“When you’re working, you don’t look all that tidy yourself,” she countered, not comfortable with telling him the truth about her odd apparel, “and I wouldn’t dare ask what you got on your boots to make them smell so bad.”
His eyes began to twinkle. “Want to know? It was,” and he gave her the vernacular for it so wickedly that she blushed.
“You’re a bad man.”
He studied her closely. “If you want to be my family, you have to stop saying unkind things to me. Give a dog a bad name,” he said suggestively.
“I’d have to work on that,” she replied.
He drew in a long breath as he glanced back at the small grave. “Why did you come out here today?”
She smiled sadly. “Today is Father’s Day. I put some new silk flowers on Grandad’s grave. Sometimes the wind blows them away. I wanted to make sure they were still there.”
“I meant to call one of the local florists and get them to come out and put a fresh bouquet on her grave. But I’ve had some business problems lately,” he added without specifying what they were. “I write myself notes about things like that.” He smiled wryly. “Then I misplace the notes.”
“I do that all the time,” she confessed.
He cocked his head, staring at her. “Why can’t you wear things that match?” he asked, noting that she had on mismatched earrings.
She grimaced. It was much too early in their ambiguous relationship to tell him the real reason. She lied instead. “I’m always in a hurry. I just put on whatever comes to hand. Around town, people know I do it and nobody makes fun of me.” She hesitated. “That’s not quite true. When I came here to live with Grandad, some of the local kids made it hard on me.”
“Why?”
“Well, my mother wasn’t exactly pure as the driven snow,” she confessed. “She had affairs with three or four local men, and broke up marriages. The children of those divorces couldn’t get to her, but I was handy.”
She said it matter-of-factly, without blame. He scowled. “You should sound bitter, shouldn’t you?” he queried.
She smiled up at him. “Giving back what you get sounds good, but these days you can end up in jail for fighting at school. I didn’t want to cause Grandad any more pain than Mom already had. You see, he was a college professor, very conservative. What she did embarrassed and humiliated him. One of her lovers was his department head at college. She did it deliberately. She hated Grandad.”
His eyes narrowed. “Can I ask why?”
That was another question she didn’t feel comfortable answering. Her eyes lowered to his tie. “I’m not really sure,” she prevaricated.
He knew she was holding something back. Her body language was blatant. He wondered if she realized it.
Another question presented itself. He frowned. “Just how old are you?”
She looked up, grinning. “I’m not telling.”
He pursed his lips, considering. “You haven’t lost your illusions about life, yet,” he mused, noting the odd flicker of her eyelids when he said it. “I’d say you haven’t hit your mid-twenties yet, but you’re close.”
He’d missed it, but she didn’t let on. “You’re not bad,” she lied.
He stuck his hands in the pockets of his slacks and looked at the sky. “No rain yet. Probably none for another week, the meteorologists say,” he remarked. “We need it badly.”
“I know. We used to have this old guy, Elmer Randall, who worked at the newspaper office helping to run the presses. He was part Comanche. Every time we had a drought, he’d get into his tribal clothes and go out and do ceremonies outside town.”
“Did it work?” he asked with real interest.
She laughed. “One time after he did it, we had a flood. It almost always rained. Nobody could figure it out. He said his grandfather had been a powerful shaman and rode with Quanah Parker.” She shrugged. “People believe what they want to, but I thought he might really have a gift. Certainly, nobody told him to stop.”
“Whatever works,” he agreed. He checked his watch. “I’d better get home. I’m expecting a phone call from Japan.”
“Do you speak the language?”
He laughed. “I try to. But the company I’m merging with has plenty of translators.”
“I’ll bet Japan is an interesting place,” she said with dreamy eyes. “I’ve never been to Asia in my whole life.”
He looked surprised. “I thought everybody traveled these days.”
“We never had the money,” she said simply. “Grandad’s idea of international travel was to buy Fodor’s Guides to the countries that interested him. He spent his spare cash on books, hundreds of books.”
“He taught history, you said. What was his period?”
She hesitated as she looked up at his lean, handsome face. Wouldn’t it sound too pat and coincidental to tell him the truth?
He frowned. “Well?”
She grimaced. “World War II,” she confessed. “The North African theater of war.”
His intake of breath was audible. “You didn’t mention that when I ordered books on the subject.”
“I thought it would sound odd,” she said. “I mean, here you were, a total stranger looking for books on that subject, and my grandfather taught it. It seems like some weird coincidence.”
“Yes, but they do happen.” He moved restlessly. “Did he have autobiographies?”
“Yes, all sorts of first person accounts on both sides of the battle. His favorite subjects were German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel and General George Patton, but he liked the point of view of the 9th Australian Division, as well as British General Bernard Montgomery’s memoirs.”
“I asked the high school age son of one of my vice presidents which of the generals he liked to read about when he was studying history. He said they hadn’t taught him about any individual officers. He didn’t even know who Rommel was.”
The allusion to vice presidents went right by her. She smiled sheepishly. She’d only graduated from high school two years before, and he didn’t know that. “I didn’t, either, from high school courses,” she confessed. “But Grandad was good for a two-hour lecture on any subject I mentioned.”
He pursed his lips, really interested. “Who was the last commander of the British Eighth Army before Montgomery in North Africa?”
She chuckled. “You don’t think I know, do you? It was Auchinleck—Sir Claude. He was a big, redheaded man, and his wife was from America.”
His eyebrows arched. “You’re good. What was Rommel’s wife called?”
“Her name was Lucie, but he called her Lu. They had a son, Manfred, who eventually became Lord Mayor of Stuttgart, Germany.” She wiggled her eyebrows at him. “Want to know what sort of anti-tank field artillery Rommel used that confounded the British generals? It was the 88 millimeter antiaircraft gun. He camouflaged them and then lured the British tanks within firing range. They thought it was some sort of super weapon, but they were just regular antiaircraft weapons. One captured officer told Rommel that it wasn’t fair to use them against tanks. But it was war.”
“It was.” He was looking at her in a totally different way than he had before. “Do you ever loan books?”
She frowned. “Well, I never have before. But I might make an exception for you. Grandad would have loved talking with you about North Africa.”
“I