by K. N. Casper
While he waited for the diesel glow-plug signal to go out, he said, “I’m glad you were able to bring your dad home.” He nodded toward the children eagerly leading Boyd Crawford from the horse barn to the house, no doubt in search of cookies. “They’re lucky to have you, too. If there’s anything I can do to help...”
He turned the key. The diesel started up and rumbled noisily. With a wave, he drove off.
* * *
WHILE THE KIDS were showing her father all the fascinating things in the barn, Kayla threaded her way through the small, iron-fenced graveyard. The oldest headstones dated back to the mid-nineteenth century and were so weathered they were almost indecipherable. Kayla assumed the woman buried beside Zeb’s new grave, Valerie Ritter, was Ethan’s mother. She’d died less than four years ago. The fourteen-year-old girl must be his sister. She’d passed away a year earlier.
Kayla noted, too, the months of their deaths. Angela had died in April. So had Zeb—within a few days of the fourth anniversary of his daughter’s death. Valerie had died in May.
It was now early March. Spring was about to burst forth with new life. This should be a time of renewal, of joy and promise.
Kayla wandered down to the barn area. As she approached, she could hear the indistinct chatter of the children as they undoubtedly rhapsodized about the horses, the saddles and tack, riding, even cleaning stalls. The solemnity of the past half hour forgotten, as it should be. Leaning against the pipe fence, she scanned the pastures dotted with small clusters of live oaks. The land was green, the sky a cerulean blue, so deep she felt as if she could reach up and touch it. A lone puffy white cloud drifted across the distant horizon.
She sensed Ethan’s approach, welcomed it in spite of what she knew was coming. He was unhappy with her, and she understood why. Children shouldn’t know death, as participants or spectators.
He came up beside her and rested his elbows on the fence. Without looking, she was aware of his strength, the broad expanse of his shoulders. The image was as clear in her mind as if she were facing him.
“You shouldn’t have brought them.”
“They wanted to come, Ethan. Even Heather. I tried to discourage her, but she said you were her friend and she wanted to be here for you.”
When he didn’t respond, Kayla glimpsed him clenching his jaw as he stared ahead.
“She’s grieving, struggling to come to terms with what happened. You’ve connected with her, Ethan. She feels close to you, maybe closer now because you share a loss.”
“Don’t make me out a saint, Kayla.” His low words were filled with reproach and remorse.
She touched his back. “Not a saint, Ethan, just a man. That’s enough.” A minute passed in silence. “Noah couldn’t stay?”
He exhaled. “He has an appointment in town. He asked me about the riding program for the special-needs kids.”
“What did you tell him?”
He looked over at her, a subtle smile on his face. “Be careful what you ask for.”
“What?”
“You wanted me to work with handicapped kids, to offer therapeutic riding.” The smile grew into a grin. “I told him I’d do it if you were my assistant.”
“But...I don’t know anything about therapeutic riding.”
“Then I guess we’re going to have to learn about it together.”
Spending hours with this man wasn’t a good idea. She had a family, a new vineyard to attend to. “Ethan, I don’t have the time,” she said, panicking.
“Neither do I.”
“But...” There must be some way to get out of this. He was the horseman, the person who had the animals, the riding experience, a talent for teaching.
“So what do you want to do?” he asked. “Tell the kids no, sorry, haven’t got the time? Or find it?”
He had her cornered and he knew it. Worse, he seemed to be taking enormous satisfaction in watching her squirm. Did he understand the nature of the predicament he was placing her in, that she was afraid of him, afraid of what being with him would cost her?
“You don’t leave me much choice, do you?” she asked with a kind of dread.
“About as much as you left me.”
* * *
NOBODY STAYED longer than good manners required. After all, this was the second time Zeb had been buried. Kayla, her father and the kids had left hours ago, too. Ethan had given Heather a big hug just before she got into the car.
