can breathe. I’ve been half dead for years and you make me want to live forever.”
When she didn’t answer, he looked away. “I don’t have anything to offer. I own a horse and a wagon.” He took a long breath and let it all out. “I do have enough money to buy a little place or the colonel offered me a job. But without you I don’t think I could settle down.”
All at once he couldn’t find the words. He’d lived from day to day, never dreaming for so long he was afraid to wish for more.
She smiled. “What do you really want?”
“I want you to be with me forever. I want to have a bunch of kids. I want to sleep next to you until I die.”
“You have me,” she said so low he wasn’t sure he heard her. “You’ve had me since the day we left Jefferson and you couldn’t be stern with Four. You had me when you let Three be her own person and you let One become a leader. You watched over us all.
“I know who you are, Trapper Hawkins. I saw the truth the first time I saw your blue eyes. You’re a good man. You have everything I want even without the money or the land or even the job. I want you.”
“Any chance you’d marry me?”
She smiled. “You can bet on it.”
As he kissed her, Trapper swore he heard five little girls laughing just outside the window.
“Look, One,” a four-year-old whispered, “Tapper got what he wanted for Christmas.”
Read on for a preview of Jodi Thomas’s next book . . .
PICNIC IN SOMEDAY VALLEY
A Honey Creek Novel
Available Spring 2021 wherever books are sold
Chapter 1
Fall in Someday Valley, Texas
Marcie
Marcie Latimer sat on a tall, wobbly stool in the corner of Bandit’s Bar. Her right leg, wrapped in a black leather boot, was anchored on the stage. Her left heel was hooked on the first rung of the stool so her knee could brace her guitar. With her prairie skirt and low-cut, lacy blouse, she was the picture of a country singer. Long, midnight hair and sad, hazel eyes completed the look.
She played to an almost empty room, but it didn’t matter. She sang every word as if it had to pass through her soul first. All her heartbreak drifted over the smoky room, whispering of a sorrow so deep it would never heal.
When she finished her last song, her fingers still strummed out the beat slowly, as if dying.
One couple, over by the pool table, clapped. The bartender, Wayne, brought Marcie a wineglass of ice water and said the same thing he did every night. “Great show, kid.”
She wasn’t a kid. She was almost thirty, feeling like she was running toward fifty. Six months ago her future was looking up. She had a rich boyfriend. A maybe future with Boone Buchanan, a lawyer, who promised to take her out of this dirt-road town. He’d said they’d travel the world and go to fancy parties at the capital.
Then, the boyfriend tried to burn down the city hall in a town thirty miles away and toast the mayor of Honey Creek, who he claimed was his ex-girlfriend. But that turned out to be a lie too. It seemed her smart, good-looking, someday husband was playing Russian roulette, and the gun went off not only on his life but hers as well.
He’d written her twice from prison. She hadn’t answered.
She’d tossed away the letters without opening them. Because of him, she couldn’t find any job but this one, and no man would get near enough to ask her out. She was poison, a small-town curiosity.
Marcie hadn’t known anything about his plot to make the front page of every paper in the state, but most folks still looked at her as if she should have been locked away with Boone Buchanan. She was living with the guy; she must have known what he was planning.
She shook off hopelessness like dust and walked across the empty dance floor. Her set was over; time to go home.
A cowboy sat near the door in the shadows. He wore his hat low. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she knew who he was. Long, lean legs, wide shoulders, and hands rough and scarred from working hard. At six-feet-four, he was one of the few people in town she had to look up to.
“Evening, Brand.”
“Evening, Marcie,” he said, so low it seemed more a thought than a greeting.
She usually didn’t talk to him,