How to Wrangle a Cowboy

by Joanne Kennedy

  Of course, there were differences. For one thing, Lindsey had a veneer of class that Tara, a small-town girl in every way, could never aspire to—even though Tara had very nearly kept her promise to leave Wynott in a pickup truck and come back in a limo. She’d done the leaving part, in her daddy’s pickup with baby Cody by her side. But she’d had to settle for a BMW when she’d returned just a few short weeks before Bud’s death.

  Shane had slept in his chair that night, as he often did. Living alone, he did as he pleased, eating at the kitchen counter, drinking milk from the jug, and tossing his clothes over the back of the sofa. He’d nodded off after the one-two punch of a John Wayne movie and a Louis L’Amour paperback.

  There was no point in messing up his bed. Not when he had no one to share it with.

  A few women had slipped between those sheets over the years, but none of them had lasted. It wasn’t their fault. It was Tara’s. She’d taught him to love—or at least to make love—but then she’d burned his heart to a blackened shell, curled in on itself like a steak left too long on a grill. What little remained had turned to coal when she’d taken Cody. Coal was hard as a rock. It didn’t feel pain or longing or love.

  Since he slept lightly, he was already awake when headlights streaked across the wall. He stood, stretching his legs and rolling the kinks out of his neck. Striding to the door, he watched a vehicle bounce its way toward the ranch house beside his cabin. It was nearly midnight, and a drifting fog turned the car’s headlights into glowing funnels that rose with every bounce of the wheels.

  Probably a lost tourist.

  Shane watched the car stop in front of the big house. A woman emerged and stepped up to the door. He was just about to head over there and make sure Grace was all right when the woman returned to her car, started it up, and headed for his cabin.

  She braked hard on the loose gravel in front of the hitching post, spattering gravel over the car’s expensive paint job. It was a BMW, one of the later models, and Shane thought the woman must not care much about it. Beemers were meant for highway driving, not rocky two-tracks.

  Dark haired and slim, the woman glanced over at the cabin, then tugged on the emergency brake with grim determination, as if she’d parked on a hill.

  Something about that gesture set off a faint bell of remembrance in the back of Shane’s mind. It was a warning bell, clanging and ominous.

  When she stepped out of the car, his mind provided a sexy saxophone accompaniment—the drawn-out wail that always accompanied the arrival of the femme fatale in old movies. His nighttime guest was all legs and long, dark hair, with pale skin and blue eyes—a lethal combination for Shane. Tara had looked like that. In fact, this woman was—

  Tara?

  He took a step back toward the safety of the cabin.

  With one hand resting on the car’s hood, she scanned her surroundings and wrinkled her nose. “Well, it looks like I made the right decision. You aren’t exactly setting the world on fire, are you?”

  The words, the tone, the scorn—they rode in on a rush of memories that burst through a dam of denial to bring back the past.

  It really was Tara.

  Once, he’d searched for this woman with wild desperation. Normally rational and organized, he’d taken to driving in random directions, stopping in small towns he’d never heard of, asking strangers if they’d seen a tall woman with dark hair driving a pickup. A young woman, just eighteen, with a baby beside her.

  His baby.

  She’d left the day after their high school graduation. He didn’t blame her for leaving. It had been tough, listening to the whispers and gossip, enduring the derision of the girls she’d once ruled as Grigsby High’s golden girl. Head cheerleader, valedictorian, basketball champ—and then, teen mom. All it took to tear down her empire was four forbidden shots of peppermint schnapps and two lapses of judgment.

  Oh, and one wild night of lovemaking.

  Shane stood stock-still, hands twitching at his sides like a gunfighter ready to draw.

  “Did you bring him?”

  He couldn’t bring himself to say the boy’s name—the name they’d agreed on, despite Tara’s declaration that it was a goddamned cowboy name and no son of hers would be a dirty cowboy. But Shane, a cowboy to the core, had prevailed.

  She rested one hip against the car and gave him a long, appraising look.

