Tonight, though, he appreciated the space-age shower stall, big enough to hold a crowd, for its multiple sprayers, strategically arranged to strike whole muscle groups at the same time, thus working the knots out of a cowboy’s weary, banged-up carcass with well-aimed blasts of steaming hot water.
He stripped, stepped into the shower, turned the copper-and-crystal handles, and took his time lathering up and rinsing off. The water pummeled him from all directions, and he stood there for a good fifteen minutes, letting it pound him into some semblance of relaxation.
Afterward, he stepped out onto the cushy bath mat and dried himself with an equally cushy towel, not even minding, for once, that the damn thing was pink.
Every towel he owned these days was some shade of pastel—lavender, mint green, baby blue, pale yellow.
It was embarrassing.
Jenna had basically cleaned the place out when she left, so why the hell hadn’t she taken the girly towels and fussy bed linens?
Probably because she knew he hated them.
He swore, glaring at his steamed-over reflection in the three-acre mirror.
Any thought of his ex-wife was a trap he could generally sidestep by running a few lines of one of his grandfather’s all-time favorite tunes, “Thank God and Greyhound,” through his head, but tonight, he’d fallen right into the pit.
He was definitely off his game.
Resigned to human fallibility, including his own, Cord brushed his teeth, wiped some steam off the mirror and took in his reflection.
He looked slightly derelict, definitely needed a shave.
It could wait until morning since he’d have to do it again anyhow. And it wasn’t as if he’d be subjecting some woman to a beard-burn.
Leaving the bathroom, Cord was confronted by the bed, as he was every night.
As decadent as any piece on display at Versailles, the head- and footboards were ornately carved with fat baby angels and blooming roses, every inch covered in gilt, and the damn thing was big enough to hold half of Marie Antoinette’s court, powdered wigs and all.
Jenna had left the monstrosity behind simply because she’d tired of it, and was ready to buy something new. Plus, like the towels, she’d surely guessed he hated that bed.
Revenge by household goods. Trust her to find a new twist.
Once again, Cord considered bunking in his old room, now more of a junk depository, at the opposite end of the hall. The drawback where that idea was concerned? The bed was too short and too narrow and, besides, he didn’t want to give Jenna the satisfaction of running him out of the master bedroom, even if she’d never know she’d scored a point.
He knew the solution, of course—get rid of the stupid bed in his current room, the matching dresser and bureau, the massive end tables, the Easter-egg-colored towels, the whole kit and caboodle.
But it wasn’t all bad.
Cord kind of liked the fireplace, even if it was a touch too fancy; he could clean up the old rocking chairs and bring them back in. It would be nice, if he ever met and married the right woman, to sit there on a chilly evening, side by side, talking or not, reading maybe, or just being together.
The bathroom might be a monument to conspicuous consumption, but it was woman-friendly, for sure. If he swapped out the treacherous faucets for something more practical and had the marble floor covered with, say, stone tile, he could deal.
Trouble was, he never seemed to find the time for remodeling projects. Most days, he worked from sunrise to sunset, and beyond.
Today, with the scene at Sully’s and then Carly’s appearance, he hadn’t worked with any of the horses since early that afternoon. Thank God for Mitch Robbins! He’d make up for it tomorrow, especially since he’d have his new client to contend with. And thinking of Mitch made him wonder how the older man would react to the presence of a teenager in his home. It should be fine, he told himself. Mitch was a kind, generous and tolerant man, and as Tina had pointed out, they’d raised three children of their own.
He and Mitch spent a lot of time together, maintaining the property, caring for the horses, doing whatever needed to be done.
And whenever Cord had a few extra hours, he generally spent them with J.P. and Eli, playing poker, riding horseback for the pure fun of it, or just sitting around on one of their porches, drinking beer and shooting the shit.
Like him, his buddies were having a dry spell when it came to romance, and they’d probably have been better off searching for a good woman out there, one they could settle down with.
Instead, they were gun-shy, all three of them, for reasons of their own.
If they didn’t want to wind up as crusty old bachelors, still playing poker in Sully’s back room every other week, having breakfast at Bailey’s far too often and spending most of their free time with each other, something had to change.
J.P. and Eli knew that as well as Cord did; they weren’t stupid. They also weren’t eager to risk getting burned again.
That, Cord supposed, was a form of cowardice, but as much as he despised his own reluctance, he couldn’t seem to shake it.
For a while now, maybe since Jenna, Cord had sunk into a kind of inertia where dating was concerned. True, he’d never deeply loved his ex-wife—hindsight confirmed that he’d loved a version of her, one he’d outlined in his own head. Her behavior, her exploitation, had quickly confirmed the mistake he’d made. Yes, he’d initially been convinced he loved her, certainly been attracted to her. But more than ever, he realized that, for her, he’d been a means to an end.
The sad truth was that he’d loved only one woman in his life—Reba Shannon. And he’d loved her with the vehemence of youth. Were those feelings, which he’d been remembering today, which he’d been experiencing, simply a holdover from the past? One that had suddenly emerged because of her daughter? He hadn’t thought much about Reba in recent years, but she’d been on his mind today. These were the questions that crowded his mind.
