Callie's Cowboy Read online

  Callie relaxed a bit, glad for something neutral to talk about. She engaged in small talk with Beverly for a few minutes as they all worked at their assigned tasks. The smell of herbs wafted across the kitchen, bringing with it the memory of many long-ago evenings just like this, when she and Sam would be hanging out in the kitchen, snapping peas or beating meringue for that night’s pie, sharing stories of their days. If she closed her eyes, she could imagine Sam’s easygoing smile. The one she hadn’t seen in years.

  “Where’s Deana?” she suddenly thought to ask.

  “She’s with Millicent Jones,” Beverly answered when it became obvious Sam wasn’t going to. “Her youngest is about Deana’s age. Millicent offered to take them both to that new Kid-Gym place where they have the tunnels and rooms full of balloons and stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah, that place that looks like a HabiTrail for humans?” Callie looked directly at Sam, making an honest attempt to connect with him on some level. She didn’t see any reason why they should be awkward around each other for the rest of their lives. Not that she’d be seeing him much, she reminded herself, but on those rare occasions when they did cross paths, it would be nice if they could get along—for Beverly’s sake if nothing else.

  “It’s not my idea of a load of fun,” Sam said. “But Millicent claims she tags right along with the kids, crawling around on hands and knees, swinging on ropes, climbing ladders. I don’t think my knees could take it.”

  Callie was gratified that at least she’d gotten a snippet of normal conversation from Sam. “I can see Millicent crawling through those tunnels with the kids.” For a moment Callie felt a stab of jealousy for her friend, who was so happy and relaxed around children—her own three, or umpteen from her neighborhood who trailed in and out of her house. Right now Deana was probably bonding with Millicent.… Now why in the world would that idea be so bothersome? Callie had no desire for any child to “bond” with her, particularly not Sam’s. She’d made her decision years ago to forgo, or at least postpone, having a family until her career was well established.

  That hadn’t happened yet. Oh, sure, she was editor of the paper. But that was in Destiny, Texas, where hardly anything happened. She wanted a chance at the big time—The Washington Post. The New York Times. Or at least the Houston Chronicle. Only a couple of weeks ago she’d sent out a new batch of résumés, a ritual she went through once a year.

  She forced her attention back to the present. At least she and Sam were talking, sort of.

  “Oh, darn,” Beverly said, “I’m out of, uh, sage for the chicken.”

  “I think we’ll survive without it,” Sam said dryly.

  “No, no, this recipe just isn’t the same without sage. I’ll run next door and borrow some from Rebecca Keyes.”

  “Rebecca’s is half a mile away.”

  “No problem.”

  “I could go get it—” Callie tried.

  “No, I need the walk,” Beverly insisted. “You two hold down the fort.”

  Well, that was subtle, Callie thought as she tried and failed to come up with some sort of reasonable objection to being left alone with Sam. If she didn’t know better … ah, hell, she did know better. Beverly had left them alone on purpose, hoping they would mend some fences.

  Callie cleared her throat. “Um, how’re things at the ranch?”

  “Are you asking to be polite, or do you really want to know?”

  Although her blood was threatening to boil, she put a lid on it. If Sam was spoiling for a fight, he wasn’t going to get one from her. “Both,” she said with what she hoped resembled a pleasant smile. “I’m interested in your welfare, which means I’d like to know how your life’s work is going. And I think it would be nice if we could be civil to one another, so I’m making an effort.”

  “My, haven’t you learned to be diplomatic over the years.”

  “It helps in my profession not to provoke people. They seldom are cooperative during an interview if you make them angry.”

  “And do I make you angry?”

  Enough that she felt like flinging her bowl of potato peelings at him. “Yes. I don’t understand why you can’t be a bit more pleasant. It couldn’t be because you’re still smarting over our breakup all those years ago. Could it?”

  She held her breath. Good Lord, what had made her say that? By baiting him, she was behaving as childishly as he.

  “I’m not the one carrying a flame. I got on with my life. I married, had a family. You’re the one holding out.”

  “Well, I … How could you—” Oh, if he only knew how close he was to wearing those potato peels. “You turkey!”

