She hesitated, then nodded.

“If we still feel the same way, then we’ll know this has a chance,” he said. He spun on his heel and walked away.

CHAPTER FOUR

“What can I tell you about Texas?” Norah asked Sherry as they sat by the swimming pool in the yard behind her sprawling luxury home. Both three-year-old Jeff and baby Grace were napping, and Norah and Sherry were spending a leisurely afternoon soaking up the sun. “Texas is oil wells, cattle and cotton. It’s grassy plains and mountains.”

“And desert,” Sherry added.

“That, too. Texas is chicken-fried steak, black-eyed peas and hot biscuits and gravy. Actually, I’ve discovered,” Norah said with a grin, “that most Texans will eat just about anything. They’ve downed so many chili peppers over the years that they’ve burned out their taste buds.”

“I’ve really come to love this state.” Sherry sipped from her glass of iced tea. “Everyone’s so friendly.”

“It’s known as the Lone Star state, but a lot of folks call it the Friendship state, too.”

That didn’t surprise Sherry.

“The men are hilarious,” Norah continued, her eyes dancing with silent laughter. “Oh, they don’t mean to be, but I swear they’ve got some of the craziest ideas about…well, practically everything. To give you an example, they have this sort of unwritten code, which has to do with real Texans versus everyone else in the world. A real Texan would or wouldn’t do any number of things.”

“Such as?”

“Well, a real Texan believes in law and order, except when the law insists on a fifty-five-mile-an-hour speed limit. They consider that unreasonable. And clothes… A real Texan wouldn’t dream of decorating his Stetson with feathers or anything else, with the possible exception of a snake band, but only if he’d killed the snake and tanned the skin himself. And the jeans! I swear they refuse to wash them—they wear ’em until they can stand up on their own.”

Sherry laughed. She’d run into a few of those types herself on her journey across the vast state. But no one could compete with the characters she’d met in Pepper. Mayor Bowie, Donna Jo and Billy Bob. The way that man had manipulated her into staying in town!

And Cody Bailman… He kept drifting into her mind, although she’d made numerous attempts to keep him out. She’d tried hard to forget their last meeting, when he’d kissed her in broad daylight in front of half the town. But nothing helped. Cody Bailman was in her head day and night. It didn’t seem possible that a man she’d known for such a short while—

“Sherry.”

Sherry looked up and realized Norah was waving a hand in front of her face. “You’re in another world.”

“Sorry, I was just thinking about, uh, the folks back in Pepper.”

“More than likely it’s that cattleman you were telling me about.”

Sherry lowered her gaze again, not surprised Norah had read her so easily. “I can’t stop thinking about him. I thought that once I was with you, I’d be able to get some perspective on what happened between us. Not that anything really did—happen, I mean. Good heavens, I was only in town for about twenty-four hours.”