Need Me, Cowboy

by Maisey Yates

“I think she did in the beginning. But everything got twisted. She thought wealth and success meant something to me that it didn’t. I wanted a ranch, and I wanted to go to fewer parties. I was fine with her going by herself. She didn’t like that. She wanted me to be on her arm. She wanted a very specific life, and it was one she didn’t inform me she wanted until it was too late. And I—”

  “You weren’t willing to give it.”

  He felt like he’d been punched in the chest.

  Faith shrugged. “It’s still no excuse to go framing you for murder,” she said. “Or, whatever she intended to frame you for. But I just mean... There were maybe one or two things you could have given her to make her happier. If she wasn’t a psycho.”

  He chuckled hollowly. “I expect you’re right. If she weren’t a psycho. But that’s why I don’t ever intend to get married again.”

  “Honestly, I can’t blame you.” Faith looked down, a dark curl falling into her face.

  “Do you want to go for a ride later today?”

  She looked at him, her whole face bright, her expression totally different from the way it had been a moment before. “Yes.”

  “Well, cowgirl, I hope you brought your jeans.”

  Eleven

  Faith sat on the top of the fence while she watched the horses circle the paddock. They seemed content in their new surroundings. Or maybe, it was the presence of Levi. Watching as he had greeted the horses, pressing his hand to their velvet soft noses, letting them take in his scent had been...

  Her chest felt so full she thought it might burst.

  He was such a hard man. And yet... It was that hardness that made the soft moments so very special. She didn’t know why she was thinking about him in those terms. Why she wanted special moments. Why she cared.

  But seeing him like that, even now, out in the paddock, as the horses moved around him, and he stood in that black Stetson, black T-shirt and tight jeans...

  She ached.

  She had been outside of so many things. There, but not quite a part of them.

  The only single person at dinner last night. A prodigy in architecture, but so much younger than everyone else, seemingly someone people couldn’t relate to. The poor girl at boarding school, there on a scholarship. The smart kid who would rather escape into books and her imagination than go to a party.

  That had been fine. It had been fine for a long time.

  But it wasn’t fine now.

  She wanted to meld herself with him. Mold herself into his life. Melt against him completely. She didn’t know what that meant. But the urge tugged at her, strongly. Made it so she could hardly breathe.

  She hopped down off the fence, her boots kicking up dust as she made her way across the arena and toward him.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I just... They’re beautiful horses.” And he was beautiful. With them, he was stunning. It was like watching him be right where he belonged. At ease for the first time since she’d met him.

  Like a bird spreading its wings.

  A smile tipped up the corners of his lips. “I’m glad to have them back.”

  “The others?”

  “It’s not possible to track all of them down. It’s okay. For now, this is enough.”

  “And then what?”

  “They’ll make a great story,” he said, his expression suddenly shuttered. “When we do that big magazine spread. Showing my new custom home, and the equestrian facility you’re going to build me. A big picture of me with these horses that Alicia took from me.”

  “Is that what everything is about?”

  “My entire life has been about her for seventeen years, Faith. In the last five years of that all I could do was think about...” He gritted his teeth. “That is the worst part. I worried about her. All that time. And she was fine. Off sipping champagne and sitting on a yacht. Screwing who the hell knows. While I sat in prison like a monk. An entire life sentence ahead of me. And I was worried about her. She knew I was in prison. She knew. She didn’t care. That’s the worst part. How much emotional energy I wasted worrying about the fate of that woman when...”

  She stepped forward, put her fingertips on his forearm. “This isn’t emotional energy?”

  He looked down at her. “How would you feel? How would you feel in my position?”

  “I don’t know. Possibly not any better. I don’t know what I would do. You’re right. I can’t comment on it.”

  “Stick to what you do, honey. Comment on the design work you can do for me.”

  She took a step back, feeling like she had overstepped. That little bubble of fantasy she’d had earlier, that need to get closer to him, had changed on her now. “I will. Don’t worry.”

  “How did you realize you were an architecture prodigy?” he asked suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” she said, lifting a shoulder. “I mean, I drew buildings. I was attracted to the idea of doing city design in a slightly more...organic way. I was fascinated by that from the time I was a kid. As for realizing I was good... I was naturally good at art, but I’ve always been good at math and science as well. History. Art history.”

  “So you’re one of those obnoxious people who doesn’t have a weakness.”

  “Well, except for...social stuff?” She laughed. “Academically, no. Not so much. And that opened a lot of doors for me. For which I will always be grateful. It was really my brothers who helped me focus. Because, of course, Isaiah being a numbers guy, he wanted to help me figure out how I could take what I did and make money with it. My education was paid for because I was brilliant, but that comes to an end eventually. You have to figure out what to do in the real world. Architecture made sense.”

  “I guess so.”

  “Why...manufacturing? And what did you make?”

