Normally Mariah would have said good riddance, and maybe even called up and offered her condolences to the blushing bride-to-be. But all three? Not one, not two, but all three of her ex-boyfriends had dumped her then become engaged within a week of breaking up with her.
It was enough to give a girl a complex.
She could see her headstone now. She inspired men to want to get married. Just not to her.
She leaned back in her chair, cringing when the sound of the plastic bag under her rear end mixed with the squishy sound of the water that still soaked the pad of her chair. Her brand-new chair. The chair she’d dropped two hundred dollars on because, well, she’d liked it. And now it was ruined.
“Good morning, Mar. My, don’t you look pretty today.”
Mariah made a face at her cousin as he came in the front door. For all intents and purposes, George was a pretty good guy. He had inherited the trademark Clayborn dark hair and pleasing features, but where they looked good on him, they made her look…well, tom-boyish. She glanced at her watch. But the biggest difference between them lay in that she didn’t know when to stop working, and her slightly younger cousin didn’t know when to start. “You always tell me that,” she murmured, glancing down at her old, faded jeans and T-shirt, then pushing at her thick hair again.
“And you never believe me.”
“Yes, well, you’re two hours late. Again.”
George took the rebuke with his usual grinning charm as he made his way to the back where she’d put out the usual morning donuts and had made coffee.
Mariah sighed and returned to trying to make some sort of sense out of her ruined desktop. And if she could figure out what was going on her life at the same time, well, so much the better.
Of course, it was only par for the course that George wouldn’t even have noticed that the roof had caved in. She tried to remember a time when her cousin wasn’t so careless, but came up with a blank. It probably explained why her Uncle Bubba, George’s father, had left the P.I. agency of Clayborn Investigations to her when he finally kicked the proverbial bucket last year. Of course, the inheritance had been attached with the stipulation that George always have a job there so long as he wanted one and that he be paid a living wage, as well as be entitled to a percentage of the net income.
Not that Mariah would have fired her cousin. He was as much a fixture around the office as the coffeemaker. She only wished he was as productive as the machine. He made juggling her life between the office and the ranch a bit of a challenge. It wasn’t so much that he didn’t carry his own weight; it was that the weight he did try to carry on occasion she ended up having to take on herself. Especially now that her uncle was no longer there to help carry the load.
George leaned against his own squeaky-clean desk across from hers, took a bite of a sprinkle-covered donut, then chased it down with coffee from his Oilers mug. “Heard Justin is getting married.”
Mariah stared at him, wishing at that one moment that she could fire him. “Boy, news sure does travel fast.”
She pulled her garbage can out from under the desk and scooped into it the paperwork she couldn’t salvage.
“That’s the way it usually is with news. Bad news. Good news.” He finished off his donut. “Which category do you suppose this falls under?”
“Good news,” she said. “Definitely good news.”
Because it meant that she wouldn’t be marrying Justin Johnson, also known as J.J.
Bad news because it meant that by the time she returned to the ranch by the end of the day, everyone and his brother in Oklahoma would have heard the news and be calling to commiserate.
“J.J. is a good man.”
“J.J. is a jerk.”
George grinned. “Well, then there’s that.”
“An awfully big ‘that,’ don’t you think?”
George shrugged and rounded his desk to sit down. He immediately leaned back in his chair and crossed his cowboy boots on the desktop. “I don’t know. He wasn’t so bad.” He shook his head. “You know, we all thought for sure this would be it for you—you’d finally take that long walk down the aisle.”
Instead prissy Miss Heather Walker would be taking the walk.
Mariah stared at the opposite wall, not really registering the outdated dark paneling or the oil paintings of ranch scenes hung on it. Instead she thought about the girl who couldn’t have been much out of high school, who wore pretty flowered dresses to church and whose only pair of jeans rode low, low on her boyish hips and were usually worn with clingy, belly-baring knit tops. She glanced down at her own regular uniform of classic Levi’s and old T-shirt, clothing that varied only in the winter when she wore a denim shirt over them, and her scuffed brown cowboy boots, then pushed her hair back from her face again.
There had been a time not so long ago when she’d felt very comfortable in her own clothing, even in a place where the state motto seemed to be The Higher The Hair, The Closer To God. Wearing what she had on had allowed her membership into the exclusive all boys’ club. It had permitted her to ride the range with her father and the ranch hands, and had, in essence, made her one of the guys. And, oh, how she’d always liked that. Barbie dolls had really never done it for her. Give her an ornery filly that needed breaking in any day and miles and miles of Texas earth, and she was a happy woman.
Oh, yeah? Then where was all that happiness now?
Somewhere down the line, the rules had changed—rules she hadn’t even known existed but was seeing all too clearly now.
She grimaced then let loose a stream of inventive cuss words under her breath that left George chuckling. She glared at him and continued cleaning her desk.
Well, just who in the hell had gone and changed all the rules on her anyway? The ones that said that when she turned eighteen she would have to start acting like the Barbie dolls she’d never played with? That she’d miraculously know what to do with her hair, how to apply makeup and how to walk in a pair of heels? And just when, exactly, had meat and potatoes not been enough? Why had her father started mentioning on almost a daily basis all the exotic foods her mother used to make for him to eat—if you could count crepes as exotic? And why did he now talk about how delicate her mother had been?
Sure, Hallmark commercials made her blubber. But delicate was definitely not a word anyone would use to describe Mariah Clayborn, the only child of widower Hughie Clayborn and his late wife, Nadine. At five foot seven in stocking feet and with a solid build, she once took a great deal of pride in being able to better many of the boys. She could probably still get the better of them even now. But whenever a physical competition of any sort was mentioned with her as the opponent, the men merely grinned and held up their hands in a mock version of being gentlemen.
Gentlemen, her rear. She knew just how ungentlemanly all these guys could get. Had been privy to some of their more honest and graphic conversations on observations of the opposite sex. They might hold a door open for their latest lady of choice, light her cigarette and appear to bless the very ground she walked on, but it was all toward one end: getting that same “lady” into the back seat of their cars by night’s end.
Unfortunately she, herself, had seen a back seat more times than she cared to count. But never had it come after a nice dinner out or dancing. No. Her handful of experiences had usually taken place on the back nine of her father’s ranch after one of her boyfriends visited. And had lasted as long as the drive out, making her wonder just why so many girls were dying to get into the back seats of all those cars. Her? She didn’t get it at all. Aside from being vastly uncomfortable, she’d always been left feeling…well, as if she’d missed something.
Of course, she knew what she had missed, but even thinking the word “orgasm” made her flush.
The telephone rang and she started,