Honky Tonk Christmas (9 page)

“That fake stuff wouldn’t put anyone to sleep. This is the real stuff, made with cocoa, sugar, and vanilla.” He poked a button and the DVD tray slid out. “How about
Lucky Seven
?”

“You’re willing to watch a chick flick?” she asked.

“Sure.” He settled in on the sofa beside her.

She took a sip. “God, this is wonderful.”

Almost as good as the kiss,
she thought and blushed.

She’d seen the movie so many times that she knew the dialogue. Who would be her lucky number seven? Had there been six already and was Holt the seventh? She didn’t think so. She damn sure couldn’t remember six and there had been none that had turned her insides upside down with a single kiss.

She finished the chocolate and set the cup on the end table beside the lamp. Her eyes grew heavier and heavier until it was an absolute chore to keep them open. Finally, she figured she’d only close them for a minute.

Holt smiled when she slumped against him. He slung an arm around her and let her sleep. She awoke with a start when the noise of the movie ended.

“Have a good nap?” he asked.

“You will never know how good it was but I’ve got to go now. It’s almost daylight,” she said.

“Want some breakfast?”

“No, I want you to get some rest before the kids wake up,” she told him.

I’d rather take you to bed,
he thought.

“Thank you, Holt,” she said as she stood up and headed for the door.

“For what?” He followed her.

“For the chocolate and the sleep.”

“Thank you, Sharlene,” he said.

She frowned. “For what?”

“This.” He leaned forward and kissed her, long, hard, and lingering through several kisses that would probably send him straight to a cold shower when she left.

“Wow!” she said when he broke away.

“Yeah,” he said hoarsely.

“See you Monday,” she mumbled as she stumbled out the door. If his kisses could make her need to change her underpants, she couldn’t imagine what a night in bed would do. She shivered as she got into the car and slapped the steering wheel. Determination to not be attracted to him just ended in pure frustration.

Only an idiot would be sitting in the hot afternoon sun when they could be inside with air-conditioned comfort. The temperature was kissing the hundred degree mark even though it was mid-September. It might be hot but it hadn’t rained but once since Holt and the guys started working and that was on a weekend. So it looked like the deadline would be met in plenty of time.

The kids were running around for another half hour before quitting time. Holt and the guys were putting up studs and the addition was beginning to look like something other than a row of concrete bricks with floor joists running from one side to the other. Now it had a floor and the walls were going up.

She kept her head down and her sunglasses pushed up on her nose, but she stole long glances at Holt while he worked. No wonder she’d felt so safe in his arms that night in Weatherford. It had been the first night she’d slept without dreams of bombs and guns and Jonah’s death, but they’d returned every night since other than the night she’d fallen asleep on his sofa after a cup of hot chocolate. She’d tried drinking the same thing for a whole week after that but it hadn’t worked. She’d still had the nightmares. It must have been the security that she felt snuggled up in his big arms that had brought on peaceful sleep.

“Yeah, right! It was the booze the first time and the kiss the second time. Knocked me on my butt and my brain cells were so fried they couldn’t dream. The second time it was the kiss. It created so much havoc in my heart that the nightmares couldn’t get inside my head,” she mumbled.

She forced her eyes away from Holt’s arms and back to the notebook in her hand. If she didn’t work while she was using the excuse to get some fresh air, then she’d have to go back inside because she had to get the book finished. She began to note out another chapter as she watched the children crawl all over the new jungle gym out behind the Honky Tonk. Holt and the guys had put it together in an hour out of scrap lumber from the project. Then at her suggestion they’d hung a couple of round discs from long ropes attached to limbs of the pecan tree. Judd and Waylon ran from one to the other, playing everything from robots to Tarzan.

Wouldn’t Ruby think that was a hoot? Play equipment on the beer joint lawn. Can’t get anymore redneck than that, can I? At least the new addition hides the whole backyard and no one can see it. I’m not going to tell Larissa. I can just hear her giggling about Holt working his way into my life through the children. If it did work it wouldn’t last. First time I told him the whole story he’d grab those kids and run for the woods. No man would ever live with a woman like me.

“Watch me, I’m a monkey,” Waylon shouted.

Sharlene looked up to see him hanging upside down from a crossbeam. “Don’t fall,” she called out.

“Watch me, Sharlene!” Judd ran past her and plopped her fanny down on one of the swings. “I’m Jane from the Tarzan cartoon.” She gave out a bloodcurdling yell that sounded more like a half-dead starving coyote out in the woods behind the Tonk than Tarzan. If he’d sounded like that back in the day when he was the star at the movie theaters, there would have been more people rushing out than paying their quarters to get inside.

“I think Tarzan did that, not Jane,” Sharlene told her and went back to brainstorming in her spiral notebook.

