Cook County Cowboys

by Crystal-Rain Love

  She slid out of the truck and followed him to the front door of the trailer. He unlocked it and moved back, gesturing for her to enter first. Kenzie stepped inside and looked around. They were in a small room with white walls and shaggy brown carpet. A blue and green plaid sofa sat against one wall and to the side was a green recliner. An entertainment center equipped with a stereo and fifteen inch TV sat opposite the sofa, and a bookshelf rested in the corner. Kenzie stepped closer to see the only books were tarot related. The other shelf contents were a few decks of the matching cards and framed pictures of a woman with long blonde hair and dark blue eyes. She looked to be different ages in the pictures, but seemed tired in all of them. “Is this your mother?”

  “Yeah.” Chance closed the door and stepped farther into the room, sinking his hands into his pockets.

  Curious what they’d looked like as children, Kenzie searched the room for pictures of Chance and Lucky, but didn’t see any. “Where are the pictures of you and Lucky?”

  “Mom never took any and didn’t buy our school pictures.” He shrugged. “This is where I come from, Kenzie. My mom was sixteen when she had me. Her mother threw her out, ashamed her unwed teenage daughter had given birth to a bastard.”

  Kenzie gasped. “She didn’t actually call you that?”

  “That and a few other things, but she ended up taking me in because my mother didn’t really take care of me. I was raised by her for the first three years of my life, but she died of cancer and I was returned to my mother.” He glanced around. “She was living here with some guy so this became my home. A year later Lucky was born.”

  “So, you have different fathers.”

  “Yes.” He scratched his head as he turned toward the small kitchen area. “My mom was messing around with a few guys when she got pregnant with me. Both men had dark hair and blue eyes. It took a court-ordered paternity test to figure out which one fathered me, and then he cut his required weekly checks. That was the extent of his parenting.”

  Chance walked over to the refrigerator and lay his hand on the door. “This is the refrigerator that hardly ever had food in it. A high school dropout with a small child, my mother couldn’t find a good job and the guy she was with when I was returned to her left. She decided to use her talents to her advantage. After putting me to sleep with cough syrup, she’d go to bars looking for the perfect target.”

  “She left a toddler home all alone?” Kenzie shook her head in disbelief, her heart breaking as she pictured a three-year-old Chance in the trailer all alone at night. The fact his mother would induce sleep with medication appalled her.

  “She figured I couldn’t get into any trouble if I was knocked out,” he responded with another shrug, but his eyes belied the pain of the memory. “She was nineteen by then, but looked older. I imagine she knew which bars carded and which didn’t because she managed to meet up with a wealthy married man in one. Lucky was born a little after her twentieth birthday. I remember her talking to a friend, saying she would name him Lucky Penny because he was going to be her good luck piece.” His lip curled in disgust. “She had it all planned out. Get knocked up by a wealthy, married man and blackmail him into taking care of her, but it backfired. I don’t know what he did, but I remember a couple of men coming here with knives. She never bothered the man again.”

  “Oh, Chance.” Kenzie raised her hand to her chest, resting it over her rapidly beating heart. “You saw that?”

  “I saw worse than that.” He glanced at her briefly before lowering his gaze to the floor, shame coloring the skin over his cheekbones. “She was even worse off with two kids and only one of them bringing in child support. My father gave the bare minimum and never bothered with me at all, and Lucky cost a lot to take care of, still being in diapers and taking formula. My mother had never been very warm, but she got worse after Lucky was born. She seemed to blame him for her plan backfiring, as if it was the kid’s fault his father wouldn’t play her game. If I hadn’t been here to feed and change him, I’m afraid to think what would have happened to him considering she all but quit paying him any attention after his first birthday.”

  “Feed and change…” Kenzie blinked. “Chance, you were just a little boy.”

  “I was never a little boy,” he said, eyes bleak. “I’ve never had a childhood. I took care of Lucky better than she did. And I took care of myself.”

