Lone Wolf Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

  “Get out of my face, then. You know what, Caleb? If it wasn’t the truth, you wouldn’t feel the need to hit me.”

  “You’re a coward,” Caleb said.

  Jacob turned away from him. “And if it wasn’t the truth,” Caleb continued. “You wouldn’t have to walk away.”

  Jacob turned around. “What can I give her? What am I going to offer her? I can’t... I haven’t done anything right. Not ever. What makes you think it’s gonna be different with her?”

  “I don’t know,” Caleb said. “What I do know is you could have her. You literally got her pregnant. It is the clearest path to having the woman that you want. And the only thing in the way is you. From where I’m standing I think that makes you a dumbass.”

  And then it was Caleb’s turn to leave him there, and Jacob spent the rest of the day feeling pissed off. And at the end of the school day, when the kids were getting rounded up to go back to their homes, there was one person missing.

  “Has anyone seen Aiden?” Jacob asked.

  “No,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “I haven’t seen him anywhere.”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Around lunchtime,” Gabe said. “When we went out to do chores.”

  “He walked away from me then,” Jacob said. “I haven’t seen him since.”

  “Dammit,” Gabe said. “Well, let’s see if he turns up at his foster home, and I guess until then we’ll keep an eye out here. We don’t know that he left intentionally.”

  But as night began to fall, and they heard from Aiden’s foster parents that they still hadn’t seen him or heard from him, it became apparent that he’d left.

  The police department didn’t have the manpower to mobilize a search party. SAR could get involved in the morning, but as far as they were all concerned that wasn’t soon enough.

  Jacob went into the art studio. It was dark, and it made his chest feel tight. Because memories of Vanessa were all over, and it smelled like paint, which made him think of her. Of the way they’d made love in here. The way her hands, her body, often smelled after a long day at school.

  He wandered through the room and looked at the canvases. And he saw one he knew he hadn’t seen being worked on in class.

  It was of a boy with dark skin and black hair, his head bent down over his forearms. Alone. On a blank black background.

  Aiden.

  Aiden had finally painted his heart.

  And Jacob had never felt more like a coward.

  He felt like a rock had settled in his gut. He tore out of the studio, to where his brothers had assembled in Gabe’s office.

  “This is my fault,” Jacob said.

  “Why?” Gabe asked.

  “Because we exchanged words, and he walked away. And I didn’t try to stop him.”

  “This isn’t time for your guilt complex,” Caleb snapped. “It doesn’t help anyone.”

  “Fine,” Jacob said through gritted teeth and didn’t argue as much as he would’ve liked to, because Caleb was right, there was no point sitting around casting blame when action needed to be taken. “We need to form a search party. We gotta go into the woods. Make sure he’s not in there. For all we know, he’s somewhere hale and hearty on the property, but if he went back in there...there’s all kinds of places he could’ve gotten hurt. There’s places he could fall.” Specifically, he was thinking about the cliff that Gavin had fallen off all those years ago. The very idea of Aiden finding himself in that situation made Jacob sick. “Let’s get the horses. I’ll call Dad and see if he wants to come out.”

  In half an hour, Caleb, Jacob, Luke Hollister, Gabe, Jamie, Hank Dalton and the Dodge brothers were all on horseback, lined up at the entrance to the woods.

  “We’ll ride in and comb the place,” Jacob said, turning the headlamp on his cowboy hat on. “Canvas the area as best we can.”

  “Let’s go.”

  They rode into the dark woods, forming a grim line, their headlights casting a glow across the bush as they searched.

  Periodically, someone would yell Aiden’s name. Taking the chance that he wouldn’t run away from rescue and was likely ready to come back to civilization by now.

  Jacob looked to his left and saw Gabe there, and then to his right, at Caleb.

  There was something comforting about having them there. His brothers at his sides.

  And it made him realize how difficult it had been all this time, to be isolated the way that he had been.

