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“Edna’s will allows me a monthly salary and the use of the foreman’s house for the six months.”
“That’s what it says.”
“Just wanted to make sure we’re on the same track.”
“We are, unless you’re forgetting who decides whether you’ve stuck to the terms of the will. If you so much as forget to show up for work one day, I can call the whole thing off. What makes you think I’ll cut you any slack?”
Good question. Cole knew Murphy didn’t much like him showing up at the eleventh hour, because it meant another six months before the fate of the ranch would be decided. If Cole didn’t inherit, Murphy would. Fortunately, Cole knew the ranch meant nothing to Murphy without Edna. And since Murphy had been financially well-off long before he and Edna got married, the money the ranch would bring at sale meant very little to him, anyway. But carrying out the stipulations of Edna’s will meant everything to Murphy, whether he agreed with them or not.
“Because you’re a fair man,” Cole said. “Edna always said so.”
Murphy’s mouth twisted with irritation, and Cole knew he’d hit him where it hurt.
“Edna let her heart rule her head,” Murphy said. “She knew her son was worthless, but his son—she had hope for him. Said all her grandson needed was a good woman, an honest job and something to work for, and he’d turn into a man she could be proud of. Instead you’ve spent the last year scraping to stay out of jail just like your old man.”
Cole forced his expression to remain impassive, but he hardly felt that way inside. He remembered that day eleven years ago when a Dallas judge finally tossed his father in jail. At seventeen, Cole would have preferred to have been on his own, but the court hadn’t seen it that way. His grandmother had agreed to take him in, and after a few rocky months, Cole made a surprising discovery—that at least one person in the world actually thought he might amount to something.
He knew she’d taken him in out of family responsibility, and in the beginning things had been pretty shaky. He remembered the day he arrived, so full of attitude that, looking back, he was surprised she hadn’t kicked him right out the door. Instead, she’d fed him a hot meal, given him a clean bed to sleep in, then told him that no matter what his father had done, he wasn’t his father and there was no need to follow in those footsteps.
In the coming months, no matter how many times he mouthed off, no matter how many times he screwed up, even though he could tell she was disappointed, still every day was a new day. Finally the days got better. She’d given him love and affection for the first time in his life, and when she died she left him everything—with a few strings attached. As her only living blood relative, the fact that she’d willed it all to him hadn’t been a complete surprise. The terms of the will had.
“Now as for me,” Murphy said, “I think Edna was dreaming. I think you’re heading down the same road as your old man. Sure, you do things a little bigger and flashier, but the end result is the same. This is just a little detour along the way, like a trucker stopping to gas up. When you’ve got what you want, you’ll be on the road again.”
He stood up and tossed a five on the table, then lowered his voice. “One more thing. I made sure that nobody but you, me and the attorney who drew up the will knows anything about the provisions Edna outlined. If word gets out that she’s trying to turn her no-good grandson into a hardworking family man, she’s going to look like a fool, and I’ll be damned if that’s going to happen. If I think for one minute that you’re telling people things they don’t need to know, I’ll pull the plug on this deal so fast it’ll make your head spin. Now, do we understand each other?”
Cole nodded.
“See you Sunday. Looking forward to meeting the wife.”
Cole watched him go, then sat back in the booth with a heavy sigh. Murphy was right about one thing. A year from now, when he sold the ranch and banked the money, his grandmother was going to look down from heaven and be sorely disappointed. But for all her good intentions, she hadn’t understood that she could make him play the part of a hardworking husband, but she was never going to turn him into one.
This time last year, the mayor of Dallas himself had applauded Cole’s efforts to revitalize a run-down area of town. Dallas Monthly had listed him as one of the twenty hottest bachelors in Dallas, which had given him so much instant celebrity that he couldn’t even stop at 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp without a woman shoving her phone number into his pocket. And he’d been on the verge of making more money than he ever dreamed he would see in a lifetime. With the profit from the sale of the ranch, eventually he’d be able to get all of that back and then some. Why, then, would he want to waste his life away, saddled with a wife and kids, on a ranch in the middle of nowhere?
He stood up to leave, smiling broadly at the waitresses behind the counter. He added a quick wink, then listened to them chatter like a bunch of chipmunks as he walked out the door. He decided he would head over to the Lone Wolf Saloon on Highway 81. The place would fill up in an hour or so, providing him with the biggest assortment of women he was likely to find under one roof on short notice. He’d get a booth in the corner, order up a long neck, then sit back and do some serious shopping.
