“Well, I guess I’ll go inside and find something to eat…” She stopped, her gaze moving from Clark to Keely. “What are you two doing together?”
“Driving Boone mad,” Clark said, and he grinned.
“Would you like to explain how?” his sister asked.
“I invited Keely over to ride horses with me, and Boone was in the barn when we drove up together.”
“So that’s why,” Winnie began thoughtfully.
“Why, what?” Keely wanted to know.
“Why my brother was sitting on the shoulder of the road in his car with a Texas Department of Public Safety car flashing its lights behind him, with a trooper sitting inside running wants and warrants.”
“How do you know what he was doing?” Keely asked.
“Because I run tags all the time at work for the troopers and the local police,” she replied.
“What was Boone doing?” Clark asked hesitantly.
Winnie chuckled. “Teaching the trooper new words, from the look of it. I didn’t dare stop to ask.”
“Oh, dear,” Keely said, glancing at Clark.
“Stop that,” Clark said firmly. “It’s none of Boone’s business if I want to ask you over here to go riding with me.”
“It shouldn’t be,” Winnie told her brother. “But he’ll make it his business. He thinks Keely’s too young to go out with men. Any men.”
Clark’s eyes popped. “She’s almost twenty years old!”
“Well, of course she is,” Winnie said gently. “But not to Boone. To him, she’s still in pigtails trying to teach her dog how to fetch newspapers.”
“Don’t dig that up,” Keely moaned.
“That was when your folks rented that place down the road while your house was being remodeled. You’d have been about eleven. That dog was very good at fetching newspapers,” Winnie replied. “It was just that it was easier for him to bring you Boone’s paper from our front porch than it was to fetch yours out of the paper box at the end of your driveway.”
“Boone yelled at me,” Keely recalled with a shudder.
“Boone yells at everybody,” Winnie reminded her.
“Almost everybody,” Clark qualified.
Keely’s eyebrows arched. “Almost?”
“It didn’t work when he yelled at Bentley Rydel, did it?” He chuckled. “Winnie told me,” he added when Keely looked puzzled.
“Bentley isn’t afraid of anybody,” Keely agreed, smiling. “He’s been good to me.”
“I’d think he had a crush on you, except for his age,” Clark said. “He’s even older than Boone.”
“I guess he is, at that,” Keely said.
“Want some lunch?” Winnie asked them after a moment of silence. “We’ll have to get it ourselves, because our Mrs. Johnston is off today, but I can make a salad and Keely can make real bread.”
“I’d love homemade bread,” Clark sighed. “The lunchroom ladies used to make it at school when I was a kid.”
“Would you mind?” Winnie asked her best friend.
Keely smiled. “Not at all. I love to cook.”
