by Sable Hunter
HOW TO ROPE A MCCOY
HELL YEAH!
By
Sable Hunter
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used factiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2014
Sable Hunter
All rights reserved.
www.sablehunter.com
Published by Beau Coup Publishing
http://beaucoupllcpublishing.com
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. This book contains material protected under the International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author/publisher.
Is Texas big enough for more McCoys? Hell yeah! Heath McCoy, the oldest cousin of Aron and his brothers spends his days championing his family. He is no stranger to heartbreak, the woman he loved left him at the altar. From that moment on, Heath developed a new attitude - love'em and leave 'em wanting more. Until he meets Cato. Cato is determined to experience all life has to offer. She is deaf, yet very adept at listening with her heart. The moment she lays eyes on Heath, she knows he’s the one man who will mean the world to her. But Heath doesn't want forever, he wants a fling. So, Cato decides to give him what he wants and hope he falls in love with her in the process. She takes a gamble on love and the stakes are high. How do you rope a McCoy? Very carefully. How do you keep him tied? With love.
A GLIMPSE INTO THE PAST
Our lives are molded by a series of
DEFINING MOMENTS
These are told before the real story begins so you will know the events which shaped the lives of
Heath and Cato.
Heath – Into the Storm
No one expected the worst. No one ever does. Heath’s heart was hammering as he drove back toward home. “Please let her be okay, please let her be okay,” he prayed. The storm surge had been almost twenty-eight fuckin’ feet high. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like to face such a massive wall of water. Ahead of him, it was hard to see anything familiar. There was nothing left, everything was gone. God, he hoped Belle Chasse had been spared.
The home where he’d been born and raised had stood guard over Tiger Bayou since 1836. While his father’s folks now owned a good sized property in West Louisiana, Belle Chasse had been his mother’s family home. Originally a sugar plantation, Christian McCoy had taken it a step further—raising cattle, planting rice, and digging oil and gas wells. He’d ushered the grand old estate into the twenty-first century. Heath’s mother always said her parents would have rolled over in their graves if they could see the pumping stations dotting their historic grounds. But their father, a native Texan, considered oil wells to be an acceptable form of landscaping.
There was no going fast, no hurrying. Heath maneuvered his faithful red truck down what used to be a well-kept highway. Now the road was washed out, trees were down and debris was strewn everywhere. He’d known it was going to be bad. The weather reporters had forecasted a direct hit and they had been right. Heath, his father and his brothers, had loaded up five cattle trailers full of purebred Angus and hauled them to higher ground. They’d made six trips each over the past two days, struggling to save their herd from the massive hurricane which was threatening South Louisiana.
Heath couldn’t believe his eyes. Slamming on the brakes, he questioned his vision. There was a dead cow up in a tree, wedged in a fork of the trunk. Her head hung down at an odd angle, her neck broken. “Lord Almighty,” he breathed. As if that wasn’t enough, around the next curve his mouth hung open as he registered what lay in front of him—a freighter sat about fifty feet from the road, tilted at a steep angle. At this point, the huge ship was a good quarter mile from the ocean. A sinking feeling lay heavy in his gut. “Please let her be okay,” he prayed again.
Ryder and Pepper had been sent to their aunt, his mother’s sister, who lived near St. Martinville and they had all traveled east to Houston, trying to outrun the storm. He’d loved to visit St. Martinville growing up. His aunt baked the best oatmeal raisin cookies. Laughing harshly, he realized letting his mind wander protected him from the awful reality surrounding him.
Heath’s mother was supposed to have left also. “Please, God, help my mother,” he murmured even as he tried to make sense of his thoughts. Carolyn McCoy had lingered, supervising the securing and boarding up of the windows and doors. Belle Chasse had survived several bad storms, including Camille and Andrew. But none had borne down on Plaquemines Parish with the same ferocity as Hurricane Katrina.
More times than he could count, Heath had to stop the truck, get out, move debris and cut up trees blocking the road. His chest was tight and adrenaline was pumping through his veins like a drug. All he could hold on to was his mother’s promise to her family that she would leave Belle Chasse in plenty of time to escape the wind and the rain. Carolyn had assured Christian that she’d call him as soon as she made it to Houston and met up with her sister and the girls.
Only the call never came.
All of Louisiana was in chaos. New Orleans was underwater—the levees had broken. The National Guard had commandeered the region and the citizens who remained behind. Footage of people stranded on rooftops, swimming in the streets and suffering at the Superdome were being shown on every news channel in the world.
Heath’s whole world was in shambles.
His father was convinced that his wife was sitting in some shelter or had been forced to travel farther north when she’d gotten caught up in the mass exit of humanity from Southern Louisiana. Heath had heard of cops and townspeople standing guard at intersections and forcing people to keep driving. All along the way, towns were full to overflowing, resources were running short and tempers were running high. Just the idea of some hot-head redneck with a gun telling his mother that she couldn’t stop for help made Heath sick. So, Jaxson and Philip were searching via the internet and telephone while Tennessee and Christian were on the road, checking every shelter between Baton Rouge and Atlanta. Heath had been elected to check their home, just in case.
