Her Small-Town Hero. Arlene James
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and forth and screeching from time to time. As he answered her, Holt couldn’t help smiling at the sounds of a little one at play. “Roughnecks. I run a crew of roughnecks. Two crews, actually, and three rigs.”
“Oh.” She kept her gaze trained on the tax form in front of her. “I remember you saying something about being a roughneck last night.”
He suspected that she didn’t have the faintest idea what a roughneck was. “I don’t usually work as a motel maid,” he told her drily. “I’m a wildcatter.”
This time she did look up. “Wildcatter?”
He leaned forward slightly. “A driller. For oil.”
Comprehension finally dawned. “Oh!”
Holt frowned. Wouldn’t a girl who grew up in Oklahoma know something about the oil business?
Eyes narrowed, Holt pointed to the signature line. “Just sign here. Then I’ll need a copy of your Social Security card and driver’s license.”
She signed on the appropriate line and pulled her wallet from the diaper bag at her feet.
“So you don’t actually work for your grandfather at all,” she said, handing over the laminated cards.
Holt inclined his head. “Just helping out since my sister married. Well, before that, really. Since they got engaged at Thanksgiving. They didn’t marry until December seventh.”
“That’s not much of an engagement,” Cara Jane commented wryly, pushing back the desk chair and leaning forward to reach for Ace.
“Two whole weeks,” Holt supplied, carrying her license and Social Security cards to the scanner.
She straightened, pulling Ace up onto her lap. “Goodness. I was engaged for two years.”
Holt punched a button and looked at her as she stood, swinging the boy onto her hip. “Didn’t you say you married at eighteen?”
“That’s right.”
He gaped. “Your parents let you get engaged at sixteen?”
Her gaze met his briefly. “Let me? I doubt they even noticed.” She poked the boy in the chest with one fingertip, saying, “Don’t you go getting any ideas, dude. You’re going to college before you get married, just like your daddy.”
Holt latched onto that tidbit of information. “So your husband had a degree?”
She glanced at him, wary now, and Holt could see her trying to decide what to tell him. Finally, she said, “He was a lawyer.”
A lawyer? Holt thought of those two lightweight suitcases he’d carried into her room and the eight-year-old car from which he’d taken them. He put that together with her reaction and came up with…more questions.
“I thought lawyers usually made a pretty good living.”
“So did I,” she said.
Rubbing his prickly chin, Holt pondered this bit of information, remembering that she’d said her husband hadn’t wanted her to work, even though they’d been married at least six years, by Holt’s reckoning, before Ace’s birth. Holt filed that away, allowing her to change the subject as he retrieved her identity documents.
“So,” she said, a bit too brightly, as he handed them over, “you’re not employed here, but I take it you live here.”
“Here at the motel?” He shook his head. “Naw, I have a little place of my own, a ranch east of town.”
“I see.” Her expression changed not a whit, but relief literally radiated off her. “I guess that means you’re, like, married.”
Folding his arms, Holt asked, “Why would you think that?”
She lifted a shoulder, using both hands to anchor Ace on the opposite hip. “I don’t know. Seemed like a reasonable conclusion for a man your age.”
“What’s my age got to do with anything? If you’re thirty-six you must be married?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, I’m not married,” he told her, feeling rather indignant about her assumption, “which means I happen to be around here a lot. Every day, in fact.”
She nodded at that, inching away. “Oh. I guess I’ll be seeing you around then.”
“Count on it,” he told her, watching her snag the diaper bag then leave the room.
Even with the boy perched on her hip, she walked with a decidedly feminine stride. Holt shook his head, disgusted with himself.
A dead lawyer for a husband, engaged at sixteen, hadn’t worked since high school, assumptions and secrets, and enticing, and he couldn’t keep his gaze off her. Without a doubt, that woman was trouble walking. He just hadn’t figured out exactly how yet. But he would. Oh, yes, he would.
Cara straightened, her arms full of rumpled linens, which she stuffed into the bag on the end of the cleaning cart. She took one more swipe at the newly made bed and hurried out to check on her napping son.
The backpack allowed her to tote him much of the time, but the thing became problematic when it came to certain chores, so she’d taken to hauling the crib from room to room with the cleaning cart. The portable baby bed resembled a playpen more closely than a conventional crib, anyway, and despite the cumbersome process, having her son within sight comforted Cara.
Unfortunately, she had no choice but to take the crib into the apartment at nap time and let Hap watch over Ace while he slept. Since Hap could routinely be found at the domino table in the other room, that usually necessitated little more than an open door between the apartment and the lobby, but Cara hated not being able to watch over Ace herself.
After locking the room, she pushed the cart across the pavement to the laundry, then moved on through the kitchen to the dining area. Her heart jumped up into her throat when she saw the empty crib. Then she heard a familiar squeal, followed by men’s laughter, coming from the front room. She raced out into the lobby to find Ace sitting in the middle of the domino table, surrounded by chuckling old men, while he clutched handfuls of dominos.
“Look there, Hap,” Justus teased. “He takes after you, hogging them bones.”
“That’s my boy.” Hap patted Ace’s foot.
“You wish,” Teddy crowed.
“He’s getting in practice for when Charlotte and Ty start their family,” Grover Waller, the pastor, maintained. Round and cheerful, Grover reminded Cara of an aging, balding cherub in wire-rimmed glasses and clip-on tie, but at the moment all Cara could think was that these men had her son.
As she rushed toward them, Hap turned his head to grin at her, holding out an empty bottle. “He’s had him a little snack, Mama, and a dry diaper.”
“Took all three of us to change that boy’s britches,” Justus told her, sounding pleased.
“Strong as an ox,” Teddy confirmed with a nod.
Cara began plucking dominoes from her son’s grasp, her anxious heartbeat still speeding. “I apologize. This won’t happen again. I—I’ll pick up a baby monitor as soon as I’m paid, one I can carry around with me so I’ll know the instant he awakes.”
“No need, Cara Jane,” Hap protested. “We don’t mind watching out for him, do we, boys?”
“Not at all,” Teddy said.
“Cheery little character,” Grover put in.
“That’s kind of you, but he’s my responsibility,” Cara said, gathering Ace into her arms. The relief she felt at simply holding him against her made the preceding panic seem all the more terrible. How could she have let him out of her sight for even a moment? Yet, she’d have to do the same thing repeatedly, for