Chapter 8

Chapter Eight

“ J ust take it,” Henry said, his voice one that she might attribute to a grizzly bear. “She’s not going to take no for an answer.”

Angel looked at the huge tote of food that Henry’s mother had put together for her. “We really don’t need all this, ma’am.”

“Well, half of it is Henry’s,” Chelsea said. She flipped over to the pantry. “Oh, I forgot to get the chocolate-covered pretzels. Henry loves chocolate-covered pretzels.”

“Momma,” he said, “I can buy my own chocolate-covered pretzels.”

She whipped the bag out of the cupboard. “But do you have any at your house?”

“Not right now, Momma,” he said in total resignation.

“That’s what I thought.” She put them on top of the other containers, bags of chips, two loaves of bread, and two thermoses. Chelsea looked at the tote, then looked at her son, and then looked at Angel. “I know you don’t need this. It just makes me really happy to give you food.”

She glanced over to Henry. “Besides, Kelly made most of it, and she’s a really great cook.”

“We’ll take it,” Angel said, looking into her eyes and seeing so much of her own mother there. Momma had spent many years feeding and caring for others. It was really what she loved, what she enjoyed doing. And if Angel had brought home a friend and said even half the things Henry had said to his parents, she would load them up with a tote of food as well.

Angel gave her a soft smile and said, “Thank you, Mrs. Marshall. I’m happy to take it.”

Chelsea beamed with all the sunshine in the world, all the moonbeams, and every single particle of light that could come from a star. She stepped over to her son and grabbed him in a hug. “Oh, I love you so much,” she said, her voice pitching up to cover her emotion. “You call me when you get back to the ranch, okay?”

“Okay, Momma,” he said. “It’s paved roads all the way. We’re gonna be fine.”

“I know you’re gonna be fine. I just like to know that you’re home.”

“I’ll give you a call when we get there.” He looked at Angel for only a brief moment, turned, and picked up the tote. “All right, Angel. Let’s hit the road.”

The clock sat just past four, which meant they’d get back to Lone Star by dinnertime. Angel wasn’t sure how she felt about that. She kind of wanted to sneak back onto the ranch in the dead of night and pretend like no one knew she’d gone to Three Rivers with Henry.

At the same time, she’d have to face her momma and daddy and Trevor and all the cowboys sooner rather than later. She wondered if they would notice a change in her.

She wondered if she’d changed in just two days’ time. She sure felt better, more settled, less like she was about to burst into tears at any moment, less like she might claw someone’s face off if they asked her the wrong question.

Because of course, on the team at Lone Star, there were no wrong questions. Everybody asked what they needed to ask, and they had leaders to guide everyone with the correct attitude, the right techniques and procedures.

So Angel didn’t have to answer a lot of questions. She wasn’t sure what put her in such a terrible mood that she couldn’t even answer texts, but sometimes she felt like if she got one more text, it would cause her to implode.

Henry started for the front door, and Angel turned to go with him right when Chelsea grabbed onto her. “Oh, you get a hug too.” She pulled Angel into her chest. “You’re such a sweet woman,” Chelsea whispered into her ear. “I don’t know what-all you have going on, but I can see some weight in your eyes. And I’m going to pray that God will send you some relief and help you carry some of that burden.”

Angel didn’t know what to do other than hold her. When Angel finally stepped back, she said, “You give the best hugs in the whole world.”

Something inside her crumpled, as if someone had picked up an empty plastic water bottle, smashed it flat, and then pulled it back to normal. She blinked a couple of times, the few tears that had gathered in her eyes going right back in. “I haven’t hugged my mother like that in a long time,” she said. “Sure feels nice.”

Chelsea pressed one hand over her heart and said, “I’ll pray for your mama too.”

“Thank you, ma’am,” Angel said, and then she turned to follow Henry before she could start crying again. Strangely, as she left through the side door, she didn’t feel like crying. She didn’t feel like even talking about her mother would push her over the edge. She didn’t feel like she was about to lose her mama the way she had many times in the past.

She’d texted both of her parents by now. After all, she’d been off the ranch for forty-eight hours, and they needed to know she was alive and okay, doing well. She’d sent them some pictures of her and Nevaeh, she’d had Henry take some pictures of them playing with the ball, and she’d sent those as well. They both responded positively and said that the ranch was doing fine. They missed her and they’d see her when she got back.

When she got in the passenger seat, she pulled out her phone and texted her daddy. We’re on the way, should be there within the hour.

Henry put the food in the backseat and then climbed in behind the wheel. “Everything all right?”

“Yep.” She looked up, turned toward him, and gave him a full smile. “I really like your mom and dad. Thank you for inviting me this weekend.”

“Anytime, Angel,” he said easily, and Angel could tell he absolutely meant it. “You know the way now. You can come anytime you want.”

She scoffed and looked away as he put the truck in reverse to back out of the driveway. “I’m not going to come without you,” she said.

“Oh, are we going to talk about that?” he asked, his voice pitching up all innocent when it wasn’t innocent at all.

“Talk about what?”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Are you going to do that?”

