Falling for the Cowgirl

by Tina Radcliffe

  “Not a bit,” she replied, stepping back to give them a clear path to her booth. “Also, I keep forgetting to thank you for helping Brian out with the financing for his business. He never would’ve gotten started if you hadn’t stepped in to smooth things over for him with the loan committee.”

  “Everyone deserves a chance to succeed,” Rick said, shifting Aubrey to his other side so she could look down at the array of necklaces that Caitlin was admiring. “Brian’s a good guy, and Lindsay’s an expert at keeping her husband and the business on track, so I felt they were a good risk. From what I see here, there’s quite a bit of artistic talent in the Calhoun family.”

  It was flattering to hear that, but Emma felt her cheeks heating with embarrassment. She’d never been comfortable being complimented for something that she considered to be a gift from God, a talent meant to be shared with others who could appreciate it. Strangers often mistook her reticence for standoffishness, so she forced herself to smile up at the tall banker. “That’s nice of you to say. Thank you.”

  “Just stating a fact, but you’re welcome. We’re looking for a Mother’s Day gift for my mom. What do you think she’d like, girls?”

  The two of them debated over several items before finally settling on a pretty beaded bracelet with a silver oval that read “Grandma.” While Emma boxed and wrapped it for them, she asked, “Do you see anything your mommy might like?”

  In a heartbeat, the three Marshalls fell silent. Rick’s jaw tightened in obvious distress, and he pulled Aubrey a bit closer, resting a hand on Caitlin’s shoulder in a protective gesture that told Emma she’d inadvertently stumbled onto very sensitive ground. Feeling awful, she wished there was a way to un-ask her question.

  Lifting large, sad eyes to hers, in a voice barely above a whisper, Caitlin said, “Mommy’s in heaven.”

  Unbidden, Emma’s gaze fell on Rick’s left hand, which still bore a gold wedding band. With great determination, she raised her eyes to meet his and frowned. “I’m so sorry. I had no idea.”

  “We try to keep it to ourselves, for the girls’ sake,” he explained tersely. “Fewer questions to answer that way.”

  Nodding, she tried desperately to come up with something else to say. Nothing comforting came to mind, so she simply said, “I understand.”

  “Thank you.”

  The casual ease that he’d displayed earlier had vanished, and in its place stood a man who was clearly still grieving, even while he raised his two beautiful daughters. Emma’s family was as close-knit as they came, and she couldn’t imagine how her life would be without her own mother. When trouble had come to her two years ago, the first person she’d confided in was Mom. They’d had a good cry, then got to work figuring out how to handle her sobering diagnosis.

  Leukemia, the doctor had somberly informed her. Stage three.

  Her family’s unwavering support, and a lot of prayer, had gotten Emma through the worst time of her life. The tests and seemingly endless rounds of chemo had gone on for months, and there had been times when she honestly thought she couldn’t possibly endure any more. She’d pushed away the despair, armed with a collection of cute hats and handmade jewelry that had spawned a new hobby that helped to keep her sane throughout her treatment.

  In the end, she’d gotten through it using equal measures of grit and faith. Now, hopefully, she was on the other side of it and moving forward. The date of her follow-up test was circled on her calendar in bright pink. It was a cheerful, upbeat color, and she hoped her results would warrant it.

  An optimist by nature, she’d learned the hard way that a positive attitude wasn’t always enough to make things work out in her favor. And while she recognized that it was important to be prepared for the worst, she didn’t know what that might be.

  She’d never summoned the courage to ask.

  * * *

  Rick had no clue what to say next.

  To cover his sudden silence, he set Aubrey down in the lush spring grass and pulled out his wallet. To Caitlin, he said, “Why don’t you two go across the aisle to Mrs. Calhoun’s stand and get us all some cookies and lemonade?”