  “Hello to you too.” Her lip curled in an all-to-familiar sneer. “Did I bring who?”

  “Cody. Where is he?” Shane could hardly keep himself from grabbing Tara by the throat, throttling her until she told him where she’d kept his son for all these years. But he calmed himself, breathing deep and slow, as if he was calming a heifer in the squeeze chute.

  She nodded toward the car. “He’s sleeping.”

  Shane approached slowly and with reverence. He’d waited for this moment for six years. Waited, searched, prayed, and even wept over his little boy. He knew what it was like to live without a father, and the fact that his own child had never known him was like a special torture designed just for him by some demon from hell.

  Now, here was his boy, sleeping in the backseat of a BMW, a tousle-haired angel in a Spider-Man T-shirt. And here was the demon herself, risen from whatever hell she’d run off to.

  Things were about to get a whole lot better or a whole lot worse—he wasn’t sure which.

  Chapter 4

  “You can see I didn’t kill him or anything,” Tara said. “Your precious son is fine, and I’m proud to say he’s never ridden a horse in his life.”

  Shane ignored the jab. “Why are you here, Tara?”

  “I went up to the big house, and the old lady said you live here now.” Again, she glanced around the cabin with scorn, as if she’d discovered him living in a cardboard box behind a dumpster. “She has a lot of class. And a nice house too.”

  He knew that expression so well—her downturned mouth, the hardness of her gaze. Time had stamped it firmly on Tara’s skin, carving lines around her mouth and eyes that told him she hadn’t found happiness while she was gone.

  “That was Grace,” he said. “Bud’s wife. You remember.”

  She shrugged. She’d probably rather not recall the one dinner she’d shared with the Wards. She hadn’t fit in any better than “Rodger with a D.”

  “She said you’re the foreman now.”

  Tara loaded the words with scorn, as if she’d found him working as a garbageman or some run-of-the-mill hired hand. He was tempted to remind her the Lazy Q was one of the largest ranches in the state. That he ran thousands of Black Angus cattle and oversaw the work of five permanent cowboys, plus more in the spring. He was tempted to tell her the place had a history reaching back to the 1850s, when it was founded by a Scottish baron.

  She’d like that part, about the baron. Tara had always liked the trappings of wealth. Titles, BMWs—whatever.

  But he wasn’t here to impress Tara. In fact, it might be just as well if she thought he was nothing but a common workingman. The truth was, he lived in the modest cabin by choice. He didn’t need anything fancy, so most of his wages went in the bank, waiting for the day Cody turned eighteen. He’d hoped the boy would track him down, and if he did, a college fund would be ready and waiting.

  How many times had he pictured that reunion? A knock at the door. A boy grown into a man. But it wasn’t going to be like that. It was going to happen now, while his son was still a child. While he still had a chance to mold him into the best man he could be.

  “How about you?” he asked, faking nonchalance. “What are you doing these days?”

  She shrugged one shoulder—a typical Tara gesture. “I plan fundraisers for nonprofits. Parties. They draw wealthy donors and inspire them to open their wallets for causes like kids’ charities and animal shelters.”

  “That’s great, Tara.” He was impressed. “Really great. You’re doing some good in the world.”

  “Yeah, right.” She rapped her knuckles on the hood of th
e car. “It’s a good way to meet men with BMWs.”

  Shane winced. Where was Cody when Tara was out snaring rich men?

  Maybe that question was best left unanswered.

  “So why are you here?” he asked instead.

  She shoved her fingers into her long hair, raking it behind one ear, and looked away—another gesture he remembered. It meant she was stuck, buying time, so she could think up her next line. Or, more likely, her next lie.

  She nodded toward the child, who was still sleeping in the backseat. “I heard you wanted him. Thought you might take him for a while, actually.”

  “You heard I wanted him?”

  Shane stared at her in disbelief. First of all, she talked about their son as if he was a troublesome dog who needed a home. Second, she had to know Shane wanted Cody with all his heart. The first time he’d seen his boy, love had punched him so hard in the chest he hadn’t been able to breathe. It had punched him even harder the first time he’d held him, and it had knocked him flat when Tara had taken Cody away. His heart had ached every day for the past six years.

