Her Forever Cowboy

by Marie Ferrarella

  “Do you have a locksmith?” he asked her innocently.

  “Don’t you?” she asked incredulously.

  Just exactly what did this town have by way of services?

  “Nope.” He saw her rolling her eyes and waited until she stopped. “We have a handyman, though.”

  Alisha searched for inner strength. “Does he change locks?”

  “I’ll have to ask him.”

  “Do that,” she said pointedly.

  “Then you’re going to rent this?” he asked.

  Did she have a choice? “Is there another apartment in this town?”

  “No.”

  Just as she suspected, she was back to having no other options. It was this apartment, or living with Davenport and his family. She knew what her choice had to be.

  Chapter Four

  “Well, then, I guess you have yourself a tenant,” she told Brett after a few seconds had gone by.

  Saying that, Alisha took a second, longer look around the premises. The last time she’d been in living quarters of this size, she was sharing the area with another medical student.

  Alisha pressed her lips together, trying to focus on the upside of the situation, such as it was. Thinking back to her medical-school existence, she supposed this meant that she had twice the room now that she had then.

  However, if she compared it to the accommodations she’d had when she and Pierce had lived together after they’d gotten engaged, well, then that was a whole other story. Coming from money, he’d resided in a Park Avenue apartment that was bigger than the clinic and Murphy’s put together. The walk-in closets were bigger than this apartment.

  You could have still had that—if you didn’t have principles—and a soul.

  Ultimately, she had no regrets over her decision to break it off with Pierce. If he felt free to cheat on her while they were engaged, nothing would change once they were married—for that matter, they might have just gotten worse. She’d made the right move in that situation. She just wasn’t all that sure about the move that had brought her to this backwater town.

  “Having second thoughts?”

  Brett’s question wedged its way into her train of thought. Alisha blinked, rousing herself and pushing aside memories that she no longer wanted to have any part of.

  Turning toward him, she said, “Excuse me?”

  “Second thoughts,” Brett repeated. “You had a strange look on your face just now, and I thought that maybe you wanted to change your mind about renting the apartment.”

  He certainly couldn’t blame her if she did. He imagined that, coming from where she did, she was accustomed to far better accommodations. There was a manner about her that didn’t strike him as belonging to a struggling former medical student.

  “No, I’ll take it,” she told him. This was better than nothing, and she really did want to have some time to herself.

  “You haven’t heard the rent yet,” Brett reminded her.

  She shook her head. “Doesn’t matter. I’ll take it—although I doubt if you’re going to charge me very much,” she added, slanting a glance at him.

  Walking into the space for the first time, she took a long, hard look around. Was it her imagination, or did the place seem smaller each time she did that?

  “You weren’t kidding when you said it was small,” she commented.

  “The last owner, my uncle Patrick, didn’t spend much time up here. Just used it for sleeping, mostly. There’s a combination stove, sink and refrigerator over there.” Brett pointed to a multipurposed appliance that stood against the opposite wall. It was a faded white, but he knew for a fact that it was still fully functional.

  Alisha walked over to it, an expression of faint disbelief on her face. “Is that what this is?” She’d never heard of anything like that before. “And it really works?” she asked skeptically.

  “It really works,” he assured her, turning on the faucet to prove his point. Shutting the faucet off, he then switched on one of the two gas burners adjacent to the sink. Instantly, a hypnotic blue flame leaped up as if on cue. Lastly, he opened the door below the sink/stove to show her the interior of the refrigerator. “What did you think it was?” Brett asked, shutting the door again.

  “I don’t know,” she answered honestly. “Some creative toy meant for a child playing house would have been my best guess.” Looking around, Alisha realized that there was a very crucial piece of furniture missing. “There’s no bed.”

  Brett’s smile contradicted her. “There’s a bed,” he said.

  It wasn’t as if they were standing in a huge loft and she’d somehow missed it. “An invisible bed?” she countered.

  Rather than answer her, Brett went over to the closet on the opposite wall and opened it. Just as he did, she crossed to it, thinking that perhaps he was about to lead her into another room. The next thing she knew, Brett was grabbing her and pulling her to one side.

  “What the hell are you—”

  Alisha didn’t get a chance to finish voicing her indignant question, as the bed that had been upright and hidden behind the closed door came flying down. Its four feet landed with a small thud on the wooden floor, part of it taking up the space where she had been standing just a moment ago.

  Stunned, she found herself staring at a bed, comforter and all.

  “Just keeping you from being smashed by your Murphy bed,” Brett answered as if she had just asked a perfectly logical question in a normal tone of voice.

  The fact that he was still holding her didn’t immediately register. Her eyes widened as she turned her head to look at the bed that hadn’t been there a minute ago.

  “A what?” she asked, referring to what he’d just called it.

  Damn, but she felt soft and round in all the right places for such a compact woman, Brett couldn’t help thinking.

  “A Murphy bed—no relation,” he quipped. “Some people call it a hideaway bed.”

