A Weaver Vow
Autore
Allison Leigh
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15
Chapter One
It was the yelling that got her attention.
Murphy. It was so easy to recognize his voice. Particularly when he was yelling at a few million decibels.
Her stomach sinking like a lead balloon, Isabella Lockhart instantly dropped her cleaning rag on the lunch counter at Ruby’s Café and raced for the door.
Locked.
Of course it was locked. She’d locked it herself just thirty minutes earlier. She darted back for the keys that Tabby Taggart had entrusted her with, finally spotting them on the stainless-steel work counter in the kitchen, where she’d left them after locking up the rear door.
She rushed back to the front entrance, fumbled with the lock, then burst out the glass door. Not only had the yelling continued, it was angrier than ever.
And it was all occurring smack-dab in the middle of Main Street, right there in front of the café, where a large, dusty blue pickup truck was parked.
Murphy, please don’t get into more trouble.
The whispered prayer was much, much too familiar. Moving here to Weaver had been supposed to change that.
She ran toward the truck, toward the yelling, then nearly skidded to a halt at the sight of the thin boy glaring up at a tall, broad man who was glaring right back at him.
What concerned her most, however, was the baseball bat clenched in Murphy’s white-knuckled fists. If he took the bat to one more thing...
She couldn’t bear to think about it.
“You damn well did know what you were doing!” The man’s deep voice was furious.
“It was an accident!” Murphy yelled back. “I told you that a hunnert times!”
“Murphy!” Isabella dashed between the two males, grabbing the bat as Murphy raised it. At eleven, he already topped five feet, and only the fact that she was wearing a bit of a wedge heel kept his eyes from being at a level with her own. She tugged on the bat hard, pressing her hand flat against his heaving chest, but his grip was equally tight. “Let it go!”
His mutinous brown eyes—so like his father’s that at first it had been a physical ache to see them each and every day—met hers and his knuckles turned even whiter around the wood. “No!”
She heard the man behind her mutter something, and then a large, tanned hand closed over the bat just above hers. “Give me that damn thing before you hurt someone,” the man snapped, and yanked it directly out of both her and Murphy’s battling grips. Then he tossed it into the cab of his truck and slammed the door shut.
Murphy’s voice went up half an octave as he unleashed a fresh round of curses that made her pale. “Dude! That’s my bat. You can’t just take my bat!”
“I just did, dude,” the man returned flatly. He closed his hand over Murphy’s thin shoulder and forcibly moved him away from Isabella. “Stay,” he spit.
Isabella rounded on the man, gaping at him. He was wearing a faded brown ball cap and aviator sunglasses that hid his eyes. “Take your hand off him!” Whatever the cause of Murphy’s latest altercation, this man had no right to put a hand on him. “Who do you think you are?”
“The man your boy took aim at with his blasted baseball.” His jaw was sharp and shadowed by brown stubble and his lips were thinned.
“I did not!” Murphy shouted, right into Isabella’s ear.
She winced, giving him a fierce look. “Go sit down.” She pointed at the wooden bench on the sidewalk in front of the café. Her head was pounding and she had to control her own urge to add to the screaming.
Whatever had made her think she could be a parent to Murphy? He needed a man around, not just a woman he could barely tolerate.
He needed his father.
And now all they had was each other.
She pointed. “Go.”
All gangling arms and legs and outraged male, Murphy jerked his shoulder out from the man’s grip and stomped over to the bench, throwing himself down on it.
She pulled her gaze away from Murphy and looked up at the man. “I don’t know what happened here—”
“Don’t you have any sense at all, stepping in front of him when he’s waving around a baseball bat?”
Isabella clamped down on her own temper. Whatever Murphy had done, it wouldn’t help for her to lose her own cool. “Murphy would never hurt me,” she said evenly, ignoring the snort the man gave in response.
She drew in a calming breath and turned her head into the breeze that she’d begun to suspect never died here in Weaver, Wyoming. She let it cool her face before she turned to face him again. “I’m Isabella Lockhart,” she began.
“I know who you are.”
She pressed her lips together for a moment. She’d only been in Weaver a few weeks, but it really was a small town if people she’d never met already knew who she was. Lucy had told her—warned her, really—about how different Weaver was from New York. That was why Isabella had hoped—still did—that the radical change might be the solution to her problems with Murphy. As long as she was able to hold on to him.
