LITMIR.BIZ

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to spend another six months in Coldwater to do it.

      “So where’s the little woman?” Murphy asked. “Don’t recall hearing anything about you getting married.”

      “She’ll be here Sunday.”

      Cole held his breath, afraid Murphy was going to ask him more questions about his wife. Instead, he moved his toothpick to the other side of his mouth and gave Cole a warning stare.

      “Part of the deal is that you work on the ranch.”

      “I’ve done it before.”

      “And hated every minute of it.”

      Cole couldn’t argue with that. Still, he’d worked hard on the ranch the year he lived there, and Murphy knew it. Cole would have shot himself before giving the old man the satisfaction of telling Edna he wasn’t pulling his weight.

      Mary Lou put a cup of coffee down in front of Cole with a provocative smile. As she walked away, Cole shoved the cup aside.

      “Edna’s will allows me a monthly salary and the use of the foreman’s house for the six months.”

      “That’s what it says.”

      “Just wanted to make sure we’re on the same track.”

      “We are, unless you’re forgetting who decides whether you’ve stuck to the terms of the will. If you so much as forget to show up for work one day, I can call the whole thing off. What makes you think I’ll cut you any slack?”

      Good question. Cole knew Murphy didn’t much like him showing up at the eleventh hour, because it meant another six months before the fate of the ranch would be decided. If Cole didn’t inherit, Murphy would. Fortunately, Cole knew the ranch meant nothing to Murphy without Edna. And since Murphy had been financially well-off long before he and Edna got married, the money the ranch would bring at sale meant very little to him, anyway. But carrying out the stipulations of Edna’s will meant everything to Murphy, whether he agreed with them or not.

      “Because you’re a fair man,” Cole said. “Edna always said so.”

      Murphy’s mouth twisted with irritation, and Cole knew he’d hit him where it hurt.

      “Edna let her heart rule her head,” Murphy said. “She knew her son was worthless, but his son—she had hope for him. Said all her grandson needed was a good woman, an honest job and something to work for, and he’d turn into a man she could be proud of. Instead you’ve spent the last year scraping to stay out of jail just like your old man.”

      Cole forced his expression to remain impassive, but he hardly felt that way inside. He remembered that day eleven years ago when a Dallas judge finally tossed his father in jail. At seventeen, Cole would have preferred to have been on his own, but the court hadn’t seen it that way. His grandmother had agreed to take him in, and after a few rocky months, Cole made a surprising discovery—that at least one person in the world actually thought he might amount to something.

      He knew she’d taken him in out of family responsibility, and in the beginning things had been pretty shaky. He remembered the day he arrived, so full of attitude that, looking back, he was surprised she hadn’t kicked him right out the door. Instead, she’d fed him a hot meal, given him a clean bed to sleep in, then told him that no matter what his father had done, he wasn’t his father and there was no need to follow in those footsteps.

      In the coming months, no matter how many times he mouthed off, no matter how many times he screwed up, even though he could tell she was disappointed, still every day was a new day. Finally the days got better. She’d given him love and affection for the first time in his life, and when she died she left him everything—with a few strings attached. As her only living blood relative, the fact that she’d willed it all to him hadn’t been a complete surprise. The terms of the will had.

      “Now as for me,” Murphy said, “I think Edna was dreaming. I think you’re heading down the same road as your old man. Sure, you do things a little bigger and flashier, but the end result is the same. This is just a little detour along the way, like a trucker stopping to gas up. When you’ve got what you want, you’ll be on the road again.”

      He stood up and tossed a five on the table, then lowered his voice. “One more thing. I made sure that nobody but you, me and the attorney who drew up the will knows anything about the provisions Edna outlined. If word gets out that she’s trying to turn her no-good grandson into a hardworking family man, she’s going to look like a fool, and I’ll be damned if that’s going to happen. If I think for one minute that you’re telling people things they don’t need to know, I’ll pull the plug on this deal so fast it’ll make your head spin. Now, do we understand each other?”

      Cole nodded.

      “See you Sunday. Looking forward to meeting the wife.”

      Cole watched him go, then sat back in the booth with a heavy sigh. Murphy was right about one thing. A year from now, when he sold the ranch and banked the money, his grandmother was going to look down from heaven and be sorely disappointed. But for all her good intentions, she hadn’t understood that she could make him play the part of a hardworking husband, but she was never going to turn him into one.

      This time last year, the mayor of Dallas himself had applauded Cole’s efforts to revitalize a run-down area of town. Dallas Monthly had listed him as one of the twenty hottest bachelors in Dallas, which had given him so much instant celebrity that he couldn’t even stop at 7-Eleven for a Big Gulp without a woman shoving her phone number into his pocket. And he’d been on the verge of making more money than he ever dreamed he would see in a lifetime. With the profit from the sale of the ranch, eventually he’d be able to get all of that back and then some. Why, then, would he want to waste his life away, saddled with a wife and kids, on a ranch in the middle of nowhere?

      He stood up to leave, smiling broadly at the waitresses behind the counter. He added a quick wink, then listened to them chatter like a bunch of chipmunks as he walked out the door. He decided he would head over to the Lone Wolf Saloon on Highway 81. The place would fill up in an hour or so, providing him with the biggest assortment of women he was likely to find under one roof on short notice. He’d get a booth in the corner, order up a long neck, then sit back and do some serious shopping.

      He had until tomorrow at midnight to find himself a wife.

      VIRGINIA WHITE turned her 1993 Celica off the two-lane highway into a gas station, swung around the pumps and parked near the bathrooms on the west side. She grabbed the big shopping sack from the passenger seat beside her, hopped out of her car and got the bathroom key from the attendant.

      She unlocked the bathroom door, hoping to find it clean, at least, only to see a stopped-up toilet, a wall of graffiti and half a dozen dead crickets on the floor. For a moment she wished she’d gone home to change clothes, but it was twenty-one miles from the outlet mall back to Coldwater. If she’d done that she would have lost her nerve altogether and ended up staying home.

      She locked the door and nudged the crickets behind the toilet with the toe of her canvas shoe. She shimmied out of the dumpy flowered dress her mother had bought her at a garage sale last summer and stuffed it into the trash can. She removed her white cotton bra and disposed of it, too, then pulled out of the sack the one part of her purchase that she’d barely had the nerve to buy—a black lace push-up bra with a front clasp, dainty satin straps and enough padding to stuff a mattress.

      Cheap women wear bras like that, her mother had always said. Cheap little hussies who are looking for trouble.

      Virginia put it on, then turned to the mirror and froze.

      Cleavage. For the first time in her life, she actually had cleavage.

      She stared at the cheap little hussy in the mirror and held her breath, her heart beating double time, waiting, waiting…

      Finally she slumped with relief. Okay. God hadn’t struck her dead. That was a good sign. Maybe her mother didn’t have half the pull with the Almighty that she’d always led Virginia to believe,

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