Page 26 of The Cowboy's Forbidden Bride

Cat looked around the rooms again, all cleared out and waiting to become a waiting room, exam rooms, and the like. What she personally knew about medicine was that she’d never liked getting a shot. She was a Lisle and Lisles stayed on Lisle Hill or left Cowboy Point altogether—they didn’t go and find other things to do.

And yet here she was.

Because she’d liked Ramona immediately. And it felt good here, in this revamped old house that spoke of history but promised a better future.

Maybe she over-related to that, too.

Or maybe she’d discovered her true feelings just lately, and now she felt duty-bound to let them lead her.

“I have an idea,” Cat said after a moment. “I’m going to work for you for a week, for free. I’m going to organize your office—but not your home, if that’s all the same to you—and at the end of the week we can see how we feel about the potential of working together. What do you think?”

“I think that it’s nothing short of a miracle that you were getting pizza at the same time that I was, and I’m in,” Ramona said, and they shook hands on it. “Tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow,” Cat agreed.

And she took her time walking back to the store, feeling pretty pleased with herself. She stopped to play with Matilda Stark’s usual collection of strays, all rolling around in puppy splendor in the back of her friend’s antique red pickup. When she got back to the store she was grinning ear to ear, but both of her brothers were standing behind the counter, glowering at each other.

Though when she walked up to the counter, they shifted all that glowering to her.

“Where have you been?” Dallas asked, in his typically surly way.

“That’s none of your business,” she replied cheerfully. She ducked past him and ignored Tennessee, too, as she walked over to the schedule that hung on the wall. “We’re going to have to rearrange some shifts.”

“We don’t rearrange shifts,” Tennessee said immediately.

“Why?” Dallas asked, looking at her more closely. “You going somewhere?”

“First of all,” Cat said, turning to her oldest brother, “I’m going to need you to stop acting like you’re managing a roster of twelve hundred employees with competing scheduling nightmares you have to juggle. You work at the diner. Mom and I work here. No one knows what Dallas does, I grant you.”

“Hey,” Dallas protested. “Iknow what I do.”

“Second,” she continued, “if I tell you that I’m taking a week off, I’m taking a week off. Whether you cover my shifts or not. Just so we’re clear, this isourstore, not yours.” She looked at Dallas. “Maybe I am going somewhere. Maybe I decided to take a page out of your book and do whatever the hell I want, as secretively as possible.”

Cat didn’t often get mouthy with her brothers. Not because she was afraid of them. She didn’t like it that Wilder had suggested that and she had been stewing on it ever since he had.

But the truth was, there really wasn’t anything to argue about, because usually everything was always the same here. Tennessee probably was controlling, but then, they all did the same things every day anyway. Whether he controlled them or not. Did he still take his supposed parental role too seriously? Sure he did.

She usually went along with it. Because most of the time she was fine with that.

Just as most of the time, she didn’t pay the slightest bit of attention to what Dallas was or was not doing with the span of his days. She figured he’d earned the right to do nothing, for no one, after his stint in the service.

“What?” she asked breezily without looking up as she slid onto the stool behind the counter. “Don’t stare at me. It’s rude.”

“Are you going to explain herself?” Tennessee asked.

She swiveled and looked at them, both of them with expressions on their faces as if she’d come in throwing punches and shouting insults. And it was interesting, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t describe herself asafraidof them. She wasn’t.

But she certainly didn’t put that to the test often.

“The new doctor has asked me to consider managing her office,” she relented enough to tell them. “So I’m doing a week’s trial run over there, mostly to see if we’ll get along in close quarters like that.”

Both of her brothers stared at her with such total and complete incomprehension, that she felt her little-accessed temper bubbling up inside of her. She knew they loved her. She loved them too. They were all they’d had, with a father who was always somewhere else and when he wasn’t, liked to make their mother cry.

What she did not love was the fact that they clearly couldn’t imagine that she could ever do anything but exactly this. Sitting in the family store, ringing up cans of corn and bags of chips.

For some reason, today, she was incensed.

“What did you think? That I was running off to elope?” She laughed when her brothers stared back at her with identical thunderstruck expressions. “Too bad that Kendall got to it first. I might have answered Harlan Carey’s ad myself.”

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