Cowboy Up

by Stacy Finz

  “You want to stop somewhere, or I could fix us something at home?”

  “Home,” she said.

  He looked in his rearview at Ellie, who was staring out the window. “Is home okay, Ellie?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  They pulled into Dry Creek Ranch and he took the fork in the road to his cabin. The sun was setting, and the sky was white, filled with streaks of color. When they pulled up in the driveway, Ellie hopped out and ran for the door. Cash suspected she’d left her phone at home when he’d gotten the call about Aubrey and had rushed her into the SUV to go.

  He and Aubrey sat in the vehicle for a few seconds, letting the silence stretch between them. Then he leaned over the console and kissed her. She clutched his shoulders with both hands and held on so tight, Cash let the kiss go on longer than he should have. He just sank into her, stroking her hair and back, reveling in the way she fit so perfectly into his arms.

  When they finally pulled apart, he said, “Are you over this Mitch guy or not?”

  The question seemed to shake her. “Over him? Is that what you think today was about, me not being over him?”

  Cash didn’t answer, but throwing a hot coffeepot at her ex-fiancé didn’t exactly sound like an act of indifference.

  She leaned her head against Cash’s leather backrest and pinched the bridge of her nose. “You do, don’t you?”

  Again, he treated her to silence. He didn’t want to identify the reasons why it mattered to him, but it did. It mattered a lot, even though he wasn’t in a place to offer her anything more than friendship. And sex.

  He had a grieving daughter to take care of and a case that still gave him nightmares. He hadn’t been able to protect Casey Farmington; how was he supposed to…he just wasn’t in a position to offer any more than he could.

  She blew out a breath and hit her head against the seat. “Remember I told you that Mitch cheated on me? Ugh…I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this. You have to promise you won’t tell a soul.”

  “What happened?”

  “He had an affair with Brett Tucker’s wife, Jill. Brett came back from Afghanistan broken, Cash. I don’t mean the lower half of his body. I mean…everything. He’s a shell of the happy-go-lucky man he used to be. The football star, the hometown hero, the man voted most likely to take the world by storm. Gone. All those men are gone.

  “You know how many times Jace has had to rush to the Tuckers’ house because Brett was threatening to…The only thing that keeps him going, the only thing, is his children and Jill. He’s loved Jill since they were fourteen years old.”

  She took a deep breath. “And Mitch, Brett’s alleged best friend, took her from him too.”

  “Shit.” Cash rubbed his hand down his face. “So Jace also knows about this?”

  She nodded. “I told him when I didn’t know what else to do.”

  “And it’s his opinion that you should both take this to the grave with you?”

  She reared back. “You sound like there’s another option.”

  “Yeah. It’s called the truth. You just got done telling me how this guy has lost everything. You want him to lose his dignity as well? Jeez, his wife is running around on him with his best friend. If you and Jace know about it, there’s bound to be others who do too. You think he won’t eventually learn of their duplicity? His wife’s infidelity? Of course he will. Then he’s going to blame you two for trying to keep him in the dark about it.”

  He stopped, trying to contain his irritation. Lies ruined lives. If Marie had told him the truth about Ellie, he would’ve known his daughter. If his bosses had told the public the truth about the Presidio murders, they might’ve caught a killer before he struck again. Lies didn’t just ruin lives, he corrected himself, they caused people to die.

  “No, Aubrey, you’re not doing the man any favors. You’re just killing him softly, that’s all. And for what? So you can be the town pariah and have your car vandalized and towed. Lose work accounts. So Jace can hand his opponent the perfect ammunition against him and get himself creamed in the election?”

  Aubrey did a double take. “My God, I can’t believe you’re that heartless. Brett can’t take another hit, especially not something like this. Brett is disabled, Cash. Do you know how much it would kill him to know that his best friend is doing what he can’t do with Jill?” It wasn’t a question, it was a rebuke.

