Her father’s face flushed. “Don’t you talk to me like that, young lady. Do you think you’ll live here and chase that cow rancher? Is that your decision?”
“Edgar.” Her mother touched his sleeve, warning in her eyes.
Amy Rose took a deep breath. Deep inside she knew there was no way around the tearing apart of their relationship and she owed it to Jess to be frank and honest about how she felt. “I love that rancher. And I’m going to see if Jess will have me and along the way I might become a teacher or a nurse or a stay-at-home mom, but it will be my choice, not yours.”
“Amy Rose, there is no need to get snippy.” Her mother’s proper nasal tone infuriated her.
“Yes, Mother. There is every reason to get snippy. You’ve been trying to set me up with every eligible male in your circle. You were trying to make my choices for me, too. Just once I’d like both of you to respect my right to live my own life.”
Her father clenched his fists. “I can sell this homestead. I will sell this homestead. Should have long ago.” He looked around with loathing.
Her father’s threat made her heart seize, but she clamped down on her back teeth and shoved that devastation away. “You family’s history is here on this land. But do what you think you need to, Dad. Jess has a home and a ranch where I am more than welcome. I know I am wanted there, just the way I am.” And she did know. She knew Jess loved her and wanted a future with her. She knew that. She just needed him to respect her choices, too.
She opened her car door. “Now if you don’t mind, I have someone I need to see and you need to leave.”
“Amy Rose, you should come to dinner at the house and we’ll discuss this like civilized adults.” Her mother’s pleading grated.
Her father shook his finger at her. “This isn’t the end of this discussion.”
She gripped her keys. “I’m never setting foot in your house again, Mother. There is nothing for me there. And yes, Father, it is the end of the discussion.”
She got in, shut her door and started the engine, working hard to control the cauldron of emotions desperate to pour from her. When her parents didn’t move, she cranked on the steering wheel and drove across the lawn and around their car to get to the highway.
She had to find Jess.
∞∞∞∞∞∞
CHAPTER FOUR
Jess wiped his feet on the mat and went in the back door of his parent’s house. He could smell biscuits and bacon and his stomach growled. He’d left Amy Rose’s bed more reluctantly than he could ever remember, but a text message fire alert from the McCormick Ranch had him scurrying so fast he’d forgotten to leave a note for Amy Rose. The small fire had been started by a thrown cigarette and had scorched four acres before being put out by fire department personnel and ranch hands.
He’d text messaged her, but she hadn’t answered. Figuring she was still asleep, he drove to his parents. He was sooty, dog-tired and wishing he’d been able to ignore the request for help and just stay in her bed for one important morning.
But he was a rancher.
Helping your neighbor in a time of need meant he helped you in the same circumstances. That sentiment is what kept small communities close-knit. Copper Canyon was no exception. Amy Rose had been around this area long enough to understand.
His mama was at the stove, dishing up a plate. “You better have wiped your feet.”
“Mama, I’ve been wiping my feet without being reminded since I was about two.” He stopped and redid the wiping just to please her.
“How bad?” His father asked from his spot at the breakfast table.
He lifted off his hat and hung it on the hook. “Buy me a cup of coffee and I might come up with some details. Let me wash up.” He walked down the hall to the guest bathroom and spent five minutes scrubbing his face, neck, hands and arms. He still smelled like smoke. Nothing to be done about that until he could get home and take a shower and change clothes.
He glanced at his phone, and tried texting Amy Rose again, but couldn’t stand there and wait for an answer. His parents were waiting for details. The ranch land was their livelihood as well as his.
Back in the kitchen, he leaned in to kiss his mother’s cheek.
She peered into his face. “You look dead tired. Don’t you ever sleep?”
“If it would rain, I might.” He took the heaped over plate she offered him and went to the table. Hash browns, biscuits covered in thick white gravy, Spanish scrambled eggs heaping with chilies and onions just the way he liked them, and a stack of toast — wheat, as a nod to healthy.