  A low laugh rumbled from Sam’s throat, sounding rusty. “Is that the best you can do?”

  Okay, so as epithets went, turkey was pretty weak. “Years ago I’d have called you much worse,” she said primly, “but I’d like to think I’ve matured a little since those days. Besides,” she added, “I am a guest in your home.”

  His amusement only increased, which farther infuriated her. “Yes, you are,” he agreed with exaggerated formality. “I guess I’ve overstepped the bounds of politeness.”

  Callie snorted. “Like the bounds of politeness ever restricted you before.”

  His eyes crackled with blue fire. “You’re really cruisin’ for a bruisin’.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yup, I think someone needs to teach you a lesson.”

  “You and who else? You never could get the best of me, even when we were kids.”

  “That’s because my mother wouldn’t let me rough-house with girls, even when they hit me first. She still won’t, for that matter.”

  “Then how’re you going to teach me a lesson?” Callie laughed suddenly, then bit her lip. She couldn’t believe she had stooped to this juvenile war of words with Sam, not when she knew how it had always ended before. He would get that look in his eye, and then he would chase her until she let him catch her and throw her over his shoulder, fireman style. Then he would carry her to the nearest sofa, drop her onto it, and proceed to tickle her into submission. Or kiss her.

  As she recalled, it was just such a confrontation that had led to their first kiss.

  The way Sam was looking at her, she was willing to bet his thoughts were running along the same lines. He slowly set the nutcracker aside. His chair rumbled backward as he stood.

  He licked his lips. She swallowed.

  Oh, dear, she’d carried this thing too far. “I only meant to loosen things up between us, Sam.” She took an instinctive half step backward. “I hate it that you’re so … cold toward me. I just want us to be friends again.”

  He shook his head as if to clear it of fog. “I’m not sure that’s possible. We haven’t been ‘just friends’ since we hit puberty.”

  “We can try,” she insisted, although she partly agreed with him. They’d liked each other as children—had played on the same Little League team, gone to church camp together. In seventh grade they’d despised each other—or, perhaps facing an attraction they didn’t yet understand, they’d only pretended the intense dislike. At some point during eighth grade their seething hormones had won out, and they’d become inseparable. And, as Sam had said, from that point on they’d never again been simply friends. They’d either been madly in love or broken up and furious with each other until they made up.

  Callie held out her hand. “C’mon, Sam. Friends? Can we let bygones be bygones?”

  He never verbally agreed to her terms, but he did take her hand. Instead of the perfunctory shake she’d expected, he held her palm against his, testing its softness with his strength. A million fireflies fluttered up her arm, then spread their flickering warmth throughout her body, settling deep in her abdomen where her most womanly urges resided.

  The doorbell rang. In a moment of irrational panic, Callie tried to jerk her hand from Sam’s grasp. He held on to her, daring her to make an issue of it. When the front door opened, however, and a cheery voice called in, “Yoo-hoo, a
nyone home?” Sam finally abandoned the game.

  “In here, Millicent,” he called over his shoulder.

  A whirling dervish, two feet high and wearing a grass-green jacket, burst through the kitchen doorway. “Daddy!”

  Sam scooped his daughter into his arms. “Hi, Deany! Did you have fun with Mrs. Jones and Lily?”

  Deana immediately launched into a long monologue about her afternoon’s adventures that no doubt made perfect sense to her. Callie, however, caught only about every fifth word.

  Sam seemed to understand. “A dinosaur’s mouth? And then what happened? Did the dinosaur try to eat you?”

  “Nooo!” She laughed uproariously, her blue eyes sparkling. But it wasn’t her smile that brought a lump to Callie’s throat, it was Sam’s. In the split second it had taken for him to greet his daughter, his whole demeanor had changed. He was smiling, animated. Love poured out of him like a bright beam of light enveloping Deana. Even his posture had changed. Instead of looking like he had a fire poker up his back, he was in a relaxed, easy stance.

  Memories danced inside Callie’s head, memories of when Sam had looked at her with love in his eyes. She suddenly ached all over to have him look at her that way again.