Time to forget about Reba. She was gone. And forget about Jenna, which he more or less had. Time to leave those bad memories behind.
And time to pull his head out of his ass and get it back on his shoulders. Stop looking for what might have been and take some interest in what is, here and now.
Painted Pony Creek was a small town, yes, but it had its share of attractive, available women. Over the years—and Cord wasn’t proud of this—he’d slept with a few of them and shut down at the first sign that something lasting might be taking root.
There’d been Katie Dupree, for instance, a pretty redheaded RN, divorced, with two great kids.
Cord hadn’t loved Katie, though something might have developed, given time. But he’d fallen head over heels for those kids, two little boys with hair like their mother’s and hope in their hearts—hope that they might, just might, get themselves a dad to replace the one who’d left them behind to move to another state, marry another woman and start himself a whole new family.
Cord had stopped seeing Katie as soon as he realized the kids had him tagged as a stepfather. He ended the relationship not because there was anything wrong between them, but because he was afraid of hurting her in the long run and, worse, hurting those innocent kids.
Katie was understandably angry and confused at the time but, blessedly, life had turned out more than okay for her. Less than a year later, she’d married newcomer Zach Fairfield, a family physician.
Zach, a widower with no children, had tired of asphalt, traffic and smog, and wanted to live a simpler life. When old Doc Fillmore finally retired, Zach bought his practice and started seeing patients right away, keeping Doc’s small staff—Millie, the bookkeeper, and Sandra, the receptionist—on the payroll.
This made him popular in the community because Millie was seventy-five if she was a day as well as opinionated and a little forgetful, and unlikely to be hired anywhere else, and Sandra, a
lthough sweet, wasn’t qualified to do anything besides answer phones and book appointments.
Zach had also hired Katie, who’d been employed at the hospital outside town since earning her degree but was ready for a change.
She’d told Cord once, over coffee, long after their breakup, that she’d fallen in love with Zach not because of his good looks, quick wit and sexy Australian accent, but because he was able to look past Millie’s advancing age and Sandra’s constant chatter and see them for the good-hearted, caring people they were.
So that was that, where anything that might have happened between Cord and Katie was concerned.
Katie was happy, Zach was happy, the kids were happy.
Cord? He was happy, too, for the most part.
He loved his work, the ranch, the state of Montana and the town of Painted Pony Creek. He was healthy and financially secure, if not out-and-out rich, like J.P.
Only one thing was lacking: a family of his own, starting—call him old-fashioned—with a wife.
So far, obviously, he was batting zero on that score. After repeating several variations of the Katie scenario, Cord had given up on finding Ms. Right anytime soon. Sex was easy enough; he knew several women who were as emotionally unavailable as he was, with no desire to lasso a husband, which should have been a win-win.
Except it wasn’t.
Bed hopping had been all right when he was younger—better than all right, actually—but these days, it always seemed to leave him lonelier than before. Not that he indulged in it all that much.
He wanted lovemaking, not just sex. Somebody to confide in and listen to. Somebody to laugh with and, if the occasion called for it, cry with, too.
She didn’t have to be beautiful.
She didn’t have to be skinny.
She just had to be real. In it for the long haul.
Basically, Cord wanted to love a woman the way he loved his job, his “calling,” as J.P. had said earlier—without reservation.
He’d learned a lot from his brief marriage. First of all, that he and Jenna had been a bad combination from the get-go.
He’d been faithful to her, but since the marriage only lasted eighteen months, he hardly deserved a medal for that. If they’d stayed together much longer, he might’ve gone looking for love in all the wrong places, as the song had it.
The plain fact was that no matter how much Cord groused to J.P. and Eli—and himself—about Jenna’s failings, he’d definitely been part of the problem. As soon as he’d realized the extent of his mistake, which was about a month after the wedding, he’d begun to withdraw.
He hadn’t half tried to make things work.
Next time he got married—if there was a next time—he’d make damn sure he found the right woman first.
Then, damn it, he would stay the course, the way he did in his work.
Once Cord took on a horse, he didn’t give up on the animal, period. He put in as many hours as necessary, met every challenge, no matter how difficult. He was all in, every time, and somehow the horse always came to understand that, some more quickly than others.
In the company of horses, Cord was his best self, the man he wanted to be, knew he should be, not just in the saddle or the corral or the round pen, but everywhere else, too.
It might sound crazy; obviously, women weren’t horses, and only so many parallels could be drawn, but Cord wanted that same level of do-or-die commitment—on his part and hers—when and if he married again.
He wanted to be that person as a lover and, eventually, as a husband and father. As a man.
All of which was fine in theory, but in this age of instant downloads and delete keys, it seemed to Cord that everything moved too quickly. People didn’t take the time to get to know each other, up close and personal; they evidently preferred digital relationships to the flesh-and-blood kind, racking up “friends” on their social media pages and mostly ignoring the people they saw every day of their lives.
