“I doubt that Angel will leave her babies or Noel either when she has them. Did you ever think about a husband and children?” he asked abruptly.
Sage bit her lower lip for several seconds.
Now why in the hell had he asked that question, Creed wondered. It was too personal and would kill the miracle that had barely gotten a foothold in her heart. Maybe she didn’t even hear him ask. Hopefully she’d been studying her art so intensely she’d blocked out everything else.
Finally she answered. “That is a scary thought, Creed. My dad died and my mother’s heart was broken as well as Grand’s. Daddy was her only child. He and Momma were high school sweethearts and married before he went off to the Army. She went with him as soon as she could and I was born a few years later.”
“So you have a fear of commitment?” he asked.
“Don’t say that.”
“Why?”
“I’ve heard it before and I don’t have any fears. I’m just a careful woman. Fear is one thing. Caution is another. Besides, if I had a fear it wouldn’t be of commitment, it would be of abandonment and Grand ain’t helping one damn bit in that business.”
“Well, I’m honest enough to say that I have the big C-word fear. It’s the only thing that makes me shake in my boots. After my fiancée pulled off her stunt, I’m gun-shy when it comes to relationships.”
“You? I don’t believe it!”
“Believe it, darlin’. I’m a flirt but when it comes to trusting anyone enough to give them my whole heart to put through a meat grinder, well, that’s another matter.”
“Guess we make a pretty damn good pair to get stuck in a blizzard together,” she said.
Chapter 5
“Well, dammit all to hell on a rusty poker,” Ada fussed.
“Burned another pan full, did you?” Essie giggled.
“Damn sure did. Guess we’ll only be takin’ three dozen to the canasta game tonight.”
“I reckon that’ll be plenty. Everyone else will bring cookies too. You wouldn’t burn them if you’d stop your worrywartin’.”
Ada tucked her salt-and-pepper hair behind her ears. She and Esther had been born in southern Oklahoma to a father with Chickasaw blood and a red-haired Irish mother. Esther had gotten the red hair and green eyes, but she was as mild tempered as a gentle southern breeze. Ada inherited the dark hair and dark eyes and had a temper like a tornado and a hurricane meeting head-on with a Texas wildfire.
Essie had just passed her eighty-sixth birthday and Ada was over seventy. They hadn’t grown up together or known each other as sisters until later in life because Essie married when Ada was only two years old.
It had been love at first sight between Esther and Richard Langston. He had come to Ravia, Oklahoma, for Christmas dinner with one of his buddies on the WPA project. That afternoon he’d met Esther, who was literally the girl who lived next door to his buddy. Three months later, when he went home to Pennsylvania to take over the farm after his father died, Essie went with him.
Sixteen years later, Thomas Presley came to Ravia from Fort Sill with a friend for a long weekend. There was a birthday party that summer for his fellow army buddy, and Ada had been invited. When Thomas finished his enlistment the following year, she went with him to the Palo Duro Canyon.
“Momma was a worrywart. She worried about you all the time,” Ada said.
Essie tidied up a bun at the nape of her neck. It was smaller than it used to be in her youth and it was more gray now than red, but she still wore it the same as the day she put it up the first time.
“You ever wish you had done things different?” Essie asked.
“Well, hell, yeah! We all do. Right now I wish I hadn’t left the ranch. I should be overseeing that young cowboy and my granddaughter. It wasn’t too smart of me to up and leave them alone.”
Essie’s green eyes twinkled. “Good lookin’, is he?”
“I would’ve pushed him into my bedroom if I’d been thirty years younger.”
“That’s a crock! You would’ve had to have been fifty years younger for him to let you push him anywhere near a bed.”
Ada smiled. “I’m second-guessing myself. Momma said that I got the vision from Daddy. I knew the night that the cancer would finally take Tom away from me. And I knew that getting out of that canyon and making Sage face up to things was the right thing, but now I’m wondering if it was my own sight.”
“Honey, there ain’t no vision. It ain’t nothing but common sense and intuition. Sage is a big girl, not just in size but in brains. Trust me, if she don’t like that cowboy he won’t even be there when you go back on Christmas Eve. And they’ll never find a scrap of hair or a bone to get any of that DNA off of either.”
“You watch too much of that damned CSI shit,” Ada said.
“Good thing that wasn’t on the television when Richard had his fling at forty or he wouldn’t have lived to see forty-one,” Essie said.
Ada laid her hand on her sister’s shoulder. “Those were some bad times, weren’t they?”
“Yes they were, but we lived through them and the boys never knew. The last words he said when he died was that he was sorry for hurting me. I was glad the boys weren’t in the room.”
“Ever wish you would have had a daughter?” Ada asked.
“I did want one but after three boys I figured all Richard could throw was boys and I stopped wishing. Maybe God knew what he was doing when he gave me boys. At least you’ll get a son-in-law when Sage marries, and you had a wonderful son. His only fault was that he didn’t want to stay in that gawdforsaken canyon. If he had, he might have lived to see
