Four times during those first tough weeks after Gabe left her, tired-looking men in worn jeans and broken-down boots came to her door in need of somewhere to lay their heads for the night. As always, she fed them and let them sleep in the barn. And she smiled to herself, thinking how, if Gabe were there, he would probably have hired each and every one of them. She would be the only woman in Texas with a hundred and twenty acres, a few bad-tempered goats and six ranch hands.
But Gabe wasn’t there. And she was getting used to that, making her peace with it. She was. She truly was….
After he left Mary, Gabe worked. A lot. Any project, any time. That was pretty much his motto.
His dad had found out right away that he and Mary were through. Gabe told him flat out that it was over when Davis asked if he would be bringing Mary to the ranch on the weekend. Davis said he was sorry it hadn’t worked out. He actually sounded sincere. Gabe thanked him and left it at that. His father had been as good as his word about leaving Mary alone. BravoCorp had bought another ranch not far from Mary’s. The Bravo River project was well underway.
Two weeks later, his mother dropped by the office. She tried to get him to “open up” about how he was doing. When that went nowhere, she gently asked if maybe he would like to go out with another of the daughters of a friend of hers, a sweet Texas debutante named Bunny McDuke.
Gabe decided he needed to quit moping around. One of his mother’s “nice girls” would be about right, for now. He wasn’t up for having sex yet and a girl like Bunny McDuke wouldn’t be wanting to have sex with him, anyway. Not on the first date.
Bunny was small and blond and bouncy. She laughed a lot. Gabe took her out to the country club he and everyone in his family had belonged to all his life. They had dinner in the clubhouse. And then they went dancing. Bunny got up good and close during the slow numbers. She laughed and rubbed her plump breasts against him.
When he took her home, she grabbed him around the neck and stuck her tongue down his throat. He gently peeled her off him and told her good-night.
On the drive home, he almost took the turn that would get him to the Lazy H. But he held the wheel steady and drove on home.
A couple more weeks went by. He worked late. He left town on two three-day business trips. He went out with friends now and then, in groups. Groups, he decided, were the way to go. For now. Groups or parties, where he could arrive on his own and leave when he felt like it.
He got offers—from women he met at those parties, from an old girlfriend in town for the night. And he knew he had his reputation as the Bravo Bachelor to uphold. But so what? He just wasn’t in the mood.
Not yet. He was giving it time, he told himself. He was in love—scratch that. He had been in love for the first time in his life. He had a right to take a few weeks to get over it.
Too bad, as more days and weeks went by without Mary—and without Ginny—he only felt more miserable. And lonely as hell. He could almost wish he’d never met her.
Except he couldn’t imagine not having met Mary, not having held Ginny in his arms. He missed them. Bad.
So bad he was even starting to get a glimmer of what a thick-headed idiot he’d been.
By the second Friday in July, six weeks and a day after she and Gabe ended it, Mary was starting to feel that she was pulling it together. Every day, hours would go by when she didn’t even think of Gabe. Her heart, she kept telling herself, had started to heal.
Still, nights were tough. By then, Ginny was sleeping straight through from about ten to six. Mary had all those hours of darkness to herself. Too much time to brood, really. So she had been taking on extra assignments from the various editors she wrote for and she would often work until midnight, concentrating on getting words on the screen, keeping her mind from wandering places there was no reason to go.
That night she was at her computer around seven when someone knocked on the door. She answered to find another down-on-his-luck drifter. This one had a handsome face lined early by hardship and too much time in the sun. A grimy-looking bedroll and a backpack waited at his feet and he held the stub of a cigarette between his lips. Before saying a word, he crushed what was left of the cigarette under his worn boot and stuck the butt in the breast pocket of his battered denim jacket.
Then he swiped off his straw cowboy hat. “Ma’am, I heard tell you don’t mind if a man sleeps in your barn for a night.”
