Chapter 3 #2
Still, they were beautiful. Intricate. Amazing. Black calfskin like her brother’s prophecy boots. But that’s where the similarity ended. Along the multi-curved scallop were small inlaid dice—six, with different numbers showing on each. Good Lord, inlaying those dots must’ve been a bear.
Curved pieces of pieces of leather wound around the front and back quarters. At first glance, a random swirl, but when she looked closer, the shapes became clearer. The four suits in a card deck—spades, clubs, diamonds, and hearts.
Dice and playing cards.
“Who…” Greer’s vocal cords mutinied, and she swallowed a few times to prod them back into service. “Who made them?”
With a gentle hand, Delaney reached over and touched Greer’s arm. “Your dad drew them and that’s what matters most. He saw them and put that design down on paper. I just helped finish what he’d started.”
She was right. It didn’t matter that Cal’s and Delaney’s boots were the last her dad had ever made. That he’d fought through the pain of his rheumatoid arthritis to guarantee they had a future together.
What mattered was these boots were crafted with loving intention and incredible skill and genuine love. Tears crowded at the corners of Greer’s eyes, and she turned to Delaney. “They’re beautiful. It would have been the world’s loss if you’d left Prophecy and never come back.”
“I’m the one who’d be lost if I’d left Prophecy again,” Delaney said softly.
Something about the way her brother took Delaney’s hand and shared a secret look with her squeezed at Greer’s insides. She wanted that. But instinct told her this unsettled feeling inside her couldn’t be cured by a man.
This was a fight she had to face herself.
Why she felt she needed to fight or what she was fighting, she wasn’t exactly sure.
Now, if she slid her feet into these boots, she was accepting whatever they, with their prophetic power, predicted. She would be embracing both the best life she was capable of living and the love of her life.
Greer gazed down at the pair of gray sharkskin boots she was wearing. Handmade by her dad.
Delaney said, “Taking them off doesn’t mean you’re forgetting him.”
She was right. He would want Greer to do this. To move forward. He would be so proud of Delaney and so happy for her.
Oh, Daddy, I wish you could be here right now.
But she would honor his memory by embracing the gift of a good life and true love that he and Delaney had given her.
She carefully toed off the boots he’d made her and scooted back her chair to stand. She eased her foot inside the first prophecy boot and stepped into it, the leather gliding over her heel and hugging her high instep.
Oh, it fit perfectly.
Quickly, she did the same with the other. Finally, when both her feet were embraced by soft leather, a feeling did surround her. A soft blanket of optimism trimmed with a border of peace.
All stitched together with the certainty that something in her world was about to change.
Dear Jesus, Alex wasn’t at a bed and breakfast. He’d just landed on Mary Poppins’ front porch.
The two-story Victorian was painted the color of taffy—pink, yellow, and blue.
He shrugged his small gym bag higher on his shoulder and headed for the stairs to get the hell out of there.
Before he hit the bottom step, the front door whooshed open behind him.
“You must be Alex.”
He glanced back to see a busty older woman hurry onto the porch. If this was Delaney’s aunt, she had at least one thing in common with his mamá. He and his brothers had always sworn that Sofia Villanueva could hear an ant crap from a mile away.
He slowly turned to face the woman fully. If that didn’t convince her she didn’t want his kind in her candy-colored place, he didn’t know what would. But just for insurance, he slapped on his baddest badass scowl.
“Yeah?” He almost closed his eyes at the bark in his tone. If his mamá ever heard him speak to a woman like that, she would yank his ass up by the ear, force-march him to the kitchen, and make him gargle a gallon of Fabuloso.
Delaney’s aunt gave him a quick once-over, taking in his boots, his jeans, his wrinkled shirt—hesitating on the grease stain on the arm—and looked straight into his eyes. What he found on her face blew him away. No judgment. No wariness. Just simple acceptance and welcome.
With a smile, she stepped forward to wrap an arm around his, making her dangly earrings swing in a circle just above her shoulders.
Alex tried to get a closer view of them without being obvious.
A tangle of Monopoly pieces—a car, a top hat, a shoe, and that Toto-like dog.
Anchoring them all was an orange plastic rectangle with $500 on it. The highest bill in the game.
She maneuvered him toward the front door. “I’m Raylene, Delaney’s aunt. I’m so happy you decided to stay here at Sweetwater. Not that there’s anything wrong with the chain hotels, but I think you’ll find my place a little homier.”
Alex tried to ease his arm from her hold, but Raylene’s grip was solid. “You know, it might be better if I just grab a room at one of those chains.”
“Well, that’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve heard since Irma Flores claimed she started a fashion trend that spread all the way to Hollywood.
You’re already here. And besides, PBC is paying for your stay.
Why anyone would sleep somewhere that offers two packages of instant coffee when you could have fresh brewed and a breakfast that will knock you to your knees?