  “You know I want him,” he said. “I wanted him from the day you told me you were pregnant.”

  She huffed out a sarcastic little laugh. “Yeah, well, you didn’t have to carry him around like a bowling ball while everybody looked at you.”

  He was surprised by the bitterness in her voice.

  “It’s been six years,” he said. “Haven’t you gotten over high school yet?”

  She stared him down, eyes cool and expressionless as ever.

  “Where did you go?” he asked.

  She raked her hair back again, tossed her head. “Denver.”

  “I went to Denver. You weren’t there.”

  “You didn’t look hard enough.”

  Tight smile, fooling with her hair—Tara was lying.

  “Why’d you run off?” He tried to keep his tone from sounding too accusatory, and failed. “I know you weren’t tied to me by love or anything else. But he was as much mine as yours.” He nodded toward the backseat, where his son slept as only children can, oblivious to the emotions that spun off his parents like dust devils, whirling in circles that went nowhere. “I could have sent the law after you. I almost did. You knew how important it was to me that my son have a mother and a father.”

  She huffed out a sarcastic little laugh. “It’s been twenty years. Haven’t you gotten over childhood yet?”

  “Not that part.” It was all he could do to keep a level tone. “Nobody gets over that.”

  “You’d know.”

  Her tone was teasing, begging him to bite back. Tara loved to pick a fight, and she fought to win. Once upon a time, it had driven him crazy. Now, older and wiser, he saw the taunt for what it was.

  He kept his tone level, his eyes veiled. “You know your dad passed away?”

  She nodded, turning away to stare into the darkness as if it fascinated her.

  “You broke his heart, same as mine.”

  She gave him a mock-startled stare. “I broke your heart?” Her tone softened a little. “Why, Shane, I thought you didn’t care about me. I thought we were about done when the baby came along.” She stepped up to him and put her hand on his chest, watching as if fascinated as she stroked her fingers slowly, suggestively down his shirt buttons.

  Her moves hadn’t changed a bit. But what was she after? Shane didn’t have a BMW, and he didn’t live in the big ranch house.

  “I remember what it was like.” She sighed. “My boyfriend—he’s rich, but he’s kind of old. Not much of a man, if you know what I mean. We could…”

  He clamped a hand around her wrist, gently but firmly drawing it away.

  “You didn’t break my heart.” He nodded toward the car. “It was him.”

  He’d have given anything to see Cody’s first smile, watch his first steps, hear his first words. But looking at the woman in front of him, listening to the bitterness in her voice, he knew he’d dodged a bullet when he’d escaped marriage to Tara O’Dell.

  But how much damage had that bullet done to his son? A bad mother could be worse than no mother at all. Shane knew that better than most. But Cody had a father now, and everything would be okay. Shane would make sure of that, starting now.

  “There’s a bed in the loft. Let me grab some sheets and pillows, fix it up a little…”

  “You don’t have time.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m running behind.”

  “Your mom waiting?”

  “No.” She said the word as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

  “Aren’t you here to see her? She’s lonely, Tara. It would mean everything—”

  “It’s none of your business, okay? Mom and I don’t get along. Never did.” Her face settled into those frown lines again. “You know that.”

  Shane did know that, but he’d never understood why. Tara’s mother was a good person, a stay-at-home ranch wife who’d dedicated everything to caring for her only child. When Tara had left, the couple who might have been his in-laws had become closer than ever to Shane, bound by shared grief over Cody’s disappearance.

  “Where are you headed?”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “Don’t worry about it?”

  Shane had discovered, in their brief liaison in high school, that Tara’s ice-queen beauty was an accurate reflection of her personality, but this was going too far.

  “Cody might worry, you know, when he wakes up and finds his mother gone.”

  All the prickly, bitchy contrariness, drained out of her in an instant as her defiant stance melted into a slouch of despair.

