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If possible, the woman was making even less sense to him than before.
Hell, if she was trying to find out what would attract guys like him, all she had to do was look in the mirror, Cody couldn’t help thinking. Because, confusing though she seemed to be every time she opened her mouth, this new shop owner was a damn sight easy on the eyes. If she stood in the doorway—or near her show window—that would definitely be enough to bring men in on the pretext of shopping.
But, curious to see if there was something more to what she was suggesting, Cody asked, “Why would you want to pick my brain?” His taste was plain and, if it were up to him, he wouldn’t have set foot in here in the first place.
In answering his question, Catherine didn’t go with the obvious: that there was something compellingly fascinating about this vintage cowboy who had strolled into her shop just in time to keep her from breaking something vital. Instead, she gave him something they could both live with.
“Because what you like is what would appeal to other people in your age bracket.”
He’d never thought of himself as being like everyone else. Not that he saw himself as unique, just … different. The gadgets out there that held such fascination for men—if he was to believe the occasional commercial he saw—held no interest for him. He was a man of the earth, a plain, simple man who’d never felt the need to be part of the crowd or to join anything at all for that matter.
With a shrug, he finally got around to answering the initial question she’d put to him. “I’m thirty-five.”
That was about where she would have put him, Catherine thought, feeling triumphant.
“Perfect,” she declared out loud, stopping short of clapping her hands together. “You’re exactly what I’m looking for. Business-wise,” she quickly qualified in case he got the wrong impression. She didn’t want him thinking she was staking him out for some reason. The last thing she wanted was to chase this cowboy away.
Cody looked at the exuberant woman for a long moment. He sincerely doubted that he was the type that any woman was looking for, at least not anymore. There was a time when he would have been. A time when he’d been eager to plunge into life, to be the best husband, the best father he could possibly be. A time when he greeted each day with hope, thinking of all that lay ahead of him and Renee.
But all that had changed once Renee had died. Whatever he’d had to offer in terms of a normal relationship had died and had been buried along with his wife.
He was tempted to tell her she was wrong in selecting him, but he could see that there was just no putting this woman off. She had a fire lit under her, and if he wasn’t careful, that fire could burn them both.
Still, he supposed he had nothing to lose by going along with her in this. She’d undoubtedly find his answers boring, but until she did, he could view this as a distraction. God knew he was always looking for something to distract him. Something to block his dark thoughts so that he didn’t have to dwell on just how empty his existence had become and continued to be.
Eight years and nothing had changed. He was still just going through the motions of living, placing one foot in front of the other.
“I don’t know about perfect,” he finally said to Catherine with a self-deprecating laugh that sounded as if it had come rumbling straight out of his chest, bypassing his throat, “but if I can help—” he shrugged “—sure.”
If possible, her eyes brightened even more. It made him think of the way a satisfying, steaming cup of hot coffee tasted on a cold winter’s day.
“Really?” Catherine pressed, this time actually clapping her hands together as if he was some magical genie who had just bestowed the gift of three wishes on her.
Cody shrugged again in response to her question. “Why not?” he said even as a part of him whispered a warning that he had just taken his first step on a very narrow ledge. A step that could result in his tumbling down into an uncharted abyss at a moment’s notice.
All things considered, he supposed that there could be worse things.
Chapter Two
“So exactly how is this going to work?” Cody asked her after a beat. As a rule, he wasn’t a curious man, but in this case, he had to admit that this woman had managed to arouse what little curiosity he did possess. “Are you going to be showing me pictures of the stuff you’re thinking of selling at the store, or what?” Before she could answer the question, Cody felt it only fair to inform her of something. “Think you should know right from the start that I’m really not too keen on broken-down old furniture.”
As far as he was concerned, furniture didn’t have to be fancy, but it had to be functional—and not look as if it belonged in some garbage heap.
Catherine laughed. “That’s good, because neither am I.”
