by Arlene James
He lay there an hour or more. Dean came out of the motor home and went into the house, then returned and drove away. An extended-cab pickup pulling a horse trailer topped the rise, and a woman with red hair got out of it. Long minutes later Shoes came out and walked to the bam, returning with Wes and Charlie’s horses, which he loaded into the trailer. Sometime later Wes and Charlie came out with the redheaded woman, got into the truck and drove away, waving to someone standing on the front porch. After that it was quiet again.
Finally Rye managed to get himself up and pull on his clothes. A heaviness weighed on him, something more than loss of sleep and physical exertion, something huge and formless that he couldn’t identify let alone fight. Leaving the sleeping bags where they were, he walked down the slope, around the house and in through the front door. He heard Champ talking to someone in the kitchen, smelled breakfast. He went directly to the room where his and Champ’s things waited. He packed and straightened up, made the bed, opened the curtains and stood staring through the window at nothing while footsteps came and went in the hall. Water ran in the bath across the way, then stopped. Doors opened and closed. Finally it was quiet.
Rye carried his and Champ’s gear out to the truck parked beneath a tree near the front drive and loaded it Shoes would have to take the borrowed horses back to Jess, he decided, seized by a sudden haste that he couldn’t stop to analyze. He had to get out of there. Now. He wanted to run, forget everything, the truck, the gear, even Champ, just walk away. Fast.
He hurried back into the house. His palms were damp, and he had to force himself to go into the kitchen. Dayna and Pogo sat at the table with Champ, nursing cups of coffee and listening to the boy’s chatter. Breakfast had been cleared away. Dayna started to get up. He shook his head. “Thanks, but I don’t want anything.” She sat back down again. “Son, it’s time we were going. Run on to the bathroom. Right now. Be quick about it and be sure to wash your hands.”
For a moment Champ just stared at him. Rye had the sudden, overwhelming fear that his son was going to balk, then with a shrug the boy got up and left the room. Rye gripped the back of his empty chair with both hands. Why did he feel as if he was going to explode?
“Want a cup of coffee?” Pogo asked.
Rye shook his head, his gaze trained on his feet. He really was going to explode if he didn’t get out of here.
Pogo said, very deliberately, “Congratulate us, Rye. Dayna and I are going to get married.”
Something in Rye went off with a bang. “God Almighty! Don’t you ever learn?” He threw up his hands, knowing it wasn’t any of his business but unable to shut his mouth. “What is this now, Pogo, four? You’ve been married and divorced three times, for pity’s sake! What makes you think this will be any different?”
“I make him think that,” Dayna said. Getting calmly to her feet, she walked to the inlaid brick countertop and poured herself a refill before turning to look at him. “He’ll stay if I have to chain him to a tree, because I don’t quit. No one in this family quits.”
“His track record—”
“He’s not a quitter, Rye, not at heart.”
“Then how do you explain—”
“It’s natural to quit on somebody who quits on you,” she said, “but I won’t, no matter what That’s what it takes. I know.”
“How could you? No one ever quit on you!”
“You think Law and I didn’t have our problems?” she asked. “Honey, let me tell you, we fought like wildcats at times. We hurt each other. We cried and we screamed and swallowed our pride until we couldn’t swallow our spit, but we didn’t quit. And it was worth it, more than worth it. I imagine your parents feel the same. Why a smart boy like you can’t see it, I don’t know.”
“I’m not like them,” Rye said through his teeth.
“Maybe not, but you’re no quitter, either.”
“I quit before!”
“You were quit on. But Kara’s not like that. And you won’t even give her a chance.”
Champ slipped back into the room just then, eyes wide because of the raised voices. Rye grabbed him by the shoulder and turned him toward the dining room door, practically shoving him through it in his haste to escape. Dayna and Pogo came after them.
“She would’ve taken a bullet for you,” Dayna said loudly.
His feet stopped working, leaving him stranded halfway across the room. It took a moment to get them started again.
“When those bullets were flying,” Dayna went on, “and you were out there dodging them, she tried to go over the truck to get to you.”
A chill went down his spine, but he kept walking, turning off the images of a wounded Kara that had scared the life out of him before.
“She’d have thrown herself on top of you if Pogo hadn’t stopped her.”
His feet faltered and would have betrayed him again, but he was ready for that and forced them to speed up across the big, airy living room, sweeping Champ along with him.
“She fought him, Rye. He had to tackle her, throw her down on the ground and hold her down.”
He burst through the front door; screen slamming back against the rough log wall, with the picture in his mind of Kara, facedown in the dirt, Pogo on top of her, tears streaming down her face.
“That’s how much she loves you, Rye.”
He swung Champ up into his arms as he stepped off the porch, afraid he’d knock the boy down in his panic. He came up on the truck so fast it startled him, so that he had to back off slightly to get the driver’s door open. He literally tossed the boy inside and climbed in practically on top of him.
“Daddy?”
“Buckle your seat belt.”