  “Just how old is this place?” she asked.

  “Old,” he allowed. “The saloon downstairs has been renovated, but I didn’t see a reason to do anything up here since it really wasn’t being used very much.”

  Suddenly aware that the man was much too close to her for her comfort, Alisha turned to look up at him, blanketing her vulnerability with bravado and doing her damnedest to ignore the rising heat she felt. “Is anything else going to come flying out at me?”

  “Not that I know of,” he replied. A laugh punctuated his words.

  “Then I guess you don’t have to go on holding on to me.”

  Her tone was cool and authoritative, meant to cover up the fact that just for a split second, she was reacting to this closer-than-necessary contact between them. Reacting in the very worst possible way. Her body temperature had gone up, responding to his before she could forcefully shut everything down.

  She’d already been this route before and learned a valuable lesson. Men who looked like Pierce—and Brett—weren’t capable of maintaining lasting relationships. They were far too enamored with themselves to spare the time for anyone else.

  She didn’t need to bang her head against that wall twice, she silently reminded herself.

  “Oh, I can think of a whole lot of reasons to hold on to you, Lady Doc,” Brett told her with a smile that was half wicked, half arousing. “Reasons that have nothing to do with falling Murphy beds.”

  She needed to draw her lines in the sand now, so no mistakes could be made. “If you value hanging on to your limbs, Brett, I’d forget all about those reasons if I were you.”

  She expected another dose of his charm and was surprised—and relieved—when Brett raised his hands in an exaggerated fashion, breaking the physical contact he’d established, and took a step back.

  “Whatever you say, Lady Doc. I’ve
never forced my attentions on a woman yet, and I’m not about to start at this late date,” he assured her. “I wouldn’t have grabbed you now, but if I hadn’t, that bed would have landed right on top of that pretty little head of yours. You’re welcome, by the way.”

  “Thank you,” she said stiffly. “I’ll write you that check now.” As she took out her checkbook, another question suddenly occurred to her. This time, she looked around twice before asking, “Where’s the bathroom?”

  Brett nodded toward the entrance of the room and the stairs just beyond. “You passed it downstairs.”

  He obviously didn’t understand, she thought. “I mean the one that goes with this apartment.”

  “You passed it downstairs,” Brett repeated.

  Her jaw almost dropped. “There’s no bathroom up here?” she cried.

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Didn’t your uncle have to relieve himself?”

  “I’m sure he did,” Brett replied. “When he did, he went downstairs.”

  That still didn’t solve the problem. Just how backward were these people? “What about bathing? Didn’t he bathe?”

  “As a matter of fact, he did,” Brett answered, taking no offense at her tone. “That’s why he built a small room onto the back end of the men’s room—so he could take a shower there.”

  Part of her couldn’t believe she was actually having this conversation. “Is there one like that in the back of the women’s bathroom?”

  Brett shook his head. “Was no reason for it. Uncle Patrick never got married.”

  Alisha felt as if she’d somehow fallen through the rabbit hole without realizing it. In an odd sort of way, she wanted to see just how far this would all go. “I can’t go into the men’s room to shower.”

  “Don’t see why not as long as there’re no men in it. The place is pretty empty until about two in the afternoon or so, and it doesn’t really get going until about five, six o’clock,” he told her. “Listen, if you like, I can see about having Clarence bring a cast-iron tub upstairs. But you’ve got to remember that it’s going to take up most of the available space in the apartment,” he warned her.

  “Clarence?” Who was named Clarence these days? she couldn’t help wondering.

  “He took over running the hardware store after his dad retired,” Brett answered. “The man’s an absolute wizard with coming up with ways to get things that you need.”

  Alisha laughed shortly to herself and murmured, “How about a brand-new start?”

  “You need a new start?” Brett asked her, interested. “Why?”

  She’d said too much, Alisha thought. That wasn’t like her. She waved away his question as she moved around Brett, anxious to get back downstairs to the shelter of the smoke-filled room and the anonymity provided by the wall-to-wall noise.

  Turning on her heel, she started to leave. Brett caught her by the arm, anchoring her in place.

  Now what? she thought.

  The question he’d just put to her still hung in the air, unanswered. “I don’t know how much experience you have with little bars like mine—or any bars, actually.” His opening line caught her attention, and she turned around to put him in his place for whatever knowing thing he was about to say.

  Brett continued as if he didn’t notice that this newcomer was about to give him a piece of her mind.

  “But when you’re in a bar,” he told her, “the bartender is like your best friend, your father and your father confessor all rolled up into one. And, also like the confessional, what is said to a bartender in confidence stays in confidence. At least that’s always been my rule,” Brett stressed. “People find that it helps them cope with whatever is bothering them if they know they can unburden themselves without any consequences.” Brett looked at her significantly. “I don’t judge.”

  Now, there was a new line, she thought. She could almost see how he would be successful, getting to women, having them open themselves up while they looked into those eyes that all but sparkled with some kind of mischief.

