The Trouble With Cowboys

by Melissa Cutler

  “I plead the Fifth.”

  “But you’re not gay?”

  “I’m not gay.”

  “Then why won’t you talk about him? Wait, you’re blushing—are you a virgin?”

  Rachel’s eyes widened. “Geez! You’re terrible. Number one, I’m not talking about it because I don’t want to. And number two, I’m definitely not a blushing virgin. My cheeks are red because it’s so damn cold.”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “Give it a rest.”

  Amy punched her playfully on the arm. “Someday you’ll tell me about him.”

  “Not likely. But then, you always were the dreamer of the family.”

  They rode toward home in companionable silence through muddy fields and stopped on a ridge overlooking Jenna’s cottage, with the roof of the big house peeking over the top of the barn a quarter mile down a dirt road. Jenna’s car sat out front and a metal-framed swing set took up space on the side. Melting snow dripped off the sides of the roofs.

  “I’m sorry it’s not going to work out with you and Kellan.”

  Amy sighed. “Me, too. He told me he doesn’t have room in his life for a relationship right now, and I don’t either, truth be told. It still stings, not to be wanted.”

  Rachel shrugged. “He wanted you, just not in the same way you wanted him.”

  Amy winced. “That he did. But it was my fault. We seemed to have so much in common. I felt a powerful connection to him. I honestly thought he felt it too. I was wrong. Again.”

  “How do you end up picking such good-for-nothing men all the time? I mean, you can’t possibly be that bad a judge of character, can you?”

  Amy chuckled. Rachel never had been one to mince words. “It’s not as though I had great role models for a healthy relationship. Dad barely seemed to tolerate Mom. I don’t think I ever saw him hold her hand or kiss her. He never took her out to dinner or made time for her.”

  “I always figured they were private about their affection. I mean, they created three kids, so they were obviously connecting on some level.”

  “Ew. I don’t want to think about that.”

  Rachel shrugged a shoulder. “All I’m saying is there had to be some kind of love between them.”

  Amy watched a cloud slide across the midday sky, suddenly sad for them all. For the lack of romance and the loss of their parents. “Yet here we are, we three sisters, and not one of us has found success in love. What are the odds? Me, picking every rotten apple in the bunch, Jenna getting pregnant out of high school and won’t even name the father, not that any man’s come around wanting to claim Tommy. And you’ve got some secret romantic regret you won’t talk about.” She poked Rachel in the arm. “And plus, you’re maybe a little gay.”

  “I’m not—oh, you’re teasing. Ha, ha.”

  At that moment, Jenna ran out of her house, holding Tommy. She stopped in the driveway, her phone to her ear.

  Rachel’s phone chimed and she fished it from her pocket. “Hey, Jenna. Amy and I are up on the hill. Can you see us waving?” Her expression grew pensive. “Wait, slow down. What do you mean we have to get to the hospital? What happened?” Amy put her hand on Rachel’s arm. Her gaze flickered to Amy, her eyes wide. “We’re on our way. Strap Tommy into the car and pick us up at the main house.”

  Chapter 11

  Kellan had been waiting on Amy’s front porch for a long time. Long enough to play a dozen different games on his cell phone and watch a group of wild turkeys scramble across the road and back again. He had to take a leak but no way did he want Amy to show up while he was relieving himself in the grass. Or even worse, for either of her sisters to catch him in the act.

  Out of nervous habit, he adjusted the knot of his tie. He was in his business duds today, ready to come clean with Amy about his connection to Amarex, her family’s dire situation and limited choices, and how he planned to help as much as he could. In the briefcase near his feet, he’d packed a financial calculator, contracts, maps, and anything else he could think of that might help his cause. As a peace offering, he’d brought several pounds of beef loaded in a cooler. It wasn’t as poetic as flowers would’ve been, but if anyone could appreciate the gesture, it would be Amy.

  Over and over, her words from the previous night bounced around his head like a cruel taunt. I need to see you again. Tonight is not enough.

  That made two of them.

