At last he stroked her hair softly and kissed the top of her head. “It sucks,” he said.
“I’m sorry.” She broke the spell with her voice and pulled away from him. “That was childish.”
“Sometimes it’s the only thing that helps.”
She couldn’t imagine him breaking down this way, but she didn’t say so. Straightening, she wiped her tears away with heavy strokes of her fingers and drew a deep breath for courage.
“I thought I’d come so far in the past few weeks. So much was because of you.”
“You’ve done a lot of things you didn’t realize you could do. All I did was irritate you enough to make you move.” He smiled and caught a last tear from her cheek with his thumb.
She wanted to melt into the touch, but she wasn’t ready for this closeness. He hadn’t solved her problems—he’d only made her face them. The next steps she had to take on her own.
“I think I actually appreciate that now.”
“I’d say we’re making progress.”
“No, Alec, wait. Before anything goes further between us, or I give you the wrong idea about getting involved with you, I think we need to slow this way down. In fact, I’ve come to the realization we need to part. As friends.” Pain stabbed her chest at the words. She ignored it. “I haven’t made all that much progress yet. I have a lot to figure out. I’m also still a married woman. If Tim sees—”
“You don’t have to be a married woman,” he said. “It can be over in five seconds.”
“I’m going to the lawyer tomorrow. I’m drawing up a counter to Tim’s offer that gives me spousal support until the insurance claim with the lumber company is settled. That will at least send Tim a message, and I can survive on that and a part-time job.”
“That’s your way of getting back at him?”
“Money is the only thing he understands.”
“No. He understands dickwad behavior. And he understands success. You being successful and overcoming his dickwaddedness will send a much stronger signal than tying yourself to him financially.”
“There you go with unsolicited advice again. What I do about this is none of your business. We barely know each other.”
“I don’t know. I think we’re more alike than different. I think we do know each other.”
“I know you love to butt into my life.”
“I want to know why you don’t see your own potential. You just showed everyone what a fantastic veterinarian you could be. It’s more than delivering a foal; it’s about dealing with the pressure. Jumping in to solve a problem without fear or second-guessing. You have a gift, pursue that.”
Anger surged through her calm. This was exactly what she’d listened to so many years before in her father’s study.
“Don’t talk to me about my gifts or what I can do with them. You talk a big story, but you have your demons, too, Alec. The difference is, I respect mine.”
“What does that even mean?”
“You were there. I can’t even get up off the barn floor on my own after sitting there for twenty minutes. So just like your excuse that there are things a prosthetic leg won’t let you do, there are things a veterinarian in a wheelchair can’t do.”
“Then get out of the wheelchair.”
“Then you get up on that horse.” At the shock in his eyes, she nodded curtly and scrambled awkwardly to her feet. “That’s right, Alec. You hide things, too. You haven’t got it all so perfectly worked out after all, and you haven’t conquered this injury as completely as you pretend. So from now on—no telling me what to do until you’ve got it all figured out yourself.”
“You’ve got it wrong,” he said as he also stood. “I don’t get on a bucking horse because it’s something specific I’ve chosen not to do. You? You’re running away in general. You haven’t made any big, philosophical decision about your life. You’re reacting. To Tim, to your anger, to me. At least I ride horses. You say you can’t ever ride again. How do you know?”
“Because I remember exactly what it requires and I can’t do it.”
“Aw, hell. You’ve never tried.”
Her leg nearly buckled beneath her. She wished for her wheelchair. For its safety and its mobility and the extension of her body it had become in the past six months. She didn’t even know where it was.
“I’m not competing in a ‘who has the worst leg injury’ contest with you. Our wounds are different. You have your reasons for not riding. I have mine. Nobody has the deeper hurt.”
“I don’t think this is about wounds,” he said quietly. “I think it’s about fear. I think this is because I kissed you yesterday and you kissed me back, and that means you did something crazy that you wanted to do. You don’t know how to handle that, Joely. You need to learn how to be you and love it.”
