His Forever Valentine Read online

  “Never mind,” she said, dismissing her flippant statement. “Any words of advice?”

  Nothing really occurred to him. He thought back to what his mother always used to tell them. “Just be yourself.”

  Val had to press her lips together to suppress the laugh that rose in her throat. What he’d just said sounded suspiciously like the “words to live by” in every Disney movie she’d seen as a child.

  “Well, I suppose I can do that better than anyone,” she murmured under her breath.

  Val realized she was uncharacteristically nervous and had no idea why. With effort, she pushed those feelings to the background. Squaring her shoulders, she pulled open the door and walked into the diner.

  She’d assumed, because she’d taken for granted that there would probably be at least two women behind the long counter, that she would have to ask Rafe which of the women was Miss Joan. But the moment she entered the diner, she realized that wouldn’t be necessary. There were three women wearing uniforms in the diner, two behind the counter and one on the floor. The latter was bringing an order over to three men at one of the booths along the wall.

  It wasn’t age that gave away the owner of the diner—one of the women behind the counter appeared older than the woman on the floor. It was the air with which she carried herself.

  Miss Joan moved like a queen amid her well-loved subjects.

  Walking up to the woman removing three plates of hot stew from her tray and placing each before one of the men seated at the booth, Val smiled at her and politely asked, “Miss Joan?”

  Amber eyes with flecks of green rose to look at her face. There was a flash of interest in them as the older woman took measure of her.

  “Yes?”

  Val gave Miss Joan her best disarming smile as she introduced herself. Inwardly, Val braced herself for anything, since, Rafe’s assessment of the diner’s owner not withstanding, she really didn’t know what to expect.

  “I’m Valentine Jones.”

  “Was that your mama’s idea, or your daddy’s?” Miss Joan asked, putting down the last order of stew. She took a step back as she gave the young woman with Rafe her full attention.

  The woman had lost her already, Val thought though she did her best not to appear bewildered.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Was that your mama’s idea, or your daddy’s?” Miss Joan repeated.

  It didn’t make any more sense to her the second time around than it had the first. “Was what my mother’s idea or my father’s?”

  “Your given name,” Miss Joan said patiently. “Did your mama think you were her little Valentine or was that what your daddy thought?”

  Val was about to say that she had no idea whose idea it was, but then a faraway memory from her childhood seemed to come out of nowhere. She was on her father’s lap and he was reading something to her out of the Sunday comics. Something to do with Valentine’s Day. “Bet you didn’t know that was why we called you Valentine,” she could almost hear him saying.

  “Why, Daddy?” she remembered asking.

  “Because the first time I ever laid eyes on you,” he’d told her, “I just fell in love with you. I told your mom that you were like my own personal little Valentine from heaven.”

  The sliver of a memory brought a smile to her lips as she relished it.

  “My father’s,” she answered in almost a whisper. Then, raising her eyes to the woman, she repeated what she’d just said, more loudly this time. And with pleasure. “I’d forgotten all about that until just now.”

  Miss Joan nodded, as if she’d expected her question to unearth a long-lost memory. The ghost of a smile on her lips was one tinged with satisfaction.

  “Why don’t you two take a seat at the counter and then you can tell me what it is you want to ask.” The last part of Miss Joan’s statement was addressed to her, Val realized. How did the woman know that she had something to ask her?

  Unable to answer that for herself, she glanced quizzically at Rafe. The latter merely smiled at her in response. The expression on his face seemed to say, “I told you so.”

  “You boys okay?” Miss Joan asked the three men she’d just served.

  All three responded in a disjointed cacophony that just amounted to different forms of affirmative responses. The men made no secret of their apparent interest in the stranger that Rafe Rodriguez had brought into their midst.

  Pretty women never went unappreciated.

  “Don’t stare so hard, Howard. Your eyes are liable to fall right out of your head,” Miss Joan warned just before she turned her back on the trio.

  Weaving her way through the crowded diner, she made her way to the counter. Pausing, she took assessment of the seating. There were a couple of single seats available, but no two were together.

  “Billy, Travis,” she called out. When the two men looked at her, she waved toward the empty stools. “Why don’t you boys do me a favor and just scoot yourselves over to the left some, so that Rafe here can have a seat next to his lady?” It was phrased as a request, but they knew it was more than that.

  As the two men abruptly rose and silently shifted over to the left to accommodate Miss Joan’s “request,” Val felt the need to correct the woman’s mistaken impression of the situation.

  “Oh, I’m not Rafe’s ‘lady,’” Val told her.

  Miss Joan slanted her a look and grunted “Uh-huh,” as if she was just humoring her. The woman’s expression was completely unfathomable.

  Val began to reiterate her denial, then stopped. She had the feeling that doing so would only make things that much worse, that any protest would somehow just make a case for the other side that much stronger.

  This wasn’t grade school, she reminded herself. No adamant denials were necessary, just a simple statement of fact before dropping the matter was all that was required. The woman could think whatever she wanted to. It didn’t make any difference. She was here for a far more important reason than clarifying her status. She was here to hopefully get the woman’s blessings and film Sinclair’s movie here.

