A Cowboy's Heart. Liz Ireland

tinting her cheeks. “Oh, well...it was her wedding dress, so I felt obliged to.”

      Will scratched his head in wonder. Paulie, wearing dresses, and blushing? Things in Possum Trot sure had changed!

      He eased himself up on a seat at the bar, and for the first time noticed they had company. Trip Peabody was face down at the bar. He was also wearing the most ill-fitting suit Will had ever laid eyes on, with cuffs practically skimming his elbows.

      “Trip?” he asked, shaking him. “Trip?” When Trip failed to respond, Will turned back to Paulie. “What happened to him?”

      “He’s thinking about courting Tessie Hale,” she said matter-of-factly.

      Here was another puzzler. Old Trip had always been half gone for Tessie, but he’d never found it necessary to dress up just to think about it.

      “What would you like, Will,” Paulie asked, “tequila, or tequila?”

      Will frowned. “Don’t you have any whiskey?”

      Paulie looked uncomfortable. “Nope, just tequila.”

      Will frowned. “Say...what’s happened around here?”

      The expression on Paulie’s face turned from uncomfortable to downright miserable. She opened her mouth to say something, but still she didn’t speak.

      “What is it?” Will asked with growing impatience.

      “Our whiskey trader sort of...” Her eyes said she would rather talk about anything else. “Well, you remember Oat Murphy, don’t you?”

      Of course! Will felt his shoulders fall a few inches. Somehow, seeing Paulie in that strange getup had made him forget his troubles for a few moments. But Oat Murphy was right at the center of them. Now Will felt about as low as Trip.

      How could Mary Ann have married that old man? It seemed impossible. He wished it wasn’t true. But it was, apparently, and now there was nothing he could do about it.

      Gerald Redfern would probably haunt him for the rest of his days for this, Will feared. The older man’s last breath had been spent asking Will to take care of his wife and daughter. For Will, making the deathbed promise had been easy. He owed Gerald so much—for taking him in when he was a raw youth with no home, giving him a job, treating him like family. There wasn’t a time from the moment he met the Redferns when he hadn’t thought of taking care of Mary Ann. Even after Gerald died, and Mary Ann’s mother had married Mr. Breen, everyone had always assumed he and Mary Ann would marry. Including himself.

      Until he’d gone off to Kansas this year. As much as he liked Mary Ann, and was positive that she was the woman he would marry, he’d always known she was a little...well, immature. She tended to be flighty, pouty, and overly whimsical in her ideas. None of these were good characteristics for a ranch wife, and Will wanted to start his own ranch. He had been saving for it for years. He was just waiting till he was good and ready to settle down; actually, he was waiting for that day when he fell in love with Mary Ann and couldn’t stop himself from proposing to her. And yet love, which every man seemed to find at least once in his life—and some cowboys he knew found on a weekly basis—eluded him.

      At first Will had thought that Mary Ann would grow out of her childish side. Then they would fall in love. But finally, two months ago, while lying on the hard ground, his bones aching from the discomfort of the trail, he realized he wasn’t getting any younger. And, unfortunately, Mary Ann didn’t appear to be getting any older. And neither of them seemed any closer to being in love with the other. She was still as much a flirt as ever, still putting off the idea of settling down in Possum Trot. A decision had to be made; and the very next day he wrote Mary Ann a letter, telling her they would both be better off if they stopped letting her mother entertain the notion that they would be married one day. He remembered now writing that he would always feel as a brother to her....

      Now he could have kicked himself. Some brother! Poor Mary Ann had been alone all autumn, and apparently out of desperation she had turned to the first man who came along. Oat Murphy—a whiskey-stained old geezer. What business did that broken-down wreck have asking a girl half his age to marry him?

      A sharp, sickening pang of regret shot through him.

      Paulie shoved a jigger of tequila across the bar at him. “Have some Mexican milk. You don’t look so good.” He drank it, and she stared at him evenly. “So...I guess you heard.”

      “About Mary Ann?” he asked, stiffly, still not comfortable discussing the topic even after endless practice. “I heard.”

      Paulie leaned her elbows on the bar. “I sure am sorry.”

      “Don’t be,” he said. “If it’s Oat she wanted, then I’m glad she got what she was pining for.”

      Paulie tossed her head back. “I don’t think she knew what she wanted. Couple of months ago everybody said she was sweet on some gambler who came through here, a man named Tyler. Your Mary Ann never has been exactly discriminating, if you ask me.”

      “I didn’t ask you.”

      Paulie ducked her head and refilled his glass. “Well, anyways, I’m sure sorry. I know you set a store by her.”

      He looked into Paulie’s eyes, wondering what she would think if he told her the truth. That he was being torn in two directions—relief that he had escaped marrying someone so flighty as Mary Ann, and regret that she had run off with someone so inappropriate. If only she had married Dwight the storekeeper, or...well, just anybody besides Oat. Then he could have rested easy at night, knowing Gerald Redfern wasn’t looking down from Heaven, scowling at him for breaking his promise to look after his daughter.

      That’s why he’d come directly here, to the Dry Wallow. Paulie and Trip were always good listeners, and both were adept at putting a man’s head straight, too, most of the time. But now this place was topsy-turvy. Paulie was flouncing around in her late Ma’s wedding dress, and dependable old Trip Peabody was passed out at the bar.

      He gave Trip a slap on the shoulder. “Hey, Trip, aren’t you even going to say hello?”

      Trip raised one bleary eyelid. “That you, Tessie?”

      Will laughed. “Not even close.”

      Woozily, the man lifted his head of gray hair off the bar. “Why, it’s Will! Son of a gun!”

      The two men shook hands, and Will couldn’t help noticing again the freshly store-bought state of Trip’s clothes. “Those are some stiff new duds you’ve got on, Trip. I don’t see how you were even able to pass out in them.”

      “I was just restin’,” Trip said.

      Paulie laughed. “He’s been ‘resting’ for two solid days now, trying to screw up the courage to propose to Tessie.”

      The awkward silence in the bar stretched almost past bearing. Trip cleared his throat. “So I guess you heard about Mary Ann Redfern.”

      “You mean Mary Ann Murphy,” Will said shortly.

      Trip nodded. “I guess everybody’s heard.”

      Paulie shifted impatiently. “Everybody’s heard too much about those newlyweds, if you want my opinion. The way people talk, you’d think Mary Ann was the only unmarried girl in this county.”

      Trip’s eyebrows knitted together, and even Will was intrigued away from brooding by this statement. There weren’t many unattached females in the area, and that was a fact. Now that Mary Ann was out of his life for good, he supposed he would have to give more consideration to these matters.

      “There’s the Brakemen twins out north, I suppose,” Trip said.

      Will smiled. “What about Tessie Hale?”

      Trip shivered nervously.

      “But most people consider her accounted for,” Will assured him.

      Paulie cleared