Midnight Faith. Gena Dalton
of her own.”
“Yeah. A mind to be a McMahan.”
Clint turned and started past the last half of the stalls.
“Check ’em on that side for me, will ya?” he said.
“Yeah. And you tell me what you’re talkin’ about, then, if it’s not you and Lorrie.”
Clint shrugged.
“Women in general, I guess,” he said. “When they act like a different person than they ever did before, how d’you know which one’s real?”
Then he snapped his jaw shut. He wasn’t saying any more, no matter what, because this whole conversation was nothing but a stupid waste of breath. Jackson couldn’t be a bit of help, anyhow, blindly in love with Darcy as he was.
But Jackson was silent, thinking about it.
“Well,” he drawled at last, “I’d say, Clint, ol’ bro, if she’s actin’ like she never did before, she might have changed her mind. She may be trying to tell you somethin’.”
By the time he and Jackson got to the house, only the immediate family, which included various relatives of Bobbie Ann’s, was left. At least the evening was passing.
Everybody was standing around talking in the dining room or going in and out of it, bringing in food and lighting candles, and Aunt Faylene was at the sideboard taking the cover off one of her famous cakes. She turned and smiled at them as they walked in.
“My favorite nephews,” she proclaimed. “I want a hug.”
They gave her hugs and listened to her chatter for a minute, then she said, very low, “Any word from Monte?”
“Not that I know of,” Clint said.
“You’d know,” she said, her lips tightening. “Poor Bobbie Ann’d be walking on air if he’d called.”
Her gaze went to her sister, just coming in from the kitchen with a huge crock of chili. Clint went to help her with it.
“Places, everyone,” she called. “Time for dinner.”
Clint set the crock in the middle of the long table and glanced around.
“Where’s Cait?” he said.
No one knew.
“I’ll get her,” he said, and left the room.
First she wouldn’t dance, then she wouldn’t mingle and now she wouldn’t come to dinner. What was she doing, anyhow? Bobbie Ann didn’t need another worry, nor another absentee right now. He would say something to Cait. If she was going to accept an invitation, then she had an obligation…
The sight of her stopped him in his tracks.
She sat beside the Christmas tree with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them, staring at it as if she were a little girl. Lost in its magic.
As he watched, she lifted one hand and fingered the glass bead on the simple necklace at her throat. She was gone someplace else, that was for sure. Dinner at the Rocking M was the furthest thing from her mind right now.
A thought came, unbidden. Was she thinking about John? Remembering times with him? Had they shared a mighty love like Darcy and Jackson’s seemed to be?
His gut told him no. Darcy and Jackson were a matched pair. Anybody could spend five minutes with them and know that. John and Cait had been a whole different story.
She laid her head against her knees for a long moment, then lifted it and looked up at the angel at the top of the tree. The white profile of her face and throat was so pure and beautiful it made him swallow hard.
Slowly he walked across the room. She didn’t even hear his boot heels on the tiled floor. He reached the circle of light made by the tree and looked down at her sitting in its shadow.
“Cait?”
She started as if he’d waked her from sleep. A quick flash of fear crossed her face, then surprise. Was that a sheen of tears in her eyes?
It moved him. Against his will.
It made him want to protect her, somehow. Which was a laughable thought, for sure.
What was she afraid of? The Caitlin he knew wasn’t scared of anything.
“Dinner’s ready.”
Cait wanted to get up. She really did. But Clint was so close she could smell his aftershave.
His gray eyes were so intense they seared her skin.
The heat rose up in her neck and her entire body tilted to feverish.
Just like early this morning when she’d walked in on him riding that colt.
Just like the moment, dear Lord help her, that she’d looked at him across the back of the black horse and told him, “Christmas Eve gift.”
“Time for dinner,” he said, as if she spoke a foreign language and he should try another phrase to convey the same information.
But she was frozen there, despite the blood pulsing through her veins hot enough to melt her.
He took a step closer, as if to see what was wrong, and for one instant she thought he was going to hold out his hand to help her up. For that same instant, she was ready to reach for it.
But he kept his hands at his sides.
“We’d better get in there,” he said, in a tone so neutral she couldn’t find his feelings in it, “or else Jackson will eat up all the tamales.”
Her pulse was pounding so hard she was afraid he’d hear it and she stood still for a moment the instant she was on her feet. Trying to slow the blood in her veins. Trying to deepen the breaths in her body.
Even in that split second, though, while they stood near enough to touch, a deeper thrill went surging through her, the thrill of his closeness, the warm scent of him and the look in his eyes that tightened the unspoken tension that invariably vibrated between them. She cleared her throat and tried to speak normally.
“So,” she managed to say in her coolest tone, “is that another family tradition I don’t know? Last one to the table gets no tamales?”
He did have the grace to let her see his chagrin.
But he didn’t apologize. Actually, she couldn’t imagine Clint apologizing to her. Not for speaking his mind about his strong, true feelings that she didn’t belong here.
She had to remember that. He thought she didn’t belong here. He didn’t want her here, no matter how gallantly he’d called her to dinner. He was the host, she was the guest.
Of his mother.
She walked past and left him to follow as she headed toward the rest of the family gathering around the table in the dining room. Delia’s voice came to her clearly as she and Clint approached the door.
“…that time John was trying to steal my sopaipilla and I tried to spear it with my fork and stabbed him in the hand instead? That’s what started the water fight of all time!”
“Ooh, yeah!” LydaAnn chimed in. “That was in Tulsa at the Fourth of July show. We had everybody at the stalls soaking wet before it was all over.”
Jackson added something, too, but Cait barely heard it. She felt she was the one stabbed. That was a story John had never told her, had never even mentioned, and everyone else here knew all about it. Everybody in the family, judging from the number of voices recalling more details.
“I remember,” Faylene said, “when Johnny was little and he’d string honey all over his sopaipilla and his plate and the table and everything else and refuse to pass it on and—”
She stopped talking the minute Cait stepped into the room. So did everybody else. No more talk about