Craving the Cowboy

by Liz Isaacson

“How are you and Felicity?”

  “Just fine.” Dwayne thought about the last words he’d spoken out loud to her. I love you. She looked like she was ready to say it back to him too, but she hadn’t. He shouldn’t have put it on her when she’d just found out about her mother.

  Didn’t matter. He’d seen the love in her eyes. Felt it in her touch. So she hadn’t said it in so many words. Didn’t matter. He knew.

  They arrived at the horse auction, and the bay horse that Dwayne had kept his eye on all these weeks stood in the stall on the end, almost taunting him to come over and say hello. Dwayne wanted the horse the moment he approached and the animal lifted its head over the top rung, as if it sensed in Dwayne a kindred spirit.

  “Hey, there,” he said, rubbing both hands up the horse’s neck and looking into his eyes. He didn’t stay too long, mostly because he didn’t want anyone else to see him showing so much interest in the bay. Starting prices and up-bidders would make him pay a hefty price if he did that. After all, this auction wasn’t his first. He feigned interest in the other horses, but he really just wanted the bay.

  The auction started, and Dwayne handed over his ticket and found a seat next to Levi. “Did you see anything interesting?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Which one?”

  “Number eight.”

  Dwayne’s throat went dry. “I want number eight.” He didn’t even have to look at the lineup.

  “The bay?”

  “Yeah, the bay.” Dwayne wondered how much money Levi had brought with him, and if he’d really have to get into a bidding war with the man.

  Levi consulted the lineup. “I like the Arabian too,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Dwayne said noncommittally. He didn’t want the Arabian. He wanted the bay, and he’d bought a lot of cash to make it happen.

  When it was time for the bay, he put in the first bid.

  “Oh, so you’re serious.” Levi grinned at him.

  “It’s the only horse I want.” Dwayne didn’t look away from the auctioneer—or the man in the third row who’d just outbid him. Dwayne let a few seconds go by as he scanned the crowd, as the auctioneer spoke so fast, his lips were a blur.

  Finally, he put in another bid. The man in row three turned, but Dwayne had already put his hand down. A back-and-forth war began, and with five exchanges under his belt, Dwayne finally won the bay.

  Relief poured through him, and he smiled for all he was worth. Levi congratulated him, but really Dwayne wished Felicity sat next to him. He wondered what she’d be like in an auction situation. Cool, calm, collected? Or nervous and admonishing him not to spend too much?

  Didn’t matter. He wanted her by his side at an auction. At his house. On the ranch. On the pew at church. Everywhere.

  He needed to call her again, and he promised himself he would tomorrow before church.

  When he finally got back to the ranch, and got the bay all settled in a box stall, he found Capri of all people sitting on his front steps.

  “Capri?” he asked as he approached. Alarms sounded in his soul, but he couldn’t run away now. “What are you doin’ here?”

  She stood, and while Dwayne didn’t know her well, he’d interacted with her several times, usually after church as he and Felicity were leaving.

  “Felicity wanted me to come out and talk to you,” she said. She shoved her hands in a dirty pair of shorts she’d obviously spent the day wearing while she repaired cars.

  Dwayne didn’t know what to say. “You wanna come in?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “No, thanks. She said to let you know that she’s going to call Levi and arrange for Linus and Lucy to be boarded there.”

  “She doesn’t need to do that.” He’d enjoyed feeding her horses and letting them out to pasture. It was the only link he had to her, as Whiskers had disappeared inside Chadwell’s house, never to be seen again.

  Capri shrugged. “You can tell her that, I guess.” She looked uncomfortable and proved it by shifting her feet left and then right. “She told me to let you know that she hasn’t given up her lease, and she’s boarding her horses in town, but she doesn’t know when she’ll be back.”

  Dwayne’s chest turned cold. “She doesn’t?”

  “She has to quit out here at Grape Seed Ranch. Dwayne, I’m so sorry.”

  He didn’t care about having Felicity here as his horse trainer. He wanted her here as his wife. “I’ll call her.”