  The hurt in her eyes damn near killed him as much as the knowledge that he might never have the chance to hold her again. He shouldn’t have brought her to his house. He dialed her cell phone number for the fourth time, but once again, it flipped to voice mail. Letting out a belabored exhale, he scrolled down the touch screen to the game mode.

  Probably, he should think about his parents. About his father’s release from prison and his mother’s call to Morton. He needed to prepare himself for the possibility that one of the two of them would be calling to hit him up for money sometime soon. He should formulate a ready response so he wouldn’t be caught off guard. And he still needed to call his brother.

  The more he thought about his family, the more that old, familiar hollowness crept into his consciousness. And with the hollowness came the caustic memories he wished he could forget. Dredging up the past led to nowhere but hurt. He was a move-forward kind of man who had risen from the muck of his youth to build himself a better life, a better family than the one he’d first been born into.

  His brother, Jake, had done the same. And maybe it was for that reason the two men had such trouble connecting as adults. They reminded each other of a shared history neither of them wanted to remember. Jake was a Los Angeles cop, and a damn good one from what Kellan had gleaned from their handful of phone calls over the years and the articles Kellan sometimes found on the Internet about Jake’s law enforcement heroics. The LAPD had become Jake’s new family, as much as Chris, Lisa, Daisy, Rowen, and Vaughn were Kellan’s.

  In the distance came the thunder of horse hooves approaching. Kellan pocketed his cell phone, listening. Maybe Amy had been riding the range that morning with Rachel, which would explain the empty house. The thought of seeing her move in the saddle got him feeling a bit tight in the groin, which was the last way he should be feeling at the moment. He stood, stretching out his legs. The horses were coming from the south, at the rear of the house, so he hopped over the rail to the ground, bypassing the porch steps, and followed the noise.

  Sure enough, Amy and Rachel were galloping down a hill toward the house like a flood was chasing them. Kellan admired the sexy way the wind whipped through Amy’s hair before registering both women’s wide, panicky eyes, tense shoulders, and pursed lips. Fear. The minute Rachel reached the corral fence, she swung off her mount and hustled to open the gate. Her hands shook, rattling the chains keeping the gate locked but not making any progress. Amy leapt down to help her.

  One of their horses was skittish, stomping and swishing its tail nervously. It seemed on the verge of rearing up, so Kellan walked to it and took command of its reins. “Amy, Rachel, is something wrong?”

  Their heads swung around to regard him. Clearly they hadn’t noticed his presence until he spoke.

  “It’s our mom,” Amy said, her voice cracking. She looked like she was barely hanging on to her composure. “Doctors think she had a stroke. She’s not conscious. We’ve got to get to the hospital.”

  Shit. Life for the Sorentino family was getting worse by the day. “Give me those,” he said, grabbing the reins of the other horse too. He led them into the corral and checked the water supply. “Where’s Jenna?”

  As if his question conjured her, a small, white sedan stopped hard a few paces away, its brakes screeching. Jenna burst out from the driver’s side. “The nurse called again. Mom’s going in for emergency surgery, but there’s a chance she might not pull through. They think the stroke was caused by a bleed. Oh, God, we have to get there.”

  Amy’s hand flew to her mouth as a strangled sob broke free. Rachel ran for the
car, snagging Amy’s arm on the way. “Keep it together until we’re on the road, Amy. Then you can freak out all you need to.”

  Kellan latched the gate and ran to intercept Jenna before she reached the car. “I’m driving,” he said. “None of you are in any condition to be at the wheel.”

  Jenna wrung her hands and nodded, but didn’t move toward the car.

  Kellan draped an arm across her shoulders, led her to the backseat, and tucked her into the car next to Rachel and Tommy. Amy sat, trembling from head to toe, in the front passenger seat. He made a quick call to his ranch foreman to send workers to tend the Sorentino horses, then folded himself as best he could into the driver’s seat and managed to get both legs in, though his knees hit the steering wheel.

  The women were silent as Kellan negotiated the road to the highway. Once they thumped onto blacktop, he put a hand on Amy’s knee. “Take a deep breath,” he whispered. “Nothing you could’ve done differently.”