  He jerked his head to the left and led her down a short, narrow hallway. Two rooms sat side by side. The first one held a full-sized bed and a dresser. Posters of wild horses adorned the walls and a prize buckle rested on a display shelf. “Lucky still stays here when he’s off the circuit, but this used to be our room.”

  Kenzie looked around the small room, trying to imagine how cramped it would be with two beds and toys, provided they’d had toys to play with. “No wonder you and Lucky are so close.”

  He nodded as he stepped forward and rested his hand against a spot on the wall that looked as if it had been patched up with plaster. “This is the spot where one of my mom’s boyfriends rammed my head into the wall when I was about twelve. They’d been fighting over who would get the last of whatever drug it was they were taking that night and he backhanded her. I tackled him, but he was bigger than me and amped up on the drugs. Lucky knocked him out with a baseball bat before he could do anything worse to me.”

  Kenzie gasped as the image played through her mind. As big and strong as he was, she’d never imagined he could have been in such a situation. Suddenly his gruff hardness made sense to her. He’d had to be tough in order to survive the hell he was put through as a child.

  She reached out to him, but he slipped past her and stood in the doorway of the other bedroom. The full-sized bed had red silk sheets and a black frame which matched the dresser and night stands. The ceiling above the bed was all mirror.

  “This is where my mother brought men home to service in exchange for drugs and money,” he nearly whispered. “When we were older, we stayed gone as much as possible, but when we were little we had no choice but to hear them while we tried to sleep in the next room.”

  Kenzie covered her mouth and swallowed back bile, disgusted by what the woman had put her boys through. “She died young. Was it because of the drugs?”

  He nodded, his eyes wet. “Lucky found her sprawled out in her bed, a needle still in her arm. We don’t even know if it was intentional or not because…” He turned around and opened the door at the end of the small hallway, revealing a bathroom barely large enough to turn around in. “We found her here a few times, either with her wrists cut or a couple of empty pill bottles next to her.”

  “Oh my god…” Kenzie’s heart lurched. “Poor Lucky. No wonder he took the death of that woman so hard.”

  “It certainly didn’t help that my mother always blamed us for everything.” Chance let out a sound that could have been a chuckle, but was far too bitter. “I stayed here for twenty-five damn years and gave her so much…she could have left this dump, but every penny I sent her went to drugs. Lucky tried to take care of her, but he didn’t stay out on the circuit as long as me, scared to leave her for too long of a stretch. You never knew when she’d overdose or bring home a guy who’d love nothing more than to treat her like a punching bag.”

  “The only time I was ever happy, was while I was working on your father’s ranch,” Chance confessed. “Lucky and I were treated like the white trash we were while at school, and we did more fighting than studying. We both barely got our diplomas, too busy working to keep ourselves fed because our mother sure wasn’t concerned with whether we ate or not. School was just something we did because the law said we had to.”

  “Oh, Chance, why didn’t you tell the authorities? They could have taken you out of here.” Kenzie wiped away the tears that trickled down her cheek.

  He laughed, and again it sounded bitter. “Despite everything, she was our mother, and like all children, we craved her love. We cared about her. We felt like we had to take care of her and
couldn’t do that if the state took us away. So, we just made do the best we could.”

  “But you finally left ten years ago.”

  He nodded. “Like I said, I was happiest while working at the ranch. I was able to stay close enough to make sure Lucky and Mom were all right, but I still lived away from here. I was good at ranch work and for once in my life I didn’t feel stupid. Men looked up to me. Then there was you.” His lips turned up into a half smile. “You looked at me and it was as if you saw your hero. Despite everything, I never got that feeling from Lucky. I did the best I could for him, but I could only do so much. All I had to do for you was answer a few silly questions and your whole face lit up. You grew on me, but then…then you started growing into a woman and despite trying my damnedest, I couldn’t ignore it.”