  “Farm equipment,” he said. “Little generic replacement parts for different things. A way to do it cheaper, without compromising on quality.”

  “And what made you do that?”

  “Not because I’m an artist. Because there are a lot of hardworking men out there, pleased as hell to replace the parts themselves if they can. But often things are overcomplicated and expensive. I wanted to find a way to simplify processes. So it started with the basic idea that we can get around some of the proprietary stuff some of the big companies did. And it went from there. Eventually I started manufacturing parts for those big companies. It’s a tricky thing to accomplish, here in the United States, but we’ve managed. And it served me well to keep it here. It’s become part of why my equipment is sought after.”

  She giggled. “There’s a double entendre.”

  “It’s boring. That was another thing my wife objected to. She wanted me to get into real-estate investing. Something more interesting for her to talk about with her friends. Something a little bit sexier than gaskets.”

  “A gasket is pretty sexy if it’s paying you millions of dollars, I would think.”

  “Hell, that was my feeling.” He sighed heavily. “It’s not like you. Mine was a simple idea.”

  “Sometimes simplicity is the better solution,” she said. “People think you need to be complicated to be interesting. I don’t always think that’s true, in design, or in life. Obviously, in your case, the simple solution was the revolutionary one.”

  “I guess so. Are you ready to go for a ride?”

  “I am,” she said.

  And somehow, she felt closer to him. Somehow she felt...part of this. Part of him.

  She wanted to hold on to that feeling for as long as it would last, because she had a feeling it would be over a lot sooner than she would like.

  But then, that was true of all of this. Of everything with him.

  She was beginning to suspect that nothing short of a lifetime would be enough with Levi Tucker.

  Twelve
>
  Levi had missed this. He couldn’t pretend otherwise. Couldn’t pretend that it hadn’t eaten at him, five years away from the ranch.

  The animals were in his blood, in his bones. Had been ever since he had taken that job at Bud’s ranch. That experience had changed him. Given him hope for the future. Allowed him to see things in a different way. Allowed him to see something other than a life filled with pain, fear.

  The other kids at school had always avoided him. He was the boy who came to school with bruises on his face. The boy whose family was whispered about. Whose mother always looked sallow and unhappy, and whose father was only ever seen at night, being pulled drunkenly out of bars.

  But the horses had never seen him that way. He had earned their trust. And he had never taken it for granted.

  The back of a horse was the one place he had ever felt like he truly belonged. And things hadn’t changed much. Twenty-three years—five of them spent behind bars—later, and things hadn’t changed much.

  He looked back from his position on the horse, and the grin on Faith’s face lit up all the dark places inside him. He hadn’t expected to enjoy sharing this with her. But then, he hadn’t expected to share so much with her at all.

  There was something about her. It was that sense of innocence.

  That sense of newness.

  A sense that if he could be close enough to her he might be able to see the world the way she did. As a place full of possibility, rather than a place full of pain. Betrayal. Heartbreak.

  Yes, with her, he could see the scope of so much more. And it made him want to reach out to her. It made him want to...

  He wanted her to understand him.

  He couldn’t remember ever feeling that way before. He hadn’t wanted Alicia to understand him.

  He hadn’t cared. He’d loved her. But that love had been wrapped up in the life he wanted to build. In the vision of what they could be. He’d been focused on forward motion, not existing in the moment.

  And maybe, there, Faith was right. Maybe that was where he had failed as a husband.

  Though, he still hadn’t failed so spectacularly that he’d deserved to be sent to prison, but he could acknowledge that some of the unhappiness in his marriage had come down to him.

  “It’s beautiful out here,” Faith said.

  “This is actually part of the property for the new house,” he said. He glanced up at the sky, where the dark gray clouds were beginning to gather, hanging low. “It’s starting to look stormy, but if you don’t mind taking a chance on getting caught in the rain, I can show you where we might put the equestrian facility.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  He urged his horse on, marveling at how quickly he had readjusted to this thing, to horsemanship, to feeling a deep brightness in his bones. If that wasn’t evidence this was where he belonged, in the woods on the back of a horse, he didn’t know what was.

  They came through a deep, dark copse of trees and out into a clearing. The clouds there were layers of patchwork gray, moving from silver to a kind of menacing charcoal, like a closed fist ready to rain down judgment on the world below.

  And there was the clearing. Overlooking the valley below.

  The exact positioning he wanted, so he could look down on everyone who had once looked down on him.

  “You think you can work with this?” he asked.

  “Definitely,” she responded. She maneuvered her horse around so she was more fully facing the view before them. “I want to make it mirror your house somehow. Functional, obviously. But open. I know the horses weren’t in prison for the last five years, but they had their lives stolen from them, too, in a way. I want it all connected. And I want you to feel free.”

  Interesting that she had used that word. A word that had meant so much to him. One he had yearned for so much he’d traded cigarettes to have a symbol of it tattooed on his body.

