His Rodeo Sweetheart

by Pamela Britton

  “See?” Adam’s voice was full of smug satisfaction. “All settled.”

  Ethan had a feeling the words were something Claire said on a regular basis and that Adam just parroted. Still, their offer was too generous to believe. “You really want me to work here?” He turned and anchored his gaze on Claire’s again. She seemed just as surprised as he did.

  “Well, maybe.” Natalie splayed a hand in his direction. “We realize we only just met you, and this is way sudden. It’s sudden for us, too, so worst-case scenario, why don’t you stay a night and think about it? Adam tells us you’re kind of homeless right now.”

  He was, but he still couldn’t take them up on such a generous offer.

  “Look, it’s really nice of you to offer, but I wouldn’t be comfortable imposing.”

  “You wouldn’t be imposing,” Colt said. “You’re a brother in arms. Or didn’t you know I was in the Army, too? I wouldn’t dare let a combat veteran stay in a strange hotel, not when we have a perfectly good place for you to bed down for the night.”

  “There’s an apartment over the barn.” Natalie’s smile grew. “It’s nothing big, but it’s new and it’s perfect for a single man. Colt and Claire’s brother will be living there when he gets discharged in a few months.”

  “Please?” Adam said, coming up and smiling at him. “It’d be a big help to my mom.”

  He realized then that the boy didn’t want him to stay for selfish reasons. This wasn’t about having a cool new adventure learning how to train dogs. This was, and always had been, about making sure his mom didn’t have to deal with Thor all on her own. The boy worried about his mother, just as she probably worried about him. They were looking out for each other. He had no idea why that made him feel weird inside, but it did.

  He inhaled deeply. He didn’t want to do it. There were a million reasons why he shouldn’t—his recent anxiety attacks, his horrible dreams, his need to get on with his life, but most of all, his hatred of being a burden on people.

  But there was one reason why he should do it. Actually two.

  He looked into Claire’s eyes, and then her son’s.

  “Okay. I guess I’ll stay.”

  * * *

  “YOU SHOULDN’T HAVE made such a big deal about it.” Claire stared at her son. Thank God they were back in her own house and Ethan at her brother’s place. “The poor man probably felt so guilty about saying no, he didn’t think he had a choice.”

  Her son sat in the same chair he had when she’d broken the news to him about his illness a year ago. He’d lost his hair somewhere in between, but the light from the kitchen window behind him revealed a peach-fuzz scalp. He looked better. Less pale. Maybe a little more flushed than she would like to see, but so much better than at the start of this whole mess.

  “Well?” she asked, because he just sat there staring up at her.

  “You need help, Mommy.”

  The kid knew how to work her, that’s for sure. All he had to do was call her mommy.

  “No, I don’t need help. We have plenty of help between Uncle Colt and Aunt Natalie and their friends. And Uncle Chance will be back soon. We’re fine.”

  “Uncle Colt and Aunt Natalie are too busy, and Uncle Chance isn’t coming home for three more months.” He said three more months as if it were a whole lifetime, and in his world, it probably was. “One more person would be good. You could go to town and things.”

  Go to town: code words for stop worrying about me. He might be six, but her son had the wisdom of someone five times his age. She couldn’t help worrying about him, though. The doctors watched Adam like a hawk. Blood samples could be taken locally, but they made the trip to Los Angeles to speak to his oncologist about the results and any adjustments that would need to be made to the myriad of medications they had him on. It served as a constant reminder that her son was in a battle for his life. So, yes, maybe she was a tad overprotective, but that was her job.

  “Buddy, we’re doing fine, aren’t we?” Claire leaned forward in her rickety wooden chair that’d been in her family for generations and had seen better days. Her whole house had seen better days. “I mean, it’s not near as crazy as before, right? It’s okay.”

  Before—when he’d been undergoing treatment. Before her life had fallen apart and the center of her world—her son—had nearly died. Not just once, but twice. Midnight trips to the hospital. Long stays while they fought to get his immune system sorted out. Weeks on end of never sleeping in their own beds.

  “At least we’re home more.” She glanced around the kitchen. It was a mess. So were the family room and bedrooms. Adam was still being homeschooled. Until his immune system got back up to normal levels, it was better for him. Honestly, though, she liked him at home. Her life was chaotic. Dogs in the morning, each of whom needed to be taken out and exercised individually, then homeschooling, something she’d thought would be easy but had turned out to be hard, then back to work with the dogs, the office work in the afternoon because her “job” was to place the dogs in her care, and then work at her other job: graphic artist. Then it was back to work with Adam, then dinner, then bed, rinse, repeat. Unless there was a doctor’s appointment—

  “Mom?”

  She’d been so lost in thought she hadn’t even realized her son had spoken, and whatever it was he’d said must have been pretty important judging by the seriousness in his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, bud. What did you say?”

  She held back a chuckle when he said, “Jeez, were you even listening?” as a teenager would have said. Too much television.

  She didn’t bother trying to conceal her guilt. “Nope.”

  He released an exaggerated sigh that was so much like the old Adam that she smiled.

