Smooth-Talking Cowboy

“Well, why didn’t you say so? Do you have a spare tire?”

“Yes,” she said impatiently.

“I’ll tell you what. I’ll drive you down to work, and then when I head back this way I’ll fix your tire.”

She frowned, suspicious at the friendliness. “Why would you do that?”

“Because I’m going that way anyway,” he said. “You still work at the winery?”

She nodded. Grassroots Winery sat in between the towns of Copper Ridge and Gold Valley, and Olivia worked predominantly in the dining room at the winery itself. It wasn’t, she supposed, the most ambitious job, which usually didn’t bother her. She liked the ambience of the place, and she enjoyed the work itself. But she had always assumed that she would marry a rancher and help him work his land. Make a home for them. The way her parents had done. That seemed silly now that she was single, and there was no rancher in her future.

She had been sure that by now Bennett would have come back to her. Was sure that breaking up with him would make him realize that he had to commit or he could lose her.

Except he seemed all right with losing her. And that was terrible, because she was not all right with losing him.

With losing that vision of her future that she had held on to for so long.

“How will I get home?” she asked.

“I could help you out with that, too, but I’ll have your car in working order by then.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being nice to me?”

That wicked grin of his broadened. “I’m always nice.”

She let out an exasperated sound and clicked the lock button on her key fob before climbing into the passenger side of his truck. She struggled to get in because of her skirt and nylons, but finally shut the massive, heavy door behind her.

“Thank you,” she said, knowing she sounded ridiculously prim and not really able to do anything about it. She was prim.

She grabbed hold of the seat belt, then pulled it forward, having to wiggle it slightly to get it to click. His truck was a hazard. She straightened, held tightly to her handbag and stared straight ahead.

“You’re welcome,” he said, stretching his arm over the back of the bench seat. His other forearm rested casually over the steering wheel. His cowboy hat was pushed back on his head, shirtsleeves pushed up past his elbows, forearms streaked with dirt as if he had already been working today. Which meant that he had likely been out at Get Out of Dodge before driving down toward town. She wondered if he had seen Bennett.

“Were you out at the Dodge place today?” She tried to ask casually.

“You want to know if I saw your boyfriend,” Luke said. Not a question. A statement. Like he knew her.

And this, in a nutshell, was why she didn’t really like Luke. He had a nasty habit of saying the one thing that she wished he wouldn’t. With a kind of unerring consistency that made her suspect he did it on purpose.

“He’s not my boyfriend. Not anymore.”

“Still. You’re wondering about him.”

“Of course I wonder about him. I dated Bennett for a year. I’m not going to just...not wonder about him suddenly.”

“I expect, Olivia, that you could go down to Get Out of Dodge on your own pretty feet and find out how he’s doing for yourself if you had half a mind to.”

Olivia cleared her throat and looked at Luke meaningfully. Which he seemed to miss entirely. “I don’t know that I would be welcome,” she said, finally.

“Come on. It’s been at least...six months since Wyatt has run anyone off the property with a shotgun.”

Olivia sighed. “You’re a pain—do you know that?”

“Now, is that any way to talk to your roadside savior?”

“Normally, I would agree, but I suspect that you’re trying to irritate me on purpose. Otherwise, you would have just answered my question.” She settled back into the bench seat, looking down at the floor mats that were encrusted in mud. She had no idea why Luke had mats on the floor of his truck at all. It seemed ridiculous when the whole thing was covered in a fine layer of dust and small bits of hay.

She felt woeful on behalf of her black pencil skirt.

“You caught me,” he said, sounding not at all contrite. “I am absolutely trying to irritate you. I would say that I’m succeeding, too. You do know how to make a man feel accomplished, Olivia.”

“And you know how to make a woman feel feral, Luke.”

“You and I both know you’ve never felt feral a day in your life, honey.”

She wanted to argue with him. Except he had a point. But she was not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that. Instead, she sniffed and looked out the window as they crossed into the town’s city limits and drove down Main Street.

The redbrick gold rush era buildings that lined the streets were picturesque, and whenever her friends from college came in from out of town they commented on them. To her they were simply buildings, rather than charming relics that looked as though they could have come out of an Old West movie. To her, having lived in Gold Valley her entire life, it was home.

Sometimes she wondered what it would be like to see the town for the first time. With fresh eyes. To see it as something unique, rather than something that simply was.

The Logan family, founders of Logan County, had been the first settlers in the area, after coming from the East Coast on the Oregon Trail.

As they paused at the four-way stop she took a moment to look at the faded, painted advertisement on the side of Gold Valley Saloon. She couldn’t quite make out what it said, and it was one of those things she had never really bothered to try to do, because it was something else that was simply there.

It was early in the day so the saloon sign—the only lighted sign allowed on Main Street, and only because it was a classic neon sign that had first been put up in the 1950s—wasn’t turned on at such an early hour, and there was a large Closed sign propped up in the window. In fact, most of the businesses on Main were closed at this hour.

The coffeehouses were open already—three of them all within walking distance of each other—because if there was one thing Oregonians liked more than craft beer or wine, it was definitely coffee. The little greasy spoon café that had been there since the middle of the last century was probably packed full of people getting their daily hash browns and bacon.

They started driving again and that cut off her ruminations as they headed out of town and down the highway toward the winery.

“What business do you have down this far?” she asked.

“I was headed down to Tolowa to hit up the Fred Meyer. Got to grab a few things.”

That was Luke. A man of few words until he wasn’t, and then they were annoying ones.

“I see,” she said.

“I didn’t see Bennett this morning,” he added. “Since you were wondering.”

“Right. Well.” And that made her wonder if he had been there. Or if he had spent the night somewhere else—which made her stomach feel like acid. All things considered, Bennett was probably happy that she had cut him loose. She of the self-inflicted metaphorical chastity belt, who had been making him wait to be intimate until he had proposed to her.

But now he was free.

She sniffed again.

She and Luke lapsed into silence as they continued down the winding road. Finally, Luke turned off the main road and onto the long, dirt drive that led up to the winery.