  He ran his fingers along Kenzie’s cheek before sliding his hands into his pockets and leaning back against the wall. “I wasn’t book-smart, didn’t have much in my pockets, and spent a lot of nights knocking back beers at Hell’s Belle and hooking up with women who weren’t much better than my own mother. When you started flirting with me, it filled me with a fear unlike anything I’d ever felt before. You were so smart and beautiful, so innocent…you had the life Lucky and I dreamed of. Your age thankfully kept us apart, but once you hit eighteen and came on to me in your kitchen…” He shook his head and held out his hands, palms up. “This is what I come from. This is what I am. I couldn’t taint you with this.”

  Kenzie took a deep breath to combat the wrenching sob her body ached to give into. She looked around the trailer, imagining the pain that had been felt within its walls, and wanted to scream. “You could have told me all this. Instead, you just left.” Fresh tears spilled free and she swiped at them. “Why did you think I’d stop loving you just because of your childhood?”

  He frowned, his brow wrinkled in thought. “Your father treated you like a princess. That ranch was like a castle to me, and your family was royalty. I was just a bum pretending to be a knight. Men like Will are more fitting.”

  “You’ve never been a bum.” Kenzie sighed. “One of the things I’ve always loved about you is that you’ve worked for everything you have. I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you, and Will was just…Will was a last resort, a desperate attempt to get over you once and for all since you seemed hell bent on never really being mine.”

  “I thought you’d worked me up as some kind of hero in your mind, and didn’t think it was right to let you believe that.”

  “You are a hero in my mind, and in my heart, but it’s not something I’ve just worked up in my head.” Kenzie stepped forward and slid her hands up Chance’s chest, wrapping them around the back of his neck. “You saved me from a raging bull, and have taken care of your little brother since you were just a kid yourself. You’re helping with my ranch because you know it’s important to me, and even that incident ten years ago was your way of protecting me from what you thought would have caused me great pain. You are a hero in my mind, Chance. My hero.”

  He swallowed hard, his eyes wet. “Even knowing everything, you still want me?”

  “Especially knowing everything.” She kissed him, pouring her heart and soul into the action. “All you’ve done by bringing me here is shown me you’re an even better man than I thought.”

  Chance closed his eyes and took a deep breath, the exhale shaky with emotion. “Come on, princess. Let’s get out of here. I’m through with this place once and for all.”

  Chapter Ten

  Kenzie finished blow-drying her hair and tightened the sash of her robe before stepping out of the bathroom. She found Chance where she’d left him, sitting in front of the computer at her father’s desk. He smiled as he hung up the phone.

  “Was that Lucky?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How is he?” she asked as she slid behind the chair and wrapped her arms around Chance, leaning forward to rest her chin on his shoulder.

  “He seems all right.” Chance reached up and snagged her arm, pulling her around and drawing her down to sit in his lap. “The woman who came to town looking for him is the sister of the woman who killed herself in his motel room. She had questions about her sister, but Lucky said she didn’t hold him accountable. Apparently, the woman had a lot of problems.”

  “Hopefully now Lucky can quit feeling so guilty.” Kenzie rested her head along Chance’s shoulder and looked at the spreadsheet on the computer monitor. “So…how does everything look?”

  “Everything looks great.”

  Kenzie tilted her head so she could see Chance’s face. “I can take the truth. I know it can’t be that great with what little I’ve done to keep the number of the herd up.”

  “No, but once we buy some more at auction and hire on a full crew to work the ranch, we’ll have this place running just the way your father did.”

  Kenzie looked back at the spreadsheet, trying to see where he’d found the money for that. “There’s enough funds to hire on a full crew so soon and buy more cattle at auction? I’ve looked over those records a hundred times and haven’t found anywhere near enough for all that.”

  He tensed. “I told you I’ve put back enough money to buy my own little ranch. Since you want to keep this land, I’ll put the money into it.”

  Kenzie smiled as she pressed her lips to his. “I told you I don’t care about money or what material things you can give me.”

  “I know, but I can’t walk into this marriage with nothing. I’m buying the cattle and hiring the ranch hands we need. It’s not just for you, but for our children’s future.”

