Chapter Ten #2
“He might go back to teaching one day. Not in Houston,” he added gently. “But Texas is a big state, and when he’s been away from alcohol a couple of years, who knows?”
“The ranch will be good for him. You did mean it, didn’t you?” she added quickly. “It wasn’t something you said to help him want to get better?”
“I very rarely say things I don’t mean, Meredith,” he replied. “Well,” he added with a frown, “I wasn’t exactly telling the truth about washing the dogs.”
“Excuses, excuses.” She toyed with her purse. “Rey, thank you for giving him a second chance.”
He laughed gently. “I’ve got an ulterior motive,” he murmured dryly. “When you come to the ranch to visit him, you can make me a pan of biscuits.”
“Just you? Not one to share with Leo?”
He shifted behind the wheel. “He can go find someone to make him biscuits,” he said. “Surely, somewhere in Texas, there’s a woman who’d do it just for him.”
“Your other brothers, do their wives bake?”
“Dorie and Tess do,” he said. “But Tira hasn’t got a clue how to,” he added on a sigh.
“Simon doesn’t mind. They have a cook who can.
Although he’s really not much on biscuits, so it doesn’t matter.
” He grinned. “You should see him with his sons. Two of them now. They’re still toddlers, and he’s a whiz at fatherhood.
Dorie and Corrigan have a boy and a girl and Cag and Tess have a son.
That makes me an uncle five times over! Christmas is going to be a real treat this year. ”
She thought about Christmas. It was going to be a lonely one for her, with her father down here on the ranch.
He saw the look on her face and reached out to catch her hand in his.
“Hey,” he said softly, “you’re invited for Christmas, you know.
We’ll pack up the kids and go over to the annual Christmas party at the Doctors Coltrain.
They have huge layouts of Lionel trains that they run every year, especially with a little boy of their own who’ll be big enough to play with them in a couple of years.
Draws a big crowd. Do you like train sets? ”
She smiled. “I do.” It lifted her heart to know that she was going to be included in the family get-together. She loved children. It would make the season less traumatic for her and her father, because they were missing two members of their immediate family.
“We’ll make it a happy Christmas,” he said softly.
She tangled her fingers into his. “I’ll have that to look forward to, when I go back.”
“It’s premature right now, but if you decide to move down here, too, I’d bet good money that Micah Steele would offer you work.”
She looked at his big, warm hand holding hers. “I like Jacobsville.”
His fingers grew possessive. “I like you. ”
“Thanks. I like you, too, and if you’ll loan me your cell phone, I’ll call the minister right now and we can set a date,” she added with wicked haste.
He chuckled. “Hold on, tiger, I may have been lying about washing the dogs, but marriage is a big step. You have to look out for me. I know you can tame snakes and handle heart attacks, and you bake good biscuits. But how do you look in a suit, and can you dance?”
“I look great in a suit,” she said firmly, “and I can do Latin dances.”
He grimaced. “I can’t. How about a nice, slow two-step?”
“I can do that, too!”
He glanced at her. “What do you like to read?” he asked.
The next few minutes were spent in gleeful harmony, going over things they had in common.
They liked the same basic forms of relaxation, and they even thought alike on politics and child-raising.
It was a very good start. Meredith had seen far too many relationships start out with nothing more than sex for a foundation, and they didn’t last. It took common interests, common beliefs, friendship, to make a lasting marriage.
Marriage. That word, once so warily approached, now seemed as natural as letting Rey hold her hand all the way back to Jacobsville. She wondered where they were going together in the future, and hoped it was someplace nice.
* * *
She had to go back to work the following week. Friday morning she had her suitcase packed. She was wearing her tailored beige suit with her blond hair in a neat ponytail when she followed Rey out the front door. He carried her suitcase to his car and put it in the trunk.
“I’ll be back late this afternoon,” he told Leo. “If you need me, I’ll be on my cell phone.” He patted the cell phone carrier on his belt.
“Oh, I think I can cope,” Leo drawled with a wink at Meredith. “Don’t be a stranger, Meredith,” he added. “We’ll miss you. But thanks for making us all those pans of frozen biscuits!”
“It’s a good thing you have a walk-in freezer, is all I can say,” she mused, chuckling. “But don’t forget the directions on how to cook them,” she added. “They’re only dough until then.”
“I’ll have it all down pat in no time,” Leo promised. “Meanwhile,” he added, rubbing his big hands together with visible delight, “there are still six biscuits left over from breakfast!”
