The Cowboy Meets His Match

by Meagan Mckinney

  Jacquelyn’s wide eyes went even wider with astonishment, and she almost dropped her cup. She was so flabbergasted, she just stared at Hazel with almost childlike defenselessness.

  “Hazel,” Jacquelyn began to protest. But before she could fashion a huffy defense, she burst into unexpected tears.

  “My goodness, honey, you are in a state,” Hazel said, rising and crossing to her chair.

  Jacquelyn was past all defenses now. When Hazel squeezed onto the wide chair beside her and took her in her arms, the younger woman wept copiously.

  “God, I am so stupid,” Jacquelyn said bitterly between sobs. “Letting myself get involved with a man so utterly different from me.”

  “Sweetheart, what’s that got to do with anything? Doesn’t the yin complete the yang or whatever?”

  Jacquelyn couldn’t help a brief smile at Hazel’s analogy.

  “Well, anyhow,” she resolved, sniffing into her handkerchief, “there’s absolutely no law that requires me to interact with him. Ever again.”

  “Interact?” Hazel repeated, bemused. “Is that what you younger girls call it now?”

  Jacquelyn blushed when she realized which “it” Hazel meant.

  “But, dear,” Hazel added, “I ought to tell you—a little something has come up in your absence.”

  Jacquelyn nodded, wiping her eyes. “I know. Bonnie said you have something to tell me.”

  “Yes, well, sometimes duty calls, doesn’t it?”

  “Duty?” Jacquelyn repeated skeptically.

  “Why, of course, dear. Civic duty, I mean. You see, while you two were up in the mountains, there was a final township meeting. Mainly, we had to tie up loose ends to kill your father’s project—please give him my sincere condolences, will you? But we also needed to fit out our sesquicentennial celebration for this coming Saturday. That’s the day of the Frontier Days Ball, if you remember.”

  Jacquelyn nodded, already knowing all this.

  “Someone suggested,” Hazel resumed, “that it would be wonderful to have one of our own local young couples portray Jake and Libbie. They could arrive by fringed surrey, wearing authentic period clothing, to officially open the whole celebration.”

  Jacquelyn felt the blood drain from her face. “‘Someone’ suggested it, Hazel?”

  The old dame spread her arms in a gesture meant to suggest her helplessness. “Oh, who knows how the proposal got started, but my Lord, was the suggestion popular! It was voted on and passed unanimously.”

  “Voted on?” Jacquelyn repeated. “But that’s…how can a vote replace my permission? Have I been drafted?”

  Hazel clapped her hands, delighted with that. “Yes, that’s it! You’ve been drafted to serve your community. Now come along, dear, I have to show you your gown. I already know it will fit you because I talked to your mother to confirm your size.”

  Jacquelyn made a token effort to resist when Hazel tugged her up from her chair and led her into an adjoining bedroom.

  “It was actually owned by Libbie,” Hazel explained, leading Jacquelyn toward an emerald-green silk ball gown on a wooden dress rack. “She paid a local dressmaker to copy it from a European fashion doll. Libbie designed the bustle herself. I think her side-lacing silk boots will fit you, too.”

  “Hazel, it’s beautiful,” Jacquelyn said, staring at the rich, foreign clothing. “But it’s impossible. I went along with your idea of the trip into the mountains with A.J. Now I’ve spent my time in hell. He doesn’t want anything to do with me, and I don’t want anything to do with him. Now I must put my foot down. Please ‘draft’ someone else.”

  “Honey,” Hazel soothed, “it’s not just me. It’s popular demand. You can’t disappoint the entire community, that’s not your way. Besides, think what fun it will be to play old-time dress up! As for A.J.—if you really can’t abide the fellow’s presence, buck up. You hardly need to spend much time alone with him. Just a quick ride from my place to the town square.”

  “Oh, Hazel,” Jacquelyn said, somewhat exasperated as she felt herself crumbling again before this woman’s steamroller will. “Does A.J. already know about this?”

  “Told him yesterday. He’s going to do it.”

  “Of course. He’d burn down a church if you told him to. But don’t fib to me, Hazel. Tell me, how did he take it?”

  “Well,” Hazel replied after a preparatory sigh, “quite honestly? Let’s just say I’m now convinced that nothing on earth could ever make A. J. Clayburn hit a woman.”