“Shit,” Heath groaned when he saw a pile of boards and a smashed cupola, both painted a familiar pale yellow. Looking around, he saw that parts of his home, his home, were scattered all around. “Oh, God, she can’t be here.”
The sugar cane fields were in shambles, the rice fields were full of mud. An alien landscape lay before him. Trying to assimilate what he was seeing, a groan of anguish escaped from Heath’s lips. Belle Chasse was gone—gone—razed to the ground. Only her foundations remained.
Great oaks which had measured twenty-one feet in circumference had been reduced to twisted trunks like totems drawn by Picasso. Skidding to a stop, Heath scrambled from his truck. “Mother! Mother!” He began calling, looking frantically around. Surely she’d escaped. Hearing nothing, seeing nothing but wrack and ruin, he hurried around, gazing off into the distance, hoping against hope not to see his mother’s battered body lying in the mud. Taking heart because he saw only bits and pieces of furniture, dishes and doors, stacked and piled tree limbs and boards, he walked farther into Belle Chasse’s grounds until a tangled heap of metal came into view. “Oh, no,” he whispered. It was his mother’s car. Running toward it, he threw aside branches and sheets of plywood until he could peer through the shattered glass and confirm the vehicle was empty.
Maybe she left wi
th someone else? He clung to hope, until he tripped over a concrete block and looked down, a shining bit of metal catching his eye. Kneeling, Heath picked it up and his breath caught in his throat when he recognized his mother’s wallet. A groan of sorrow echoed midst the desecration.
Unwilling to give up, Heath spent hours walking and looking, but he found no other trace of his mother. When dark was upon him, he drove back out until he reached a filling station in Lake Charles and got a signal on his cell phone. He called his father. “Dad, this is Heath.”
There was a great deal of static on the life. “You didn’t find her, did you? She wasn’t there?”
“No…”
“Good, I knew you wouldn’t. We haven’t found her either, but we will. She’s fine, I know she is.”
“Dad, Belle Chasse is gone. Completely destroyed.”
He heard his father’s breath hitch.
“Her car was there and her wallet.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.” Christian was almost defiant in his denial. “She’ll turn up.”
His father’s words were prophetic. Carolyn McCoy did turn up, but not the way he’d hoped. A fisherman discovered her body near one of his grounded shrimp boats, tangled in the nets.
Christian’s spirit shattered. He refused to consider rebuilding. He refused to even step foot upon the ground where their house once stood. He said it was no longer home.
They would have to start over somewhere else.
Cato – Four Senses Instead of Five
“Listen with your heart, then you’ll understand,” Cato sang as she sat in her room and rocked her baby doll. “You’re such a pretty girl. Someday you’ll grow up to be a beautiful bride.” Holding the doll on her shoulder, she burped her soft back. “Uh, oh!” Cato laughed, pretending. “You pooped.” Going to her bed, she laid the doll down and went through the process of changing its diaper, laughing and giggling all the while. “You’re such a good girl. Mama will always make sure you have everything you need. I will always think you’re pretty and I’ll never ever make you go hungry.”
Such were the promises Cato felt a mother should make to her child.
“Cato, put up your toys. It’s time to go to Ms. Barlow’s house. Put on a clean dress and don’t wear that red one, it’s too tight. I swear, if you don’t quit eating so much, I don’t know what I’ll do. I was a beauty queen, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you know it’s embarrassing for me if you’re overweight? What will people say about me?” Her mother shouted instructions from the other side of the door.
“Yes, Mama.” She kissed the doll and put her to bed. Cato felt sad. She didn’t want to go to voice lessons. She’d much rather go outside and make mud pies or fish in the crawdad holes down by the bayou. It wasn’t that she hated music, Cato loved it. She just didn’t want to do it all the time and she wanted to sing the songs she liked, not the fancy stuff the teacher made her learn. Opening her closet, Cato found a dress she thought her mother would like. It was baggy and Cato could hide in it. Sometimes she wished she could just be invisible.
“Practice your scales while you’re changing! Your voice was stiff at your last lesson.” Dutifully, Cato began singing. She didn’t understand why her mother pushed and pushed. She was the real singer, not Cato. Her mother had been on television, Cato had seen it. Edith Vincent played the tape over and over again, the day she’d been crowned Miss Louisiana, 1980.
Going to the restroom, she brushed her hair and her teeth, all the time avoiding looking in the mirror. Cato was no beauty. She wished she was. Maybe her mother wouldn’t be so mad all the time. Sometimes she longed for a brother or a sister. Being an only child meant there was no one to make her mother happy but Cato, and she wasn’t very good at it. Her father hadn’t stayed either. Maybe that was her fault too.
“How’s my baby?” She picked up her doll when she’d finished in the restroom. “Be sweet,” she whispered so her mother wouldn’t hear. She thought it was silly for Cato to talk to dolls. But Cato didn’t have too many people to talk to. She usually played alone, except when she was allowed to visit Tessa. Cato didn’t have many friends because she was chubby and the girls at school didn’t like her. Neither did the boys, but that didn’t matter. Who wanted boys as friends anyway? Mother said if she slimmed down, she’d be popular, so Edith watched and measured every bite Cato ate, but it didn’t seem to do much good. The doctor said she had a slow metabolism, whatever that meant.
