Saddles and Sin, page 3
Logically, of course, she knew she and Robert had a contract that required six months’ notice for either party to terminate the agreement. But even if there weren’t a binding legal document involved, only a crazy woman would consider dumping her most promising client.
The meeting with Wendy Dann’s people earlier this morning had gone off without a hitch. Robert had been charming, the conversation had flowed more smoothly than the gourmet coffee, and by the time Marisol shook Wendy’s manager’s hand on the way out, she would have bet her favorite pair of vintage Armani pumps that Robert was going to be offered the gig. He was going to open for Wendy Dann on the second leg of her Country Girls Do It Better tour and take his first step toward fame and fortune.
Right now, they should be busting their asses getting his first single ready to drop, not going for a seven-hour road trip to Where Dreams Go To Die, Texas.
Robert had assured her Lonesome Point wasn’t a bad place, but Marisol knew better. She knew what awaited her in a small town like the one where Robert had grown up, because she’d grown up in one just like it—sixty miles west, poorer, less touristy, and with a mostly Hispanic population, but the same in all the ways that count. The people in Aqua Caliente were still narrow-minded, unimaginative, and quick to judge a girl who didn’t play by their rules. Marisol had been an outcast long before Shane dropped his bomb, blowing the last of her ties to Aqua Caliente to bits. Now, she had no reason to go back to the patch of desert she’d inhabited while she was growing up.
She didn’t call it home. Home was a place where people cared about you. No one in Aqua Caliente gave a damn if Marisol lived or died, and she’d sworn on her pride and sense of self-preservation that she’d never go back.
The thought of heading southwest of Austin made her mouth fill with a rancid taste and her heart slam against her ribs. Even sixty miles away from her parents’ house was too close. She didn’t know how she was going to get through it, or how she was going to get through seven long hours sitting beside Robert in his truck without giving in to the urge to lean over, kiss the place where his jaw met his neck, and breathe the addictive scent of him into her soul.
No matter how much they needed to finish the songs they were working on and prepare for the next step in Robert’s career, she had to back out of this trip. Now. Before it was too late.
She was pulling her cell phone from her purse and mentally composing an apology for flaking, when Robert’s truck pulled up to the curb.
“Shit,” she muttered as she looked up, heart skipping a beat as her gaze connected with his through the open passenger side window.
“You ready to go?” he asked, in a voice much cooler than the charming drawl he’d employed with Wendy Dann’s people at the meeting earlier this morning. He sounded less than thrilled to see her, and when she hesitated a moment before reaching for the passenger door, he sighed with a frustration that wasn’t like him. “Seriously, Marisol. If you’ve changed your mind about coming with me, that’s fine. But get in, or let me get going. I need to get home.”
“Sorry.” She forced a smile as she grabbed her suitcase and tossed it into the truck bed. “Just trying to juggle my phone and coffee. Do you want me to run into the cafe and grab you something for the road? Coffee, or a soda, or something?”
“No, thank you,” Robert grumbled as she opened the truck door and climbed inside, seemingly annoyed even by her efforts to be solicitous of his beverage needs.
He definitely wasn’t feeling the Marisol love, and she couldn’t afford to let him head down to Lonesome Point alone to marinate in his irritation for a week. She had other clients, but none of them had taken off as quickly as Robert had, and she wasn’t going to let her rocket ship to success blast off into the stratosphere without her. She deserved more than another six months as his manager. Robert had talent and star power, but she was the one who’d smoothed away his rough edges, developed his brand, helped him write songs, and gotten him the right meetings with the right people at the right time. She deserved her piece of the success that was headed his way and nothing was going to get in her way of claiming the reward she’d been cheated out of the last time she’d been in a position like this one.
If a road trip to small town hell and a week playing ranch hand while she pretended she wasn’t insanely attracted to Robert was what it took to keep him on her client list long term, then Marisol would put on her cowgirl boots, strap on her chastity belt, and make the best of it.
