I watched as her eyes lightened, getting a far away look I recognized as the one she wore when she thought of my dad. Blinking, she looked back at me with a soft smile. “Just do me a favor and keep your eyes and your heart open, okay? For me?”
I hugged her again. “I will, Mom. I promise.” I stepped back, moving to pick up my carry-on bag, when my mom gasped.
“Oh, shoot! I almost forgot. Wait. Just wait one minute.” She dashed off back to her bedroom, leaving me standing at the open front door at four-thirty in the morning. She was back only moments later with a wrapped box in her hands.
“Mom, what is this? You shouldn’t have done this.” We didn’t have the extra funds for gifts.
“I didn’t do it alone. All the nurses from the hospital pitched in. You know how much those gals love you.”
My mom had worked as a pediatric nurse at Mount Sinai hospital for almost thirty years. Her friends and coworkers there had been instrumental in our lives when things got rough. They were over almost every day while dad was sick, bringing food, helping with the chores and washing so mom and I could spend as much time focused on dad as possible. When he passed, they circled around us, lifting us up and helping us through. They were all like aunts and uncles to me, and I loved them very much. “Now, hurry, you don’t have much time.”
Grinning like a loon, I peeled back the paper, revealing a box with words on it that I couldn’t bring myself to comprehend. Looking up at mom with huge eyes, she was smiling for all she was worth as tears poured down her face.
Removing the lid, I carefully withdrew the most glorious pair of magenta pink suede Jimmy Choo pumps I had ever seen. I remembered the day mom and I had first spotted them in the window of the Jimmy Choo store on Madison Avenue. We were window shopping, our favorite pastime, when the gorgeous shoes had caught my eye. I stared like a kid at a pet store, my face pressed up against the glass, admiring the stunning works of art that were those shoes, until mom tugged me away by my elbow. The fact that I was now holding these shoes was beyond belief.
“Mom, this is too much,” I said, now remembering the price tag that came with the beautiful shoes. “Really. I can’t.”
“You can and you will. All the ladies helped. Bernice had her daughter go over and pick them up yesterday. They said the first rule of getting a promotion is dressing the part. These shoes will help you get there in style. You will do the rest.”
My heart felt like it was going to explode. How could I possibly be away from Queens for four months? How could I leave my mom, my biggest cheerleader, here while I went to partake in this ridiculous contest? Not to mention the countless people around us who showered us with love. My whole life was here in Queens. I wasn’t prepared to give them up. Any of them.
“Penelope,” my mom said, rubbing my arms as my heart fluttered out of control. “You are going to be fine. I am going to be fine. This is just another adventure for our memory books. I will see you in four months. You will be the Vice President of Marketing for Pennington Hotels, and everything is going to be great. Believe me. I’m a mom. I know these things, you know?”
So, for hopefully the last time today, I wiped my tears, tucked my incredible shoes into my suitcase, hugged my mother - again - and set off on my first big adventure.
I mean, how bad could it possibly be, right?
CHAPTER THREE
Stone
The sun had barely crested the horizon and I was already returning to the barn at the end of a ride. My horse, McNally, was being extra surly because I had hauled him out of his warm stall and made him drag my ass around in the dark.
Rising early was a way of life for me here on the ranch, but today I was up even earlier. Hell, I had hardly slept to begin with. I was too damned pissed off to get much rest. Ever since that phone call from Harold, I had been a pressure cooker of anger, just waiting for someone to snap at. I figured a ride out to the back quarter all alone might take some of the edge off before I had to catch my flight. I certainly didn’t need some TSA agent getting in my face. I’d be liable to end up in cuffs at this rate.
As I walked McNally back to his stall and began the process of unsaddling him and rubbing him down, I thought about why I was so damn angry in the first place.
A phone call from Harold Pennington was never a pleasant experience. They were even less pleasant when he was calling to ask things of me. Three days ago he called with the biggest ask yet. I had wanted to turn him down. I really did. His motivations were always suspect, and I didn’t trust the man as far as I could throw him.
Which was saying something, because Harold Pennington was my father.
At least, biologically.
As far as the rest of being a father went, the man was sorely lacking.
Harold Pennington had come to Austin almost thirty-four years ago to open a new Pennington Hotels property, a luxury spa retreat on the outskirts of town. He was looking to cater to all the newly wealthy oilman’s wives. You know, the type that will spend hundreds of dollars to paint their faces in some exotic mud flown in from a riverbed in north Africa. As a part of the launch, he was overseeing the hiring and training of all the new staff, which included a beautiful young woman in housekeeping, Eleanor Montgomery. My mother.
She was twenty-one years younger than him, but that didn’t matter to him in the least. She was taken with his big city ways, I guess, and she fell for all his lines.
When the launch was complete he left her behind. Took off back to New York City like a thief in the night and didn’t look back for over four years. Needless to say, he was shocked to come back to the hotel and see three-year-old me wandering around the staff room. I did spend a lot of time there with my mother, and when I wasn’t at the Spa, I was with my grandparents on their ranch, riding and climbing trees, and scraping my knees. It was great. A perfect Texas childhood.
