would be sitting in the hot afternoon sun when they could be inside with air-conditioned comfort. The temperature was kissing the hundred degree mark even though it was mid-September. It might be hot but it hadn’t rained but once since Holt and the guys started working and that was on a weekend. So it looked like the deadline would be met in plenty of time.
The kids were running around for another half hour before quitting time. Holt and the guys were putting up studs and the addition was beginning to look like something other than a row of concrete bricks with floor joists running from one side to the other. Now it had a floor and the walls were going up.
She kept her head down and her sunglasses pushed up on her nose, but she stole long glances at Holt while he worked. No wonder she’d felt so safe in his arms that night in Weatherford. It had been the first night she’d slept without dreams of bombs and guns and Jonah’s death, but they’d returned every night since other than the night she’d fallen asleep on his sofa after a cup of hot chocolate. She’d tried drinking the same thing for a whole week after that but it hadn’t worked. She’d still had the nightmares. It must have been the security that she felt snuggled up in his big arms that had brought on peaceful sleep.
“Yeah, right! It was the booze the first time and the kiss the second time. Knocked me on my butt and my brain cells were so fried they couldn’t dream. The second time it was the kiss. It created so much havoc in my heart that the nightmares couldn’t get inside my head,” she mumbled.
She forced her eyes away from Holt’s arms and back to the notebook in her hand. If she didn’t work while she was using the excuse to get some fresh air, then she’d have to go back inside because she had to get the book finished. She began to note out another chapter as she watched the children crawl all over the new jungle gym out behind the Honky Tonk. Holt and the guys had put it together in an hour out of scrap lumber from the project. Then at her suggestion they’d hung a couple of round discs from long ropes attached to limbs of the pecan tree. Judd and Waylon ran from one to the other, playing everything from robots to Tarzan.
Wouldn’t Ruby think that was a hoot? Play equipment on the beer joint lawn. Can’t get anymore redneck than that, can I? At least the new addition hides the whole backyard and no one can see it. I’m not going to tell Larissa. I can just hear her giggling about Holt working his way into my life through the children. If it did work it wouldn’t last. First time I told him the whole story he’d grab those kids and run for the woods. No man would ever live with a woman like me.
“Watch me, I’m a monkey,” Waylon shouted.
Sharlene looked up to see him hanging upside down from a crossbeam. “Don’t fall,” she called out.
“Watch me, Sharlene!” Judd ran past her and plopped her fanny down on one of the swings. “I’m Jane from the Tarzan cartoon.” She gave out a bloodcurdling yell that sounded more like a half-dead starving coyote out in the woods behind the Tonk than Tarzan. If he’d sounded like that back in the day when he was the star at the movie theaters, there would have been more people rushing out than paying their quarters to get inside.
“I think Tarzan did that, not Jane,” Sharlene told her and went back to brainstorming in her spiral notebook.
The new book wasn’t a sequel to the first one even though her editor would have liked that. She’d started with a whole new cast of characters and timeline. This one was a time travel about a woman who went to sleep in the late eighteen hundreds and woke up the next morning in a small town in north Texas a hundred years later with a redneck husband, a double-wide trailer, and pregnant. All she could think about was getting back to her own world but then her husband won her heart and they lived happily ever after.
“Then I’m a girl
The kids were running around for another half hour before quitting time. Holt and the guys were putting up studs and the addition was beginning to look like something other than a row of concrete bricks with floor joists running from one side to the other. Now it had a floor and the walls were going up.
She kept her head down and her sunglasses pushed up on her nose, but she stole long glances at Holt while he worked. No wonder she’d felt so safe in his arms that night in Weatherford. It had been the first night she’d slept without dreams of bombs and guns and Jonah’s death, but they’d returned every night since other than the night she’d fallen asleep on his sofa after a cup of hot chocolate. She’d tried drinking the same thing for a whole week after that but it hadn’t worked. She’d still had the nightmares. It must have been the security that she felt snuggled up in his big arms that had brought on peaceful sleep.
“Yeah, right! It was the booze the first time and the kiss the second time. Knocked me on my butt and my brain cells were so fried they couldn’t dream. The second time it was the kiss. It created so much havoc in my heart that the nightmares couldn’t get inside my head,” she mumbled.
She forced her eyes away from Holt’s arms and back to the notebook in her hand. If she didn’t work while she was using the excuse to get some fresh air, then she’d have to go back inside because she had to get the book finished. She began to note out another chapter as she watched the children crawl all over the new jungle gym out behind the Honky Tonk. Holt and the guys had put it together in an hour out of scrap lumber from the project. Then at her suggestion they’d hung a couple of round discs from long ropes attached to limbs of the pecan tree. Judd and Waylon ran from one to the other, playing everything from robots to Tarzan.
Wouldn’t Ruby think that was a hoot? Play equipment on the beer joint lawn. Can’t get anymore redneck than that, can I? At least the new addition hides the whole backyard and no one can see it. I’m not going to tell Larissa. I can just hear her giggling about Holt working his way into my life through the children. If it did work it wouldn’t last. First time I told him the whole story he’d grab those kids and run for the woods. No man would ever live with a woman like me.
“Watch me, I’m a monkey,” Waylon shouted.
Sharlene looked up to see him hanging upside down from a crossbeam. “Don’t fall,” she called out.
“Watch me, Sharlene!” Judd ran past her and plopped her fanny down on one of the swings. “I’m Jane from the Tarzan cartoon.” She gave out a bloodcurdling yell that sounded more like a half-dead starving coyote out in the woods behind the Tonk than Tarzan. If he’d sounded like that back in the day when he was the star at the movie theaters, there would have been more people rushing out than paying their quarters to get inside.
“I think Tarzan did that, not Jane,” Sharlene told her and went back to brainstorming in her spiral notebook.
The new book wasn’t a sequel to the first one even though her editor would have liked that. She’d started with a whole new cast of characters and timeline. This one was a time travel about a woman who went to sleep in the late eighteen hundreds and woke up the next morning in a small town in north Texas a hundred years later with a redneck husband, a double-wide trailer, and pregnant. All she could think about was getting back to her own world but then her husband won her heart and they lived happily ever after.
“Then I’m a girl
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