  Millicent leaned into the kitchen doorway. “Oh, hi, Callie. I thought I recognized that car out front.”

  Callie almost laughed. Millicent had known good and well that Callie was joining the Sangers for dinner that night. They’d talked about it at least three times on the phone earlier this week.

  “Hi, Millie.”

  “Can you stay for dinner?” Sam asked. “There’s plenty of food.”

  “No, I’ve got a car full of kids with me, and Nancy has to get to her viola lesson. But thanks. Is your mom here?”

  Sam shook his head. “Went to borrow some spices from the neighbor.”

  “Oh. I was going to ask her for a couple dozen eggs. But I can come back—”

  “No, no problem, I’ll get them.” Sam set Deana on the ground and went to the huge double-sided refrigerator. “Yeah, looks like she’s got plenty. I don’t know what she charges for them, though.”

  “I do. I have the exact change right here.”

  During Sam and Millicent’s exchange, Deana had wandered over to Callie’s side. Feeling awkward, Callie leaned down to attempt a conversation. “Hi, Deana. I’m Callie.”

  “Cal? Dem soxis poody.”

  “What?”

  Millicent laughed. “She’s saying your stockings are pretty.” She indicated Callie’s lace-textured hose.

  “Oh. Uh, thank you. Your, uh, barrette is pretty too.” Callie touched it lightly, pondering the purple cartoon character. “Is that a … a hippopotamus?”

  Deana looked horrified. “Iss Barney!”

  Millicent laughed again. “Get with it, Callie.”

  “Oops. Oh, yes, now I see. Of course it’s Barney. Guess I need new glasses.”

  Sam returned, carrying two cardboard cartons of eggs.

  Millicent laid a couple of bills and some change on the table and took the eggs. “Thanks.”

  “Sure you won’t stay for dinner?”

  “Can’t. Nancy would have a fit if she missed her viola class. But it’s nice of you to ask. Another time, maybe. Oh, we had a little accident.” She handed Sam a diaper bag.

  “No problem,” Sam said easily. “We have lots of little accidents, don’t we, Deana? But we’re working on it.”

  “My Lily is still in diapers, so don’t feel too badly.”

  “I won’t.” He smiled warmly at her. “Thanks, Millicent.”

  “No problem. See ya, Callie. Bye, Deana.”

  “Bye bye!” Deana waved her chubby hand at Millicent as the latter disappeared.

  “Potty training, huh?” Callie said, feeling really ignorant.

  “Yup. Speaking of the P-word,” Sam said, “Deana, do you need to use the bathroom?”

  “Mmm, don’t know,” she said cheerfully.

  “Okay, well, maybe we better give it a try. Excuse us, Callie.”

  “Yeah, ’scoose us.” Deana giggled, touching Callie’s heart with her ingenuousness, before leaving the room with her father.

  “I don’t hafta go, Daddy,” Deana said.

  “Well, that’s okay if you don’t, but just sit there for a couple of minutes to be sure, okay?”

  “Mmm, okay.”

  And give Daddy a few minutes of peace away from Callie Calloway, he added silently. Damn, he’d forgotten what that girl—woman, he should say—could do to him. He considered himself a controlled man, one who didn’t easily give in to emotion. He had accepted his wife’s desertion with his usual stoicism, having realized early in the marriage that it wasn’t going to work. Debra’s unexpected pregnancy had kept things together for a while, but even Deana couldn’t preserve her parents’ marriage indefinitely, not when there was no love left between them—if there had ever been any to begin with.

  Even his father’s suicide Sam had taken with outward pragmatism, if not inner acceptance. He and Johnny Sanger hadn’t exactly seen eye to eye on much of anything, but Sam had respected his old man for sticking with the farm against the worst odds, and for his continued loyalty to Beverly. His abrupt departure from this world had hurt, no doubt about it, and Sam would have to deal with the pain eventually, but he hadn’t lost control.

  Now, along comes his childhood sweetheart, a slip of a girl with whom he’d shared an on-again, off-again, essentially immature relationship, one who had practically stomped on his heart with her refusal to marry him, and he was as stoic as Silly Putty, as controlled as a stampeding herd of cattle.

