Texas Gothic

  In the upstairs hall, the pine floorboards were smooth under my feet. Then down the stairs, through the living room, with its oak beams and limestone fireplace. By chance I glanced out the window to where Stella was parked just outside the wooden yard gate.

  And then I stopped, because there was something next to my Mini Cooper, and it was not Aunt Hyacinth’s beat-up SUV.

  It was a cow.

  A half-grown calf, really. My aunt didn’t have cows, so this guy was trespassing, which was inconsequential next to the fact that it was also scratching itself on Stella’s bright blue fender. Scratching its ass on my graduation/early birthday present to myself, bought with years of savings from after-school jobs.

  I leapt to the window and banged on the glass, scaring Pumpkin the Pomeranian, who was snoozing on the couch, half to death.

  “Hey!” Bang bang bang. “Get away from my car!”

  The calf didn’t move, except to keep scratching.

  “Son of a—” I whirled and sprinted through the kitchen to the mudroom. Nudging dogs out of the way, I shoved my feet into the oversized Wellies and straight-armed the screen door, sending it crashing against the wall.

  I clattered down the steps. The goats watched me, chewing leaves unfazed as I went flying by their pen. If the cherries on my underwear tempted them, I was too furious to notice.

  Varsity soccer had made me fast on my feet, even though the too-big boots slowed me down. When I banged open the wooden gate, the calf looked unconcerned, until it realized I was still coming.

  It took off, and I took off after it, running across the pasture like William Wallace in Braveheart. Except in panties and a bra, which sounded like a Monty Python sketch but had become my life, thanks to my sister, who had obviously left the second gate open so the neighbors’ bovine could mosey onto Goodnight land, and don’t think I wasn’t going to let her hear about it.

  Stupid cow. Waving my arms, I chased the animal almost to our barbed-wire fence, where I realized the calf wasn’t half grown at all. It was more like one-quarter grown, and its mother was big. Big, and also on our side of the fence, and pissed that I was yelling at her baby.

  She lowered her head and mooed at me, a long, foghorn sound punctuated by the aggressive swish of her tail. The filed stumps of her horns were blunt but would definitely break a rib, at least, if she charged me. Or she might decide to knock me down to trample at her leisure. We’re talking a creature the size of Stella.

  And I totally didn’t care.

  “Don’t yell at me, you stupid cow!” I jabbed a hand toward the calf, who taunted me from behind its mother. “Keep your juvenile delinquent away from my car!”

  She stamped her hoof and let out another throaty bellow.

  “No. You shut up. This is my side of the fence.” I waved vaguely gateward. “Get your fat ass and your miscreant offspring back on your side of the barbed wire.”

  “Hey! You!”

  I froze, with a screech of mental tires and the bug-eyed equivalent of a cartoon spit-take. What the hell?

  “You! Crazy girl over there!”

  The “over there” jump-started my stalled brain and ground my gears back into motion. It wasn’t the cow talking, then. What a relief.

  Slowly, I turned to see a horse, not far away from me, and a guy on the horse, sitting with one fist on the reins and one on his hip, looking down at me like I was insane.

  “What the blue blazes are you doing to that cow?” he said.

  “Me?” My voice went stratospheric with outrage. “That calf was violating my Mini Cooper.”

  The cowboy turned his horse in a leisurely circle, scanning the field. I really had run quite a ways from the house. He shaded his eyes to peer in that direction. “You mean that blue toy parked in front of Ms. Goodnight’s place?”

  I swatted a fly and sort of glare-squinted up at him. “Goodnight Farm. Yes.”

  “I heard Ms. Hyacinth was going on a trip this summer,” he said, eyeing me and keeping his distance the way people did from lunatics. Even his horse was looking at me like I was nuts.

  This was not a good time to realize that I was standing in the pasture in a state of highly questionable decency. Maybe if I pretended I meant to be out there half naked, he would think it was a bathing suit.

  Placing a casual hand on my hip—then dropping it because the pose was ridiculous—I answered, “I’m house-sitting for her.”

