Helen Myers – A Holiday to Remember (страница 7)

As her uncle put her egg on her platter, along with a portion of the hash browns and bacon, he handed it over, asking, “So? What do you think of him? He sounds like a fine specimen of manhood. If he didn’t inherit Fred’s ugly mug.”

“OMG,” Alana groaned. “You’re worse than Bunny. When I called in that I was checking out someone along the creek, she went into some nonsense about blue moons.”

Duke frowned as he plated his breakfast. “Was there a toxic spill in the area that I missed on the radio?”

“My thought exactly.” Leading the way to the table, she saw a way to get him away from his rabid matchmaking focus. “I told him about the will.” She’d never disclosed anything about Fred’s proposal to her uncle, afraid that it would upset Duke and forever alter the two friends’ relationship—if not destroy it. But she had shared the rest.

Sighing as he relieved his legs of some weight, Duke opined, “Bet he loved that.”

“You can say that again.” Remembering that kiss forced Alana to take her time with her napkin and taking a slice of toast from the plate on the center of the table. Her lips all but tingled as though she was reliving the experience again. “Why do you always make the toast first? It’s practically as hard as Sheetrock.”

“Don’t exaggerate. You can inhale your weight in those stale croutons they put on your Caesar salad at Doc’s, but you’re faulting my toast?”

“Now you sound like an indignant wife, all puffed up,” she teased.

“And you sound like an ungrateful husband,” Duke muttered. “Get back on topic.”

Instead, Alana took a big bite of toast with jam and chewed. The later it grew, the more compelled her uncle would be to get to the station. He was determined to retire with the pride of knowing that he’d probably had the best attendance record of most police chiefs in Texas, and a more impressive tardiness record.

“Ally, how did he take the news about the will?”

“He now thinks I’m a Jezebel. The kids today would just say ‘ho,’ but it all amounts to the same thing. He’s concluded I used my feminine charms to con Fred into making me the alternate heir.”

Duke’s eyes bulged. He stopped in midchew.

“Swallow, please,” Alana directed. “It’s a completely rational reaction if you consider what his opinion of women must be after what he learned about them through experiencing his mother’s behavior.”

“I can worry about you,” Duke said, poking his chest with his thumb. “People can gossip because you drive like you’re auditioning for a NASCAR sponsorship—”

“I was very respectful of the speed limit driving Mack to Last Call.”

“—but nobody calls you...that!”

As Duke’s fist struck the table, the reverberations had Alana lifting her mug to keep coffee from splashing into her plate. “One bright spot.” Alana continued to soothe him. “Fred can rest in peace knowing Mack doesn’t seem to have a cozy relationship with Dina.”

Duke’s coloring slowly eased to a mild pink. “Is that so?”

“He didn’t sound like he would be heading there anytime soon, even if things hadn’t worked out for him here.”

“You covered a lot of ground.”

“It’s a long shift.”

Looking as though he had a few choice things to remind her about that, Duke managed to settle down and instead ask, “Where is she these days?”

“Managing a strip club in California.”

Her uncle slumped back in his chair and looked toward the ceiling. “You called it, Fred.” To Alana, he explained, “He said she would squander the money he gave her in the divorce settlement, and take the boy to ruination, too.”

“Uncle Duke, you’re sounding a bit like an offended mother-in-law. From the rest of what I learned so far, Mack didn’t have much of a childhood once they left here, but he’s made a life for himself that he can be proud of.”

“Let’s hope you’re right about that.” Duke returned to his meal and took another bite. “Did you tell me if he’s married? I forget.”

The wily fox never forgot anything, but Alana let that slide. “Not married. No children.”

“At thirty-eight?”

Of course, people of her uncle’s generation would think there was something wrong with that. “If he’s gay, my antenna is way, way off,” Alana replied, again thinking of the kiss. “But I meant what I said—don’t even think of matchmaking.”

“Fine. Send me to my grave without a great-niece or -nephew to spoil.”

“If that’s the way it works out, you have my apologies. You can apologize for throwing every male at me that passes through the city limits.”

“I do skip bona fide transients and felons. One of us has to pay attention to your biological clock.”