“Listen with your heart, then you’ll understand,” she sang, then hummed, hugging her doll close before laying it on her bed. “I’ll be back.”
But Cato didn’t do well at voice lessons that day. Her head hurt. Ms. Barlow fussed, but it didn’t help. The next day, Cato felt too ill to get out of bed. Instead, she stayed in her room and watched her favorite Disney movie, Pocahontas. Cato knew every song by heart. She’d watched it over and over again. Right now her head hurt too much to sing, but the music playing gave her comfort. Listen with your heart, you will understand.
Tomorrow would be different. Tomorrow, she would run and play and sing. But now, her neck was stiff and she ached all over. When her mother came to check on her, she wasn’t alarmed at first by how hot Cato was. “Maybe you’ll sweat some of this weight off of you.”
The words should’ve hurt Cato’s feelings, but she was too sick to care. When Edith took her temperature, Cato wasn’t aware how concerned she became. She didn’t know the doctor was called. She didn’t awaken when Edith took her to the hospital, where her temperature rose to over one hundred-six degrees.
Cato drifted in and out of consciousness. Every time she came to, she called for her mother. Edith sat with her. She loved Cato in her own way. She just wanted to be proud of her. To make her feel better, Edith played the soundtrack of her movie so Cato could hear. Listen with your heart, you will understand.
She listened, the words dancing through her mind. Cato listened until she couldn’t hear anymore. The growing silence confused her. Why was everything so quiet?
“Mama?” she called when the thick stillness threatened to suffocate her. “Mama!” Cato called again. Then, with growing horror, she realized she wasn’t really hearing her own voice.
A touch on her leg made her jump. She looked. Edith was standing at the foot of her bed. She was speaking, but Cato couldn’t hear. “Mama, I’m scared. I can’t hear you!”
Her mother’s lips moved, but no noise came out. She looked at the television where Pocahontas was playing. She could see the leaves blowing, she could see Grandmother singing, but Cato couldn’t discern the words or the music. She remembered them, but she could no longer hear them.
Cato was deaf. Her ears no longer worked.
She could only listen with her heart.
Heath – Leaving Montana
“I want to go home,” Ryder cried as Heath held his sister close.
“Home isn’t there anymore, honey.”
“I don’t like it here. Montana is cold and no one is happy. Daddy won’t talk. He just sits and stares out the window,” she sobbed into his shirt, her words muffled.
Heath felt helpless. He was at his wit’s end. After his mother’s death, the whole family seemed to want to be as far away from Belle Chasse as possible. Oh, they could’ve rebuilt. The land was rich and fertile. Rice would grow, sugar cane would flourish and the hay meadows could support the herds. What couldn’t be replaced was the sense of peace and welcome they’d once known. Christian said he couldn’t bear to go back and see where Carolyn had been killed. Hurricane Katrina had completely transformed their lives forever.
Their father suffered a stroke at his wife’s funeral. For a while, the whole family thought they’d lose him too. But he survived, although a changed man. Since Christian McCoy had simply shut down, Heath had done the best he could to carry on. He’d contacted a specialist in ranch realty and located a piece of property on the Yellowstone River near the Dome Mountain Range. There was nothing not to like about Paradise Valley—ex
cept that it wasn’t home.
As he tried to console his sister, his eyes focused on the window where he could see flakes of snow drifting down. The weather was harsh in Montana. As Heath patted Ryder’s shoulder, he realized he’d made a mistake taking the family so far from what they were used to. He hoped they’d forgive him in time. “We’ll adjust, Ryder. We have to.”
“No, we don’t have to.” The voice caused both of them to look up. It was their father, Christian, his wheelchair filling the doorway. “Put this place up for sale. We’re going back south. We have another home, we’re moving to Texas.”
“How? Where?” Heath was confused. He had no idea what his dad was referring to.
Christian rolled his chair closer to his children. “When your grandfather, Isaac, divorced your grandmother, he needed a change of scenery, much like we did. Painful memories, I guess. There was a dispute over ownership with a former partner and they had trouble.” The old man rubbed his face. “Anyway, my father sold Highlands, our family’s legacy, and since your mother passed, I’ve been working to buy it back. And I think I’ve made a deal. I’m negotiating with the current owner, Al Hollings. He’s been running cattle on the property and I’m offering him top dollar. The man is in ill health and wants to liquidate his holdings to form a trust for his only child, a daughter. Highlands Ranch has been waiting for the McCoy family to come home. And if all goes well, that’s where we’ll be going.”
“Why didn’t I know anything about this?” Heath asked, feeling funny about not knowing all of his family’s history.
“The whole divorce thing between your grandparents was a sore spot. I was raised to never talk about it. Ignoring our past became a habit. My father changed. Losing a spouse is always hard.” He drifted off, deep in thought, as if what he’d said explained everything.