  It was a symbol he was deeply protective of. He wasn’t a sentimental man, and his tattoos were about the closest thing to sentiment he possessed.

  “I like the way you think,” he said.

  He meant it. In many ways. And not just this instance.

  She tilted her head, scrunching her nose and regarding him like he was something strange and fascinating. “Why do you like the way I think?”

  “Because you see more than walls, Faith. You see what they can mean to people. Not just the structure. But what makes people feel. Four walls can be a prison sentence or they can be a refuge. That difference is something I never fully appreciated until I was sent away.”

  “Homes are interesting,” she said. “I design a lot of buildings that aren’t homes. And in those cases, I design the buildings based on the skyline of the city. The ways I want the structure to flow with the surroundings. But homes are different. My parents’ house, small and simple as it is, could not feel more like home to me. Nothing else will ever feel like home in quite the same way it does. It’s where I grew up. Where the essential pieces of myself were formed and made. That’s what a home is. And every home you live in after those formative years...is not the same. So you have to try to take something from the life experience people have had since they left their parents and bring it all in and create a home from that.”

  He thought of his own childhood home. Of the way he had felt there. The fear. The stale scent of alcohol and sadness. The constant lingering threat of violence.

  “Home to me was the back of a horse,” he said. “The mountains. The trees. The sky. That’s where I was made. It’s where I became a person I could be proud of, or at the very least, a person I could live with. My parents’ place was prison.”

  He urged his horse forward, moving farther down the trail, into the clearing, before he looped around and headed back toward the other property. Faith followed after him.

  And the sky opened up. That angry fist released its hold.

  He urged the horse into a canter, and he could hear Faith keeping pace behind him. As they rode, the rain soaked through his clothes. All the way through to his skin. It poured down his face, down his shirt collar.

  Rain.

  It had been five years since he had felt rain on his skin.

  Fuck.

  He hadn’t even known he’d missed it until now. And now he realized he was so thirsty for it he thought he might have been on the brink of death.

  He released his hold on the reins and let his arms fall to his sides, spread his hands wide, keeping his body movements in tune with the horse as the water washed over him.

  For a moment. Then two.

  He counted the raindrops at first. Until it all blended together, a baptism out there in the wilderness.

  He finally took control of the animal again. By then, the barn was back in view.

  The horse moved with him as Levi encouraged him into a gallop. The rain whipped into his eyes now, but he didn’t care. He brought the horse into the stable and looped the lead rope around a hook, then moved back outside and stripped off his shirt, letting the rain fall on his skin there, too.

  If Faith thought it was strange, she didn’t say anything. She went into the barn behind him and disappeared for a few moments. Leaving him outside, with the water washing over him. When she returned she was without her horse, her chin-length dark hair wet and clinging to her face.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “I just realized,” he said, looking up above, letting the water drops hit him square on the face. “I just realized that it’s the first time I’ve felt the rain since before I was in jail.”

  Neither of them said anything. She simply closed the distance between them and curved her fingers around his forearm.

  They stood there for a while, getting wet together.

  “Tell me about your family,” she said softly.

  “You don’t want to hear t
he story.”

  “I do,” she said.

  “Maybe I don’t feel like telling it,” he responded, turning to face her.

  She looked all around them, back up at the sky, and then back at him. “We’re home,” she said. “It’s the best place to tell hard stories.”

  And he knew exactly what she meant. They were home. They were free. Outside and with no walls around them. In the exact kind of place he had found freedom for himself the first time.

  “My very first memory is of my father hitting my mother in the face,” he said. “I remember a bruise blooming there almost instantly. Blood. Tears. My home never felt safe. I never had that image of my father as a protector. My father was the enemy. He was a brutal man. He lived mean, and he died mean, and I’ve never mourned him. Not one day.”

  “How did he die?” she asked softly.

  “Liver failure,” he said. “Which is kind of a mundane way to die for a man like him. In some ways, it would’ve been better if he’d died in violence. But sometimes I take comfort in the fact that disease doesn’t just come for good people. Sometimes it gets the right ones.”

  “Your mother?”

  “Packed up and left Oregon the minute he died. I send her money sometimes. At least, I did before...”

  “Obviously you couldn’t send money when you were in prison.”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t think you understand. She didn’t want anything from me after that. She didn’t believe me. That I didn’t have something to do with Alicia’s disappearance. She figured I was cut from the same cloth as my old man.”

  “How could she think that?” Faith asked. “She was your mother.”

  “In the end, she was a woman standing with another woman. And part of me can’t blame her for that. I think it was easier for her to believe that her worst nightmare had come true. That I had fully become the creation of my genetics. You can understand why she would have feared that.”

  He had feared it, too. Sometimes he still did.

  Because that hate—that hard, heavy fist of rage living in his chest—felt far too evil to have been put there recently. It felt born into him. As much a part of him as that first memory.