The Love of a Cowboy

by Anna Jeffrey

Good Lord. Where had that come from? Until this instant, he hadn’t considered a trip to Texas.

  “—expect her to be content. Life at this ranch is hard on a woman. Do you think a pretty little thing from clear across the country would handle it any better than Janet did? Why, she’d be hot-footing it back to Texas after the first winter and maybe taking a piece of DAM Ranches with her.”

  His mood plummeted into a black hole. “She’s not a pretty little thing. And life’s no harder here than it is anywhere else. It’s just a little farther out of town.”

  His mother’s chest rose on a deep breath, as if she were rallying for a new assault. “We have a right to know if you’re planning to claim this child.”

  “I don’t know what I’m planning,” he snapped. “But I want to see him. You can’t fault me for that.”

  “And her?”

  “Her, too.” His mind was busy now, planning.

  Silent seconds passed as his mother returned to stare out the window, her head shaking.

  “Dahlia’s not like Janet, Mom. She’s a good, decent person. She doesn’t deserve anybody’s animosity. I’ve been sorry ever since I broke off with her”

  “I’ll tell you this much. If you’re of a mind to bring her and her little boy into this family, don’t think it’s going to be easy. You’ve got two sisters and three kids to consider. Your two girls are old enough to have minds of their own and one of them might have an interest in running this ranch some day.”

  “I doubt that. Mary Claire’s already planning to go to art school in Seattle. And Annabeth wants to be a vet. If that’s what she wants, damned if I’ll force her into the cattle business.”

  His mother’s jaw tightened. They both knew he spoke of the day she had demanded he leave college and return to the Double Deuce to meet his responsibilities as a McRae son. Her chin raised another notch. “I guess I had that coming.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know,” she said. A tear dared to sneak from the corner of one of her eyes. Her hand fumbled for her jeans pocket. She pulled out a handkerchief and wiped her eyes. He felt like crying himself. It would have been easier if she had kept up the confrontation. The soft side that had returned since the diagnosis of her illness was disconcerting.

  “I didn’t say that about Annabeth to make you feel guilty, Mom. I admit it pissed me off, being forced to leave school and come back. For a long time, I carried it around like a chip on my shoulder. It’s come to me in the last year or so, I couldn’t have been happy living away from here.”

  “It’s funny how things happen,” she said softly. “I’ve always puzzled on it. I don’t know if the ranch would have survived if the responsibility for it had passed to Matt. If it means anything to you, I think you’ve made a better manager than he would have. He was a plodder, like your dad. But you’re a do-er. And you’ve got vision and spunk.”

  Resentment of the implied criticism of his dad sprang up in Luke. “Dad’s a wiser man than anybody gives him credit for.” He deliberately didn’t direct the remark at her, not wanting to cause her more anguish.

  He went to her and put his hand on her arm, urged her down to the chair seat. “Sit down, Mom, and listen to me for once.” He took the opposite chair and leaned forward, his forearms braced on his thighs. “This boy, if he is my son, might guarantee the ranch’s survival. He should be with me, with his family. He won’t lean toward being a stockman if he doesn’t grow up knowing who he is.”

  His mother eyes glistened with tears. She looked down at her lap, shaking her head. “If only Jimmy . . . ” She raised her chin with a deep sniff and looked past his shoulder. “Well, no point going into that. If wishes were horses, as Granny McRae says. When are you going?”

  “In a few days. Monday maybe.”

  “Can’t it wait? We could get snow any time now. It’s a bad time for you to be gone from here.”

  “Just a few days. That’s all I need.”

  “Your girls will know you’re going. Do you intend to tell them about the boy?”

  “Not yet. When I get back.”

  Another sigh, another headshake. His mom struggled to her feet and made her way toward the door. Before leaving, she stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. “You be careful, Luke. There’s been no mischief over inheritance in this family for two generations. Don’t do something that will sour the well at this ranch.”

  An igloo would have held up as a dining table centerpiece in the atmosphere at supper. His mother was as cold and silent as winter fog. At the meal’s end, she went to her bedroom.

