Cowboys Can’t Lie (A Lily’s House Novella)

by Rachel Branton

  Being here was familiar and comfortable, and he felt himself relaxing. He’d grown up in this house, but ten years ago when they’d built the training stables, they’d also built the new house. Breeding and training Thoroughbreds was all about appearances, his grandfather had said, and folks who dropped seventy grand on a stud fee expected a wealthy atmosphere. The new house had been the one thing his father and grandfather hadn’t argued about. Now Crew was the only one who lived there.

  Like the men who boarded, Crew always ate at Isaac and Julie’s. Julie was a fabulous cook, and it was good to unwind before heading home. If he didn’t eat here, for whatever reason, he was more likely to fall into bed without eating and watch TV until he slept.

  Julie emerged from the house and set a large bowl of stew and a plate with two biscuits in front of him. “Extra biscuit?”

  He smiled wearily as he removed his hat and placed it next to the bowl. “You know it. Thanks.”

  She set her hand on his shoulder. “You work too hard.”

  “We could say the same about Isaac. He’s back out with the cows.”

  She laughed. “He’s a stubborn old fool. But maybe once we’re past the danger.”

  The danger of losing everything because of what his father had done. Isaac, as the ranch manager, might be an employee, but he was also a shareholder, and Crew considered him a partner.

  “I’ll make sure he rests then,” he told Julie. For as long as he remembered, Julie had been here on the ranch, and after his grandmother had gone, followed by his mother, Julie had been a mother figure for him.

  Marti, Isaac’s adult daughter, emerged from the house, opening a Dr. Pepper and setting it in front of him. The sun hung low in the sky, glinting through her red hair. “Hard day?”

  “Less than usual,” he said. But he did feel tired. Bone tired.

  Marti sat down next to him, far enough away so she didn’t touch his mud-caked leg. “Poor baby,” she said, pushing out her bottom lip. “What you need is a little more fun in your life.”

  “Maybe.” He shoveled in a few more bites.

  She laughed. “You know I’m right.” She chatted on about all the fun things he could do as he only half listened.

  Marti could rope and ride as well as any cowboy, but she planned to become a veterinarian. Someday he’d hire her full time. He occasionally found himself wishing she weren’t his second cousin who seemed more like a little sister because it would be a darn sight easier to marry a cowgirl like her than go out and find someone who was suited for this life. At twenty-two, she was six years younger than he was, but that wasn’t much.

  “So how’s college?” he asked her when he was almost finished with his stew.

  “Good. Really good.” She watched him eat for a few more minutes before adding, “I met someone last week. We’ve been out three times since. Name’s Trevor Hadfield.”

  He stopped chewing. “And?”

  “I think I’m going to marry him.”

  “Don’t you think it’s a little soon to be picking out china and debating baby names?”

  “Sometimes one look is all it takes.”

  Crew had a sudden vision of walking out of the training stables to see Tara Levine staring at him. He also thought about how she’d acted around the Thoroughbred foals.

  “Crew?” Marti bent over to look at him.

  He shook his head to clear it. “Sorry. Been a long day.” He guzzled his drink, folded his two biscuits in a napkin, and stood. “I’d better get home. I wanted to look over the books again.”

  She jumped up from the table. “I’ll walk with you. I don’t get to see you enough. I’d been planning to ask you to go for a ride tonight, but I can see that ain’t going to happen. What you need is a nice hot bath.”

  That did sound good, and heaven knew his jetted tub was comfortable.

  She laughed at his blissful expression. “Guess I’ll settle for walking you home.”

  Crew was glad for the company. As a child, she and Sophie had tagged along behind him everywhere. Sometimes he’d been annoyed, but when they’d finally grown up, they’d all been friends. His house was only a half mile away, and they walked along the grassy back road in silence as he munched on his biscuits. There had probably been cake too, but he wasn’t going back for a slice now.

