could soften. He got a jump start on that softening, though, when the tack room door opened.
Hope and he scampered away from each other as if they’d been caught doing something wrong. However, the jumpy movement got the attention of the people in the doorway.
His mom and dad, Mattie and Elgin.
They were clearly on their way to the party and had on their Sunday best. His dad was wearing a suit, looking about as uncomfortable as Josh would be if he had to wear a tie. His mom was in a blue dress that she had probably saved for months to buy. Her grandmother’s rhinestone necklace glimmered around her neck.
Both of them looked at Hope and him before looking at each other. Their eyebrows were raised as if trying to figure out what was going on, but then they shook their heads and shrugged. Obviously they thought there was no chance in hell that Hope Applewood would have anything to do with the likes of him.
“Beaver told us you were in here, talking to Miss Applewood,” his mother commented.
“Termite,” the hand called out to correct her.
“Mr. and Mrs. Whitlock,” Hope said, going to them. She shook their hands. “It’s good to see you. And please call me Hope.”
His parents both gave her polite smiles and greetings—which didn’t extend in any way to Josh. “You’re not dressed for the party,” his mother pointed out, her voice crisp and weary at the same time. “I told you he wouldn’t be dressed,” she added to her husband.
“I’m not going.” And Josh hoped he didn’t have to keep saying that.
Tears sprang to his mother’s eyes. Yes, actual tears. Mattie was a crier, complete with a trembling bottom lip, and while he wasn’t completely unaffected by it—she was his mother, after all—Josh had grown tired of it. Better yet, he’d learned not to give in to it as he had for the first thirty years of his life.
Hope fluttered her fingers toward the door. “I’ll just go and give you some time with your folks.”
Josh didn’t want time with them when he knew what was coming—a browbeating attempt to get him to that party. Apparently, though, his parents did want that time because they stayed put. They didn’t intentionally block Hope’s exit, but that’s what they were doing. Probably because they had their attention nailed on Josh and no longer noticed she was there.
“Your mom told you that she’d arranged for you to meet someone at the party,” his dad piped up.
“Yes, the new doctor at the hospital,” Josh verified. Dr. Marie Stapleton was the daughter of one of the former maids at the Granger Ranch. Marie had apparently done what Josh’s folks had wanted him to do, so maybe they thought he needed a visual to clarify their dreams for him. “I told Mom I didn’t want to meet her.” Josh braced himself because the crap-storm was about to hit.
His mom’s eyes got even more teary. His dad huffed. For such a simple sound, it carried a lot of emotion and old baggage. “We just want something better for you than you have.”
“Something better than we have,” his mother amended. “Give us one good reason why you won’t go to the party and meet Dr. Stapleton. Just one good reason,” she emphasized.
Hope turned to him, and it wasn’t the itch look she gave him this time. There was sympathy in her eyes. And maybe a little anger, too, because this was the kind of stuff she got from her own parents. She had an advantage, though, because her parents didn’t live in Wrangler’s Creek, so they weren’t always right underfoot, but they did make trips back to see their daughter and to attend parties thrown by their old friends, the Grangers.
“One good reason?” Hope repeated. “Well, I did ask Josh to go to the party with me.”
And she’d just thrown the ball into his court.
“I was just trying to convince him to go when you came in,” Hope tacked onto her thrown ball.
That silenced his parents. Not a good silence, though. Their quiet, condemning stares were riddled with suspicion, and they likely thought he’d put Hope up to saying that. They also likely thought that he didn’t stand a snowflake’s chance in an El Paso summer of being with an Applewood. And they wouldn’t believe that it had been his choice not to pursue her because they hadn’t been around for the “itch” look she’d given him.
A slow storm moved through him, and no, it didn’t have anything to do with the activity that Hope and her dress had caused behind the zipper of his jeans. This had to do with throwing back some of that suspicious condemnation. It had to do with, well, some I’ll show you.
“I’m going to the party with Hope,” Josh heard himself say. And he sealed the deal by catching that ball and doing something stupid with it.
Josh hooked his arm around Hope’s waist, yanked her to him and kissed her.
MY, OH, MY. Hope hadn’t seen the kiss coming, but it turned out that seeing it wasn’t really necessary anyway. She felt it—mercy, did she—and that was much, much better than getting any advance warning that Josh was going to do it.
Actually, she figured he hadn’t known he was going to do it, either. This was no doubt a knee-jerk reaction to his parents’ jerk remarks. But Hope would take it, and for these few scalding moments, she would pretend that it was the real deal.
Finally!
She’d wanted this to happen for so long that it certainly felt real. Deep-immersion fantasizing could do that, and she’d been fantasizing about Josh since he’d first walked into her office three years ago and applied for a job. Like now, he’d been wearing those Wranglers that were snug and worn in all the right places. With his rumpled black hair, and chiseled body, he’d looked ready for a photo shoot for one of those magazines that put tough cowboys on the covers.
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