by Cindy Gerard
For a long moment after the door closed, he stood there. His heart was rapping like a damn jackhammer; a cold sweat had broken out on the back of his neck.
She had a son.
For the life of him, he couldn’t unscramble the explosion of emotions that bombshell of information created.
Jealousy seemed to be one of them, though he worked hard to ditch the nonsense of that notion. Protectiveness seemed to be another, though again, he didn’t understand its origin or the force of it or the reason for it. And, for some unfathomable reason, he felt a hollow sense of exclusion. Look at all she’d done without him. A child. My God. There’d been another man, a man she had loved enough to make a child with. A man she might still love, though he’d picked up enough grapevine material to know there wasn’t a steady man in her life right now.
He hadn’t heard anything about a child, though. Something inside him twisted a little tighter.
Then there was the want that underscored it all. He understood that, all right. It started with desire. Ended with the same, but somehow, it had gotten so tightly woven around everything else, he felt as though he were one big knot of sorely tried humanity.
“Hell,” he swore as he snagged his rigging bag and grip, and fumbled with the key to his room. Shouldering his way inside, he tossed his gear onto the floor, pulled the blinds shut, and flopped onto his back on the bed.
Then he lay awake in the dark.
For the rest of the afternoon he fought the urge to head down to the motel’s indoor swimming pool and offer to play lifeguard to a woman who obviously didn’t need the likes of him to look out for any aspect of her life.
“Perspective,” he grumbled, slinging an arm over his head. “Yeah, you sure as hell got yourself some big-time perspective the last week or two, you stupid wingnut.”
What a joke. He’d hightailed it out of sight to weed her out of his mind. He’d thought he’d gotten the job done, too. Until he’d seen her.
Until he’d looked into her eyes.
Until he’d seen the concern there.
He stared hard at the ceiling and with a soberness he rarely felt, understood the full reason for that concern.
She was a woman alone. A woman with a child she was responsible for and loved. Life wasn’t a game for her, as it was for him. For Sloan, life was starkly real. The child was a graphic illustration of how high the stakes could actually be.
No wonder she wanted nothing to do with him, he thought in disgust. He represented everything she couldn’t be, even if she wanted to. He didn’t have a real clue as to what the word “responsibility” meant. Wouldn’t know commitment if it reared up and struck him in the head. He had no one to answer to but himself. No obligations except to his whims and the road and the excitement of where both would lead him.
But she knows, doesn’t she, Jesse? She knows what it means to have someone depend on her for food and shelter. And she knows the price she has to pay to make sure she doesn’t let that someone down.
Christ. He ran a hand through his hair, disgusted by his total absorption with himself and his big, bad issue with perspective. Compared to the issues she dealt with, his didn’t amount to a small pile of horse manure.
He scrubbed a hand over his face then reached into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out the strip of leather he’d carried since that moonlit Wyoming night. It was the tie she’d used to hold back her hair. The one he’d undone so he could see that glorious silk fall free, so he could feel it in his hands, touch it to his face.
He’d been meaning to throw it away. But somehow, he’d just never gotten around to it
He’d been meaning to get her out of his mind, too. Looks like he’d never gotten around to that, either.
And now, now that he understood just how dangerous his kind of game was to a woman like Sloan, he was going to have to get around to it whether he wanted to or not. He was going to have to put someone’s needs other than his own first for a change.
This wasn’t about how much he wanted her anymore. This wasn’t about how she could mess up his head and his life.
This wasn’t about him.
This was about her and what he could do to her life.
This was about how he had to—for her sake, not his—keep the promise he’d made her and just back the hell away.
Six
Work It was the cure for all that ails you. That’s what Sloan’s daddy always told her when she was feeling blue. Well, she’d been working her way through the stalls for more than an hour now and so far she was feeling far from cured. For a woman who prided herself on being strong, she was feeling tired, and confused, and hollow. No thanks to Jesse James, she thought morosely.
Jesse, with his probing blue gaze and stolen kisses may not be the root of her low spirits, but he sure added to the mix. The sight of his big hand linked with Noah’s outside her motel room yesterday afternoon had put the squeeze on her heart like a pair of vise grips. Her first thought when she’d seen them together was of how unfair it was that Noah didn’t have the daddy he needed. On the heels of that thought had come another—how unfair it was that Jesse was the one to remind her.
Until that moment, it had been almost three weeks since she’d seen him. Three weeks since the night he’d lured her down to the river and she’d let him smoothtalk her into that kiss.
That kiss. That kiss haunted her. And angered her. It made her ache, made her yearn—and made her more aware than ever of his powers of seduction and the need to keep her distance.
The power had all been his that night. Seeing him again yesterday had made her realize it was still his. The admission didn’t come easily, but then, the truth often didn’t.
She accepted that. Just as she reluctantly accepted that if he had kept on kissing her that night, if he had touched her longer, if he had asked her to let him lay her down in the soft river grass and make love to her, she would have let him.
And she would have loved it.
And she would have been lost.
Well, she still felt lost on that count, but when she forced her thoughts away from him, a sharper sense of loss caught up to her. One that overpowered her issues with Jesse and ached in a way that was becoming far too familiar and more and more difficult to overcome.