  “See?” Jacquelyn challenged, her insides tightening with hurt. “He doesn’t want to, either. It’s a bad idea, Hazel. I…I realy just don’t think I could get through it.” That was an understatement, at best. To look at A.J. again after all she’d confessed to him, all she’d revealed to him, all she’d done to him, was more that her spirit could endure.

  “Hmm,” Hazel replied mysteriously, looking at her visitor with a speculative eye. “Of course, you do have that short hair. So we’ll be sure to include a bonnet.”

  “I give up!” Jacquelyn exclaimed. “I never had a choice, anyway.”

  “No,” Hazel agreed sweetly. “Because your only choice is to say no. And that’s not choosing, that’s being a coward. And Jacquelyn Rousseaux is no coward. She’s a mixed-up young woman in love, and she’s going to confront that fact come hell or high water.”

  Eighteen

  By 8:00 p.m. on Tuesday, most of downtown Mystery had rolled up the sidewalks. But Bonnie Lofton was still hard at work in the Gazette office.

  Bonnie was laying out the special sesquicentennial issue, which would be in the corner coin-ops and rural paperboxes by early Friday afternoon. She had left a “double truck”—two facing pages in the middle of the paper—blank for Jacquelyn’s feature. With Hazel’s and Jacquelyn’s input, Bonnie had already selected most of the historic photos and documents that would support Jacquelyn’s article.

  The usual Wednesday deadline had been pushed back one day so that Jacquelyn had more time to edit and polish her story. Bonnie had heard a first draft over the phone. It made her feel the excited expectation she always experienced before the release of one of Jacquelyn’s major assignments. The girl’s talent made the job fun again. Suddenly, a little sixteen-page weekly from a remote Western valley was turning heads in far-off places.

  It was peaceful in the office, the heavy tick-tock of the old case clock’s mechanism lulling her. So Bonnie actually started in fright when the phone on her desk abruptly burred.

  Still pasting down a headline with one hand, Bonnie speared the phone with the other.

  “Mystery Gazette, Bonnie Lofton speaking. May I help you?”

  “Howdy, Bonnie, it’s A. J. Clayburn. I called your house, and Ray told me you were still working. What, you night watchman now, too?”

  Bonnie laughed. “No, I’m not due for promotion yet, A.J. What a surprise to hear from you! What’s up, cowboy? Got some news for us?”

  “Maybe I do, at that. Tell me, Bonnie. Has Jacquelyn finished her story about our trip?”

  “Well, an early draft.”

  “You read it?”

  “She read it to me. It’s wonderful, A.J. Weaves historical details with a gripping account of the trip you two made.”

  “But did she write anything about how she saved my life on Devil’s Slope?”

  “Saved your life?” Bonnie repeated. “Why, no. She described a harrowing avalanche, but nothing… Well, I’ll be darned! She saved your life, A.J.? Really?”

  “As sure as God made Moses,” A.J. confessed, sounding a little bitter about the fact. “Not just that…while doing it, she executed one of those fancy steeplechase-style jumps like she was born to the saddle.”

  “It’s just like her,” Bonnie mused, “to be too modest to mention it in her own article. I guess she’s too professional to toot her own horn.”

  “Can we toot it for her?” he suggested.

  Bonnie grinned. “Sure we can. We’ll team up for a little sidebar
story next to Jacquelyn’s. You describe it, I’ll bang it out. It’ll carry both our bylines. Fair enough?”

  “Fine by me,” A.J. agreed. “People’ll think I’m literate.”

  “We’ll even keep it a surprise from her,” Bonnie added, warming to the scheme. She picked up a pencil. “Now tell me more about this heroic rescue, A.J.”

  Hazel finished tying the muslin bonnet under Jacquelyn’s chin, then stepped back to admire this newly transformed nineteenth-century beauty.

  “Ta-dumm! Ladies and buckaroos, I present the Southern belle of the Western ball! Jacquelyn, you look absolutely beautiful. Or at least you will when you stop frowning.”

  Jacquelyn—bustled, bonneted, and gloved—stood looking at her reflection in a tall cheval glass. It was eerie, she thought, how precisely Libbie’s emerald gown fitted her. As if this night were meant to be.