He had until tomorrow at midnight to find himself a wife.
VIRGINIA WHITE turned her 1993 Celica off the two-lane highway into a gas station, swung around the pumps and parked near the bathrooms on the west side. She grabbed the big shopping sack from the passenger seat beside her, hopped out of her car and got the bathroom key from the attendant.
She unlocked the bathroom door, hoping to find it clean, at least, only to see a stopped-up toilet, a wall of graffiti and half a dozen dead crickets on the floor. For a moment she wished she’d gone home to change clothes, but it was twenty-one miles from the outlet mall back to Coldwater. If she’d done that she would have lost her nerve altogether and ended up staying home.
She locked the door and nudged the crickets behind the toilet with the toe of her canvas shoe. She shimmied out of the dumpy flowered dress her mother had bought her at a garage sale last summer and stuffed it into the trash can. She removed her white cotton bra and disposed of it, too, then pulled out of the sack the one part of her purchase that she’d barely had the nerve to buy—a black lace push-up bra with a front clasp, dainty satin straps and enough padding to stuff a mattress.
Cheap women wear bras like that, her mother had always said. Cheap little hussies who are looking for trouble.
Virginia put it on, then turned to the mirror and froze.
Cleavage. For the first time in her life, she actually had cleavage.
She stared at the cheap little hussy in the mirror and held her breath, her heart beating double time, waiting, waiting…
Finally she slumped with relief. Okay. God hadn’t struck her dead. That was a good sign. Maybe her mother didn’t have half the pull with the Almighty that she’d always led Virginia to believe, even though she’d been up there with Him now for over three months, consulting with Him in person.
Virginia pulled a pair of jeans from the sack and wiggled into them, thinking maybe they looked pretty good for her first pair. At $12.99 they hadn’t eaten her whole paycheck, and they had a little strip of elastic in the back so, even though they were sort of tight, she’d still be able to breathe.
Next she pulled out a brown short-sleeved cotton shirt with little horseshoes on it. Very Western. She put it on, leaving the top two buttons undone. On second thought, she unbuttoned a third one, then spread the edges of the shirt apart to reveal a hint of her newly enhanced bustline. She froze again, holding her breath, waiting for the inevitable. But it never came.
Maybe God was fresh out of thunderbolts.
She pulled a pair of plain brown cowboy boots from the sack and tugged them on, knowing they couldn’t possibly be leather for $17.99, but figuring they looked the part, anyway. Turning to the mirror, she ran a brush through her hair, wishing for the umpteenth time in her life that she’d been blessed with wavy blond tresses instead of the limp brown mop she’d gotten stuck with. Then she pulled a tube of lipstick from the sack. It wasn’t the cherry red she’d planned on getting, but it wasn’t baby pink, either. She spent a good five minutes nose-to-nose with her reflection in the mirror, dabbing at her lips, telling herself it was just like kindergarten and all she had to do was color inside the lines.
She smacked her lips together, then backed off from the mirror for an arm’s-length exam. Okay. Not bad. Truth be told, though, she didn’t much care what she looked like.
As long as she didn’t look like Virginia White.
A few minutes later she was back on the blacktop, moving down the road. She rolled down the windows and jacked up the radio, singing along with Shania Twain. The crisp breeze lifted her hair off the back of her neck. The sun had just set, filling the countryside with the muted shades of twilight. It would be dark by the time she reached her destination.
Happy birthday, Virginia, she told herself. It’s time to go live it up.
Tonight she was giving herself a long overdue gift. She was going someplace where there were hundreds of people she didn’t know. People to whom her name meant nothing. People who wouldn’t automatically dismiss her because she was the daughter of the town recluse, or because she didn’t dress right, or because she was just a painfully shy nobody who’d never learned how to be anything else.
While she’d been working at the library after school to help support her and her mother, other girls were chatting on the phone, painting each other’s nails and talking about boys. While she was paying bills and balancing the checkbook, other girls were making out in the back seats of cars. While she was living with her mother, taking care of her various ailments and catering to her whims, other women were getting married, making love and having children.
Sooner or later she would save enough money for college, and then she’d start a whole new life. But bank tellers didn’t make much, particularly when they worked at the First State Bank of Coldwater, Texas, where raises came around about as often as Halley’s Comet. So it could take a while, maybe even a couple of years, and she couldn’t wait that long to start grabbing some of the fun and excitement the rest of the world took for granted.