  Taking a breath, she proceeded to shoot him down—or so she thought. “Number one, I don’t have a best friend. Number two, my father’s been dead a long time, and number three, I haven’t made use of a priest since I don’t know when.”

  Actually, she did, she silently amended. The last time was when her father had died. There’d been no solace, no consoling her grief. God had taken her father all too soon, and listening to a sympathetic-looking priest telling her that we had no way of knowing God’s reasons for doing things just wasn’t good enough for her.

  However, she wasn’t about to share any of that with this complete stranger. She had a fatalistic feeling that somehow, if she did, if she took Brett Murphy at his word, it would all wind up blowing up on her, or it would come back to haunt her when she least expected it.

  Keeping her own counsel was the best way to go in this case. In every case.

  But Brett, obviously, couldn’t seem to take a hint, she thought in frustration. He’d taken her words of dismissal and twisted them around to indicate need.

  “All the more reason to make use of me, Lady Doc. I’m here. Use me.”

  Desperate, her eyes flashed as she tried to make him back off one last time. “Look, I’m sure that all the women in this town would love to have you say that to them, but I am just not interested in what you’re selling.” She couldn’t make it any clearer than that—and she didn’t want to cause a scene or completely alienate him because she did want that hole-in-the-wall that he called an apartment. At least until she figured out what she wanted to do with the rest of her life.

  “Not selling—offering,” Brett corrected, then added, “Friendship,” before she could put her own meaning to his words and light into him again. “I think you could use a friend.”

  So now he was clairvoyant? He was claiming to see into her heart, was that it? She was fairly certain that she had buried her loneliness better than that.

  The man was probably just shooting in the dark, nothing more.

  “Do you, now?” she asked, tossing her head in a studied movement of nonchalance.

  He would have had to have been deaf not to pick up on her mocking tone, but he ignored it. Something told him he’d struck a nerve. Something had made her answer Dan’s letter and come here, and it wasn’t selfless dedication. He’d bet the saloon on that.

  “I do,” he acknowledged amicably. “Never knew anyone who couldn’t use a friend.”

  “Then prepare to be astounded,” she informed Brett.

  He wasn’t about to push himself on her in any capacity, but that didn’t change the fact that he still felt he’d gotten it right. The woman needed a shoulder to lean on—and maybe to cry on once she trusted him. But that was for later, he decided.

  “Have it your way,” he said easily. “But the offer’s still there if you ever change your mind.”

  Her eyes met his, and the sarcastic retort that rose to her lips died there without making it to the light of day. Maybe, in his own way, Brett was trying to make her feel welcome. For now, she gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  “I won’t,” she told him quietly. “Now, how much do you want?”

  They’d just been talking about friendship—at least he was. Her question seemed to come out of left field. Brett shook his head slightly, as if to indicate that something had been lost in translation. “For?”

  “The apartment,” she cried. Wasn’t the man listening at all? “How much do you want in exchange for renting out the apartment to me?” she asked, carefully specifying everything so there wouldn’t be any further confusion—or whatever it was that he was feigning.

  “You’re still interested?” Brett asked incredulously. He’d been fairly confident that not having a bathroom or shower on the same floor as the bedroom would have se
nt her hurrying off into the night.

  “Interested is probably too positive a word in this situation,” she granted. “But it is what it is, and I do want to have some peace and quiet and privacy.” She underscored the last word intentionally, hoping that got the message across to her new landlord. Once she was inside the apartment, she wanted to be left alone. “There’s very little of either in Dr. Daven—in Dan’s house,” Alisha amended, catching herself at the last moment.

  Why she felt it was necessary to go along with what Murphy had cited as the terms of their agreement was really beyond her. After all, the man would have had to have been crazy to declare the rental agreement null and void if she referred to the doctor by his occupation coupled with his surname.

  On second thought, she reconsidered, looking up into Murphy’s eyes; maybe he was a little off-kilter. Just off-kilter enough to want her to live up to that ridiculous term he’d given her—or else. Who rented out a box of a place without a bathroom and still expected to be compensated for it?

  Well, he thought, the woman definitely knew what she was getting into. There were certainly no hidden surprises to spring on her. She’d seen the place, for better or for worse.

  Grinning, Brett put out his hand. “Works for me,” he told her.

  Alisha looked at him and then down at his hand. She shook it almost hesitantly.

  “It’s my hand, Lady Doc,” he prompted, “not a rattlesnake. Don’t be afraid to shake it.”

  That goaded her enough to firmly grasp his hand this time and shake it the way she would have if a sane person had offered her his hand to shake.

  “Okay, now do you have papers for me to sign?” she asked.

  Every rental agreement she’d ever known or heard about came with legal papers to sign—and notarize, most of the time. He hadn’t said anything about that, or standard things like first and last months’ rent.

  An uneasiness whispered along the fringes of her mind. Just what was she getting herself into? a little voice in her head whispered.