Cowboy's Caress by Victoria Pade

Author:Victoria Pade
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2013-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Nine

The meet-and-greet should have been called the meet-and-greet-and-bring-the-new-doctor-a-casserole because so many women came bearing foil pans for Bax and his daughter.

It happened frequently enough that when Bax spotted someone approaching with their offering, he began to whisper his guess as to what kind of casserole it might be.

Of course his guesses got more and more farcical as the evening wore on—cream of outdated encyclopedia pages from Nan Carpenter, who looked like an old-fashioned librarian with her hair in a bun; duck à la dill weed from Maude Benchley, who had a mallard embroidered on her blouse; long drink of watercress custard from Prissy Palicomo, who stood a full six feet tall.

It was all silly but not unkind and his comical conjectures teased Carly at the same time for the descriptions and commentaries she made as sidebars to her own introductions.

Nearly the whole town streamed in and out of the church basement, and what was scheduled to be a two-hour reception stretched until nearly ten o’clock at night. But for Carly the time flew by.

She and Bax stayed together in what was actually a two-person receiving line, which meant it was a concentrated evening of being with him. And even though Carly did what she’d done the day before as they’d visited the outlying farms and ranches—performing the introductions, then trying to fade into the background as Bax got to know the townsfolk—there was still no question that she was with him. That they were sharing the evening. That she was enjoying herself.

When the church basement finally saw the last of the people who’d come to meet Bax, there was a tableful of the casseroles along with cakes, pies and various loaves of banana, zucchini, cranberry and poppy seed breads for him to take home.

Luckily he’d driven his station wagon so that Carly wouldn’t have to walk. It gave him a way to get everything home.

By then Carly’s ankle was throbbing and since she couldn’t help load the goodies into the back of the station wagon anyway, she sat on one of the folding chairs that lined the walls and put her feet up on another.

Evie Lee, who had had a full evening of meeting and playing with just about every child in town, joined Carly to lie down on the chairs beside her, laying her head in Carly’s lap.

“Tired?” Carly asked.

“No, not me,” Evie Lee claimed as she closed her eyes and fell instantly asleep beneath Carly’s hand smoothing her hair.

Carly smiled down at the cherub and then rested her own head against the wall and closed her eyes, too, as Bax and several of the husbands of the Ladies’ League members who had given the party and were doing cleanup detail began to make trip after trip to the car.

She lost track of time, but it didn’t seem long before Bax’s voice interrupted her reverie.

“Looks like my girls have had it,” he said when the gifts of food were all loaded and he’d come back for her and Evie Lee.

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