Chapter Seven #2
“I think her name is Debbie, or Diedre.” He answered.
“I know it starts with a D. The redhead that was staying there last week was a friend of the granddaughter’s.
She up and left in a hurry, and a Realtor came around and put the sign on the lawn this morning.
It’s like she vanished off the face of the earth.
I’ve called a couple of times and left messages, and texted a few times, but I was beginning to feel like a stalker, so I stopped. ”
Elijah clamped a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. You can’t find her on social media, either?”
Miles nodded. “Evidently, she’s not into technology, which doesn’t surprise me. She liked spending time doing simple things like watching sunsets.”
“Sounds like you lost a good one,” Elijah said, and kept walking toward the bunkhouse.
“I wouldn’t go in there if I was you,” Miles warned. “She’s taken over the kitchen like a tyrant.”
“Ain’t no woman alive that’ll keep me out of my own bunkhouse.” Elijah chuckled. “I won’t get in her way, and she can damn well stay out of mine.”
“If I hear an explosion, I’ll call 9-1-1,” Miles said, and went inside the house and straight to his office.
At five minutes until noon, he looked up from a mountain of paperwork and was surprised to see that it was already dinnertime.
He stood up, rolled his neck to get the kinks out, and headed outside.
The morning had been fairly nice, but as he passed by four-wheelers and a couple of pickup trucks, sweat was rolling off his forehead and dripping off his jaw onto his shirt.
Elijah slid off another four-wheeler and wiped his forehead with a bandana he took from the hip pocket of his bibbed overalls.
“I saw a lizard out there in the pasture. Poor critter was carrying a canteen on one hip and a tommy gun on the other. I didn’t ask him for a sip of his water for fear he would shoot me dead and leave me for the coyotes. ”
Miles laughed even though he’d heard the story many times before. “I’ll trade places with you this afternoon. You can get the paperwork all straightened out in air-conditioned comfort, and I’ll work on replacing all those rotten fence posts with metal ones.”
“Hmph,” Elijah snorted. “If I had to do that for a whole afternoon, I’d just tell that lizard to put me out of my misery.”
“I heard that we might have something other than sandwiches, and something sure smells good,” Rex, one of the permanent hired hands, said. “Did you finally find us a cook?”
“I hope so,” Miles said. “She says if y’all are a surly bunch, she will be gone right after dinner, so mind your manners if you want her to stay.”
“I’ll pass the word around,” Rex said with a serious nod.
“Sweet Jesus and all the angels in heaven,” Miles said when he was inside the bunkhouse.
“I’ll take that as a good thing,” Stella said.
“Plates are at the end of the buffet line. Sweet tea, lemonade, and water are all on the table. Ice is in the glasses set at each place. Y’all help yourselves, but first you go wash your hands.
You don’t eat my food with sweaty, dirty hands even if they’ve been inside gloves all morning. ”
Elijah was the first one to wash up in the kitchen sink, and then get in line.
“Fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, plus hot biscuits and corn on the cob. And is that chocolate cake for dessert? I think I’ve died and gone straight to heaven.
I might drop down on one knee and propose to you if this food is as good as it looks. ”
“If you did, I’d have to holler for the ranch hands to help you up,” Stella teased. “If you ever get a hankerin’ to do that, though, you better have a ring in your hand.”
“Just how big of a diamond do you want?” Elijah chuckled.
“That’s enough of that nonsense,” she said, and changed the subject. “I had to rush dinner, but there’s a ham in the oven for the evenin’ meal.”
“Well, dammit!” one of the other guys said. “Me and Willie don’t stick around for supper.”
“You are awesome, Ms. Stella. Please don’t ever leave us. Elijah don’t know how to make anything but cowboy steak and fried potatoes. I never thought I’d say this, but I’m tired of steak,” Rex said as he piled his plate high.
“And we ain’t had dessert except for store-bought cookies and canned peaches,” Willie declared.
From Stella’s smile, Miles had high hopes that he had finally found a cook.
When he bit into a chicken leg, a picture of Lula Ann popped into his head.
A warm breeze wafted the scent of salty water across the warm sand that night.
Like always, a few curly strands of hair had escaped her braids and were flying around her face.
Her blue eyes danced with happiness at the sunset over the ocean, and Miles—no, he was Bubba that night—wished that he could go back to those hours and relive them.
Holly wrestled with doubts and indecision for the first time in her life for days after her mother was back in the office, and Holly was given the okay to go out into the field.
After dreaming about Bubba Jones all night, she woke up in a hotel room in Pampa, Texas, on a Saturday morning.
She threw on a pair of sweatpants and made her way down to the dining room for a cup of coffee and a bagel and let her mind drift back to the speed-dating event three weeks ago.
“It’s sure not an out of sight, out of mind situation,” she muttered as she carried her food back up to her room.
Checkout was at eleven o’clock, but she planned on being well on her way back home by that time.
While she ate her breakfast, she checked all the numbers one more time, went through the notes she’d made to add to the contract, and then put her computer in the case and dressed in jeans and a T-shirt for the eleven-hour drive home.
This is one time that I really wish the company plane wasn’t in for repairs.
She slung the computer case over one shoulder, her purse over the other, scanned the room where she had stayed for a week, and rolled her suitcase out into the hallway.