  “Her mother has thyroid cancer, and they’re working out all the treatment possibilities,” Capri said quickly. “She’s real busy, and…well, she probably won’t answer.”

  He blinked at the other woman, realization after realization crashing on top of him, crushing him. “She’s breaking up with me, isn’t she?”

  “Her note didn’t say that,” Capri said. “She just doesn’t know when she’ll be able to come back. She said she’d understand if you didn’t want to wait.”

  Didn’t want to wait.

  Didn’t want to wait? Why wouldn’t he wait? He was in love with the woman, for crying out loud.

  “Sorry, Dwayne.” Capri started to back away, and Dwayne watched her go, unsure as to what had just happened.

  He pulled out his phone and dialed Felicity, begging God with everything he had that she would pick up.

  “Please pick up,” he whispered. “Please pick up.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Felicity didn’t pick up his call. Or the next one he placed after he’d showered. Or the one he dialed before bed. Sunday morning found him on the bay’s back, contemplating a name for his new horse and guiding the animal toward the wishing well.

  This was a good horse, who’d done everything Dwayne had asked of it the first time. “I think I’ll name you King,” he told the horse, his words almost getting swept away in the fall wind that had picked up.

  At the wishing well, Dwayne just stared into its depths while King snacked on the long grasses nearby. He hadn’t brought any coins, knew wishing wouldn’t bring Felicity back.

  She kept her cottage, he thought. Her horses are here.

  “She’s coming back,” he whispered, the words feeling right and comforting in his throat. But why wouldn’t she talk to him? Why had she sent her neighbor out to tell him?

  Something had changed in the week she’d been gone, but Dwayne didn’t know what.

  Determined to drive all the way to Marysville if he had to, Dwayne swung onto King’s back and urged him toward the homestead.

  Before he had a signal on his cell, and before he’d returned to the barn, a horse appeared on the horizon. Dwayne had told exactly one person where he was going that morning. Sure enough, Kurt appeared, breathless and with panic written all over his face.

  “What is it?” Dwayne asked, his nerves firing on all cylinders. If Tiger had broken the fence again, Dwayne didn’t know what he’d do.

  Kurt swung his horse around and came alongside Dwayne. “Your dad,” the foreman wheezed. “Collapsed and we can’t wake him up.”

  Felicity volunteered to stay home with Momma while her brothers went to church. She hoped Dwayne would call again, and she could sneak out to the back porch and answer his call. He didn’t call, and Momma woke up with such a fit of coughing that blood came up.

  Felicity had a very bad feeling that her mother’s condition was a lot more than thyroid cancer. She slept a lot, leaving Felicity to the household chores, the grocery shopping, the meal preparation. As the days passed, her mood worsened and worsened—especially because Dwayne had stopped calling altogether.

  “You have a phone,” she muttered to herself. “You know his number.” And yet, she couldn’t get herself to dial it. Instead, she mopped, she washed sheets, she fed her brothers, and herself, and had to force-feed Momma. She rarely went outside anymore, and the bluebonnets on the ranch sign still hadn’t been stained.

  By the weekend, Felicity was starting to feel like she’d never escape the walls of the house, get away from her mother, o
r be herself ever again. She lay in bed early on Saturday morning, her thoughts far from her father, far from the bluebonnets, far from everything except one person.

  Dwayne.

  She thought about cooking with him that last time. Riding out to the wishing well. Having a family with him.

  Bolting to a sitting position, her heart started hammering. Once she had children, would she be as confined to the house as she felt now, taking care of her mother?

  Hot tears pricked her eyes. If so, she couldn’t do that. Her spirit longed to be free, riding horses with the wind pulling at her cowgirl hat. She had liked fixing fences, and facing down bulls, and she’d wished with all her heart she could’ve gone to the horse auction with Dwayne.

  Nowhere in there had she considered what having a family would do to her ability to leave walls behind and experience the Texas ranch she’d grown to love.