He pulled out his chair and sat, grabbing a napkin from the holder and putting it in his lap. He paused and just breathed in the aroma of the cup of coffee his father put on the table in front of him. “Fire department found a cigarette where they think the fire started. Four acres, mostly grassland, no cattle on the space, thank God. Got put out quickly.”
His dad took a sip of his coffee. “Still dangerous stuff. Temperatures going to be over a hundred again today. How are we for hay and feed?”
“We’ll be okay. Working on a different supply source. It’s going to cut our margins some. But most of our regulars are tapped.” Neither parent knew he was managing Amy Rose’s two horses from their supply, also, because her help was doing such a lousy job.
His mother joined them at the table with her plate and her usual cup of tea. “Don’t suppose Amy Rose’s place is fairing any better?”
He took his time taking a bit of eggs and swallowing a mouth of coffee before he answered her. “Not as near as I can tell.”
Mama looked like she’d say more, but Daddy interrupted. “You let me know if you need help. I’m right here.” He glared at his wife.
“I know, Dad.” Jess looked back and forth between his parents, wondering at the byplay, remembering Shane’s words about how the breakup had affected everyone. His mama had been real close to Amy Rose. He understood her hurt and loved that their relationship had brought Amy Rose tightly into the fold. But Lord, sometimes privacy was a tad difficult. Butting in was a family practice and stretched from aunt to cousin to neighbor to the mailman.
He waited for more prodding questions, but his parents let him eat in silence. He took the last piece of biscuit and cleaned his eggs and gravy off his plate.
He wasn’t fooling himself that making love last night solved anything. They needed an uninterrupted conversation and some compromise. And he needed to apologize.
He leaned back in his chair. “Amy Rose is back.” The words came out, like the squeak of a rusty bucket handle. “She’s still pretty mad at me and I’m not sure where the compromise is.”
He looked at his dad first. That was easiest. But his father turned to his mother and gave her a hand to go first. He had no choice but to face his mother and finally clear the air on the affects this breakup with Amy Rose had wrecked on his family.
Mama stared at him quietly, fingering her tea cup, and making him squirm in his chair like he was five-years-old.
When she spoke, he braced himself. “She loves you, adores you. I’ve never understood the problem. What is it exactly?”
“We fought about her future. She wouldn’t stand her ground with her father and I feel like those choices are going to take her down a path away from me. I couldn’t stand the idea, couldn’t stand that she wouldn’t turn away from that and I opened my big mouth.”
His mother stared at him, amazement, frustration, irritation, passing over her face. “You didn’t trust her to choose you, then? You just wanted to order her around?”
“I didn’t want to order her around. I just want her to choose, Mama.” He finished his cup of coffee, sorry he’d started the conversation.
“Did you ask her to choose you? As in asking her to marry you?”
“It was under discussion. I just assumed, but then she was dithering about this position with her father’s law firm and you know how different that life is from the one here. She can’t have both.”
/> His mother shoved her teacup aside. “Let me give you a piece of advice, young man. A woman generally doesn’t like to be told what her decisions ought to be.”
“She apparently agrees with you, Mama. She spit some nastiness at me. I spit some at her. Next thing I know, we’re broken up and she’s high-tailed it to Dallas.”
His mother huffed in disgust. Jess looked at his dad for help.
His dad shrugged. “Hard when you’ve got a smart woman with a will strong enough to solve her own problems. Latching onto that wagon takes a patient, steady man to just love her. You think you don’t love her enough to wait her out? Let her figure it out?”
“No! Yes!” Jess leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He took a deep breath before opening them again. “I don’t think it’s been any secret how I’ve felt since the moment I laid eyes on her.”
His mother gave a tight laugh. “I remember that day. You came home from school with stars in your eyes. Had to be a girl, but you were so taken by her that I couldn’t even get her name out of you. Shane told me.”