“This will be fun. I can’t wait to get out of the city,” she lied as she buckled her seat belt, pretending not to hear the grunt Robert offered in response to her upbeat tone.
He could only stay grumpy for so long. She would wear him down eventually, and when she had his ear again, she would use the opportunity to convince him it was time to loosen the ties binding him to Lonesome Point. He needed to wrestle his dream to the ground before someone else snatched it away. Marisol knew how quickly the industry’s romance with a new talent could go cold. Robert was poised to take off in a big way, but if he weren’t careful, all his opportunities would slip through his fingers and he’d be left to wonder “what if.”
Marisol hated “what if.” She hated mistakes—especially her own—and she was determined not to make another one.
With that thought at the front of her mind, she cracked the window and leaned into the hot breeze blowing into the truck, hoping it would keep Robert’s unholy pheromones from driving her crazy before they reached the Austin city limits.
***
The journey home had never been so torturous.
Usually, Bubba enjoyed the drive. He listened to audiobooks—his newest addiction—sang along with the radio station that played classic country, and stared out the window as the green faded from the landscape, giving way to the familiar brown summer vistas of home.
He knew some people found desert views depressing, but Bubba loved being able to look around and see nothing but earth stretching away for miles. He loved the hard angles of the buttes outside of Lonesome Point, and the spindly rock formation reaching toward the sky that had inspired the town’s name. He loved the secret river valleys, the amazing rock climbing, and the peace he found when he was floating the Rio Grande or camping out under a million stars.
But today, he felt anything but peaceful as he pushed the truck to eighty miles per hour, risking a ticket in the name of getting out of a tightly enclosed space with the woman who was driving him insane. He’d tried rolling down the windows, turning up the music, and stopping for bottles of cold water to cool himself off, but nothing worked, he’d still had a hard on for the better part of six hours.
He was beginning to worry his cock was broken. He kept thinking of those commercials for erectile dysfunction, the ones that warned a man to get to a doctor if he suffered an erection lasting more than four hours. But no drug could be blamed for his miserable state; it was all Marisol. The way she crossed her legs, the way she ran her fingers through her hair, the way she sipped her latte or coughed when a whirl of dust blew in the window—even her most innocent actions were enough to make him think of all the not-so-innocent ways he wanted to touch her.
He’d barely slept last night. His mind was too busy dissecting every moment of their kiss, wondering what it was he’d done to make her push him away. He couldn’t believe the passion in her response had been faked, so he had to have done something.
Doesn’t matter. She isn’t interested and you’d better get a hold of yourself before your family gets an eyeful of that situation in your pants.
As he pulled through the gate to the Lawson family ranch, the thought of his brothers—or, God forbid, his mother—seeing the bulge in his jeans was enough to help him get things under control.
Finally, for the first time in almost an hour, Bubba felt safe risking a glance over at Marisol. “You ready to meet the family?”
She nodded. “Can’t wait.”
“That’s my brother John’s place.” Bubba motioned toward the simple split-level home to their left, near a stand of cedar trees that offered the only shade in the lower ten acres. “His little boys are both sick, so we won’t stop in, but I think you’ll like his wife. Lily’s a sweetheart and rides like nobody’s business. If you want to ride while you’re here, she’ll pick out a gentle horse. She might even be able to give you a lesson if Peyton and Carter get to feeling better. She’s great with beginners.”
“Great,” Marisol said, but she only gave the home the briefest of glances before turning her gaze back to the dusty gravel road in front of them.
Bubba had been so wrapped up in his own sorry state, he hadn’t noticed how unusually withdrawn Marisol had become. She’d chattered her fair share as they left Austin, but the closer they got to Lonesome Point, the quieter she’d become. He didn’t know if she was nervous about meeting his family, or simply sick of being trapped in a truck with a cranky bastard. Either way, he felt bad for being a shitty host. It wasn’t Marisol’s fault that their kiss had unleashed all the raging hormones he’d managed to ignore since he’d called things off eight months ago with Raney, who worked at the coffee shop, thus forcing him to make due with gas station coffee ever since.
