.

He closed his eyes and said, “Who knew honey and lime would bring out the sweetness of melons, pears, and strawberries?”

“That’s the mint in the dressing talking.”

Trick cocked an eyebrow at her in question.

“What? I picked a few things up in home-ec. And Gui makes a salad similar to this for the Fourth of July barbecue. Sometimes, I help.”

“I’ve never gotten the full story on Guillermo. He’s the ranch cook, but he’s also Mat’s uncle?”

Monica nodded. “Gui and Grandfather buddied around the rodeo when they were younger. Gui took a hard fall not long after my grandmother passed away and Grandfather gave him the job. He couldn’t cowboy anymore, not for a regular paycheck and certainly not for a rodeo check. None of us knew about his connection to Mat until the bull sale fiasco.”

Trick nodded and ate some more salad. The bull sale, when Vanessa and Mat had begun dating. Van’s mother showed up at the ball following the sale and outed Mat as not only the ranch foreman but heir to a Silicon Valley tech fortune. They were quiet for a few minutes.

“You took home-ec classes in school?”

“It was cooking or sewing. I figured cooking would at least teach me something I’d need in day-to-day life.”

He shook his head. “Very practical.”

“I’m a practical kind of girl.”

He laughed. “Maybe in some ways, but in the big ways, not hardly.”

She took another bite, enjoying the combination of rich cheese and light fruit. Candles flickered in the slight breeze coming in through the cavern entrance. Or maybe this was the exit, since this wasn’t the same place where they’d entered. Monica felt herself relaxing, enjoying lunch and the idle chatter.

“What do you mean by that?”

Trick sat back in his chair, as if measuring his words. “Practical girls go to school to be doctors or lawyers or accountants. Or they get married right out of high school. They don’t travel the West, racing barrels or training new horses. They go to work and come home and have a family and most of them never wonder what else is out there. You wondered, and you followed the path that opened for you.”

Her life wasn’t nearly as romantic as Trick made it out to be.

“You know better than that. Rodeo is hard, messy, sweaty work. When I’m not traveling, I’m riding. When I’m not riding, I’m training.” She grinned at him. “Or that was the schedule before we-” she waggled her fork between them-”you know.”

“Yeah. I know. But compared to the mundane of driving car pools and punching a time clock, I’m betting most of the women watching you think it’s a glamorous life. Made all the more appealing because you do it so well.”

“Not well enough to keep my horse safe.”

Trick shook his head and then reached across the table to take her hand. “What you did was a brave thing. You could have run from the arena like the other barrel racers but you didn’t. You stayed to herd those cattle back into the pens.”

“And gave that bull the perfect opportunity to take Jinx and I out.”

“If you hadn’t been there, more could have escaped.” He squeezed her hand. “They might have trampled right through the stands. People could have been seriously hurt.”

“You really think I did the right thing?” She watched his grey eyes for a long moment, needing to know if he blamed her for Jinx’s injury. Needing his approval for a reason she didn’t care to name.

“I think you did the only thing you could do. Jinx was a working cow-horse before you retrained him.” He twisted his mouth to the side and then continued. “I was petrified, watching that footage. Not because of Jinx’s injury but because when I saw you pinned between the horse and the stands I thought you might have been crushed. When you got home the other day, I wasn’t mad at you. Not for riding into the fray. Not for Jinx’s injury. I wasn’t mad at all.”

Monica breathed easier at the words, because what she saw in his eyes underlined the words he said. All the way back from Utah she worried about Jinx, but she also worried how Trick would react because she knew how much he loved animals. A piece of her was terrified the accident would be the straw that took him from her. Now it seemed the accident was opening her up to have more of him in her life. If she could be like the practical women he talked about.

“Is normal and practical important to you?”

Trick held up his glass, tipping it against hers with a quiet clink.

“I like my normal and practical life, yes. Maybe you should try it. You might find it a nice change from rodeo life. But before you ask, I wouldn’t expect you to turn into one of those practical bankers or lawyer types. A normal horse trainer is fine by me. If we take this on to the next level, that is.”

“Mmm.” Monica made only a noncommittal reply and concentrated on their meal. She didn’t want to talk about
next levels
. She sipped the wine, which exploded across her tongue, mating with the honey-and-lime dressing from the salad and softened by the rich brie. She moaned at the taste combination and sipped again.

She should cut the day short, she knew, but the thought of leaving their cocooned cave left her feeling twitchy. Trick wanted normal and practical, and he might be okay with her profession while she was rehabbing Jinx at the ranch, but she knew his opinion would change when she hit the road again. And she would hit the road. With or without Jinx. With or without Trickett Samuels.

“Why did you choose Texas?” As long as they were talking career choices, she might as well get insight into his. She knew he’d attended U-TEP, the same school Kathleen and Jackson had attended. She knew was in line to buy the Lockhardt practice when Dr. Vaughn retired next year. She didn’t know why Lockhardt was his destination of choice. Maybe if she did it would make it easier to keep those barriers in place.

“It’s more like Texas chose me,” he said as he finished off the fruit and reached for another slice of cheese. “The scholarship to U-TEP was the farthest from Florida and the best program I could find. I interned in Canyon Lake, with the guy who owns this spread and decided the Hill Country was for me.”

“Do you ever think about going back?”

“To Florida? No.” He shook his head.