“I think maybe I’d like to go home now,” she replied.
She didn’t even want to respond to his ridiculous theory. Kissing him had nothing to do with her anger at his current arrogance—thinking he could comment incessantly on her life. She’d liked the dang kiss. She’d thought about little else for twenty-four hours. She just didn’t want another. Alec Morrissey messed up her head.
“No,” he said, throwing her further off balance. “You need to stay and put on a good show for your family. They want to pat you on the back even if you don’t. I’ll tell Gabe I have an unexpected emergency and need to leave. Someone will take you home later.”
Really?
“Fine.” She tried to sound flippant. It came out angry.
He nodded curtly. Halfway to the door he looked back. “Just so you know. The kiss was pretty amazing. You’re a special woman in more ways than one. But it didn’t mean I was looking for a sudden commitment. I don’t want serious, heavy relationships. As you can see, they don’t go well for me. So you didn’t have to be nervous. I never intended to be more than a fling.”
He left.
She didn’t feel a shred of relief.
ALEC TOSSED HIS briefcase across the driver’s seat of his truck to the passenger side and climbed behind the wheel, giving the door to the Breswell Trucking building a visual check. Locked and secured. He scanned the yard one last time for anything unusual, saw nothing but the small fleet of four trucks that weren’t currently out on runs, and started the pickup. He’d stayed as long as he could justify. He had to go home.
He’d have blown it off and gone into Jackson for distraction if Rowan hadn’t been waiting for him. Sitting in his stark, recently moved-into living room alone with his dog, the television, and a can of soup for company had lost its appeal over the past two days. Since the weekend’s two disastrous days—dealing with Vince’s grinding push to have him rejoin the rodeo topped off by effing it up with Joely—he didn’t want to sit anywhere he’d have time and space to think.
He could take Rowan with him and go to that warehouse pet emporium in Jackson where dogs could accompany their owners into the store. It might be entertaining, or at least distracting, to watch people give wide berth to his monstrous pet. They could stop for fast food—Rowan liked a greasy burger as much as the next human.
By the time she was greeting him in her usual indecorous way, he’d decided to follow his plan. He was a big boy who’d survived happily without rodeo or Joely Crockett for the past three-plus years. He didn’t need to sit on his sorry ass and contemplate navel lint just because he’d had a bad weekend.
“How about we go for a ride?” he said as he opened the door to the back. Rowan hesitated and looked up, backing away from the deck. She knew the word “ride.” “No, you go out first. I’ll check e-mail and then we’ll leave.”
She slipped out the door, and he closed it behind her. She eyed him balefully for a moment and then clumped down the steps like a sullen child. Alec made his way to the bedroom, unbuttoning his shirt as he went. He didn’t have a fancy job where he needed ties or coats. In fact most of his coworkers were ex-truckers who preferred plaid cotton or logo-fronted hoodies. His wardrob
e choice was generally casual dress slacks and button-down shirts with the occasional polo thrown in. He made it a point to avoid anything that hinted of western yokes, horse motifs, or cowboy culture. No boots, no ostentatious buckles. Definitely no cowboy hat. He still loved jeans and boots, but he wasn’t going to advertise it at Breswell. The less often they remembered him as Alec Morrissey, the rodeo champion, the better.
He’d been there just shy of two months, and they were already taking him seriously. He’d moved from being a simple dispatcher for the medium-sized transport company to working with the schedulers. He was efficient and kept his mouth shut, and they all forgot, most of the time, he was anything but a nobody working his way up. The persona he was developing there helped him forget, too. He didn’t honestly want to stay in the low-level job for long. There wasn’t exactly potential for riches even if he rose to the top in a few years, but it was honest work. It paid a salary good enough to live on and kept him far away from the Jackson rodeo scene. Assuming he could keep Vince’s annoying ideas from infiltrating his life, the job would serve him well until he decided what he wanted to do when he grew up. He wasn’t in a hurry.
