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So he could learn to pick up his kid promptly at five someday, Matt thought testily.
Besides, how could you inflict Mrs. Beatle on someone you loved two days in a row?
And he loved Robbie. In fact, the boy’s presence in his life had Matt discovering the oddest tender regions in a heart he had always foolishly assumed was as tough as the rest of him. He had never felt anything like the feeling that boy put in his heart. And maybe that was a little something worth believing in, when he could find nothing else.
His sister had told him the love would survive.
He clung to that some days, that one truth.
“Uh, no, Mrs. Beatle, he won’t be coming tomorrow.”
“Ms. Bettle,” Robbie corrected him in a loud whisper, and then beamed at him.
Ms. Bettle—what kind of fool would marry her after all—made a sucking sound with her lips. Ignoring her, Matt hoisted his nephew onto his shoulders, ducked under the doorway and went out into the bright May sunshine.
“Auntie, I’m hungry.”
Auntie. No amount of begging or pleading or ordering or demanding could change it. Robbie’s first attempts at Matt, had come out Auntie, and he stubbornly refused to budge on this issue. His uncle was Auntie, period. In a small town, it was like being a boy named Sue, a cross Matt bore better on some days than others.
The kid was always hungry. Matt tried to think what he had for groceries in that lonely house he and Robbie now shared.
Macaroni and cheese, but they’d had that last night. Wieners and beans, but they’d had that the night before. Taco chips and Cheez Whiz spread, but that didn’t count as real food for some reason. Somewhere in his limited inventory of kid information he knew he was supposed to be feeding Robbie at least some stuff that was green.
“You want to go for a hamburger?” At least that would have Walt’s big, fat homemade pickle on the side. Green.
Robbie nodded happily.
Maybe if Matt ordered a salad, too, even though neither of them would eat it, he wouldn’t feel so bloody guilty about his absolute failure in the nutritional health department.
He wondered if she knew anything about nutritional health, and was annoyed with himself for wondering.
He didn’t have to wonder for long. After he and Robbie had eaten, he went home, fed his own horses, then loaded a few bales, and returned to her place. She was sitting on her front step eating a bag of potato chips. Her furniture, and boxes, were stacked on the porch all around her.
He looked sternly at his nephew. “Stay here. I’ll only be a second.” The astonishing truth was he didn’t want Robbie calling him auntie in front of her. He got out of the truck.
She rose to greet him, slender, innately graceful. She wiped her hands on the seat of her jeans, which he really wished she hadn’t done. How could she be slender and curvy at the same damned time?
“Supper?” he guessed, a lame conversation opener, not that he wanted a conversation, despite the intriguing sight of her behind. He just wanted to dump his bales and go home.
After reading Robbie that book his nephew loved a couple of times, he could go to bed.
She gave him a look that told him her supper was none of his business, then offered grudgingly, “I’m trying to get the inside cleaned up before I put my stuff in.”
Robbie, obedient only when it was convenient, as always, finally managed to get himself out the passenger side of the truck. He came around and stood gazing at her. “I’m Robbie,” he announced, finally.
“Hi, Robbie,” she said, not moving on to any of that sentimental gushing that made Matt just cringe. Robbie wasn’t too fond of it either. “I’m Corrine. You can call me Corrie.”
“My nephew,” Matt said, and then as way of a hint to Robbie, “I’m his uncle.”
She gave him a sour look that said she had figured that out. If she was any pricklier, roses would be growing out of the top of her head.
“How old are you, Corrie?” Robbie asked, missing the prickliness apparently.
“Twenty-seven,” she said, without apology or giggling or even flinching.
Finally, something he liked about her, Matt thought, then realized how bloody tired he was. He’d been up since five-thirty, and suddenly he knew he was not up to this, to standing around making small talk with a woman who seemed to have grown less likable and more gorgeous since this afternoon.
Maybe because some of that honey-gold hair had fallen free from the ponytail. But the evening light had not softened the unfriendliness of her, though he reluctantly noticed she did not look so scared anymore. Just untouchable. And tired, like him.
“I’m five,” Robbie said, a conversation opener that had to be cut off quick.
Matt brought it back to business. “I brought you a couple of bales and a sack of oats for your donkey.”
Leave it at that, an inner voice advised him. Besides, she looked like she’d rather kill him than owe him anything. But he couldn’t. The welfare of the animal came before his desire not to get frost-burn from the ice queen.
“He’ll need to be wormed, and have his feet trimmed soon, too. I don’t think I could do it without throwing him.”
“Donkey?” Robbie breathed.
Half a million dollars of horse flesh at home that he couldn’t persuade his nephew to be even mildly interested in, but the word donkey was said in the same tone usually reserved for The Rock, Robbie’s favorite wrestler.
“Ms. Parsons has a donkey,” Matt offered reluctantly.
“I love donkeys,” Robbie declared firmly.