  They talked about casual things, laughing about her experiences at school and how he’d ended up covered in mud. When they reached his back lawn, Marti stopped and turned to him, her face serious. “So what are you going to do about the gray foal? You’ve finally got him. Now what?”

  He didn’t know, plain and simple. He’d bred that gray foal for Sophie, but he had no idea how to reach her or where she was.

  “It’s time,” Marti said, taking his free hand. “I miss her too. She was my best friend.”

  The words bit at him, because despite the four years between him and Sophie, she had been his best friend and he had been hers. Even before Marti. They’d been motherless and grandmotherless. No children knew loss the way they did.

  “She wasn’t your best friend,” he shot back, pulling his hand away. “And she wasn’t mine. Or she wouldn’t have run away.”

  “She was hurting,” Marti said.

  Unbidden fury swept through him. “So was I! I didn’t leave her.”

  “That’s because you’re responsible, and she was still a kid. Besides, you had Iron Express.”

  He turned away, pacing. “I’d have given him up a million times for her. I’d have given up this whole ranch!”

  “You don’t mean that.”

  He faced her. “Even when my father gave Jump Start and the other horses to High Vista. When he gave our land to them. When he caused the death of two hundred head of cattle—or four hundred if you also count the unborn calves—because he wanted the money to drink himself to death. Never mind what Grandpa had wanted. Never mind that he screwed me and your dad. Never mind that he broke Sophie’s heart. Even when he did all that, we came away stronger. All of us. All of us but Sophie. I was still here. You were still here. Your parents were still here. We’re family, all of us fighting for the ranch together, but she threw us away. And don’t tell me again that she was a kid. She was barely younger than you are now.”

  He didn’t realize his hurt had grown into such anger. Was it only yesterday he’d thought about hiring another investigator to find Sophie? Not a day had gone by when he hadn’t thought about his sister, wondering if she was dead in a ditch or if she’d found a safe place to land. Three years of not knowing. That was what hurt most of all. Because his sister was out there somewhere, and he couldn’t take care of her. If she was alive, she probably still hated him for not saving Jump Start. Failing her and his grandfather hurt more than Crew could admit, even to Marti.

  “Maybe that’s the curse of my family,” he said, his tongue tasting like acid. “Maybe all the women are destined to leave.”

  “Hey, I’m a woman in this family,” Marti retorted. “Just because your mother couldn’t hack it here doesn’t mean the rest of us will leave. I will never leave the Silver A. I love it here.”

  Crew’s anger slid from him at the hurt in his cousin’s eyes. “I’m sorry. I’m out of line.”

  “You sure are.” Marti glared at him for several seconds before closing the gap between them, reaching up to pull his forehead down to hers, nearly tipping off his hat. “Sophie will come back when she’s ready.”

  Again the fury and betrayal welled up inside him, but he fought it down. “I no longer care if she ever comes back.”

  His attempt didn’t fool Marti. “Does that mean you’re selling the foal?” When he didn’t respond, she laughed softly and said, “I didn’t think so. You’d better get rid of that anger before she does come back, or you’ll scare her away.”

  “Go home, Marti.” He lifted his head from hers.

  She nodded. “You need more fun. Remember that.”

  With a kiss on his cheek, she turned and strode across the grass
, walking like the rancher she was. Tears threatened as he recalled Sophie walking the same way, but he squelched the emotion as he had so many times since she’d left. As of this moment, he was going to follow Marti’s recommendation and find some fun.

  No sooner had the thought come to his mind than his eyes caught something out of his peripheral vision. He rotated to face the newcomer and felt a tightening in his chest as he saw Tara Levine strolling toward him across the grass. She was wearing jean shorts that made her legs look as if they went on forever, and her red blouse set off her ample curves perfectly. She flipped her long hair over her shoulder and gave him a tentative smile. She was gorgeous.

  As if he’d stepped from the darkness into the sunshine, all anger left and his weariness vanished. This night had just gotten a whole lot better.

