Joe & Emma’s Story - Chapter One #2
“So you take care of the books,” she said. “That means you know the budget.”
“It means I wrote the budget.”
“Then you and I are going to be great friends.” The warmth came on smooth and easy, the professional charm clicking back into its track now that she had found a use for him. “Friends with the budget. It is the single most important friendship a wedding has.”
“Mm,” Joe said.
She slid him a look. He could see her trying to take a reading off him and coming up with nothing, and he could see that it bothered her.
Clearly she was far too well brought up to let her curiosity show, and Joe, who came by most of his entertainment quietly, enjoyed it more than was strictly neighborly.
“You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?” It was not quite a question. There was something underneath it, though, something close to enjoyment, and Joe felt it.
“Haven’t decided yet,” he said, which was the most honest thing he had told anybody all morning.
“I’ll be straight with you, Joe, seeing as you’re the budget man.
” She negotiated a rut in the gravel and kept her feet, which he gave her credit for.
“I’m not only here for your brother’s wedding.
Your family asked me to take a look at whether this place could become a wedding venue for the public going forward. ”
“I heard.”
“And?”
Joe considered the live oaks, the lake glistening silver below them, the big barn that had stood ninety years now, minding its own affairs. “It’s a fine ranch,” he said, “the way it is.”
She was quiet a moment. “That is not a no,” she said.
“No,” Joe agreed. “It isn’t.”
It was right about then, with the morning finally settling into something a man could halfway predict, that he heard the engine. A low, expensive growl coming up the country road a good deal faster than the average neighbors traveled. Joe shut his eyes for the length of one long breath.
The Corvette came over the cattle guard in a spray of gravel and glory, fire-engine red, polished to a shine a man could shave in, and rolled to a stop a respectful two feet off the bumper of the rental car.
The door swung up toward the sky. And out unfolded six lean feet of Quentin Watkins, eighty-one years old, silver headed, sharp eyed, dressed like a man who had somewhere finer to be than a working guest ranch.
“There she is.” Quentin said it to the yard at large, with the pure delight of a man unwrapping a present he had bought for himself. He was already out of the car, crossing the gravel, folding both of Emma’s hands into his.
“The wedding lady, right on the dot. Quentin Watkins, darlin’.
" He glanced around, noticed the animals still milling around. "And I apologize for every last thing that has probably happened to you since you crossed that cattle guard. The goat hasn’t got a lick of shame, the dogs have got less, and that grandson of mine has probably been hauling your luggage polite like I taught him instead of telling you the good parts of this ranch’s possibilities. ”
“Grandpa,” Joe said.
“I am only saying what’s true.” Quentin turned the full hundred-watt force of himself back onto Emma, the way a man turns a porch light on a June bug.
“The good part, darlin’, is that you have come to the prettiest piece of land in the state of Texas, and we are purely glad to have you on it.
Don’t you mind Joe. He gets the quiet from his mother’s people. ”
Joe watched her recalibrate, and he would give her this much, she was quick about it.
He had watched her file him away back there by the car, neat as a receipt.
The bookkeeper, the quiet one, nobody worth spending her good charm on.
And now here came Quentin, larger than the whole morning, and Joe could very nearly see her mind shifting gears, turning her attention to the man she believed was running things.
It should have stung a little, being dismissed like that.
It didn’t. What landed on Joe instead, standing in his own front yard with a garment bag over his shoulder and the sun all the way up now, was something else entirely.
He had come down off that porch to scatter a few dogs.
And somewhere between the goat and the top of the gravel drive, a woman he had known for the length of one walk uphill had gotten herself in under a door Joe kept shut on purpose.
And he could not, for the life of him, find the place where she had slipped through.
Quentin was already steering her toward the house, promising her coffee and a plate of Mike’s biscuits and the good end of the porch swing, talking a blue streak the whole way about lake views and barns and the prettiest wedding Bear Valley would ever be given the privilege of throwing.
Emma went along with him, charmed and nodding, taking in every blessed thing. But at the foot of the porch steps she looked back. Just the once. At the dust, and the goat up on the truck, and the morning that had clearly not gone one bit the way she had planned it.
Then she looked at Joe.
Whatever she had driven all this way so certain of, he thought, she looked a good deal less certain of it now.
That made two of them.
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