He shut his eyes and let his chin drop enough that Jill would think he was dozing, and replayed the night before in slow motion. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, and looking back, it wasn’t probably the best of ideas for them to have sex after knowing each other only a few weeks. But he’d be a complete jerk to tell her that they shouldn’t let it happen again because they worked together, because they were such good friends, because they lived in the same bunkhouse. Besides, he didn’t want to tell her that, because he wanted it to happen again, and the sooner the better.
In all of his thirty years, no one had ever made Sawyer feel the way Jill did. The chemistry was so hot and so real that it couldn’t be genuine. It might be a flash in the pan that would burn itself out quickly, but he didn’t want to miss a moment of the heat.
Jill shoved a knee against his, and he sat up straight, eyes wide open.
“Is it over?” he asked.
“No,” she whispered. “The preacher isn’t even winding down. I didn’t want you to start snoring.”
“Finn asked us all to dinner. Got a problem with that?”
She shook her head. “I’d love to spend the afternoon with them, long as we can go home in time to catch a nap.”
The preacher’s gaze started on the Brennan side of the church and moved across the center section to the Gallagher side. “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord!” He raised his voice as he leaned closer to the microphone.
“Amen,” an old-timer yelled from the back of the church.
“There comes a time to let go of the past and move toward a bright new future,” he whispered.
Finn’s newly adopted son Ricky asked a little too loud, “What’s wrong with him, Granny Verdie? Is he yelling to wake us all up and then talking all soft to make us pay attention?”
Verdie nodded. “Something like that.”
* * *
Jill clamped her teeth shut to stifle the giggle. Out of the mouths of babes, she thought. Those kids were so cute all lined up on the pew. Finn sat on the end with Callie next to him, and then the kids, starting with Martin and ending with Sally, who sat right beside Verdie. Looking at them, no one would ever believe they hadn’t been a family since the children were born.
Callie and Finn had to have big hearts to take on the raising of four children and to let Verdie move in with them too. Jill examined her own heart and came up short. She wanted kids, but she wanted them to be her own. She glanced up at Sawyer, who was smiling at the comment too. He’d make a wonderful father.
Whoa, woman! One night of wild sex doesn’t give you the right to start thinking about babies with him.
She made herself concentrate on the kids sitting in front of her. She’d been to enough church services also to recognize the preacher’s tactics, and she wouldn’t want to be up there behind that pulpit. No, sir! With a congregation split into three parts, it couldn’t be easy to attempt to unify them, not even with scripture. And especially not when the two major factions had refused his offer of help that week.
In an attempt to keep her carnal thoughts at bay, she glanced across the room toward the Gallaghers’ side to see Naomi staring straight past her. She followed Naomi’s gaze to Mavis, who was firing daggers across the church. Evidently God did not hold the copyright on vengeance.
“When we forgive others, it brings peace to our own lives as much as it gives them peace for their wrongdoings,” the preacher said.
Forgiveness was not anywhere in the near future. It would take a lot more than a strong Sunday morning sermon for that to happen.
As long as they didn’t mess with her or with Sawyer anymore, it wasn’t her problem, so she wasn’t going to worry about it.
* * *
Sawyer’s phone made a buzzing noise that said a text was coming through, but he ignored it. It was probably his sister, Martina. She and her family attended a church that started earlier and ended before the customary twelve o’clock.
He loved his family, even his bossy sister and overprotective brothers. He’d really like to take Jill to Comfort to meet them, but to drive that far and back in one day wouldn’t work. They had promised to visit Fiddle Creek over Easter, so he could look forward to that. They would bring their RVs and park behind the bunkhouse, and he could show his brothers the ranch while his sister, his mother, and his brothers’ wives got to know Jill better.
You take your woman home to meet the mama only if things are getting serious, that smart-ass voice in his head said. And it might be a good thing to tell Jill that they are planning to visit. That means tell her before the weekend they are arriving.
Sawyer nodded when everyone around him was shaking their heads. Jill poked him on the thigh. “Are you listening to the preacher?”
He shook his head.