  Her heart swelled at the thought and she closed her eyes before tears could form. “I love you,” she whispered, praying he didn’t react to the words the way he had a decade before.

  “I love you, too,” he replied, voice raw.

  Capturing her mouth with his, he kissed her senseless as his hand slipped through the robe to trail up her thigh. Pulling back, he glanced down.

  “Kenzie, what do you have on under this robe?”

  She grinned. “My birthday suit.”

  “Lord have mercy.” Chance stood from the chair, lifting her in his arms. “Where’s your bedroom?”

  “Our bedroom is upstairs at the end of the hall.”

  “I like the sound of that.”

  He reached the bedroom in record time and gently lowered her to her feet before reaching for her sash.

  “Wait.” Kenzie clutched the sash, suddenly nervous. The last two times they’d come close, she’d been caught up in the rush, but now she stood before him as if she were on display. What if he didn’t like what he saw?

  “What’s wrong?” He sighed when she didn’t answer. “It’s all right, Kenz. If you want to wait until the wedding, we can wait. I’ll wait as long as you want.”

  “I know you would.” All the men she’d dated in the years he’d been gone had pushed and coaxed, but Chance had always known he could have her. Yet, he’d refrained, her emotional well-being always at the forefront of his mind. Taking a deep breath and blinking back tears, Kenzie made quick work of the buttons on his shirt. “But I can’t wait any longer.”

  Buttons on his shirt undone, Kenzie slid it down his shoulders and unfastened his belt with trembling hands. After a few fumbles with the snap of his jeans, Chance took over and soon they were both naked on the bed. “Beautiful,” Chance murmured before planting a soft kiss against her stomach.

  Kenzie sucked in a gasp from the sensation of his soft lips against her sensitive skin. Now would be a good time to tell him she’d never done this before, but she’d said things to make him believe otherwise and feared he’d think she was lying, which would ruin the moment. She decided against it, knowing as long as he went slow he couldn’t hurt her more than what was unavoidable.

  He turned her on her stomach and slowly kissed down the length of her spine, adding little flicks of his tongue along the way. The tickling sensation made Kenzie squirm and dig her fingers into the mattr
ess while fighting back the urge to squeal in delight. “Oh my gosh, that feels so good.”

  He chuckled against the small of her back, his breath tickling her skin even more and she did squeal as he started his way back up her spine, teasing with lips and tongue as he slid a hand around to graze her belly before sliding down between her legs.

  She gasped, never having been touched there before, and tensed. The brief fear quickly subsided as he used his hand to gently stroke her while kissing a trail along her shoulder. Wonderful sensations built inside her, drawing whimpers of fulfillment from her throat. He caught her earlobe in his mouth and gently nibbled while his hand quickened its rhythm, causing her breath to come out in rapid bursts.

  A tingle started where he rubbed her and intensified until it exploded through her body, making her cry out and momentarily forget how to breathe. “What was that?” she asked after getting her breathing back under control.

  “Round one.”

  Chance turned her so she rested on her back and covered her body with his. Her legs trembled in nervous anticipation as he raised her thigh and connected their bodies, pausing when he met resistance. His brow furrowed as he pushed again, and Kenzie winced at the tiny flare of pain.

  He froze, his eyes questioning as they met hers. “Kenzie?”

  “You can tell?”

  His eyes widened before he blinked and looked down at where their bodies were joined. When he returned his gaze to hers, his eyes were shiny with unshed tears. “You waited.”

  She nodded. “I’d already given you my heart. My body is the other half of the set. Both have always been yours.”

  He rested his forehead against hers for a moment before kissing it. “If it hurts too bad, I don’t care how far along we are or what you think I want, you tell me and I’ll stop. Do you understand?”

  She nodded and he kissed her long and hard before slowly easing deeper inside her. Kenzie gritted her teeth against the pain, knowing if she made the slightest sound of discomfort he’d stop, and she’d waited too long for Chance to stop now.