His shirt went into an old green laundry basket that served as a hamper. He’d worn the shirt twice, he could wash it. He unzipped his pants, pulled them down, and sat on the edge of the mattress in his boxers. With a sigh he eased his own leg out of the prosthetic socket and let the artificial limb slide to the floor. He pulled the pants all the way off and tossed them after the shirt. He rubbed the stump of his leg absently, glad for the relief from the pressure, and tried to decide if he wanted to go to town in shorts and play the wounded vet game, or just be normal as he usually was. It was warm today—he’d imagined the cooler shorts—but then the image of Joely standing beside him, seeing him bare-chested in his cotton boxers from Target sitting on the edge of his bed with half a leg sticking out like an appendage from his knee, gripped him.
For the first time in a very long while—years perhaps—his leg embarrassed him. He had no reason to think she’d react badly to seeing the empty space between the stump and the floor, but he suddenly didn’t want to find out. Not that there was any chance of it happening; he just couldn’t stand the thought of not being whole in front of her.
He stood and hopped the four feet to his walk-in closet, using a strategically placed dresser and chair as guides along the way. He grabbed his dynamic walking foot and jammed it on. Then he picked his most comfortable jeans off the floor where they lived when not on his body or in the wash. A few moments later, he was dressed, his work shoes had been swapped for running shoes, and his embarrassment had turned to anger.
Who was this girl that she made him change his routine mentally and physically just to get away from the memory of her slender curves, her bright smile, and her snappy comebacks? People met other people all the time. They went in and out of each other’s lives, and nobody was the worse for the experience. Joely was changing something he didn’t want her to change. She’d started out as a good deed, but she’d turned into a living, breathing, smart and insightful person. She’d dug beneath his façade. She’d exposed the little lies he’d told himself about being healed, even while she was healing herself. He didn’t like that part. He wanted to be glad that he’d given her a taste of what was to come and let her go. Instead she was working her way into his life whether either of them wanted it or not.
Rowan stood by the patio door, her tail wagging her entire body. When Alec slid the door open, the dog jumped in and trotted straight to the garage door. He shook his head.
“You scare me,” he said. “You aren’t supposed to understand and process human speech. And I never even said anything about a hamburger.”
Rowan yipped and looked pleadingly over her shoulder.
“Still have to make a quick check of e-mail,” Alec said. “Come get your treat.”
He settled Rowan temporarily with her bone and went to the computer. He went through the junk mail that showed up every day and scrolled down a screen before he saw the message from Vince. His finger froze over the name but only for a moment. He clicked and read.
“Here are mock-ups of two new flyers. If you approve the pictures I’ll send them to the printer tomorrow. Ghost Pepper’s first rodeo will be July fourth—that’s just over three weeks. C’mon, man, put it on your calendar. Even if you’re just sitting in the bleachers, you know you should be there. Your lady will be. I talked to one of her sisters about Paradise Ranch being a sponsor for the event that night. She was excited and agreed, and she promised to bring a big group from the ranch to watch. I asked her please to try and get the former Miss Wyoming to come. Yes, jackass, I did my homework on you and on her. Let me know about the flyers. P.S.—I lied. This is all about the bet and the hat.”
Alec bolted to his feet, running his hand roughly through his hair. Damn. Damn. Damn it. The man was shameless. He dared to mention the hat after everything Alec had warned? And the scumbag had invited Joely to participate? That was below the belt.
After a minute the frustration abated. It didn’t matter anymore, he reminded himself. Joely was not his lady. There’d never been anything between them, and she could certainly do as she liked. Still, he blew out a hard breath, trying to ignore the battalion of wings beating through his chest at the memories of the girl who didn’t matter.
He sat back down and clicked on one of the attachments. He had to admit the flyer was eye-catching. Colorful lettering at the top spelled out Jackson Hole Rodeo. The background picture showed the beautiful low mountains surrounding the rodeo grounds. In the middle was his picture—Ghost Pepper fully airborne, his back arched beneath his saddle and his body twisted in two directions—that insane move Alec had studied to no avail until his eyes had practically melted out of his head. Alec himself was stretched straight up, heels at the horse’s neck, one arm raised in perfect position. The second flyer’s picture showed Ghost Pepper head-on, and Alec was the airborne one, his legs and arms splayed on his way to eating dirt.