  He never should have looked into those earnest brown eyes, much less have touched her. One glance, one almost caress, and he’d been thrown back eight years. He’d thought his adolescent adoration of Callie had long since been dealt with and buried. But it appeared he was wrong.

  “Done, Daddy,” Deana said proudly.

  “Well, I’ll be darned,” Sam said. “I knew you could do it! See, this toilet-training stuff is a breeze, isn’t it?”

  “Bweeze,” Deana experimented. She liked the sound of the word, so she said it over and over.

  As Sam helped Deana wash her hands he decided that this dinner with Callie was simply something to be endured. She was right about one thing, though. He should behave civilly toward her. Their breakup was ancient history, and it would be silly of him to hold a grudge. She’d done nothing recently to justify treating her with anything but respect and politeness—unless she was intent on stirring up trouble about his father’s death, and so far that didn’t seem to be the case.

  “So that’s what I’ll do,” he told his reflection in the mirror. “I’ll be polite, I’ll be pleasant.” No more silly conversation burgeoning with sexual innuendo. No more smart comebacks or attempts at one-upmanship. He would treat her with friendliness, but impersonally—the way he did Millicent Jones, for example.

  Once he proved, to both himself and Callie, that the feelings he harbored were nothing but a fond remembrance of a childhood sweetheart, they could move on.

  If he could just get through dinner without saying something stupid … and then what?

  Well, he wasn’t staying in Destiny very long, anyway—just long enough to help his mother push the will through probate, collect Dad’s life insurance, straighten out the bills, and get the farm business back on track where she could manage it. A few weeks at the most.

  If he ran into Callie during that time, he would be prepared. He would handle it.

  But he’d give anything to be back on his ranch, in the saddle, cutting through a keen wind, with nothing more pressing on his mind than rounding up a few strays.

  THREE

  Sam washed his own hands and ran a comb through his hair. “Okay, I think we’re—Deana?”

  Apparently, during his lengthy soul-searching, she’d wandered out of the bathroom. Feeling a pinprick of panic, even though he knew she couldn’t wander far, he went in
search of her. She wasn’t hard to find. She was in the kitchen, sitting on Callie’s lap.

  “Looky, Daddy!” she exclaimed the moment she caught sight of her father. She held up a fuzzy yellow toy that appeared to be a baby chick. “Cal gimme.”

  “Oh, very nice.” Sam bit his tongue. But if he bit it any harder, he would bleed. So to Callie he added, “That was thoughtful of you. But I thought you didn’t like kids.”

  Callie’s jaw dropped open for an instant, but then she quickly composed herself. “I never said I didn’t like kids. I don’t know much about them, but I still like them.”

  “Think you’ll ever have any of your own?” All right, so he was being nosy. Callie’s interest in Deana, though nothing to be shocked about, intrigued him.

  “I don’t know. But I have a few more years to decide. Heck, I might not even get married.”

  “A few years ago marriage didn’t appeal to you, but I thought maybe your biological clock had kicked in by now.”

  “Not even a little,” she said flatly, though the way she cuddled Deana—and the way Deana responded—made him wonder about her self-avowed lack of maternal instincts. “Sam, surely you don’t think that because I brought your daughter a present, I have my sights set on a ready-made family?”

  “Of course not. I’m just making conversation.”

  “You’re deliberately provoking me.”

  Okay, so maybe he was. Maybe he’d never gotten over the fact that she’d chosen her career over him. It was his damned male pride, that was all. He didn’t really want Callie. She was way too bristly, too stubborn, and too independent to make a good wife and mother. But she brought out this belligerent streak in him that he couldn’t seem to control.

  Callie’s face went neutral. She gently set a protesting Deana on the floor. “I wanted to be friends with you, Sam, but apparently that’s not possible. I’m not sure if you have a chip on your shoulder, or if you just enjoy making me uncomfortable. Either way, I can’t deal with it anymore. So I’ll be on my way.” She paused, then awkwardly patted Deana on the head. “Good-bye, Deana.”