Page 10 of A Cowboy's Convenient Marriage

They finished the meal with Aunt Karen chatting about different things that had happened in town, relaying gossip and whatnot, and he listened with half an ear. He perked up a little when she started talking about a couple of things at the church, but it was just a habitual reaction. It wasn’t that he was necessarily more interested. Although, he supposed he was. There was just something in him that was programmed to care about the church.

He thought about how busy and crowded the church in Sweet Water was. It wasn’t anything like his two-thousand-member church back in Virginia, but they had several hundred people, although his aunt had explained to him that more than fifty of those people were from the same family who had moved in five or ten years prior. They’d mostly all married, and every one of them seemed to be trying to have a family as big as the one they came from, according to his aunt.

The few members of the Clybourn family that he met and spoke with had seemed like really decent people. A little out of the ordinary.

But typically the best Christians were a little out of the ordinary. After all, God said that His people would be a peculiar people. They were supposed to come out from the world and be separate from it. They weren’t supposed to look like the world, and he supposed that would make them a little out of the ordinary.

Chapter 5

Cash stood in frontof Kendra Whitmore’s front door, knocking with a few short raps before he shoved his hands in his pockets.

He had never done anything like this in his life before, and it wasn’t feeling right now. In fact, he had the definite feeling that he needed to turn around and walk away. But that could be him just chickening out, and he wasn’t going to allow himself to do that. One billion dollars was no small thing, and if getting married was all he had to do in order to get it, he was at least going to make the effort.

There was some shuffling, a little bit of yelling, then suddenly a child started to scream.

Almost as abruptly, the screaming stopped. Not long after that, a woman, her hair askew, her T-shirt stained and worn although still skintight, wearing skintight black pants along with a pair of socks with one big toe sticking out of a hole of the one on the left, opened the door.

“Yes?”

“I believe you spoke with my aunt. She called an hour ago to let you know that I was coming.”

“Oh. Of course. Cash Johnson?” the woman said, as though she wasn’t sure of his name.

Cash nodded.

“You can come in. I did try to clean up a little, and I have my hired girl helping me with the children. It just took us a bit to get them out of the room.” She spoke as she opened the door wider, slowly, as though she were waiting for the last of the kids to disappear.

“You have three?” The way she was talking made it sound like she had a whole lot more than that.

“That’s correct. All under the age of six. It’s quite a handful,” she said, like raising small children was hard work, which he knew it was. Although if they were properly guided and disciplined, it wasn’t as hard.

He tried to curtail that thinking. What did he know about that? He hadn’t raised any children at all, although he certainly spent his share of time around them with various church activities and with teaching Sunday school and junior church from the time he was a teen.

Kendra led him through the living room, which was strewn with toys, although it did look like someone had made a bit of an effort to tidy things up. The TV was on but muted. It was some kind of children’s program from the look of it.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll just take you right into the kitchen, and I’ll make you a cup of coffee.”

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