  He and his girls helped Ethel clear the table and would have helped her clean up, but she pushed them out of the kitchen. Luke bolstered his courage and followed his daughters into the living room. He punched off the TV and announced he was going to Texas to see a lady friend who used to be important in his life.

  After the first shock waves settled, Annabeth warmed to the prospect of him having a girlfriend. Mary Claire swelled up, called him a hypocrite and stomped up the stairs. Her reaction didn’t surprise him much. She believed he was the cause of her mother’s woes.

  “I’ll bet she can’t wait to see you,” Annabeth said, her eyes alive with excitement.

  “She doesn’t know. I’m gonna surprise her.”

  “Let’s go to Boise and buy her a present.”

  “A present? I hadn’t thought about that.”

  Blue eyes rounded with concern. “Daddy! You can’t go see your girlfriend without taking a present.”

  His younger daughter often instructed him on courtship. She thought it was lacking in his life and in truth, it was. A smile spread within him. “I guess you’re right, Annie.”

  “I’ll help you. We could go on Saturday and we could visit Jimmy.”

  Luke laughed at himself for being so dumb. He guessed he should take a present and he hadn’t seen his Jimmy since the boy’s eighth birthday party two weeks ago. “Okay, kiddo. We’ll do it.”

  Annabeth threw herself against him and hugged his ribs. “I love you, Daddy. Everything’s gonna be fine. Don’t worry about M.C. I’ll go talk to her.” Hurrying toward the stairway that led to the bedrooms, she stopped and called over her shoulder. “Oh, and Daddy, Chico needs a new blanket so he won’t be cold this winter. While we’re down there we could get him one.”

  Luke looked after his younger daughter with warmth in his heart. If he were a crying man, he could burst into tears. The difference in his children would puzzle him forever. Mary Claire, though fleshy and short of stature, was a golden-haired beauty, reminding him of how Janet had looked when they married. Large breasted and round hipped, she looked older than her years. More than a few times, he’d had to force himself to calm down when he saw teenage boys ogling her. But she had inherited more than good looks from her mother—she also had Janet’s selfishness and sour disposition.

  But fourteen-year-old Annabeth was a breath of fresh air, a bubbling, eternal optimist, tall like himself with curling sandy hair like his, flat-chested as a boy and too skinny for her height.

  His dad came from the kitchen. “That kid loves that horse.”

  “I’m glad. I could sell him tomorrow for a pretty penny. Bud Dixon wants him for a barrel horse so bad he can taste it.” He gazed up the stairway. “Mom tell you about the boy?”

  His dad nodded. Luke knew he could count on his father not to pass judgment.

  “She sure was cold at supper.”

  “We talked and she agreed to let it lay. I told her it’s time we mind our own business. You deserve to be happy, Son. The right woman’s a comfort to a man. If this is the one you want, then go get her. You’ll get no guff from me.”

  “It’s hard not to think about all that happened between Janet and Mom. Janet had her faults, but Mom was awful hard on her.”

  “Your mother’s had reasons to be bitter. Callister’s a small place. I’ve added my share to her pain.”

  In all his thirty-five years, Luke hadn’t hear
d his father make such a personal remark. He planted his hands at his waist, his mind a blank as he stared at his aging parent.

  The patriarch avoided Luke’s eyes, tamped tobacco into his pipe. “I don’t think I ever talked to you about how it was when I met your mother. She had come from Lewiston to teach school down in town. So much energy packed into one person. Everything was important to her. She could get excited about dew on the grass. Keeping up with her was like grabbing onto a shooting star. More than a dull man who lived in a dull place could ever hope for.

  He lit his pipe and drew deeply. “All of us changed after your brother’s death, Luke. Claire handled it best. She turned into herself, but she kept moving forward. Kept life going around here. I was the weaker. I had to have help. I found it in town.”

  Dad’s youthful mistress. The family’s dirty little secret. Years back, the relationship had been the talk of the county. The woman was someone with whom Luke had gone to high school. Dad still spent time with her, though no one discussed it. She lived in a house in town owned by DAM Ranches, Inc. The modest house was hers to keep as long as she chose or until her death, whichever came first. Dad had had it written in legalese.