She kept singing along with Shania, letting her foot get heavy on the gas pedal until she teetered on the edge of the forty-five-mile-per-hour speed limit. Then, just as she was starting to feel pretty cool, she topped a hill and her destination came into sight, and she felt self-conscious all over again.
The Lone Wolf Saloon was nothing more than a gigantic, flat-sided metal building with its name on the side in red-and-blue neon. But looks were deceiving. From what Virginia had heard, it was sitting smack-dab in the middle of the fast lane of life, offering a wild, rowdy evening of decadence to every fun-loving person within a thirty-mile radius.
The gravel parking lot was nearly full. Virginia found a space between a pair of spit-polished, fresh-off-the-lot pickup trucks. She turned off the engine and sat in silence for a moment, hearing her mother’s voice reverberating inside her head.
Places like that ought to be outlawed. They’re sinful, that’s what they are. Sinful.
She took a few deep, calming breaths, telling herself that if going out and having a good time was a sin, hell would be so full by now that there wouldn’t be any room for her, anyway.
She grabbed her purse, eased out of her car and locked it behind her. She toddled across the gravel parking lot as best she could in her new footwear and made it to the front door. She squared her shoulders, bracing herself against the unknown, but still she was unprepared for the sensory overload that assaulted her the moment she opened the door.
The music, played by a country-western band gyrating with wild enthusiasm on a rainbow-lit stage, hit her eardrums at approximately a hundred decibels above the supersonic range. Every chord, every drumbeat, every twang of the lead singer’s voice hummed through her body like an electrical circuit gone haywire. A beer. That’s what she needed.
She headed toward the bar, passing table after table crowded with people and littered with beer bottles and ashtrays. The entire place seemed to be in motion, from the slow rhythm of interaction between men and women, to the sway of denim and leather on the dance floor, to the slither of waitresses from one table to the next. Every molecule of air was drenched in cigarette smoke, giving the room a surreal, otherworldly feel. Virginia had a thought about secondhand smoke, then chastised herself. She’d spent twenty-four years breathing the right air, so one evening of sucking in a few carcinogens was hardly going to matter.
She found an empty bar stool and climbed onto it. The bartender, a brawny beast with biceps the size of telephone poles, approached her. He wore a single gold earring that glinted under the neon lights surrounding the bar.
She cleared her throat. “A beer, please?”
“Any particular kind?”
Virginia froze. “In a bottle?”
The bartender gave her a sarcastic little smile and walked away, leaving her feeling dumb as a rock. To her relief, though, he returned a moment later and slapped a bottle on the bar in front of her. “Three bucks.”
She gave the bartender three one-dollar bills, then picked up the beer. It felt ice-cold. She sniffed it tentatively, then put the bottle to her lips and took a sip. She swallowed, and her eyes started to water. It was like drinking a rancid, extra-fizzy soda, but she managed to get it down without it coming back up. Buoyed by that small victory, she took another sip, this time a bigger one, and felt it burn all the way down her throat.
Okay. That wasn’t so bad. And because she was still among the living, she decided maybe God was taking the weekend off.
She took mini-sips of the beer and turned around on the bar stool to watch the crowd. Nobody seemed to notice her, which was pretty much par for the course. She was one of those people who didn’t speak up, who blended into the woodwork, who got lost in a crowd of two. It had been that way all her life, and she didn’t expect things would change overnight.
As long as they changed eventually.
The couples on the dance floor moved with intricate little steps and whirls, their feet always falling in just the right places. Then a dozen or so people lined up to do a little group dance, where everybody seemed to know just where to step to avoid kicking the person in front of them.
And everywhere, people were laughing.
Pretty soon Virginia started to loosen up, and by the time she’d drained the bottle, she felt warm and a little woozy. She ordered another one, thinking if one made her feel good, two would be even better.
Then the band played a soft, soulful number. Couples inched closer to each other, body-to-body, moving together as one. Virginia felt as if the world had suddenly paired up two by two and she was the odd woman out.
She rested her elbow on the bar, her cheek against her palm, watching all the lucky women who knew what it felt like to ease next to a man, tuck their heads against a broad shoulder and move to the music, letting the rest of the world slip away. A wave of longing swept through her that was so powerful she thought she’d faint from the feeling.
