Hawk's Way Grooms

by Joan Johnston

  Colt threw the ball with ease and watched it fall perfectly, gently into Huck’s outstretched hands. Huck did a victory dance and spiked the ball.

  “We are the greatest!” Huck shouted, holding his pointed fingers upward on either side of him in the referee’s signal for a touchdown.

  They made a pretty good team, Colt conceded. About the best in the state. Both of them would likely be offered athletic scholarships to college. Huck was so rich—his father was a U.S. senator from Texas—he didn’t need a scholarship to pay for college. Colt’s family could easily afford to send him to college, too, but he kept playing football because he had heard it might help him get into the Air Force Academy.

  If Huck had wanted to go to the Academy, his dad, the senator, could write a letter and get him appointed. Colt didn’t have that advantage. He would never presume on his friendship with Huck to ask for that kind of favor from Senator Duncan. So he had to find another way to make sure he got in.

  Huck retrieved the ball and started walking back toward Colt and Jenny. Colt took advantage of the opportunity to have Jenny’s full attention. “He’s pretty good,” he said, knowing Huck was the one thing Jenny was always willing to discuss.

  “He is, isn’t he,” she said, a worried frown forming between her brows.

  “Something wrong with that?” Colt asked, leaning his elbow casually on the top rail next to Jenny’s thigh where her cutoffs ended and her flesh began. Casual. Right. His mouth was bone-dry.

  “I don’t want him to go away,” she said.

  He watched her face as she watched Huck. “You think football will take him away?”

  “No. Huck loves football, but I think he’d be willing to attend a college somewhere close just so we could be together. Only…” Her head swiveled suddenly, and she looked him right in the eye. “You’re going to take him away.”

  He swallowed hard, his hormones going into overdrive as she continued staring at him. He managed to say, “I am?”

  She nodded solemnly. “He’s going to want to follow wherever you go, Colt, and I know your plans don’t include staying here in Texas. I don’t want to get left behind.”

  Jenny was dirt-poor, and even if she could have gotten a scholarship to a college somewhere else—which, with her brains, she probably could—she had to stay at the Double D Ranch to help take care of her sick mother and four younger brothers.

  “Huck would never leave you behind,” Colt said seriously.

  “He might not have any choice. Not if he went off to fly jets somewhere with you.”

  Colt felt angry, vulnerable and exposed. “How did you know about that? About me wanting to fly jets?”

  She shrugged and slipped down off the top rail of the corral. “Huck and I don’t have any secrets.”

  “He shouldn’t have told you,” Colt said, feeling his heart begin to thud at the closeness of her. He wanted her to step back so he could breathe, so he could think straight. Didn’t she see what she was doing to him? “That was private information,” he snapped. “It doesn’t concern you.”

  Her fisted hands found her hips. “It does when Huck is thinking about going with you.”

  “I never asked him to come along,” he retorted.

  “Hey, you two! What’re my two favorite people arguing about?” Huck said, grinning as he stepped between them and slipped an arm around each of their shoulders. Colt stood rigid beneath his arm. Huck still had the football in one hand, and Colt knocked it to the ground.

  “Ask your girlfriend,” he said, bending to retrieve the ball and pulling free of Huck’s arm. “I’ve got to go find Mac Macready. I’m supposed to throw some passes to him this morning.”

  Huck left Jenny standing where she was and headed after Colt. “Macready’s really here? I mean, I heard rumors in town he was, but I wasn’t sure. You’re really going to throw some balls to him?”

  “I said I was, didn’t I?” Colt stopped where he was and looked back over Huck’s shoulder to where Jenny stood abandoned. Her expression said it all.

  See what I mean? You lead. Huck follows.

  It wasn’t his fault. It had always been that way. If Jenny didn’t like it, she didn’t have to hang around. Colt turned back to Huck.

  Huck’s sandy hair had fallen over his brow and into his eyes. His rarely combed hair, combined with his ski-slope nose and freckled cheeks and broad smile, gave him an affable appearance he deserved. Huck didn’t make enemies. He wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Colt was sure he hadn’t meant to hurt Jenny’s feelings. Huck just forgot to be thoughtful sometimes.