  “Okay, Daddy,” Caitlin agreed, nodding as if she understood that the conversation he was about to have wasn’t one for young ears. Taking Aubrey’s hand, she smiled and gave a light tug. “Come on. Let’s go get a snack.”

  When he was satisfied that the girls were out of earshot, he squared his shoulders and faced the art teacher, who’d so innocently punched him in the gut. Her vivid blue eyes were filled with sympathy, made even more intense by the sunlight streaming down through the branches overhead. Her honey-brown hair shifted in the warm breeze, and she toyed with a short piece in a gesture that made it clear she was as uncomfortable as he was.

  “About the ring...” The opening sounded awkward, and he felt more like a teenager approaching his crush to ask for a date than a twenty-eight-year-old man about to impose some logic on what must seem odd.

  “There’s no need to explain yourself to me, Mr. Marshall,” she assured him in a formal tone very unlike the one she’d been using with him up until now. “What you wear or don’t wear is your own business. I’m just sorry that I misunderstood your situation. Being a single father is hard enough, but your circumstances are heartbreaking. I feel awful for upsetting you and the girls this way.”

  Amazing, he thought with true admiration. Any other woman would have been curious about why he still wore his wedding ring when he was no longer married. Enough had done it recently that he’d come to expect the question. Despite the strain he was feeling, Emma’s respect for his wishes brushed some of his discomfort away.

  “Sarah and I got married right after we finished college and had Caitlin a year later,” he explained quietly, hoping to avoid sharing his painful personal history with the people browsing at the next table. “When Aubrey was born four years ago, Sarah didn’t bounce back the way she did after Caitlin. For a few months she chalked the fatigue up to being a full-time mother of two.”

  He heard the catch in his voice and paused to steady it. To his surprise, Emma laid a reassuring hand on his arm. “You don’t need to keep going if you’d rather not. I can fill in the blanks on my own.”

  “Really?”

  She nodded. “When Caitlin first started at school, my hair was still coming back in and I wore a lot of hats. She mentioned that her mother had done the same thing, so I assumed she’d been through something similar. I just didn’t realize that she passed away, and I’m truly sorry for all you and the girls have lost. They’re both wonderful, and Sarah must have been a remarkable woman to give them so much before she died.”

  “She was,” he confirmed, relieved to feel his emotional balance returning. Emma’s soft voice, coupled with the compassionate words that she’d offered to him, eased the tension he’d been fighting, and he dredged up a smile for the kind woman. “Thank you for understanding.”

  “Of course.”

  The girls returned with their snack—most of it, anyway—and Rick turned his attention to a less morbid topic. “I’m seeing partial cookies and half-filled cups. Did you run into the Cookie Monster between here and there?”

  “No, Daddy,” Aubrey replied, laughing at his reference to one of her favorite characters. “We were hungry.”

  “But we saved one for you,” Caitlin added, pulling it from the pocket of her sundress to hand it to him. And then, reaching back in, she pulled another to offer her teacher. “And this is for you. Your grandma said it’s your favorite.”

  “It’s a raccoon,” Aubrey chirped helpfully.

  “Macaroon,” Rick corrected her with a chuckle. “And it looks delicious. Did you thank Mrs. Calhoun when you paid her?”

  Caitlin’s eyes widened guiltily, and she took the money he’d given her from her other pocket. Giving it back to him, she confessed, “We were talking about what I’m doing at
school, and I forgot. I’ll go back and give it to her.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Emma told her with a laugh. “Gran doesn’t charge anyone under the age of ten, even at the bakery. She loves kids, and she likes nothing better than spoiling them. My brothers and I are living proof of that.”

  “How many brothers do you have?” Aubrey asked, apparently over her initial shyness.

  Hunkering down to her level, Emma said, “I have two, Sam and Brian, both older than me. Sometimes being the youngest is fun, and sometimes they bug me.”

  The childish phrasing puzzled Rick for a moment, until he saw his younger daughter nod in agreement. “Me, too.”

