The Cowboy Meets His Match

by Meagan Mckinney

  For a second the old pain and humiliation rushed back, so fresh it numbed her. All over again she felt like one of those sordid, vulgar, shouting idiots on the tabloid TV shows—betrayed and publicly mortified by the very people she counted on most to sympathize with her.

  The cowboy stood only a few feet away. His gleaming, invasive gaze held her while he waited for her to reply.

  Hazel saved the day by arriving at the awful moment. She bustled into the parlor, skirts rustling, carrying an old-fashioned musette bag stuffed with faded envelopes.

  “Here you go, Jacquelyn, some of Jake’s letters from the folks back East. I trust you two had a chance to discuss your upcoming ride?”

  Jacquelyn had to fight to slow her pounding heart. It was now or never.

  “Hazel, I can’t go,” she managed to say, with great difficulty, accepting the letters from Hazel. She hurried back to her chair to retrieve her recorder. Then she headed toward the wide parlor doors. During all the fluster of activity she refused to look in Clayburn’s direction.

  “I’m sorry, Hazel, but it’s simply out of the question. I…I just can’t. I’m sorry.”

  “All right, dear,” Hazel said, dismissing her. “It’s my fault, I suppose, for jumping to conclusions. One can’t assume the wood is solid just because the paint is pretty.”

  “Yeah, she looks that way all right,” A.J.’s voice added behind Jacquelyn. “You ask me, though, the whole dang Rousseaux family needs to move their summer lodge out of here. They’d be more at home in a sunny condo in Florida or California. Among their own kind.”

  Jacquelyn had been on the feather edge of rushing from the house, but Clayburn’s words acted on her like a brake. She turned to stare at him.

  “And just what kind might that be, Mr. Clayburn?” she demanded, convinced her green eyes were snapping sparks.

  “The grasping kind,” he told her bluntly and without hesitation. “I know all about your father and his dang plans to develop and ruin Mystery Valley. I’m no fan, Miss Rousseaux. I have no need for big-city developers and jet-setting money-grubbers who get rich off other men’s risk and labor. So what kind, Miss Rousseaux? The carpetbagging, uppity, Perrier-sipping, spoiled-brat kind who need to be brought down to size. That kind, Miss Rousseaux.”

  He hurled each word at her like a poison-tipped spear.

  But Jacquelyn only became even more determined and defiant. “I’ll have you know, Mr. Clayburn, that I don’t support my father in his company’s demand to develop Mystery Valley. But I’ll remind you that it’s not your place nor my place to make that decision for this community. It’s up to the town council to vote on it. And if you have an opinion, Mr. Rodeo Star, why don’t you hire someone to write it down for you and exercise your rights in this democracy of ours and give it to your town council.”

  The silence almost boomed after she was through.

  Hazel watched them both with the rapture of a tennis fan at Forest Hills.

  Then suddenly A. J. Clayburn broke out in rude, lustful laughter. “I’ll be damned. You must be a writer. Nobody else I know could do that in a paragraph the way you just did.”

  The anger almost choked her. “You know very well I’m a journalist, and it was not given to me, by the way, Mr. Clayburn. I had to work hard at it.”

  “Even if Daddy does own the paper,” he taunted, his steely gaze shadowed by the rim of his hat.

  “Even if Daddy does own the paper,” she defied, pronouncing every cold word.

  “Then I’m half sorry we’re not going up on that mountain, miss. Maybe you could teach me a new word or two.” He looked at Hazel, resignation in his handsome smile.

  “Hazel, I’ve changed my mind,” Jacquelyn announced, surprising even herself. “Mr. Clayburn, Hazel has my work and home phone numbers. Since we’ll be crossing one of the most difficult mountain passes in the Continental Divide, would I be too much of an ‘uppity, Perrier-sipping brat’ if I request at least one day to prepare?”

  “You go right ahead, Miss Rousseaux. Do whatever you think is necessary,” he said as if patronizing her.

  Hazel walked her out, looking way too pleased by Jacquelyn’s anger. Just as she was about to let the younger woman through the front door, Hazel whispered, “Don’t you worry about anything on the trip, Jacquelyn. A.J. will handle it. That’s why he’s the best one to take you. Oh, and by the way, don’t go teaching him any new words, either.” The older woman gave a meaningful pause. “He’d only want to learn the dirty Latin ones, anyway.”