  “I tried, okay?”

  Again she raked her fingers through her hair, and he wondered if she was lying. How much of an effort had she really made? What kind of a childhood had she given his boy?

  “You know I never wanted to be a mom. I knew better.”

  That was true, at least. During the brief infatuation that had swept through their young lives like a red-hot tornado, she’d told him she was too selfish to have children. He’d laughed, appreciating her self-awareness—but in that moment, he’d realized their liaison was doomed. He’d wanted a family more than anything in the world.

  And then, in one thoughtless moment, she’d become the mother she’d never wanted to be.

  The boy stirred, mumbling something in his sleep and clutching a worn toy closer. Shane peered through the window, trying to make out if it was a horse or a dog.

  “That’s his damn horse. Trigger,” Tara said. “I made the mistake of telling him his daddy was a cowboy. You’ll see in the morning how that worked out.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he probably won’t even notice I’m gone.”

  “He’ll notice.”

  “He won’t. You’re his hero.”

  Shane knew about abandonment. He’d never known who his father was, and his mother had chosen drugs over motherhood when he’d turned six. He’d spent his childhood moving from one foster home to another. The one lesson he’d learned from his mother—or from his mother’s slaps—was that big boys don’t cry. The result was that three sets of foster parents gave up on him—one in six months, one in three. The next tried for a whole year to make him the son they wanted. They expected to bond with him, but how could they bond with a child who seemed to have erased his emotions?

  Confused, he’d done his best to be perfect. He’d excelled in school and in sports. He’d kept his room clean as a military barracks. He’d taken out the trash, washed the dishes, cleaned the bathroom.

  But he’d done it all with the grim stoicism of a small automaton, and his foster parents sent him back to the state like a puppy to the pound. He hadn’t found a home until it was almost too late.

  “I did everything okay up to now, I think.” Tara’s uncertainty made her look younger, like the girl he remembered. “I’m just no good at it. Motherhood, I mean.” She gestured toward the car. “I need you to take ov
er. You’ll do better.”

  You bet, he thought.

  But all he said was, “Okay. But why not sooner? I would have helped. So would your mom.”

  “I didn’t want that.” She shook her head, as if she could erase her mistakes. “I know now that I should have asked for help. But the past is past.” She shrugged. “He’s yours now.”

  Chapter 5

  The past is past.

  Tara had always told Shane that. She’d said it whenever she’d been selfish or wrong or cruel. And she’d said it whenever he’d tried to explain that his feelings were driven, deep down, by his own past.

  What she’d meant was buck up, move on. And he had, in every possible way. He’d become a success—at being part of a makeshift family formed from two fellow foster kids and a ranch couple who’d been willing to take them in. At being a respected member of the community. At making a living. But deep down in his heart, his past would always be part of him. Tara could never understand that.

  Just like she couldn’t understand that dropping Cody off and walking away would be a stone in her son’s heart for as long as he lived.

  “Stay for a couple days,” he said. “Not for me. For Cody.”

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  She grimaced, shifting from one foot to the other. “I have to get the car back. It’s not mine.”

  “I’ll follow you. Take you wherever you want to go.”

  “No.” She stared down the driveway, then back at him. Cool, composed Tara was back. “I have a chance at a good life with a good man, Shane. He wants to marry me, but he doesn’t want to raise another man’s child.”

  Shane kicked at the dirt, a little more viciously than he’d intended. Gravel pinged off the shining finish on the Beemer.

  “How good a man can he be if he’d send Cody away?”

  “He loves me, Shane. Just me. He treats me like a princess. And he’s busy. Doesn’t have time for a kid.”

  “Well, I guess you have everything you ever wanted then.” He swallowed, tasting bile. So this was how it happened. This was how a mother walked away from her own child. For drugs, for money, for security—the reason didn’t matter. Not when you were the one left behind. “Just stay for a couple days, Tara. Or even one. He’s going to wake up with a stranger, for God’s sake.”