One Fine Cowboy

by Joanne Kennedy

  They loaded the bags in the back of the pickup and climbed in. “Feed store next,” Nate said. He drove back to Bucky’s in silence and put the car in park.

  The feed store was a barnlike, cavernous structure stocked to the ceiling with feed, tack, tools, and even clothing. Nate stopped at the cash register to talk to yet another acquaintance while Charlie paused at a circular rack of Carhartt jackets, admiring the stiff, utilitarian canvas and wondering what kind of winter called for a coat that could stand up by itself. She moved on to the hats, trying on a felt Stetson like Nate’s, then whipping it off before it could wreck her hair.

  “Hey. Come on back here,” Nate said, leaning around the corner of a tall metal utility shelf stacked high with sacks of feed. “I want to show you something.”

  Charlie followed him to the back of the store, where boxes lined the wall, each stack topped with a cowboy boot.

  “Try these on,” he said, handing her a boot. It was a soft shade of brown, with simple tooling decorating the leather. The toe was pointed, the heel slanted, but it wasn’t nearly as extreme as her Jersey boots.

  Charlie sat down on a bench and slipped her foot into the boot, but it wouldn’t make the turn. Frowning, she tugged at the top and shoved her foot the rest of the way in.

  “Comfortable,” she said, surprised. “Really comfortable.”

  “That’s how a boot should feel. Those things you’re wearing are like torture devices.”

  “You got that right.” She picked up the other boot and examined the tooling. “How much are these?”

  Nate turned away. “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No, really, how much? I think I might want a pair.”

  “Sure hope so, ’cause they’re yours,” he said, faking absorption in the label on a Western shirt.

  “You bought them? For me?” Charlie touched his arm, forcing him to look at her.

  “They’re not very fancy,” Nate said.

  “No,” she said. “They’re real boots.” She tugged off her other high-heeled absurdity and slid her foot into the other boot. “They fit,” she said. “How did you know my size?”

  “I looked,” he said, flushing. “You left yours in the kitchen last night.” He cleared his throat. “You have, um, little feet.”

  What was this fascination he had with her clothing? First he wanted to see her panties; then he was checking out her footwear. The man had some kind of fetish.

  “I thought you were broke,” she said. “I mean—sorry, but you don’t have to buy me stuff.”

  “I have an account here,” he said. “It’s fine. And you’ll need them for working with the horses.” He turned away. “I—I need a fair amount of help out there.”

  He swallowed hard. Charlie knew that admission hadn’t come easy. And while Nate might not talk much, buying the boots was a clear statement that he trusted her with the horses.

  And that he wanted her to stay.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that, except that she was moved by the gesture. She stood pigeon-toed in the middle of the aisle, looking down at her feet and admiring the pointed toes and the soft sheen of the new leather. She felt like a little girl wearing her first pair of grown-up shoes.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  Nate looked so embarrassed she took pity on him and changed the subject. “What else do you need? I can help carry stuff.”

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “You just came in to buy me boots?” Charlie could feel her heart warming and melting in her chest.

  “That’s it,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  He charged for the doorway like a bull charging an open gate. Charlie could barely keep up with him.

  She paused when they reached the truck, savoring the quiet. She could hear crickets chirping and the occasional hum of a passing car, but there were no blaring horns, no loud music, no shouts or sirens. The single stoplight flicked from amber to red to green, but there was no traffic to heed the signal—just empty streets lined with shop fronts. Several of the shops were closed for good, their show windows covered with pristine plywood. Charlie wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a boarded-up window unmarred by spray paint.

  This was nothing like New Jersey.

  And Nate was nothing like the cowboy she’d expected. She watched as he shoved the truck in gear and stared straight ahead. Buying her a present should have broken the ice that had built up between them since the episode in the bunkhouse. Some men would have made a big deal of it, made her feel like she owed them something, but Nate seemed simply embarrassed by his own generosity.

