Life After Wife (22 page)

“Good ranch man,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” He held the door open for her.

“It means you’ve got the good sense to know a good ranch woman when you see one.”

“You sounded like Maud.” He crossed the porch behind her and opened the pickup door. It wasn’t as good as sitting on the cycle with her arms around his waist, but riding in the front seat side by side wasn’t too bad.

“That, sir, is the best compliment you can pay me,” she told him.

Sophie didn’t know a good tractor from a lemon. She did know that Aunt Maud liked John Deeres and they were green, but that was the extent of her knowledge on them. However, Elijah did not have to know that, now did he?

They arrived at the auction thirty minutes before starting time and circled the whole area. Elijah had the forethought to bring along a notepad, and he wrote down such things as hours the tractors had been used, if and when the engine had been overhauled, and what year it had been bought.

“What do you think?” Elijah asked.

“Honestly?”

“Of course.”

“I don’t know jack about a tractor. That was Gus and Aunt Maud’s bailiwick. I was the accountant. I can drive a
tractor and pull a plow or a baler behind it, but I wouldn’t know a good one from a bad one.” She wondered why she’d fessed up when she could have had him thinking she was so much smarter than he was.

It was the kisses.
Aunt Maud was back in her head.
But it’s a wise thing to be honest because then that puts him on the hot seat to be the same.

Elijah nodded seriously. “OK, I’ll confess that I’m pretty slow when it comes to accounting, so I’m glad you can do that. I don’t have any idea what’s tax deductible or what has to be depreciated out, or even how to do taxes or insurance forms.”

“Guess we’ll get along just fine then. Please tell me you know something about tractors,” she said.

“I do. Daddy was adamant that all of his sons know equipment. And a cotton tractor is the same thing as an alfalfa or winter wheat tractor,” he said. “The best one on the lot today is that one right there.” He pointed to one with wheels almost as tall as Sophie. “Next best would be those two. I’d like to buy all three if the price is right.”

“What about that little one over there?” She pointed at a small red one at the end of the lot.

“It’s a good tractor but too small for much except making a garden. We going to plant a vegetable garden next spring?”

“Of course. Aunt Maud would sit on the bedpost and haunt me at night if we didn’t plant our tomatoes, green beans, squash, and cantaloupes. We usually put in about a quarter of an acre and we canned what we didn’t use. Won’t be much cannin’ goin’ on with five big, strappin’ men sitting at the supper table,” she told him.

“That sounded like something Momma would have said. She said she had to have a garden to keep us out of the poor-house with nine boys.”

She frowned. “I remember that there’re four older ones and then you and Noah, and the twins that we’ve inherited. But that’s only eight,” she said.

“You’re leaving out Jedidiah. He’s right under me in age. Thirty-eight last spring. He started off career military and then transferred into the FBI. Works out of Washington, DC, and comes home about once a year when my oldest brother and his wife host the annual family reunion at Thanksgiving. Never married except to his job.”

“So you all weren’t ranchers or farmers after all.”

“Seven out of nine ain’t too bad. Well, six out of nine, and then I came around to their way of thinking, thanks to Aunt Maud,” Elijah said.

“Ladies and gentlemen, gather round and we’ll get this show on the road,” the auctioneer’s big booming voice came through a sound system. “First thing we’ve got to offer is this trailer and everything on it. If you’ll notice, there’re tools in this box, fruit jars in that one, and lots of miscellaneous farm stuff in the rest of the boxes. Let’s start the bidding at two hundred dollars.”

Elijah raised his hand.

“I’ve got two, let me hear three, come on now, that’s for the trailer and the load,” he started his fast-talking.

Sophie noticed Elijah nod a couple of times, but had no idea that he’d bought the whole mess of stuff until the auctioneer said, “The lot goes to number thirteen standing back there by the pretty red-haired lady for four hundred and fifty dollars.”

“Why’d you buy that?” she whispered.

“You might want the fruit jars.”

“You idiot! There’re dozens and dozens of those in the cellar.”

He patted her on the shoulder. “We need another trailer. There’re only two on the inventory. With all that land, we’ll use at least one more every day. Think about hauling fence posts and barbed wire.”

“And what would a new one cost?”

“Up over a thousand.”

She nodded. “Then I guess you did good.”

“Next item is this riding lawn mower. Good condition. Bought two years ago from Sears. What do I hear? Can we start at two hundred?” His speed-talking started but Elijah didn’t raise his hand or his card.

“Sold for three hundred dollars!” he yelled in less than five minutes. “To the lady behind the pretty red-haired woman with the man who bought the trailer. Now moving right along to this plow.”

“Buy it,” Sophie said.

“Thought I might try,” Elijah said.

At the end of the day they owned a trailer, a plow, a small square hay baler, a pickup truck, and all three tractors. Sophie wrote the biggest check on the ranch account that she’d ever written before and handed it to the cashier. But strangely enough, it didn’t make her nervous or anxious. The thing that surprised her was that she trusted Elijah so much, when she’d vowed that she’d never trust another man in her entire life.

“We’ll deliver it to your ranch tomorrow morning. I expect you’ll be driving the truck home, won’t you?” the cashier asked.

“Do they always deliver the equipment?” Sophie asked on the way to the truck.

“No, it’s a courtesy of this auction. They had it printed on the sale bill that they’d deliver up to two hundred miles on the big equipment. Let’s stop in Abilene and get some lunch. What are you hungry for?”