  Hazel’s Lazy M spread sat in the exact center of verdant Mystery Valley. Several thousand acres of lush pasture crisscrossed by creeks and run-off streams and dotted with scarlet patches of Indian paintbrush.

  The town of Mystery, with a year-round population of four thousand, was a pleasant fifteen-minute drive due east from the Lazy M’s stone gateposts. The Rousseaux’s summer lodge was a ten-minute walk to the west, the ranch’s nearest habitation.

  Jacquelyn, who had driven to Hazel’s place from the Gazette offices, turned east out of Hazel’s long driveway. Her thoughts, like her emotions, were still in a confused riot. What had she just committed herself to? How could she possibly ever endure such an ordeal—especially in the company of such a man?

  Tears abruptly filmed her eyes. The extent of her vulnerability surprised and dismayed her. A. J. Clayburn’s crude baiting had brought back all the insecurities, all the bitter misery Joe and Gina had dragged her through.

  Gina and Joe had proved perfect for each other, a matched set. As harmonious as the easy, breezy alliteration of their names. They were both charming, careless people, takers not givers, and honored no laws except self-survival and gratification of their sensual pleasures. And they had taught her a valuable lesson: it was easier to deal with known enemies than with phony friends.

  At least, she had to admit as she reached the outskirts of town, A. J. Clayburn wasn’t feigning friendship.

  She parked her car. When she entered the office, the red light was on over the darkroom door, which meant Bonnie was busy making photo-offset plates for the next issue of the paper. She left a brief note explaining Hazel’s imperious request, then hung up her hat for the day.

  She was returning to her BMW, angle parked out front, when a throaty female voice cut into the tumult of her thoughts.

  “Hey, there! How’s ’bout a ride for an old geezer?”

  Jacquelyn saw her mother veer toward her along the brick sidewalk, carrying a plastic shopping bag. It bulged from the weight of several clinking liquor bottles.

  “I walked to town,” Stephanie Rousseaux explained, “with all sorts of healthy aerobic intentions. But next time I get the fitness urge, I’ll remember to wear tennis shoes. Good God, my feet are killing me! I can’t wait until your father and I return to Atlanta. How I wish at least one of our local rednecks would exchange his pickup truck for a limo service.”

  At forty-eight, Stephanie was still a striking woman, her hair covering the right side of her face in a hip style. Though lately she was stouter than she had been and a bit more grim around the mouth. She made it a point of honor to always be civil and even-tempered. But while she was far too cultivated and controlled to ever create an emotional scene, Stephanie had developed a chilly, disengaged manner that stymied others around her. Including her own daughter.

  “Some of the local yokels,” Stephanie remarked as her daughter backed out into the sparse traffic of Main Street, “seem surprised that I’m still sober at midday.”

  “Mother,” Jacquelyn pleaded, “please don’t start with that.”

  “Start with what, Miss Goody Two-shoes?” Stephanie countered, adjusting her diva shades. “I’m quite proud that I have strict rules concerning my addiction. I’m disciplined, just like your dear old dad. After all, baby, decorum should rule everything, don’t you agree? Even a Southern debutante’s failed life.”

  Mine or yours? Jacquelyn felt like shouting. But there was no point. She knew her mother mean
t herself.

  “You know,” Jacquelyn said, keeping her tone patient and persuasive, “they have A.A. meetings out here, too, Mom. I checked it out. And you know, Dr. Rendquist told you—”

  “Zip it. Renquist doesn’t know his elbow from his libido. The only reason I go to him is because he keeps me in touch with the charming Prince Valium. I’ve decided A.A. is for the great unwashed masses. Your elitist mother has a better system.”

  Stephanie shook the bag, clinking the glass bottles inside to emphasize her point.

  “Discipline. No therapy until the sun goes down. I despise a daylight drunk. Those lushes at A.A. lack discretion, self-control.”

  Discretion and self-control. Two traits instilled in Stephanie back in Queen Anne County, by parents whose ancestry traced back to the First Families of Virginia. Traits that had proven invaluable for surviving a loveless marriage to a faithless, hypercritical man.