Champ moved across the seat but stayed on his knees, looking out the back. Rye started the engine and stomped the gas. The big double-cab pickup banked around the curve, then tore up the slight slope and in seconds crested it. Rye let out a breath of relief, perfectly aware that this was a cowardly act, that he was running as hard as he could. The truck threw up dust behind it. Champ turned around and slid down into his seat, reaching for his safety belt. The truck bumped roughly over a drive that needed grading, bucking and lurching. Rye saw the cattle guard and beside it the little gate that one of Kara’s friends had opened for them the evening before. Freedom lay just on the other side of it, safety. He could almost feel the roughness of the crossing, hear the accordion scrape of tires on spaced pipe, feel the relief that would engulf him. And then another sort of panic seized him. Without really knowing why, he jammed his foot down on the brake and sat there disbelievingly. It was right there, the last step, the end of it, the fresh beginning. Another fresh beginning. On his own. Alone. A great sadness hit him. He didn’t want to live alone.
But he had Champ. He was forgetting Champ. His hands were gripping the steering wheel hard enough to snap it off, he made himself relax and looked at his son, realizing with a shock that he was eight years old. He’d grown even in these past few weeks. Just yesterday he’d been a slobbering little lump of blubber with less personality than an apple, and now he sat there staring at him with big black eyes that had seen and understood too much. For the first time Rye fully faced the fact that his son would grow up, become a man with a life of his own, needs of his own, needs a father couldn’t fulfill. One day Champ would meet a woman, a special woman, and even if she turned out to be a quitter, even if she chewed him up inside and left him in pieces, Rye knew that he would want Champ to have her. He would always want Champ to have his heart’s desire, always want to give what he needed.
You needed me, and I wanted to be there for you. I couldn’t bear to see you wanting what you couldn’t have.
The sound that came out of his mouth shamed him so much that he managed to blink back the sudden swell of tears. Determinedly he shifted his foot to the gas pedal. But that was it. Try as he might, he couldn’t push down that pedal. He put his foot back on the brake and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel.
“I can�
�t do it.” Champ didn’t say a word. Rye swallowed hard and licked his lips, working up his courage to face his son again. “I can’t do it, Champ. I can’t leave her. I don’t know why, but I just can’t”
Champ folded his arms and knocked his feet together, staring off through the windshield. Suddenly he turned a sly look on his father and asked, “Could you leave me?”
“Never! Never ever,” Rye vowed. “Whatever happens, I’ll never leave you, not for good. One day you’ll leave me, though, move out on your own, make your own life.”
“But that’s not the same,” Champ said.
“No, it’s not.”
“Well, if you can’t leave me and you can’t leave her...” Champ said, assuming that the correlation was obvious, even to his thickheaded father. And it was. He loved her, and he wasn’t going to stop.
“You’re right.”
Rye sat there a moment longer, staring at that gate and the road beyond it, then he put the transmission into Reverse and turned the truck around. The weight that had been pressing on him since daylight lifted, but as they topped the rise, his heart started to pound ominously. He wouldn’t blame her if she threw him out after this. But she wouldn’t do it. Dayna was right There was no quit in Kara Detmeyer, no quit at all. He didn’t deserve a woman like her, but if she didn’t know that already, she never would, or, God help her, she was determined to love him anyway. He was selfish enough not to care which it was, so long as it was.
Dayna and Pogo were still on the porch. Dayna lurched to the door and opened it, apparently shouting inside. By the time he brought the barreling truck to a dusty stop squarely in front of the house, Kara was there and Shoes, too, a wide grin on his face. Rye threw the transmission into Park and yanked open the door. He got out and started walking. Then Kara stepped down off the porch, moving tentatively toward him, and he was running again, but this time to love, not away from it, even though it was running toward him full tilt now. They collided and locked arms, both talking at once.
“I couldn’t go! I couldn’t!”
“Thank God! Oh, thank God!”
“I’m not even a good coward! I couldn’t get over the damned cattle guard!”
“I love you! It means nothing without you! The ranch means nothing!”
“I love you, Kara. I need you. I want to be with you always.”
“Will Champ—” she began, but he squeezed her so tight that he cut off the rest of the words.
“Hell, Champ has better sense than I have! He didn’t want to go to begin with. He knows there isn’t any other choice. He knows I couldn’t leave you any more than I could leave him, because you’re both a part of me, because I love you.” He held her away a little then and let her know that he really got it, he truly understood what he was doing and why. “I can’t bear to see either one of you wanting what you can’t have, so I guess I’ll just have to spend the rest of my life making sure you get what you need.”
Kara laughed—a watery, happy sound—and threw her arms around his neck. There was other laughter, but they didn’t hear it, other happiness besides their own, but they didn’t feel it. In that moment love left no room for anything else. It filled up their hearts and spilled over into their lives, coloring their hopes as it flowed, converting them into strange and wonderful new realities, the stuff of marriage and partnership and family and a place where both belonged, a place where dreams come true for every cowgirl—and every cowboy.
Be sure to catch the latest Silhouette Romance
by Arlene James called A BRIDE TO HONOR,
coming November 1998—don’t miss it!
ISBN : 978-1-4592-6696-4
EVERY COWGIRL’S DREAM
Copyright © 1998 by Deborah A. Rather
All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the editorial Office, Silhouette Books. 300 East 42nd Street, New York, NY 10017 U.S.A.
All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.
This edition published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
® and TM are tredemarks of Harlequin Books S.A., used under license. Trademarks indicated with ® are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, the Canadian Trade Marks Office and in other countries.