Page 18 of Soldier Cowboy
“Well, now, Colton, sweetheart.” Beulah shook her head. “I sure do thank you for bringing along your fiancée but hopefully you’re not getting married too soon. Because we’re not quite ready for her.”
“You should have called ahead,” Maybelle said, nodding.
Calledahead?
Not quiteready?
Jennifer glanced at Colton, but he just shrugged. “Not anytime soon, so don’t worry, but we can pass on the quilt. Right, honey?”
“Um…uh sure.”
Quilt?
“You will most certainly not pass on the marriage quilt, young man!” Beulah shook a finger. “That’s bad luck.”
Wait. What?Marriagequilt? This felt like theTwilight Zone. As if she’d stepped into an alternate reality and time traveled back to the Old West.
“Miss Beulah, please don’t scare Jennifer off with your old-school traditions. She’s a modern woman,” Colton said.
“And mynieceisn’t a modern woman? We’re still putting the finishing touches on Bonnie’s quilt. Then we can move forward with Jennifer’s so it’s ready for your wedding, whenever that may be. We will call in reinforcements if needed.”
“You make it sound like you’ll rally the troops.” Colton skimmed his hand low on her back and it felt…kind of nice.
“That’s exactly what we’ll do. I just make one phone call to the top of the phone tree, Anne Abernathy? And then it just goes on down the line until we get to Helen Zelinski.” She turned to Jennifer. “We make marriage quilts for all the brides in town. You’ll have your own marriage quilt someday, sugar, handmade by the Ladies of S.O.R.R.O.W.”
“It isn’t as weird as it sounds.” Bonnie laughed. “These women head up the Society of Reasonable, Respectable, Orderly Women. Also, thatsoundsa lot worse than it is. Think of it as a club that does good works and most of them are for women’s causes. They’re kind of like the junior league, but Stone Ridge style.”
Jennifer’s mother had been a junior league member, so she understood a little something about this and wasn’t sure she’d like it much. Part of the appeal of staying single had been avoiding all the wedding hoopla her aunt Betty and her friends would put her through. Tea parties and cocktails parties. After all, Jennifer was to have married a career military man and proceeded to pop out children one right after the other, supporting her husband as he possibly ran for office. No,thanks.
If anything like that was expected of her here, she’d have to pretend to be ill for weeks.
There wasnothing quite like a big breakfast on the Henderson ranch. Even if Colton was so tired he might soon need toothpicks to hold up his eyelids, he ate a little bit of everything. With everyone bringing a dish or two, Bonnie served a breakfast worthy of Delores’s best spreads. Hash brown casserole, bacon, green beans, fried okra, apple bread and southern cheese grits.
He hadn’t eaten this well in years. No wonder Riggs had called him skinny. He hadn’t hugged him like Sean had, but he also hadn’t yelled at him. So, he’d count that as a win. Riggs had always expected a lot out of both him and Sean. When their parents died, they’d been left acres upon acres of land in Hill Country. Maybe, biologically, they weren’t Hendersons, but that hadn’t mattered to Cal and Marge, who’d left them everything they owned. A few cousins on Cal’s side hadn’t liked the idea much, but there’d been nothing they could do about it.
Riggs’s position was that the brothers could never lose this land, not a square inch of it. He’d gone to law school to protect his adopted family’s heritage, specializing in contract law. And he wasn’t wholly convinced that Colton had the same kind of passion for the land Riggs did. Colton would just have to prove himself to Riggs. Prove to him he was settled and staying. Just because he’d let another cause come before his family for a time, this didn’t mean that he wasn’t ready now, to do what he had to do. Tokeepthis Henderson land for generations to come. For little Cal, Joey, and Mary. For the kids he assumed Sean and Bonnie would have soon.
And for his own children, someday, even if that seemed light-years away.
Conversations around the table ranged from the hideous billboard the production company still hadn’t taken down to all the new cabins the Stephens family was building around Lake Lupine.
“It’s an economic boom,” Beulah insisted, since apparently, she held most of the blame for all this progress.
“Seems like Beau Stephens and his family’s construction company is getting the most out of all this.” Riggs scowled.
“Unless you want to count all our single cowboys.” Beulah sniffed.
Yet another reason Colton was glad for this charade with Jennifer. If not, Beulah would be trying to marry him off.
“They can’t build those cabins fast enough,” Winona said, balancing Mary on her lap while she tried to eat.
“Jackson isn’t doing too badly, either, with the Shady Grind,” Sean said.
“And we have a school for the first time in decades,” Bonnie said.
“And don’t forget the new medical clinic!” Beulah stated triumphantly.
“Did all these people move here for you, Winona?” Colton said, knowing that his beautiful sister-in-law had quite a fan base.