“You hungry?” he asked. Marisol hadn’t eaten more than a few bites of the chicken sandwich she’d ordered at the drive through four hours back, and only picked at her fries. “My mom usually has dinner on the table early, but we can raid the freezer in the barn on the way up to the main house if you want. My other brother, Cole, keeps it stocked with popsicles and ice cream. He’s got a sweet tooth.”
“How many brothers do you have?” she asked, eyes still fixed on the road.
“Two. John is thirty-two. Cole just turned thirty.”
“So you’re the baby of the family,” she said with a soft laugh. “I didn’t peg you for a baby brother.”
“Why’s that?” Bubba asked, wishing she would glance his way. It was hard to tell what Marisol was thinking when he couldn’t see her eyes.
She lifted one slim shoulder. “I don’t know. You work so hard. My youngest brothers are the laziest people I know. They couldn’t even be bothered to wipe their own bottoms for years. Matteo was six by the time he finally stopped calling me into the bathroom to clean him up and pull up his pants.”
Bubba’s foot eased up on the pedal. They were getting close to the house, but he wasn’t ready for this conversation to end. In the entire month they’d been working together, Marisol hadn’t said a word about her family. He’d started to think she crawled out of a fashion magazine, fully formed, with none of the family ties that bind and chafe as much as they support and nurture.
“How many brothers and sisters do you have?” he asked.
“Seven brothers,” she said flatly, giving him no clue how she felt about her siblings. “Two older, five younger.”
“Wow, that’s…a lot of testosterone.”
“It was. And a lot of stinky socks.”
He hesitated, hoping she would go on before he gently prodded, “So are y’all close? It must have been hard being the only sister.”
“It was harder being my parents’ only daughter,” she said, before adding in a brighter voice. “So tell me about your parents. Are Mom and Pop going to freak that you’ve brought a woman home for the week, or are they cool?”
“My parents were both cool, but it’s just my mom now. My dad passed away when I was sixteen.” Bubba wished they could have stayed on the subject of Marisol’s family a little longer, but he knew she wasn’t the type to bare her soul all at once. With Marisol, a person was lucky to catch glimpses of her inner life through the hairline cracks in her defenses.
“I’m sorry,” she said, but without the tragic inflection he was used to hearing when people learned his father had passed. “That must have been hard on your family.”
“It was, but we got through.” Bubba shrugged, pretending it didn’t still hurt to know he’d never see his dad’s smile again. “We all wish we’d had more time with him, but what we had was the good stuff. He was a wonderful man.”
Marisol turned to him, a soft smile on her lips. “I don’t doubt it. He certainly raised a good son.”
Bubba didn’t know whether to be flattered or ashamed of how un-wonderful he’d been to Marisol for most of the drive. But before he could figure out a way to apologize without admitting why he was so damned cranky in the first place, they were pulling up to the main house.
The moment he parked the truck, the front door flew open and his mother rushed out onto the porch, a giddy smile on her face that would make a person think it had been two years since she’d seen her baby boy, not a little over two weeks. Bubba had been working overtime in preparation for his trip to Austin, and before that he’d been so worried about his friend, Mia, he’d spent most of his down time hanging out near her place, but it wasn’t as if he didn’t talk to his mother on the phone at least twice a week.
But Laura Mae was used to seeing John and Cole every day. Her older sons hadn’t ventured from the family ranch for more than a week at a time since the day they were born. In contrast, even Bubba’s move to a bungalow in downtown Lonesome Point seemed like a big step away from the family.
“There you are.” Laura Mae bustled down the porch stairs, brown eyes shining and her arms outstretched, the slight hitch in her step from her arthritis not slowing her down. “Come here you sweet thing.”