Elijah’s voice was full of excitement, like a little boy at Christmas. Just his tone said he could hardly wait to get home and tell the other guys what good deals he’d gotten. He’d gotten all three tractors for the price that he thought he’d have to pay for two, and it didn’t take a rocket scientist to see that his feet were about six inches off the ground when he walked beside her.

“Cheap, fast Mexican. Nothing fancy. Just a fast-food place that makes those little dollar tacos. I could eat about eight of them,” she said.

“Nervous over spending that much money?”

“No, I am not. When are we going to buy more cows?”

Elijah threw an arm around her shoulders. “One thing at a time, partner.”

She flinched.

Not because she wanted him to remove his arm, but she wanted to be more than a partner to Elijah. He darn sure wasn’t Prince Charming, but his kisses had awakened her to life and the possibility of love, and “partner” didn’t cover nearly enough.

Sophie dreamed about Aunt Maud for the first time since the funeral. Her aunt had come to whisper in her ear at the most inopportune times, but she’d never actually dreamed about her in Technicolor until Saturday night. They were sitting at the kitchen table having morning coffee as the sun lit up the sky.

“It’s been more than a month now. You stayin’ or sellin’?” Aunt Maud asked.

“Well, I dang sure ain’t goin’ nowhere. Elijah won’t budge and neither will I.”

Maud laughed like she did when something was really funny, slapping her leg and wiping at her eyes with her shirttail. “I knew I was doing the right thing. You needed something to shake you out of your doldrums. Eli is just the ticket.”

“I call him Elijah.”

That brought on more laughter. “Oh, really! Well, darlin’, I see good things in your future, and I’m glad you bought that land. This ranch is going to be something else to behold by the time you and Eli pass it on down to the next generation.”

And then the dream started to fade and Sophie awoke. No matter how tight she squeezed her eyes shut, she couldn’t
bring Maud back and there were questions she wanted to ask, answers she needed. She finally popped her eyes open and inhaled deeply. Yep, coffee and bacon and male voices in the kitchen.

She hurriedly dressed in jeans and a bright turquoise tank top, and padded barefoot down the hallway to the big country kitchen. Elijah and his brothers were sitting at the kitchen table, coffee cups in front of them and the pot on a hot pad in the middle of the table. She got her favorite mug from the cabinet, slid into a chair at the other end from Elijah, and poured her own coffee.

“Sleep well?” Hayden asked.

“Dreamed about Aunt Maud,” she answered.

“Was she tellin’ you the what for?” Tanner asked.

“She was laughing so hard that tears came to her eyes.”

Elijah chuckled. “She did pull a pretty slick trick, didn’t she?”

Tanner drew his dark brows down in a frown. “Only slick trick I see is that she left half the place to Elijah rather than me. I’m the one who’s got the most ranchin’ experience, and he’s the war vet who was probably going to be a motorcycle bum and ride around the country the rest of his life.”

“I’d have ridden around the country for about three months and then reenlisted or done what Jed did and applied at the Bureau.” Elijah talked to Tanner but looked down the table into Sophie’s eyes.

“I think he means that Aunt Maud pulled a slick trick by leaving half the ranch to Eli and the other half to Sophie. She knew she was tying two cats in a burlap bag and throwing them over a clothesline, and it was her last joke on them,” Hayden said.

The light went on in Tanner’s eyes. “Oh! Ohhhh!”

“Yep,” Hayden nodded.

“What?” Elijah shifted his gaze to his brothers.

“She wanted you two to get together, didn’t she?” Tanner said.

“She wanted us to partner up and run this ranch.” Elijah blushed.

Sophie giggled.

“What’s so funny? Ain’t my brother good enough to do more than partner up with you?” Tanner asked.

“She and her friends made this pact thing,” Elijah said.

“What?” Tanner looked at Sophie.

“It’s a long story,” she said.

“We got all mornin’.” Hayden refreshed her coffee cup.

“She’s got to have a ‘life after wife’ thing.” Elijah’s eyes had locked with hers again.

She blinked and looked at Tanner. “It’s like this. When Kate, Fancy, and I all moved back to this area, we were talking one night and one of us asked Fancy why she wasn’t married. She’s tiny and cute and full of life. She said it was because no one had said the three magic words.”

Tanner nodded. “‘I love you,’ right?”

“That’s the three words, but not the magic words. We decided that we have to hear that first for sure, but we all three wanted more, a lot more. Fancy wanted someone who’d give her a forever thing, not just a passing fancy that ended up in divorce courts. Kate wanted the three words, but she wanted them from her knight-in-shining…and then she couldn’t think of the word ‘armor’, and said ‘whatever,’ so we teased her about Hart being her knight-in-shining-whatever.”

“And you?” Tanner asked.

“Life after wife.”

“What in the devil does that mean?” Hayden asked.

“I was married before. My husband died in a plane crash, but when he got home from his trip I was going to divorce him. He’d been cheating on me since day one of our relationship. I want someone who can give me a life after he gets a wife. Someone who loves me past the wedding day. It’s hard to explain.”

“I get it,” Elijah said.

Hayden scratched his head. “You do?”

“Sure. She wants a marriage, not a wedding. A marriage is two people working together forever. A wedding is the day the marriage is supposed to start, but sometimes, like in Sophie’s case, it was the day the relationship died.”

Sophie nodded. “So until I’m sure, absolutely sure that I’ll have life after wife, then the three words don’t mean jack squat to me. So tell me, guys, what’re your three magic words?”