“Spice up your summer nights. Treat yourself to Ghost Pepper’s return at the Jackson Hole Rodeo,” read the first sign.
“Ghost Pepper—the hottest of the hot broncs: back for the summer at Jackson Hole Rodeo,” said the other.
Alec studied them, distracting himself from his anger. After a few more minutes he hit reply and typed quickly.
“The pictures are fine. Make the headlines punchier—they’re too windy like a girl wrote them. Use something like, ‘He’s back. And nobody can handle a Ghost Pepper.’ Or ‘Ghost Pepper returns . . . still so hot, cowboys eat dirt to cool down.’ Not coming to the rodeo. Don’t bring up the damn hat again.”
He hit send before he could rethink his reply, and then he shut down the computer before crazy Vince could respond. The man was probably sitting there waiting for Alec’s message.
“Let’s go,” he called to Rowan. “Ride in the car?”
She jumped to her feet and raced back to the garage door. “Let me grab my sweatshirt in case we stay out past dark,” he said and went to the bedroom. He grabbed a zippered gray Wisconsin Badgers hoodie off the shelf in his closet, and his eyes drifted to the square, white box pushed as far back onto one top shelf as he’d been able to get it.
Anger swelled up against grief, and his throat closed with pain. He lifted his arms to reach for the box, but he stopped himself with effort.
No. He hadn’t looked in the box in nearly four years. He wasn’t going to do it now. Damn Vince for dragging all the memories and feelings back into play. The hat stayed where it was. If he were a stronger person he’d get rid of it, but the mere idea of such a thing was ludicrous. He wasn’t a stronger person.
He pushed back the pictures of Buzz and his cocky, hell-raising grin taking everybody in and inviting each one to love him—which they inevitably had. “Keep this safe,” he’d said of the hat. “It could be yours. You take that horse to eight seconds, and I’ll take over the black hat when I get back.
”
Alec didn’t want the hat. But it wasn’t going back to being the object of a bar bet made over ill-advised tequila shots either. Vince could shove tequila bets up where the sun didn’t shine until his ass got drunk. He wasn’t getting possession of Buzz’s ghost.
“It’s your fault,” Alec said aloud, his voice shaking. He hadn’t talked to his cousin’s ghost in years either. “You had to fall in love with the army life, you freak. If you’d come home with me, come back to the life you were supposed to love, I wouldn’t give a flying shit about Vince Newton, I’d still have my leg, and I’d probably have won another championship on the back of the frickin’ horse. So, yeah, I blame you.”
He’d made the same speech to Buzz many times in the past. He knew his ghostly cousin was haunting the corner of some bar somewhere, laughing uproariously, and telling all his ghost drinking buddies that his cousin was hilarious.
“I’m serious this time,” Alec said, still angry and feeling like an imbecile for talking to a half-empty closet.
He shut off the closet light, left the room, and grabbed Rowan’s leash off the old table by the front door. All the way into the city, Rowan grinned out her opened window while the wind whipped her ears back and flapped her doggy lips so her teeth were bared to passing cars. By the time they reached the pet store, Alec’s anger, if not every bit of fresh sadness, had dissipated and he knew he’d made the right decision to leave home.
Rowan did her job well, padding regally beside him down the aisles as he picked up a large bag of her dog food, two boxes of the bones she loved, and an expensive bag of meatier treats for special occasions. Two women oohed over her—true dog lovers. But two gave her obvious wide berths, their eyes reflecting the uncertainty that such an enormous animal could actually be safe. And when they turned down the toy aisle so Rowan could browse, a small girl of about ten actually let out a scream. It was all evilly satisfying.
The Bride Wore Starlight Page 21