She was still feeling her way around as to the kind of focus she wanted to bring to the shop. Right now, she was pretty much making it up as she went along.
Catherine wondered if admitting that to this down-to-earth cowboy would be a mistake. Would it make him think less of her? Or would he just dismiss her present indecision as a “woman thing”? An inconsequential whim on her part? She realized that it would bother her if he did.
His expression registered mild surprise. Cody looked around at the showroom. Everything here was way older than he was. If it wasn’t for the fact that Caroline had a weakness for this kind of thing, he would have just called it all “junk” and dismissed the whole place out of hand.
If this woman was really being on the level with him and felt the same way he did, that brought up another question. “Then what are you doing with this store?”
“Changing its image,” Catherine answered without hesitation.
How was she going to do that with the things she had to work with? “To what?” he wanted to know.
“To a shop that sells vintage items, whether it’s clothing, books, furnishings, whatever.” It was a slight matter of semantics she supposed, but there was still a difference.
One she was apparently going to have to explain because Cody moved back his Stetson with his thumb and squinted at the merchandise in the immediate area. “Just what’s the difference between something being an ‘antique’ and being classified as ‘vintage’?”
That was easy enough, Catherine thought.
“Price mostly,” she answered with a grin that he had to admit—if only to himself—he found rather engaging.
Cody rolled her words over in his head, then nodded. He was willing to accept that. But there was something else.
“Still haven’t answered my first question,” he pointed out. When she raised an eyebrow, silently asking to be reminded, he said, “What do you want with me?”
I could think of ten things right off the bat, Catherine thought in reply. But out loud she simply said, “I intend to use you for market research.”
Cody laughed shortly. “Only market I know is the one I go to buy my supply of eggs, milk and bread.”
That was not the kind of market she meant. “Think bigger,” Catherine coaxed.
“Okay,” he said gamely. “How about if I throw in a chicken, too?”
Obviously this wasn’t going to be as simple as she’d hoped. “I’m talking about the general buying market out there,” she explained. “You’re just the age bracket I’m trying to attract.”
Cody’s eyes met hers. “You ask me, you keep on smiling like that and you’ll attract more than your share of men my age—and older.”
The remark pleased her, amused her and embarrassed her all at the same time. Not only that, but she could feel her cheeks growing hot. From the way he looked at her, she knew it wasn’t just an internal thing or her imagination. Her cheeks were turning pink. She had an uneasy feeling that her new “researcher” could see the color creeping up into them.
Great, now he probably thought of her as some naive, innocent little girl playing at being a store owner.
“I’m not looking for attention,” she told him with feeling. “What I’m looking for are paying customers who are interested in buying what they see.”
The way he looked at her told Catherine that she was only making matters worse by talking. But she wanted him to take her seriously, to understand that all she was after at the moment was a business arrangement and a little input from him.
She cleared her throat. “There has to be something that you want—to buy,” she tacked on when she realized that she was still sinking into the grave she had verbally dug for herself. She tried one more time, taking it from the top. “When you walked in here, what were you hoping to find?”
“Like I said, I was looking for something for my sister.” As usual, he had put getting something for her off, telling himself he had plenty of time until he suddenly didn’t.
“Such as?” she coaxed, trying to get him to give her something to work with.
The broad shoulders rose and fell again as Cody shrugged carelessly. “I figured I’d know it when I saw it.”
She could accept that. Shoppers didn’t always have a clear picture of what they were looking for. “Then look around,” Catherine urged, gesturing around the store. “See if anything appeals to you.”
She’d been the former Tattered Saddle’s legal owner—using her life savings as a down payment—for almost a month now. During that entire time, she’d spent her days clearing away cobwebs, cleaning up and trying to put what she had gotten—the items in the store were included in the price whether she liked them or not—in some sort of manageable order.
To be honest, there was a lot here that she was tempted just to toss out, but she decided that she should seriously consider calling in an expert to appraise everything before she began throwing things out wholesale. However, experts cost money. Someone like Cody Overton did not and it was to the Cody Overtons that she intended to sell.