She tried not to think of Gabe, not to wonder if he would have insisted on hiring this guy, too. “Of course I don’t mind.” At her request, Ty and Wyatt had spent a day closing off a corner of the barn, making a small, private area for any wanderer who needed a place to lay his head.
“There’s a door to the right as you enter the barn,” she told him. “You can sleep in there.” The room held a bed and an old night table. Ty and Wyatt had run a line in there for light. “Are you hungry?”
“I could use a little something, if it won’t put you out.”
She made him two sandwiches and added an apple and a square of spice cake Ida had brought by the day before. He was painfully polite. “Thank you so much, ma’am. For everything.”
“My pleasure. Sleep well.”
“I will, ma’am. Thanks to you.”
She nodded and shut the door, smiling a little at the way the guy had called her “ma’am,” just like Rowdy always used to do. And then she went back to her computer and worked for another few hours on a quilting piece for Country Ways Monthly.
Later, after she’d fed and diapered Ginny and put her in her crib for the night, she had a long, slow soak in the tub and then climbed into bed.
There was a full moon out, hovering huge and silvery above the barn. So she left the curtains open and stared at it for a long time, thinking how cool and distant it looked—and longing for Gabe.
The truth kind of snuck up on her, as she lay there, unable to sleep.
She had to admit it: Her love wasn’t fading. She wasn’t getting over him, she was…denying him. Denying the love she felt for him. Trying to bury it, to call it gone, to say she had healed. As if her love was no more than a messy wound she could stitch up and slap a bandage on. And then wait for it to fade to a thin, white scar.
As she stared at the faraway face of the man in the moon, she started seeing her own stubbornness. Her blindness. She started thinking the impossible, thinking that maybe it wasn’t impossible. Not impossible at all—to let loving him be enough. To let what they had just be, to stop demanding more of him than he was willing, freely, to give.
Okay, he had some hang-up about marriage. But he did love her. He’d said it. And more important, he’d shown it in a thousand ways. He’d been so good to her, always doing whatever he could, going the extra mile for her. Even when he’d left her, he’d gone with her child’s education paid for, her ranch spiffed up, all the dangerous dead brush cleared away, with Ty and Wyatt to help her—and insurance for all of them.
He might not be a man who would ever marry her. But so what? He gave her so much. Why couldn’t she let that be enough?
She could, she was starting to realize. She wanted commitment from him and he’d already given her that. She could loosen up a little. She could be the one to compromise.
Mary threw back the covers and padded on bare feet to the closet. She slid the door wide and got way in the back and stood on tiptoe to get the last gift he had brought her. And then she sat on the bed and opened it by the light of the moon, sighing in pleasure when she lifted it from its velvet box.
A bracelet—alternating diamonds and sapphires—to match the necklace he had given her before. She put it on. And then she got back under the covers.
She missed him. So very much. She could see the light in the barn, a glow from the small window in the makeshift bedroom where another man without much to call his own had bedded down for the night. She lay snug in her own house on the land she loved, but she felt lonely. Maybe lonelier than that guy in the barn.
Tomorrow, she thought
.
Tomorrow she would go to Gabe. She would ask to try again. Maybe he would turn her down. He could very likely have moved beyond her by now. He could say he was doing fine and didn’t want to get involved with her again.
If he refused her love, so be it. She would never know if she didn’t try.
Mary let her eyes drift shut. She felt relaxed and easy in her skin for the first time in six weeks. The decision was made and with it came a certain peace. Sleep closed over her, sweet and deep.
She woke suddenly, bolting upright.
Someone was pounding on the back door, calling her name. “Mary! Mary, wake up!”
Blinking in sleepy surprise, she glanced toward the window. It was still night out there and the moon had gone down.
But it wasn’t the darkness that had her crying out in distress.
The barn was on fire.
She threw on a robe and raced to the door.
Wyatt, bare-chested in a pair of old Wranglers, with a serious case of bedhead, said, “Get the baby and come outside. The wind’s blowing toward the house.”
“The fire department…”
“I’ve already called them. Just get the baby and get outside.”