  Chapter 5

  Tara had sat in the parking lot at the Silver A Ranch for fifteen minutes, debating if she should use the small connecting road that wound up to the front of Crew’s house instead of leaving her car in the regular parking lot. Using that parking lot meant approaching the house from the rear, and that felt a little like intrusion, despite the light burning inside his office at the back of the house. As she debated, she’d seen a of couple workers going in and out of the training stables, and one woman had come to drop off her horse. Compared to yesterday, the parking lot was almost deserted.

  Finally, she grabbed the boots by the tops and decided to walk up the pathway from the parking lot and knock on his office door. She was halfway up the cement path when she heard voices arguing. The next step brought her into view of a couple behind the gazebo that sat a short distance from Crew’s back deck. It was Crew with a fiery-haired woman.

  Tara hesitated as the voices raised in anger and then lowered. Finally, the couple stood in an oddly intimate moment, forehead to forehead before the woman kissed Crew’s cheek and sauntered away.

  Maybe now wasn’t a good time. Tara could come back later or let the girls return the boots for her after all.

  No. She’d come all this way, and what did she care about the redhead? Crew had asked her to go for a ride, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t dating others. She certainly wasn’t traipsing out here again just because she’d accidentally stumbled on a private moment between Crew and a beautiful woman.

  So why did she feel so disappointed?

  She took three more steps, and finally he turned toward her. A smile appeared on his face, sending tingles up her arms and through her chest. He was every bit as attractive as she remembered from yesterday.

  “Hi there,” he said as they both continued to close the gap. “What brings you out here? Don’t tell me the girls are giving up already?” He hooked a thumb in one of his front pockets as he came to a stop.

  She laughed. “No, they texted me a dozen times after they got home. They love it. In fact, they want to stay longer each day. I told them they needed to work at least a week before they asked to change anything.” She held up the boots. “Anyway, I brought these back.”

  “Thank you.” He reached out for the boots. “You’ll have to excuse all the dirt. I wasn’t expecting company.”

  She’d been far too busy staring into his eyes and losing herself in their brown depths to notice before, but now that he mentioned it, he did look like he’d walked through knee-deep mud at some point during the day.

  “You only now finishing work?”

  “Pretty much. Just came from dinner.”

  “I hope I’m not interrupting.”

  “Not at all.”

  Should she leave? What she really wanted to do was to ask him about what she’d found out on the Internet, specifically where his sister had vanished to, and how High Vista had ended up with Jump Start.

  Lily always told her she liked to start at the end instead of taking the proper steps to get where she needed to go. That was also part of why dating didn’t go well for her—she could always tell it would end terribly right from the start, so what was the purpose in giving it a decent try? The truth was that people left. They always left. Always. It was a lesson she’d learned very young.

  Her excitement at learning that Sophie was Crew’s sister and not a girlfriend or wife had puzzled her. In fact, she hadn’t been able to stop smiling all day. All her coworkers had noticed. Perhaps it might only be a matter of time before she guessed at her “end” with Crew, but she hadn’t glimpsed anything yet, so there was always the slightest chance this time would be different.

  Meanwhile he stood there with those wide shoulders and eyes that drank her in like water.

  “I came up with a few pictures and ideas for social media,” she told him.

  “Already?”

  That made her laugh. “If you were my boss, you’d be asking what took me so long.”

  “Sounds like a winner.”

  “He’s taught me a lot, but he is rather high strung.”

  “Well, come on in,” he said. “If you don’t mind waiting a bit for me to clean up, I’ll be happy to look at what you got.”

  She followed him through a door at the opposite end of the house which opened into a two-car garage. A shiny silver truck sat in the middle of the organized space. “Wherever you got muddy, you weren’t in that truck,” she said.

  His laughter echoed heartily through the garage. “I have a beat-up Toyota I use on the ranch. This truck we use for regular life and to pull the horse trailer when we need to.”

  “You have a regular life?”

  He laughed again. “Sometimes I wonder. Maybe none of us do.” He reached up high and set the pair of blue boots on one of the shelves near the door where other shoes and boots were neatly arranged. Then he sat on the stair leading into the house and pulled off his own dirty boots, setting them on the floor under the shelves. “I lose more boots to cows in the mud than anything else,” he said.