  “You’re fortunate, dear,” Hazel reminded her as she pinned a beautiful silver and garnet brooch onto Jacquelyn’s bodice. “Hoop skirts were not yet all the rage when Mystery was founded. Otherwise, we’d have to rig you up wider than the seat of the surrey. A.J. would have to trot beside the team.”

  Then dig out some hoops, thought Jacquelyn resentfully. Her stomach fluttered with dread at the thought of facing A.J. again.

  It had been four days since she reluctantly agreed to Hazel’s latest meddling scheme. And with each day that passed, Jacquelyn felt more like a condemned woman whose last appeal had been rejected.

  “Dear,” Hazel chided her gently, “you needn’t look as if someone just kicked your dog. You’ve got to get in a celebration mood. My goodness, you act as if you’re afraid of A.J. Honey, it’s true he’s all man. But he’s only a man. The entire sex is eternally doomed to defeat when they clash with the feminine will. And they know it, too.”

  “A.J. doesn’t know it,” Jacquelyn insisted. “And if he knew it once, he’s long since forgotten.”

  “That so?” Hazel said, stepping back for one final look. “Then perhaps you’d better be a real woman and remind him of his place.”

  At these last words Jacquelyn felt a little prickle of shock. The “grandmotherly” tone left Hazel’s voice when she spoke them. My God, she just gave me a direct order, Jacquelyn realized. Is she going to slap my face, too, and tell me to “nerve up”?

  Hazel’s sweet manner returned instantly. She glanced at her watch. “I’ll have to leave in a few minutes, dear. I’m the grand marshal, so it won’t do to show up late. A.J. will be here shortly. The surrey is hitched and ready in the side yard. Do put a fine face on all this, won’t you? This means so much to the entire town, not just to old fuddy-duddy me.”

  “I’ll need a blindfold and earplugs to complete my outfit…without them, I’ll just have to do my best,” Jacquelyn quipped.

  Hazel dismissed her with a wave. “Oh, fudge! I know what you’re talking about—your morbid, self-pitying belief that you are incapable of true caring. We all have that at times, but, honey, what is wrong with you and what doctor told you so? You little fool! Stop worrying about that strutting peacock back in Georgia and his ignorant opinions. Women who ‘don’t care’ don’t risk their lives as you did to save A.J.”

  Jacquelyn’s green eyes went even wider with surprise. “So A.J. told you about that?”

  “Told me? My lands, girl, where have you been grazing? He told the world!”

  Lately, Jacquelyn had been so gloomy and preoccupied with this night, that she hadn’t even bothered to read yesterday’s Mystery Gazette.

  Hazel crossed to an oak highboy and scooped up the newspaper lying there. She handed it to Jacquelyn.

  “Turn to your story,” Hazel told her.

  Jacquelyn did. Immediately her lips parted in surprise. A sidebar box ran alongside the copy for her feature. It carried its own headline: Rodeo Champ Says Heroic Reporter Deserves Medal.

  And the greatest shock of all—A.J. shared the byline with Bonnie.

  The story was brief and factual. A.J. even admitted to his stupidity when he stood up in his stirrups at the wrong moment. The article described Jacquelyn’s actions as “quick horseback thinking, competent, gutsy and graceful.”

  “I…I didn’t know,” Jacquelyn stammered. Here she believed she was the butt of lewd jokes, when in truth she was being feted as a heroine.

  “Well, now you do,” Hazel remarked as she aimed for the door to the parlor. “So why don’t you adjust your attitude accordingly? Now I have to head into town, dear. Donna will let you know when A.J. arrives. Remember—” Hazel wagged a finger at her “—frown all you must on the trip into town. But once that surrey rounds the courthouse building, I want ear-to-ear smiles on both your young faces, you understand? The town square will be rightly lit and very crowded. So remember you are Libbie and Jake and you are in love.”

  “I’ll try,” Jacquelyn promised, wanting very much to roll her eyes.

  “Not try,” Hazel corrected her. “You’ll do it. You survived McCallum’s Trace. This little ride with A.J. won’t whip you.”

  Jacquelyn mustered a smile. “You’re something, Hazel. For God, for country, for Mystery—right?”

