Page 92 of His Tenth Dance

Tucker couldn’t tear his eyes from Bobbie Jo. “You are so beautiful,” he said aloud.

She smiled at him and leaned forward. “You gotta turn around, cowboy,” she said in a much quieter voice.

A few people still laughed as Tucker quickly moved his horse into position.

Pastor Benson held out his hand. “Can I have your reins too, Tucker?”

Tucker leaned forward and passed them to him. Pastor Benson lifted both sets of reins into the air. That brought the horses closer together, their noses nearly meeting at the altar.

“Today,” he called into the crowd. “We unite the hearts, minds, and lives of Tucker Hammond and Bobbie Jo Hanks.”

He quickly looped the reins together. “We make this union symbolically with these ties, but their covenant and commitment are real and binding between them and God.”

He looped the joined reins around a handle protruding from the front of the altar that Tuck hadn’t even noticed until now.

He’d always been bored at weddings, but as Pastor Benson started in about what it meant to be married and to put another person’s cares and needs above his own, Tucker tried to stay present.

After all, this washiswedding day—and he planned to only have the one.

Pastor Benson spoke about sacrifice and compromise, and Tuck questioned so many things. He was right in the middle of rodeo season, and the moment he and Bobbie Jo came home from their honeymoon, he’d be off again. Another place. Another event.

And for what?

He didn’t need the money. He simply didn’t like standing still.

He didn’t know what the right answer was, but he’d lived the last year of his life asking God to show him the way. And Tucker felt like the Lord had; he didn’t want to keep asking for an answer he’d already received.

So he basked in the warmth of the autumn day and the pastor’s words.

When it was his turn to sayI do, he did it.

“And do you, Bobbie Jo Hanks, take Tucker Allen Hammond to be your lawfully wedded husband? To love and to cherish, to serve and to build a life with?”

“I do,” Bobbie Jo said.

Tuck finally let his nervous energy get the best of him. He reached up, grabbed his cowboy hat, and threw it into the air as he whooped.

Pastor Benson laughed, as did many in the crowd. “You may kiss your bride, Tucker.”

Tuck quickly slipped from his saddle and climbed onto Bobbie Jo’s horse with her, taking her into his arms and sealing their marriage with a kiss he hoped wouldn’t be too embarrassing for her.

thirty

Lindsay Whettstein opened the front door and reached up to take down the fall wreath she’d hung there last month. She wasn’t a domestic goddess by any stretch of the imagination, but she’d signed up for an online kit to be delivered to the house—one that provided all the materials and instructions to make one home décor item each month.

Specifically, a wreath.

The company staged the kits so she could make the wreath for October in September, and today, just a couple of days into the month, she was finally getting it up. She took down the one filled with autumn leaves and scarecrows and balanced it on the back of the couch near the door. The wind slithered through the doorway, reminding Lindsay that fall had fully arrived in Colorado.

She was due with her first baby next week, in only eight days.

And while she’d insisted she could keep working at the horse boarding facility that her uncle owned—and her husband, Keith, ran as the agricultural manager—they’d both insisted she take it easy. So today, she’d finished her October wreath and was finally hanging it only a couple of days late.

This one bore jack-o’-lanterns, ghosts, and a bubbling cauldron of green goo. She’d painted the jack-o’-lantern faces and tied fabric around the foam circle to fill in between the die-cut wooden pieces that had come with the kit.

She’d then painted all three letters that spelled outBooat the bottom, waited for them to dry, and attached them. The whole thing had taken her a couple of hours this morning, and she’d enjoyed the process.

Lindsay could admit she got tired faster than usual, and she was glad she wasn’t still living on her hobby farm—that had been too much for her as a single woman. She and Keith had moved closer to Blackhorse Bay, where they both worked. They had ten acres now, enough for a few of their own horses and all of Lindsay’s beloved chickens.

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