But Roy wasn’t about to be put off. “You do. You just have to look a little harder into yourself. And remember, Wynona isn’t Susan. Susan wasn’t good enough to even clean Wynona’s shoes,” he insisted. “Now, I can’t tell you what to do—”
“Doesn’t seem to be stopping you,” Clint commented, the fire having entirely left his voice.
“But if I were you,” Roy continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted, “I’d run, not walk, to that teacher’s house, fall on my knees in front of her and beg her to forgive me.”
“I can’t do that.” He’d done too much damage by staying away. It was already too late for any apologies.
“Yeah, you can,” Roy insisted. “You can tell her you’d taken temporary leave of your senses, but you’re all better now and you will do anything to make it up to her if she would just give you another chance.”
Clint laughed drily. “You have this whole thing worked out, don’t you?”
Roy became serious as he answered, “All except the part where I get you to listen to reason and try to win her back.”
“It’s too late for that,” Clint repeated. “The damage is done.”
“You don’t know that,” Roy insisted.
“Yeah, I do,” Clint answered flatly.
“No, you don’t,” Roy countered. He could guess what his brother was thinking. “You’re afraid she’ll turn you down but you don’t know for sure. And my money is on Wynona. The woman has a great capacity to overlook people’s flaws.”
“How do you know that?”
“She was willing to go out with you, wasn’t she?” Roy pointed out.
He hadn’t told Roy that he’d told Wynona on the night of the search that he had initially sought her out at the school to ask her to come to dinner. “How would you know that?”
“Simple. You don’t share anything with me so I make it my job to find things out,” Roy explained, adding, “I was never the kind of guy who was content staying in the dark. Now, for the love of Pete, stop stalling! Get into your truck and drive over to her place before someone else in town realizes what a catch that woman is and aces you out of what could have been the best thing that ever happened to you—outside of me and the kid.”
The last words were addressed to Clint’s back as his brother turned on his heel and began to run toward his truck.
Roy smiled. Finally!
There was hope for his brother after all.
Chapter Seventeen
Clint kept going over what he wanted to say to Wynona the entire trip from his ranch to her doorstep. Rehearsing, he used different words each time, predominantly because he couldn’t remember the words he’d used only minutes before.
Nothing he said sounded right.
Clint swore under his breath. He’d blown it; he was certain of it. Wynona was never going to give him a second chance, he thought.
And why should she? If he’d been in her place, he certainly wouldn’t give him a second chance.
“If you had half a brain in your head, Washburn, you’d just turn around and go home,” he told himself in hopeless disgust.
Clint’s frown deepened. If he did just turn around and go home, he knew that Roy would give him hell. But that didn’t matter to him. Maybe he even deserved it, he thought. But what had gotten to him, what kept him driving to town rather than just giving up, turning around and heading back home, was the look he had seen on Ryan’s face earlier.
The look he would see again if he returned without having even tried to get Wynona to understand why he had done what he’d done.
The look of complete, total disappointment.
Clint sighed. He had finally seen his son coming around, finally becoming lively and animated. He didn’t want to be the one responsible for making Ryan revert back to the withdrawn shell of a boy he had been before Wynona had come into their lives.
So he kept driving, ready to take his medicine and whatever else he had to do in order to, as Roy had pointed out, rejoin the forces of the living.
* * *
He still didn’t know what to say or how to begin.
All the words he had rehearsed on the drive here completely deserted him as he brought his truck to a halt in front of Wynona’s house. Deserted him and scurried away like rats fleeing a sinking ship.
He could far more easily face down a wild, bucking mustang than do what he was about to do.
He knew what to do when it came to taming a wild horse. He was good at it. But as far as baring his soul to a woman he knew he was guilty of treating badly—a woman who deserved so much better than him—he had no idea what to say or what to do.
Completely clueless, he had no idea how to make her forgive him. All he knew was that he wanted her to forgive him.
Steeling himself off, he finally raised his hand and knocked on the door.
There was no answer at first and he knocked again. Was Wynona still at the school?
Or had she gone out? Maybe she was at Miss Joan’s, or—
A number of places crossed his mind and he thought about looking for her, then decided that eventually, the woman who had taught him that he still had a heart had to come home.
Right?
He finally decided he was going to wait for her in his truck no matter how long it took.
Reluctantly turning away from the front of the house, he had just begun to walk to his truck when he heard the door behind him opening.
Clint whirled around immediately, prepared to launch into a disjointed, jumbled apology in order to break down any walls that Wynona might have constructed around herself.
But the words he began to say froze on his lips. He wasn’t looking at Wynona. He was looking into the disapproving face of her cousin, Shania.
“Are you lost?” Shania asked him coldly. “The feed store is on the next street,” she told him, pointing in the store’s general direction.
He wasn’t in the habit of making anyone privy to his business, but he knew that wasn’t going to cut it right now. Forcing himself to put his personal feelings aside, he told the young woman in the doorway, “I want to talk to Wynona.”