  She hugged herself. “I thought I’d be prepared to handle her passing. But I’m not ready.”

  “I’m going to get you there as fast and safely as I can. The nurse who called Jenna, she’d call again if there are any developments. I’m sure of it.”

  She looked bleakly out the side window, tears streaming over her face.

  With a glance into the rearview mirror at Rachel and Jenna’s own forlorn, distant expressions, Kellan wrenched Amy’s quaking hand from around her ribs and took it firmly in his. Albuquerque was a three-hour drive, slightly less if conditions were ideal and the traffic light. Thank goodness the storm had passed before dawn and the roads were clear and dry.

  The more miles they ate up, the more the tension in the car eased, due in large part to Tommy, who babbled on about road signs and asked nonstop questions to anyone willing to answer. Which pretty much meant Tommy and Kellan were having a two-way conversation about everything from tractors and pizza to cows. Kellan told him about his dog, Max, and Pickle, the horse he’d bought for Daisy the week she was born. For his part, Tommy expounded to great lengths on cartoon characters Kellan had never heard of.

  An hour into the drive, Amy flipped her palm over and squeezed Kellan’s hand. She looked his way, a sad smile on her lips. “Thank you for doing this.”

  Kellan nodded. “You’re welcome.” He chewed his lower lip, wondering how to approach such a delicate topic as their mom’s downward spiral. “Any chance you feel up to telling me more about what happened to your mom?”

  She wiggled her hand away from his grip and he thought, Oh, man, I had to go flapping my lips, causing her more pain. In the ensuing silence, he tugged his tie, loosening it enough to pop the top button of his shirt.

  But then, she started fidgeting with her fingernails and talking. “Mom never was very stable, mentally. Superde-pressive, but like on a roller coaster, you know? One day, she’d be the happiest woman in Catcher Creek and the next, she couldn’t even get out of bed. Too proud to take medicine for it, she was this wild card in our lives.”

  Jenna leaned forward. “I remember getting ready for school and I’d listen at my bedroom door to figure out what kind of mood she was in that day. We never knew what to expect.”

  “Why do you guys think I worked such long hours on the farm?” Rachel added. “It wasn’t because I was a glutton for hard labor, that’s for sure. But it got me out of the house before anyone else was awake and kept me away until dark. I didn’t have to deal with all her mood swings like the two of you chose to.”

  “We didn’t choose to,” Amy said. “Not consciously, anyway. Since you weren’t around, you didn’t only miss out on her bad days, but the good ones, too. I lived for her good days. She could be so much fun.”

  “She’d let us eat pie à la mode for breakfast,” Jenna said.

  “I love pie!” Tommy squealed.

  Amy twisted in her seat to smile at Jenna. “Remember the morning she started a pie fight in the kitchen?”

  Jenna laughed. “Our clothes were toast. And we were late for school because we had to shower to get the berries out of our hair. Mom lied to the school secretary that she had car trouble.”

  “That was a great day,” Amy said quietly, her gaze drifting to the window. “But the bad days . . .” She shook her head.

  Kellan squeezed her hand. He knew about bad days, about never knowing what you’d find when you woke up that morning. The not-knowing created a constant ache in your belly, burning a hole right through the middle of you. He knew about the desperate clinging to the good days, to the flashes of happiness and harmony. “Your dad died in a car accident, right?”

  “Last New Year’s Eve. He drove off Hoja Pass when the steering mechanism of his truck malfunctioned,” Amy said.

  Rachel leaned forward. “And before you ask—no, he hadn’t been drinking and, no, he wasn’t depressed. That day, he was stone-cold sober. He worked the morning milking and fed the livestock, like most days.”

  “I’m a little surprised you don’t know the whole story already,” Amy said, her tone wary.

  “At the time, I heard talk in town, but never got a feel for what happened.”

  Jenna huffed. “You mean, your bestie, Sheriff Cooper, didn’t fill you in on all the sordid details of our private lives?”