She gave a light laugh and shook her head. “I suppose we should talk about it.”

“Why don’t you define it for me?” he said.

“Why don’t you define it for me ?” she fired back.

“Holding hands,” he said. “How about that? How about you hugging me, telling me thank you twenty-five times a day, saying how much you liked my family? I mean, if we’d been dating, if we’d gone to dinner a few times, and maybe I’d kissed you, this could be the weekend I took you home to meet them. Like it was for Libby, bringing her boyfriend home to meet her family.”

Angel had known Henry for a long time, a couple of years now at least. He’d done a summer internship two summers ago, and he’d been an apprentice at Lone Star for almost a year. She’d known him before that too, as her father had done quite a bit of training at the farrier academy Henry attended, and she’d gone with him several times.

“I see your point,” she acknowledged. “But we haven’t gone to dinner a bunch of times. We haven’t gone to the movies. We haven’t kissed.”

“Well, technically the last one isn’t true.”

She could hear the smile in his voice, and she didn’t even need to look over at him to see it. Oh, that blasted kiss. If only Angel didn’t think about it every night before she went to bed.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Yeah, I know what you mean,” he said. “Because trust me, when I kiss you for real, we’re both going to know it, and we’re going to know what it means.”

She whipped her attention to him now. “You think you’re going to kiss me again?”

“I’d like to,” he said in a brave, bold voice. “I think the rule about no dating at Lone Star is a little antiquated. And I think you have the power to change it. Your daddy’s not in charge anymore. He doesn’t have to deal with any of the drama at Lone Star. You do. And if you’re the one dating, it’s your drama.”

He gripped the wheel hard, released it, and turned to go around the corner that would lead them back to the highway. Angel watched the landscape. It wasn’t all that different than at Lone Star.

“I can also see that point,” she said. “But you know my daddy, right? You’ve talked to him lots of times.”

“Yes,” Henry said. And he had a guardedness in his voice, which meant he knew exactly what Angel was going to say next.

“He’s not the easiest man to convince to do something he doesn’t want to do,” she said.

“I can see that,” Henry said. “But you’ve made new rules since you’ve been in charge.”

“Yes,” Angel said. “And each one of them took hours of consultation with my father.” She crossed her arms across her middle, hoping that she wouldn’t say too much. “I love Daddy,” she said. “I love him with my whole heart. He is a frustrating and irritating man to work with sometimes, but whenever I have a problem, I go to him and I talk it out. He never leads me wrong.”

“I got a daddy like that too,” he said quietly.

“Going to him and telling him I want to change this rule would require me to tell him who I’m interested in,” she said. “I don’t really do that with my parents.”

“You haven’t introduced them to a boyfriend?”

“Not in a long time,” she said. “No one ever made the cut to bring home for dinner.”

“Not even that guy I saw you with in the grocery store a couple of years ago?”

Angel shook her head. “We only dated for six or seven months.”

“Why did you break up?” Henry asked.

Angel looked over to him, putting every fiery star she had in her gaze. “Because you kissed me, Henry.”

He came to a stop at the stop sign. All he had to do was turn right and get on the highway, but he sat there. Angel saw no traffic coming, but Henry made no effort to even look.

“Because I kissed you?” he asked.

She couldn’t bear the weight of his gaze. Those powerful eyes and dark beard. He seriously was the most handsome man she had ever met.

“Yes,” she said. “Because you kissed me. And I realized how much I liked it and how much I wanted to go out with you . And it didn’t seem fair to keep going out with Caleb.”

The resulting silence smothered her. Angel couldn’t believe what she had just admitted.

“Is this why you do my interviews with the door open?” he asked.

“Yes,” she clipped out.

“Well, that’s gonna change.” He made the turn and accelerated quickly, pushing Angel back into her seat, and she realized he was upset, maybe even angry.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“You’ve liked me for a whole year, and you’ve said nothing?”

“You haven’t said anything either,” she shot back.

“There—is—a—rule,” he clipped out. “And I follow the rules because I need this apprenticeship to graduate.”

“You got the apprenticeship,” she said crossly. “You’re going to graduate.” She worked up the courage to look at him again. “I have an idea,” she said in a much softer voice. “This might sound crazy.”

“What?”

“After we watched the sunset last night, I stayed up for a while thinking about us. I’m gonna pray about the situation again tonight. And maybe you can too.”

Henry looked over to her and swallowed. He looked nervous and anxious and also, yes, angry. “All right,” he said. “Spit it out. My word, we’ve got to start saying what we mean to each other.”

Angel smiled at the exasperation in his tone. “Is that what we’ve got to start doing?”

“Yes,” he said. “Are you holding back with me on things at Lone Star too? Anything with the horses?”

“No,” she said. “I talk about the horses.”

“So it’s just your own feelings you don’t talk about.”

“Yes,” she said. “No. I talk about my feelings. I’ve literally just told you I’ve had a crush on you for a year.”

“Yeah, well, mine goes back longer than that, sweetheart,” he said.

Angel rolled her eyes, blinked, and looked away. “Yeah, well then who needs to start talking first? Me or you?”