  She and Dwayne hadn’t specifically talked about having kids, but Felicity assumed he’d want them, want someone to leave the ranch to once he was ready to retire. He’d made it clear Thatcher didn’t want it, and Heather taught school in town.

  Her heart raced faster when she heard a moan from the bedroom next door. With feet that practically flew, she headed into Momma’s room to help her. A sense of suffocation enveloped her, and a sob worked its way up Felicity’s throat.

  “Let me get you a drink,” she managed to say before escaping the room in favor of the kitchen, where Parker stood at the sink, gazing out the window.

  “Momma needs a drink,” Felicity said, her voice breaking on the last word. She didn’t wait to see if Parker would get it for her. She had to get out of this house. Get out now.

  Hours later, she climbed the steps of the fire truck, the way she’d done for years. Uncle Ezra had responded to her desperate call immediately, and her soul quieted with each stair she put behind her. She wanted to keep going; climb all the way through the atmosphere and right into the heavens. Anything not to have to return to the house.

  She hadn’t been back inside except to change out of her pajamas and into her more comfortable jeans and T-shirt, and she’d texted her brothers that she would do the morning feeding if they would please help with Momma today.

  “You okay?” Uncle Ezra called up the ladder, and Felicity gave him a thumbs up. She carefully reached into her back pocket and took out the paintbrush Daddy had been using on these bluebonnets for decades.

  She set the jar of pennies and vinegar she’d carried up with her on the top rung of the ladder and twisted off the lid. The acidic scent had made her wince the first time, and her father had chuckled at her. Now the vinegary smell made her chest tighten with loss. Steadfastly, and with determination, she dipped the brush into the homemade blue stain, and swirled it around to really get the darkest bluebonnet blue she could get.

  As she worked, everything that had grown tight inside her loosened. This was what Felicity was meant to do with her life. Not laundry, and vacuuming, and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Ranch work, and horse training, and afternoons out on the open range.

  How she’d never known that she didn’t want children upset her. Frustration made the brush slip a little, and paint part of the stem the wrong color. Felicity drew in a deep breath and steadied herself.

  She hadn’t known, because Dwayne was the first man ever to make her think long-term. Make her think outside the ranch. Make her consider being a wife.

  “I want that,” she muttered to the pesky top of a bluebonnet that wouldn’t seem to accept the stain. She went back to the jar again and again, and still the color wouldn’t stick. Like lightning, she realized she’d been doing the same thing. Going to church over and over, the message never really sticking in her mind.

  She finally got the bluebonnet the right color. “There you go, Daddy,” she whispered before capping the vinegar bottle and heading down the steps. Uncle Ezra lowered the ladder and gave her a side-hug.

  “He loved those bluebonnets,” he said.

  “He sure did.” Felicity turned back to the house to find her brothers and Momma sitting on the porch. Resignation made her shoulders droop. “You want to come in for lunch, Uncle Ezra? I’m sure I can whip something up.”

  “If you’re half as good of a cook as your momma, I’m sure you can.”

  Felicity pressed her lips together. She wasn’t half as good as her mom, she knew that. But she knew how to put butter and cheese on bread and toast it up fine.

  “Thank you, Felicity,” Gordon said as she passed him, and confusion pulled through her. She wasn’t sure what he needed to thank her for. Coming home and caring for their mother? Painting the bluebonnets? Simply being there?

  Felicity frowned as a surge of fury reared through her like a tsunami. He hadn’t given up a single thing to have her there, or to look after Momma, or to keep working on the ranch. But Felicity felt like she’d lost everything that mattered to her.

  She made it through lunch by talking to Uncle Ezra about the little petting zoo he ran now that he was retired. He could talk about goats and ponies forever, and she let him, hoping she’d be able to face the afternoon once he left.

  After waving good-bye to him from the driveway, Felicity tucked both hands in her back pockets, her confusion and anger still swirling through her. Dodging, lifting, twisting the way hot and cold air currents did when they made a cyclone.