See if anything appeals to you.
Cody looked at her for a long moment as her words echoed in his head. And then the corners of his mouth curved—just a little. Had this been years ago, he thought, he would have been tempted to say that what appealed to him was her.
But that was a remark for a young man to make, not a man whose soul felt ancient—as ancient as some of the things in this little shop of hers, if not more so.
“Okay,” he finally said, moving toward a newly cleaned shelf that displayed a few miscellaneous, mismatched items.
At the very end of the shelf was a small, cream-colored, fringed coin purse. Looking closer, Cody could see that it had been carefully cleaned up so that there wasn’t even a speck of dirt or telltale grime on it. In addition, it had been lovingly polished with some sort of leather cleaner. He could tell by the trace of scent on it.
The coin purse felt soft to the touch.
Caroline had always liked things with fringes on them, he recalled. She’d had a vest with fringes on it that their mother had given her when she was a little girl. The vest was a little large for her, but Caroline didn’t care. She wore it with everything until it completely fell apart.
There was no price tag visible on the purse, or on any of the other items on the shelf for that matter. Catherine must have just gotten started arranging the things, he reasoned.
Turning around, he held up the coin purse for Catherine to see. “How much you want for this?”
Catherine smiled, secretly relieved that he hadn’t chosen one of the more expensive items. “Consider it a gift.”
That was exactly what he considered it to be. A gift. The gift he was going to give his sister. “That’s what I plan to do with it,” he confirmed. Then he repeated, “How much is it?”
Rather than continue standing some distance away, Catherine crossed over to him. Maybe he’d understand her better if she was closer, she thought.
“No, I mean consider it my gift to you in exchange for your services. I can’t really afford to pay you yet, but you can have whatever you want in the shop in trade for your help.”
Cody was surprised. He hadn’t assumed that this woman was going to pay him anything at all. After all, if he understood what she had proposed earlier, this enthusiastic woman was just going to be asking his opinion about things. Didn’t seem right asking for money for giving his opinion.
It wasn’t as if he was anybody special.
He felt a little guilty about accepting the purse, but then he had a hunch that she was determined to give him something for his services.
“Thanks. This’ll do just fine,” he told her. “My sister’ll like it.”
Pleased to have gotten that out of the way—she hated feeling indebted for anything—Catherine put her hand out for the purse. When he looked at her quizzically, she explained, “I’ll wrap it up for you.”
He was about to tell her there was no need, but then he decided against it. It seemed to make this woman happy to go through the motions of playing shopkeeper and, besides, he was really bad when it came to wrapping gifts.
So he surrendered the purse to her and watched as Catherine placed his sister’s gift into a box that just barely accommodated the purse. The fringes spilled out over the side. She carefully folded them into the box until they all but covered up the purse.
“This’ll make a nice gift,” she told him. Catherine glanced up at him, thinking he might like to hear the story that went with the purse. “It’s actually over forty years old. The original owner had it with her when she went to Woodstock.”
Reaching beneath the counter, she pulled out a roll of wrapping paper she’d just placed there last night. With what appeared to be a trained eye, she cut exactly the right length of paper for the box.
Completely switching topics, she asked Cody, “Younger or older?”
That had come utterly out of the blue, catching him by surprise. He had no idea what she as asking him. “Excuse me?”
She glanced up at him just for a moment as she clarified her question. “Is your sister younger or older than you?”
“Oh.” Why did she want to know that? It had nothing to do with wrapping the gift. “Younger.”
Catherine nodded as she took in the information. The questions didn’t stop there. Why didn’t that surprise him? “Are you two close?”
“I guess.” But that wasn’t exactly the real truth, so Cody amended his statement. “We were, once. But then she got married and her husband made her move away—to another state.” Caroline’s husband had done it to control his sister, Cody was sure of it. The man wanted to isolate and control her so that he could be the center of Caroline’s world.
