leaned against the headrest of her chair, squinting as she considered her answer. His heart beat double time, waiting…
“I guess I’d have to say, you’re a very pleasant diversion.”
“From what?”
A strange expression—sadness? detachment?—flit across her features like a fast-moving shadow, and he wondered about that, too, as he waited yet again for a reply.
“Oh, just…everything.”
She had a talent for turning two syllables into four, and three into six, just as Rose had. Lamont waited for the usual twinge of grief that followed a memory of his late wife, and when it didn’t come, he chalked it up to Nadine’s gift for making folks feel at ease.
“Do you believe this sky?” She pointed at the stars, winking on their bed of black velvet, then clucked her tongue. “And the so-called experts were calling for thunderstorms…”
“I hope it’s this clear tomorrow night.”
She looked at him over the rim of her mug, and sent his heart into overdrive. “Why?”
He shrugged. “Might be inclined to throw a couple steaks on the grill, if you’ll share ’em with me, that is.”
She put her cup down and turned to face him. “Lamont London,” she said, her blue eyes boring into his, “are you asking me out on a date?”
He’d gone down the “dating road” more times than he cared to remember, with disastrous consequences. Granted, he was mostly to blame, comparing every woman to his wife a couple hundred times between the pickup and the dropoff. He’d made a promise to Rose after that last calamity: Since no woman could hold a candle to her anyway, why torture them and himself? “Can’t a fella be neighborly without people jumping to conclusions?”
It was a moment before she answered, “Sure. I guess so.”
“Sure,” a fellow could be neighborly, or “sure,” she’d share the steaks with him? “Can I take that as a ‘yes’?”
She gave a one-shouldered shrug. “Why not?”
Chuckling, he said, “Try to curb your enthusiasm.”
“Can’t a gal be blunt without people getting overly sensitive?”
My, but he liked the sound of her laughter! But why stop there? He liked everything about Nadine, from her sunny blond hair right to the cherry-red toenails poking out from her terrycloth slippers.
Lamont stared at the floorboards beneath his boots, trying to make sense of everything that was going on in his head and his heart. He’d escorted a couple dozen good-looking women to the movies, dinner and concerts, and never once felt the way he did drinking tea with Nadine.
“I’m probably wasting my breath,” he said, “pointing out that I’m not one to mince words.”
“I’ve been in the crowd at enough cattle auctions to know that’s the truth!” she said, grinning.
Lamont didn’t have a clue what she meant. But that was no surprise, because what he knew about women, he could put in one eye.
She reached over the table between them and gently squeezed his forearm. “And I like you, too. You’ve always been a good neighbor, and I count myself lucky to call you a ‘friend,’ too.”
“I like you, Nadine.”
Friend? The term made him sound like a wet-behind-the-ears schoolboy, because he wanted this—whatever this was between them—to be so much more. And doggone it, he didn’t cotton to feeling this way, not one little bit! He’d sustained broken bones taming wild stallions, and the ice-white scars on his forearms were reminders of his run-ins with barbed wire. The whole idea behind dating vain, empty-headed beauties was to ensure he’d never be tempted to marry one of them. But this thing with Nadine?
Show me a sign, Lord. Show me a sign!
The wind kicked up, thunder echoed in the distance and a bolt of lightning sliced the black sky. Coincidence? Or had God decided that it took the power of nature to get the message through his thick skull?
He didn’t have time to come up with an answer because, quick as the blink of an eye, the skies opened up. Lamont could barely see his truck through the teeming rain.
“Oh, my,” she said, standing to gather their cups, “you’d better make tracks, cowboy. You know what that road is like in a storm…”
Yeah, he knew. The hard-packed runoff would turn the blacktop into a swift-moving river of muddy water. But his place was just over the next rise. If he floored the pickup, he could make it home in ten minutes flat. Plenty of time to spend with Nadine—
Thunder boomed directly overhead and lightning exploded, brightening her yard.
Okay, Lord, I can take a hint…
“Guess I’d better make a run for it,” he said, jamming the Stetson onto his head. “Thanks for the tea.”
And as he hotfooted it toward his truck, he couldn’t help but wonder if he was running from the storm flashing all around him…
…or the one roiling in his heart.
Chapter Three
Nadine tossed and turned for hours, alternately staring at the ceiling and punching her pillows. Flipping the covers aside, she stepped into her bedroom slippers and headed downstairs, belting a light terry robe on the way. No need for lights for, even in the dead of night she could navigate these rooms with her eyes closed. No surprise there, with all the practice she’d gotten while Ernest was alive. How many times, she wondered, filling the teapot with water, had she paced the floors, trembling with fear and rage and bitterness as she waited for the throbbing aches and pains of yet another beating to ease?
“Too many to count,” she whispered, staring at the blue flame that she turned on under the kettle. She’d worked hard to keep the cuts and bruises camouflaged, a job made easier because Ernest had always been careful to leave evidence of his brutality in places that could be covered. If she didn’t know better, she would have said he took those lessons from her own father.
When had the switch flipped, she wondered, turning Ernest from the loving young man who vowed to protect his sweetheart from her father’s manhandling, to the mean-spirited husband who made her pa seem gentle as a kitten? A jagged scar on her forearm, the remnant of a long-ago beating, caught her eye. Instinct made her tug at the sleeve of her robe to hide it.
Old habits die hard, she glumly thought. If Nadine had a dollar for every time someone asked why she’d worn trousers and long-sleeved shirts in the dead of summer, maybe she could pay one of the steadily mounting bills that lay in a tidy stack on her desk.
These past three years had been tougher than any in memory. The run of bad fortune began when her stud bull broke free of his pen and wandered into the path of a speeding eighteen-wheeler. Two calves born that spring had been too weak to survive. The following fall, weevils had attacked her fields, destroying the harvest that would have fed the livestock. Then, three years of oppressive, unrelenting drought.
