One Hot Cowboy

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  “You didn’t, did you?”

  Again, Maggie scoffed. She edged nearer, so her breasts lightly brushed his chest. “Why do you care, Mr. I-Only-Embark-On-Hot-Passionate-Affairs?” she asked in a soft bedroom voice that only made him want to kiss and hold her all the more.

  “Because I don’t want to see you hurt,” Jake said gruffly, aware that in the short time he’d been talking with her, he’d grown painfully hard.

  Maggie stepped even closer, so her thighs brushed his. “Then you shouldn’t have made love to me last night.”

  Jake adjusted his grip on her. “As I recall,” he recounted, his voice hard as nails as he let her go at long last and stepped back, putting some physical distance between them, “that was a two-way street.”

  “You think I don’t know that?” Maggie said, tears glimmering in her eyes. With a trembling hand, she picked up the orange juice carton and set it back in the refrigerator. Her back to him, she carried her glass over to the dishwasher and carefully slipped it into the upper dish rack. “I thought—Oh, never mind what I thought!” Hands raised in a gesture of defense, she marched past him.

  “What?” Jake demanded. Irritated she hadn’t finished, he stepped to bar her exit from the kitchen.

  Maggie stopped dead in her tracks. He lounged in the doorway, arms folded loosely in front of him, his right hip and shoulder resting against the frame.

  “I thought you were capable of loving someone again,” she told him in a voice strangely devoid of emotion for someone so visibly upset. “But obviously you’re not, because if you were, you wouldn’t have set me up without my knowledge and then dumped me on someone else the way you did tonight. But not to worry, Jake.” She pinned him with a look of quiet dignity and adapted a reasonable tone that was somehow all the more alarming, “Your plan to get rid of me ASAP worked.” Maggie paused and lifted her chin as if daring him to try to get her to do otherwise. “I’ll be leaving as soon as Kelsey and her husband Clint return to collect their boys.”

  “GOSH, MAGGIE, you look tired,” Wyatt said.

  “Yeah, what happened, didn’t you get much sleep?” Rusty asked, between mouthfuls of hot cereal.

  Aware Harry was watching her carefully, and that these days she was wearing her heart on her sleeve all too frequently, Maggie headed straight for the coffeemaker and said, “I had a late night.”

  “Then you enjoyed your date with Kirk Sutherland?” Harry asked.

  Maggie lifted her hand noncommittally, amazed at how much it hurt her to recall such a splendidly pleasant and uneventful evening. “Yes and no.” Maggie smiled at Harry warmly, knowing that whatever was going on here, Harry was not to blame. “Kirk’s a great guy, no doubt about it. Funny, successful, handsome, interested in marriage and children, just like I am.”

  “But—?” Harry pressed.

  He’s not Jake. Wary of revealing too much of her feelings, lest they get immediately back to Jake, Maggie merely shrugged helplessly. “There just wasn’t any chemistry. I can see Kirk being a friend. A good friend, actually.”

  “But nothing more,” Harry guessed, ladling cereal into a bowl and handing it to Maggie.

  “Right.” She sat at the table and stirred her oatmeal listlessly.

  “Unka Jake went out riding this morning,” Wyatt announced.

  “Yeah, he’s grumpy, too, ‘cause he said he didn’t get much sleep, either,” Rusty reported.

  Finished with their cereal, they pushed their bowls away. “Maggie, if we’re not grounded any more can we go watch cartoons on TV in the family room this morning?” Wyatt asked.

  “We’ll be good so’s we won’t lose our priv’leges again,” Rusty promised.

  “I think that would be a very good idea,” Maggie said.

  The boys carefully carried their dishes to the sink for Harry to wash, then tore out. Harry poured himself a cup of coffee and sat down opposite Maggie. She didn’t know quite how it happened, but in the short time she had been at the Rollicking M Ranch Harry had become as much a father figure to her as he had to Jake.

  Harry, being Harry, cut right to the chase. “You love Jake, don’t you?”

  To her horror, Maggie felt her eyes fill with tears. She swallowed hard as she met his eyes. “For all the good it will do me.”

