Tex Times Ten. Tina Leonard
that’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said, cutting another piece for himself. “How many children do you have? Because I found a picture of you in Hannah’s room, and I think I counted nine. Nine!” He looked at her, his heart in his throat. “Those weren’t your responsibilities, were they?”
She looked at him for a long time, and he didn’t like the depth of her gaze. It told him all he needed to know, and he didn’t need the lie of a sugar boost to ease the strain in his jeans. His pants started fitting better instantly.
“They’re all mine—nephews and nieces,” she said. “There are ten of us. If one doesn’t count Gran. And then there are my missing three siblings, which, if and when they ever come back into the picture, will make fourteen.”
“You support fourteen people.”
“Well, my brother and sisters are missionaries. They’re gone a lot, and they don’t make much. Gran used to be able to work, but now that she’s older, she gets tired more easily.”
“Taking care of nine kids would tire me out.”
“Yes, but we didn’t expect my family to be gone so long. They left for a weekend to take coats and blankets to a sister church in South America.”
To his dismay, her eyes filled with the first tears he’d ever seen her cry. “Wait, wait,” he said. “Don’t do that. They’ll be back, I’m sure.”
“I’m not so certain anymore.” She got up to wash her hands and dry her eyes at the washstand sink in her room. “We haven’t heard from them in almost three years. The government won’t tell us anything. And needless to say, Gran and I do not have enough money to hire an investigator.”
And then he saw her shoulders shaking. Oh, boy. Putting the cake back into the box, he moved it back to the dresser. “Cissy,” he murmured, going to stand behind her. “You’ve got a great ass.”
“What?”
She turned to stare at him, and he prepared to dodge a slap. “It was all I could think of to make you stop crying,” he admitted. “I don’t have much experience with women’s tears.”
She put her hands on her hips. “I wasn’t crying.”
Now who was fibbing? And yet, he understood covering up. “My brothers say I have an intimacy problem,” he offered.
Her eyes widened. “No man admits to something like that.”
“I didn’t say I had one. That’s what they like to accuse me of. It’s not true.”
“Is that why you’re here?”
He frowned at her. There was a real reason he was there—to deliver the cake as Hannah had requested. And then there was the real-real, albeit inadmissible, reason he was there—to see Cissy. But neither of those reasons could be what Cissy had in mind. “What?”
“Because of your intimacy problem.”
“Why would I come here for that? Just saying I had one, which I don’t.”
“Because this salon is the place men like to come to lose their intimacy problems. And a whole host of other problems.”
His jaw sagged. “You’re suggesting that I—”
“Not suggesting. Asking, cowboy. Asking.”
No. The answer was no.
And yet, he had to admit he was pulled to Cissy in a sort of strange, like-what-I-see-but-can’t-touch it way. It was a sexual paradox of sorts.
Which would play into his brothers’ theory.
“I’ve always espoused the ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy of life,” he said.
“And yet you’ve asked plenty of questions about my life. My family.”
“Yeah. That’s when I thought you were my kind of girl.”
She stared at him. “And now you think I’m…?”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I guess you’re a good girl. A good girl with issues, but I definitely see why Hannah likes you.”
“And so that crosses me off your short list.”
“I don’t have a list,” he replied.
“But if I were a wild woman, I’d be on it.”
“Well, that, and if you wore interesting lingerie.
I’m going to develop a fetish for interesting lingerie.”
She sighed. “Tex, I think you have an intimacy problem.”
He sighed, too, and laid back across the bed horizontally. She lay next to him, and they both stared lackadaisically at the ceiling, their legs hanging off the bed. “Not if I have a fetish.”
“You don’t, cowboy. You said you’re going to develop one. Like, maybe when you’re forty? Not that any of this matters, since I’m not your kind of girl or anything.”
“And thank heavens for that,” he said. “I do not want to end up like my brothers. Even though they’re happy,” he said expansively, “that is no reason to emulate them.”
“Back to the raffle,” she reminded him. “I think you should do it.”
“Why?”
“It would prove to your brothers that you don’t have any issues,” she pointed out. “You would also prove it to yourself, because on a subconscious level, you could be in denial.” She beamed at her attempt at psychoanalysis. “And it’s for a good cause.”
They turned their heads to look at each other. It was, Tex realized at that moment, too close for comfort. “You may not be a trashy girl,” he said, “but you didn’t slap me when I said you had a great ass.”
“That’s because I felt sorry for you,” she said softly, staring into his eyes. “I knew there had to be a reason you were trying so hard to be something you weren’t.”
He could practically feel his eyes bug from their sockets. “Now comes the enlightenment. What am I not?”
“A badass cowboy.”
“So you’re figuring I’m a pansy.”
“You’re neither. Just right down the middle. A nice guy.”
Just what he’d always wanted. “Maybe you’re not as smart as you think you are.”
She shrugged, a little icily for his taste, especially since she was lying on her back and shouldn’t have been able to get that much movement into a shrug.
“Okay. Let me ask you something. If I was a trashy girl—your favorite kind—would you have tried to hit on me by now? I mean, you’re holding back for some reason. In fact, you’re almost a hypocrite. You tease about kissing me and having sex and say I’ve got a great behind, and it’s clear you like what you see, but then you treat me like a sister.”
“I don’t have sex on the first date,” he said gruffly.
“You did,” she reminded him. “If meeting me in a barn can be called a date.”
“It can’t,” he argued. “That was a first meeting, and I’d definitely never done that before.” He moved his head back to stare at the ceiling. “There are moral imperatives involved.”
She rolled up on her elbow and looked at him quizzically. “Are you quoting someone?”
“No,” he said, not about to admit that some of his brother Bandera’s philosophical ditherings and their father’s teachings had soaked into his skull. “I’m only trying to illustrate that I’m not a loser or an intimacy-phobe. I don’t have to mate like a gorilla.”
“Now