  “Are you privy to what Brett can or cannot do?” He nudged his chin at her in challenge. He doubted Brett had shared his sexual capabilities with Aubrey. Just because he was paraplegic didn’t mean he couldn’t perform in the bedroom. “You do know that women have affairs on nondisabled men every day of the year?” The point was that only Brett and Jill knew what was going on in their marriage, and it might not have anything to do with Brett’s injuries.

  She unbuckled her seat belt. “So basically, you’re telling me I should blow the whistle?”

  He didn’t know if he would call it blowing the whistle. But, yeah, she should stand up for herself. “What I think is that lies have a way of biting people on the ass and hurting the ones you’re trying to protect. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “I’m not lying,” she said, and reached for the door. “I’m just not telling. There’s a difference.”

  Not as far as Cash was concerned. Omitting the truth was the same as a lie, plain and simple.

  She got out of the SUV and started walking toward the footbridge.

  “Hey, where are you going? I thought I was making us dinner.”

  “I’ve lost my appetite.” She kept walking.

  He followed and caught her arm. “Don’t do this. We were having a frank discussion and I gave you my opinion. I think your heart is in the right place, Aubrey. But I think your logic is skewed.”

  She spun around. “I can’t ask you to understand. Brett isn’t your friend and you have no idea what he’s going through.”

  “Nope, I don’t.” But he had an inkling of what she was going through. She’d just spent the last five fucking hours in a jail cell because that asshole Mitch had pushed her to the brink.

  She took his hand and laced her fingers in his. “I’ll take a rain check on that dinner. I’m tired, grouchy, and want desperately to shower.”

  He got it. He was disappointed, but he got it. “If you change your mind, you’re always welcome.” If it wasn’t for Ellie, he’d offer his shower, a glass of wine, and his bed as long as she was interested.

  Cash returned to his cabin to find Ellie pawing through the pantry. She was standing on a footstool, trying to pull something down from the top shelf. His stomach pitched at the sight.

  “Hey, kiddo, let me get it. I don’t want you to fall.” He took down the box she was reaching for. “Cereal? Don’t you want a real dinner?”

  “Cereal is a real dinner.” She hopped off the stool as spry as a goat and got a bowl and spoon out of the cupboard.

  “You’ve been hanging around Uncle Sawyer too much.” He opened the fridge and searched the contents. The day had gotten away from him with Aubrey’s arrest and he’d failed to shop. “How about pasta?” It was his go-to dinner these days.

  She reached around him and got the milk. “Cereal’s good.”

  He swiped the box off the counter and read the ingredients. “You know how much sugar this stuff has in it?” Why the hell had he let her put it in his basket the last time they’d grocery shopped? “We’re going to have to hide this from your grandmother.”

  She grabbed the box, piled it on top of her bowl along with the milk, and took it to the table.

  “Why do I have to meet them?”

  He held on to his patience. “Because they’re your grandparents, your flesh and blood, and they’re dying to meet you.”

  “Why? Why all of sudden do they want to meet me?”

  “All of a sudden?” He joine
d her at the table. “We talked about this, Ellie. They learned about you when I did.” Not much more than a month ago. “Had they known about you sooner, nothing could’ve dragged them away.”

  Her small, heart-shaped face scrunched up. “Right.”

  They were back to this again. “El, how about you give them a chance? I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.”

  “I don’t want to,” she said and stared into her cereal bowl. “I don’t want to meet any new people. It’s hard enough keeping everyone that’s supposedly related to me straight.”

  His first inclination was to tell her she was being a spoiled brat. That his parents weren’t getting any younger and they deserved to know their grandchild. But when her bottom lip began to quiver, he saw something other than obstinance; he saw fear, and his heart melted.

  “They’re going to think you’re great, Ellie.” He picked up the box of cereal and poured himself a handful.

  “I don’t care,” she said with a steely stare, trying her damnedest to sound indifferent. Tough. But Cash saw the vulnerability in her blue eyes.

  “Okay.” He stuffed the cereal in his mouth. “Then it shouldn’t be a problem, right?”

  He could feel the anger vibrating through her clear across the table. She’d wanted him to fold and let her have her way. Not happening, kid. She’d thank him for it later.