  “What about Jenny?” Colt asked.

  “Hey, Jenny,” Huck called. “You want to hang around and meet Mac Macready?”

  Jenny shook her head.

  “See? She’s not interested,” Huck said. “But I am.”

  Colt sighed. “You want to stay?” he asked Huck.

  “Does a cowboy wear spurs?” Huck replied with a lopsided grin.

  They headed for the counselor’s cottage where Mac was staying, leaving Jenny behind at the corral. Colt glanced over his shoulder at her. It looked for a moment like she might follow them. Then she turned to where her horse was tied to the corral next to Huck’s, mounted up and loped the gelding in the direction of her family’s ranch.

  “You shouldn’t ignore Jenny like that,” Colt said, turning back to Huck.

  Huck seemed to notice suddenly that she had left. “What did I do?” He shook his head. “Women. They’re mysterious creatures, old buddy. Don’t ever try to understand them. It’s a waste of time.”

  “Why did you tell her about me wanting to fly?” Colt asked.

  Huck looked chagrined. “We were talking about the future and…it just came up.”

  “Make sure it doesn’t come up again,” Colt said. “That’s my business, and I don’t want the whole world knowing about it.” Especially when he was afraid he wasn’t going to be able to make his dream come true.

  “Jenny isn’t the whole world,” Huck argued. “She’s my girlfriend. I have to tell her things.”

  “Just don’t tell her things about me,” Colt insisted.

  “That’s hard to avoid when you’re my best friend,” Huck said. “Besides, if we’re going to be jet pilots—”

  “When did my plans become yours?” Colt asked.

  Huck grinned and pulled an arm tight around Colt’s neck in a wrestler’s hold. “We’re friends forever, pal. Where you go, I go. If you fly, I fly. Enough said?”

  Colt wished it were that simple. He wished he could express his desire to be a jet fighter pilot and expect his parents to be happy about it. He had never said a word to them, because he knew they would hate the idea.

  He might be one of eight adopted kids, but his mom and dad had made it pretty clear over the past couple of years that he was the one they expected to inherit Hawk’s Pride. They already had his life planned for him. They expected him to come back home after college to manage the ranch.

  He was grateful to have Zach and Rebecca Whitelaw for parents. He loved them enough to want to make them happy by fulfilling their expectations. It just wasn’t what he wanted for himself. He wanted to fly.

  So he made his plans surreptitiously, meanwhile letting his father teach him everything he would need to know to run the cattle and quarter horse end of the business. His father had told him his sister Jewel was taking over Camp LittleHawk, and that was fine with him. Although he kind of liked the ranching business, he wanted absolutely nothing to do with a camp for kids with cancer.

  Not that he didn’t have sympathy for the plight of all those sick kids. But he had learned his lesson early. He had befriended a couple of them when he was old enough to make friends. It was only later, when he asked why they hadn’t returned the following summer, that he learned the awful truth. Sometimes sick people died.

  It was a sobering lesson: Illness could rob you of people you loved. He had found a child’s solution to the problem that had stood him in good stead. He
stayed away from sick people. Which was why he hadn’t been to Jenny’s house much, even though Huck went there a lot. Her mom was dying slowly but surely of breast cancer.

  Colt might have argued further with Huck, except he caught sight of Mac Macready coming around the corner of the house with his sister, Jewel.

  “Hey!” Colt called. “Ready to catch a few passes?”

  “You bet,” Mac called back.

  Colt looked for signs of reluctance or resignation on Mac’s face. After all, Colt was just a kid. He didn’t see anything but delight.

  “Just give me a minute,” Mac said with a smile and a wave. “Be right with you.” He turned and said something in Jewel’s ear, then headed in Colt’s direction.

  JEWEL HEARD THE KITCHEN SCREEN DOOR open and called, “Is that you, Mac?” “Jewel?”