Alana’s mirthless laugh had an edge. There was no denying he did that. “Hasn’t it crossed your mind that he could be a post-traumatic-stress candidate, a walking powder keg waiting to go off? Leave him alone and give him a chance to come to terms with this loss. He’s already a tired soldier.”

With that, she attacked her food in all seriousness and ate in record speed. Inevitably, her uncle noticed.

“In a hurry to meet the sandman?” he drawled. “You never do sleep well, and never at all on a full stomach.”

“Don’t plan to sleep. I plan to change and get to the barn and work on Tanker. If the abscess in that tooth is completely gone, he needs to start being worked again.”

“Does that include a ride to Last Call? I’ve yet to meet the man who can resist the picture you make when you’re on a horse. Not that you seem to notice.”

“If I head that way, it’ll be because I jumped every other fence and tree and creek on this place,” she said, although she knew what that would do to him.

Duke turned pale. “Try to remember people count on you to show up for your shift this afternoon.”

“I never forget,” she said softly. That was the problem.

* * *

After Duke left and once Alana changed into jeans along with one of Chase’s big football jerseys from UT—just in case Mack Graves got the wrong idea and thought she was intent on seducing him—she locked up the house and headed for her truck. She did intend to check Tanker, but first she wanted to deliver a plate of breakfast to go with the supplies she’d bought for next door. She’d done much the same thing for months when Fred got increasingly weaker. It was what neighbors should do, she assured herself, and Mack was Fred’s son, so it was, in a way, like helping Fred. But no matter how hard she tried to justify her actions, she knew she was at least partly kidding herself.

The man had triggered something inside her that was as powerful as an adrenaline rush. She’d often felt a similar thrill riding and sometimes driving, and occasionally when there was an arrest to be made on the job, but she’d never felt the same curiosity, let alone interest, in a man. That was saying something, when she’d been courted, and been the object of many a matchmaking scheme, and had even tried an affair or two. Mack’s kiss made all of that pale in comparison. She wanted to discover if it had been a fluke. Of course it was, she assured herself quickly. But she doubted a fling with Mack was going to raise her uncle’s blood pressure the way some of her other behavior did.

As she closed the gate between their properties, she spotted Eberardo emerging from the barn, Two Dog, the cow-dog-mix canine, only steps behind him. Eberardo waved and met her at the house.

A few inches shorter than her and perhaps five years older, he was a nice-looking man with a quick smile and a gentle hand with livestock. Fred had hired him over a dozen years ago on a temporary basis, but soon moved the trailer in to make the job permanent.

“Buenos días!” she said, as she emerged from the truck with the covered plate and the two bags of groceries. The dog jumped high to sniff at the plate. “Nothing for you this trip,” she told him. “I promise, next time.”

Eberardo sharply ordered Two Dog to sit and the dog immediately dropped to the ground, all obedience.

“I don’t think Mr. Graves is up yet,” Alana told Eberardo. “I was going to put this in his refrigerator.”

The ranch hand tipped his straw Western hat in greeting. “Then I come back. I just wanted to check in case he don’t want I stay.” He wiped his hands with a red kerchief that he pushed back into his jeans pocket. “I don’t want no trouble.”

Alana hadn’t seen him so nervous since he’d come to Last Call looking for work. “Eberardo, this is your home, and Mr. Mack doesn’t know much about ranching. He’ll need your knowledge and advice.”

“Gracias, Señorita Ally. I hope you are right. I would like to stay.”

Alana knew that was partly because he was in a relationship with a nurse at the local hospital. “Then we’ll work toward that goal. Mack Graves seems a decent man.”

* * *

That’s what Mack heard as he opened the side door. At the sound of the approaching vehicle—and knowing he’d locked the gate last night—he’d managed to drag on jeans and had hoped to pull on the T-shirt he’d grabbed, but he had to settle for holding it between his hands. Most of what he wanted to cover was on his back, anyway.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” he said, allowing himself a swift head-to-toe review of the woman who’d even intruded into his dreams. His first thought was that if she had put on that big jersey hoping to make herself less appealing, she’d failed. His second was an unexpected twist of jealousy as he wondered who it had belonged to.