  “They can’t be cleaned?”

  “Yes, but it’s a pain. I’ll do it later.” He peeled his socks off, tossing them next to the boots, and then rolled up his pants a few turns, presumably to protect his flooring from the few remaining clumps of mud. Standing, he opened the door to the house for her, pushing it inward. “It involves a special cleaner and a little patience, is all.”

  Tara barely heard him. She was too busy looking around the amazing kitchen. Huge expanses of white cabinets, beautiful light fixtures hanging down from the ceiling on chains, an enormous center island with decorative shelves and a second sink, lovely gray-marbled granite countertops, an industrial-sized stainless steel stovetop, double ovens, and a glistening steel fridge. Everything was light and airy. It was a room to live and work in, yet it felt new and unused.

  She came back to herself to find him staring at her. “You like to cook?” he asked.

  “No. Well, I mean, I love the idea of cooking, but with working so much, I don’t have the time, and of course my apartment isn’t nearly this nice. What about you?” With a kitchen like this, he had to cook.

  “I think about it every now and then but mostly by the end of the day, I just want to crash. My sister liked to cook.” He broke off, his mouth puckering as if he’d tasted something sour.

  “Your sister?” It was the opening she’d hoped for. In her research, all mention of his sister Sophie Ashman had stopped three years ago, less than six months after Crew’s grandfather died from complications of pneumonia.

  “Never mind,” he said, stiffness entering his voice.

  An awkward silence fell between them, and then he said, “Would you like to stay in here or would you be more comfortable in the living room?”

  “Here’s better.” Tara drew out her laptop and went to the middle island, sliding onto a stool. “If you could log me into your Internet and Facebook, I could start while you’re changing. I can even give myself permissions to manage the account, if that’s okay.”

  “Sure, go to town.” He typed in one password and then the other, his arm brushing hers. He smelled like dust and green meadows and sweat
, which should have been a turnoff but strangely wasn’t. “I didn’t actually set up the account,” he said, “so I’m not familiar with it except for posting.”

  Having researched the page and his personal profile, she already knew that. Both had been created ten years ago, but he hadn’t posted on his personal page for four years, and only a few times a year before that. “That’s okay. As long as the password works.”

  The page came up, showing his personal profile picture. “You look about twenty there,” she said with a laugh.

  “I probably was.” Still the tight sadness in his voice. He wandered to the edge of the kitchen before pausing to say. “Help yourself to a drink, if you want. It’s in the fridge.”

  “Thanks.”

  She didn’t waste any time after he disappeared. The page for the ranch was called Silver A Thoroughbreds and had been updated regularly before three years ago. Now that she was logged in as Crew, she saw that most of the posts had been created by Sophie Ashman and without exception, they were all about horses. No mention of the cattle side of the business at all, which according to Crew, was his focus. Obviously, his sister had lived and breathed for horses, and she’d managed the page. Tara’s curiosity was killing her. Being a child who was first abandoned and then orphaned, the idea of a sibling fascinated her. The only girls she was really close to, including her roommate, were from Lily’s House.

  She hummed to herself as she scheduled the posts she’d created using some of the foal pictures and random facts about horses. Since it was all prepared, it was only a matter of uploading images and copying text. She’d also prepared posts about different beef cuts, recipes, and a few random pictures of calves and cattle, but those really needed to be on a different page, dedicated solely to the cattle business. All of her posts, both for the horses and cattle, were general, because there was too much she didn’t know to be more specific, but she was hoping talking to Crew would shed insight about her focus.

  She quickly scheduled a week of posts and created a new unpublished page entitled Silver A Ranch for the cattle side of the business. Feeling a sense of accomplishment, she stood and went to the refrigerator. She was used to her own jam-packed refrigerator, so this felt sparse, with only a jug of milk and several dozen varieties of bottled drinks.