“That’s me,” Tina agreed. Her eyes twinkled. “You don’t realize how much the world has changed in recent years. When I was in high school, girls could get expelled for wearing a skirt an inch above the knee. That was considered vulgar.” She pursed her lips with a smile. “Life is so violent these days that I sometimes wish we were back in the Amazon,” she muttered. “I felt safe there.”
“I can help you out,” Elissa said. “I’ll bring Warchief over here to live with us and he can make you feel you’re back in the jungle.”
Tina, who’d heard volumes about the big parrot, frowned. “We have neighbors with sensitive ears.”
“Our nearest neighbor is a mile down the beach,” Elissa pointed out.
“That’s what I mean. Sound carries. Besides,” she groaned, “parrots fly. I have enough trouble with little bitty mosquitoes. Imagine something that has wings and bites and weighs a pound.”
Elissa had never thought of him as a giant green mosquito. She laughed. She’d have to remember to tell King. King. Her gaze softened. What was she going to do?
Tina patted her hand. “Life generally goes on,” she reminded her daughter. “And God loves us. Even when we’re naughty little girls and boys.”
That was a comforting thought. Elissa got up and began to set the table.
CHAPTER EIGHT
ELISSA’S FIRST SIGHT of the Oklahoma plains drew a helpless sigh from her. Oklahoma City, where King had claimed his big gray Lincoln at the airport parking lot, was beautiful and intriguing for its rising oil derricks within the huge city itself. But the rolling plains, sweeping toward the horizon as far as the eye could see, brought tears to her eyes.
“I’ve never, ever seen anything like it,” she breathed, her expression mirroring total delight.
King swerved the car as he darted a glance at her, fascinated. “I thought you’d hate it,” he replied. “You live on the coast.”
She wasn’t even listening. “The Plains Indians—did they come down this far? The Sioux and Cheyenne?”
“Well, honey, Oklahoma was where they sent the Five Civilized Tribes back during the Trail of Tears, during the late 1830s and 1840s. Some of them fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War—a few were slaveholders, you see—and because of that, the government forced them to sell their western lands at a sacrifice. We have Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees, Creek—and Seminoles,” he added after a pause.
Her face brightened. “No wonder it seems like home. Don’t they say something about an ancestral memory? Perhaps some of my ancestors came here.”
“The Seminoles were fierce warriors,” he agreed easily. “They fought the government to a standstill.”
“The Apache were pretty fierce, too, I hear,” she murmured. She smiled at him and then turned her attention back to the undulating hills. “How beautiful. There’s so much space, King.”
“That’s what I like about it. No crowding yet. Plenty of room. Oil and gas and cattle.”
“The oil industry has been hard-hit, though.”
“Bobby and I had to diversify,” he agreed. “But good business management will spare us too much grief. There it is.” He indicated a dirt road leading to a grove of trees and a sprawling white frame house with huge porches. There were outbuildings and endless fences and herds of white-and-red cattle everywhere.
“The ranch?” she asked, excited.
“The ranch.” He chuckled at her expression as he pulled off the main highway onto the winding dirt road. “Like it?”
“Oh, I love it,” she said softly, drinking in the lush greens and the wildflowers that seemed to be everywhere. “Those are sunflowers!” she exclaimed.
“You’ll find a lot of unfamiliar vegetation,” he said. “We don’t have sea grapes and palms out here. We have water oaks and hickory trees... Of course, we have some fascinating animals here, too. I doubt you’ve ever seen a moose.”
“I can hardly wait.”
“You shouldn’t be this enthusiastic,” he murmured drily, remembering how much Bess had hated the ranch when she and Bobby married. Of course, Bess had grown up in dirt-poor surroundings, and he supposed she’d had her fill of roughing it. She’d probably longed for something completely different, more refined. But Bobby, like King, had loved the plains, loved walking the hills in search of arrowheads—one of King’s favorite childhood pastimes. “You’re a city girl, remember?”
“I’m a country girl,” she argued. “Just because I work near Miami doesn’t make me citified. I like wide-open spaces, like the beach and hills. Can I go walking when I feel like it, or are there...”