She focused on the man’s face—what she could see of it beneath the hat and sunglasses, at any rate. “I’m sure we can resolve whatever’s happened here,” she continued in the same appeasing tone she’d once used to great effect with outraged prima ballerinas, “but could we do it somewhere other than the middle of Main Street, Mr., uh—”
“Erik Clay. Since there’s no traffic to speak of, I don’t know what you’re worried about. But I am mighty curious how you think we’re going to resolve that.” He jerked his chin toward the bed of his truck.
He wasn’t known for having much of a temper, but considering everything, Erik felt like retrieving that baseball bat and bashing something with it himself.
Focusing on the woman in front of him was a lot safer than focusing on the skinny, black-haired hellion sprawled on Ruby’s bench.
She tucked her white-blond hair behind her ear with a visibly shaking hand. Bleached blond, he figured, considering her eyes were such a dark brown they were nearly black. It didn’t seem natural that anyone with such light hair would have such dark eyes. He’d never much understood the bleached-hair deal. But even pissed as he was, he wasn’t blind to the whole effect.
Weaver’s newcomer was a serious looker.
“I’m sorry,” she was saying. “Whatever happened, I’m sure I can make it right.”
“Really?” He very nearly took her arm, but the way she’d squawked over him pushing the kid away from her kept him from doing so. Instead, he held out his hand in obvious invitation toward the truck bed. “Care to tell me how?”
Her brown-black gaze flicked over him. Her unease was as plain as the pert nose on her pretty face when she stepped over to the truck bed, which was nearly as tall as she was, and peered over the side. “Oh...sugar,” she whispered.
The words he had for the damage were a lot less sweet than sugar. But sharing them held no appeal, considering the foul mouth her kid had already exhibited.
He reached down and plucked a baseball from amid the shards of colored glass that had once been a very large, very elaborate stained-glass window destined for the Weaver Community Church. “Your boy threw the ball deliberately.”
“I did not!” Murphy screeched as he launched himself back into Erik’s face. “And I ain’t her—” he dropped an f-bomb as if it were a regular component of his vocabulary “—boy!”
Erik shot out a hand, halting the kid’s progress even as he scooped the woman out of the kid’s angry path.
“Murphy!” She wriggled out of Erik’s grip and grabbed the boy’s arm, physically dragging him back to the bench. “I told you to sit.” She leaned over and said something under her breath that Erik couldn’t make out, but that obviously had some effect, because the kid angrily sank against the bench and crossed his arms defensively over his chest.
The woman tugged at the pink skirt of her waitress uniform as she straightened. Erik quickly directed his gaze upward from her shapely rear when she turned and walked back to him.
She stepped up to the side of the truck and peered over the edge once more. “It looks valuable.”
The window depicting the Weaver landscape had been a gift. An unexpected, completely unwanted gift. And it was probably wrong of him, but Erik calculated the value more in terms of personal discomfort than dollars, since the artist was a woman he was no longer seeing. And who’d likely tell him to pound sand when he approached her for a replacement, which he’d have to do, since he’d gone and donated the thing to the church, seeing how churches were more suited for that sort of thing than his plain old ranch house. Now they were expecting the thing. “It was.”
Her slender shoulders rose and fell in a sigh that only served to make the curves filling out her uniform even more noticeable. Her gaze lifted to his. “If you could tell me how much the damage is, I’ll figure out a way to pay you.”
Erik looked away from those near-black eyes that were so full of earnestness he couldn’t help but feel his anger lessening. And that just irritated him all over again. “You didn’t throw the ball at my window. He did.” He gestured toward the kid. “In my day, we pulled stunts like that, it earned us a trip to the sheriff’s office.”
She was fair-skinned to begin with, but he actually saw color drain right out of her face. Without seeming to realize it, she closed her hands over his arm, as if to prevent him from heading toward the sheriff’s office right then and there. “Please. Not the police.”
“Tell me why I shouldn’t.”
“He didn’t mean to cause any harm.”
Erik snorted, though it was a shame for such dark, pretty eyes to show so much panic. “Really? He wound up his arm and aimed straight for my truck. I saw it with my own eyes.”
