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Ma’s rough voice called, “Hope I ain’t interrupting nothing.”
Archer’s hooded gaze was purely for the bedroom. Not the middle of my house.
“No, Ma. Archer rescued a calf from the stock pond by the road, so he’s cleaning up.” I shoved him away. He reluctantly moved enough that I could edge by him. I pushed the towels into his hands and turned away, calling to Ma, “Think Papa would mind if he borrowed a shirt and some shorts?”
I left Archer in the hallway. He could find the bathroom easy enough. What I wished I could leave behind was how kissing him again only reminded me how good it was between us.
* * *
Archer
While I’d been cleaning off, the bathroom door had opened and closed. As much as I’d wished Delaney would slip in, take her clothes off, and come into the shower with me, it hadn’t happened.
She still wanted me. And I spent too long in the shower pondering that news. We’d argued. I’d told her a little about how I’d grown up, but it hadn’t dampened her reaction to me.
The girls Briony and Wilson had set me up with before I’d met Delaney hadn’t been as stout. Those girls were from a different world. Dating me was more about the image we presented than whether we knew each other. I had lived through a time when Dad had forgotten to buy essentials like shampoo and toilet paper because Mama had been so sick and I hadn’t been old enough to drive. And it wasn’t like I’d offered up that information.
Hey, did your parents ever have only beer in the fridge?
I turned off the spray before I wasted more of the Grangers’ water and stared at the white-tiled walls. Parts of several tiles had chipped and cracked, and the grout around the base by the tub was blackened in parts. The place was clean but so old that some areas just refused to look any more than they were. The bathroom in the house I’d grown up in had looked different, but the age and the wear had been similar.
I didn’t miss having to fix handles that would no longer screw into stripped-out cabinets. Plumbing that ran hot, then cold, low pressure or no pressure. Flooring that was a few decades past replacement. In my current place, everything was new and modern, and, more importantly, not broken. My housekeeper came in once a week to clean the nonexistent layer of dust that had accumulated. Simple.
It used to be.
I was supposed to drive up here, arrange an annulment, and then go back to Texas a single man and start dating again.
My stomach twisted. Over the last few days, the only part of the plan I was okay with was the “driving up here” part. I opened the shower curtain with the mermaids dancing on it to grab a towel. I’d had to stoop to get my body under the spray of the showerhead, but I was clean and mud-free. I pressed the towel to my face and inhaled a faint strawberry scent under the smell of fabric softener.
I dried off with the coarse towel. I’d get some added exfoliation. The clothing waiting for me was a pair of large black basketball shorts and an old gray T-shirt that read “Coal Haven Drillers” with a logo of a guy in a hard hat flexing his muscles. My lips curled up. In Texas, if you weren’t playing a sport the moment you could walk, you ended up benched more often than not, and it didn’t matter how much money your daddy had.
Since my daddy had had no money, we were all too busy working to spare time for something that wasn’t going to put food on the table.
I bet Coal Haven was small enough to play every kid who wanted to try out. The trade-off for fewer opportunities in a smaller population was that more people could participate.
Was this what my life would’ve been like if Dad had reconciled with Uncle Cameron and stayed? He wouldn’t have met Mama and put down roots. He might’ve learned what it took to run a successful ranch and hang on to it so when he met some young girl and had kids, he wouldn’t rim the fucking drain of life. Would my life have been different? Ansen’s? Mama’s?
Would I have snatched up Delaney before my cousin had a chance? Would I have been smart enough to keep her?
I shook my head. Moot points. Mama was gone. Dad was nearly there. Ansen was fucking around somewhere in the country. I’d worked hard to get to where I was. Got my degree. Got a good job and had a chance at making partner with a man I admired. But I’d sacrificed my marriage the night of the dinner with Jaycee Henry. The following eighteen months had been some of the longest and loneliest of my life.
I pushed a hand through my hair and glanced in the mirror. A shadow of a beard graced my jaw. I could use a hair trim before I returned to work. Since I’d met Mr. Truitt, I hadn’t let my clean-cut appearance falter. He was old school. His meticulous attention to appearance had rubbed off on Wilson and then on me.
I couldn’t delay leaving the bathroom any longer. The shower hadn’t helped to clear up a damn thing. All I knew was after that kiss, I didn’t give a shit about an annulment.
I was still barefoot, and while it was weird to walk around someone’s place without socks, it wasn’t like I had shoes either.
I found Delaney in a little office with an inflatable twin bed behind a desk. She glanced up from an old laptop that ran like it was a jet engine readying for takeoff.
I frowned at the device. “You need a new computer.”
“I need a few hundred dollars,” she said flatly. “But we need food and feed more, so as long as this is working, I’m using it.”
I could go buy her one. I doubted there was a computer for sale in Coal Haven, but it would be nothing for me. I could buy a hundred laptops before I flinched.
Note to self: order laptop.
I soaked her in. Her sleeveless top showed the curves of her muscles and the hint of a tan line around her bra strap. I could picture her throwing square bales onto a flatbed trailer. “Do you know where I can get a haircut and some clothes?”