  Then I called myself an idiot. Like axe murderers couldn’t ride horses. Forget that he was tanned and rugged and had a sexy-young-cowboy thing going on, which I didn’t need to be invoking in my head, because he was a stranger and I was in my underwear.

  “Um, not just me, of course.” I cleared my throat and folded my arms. Nice defensive body language. I was a National Merit Scholar, for God’s sake. Soldiering on, I said, “Me and my sister. And our pack of big, ferocious dogs.”

  The guy was just close enough that I could see his brows arch, one sardonically higher than the other. “And you’re out here sunning yourself in your skivvies because … ?”

  So much for that bluff. God, this bravado thing was tough. “I told you. That cow was scratching its butt on my car. I saw it from the window and ran out—”

  He’d raised his chin to look past me, toward the house. “Did you by any chance leave the gate open?”

  “No! That was my sister, who— Oh hell!” I could hear the dogs barking. Worse, I could hear bleating. Joyful goat chuckles of freedom.

  “The goats!” I clutched my head, an absurdly melodramatic reaction suited to this farce. “The goats were in the tree!”

  “The … Wait, what?”

  I didn’t stay to enlighten him. For all my cursing Phin for leaving the outer gate ajar, I’d left the yard gate standing wide open. Running toward the house, I could see the dogs weaving mad circles around the field. Behind them were the goats, chasing them just for the hell of it, as far as I could tell.

  The horse came up alongside me at a trot. Something dropped onto my head and I screamed and batted it to the ground, then found myself staring stupidly at the cowboy’s worn denim shirt. When I looked up, he called over his shoulder, now covered by just a sweat-blotched white undershirt, “Put that on. You’re getting a sunburn.”

  Then he kicked his pinto into a slow lope and directed his efforts at rounding up the goats.

  Focus, Amy. Just because he looked great in the saddle did not mean he wasn’t an axe murderer.

  I shrugged on the shirt, which was dusty and smelled like leather and horse, but I wasn’t particular at the moment. Buttoning it up just enough for it to stay closed, I started running again.

  The cowboy brought his horse neatly around to head off Gordita and Taco. “Go right!” he yelled, in case I was an idiot who couldn’t figure out I needed to go the opposite way. “Get your dogs to help!”

  The dogs were headed straight for me. I could see the whites of their eyes. Bear, the big, dumb coward, was moving as fast as I’d ever seen him.

  I pointed to the house. “Go inside, guys! Go inside and I’ll give you a cookie!”

  They knew “cookie,” and they knew that “inside” did not contain livestock. Lila, the smartest of the pack, gave an emphatic bark, and they made for the yard like greyhounds after a rabbit.

  Most of the goats skipped after them, except Taco and Gordita. They seemed to consider the horse an awesome addition to their game of who-wants-to-be-barbecue-when-Amy-catches-us.

  The pinto appeared to be enjoying the game, too, leaping and turning in the air to round up the stragglers, then working close to the ground, never letting them get around him. The cowboy seemed part of the horse, the way the pair worked together. I was a Texan, sure, but I was a city girl. This was new to me. I stood transfixed by the flex of the young man’s legs, the effortless shift of his weight as he controlled the horse, until the dust became too thick for me to appreciate details, only the overall aesthetic.

  Taco and Gordita ran for the gate and I
shook myself into action. Waving my arms—and looking, I’m sure, a hell of a lot less graceful than the rodeo ballet—I chased the goats into the yard and slammed the gate closed behind us. At the clang of the latch, the cowboy gave his horse some silent command and the pinto relaxed, blowing a deep breath of satisfaction.

  No rest for me yet, not while the herd was chasing the dogs and eating Aunt Hyacinth’s zinnias. I ran to the pen and opened the feed bucket, banging the metal lid like a dinner gong. The goats trotted right in, as if they’d merely been for a stroll in the park. It was almost anticlimactic, in a way.

  The cowboy had dismounted and followed me into the yard. He swung the gate of the goat pen closed, allowing me to slip out first. I latched it firmly, then leaned against the board fence, not knowing if I should laugh or cry, or just have hysterics and do both.