Bubba took four long steps, meeting his mother by the hitching post his grandmother had carved in the fifties and leaning down for his hug. The long, gray hair Laura Mae wore pulled into a ponytail tickled his arms as they embraced, and the buttons of her western shirt dug into his chest through his tee shirt. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mother in anything but a battered polo and jeans, and knew the button up was her version of getting gussied up for his homecoming.
“Thank you so much, Bubs,” she said, hugging him tight before she released him with a few pats on the arm. “John told me this morning that you were cutting your trip short to come lend a hand, so I put on your favorite slow cooker ribs just before noon. They should be ready as soon as…”
Laura Mae trailed off, her smile fading as her eyes focused on something behind him. Bubba turned to see Marisol standing by the rear wheel of the truck, her trendy blue suitcase in one hand and her designer purse in the other, looking so out of place in her slinky black sundress and spiked-heel sandals that Bubba wanted to bustle her back down to John’s house to borrow blue jeans and a tee shirt from Lily this very second.
The women in the Lawson family didn’t do fancy. They didn’t wear dresses except on Sundays, and those were comfortable skirts and shirts that could go from a church service to a BBQ in the back yard without any fuss. Bubba couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen his mother wearing makeup, and he’d never seen Lily wear more than lip gloss and mascara, even on her and John’s wedding day. None of his mother’s friends bothered with fashion, and Bubba’s friends, Tulsi and Mia, were almost as no frills as Laura Mae’s buddies from her pottery classes.
Still, for some reason, Bubba hadn’t stopped to think that his mom would take a dislike to Marisol based on the way she looked. But the moment his mother’s usually warm brown eyes grew frosty, and her happy smile tipped into a frown, he realized that was what was happening. There was no other explanation. Marisol hadn’t done a damn thing except stand there with a smile on her face.
A part of him wanted to defuse the situation by reminding his mother it took fewer muscles to smile than to frown—one of her favorite sayings—but he had a feeling drawing attention to the problem would only make things worse.
“Mom, this is Marisol, one of my friends from the city,” he said with a smile, doing his best to ignore the tension simmering in the air as Marisol came to stand next to him. “Marisol, this is my mother, Laura Mae Lawson.”
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Lawson.” Marisol set her suitcase down and extended her hand. “I’ve heard so many great things about you, and I can’t wait to see your pottery. Robert says it’s really something special.”
Laura Mae hesitated long enough to make Bubba’s throat tight, but she finally took Marisol’s hand and gave it a squeeze. “Well, Bubba hasn’t said anything about you, I’m afraid. We had no idea he was bringing company. I wish you’d called ahead, Bubs.”
The words were enough to shock him speechless. From the time he was a boy, his mother had made it clear he was welcome to invite his friends over any time. He never had to ask permission to have Ugly Ross—so nicknamed because he had the misfortune of being uglier than the only other Ross in town—come ride four-wheelers, or make sure it was okay to bring Mia and Tulsi along to Sunday brunch. When he was dating Casey, she’d come over every day after school, and as an adult, he’d continued to bring the occasional girlfriend over to go riding and to tote truck beds full of friends up to the ranch for impromptu BBQs.
Laura Mae had always said that this was Lawson land, and as a Lawson, Bubba should never feel like he had to ask permission to use it the way he saw fit.
But apparently something had changed…
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he finally said. “Calling didn’t cross my mind.”
“It’s just that everyone’s been sick, and we’re shorthanded as it is,” Laura Mae said, maintaining rigorous eye contact with her son, obviously making an effort not to look at Marisol. “We really don’t have the energy to entertain company.”
“I don’t need to be entertained, Mrs. Lawson,” Marisol piped up in a cheery voice. “I’m here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me get changed, and I can help get supper on the table.”
Laura Mae’s gaze flickered to Marisol, but she didn’t return the younger woman’s smile. “Thank you, but I won’t need help. I’ve already got most everything made. Just a matter of setting the table.”