  Val knew that if Rafe’s father allowed them the use of his ranch and this Miss Joan put the kibosh on the crew filming within the town proper, the production crew could always find a way around that. But she also knew that it would be far easier—and to everyone’s mutual benefit—if she could get the queen bee’s approval to go ahead with using the town itself—and its citizens—in the movie.

  “Can I get you two anything?” Miss Joan was asking, looking exclusively at her even though she’d used the word “two.”

  She needed to get the small talk out of the way, Val thought.

  “Water will be fine,” she told the owner of the diner.

  “Water’s to wash with,” Miss Joan told her dismissively. She tried again. “So, what’ll it be? Lemonade? Iced tea? Coffee?”

  Because she had a feeling that if she didn’t select something the woman would just doggedly keep giving her choices—or worse, become insulted, Val gravitated to the first choice she’d been offered.

  “The lemonade sounds good.”

  “The lemonade is good,” Miss Joan confirmed. She looked at Rafe and raised one carefully penciled-in eyebrow. “Two?” she asked.

  “Two,” he agreed.

  Miss Joan’s thin lips curved in approval ever so slightly. “Be right back,” she promised.

  Entering the kitchen through double swinging doors, she retreated to retrieve a pitcher of the promised lemonade.

  As she sat there at the counter, Val could swear that she felt every pair of eyes in the diner were on her. It wasn’t a matter of vanity. She knew she looked like her mother and that her mother had been considered beautiful at this stage of her career, but that had nothing to do with this.

  Leaning into Rafe, she asked, “
I take it you don’t get too many people coming through Forever.”

  Rafe couldn’t help grinning. “None that look like you.”

  She was more than accustomed to hearing compliments, when they were merited and especially when they weren’t. It was all part of the game. Compliments were tendered with an endgame in mind.

  The endgame being seduction.

  She was also accustomed to blocking compliments, to deftly avoiding getting caught up in any flowery displays of rhetoric intended to get her ensnared in a web. But Rafe had said what he’d said without an obvious endgame. He’d given her a compliment, she realized, because he thought it was true.

  Which would explain why she could feel herself blushing.

  Deliberately avoiding making any eye contact with him, she turned on the swivel counter stool to face the people in the diner. She noticed that more than half of them were men. Taking that into account, she dug out her one-thousand-watt smile.

  “Hi,” she said, addressing all of them at the same time. “I’m Val Jones,” she told them, thinking that it might be prudent not to use her whole name at this time and thus avoid the possibility of getting asked the same question that the diner’s owner had put to her.

  A chorus of “hellos” greeted her. That and one tall, hulking wrangler in worn-out boots and even more worn jeans strode over to her.

  “You looking for a good time, Val Jones?” he asked, leaning over her stool and giving the impression of crowding her. “’Cause I can give you a better one than he can,” he assured her, jerking a dismissive thumb in Rafe’s direction.

  Before she could think of a way to answer his statement that wouldn’t create a problem rather than avoid one, she heard someone behind her speak up first.

  A sense of relief washed over her as she heard Miss Joan’s voice.

  “Why don’t you go and sit down, Emmett?” It was more of an order than a question. Turning, Val saw that Miss Joan had returned with the pitcher of lemonade and took charge of the situation. “She’s not interested in having any kind of a time with you, good or bad, so my advice to you is to stop making a fool of yourself and just go sit down,” she told the lumbering wrangler with finality.

  Chapter Six

  Turning back to the twosome she’d placed at the counter, Miss Joan noted that Rafe was no longer seated but on his feet, no doubt ready to defend the young woman he’d brought with him.

  For as long as she could remember, even when he was a little guy, Rafe had always been slow to anger. But once there, he was a force to be reckoned with. The fact that Emmett had fifty pounds on the Rodriguez boy was not a deterrent.

  “Down, boy,” Miss Joan said affectionately, lightly patting Rafe’s chest to get him to sit back down on the stool again. “Confrontation’s been averted. Nobody wants to watch you messing up that pretty face of yours,” the older woman said matter-of-factly as she made her way back behind the counter again.

  Taking two tall glasses out from beneath the counter, she placed them before Val and Rafe and filled each one with lemonade. Finished, she set the pitcher down and waited.

  “Well, take ’em.” She gestured toward the untouched glasses of lemonade. “The glasses aren’t going to walk up to you.”

  They did as she said. Miss Joan waited until they’d had a chance to sample the lemonade, then focused her attention pointedly on the newcomer. “Now, then, what is it that I can do for you?”

  It made Val a little uneasy that the woman had worded it just that way. It was as if Miss Joan was looking right into her thoughts. “I represent Sinclair Productions,” Val began. “That’s a—”

  “—movie company,” Miss Joan concluded for her. “Yeah, I know.” She saw the surprised look on Rafe’s face. “What, you thought I didn’t know what that was?” she questioned, looking from Val back to Rafe. “I read People magazine,” she informed them with just a hint of indignation. “I know that there’s a world outside of Forever and I keep up on it.” Shifting her eyes back exclusively to Val, she encouraged the young woman to, “Go on.”

