by Hope Navarre
Robyn poked her finger into Neal’s chest. “If you tell anyone about this, I’ll deny it and make your life a living hell.”
She turned away from him, scooped up her boots and jeans and snatched her still-damp shirt from the branch as she headed for the willow clump. Thank God Jake was here. At least she didn’t have to spend one more minute alone with Neal.
She stopped behind the willows and yanked his shirt off over her head without undoing the buttons, but she paused for an instant and held the sun-warmed cotton against her cheek. It held his scent. Tears stung her eyes. Why did he still have the power to hurt her?
Why had she told him the truth? Was she nuts?
Dropping his shirt, she began to pull on her own as she chided herself for her stupidity. How could she have fallen back into his arms so easily? She struggled to tug down the damp pink material. What an idiot she was!
She glanced at his shirt lying on the ground, and she stomped on it. Crossing her arms, she willed the tears back and stared out at the quiet blue water. How could she have forgotten even for a minute what he had done to her?
At least now he knew what she had done in return. Would he keep her secret, or would he make trouble for her?
It was a little late to be thinking about that. Why hadn’t she kept her mouth shut?
Why had she let him kiss her?
The leaves of the cottonwoods fluttered overhead and the willow’s long strands swayed in the gentle breeze; their tips tapped circles on the calm surface of the pond. It was this place. Something here made it easy to slip back into the past, to pretend their lives had never changed, that she and Neal had never changed.
She grabbed a willow stem and stripped it to the end. Opening her hand, she let the dainty leaves fall onto the water, watching as they slowly drifted apart.
This place might seem unchanged, but it was only an illusion. She was not the same wide-eyed adolescent who used to play here, and Neal wasn’t her perfect hero. She’d spent a lifetime adoring him, and he had turned that adoration into dust.
Spinning away from the water, she stepped into her jeans, then sat down and pulled on one boot. She had been so sure she was over him, but after one kiss, she had literally flung herself at him. She needed to get away, to put some distance between them, to get her head back on straight. Her anger swelled again.
This wasn’t love. It was a simple case of lust. She jerked on her other boot. Maybe it had been a long time since she’d had sex, but she wasn’t about to give Neal Bryant a quick tumble because he didn’t have some adoring Buckle Bunny handy. She had more self-respect than that.
She stood, dusted her hands together and picked up his shirt. Okay, she didn’t care for the picture of herself as a sex-starved widow, but it was better than being the kind of weak-willed woman who went back to the man who had cheated on her.
She wasn’t that kind of woman. She didn’t need a man. Certainly not some rodeo bum who was here today and gone tomorrow.
She had made a good life for herself and for Chance, a stable life, and she wasn’t about to let Neal mess it up.
* * *
THE BUSHES SWAYED where Robyn had disappeared behind them. She had known all along. He had a hard time absorbing that fact. It changed everything—and yet it changed nothing. No wonder she had stayed away.
God, how could he have been so stupid? If he’d gone after her and begged her to forgive him all those years ago, would things be different now?
That was a no-brainer. He’d be a father with a kid following him around.
As much as he hated to admit it, Robyn might have made the best decision for both of them. She was right. He’d never wanted kids. They tied a man down. He wasn’t ready for that. He might never be.
He could mess up his own life, but he didn’t want to be responsible for messing up another human being. He only had to look at his own relationship with his emotionally distant father to know how deep that kind of hurt could go.
How many times had he tried to win his dad’s affection or at least get noticed? More times than he cared to think about. Now that his father was gone, he’d never have the chance to change that.
A hail from behind him drew his attention. He turned away and stepped out to meet his brother. Jake rode up, reined to a halt and leaned an arm on the saddle horn. His gaze slid from the wildly swaying willows to Neal’s face. He arched one eyebrow. “Did I come at a bad time?”
“Yes. Go away.”
“Now that’s gratitude for you.” He swung down from his mount and handed Neal the reins of the second horse. “I come all this way to save your butt a ride home behind a saddle and this is the thanks I get?”
“Sorry.” Neal combed his hair back with both hands and glanced toward the willows. He didn’t like the way things had ended between him and Robyn. He might not have wanted the responsibility of children, but it didn’t feel right to pretend the boy wasn’t his now that he knew the truth.
This wasn’t something they could discuss in front of Jake. Neal would have to find time alone with her. From the looks of things, that was going to be hard to do.
He turned to his brother. “Thanks for bringing me a horse.”
“Don’t mention it,” Jake replied with a lopsided grin. “I love taking long, dusty rides on scorching-hot days.”
Robyn emerged from the willow clump. “Yes, thanks for coming, Jake.”
She threw Neal his shirt. It struck the middle of his chest. He caught it with one hand. “You saved me a long, boring trip back to your mother’s place. I’ll ride home from here. If you gentlemen will excuse me, I’ve wasted enough of my day.” With that, she turned on her heels, picked up the saddle and started for her horse.
Neal began to pull on his shirt and button it. Jake frowned at him. He handed Neal the reins of his horse and started after her. “Let me do that for you.”