Not once in her life had a man so much as touched her. She’d never been on a date, never been kissed, never chatted with a girlfriend about boys. She’d never had a man look into her eyes with desire or tell her she was beautiful. She wasn’t, of course. They didn’t come any plainer than Virginia White, so she had to face facts. She was going to need a little extra something that didn’t involve a traffic-stopping body or a Miss America smile.
Maybe it was all in the way a woman moved. That was apparently what a platinum blonde on the dance floor right now thought as she undulated against her partner. Making love standing up. That’s what it looked like. Not that Virginia knew the details of such a thing, but even a cloistered nun could see what that woman had in mind.
Virginia couldn’t say she blamed her.
If she’d been dancing with a man as sexy as that woman’s partner, it might make her hormones shift into overdrive, too. He was tall, well over six feet, moving to the music as if he’d been born to do it. Virginia inhaled the sight of him, her gaze traveling from his rock-solid shoulders, to his narrow waist, to his hips and thighs swaying rhythmically inside a pair of snug, well-worn jeans. Thick, dark hair brushed the back of his shirt collar, and she watched as the blonde eased her hands upward and threaded her fingers through it. Virginia wondered what that would feel like. She wondered what all of it would feel like—dancing, touching, even kissing. She blushed at the very thought of it, but that didn’t stop her mind from wandering into previously uncharted territory. Then he turned, and she had a sudden, stunning view of an incredibly handsome face.
She blinked. It couldn’t be.
Cole McCallum.
She felt a hot rush at the realization of just who it was she was looking at. It had been a lot of years since she’d seen him, but he wasn’t the kind of guy you easily forgot. She’d been a freshman when he was a senior, but still she’d fantasized about him, even though good girls weren’t supposed to have the hots for bad boys. Not that it would have mattered which way her hots were directed. A guy like Cole McCallum would never have been interested in a shy, dumpy little wallflower who would have gone into cardiac arrest if he’d so much as glanced in her direction.
Maybe it was a good thing he’d never looked her way. If there was one thing she’d learned by keeping her mouth shut and her ears open, it was that Cole’s good looks and lady-killing smile were nothing more than bait for any unsuspecting girl who happened to wander into his web.
The band wrapped up the song and Cole left the dance floor, the blonde clinging to him like moss on a tree. Age had only improved him, turning a cocky, hell-raising, sexy-looking teenager into a smooth, confident, sexy-looking man. She couldn’t say for sure if the hell-raising part still applied, but she doubted that inclination had left him entirely.
Virginia caught the bartender’s eye and ordered another beer, and before long the room began to spin in a most pleasant manner. She closed her eyes and listened hard, but the alcohol had chased away her mother’s voice. She drained the beer and set the empty bottle on the bar with a definitive clunk. Warmth coursed through her all the way to her toes, and she sighed with contentment.
For the first time in her life she felt free.
Nobody was standing over her shoulder passing judgment. Nobody was telling her what to think. Nobody was soliciting thunderbolts from the heavens as a punishment for the slightest transgression. She was in charge of her own destiny and answered to no one.
She watched Cole dance with another woman, following his tall, gorgeous body like a moth follows light. Beer number three hit home, and she started to think that maybe there wasn’t that much difference between her and those other women he seemed so interested in. It was possible, wasn’t it, that she might even have some qualities they didn’t?
A boldness she’d never felt before unfurled inside her like a tight rosebud opening to the sun. As the minutes ticked by, she started to feel less like a wallflower and more like a woman who could rule the world. She rose from her bar stool, wobbling a little, but never losing sight of the opportunity that was staring her right in the face.
Maybe a bad boy like Cole McCallum was exactly what this good girl needed.
2
COLE TOOK a sip from his long neck, settled back in his chair and surveyed the situation. It didn’t look good.
The Lone Wolf was filled to capacity, teeming with Friday nightlife. He’d been here several times before, years ago. Even though he’d been underage through most of that time, he’d never had any trouble getting in the door. Even at seventeen he’d looked twenty-one, standing six-foot-two with an attitude even taller, tempered by a killer smile he’d learned early to use to his advantage. And he’d be willing to put it to good use right now, if only he could find that one special woman who wouldn’t mind being married for six months and then disappearing.
In the glove compartment of his car was the necessary prenuptial agreement that would allow him to sidestep Texas community property laws, along with the phone numbers of a couple of the airlines so he could snag some last-minute tickets to Vegas tomorrow night. But the woman…now that was going to be a bigger problem than he anticipated.