  His dad walked to the front entry and gazed up at the portrait of Donald McRae. “But for the sake of the ranch and the family, I made sure I didn’t leave any catch-colt kids behind.”

  His dad turned back into the living room and laid his pipe in a granite ashtray on a massive chairside table. He moved toward the bedroom hallway, “Guess I’ll turn in now. I know you’ll make the right decisions. You always do.”

  Luke was so staggered by his father’s confession he barely stammered a goodnight, but he felt the passing of a torch more than he ever had since assuming the role of leader at the Double Deuce. He stared into the entry at the paintings of his distant grandparents. Summer sounds wafted through open windows—sawing crickets, the snuffling of well-fed horses, the barks and wails of hungry coyotes. Loneliness settled on him as he studied the one-dimensional face of the ranch’s founder, the multi-dimensional man whose shoes he tried every day to fill.

  Old Donald looked down on each succeeding generation with haunting blue eyes that had passed to his progeny for a hundred sixty years. He had bequeathed them more than red hair, blue eyes and strong genes. He had left them a charge to keep. In old world fashion and rare accidents of birth, a McRae son had always stood as the guardian of the Double Deuce’s acres of wild grass meadows, its miles of rivers and streams and its sections of timber.

  To keep all of it in tact and privately owned, McRae’s had fought the elements and epidemics, the Indians and the government and sometimes each other. Some had sanctified its soil with their blood and every last one of them who had passed on since the beginning was buried in the McRae family cemetery.

  This was the legacy he would bestow on his son.

  He had begun to worry in recent years who would pick up the DAM Ranches standard. Like Dad, he had wondered if, breaking with tradition for the first time, Annabeth would be the one. Or if it would be the child of his sister, Kathleen, who was now four months pregnant, a child who would bear a different last name.

  Now he had the answer. It would be his own son, also breaking tradition. For with the exception of Donald Angus himself, no keeper of the Double Deuce had ever been born outside God’s country, Idaho.

  He would go to Texas and claim his son and heir and the beauty who was the boy’s mother.

  That is, if she didn’t kick his ass clear back to the Double Deuce.

  Chapter 23

  Beat to life by a hot shower, Dahlia stood in front of the vanity mirror trying to remember how a full night of sleep felt. She’d had to nurse her three-month-old son twice in the night, the last time, three hours ago at two a.m. Preparing to begin her morning routine, she wondered why she bothered making up every day. Who would notice if she didn’t?

  Well, at least her hair was less trouble than it used to be. The long curly style that once had taken so much time and pampering had grown out and been trimmed to shoulder length. Blow-drying the oversized rollers that curved the blunt ends of her now straight tresses, she ran through her plan for the day.

  Produce would be delivered late morning. A high school student apprenticing as a butcher would be in after lunch. Once she had assumed management of the Handy Pantry, it hadn’t taken long to spot how much of her time and Chuck’s was being consumed by doing all of the butchering themselves. The struggling store couldn’t afford a to hire a professional butcher from the outside, so she had gone to the high school principal and volunteered an apprenticeship. Now, to her surprise, several teenagers waited in line for the opportunity to learn the craft of cutting meat.

  “It’s Monday here at WBAP. It was August a year ago when . . . ” The voice of a Fort Worth/Dallas broadcaster came from a radio she kept on the bathroom counter.

  August, a year ago. Her son’s conception. A date more securely locked in her memory than his birth date or her own. If her life had a pivotal period, that month had been it. Neither losing both her mother and her husband before she reached thirty nor resolving the havoc after Kenneth’s death had changed her so profoundly as the events of last August. Prior to then, she had fumbled through time merely reacting to life’s trials and wondering what could happen next.

  Then, bam! A meteor landed smack in the middle of her existence. For the first time, life-altering decisions were left to her alone. She had gritted her teeth and made them, discovering strength she didn’t know she possessed. She had shed gallons of tears between then and now, spent countless sleepless nights plotting survival and pondering her destiny. But now, she had a firm grip. Whatever the future held, she could handle it.

