her daughter, Cassie poured him a glass of water, then set it down in front of his chair. He was dying to drink and wouldn’t have minded resting his feet, but he waited for her to take a seat.
Instead, she selected a cup from another shelf and poured what looked like coffee from a silver-colored machine on the counter next to the sink. “You like it black, right?”
“As tar.”
“Sorry. It’s strong, but not quite that strong.”
A horn sounded outside. Cassie turned to her daughter, who was still grinning at Charlie. “That’s your car pool, honey. I guess you don’t have to eat your oatmeal after all, lucky you. Take some oatmeal cookies with you.”
“But, Cowboy Charlie’s here,” the little girl said, the sparkle in her eyes bright with happiness and wonder. “I want to stay.”
“I’ll be here when you get back, little lady,” he told her.
“Mom?” Trish said with a squeak of joy that made him wince. “Will he be here?”
“We’ll see,” Cassie said.
At the exact same moment Charlie opined, with a wink, “I sure will.”
The little girl looked from her mother to him, then decided to go with his answer. “Goody!” She clapped her hands. “Wait till I tell everyone!” She grabbed a few cookies from a jar on the counter, seized a small pack with straps from the back of her chair and ran out the door.
Frowning, Cassie set both cups of coffee down on the table. Alone at last. She noticed that Charlie waited to sit until she did, and wondered when was the last time anyone had displayed actual manners. It felt quaint…and kind of nice.
She watched as he downed the water quickly, his Adam’s apple darting up and down with each gulp. His hands were deeply tanned, his fingers callused. As she sipped her coffee, she studied him, ignoring the attraction she felt toward him in an attempt at objectivity.
In the morning light he was even more the embodiment of Cowboy Charlie than he had appeared to be last night. Everything about him indicated that he worked with those sun-browned hands, that he spent days on the trail, in the open air. She wondered about his background, how much he was getting paid for this little impersonation, and frowned as she tried to think which of her friends had money for this kind of thing.
And why whoever it was had decided to play a trick on her in the first place.
“You shouldn’t have said that to Trish,” she admonished. “About your being here when she got home.”
“Why not?”
“Because you’ll get her hopes up. She thinks you’re real, as opposed to me, who knows you aren’t.”
He frowned, obviously perplexed and just a little bit impatient with her. “I thought we’d gotten that all worked out last night. I am real. You can touch me if you’d like.” He put his hand out toward her. “Flesh and blood, just like most men.”
Not even close to most men, at least the ones I know, she could have said, but didn’t. Instead she set her coffee cup down, then folded both arms across her chest.
“Look,” she said firmly, “I may have some Irish heritage and my grandmother may have filled my head with tales of faeries, curses and Fate, but that was then, this is now. I’m a grown-up, and I rebel against being asked to accept some, some…creature of my imagination turning into flesh and blood reality. Okay? It isn’t possible, it didn’t happen, and that’s it!”
There. If that didn’t get through to him, she didn’t know what would.
But he didn’t react, not really, except for a slight tension around the jawline that disappeared almost as quickly as it had appeared. No, he just shrugged, sat there and drank down her coffee, a thoughtful look on his handsome, weather-beaten face.
Had she hurt his feelings? she wondered suddenly. Did he mind being called a creature? What in the world was going on? And, more immediate, what in the world was she going to do with him?
“Are you hungry or anything?” she found herself asking him, by way of soothing any feathers she might have ruffled. At once she was disgusted with herself. God, she was such a wuss. Every time she forced herself to act with firmness and strength, in the next moment, she usually wound up taking care of whoever she’d been firm and strong with.
“Don’t bother yourself, ma’am—I mean, Cassie. I’ll get myself some grub later on.”
She reached behind her for the cookie jar. Setting it in front of her, she opened the top and handed him a couple of oatmeal cookies, which he accepted, she noticed.
“Thanks,” he said, then gobbled them down, like someone who’d been deprived of food for a while. He really needed this impersonation job, she figured, wondering again at his background and what had brought him to this point.
Both cookies were disposed of in a matter of seconds, after which he said, “You’re a real good baker.”
“No I’m not. Other people bake. I shop. There’s more, if you’d like. Or I can scramble up some eggs.”
She began to rise, but he stayed her with a gesture. “No thank you. I meant what I said. I’ll eat later. Now I need you to tell me what I can do for you.”
He seemed so sincere, so earnest, she almost laughed, mainly because it crossed her mind that it would be nice if she could believe in fairy tales, in someone sent from another plane of existence to help her.
Maybe she had believed at Trish’s age, but the early death of her mother, followed two years later by her father’s death, had taken away her childhood long before it should have ended, along with any faith in either magic or fantasy. A maiden aunt had raised her to the best of her abilities, but she’d been a sour and strict woman. Cassie had left her home right after high school and had never gone back.
She’d met Teddy in junior college, at age nineteen, married him three months later, had Trish at twenty and been widowed at twenty-six, nearly two years ago.
Since then there had been no room for fairy tales, very little room for much of anything except the day-to-day struggle to just get by. So now this man in cowboy duds sat across from her, all earnestness and manners, asking what he could do for her?
The obvious first answer came to mind. Money would help. Her late husband, who had done enough dreaming for both of them, had always been into some kind of flaky financial scheme. In fact, he’d put the house up as collateral on the final project, something to do with windmills and solar power. It had failed, of course, as had all the others. After that, he’d been so distracted, he’d accidentally stepped into the path of a large truck and been mowed down like a weed.
Cassie hadn’t had the luxury of weeping all the tears she’d felt inside; there was a five-year-old child to raise and bills to pay. There had been no insurance, no savings. Only debt. This small structure in the tiny town of Yatesboro, Nevada, twenty miles outside of Reno, was all that she and Trish had left, and every month they seemed on the verge of losing it.
There was never enough money, not for extras like ballet lessons for Trish or art classes for Cassie, so she could hone the skills to translate what she saw in