  The dogs came running, their fear of the goats insufficient to outweigh their need for reassurance. Sadie spun in circles, and Bear, against all reason, wanted me to pick him up. Lila avoided the crowd and tried to get the cowboy to pet her.

  Awkward didn’t begin to cover it. Wrestling with goats and dogs, wearing nothing but a stranger’s shirt over my underwear? If my mother had a crystal ball, she would be on her broom (figuratively speaking) and on her way over in a heartbeat.

  Unable to look at him, I busied myself getting Bear and Lila to behave. “Sorry about the dogs. They weren’t much help.”

  “They’re completely worthless,” he said, in an exasperated tone to which I could totally relate. “It’s a shepherd and a collie and a—” He floundered when he got to Bear. “I don’t even know what that one is.”

  “None of us do.” I staggered as the hairy lummox bumped the back of my knee. “And they’re not worthless. Lila here, she’s a search-and-rescue dog.” He looked at the border collie trying to climb into my arms like a toddler and appeared unconvinced. I assured him, “Really. They, uh, just happen to be afraid of the goats.”

  “Of course they are,” he said, with a long exhale of annoyance. I caught a whiff of spearmint under the stronger smells of leather and dog and dust. “Leave it to crazy Ms. Goodnight to have a bunch of chickenshit dogs on a ranch, for God’s sake.”

  “Excuse me?” I’d been fixing to say something else. Another apology, another inanity, I didn’t know—the spearmint had distracted me. His tone, however, brought me up short, and my eyes narrowed to reevaluate him in the harsh sunlight.

  He had just been pretty decent—gentlemanly, really, giving me his shirt and all. Up close I could see that he wasn’t soft enough to be cute. He was too young to be rugged. (Which was a relief considering the underwear thing.) His eyes were very blue against his tan, and his teeth very white. But his brows were drawn down in a scowl that, even though it was aimed at the dogs, seemed to cover a lot more.

  “It’s just typical,” he said, his tone a razor slice of derision, “Ms. Goodnight owning herding dogs that are afraid of goats.”

  “You mean as in typically kind of her to give these useless dogs a home?” The overly sweet question should have been a warning, if he’d been paying attention, but he seemed to take it at face value.

  “Doubtless.” His softly mocking snort ruined this admission. “She’s a soft touch. I’m sure these dogs had a sob story to tell her. Ms. Goodnight is notorious around here. Everybody’s kooky old aunt.”

  “Oh really.” My voice painted a layer of ice on the Texas afternoon. Finally it sank in; his eyes flew to my red hair—a family trait—and I saw the flash of “Oh crap” on his face, even before I finished. “I just thought she was my kooky old aunt.”

  He could have saved himself—apologized, said that he meant it in the nicest possible way. I mean, no one knew better than me how kooky the Goodnights were by any normal person’s standards.

  But what he said, with an up-and-down glance that encompassed my bare legs, rubber boots, cherry-covered underwear, the dogs, the goats, and even the cow, was: “Well, that explains a lot.”

  This day kept getting better and better.

  Fury erased the rapier reply I wanted to make. Even sarcasm failed me, and all I had left was indignation. “You have a lot of nerve,” I heard myself saying, like some vapid Victorian heroine, “insulting my aunt like that.”

  The accusation seemed to score a hit. His cheeks darkened under his tan, but he didn’t back down.

  “Do you know what she tells people about this place?” He gestured toward the house and barn and Aunt Hyacinth’s acres of herbs and plants, and even that managed to express contempt. “Why she won’t sell it and move to somewhere she can have a bigger farm and decent staff to help her?” He paused, and familiar dread curdled in my stomach in the beat before he made his point. “Her dead husband doesn’t want her to.”

  I knew where this was going, had to keep my head and try to steer away from the shoals. “So she’s sentimental about his wishes,” I said. “Just because some people have a heart—”

  His snort ratcheted up my blood pressure, nearly drowning out the cautioning voice in my head. “She says his ghost won’t let her sell. She talks about him like he’s still living here.”

  “So?” I forced a careless shrug, as if this were the worst of our idiosyncrasies. “Lots of people believe in ghosts.”