  Not just in the past couple of years since Clint’s death, but in all the years before that. When Gavin had died and he had shut everything out, because he didn’t want to face the feelings that existed inside him.

  But they had always been there. Always. It was Jacob who hadn’t always been able to reach out.

  He turned his focus back to the task at hand, urging his horse forward.

  When they were about an hour into the woods, they had all put some distance between each other, brush and ridges spreading out the search party.

  Jacob felt compelled to head to that place where Gavin had fallen. A combination of dread, terror and what he hoped was paranoia spurring him on.

  He kicked the horse’s flanks and urged him up the side of the steep mountain. “Aiden!” he called over and over again, his voice echoing across the space. Rebounding back off the side of the mountain across from them.

  “Jacob?”

  The voice he heard was faint, but it was there all the same.

  “Aiden?”

  “I’m down here!”

  “Dammit,” Jacob said, dismounting and moving over to the edge of the narrow trail.

  He looked down and saw Aiden, wedged into a small outcropping on the side of the cliff.

  He was hanging on, but just barely, and he looked terrified.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I think I broke my ankle,” Aiden said. “I fell off the side of the trail and I can’t move. If I do I’m gonna fall.”

  “I won’t let you fall,” Jacob said, terror like granite in his chest. But if he was certain of anything in his life, it was this: he would not let Aiden fall. Not now.

  He grabbed the radio that was strapped to his belt and called to the channel his brothers were on. “I’ve got him. I’m sending you coordinates on the GPS. We might need the fire department.”

  Jacob had a rope stashed at his side, and he unhooked it. He tied one end of it to a rock, and the other to his waist. “I’m going to come down toward you.”

  “Shouldn’t you wait for help?”

  “I don’t want the ground to give way. If you fall... I’m not waiting.”

  “Okay,” Aiden said, clearly not about to argue about a rescue.

  Jacob made sure the rope was secure, and he slid down partway, toward Aiden. “I have done this before,” Jacob said, talking to the kid as he made his way toward him. “I was an EMT. And a firefighter.”

  “My hero,” Aiden said drily.

  “I might just be,” Jacob said.

  When he got down to him, he grabbed hold of his arm, and then the rest of him. “Now the hard part. I just have to drag us both up.”

  He heard brush crashing above him. “Jacob?”

  “Down here,” Jacob called up.

  “Do you have him?”

  “Yes,” Jacob said. “Help me out. Grab hold of the rope and pull us up.”

  Jacob climbed, and with support from Caleb and Gabe, he managed to get both of them back up onto the narrow trail. A burst of adrenaline went through his chest, and suddenly all of the strength drained from his body. He lay on his back, right next to Aiden, who was panting.

  And then he hit him. “What the hell were you thinking?”

  “I was mad,” Aiden said. “I just wanted to go for a walk.”

  “You don’t know the area, you didn’t tell anyone where you were. You are in big trouble. You are grounded for the rest your life.”

  “You’re not my dad,” Aiden croaked.

 
; “Maybe not. But I’m going to be somebody’s dad. I might as well start practicing on you.”

  They got away from the ravine, and Caleb helped Aiden up onto the back of Jacob’s horse, and they all rode into the edge of the woods. By the time they got there, the fire department was waiting to take a look at his ankle.

  “You’re gonna want to go to the hospital,” one of the guys said. “You need to get that set.”

  “Will do,” he said.

  Aiden’s foster parents weren’t far behind the fire department, and they bundled him into the car and took him off toward the hospital.

  Jacob knew they didn’t need him, but he struggled with wanting to follow them all the same. “You’re a damn hero,” Caleb said. “Whenever something like that goes down...you show up. It’s what you do.”

  “I’m not a hero,” he said.

  “Yeah, except that everything you do proves that you are,” Caleb responded. “And I don’t know why you’re so married to the idea that you can’t be. But you are, aren’t you?”

  “I haven’t done anything that anyone else wouldn’t do,” Jacob said.

