Lucky In Love Read Free Page A

Lord, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. Now why would you shoot at him?”
    “Because he made me mad. He yelled at me.”
    “He’s one of your Poppy’s best friends. He used to visit Alice in the summertime. Surely you met him at a barn dance or something when you come back here to visit?”
    She tugged off her socks. “Nope, I did not. I didn’t even know he was kin to Alice until right now.”
    “Maybe you better get in your truck and drive over there and make things right,” Mary suggested.
    “Me? I didn’t do nothing. It was his stupid bull in our pasture, and he started the fight, yelling at me like some kind of idiot. Come through that cut fence like somebody died and made him God. Called me a bitch, even,” Milli said.
    “Have it your way.”
    Something wasn’t right. Mary felt as if she was looking at the pieces to a jigsaw puzzle and had no idea where to start fitting them together. There had been questions Milli would never answer, not when all three of her brothers pitched a fit that could be heard all the way from Amarillo to southern Oklahoma. Not even when her mother threatened to throw her out on her ear if she didn’t tell them who the baby’s father was. Mary didn’t know the details, but the first piece of the puzzle glowed brightly.
    Milli knew Beau, and that was the corner piece to the whole puzzle.
    “Where’s Katy?” Milli asked. She padded across the room in her bare feet, untucking a blue chambray shirt to let it fall on the outside of faded blue jeans that fit her so tightly she looked as though she’d been melted and poured into them. Mary remembered a time many years before when she filled out a pair of jeans like that: when all the male eyes in a room followed her as she walked across a room. Milli might look like her mother, but she was sure built like Mary had been at twenty-three: full bosom, tiny waist, rounded hips. Evidently Beau really had let his temper get ahead of his hormones if he yelled at her, instead of admiring all the curves under her jeans and shirt.
    “Katy is entertaining your Poppy. I put her in the playpen and she’s been throwing her toys out over the top. He picks them up with his cane and tosses them back inside. It’s a good game for both of them,” Mary answered.
    Milli headed for the den, where a hospital bed and lift chair had been installed for her grandfather when he came home from the hospital, and where he ruled the ranch with an iron fist even yet. At least Mary let him think he was king of the Lazy Z. Mary had as much of the ranch sense in the Torres family as her husband. They worked as a team and she was wise enough to let Jim wear the crown.
    A pretty little toddler with a head full of gorgeous blonde curls looked up and squealed, “Mommy! Ride, peas?”
    The baby raised her chubby little arms. Milli picked her up, squeezing her tightly to her chest. She talked fast to hide the quiver in her voice and the tears welling in her eyes. “We’ll go for a ride later, Katy Scarlett. Have you been taking good care of Poppy while Momma’s been out checking the cows?”
    Katy wiggled down into her mother’s embrace and giggled.
    “Course she’s been taking care of me,” Jim said from his recliner. “Best nurse a Poppy could have. If she wants to ride, then take an hour and go ride with her. We have to encourage her to keep her a cowgirl.”
    A smile lit his weathered brown face and his soft brown eyes glittered as he watched his only granddaughter. He enjoyed having them both at the ranch so much that he’d begun thinking in terms of healing slower so they wouldn’t go home at the end of the summer Perhaps he could offer to build them a home of their own. Give Milli a hundred acres or so and bring her herd of cows out from west Texas. The ranch needed the laughter of a child again, and Katy fit the bill just right.
    “Poppy, that’s all I hear: ‘Ride, peas.’ She’d keep me on a horse twenty-four seven if I’d let her. She loves to