Luella had overprepared, but he reckoned she’d done that on purpose. The cookies wouldn’t go to waste. She’d sent one of her banana-nut loaves home with Kayla, along with the lemon meringue pie she’d noticed Boyd drooling over.
Ethan and Carter were now sitting on the bunkhouse porch drinking coffee.
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Carter asked after a sip.
“About what?” Ethan asked innocently.
“You know what I’m talking about. Those kids. Her.”
“Noah asked me—”
Carter waved his excuse away with a swing of his mug, sloshing the coffee dangerously close to the rim. “Don’t try to bull me, too. I’ve been around too long to buy it. I saw you the day you was born, and except when you went off to college, I’ve seen you just about every day of your life since. So quit stallin’. This ain’t about Noah. It’s about her and the kid.”
Ethan suspected he spoke more out of worry than anger.
“I haven’t liked all the decisions you’ve made,” the old man went on, “but I’ve supported them because they were right, and I’ve respected you for them. I wish what happened hadn’t have, but it wasn’t your fault. You were as much a victim as she was, but you’re screwing up this time.”
Ethan held his tongue.
“She’s falling in love with you. What then? Leave her the way you have all the others? At least they knew up front what to expect. What happens when this one wants more? You know she will. She’s not the kind of gal you pick up at a beer joint.”
Maybe that’s what I find so attractive. She’s somebody, not anybody.
“You’ve never broken a heart before, far as I know,” Carter continued. “But you’re going to break hers.”
Ethan remained silent.
“You’ve been spending too much time here with horses,” Carter observed. “Your hormones are out of whack. Haul yourself into town and work off some of that energy on the dance floor with some sweet young thing. Maybe then your brain will start working right again.”
Ethan laughed. “That’s the first thing you’ve said that makes sense, old man.”
It was true. He hadn’t been out with a woman since...well, in quite a while. Maybe that was what was driving him so crazy when he was with Kayla—or thinking about being with her. His hormones were out of whack.
He went back to the house, showered, put on freshly pressed jeans and a clean Western shirt and hightailed it into town.
The Saddle Up was technically outside city limits, though the boundary was less than twenty feet east of the parking lot. To the west was Louie’s Liquors, which offered a fine selection of beers and wines in addition to the standard variety of distilled spirits.
Happy hour was still underway when Ethan arrived. He bought a longneck for a buck and scoped out the joint. The jukebox was playing right now. The band would start at nine, when the cheap drinks ended.
A hand slapped him on the back. He turned to find Chad Duggan, a guy he’d gone to high school with. Duggan had been a fullback, good enough to be picked up for a college team. He’d blown the opportunity, though, when he tested positive for drugs in his first season. Never did finish college, ended up in rehab a couple of times, got married twice and divorced as often.
“Ain’t seen you in a long time. How’re the horses?”
“Doing fine. Keeping me busy.” Ethan almost asked the next logical question: “What are you up to these days?” But he was leery of the answer. If Duggan was between jobs, which was as likely as not, he’d probably ask if Ethan had
any openings at the Broken Spoke. With Carter slowing down and business picking up, Ethan was considering putting on part-time help. Not Duggan, though. And he preferred not to be put in the position of having to turn the guy down. Fortunately he saw someone much more interesting on the other side of the room.
Stacy Holbrook had been the homecoming queen in Ethan’s senior year—she was Stacy Hronec then—and they’d dated a few times. She’d married Mitch Holbrook right out of college, but he’d been killed in a small plane crash in Alaska a few months later. A year after that she’d remarried and quickly divorced. Since then she spent a good deal of her free time drinking and dancing.
She greeted Ethan with an open smile. “Well, howdy, stranger.”
Someone pulled the plug on the jukebox in the middle of a tear-jerking ballad, and the band started tuning up. Within a few seconds of striking the first solid chord, the dance floor was packed.
“Still know how to dance?”
He laughed. “I sure hope so.”
She was wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt that clung provocatively to her curves.