“No use asking you to save me a couple, is there?” Rey asked on a sigh.
“Blood is thicker than water, except where biscuits are involved,” Leo shot back. “Sorry.”
Rey got in the car and started the engine without another word.
* * *
Meredith was quiet most of the way to Houston. She was oddly reluctant to go back to work, although she loved her job. She was going to miss Rey and Leo and Mrs. Lewis. She was even going to miss the chickens.
“You can come down anytime you want to,” Rey reminded her, when he noticed that she was brooding. It had been hard, but he’d kept his hands to himself for the duration of her stay at the ranch. He was planning a frontal assault in the near future. This wasn’t the time, though.
“I know.” She stared out the window at the bare trees and chilly flat landscape. “Thanksgiving comes along pretty soon.”
“Your father will be working for us by then. You can come and spend a few days while you’re off.”
“I might still be on call,” she worried.
He was grim and silent himself, after she said that. The rest of the way to Houston, he had the radio on, letting it fill the cool silence.
He dropped her off at her father’s house. It looked cold and unwelcoming as she unlocked the front door so that he could sit her suitcase inside.
She turned back to him, her grey eyes wide and sad as they met his dark ones. He hadn’t removed his hat, and it was hard to see his face in the shadow of it.
“Well, thanks for everything,” she began.
He stared down at her with a sense of loss.
After their ride up to Houston to visit her father, there seemed to be a curtain between them.
They’d been very close that Sunday. But he’d gotten cold feet, he admitted to himself, and he’d drawn back.
He felt the threat of her in his heart and he was trying to run from it.
Suddenly it was like trying to run from himself.
“You’ll be here alone,” he said quietly. “Make sure you keep your door locked. We haven’t had any reports that they caught the guys who rolled Leo. Just in case, don’t let your guard down.”
“I’ll be fine,” she promised him.
She looked so small and vulnerable standing there. He hated leaving her.
“You wear your jacket when it’s cold like this,” she told him firmly, noticing that he was standing in the cold wind in just the shirtsleeves of his chambray shirt.
“And my raincoat when it’s raining,” he said with a mocking smile. “You wear yours, too.”
She hesitated. “Well, goodbye,” she said after a minute.
“You and I won’t ever say goodbye, Meredith,” he replied. “It’s ‘so long.’”
She forced a smile to her lips. “So long, then.”
He was still hesitating. His face was absolutely grim.
“I know where a jeweler’s is open this early,” she said suddenly, with mischievous enthusiasm.
It warmed him to hear her tease, to see that wonderful smile. “Do you, really?”
She nodded. “You can even have a diamond. But it would have to be a small one.”
His dark eyes twinkled. “You just hold that thought,” he said gently. “One of these days we might talk about this marriage hang-up of yours. Meanwhile, I’ve got to…”
“If you say ‘wash the dogs,’” she interrupted, “I’ll slug you!”
He chuckled. “I wasn’t going to say that. I’ve got to get back and finish my marketing strategy for the next year before we have our year-end board meeting.”
“I guess that’s pretty complicated.”
“No more than treating diseases and plotting nutrition,” he replied. He studied her quietly. “I’ll miss you. Don’t stay away too long.”
“Why?” she prodded.
“You have to save me from attacks on my virtue from hordes of amorous, sex-crazed women,” he said without cracking a smile. “Who knows when I might weaken and give in to one of them, and then where would we be?”
“I’ve got my heart set on a virgin,” she informed him.
He laughed helplessly. “Sorry, honey, you missed the boat by a decade or so.”
She snapped her fingers. “Damn!”
“On the other hand, I didn’t,” he said in a deep, soft voice, and moved closer. He framed her face in his lean hands and studied it hungrily for several seconds. “You make me ache every time I touch you,” he whispered, bending. “I’ll starve to death before you get back.”
“Starve…?” She wasn’t thinking. She was watching his long, hard mouth come closer. She held her breath until it settled, ever so softly, on her parted lips. And then she didn’t think at all for several long, tempestuous seconds.
Too soon, he caught her by the arms and pushed her away. “You stop that,” he muttered breathlessly. “I refuse to be seduced on the front lawn.”
She was trying to catch her own breath. “No problem. There’s a nice soft carpet just five steps this way,” she indicated the hall.
“I’m not that kind of man,” he said haughtily.
She made a face at him.
He chuckled and kissed her one last time, teasingly, before he pulled back and started toward his car. “I’ll call you.”
“That’s what they all say!” she cried after him.