” She glanced down at Alex’s jeans as if she were speculating about his knees.
“And speaking of good food, have you had lunch yet?”
His stomach chose that moment to make a sound like a lion too long without a gazelle.
“Guess that answers that.” She pulled him down a hallway bisecting the house, his boots clomping on the shiny wood floor. He lightened his step because he sure as hell couldn’t afford to mark up the place and owe her to refinish the floor.
They stepped into a light-filled kitchen his mamá would’ve killed for.
The center was dominated by an island the size of his Montana cabin, and windows spanned the wall overlooking a backyard filled with lush grass and blooming flowers.
But the peaceful view couldn’t compete with the hen-chatter coming from an L-shaped breakfast nook.
Several ladies—probably ranging from their twenties to their sixties—sat elbow to elbow, sipping iced tea, eating something off dainty-ass plates, and yapping over one another.
AKA hell on earth.
“Some of my Bunco ladies are here for salad day.”
Salad? Yeah, that hellevator had just dropped a floor. “Mrs…”
“Call me Raylene.” She patted his arm. “Or Aunt Raylene, if you want.”
“Raylene, if you’ll just point me to a room, I’ll get out of your hair. I’ve got some work to do for your niece and really need to get on that.”
Shaking her head, she tsked. “You ask me, she’s working a little too hard these days, but I’m happier than a dog in a trashcan full of leftovers that she finally came home.”
Home. Alex wasn’t even sure what that word meant anymore.
Montana had never been home. It had been a means to an end, an escape from Texas to make sure no one took out his family.
And now he needed to finish his business in Prophecy and get his ass back out of Texas before he was revisited by a very ugly, potentially deadly, part of his past.
“Ladies—” Raylene pitched her voice over the chitchat, “—I’d like to introduce you to Alex Villanueva.”
Four women swiveled their heads in some eerie synchronized movement, giving him once-overs that included one peering over her bifocals, another shoving her glasses on top of her head, one popping open a couple of shirt buttons, and one fanning herself with a placemat.
Only the fifth, a buttoned-up type with brown hair, stared down at her silverware instead.
Raylene made a shooing motion. “Cheryl, you and Lily, y’all scoot out right quick.”
The ladies, a forty-something streaky blond and the silverware inspector, hurried to do as Raylene asked.
“Now, Alex, you just slide right on in there by Lily, and I’ll get you a plate.” The shove in the small of his back left no room for argument, so he stumbled forward.
In that second, he’d rather be facing a switchblade on one side and a .38 on the other, but he swallowed and tried to put on a nonthreatening smile. “Ladies.”
He slid his ass onto the fabric-covered cushion. No sooner was he on the bench than one lady hip-bumped him to scoot to the middle. He pulled his elbows close to his sides. What the hell had he gotten himself into here?
In a flash, Delaney’s aunt was back with a lettuce-covered plate and proceeded to fill it with three heaping spoonfuls. “Today is pimento cheese with pepper jack, tuna salad with Granny Smith apples, and chicken salad with pineapple and almonds.”
Why hadn’t he stopped at that Tex-Mex place just down from Prophecy Boot Company before heading over here? At least that way he would’ve been able to claim lack of hunger with complete honesty.
“So, sugar,” she said, placing the mounded plate in front of him, “tell us a little about you.”
Between this and the meeting at PBC, Alex hadn’t been expected to talk this much in the past two months. And what was it with people’s curiosity about his family? Suddenly, pimento cheese had never looked so damn good. He shoveled in a mouthful and gave an apologetic shrug.
She flashed him a smile and said to the other women, “Delaney says he drove down here all the way from Montana.”
Look-Over-Her-Glasses did just that and squeezed Alex’s biceps. “Sure do grow ’em stout up there in the snow.”
“I could never live in a place that cold,” another woman chimed in. “I heard if you lick a flagpole, your tongue’ll get stuck.”
Raylene’s fork clattered to her plate. “Why on God’s green earth would you ever lick a flagpole?”
“Well, I don’t rightly know. But if that could happen, then all kinds of body-freezin’ things could happen.”
Alex’s balls shriveled a little at the comment. It had definitely taken a couple of years before his blood thickened up to the point where he didn’t want to hibernate all winter. But no way would he get involved in this conversation, so he just kept eating. Pimento cheese was pretty good too.
“Bet his family’s gonna miss him if he stays out this way.” The woman next to him jostled him with her elbow. “What’s your mama think about you traipsing all the way down here looking for work?”
Unfortunately, she caught him when he’d just swallowed. Not answering would be downright rude. “My mamá lives in Georgia.”
“That so?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, then,” another said, “we’ll just have to step in for her while you’re here. Treat you like family.”
God, if they only knew what he’d done to his own family, these women would jump up from this table and run away screaming.