How to Kiss a Cowboy

by Joanne Kennedy

  He knew her father had been notified. The old bastard just hadn’t bothered to go.

  Brady slammed his fist into the door again. Earl Carlyle would hurry if he knew what was good for him, because the longer Brady waited, the hotter his rage burned. When the door finally opened, he had to consciously take in a few slow breaths so he wouldn’t use that same fist to smash in the man’s face.

  Looking at Earl Carlyle, he realized it wasn’t worth it. The man looked like a plant that had gone too long without water. His posture was bent from arthritis and his face was lined by sorrow; his eyes drooped, and the corners of his mouth turned down in a permanent frown. His hair, still dark, was sparse, and his efforts to combat encroaching baldness with a comb-over were futile.

  Maybe it wasn’t water Earl needed; maybe it was fertilizer. Maybe he needed someone like Brady to give him some shit about how he treated his daughter.

  Through clenched teeth, Brady asked, “What are you doing, Earl?”

  “Having breakfast with my—having breakfast.” The old man lifted his chin, asserting some dignity. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  Behind him, Suze’s little dog was bouncing like a kid on a pogo stick. The old man started to swing the door shut, but Brady smacked his open palm against the wood and shot the man a look that would freeze a bird in midflight.

  “You going to see your daughter after breakfast?”

  “None of your business.”

  Dooley rushed out the open door and circled Brady, yapping like he was possessed. Brady knelt and petted him, but nothing quieted the dog until he picked him up.

  “You fed her horses yet?” Brady knew the answer to this one. If Earl had been out to the barn, he would have realized Speedo was missing, and he’d be in a panic—not because he cared about the animal, but because the horse was worth money.

  “I’ll feed ’em when I’m ready. And those are my horses much as hers, young man.”

  Brady narrowed his eyes, but it was hard to look tough when you were holding a hairy little mutt in your arms. “When’s the last time you had anything to do with ’em?”

  Earl turned away, grumbling something about them reminding him of his wife. That was his answer for everything. Supposedly he’d been crazy in love with Suze’s mother, but the way he shied away from anything that reminded him of her, you’d think the time he’d spent with her had been the worst years of his life, a trauma he couldn’t bear to think of.

  No doubt her illness and death had been just that—a trauma. But from what Brady had heard, Ellen Carlyle had only lived a few months after the diagnosis, so it wasn’t as if she’d lingered for years. They’d had plenty of happy times on horseback, and you’d think he’d want to remember those.

  “I’ve got Speedo at my place,” Brady said. The lie almost choked him, but it had to be told. Brady would get the police involved if the horse didn’t turn up soon, but for now he was doing his own detective work. “Tell you what.” He stepped into the house past the old man without asking for permission, shedding his Carhartt jacket and hanging it on a hook beside the door. The rising sun was beginning to warm the Wyoming plains and gild the grass with gold, but that wasn’t why he hung up his coat. He was staking his claim, letting Earl Carlyle know that he’d come to stay.

  Glancing around the house, he saw chaos—dirty dishes stacked high in the sink; floors smudged and dirty; junk on the stairs that looked like it had been dropped midclimb. He knew Suze wasn’t home much, and no wonder. He’d seen how neat she kept her trailer, and doubted she could stand to live in the pigpen her home had become.

  It would have to be cleaned up before she came home, that was for sure. It would probably be a long time before she could climb stairs, but still, all those tripping hazards should be cleaned off the steps. And the dishes needed to be washed, and the floors mopped.

  Looking at Earl, Brady had a sinking feeling he knew who was going to get stuck doing all that housework. He might as well buy an apron and a stock of Swiffer refills right now.

  Maybe he could let the dog mop the floor. Dooley looked like a mop, after all. But he probably shed more hair than he picked up.

  “You got a sister, Earl?”

  “Nope. Only family I had was my wife,” Earl said.

  “And your daughter.”

  The old man didn’t respond, just stared at Brady. “What do you want, son?”