“I wasn’t that smitten.” Jess made a mental note to kick his brother.
She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “Were so. If I recall, I offered to let you cut some of my wild roses to take her the next day. You blushed and went to the barn.”
Jess’s face turned red. The memory reminded him that at the time he didn’t want anyone knowing how he felt. It was too precious and fragile. “You could have been more subtle, Ma.”
“Why? You were in love and I was tickled pink.”
Jess squirmed in his chair. He hadn’t found the nerve to do anything about those feelings until several years later.
“Regardless, the idea that she’d choose that life over you is ridiculous. Don’t you know that?”
Did he know that? Maybe he did, but if that was the case, why didn’t she just choose? He voiced that very question.
“She had her relationship with her parents to think about, and it wasn’t your place to make the choice. You’re supposed to love her enough to respect that!”
“Read her mind, you mean.”
His father reached over and patted his arm. “Don’t argue with your mother. She’s right. Patience and respect.”
His mother rapped on the table to get his attention. “Listen to her and understand and she’ll latch onto you and never let go. And if you don’t go apologize for being so pig-headed right now, well I just don’t know what to say.” His mother rose from the table, dabbing at a tear in the corner of her eye.
Both men watched her retreat to the living room. The television switched on with a morning news show.
“Sometimes a man thinks he can solve every problem by just saying what’s going to happen. Doesn’t work that way. How long you been feeding Amy Rose’s horses out of our supply?”
Jess closed his eyes for a moment, feeling a new flush creep over his face.
“I still look at the books and can add two and two. We didn’t paint anything around here either.”
Jess opened his eyes and turned to his daddy with an explanation on his lips.
His dad held up his hand. “Don’t explain. I’ve been married for thirty-five years to a strong, stubborn, smart woman. I know. Thing is, son, they gotta hear you backing them up once in a while. Doesn’t matter if there is money in the bank, or if you break your back making her world perfect, you gotta tell her that her choices matter. Understand?” His dad rose. “Is it harder to do that or harder to lose her?”
Jess’s stomach dipped, tossing his eggs to and fro. God, the last two weeks had been hell and last night, well, it had been as close to heaven as a man could get. He knew what he had to do.
His dad put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Seems to me she’s had more than a few years of schooling in which to accomplish her objective and yet she’s still here with you.”
He rose and hugged his father. “I hear you.”
“Good. Now get to work. I gotta go soothe your mother.”
Jess took his plate to the sink and high-tailed it outta the kitchen and to his own house on the corner of the ranch. He raced through a shower and dressed, but stopped when he pulled out a clean pair of socks. There in the corner of his bureau drawer was a jewelry box. He hadn’t looked at the necklace inside for a long time. He snapped open the lid and stared at the small heart on the silver chain. The tiny diamond winked at him. He’d bought this necklace for Amy Rose in high school, imagined giving it to her a thousand times. Yet, he hadn’t even found the nerve to ask her out. It had sat in his drawer for years, mocking him for his foolishness and even when he’d started dating her, he’d never quite worked up the nerve to admit how long he’d loved her.
He slipped the necklace out of the case and put it in his pocket. If a man couldn’t admit he was foolish to a woman he loved, then it was time to pack it in. Way past time he should have given this to her. Way past time to admit he’d been wrong and say he was sorry.
∞∞∞∞
Amy Rose turned into her driveway, frustrated and tired. And there was the object of her frustration.
Jess’s truck was down by the barn.
What in the hell was he doing in her barn?
She driven to his ranch to see him, but his truck hadn’t been there. In the mood she was in, she didn’t think it was a good idea to talk to his parents. So she’d kept searching. She’d driven the circle from his house into Flower Mound and back to the Low-Down, checking all the places he normally went and couldn’t find him. So she’d driven to the grocery store and to the cell phone store and while she bought food and a new cell phone, she simmered.