  “Um,” Caleb said. “I’m pretty sure you have. Most people wouldn’t tie a rope to their waist and go down the side of a cliff to save someone else’s life. That, in my book, is a hero. Look what you do, look what you’ve always done for work. You are a hero, Jacob, and I don’t know why the hell you can’t seem to handle that.”

  “Because I’ve never been able to do it when it counts.”

  “What’s tonight? Aiden. He counts. He matters.”

  “He sure as hell does,” Jacob said. “But he could have died. He could have died, and ultimately, there would have been nothing I could do to stop it. Great. I showed up, and I was able to act. But it might not have ended that way. It might not have ended that way, and we can’t know when something is going to go bad.”

  Caleb looked at him, his expression blank. “No,” he agreed. “We can’t. We can’t know that, and that’s why we have to do everything that we can to make sure we’re there when it counts. That’s what you did tonight, that’s all anyone can do.”

  “Not enough,” Jacob said, desperation clawing at his chest. “It’s not enough, and it’s never going to be. I can’t... I can’t be a hero.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I—”

  “Don’t say it’s because you feel guilty about Clint.”

  “I need to feel guilty about it,” he said, the words bursting out of his mouth. “I need to feel guilty about it because if I don’t...then I just have to feel it. Then I just have to feel it like everything else. And I don’t know if I can do that. How are you supposed to do that? Walk around with all that shrapnel in your chest. That loss. That knowledge that...any given day one of us could wake up and not come back home.”

  Caleb nodded slowly. “I mean, I get it. I know what it’s like to walk around feeling bulletproof for a long damn time and then realize we aren’t. What we do... It’s not without risk. But of course we’ve done it so many times, been right in the thick of it and come out of it okay. Losing Clint like that, it drives the whole reality of it home.”

  “I’ve always known,” Jacob said. “I’ve always known that it could end. That you could be here one minute, and the next be gone. When Gavin died... When Gavin died, I knew then. I was ten years old and I knew it.”

  His brother knew Jacob had lost a friend as a child, but he didn’t know the details, and Jacob wasn’t about to get into them now. Caleb clearly wasn’t going to press.

  “It’s not the not-being-bulletproof that gets me,” Jacob continued. “It’s that the people around me aren’t. It’s that I can’t predict it or control it. That I can’t stop it. That no matter how hard I tried... Dammit, Caleb, I went into being an EMT, went into the fire department to try to make some kind of difference, but it doesn’t help protect the people around me. It’s still not enough. Me being a damn hero isn’t enough. I will never be enough of one to stop time from moving on, to stop...fate, or whatever the hell it is that I don’t even want to believe in. Because I want to believe we have choices, but I can’t seem to... I can’t seem to be able to make the right ones.”

  “That’s just life,” Caleb said. “We can’t know what’s going to happen day to day, and we can’t control or stop everything. That’s just...the way it is.”

  “And that’s just fine with you?”

  “No,” Caleb said. “Hell no. It’s not fine with me at all. But what else can we do?”

  “How am I supposed to live with Vanessa? How am I supposed to love her, knowing that... I mean, what if I deserve her? What if I’m not broken? What if I could have her? What if she could be my wife? The mother of my child, and she could live with me, for the rest of our lives. What if all that’s true? But what if I lost her? What if I couldn’t protect her? Then what? Then what would I do?”

  His brother’s ice-blue gaze collided with his. “A man can’t live on what-ifs, Jacob. Believe me, I know. What-ifs don’t make reality. No matter how much you might want them to or might want them not to.”

  And Jacob had a feeling that his brother was talking about Ellie, but it was one of those things he wouldn’t mention, even now, because it was one of those unspoken things that Gabe and Jacob didn’t even really talk about with each other. Out of respect. Not just for Clint, but for Ellie and Caleb themselves.

  “But it’s the what-if that kills me,” Jacob said. “It’s the what-if that makes me...” He shook his head. “Maybe I’m a damn coward,” he said. “But I don’t know how to live in a world where I might lose something I care about so much.”