It had been a little more than an hour since her dad and Ellie had picked up Noah to take him back home to Snowy River. She was still feeling raw from watching him go, still hurting for the missing of him.
“Hey, Country.”
She was so wrapped up in her self-pity, she hadn’t heard Jesse walk up behind her. His deep voice startled her into dropping the hose she was using to fill Baby’s water tank. She quickly bent to retrieve it and, keeping her back to him, shut off the faucet, realizing only then that her hands were shaking.
She wasn’t up to this. She was still too lost in missing Noah.
“Hey,” she said, snagging a hay fork and filling Baby’s manger in the hopes Jesse’d just move on so she didn’t have to face yet another weakness today.
“So where’s the little guy?”
She stiffened, then used the silence to try to push away the sight of Noah’s sweet face pressed against the car window, his chubby little hand waving goodbye. “I’d suspect he’s halfway home by now,” she said when she thought she could keep her voice from breaking.
“He didn’t want to stick around for the rodeo?”
Out of her peripheral vision, she saw him lean lazily against the stall rail then reach down to absently scratch nanny behind her ears. She knew he wasn’t going anywhere soon.
“He wanted to stay.” She had to work hard to keep her voice steady. “But I can’t watch him and take care of business, so—” She broke off abruptly, damned the tear that threatened to leak out.
A long moment passed before Jesse’s voice, sounding oddly rough, astonishingly perceptive, merged with the sounds of the stock barn. “It’s tough, huh?” he asked softly. So softly, and with so much tender understanding
that she let that tear fall and gave up the brave front.
Damn him. Damn him for showing up here and being so gently understanding, for making her feel as if all she had to do was turn to him and he’d offer her his shoulder to cry on.
Deliberately, she kept her back to him, not wanting him to see how close she was to giving in to both a pathetic dose of self-pity and the temptation to let him fold her into the soothing comfort of his arms.
She didn’t think she could speak without giving herself away, so she nodded, then sniffed before finally forcing herself to talk her way through it.
“Yeah. It’s tough,” she confessed when she felt she had her composure back. “But it goes with the terntory.”
Accepting that didn’t make it any easier, though, and her next words tumbled out before she could stop them. “Sometimes. . . sometimes I get to missing him so much between trips home that I just have to see him.”
Irritated when another self-pitying tear snuck past her defenses, she wiped it roughly from her cheek with the back of a gloved hand. “Thank God, Dad and Ellie understand, like this time, bringing him to see me when I can’t get home.”
Oh, man, Jesse thought, feeling helpless and inept as he watched her very quietly try to keep herself from falling apart. It was a side of her he’d never seen before. An achingly vulnerable side that she kept well hidden behind cool control and a sassy tongue.
He couldn’t handle seeing her like this and not want to do something about it. He wanted to pull her against his chest, wrap himself around her and offer a little physical comfort.
Knowing it would come to no good, he stared dismally at the brave set of her shoulders instead. Somehow he managed to keep his hands to himself and his feet firmly planted as the last ounce of his good sense willed out.
Too damn bad he hadn’t used a little of that sense when he’d decided to head for the barns. If he had, he wouldn’t be standing here now, this huge knot twisted somewhere in the vicinity of his heart because witnessing her pain was slowly killing him.
He hadn’t come looking for her. He’d happened on her by chance. Hell—it was bound to happen sooner or later. He just wished it had been later. Much later. When she wasn’t hurting and when he wasn’t feeling as though he needed to prove to himself that he could be something to a woman he’d never tried to be before. A friend.
He didn’t know if he had it in him. But, it was a friend she needed right now, and by default, it looked like he was going to have to bite the bullet and try to play the part.
It was like breaking in a new pair of boots. The fit was tight, uncomfortably so.
So get over it, he ordered himself mentally, dredging up all the conclusions he’d come to yesterday as he’d wallowed in his own failings in that dark motel room. This wasn’t about his life. It was about hers. All he had to do was look at her, at the way she worked hard at avoiding his eyes, to be reminded of that.
The brave way she tried to deal with her gnef was as emotionally wrenching as anything he’d ever witnessed. The intensity of it ate at places inside him he hadn’t visited since he was a little kid lost in his own pain. That memory alone was enough to prompt him into taking a stab at lightening her load.
“He’s quite the little cowboy,” he offered finally, feeling a small sense of relief when her slim shoulders squared up a bit. Though she had to reach for it, the quick, overbright smile she shot him over her shoulder encouraged him even more.
“Yeah. He’s quite a boy”
“I got a charge out of him letting me know he’s the only one who can ride that pride-bustin’ bull of yours.”
“Well,” she said, sounding a little more like herself, “you’d get an even bigger charge if you saw him sitting on Baby’s back.
“Oh, yeah,” she added, smiling in earnest when she read the doubt in his eyes. “For some reason, Baby not only tolerates it when we set him up there, he seems to like it.”
“Well, I’ll be damned.” He frowned from her to the killer bull. “You think that’s wise?”