  “I worry about you, Mommy. You’re doing too much. There’s all that paperwork about Dad. The dogs. Me. I’m not a little boy anymore. I can take care of myself.”

  The paperwork for Dad. She was part of a lawsuit against the makers of the vaccine that’d made Marcus so sick. Yes, she admitted, Adam was right. That was a lot of work, too. But he was wrong about one thing. He was still a little boy. He might have seen more in this past year—friends dying, his mom’s grieving, the harsh realities of life—than most people saw in a lifetime, but he would always be her little man. Always.

  “Don’t worry about me.” She touched his chin. “I’m doing just fine.”

  “That’s what every parent says until they drop dead from a heart attack.”

  The words were uttered so seriously and so matter-of-factly that she ended up smiling.

  “I’m taking care of myself.” Okay, so maybe she wasn’t. She needed more sleep. Truth be told, she always felt so tired. And she would love some time for herself just as Adam suggested. To know that the dogs were taken care of and Adam looked after so she could escape into town to do a little window-shopping. All things she could hypothetically do right now, except she never did.

  “All right.” She sighed deeply. “I’ll tell you what. When Dr. McCall comes over tomorrow morning I’ll let him take care of the dogs for me. You can stay with me and help and I’ll run into town for some errands.”

  Her son’s whole face lit up and only in that moment did she truly understand just how much he’d been fretting over her.

  “He said to call him Ethan. And that sounds like a deal.”

  Yes, she admitted, he had said to call him that, but for some reason, it felt better—safer—to add the doctor title in front of his name. He was here temporarily, after all. She wasn’t going to become friends with him. Well, okay, she’d be friendly, but that was it.

  Yeah. Keep telling yourself that.

  Chapter Six

  He slept more soundly than he had in months—at least at first. But then, almost as if his subconscious sensed the rising sun, the nightma
res began.

  Trevor lay on the ground.

  Fire.

  BOOM.

  He’d shot up, and then as his heart settled into his chest, slipped from bed, walking over to the row of windows that overlooked the old hay barn and wondering, not for the first time, what he was going to do. He wanted to train dogs. He knew that, but he didn’t want to give up being a vet. He hated being a burden almost as much as he hated the nightmares that haunted him.

  Focus.

  The word had become his mantra. He had the entire upstairs portion—no little space as Colt’s wife had made it sound. The roofline made for shorter walls to his right and left, but dormers had been placed at regular intervals, allowing light to spill in. It was bare. Nothing more than a space that echoed back the sound of his boots against the hardwood floor, but it felt like a mansion compared to his cramped quarters overseas.

  He held up his hand, noticed it still trembled and forced himself to concentrate on the view outside. The sun had just started to peek over the horizon to his right. It cast a glow over the pastures and roofs and tops of trees, as if an artist had spilled a bucket of pink paint over one side of the canvas. If ever a place should soothe his nerves, this would be it, and yet he’d still had that terrible nightmare. Still felt the familiar edge of anxiety. Why? He wasn’t worried about his new job, if one could call it that, because he recognized charity when he saw it, although in this instance it wasn’t directed at him. They were trying to help Claire and her son. Well, okay. He could live with that, and he could play along. He could palpate a uterus with the best of them, and depending on the breed of horse, he could supervise a breeding. Thoroughbreds had to be live covered, meaning the stallion had to breed the mare naturally. Either way—AI or live cover—he could do that kind of work in his sleep.

  He just wondered why he didn’t get on with his life.

  What he needed to do was start figuring out where he wanted to settle down, and which type of work he wanted to do: go to work as a city veterinarian and deal with Fido and his well-meaning but clueless owner? Or train dogs? The wise choice would be to do both, but the odds of doing both jobs well would be slim to nil. He should focus on finding a real job, maybe at a big horse-racing farm. He liked Reynolds Ranch. It would be great to find another place just like it.

  Downstairs a horse nickered. He wondered who fed them and at what time. Maybe he could help out, because, damn it, he needed to be busy. His hands refused to stop shaking and he felt the familiar buzz of anxiety deep in the pit of his stomach where he knew it would slowly begin to unfurl as it did every morning until...

  He wasn’t going to let that happen. Not today, he thought, pulling on an old pair of jeans with a hole in the knee and a green button-down shirt, long-sleeved because he suspected it would be chilly outside. What he needed was work. Hard work. Only that would soothe the demons that haunted his soul.

  He shot toward the front door. He had to keep moving. His hand settled on the brass door handle, pushed, but despite the place being new, it liked to stick. He had to rattle it a few times to get it open, and when he did he paused for a moment on the covered landing, inhaling deeply. It was the smell of it all that soothed him like nothing else, he admitted. The air was fresh here, scented by dew and earth and freshly mown grass—the unmistakable smell of small town USA. It acted like a balm.

  You can do this.

  Colt must have heard him struggle with the door because he didn’t seem surprised to see him. “Did I wake you?”

  The man stood in the middle of the barn, tossing a flake he’d pulled from a giant feed cart to one of the horses. And what an animal it was. Today the feed doors were open and every single horse had stuffed their head through them, eyeing the human and his cart of hay as if they could somehow will Colt to feed them faster. Each one of those heads was huge and yet beautiful, their coats glistening beneath the fluorescent lights in a way that spoke of excellent care.