Catherine immediately picked up on his tone. It spoke volumes even if the actual man didn’t. “You don’t like him much, do you?”
Cody shrugged off the observation, then was surprised to hear himself saying, “Not much to like.” He stopped abruptly and looked at this woman who seemed to coax things out of him so effortlessly. “What’s with all these questions?” He wanted to know. “This part of your marketing thing?”
Catherine smiled as she put the finishing touches on the box by tying a big red bow on it. “This is part of my getting to know you ‘thing,’” she corrected. Then, so he didn’t feel as if she was dragging information out of him without giving some up herself, Catherine said, “There’s eight of us in my family. I guess I’m just curious about how other people get along with their siblings.” She raised her eyes to his, a look of apology in them. “Sorry if I sounded as if I was prying.”
Because he couldn’t think of anything else to do, Cody shrugged to show her that he hadn’t taken any offense at the questions. “Guess there’s no harm in asking questions,” he allowed. And then he rolled over in his head what she’d told him. “Eight of you, huh?”
“Eight of us,” she confirmed.
“They all like you?” If they were, it must have been one hell of a noisy household.
She wasn’t exactly sure what Cody was asking her. “You mean are they all girls? No, I’ve got brothers and sisters.”
But he shook his head. “No, I meant are they all like you,” Cody repeated, then, because she was still looking at him quizzically, he clarified, “You know, all enthusiastic and excited, coming on like a house afire.”
She’d never thought of herself as particularly enthusiastic, or excitable for that matter. Certainly not in the terms that he’d just mentioned. Shaking her head, she told him, “I’m actually the shy, retiring one in the family.”
He laughed at that. It was a deep, all-encompassing sound that made Catherine smile rather than cause her to get her back up.
“Sure you are,” he said, adding, “good one” under his breath as he commented on her sense of humor. After a moment, the smile on his lips faded just a little as he looked at her more closely. “Oh, you’re serious.” Cody took a minute to reassess his opinion. “You all must have been one hell of a handful for your parents to deal with.”
“Actually, I was the one who did a lot of the ‘dealing with,’” she corrected. “I’m the second-oldest in the family.” He probably didn’t even want to know that, she guessed.
She was talking too much, Catherine thought. She had a tendency not to know when to stop talking. That was probably one of the reasons she’d decided to buy Fowler’s old store. Customers meant that there would be people for her to talk with, even if they left the shop without buying anything.
She liked the idea of meeting new people. Of getting to know things about them.
Catherine looked down at the box she’d just finished wrapping, remembering what Cody had said about the purse’s final destination.
“If you’re mailing this, I can see if I can find another box to put it in for you,” she offered.
She was certainly going out of her way here, Cody thought, especially since he hadn’t paid for the purse. On top of that, until a few minutes ago, the overenergized woman hadn’t known him from Adam. That made her a pretty rare individual in his book.
“Are you always this accommodating?” he wanted to know.
She couldn’t gauge by his expression whether he thought that was a good thing or a bad thing. Either way, she still felt the same about it.
“Nothing wrong with being friendly,” she said, flashing a wide smile at him. “Or helpful.”
“Didn’t say there was,” he pointed out. “Just not used to it, that’s all.”
Fair enough, Catherine thought. She pushed the gaily wrapped gift a little closer toward him on the counter. “So, about that bigger box, do you want it?” she wanted to know.
He was planning on mailing the gift once he left the shop. He supposed that having Catherine provide a box to ship the gift in would be exceedingly helpful in moving things along.
“Sure, I could use it,” he allowed. Then he mumbled, “Thanks.”
Her smile was triumphant. “You’re welcome.” And then she couldn’t help adding, “There, that wasn’t so hard now, was it?” she asked. Because she saw the furrow that had formed across his forehead that indicated to her that he was trying to understand what she was referring to, Catherine clued him in. “Saying thank you,” she explained. “That wasn’t so hard, right?”