My mother had never gotten over Harold, never moved on with another man, always holding out hope that Harold would come back for us. So, when he showed back up in Austin, she got her heart broken again when she learned that in the intervening time, Harold had gone and gotten himself married. Some fancy rich lady from Manhattan who would never lower herself to looking after her own child, which she proved with the army of nannies and maids she kept in their penthouse apartment to take care of her own new infant.
When Harold learned about me he immediately tried to throw money at the situation. He offered to put mom and me up in a fancy house so she didn’t have to work anymore. Mom turned him down, saying she liked living at her parent’s ranch, and that she was proud of her work at the spa. She had worked her way up from chambermaid to housekeeping manager and her staff and the guests all loved her. She was happy with the way things were.
Harold came though town a few times a year after that, always trying to be a dad, always just managing to make our relationship even more uncomfortable. Every time he would leave again, I had to watch the hope in my mother’s eyes die a little more.
By the time I was fifteen Harold had divorced his wife. For a while I thought maybe this would finally be the time he came for us. The time he took the heart my mother had offered him over and over again and treated it with care.
But once again he disappointed me. He and his other kids, my younger half-sisters, stayed in Manhattan, living the high life, while my mother continued to work her way up within the Austin Spa.
When I graduated high school, she sat me down and asked what I wanted to do. Having grown up following her around at her job, I had long decided that hotel management was where I wanted to work. I had applied for several schools, and even received a few scholarships, though I would have to work hard to earn enough money to make up the difference.
That was when my mother told me that Harold had offered cover my college expenses. I tried to refuse, saying that we hadn’t needed him before, I damn sure wasn’t going to start taking his money now. She let me storm around a bit, blowing my top as I always do, then reminded me that regardless of
how I felt, Harold was my father, and had always tried to do right by me in the best way he could.
My mother was a friggin’ saint. She put her own hurt aside every time.
So, in the end, I accepted, more for her sake than my own. Harold tried everything to get me to attend school at Cornell, but there was no way I was ever stepping foot in New York. That state had taken enough from my mother, I wasn’t going to let it take her son, too.
So we compromised. I would let him pay if he let me choose a school in Texas. In the end, I got my degree in Hospitality Management at the University of Texas at San Antonio. I got the degree I wanted and I was less than two hours from home.
When I finished school, Harold offered me a job. I turned him down. I didn’t want any more hand outs. But once again, my mother intervened. She encouraged me to take a position with Pennington Hotels, saying that it would be good for me to get to know my father more, to understand that side of myself and where I came from.
“You are more than just a cowboy, baby,” she’d say to me every time I claimed that my New York blood didn’t exist. So, when she pressed, I relented. And when I was twenty-three years old, I took a job at Pennington Hotels. Much to my fathers’ displeasure, I insisted on using my mothers last name, Montgomery. I didn’t want anyone thinking I hadn’t earned my place.
I started at the Dallas location as the night manager. Then moved up to food and beverage manager, and finally on to general manager. At that point, Harold started to offer me promotions personally, but they were all at the head office in New York. I kept turning him down. Even stopped taking his calls for a while, until he reminded me that even if I didn’t want to talk to my father, he was still my CEO.
I had spent the last few years as the regional manager for Pennington Hotels southwest division. I covered territory from Texas to California and all the states in between. It was a good place for me, and I had been happy. I thought we had settled this, until Harold came calling again.
“It’s an incredible opportunity, son,” he said, knowing I hated it when he called me that, but doing it anyway. “Pennington Hotels is branching out in to Casinos. I want to take the Las Vegas Strip by storm, and with you at the helm, we’ll have a much better shot at doing just that.”
I ground my teeth. The bastard knew this was an opportunity I would love to take. I just hated that he was the one to give it to me. I hated taking anything from him. I didn’t need him, no matter what my mother thought.
“It will only be a four month stay in Nevada. You’ll oversee the completion of the project. We have a top-secret theme that I personally picked. I think you’ll love it. You will have final say in all the details. I’m sending someone from marketing out as well, so you will have someone completely devoted to this project exclusively. You will stage a few massive launch events, and then you can go back to Austin. Easy.”
Truth be told, it sounded fantastic. Really getting to sink my project and put my own stamp on the finished product. Let everything I’ve learned in the last nine years come into play and really make a name for myself. I could maybe even use this project to pad my resume enough that I could leave Pennington altogether. Get a position with a company not run by the man who broke my mother’s heart. All I had to do was give up four months. It couldn’t be that hard.
Finishing with McNally’s care, I popped a few sugar cubes in my palm from the box I kept in the tack room to try and get back on his good side. I hate to leave him this way, on bad terms, as it were, but I had to catch that flight. McNally looked at my hand skeptically, ears back to show me his displeasure.
“I know, old man, and I’m sorry,” I muttered, rubbing my other hand down his nose. “You know as well as I do that I’d rather stay here. But ma wants me to go. I’ve never been good at saying no to her.” McNally gave a whinny and, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think he was laughing at me. Dipping his head, he took the sugar cubes, letting me know we had reached a truce. “That’s my boy. You hold a grudge like no one else, you know that?” He leaned forward and pressed his head into my chest. “I know. I’ll miss you too. But you have to look out for Ma for me, alright? Keep an eye on things? Can you do that?” McNally gave another soft wicker and huffed out a breath in my face before retreating back into his stall and digging into his breakfast of hay and oats. “Thanks, my man. I’ll be back before you know it.”