  “Colt?” At the sound of her brother’s frightened voice, Jewel hurried from her bedroom wearing an oversized plaid Western shirt, jeans and boots, her hair still wet from her shower. She met Colt halfway to the kitchen. “What’s wrong?”

  Her brother stood white-faced before her. “It’s Mac. He fell.”

  Oh, dear God. “Should I call an ambulance?”

  “I don’t know,” Colt said, his hands visibly trembling. “I thought maybe you ought to come and see for yourself first. It was awful, Jewel. One minute Mac was fine, and then Huck tackled him and…he didn’t get up.”

  “Huck tackled him? What on earth were you boys thinking, Colt? You know Mac’s recovering from surgery!”

  “We thought it would be more fun—”

  “Did he hit his head when he fell?”

  “I don’t think so. I think—”

  Before Jewel could make the decision whether to call 911, Mac appeared at the kitchen door, one arm around Huck’s shoulder, the other pressed against the thigh of his scarred leg.

  Colt had been pale, but Mac’s face was completely drained of blood. His teeth were gritted against the pain, and he was leaning heavily on Huck Duncan’s shoulder and favoring his leg. It took her a second to realize it wasn’t his poor, wounded and scarred left leg he was favoring, it was the other one. Now both legs were injured!

  “What happened?” she asked as she crossed quickly to hold the screen door open for him. As soon as she moved, Colt seemed to wake from his shocked trance and took a place on Mac’s other side. The two boys helped him keep his weight off both legs as they eased him through the kitchen and onto the sofa in the living room.

  While the boys stood awkwardly at her side, Jewel dropped to her knees and eased Mac’s foot up onto a rawhide stool that Grandpa Garth had given her one Christmas, a relic of bygone days at his ranch, Hawk’s Way. Then she started untying the laces of Mac’s athletic shoe.

  “I can do that,” he said, trying to brush her hands away.

  “Sure you can, but let me,” she insisted. She eased off the shoe and the sock beneath it and immediately saw the problem. His ankle was swelling. “Can you move it?” she asked.

  Slowly, hissing in a breath, he rotated the ankle. “Doesn’t feel broken,” he said. “I’ve had enough sprains to recognize one when I see it. Damn. This is all I needed.”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Macready,” Huck said in an anguished voice. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  Mac looked up at the boy and said, “Call me Mac. And it wasn’t your fault, Huck. Your tackle wasn’t what caused the problem. I just didn’t see that gopher hole soon enough.”

  Jewel watched him smile at the boy, pretending it was no big deal, when she knew very well it was. This was a setback, no doubt about it.

  “But your leg—” Huck protested, his eyes skipping from the awful scars on Mac’s left leg to the swelling on his right ankle. “How’re you gonna walk now?”

  “One step at a time,” Mac quipped with an easy grin. “Fortunately, I brought a cane with me. That should help matters some.”

  Jewel turned to Colt and said, “Wrap some ice in a towel and bring it here. You go help him, Huck.”

  When they were both gone, she gently moved the ankle. “Are you sure it isn’t broken?”

  He sighed. It was a sound of disgust. “It’s a sprain, Jewel. Not even a bad one.”

  “I should have warned you about gopher holes,” she said.

  “I didn’t step in a gopher hole,” he said quietly, looking at the hands he held fisted against his thighs.

  “Then what—” She saw the truth in the wary look he gave her. His leg—his right leg—must not have supported him. She reached out a hand, and he clutched it with one of his.

  She didn’t offer him words of comfort. She could see from the grim look on his face that words wouldn’t change what had happened. She didn’t point out the obvious—that his football career was over. He had to see that for himself.

  But if she had thought this accident would make Mac quit, he quickly disabused her of the notion.

  “This’ll slow down my rehabilitation some,” he said. “Will you mind if I hang around a little longer? I know camp’s starting in a day or so—”

  She rose to her feet, her hand coming free of his. “Of course you can stay!” she said, her voice unnaturally sharp. She didn’t want him to go away. She liked having him here. But she couldn’t believe he was ignoring the implications of this injury. How long was he going to go on batting his head against the wall? Couldn’t he see the truth? Didn’t he understand what this accident meant?