Shania remained planted right where she was, blocking any access into the house. She even put her hands on opposite sides of the doorsill to form even more of a barrier.
“Well, she doesn’t want to talk to you so why don’t you just go back where you came from?” Shania suggested with a smile that was cold enough to freeze a medium-size lake.
He’d come this far; Clint decided to push a little further. “I want to hear Wynona tell me to go.”
Shania’s face darkened. “You are not in any position to make any demands, Washburn.”
“But—” Clint protested.
Shania wasn’t about to hear him out. “You lost that right,” Shania informed him angrily, “when you treated my cousin as if she didn’t matter.”
“I need to talk to her, to explain,” Clint insisted, refusing to be put off. “Wynona needs to understand that I didn’t mean to hurt her.”
Shania wasn’t budging. “Talk is cheap, Washburn,” she retorted.
“Please,” Clint said. His eyes said things to Wynona’s cousin that he couldn’t.
“It’s all right, Shania,” Wynona said quietly, coming up behind her cousin. She placed a hand on Shania’s shoulder. “Let him come in.”
Shania frowned. If it was up to her, she’d toss Washburn out on his ear, but ultimately this was Wynona’s call.
“Fine,” she relented, stepping aside. “I’ll go get a broom and a dustpan so I can sweep up the pieces that’ll be left behind once he’s had his say.”
Clint walked in as Shania left the room. The latter paused to shoot a warning look at him over her shoulder before leaving the area.
“She hates me, doesn’t she?” Clint said to Wynona as he closed the door.
He had no desire to drink coffee or anything else, but it was a way of stalling for a few minutes, so he said, “Sure, why not?”
“I’ll be right back,” Wynona replied, then walked into the kitchen.
Shania had put up a pot of fresh coffee when she’d come home earlier and there was still about half a pot left. Wynona poured a cup and returned with it to the living room.
He saw the single cup. “You’re not having any?” he questioned.
She shook her head. “If I have coffee past a certain hour, it keeps me up at night.”
“Oh.” Clint put the cup she had brought him down on the small coffee table, untouched.
“Not to your liking?” she questioned.
The smile on his lips was forced. “I’m sure it’s fine.”
This whole situation was so awkward, it was downright painful, Wynona thought. It was time to put both of them out of their misery.
“Why are you here, Clint?” she asked him.
Picking up on her tone, he read into it. “Do you want me to leave?”
Wynona didn’t say yes or no. Instead, frustrated, she said, “What I want is for you to tell me why you left your ranch, drove all the way here and asked me for a cup of coffee you had no intention of drinking.”
“Well, technically,” he told her, “I didn’t ask for the coffee. You offered it.”
Wynona’s eyes widened. He was going to lecture her about technicalities? Wynona felt her temper spiking. “And ‘technically,’” she retorted, “no court in the world would convict me if I threw the cup of coffee straight at your head.”
Clint took a breath. “I’m sorry.”
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be once that cup grazes your skull,” she informed him angrily.
She had kept her temper under wraps for the past two and a half weeks, struggling not to allow anyone to glimpse the pain she was going through. Now that she had allowed her temper to finally erupt, she was having trouble getting it back under control.
But Clint didn’t let himself get distracted, didn’t extrapolate on any sidebars that had come up. Now that he had finally said the words to her, all he could do was repeat them until their meaning sank in with her.
“I’m sorry,” he said to Wynona again.
“Well, you just—”
About to make another comment, this one about the way his vanishing act had affected her, Wynona stopped midword and stared at him, her eyes wide. She was reading into this; she just knew it.
But even so, Wynona heard herself asking, “You’re what?”
“I’m sorry,” Clint repeated a third time with sincerity. “Very, very sorry.”
Afraid that she was interpreting his words in her own way, Wynona wanted this apology spelled out.
“For?” she asked him, waiting.
He took in a deep breath as if to fortify himself. And then he said, “For not getting back to you. For acting like a coward. For allowing a ghost from the past to do a number on me and scare me off.” Revved up, his words took on strength as he continued. “For very possibly losing the best thing that’s happened to me. I’ve lost sight of the last time I felt so happy. I’m sorry for—”
Wynona put her index finger against his lips, stilling them. Despite everything, she could feel her mouth curving.
“You can stop now. You’ve answered my question,” she told him.
But he had only gotten started. “I know this isn’t something a man’s supposed to admit,” he told Wynona, his voice softening, “but making love with you woke up so many things inside me, things I wanted to feel, I was afraid that you’d use that against me somehow.”
She looked at him, feeling both hurt and mystified at his reasoning. “I think that maybe we need to go back to the beginning so that you can get to know me, get to know the kind of person I am.”
“I already know you,” Clint told her.
But Wynona shook her head. “No, you don’t. If you did, you wouldn’t have harbored those kinds of thoughts about me. You would have known better.”