  “I’m not your son,” Brady said. “But I tell you what. I’ll take care of the animals so you can go see your daughter.”

  Earl looked at him from under heavy brows. He’d reached that point in old age where men’s eyebrows went all wild and scraggly.

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” he said.

  Brady felt a stab of compassion for Suze, even beyond what he’d felt at the hospital. How did she live with this day after day? Her injuries were a temporary condition, but she’d dealt with her father all her life. Surely there was some way to make the man see what he was doing to the one person he had left to love.

  “You know what she’s feeding the horses these days?”

  “Hay, I s’pose.”

  Brady wanted to wipe the smug smile off Earl’s face. “Supplements? Grain? Anything?”

  Earl shrugged. Disgusted, Brady left him standing in the hallway and headed for the barn, slamming the door behind him.

  Once he’d entered the shadowy realm of the barn, Brady’s anger faded. This was his world even more than the rodeo ring. He’d loved barns from the first day he’d arrived at Decker Ranch. The rough-hewn wood, the smudged windowpanes draped with cobwebs, the high hayloft where a boy could sit and dream in the sweet-scented dark—the barn at Decker Ranch was a cathedral to him, a symbol of the new life he’d been granted when the Deckers had found him and his brothers and given them a home. Somehow, all barns had taken on that same spirit for him. They calmed his soul.

  He could hear Suze’s backup horse, Bucket, stamping with impatience. Apparently the only thing that would calm his soul was breakfast.

  He was probably lonesome too. Horses were herd animals, and they needed company. With Speedo gone, there was a good chance Bucket would go off his feed.

  “Bucket.” He kept his voice low and soothing. “’Bout time to eat, isn’t it, boy?”

  He put a few flakes of hay in the horse’s net, then rinsed and filled the water buckets at the outside tap. He noticed Earl Carlyle’s car was still in the drive, and he could hear the squawk of a television drifting from the house. Breakfast was over, but there was no telling when visiting hours at the hospital would start. Or if they’d ever start for Earl.

  Brady hung the water bucket back in Bucket’s stall and found a well-stocked tack room at the back of the barn. It boasted an entire wall devoted to plastic bins that held grain and supplements, and above them was a whiteboard, the kind you saw in corporate boardrooms. Suze had inked each horse’s proper ration under its name.

  Now why couldn’t Earl Carlyle have told him that? Did he not know? Did he never come out here?

  Brady hung around until Bucket was finished with his breakfast, biding his time by restocking the stack of hay bales Suze kept near the horse’s stalls. Tossing the big bales from the loft and lugging them into the alleyway helped him work up a healthy sweat—always a good way to start the day, in his opinion. As he took off his hat and wiped his brow, he admired the tidiness of the barn. He’d have to work hard to keep the place up to Suze’s standards, but he was determined to do the job right.

  He turned Bucket out into a small corral beside the barn and leaned on the gate for a while, chewing a green stalk of timothy and watching the horse relax in the morning sun. It was hard to think of Suze spending this blue-sky day trapped in the fake fluorescent lights of the hospital.

  But maybe it would be a good day for her, in a way. Maybe once her father saw his only child there, so small a
nd frail among the lifesaving machinery, he’d find the heart he’d mislaid when his wife had died. Maybe the two of them would talk—really talk. That could make this all worthwhile for Suze.

  Aw, who was he kidding? That kind of thinking might make him feel better, but there was nothing good about the accident, and wishing wouldn’t make it so.

  Besides, Earl Carlyle’s truck was still in the driveway.

  Chapter 24

  Suze woke reluctantly to the poking and prodding of a nurse who said she was “taking her vitals.”

  Yeah, she was taking her vitals, all right. Sleep was vital, and the nurse was taking it away.

  Suze took some medication and said she felt okay, which was a lie. When the nurse left, she lay in the half dark, listening to the sounds of the hospital waking up—a faint blend of voices from the nurse’s station down the hall; the soft squeak of nurse’s shoes up and down the hallway; her own breathing, steady and slow but ragged with pain.