Walking back across the gravel drive between the house and the barn, I paused and glanced around at the spread that belonged to my grandparents. What was a large and prosperous cattle ranch covering several thousand acres had been reduced to just a small parcel. My grandfather, Earl Montgomery, inherited the land from his father and worked it as a cattle ranch for a few decades. He and my grandmother, Sophie, had hoped for several sons to help work the land and pass the property on to, but after my mother was born, they were never lucky enough to conceive more children. That, combined with the rise of corporate farming and ranching, made it hard to continue on as things had been, so Earl was forced to sell off more and more of the property. By the time he passed, the land he did keep was all being rented out to neighboring ranchers for their stock. The only parts my mom still used was the house, the small garden behind it, and the barn, and only because I kept McNally. He was probably lonely, being the only resident, but he had plenty of space to roam, and mom visited him every day, even if she didn’t ride anymore.
I tired to spend as much time out here as I could, but work was keeping me in the city more and more. Mom had retired from the Spa a while back, and I only kept a small place in Austin so that I could help out here with chores and maintenance and the like.
The sprawl of the Austin city limits was creeping closer and closer to our spot, but it still didn’t sit well with me, leaving mom alone out here for four months.
In the distance, down the long gravel drive that ran to the highway, a pair of headlights turned my way, their mellow beams shining in the growing dawn light. Recognizing the truck immediately, I waited near the porch steps as it worked it’s way towards the house and parked beside my own vehicle.
“Didn’t expect to see you here this morning,” I said reaching for the outstretched hand of my best friend, Silas Harrison. Friends since middle school, Silas was the closest thing to a brother I had ever had.
“Don’t even go there,” he said, drawing me into an embrace, our hands clasped between us, and rapping on my back with enough force to knock the wind out of me. Silas was a big dude; even his gentle hurt a bit. “You know you’re the one who can’t roll his ass out of bed in the mornings. I wanted to come and make sure you were even awake. Didn’t want you to miss your plane. I know how eager you are to please dear old Dad.”
He said it in jest, knowing exactly how I felt about Harold, but it still made my hackles rise. “Cut that shit out,” I said, stuffing my hands in the pocked of my jeans. “You know the only reason I’m even doing this is for ma. Why that woman has to push him and I together, I’ll never know. She should hate him after all he’s put her through.”
“Your ma could never hate anyone, and you know it.” Silas had spent as much time at our place as he did his own. He had two older brothers and their own spread was small compared to some of the other properties around the area, so he had more freedom to come and go than most of the other ranch kids we knew. My grandfather was done working his place actively by then, so Silas and I were free to roam, finding all sorts of mischief to get up to. “Seems to me like she’s just trying to do right by you, let you get to know your old man before it’s too late. I think she just doesn’t want you to have any regrets, is all.”
I grumbled out a noncommittal noise because I refused to let the bastard know I thought he might be right. I knew my ma always had my best interests at heart, but it didn’t make it any easier to look past the way Harold had treated her. She deserved better from him.
Making our way up the porch and into the house, we both stopped just inside the doors, each taking a big inhale
of the delicious aromas wafting out from the house. “Oh, man. I do love when your mama cooks,” Silas said, a huge grin spreading across his face as he pushed past me and headed for the kitchen. I followed behind, watching as he gathered mom up in a huge hug, spinning her around.
“Silas Harrison, you put me down right this minute! The eggs will burn.”
“Miss Ellie, your cooking is so good, I’d eat them even if they were burnt.”
I scoffed. “Kiss ass.”
“Stone! You mind your language in my house, now,” my mom admonished, turning a scowl my way.
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, leaning in to press a kiss to her cheek.
“You boys wash up, I have enough for you both.”
Silas and I moved to the sink, then took our places at the table, already spread with toast and bacon, pancakes and an assortment of homemade jams and preserves. We began to load up our plates, filling them to the brim as we always had. Mom brought the skillet from the stove and placed a couple fried eggs on top of everything, then dished a small plate for herself before joining us at the table.
“Silas will be by to check on you in a few days, ma, before he files out to join me in Las Vegas.”
Silas was not only my best friend, he was also a security specialist and I hired him for all the properties I was responsible for.
After high school, when I went off to San Antonio for university, Silas had enlisted in the Army, then went on to join the Army Rangers. He didn’t talk a lot about his time as a Ranger, but I knew some shit went down that haunted him. He worked real hard at being the same guy I knew growing up, but I could see when he was in a dark place. His eyes weren’t the same, growing shadowed and distant when the memories were nipping at his heels, but he never let it keep him down for long.
“You know I don’t need to be babysat, boys,” my mom interjected.
“I know that, Ma, but it’s for my own peace of mind. Once Si comes out to Nevada, I’ll have one of the Berkshire boys come by a few times a week to look after McNally and ensure everything is running smoothly.”
The Cowboy and the Bombshell Page 3