Rather than answer her question, or say anything in response, Catherine saw that Cody was looking down at her left hand. Was he checking her out or about to say something flippant about her single status?
In either case, she decided to beat him to the punch. “No, I’m not married.”
Cody nodded as if he had expected nothing else. “That explains it.”
This time it was her turn to be confused. “Explains what?”
“Explains why you’re showering me with all these questions,” Cody told her. Then, because she apparently didn’t understand what he was telling her, he elaborated, “You don’t have anyone to talk to.”
She felt a little sorry for the man. He obviously hadn’t had the kind of upbringing and family life that she’d experienced. And, to some extent, was still experiencing.
“Oh, I’ve got people to talk to,” she assured him. “Lots of people.”
“Then what’s with all the questions?” he wanted to know.
“I’m just a naturally curious person,” Catherine explained.
Was Cody trying to tell her something? He didn’t strike her as a man who worried about being perceived as subtle. If there was something that bothered him, she had a feeling he’d tell her.
Maybe not, a little voice in her head whispered. She’d better clear things up now, if that was the case.
“If that’s going to be a problem …”
She let her voice trail off so that he could put his own interpretation to what she was driving at.
“No, no problem,” he told her. “But it’s going to take some getting used to if you’re going to be ‘picking my brain.’” He used her words to describe their working arrangement.
“You can always tell me to back off,” Catherine pointed out.
He was mildly surprised at what she’s just said. “And if I do, you’ll listen?”
Her eyes seemed to sparkle as they laughed at him. Cody found himself captivated. It took him a moment to retreat from the reaction.
“We’ll see” was all she could honestly tell him.
But it was an honest reaction and a man couldn’t ask for more than that, Cody thought. Honesty was a rare commodity.
“There you go,” she pronounced, placing the package wrapped up for shipping on the counter before him. “All ready to be mailed out.”
Cody nodded his head in approval as he regarded the box.
“Thanks.” He picked it up, then paused for a moment. “I guess I’ll be seeing you.”
“I certainly hope so.” And then she bit her lower lip. Did that sound more enthusiastic than she meant it to? Catherine looked at his face for some sign that she’d made him wary, or worse, and her prime target was going to change his mind and back away.
“How’s an hour in the morning every other day sound? Or whenever you can spare the time?” she quickly added.
“Whenever I can spare the time,” he echoed, touching two fingers to the brim of his black Stetson just before he walked out of the shop.
Catherine watched him walk down the street through the bay window she’d cleaned that morning. She had a very good feeling about this alliance she’d just struck up.
She smiled, well pleased. Getting back to work, she started humming to herself.
Chapter Three
The need to replenish some supplies in his walk-in pantry brought Cody back into Thunder Canyon a scant two days later.
At least, that was the excuse he gave himself and the two hands he had working for him on his ranch.
The younger of the two ranch hands—Kurt—knowing how much his reclusive boss disliked having to go into town, offered to run the errand for him.
To the surprise of both men, Cody declined, saying something to the effect that he wasn’t exactly sure just what he wanted to get. It was a comment that for the most part seemed completely out of character for Cody, a man who always knew exactly what he did or didn’t want at any given moment.
But the ranch hands knew better than to question their boss, so they merely nodded and got back to cleaning out the horse stalls.
Driving in, Cody took the long way around, passing by the former Tattered Saddle to see how it—and its new owner—was coming along.
The first thing that he noticed was that there was a new sign leaning against the wall just to the right of the front door. From its precarious position, he figured it was obviously waiting to be mounted.
Making a spur-of-the-moment decision, Cody parked his truck close by. Then he got out and crossed to the store to get a better look at the sign as if it was the most natural thing in the world for him to do. The fact that he ordinarily didn’t possess a drop of curiosity about anything didn’t even occur to him or make him wonder at his own behavior.