Not that he didn’t already have a few candidates. Within ten minutes of his arrival, three ladies had made themselves at home at his table. The first had been Tonya Jenkins, a bleach blonde who’d graduated from Coldwater High the same year he had and now lived in Tyler. She wore a denim miniskirt and fringed leather vest that closed over her ample breasts with a single tie—without the benefit of a shirt beneath it. Everything about her was excessive, from the height of her oversprayed hair to the makeup she’d applied with a steamroller, to the way she kept running her bloodred fingernails up and down his arm. He remembered now it was because of Tonya that he’d developed such an aversion to pushy women.
She grabbed his hand. “C’mon, Cole. Let’s dance.”
She had that look of hot anticipation on her face that told him if he so much as raised an eyebrow, she’d have her skirt up and her panties down in a heartbeat.
He maintained an easygoing smile. “Think I’ll sit this one out.”
“But you danced with Shelly and Tiffany.” She pressed that cherry-red bottom lip of hers into a full pout, and he could tell his mission tonight was going to be a much bigger challenge than he’d anticipated.
He’d tried to look up some of the women he knew in Dallas to see if any of them might be interested in a temporary marriage, but without exception they’d moved on to other eligible bachelors months ago when they discovered he had an arson accusation hanging over his head. So he jumped into his car and headed here, figuring a local girl might make a better candidate anyway. Someone from around here would be more likely to submit to life on a ranch for six months, while the women he knew in Dallas would last about a week before they burst into tears and rushed back to the city for a trip to Neiman Marcus and lunch at the Palm.
The downside of marrying a girl from the Coldwater area was that it pretty much insured that Murphy would find out the marriage wasn’t the real thing. But according to the provisions of the will, as long as Cole got married by midnight tomorrow night and he and his bride spent six months on the ranch as man and wife, Murphy couldn’t pull the plug on the deal just because they weren’t committed to a lifetime relationship. At the end of that time period, Cole would sell the ranch, give his new ex-wife twenty-five thousand dollars for her trouble, then take the rest of the proceeds and get on with the life he was meant to live.
He surveyed the women at his table. Shelly was a definite possibility. She was decent looking, with platinum blond hair and a pair of breasts that were beyond belief. A few quick questions had netted him the answers he needed to move forward. No, she wasn’t married; no, she wasn’t thinking of leaving town anytime soon; and yes, she was a spontaneous person. Unfortunately she seemed about as bright as a two-watt bulb.
Tiffany, on the other hand, had at least a few gears turning upstairs. She had dark, silky hair, a pair of mile-long legs and seemed to be open to new adventures, but at the same time she was quick to say she’d just come off a nasty divorce. Marriage to a man with an ulterior motive might not sit too well with her.
The more he looked at them, though, the more he sensed a harshness about them that turned him off—a shadowed, wary look in their eyes that said they’d been around the block a time or two and could easily shift into ball buster mode if need be. Could he spend six months in the same house with a woman like that?
And then there was Tonya.
He checked his watch. Time was running short, and his options were few. He had to make a decision pretty quickly, because if one turned him down, he’d need time to talk another one into it. But which one first? Would they think it was strange if he asked them to draw straws?
“Excuse me?”
He looked up from his beer to see a woman standing in front of his table. Just barely a woman. He couldn’t say for sure she was even of legal age to be there. She wore a shirt with little horseshoes all over it, and her jeans were a deep indigo blue with a loose, crinkly fit. If she added a straw hat and a bandanna, she’d look just like Dale Evans.
Her brown eyes shifted back and forth as she systematically disintegrated a balled-up cocktail napkin, and he got the feeling that if he so much as said boo she’d go running for the hills. He pictured her going out with guys who wore sweater-vests and had her home by ten o’clock—the kind of date she could bring home to Mom for Sunday dinner. But here she was at a raunchy country-western bar on a Friday night looking as out of place as a sparrow in a flock of peacocks.
Then she fixed her gaze on his, and he felt a twinge of apprehension. She took a deep, shaky breath, looking as if she were about to faint.
“Would you like to dance?” she asked.
Oh, boy. He did not need this.
Before he could say anything, though, Tonya snickered a little, then leaned forward, her forearms on the table. “A little out of your league, aren’t you, honey?”
For a minute Cole thought the woman might go running for the hills after all. Instead she stood her ground, but her slightly panicked expression said it was a hard-won battle.
Tonya smelled blood. “Don’t you have a church social to go to? Or how about a bingo game? I hear it’s twenty-dollar jackpot night down at the VFW Hall.”