The new book wasn’t a sequel to the first one even though her editor would have liked that. She’d started with a whole new cast of characters and timeline. This one was a time travel about a woman who went to sleep in the late eighteen hundreds and woke up the next morning in a small town in north Texas a hundred years later with a redneck husband, a double-wide trailer, and pregnant. All she could think about was getting back to her own world but then her husband won her heart and they lived happily ever after.

“Then I’m a girl Tarzan.” Judd let out another whoop that had all four men looking in that direction. When they didn’t see broken bones or blood, they went back to work.

Waylon left the jungle gym and claimed the other swing. “You can’t be a girl Tarzan. He’s a boy so I get to be him. You can be his monkey or Jane but you can’t be Tarzan.”

“I will
not
be a monkey. They’re ugly. I’ll be Jane and you be Tarzan. If you can’t holler like he does then I’ll do it for you. Me Jane. You Tarzan. Monkey is Chee-Chee.”

“My monkey ain’t Chee-Chee. That’s a dumb old girl’s monkey. My monkey is Hoss.”

“That ain’t a monkey’s name. You can’t name a monkey something like that. It’ll think he’s a horse and horses can’t climb trees,” she argued.

For the next hour they lived in a jungle. Their bickering and giggles blended in with the sounds of nail guns putting up two-by-four studs and men discussing what was next on the list that day and when they’d have the whole building in the dry. If they kept on at the rate they were going, it would be finished before the end of September. That meant she’d have to make a decision whether to go ahead and open the room up for customers before the grand opening or to wait.

She’d filled three pages with notes before she laid the book on the grass beside her folding lawn chair and watched them play. Her phone rang and she ignored it the first time but then it started again.

“Hello,” she said.

“Sharlene, where are you? What’s all that noise I hear in the background?” her mother, Molly, asked.

“I’m outside. I brought my work with me so I could get some fresh air,” she said honestly.

“I’m making final dinner plans for Sunday and I’m not taking no for an answer. Your brothers and their families are all going to be here right after church and then the next day we’re having a picnic in the backyard with the whole family plus friends and neighbors. You will be here. We haven’t seen you since Christmas.”

“I haven’t changed all that much since Christmas that you wouldn’t recognize me, and the road runs both ways, Momma,” Sharlene said, hoping the whole time that her mother wouldn’t get a wild hair and come south to see her.

“Yes, it does and if you don’t come see me this weekend like you’ve been promising, I’m coming to Dallas the next one. I mean it, Sharlene. Your dad said he’d let the boys take care of the chores and we’d drive down there. Eight months is too long.”

“I was gone a year two different times to Iraq, Momma.”

“That was more than five hours away and it was impossible for you to come home. It’s not now.” Molly’s tone didn’t leave an ounce of wiggle room.

“I’m coming to Corn, I promise. So don’t pack your bags and make Daddy put on dress clothes just yet,” Sharlene said.

“Just you?”

“Did you want me to bring someone, Momma?” The idea was born in an instant and she rejected it just as quickly. She would not ask Holt to go with her to Corn. As much fun as it would be to take the children, she couldn’t ask.

Or could she? All he could do was say no.

“You’re not getting any younger. I had five kids when I was your age,” Molly was saying when Sharlene snapped back to the present and stopped entertaining crazy notions.

“Can you hold just a minute?” Sharlene asked. If he went, he’d understand why she could never live in a place like Corn, Oklahoma.

“Yes, I can. Why?” Molly asked.

“I need to ask a co-worker a question,” she answered. She pushed the mute button and crossed the small yard to where Holt was measuring studs and cutting the ends off with a chop saw. She tapped him on the shoulder. “Hey, I’ve got a favor. Do you have plans for this weekend?”

He rolled the kinks from his neck and looked at her. “Other than laundry? You want to come over and help me do laundry?”

“I do not!”

“Then why are you asking?”

She wished he’d bring those arms down and wrap them around her. “I want you to go home with me. We’ll leave at the break of dawn Sunday and not get home until Monday night. You up for a five-hour drive to Corn, Oklahoma, and another one back here on Monday afternoon?”

Holt frowned. “Are you asking me to meet your parents? We haven’t even gone to dinner or had a date. I mean, we did sleep together, but I don’t think…”

She slapped him on the arm. “Not in that sense. I just thought the kids might like to go to the farm for a couple of days. I’ve got tons of nieces and nephews and there’ll be family and food everywhere. If you don’t want to go, can I at least have the kids?”

He grinned. “Are we going to have a custody battle if I say no?”

“My momma is waiting. She asked if I was bringing someone. I’m asking you. It’s not a marriage proposal.”

“Good. I don’t get engaged without a ring and I don’t see one in your hands. Yes, Sharlene, the kids and I would love to get away for a couple of days. The only condition is that we take my truck. I refuse to show up anywhere in a pink Volkswagen.”

She bristled. “What is wrong with my car?”

