Free Making Hay by Pamela Morsi Page B

with her. If she’s pleasant and sweet, you’re interested whether she’s eye-popping or no. But still, when a man’s got that gal on his arm, he wants her to be looking good. He wants the other fellows to be green with envy. That makes a fellow feel pretty cocky. But a man won’t bother to sashay around with a woman he don’t cotton to.”
    “So it’s pretty important,” Lessy said.
    Rip reached out a hand and raised Lessy’s chin. He looked into her eyes. She was no beauty, but there was strength and substance to her that held a lure all its own. His smile was warm and bright. “When it comes to walking out, yes. But you said wife, Miss Lessy. In a wife it ain’t important at all.”
    Lessy’s eyes widened with surprise.
    “Us country boys may act the fool,” Ripley told her. “But most of us are smart enough to know that a pretty child at sixteen may not be worth her weight in beans as a helpmate at forty-five. It’s what’s inside a woman that makes you choose her for a wife. Her heart, her soul, her dreams ... that makes a man want to live a lifetime with her. If the feeling and yearnings all fit, it don’t matter if the gal is belle of the county or fit to wear a cowbell.”
    His words scoured a rough tenderness in Lessy’s heart, and she blinked back a burning in her eyes that she feared might be tears.
    “But what if the man doesn’t really know who she is inside? And what if he thinks the woman to be a good helpmate but can’t bring himself to sweeten toward her? Could a man marry a woman that he has no ... no yearning for?”
    The tears were welling, unwanted, in the comers of her eyes, and she tried to drop her gaze from Rip’s expression that had been teasing and sweet but had now turned tender and concerned.
    With a hint of anger in her motion, she cast the halfeaten peach in her hand into the distant grass. “I’m just being foolish—” she began, trying to turn away.
    Rip did not let her. He slipped his arm around her waist and pulled her close to him. “Are you being foolish, Miss Lessy? Or is it that big farmer of yours who’s a fool?”
    Standing in his arms, Lessy looked up at the dark, handsome face above her, and she knew he was going to kiss her. He did not hold her tightly, and his hesitation was clearly to give her time to retreat. She did not.
    His mouth touched hers with skill and confidence. He traced the line of her lips with his tongue, causing Lessy to startle.
    Ripley grinned at her innocent surprise. “The sweetest peach in Arkansas,” he whispered against her as he opened her mouth to get another taste.

    “ D adburnit !” Roscoe swore. “This wagon jack ain’t worth throwing into the scrap heap.”
    The men around him were nodding their heads in agreement, but Vass only chuckled. “Now, you can’t go blaming this poor hardworking little jack for not being able to do something that I told you would need a rope and pulley.”
    Doobervale threw up his hands in defeat. “Lord love you, Muldrow, I’m just grateful you ain’t a betting man, or I’d a lost money on this one.”
    The empty hay wagon was bogged down in the mud on the low side of the barn. Young McFadden, in the ignorance of youth, had left it there when he’d driven it out of the field. Doobervale had insisted that a wagon jack would be enough to rescue it. He might have been right if they’d begun working at it early in the morning, as they’d planned. But after hours of tool sharpening, both their own and Mouwers’s, the muddy ground had hardened, holding the wagon wheels to it like molasses turned into hard candy.
    “Get me that rope and tackle that I left on the floor of the harness room.” Vass directed the order to young Tommy, whose cheeks were still alternately pale and flushed with the humiliation of his mistake. “We can throw it over the ridge pole of the bam and get all the leverage we need.” Vass looked up to the timber that extended out from the peak of the bam roof,