A Rich Man for Dry Creek / a Hero for Dry Creek (22 page)

Nicki stopped walking.

Garrett grinned.

“Yeah, I don't much, either,” Garrett said as he continued walking.

Nicki hurried to catch up with him.

The morning's light gave a crispness to Dry Creek. A thin layer of white snow coated the road and all of the buildings. Smoke came out of the large building across the street from the café. A dozen or so houses were scattered around the small business buildings. A church with a white steeple was set back off the main road to the east and a barn was set off the main road to the west.

It only took a few minutes to walk over to the hardware store.

Nicki could smell the burning wood as she stomped the snow off her boots on the porch outside the store. Pastor Matthew Curtis was clerking here, and he and his new wife, Glory, kept the potbellied stove in the middle of the large room going all day long when it was snowing. Several straight-backed wooden chairs were usually gathered around the stove and as often as not, a game of checkers was being played beside the stove. Glory kept her art easel set up by the window and painted portraits.

“I don't suppose they sell any jeans here?” Garrett asked as he put his hand around the stone-cold doorknob. He might as well be comfortable for the flight back to Vegas. If Lillian was staying, her chauffeur could come drive her back. That meant Garrett would need to fly back and he sure wasn't getting on any airplane dressed like a butler.

The hardware store door had a half-dozen small panes of glass in it, but Garrett could not see inside the store because of the frost on the glass. He could already smell the flavored coffee brewing inside, though.

“They have overalls.” Nicki couldn't picture Garrett wearing them. “Farmer overalls.”

Garrett opened the door wide and then waited for Nicki to enter first.

Nicki had known the two old men sitting beside the stove all her life. In fact, Jacob Holmes's wife, Betty, had been her mother's best friend. After Betty died, Jacob spent his mornings at the hardware store.

They both looked up at her with smiles that turned to surprise when they saw Garrett come in behind her.

“Hi. Is Pastor Matthew around?” Nicki asked.

“The pastor?” Jacob was the first of the two men to recover his voice and his manners. He stood up and nodded to Garrett. “Pleased to meet you, young man. Any friend of Nicki's here is a friend of mine.” Then Jacob turned to Nicki and beamed. “Of course, I can see he's more than a friend. We heard you had a fella heading out your way. And here I see he's already in his wedding suit and asking for the pastor. Are you eloping or something?”

Nicki froze. Here was where the thunderbolt reached down from the sky and struck her. Please, let it strike her. “Garrett's not—”

“We don't need the pastor.” Garrett frowned and then realized what all the whispering had been about. “I know it looks like I'm in a tuxedo, but it's really just a chauffeur's uniform.”

“Looks like a tuxedo to me,” Jacob said suspiciously. “You're not just trying to pull the wool over our eyes are you, young man, so you can marry our Nicki with no one knowing?”

The sudden vision of what it would be like to be married to Nicki made his knees shake as if he were heading downhill in Big Blue with no brakes. But his throat didn't close up like he'd have expected. At least he could still breathe. He wondered why that was.

“Garrett is a stranger. He's just passing through. We don't know each other. And we are not dating.”

Garrett frowned. She could have been a little less emphatic—just to be polite. She swatted the whole idea away as if it was annoying. Maybe that's why his allergic reaction didn't kick in. Nicki was making it clear she had no interest in even dating him, let alone marrying him. Which should make him feel good. “We're not strangers. You know my name.”

Jacob nodded and turned to Garrett. “You wouldn't be the first man to be smitten with a Redfern woman before he knew more than her name. Nicki here is a prize. I knew her father—shoot, I knew her grandfather before that. I used to work on the Redfern Ranch back in the good old days when it was the biggest ranch between Canada and Texas. I wouldn't take kindly to some man doing wrong by her.”

“He's not—” Nicki wondered how many ways a person could die from embarrassment. “He's not doing me wrong. He's not doing anything. He's not smitten with me.”

Did Jacob ever look at her? Nicki wondered. She wasn't exactly a femme fatale in her barn-cleaning clothes.

Jacob kept his eyes narrowed on Garrett. “It's a funny thing about the Redfern women and love. Why, I remember hearing that your great-great-grandmother—”

Nicki knew she needed to stop this one. “She wasn't a Redfern. She was an Enger. And she didn't agree to marry Matthew Redfern because she was in love with him, she just needed that gold nugget he was offering up in the saloon so she could take care of those little kids of hers.”

“Maybe so,” Jacob agreed. “But that doesn't explain what happened with your great-grandmother. Why she—”

“My great-grandfather didn't fall in love with her at first sight, either. He just told that to the ranch hands so they'd stop trying to win her in those poker games and get back to herding the cattle.”

“Well, still.” Jacob didn't back down. “You've got the same blood running in your veins. The Redfern women always were a passionate lot.” Jacob scowled at Garrett. “Not that you need to be knowing about that, young man.”

Garrett grinned. “Yes, sir.”

Nicki groaned. The thunderbolt was sounding better all the time.

No thunderbolt roared, but the phone did ring.

“Dang it, that phone's been ringing all morning,” Jacob complained as he went to sit back down on his chair by the stove. “A man can't get any peace anymore.”

“Well, why don't you answer it?” Nicki said as she walked over to the counter.

“It's not my phone,” Jacob said righteously. He pulled his chair closer to the stove. “It's not polite to answer someone else's phone. Gotta be for the pastor. But he's been gone. Should be back soon but—”

“Hello,” Nicki said into the phone.

“Is this Dry Creek?” a woman's voice asked. She sounded breathless, as if the woman was rushing and worried.

“Yes, can I help you?”