“Wise? Safe? Both the above. It’s the darnedest thing how gentle Baby is with him. And with me.” She let herself out of the pen, then checked the bull’s water one last time. “It’s just cowboys he doesn’t cotton to. I always figured he was a good judge of character.”
She delivered her little jab with such a good-natured smile and renewed strength that he couldn’t do anything but grin back.
And that smile of hers was something to behold. A man could get lost in that smile, get to thinking about hundreds of ways to coax more out of her.
A smart man, however, a man who was determined to do the right thing, would also realize that now that she was perked up a bit, he should just two-step right on out of there and leave well enough alone.
As was becoming a habit when he was around her, though, he quickly proved that he wasn’t a smart man. He stayed put. He wasn’t exactly sure why he didn’t leave. Or why he fell into step beside her when she moved on to another pen. Or why his heart had lightened with the knowledge that most of the sadness had left her eyes. Or why, as she worked her way down the line of stock, he just kept moving in the same direction.
“Don’t you have hands to do this for you?” he asked when he hustled to help her wrestle with the weight of a feed sack
She shrugged easily. “I gave them the afternoon off. I needed to do something physical.”
Well, he understood her methods. He subscribed to the same theory. When the blues caught up with him, he’d drag out the free weights he always carried in the back of the truck and work it off.
Before he knew it, the few minutes he’d told himself he’d hang around worked into fifteen, fifteen into twenty. He kept telling himself to make tracks, but the next thing he knew, he had a pitchfork in his hand and was mucking out stalls right alongside her, lugging feed buckets, filling water troughs.
A couple of times she’d asked him if he didn’t have something better to do. Both times, he was sure he’d come up with something. But he didn’t. So she just shrugged, got in a few digs about mucking stalls being a comedown for a cowboy, and shoved another pitchfork in his hand.
And he, fool that he was, just grinned and kept right on working. And talking. He talked about his family, his mother, Maya, and her new husband, Logan. About Garrett and Clay and their wives and babies—and about how if they could see him now, gripping a hay fork instead of a rigging, they’d never let him hear the end of it.
Damned if he knew why he talked so much. Damned if he knew why he stuck around. It wasn’t as if there was anything in it for him. He’d promised her—and he’d promised himself—that he’d back off. It was a promise he was going to do his damnedest to keep, though he wasn’t improving the odds that he would by hanging around her this way.
And still, he couldn’t make himself leave.
So he stayed, reminding himself frequently of that precious perspective he’d gained, and that keeping his physical distance was still the best thing all around for both of them. Because she had a child who depended on her. Because she had a business that needed her attention.
And because he was only looking for good times and short terms. He couldn’t afford to get mixed up with her any more than she could get mixed up with him. Couldn’t afford to sully those basic rules he’d initiated long ago: never get involved in something he couldn’t walk away from. Never let anyone get too close. Never let a woman interfere with his life.
Yet here he stayed. Exactly where he wanted to be. And not having the vaguest notion why.
“Looks like I owe you, Jess,” she said, relieving him of the water hose and snapping him out of his jumbled thoughts. “With your help, I cut my chore time by half.”
He glanced around, surprised that they’d reached the end of the line “Yeah, well, I don’t come cheap.” He grinned as he rolled down his shirt sleeves and buttoned his cuffs.
“I’d tell you to name your price, but Lord only knows what kind of trouble that woul
d get me into. How about I spring for supper?” she suggested.
He knew he should say no. Not necessary. Forget it. But as he smiled down into her eyes, he realized that he liked this easy, breezy twist to their relationship almost as much as he’d liked the prospect of a more intimate, decidedly sensual one. Almost, he conceded, knowing he couldn’t kid himself on that count.
Before he veered off down that closed street again, he heard himself agreeing. “That’d work for me. The question is, will it work for you? I don’t usually eat until after I ride on the nights I compete. It would make it a little late.”
She thought for a second, then shrugged. “I’ll get the guys to bed down the stock. I’m due for a night off.”
“Long overdue, the way I hear it.”
Everyone on the circuit knew she worked as hard or harder than any man. Even the good ole boys’ club had finally acknowledged that she was made of stern stuff and were loosening up around her. It felt good to be the one who had prompted her to cut herself a little slack.
“So it’s a date, then?” she said, then amended quickly, “Well, not a date. A bargain.”
“Whatever.” He grinned, tipped his hat and walked away before he got to thinking too hard about the “whatever.”
There would be no whatever, he told himself firmly as he hit the shower a half hour later then dressed for the night’s competition. There would be nothing. This afternoon with her had been just one of those odd little windows of circumstance that people sometimes find themselves in.
He’d seen that she was hurting and he’d surprised himself by rising to the occasion and helping her through it. No big deal. No life-altering moment.
So he’d seen yet another side of her—a vulnerable side, a side that had moved him to offer, if not comfort, then at least a distraction from her pain. So she’d brought out a side of him that he didn’t know he had in him.
It didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean he was interested in finding out more about her. Didn’t mean he’d gotten his heart all tied up in the want to do things for her, make things easier for her, make it so she needed to have him around.