Cowboy Ever After

“Sex?” The word came out high-pitched, like a squeak. “Who said anything about sex?”

“You did,” Joslyn replied with good-humored certainty. “Oh, not in so many words. But you’re feeling a little jealous, aren’t you? Because you have some scenario in your head of Hutch defending Brylee’s honor at the Boot Scoot Tavern?”

“I wouldn’t call it...jealousy,” Kendra finally replied, her tone tentative.

“Okay,” Joslyn agreed sunnily. “What would you call it?”

“You’re no help at all,” Kendra accused, further deflated, but smiling now. Talking to Joslyn always made her feel better, even when nothing was really resolved.

“Let’s do lunch in a couple of days,” Joslyn said, “after Mom goes back to Santa Fe and things return to normal around here. Maybe Tara can join us.”

Still feeling like an idiot, Kendra replied that she’d enjoy a girlfriend lunch, said goodbye and hung up.

She spent the morning noodling around on her computer, carefully avoiding the “Down With Hutch Carmody” webpage, along with the temptation to add a thing or two, and answered a grand total of two inquiries by phone.

By ten forty-five, she felt so restless that she set the business phone to forward any calls to her cell, locked up the office and drove out to Tara’s chicken ranch, intending to pick up Daisy and go home. Madison still had a couple of hours to go at preschool, which she was starting to enjoy, and Kendra didn’t want to disrupt the flow by taking her out early.

Tara was outside when Kendra pulled into her rutted dirt driveway, wearing red coveralls and wielding a shovel. Daisy and Lucy frolicked happily nearby, playing catch-tumble-roll with each other.

“Don’t tell me,” Tara chimed mischievously, approaching Kendra’s car on the driver’s side. “You’re here to help me clean out the chicken coop! What a true friend you are, Kendra Shepherd.”

Kendra laughed. “You wish,” she said. It was a relief to stop thinking about Hutch Carmody and sex for a while. They were two separate subjects, of course, but she hadn’t been able to untangle one from the other since her phone conversation with Joslyn.

“Then what are you doing here?” Tara asked, looking like half of “American Gothic,” except young and pretty instead of severe.

“Can’t I visit a friend?” Kendra bantered back, pushing open the door and stepping somewhat gingerly into the muck of the barnyard. She wished she’d swapped out her Manolos for a pair of gum boots before leaving town.

Not that she actually owned gum boots.

Tara laughed at Kendra’s mincing steps, pointed out a relatively clean pathway nearby and paused to lean her shovel against the wall of the chicken coop before following Kendra toward the old farmhouse she’d been refurbishing over the past year.

The woman was the very personification of incongruity, to Kendra’s mind, with her model’s face and figure and those ridiculous coveralls.

They settled in chairs on Tara’s porch, since the weather was so nice and the dogs seemed to be having such a fine time dashing around in the grass, two flashes of happy gold, busy being puppies.

Once seated, Tara nodded in the direction of Boone Taylor’s place, which neighbored hers. “He’s finally cleaning up over there,” she said in a tone that struck Kendra as oddly pensive. “I wonder why.”

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