“You do,” he said. “You’ve got an idea.”

“Yeah.” She drew in a long breath, trying to get her tangled thoughts to line up. She didn’t want to fight with Henry. She liked holding his hand. She didn’t need to talk to her father about the rule. Or did she?

She was in charge. Why did there need to be a no-dating rule at all?

“Do you think any other cowboys would want to ask me out if there was no rule?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” Henry said. “But if they do, I will seriously rearrange their faces.”

Angel burst out laughing, because she was not expecting him to say that. He did not join her. He growled. “I’m not kidding, Angel. I don’t want you going out with anyone but me.”

Angel heard the dark, possessive tone of his voice, and it didn’t bother her. She felt wanted and needed, desirable and seen. “What if,” she said. “We leave the rule in place? That way no one else thinks they can ask me out.”

“I’m following,” he said.

“What if we don’t say anything to Daddy quite yet, and when we do, we do it together? Because I don’t really want to talk to him by myself. He really likes you, and I think if we get to know each other more and start dating, there might come a point where, when he looks at us, he can tell that we really care about each other.”

“I really care about you right now,” Henry said quietly.

“I know,” she said. “I care about you too. But I don’t know you. I feel like we need more time to get to know each other.”

“That’s what dating is, right?” he asked.

“That’s what dating is. So I’m thinking maybe we just keep it a secret.”

“A secret,” he repeated.

“For now,” she qualified. “Nothing has to change, and we’ll find ways that we can be together that aren’t obvious. I mean, you go to town with Levi. Why can’t we just go to town together?”

“Angel,” he said. “If we are seen going to town every weekend together, everyone on that ranch is going to know what’s going on by the second weekend. They’re not stupid.”

“I know,” Angel said. “I just meant like, you’re going to town for groceries, and I drive myself.”

“No, we’re not driving ourselves to Amarillo and meeting there for some clandestine date. That’s not happening.”

Angel huffed out a breath. “Fine. It’s a stupid idea.”

“It’s not a stupid idea,” he said. “It’s a fine idea, but we need to…finesse it a little bit.”

“Finesse it a little bit,” she said.

“Yeah,” he shot back. “Just like trying different pairs of shoes on horses. This is like that. We’ll try one thing, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll try something else.”

“Yeah, but in the meantime, people could figure out that we’re dating.”

“Dates can happen in a lot of different ways,” Henry finally said. “We don’t even have to leave the ranch.”

“You think so?”

“Number one, I know you’ll want to leave the ranch. You need to leave the ranch every week, Angel—but it’s not for me, and it’s not with me.” He glanced at her. “It’s just something you need to do to take care of you.”

She couldn’t look at him, but that had never stopped Henry from talking. “No one expects you to work seven days a week without a break.”

Angel scrunched up her face and pressed her teeth together. She wanted to say, “I know,” in a bratty voice, but the truth was, she didn’t know. She did feel like Lone Star would fall apart without her, and the past couple of days had proven to her how replaceable she was.

“I don’t like feeling unneeded,” she said.

“I’m right there with you, sweetheart,” Henry said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to work yourself into the ground.”

“Okay,” she said. “I hear you.”

He reached over and took her hand in his. “I’ll help you slow down when things feel too hectic,” he said. “I’ll help you carry some of the load.”

She nodded, and Angel relaxed into the drive from his family ranch to hers. He pulled down the lane toward Lone Star, a familiar weight settling over her shoulders. She did love this place, with its rolling landscape, green fields, and oh, she could smell the horses before the stables even came into view.

Henry went past the farmhouse and around the corner, pulling in front of her house only a few seconds later. He put the truck in park and looked at her.

“I won’t say thank you twenty-five times a day.”

He grinned, then burst out laughing. “That’s what you’ve been worked up over during the drive?” He shook his head as he chuckled and got out of the truck. She followed him into her house, him carrying the big tote right to her kitchen counter like he’d been here dozens of times in the past.

He had not.

Angel almost didn’t want to close the door—which was why she hadn’t been able to do his performance interviews with the door closed either. Shutting herself into tight spaces with Henry made her fantasies about kissing him again—for real, this time—dance to life.

He unloaded food into her fridge like he lived there, and left other things on the counter. Finished, he finally looked at her, still standing way over by the front door. “You think I’m gonna bite?” he teased.

“No.” But kind of.

He laughed, walked over to her, and drew her straight into his arms as if he was a mother hen and she the little chick that needed guidance. She felt so small and so safe inside the circle of his arms. She wrapped her arms around him and hugged him tight.

“I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said. He bent his head down and brushed his lips from her earlobe down to her jaw. “Okay?”

She looked up at him from beneath the brim of his cowboy hat until she nodded. “Okay,” she said.

He left her house with the rest of the food, and Angel wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself now.

I better go see Trevor and make sure he’s okay.

Her brother might have questions about where she’d been and who she’d been with, but Angel didn’t mind telling him. In fact, if Trevor didn’t ask, Angel was simply going to tell him so that she could get the teeming things inside her out, get them laid down where she could see them, and maybe even have her brother help her understand what all of this meant.