  She was starting to think her mother might be wrong. There were good men in the world—you just had to know where to find them.

  But who the hell was Sam?

  ***

  While he put the truck into gear, Nate could feel Charlie’s gaze hot on the back of his neck.

  “So who’s Sam?” she asked as he pulled out of the lot.

  Nate groaned inwardly. He’d have to get it over with. Spill his life story, and that would probably put an end to any chance of more intimacy between them. Once she figured out how much he’d messed things up—his life, and Sandi’s too—she’d probably run away screaming.

  “Sam’s my little girl,” Nate said. “She’s seven.”

  “You have a daughter?” Charlie looked down in her lap, and he could see she was surreptitiously counting on her fingers.

  “We had her in high school,” Nate said, saving her the trouble of figuring things out. “That’s why me and Sandi stayed together. We probably would have gone our separate ways otherwise.”

  Actually, there was no “probably” about it. Sandi had always made it clear he’d ruined her plans for the future. She’d been headed for beauty school, and after that, she was going to go to L.A. and be a stylist to the stars. The way she said it, you’d have thought she’d had a ten-pound line hooked onto fame and fortune if Nate hadn’t come along and messed everything up with his renegade sperm.

  “Got a picture?”

  Nate gestured toward the keys dangling in the ignition, and Charlie reached over and fingered the Plexiglas fob. It held a school photo of a little girl with strawberry blond hair and a wide grin. Someone had tried to tame all that hair into a stylish girlie up-do, but it was cascading around the child’s face as if it just couldn’t be tamed. She looked like she’d just blown in on the Wyoming wind.

  “She’s adorable,” Charlie said.

  “Yeah,” Nate said. “She sure is.”

  He blinked a couple times, cursing himself for being so transparent. As far as he was concerned, Sandi could go to Denver and stay there, but he had to get Sam back. Sam was the only person in the world who loved the ranch like he did. Who belonged there, like he did.

  “You miss her,” Charlie said.

  Nate nodded, his throat tightening. “You have no idea.” His voice came out sounding half-strangled at first, but then he picked up speed. “She’s—she’s really something,” he said. He could feel the words building up inside him, spilling over. Once somebody asked about Sam, talking was suddenly no problem. He couldn’t stop. It was like he’d released a pent-up horse from the corral and it had taken off at a gallop. “She loves the horses and the plains like I do. She does okay in school because she’s really, really smart, but she hates it because she has to spend the day inside.” His voice came easier as he talked, the lump in his throat disappearing. “She rides like she was born on horseback. Sandi has fits about it—says she doesn’t act like a lady. Well, why should a seven-year-old act like a lady anyway?” He cleared his throat, suddenly feeling awkward. He’d said too much. “We can’t seem to agree on how to raise her,” he muttered.

  “So you and Sandi aren’t—I mean, you don’t… you’re just together because…”

  He knew what she was asking. She was asking if he’d been in love with Sandi. That wasn’t a question he wanted to answer.

  And anyway, love didn’t matter when you had a child
to raise. He’d done what he had to do, and so had Sandi.

  Until now.

  “It seems like you and Sandi didn’t have much in common,” Charlie said.

  “We had Sam,” Nate said. “That was enough.”

  Chapter 17

  Those two sentences told Charlie pretty much everything she needed to know about Nate. The guy might not talk much, but he’d managed to define his whole adult life in six words. She spent the next ten minutes in thoughtful silence, readjusting her picture of her cowboy host. She’d seen him with his horses, kind and patient. Now she’d caught a glimpse of his love for his daughter.

  Maybe cowboys weren’t so bad after all.

  Not this one, anyway.

  She thought of her own father—which wasn’t easy to do. She didn’t even have a clue what he looked like. He’d never said she was “really something.” He’d never known she was smart in school. And he obviously didn’t give a damn if she acted like a lady or not.