It didn’t take a shrink to figure that one out. Real, face-to-face human beings could be troublesome. They needed time and attention. More than a chirpy text or a 140-character “tweet” or a post on some cyber wall.
Oh, yeah. Things got messy with the three-dimensional types.
Plenty of people seemed to prefer communicating from a comfortable distance. That way, you didn’t have to engage. But Cord believed you could still be generous. You could drive somebody to the hospital in the middle of the night—whether it was a male friend, an elderly person, a woman you were seeing. You could help people move, let them sleep on your couch when they needed a place to stay or give them a ride home when they’d had too much to drink.
Cord didn’t frequent social media sites; he had a PR firm to promote him and his training programs online. But he did a lot of business on both his phone and his laptop, often without talking to another living soul.
So maybe he didn’t have any right to criticize other people’s ways of interacting with their fellow mortals.
Jenna, for one, would’ve had a lot to say about his style of communication—and none of it would be good. Granted, she wasn’t the most objective person he knew, but she had a knack for calling bullshit.
A few minutes later, all these random thoughts stopped circling his brain like so many squawking crows, and he was left with the present dilemma. Carly.
Carly, who might—or might not—be his daughter.
If he’d fathered the girl, he had a responsibility toward her. One he’d willingly accept. But it was about more than responsibility. He had to think about her lost years—all those years lost to the three of them. And the fact that after Reba’s death, she’d been through so much, including a hateful stepfather who’d given her dog—and her!—away. Then a year of neglect, of fielding the foster care system, finally managing on her own. At seventeen!
It was all so wrong.
Even if she belonged to J.P. or Eli, she definitely qualified as an honorary niece, and that was no small thing, either.
And if she didn’t belong to any one of them...well, she was still a mixed-up kid, apparently alone in the world and headed for trouble, if she wasn’t already in it up to her musical tattoo.
No getting around it, Carly needed help.
Cord rolled onto his side and reached out to take his phone from the charger on the nightstand.
It was 1:12 a.m.
He grinned.
Not too early to call J.P., he decided.
He pressed the appropriate key.
“Cord?” J.P. mumbled. “What the hell—? Do you know what time—?”
“I changed my mind,” Cord said cheerfully. “About meeting up for breakfast tomorrow, I mean. I’ll be at Bailey’s as soon as the chores are done.”
J.P. yawned loudly. “What about your client?”
“She’ll keep,” Cord replied. “You want to call Eli or shall I?”
“No need. He has breakfast at Brynne’s pretty well every morning, with or without us. You know that.”
“Right. Well, I’ll let you get back to sleep.”
“That’s mighty generous of you.”
“You gonna unfriend me, old buddy?”
J.P.’s chuckle was husky. “You should be so lucky.”
With that, he hung up.
* * *
CORD, STILL WIDE-AWAKE, propped himself up in bed, went through the contact list on his phone and found S. Fletcher’s email address. Waking J.P. in the middle of the night was one thing; waking a client was another.
Quickly, he thumbed out a message. Something has come up, he wrote, and I’ll be unavailable until around 9 tomorrow morning. We’ll start your training then. Sorry for any inconvenience. Cord Hollister.
He hit Send, and the phone made a cute little zipping sound.
He hated “cute,” but sometimes it couldn’t be
avoided. More like, he always forgot to turn off all that cheerful shit.
Thinking maybe he could sleep now that he’d made a decision and acted on it, Cord switched off the bedside lamp and was about to set the phone aside again when it chimed, alerting him to a new message.
It was probably incoming junk mail, Cord figured, but he checked anyway.
I hope you don’t make a habit of changing plans at the last minute, Mr. Hollister. Consistency and order are important to me. Nevertheless—(never-the-freaking-less?)—I will do as you ask and arrive promptly at 9 a.m. S. Fletcher.
Cord set the phone on the nightstand with an annoyed thunk.
Great.
S. Fletcher was serious about learning what he had to teach, which was a good thing because the course was tough. Tough enough to weed out the wannabes and ensure that the ones who made it through were fit to work with horses.
She seemed a little on the snippy side, though, and that wasn’t so good, because it meant they were likely to butt heads along the way. But if S. Fletcher turned out to be a bossy pain in the butt, class would be dismissed early, either because she told him what he could do with his course and stormed off, never to be seen again, or because he returned her money and showed her the road.
Cord stretched, yawned and settled in to get a few hours of sleep.
He woke at 4:15 exactly, as always, threw back the covers and got out of bed.
After grabbing a cup of cold coffee, left over from the previous day and nuking it in the microwave, he showered, shaved, put on some clothes and returned to the kitchen, his boots dangling from his right hand.
The dogs were already at the kitchen door, yipping anxiously and wriggling their hind ends, so he let them out, then followed as far as the porch steps, where he sat down and tugged on his boots.
The horses—his own four and the two special boarders—would be wanting their feed.
Last night’s storm had blown itself out and the sun was about to rise, though it was still just a faint line of orange-red light rimming the eastern hills. The still-cool air smelled of hay and horsehide, wet grass and manure.
Country Strong--A Novel Page 7