She would be back in the office to present her report on Monday morning and off to Beaumont the next day to settle a dispute in that area.
She loaded her things in the back seat of a company truck and turned on the A/C as soon as she was behind the steering wheel.
Fall had not pushed summer into the history books yet, and wouldn’t for several more weeks.
Holly remembered reading that Texas had four seasons like all the other states.
Summer, Scorch, Almost Christmas, and Christmas.
This was still Scorch season, so it took a while for the A/C to chase the searing heat from inside the truck.
She plugged her phone into the dash screen and started her playlist.
One of her mother’s favorites, “Last Date” by Floyd Cramer played first, and the words struck Holly’s heart so hard that she had to blink back tears.
The words said that she had found love too late and was miserable, and she let the memory of that evening on the beach flash through her mind.
She didn’t want her last date with Bubba to be the final time she saw him.
She sure didn’t want to look back and regret that she might have let the love of her life slip through her fingers.
The music had just ended when her phone rang and the name on the screen said that Darlene was calling.
“Hello,” Holly said.
“I’m sending a screenshot of something I saw on Facebook this morning. If you want a cowboy, go after this one,” Darlene said. “He’s rich enough to buy a ranch near Katy, so he’s not just a hired hand.”
Holly unplugged her phone from Bluetooth and glanced down at the picture on the screen. Her breath caught, tightening her chest. She had to make herself inhale. A car honked, and the driver stuck his middle finger up at her.
“What’d I do?” she barked, and then realized she had swerved over into the wrong lane.
“What’s going on?” Darlene yelled. “Did you drop the phone again?”
“No, but … hold on a minute,” she said, and pulled over onto the side of the road. “Where did you get this?”
“An acquaintance, Maribelle, posted it on her page,” Darlene said. “I thought her brother was sexy and figured if you had the hots for a cowboy, this one would do better than a hired hand.”
Holly couldn’t take her eyes off the picture of Bubba Jones with a couple of little girls sitting on a horse with him leading it.
“Bubba told me that he worked on a ranch,” Holly said, “and that he had three nieces and a horse and a sister named Maribelle. I’ve looked for him on all the social media sites, but I couldn’t find him.”
“Are you serious?” Darlene’s tone was pure shock. “That is your Bubba Jones?”
“Yes, it is,” Holly answered.
Darlene giggled and then laughed out loud.
“What is so funny?” Holly asked.
“The caption reads: My brother, Miles Chapman, on the Lazy M, his new ranch near Katy, Texas.”
“What?” Holly gasped. “How … What … When?” she stammered.
“I’ve never met Maribelle in person, but I was doing research on women ranchers for a big article for my magazine, and we had several Zoom meetings. Looks like both of you were using fake names. You were really dating Miles of the Chapman empire, one of the biggest ranches in Texas.”
“Holy crap!” Holly gasped.
“I’m going into his social media pages right now,” Darlene said. “Are you already on the road?”
“Yes, I am, but that shocked me so badly that I’m pulled over on the side of the road right now.”
“From what I’m seeing, he really is, or at least was, a player.
His picture is popping up all over the place with one woman or another.
Fancy restaurants and clubs. I’m pretty sure you were wise to just walk away,” Darlene said.
“Call me when you get home this evening. I’m on my way to a brunch interview with an up-and-coming country music star, but we need to talk more about this. ”
“Oh no, we do not, but I do need to talk to Bubba or whoever he really is,” Holly said.
“Hey, don’t go in there with your redhead temper at the boiling stage. Remember you were playing the same game as he was,” Darlene warned her. “Talk to you later.”
Holly tossed the phone over onto the passenger’s seat and drove to the next exit.
She parked in a convenience-store lot and reached for her phone.
She brought up several social media sites and checked for Miles Chapman—and there he was in every one of them—smiling, his arm around women who exuded confidence and beauty.
Darlene was right. He really was all over the place, and in every one of the pictures, he seemed to be looking right at her.
“Are you laughing at me because you were just toying with Lula Ann? Was I just a passing fancy?” she asked.
Hey, that’s not fair unless you ask yourself the same questions, the voice in Holly’s head scolded her.
“I was not,” she protested. “But maybe he already guessed that I was not Lula Ann, and he had seen me on Insta and Facebook.”
If you want answers, go to the source, the pesky voice said.
For the next four hours, Holly worried with that idea.
She stopped for a bathroom break to fill up the truck’s gas tank and buy a snack to hold her over until she reached home and could DoorDash some food to her apartment.
While she was in the ladies’ room, she brought up the pictures that Darlene had sent her again.
A quick Google search brought up the location and a few sentences about how it had recently sold for millions of dollars to the son of billionaire Martin Chapman.
A little cameo photo of Miles Chapman, looking like sex on a stick, was included with the article.
Could this possibly mean that she and Bubba, aka Miles, could actually have a relationship?
A tiny seed of hope seemed to sprout at the idea.
Could that seed grow into a real relationship?
Those were questions that she had no answers for—not until she talked to him face-to-face and came clean about who she was, too.
Once she was back in her vehicle, she put the address of the ranch into her phone. She wanted answers, and thanks to social media and the internet, she knew where to go get them.