“It looked like you were disagreeing with the Bible, nodding like that,” she said.
“I was thinking about something else,” he admitted.
She blushed.
“Evidently you were too.”
The blush deepened, and his hand dropped from the back of the pew to her shoulder. He squeezed and leaned over to say softly, “After lunch with Finn and Callie, want a repeat of last night?”
She didn’t nod, but then she didn’t shake her head, but the slight upturn to her full mouth was a yes in his books.
The preacher wound down, making his final plea in veiled words to both families that the feud would consume them if they didn’t make peace. Sawyer didn’t see either side softening up a bit.
Jill suddenly jerked her cell phone from her purse, which was sitting on the floor right beside her foot. She read the text message, tapped Sawyer on the shoulder, and said, “We’ve got to go right now.”
Sawyer’s blood turned to ice. The only reason a person left the church was if a catastrophe had occurred. “Is it Polly?”
“No, but it was Aunt Gladys. She’ll meet us at the store. There’s a problem on the ranch.”
The congregation stopped listening and stared at them as they left the church. When Sawyer opened the squeaky double doors, suddenly a whole sea of Gallaghers hurried outside behind them.
“Damned Brennans,” Betsy said. “They’ve cut the fences between Wild Horse and Fiddle Creek. Our cattle is all mixed up with Fiddle Creek’s cows again. We’ve got to get this sorted out, or we’ll have mixed breeds on both ranches if they’ve let Granny’s Blonde d’Aquitaine in with your Angus.”
“Shit! I don’t want that breed mixed with our stock. They’ve messed with the wrong woman,” Jill declared.
If it was the truth that they’d involved her even more in this crappy pig-shit war, or if they used it as a ruse to try the kidnapping stunt again, she fully intended to join the war and wipe both families off the map. Now they’d spend the whole damned afternoon sorting out cattle, when she could be over on Salt Draw, having dinner with Callie and playing with those kids.
Gladys was fuming by the time they reached the ranch, cussing like a veteran sailor as she showed them the area where more than two hundred head of Wild Horse cattle roamed over a field of sprouting winter wheat. If it hadn’t been for the difference in the brands on the hips of the black cows, they wouldn’t have been able to tell them apart.
Betsy frowned and yelled at Tyrell. “Someone got it wrong. This isn’t our Blonde d’Aquitaine herd. This is just our regular Angus stock.”
“What are you doing with that breed?” Sawyer asked.
“It’s something Granny wanted to try. But these are our regular Angus cows. Not even a bull amongst them. It won’t take long to get them sorted out, and then we’ll take all three of you over to Wild Horse for dinner,” Betsy said.
Gladys checked the barbed wire. Yes, sir, it had been cut smooth right in the middle between the two metal fence posts. The Brennans had had her sympathies more than the Gallaghers down through the years, but now they’d lost every bit of it.
It took a lot longer than they thought it would. When the job was done and the fence fixed, it was well past two o’clock. Gladys refused to go to Wild Horse but did offer to take Jill and Sawyer down to Gainesville to a little café that made the best chicken-fried steak in North Texas.
“What about Polly?” Jill asked.
“She and Verdie decided to watch movies all afternoon. She’ll be fine,” Gladys said.
Chapter 21
While the Gallaghers were busy herding cattle and fixing fence on the south side of Wild Horse, four Brennan men simply opened the gate on Wild Horse Ranch, down next to the Red River and herded the light-colored, floppy-eared bull and his harem across the shallow stream and up over the bank on the Oklahoma side, where two cattle trucks waited.
The last cantankerous old heifer refused to get into the truck like her cohorts, so they shooed her back across the river and into the pasture before they shut the gate. Careful not to touch anything without gloves, they damn sure hoped the weatherman and the sky weren’t lying to them. They needed the driving, hard rain to wash away the hoofprints leading over into Oklahoma.
“Ready?” Russell Brennan asked when his nephew, Quaid, climbed up into the cab.
“Across to the bridge crossing back into Texas, through Gainesville, and to our destination. We should be there in an hour,” he answered.