Joe & Emma’s Story - Chapter One
Joe & Emma’s Story - Chapter One
The gravel kicked up dust the color of old pennies, and Emma Blackstock’s rental car, a sensible sedan that had survived Dallas traffic just fine, shuddered over the cattle guard like it was crossing into another country.
Which, Emma thought, white-knuckling the wheel, might not be far from the truth.
Bear Valley, Texas. Population clearly not large enough to warrant a Starbucks.
The last reliable cell tower had been ten miles back, and the GPS had given up entirely somewhere around the time the road stopped being paved and started threatening the undercarriage of her rented Chevy.
She’d passed through a small, quaint town about forty minutes ago, noting a feed store, a church with a peeling white steeple, and something called Cooters that appeared to be equal parts bar, diner, and town hall.
The Watkins Dude Ranch sat at the end of a long drive lined with live oaks and white ranch-rail fencing.
Emma pulled up as close to the main house as she could, which was still several hundred yards from the front porch.
With her spine straight and her game face on, the one that had seen her through more than a hundred weddings, six impossible mothers-of-the-bride, and one venue fire she still didn’t like to talk about, she cut the engine.
She could handle a ranch.
She checked her lipstick in the rearview, then stepped out into the Texas heat wearing cream linen trousers and a silk blouse.
She popped the trunk of the sedan and pulled out her suitcase and garment steamer.
Before she could take a step, her three-inch heels sank into the soft dirt where the gravel met green grass.
“Well,” Emma said, to nobody at all. “All right, then.”
She was working the shoe loose, balanced on one foot with the dignity of a woman who has been obliged to balance on one foot in finer places than this, when something tugged at her suitcase. She looked down. A goat looked back.
It was a sturdy, barrel-shaped goat about the size of a Labrador, and it had her good leather luggage tag in its mouth, chewing with the slow, contented confidence of a creature that didn’t have a care in the world. It did not appear sorry. It did not appear capable of sorry.
“That tag was a gift from my sister,” Emma informed it.
The goat chewed.
Not knowing what else to do, and frankly a little afraid to argue with a goat, she stepped back, nearly breaking her shoe’s heel as it popped out of the earth that had been holding it hostage.
And that’s when the dogs arrived.
There were a lot of dogs. Emma was in no position to count them, because they came around the back of the car in a single joyful brown wave.
A wet nose found her hand, and another found the back of her knee.
Her steamer tipped over into the dust with a soft thump.
They were not unkind dogs. They were simply large, and overjoyed, and entirely of the opinion that Emma had been delivered to this ranch for their personal enjoyment.
Emma had planned weddings on cliff tops and in cathedrals and once, memorably, on a moving train, and she had walked into every last one of them with her chin up and her smile on and the bone-deep conviction that she could handle whatever the day chose to produce.
The day had not, until now, produced livestock.
“Tiny. Off.”
The voice came from somewhere above the chaos, low and unhurried.
The goat, astonishingly, stopped chewing.
A man had crossed the yard while Emma was losing her war with the animal kingdom.
He waded into the dogs now without any particular hurry and made a one-handed gesture toward them.
The brown wave broke and scattered. He said a word she didn’t catch, and the goat surrendered the luggage tag and ambled off, deeply unbothered, to go and stand on the hood of a truck.
Thank God it didn’t stand on her rental car.
That would have been an interesting conversation with the insurance company.
And then it was quiet, and the man was standing in front of her. Emma forgot, for a full and undignified second, every single one of her opening lines when meeting prospective clients.
He was tall. That was the first thing she noticed.
Dark hair, a little overdue for a cut, peeked out beneath a brown cowboy hat.
His face was tanned by the Texas sun, weathered a bit at the eyes.
A strong jaw was clean-shaven and spoke of confidence.
Definitely handsome. Not in the way some city men worked at being handsome.
Natural. Innate. He simply stood there in a faded shirt with the sleeves shoved up over a pair of forearms that had plainly done something for a living, and were the most arresting thing Emma had laid eyes on in longer than she cared to admit.
Her professional smile arrived a beat late. “Well. Thank you for the rescue,” she said. “Although I had it handled.”