  Jacquelyn ached to say something that might break through to her mother’s inner core. She knew, from her own childhood memory of her mother, that she had once possessed a deep well of inner feeling. But that well had long since gone dry.

  Jacquelyn had borne silent witness for many years. By now Stephanie Rousseaux merely went through the motions of living. She simply reminded herself to change her facial expression now and then, so people would think she was properly “involved.” But in fact her existence had become a long, unbroken silence—the empty and meaningless stillness left behind when love and hope are abandoned.

  And there was nothing her daughter could tell her to make things different. Stephanie was the frost queen Jacquelyn feared she herself was becoming—had perhaps already become. A chip off the old ice block.

  Now Jacquelyn watched the town of Mystery roll past the car windows, alone with her thoughts. Downtown Mystery still included plenty of its original red brick buildings with black iron shutters—nothing fancy, just practical and sturdy. But the ornate, nineteenth century opera house with its scrollwork dome still placed the community a cut above plain saloon towns. So did the stately old courthouse, the only gray masonry building in town.

  “Not exactly the height of sartorial splendor or exotic cuisine,” Stephanie drawled in her droll, husky voice. “But no squalid industrial sprawls, either. Although your father is working on that as I speak—that is, unless he’s relieving his stress with one of his new consultants.”

  Consultants. The euphemism of choice, Jacquelyn realized, to designate the string of mistresses that Eric Rousseaux seemed to require in order to “validate his manhood.”

  Hazel’s Lazy M Ranch slid by on their left as Jacquelyn headed toward the Rousseaux’s summer lodge at the western edge of Mystery Valley. A. J. Clayburn’s old rattletrap pickup truck was just at the entrance, turning to town. He passed them, tipping his hat while he went. Jacquelyn wondered if he recognized her car, or if he was just the good-ol’-boy type who tipped his hat to everyone in his path.

  Again cold dread filled her limbs as if they were buckets under a tap. She wondered again what she had agreed to.

  The Rousseaux place sat in a little teacup-shaped hollow about three-quarters of a mile west of the Lazy M. It was surrounded by bottom woods and Hazel’s pastures on the east and south, jagged mountains to the north and west.

  The sprawling two-storey lodge was made of redwood timbers with a cedar-shake roof. Out back was the lodge guest house that Jacquelyn—insisting on independence—rented from her father. Additionally, there was a big pole corral, and low stables sported a fresh coat of white paint. Jacquelyn liked the lodge’s proximity to town. Often she had time to ride Boots, her big sorrel thoroughbred, into Mystery instead of driving. Though her mother and father both kept horses, too, neither of them rode much anymore.

  Jacquelyn parked in the paved stone driveway out front.

  “Home sweet home,” Stephanie said with lilting irony. “Thanks for the ride, kiddo.”

  Jacquelyn headed through the house instead of around while Stephanie took her purchases into the basement to re-stock the wet bar. Jacquelyn encountered her father on the phone in the living room.

  At fifty-one, Eric Rousseaux was trim and athletic—one of those vain middle-aged men who constantly found excuses to remove his shirt so others could admire the hard slabs of his sculpted abs and pecs.

  He had accumulated his considerable fortune in newspaper publishing. Eric owned controlling interest in several major daily newspapers and a handful of smaller weeklies. Including, by monopolistic takeover, the Mystery Gazette. Recently, however, he had diversified into land-site development ventures.

  “Money,” her father had once solemnly informed her, using the old cliché, “is like manure. It has to be spread around.”

  Eric tossed his daughter a careless wave as she entered the room. Before she could hear what he was saying, he backed into his den and closed the door with his heel—talking in private on the phone was something he did a lot these days.

  Was “the Lothario of the ink-slinging industry,” as her mother called him, involved in yet another romantic intrigue? Stephanie’s liquor consumption lately suggested he was.

  A hopeless weight seemed to settle on her shoulders as Jacquelyn escaped to her house. A.J.’s words from earlier pricked at her again like nettles: huh, ice princess?