  “Mac—”

  He cut her off with a shake of his head. “Don’t say it. Don’t even suggest it.”

  “Suggest what?”

  “This doesn’t change my plans.”

  “But—”

  His face turned hard, jaw jutting, shoulders braced in determination. She had seen that look before, but she had been too young and naive to recognize it for what it was.

  “Be my friend, Jewel,” he said. “Don’t tell me why I can’t do what I want to do. Just help me to do it.”

  She stared at him as though she had never seen him before. She knew now why Peter Macready had survived a form of cancer that killed most kids. Why he had become the best rookie receiver in the NFL, despite the fact he had never been the fastest athlete on the field. Mac didn’t give up. Mac didn’t see obstacles. He saw his goal and headed for it without worrying about whether it could be reached. And so he invariably reached it.

  Jewel wished she had half his confidence. She might be a married woman now with a baby in her arms.

  Maybe it wasn’t too late for her. Maybe she could learn from him how it was done. Maybe she could take advantage of Mac’s presence to give her the impetus to change her life. If Mac could recover from a shattered leg, why couldn’t she recover from a shattered life?

  The boys returned with two dish towels loaded with ice and fell all over each other arranging the cold compresses around Mac’s ankle. Jewel saw Mac wince when their overenthusiasm rocked his ankle, but instead of snapping at them, he launched into a story about how he had played a whole football game with a taped-up sprained ankle, thanks to an injection of painkiller.

  The teenage boys dropped to his feet in awe and admiration. Jewel started to leave, but Mac reached up and caught her hand. “Join us,” he said.

  “I have work—”

  “Just for a few minutes.”

  She figured maybe he didn’t want to be stuck alone with the boys. She would stay with him long enough to let them hear a story or two before shooing them away. She settled beside Mac on the worn leather couch—another donation from her grandfather’s house at Hawk’s Way. Mac’s arm slid around her as naturally as if he did it every day.

  She resisted the urge to lay her head on his shoulder. Putting his arm around her had been a friendly gesture, nothing more. But she was aware of the way his hand cupped her shoulder, massaging it as he regaled the three of them with stories of life in the pro football arena.

  As she sat listening to him, an insidious idea took root.

  What if she c
ame to Mac tonight and explained her problem and asked him to help her out?

  She trusted Mac not to hurt her. She trusted him to go slow, to be patient. He didn’t love her, and she didn’t love him, so there wouldn’t be that particular pitfall complicating matters. It would be just one friend helping out another.

  She could even explain to him how she had gotten the idea. That she had seen his determination to play football again and been inspired to try to solve a problem that she had thought would never be resolved.

  All she wanted him to do was teach her how to arouse a man and satisfy him…and be satisfied by him.

  She tried to imagine how Mac might react to such a suggestion. He was obviously an experienced man of the world. Only…What if he wasn’t attracted to her that way?

  Her mind flashed back to the scene in the canyon earlier that afternoon, when she had felt Mac’s arousal. But he had apologized for that. Maybe when push came to shove, he wouldn’t want to get involved with her.

  Jewel didn’t hear much of what Mac said to Colt and Huck. She wasn’t even aware when he sent them away. She was lost deep in her own thoughts. And fears.

  She wished the idea hadn’t come to her so early in the day. Now she would be stuck thinking about it until dark, worrying it like a dog worried a bone.

  All she had to do was cross the hall tonight and knock on Mac’s door and…She didn’t let her imagination take her any farther than that. Oh, how she wished night were here already! It was so much easier to act on impulse than to do something like this with cold calculation.

  Of course, she was far from cold when she thought about Mac. Her whole body felt warm at the thought of having him touch her, having him kiss and caress her. She just wanted to get through the entire sexual act once without cringing or falling apart. That’s all she wanted Mac to do for her. Just get her through the moments of panic before he did it. Get in and get out, like a quick lube job on the truck.

  The absurdity of that comparison made her chuckle.

  “Are you going to let me in on the joke?” Mac said.

  “Maybe.” If she didn’t lose her nerve before nightfall.