  Harry patted her arm compassionately. “Give him time.”

  “If I thought it was just that—” Unable to eat another bite of the hot, delicious cereal, Maggie pushed her bowl away and briefly buried her face in her hands. “I would wait for him, Harry,” she confessed in a muffled voice laced with regret. “I’d wait as long as it took. But I don’t think he is ever going to stop feeling married to Louellen.”

  Harry kicked back in his chair and, pouring himself another cup of coffee, settled in for a long talk with her. “I haven’t always been the housekeeper here, you know. I used to be a ranch hand. Did Jake ever tell you that?”

  “No.” Maggie wiped her eyes, feeling honored to be taken into Harry’s confidence. She swallowed hard around the knot of emotion in her throat. “What happened to make you change?”

  Harry frowned unhappily, recounting, “Jake fell apart when Louellen and the baby died. His sister Kelsey didn’t know it, ‘cause Jake managed to put on a good act whenever she was around. But the reality was he didn’t eat, didn’t sleep, didn’t do anything but work himself into the ground. The ranch house went to ruin. Someone had to step in and make sure he had something to eat now and then, and push him into bed when he needed sleep but was too proud and stubborn to admit it. So I did all that.” Harry sighed heavily, his own lament evident. “But the one thing I could never make him do was talk about his loss, cope with it and grieve.” Harry pinned Maggie with a mutually concerned look. “No one’s been able to do that, Maggie. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that Jake’s not going to recover fully from his loss until he does deal with it.”

  Maggie was silent, thinking. What Harry had told her squared with everything she had already intuited. And it squared with Sabrina’s predictions, too. “You expect me to get him to own up to all he’s feeling deep inside?” she asked. It was a powerful responsibility.

  Harry looked at her hopefully. “I have the feeling if anyone could do it, you could.”

  Maggie shook her head. She only wished that was so. “You’re overestimating my impact on him,” she replied sadly. “Vastly overestimating it, Harry.”

  “No, I don’t believe I am.” Harry paused, clearly not about to give up on either Maggie or his boss. “Jake didn’t tell me where he planned to ride this morning, but I know where he went anyway. And so, Maggie, should you.”

  MAGGIE DIDN’T KNOW why she let Harry talk her into it, but she did. And half an hour later, she was cresting a hill on the deep interior of the ranch.

  To her relief, Jake was exactly where Harry had predicted.

  And the scene was right out of Sabrina’s crystal ball. Hat in hand, Jake was lingering before the two graves. Maggie dismounted from Buttercup and tied her to a tree.

  As she opened the white picket fence surrounding the graves, Jake turned. “What are you doing here?” he demanded, an expression of supreme unhappiness on his face.

  Maggie swallowed. “I came to talk to you.”

  Jake’s expression turned even grimmer. “Why?”

  Maggie strode closer, her footsteps disappearing in the soft manicured grass. She stopped just short of him. “Because I think you owe me more than this, Jake.”

  His jaw, already rigid, tautened even more. “I never made any promises to you—”

  Maggie felt like a gambler with her entire life’s earnings placed on one high-risk bet as she fastened her eyes on his and reminded him softly and implacably, “But you did convince me to stay here and you did make love to me. Granted, that doesn’t come anywhere near to constituting a commitment, especially in this day and age, but I have a feeling it was a big step for you, making love to me here, in the house you once shared with Louellen.”r />
  Jake swallowed. The brooding look was back in his eyes, as well as the hurt. “What’s your point?” he asked gruffly.

  Maggie drew a deep breath and furthered her risk to an unsettling degree. No matter what it took, she had to make him face the fact that his life was not over, too. “If your feelings for Louellen are what’s keeping us apart,” she told him gently, “then you need to explain this to me. As a gentleman, Jake, it’s the least you can do.”

  “First off, I never claimed to be a gentleman, Maggie—”

  “But you are a gentleman, deep down,” Maggie interjected complacently, choosing to ignore the fact he’d gone deeper into his Wounded Bear mode than ever.