  Everything happens for a reason. Indeed. The proverb came to her often, hanging in her mind like a gigantic sign on the side of a tall building.

  Temperature over a hundred today, the radio forecasted. Ugh. She passed up wearing foundation which would only make her feel hotter, opting instead for a few swipes of rose blush and a few flicks of black mascara. She finished with Paint The Town Red lipstick and spritzed herself with True Love. She had always enjoyed good fragrances, didn’t intend to let near-poverty deprive her of every pleasant remnant of her former life.

  Inside her narrow walk-in closet, she scrutinized the two clothes racks that held her pitiful wardrobe—mostly odds and ends left from her yuppie days in Dallas. Once, she had spent big bucks on clothes. But now, being fashionable had taken on much less importance than her son’s first smile or the quality of the meat sold in the Handy Pantry.

  Her gaze landed on a plastic garment bag in the very back of the closet. It held an expensive red silk dress she had worn only one time. She hadn’t so much as looked at it since her return from Idaho. As she fingered the bag’s zipper, a flood of memories washed over her. Like echoes in an empty hall, Luke McRae’s soft baritone voice reverberated through her mind. . . . I was starting to wonder if I was gonna get to dance with the belle of the ball. . . .

  She stopped herself. Good Grief. Where had that flashback come from? She thought she had dispatched him to a far corner of her memory alongside her deceased mother. Being reminded how desperate for his affection she had once been was not fun.

  Re-directing herself to choosing clothing, she picked a cherry red poplin skirt that hit her mid-knee, then searched for a coordinating top. Her tops these days consisted of mostly T-shirts. More convenient for nursing.

  Snuffling cries came from down the hall and she smiled. Her baby boy was waking up again and ready for breakfast. She went to his room and as she approached his crib, he let out one blatant “wah” and looked up at her with sky blue eyes that assured that no matter how hard she tried, she would never be able to forget his father.

  “Hiya, Joey.” She cooed at him as she removed his diaper. He fretted and shook his tiny fists while she washed him and dressed him in dry clothing. Then, she carried him to the rocking chair that had belonged to h
er paternal grandmother, the only extended family she had ever known. The infant nuzzled at her breast and as soon as she lifted her T-shirt and loosened her nursing bra, he latched on and settled down to eat. She relaxed and relished the connection to this tiny human who was surely the most wonderful child ever born.

  “You look good, Dal. Just like always.”

  Dahlia’s head jerked in the direction of a deep, familiar voice and her world spun off its axis. “Luke!”

  Her heart hammered so hard her vision blurred. Gulping air, she braced herself against the edge of a sturdy round produce display. “Wha—what are you doing here?”

  “I came to see the boy.”

  His family’s lunatic ideas about heirs rushed at her. Joe. He had come for Joe. Just as she had feared he might someday.

  Fighting for calm, she forced herself back to her task—building a shoulder-high pyramid of apples on the round display island. An apple slipped from her grasp. She grabbed for it and her elbow struck the stack of fruit. “Oh! Ohmigod.”

  Like a red waterfall, a hundred costly top quality apples cascaded to the floor. Effort to stop them left her clawing the air. She dropped to her knees on the splintery wood floor and grabbed up the apples, throwing them back into the perforated box from which they came.

  Luke laid his hat on top of a bin of oranges and crouched to help. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He grasped her wrist and stopped her hands. “You should have told me, Dal. We could have worked it out.”

  She looked into his face and nearly came undone. His eyes were even bluer than she remembered, a reflection pool threatening to drown her. “How did you find me?”

  “Piggy. She wrote me.”

  “She did not. She’s my best friend.”

  Dahlia freed her wrist and returned to rescuing her investment. In front of her, as distinctive as his face, were his size twelve, full-quill ostrich boots. They had probably cost more than today’s produce shipment.

  He moved crab-like on the balls of his feet picking up the fallen fruit. “Guess she’s my friend, too.”