“Good night, folks,” Sharlene said when the song was over. “Thanks again for coming around to make us old folks feel like stars.”
“Old Hank sure set the bar high for country music, didn’t he?” A gray-haired man stopped and put a bill into the guitar case.
“Honey”—his wife looped her arm in his—“Hank didn’t set the bar. He was the bar.”
“Amen,” Nita said with a smile as she put her guitar away.
Joelle glanced over at her aunt, who was loosening the strings on her fiddle. She had set the bar high—no, she was the bar—for the kind of independent woman Joelle wanted to be when she was almost eighty.
She picked up her aunt’s fiddle case in one hand and Nita’s guitar in the other. The three of them had drawn their chairs up around Billy Joe’s case and were sorting and counting money. In that moment, seeing the happiness on their faces, she knew what decision she had to make if she was ever going to be like Sharlene. She was already thinking about the wording when she wrote her resignation while she put the instruments in the trailer. Peace that she hadn’t known in many years flooded her heart and soul, telling her that she was on the right path now for sure. No more lost highways for her.
“That was quite an experience,” Ford said.
“And just look at how happy they are,” Joelle said with a broad smile.
“You look pretty happy yourself,” he said.
“Yep, I am,” she admitted. Ford would have to come to his own decision about ranching, but if he made the right one, she wondered if maybe they could pursue this attraction that had popped up between them.
Chapter 5
Joelle opened her door to her bedroom at the Gaylord and stepped into her room, which was two floors up from the other two rooms that Nita had booked for them. Two queen beds, a chair and a desk, and a gorgeous view of the atrium greeted her from out the window.
“This is pretty fancy compared to the floor of the VW bus,” Ford said as he pulled his suitcase into the room. “Are you sure you’re comfortable with us sharing the room?”
“We are two adults, and if you haven’t noticed, there’s about three feet between the beds. We’re probably less than six inches apart on the bus,” Joelle reminded him. “And we shared a room at the dude ranch, remember?”
“But that seems different. I was up before everyone else, so I’m not sure they even knew that we were sleeping in the same room back there, and camping out is a whole ’nother story, as Grandpa says.” Ford crossed the room and looked out the window. “Looks like this is another city that never sleeps.”
Joelle left her suitcase and went over to join him.“The view is beautiful. Maybe tomorrow we’ll have time to do a walk-through while the others take a nap.”
“Maybe after supper, which Grandpa says we’re having here in the hotel. The tour bus picks us up at the front entrance at nine in the morning. We won’t be back until evening. It’s one of those stop-and-go things. We can get off at the Ryman, spend as much time as we want there, and get back on to go to the next place,” Ford said.
“Aunt Sharlene says that we will meet them for breakfast at seven, and she told me to be ready to leave,” Joelle said. “Truth is, I’d rather stay right here and read a book or sit down there in the atrium and watch the people as spend a day on a tour bus.”
“Me too.” Ford covered a yawn with his hand. “But they might get into trouble if we aren’t there.”
“Amen!” Joelle said. “I’m calling dibs on the bathroom. After sitting out in the open and fighting mosquitoes, I’m ready for a shower.”
“Don’t use up all the hot water,” Ford teased.
Joelle turned and walked away. “Wouldn’t dream of it.”
She picked up what she needed from her suitcase—glad that she had brought shorts and tank tops for sleeping. She usually slept in the nude, but not knowing if she would be sharing space with her aunt and Nita, she had tucked in sleepwear. She went into the bathroom, adjusted the water in the shower, and then dropped her clothing on the floor.
Ford’s statement about not using all the hot waterwent through her mind as the pulsating stream pounded her stiff back muscles. “That’s easy,” she muttered as she washed her hair. “The tank in a hotel this big probably looks like the water tower in Whitewright, Texas.”
She had really thought she was over the teenage infatuation with Ford Holt, but the hot water coming out of the shower wasn’t nearly as hot as the attraction she had for him, and it was getting stronger every day.
***
Ford slipped under the covers and wondered again if Joelle was the magic that grounded him and made his nightmares disappear. Maybe it was simply the fact that he was on a road trip and was finally moving away from what he had seen in the military—not only physically, but mentally.
He turned over on his side to find her staring right at him. “Having trouble settling down and going to sleep?” he asked.
“Yes,” she answered. “I can’t get my thoughts to stop running around like a hamster on a wheel. How about you?”
“I’ve hated closing my eyes for months,” he admitted.