She had to be honest with him. No, she’d been honest. She needed to be blunt. He was staying. She wasn’t.

“I want Jinx to race again, but if he doesn’t, I’ll still ride wherever there’s a rodeo and train and live in Austin.” She sipped her wine and took a breath. “You keep throwing around us dating like it’s a solution to a problem. I like things as they have been. We meet up, we have fun, no one gets hurt.”

“You can train horses anywhere.”

“I know. But I like Austin. I like my life.”

“Then we’ll date while you’re here and make those decisions when and if the time comes.”

They finished their plates, leaving only a small pool of dressing in the bottom of the fruit bowl and a single sliver of cheese on the plate. Trick topped off their wine glasses and put the bottle back in the chilled bucket. Monica sat back, tilting her head to watch the formations on the ceiling. How many picnics had those rocks seen? How many couples had lunched here, escaping the Texas heat for an hour or even just a few minutes?

She didn’t believe him, not for a second. Trick wasn’t the long-distance relationship type. When they were fooling around and meeting up whenever their schedules allowed, the distance wasn’t an issue. But she’d take him at his word. As long as they both knew this so-called dating was only a short-term arrangement while she was rehabbing Jinx, it wouldn’t change anything.

A clicking sound interrupted her thoughts. Trick held his camera phone before him, pointed at her.

“I wasn’t even smiling.” She reached for the camera, but he held it out of her reach.

“You wanted pictures of rocks. I wanted a picture of you.”

“You could have at least let me grin like a maniac,” she grumbled and gathered the plates into a small pile. A picnic basket sat under the table, and she packed everything away.

“I prefer Natural Monica to Crazy Monica, thank you very much.” He slipped the camera into his back pocket and carried the ice bucket and wine bottle back to the mouth of the cave, while she toted the basket. When they reached it, he dumped the ice in the hot, Texas sun, took the basket from her, and set everything near the opening. When he’d finished, Monica slipped her fingers into his back pocket.

Trick slapped his hand over hers. “Ah-ah-ah. If you want to see your pictures again, you have to leave me mine.”

“Unsmiling pictures aren’t practical.”

“Sometimes the impractical is better.” He shrugged and hooked his arm around her shoulders, turned her back for one more look at the cavern. “What’s practical about a river of color underneath the earth?”

She looked at the rolling colors of rock for a long moment. “You win. You’ve changed how I look at Texas.” She tilted her head to watch his expression. “Can we come back sometime?” She didn’t want to leave. Didn’t want this day to end. For a girl who didn’t want the hassles that came with dating and relationships, she was curiously reluctant to let their day in the cave go.

Trick’s arm was warm around her shoulders. He hugged her to his side. “We’ll come back. And we’ll remember a real camera next time.”

They stepped back into the Texas afternoon, squinting their eyes at the glare. A short walk down the hillside sat the truck. Waiting as if nothing in the world had changed.

Only everything had, no matter how many times she told herself otherwise. Trick had dared her to enjoy a real date. He said he wanted normal and practical, but followed up with that ‘impractical is better’ statement a moment before. He didn’t try convincing her to leave the road. Maybe they could make an impractical, road-based relationship work.

She more than enjoyed the date, Monica admitted, and the scenery was only a small part of the reason. Sitting with Trick, talking about nothing was the best time she’d had in months. Better than winning an event. Better than training the new horses.

He’d won.

So why didn’t she feel like she’d lost?

Chapter Five

Three days later, Monica walked with Jinx in the therapy pool. A week into the rehab program wasn’t a great measuring stick, but she didn’t see any improvement. She wanted to see improvement.

Needed to see it.

Instead, Jinx kept up the slow walk forward, and he seemed to sigh as the jets beat water against his legs as they backed up. Kathleen sat, cross-legged, on the side of the pool, watching intently.

She watched Monica as closely as she watched the horse, and Monica knew why. Her sister wanted to ask about her date with Trick earlier that week. She wanted a play-by-play of everything they’d done. Monica didn’t want to talk about it. Kathleen would read between the lines of anything she said. Her sister had a knack for figuring her out and right now Monica didn’t need the scrutiny.

Not when she didn’t understand fully what had happened to her plans to drop Trick and get on with her solitary life. An afternoon spent wandering through a cave, looking at rock formations shouldn’t have changed her life philosophy so fully. It hadn’t, she reasoned. She’d just been charmed by the setting and the cowboy showing it to her. The date didn’t really mean anything. Her time in Lockhardt had a limit. As soon as Jinx was better, they’d be back in Austin at the stable, training for next year.

End of story.

Dating Trick would either go back to the occasional movie night followed by hot, sweaty sex, or the entire situation would fade into the past as so many other things had.

“Watch him on the left, Mon.” Kathleen’s quiet words jerked Monica back into the therapy pool and Jinx’s extra session.

Instead of the straight line they’d been walking, Jinx was now angled in the pool. His left hip angled into the corner so the jets pounded against the front of his leg rather than the back. Jinx tossed his head and blew out a breath. He liked the new placement, accidental or not.

“Stay there for another minute,” Kathleen instructed. Monica held on to Jinx’s bridle, holding him in place for a long moment. “Now forward.” Monica and Jinx started forward. Kathleen held up a hand, and Monica stopped so the jets could work the back of Jinx’s bruised leg.