  Val continued with her pitch, wondering how much she actually needed to say and how much Miss Joan already knew. Did that mean the woman had already made up her mind and this was just to see what she might have to say to sway the decision her way?

  Whatever the game, she’d play it as long as the outcome was what she needed it to be. Maybe this was the way the woman entertained herself.

  “They’re going to be filming a romantic comedy about a woman going to a dude ranch to get over her divorce. The story is set in the 1960s—”

  “And you think we’re old-fashioned looking enough to serve as the movie’s location?” Miss Joan guessed, interrupting.

  Most of the time, when she dealt with home owners and the heads of town councils in some of the smaller towns that Jim tended to favor when he was shooting his films, she had to literally explain everything to the people from the moment she began. This woman was apparently far more savvy that the average person she encountered, Val thought. Miss Joan obviously had a handle on how a production company operated.

  It made her wonder just exactly what the woman had done for a living before she’d come to live here. She had assumed that Miss Joan was a native to the area, but maybe she’d been wrong.

  More than anything, she wished she could read the woman’s expression, but right now, she hadn’t a clue. Crossing her fingers, Val continued.

  “Not exactly old-fashioned,” she tactfully amended. “Forever has the warm, homey feel that Sinclair Productions is always looking for.”

  “Very diplomatic.” Miss Joan nodded her approval, adding, “You’ve got a real way with words, girl. So,” she said, moving the conversation along, “why are you looking to talk to me?”

  “Well, if Rafe’s father agrees, we’ll be using his ranch in the movie, but we’d like to do some background filming here in the town and maybe use some of the local people for extras.”

  “Extra what?” Someone in the diner called out the question.

  He was quickly answered by someone else in the diner. “Extra people, you dummy,” the man told him condescendingly. “Don’t you know anything?”

  The sound of a chair scraping along the black-and-white tiled floor was heard as the first man challenged the second. “I know enough not to call someone I work with every day a dummy.”

  “That’s ’cause I’m not the dummy,” the second man snapped.

  The voices grew louder—and uglier. “You saying that I am?”

  “Excuse me,” Miss Joan politely said to Val.

  Like a winged fury on a mission, Miss Joan moved from behind the counter to the feuding two men. She got between them, her expression reproving despite the fact that each of the men was at least twice her size. They both loomed over her like storybook giants on the verge of battle.

  The woman looked small, Val couldn’t help thinking. It occurred to her that a stick of dynamite might look small, but could still easily take down a tall tree with no effort.

  “You two lunkheads want to be banned from my establishment for life, just keep this up,” Miss Joan warned them.

  The men glared at one another, then ever so slowly, their expressions turned contrite as they addressed the woman between them.

  “Sorry, Miss Joan,” the two hulking wranglers all but chorused together.

  Satisfied that the fuse had been extinguished for now, Miss Joan returned to Val and Rafe.

  “You were saying?” she prompted Val as if nothing had happened.

  Val looked at her with new respect. Rafe had not exaggerated about the woman being in charge here. “I wanted to know if it would be all right with you and the rest of the town council, or whoever it is that rules on these things, for the production company to film here.”

  Miss Joan didn’t
answer immediately. Just as Val was about to restate her question, the woman finally spoke. “Well, I don’t see the harm in it,” she allowed. “And these film people, they’ll be staying here in town for a bit, right?”

  “Absolutely. We’re bringing in trailers,” Val explained in case the woman was going to ask her where everyone intended to stay. She was fairly certain that she hadn’t seen a hotel in the town—at least not so far. And if there was one, she knew it wouldn’t be able to accommodate all the people needed to make this movie.

  “I suspect that they’ll be needing to eat, to buy supplies, unwind at the local establishment, right?” Miss Joan asked, quietly studying her expression.

  “Absolutely,” Val assured her with feeling. She cocked her head, watching Miss Joan’s face. “So you don’t have any objections?”

  “As long as these Hollywood people of yours mind their manners, I don’t see a problem. Having them in town’s fine with me.” Miss Joan’s thin lips curved in the smallest of smiles. “Now that that’s out of the way, what can I get you?”

  Val looked at the tall glass before her. She’d only consumed a little less than half its contents. As far as she was concerned, this was more than adequate. “You brought us these.” Val nodded at her glass, indicating that the lemonade was more than sufficient to satisfy her needs.

  “That was to drink, not to eat,” Miss Joan pointed out. “I realize you don’t put all that much into your mouth, judging by the size of that waist of yours,” the diner owner said, glancing at Val’s flat waistline, “but you have to eat something. You might as well have that ‘something’ here,” Miss Joan speculated.

  “I actually have a very healthy appetite,” Val protested. She knew that it had to look as if she was constantly dieting—but she wasn’t. She ate more than her fair share. The thing of it was, she had the metabolism of an overactive hummingbird.

  “You lend it out to someone?” Rafe asked her, his eyes slowly traveling over the length of her.