“No need.” She smoothed the blanket on the pinto’s back and lifted the heavy saddle.
Jake reached her and laid a hand over hers. “Let me help.”
She jerked the saddle away from him. “I said I can get it.” She threw the saddle up, hooked the stirrup over the horn and reached for the girth. Jake glanced at Neal with a puzzled expression.
Neal shrugged. “Sometimes it’s best to let her have her own way.”
The pinto grunted in surprise as she yanked the cinch tight. She dropped the stirrup and turned to Jake. “I’ll get the horse back to your mother tomorrow, if that’s all right.”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll send one of the hands to pick him up in the morning.”
“Suit yourself.” She mounted and headed out of the canyon without a backward glance. At the mouth, she turned north toward her home and rode out of sight.
Jake walked back to Neal. “I was worried you might get heatstroke out here, but I’d say you were in more danger from frostbite. What did you do?”
Neal handed him the reins of the bay and mounted the Appaloosa. “Very funny. Has anyone ever told you to mind your own business?”
“My wife tells me that all the time.” Jake swung up into the saddle.
“You should listen to her,” Neal snapped. He wheeled his horse and kicked him into a trot.
“She tells me that, too,” Jake yelled, trailing after his brother.
The creak of saddle leather and the clatter of hooves over stone were the only sounds as the men rode single file down the canyon floor. The heat was oppressive away from the shade. Overhead, a pair of hawks glided in large, lazy circles against the hard blue sky.
After a mile, the trail cut to the top of the canyon wall. Both horses scrambled up the steep slope and emerged onto the wide, grassy plateau where Neal had been thrown. Jake nudged his mount up beside Neal’s, and they started across the prairie side by side.
“It
might help to talk about it,” Jake suggested.
“Talk about what?” Neal snarled.
Jake reached out and grabbed the reins, pulling the Appaloosa to a stop. “About whatever it is that’s eating your guts out, little brother. And don’t tell me to mind my own business. My family is my business. Like it or not, you’re family.”
Neal stared hard at his brother’s hand. Jake let go of his reins and sat back. “I’m not saying you haven’t had cause to act like a bear with a sore head, but we are all wondering when it’s going to stop.”
Neal looked up and found his brother watching him intently. “Did you ever wish you could go back in time? I do. I wish I could go back and change the one thing that screwed up my life.”
“You could have gotten hurt on any bull you rode in the past ten years.”
Neal touched the black patch on his face. “I’m not talking about this. I’m talking about Robyn.”
He nudged his horse into a walk, and Jake’s mount fell into step alongside. “Mom asked me this morning why Robyn left me, and I told her I didn’t know. She asked me why I didn’t go after her and demand an explanation. The truth is I was ashamed.”
“Ashamed? Of what?”
“You don’t know what it’s like on the rodeo circuit. There are women who idolize you, trail after you, beg and scheme to sleep with you. They don’t care who you are. All they see is that you ride bulls. They think that must make you fantastic in bed. I tell you, it’s hard to resist.”
“I imagine it would be,” Jake said quietly. “Is that what happened?”
“I had been on the circuit for a year before Robyn joined me. She was like a breath of fresh air from home. She knew me. She cared about me. Me. Not some fantasy. We had a good thing together, but I was too young or maybe just too stupid to realize how much I loved her. She’d always been part of my life. I took it for granted she always would be.”
Neal stared into the distance. The rolling hills shimmered and wavered, an illusion created by heat waves rising from the prairie in the late afternoon. It was just as hard for him to bring into focus what had gone wrong between Robyn and him.
“After our first year together, she started talking about quitting the circuit, settling down and having a family. Hell, I wasn’t ready to settle down. I was moving up in the standings, and I didn’t want anything to get in my way.”
“Did she know how you felt?”
“Sure she did. We had plenty of fights about it. She wanted me to give up bull riding. For me, that meant giving up my dream. I wasn’t willing to quit.”
“So you split up because you both wanted different things out of life?”
“I tried to believe that. We’d hit a rough spot in our relationship. It seemed like we were always fighting about something. She wanted to get married. Everyone was expecting us to—her parents, our parents, my friends. I felt like I had a noose tightening around my neck.”
“I thought you wanted to marry her.”
“I suppose I did, but just the thought of being responsible for a family was enough to blow my mind. You know how I am. You’ve always been the responsible one, and I’ve—”
“Always been the wild one,” Jake finished for him.
“Yeah, and damned good at it. Dad used to say responsibility stuck to you like glue and rolled off me like rain off a tin roof.”
Jake shook his head. “Dad was hard on you, but it was because the two of you were so alike. He didn’t want you to make the same mistakes he made.”
Their father had been on the pro rodeo circuit during their early childhood. When he’d come home to ranch for good, he did everything he could to discourage Neal from following in his footsteps. His disapproval only spurred Neal’s drive to become the better rider. He became determined to outdo his father’s record. Win more. Earn more. Bring home the world-championship buckle that had eluded his father. Then his father would have to take notice. Only it hadn’t happened that way. His father had passed away before Neal could throw his success in his face.