  Without talking to or texting anyone, she got in her car and went to the only place she could think of to find peace and clarity. She went to the little red-brick church she’d grown up attending. But she didn’t go inside the chapel. She didn’t need more walls.

  The cemetery stretched along the west and north side of the church, and her feet took her that way. She paused at the gate, hesitant to walk down this memory lane. She hadn’t been to her father’s final resting place once, the emotions too fresh and too raw.

  But as she made her way across the grass, the breeze the only sound in the warm afternoon, the sense of sorrow and foreboding left her. Peace replaced it, and by the time she gazed down at her father’s headstone, Felicity knew why she’d come.

  “Daddy.” She bent and traced her fingertips across the top of the stone. “I met the most wonderful man.” Tears splashed the dark gray rock, and Felicity sat next to her father’s gravesite and looked out across the horizon.

  “This is a great place to be buried,” she told him. “I’m sure you like the view. You can almost see the ranch from here.” She fell silent for a while after that, her thoughts moving slowly, as if they’d been caught in cooling tar. She finally started talking about Dwayne again, and how she’d fallen in love with him, and how she thought sure she’d lose him once she confessed she didn’t want children.

  Her father never answered, but Felicity could feel him nearby. She wondered how she’d left Marysville, and if perhaps she’d made a mistake in moving to Grape Seed Falls. Her bewilderment and frustration returned, because she’d felt whole and at peace there too. She’d made friends, and been happy, and fallen in love.

  So where should she be?

  She leaned back on her hands and stretched her legs out in front of her, tipping her face toward the sun.

  “Where should I be?” she asked the Lord, hoping with everything in her that He would respond in a way that made sense to her. Several seconds of silence passed, and Felicity felt nothing inside. Only the beating of her heart, which seemed to slow the way it did when she fell asleep.

  Then she heard, “There you are,” in a voice she swore she knew. A voice that belonged to her heart. A voice that tickled her eardrums, that she’d daydreamed about waking up next to, that never got angry or lifted in frustration.

  Her eyes shot open, but she couldn’t focus because of the bright sun. “Dwayne?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “Just me.” Gordon approached slowly, casting Felicity in shadow before dropping to the ground beside her. “Sorry.”

  She told her heart to settle down, that Dway
ne was far away, probably interviewing a new horse trainer already. She wondered if he’d purchased the bay at the auction, and if so, what he’d named the horse.

  “So you really like this guy.”

  Felicity wanted to deny it, but her voice wouldn’t betray her heart. “Yeah.” She sighed. “I really like him.”

  “Maybe you should go visit him this weekend. We’ll be okay with Momma.”

  Felicity’s chin trembled as she tried to hold back the tears. “I don’t think he’ll want to talk to me.”

  “No? Why not?”

  She sniffled and waved her hand at nothing. “I haven’t answered any of his calls, and he stopped trying earlier this week.”

  Gordon sat on the information for several long seconds. “Why didn’t you answer?”

  What a great question. Who had she been trying to spare? Dwayne? Herself? From what, exactly?

  “He’s a busy man,” she finally said. “He owns and operates the ranch.”

  “He doesn’t have a foreman?”

  “He does.”

  “Then he can take a phone call. Or a weekend to see you. Or whatever else he wants.”

  Felicity didn’t like how Gordon was making it sound it was Dwayne who’d done something wrong. Instead of defending him, she asked, “What should I do?”

  “Well, it’s clear you’re miserable here,” Gordon said. “Parker and I hate that we’ve asked you to come when you have something you’d rather do somewhere else.”

  “It’s not that I’d rather be somewhere else.” But it was. Sort of. “I just…I wasn’t made to clean bathrooms, make dinner, and sit in the house.”

  “I know.”

  “I want to be here and help. But I—I can’t stay in the house all the time.” She met her brother’s eye with desperation and panic in hers. “I just can’t. Maybe we could work out a rotation.”

  “We will.” He stood and brushed the leaves off his jeans. “First thing Monday.”

  “Monday?” Felicity scrambled to her feet too. Maybe she could go to church early tomorrow, stay late….