“He’s just a boy. Didn’t you ever make a mistake when you were a boy?”
Heat was running up his arm, starting exactly where her fingers were digging into it. But it was her expression of sheer panic that had him sighing. That and the fact that he could remember a few ill-considered stunts from his youth.
“Relax.” He eyed the boy, who gave him a sullen look in return. “He can work off the damages.” Maybe that was to be his penance. Break the heart of a perfectly nice woman who’d saddled you with a stained-glass window you never wanted in the first place. In return, get saddled with a demon kid. “Out at my place.”
Isabella showed no signs of relaxing, however. “Your place?” Her eyebrows—considerably darker than her whitish hair—shot up her smooth forehead as she visibly bristled. “What sort of thing are you suggesting?”
His irritation ratcheted up a notch again. “Honey, this isn’t a big city filled with perverts. I have a ranch. The Rocking-C. The kid can do chores for me there.”
“The kid has a name.”
Why did Erik feel as if he was in the wrong here? He wasn’t the one who’d willfully destroyed a piece of artwork worth thousands of dollars. “Murphy can shovel manure and haul hay and clean stalls. I figure every Saturday morning until the end of summer oughta do it.” It wouldn’t come close, but he wasn’t saddling his peaceful existence with a delinquent for any longer than necessary.
“No way.” Murphy shot to his feet. “I’m not wasting Saturdays with him.”
Isabella wanted to tear out her hair. She pointed at the bench again. “Sit. I mean it, Murphy.” She waited until he’d done so before looking back up at the man. “Mr. Clay, I—”
“No need for the mister, honey. Just Erik’ll do.”
“Fine.” He undoubtedly called every female he encountered honey. She felt she ought to find it derogatory or something. She hadn’t particularly loved being called babe, after all, even though she’d loved the man who’d called her that.
She blamed her scattered thoughts on too little sleep and too many months of worry. “I appreciate your willingness to work with me on this. Really appreciate it.” He would never know how imperative it was that Murphy have no more brushes with the law. “But we don’t even know you.” She felt pretty certain that perverts—to use his word—weren’t strictly the domain of large cities. “Small-town folk or not, I just can’t send Murphy off with a complete str—”
“Talk to Lucy,” he suggested. He didn’t look amused. Exactly. But his tight jaw had relaxed just a little. It was still sharply angled, coming to a point with a whisper of a cleft in his chin. “She’ll vouch for me,” he added.
“Lucy Ventura?” She folded her arms, giving him a considering look. He was tall. Taller even than Jimmy had been, and he’d been six-three. This man was also broader in the shoulders, which—along with his chin or anything else about him—wasn’t anything she ought to be noticing. Jimmy had only been gone for nine months. “You know her?”
“You could say that. She’s my cousin.”
“Oh.” She dropped her arms and pushed her hair away from her face. Knowing that he was related to Lucy made her feel some hope that the situation could be redeemed. Not only had she and Lucy worked together in New York, they’d also been roommates for a time.
But that had all happened before Jimmy Bartholomew blew into Isabella’s life.
“Here.” Erik handed her the dirt-smudged baseball. It was clearly Murphy’s. She recognized his scrawled signature on it that he’d added when Jimmy had given it to him. Pretending to be a big-league player, or just marking his own territory among his hoodlum friends. Whatever his reasons had been, there was no way Murphy could deny it was his ball.
She took it, rubbing her thumb over the stitching. She remembered the day Jimmy had given it to Murphy as if it had been yesterday.
Despair threatened to roll over her.
For her, Jimmy had been a whirlwind. Sweeping her off her feet one minute with buckets of flowers and outrageous displays, and proposing the next in front of his entire firehouse. But they’d never made it to a wedding.
It wasn’t even three months from the moment they’d met until she and Jimmy’s son were standing beside his grave.
She looked over at Murphy. When his father died, Murphy lost everyone he had.
Now he only had her because of the tenuous approval she’d received from a family court judge that placed him provisionally under her guardianship.
“Thank you,” she whispered huskily. She held up the baseball between her fingers. “The ball means a lot to Murphy.”
She could see Erik’s jaw tighten again. “Then he shouldn’t be tossing it at passing vehicles.”