  “I know.” Sarcasm gave way to real anger, like we were getting to the root of his personality malfunction. “A lot of people now believe there’s a ghost on our property, thanks to your aunt. As if we didn’t have enough problems.”

  “Everyone’s got problems.” That didn’t excuse his calling my aunt a nutcase. “I fail to see how your ghost is Aunt Hyacinth’s fault.”

  “It’s totally her fault!” He ticked off the reasons on his fingers, a pompous move that infuriated me even more. “She fed the flames of these idiotic ghost rumors, which only started because we had to build a bridge, which we had to do because she won’t sell her land, and she won’t give us an easement across her back acreage to cross the river there because it messes with the feng shui of her herb farm or something.”

  “That’s ridiculous.” I shook my head, my ponytail swinging. Something had short-circuited my normal instinct of self-preservation. Maybe because we were here, on Goodnight property. Maybe because he’d made me so mad, I wanted to return the favor, and channeled Phin at her most aggravating. “Aunt Hyacinth would never say that. She doesn’t practice feng shui. She’s a kitchen witch.”

  He opened his mouth, closed it, then scrubbed his hands up and down his face. When he dropped them, his gaze had turned scathing.

  “I should have known.” He looked me over, and I felt myself flush from head to toe. “From the moment I saw you standing out in the field in your underwear and gum boots, screaming at my cow, I should have known the whole family was crazier than a sack of weasels.”

  This was something I’d said more than once. Not the underwear thing, the crazy part. And they were crazy, not because they were psychics and potion makers and ghost whisperers, but because they couldn’t pretend to be normal. They drove me crazy, too. But they were my family. Only I was allowed to call them nuts, not this stranger who didn’t even know me. Us, I mean.

  “Look, you.” Anger burned off my facade of calm, and I poked my finger at his chest, near but not quite touching, because he was bigger than me and I was new at this. I didn’t yell at people. I was snide, sometimes bitchy, but I’d never gone rubber toe to cowboy boot with a guy and glared right into his steely blue eyes, so close I could see the darker blue flecks in the irises and feel the heat of his—wow, really nicely muscled—chest through his thin undershirt. Not just in my jabbing finger but my whole body, the parts of me that were covered and the parts of me that weren’t.

  Damn.

  Focus, Amy. He might not be an axe murderer, but he was definitely an asshole.

  “I don’t care who you are,” I said, pushing aside all those distractions. “If Aunt Hyacinth won’t sell to you, it’s for a good reason. Maybe it’s
because this ‘us’ you speak of are all as nasty as you.”

  “Is that so?” He hooked his thumbs in his belt and shifted his weight so that somehow, without really moving, he was suddenly looming over me, as if he could tell how much that bothered me. I didn’t budge, just set my teeth against the urge to either step back or kick him in the shin. “Since I’m so nasty,” he drawled, “next time I’ll just leave you to round up your goats alone.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” I snapped, “because I’m going to chop down that blasted tree.”

  “Tree?” His brows shot down in confusion. “What the hell are you going on about now?”

  “The goats!” I said, like he was an idiot.

  If possible, he scowled even more deeply. “What does the tree have to do with it?”

  “The fence!” I flapped a hand toward the pen, losing the battle for simple coherence. “They climb the tree and go over the fence.”

  He eased his weight back and peered down his nose at me. “You have some very strange ideas about livestock.”

  “Oh my God.” I dug my dirty fingers into my hair. “Why are we talking about my stupid goats at all?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, more infuriatingly calm the angrier I got. “I just thought maybe you wanted to say thank you for helping you round them up.”

  Despite the frustration burning my ears, I still felt a rush of shamed heat. Gritting my teeth, I forced a chill into my tone to hide that last degree of mortification. “Thank you,” I choked, “for rounding up my goats …”

  I trailed off where I would have coldly put his name, if I’d known it. Downright smug at my forced gratitude, he supplied the belated introduction. “Ben.” He neglected to offer a handshake. “Ben McCulloch.”

  “Great, now round up your cows and get off the Goodnight property, Ben McCulloch.”

  His fingers tightened on his belt, self-satisfaction vanishing. “Fine. And you just keep away from McCulloch property, Underwear Girl.”