“Nothing I did was ever good enough for our old man.”
“Neal, that’s not true.”
“That’s how I remember it.”
“We’ll agree to disagree on the topic, but aren’t you changing the subject? I thought we were talking about you and Robyn.”
Jake was right. Jake was always right. Neal drew a deep breath and blew it out. “I’m not sure how things got so messed up between us. Money was tight. The camper we lived in was too old and too small. Being on the road constantly was a grind. I do know I didn’t help matters. I started staying out late with the boys instead of going home. It gave her one more thing to harp at me about.”
Neal paused. It was hard to admit he had been in the wrong, especially to Jake. How could he tell his big brother what a jerk he’d been?
“There has to be more to it than that,” Jake coaxed.
Neal nodded. “Yeah, there was. One night I went drinking with a buddy of mine, Ned Owens. We stayed out until the bars closed, and Ned got totally wasted. He passed out, and I drove him back to his trailer. His wife was waiting up. She said to let him sleep it off out in the car. She invited me in for a nightcap.”
“You went?”
“I wasn’t in any hurry to get the tongue-lashing I knew Robyn was going to give me, so I said yes. One thing led to another, and we ended up having sex on her sofa.”
He glanced at Jake to gauge his reaction. His expression was noncommittal.
Neal bowed his head. “Jeez, even now I can’t believe I had sex with my friend’s wife while he was passed out in my car. I haven’t lived the life of a saint, but that was the lowest thing I’ve ever done.”
“I see,” Jake said slowly. “It sounds to me like she was a willing participant.”
“Oh, yeah, she was very willing. For weeks, Meredith made my life miserable trying for a repeat performance. I told her as nicely as I could that it had been a mistake. She didn’t want to hear it. I found out she’s the one who told Robyn about us.”
“You know what they say about a woman scorned. Old sayings hang around for a reason.”
“So I’ve noticed. That night, I crawled back to our trailer like a whipped dog. I felt like scum. Hell, I was scum. Robyn was asleep. I got into bed, trying not to wake her. She rolled over and slid her arm across my chest. She was so innocent, so sweet.”
The shame of that night still burned in his chest. “Robyn was more than the girl I was living with. She was my friend, my best friend, and I betrayed her. For what? I realized that night how much I loved Robyn.”
“So you told her what happened?”
Neal almost laughed. “Are you kidding? I didn’t have the kind of courage it took to tell the woman I loved that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.”
He shook his head. “I tried to pretend nothing had happened. I thought she’d never find out. A few days later, Robyn got the call that her father had had a stroke and she flew home. I waited for her to come back, to call or something, but she didn’t. After a few weeks, I realized it was over. I got exactly what I deserved.”
“So you let her go?”
“Yeah. When I heard she got married soon after, I was actually glad. Somehow it made what I had done seem like less of a betrayal if she hadn’t really loved me. I honestly wanted her to be happy. I knew I wasn’t the man for the job.”
“I take it you learned today that she found out about your indiscretion?”
“Yes.” He’d learned that and a whole lot more. He had a son. It was hard to get his head around that bit of information.
“Okay, answer me one question. Are you still in love with her?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Fair enough, little brother. What are you going to do about it?”
; CHAPTER SEVEN
NEAL SHOT JAKE a puzzled look. “What do you mean what do I intend to do about it? What can I do?”
“I’m asking if you intend to tell her you were a fool and that you still love her.”
If only that would be enough. “Get real. You saw how it was. She hates my guts.”
They rode in silence for a while, and then Jake said, “You know, I don’t think she does.”
Neal looked at him sharply. “What makes you say that?”
“Actions speak louder than words. She drove Mom to Kansas City the night you were hurt. She stayed with you until you were out of danger. Today, she grabbed a horse and rode out to find you before anyone else did. Call me crazy, but that doesn’t sound like a woman who hates your guts. I think she still cares about you.”
“Maybe, but she doesn’t trust me. How can I expect her to?”
“I don’t know the answer to that one, but I expect it will involve a lot of groveling. Before you can gain her forgiveness, Neal, you are going to have to forgive yourself.”
Neal mulled over his brother’s words as they rode. He’d never forgiven himself for that one mistake a foolish and much younger man had made. Maybe it was time to let that go.
They topped a low rise and rode past a large herd of cattle. The steers raised their heads to watch them. Two red Herefords turned and trotted away. The rest of the herd moved to follow them. Neal found himself studying them carefully, looking for signs of illness or injury, and he smiled. Once a cowhand, always a cowhand.
But it felt good to be out riding the range. He’d missed this, too, this feeling of belonging to the wide earth, of being part of something bigger than himself.
He reined to a stop and called to Jake. “That small, black bald-faced calf is limping on his right front leg.”
“I see him.” Jake reached down and pulled loose his lariat. “Do you feel like earning your keep, little brother?” he asked, shaking out a loop.
Neal hesitated. “Jake, I don’t know....”
“What? You afraid you might miss?”