“Since when?” Matt snapped, then turned back to her before this got out of hand, “Look, since you probably don’t want me to throw your donkey—”
“Even you can’t throw a donkey,” Robbie decided solemnly.
“I don’t know what that means,” she added uneasily, “throwing him.”
“It means roping his feet, yanking them out from under him.” Was he deliberately making himself sound like a barbarian? If so, it was working. His nephew and his neighbor were both looking at him with horror.
“And since you probably don’t want me to do that,” he continued, “and since his feet and his worms are going to have to be looked after, you probably want to get a vet up here. Soon.”
“How soon?” she said. “I mean, I think he’s been traumatized enough for now.”
He contemplated that. A donkey traumatized. A tiny puncture in her armor, and it was for a donkey.
“I’ll give you the name of a good vet. She can come out and do it for you. She’ll give him a sedative if he’s too difficult to work with.” He knew he’d feel guilty if he told her what it would cost, because the bottom of her jeans were worn nearly plum through, and she was driving a jeep that had probably done service in the Second World War.
Still, if she was going to go to the trouble of having the vet all the way out here for that flea-bitten varmint, she might as well kill two birds with one stone. Or two balls with one scalpel, whatever the case might be.
“And while she’s here,” he said, his tone so neutral as to appear casual, “you might want to have her castrate him.”
“Castrate?” He’d been around women just enough to know arms folded over the chest like that were not a good sign.
“It would be the kindest thing.” He said it with the full authority of a man who had spent his entire life around livestock. His tone was as convincing as he could make it.
“Right after murder,” she snapped back, unconvinced.
“It would improve his temperament.” He heard just a little note of irritation in his own voice. He tried to think if he’d ever struck out quite this thoroughly with a woman.
A dangerous little sparkle had appeared in her eyes. “And of course, if he were castrated he wouldn’t be after your mares.”
“Gee, I hadn’t thought of that.” He said this with as much innocence as he could muster, but she wasn’t fooled.
Come to think of it, in order to strike out, he’d have to want to run the bases. Tangling with a porcupine would be about twice the fun as tangling with her. In any sense of the word.
“What’s catrated mean?” Robbie asked innocently.
She looked smug, and he had the uneasy feeling she and Robbie had somehow just become conspirators against him.
“I’ll tell you later.”
“I want to know now.”
“No.”
Robbie looked stunned. Matt had never taken that tone with him, and somehow it felt like it was all her fault that he had now.
“Can I go see the donkey?” Robbie asked in a small voice. “Oh, please, Auntie? Please?”
“Auntie?” she said, incredulous.
Matt sighed. There. At least he didn’t have to worry about his secret name getting out anymore. It was not as if she liked him, anyway. Big surprise that the first hint of a smile from her was at his expense.
It was not as if he cared if she liked him.
“You know what? It’s a long story, and I’m not in the mood for telling it. Could I just dump the hay, introduce my kid to your donkey and go home?”
“Certainly,” she said, as if she couldn’t think of anything she wanted more than for his stay to be a brief one, too.
“Great, hop in the truck.”
She didn’t unfold her arms from her chest.
“You want to know how to feed him, right?”
She glared at Matt for a moment, and then with ill grace hopped on the tailgate of the truck. Not in the cab. He choked back his desire to tell her he hadn’t bitten anyone recently. To his annoyance, Robbie-turn-coat, jumped on the tailgate with her.
In the rearview mirror he saw her tuck some of that wayward hair behind her ears, adjust her T-shirt, and lick her lips. He ordered himself not to wonder if that meant anything.
Did that mean anything?
“I sure as hell hope not,” he said out loud.
He backed his truck up to the barn, and by the time he went around the back, she was trying her darndest to heft one of the bales out of there.
Seventy pounds. She had both hands inserted between the twine and the hay. She lifted. Nothing happened.
He knew damn well what the twine would do to soft hands, but she didn’t quit. With a mighty grunt she picked the hay up three inches, moved forward one, and dropped it.
“I’ll get it.”
He might as well have saved his breath, because she gave him a look of fierce pride, squatted down and shoved the bale with her shoulder. It moved another millimeter or so. It would be fun to cross his arms and watch, but that wasn’t the kind of boy his mama had raised.
He climbed in the truck bed, moved carefully around her, and tossed down the other two bales, which also earned him a glare. Was he supposed to apologize for the fact he was a man? That some things that came hard to her, came easy to him?
He wondered what would happen if he told her she looked like a Sumo wrestler.
That would be the end of hair-tucking and lip-licking.
Still, he didn’t tell her. Because it wasn’t precisely true. The position yes, but the beauty? She looked more breathtaking than ever with her little pink tongue poking out between her teeth, and her face flushed red, and the sweat beginning to pop out on her brow.
Pretending to ignore her, he moved back around her, hopped off the truck, picked up his two bales, one in each hand, and went into the barn.