  “I don’t bug you,” Caitlin corrected her with a frown.

  “Yes, you do, but it’s okay. I still love you.”

  “Aww...” The older girl beamed at her little shadow and pulled her close for a sideways hug. “That’s so sweet. I love you, too, Froggy.”

  Rick laughed out loud, and Emma looked up at him. “Froggy?”

  “When we were waiting for Aubrey to join us, we let Caitlin name the baby. There was a character in a kids’ movie at the time named Froggy, and she picked that. We thought it was cute, so we went along. After that, it became one of our inside family jokes.”

  “I’m very familiar with those,” Emma commented, smiling as she stood.

  “I’ve met your brothers, so I don’t doubt that for a second.”

  While they finished off their snack, they chatted lightly about the weather and the upcoming spring concert and art show to be held at the school. While his daughters occupied themselves by rearranging Emma’s dwindling stock by color, Rick noticed a stack of flyers sitting on her table. Recognizing her sister-in-law Lindsay’s handiwork on the promotional material, he picked one up to see what it was about.

  One-of-a-kind jewelry designed and handmade by Emma Calhoun. All proceeds to benefit the Liberty Creek After School Arts Program.

  Amazed that she was giving up an entire Saturday and not keeping any of the money she made, he turned the sheet toward her. “I didn’t realize you were doing this for nothing.”

  “Not for nothing,” she corrected him sweetly. “For a bunch of awesome kids who enjoy art as much as I do.”

  “Is the program really in danger of being cut?”

  “Always. It’s open to students of every age, and they bus kids who want to participate down from the middle and high schools. It’s a great alternative to them going home to an empty house, but every year the school budget gets tighter, and there’s only so much money to go around. Last year we barely squeaked by.”

  “How many students use it?”

  “That’s not the point,” she reminded him curtly, a flash of temper pinking her cheeks. “Children deserve to have a creative outlet, and some of the older ones need a place to hang out after school. This program does both.”

  The scolding was delivered in the same soft voice she’d used before, but it seethed with a frustration that told him she’d delivered this speech many times before. Hoping to soothe her ruffled feelings, he smiled. “It sounds like a valuable thing to offer, and I didn’t mean to imply otherwise. I was just curious about the numbers, because sometimes using them to illustrate your point carries more weight with bureaucrats than pure sentiment does.”

  “Well, that’s different,” she announced, shaking off the fit of temper with a breezy laugh. “I guess I’m so used to defending the arts, I get my back up too easily. Thirty-four kids come in on a regular basis, but around holidays like Christmas and Easter we get more because they like making gifts for people.”

  No mention of Mother’s Day, he noticed, although he was fairly certain that was also on the list. He appreciated her avoiding the difficult subject, and while he didn’t normally interfere in people’s endeavors, her sensitivity made him more inclined to volunteer some advice. “If you’d like, we can sit down and review the finances for the program, see if there might be a way to generate the revenue you need to keep it on firmer footing. That way you and your Rembrandts-in-training wouldn’t be so dependent on the school board to keep the club afloat.”

  She blinked up at him as if she didn’t quite follow his train of thought. “Finances for the program?”

  “How much is earmarked in the budget for supplies, your salary, things like that,” he clarified as patiently as he could. Sarah had often accused him of assuming that everyone had his affinity for numbers and how certain strategies affected a company’s bottom line, he mused sadly. Apparently, his approach to problem-solving still had some room for improvement.

  “Oh, there’s no salary involved,” Emma told him, laughing as if it was absurd for him to think there might be. “I go into the budget hearing every May and beg, praying they’ll find some money to help offset my expenses.”

  Rick couldn’t believe what she was telling him. He’d never met anyone who so willingly sacrificed not only their free time but also a chunk of their own money to make sure kids had a fun place to go after school. From her answer, he realized that while the school contributed a share, it didn’t fund the program entirely. That left Emma picking up the rest on a teacher’s salary, which he suspected wasn’t all that much in a small town like Liberty Creek.