  “Do you know why death is a tragedy?” Caleb asked slowly. “I mean, do you know all the reasons it makes us so sad?”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “You know. Death is sad because of love. Because it leaves people who love that person behind. And it leaves a hole inside them that can’t be filled. It’s love that makes it matter. And it’s the possibility of everything those who went before us will miss that makes it even more tragic. Why is it tragic that Clint is gone? Because of love. Because look at everything that he left here. Because of Ellie, because of Amelia. Why is it tragic that your friend Gavin is gone? Because of all the life that he didn’t get to live. You have that life right in front of you. You have that choice. You’re not in the grave, Jacob. And there isn’t a damn thing stopping you from being with Vanessa other than you. Other than fear. And that’s a real damn tragedy. But you could have this woman, this woman who loves you. She loves you, and there isn’t an earthly power standing in your way except for your own self, and you won’t take it.”

  The words hit Jacob like a bomb, pain exploding inside his chest.

  Because Caleb was right. The tragedy of death was in the hearts that were left behind, and in the possibilities of life missed by those who were taken too soon.

  “You’re here,” Caleb said. “You’re here, and Vanessa loves you. That’s a gift. That is a gift that...so many men would give a whole hell of a lot to have.”

  “You make it sound easy. You make it sound like there’s nothing to it at all.”

  Caleb laughed, hollow and bitter. “Well, I’m not the one who’s in love,” he said, the word sounding dry. “But you are. You are, and that means you have a choice to make. Are you going to live like you went over the cliff with Gavin? Are you going to live like you went down in that helicopter, which isn’t living at all? Or you can live like these years are a gift. A gift that some people don’t get. No, you don’t have a guarantee about tomorrow. None of us do. Whether you’re with Vanessa or not, something could happen to her, and you wouldn’t be any happier about it if you weren’t married to her, because the fact of the matter is...you love her. You love her already. And you damn well know it. Being apart from her is just punishing yourself more. Protecting yourself, really. But from what? Maybe from the full spectrum of pain, but the full spectrum of happi
ness too.”

  “You think a lot about this?” Jacob asked heavily.

  “Yeah,” Caleb said. “I do. I spend a lot of time looking around at the life that Clint left behind. It’s a beautiful life. And if you could have something like it...”

  “I love her,” Jacob said, the words bursting from him, filled with truth that he’d been avoiding for the past few weeks.

  “I know you do,” Caleb said. “Love is the strongest thing on this earth. I think it makes everything hurt a lot more.”

  Jacob laughed, but it was hollow and humorless. “Is that supposed to be an endorsement?”

  “I don’t know,” Caleb said. “I can’t really endorse it one way or the other. Anything that matters is heavy. That’s all I know. But what’s the alternative? The alternative is going through life caring about nothing. Not letting it touch you.”

  “And I suppose that’s when you become Hank Dalton,” Jacob said. “Happy-go-lucky and hurting people without meaning to, because you don’t let yourself feel.”

  “I expect that’s true,” Caleb said. “We have our very own cautionary tale available to us in the form of our father.”

  “I want her,” Jacob said. “I want her so much it hurts to breathe.”

  Caleb was silent for a long moment. “If you want someone that much, and you could have them, but you don’t...life isn’t worth living anyway.”

  And he knew then that Caleb was talking about Ellie. He didn’t know the whole situation with their relationship. They were connected, that was for sure, but one thing he never asked, and never wanted to ask, was if Caleb had ever had any kind of romantic involvement with her. It was clear to him now, based on the anguish in his brother’s voice, that those feelings were only on one side.

  And nothing drew a line under the absurdity of the situation Jacob found himself in quite like that.

  “I don’t know why she loves me,” he said. “She’s...she’s the strongest woman I’ve ever known. Strong and brave. I’ve gone through a couple of hard things, but Vanessa has been walking on a hard road for half her life. But she does it. And she’s just...everything.”