  Cold on the surface, cold within. Everybody, it seemed, sensed a basic lack in Jacquelyn—something missing down deep inside her. Some empathetic quality necessary to complete her femininity. But the empathy was there, all right, and anyone who sensed the chink in her armor pounded away at it incessantly, so the scab never got a chance to heal.

  Ice princess…daughter of the ice queen. “I’ll bet you even pee icicles,” Joe had insulted her on the night he unceremoniously dumped her for Gina.

  Suddenly huge tears welled in her eyes, and she sat on the edge of her couch. Mother was back in the big house, hiding in the basement, waiting for sundown and the night’s first dose of anesthetic. Father was in his den, either arranging a bribe or a nooner. Yes…home sweet home!

  Just why should she, Jacquelyn wondered, be able to nurture any belief in love? Who, in this travesty of a family, could have any confidence that they were worthy of love and affection—much less able to express it to others?

  The phone on the table chirred. She cleared her throat, took a few deep breaths and picked it up.

  “Hello?”

  “Y’all requested one day’s notice,” A. J. Clayburn’s mocking voice informed her without preamble. “So that’s what y’all are getting. Be ready at sunrise tomorrow. I’ll pick you up at your place.”

  “That’s not a full day’s notice. That’s impossible. I—”

  But she was protesting for the benefit of her own walls—the line went dead when he hung up on her.

  Four

  Jacquelyn had never bragged about being a morning person. Yet here she was, shivering in the damp chill well before sunrise, miserable as a draftee in the rain.

  “C’mon, Boots,” she urged her reluctant sorrel mare. “It’s only the headstall, I promise. No cold bit in your mouth this time, honest, girl.”

  Boots, however, kept trying to back into her stall. She wanted nothing to do with any equipment this early in the morning. The seventeen-hand thoroughbred was well trained and of a sweet disposition. But Jacquelyn once made the thoughtless mistake, early on a cool morning like today, of slipping an unwarmed bit into the mare’s mouth. Now Boots always rebelled at being rigged in predawn chill.

  Jacquelyn shook the oat bag, gradually luring Boots back out of her stall.

  “I know, girl, I know. This ‘reliving Western history’ is for the birds, huh? That’s a girl, c’mon, that’s a sweet lady.”

  Each time Boots exhaled, the breath formed a ghostly wraith of smoke. This late in summer, Montana mornings had quite a snap to them. And Jacquelyn knew it would be even colder up in the high altitudes of Eagle Pass. As a native Georgian, she shared the Southerners’ deep aversio
n to cold weather. Better a hurricane than a frigid night.

  Last night she had crammed some warm clothing into a duffel bag along with her microrecorder and a notepad. But she still had to assemble all her riding gear. This rushing at the last minute was totally idiotic. She liked to plan carefully for a trip, with plenty of notice. Instead, she was being instantly “mobilized,” with Hazel and A. J. Clayburn her tyrannical, heartless commanders.

  “’Atta girl,” she praised when Boots, finally realizing she would not have to take the bit, dipped her head and let Jacquelyn slip a headstall on her. She tied a lead line to the ring and led her mare out into the grainy semidarkness of the corral.

  She was carrying her saddle and pad out of the tack room when A.J.’s battered pickup rounded a rear corner of the house and parked in front of the corral gate. A two-stall horse trailer was hitched to the rear.

  He somehow managed to poke his head out of the open window without disturbing his neatly crimped Stetson. He thumbed the hat off his forehead, grinning at her. The glare of a big sodium-vapor yard light cleanly illuminated the scornful twist of his mouth.

  “Stir your stumps, girl!” he called out the window. “Time is nipping at our fannies. Drop that sissy saddle and let’s hit the trail.”

  “Hit the…? May I suggest we at least load up my horse and saddle?”

  “Won’t need ’em,” he informed her curtly, turning off the engine and swinging down lithely from the truck.

  Begrudingly she felt a twinge of animal attraction to his good looks. But she shoved the feeling away as soon as she recognized what it was. Lust was sure not going to help her in the situation she was about to get herself into. It would only cause problems.

  “Oh? I suppose I’ll be riding double with you?” A.J. glanced toward Boots. “As rare a privilege as that would surely be for me,” he drawled with evident sarcasm, “it won’t be necessary. Is that your horse?”