Now you’re showing off, an annoying little voice inside his head informed him.
Showing off? What for? He’d already decided she was pure poison.
He glanced over his shoulder. She had managed to tumble her bale off the back of the truck. Now she and Robbie were rolling it laboriously toward the barn.
Panting, with a final grunt, she finally managed to get it in the door.
Pretending she didn’t have his full attention, he slipped his pocket knife from his back pocket and cut the twine.
She came and watched.
Her bosom was heaving nicely under her too large shirt.
“See how the hay breaks apart?” he asked. “That’s called a flake.” He explained to her, carefully, how to feed the donkey, the repercussions if it wasn’t done right.
There. He sounded like a reasonable man. A man whose mind was a million miles away from heaving bosoms. Really, it was one of the rotten parts of being a man. Nature noticing whatever the hell it wanted to notice, even when he’d already told his mind, no way, never, forget it.
He turned swiftly away from her and shook the first two flakes out into the hay crib. The donkey thanked him by flattening his floppy ears to his ugly head and charging the fence. Robbie oohed and aahed as if he was seeing an animal that was both lovable and exotic. She was also smiling indulgently at the donkey’s exceedingly bad manners.
Just above the barn smells, the fresh hay, and the donkey, he could smell her. Her shampoo, and her soap and her deodorant, and something else so sweet and soft it near took his breath away. Matt tried to place the scent and couldn’t.
What he could do was never come back here again. Ever.
Of course, if he chose that, he was going to have a crop of little mules running around next year, after that donkey pushed down the fences and bred all his mares. He could change the name of his pure-breed quarter horse ranch from No Quarter Asked, to No Quarter Assed.
“Auntie,” Robbie announced sleepily, tucking his head against Matt’s belly as they headed for home a few minutes later, “I’m coming to see that donkey again real soon.”
Somehow it didn’t even sound like a question, or a request.
His nephew had just told him how it was going to be.
Life was telling him how it was going to be, but he still fought it.
“Don’t you think your own horse is better?” he suggested subtly. “You can ride her. Pet her. Get close to her.”
“I don’t like Cupie Doll,” Robbie announced firmly. “She has real mean eyes.”
Cupie Doll was a prizewinning brood mare that Matt had reluctantly retired. She wouldn’t take anymore. And Robbie, unfortunately was right. Sweet as shortcake when she was pregnant, she seemed miserable when she was not growing fat with a baby.
As a riding horse she was a gem. Gentle. Predictable. A perfect mount for a child. But the sullen expression hadn’t left her face since her last heat had come and gone without her seeing any action.
Maybe Robbie noticed more about the horses than Matt had given him credit for.
“And that thing back there doesn’t have mean eyes?” Matt sputtered.
“Corrie?” Robbie asked, indignant.
Even Matt couldn’t make himself go that far. For all the bristle of her personality, there was no meanness in her eyes. “The donkey,” he said.
“Oh, no. He doesn’t have mean eyes. Can I go back? Please, Auntie?”
It was the first real enthusiasm he’d seen Robbie show for anything in a long, long time. The pair of them had been walking around in a daze since Marianne died.
Six months ago, already.
What was it about that donkey that so appealed to his nephew? Maybe being attracted to frightened things ran in the family.
Whatever it was, he couldn’t put out the light in his nephew’s eyes. Not even for his own self-preservation.
“We’ll go back in a few days.” He figured he’d left her over a week’s supply of grub for the donkey. He had to go look after those fences, anyway.
“Okay,” Robbie agreed with a yawn. “She’s a pretty lady. I like her eyes. Lots of colors.”
“Really.” He did not say this with anything approaching encouragement. He certainly did not let on that he had already committed the offense of comparing her eyes to crocuses.
Lots of colors. He’d have to have another look when he went back over there and tried to set up a fence that would hold a determined donkey back.
The fence that needed to go up, was the one around a mind that rebelliously wanted to recall her heaving bosom and delicate scent.
Matt sighed. This was not the first time life had been wrested from his control. It just seemed that every time it happened, he could count on a bad ending.
Corrine watched his truck pull away. It wasn’t until it was out of her driveway that she allowed herself to breathe again.
What was it about a man’s easy strength that made a woman go weak with longing?
When he’d hefted those bales, one in each hand, she’d been resentful. But right underneath the resentment, something else flickered dangerously to life.
Desire.
“Corrie Parsons,” she informed herself, doing one last check of the donkey, who flattened his ears menacingly when she got too close to his grub, “you will not be ruled by something so base.”
A little voice inside her whined piteously.
She ignored it, throwing herself into finishing cleaning the cabin.
Finally, exhausted, she dragged a mattress in, and flopped on it in the middle of her living room floor.
But her plan, to work herself to exhaustion so she couldn’t think of anything else, had backfired.
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