Another thing she could blame herself for. She’d been the one to send Murphy outside in the first place, thinking she could finish closing up the diner more quickly without him inside and underfoot, constantly complaining that he wanted to go home.
She wanted to believe that Murphy hadn’t done it on purpose. But experience had taught her to be wary.
She looked along the street. There were plenty of cars slanted into the curb up and down Main, parked in front of the various businesses there. Not a single vehicle had driven by during their argument, though.
She’d wanted a place different than the city. She’d definitely gotten it. No Starbucks on every other corner in Weaver. No Starbucks at all, in fact. Just homey cafés like Ruby’s that served up coffee the old-fashioned way, and no other.
She gestured toward the front door. “Do you want to go inside? We can work out the details.” She wished she could see past his sunglasses. Get a better gauge on how merciful he might be inclined to be. “The least I can do is offer you some coffee.” She managed a hopeful smile, even though all she wanted to do was put her head down on her arms and cry.
“Throw in a piece of pie if you’ve got it,” he suggested as he headed around the truck for the driver’s side. “And we’ll talk. Meantime, I’ll get this out of the middle of the road.”
Murphy came off the bench when the truck engine started with a low growl. “What about my bat?”
Isabella shushed him. “Don’t worry about your bat.” She tucked the ball in her pocket and closed her hands over his thin shoulders, steering him toward the open door. “You’re lucky he’s not calling the police,” she hissed. Inside, she pointed at the corner booth where his schoolbooks were still stacked. “Go sit over there and do some homework.” His sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Rasmussen, was a big believer in homework. Murphy had hours of it every day.
“I’m done with my homework, remember?” Murphy rolled his eyes and slunk over to the corner.
How could she forget? It was because he’d been done with his homework that he’d wanted to go home. But she wasn’t finished at the café yet, and she couldn’t trust him to be alone yet. With no other option left for after-school care for him—she couldn’t afford it—he had to come to Ruby’s, where she could provide some supervision.
“Then redo it,” she suggested wearily. She didn’t think she’d ever been so tired in her life. “Just sit over there and be quiet while I try to get us out of this mess.”
“I wasn’t doing nothing wrong.”
“Really?” She gave him a look. “Like you weren’t doing anything wrong when you were caught red-handed vandalizing a brownstone in our own neighborhood?”
He slid down into the booth, ignoring her.
She sighed and went behind the counter to put a pot of coffee on to brew. Then she went to the refrigerator case and pulled out an apple pie. She cut off a large wedge and popped it in the microwave to warm. If she was going to try bribery with coffee and pie, she might as well go all the way.
She was placing a large scoop of creamy vanilla ice cream on top of the pie when Erik appeared in the doorway. He was so large that he seemed to block out the afternoon sun for a moment. When he stepped inside, he pulled off his cap and rubbed his hand over his hair.
Dark blond. Lighter than the whiskers on his angular jaw. Cut short, it was thick and full even with the dent in it from his ball cap. Her mouth felt dry and she swallowed a little, looking down at what she was doing.
“Can I have a piece of that?” Murphy asked when she set the plate on top of the lunch counter.
Isabella nodded and started to turn toward the refrigerator case again.
“Please.” At Erik’s deep voice, she paused, looking back. But he wasn’t looking at her. He was looking at Murphy, over in the red vinyl corner booth. “Please,” he prompted again.
Murphy’s lips twisted. “You’re not my dad,” he muttered, not quite low enough to go unheard.
“Damn skippy,” Erik returned flatly. “If I were, you’d have enough manners to use please when you should, and you wouldn’t curse around a lady.”
The two males stared each other down for a moment. Isabella, who’d given the whole please-and-thank-you-and-no-cursing speech to Murphy countless times, was ready to break in when Murphy grunted, “Please may I have a piece of pie?” His tone was sarcastic.
Isabella quickly nudged the plate she’d already prepared closer to Erik. “Ice cream is melting.” She set up a folded paper napkin with a knife, fork and spoon next to the plate and filled a coffee mug. “Sugar or cream?”
“No thanks.” With a last glance toward Murphy, he lifted one jean-clad leg over the padded red stool. “Looks great. Thanks.” He slid the flatware aside and shook out the napkin, tossing it over his lap.