“It’s pink. It cramps my long legs. It doesn’t have enough room for the kids to cuss a cat without getting hairs in their mouths and I don’t like it. So it’s up to you—are we still invited? I’ll drive up and back. You provide us with a place to sleep and lots of food. Sounds fair to me.”

“Can I tell the kids?” she asked.

“I don’t care. You might wait until they wake up from their naps or else they’ll be so hyped they won’t sleep and then they’ll be cranky as hell the rest of the day. I’ll have to deal with them all day tomorrow wanting to know how many hours it is until we leave and how many kids will be there as it is.” He went back to measuring studs and wondered why in the devil he’d just agreed to her invitation. Sure, it would be nice to get away for a couple of days and the children would love the country. But five hours up there and back with Sharlene? Just the touch of her palm on his sweaty bicep had glued him to the ground. No woman had ever affected him like that.

“I have twelve nieces and nephews, all totaled. I’d have to count how many of each but it’s a good mixture so you can tell them that much. And they’ll have to be ready to leave Mingus by seven and we’ll get there by noon. That’s five hours any way you look at it.” She pushed the mute button on the phone and walked away from him.

“Hey, Sharlene,” he hollered.

She turned around with the phone at her ear. “What?”

“Do I have to pretend to be something other than your employee?”

She shot him a mean look and shook her head.

“Who was that?” her mother asked.

“Someone working on a building beside my park bench,” she said.

“You’ve got to get out of that big city, Sharlene. It’s not safe for a woman to be wandering around in a place as big as Dallas with men yelling at you that you don’t even know. You need to come on back home and find a good husband,” Molly said.

“Maybe someday I’ll get out of Dallas, Momma. But I’m not ever coming back to Corn to find a husband. Are you making ham?” She changed the subject.

“Yes and the kids are out of school up here on Monday for a teacher’s meeting so we’re having two days. Sunday it’s ham and the family. Monday your dad is grilling burgers and hot dogs and we’re inviting friends, but you didn’t answer me a while ago. Are you coming up here alone? Is there finally someone in your life? Please tell me there is. Folks up here are beginning to say that you are an old maid or worse.”

“Is there anything worse in Corn than being an old maid?”

“Yes, there is. Being one of them women who sell themselves or being one that don’t like men,” Molly said sternly.

“Well, I’m neither of those so I guess I’ll just be a disgraceful old maid. Maybe I’ll get a dozen cats and be a crazy old maid cat woman,” Sharlene teased.

“Don’t you go on like that with me when I’m worried about you ever finding a decent man at your age.”

“Sorry, Momma. It was going to be a surprise but I’ll tell you so you can quit fretting. I’m bringing a co-worker with me. His name is Holt Jackson and he’s raising his niece and nephew. Their momma died in May. Kids are twins. Six years old. Is that all right?”

Molly squealed. “Oh, honey, I can’t wait to go to Ladies Circle tomorrow morning and tell everyone. Is it serious?”

“No, Momma, it’s not serious. We’re just… friends.”

“Once he eats my cooking, it could get serious. A mother can always hope and pray,” Molly said.

“Yes, you can. Good-bye, Momma,” Sharlene said.

Her conscience nagged at her. She and Holt weren’t even friends. They were business associates. Of course her momma would read all kinds of scenarios into the visit and once she met Holt with his deep voice and big smile, she’d be on the sidelines with a John Deere tractor pushing Sharlene at the man. Thank God it was only for two days and then she could come back to her Honky Tonk. She’d just have to remember to go home more often.

At five thirty the hammering stopped and the work came to an end for another week. What had happened to the last four weeks? It seemed like only yesterday that Sharlene had hired Holt and now the job was nearly half done.

Sharlene and Judd helped gather up small pieces of scrap lumber and throw it in an ever growing pile in the backyard. The kids scattered it most days building forts or playhouses, but at five o’clock it was their job to get it all gathered up. As they picked up the pieces, Sharlene ran across several small end stud pieces that Judd had used for art. She’d colored them in bright colors and then stacked them up like a totem pole. The pictures made Sharlene smile and she couldn’t bear to throw them into the trash heap to be carried away.

“You want to keep your colored ones over by the back door so you can play with them next week?” Sharlene asked.

Judd nodded and carried them in that direction.

“Did you tell them?” Holt whispered when Judd was out of hearing distance.

“No, I thought I’d let you have some peace tomorrow. You can tell them whenever you want,” she answered.

He wiped the sweat from his brow with a bandana he kept in his pocket and slumped down into one of two old lawn chairs under the shade tree. “Sit down here with me and tell me what to expect. Am I walking into a hornet’s nest? I probably shouldn’t mention that I’m building an addition on your beer joint, huh?”

Sharlene sat in the chair beside him. Her sweaty thighs immediately stuck to the plastic webbing. “That would be a very good idea. I might tell them the news while I’m there. The stuff is going to hit the fan and stink to high heaven when I do.”