“Yes. All right. I will….”
Wyatt didn’t hang around to see if she was doing what he’d told her to do. He ran toward the barn where Ty already had a hose turned on full blast, trying to keep the blaze under control until the county’s volunteer firefighters arrived.
Her pulse echoing in her ears, Mary hustled upstairs barefooted to get Ginny. She scooped the sleeping darling up in her arms and swung the diaper bag onto a shoulder.
Back downstairs, she set Ginny on the bed while she tugged on a pair of boots. Then she picked up the baby, grabbed her purse and settled it and the diaper bag over her spare shoulder. What else? Her work.
She hurried to the living room to get the memory stick with her recent projects on it. The stick hung from a lanyard on a pin by the computer. She lifted it free and slipped it over her head.
And then she fled through the back door, only pausing to call Brownie, who came running at the sound of her name. Outside, the flames were brighter than before. Ginny’s stroller waited beneath the patio cover. Mary tucked her in there, nice and safe.
“Stay, Brownie.” The dog dropped to her haunches. Mary left her there with Ginny and went to see if she could help. The patio cover, she figured, would protect the baby from any random sparks.
Ty still had the hose on the blaze. Wyatt had dragged the other hose around from the front. He was wetting the roof of the house, trying to douse the flying sparks before they could catch the old, dry roof shingles on fire.
“The baby?” he shouted at her.
“On the back patio,” she told him.
“Better stick with her. This thing could get loose and take the house any time now.”
She feared he was right. And there wasn’t a lot she could do, anyway. She might have manned a hose herself. There were other faucets on the property—at the horse trough and in the goat yard. Too bad the extra hoses were in the barn and there was no going near it by now.
The flames had eaten their way along the walls and up over the roof, turning the dry old walls and ancient roof shakes to an inferno. It would be burned to ash in no time…
Oh, God. That poor man she’d let sleep in the corner room! She sent a prayer winging heavenward that he wasn’t in there, that somehow he’d managed to get out before the fire or the smoke overpowered him.
At least all the animals should be okay. By the blazing light the fire provided, she could see the two horses, milling around at the far side of their paddock. The goats had moved to the back of their yard, too. She could hear them out there, baaaaing like crazy, some of them even making outraged screeching sounds. But they were away from the building, safe outside.
The chicken coop was several hundred feet from the barn. But what if a random spark found it and it caught fire?
Mary glanced toward the patio. Brownie sat patiently next to the stroller. It should be safe for her to see to the chickens…
She ran, clutching her robe tight around her, the boots she’d pulled on rough against her heels—she hadn’t wanted to waste the extra seconds finding socks. The coop was over by the cabin where Ty and Wyatt lived, off to itself. And the wind was blowing the other way.
Still, she could hear the chickens in there, agitated, fluttering around. She threw the coop door wide. The chickens fluttered and pecked each other, but they didn’t emerge. They weren’t the brightest creatures in the animal kingdom. She had to go in there and chase them out.
Freed, they ran around the yard in circles, clucking and fluttering. Mary shooed them out of the way and ran to check on Ginny.
The barn roof came down just as she ducked beneath the shelter of the patio cover. It made a terrible whooshing sound and then collapsed in on itself, sparks shooting skyward, thousands of them, most of them blowing right for the house. Brownie whined in fear.
“Move away!” Ty shouted. “Get clear of the house, Mary!” By then he’d given up on dousing the barn and had turned his hose, with Wyatt’s, on the roof of the house.
Mary hooked the diaper bag and her purse over her arm again, and flipped the shade of the stroller to cover the baby’s head. Brownie at her heels, she rolled the stroller as fast as she could away from the fire and the house, toward Wyatt and Ty’s cabin and the open chicken coop.
By then Ginny was wailing. Mary picked her up and rocked her from side to side, staring in disbelief at what was left of the barn.