  Ellie got up from the table, washed her bowl out in the sink, and stormed off to her bedroom. By ten, her bedroom had gone dark, and Cash assumed Ellie was fast asleep. Tomorrow would be a big day for both of them.

  Twice, he considered calling Aubrey to see how she was doing and convinced himself she was probably asleep. Besides, he wasn’t her boyfriend. Yet he went out on the porch to see if her cabin lights were still on or a reflection from her TV. Nothing.

  He stood at the railing, smelling the sweet scent of pine trees in the breeze. In the distance, the hoot of a lonely owl echoed off the creek, breaking the stillness of the night. The sounds and smells brought him back to his childhood, to summertime at Dry Creek Ranch when life was uncomplicated. Taking a deep breath, Cash stared up at the star-filled sky.

  At midnight, he turned in, sleeping soundly only to be awoken a few hours later. At first, he thought it must’ve been the nightmare that still plagued him. But as his eyes began to adjust in the darkness, he saw a shadowy figure standing next to his bed. Cash moved so fast, he nearly knocked the lamp off his nightstand.

  The figure jumped back and let out a bloodcurdling scream.

  Ah, Jesus. Ellie.

  Cash flicked on the light and reached for her. “What’s the matter, sweetheart?”

  “You scared me.”

  That made two of them, because she’d nearly given him a heart attack. He pulled her onto his lap and cradled her head against his chest. “Sorry. I was asleep.”

  It took a while for it to register, but she was letting him hold her. Not just letting him, she was clinging to him like a barnacle.

  “I had a bad dream,” she said, her voice shaking.

  He knew something about bad dreams. “What was it about?” he whispered.

  “My mom. She didn’t have a face anymore. Worms had eaten it off. And she was trying to talk to me, but she didn’t have a mouth.” Ellie snuggled closer.

  “I’ve got you, sweetheart.”

  “It was so horrible.” She shuddered, and he tightened his arms around her, brushing the back of her hair with his hand.

  “I have them too, sometimes. They’re awful.”

  “What are yours about?” She seemed to relax somewhat, pressing her cheek against his shoulder.

  “A case I had. I dream about it a lot.” They often kept him awake into the morning. The circumstances of the nightmare varied, but it was always Casey Farmington’s dead eyes staring back at him.

  “Did someone die?”

  “Yes.” Maybe he shouldn’t have told her that, but her mother had been a homicide investigator. “The bad guy is in jail now. So when I have the dream, I just think about that and it goes away.”

  “What can I think about to make mine go away?”

  He pondered it for a while. “You could remember her face, the way it really was. How does that sound?”

  She sniffled, and he found a handkerchief in his bedside table and wiped her nose.

  “Sometimes I’m worried that I’m starting to forget what she looked like.”

  “Nah,” he said. “You’ll never forget her. When your stuff comes, we’ll frame a big picture of her and hang it on the wall, and we can get a small one made and put it in your wallet. But, Ellie, you won’t forget your mom. She’ll always be with you.” He touched her heart and then her temple. “Here and here.”

  “I don’t want to forget her.” She swiped Cash’s handkerchief across her eyes. “I miss her so much.”

  “I know you do, sweetheart.” He took the handkerchief from her and wiped her tears with his two thumbs, wishing he could take the pain away. “You want to stay in here tonight?”

  “Maybe just for a little while.” She yawned, and her eyes drooped to half-mast.

  He pulled the blanket down and settled her under it on the other side of the bed. She looked so tiny laying there that it brought out all kinds of paternal instincts he didn’t think he had. Suddenly, he wanted to hunt the monsters under her bed and wipe out the bad dreams in her head.

  He leaned over and smoothed her brown hair away from her forehead and kissed the top of her head.

  “Sleep tight, little one. I’ll be right here if you need me.”

  In a groggy voice, she said, “Okay, Dad.”

  He froze. She’d never called him that before. The sound of it—Dad—made something move in his chest.