  Jenna’s hostility threw him off, though he shouldn’t have been surprised. No one wanted to be the subject of rampant gossip, which was why Kellan had worked so rigorously to keep his parents and his past a secret. “Believe it or not, Vaughn takes his job seriously. He’s tightlipped on cases he’s involved in.”

  Thinking about Vaughn got him wondering again about what happened between him and Rachel, how their bad blood got started. Both Vaughn and Rachel were strong, stubborn personalities. Maybe they’d disagreed over his handling of Gerald’s accident or the conclusions he’d reached. He filed the questions away to ask Vaughn about later.

  “He died around the time you were filming Ultimate Chef Showdown, right?” He didn’t want to pile the unpleasant memories on Amy, but since watching the show, he’d wondered why she hadn’t quit and gone home, given how close she and her sisters were.

  “Three days before filming started, actually.”

  “Was going on the show a difficult choice to make after that?”

  Amy shrugged a shoulder. “Yes, and no. I wanted to support Mom, Rachel, and Jenna more than anything, but Dad was always one to follow his dreams no matter what, even if others didn’t understand or agree with him, so I knew he’d be proud of the choice I made not to quit when the going got tough. And when we discovered the debt he left us, the three-hundred-thousand-dollar grand prize on the show sounded awfully good.”

  “Was your mom overcome with grief when your dad died?”

  “I’m not sure grief is the right word. My folks had a rocky relationship. Dad was a good-timer, a gambler. And Mom, with her shaky mental health, was too fragile to stand up to him or tell him what she needed.”

  “And when your father died?” he prompted.

  Rachel answered. “When Dad died, Mom was . . .”

  “Stricken,” Jenna added. “There’s no other word for it. Since she was already so emotionally fragile, after Dad died, she needed to be watched over all the time, but that was easier said than done. She’d wander off in the middle of the night and we’d get a call from the police to come pick her up at some random bar or gas station. We tried to get her on medication, but she wouldn’t take it. Looking back, we should have put her in a facility immediately.”

  He witnessed one of her less lucid episodes in the Clovis Walmart. She’d wandered the aisles in the gardening section, muttering nonsense about buying dirt to fill in holes so people wouldn’t steal from her, working herself into a fit before security whisked her away. No need to bring that incident up now.

  “You two did all you could,” Amy said. “Don’t beat yourselves up. You can’t help someone who doesn’t want it. Besides, we were all grieving for Dad. We had so much stuff to deal with, it
’s amazing we didn’t need to check ourselves into a facility.”

  “If it hadn’t been for Tommy, I would have considered it after Mom’s overdose,” Jenna added.

  “How long after your dad passed did that happen?”

  “Four weeks.”

  He had a lot of questions, but how did one ask for details of such a painful memory? Maybe he should’ve kept his trap shut, but he found himself asking, “Who found her?”

  “Jenna and I did,” Rachel said. “It was an hour or so after daybreak, I went to her room to wake her up and she was gone. By then, we’d taken away her car keys, so we knew she couldn’t have gone too far. We found her on the northern edge of our property, unconscious. There was blood everywhere because she’d hit her head on a rock, but she had a pulse and she was breathing. Thank God we had cell phones.”

  Kellan navigated around a trailer hauling oil drilling equipment and kept his speed steady. Only an hour or so until they reached the outskirts of the city. The nurse hadn’t called again, which he took as a good sign. “She was so lucky you found her.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” Amy said quietly.

  Kellan glanced sideways at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Rachel and I found vodka and an empty bottle of painkillers next to her,” Jenna said. “With the pills and the alcohol and hitting her head on the rock, the damage to her brain was devastating. She regained consciousness after a ten-day coma, but her mind is gone for the most part. She can’t even take care of her own basic bodily functions.”

  No wonder Amy hedged her answer. How lucky was it to stay alive, but never really be able to live again? “Do you think she meant to kill herself?”

  “We weren’t sure at first,” Jenna said. “Amy jumped on a plane and met us at the hospital. We all stayed in Albuquerque together, so we didn’t know about her note until Sheriff Cooper found it in her bathroom during his investigation. That was the toughest part for me, knowing it wasn’t an accident, that she’d made a choice.”