Then, grimly, she turned her gaze to the house. She watched, helpless, as numberless embers gently drifted, glowing bright, onto the roof. Wyatt and Ty watered most of them to wet ash. But there were simply too many.
The section of roof over her bedroom caught all at once. One moment it was only an ember, red as a dragon’s eye, and the next, with a wild rush of sound, a raging blaze. The water the two men aimed at it seemed to do no more than slow it down—for a few seconds. Then the flames rose up again, hungry. Roaring.
Mary stared, sick at heart, as her house burned.
And then, at last, the sounds of sirens filled the night. She saw the lights from around the front of the house. They were too late to save the barn. But maybe, if the good Lord, and a little luck, was with them, they would manage to save her home.
Once the firefighters took over, Mary called Ida. Her mother-in-law arrived in fifteen minutes flat.
Then she and Ida stood side-by-side, Ida holding the baby, out of the way, as the firefighters did what they could. It didn’t take long after that. Within minutes of Ida’s arrival, the fire was out.
The barn and the master bedroom were smoldering piles of wet ash, though the rest of the house still stood. The fire marshal arrived with a clipboard and a whole bunch of questions. He shooed a couple of chickens out of his way and took Wyatt aside first.
“It could have been worse,” Ida said softly.
Mary nodded. “I think it started in the corner of the barn where I had Ty and Wyatt build that sleeping alcove. When Wyatt woke me up, I looked out the window and saw that corner of the barn on fire.”
Ida sent her a look. “Someone staying in there?”
“Yeah.” Mary spoke softly.
“No sign of him since the fire started?”
“Nope.”
Ty, shooing chickens back toward the coop, heard them talking. He stopped with a fat white hen tucked under his arm. “The guy in the barn, you mean? He ran away—though he did stop to knock on the cabin door and warn us first. When Wyatt answered, he pointed at the barn, yelled, ‘fire,’ and then took off running.” The chicken clucked and he stroked its white feathers. “You’d think he might have had the guts to stick around and give us a hand.”
Mary shook her head. “He was probably scared to death he would be blamed.”
Ty grunted. “The fire started in the part of the barn where he was staying. A
nd it doesn’t take much. Probably dropped off to sleep with a lit cigarette in his mouth. So his being scared he’d take blame? That ain’t no excuse, not where I come from.” He left them to gather up the rest of the chickens.
“Well.” Ida tucked the baby blanket closer around Ginny. “At least we know he got away.”
Mary agreed. “It’s so good to know he’s all right. I’ve been dreading the worst, worrying over what might have happened….”
Ida shifted the baby to one arm and wrapped the other around Mary’s shoulders. Mary sagged against her, thankful that no one had been hurt after all, and glad for Ida’s steady presence at her side.
Beyond the smoking roof of the house, dawn was breaking. A rooster, perched on the fence of the goat yard, let out his morning cry.
And it was then, as Mary leaned on Ida and the sun came up, that the black Escalade came flying around from the front of the house, dodging the fire trucks and the firefighters’ equipment, only slowing when the driver had a clear view of Mary and Ida, with Brownie at their feet and Ginny held safe in Ida’s arms.
Chapter Sixteen
Her heart soaring, tears blurring her eyes, Mary glanced at Ida.
Her mother-in-law shrugged. “He stopped in the hardware store after you two broke up, gave me a bunch of phone numbers, told me to call him right away if you ever needed him. I figured he’d probably want to know your ranch was on fire.”
“Oh, Ida…”
“You go on, now. He’ll be wanting to see for himself, up close, that you’re all right. Brownie.” She clucked her tongue at the dog, who was already up on all fours and wagging her tail. “Stay.”
Mary turned as Gabe emerged from that shiny black car. Had there ever in this world been a man so handsome and proud?
She ran to him. And he opened his arms to her and gathered her in, whispering her name against her hair. “Mary. Mary…”
She looked up into his face and she saw the love there and she knew then that whatever happened from that moment on, they would be getting through it together.
The Bravo Bachelor Page 17