  Charlie had always told herself she hadn’t lost much when her father walked out of her life. Most of her friends had awkward relationships with their dads, so she’d decided hers wasn’t that different from other men. Men just weren’t into kids.

  But Nate was pulling that rug right out from under her firmly planted feet.

  She looked over at his rugged profile. The checkout clerk at the grocery store was right.

  This was a good man.

  She’d known that, deep down, the moment she’d first met him, when he’d bent down to soothe his nervous horse with that gentle, tender touch. She remembered how he’d coached her through her encounter with Junior, helping her earn the frightened animal’s trust. How he’d held her after the incident, squeezing her tight, as if he’d really cared about her safety despite how difficult she’d been.

  And she remembered the hurt she’d seen in his eyes when she’d checked his pupils, looking for signs of a concussion and finding a pain that went way beyond a knock on the head.

  “You’re a good dad,” she said softly. “My father—he left us when I was a baby. I don’t even know what he looks like.”

  Nate shot her a look so full of pity she was tempted to pull up her tough-girl shield—toss her hair and throw out a joke, laugh the whole thing off. But she’d opened a long-closed door and the anger she kept locked behind it was bolting for freedom.

  “Your daughter’s lucky,” she said. “There aren’t many men who give a crap about their kids. It’s like the parenting gene and testosterone cancel each other out or something. Men ditch their daughters all the time. They don’t realize what a damn mess they leave behind, and they don’t care, either. Men are…”

  The truck lurched to a stop and she looked up, startled. Had she offended him? Scared him? She hadn’t meant to get going like that, but once she started emptying the bitterness out of her heart, she hadn’t been able to stop. It felt cathartic, like throwing up after too much tequila—only you generally did that in private. You didn’t go spewing your poison all over some stranger you barely knew.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Sorry? Heck, she was appalled. She was screwed up and she knew it, but she didn’t generally share her abandonment issues—not even with her best friends. And now she’d gone and dumped them in Nate’s lap. He was probably wishing she’d get out of the car and out of his life. He was probably…

  “Deer,” he said quietly, nodding toward the side of the road.

  A trio of big-eared does exited a copse of trees and minced across the road in front of them on impossibly slender legs, one pausing to regard them with enormous, long-lashed eyes before leaping gracefully into the brush on the other side.

  “Oh,” Charlie said, straightening in her seat, forgetting everything in the wonder of the moment. “Mule deer. I’ve never seen one.”

  Nate’s knuckles whitened on the steering wheel. “You almost got to see one real close. You have to be careful driving at night. They seem to have a death wish.”

  “They’re beautiful,” Charlie breathed. Nate started to put the truck back in gear and she reached out and set her hand over his on the shift knob. “Wait,” she said. “Let’s watch them a minute.”

  The deer were picking their way up the bank on the left side of the road, turning occasionally to regard Charlie and Nate with their big brown Bambi eyes. When they reached the top, each one leapt over the barb-wire fence, four-footed ballerinas en jete.

  “Beautiful,” Charlie said again.

  “They are, aren’t they?” Nate said, his voice hushed. “I forget to pay attention, sometimes. Forget to appreciate things.”

  He turned to her as the shadowy forms of the deer faded into the twilight. The moon, nearly full, had floated in her window like a silent companion all the way back from town, casting its dim silver light over the plains and calming summer’s gold and tan down to black and white and gray. Now it lit Nate’s face, creating soft shadows that gentled the hard line of his jaw and made his gray eyes glow with an otherworldly light.

  Charlie started to reach up and touch the side of his face, but her fingers had somehow entwined with his on the gear shift. She lifted her other hand and started to say something about his concussion—about how his eyes looked almost normal now, and he must be feeling better—but the words caught in her throat when his hand mirrored hers, reaching up and tracing the line of her cheek. She tilted her head into his palm, then closed her eyes as he leaned in and touched his lips to hers.