  She stared up at the ceiling. She hated sleeping on her back, but with all the tubes coming out of her arms and the bulky brace around her neck, it was the only choice she had. They’d said the neck brace was a precaution, as she hadn’t actually broken anything there. She felt like she’d been put through a meat grinder and pounded into patties, but they said her injuries were mostly sprains, strains, and torn ligaments. The only thing broken was one foot, her wrist, and some fingers. Her ankle was sprained, but that wouldn’t be a problem. She’d be back in the saddle in no time.

  She flicked through all the television stations, but she hated SpongeBob SquarePants and wasn’t too fond of the Kardashians, either. For a while, she watched a mixed martial arts fight on Spike TV. The fighters were women, and she settled on that. Maybe she’d pick up some tips to use when she got a chance to beat the crap out of Brady Caine.

  * * *

  Brady finished with the horses and looked around the Carlyle place for something else to do. He’d go hunt for Speedo if he had any idea where to look, but he’d have to count on the cowboy network for that. Meanwhile, he’d lose his mind if he didn’t get busy.

  If Earl didn’t go to see his daughter, he’d lose his temper. Or, more likely, he’d go to the hospital himself. Suze had made it clear to Brady that she wanted him to leave her alone, but he’d tried that once before, after the night of heaven they’d spent together. He’d regretted it ever since.

  With age had come wisdom, and he realized now that she’d completely misunderstood his reason for leaving. She thought he’d gotten what he wanted and didn’t care about her anymore. She thought she was nothing more than a notch on a bedpost.

  He wasn’t sure where she fit into his life, but she was more than that. She’d burrowed deep into his subconscious from the moment he’d first seen her.

  He leaned against the hitching post in the sun, watching the house for signs of life and pondering the fact that this was his one chance to show Suze he was something more than some jerk who lured women into bed and then walked away.

  The sun felt good on his face, and he could smell sage on the breeze that stroked his cheek. There were acres of wild country beyond the Carlyle house, acres that had never been tamed. It would have been better for Earl Carlyle if it had all been cleared and turned to pasture, but Brady loved the wildness of it, the toughness of the rocky land and the twisted trees that managed to grow from the sandy soil. Oddly enough, the trees reminded him of Earl. There was a toughness about the old man that made it seem like he could survive anything. So why was he so weak in the face of his grief?

  Brady plucked a daisy from the tangle of flowers that grew alongside the fence. It was wildflower season, and there was a festival of color hidden in the tall grass. Asters showed their shy faces in the shady spots, while dame’s rocket grew even where the sun had baked the soil brick hard.

  This was Suze’s world, when she wasn’t on the road. Every morning and every evening, she smelled this sweet-scented air and listened to the grasshoppers clicking in the tall grass. She carried buckets to the rusty faucet by the barn and checked the fence along the weedy pasture.

  He looked down at the daisy smiling up from his work-worn hand. It didn’t look like Earl was going to go anywhere today, and Suze wouldn’t be happy to see Brady arrive in his place. But she might welcome a little piece of her ranch, since she was trapped in the sterile world of the hospital. Those harsh white lights, the gleaming linoleum floors—it was all so artificial.

  Half an hour later, he had a healthy fistful of wildflowers picked, and they were even arranged in some sort of order, with the little ones around the edge and the big, showy ones dead center. He found a length of twine in the barn and wrapped it around them, then fumbled the ends into a sloppy bow with his big, clumsy fingers.

  Pleased with his work, he climbed in his truck and did a quick and very noisy K-turn in the turnout, raising as much of a dust cloud as he could. As he sped down the drive, he could see the dust billowing up behind him. He pictured it settling on Earl Carlyle’s shiny pickup and smiled at the thought of the old man cussing up a storm while he cleaned off his vehicle.

  Hell, Earl probably wouldn’t bother. The old man was such a do-nothing stick-in-the-mud, he’d probably leave the dust. Brady was surprised there wasn’t a layer of it on the man himself.

  * * *

  “Well, look at the pretty flowers. Are those for me?”