  “Second, I don’t talk about Louellen to anyone,” Jake emphasized bluntly.

  “Well, maybe it’s time you did,” Maggie retorted angrily, slapping her hands on her hips.

  “Fine. You want to talk about it, then we’ll do so, but we’ll do so somewhere else.” Jake leapt onto his spotted Appaloosa and took off. Maggie had no choice but to climb on Buttercup and follow.

  Jake rode hard. It was all she could do to keep up.

  Some fifteen minutes later, they reached a stand of trees next to the meandering stream that cut across his ranch and fed the Guadalupe River. Jake dismounted wordlessly and led his horse to water. Still a little breathless, Maggie followed suit. Damn it all, if he had meant to show her exactly how difficult he could be, he was succeeding.

  “You’ve got five minutes to ask anything you want.” Jake guided his horse away from the stream, and tethered him to a tree.

  Again, Maggie followed suit. Determined to get through to Jake one way or another, she made sure Buttercup was well-situated before she turned to him again. “I want the whole story, Jake.”

  He regarded her impatiently. “What do you mean, the whole story?”

  “I want to know about your life with Louellen, where and when you met, everything up until the point she died.” Her voice dropped a compelling notch. “I want to know how and why you became so hurt and disillusioned that six long years later, you have yet to recover.”

  Again, he turned away from her, a haunted look in his eyes.

  “I mean it, Jake.” Maggie threw down the gauntlet at long last, knowing that Harry was right—Jake had to talk about this, if he was to recover and move on with his life. And to that end she was willing to pull out all the stops to accomplish her goal. She stepped closer, her glance determined. “So either you tell me,” she vowed, very low, “or I’ll find someone else who will.”

  JAKE SWORE vehemently beneath his breath. He didn’t know whether he was mad as hell at Maggie for following him here, or glad she had followed him; he had only known that she would find a way to be with him as soon as she had found out from Harry where he’d gone. He whirled on her, half wishing his anger at the world would do them both a favor and chase her away.

  “You’re determined not to make this easy on me, aren’t you?” he demanded.

  “And with good reason,” Maggie replied, looking more tranquil than ever. “Everyone else has made it easy on you, Jake, and it’s clear it hasn’t helped. Instead, it may have exacerbated the situation to an unhealthy degree.”

  As much as Jake wanted to, he couldn’t disagree with that.

  Maggie leaned against a tree, and swept off her flat-brimmed hat. Her voice as gentle and soothing as a silk ribbon against his skin, she asked, “How long were the two of you together?”

  Considering the depth of Maggie’s determination, Jake figured they might as well get this over with. Once she heard the entire story and realized, as he did, that he was not likely to ever get over what had happened, he figured she would probably want to leave anyway.

  With a beleaguered sigh, Jake began his recitation in a low, listless voice. “Louellen and I met in high school and married about a year after my dad died, when I graduated from college. It was rough at first. The ranch was on the verge of bankruptcy, but Louellen never complained. For the first five years, she held down two jobs—one on the ranch and one in town—and so did I. It was rough but we finally paid off all the debts and most of the mortgage on the ranch. With the cattle operation in the black again, I knew it was finally time for us to start a family of our own.

  “Louellen wanted that, too, but she had some reservations about the timing. She wanted to wait until we had more of a nest egg in the bank, but I was young and idealistic, and I didn’t want to put it off any longer. So I kept pitching the idea until she gave in.”

  He swallowed and had to force himself to go on guiltily. “As luck would have it, she got pregnant right away. She was so happy then—we both were.” His voice trailed off sadly. Remembering was almost more than he could bear.

  Still listening intently, Maggie searched his face. “And then what happened?” she asked softly.