  The kiss started out like a question, hesitant and gentle. Charlie answered with a cautious but unmistakable “yes” and it grew more assured. Suddenly they were tangled together, lips and limbs and bodies, joining in that kiss like Charlie had never joined with any other man—not in bed, not anywhere.

  The kiss said everything Nate had been hiding behind his wall of silence. It said he’d never loved Sandi. It said he’d been unbearably lonely all those years, trying to forge a family from a relationship that should have ended long ago. It said he missed his daughter. It said he needed comfort.

  It said he needed love, and Charlie felt something in herself reach out to answer that call. There were empty places inside her, aching, painful places, and that kiss was filling every one. She kissed him harder, tugged him closer, and felt like she had in the bunkhouse, dizzy and happy and whole and full.

  Too whole. Too full.

  She pulled away. What was she thinking? Was she thinking at all? For some reason she’d granted a man she barely knew the status of a savior simply because he had his kid’s picture on his key fob.

  Her heart was getting ahead of her head. She had The Plan, she reminded herself. There was no time in her life for romance.

  And anyway, she was going home soon. The sooner the better. Otherwise, she was liable to end up like Sandi, alone on this godforsaken ranch with a man who couldn’t even carry on a conversation.

  But he sure could teach her a thing or two about nonverbal communication.

  ***

  Nate opened his eyes as Charlie pulled away. He could hardly believe he’d broken the rules again, kissed those sweet red lips again, buried his fingers in that wild, spiky hair.

  He could hardly believe she’d let him.

  And this time, it had been more than a kiss. It had been something infinitely better—like a complicated dance with a perfect partner who knew all the steps. A partner who followed your lead, then took her own turn, revving up the tempo until you lost control and your stately minuet turned into a wild hoedown free-for-all.

  It had been one hell of a dance. And it was starting to become clear that the dance was leading somewhere—somewhere inevitable. That kiss held a promise neither of them could break.

  Their tryst in the bunkhouse had been a mere taste, a test of what was between them. The kiss made it clear it was growing into something more. Was he ready for this? Was Charlie? He’d only just let Sandi go. And Charlie—hell, Charlie didn’t even like him half the time.

  Did she
?

  He looked away, clearing his throat, and shoved the truck into gear.

  “Sorry,” he said.

  Charlie glanced over at him, then concentrated on the road ahead as if her life depended on it. He cursed himself. Should you apologize after kissing a woman? It seemed rude, somehow.

  “I mean, I’m not sorry. I’m—I don’t know what I am. But I shouldn’t have done that. Not that I didn’t like it. I did. A lot. I just…”

  “I never thought I’d have to say this,” Charlie said. “Never in a million years.” She took a deep, shaky breath. “But—shut up, Nate.”

  Chapter 18

  A dim light burned at the door to the bunkhouse when Charlie and Nate reeled in from their shopping trip, but the building’s windows were dark. Doris and Phaedra had evidently turned in early. The only sound was the faint scrape of cicadas and the whisper of a sage-scented breeze that tickled Charlie’s cheek as she stepped out of the truck.

  Once they’d lugged the bags inside, Nate pulled a six-pack of beer out and popped the top off two cans, handing one to Charlie. Then he grabbed a gallon of milk and put it in the fridge while she downed a generous glug of Bud Light.

  “You don’t have to do that,” she said as he pulled a bottle of balsamic vinegar from another bag. “I’ll put the stuff away. That way I’ll be able to find it when I cook.”

  Nate tightened his lips into a thin line and shook his head. “You shouldn’t have to do all the cooking. I could make something once in a while.”

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know. Like, umm…” His voice trailed off into silence.

  “It’s okay. Gotta earn my boots.” She kicked out one booted foot and grinned.

  “You already did. Come on, I’ll help. It’ll go faster.”

  The guy did his best, but he clearly wasn’t at home in the kitchen. He opened three cupboards before he figured out where the vinegar should go, and then stood in the middle of the room with a jar of thyme in his hand, scanning the cupboards for a likely home.