“You may have to refresh my memory, though.”
She grinned. “It’ll be my pleasure.”
Over the next few hours they paused only when the band did. His first beer got warm before he had a chance to drink it. The second was knocked over. He ordered a third at last call, but by then his mind was on other things.
When the band finally stopped playing, he and Stacy were standing in the middle of the dance floor.
“It’s time to go, darlin’,” she whispered in his ear. “You are going to be a gentleman and see me home, aren’t you? My place isn’t real far.” She draped her arms over his shoulders. “We can unwind there.”
“Sounds inviting.” He threw an extra tip on the table, slipped his arm across her back as he escorted her to the parking lot.
“Just follow my taillights,” she said breathlessly, when she pulled away to get into her pickup.
“Baby, I promise you. I won’t let them out of my sight.”
Her eyes glittered. She started her engine. He jogged to his truck, pulled up behind her and flashed his lights.
She lived a mile or so down the road, but the silence of the cab, compared with the blood-pounding beat in the bar, gave him a chance to think, and the cool night air through the open window cleared his head.
He saw Kayla’s face. Pictured her standing at the fence, watching the horses and children. He thought about what it might feel like to be with her. To be near enough to catch her scent. To hear her laugh at one of the kids’ antics. He tried to imagine what it would be like to hold her.
Stacy pulled into her driveway and switched off her lights. Ethan came to a stop behind her, but left his engine running.
She walked back and stood below his door. “Here we are.”
She was warm and willing and eager to please, but this woman’s face, this woman’s voice, this woman’s touch weren’t the ones he craved.
“I can’t stay,” he muttered.
“What?” She gaped at him in shock, then anger.
He didn’t blame her. He’d led her on, inferred a promise he couldn’t deliver. “I’m sorry.”
“What’s going on, Ethan?”
“I’m sorry,” he repeated. “I have to go.”
She stood there with her hands on her hips as he backed out of the driveway. She was still there when he turned and headed for home.
* * *
KAYLA WAS COMING in from the vineyard, stretching her tired back muscles when the phone rang. She and her father had elected to do all the planting themselves, both to save money and because they wanted it done right. It would take them about a week, provided their backs didn’t give out first. She lifted the receiver.
“Hello, Kayla.” Millie at the Herald. “Just checking to see if you got any rain last night.”
“Rain, no. As far as I know the sky was clear all night.”
“Well, we received a trace here in town, thought you might have gotten more. Every drop is a blessing here, you know. Different from where you’re from, I reckon.”
Kayla laughed. “A bit,” she agreed, suspicious that the woman wasn’t really calling about the weather.
“Seen Ethan today?”
“No, don’t usually go over there on Thursdays. Why?”
“Oh,” the newspaper editor drawled, “just wondered how his hangover was.”
“Hangover?”
“Well, I heard he closed the Saddle Up last night. Didn’t leave with Stacy Holbrook till after one. My sources tell me he was really rocking. Always was a good dancer, even as a teenager.”
“Who’s Stacy Holcomb?”
“Holbrook,” Millie corrected her. “They were sweethearts back in high school. A widow now, well, that and a divorcée. First husband died. Second one ran off. No wonder she spends most of her nights picking up guys.”
Kayla was speechless. Regardless, Millie made small talk for another five minutes before finally hanging up.
If there was ever a reason to stay away from Ethan, this was it.
The problem, of course, was that she had to work closely with him if they were going to help the special-needs kids.
CHAPTER FIVE
ON FRIDAY AFTERNOON, WHILE Megan and her friends were cleaning stalls, Ethan drew Kayla outside into the warm spring sunshine to talk about their therapeutic riding program.
“I suggest we evaluate one handicapped child at a time after Megan’s riding lesson with Heather and Brad. That means it’ll take two weeks to check out all six.”
“Can our kids help out?”
Our kids. The words came out of her mouth so naturally she probably hadn’t even realized she’d said them.