“That didn’t have anything to do with you,” he told her with feeling. “All those thoughts had to do with Ryan’s mother. When we started out, I had those kinds of feeling about her. She used them to twist my heart right out of my chest like it was some kind of a living corkscrew.”
Reliving these memories was incredibly painful, but if he had a prayer of making Wynona stay, he had to share them with her so she could understand what had driven him to do what he’d done.
“When I found that Susan had just up and left me without warning, I thought I’d never recover. Eventually, I learned to live with the pain and I made my peace with that, but I wanted to make sure that it never was going to happen to me again.”
She saw it differently. “You were a man with no heart, no feelings, who couldn’t even relate to his own son. That’s not making your peace with anything, Clint.” Couldn’t he see that? “That’s resigning from life altogether.”
He looked at Wynona, looked into her eyes as she spoke. He felt her passion. Moreover, he knew she didn’t just have a point; she was completely right.
So he told her as much.
“You’re right,” Clint said out loud.
Wynona had revved herself up to deliver a full-fledged lecture to him. To have Clint immediately agree took away some of her thunder, leaving her with nothing to add.
She blinked. “I am?”
“Yes,” Clint answered. “You are.”
“Well, I guess I can’t argue with that,” Wynona murmured.
A hint of a smile slipped over his lips. Why had he run from this? What kind of an idiot did that make him? “You can if you want to,” he told her.
“What I want,” she told him, “is to just forget the past two and a half weeks ever happened.”
“But not the lovemaking,” Clint quickly interjected, looking at her hopefully.
“No,” Wynona agreed, smiling at him, “not the lovemaking. Not if it’s the part that you want to remember.” She held her breath, waiting to see what he would say to that.
Her stipulation puzzled him. “Why wouldn’t I want to remember coming to life for the first time in over seven years?” he asked her.
She just wanted to be sure that it was as important to him as it was to her. “I have no idea,” she told him honestly. “I never claimed to be able to understand the male mind.”
Relieved beyond words that it looked as if it was going to work out after all, Clint put his arms around her. “I could give you a quick course. If you’re interested, that is.”
“I guess I have to be. That is, if I’m going to survive this relationship.” And then, just to make sure she hadn’t jumped to conclusions, she asked, “This is a relationship, right?”
Clint nodded. “That’s one way to describe it,” he answered.
She wasn’t sure what to make of his response. “What’s another way?” she asked, looking at him uncertainly, bracing herself for anything.
He took a breath to fortify himself. “How about ‘an engagement?’”
Had she had any of the coffee she had offered him, she would have undoubtedly been choking on it at this point.
As it was, she found herself coughing as she tried to catch her breath. “What did you just say?”
“An engagement,” he repeated, then quickly backtracked, afraid he’d taken too much for granted. “No, I’m sorry, that was too soon. I shouldn’t have just thrown you into the deep end of the pool like that. I didn’t mean to—”
Wynona put her hands on either side of his face, sy
mbolically capturing his words so that he could catch his breath.
“I think you missed a few steps, Clint. Do you want to start from the beginning?” she asked.
“The beginning?” he asked. Then, as she nodded her head, he said, “Right, the beginning. Do you think that maybe you might, maybe someday, be willing to maybe think about, um, well, marrying me?”
Not exactly the eloquent proposal she was hoping for, Wynona thought. But it would do.
“Someday?” she questioned.
He took that to mean that she thought it was the right word to use in this case.
“Yes, like maybe a long time from now,” he added quickly.
“Why?” she asked. She needed to hear reasons, his reasons, before she answered the all-important question that was making her heart flutter.
“Why?” he repeated, not sure what she wanted to hear him say.
So she explained it to him. “Why are you asking me to marry you?”
“Because I love you,” he said, blurting out the answer before he had time to stop himself.
Wynona smiled. Finally. “That’s all I wanted to hear,” she informed him.
“So does that mean you’ll think about it?” he asked hopefully.
Her eyes were dancing as she answered, “Think about it?”
She managed to suppress the laugh that rose up in her throat. The man was going to really have to work on his confidence, she thought. Couldn’t he see that she loved him?
“No, I’m not going to think about it. I’m going to say yes, you big, thick-headed cowboy. Because I love you,” she told him before he could ask.
Relieved beyond words, Clint pulled her into his arms. Lord, but she felt good, he couldn’t help thinking. A part of him had been convinced that he’d lost her. He had never been so happy to be wrong.
“I love you, too,” he said, lowering his mouth to hers.
The rest of what happened after that was a blur, but that was all right with them. After all, they had the rest of their lives to sort it all out.
Epilogue
Clint was standing in one of the two tiny rooms located at the rear of the church. The rooms were reserved for brides and bridegrooms spending their final moments as single people just before they exchanged the vows that would bind them to each other.
The Cowboy's Lesson in Love Page 16