  Chapter 16

  The Bealses had indeed been to Disneyland with their grandkids the week their cattle had gone missing. Jace had a plane manifest and a slew of time-stamped pictures at the Magic Kingdom to prove it. They most definitely had an alibi.

  What they didn’t have was a motive.

  As it turned out, the Bealses didn’t have livestock insurance; it was too expensive and “not worth the paper it was written on,” according to Randy Beals. So the working theory that they’d stolen their own cattle and made it look like someone else had was a nonstarter, leaving Jace at square one.

  “How the hell does two hundred head of cattle disappear into thin air, that’s what I want to know?”

  “Were you able to get a look around their ranch?” Cash sat in the chair on the other side of Jace’s desk.

  “Just from the driveway to the house. What’s the point, if they’re no longer the suspects?”

  “You said it before.” Cash flicked a speck off his boot. “Two hundred cattle didn’t beam themselves up, Scotty. Someone either snuck them off the property very quietly or they were slaughtered there.”

  Jace tilted his chair against the wall until it rested on two legs. His head hurt from trying to crack the case.

  He turned his attention to Cash and examined his cousin. Since the weekend he’d been a little off. “What’s going on with you and Aubrey? Why didn’t she come to the barbecue Sunday afternoon before your folks left?”

  Cash let his eyes wander around Jace’s office, pretending he was too caught up in his own thoughts to thoroughly answer the question. It was a mechanism for avoiding something he didn’t want to talk about. Jace knew, because he did it himself, and he suspected Sawyer did it too. Daltons were cowboys at heart, and cowboys weren’t sharers when it came to personal stuff, at least in Jace’s experience.

  “Cash!” Jace stuck his finger in front of Cash’s face and guided him back so they were locking eyes. “Aubrey. We were talking about Aubrey.”

  “You were talking about Aubrey. I was talking about the case.” He sighed, resigned. “She’s pissed at me and I’m a litt
le pissed at her…and at you.”

  “Me? What did I do?”

  Cash got up, shut the door, and leaned against Jace’s file cabinet. “I know about Mitch and what he did and how he’s holding it over both your heads because of some heroic notion that you and Aubrey have.”

  Jace should have seen this coming. Pillow talk. Jace was far from an expert when it came to relationships—just look how his own screwed-up marriage had gone—but he was pretty sure Cash and Aubrey were tangling up the sheets together.

  “It was Aubrey’s call to keep it secret,” he said. “But I can’t say I disagreed with it. I don’t want to be the guy who tells one of his best friends that his wife is stepping out on him, especially a friend who’s been to hell and back.”

  Cash walked to the window and gazed outside, resting his hands on the sill with his back to Jace. “It’s not my business,” he said. “And I’m certainly not going to tell anyone. But lying…it has a way of catching up with you, Jace.”

  It was something Jace had had to wrestle with. If his friends had only come to him with how unhappy Mary Ann had been, maybe they could’ve fixed their marriage. By some divine intervention, Jace had been able to hold it together when she’d walked out on him and the boys.

  He wasn’t so sure Brett could. Not too long ago, Brett was in such a funk that Jace feared he’d do something stupid. Jace didn’t want to send him back to that place. And finding out about his wife and Mitch would surely make Brett spiral. “Brett isn’t wired to handle the truth right now.”

  But Cash was avoiding the real question, and Jace wasn’t about to let him get away with it. “So this is why Aubrey didn’t come to the barbecue?”

  “You’d have to ask her,” Cash said.

  He was doing that Dalton thing—deflecting—which told Jace there was more going on between Cash and Aubrey than recreational sex. For now, Jace decided to leave it alone. His cousin’s personal life was Cash’s to screw up any way he wanted. And Aubrey was no fragile daisy. But the town had picked sides in the Aubrey-Mitch marriage debacle, and she could use some backup. In other words, now wasn’t a good time for Cash to be throwing a bunch of morality at her. She wanted to protect Brett at all costs and that was her prerogative as far as Jace was concerned. After all, she was the one taking the bulk of the shitstorm for it.