  Jake ran a hand over his face, as if that would take away some of the sorrow in his heart. “She was about two months along when the doctors discovered she had cancer. She learned it was invasive, there was little hope of her surviving, the most they could do was prolong her life a year or two, but she couldn’t take the chemo or radiation without harming the baby. And she wanted the baby. God, how she wanted the baby.” Jake’s eyes grew moist. His voice grew hoarse. “She knew how much I wanted the baby. She didn’t know how little time we had and she didn’t want anything to spoil our joy. So she made her doctors keep her illness a secret from me until she could no longer hide it.” He shook his head in an agony of regret “Once I found out, I pleaded with her to take whatever treatment was offered, anything to prolong her life, but Louellen was adamant. She was five months along by then and she was determined to give me our child as a token of our love. She was determined to leave something of the two of us behind and she told me, come hell or high water, our baby was going to be born alive.”

  Jake swallowed again, and forced himself to continue. “Meanwhile, she got weaker and sicker with every day that passed. When she was in her sixth month, the doctors knew they had to go ahead and deliver the baby by C-section if the baby was to have any real hope of surviving.”

  Jake leaned against the tree, recalling the utter lack of joy surrounding what should have been one of the happiest moments of his life with his wife. “Louellen agreed to the C-section,” he reported numbly. “And she was so happy afterward, even though she knew she was dying, because she knew she was leaving me with our child and that I wouldn’t have to go through her death alone.” Jake blinked rapidly as the tears rose in his eyes and his chest tightened to the point he could barely breathe. Turning his glance toward the sun-swept horizon, Jake said, “She died several days after our daughter was born.”

  “Oh, Jake,” Maggie said, the heartache he felt mirrored in her voice.

  Jake knew if he let himself fall apart now, he might never put the pieces of his life together again, so instead he began to pace as he recounted as impassively as he could, “Our daughter lived on for three more months. And during that time she suffered just about every problem premature babies can suffer.” Jake drew a deep breath and clenched his teeth. “She had innumerable operations and procedures. Every day, I went to the hospital and I sat there with her and I hoped and I prayed for a miracle.” Again, he had to pause. Had to avoid Maggie’s eyes and force himself to go on. “Only no miracle ever came, and when I had to bury our baby girl right alongside Louellen I wanted to die right along with them.” Because he had known somehow he had failed them both. Louellen, in pushing her to get pregnant, and perhaps exacerbating her illness in the process. And their daughter, in not saving her mother.

  “Oh, Jake,” Maggie whispered, stricken.

  But Jake didn’t want her pity.

  “I didn’t die, of course, but I did make myself a promise,” he said stonily, balling his hands into fists. “I promised myself that I would never let myself be hurt that way again, because I knew I just wouldn’t survive it. So I became a Good Time Gus with women. And that was
it. Since then,” he said simply, “I have spent all my time and energy building up my businesses and taking care of the ranch.” And it had helped. It had kept him sane.

  Maggie was quiet. He could tell by the look on her face she didn’t know what to say. But then he hadn’t imagined she would. What did you tell someone who had failed his entire family? First, Louellen and the baby. And now even Kelsey and Clint, and in a roundabout way, because he couldn’t seem to handle them on his own, the twins. Like it or not, he had to face it, as much as he had once wanted it all, he was not cut out to be a family man. And Maggie, curse her stubborn heart, deserved the best.

  Jake knew Maggie was thinking she could fix this for him, much the same way she had taken the situation with the twins in hand. Once again, he knew it wasn’t so. Jake shook his head at her. “I know it hurts you, Maggie,” he said gently, determined to present her with the truth, “and I’m sorry, but I’ve just got no place in my heart, no strength, to go through anything like that again.” Or put anyone else through it, either.

  Maggie closed the distance between them and touched his arm lightly. “You have to know the odds are against anything like that happening to you or your family again. It was just fate doing a number on you.”

  Jake drew a ragged breath and moved away from her. “The odds were against it the first time,” he reminded her brusquely. “It happened anyway—and when it did, I let everyone down. My wife, because she felt she had to shield me, and our baby, because I didn’t know what to do or say.”

  Maggie sighed. Her lips parted.

  He held up a silencing hand before she could interrupt. “And don’t hand me that line about us not getting more burdens than we can handle in this life, ‘cause I’ve heard it all,” he told her, the grief and guilt welling up inside him to a disabling degree. “And I don’t believe it, not any of it, not anymore. ‘Cause I sure had more than I can tolerate.”