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But the way my cowboy looked at me…
Like she hadn’t changed at all. Like she was still game for adventures with scoundrels and kisses stolen by strangers.
“I can’t be distracted.” Violet dug her laptop out of its bag and sat on the bed next to Maggie.
“Are you creating a social media post?” Maggie flopped back on the bed. “About how you were whisked away by Cowboy Hunky?”
“No. I’m adding to my research notes.” She suddenly felt inspired. Her cowboy kidnapping was an example of how fate, something William Shakespeare had thought couldn’t be avoided, could in fact be thwarted with positive results, unlike many of the bard’s plays.
My cowboy.
Violet rolled her eyes.
The bedroom door burst open. “Who knows how to dance the hip hop? I need to learn.” Grandma Dotty closed the door furtively behind her. She strutted forward, waving her petite arms, and shaking her practically non-existent booty. “And don’t tell your father. If he had his way, I’d be knitting in a corner room of a retirement facility.”
Maggie and Violet exchanged glances. Grandma Dotty had been battling the onset of dementia for the past couple of years. The doctors adjusted her meds every few months, which meant that sometimes Grandma Dotty was clear as a bell. And other times? She got a bit frenetic and obsessed with things on her bucket list. This seemed like one of the latter times.
“Why the sudden interest in hip hop?” Violet asked tentatively. Her grandmother was never direct about her motives, and this smacked of trouble.
“Let’s just say it’s an interest of mine.” Grandma Dotty held her arms up, bent at the elbows like a goal post. She opened and closed her arms as if they were a set of imaginary doors. “Ready or not.Here I come,” she sang a line from a Fugees song in a warbly, high-pitched voice.
“That’s not a hip hop song,” Violet murmured.
“I think there’s a hip hop class weekday mornings down at the Pilates studio by the gelato place.” Maggie had no filter, even when she hadn’t been drinking.
Violet poked her sister’s leg. “Don’t encourage this. Are you going to take her?” Maggie may live and work in another part of the Hamptons, but it was Vi who was staying in this house for the summer and on Grandma Dotty watch. The rest of the family was heading back to New York tonight.
“No. In addition to office hours, I’m on call all week.” Maggie brushed Violet’s hand away. She worked as a veterinarian at a large animal practice. “But you should go with Grandma Dotty to hip hop cardio. Sitting and studying those dusty old books all day can’t be good for you.”
“I’m finishing a book.” Vi thought longingly of her topic—Shakespeare’s understanding of the human condition. The man’s words were as applicable today as when they’d been written several hundred years ago. “And my deadline is looming.”
“No diggity.” Changing records, Grandma Dotty crab walked sideways across the floor on two legs. Then she spun around and shook her skinny butt back-and-forth at them.
“Grandma Dotty, have you been drinking?” Vi set her laptop aside and stood, turning her grandmother around so she could look her in the eye.
Both eyes were clear and filled with sparks of mischief. She shook her head. “No drinks other than a toast. I’ve been given an opportunity to model for Xuri. Except I need to learn hip hop.”
Maggie and Vi exchanged glances again. And then they started to laugh.
There was no way the trendy, Pan Asian fashion designer was going to let their white-as-snow grandmother walk—or hip hop—down her runway.
Grandma Dotty crossed her arms over her chest and sniffed her disdain. “You’ll believe me when Xuri sends me a coat for my audition.”
Violet tried hard to keep a straight face. “If Xuri sends you a coat, I’ll take you to hip hop cardio every day this summer.”
“You’ll take me anyway.” Grandma Dotty struck a coy pose. “Because we’re housemates and you love me.”
*
“This is what happens when you teach horses dog tricks, Chuck.” Rafi snorted as he pushed the wheelbarrow full of stall waste out of the main barn and past an incoming Coop.
“You’re just upset because Tally is smarter than you are.” Coop led the white mare back to her stall with a hand on her neck, fingers wrapped around a handful of coarse mane.
“Chuck, Chuck, Chuck.” Rafi took great pleasure in saying Coop’s alias. Not that the live-in farm manager knew it was an alias. He assumed Coop was just another down-on-his-luck cowboy happy to exercise horses for a daily wage. “I’m not the one who let a horse escape, Chuckaroo. You can’t make too many more mistakes like that with expensive horse flesh, or you’ll be out a job. And then who will Chuck-Chuck have to talk to?”
Normally, Coop let Rafi’s teasing roll over him. But today, after things didn’t go as expected with the brunette, Coop was feeling every slight and not open to his supervisor’s glib cautionary notes.
He was Charles Cooper Pearson the Third, for cryin’ out loud! Heir to a massive oil fortune in Texas. Or at least, he had been until his father had a heart attack two months ago.