  “Maybe parents could pay a small fee to help defray the costs.”

  Emma firmly shook her head. “Folks around here have a tough enough time making ends meet as it is. I’m afraid if I ask for something like that, their kids won’t be able to come anymore. That would leave some of them going home to an empty house after school, and I can’t stand the thought of that.”

  “This isn’t a big city,” he argued sensibly. “It’s not like they’ll get into trouble with a gang or something like that.”

  “But it’s lonely,” she argued, compassion deepening the blue of her eyes in an emotion he could almost feel. “To my mind, that’s just as bad for them. I’d rather put in a few extra hours of my time and give them a bright, constructive place to go hang out with their friends than know they’re by themselves, plopped in front of the TV or some video game until their parents get home from work.”

  That was the challenge so many modern families faced, Rick knew. As he’d worked his way up the ladder from floor teller to bank management, he’d always known that he was fortunate to be in a business that had allowed Sarah to be a full-time mother, and now enabled him to afford a dedicated nanny and housekeeper. If he had to cope with day care and car pools on top of his demanding job, he wasn’t sure how well it would go. But he was fairly certain that his girls wouldn’t be nearly as secure and happy as they were now.

  This was his first opportunity to work as an assistant branch manager, and he wanted to shine in the position. Not so much for himself, but for his sweet girls. While Patriots Bank was a collection of modestly sized regional offices, his boss and mentor had made it clear that his intention was to groom Rick for something more. That meant a spot at one of his larger banks that offered an equally larger salary. Then Caitlin and Aubrey would have a permanent home to grow up in rather than the time-worn rental near the square that he’d been forced to take.

  Rick acknowledged that there was no way for him to replace their mother, but he’d do everything in his power to make certain his daughters never wanted for anything he could possibly give them.

  “I get that,” he relented, letting go of his usual pragmatism to see things from Emma’s vastly different point of view. “And I think it’s great that you’re willing to do it. I also think you deserve to be compensated for your time.”

  “There are more important things in life than money,” she told him. Nodding toward his content daughters, she smiled up at him. “Being a father, you know that better than anyone.”

  It wasn’t exactly a scolding, but her gentle reminder hit him harder than if she’d yelled at him for being a coldhearted, capitalistic jerk.
He couldn’t recall the last time that he’d paused in his busy schedule long enough to consider what was most important in his life.

  Without question, his family came first. But during the past two years, while struggling to cope with the demands of his career and raising two precocious daughters on his own, he’d become more concerned about making it from day-to-day with no major disasters. He adored his girls, and he’d do everything humanly possible to keep them safe and happy in a world that seemed to grow more complicated every year.

  In Emma’s quiet conviction, he heard an echo of how he’d felt when he was a new father, overjoyed by the simple pleasures that had governed their time as a family. Coming home from the hospital, crawling, walking, first words—those memories were precious to him. All the more because Sarah had been part of them.

  But, as Caitlin liked to remind him on a regular basis, they weren’t babies anymore. At six and four, they were far from being independent, but they didn’t need him for every little thing as they once did. His role in their lives was gradually changing and would continue to evolve until the day he died. His goal was to enjoy every moment of that time to the fullest, but sometimes he lost sight of what that meant.

  It didn’t escape him that this lovely artist had been the one to set him straight, and he couldn’t come up with a better way to repay her than to help save the program she’d put so much effort into.

  “You’re right,” he agreed, smiling to show her there were no hard feelings. “And I appreciate you pointing that out to me. In return, I’d like to support you at the upcoming board meeting. When is it?”

  “This coming Wednesday night. But it’s really not necessary for you to come. I know how busy you must be.”

  “Everyone is, but we all make time for the things that matter. If you can stop by the bank tomorrow around three, I’ll take a look at what you have and see if there’s anything I can do to help you make your case for keeping the program a little stronger.”