“Sure you did.” His smile was subtle and just the slightest bit mocking. “Tiny collects the tags. I imagine he has a whole drawer of them somewhere. Keep your hands where he can’t reach, and your high-heeled shoes off the flower beds, and you’ll get along fine here.”
“I’ll make a note.” Emma put her hand out, because you always put your hand out to new clients, and because it gave her something to do that was not looking at his forearms. “Emma Blackstock. I’m the wedding planner. I’d tell you I’m not usually like this, but you’d know I was lying.”
That earned her something. Not a smile, still, but a flicker low down in his eyes, like a porch light coming on in a window a long way off.
“Joe Watkins.” He took her hand. His was warm and dry and ridiculously, distractingly steady. His palm engulfed hers, and held for just a touch longer than strictly necessary. “I take care of the accounting on the ranch.”
“And hire wedding planners?” she asked, feeling a tingle climb up the inside of her wrist.
“That too. Although I won’t be the final say in that department. My brother, Mike, and his fiancée, Liv, will be your clients.”
“I’m looking forward to meeting them.”
He bent and set her steamer upright, and had her garment bag up off the dust before she could reach for it. There was no taking it back from him without a wrestling match she was not prepared to have in front of the goat.
“You really don’t have to,” she began.
“City shoes. Gravel drive. Two hundred yards uphill.” He settled the bag over one shoulder. “I’ve watched this go badly before.”
Emma elected to be charmed rather than annoyed, because charmed was useful and annoyed was not. And also because his gallantry was, irritatingly, a little bit charming. “Has anyone ever mentioned to you that you’re a generous conversationalist?”
“No.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
There it was again, that far-off cousin of a smile. Emma found that she wanted the whole smile, the way you want the rest of a song, but she filed that thought away.
Behind him the ranch went on about its morning, sublimely indifferent to her arrival.
Off past a rail fence a man had a horse on a long line in a round pen, the two of them turning slow, patient circles in the early light.
A windmill ticked. The live oaks held still in the gathering heat.
It was, Emma reminded herself, a job. A beautiful one, for a family she already wanted to do right by.
A venue to size up. A wedding to build out of bare Texas ground.
She would simply need better shoes.
* * *
Joe Watkins had carried a great many things up this drive in his time. Feed sacks and fence posts, a calf with a busted leg, Lyle’s goddaughter asleep and drooling on his shoulder. He had never once carried a garment bag, and he was fairly certain this one had cost more than the calf.
The wedding planner walked beside him and did not, to her considerable credit, complain.
She picked her way up the gravel in those wrecked shoes like a woman crossing a creek on stepping stones, chin level, smile bolted on, telling him about his own lake as though she gave this exact tour every morning of her life.
She was not from anywhere near here. Joe had known that before she got the car door open.
He had watched her step out into his yard the way a person steps out onto a stage, every piece of it arranged in advance, the city haircut that hit just at her shoulders, the good linen pants and the smile she’d carried up out of the car already lit.
Then he had watched the goat take her down a peg, and all six of the dogs take her down another, and he had watched her square her shoulders and decide, then and there, to be gracious about the whole business.
That last part was what had brought him down off the porch.
A man could learn a lot about somebody by what they did when the morning got away from them.
The dogs, for the record, were six. That was four more than a working ranch had any earthly need of, and the exact number his family had somehow settled on. And that didn’t include his sister-in-law’s search and rescue dogs in training, or the various fosters she took in.
He took his read of Emma while she talked.
Younger than the brief had led him to expect, or maybe just a good deal more alive.
The email had said highly experienced, and he had pictured somebody starched.
This one had velvet brown eyes that went everywhere at once, taking a careful inventory of his ranch.
Her dark, shoulder-length hair was already losing its salon-perfect battle with the Texas heat.
She smelled, faintly and expensively, of some flower he could not have named on a bet.
But he liked it. She was pretty, and Joe had the notion that pretty didn’t even begin to scratch the surface of her, and he caught himself wanting to know more.
He set that thought down where he had set his coffee an hour ago. Carefully. Off to the side.