How was it possible for her heart to soften all the while still being mad? She knew she’d made a bunch of mistakes, one piled on the other. Mistake one: She’d let hurt feelings dictate her actions and she’d run home. Mistake two: Not checking her cell phone sooner and realizing it had quit. Mistake Three: last night. She’d waited too long, been too desperate, and hadn’t used her head before letting her body run amok. They should have talked, because he’d made mistakes, too.
She drove down her driveway and parked next to Jess’s truck. One part of her was advising calm, take a minute and breathe. The other part was still hurt with temper from her parent’s visit, from Jess leaving bed without waking her, from two weeks of replaying their argument like a You Tube video.
She scurried out of the car, determined to grab Jess by the ears before he disappeared on her again.
She stepped into the dark interior and gave herself a minute for her eyes to adjust to the shadows. Jess was on his haunches checking the legs of her favorite mare, Betsy Brash.
He was murmuring a nonsensical tune while he rubbed expert hands over every muscle and joint, pausing for a moment with hands held over her back right leg. The horse danced away from his touch.
“I know, girl. Sore isn’t it?”
“Why are you taking care of my horse? What’s wrong with her?”
She approached carefully, but the agitated tone of her voice had upset Betsy, making her sidestep. Jess grabbed her reins and crooned to her, making her settle.
“Sorry, I know better than that.” Amy Rose moved slower and reached the shy, brown spotted horse and petted her nose. “Sorry girl.”
“She’s got a sore leg. Not sure why. She hasn’t been ridden.”
“Chaz Davies is supposed to be caring for my horses. That’s what my father pays him to do.”
“Let me put Betsy away and we’ll talk.” He pulled the gentle horse to the last stall and spent several long minutes getting her settled.
Amy Rose looked around the barn and was surprised to see the area was extraordinarily clean, like Jess’s barns. Tack was hung, the floor clean, the posts painted. Jess closed the gate on the stall and walked toward her. She turned to him, suspicions prodding her tongue. “What have you been doing?”
Jess shrugged and reached for a towel to wipe his hands. “You shouldn’t pay Chaz. He h
asn’t been caring for the horses. He hasn’t been here in at least a week. Since you left, he’s been here maybe twice.
“And you know this how?”
“I’ve been watching. I suspect he’s been slacking since long before you left. Your tack was a mess. And this last week, you’ve been out of hay and feed. Maybe he didn’t think they needed to be fed.”
She sucked in a breath. “I don’t understand. Chaz has been working for my father for years without many problems. He paid him to get the feed, to be here to care for the horses. I confirmed with him after I left.”
Jess shrugged and started picking up his supplies. “I don’t know what to tell you, Amy. I’ve been feeding them since day four, and cleaning their stalls. He hasn’t been here. I’ve only saw him the first two days, and the second day I gave him a piece of my mind about the state of the horses and the stalls. He may have quit coming after that.”
Horrified, she wrapped her arms around herself. “You should have called!”
He shrugged again. “I did. You didn’t answer.”
Her temper died. “My phone quit. Turned off. I didn’t know. Just bought a new one this morning.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but his cell phone beeped and he pulled it and read a text message.
“I have to go, Amy. Another fire. Had one at the McCormick place this morning. Now the Hardy’s on your other side need some help.” He reached for her and pulled her close. “We’ll talk later, I promise.”
He pressed a warm kiss against her lips and was gone, leaving her standing in the dark barn, her morning of searching all for naught.
Amy Rose hauled groceries into the kitchen and put them away. She should have some lunch, but the churn of her emotions and the benign smells in the kitchen meant that wouldn’t happen. She made her way to the bedroom and stared at the bed where she and Jess had spent the night.
She was so damn tired — tired of fighting, physically tired, emotionally tired. And the argument with her parents and unresolved things with Jess just made everything worse. She slumped down on the bed and typical for a pregnant woman according to all her reading, she fell asleep.
Cowboy's Heart (Copper Canyon, Texas) Page 4