“Having peers around, encouraging them might give them a sense of security and confidence.”
They selected as their first “client” a six-year-old girl with cerebral palsy. Ethan called Noah that evening and told him of their plans. Noah promised that Daphne Jones would be there with her mother promptly at four o’clock Monday.
Ethan spent the weekend working with a new horse that had arrived the previous Thursday. Authorities had removed the young gelding from its owner because of abuse. As a result the animal was skittish around people, especially men.
Ethan placed him in a small corral on the far side of the barn where he had room to pace, yet was still in a controlled environment.
Gaining the confidence of a young horse, especially one that had been mistreated, could be a slow and painstaking process. Ethan spent an hour or two each day with Duke in at least two separate sessions. Upon getting a positive response to an overture, he backed off, essentially rewarding it for good behavior. Sometimes that amounted to no more than crouching in the middle of the corral and watching the animal for minutes on end until its natural curiosity brought it over. Once Ethan was able to touch it in a nonthreatening way without the horse bolting, he let it go.
“That one’s slow,” Carter said Sunday evening, as Ethan climbed out of the arena through the steel fence.
“He’ll be all right. So far it’s been one step forward, one step back, but in a few days the two of us will make a giant leap. By the end of the week I’ll have a saddle on him, and by the end of next week I’ll be riding him.”
“You sure about that?” the ranch hand asked, but Ethan knew Carter believed him.
That evening he read up on cerebral palsy. On Monday Kayla came over to the Broken Spoke an hour before the school bus was scheduled to drop the kids off. Her auburn hair burnished by the afternoon sun, she looked absolutely beautiful, though she appeared to be stiff.
“How’s the planting going?”
“Almost done.” She rolled her shoulders. “Thankfully. I don’t know which aches more, my shoulders or my knees.”
“Turn around.”
“What?”
“Let me see if I can work some of the kinks out.”
He stood behind her and
placed his hands on her shoulders, then began a slow kneading massage.
“Ah...” She moaned. “I’ll give you three hours to stop that. Oh, yes!” She sighed as he dug his thumbs into the tight muscles, rolling her shoulders to accommodate him. “Make that four hours.”
He chuckled, enjoying the feel of her under his hands, at the same time trying not to acknowledge the temptation to bend and kiss the nape of her neck.
“How do you want to do this today?” she asked, as she slowly rocked her head back and forth.
“For this initial session Daphne and I will ride Ginger bareback. I’ll put her in front of me. That’ll give her a sense of security if she has balance problems, and I’ll be able to gauge her reactions better.” He could feel Kayla starting to relax under his hands. “From what I read, people with cerebral palsy tend to tire easily, so one or two circuits around the arena may be all she can handle this first time. I’ll leave it up to her.”
Kayla bowed her head, straining against the kinks. “I talked to Daphne and her parents yesterday. She’s really excited about coming here. I’m not sure her father is, though. He struck me as very protective.” She leaned into Ethan’s hands as he rubbed her tired muscles harder. “He kept making noises about putting it off until he could be here, even though his wife insisted she could handle it. Oh, that feels so good.” After another moment she added, “I suspect Daphne may be better off not having him around, at least this time.”
“Good dads are very protective of their girls,” Ethan said casually.
“They’ll be here—” Kayla looked at her watch “—in about an hour.”
Just then they heard the chatter of kids. Reluctantly Ethan gave Kayla’s shoulders one last squeeze. Before releasing her he bent close to her ear. “You still have two and a half hours’ credit.”
She turned, stretched up and planted a soft kiss on his cheek. “Three and a half. I raised the ante, remember?”
He looked stunned but quickly recovered. “So noted,” he said and grinned.
A second later Megan and her friends came charging straight toward them with enthusiastic greetings.
“Hurry and saddle your horses,” Ethan instructed them. “Our special guests will be here in an hour. You can clean stalls after they leave.”