“Just what did you do to that poor woman?” Marcia asked, moving towards him with papers in her arms, no longer badmouthing him. “She was trembling. And how did she get in here anyhow?”

Marcia was becoming way too casual with him, Ellison suddenly realized. Abruptly tired of her judgments and eager to hear what she had found out he curtly interrupted. “Does it matter?” he asked.

Her pretty face flushed with the rebuke. Ashamed of himself, he backtracked. He waved his hands at her. “Sorry,” he said. “It’s already been a bad morning. Let’s start again. No reason for us to get testy so soon.”

He waited.

And she waited.

“Good morning, Marcia,” he said finally, with forced pleasantry, giving the twenty-two-year-old female wunderkind his patented employer/employee smile, pausing for her expected reply and feeling really, really fake.

“Good morning, boss.”

Still grumpy, he thought.

Ellison raised his voice to address the staff in the pro shop since almost all of them were simply standing around watching the two of them. “Let’s get back to work guys,” he said. “And don’t let anyone else in who doesn’t belong. Do you understand?”

The teenaged boy Peter stood up from collecting golf balls on the floor. Gangly to the extreme, he raised one hand high, showing them a key, then made a twisting gesture to illustrate locking the door. That was the equivalent of a whole speech for Peter, Ellison noted as he saulted him with a bright smile. He then marched Marcia and himself out of the public store and into his private office.

“Seriously though,” Marcia asked. “What did you do to Mrs. Bishop? She had the strangest expression on her face.”

Ellison fluttered his hands in the air and her blue eyes went wide with mirth.

“Oh, no, you didn’t?” she exclaimed. “The giggle? You sicced the giggle on her?”

It wasn’t that funny. He’d been told countless times he giggled like a girl and it wasn’t the self-image he preferred. He had never found it that funny.

“Now you’ve got that same expression,” Marcia observed.

“Enough. See if you can fix the damage. I don’t know what she wanted.” He looked back towards the pro shop. “Golf balls, I guess, since that’s where she ended. Silly staff let her in.”

“Don’t blame them too much,” Marcia advised, hiding her smile. “It’s pretty hard to keep Mrs. Bishop from doing whatever she wants.”

Ellison filed that information away for further thought then dismissed Mrs. Bishop from his mind. They had bigger problems than customer relations. “What did you find out?” he asked.

Excerpt from The Cowboy’s Baby… to be continued. Copyright 2010. www.amazon.com/The-Cowboys-Baby-ebook/dp/B003UYUVZC.

FUN THINGS TO DO IN LOCKHART, TEXAS

Black’s Barbecue in Lockhart, Texas has a genuine old-fashioned friendly atmosphere and really good barbecue. It’s one of the four reasons Lockhart is the Barbecue Capital of Texas. People come from all over the world to eat here. They even take photographs of the outside of the building. Love it! And for those of you too far away to eat in, they ship. Go to www.BlacksBBQ.com.

Again, photos on this blog are by Roxanne Rix/Subliminal message: buy my book, buy my book, etc.