  “I was already up before these guys started nickering.” He went up to the horse Colt was about to feed. “They’re beautiful.”

  Colt used a hand to push the head of a dark bay back inside the feed door, then tossed the hay in afterward. “They should be, considering how much they cost.”

  Yesterday, Ethan had taken note of the nice-looking animal Colt’s wife rode; this morning he realized she had a whole barn full of them.

  “Something tells me your wife must be good at what she does.” Down the row of stalls a horse began to bang his leg against a stall door. He moved forward. “Here. Let me help.”

  “One of the best in the world.” He turned toward the horse protesting the complete ineptitude of his human caretakers. “Quit it!”

  Silence. Colt smiled, shook his head, “Happens every morning.” He pointed to the gallon-sized freezer bags housed in the cart, too. “You can give them their grain. Each horse has a packet with their name on it. Just match the packet to the name on the door.”

  Easy enough. “I take it your wife competes?” It wasn’t just grain, he noted, inhaling the sweet scent of oats and molasses. It was grain and some kind of powder, vitamins no doubt, but it was a simple task to open the stall door and pour the baggies in a bright red bucket. In fact, it was just the sort of task he needed. Busywork.

  “She just won a big grand prix back East. You should have seen it.” Colt tossed another flake, then moved on to the next horse. “We pull into this big, elite show grounds with my Rodeo Misfits rig. Everyone on the ‘circuit’—” he made air quotes with his fingers “—has these fancy buses. We pull up in my old rodeo rig and out comes Natalie and her horse. Of course, everyone knows who she is. They just hadn’t seen her in a while, and they sure weren’t expecting her to show up in a cattle trailer.”

  “Did her own rig break down or something?” He stepped back to admire the animal he’d just fed. The horse was huge. His whole opinion of the Reynoldses and their operation shifted. He’d assumed they were a local horse place and Natalie someone who gave lessons, but as they worked their way down the row, what he saw convinced him each one of the animals was world-caliber—not just one or two, but the whole barn.

  “Something like that.” Colt shrugged. “But these days she can afford what she wants. She’s in the process of deciding what she wants to purchase.” They’d reached the end of the row, Colt having already fed the other side, and so he turned to face Ethan while the horses quietly munched. “She was in a bad wreck almost two years ago. Nearly died. She was out of the business for a while... Hell, she stopped riding, but then she hooked up with me and all that...changed.” He smiled and Ethan could tell Colt looked back on happy memories. “These days she’s right back where she left off. Got a waiting list of clients and a bunch of talented horses in the barn, including that stallion over there.” He nodded to the other side of the aisle, the black stallion Ethan hadn’t fed yet. “We’re thinking that guy over there might just win her a gold medal one day soon.”

  He walked toward the animal in question, a beautiful horse with small ears and a sculpted-looking head. “He’s magnificent.”

  Colt nodded. “And easy to handle. Natalie already called the owner last night and told her our news. Honestly, you couldn’t have come along at a better time. My sister needs a break with those dogs and we’re about ready to hit the road pretty hard and so your arrival seems like a gift from God, as long as you don’t mind a little hard work.”

  Work? It was the only thing that seemed to calm him down, which was why he didn’t understand his inability to focus on the future. He should be out there finding a permanent job, not playing houseguest at a horse farm.

  “I’ll stick around until you find someone more permanent. It won’t take me long to retrain Thor, and I don’t want to be a burden.”

  “You won’t be a burden,” Colt said as they finished up. “And we’d love to discuss making this per
manent. Natalie and I were talking and you’ve already been a big help, advising us on what equipment to buy last night. In fact, we were hoping you might stick around. There’s a real need for a veterinarian in these parts. The closest vet is a friend of ours, but she’s all the way in town. We’re sure the ranchers out here would appreciate your presence. But, hell, I don’t want to scare you with our big plans. Why don’t I bring you over to my sister’s place? You can get started with Thor.”

  Permanent? He wasn’t ready to make a commitment like that. Not now. Maybe not ever.

  His hands started to tingle. He stared down at them for a moment before saying, “Actually, if it’s all the same to you, I think I’d rather walk.”

  * * *

  THE SOUND OF dogs barking penetrated her consciousness, a little at first. Claire incorporated the sound into a dream where she was being chased by a pack of... Something. She sat up in bed.

  Kennels.

  The sound came from outside. The dogs were barking.

  She crawled out of bed, the sheets clawing at her legs as if they were the paws of her phantom dogs. A quick glance out the window and she saw why they barked. A lonely-looking cowboy walked up the driveway.

  Ethan.

  She didn’t know why her heart quickened. Perhaps it was the remnant of her dream. Then again, her body always seemed to react whenever he was near. She might as well admit that.

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  She snatched the curtains closed, before he could see her, before he could spy her standing there in her white cotton nightgown that looked as if it belonged on a woman triple her age. At least, that’s what it suddenly seemed like to her.