  The woman manning the nurse’s station on Suze’s floor was just pretty enough to make Brady stammer, and he felt his face flush even as a response rose to his lips.

  “If I’d known you were here, I would have picked more, ma’am.”

  The nurse laughed. “You were doing okay until you called me ma’am.”

  “Sorry, ma’am.” Now he was really blushing.

  An older nurse behind the counter shot him an appraising glance over the wire-rimmed reading glasses perched on the end of her nose. When she spotted the flowers, she broke into a smile wreathed in wrinkles.

  “Well, who are those for, young man?”

  “Um, Suze Carlyle?”

  “Oh, that poor girl. She’s in room 320,” the older nurse said. “But, Charlotte, why don’t you find something he can put them in? He doesn’t get them in water, those flowers won’t last an hour.”

  “I guess I should have thought of that,” he said.

  The younger nurse—the one he’d called ma’am—examined the bouquet, touching a daisy at the edge that already showed signs of wilting.

  “We’ve got some vases in the break room,” she said. “People are always leaving them behind. Come on, we’ll find something.”

  Two more nurses were in the break room, finishing up early lunches or a midmorning snack. Brady was touched by their determination to make sure Suze received a proper bouquet. They searched the top cabinets over the room’s small sink and microwave, putting half a dozen vases on the counter for him to choose from.

  “I think that one,” Brady said, pointing to a simple but graceful vase of clear glass.

  “But what about this?” One of the women turned around with a cobalt-blue number in her hands and displayed it with all the grace of a game-show hostess. “This would show off the blue in those asters.”

  The discussion went on, with Brady patiently clutching his bouquet. He might get on well with women, but he never felt like he truly understood them. To him, any of the vases would have been fine, but if these women thought it was important, Suze might think so too. Although she was the least girlie woman Brady knew.

  They finally settled on the clear vase he’d chosen originally. With much fussing and a little fighting, it was filled with water. The baling twine was untied, and the flower arranging symposium began, dominated by the first nurse he’d spoken to. In her teddy bear scrubs, with her perky ponytail bobbing with every move, she reminded him of a kindergarten teacher.

  “Di
d you pick these?” she asked.

  He nodded. “Sure did. From her pasture. I thought she’d like a little bit of home.”

  “Did you hear that?” She fairly squealed the words to the others. “He picked them himself. Said she’d like a little bit of home.”

  The older nurse beamed at him. She had a nice, honest face, and a wide smile that made him feel blessed somehow.

  “That is sweet,” she said. “My Harley thinks a dozen red roses is all a woman wants. I appreciate it, but I wish he’d put more thought into it.”

  Brady hated to think he’d got Harley into any kind of trouble. “He’s probably a hard worker, though,” he said. “It’s hard for a working man to find time for picking flowers. I’m just a saddle-tramp rodeo bum, so it’s easy for me.”

  She beamed again, and he thought Harley might get lucky tonight.

  “I knew it.” The teddy-bear nurse had thin, artistic fingers that deftly arranged the flowers into a shapely bouquet. “I knew you were a real cowboy. I told Alice. Didn’t I, Alice?”

  Another nurse, dressed head to toe in Toy Story characters, nodded agreement. “You called it, Annie.”

  Annie handed Brady the vase. It looked like a bouquet from the best florist in town. She gestured with the baling twine and he held out the vase. Carefully, she retied it around the outside of the arrangement, finishing it off with a perfect, multilooped bow that added just the right rustic touch. Brady hadn’t realized how crude the original bouquet was. This was more the effect he’d been going for.

  “Where’d you learn to make ’em look so pretty?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged and gave him a shy, sideways glance. “I just like doing stuff like this.”

  “Well, you’re good at it. Thank you.”

  She smiled at him, her face suffused with a very becoming blush. “You’re welcome.”

  Aw, shoot. Things were starting to feel uncomfortable. She was a nice girl, but Brady wasn’t looking for a girlfriend, that was for sure. He had more important things to do.