“This is the only Dry Creek number the operator had. I'm trying to locate a Mr. Redfern.”

Reno? “I'm Mr. Redfern's sister.”

“Oh. Is Lillian Fern there?”

“I can get her for you.”

The woman gasped, as if she had seen something she didn't like. “There's no time for that. Just tell her I'm getting gas outside of Vegas and she's to stay where she is until I get there. This is Chrissy.”

“Garrett's cousin?” Nicki asked, but the line was dead. The woman had hung up.

“That's Chrissy?” Garrett walked over to the counter. Why would Chrissy be calling the hardware store?

“She said my mot—I mean, Lillian is to stay here until she gets here. Chrissy's left Vegas.”

“Chrissy's coming?” Garrett wondered if his cousin had had a change of heart and had decided not to get married after all. “Did she mention any fiancée?”

“No.”

“So she's coming alone?”

Nicki shrugged. “Sounds like it.”

Well, that's good news, Garrett thought. If Chrissy was just leaving Vegas, she'd be here sometime tomorrow morning. Maybe she'd be willing to stay with Lillian a few days and drive the older woman's limousine back to Vegas so he could fly back. “So she's coming here.”

Jacob held his hands out to the heat that was coming from the potbellied stove. “Won't that be nice. We could use some more young women in this town—especially if we're going to be having another wedding. Someone to help throw all that rice.”

“They use birdseed these days,” the other old man, Elmer, said as he looked up from the wooden stove. He had his shoes off and his legs stretched out toward the stove. “It's the modern way.”

“But Nicki's an old-fashioned girl. She'll want rice.” Jacob had a satisfied look on his face.

Nicki groaned. “No one's getting married.”

“Well, you never know, now, do you?” Jacob drawled as he tipped back his chair. “We've had us a whole lot of weddings ever since last Christmas when the angel came to town.”

“She wasn't a real angel,” Nicki hastened to add. She didn't want Garrett to think they were completely nuts. “She just played the angel in the Christmas pageant.”

“You should have heard her sing,” Jacob reminisced. “Almost made me cry. It's a wonder Santa Claus had the heart to shoot at her afterward.”

Nicki groaned. “It was a hit man that had dressed up as Santa Claus who tried to kill her.”

“I see,” Garrett said, appearing bewildered.

“Of course, the reverend risked a bullet to save the angel,” Jacob continued.

“That's because he was in love with her,” Nicki finished the story for the old man. Everyone knew how the story ended. “Well…and the twins—that would be his young sons—would have been brokenhearted if something had happened to their angel.”

No wonder she was having those fairy-tale dreams, Nicki thought to herself. After all of the excitement and romance in Dry Creek lately, it was a miracle she wasn't flying off to enter some dating show in Hollywood. “But all of that romance is behind us now. Matthew and Glory are just another married couple. Dry Creek really is a very quiet little town.”

“I see.”

Nicki groaned. There was no way a stranger would see that Dry Creek really was a nice sensible place. At least no one had mentioned the rustlers that had kidnapped a local rancher and his girlfriend—well, she wasn't his girlfriend at the time, but she soon came to be. There seemed to be something about danger that made people fall in love around here.

“You know the pastor is going to insist on doing marriage counseling with the two of you,” Elmer said thoughtfully as he leaned forward from his chair and cupped his hands around the warmth coming from the woodstove.

“We don't have any need for—” Nicki groaned at the disapproving look on Elmer's face.

“Now, I know you try to hide it, but you've had bad feelings about church ever since your mother left. And I can't fault you for that, but that don't mean you can just wave God goodbye on the most important day of your life.”

“I'm not waving God goodbye. I'm not having an important day.”

Elmer grunted in disapproval and turned his eyes to Garrett. “And you, young man—are you planning to ditch marriage counseling, too?”

Garrett had forgotten that pastors knew more about marriages than anyone else. They certainly attended more weddings than the average person. Maybe that's where he could get some advice on what to say to Chrissy just in case she hadn't jilted her boyfriend. “Not on your life. If someone claims to have the answers to getting married, I'll sit down and listen.”

Elmer beamed. “That's the attitude. The pastor will be glad to know you're open to talking. Now that he's married again, he sure does like to see people walk down the aisle.”

Nicki knew her face was getting red. She didn't want to open her mouth because she knew she would sputter. Elmer was the kind of man whose mind ran on a single track. He wasn't going to let go of his marriage idea unless something came along and knocked that idea off his track.

“Lester's been stopping by the ranch, you know.”

“Lester Wilkerson?” Elmer frowned. “I know he picks up your mail and has been asking around about what kind of feed you buy for your cattle, but I wouldn't think he'd be the one for you.”

“Well, he's asked me out.”

“Didn't he bring you and your brother to the Christmas pageant?” Jacob asked with a matching frown.

“He likes to include the family. Family is important to him.”

Elmer shook his head. “If he ain't out-and-out asked, you've got no obligation to wait for him. But it does make me think you'd do good to hear what the pastor has to say about getting married.”

“I am not getting married,” Nicki said through clenched teeth. “What I am going to do is go back over to the café and have breakfast.”

Jacob nodded sagely as he leaned back in his chair. “I read in
Woman's World
that people in love eat more. Of course, it's mostly chocolate.”

That stopped Nicki. Jacob had ridden the range with her father. “What are you doing reading
Woman's World
?”

Jacob tilted his head toward the small table that stood behind the stove. “Glory says we need to keep informed so she brings in her magazines. That's where Elmer read about the birdseed at weddings.”

Elmer frowned. “I didn't know there was so much to know about getting married. It'd make a man think twice about it all if he knew what was involved in guest lists and place cards.”