Jake frowned mockingly. “Now why would you think that?” He leaned down to kiss her cheek, then grinned as he turned to walk back to his horse and mount up. He looked down at her. “Will you unlock that hotel room door for me?”
Randy folded her arms and raised her chin. “Maybe.”
“You might regret it.”
“Something tells me I will.”
He grinned more. “Woman, you don’t want to know what I’m thinking right now.” He rode back to the supply wagon to get his things, and Randy climbed back into the buggy.
“Mother, is he all right?”
Randy patted her knee. “Evie, you are the most gentle-hearted and forgiving young woman I’ve ever known. Like your father told you, you just worry about your husband and children and that baby you’re carrying. Right now Jake is just being…Jake. The most frustrating, confusing, self-depreciating, lonely man who ever walked.” She sighed. “I’ll straighten him out.”
“What did he say?”
“Nothing I haven’t heard before, but I know he always means it. Your father can be quite the romantic when he thinks it will soften me up, and it always does. Sometimes I just want to hug him and hit him at the same time.”
Evie smiled. “You can’t stay mad at him, can you?”
“Evie, I can’t stay mad at that man any more than I can stay mad at Stephen or Little Jake or Ben, which tells you how easily I see the sorry little boy in him sometimes. I don’t always know which one I’m dealing with—the boy, or the man.”
Brian climbed into the buggy seat. “Ladies, I am your official driver today.”
“Then I am sitting up front with you,” Evie told him, climbing down and then getting into the front seat. She grasped Brian’s arm and leaned in to kiss his cheek. “You will dance with me tomorrow night, won’t you?”
“Every single dance.”
Evie looked back at her mother. “And you’ll look for a yellow dress for the ball, won’t you, Mother? It’s Daddy’s favorite color.”
“Yes, dear, I will wear yellow.” Jake rode past them, headed for Denver. I’ll wear yellow, all right. Randy wanted to hold him. Sometimes she wondered if in all these years she had ever really reached the deeper man, the one who, in spite of all the love he enjoyed now and all the love he gave back, was still a loner, still…lonely…in a way no one would ever be able to comprehend.
Soon he was a small dot on the horizon, and for some reason she shivered and wanted to cry. After all these years, there were times when even she couldn’t penetrate that wall he’d built around his heart when he was a lonely little boy.
And that scared her more than anything.
Part Two
Sixteen
“Well, well, well, if it isn’t the infamous handsome outlaw.”
Jake turned from a mirror where he’d been adjusting the lapel of a new suit. He watched a beautiful, auburn-haired woman walk right through the curtained doorway to the clothing store’s dressing room without making sure first he was even dressed.
Jake grinned, holding his arms out to his sides. “What do you think? I hate dressing up, but I need something for the Cattlemen’s Ball tomorrow night. Will this do?”
The woman strutted closer and looked him over, walking in a circle around him. She stepped back then and sized him up with bedroom eyes. “I think a man like you could wear a simple farmer’s cotton pants and have dirty hands and need a shave and a haircut and still make a woman…uncomfortable. Even more uncomfortable if you didn’t have a shirt on. Why don’t you take that one off so I can better judge?”
Jake chuckled. “Well, ma’am, underneath this shirt is an undershirt, and that stays on.” He guessed the woman to be perhaps thirty—a hard thirty years at that, but still beautiful.
“Yeah, well, according to that book about you, women like me raised you, so before you got married, I expect plenty of women saw that great body without a shirt. And something tells me you learned about the facts of life at a very young age.” She held his gaze. “And my God, you have a smile that could melt a woman right down to the boardwalk.”
Jake folded his arms, scrutinizing the blue eyes with lines about them. Her still-trim figure showed full breasts that mushroomed from the low-cut neckline of a blue taffeta dress with ruffles in all the right places. She wore tiny diamond earrings and a feathered hat that matched the dress. “Let me guess,” he told her. “Gretta MacBain?”
She nodded. “And how do you know my name?”
Jake removed the suit coat, hanging it on a hook. “Oh, I know your kind very well, and from the way some of my men have described you, I just figured you had to be Gretta.”