Texas Gothic - By Rosemary Clement-Moore Page 0,105

he was kind of seeing my bra by Braille at the moment, maybe not so much of a stretch.

And God, if anyone understood about wanting to just be there, breathing the warm air that he exhaled, seeing how long we could prolong the moment before my head cleared or his did or we started arguing again … that person was me.

Which was why I couldn’t let it go. I wouldn’t have been there with him like that if he hadn’t been the uptight control freak that he was.

“What if it’s something with your granddad?”

And that was that. He drew back a fraction and looked at me. I could see him pretty well, thanks to a clear night and a country sky. It’s amazing how bright the stars can be, and all of them shone down on us just then, as we were caught between what we wanted to do and what we—both of us—knew had to happen.

“Dammit,” he said.

“I know.” Boy, did I know.

He pulled his hand out from under my shirt, letting his fingers trail over my stomach. I shivered and wished I could be an enabler.

“Where’s the phone?” he asked, tactfully looking for it while I straightened my clothes.

I found it on the floor and handed it over. He thumbed through the menu until he got to voice mail, and listened. In the cool glow of the phone, I could see the animation leech out of his face. The nagging worry that had tugged at the shirttail of my conscience bloomed into an ominous dread that pushed everything else out of my head.

“What is it?” I asked when the message was done and he clicked open the keypad to send a quick text.

“We have to go.” He dropped the phone into the console between our knees. “Granddad’s missing. Mom doesn’t know where he went.”

“Where could he have gone?”

He’d turned on the engine and put the truck in gear. “If I knew that, he wouldn’t be missing, would he?”

I didn’t appreciate the sarcasm, and that was not the tone you took with someone you’d been making out with just three minutes ago. The pitch of his brows, the tightness in his jaw—those I got. It was his grandfather. But I didn’t understand the walls going up, pushing me back.

Those worries, however, could wait. “He can’t drive, right? And none of the cars are missing? So he’d have to go on foot or on horse. How far could he go?”

“That’s just it. Mom doesn’t know how long he’s been gone. She’s got Steve looking in the stable to see if Grandpa took one of the horses. They’re also checking to make sure none of the guns are gone.”

My stomach dropped. It was an abrupt, elevator sensation, and I really thought, for a moment, that it might come back up again. I hadn’t thought about that. Aunt Hyacinth had a .22 rifle just because she lived in what was pretty much wilderness, but otherwise the Goodnights were not a gun-toting family.

“The gun cabinet stays locked, and it’s in the ranch offices, which are also locked. Granddad doesn’t have a key to either. Hasn’t for a while.”

The reasons for that would be pretty obvious. And I knew that Alzheimer’s patients could turn in a moment to depression—and Grandpa Mac definitely had some mood swings. But he wasn’t so far along he couldn’t almost pass for a forgetful curmudgeon.

“He’s probably headed over to Goodnight Farm.”

“Because you know him so well?” he snapped.

“Oh, don’t be an ass, Francis.” The words burst out of me, because what I wanted to say was Please don’t go back to being an ass because I like you, and I’m not the kind of girl who likes guys who are asses. “I’m trying to help. I really like your grandpa, and I can tell Aunt Hyacinth does, too. And he seems to really like to visit her.”

“Yeah, to chat about the Mad Monk and my dead grandmother.”

“Well, maybe she’s the only one who doesn’t act like he’s crazier than a sack of weasels because he talks to his departed wife.”

He was silent for a moment, hands gripping the steering wheel, eyes straight ahead. But I could tell he recognized his own description of my aunt, because I could see the muscle working in his jaw. So square, strong, and stubborn.

“I get your point.” The words seemed dragged out of him. And they were far from an apology. “Except that it’s not my grandma Em who sends him out searching