His ball cap was stained with God knew what; she was pretty sure it was mud caking the bottom of his jeans; his plaid short-sleeved shirt was damp with sweat and he smelled of hay. At least, she was guessing it was hay. But he used a paper napkin on his lap.
Shaking off her strange bemusement, she cut a slice of pie for Murphy, heated it for a few seconds and added ice cream to his, as well. She didn’t even consider telling him to come get it. She wanted to keep as much distance between Murphy and Erik as possible.
She took it with a glass of milk over to the booth and set it in front of him. “You’ll still have to eat your dinner,” she warned.
He didn’t answer. But his gaze flicked past her, then back down to his pie. “Thanks,” he muttered a moment before he shoveled a forkful into his mouth.
Isabella pushed her hand into the side pocket of her uniform, toying with the baseball stuffed there. The pink dress was simple and clean, and she was perfectly happy to wear it, since it came with a paying job. Between it and the classes that Lucy had hired her to teach over at her dance studio, it would keep a roof—barely—over her and Murphy’s heads. “You’re welcome.” She headed back behind the lunch counter. Having three feet of laminate countertop between her and Erik Clay seemed like a good thing. Having her hormones climb out of Jimmy’s grave at this point was completely unacceptable.
“Okay,” she said on a sigh. “Exactly how many hours on how many Saturdays are we talking about?” Murphy still had a few months left of school before summer vacation. And if his grades remained as poor as they were, she knew he’d be taking summer school, if it was even available. Otherwise, there’d be no choice but to add tutoring to an already thin budget. He also had to meet regularly with his therapist. It had been mandated by the court as a condition of her being allowed to bring him to Wyoming.
All of which, of course, could come to a screeching halt once their caseworker visited in seven weeks and made her final evaluation.
She blocked the thought.
Handling one worry at a time right now was about all she could manage.
“Well, now, that’s a fair question.” Erik tapped the tines of his fork softly against the surface of the plate a few times before he set the fork down altogether. He slowly tugged off his sunglasses and dropped them on the countertop next to the coffee mug.
Then his gaze lifted to hers, and Isabella’s heart nearly skipped a beat.
Violet. His eyes were violet. Elizabeth Taylor violet. Surrounded by thick, spiky brown lashes that ought to have looked feminine but didn’t. Nor did she make the mistake of thinking the color was derived from contact lenses. Not with this man.
“You bring him out next Saturday,” he said, mercifully unaware of her thoughts. “Not this week. I’m busy moving stock with my uncle. But next. For four hours. We’ll see how it goes from there. If he works hard, maybe he won’t have to bless me with his charming company all the way through spring and summer, and we’ll call it quits after a few months. If he doesn’t...” He shrugged and picked up his fork again, looking as if it made no difference to him whatsoever.
She chewed the inside of her lip. It was late March. She was praying she still had Murphy come the end of the summer. “But if he does work steadily, you’ll consider everything squared? Maybe even by the end of the school year?”
His gaze didn’t waver from her face. “I won’t call the sheriff, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She didn’t care about being so transparent. When it came to Murphy, she didn’t have that luxury. “It is.” She wanted to look away from Erik’s mesmerizing eyes but couldn’t seem to.
“Got a pen?”
She automatically handed him the pen from her pocket. He leaned across the counter and grabbed a fresh napkin from the metal dispenser near his coffee mug, his arm brushing against hers. Without so much as a blink, he sat back on his stool and scratched out a few words on the napkin.
There was no quelling the shudder rippling down her spine as she whirled around, busying herself with the coffeepot that needed no busying. Without looking at him, she grabbed the cleaning rag she’d abandoned when she’d heard the commotion outside and started running it over the vinyl seats of the stools lining the long counter. When she reached Erik, she stopped and looked at what he’d written.
Four hours every Saturday through end of school year but no later than end of summer in return for destruction of stained-glass window.
He’d signed and dated it.
Hardly legalese, but she didn’t care. He was Lucy’s cousin and she could only hope that he was just as decent. The fact that he hadn’t immediately summoned the sheriff when he could have was already more than Murphy deserved. “Do you want me to sign it, too?”
He shook his head. He jabbed the pen in Murphy’s direction. “He does.”