  “You don’t even realize,” Hazel confirmed before she shut the door, “just how true that is.”

  The evening sky was deep purple with twilight when A.J. arrived to escort his “bride” to the Frontier Days Ball. Preoccupied as she was, Jacquelyn had forgotten that A.J., too, would be in period dress.

  Her first glimpse of the handsome frontiersman startled her. He looked spiffy and well set up in a gray summer-weight suit with a frilled white shirt and octagon tie. His usual Stetson had been replaced by a broad black plainsman’s hat. A gold watch chain trailed from the fob pocket of his vest.

  “You look very well,” Jacquelyn said with stiff formality while A.J. escorted her, arm in arm, to the surrey.

  “Thanks,” A.J. replied brusquely, not bothering to meet her eye. “You’re easy to look at, too.”

  He handed her up into the carefully maintained fringed surrey. It was, in fact, an original McCallum vehicle from the early days of Mystery Valley. The handcrafted beauty had been stored in the wagon shed until a few of Hazel’s hired hands recently rolled it out for service. Now there was fresh blacking on the dashboard and a new whip in the socket. A handsome, seventeen-hand blood bay gelding stood in the traces.

  Jacquelyn cringed inside each time she peeked over at A.J.’s frosty, tight-lipped face. My God, he wants to be here even less than I do, she realized.

  He lit the running lamp suspended from a pole near the driver’s spot. Then he unwrapped the reins from the brake handle and swung up onto the seat. He gave the reins a quick tug.

  “Gee up, Rip!” he called out to the gelding. “Hep! Hep!”

  The surrey sprang forward. As it turned through the stone gateposts of the Lazy M, she finally mustered her courage to speak.

  “A.J., Hazel just showed me the article you and Bonnie wrote.”

  “Bonnie wrote it,” he qualified. “I just told it to her.”

  “Well, thank you. It was very…decent of you.”

  “Look,” he retorted, “nobody’s worried about being ‘decent.’ You earned it, that’s all. Fair is fair. A. J. Clayburn ain’t beholden to anyone.”

  “Beholden?” Blood abruptly pounded in Jacquelyn’s temples. “I get it. You were afraid I’d gloat about the rescue, hold it over you? A mere slip of a greenhorn girl, saving A. J. Clayburn’s celebrity butt.”

  “I admit it,” he returned. “You would gloat. Now we’re even.”

  “You insufferable, self-loving egotist.” She fumed.

  “You uppity, conceited snot.” He punched right back.

  Several minutes passed in awkward silence. Jacquelyn listened to the rattle of the tug chains, the clip-clop of Rip’s shod hooves on the blacktop pavement.

  Despite her seething anger, she was struck by something he’d just said. You earned it. Hazel had reminded her of the same point just minutes
earlier. Jacquelyn had indeed ridden McCallum’s Trace and survived. Ice princess or not, loser in love or not, she did it.

  Hazel’s original claim sank in again—the trip had changed Jacquelyn. She’d survived much of what the legendary Jake McCallum survived plus some dangers of her own. She had entered the crucible of her own fears and doubts, and she had emerged. Sure, she was bound to see A.J. around Mystery, perhaps even bound to yearn for him for the rest of her life. But what she had survived up on the mountain would strengthen her. And when she should by chance look again into his eyes, she might one day not feel the pain of love lost, but perhaps gratitude that in this short life, she at least had her moments of true love. She certainly had never had them before with anyone else.

  As for right now, right here and now…she aimed a sidelong glance at A.J.’s stony, resentful profile.

  There was one more important gesture she must find the courage to make. If not, she’d go mad in the unbearable silence.

  She cleared her throat. “A.J.?”

  He said nothing.

  “A.J.?” she repeated.

  “Is there a bone in your throat?” he demanded. “You got something to say, spit it out.”

  A surge of anger almost coaxed her to leap down from the surrey right there. Instead, she fought down the impulse and said calmly, “We both know that certain…indiscretions occurred during our trip. We can’t undo the past. But as this very occasion proves, our paths are bound to cross often in a little town like Mystery. Can’t we at least try for a civil peace between us?”

  He totally surprised her by becoming even more angry.

  “Exactly what,” he demanded, the ice of suppressed rage in his voice, “do you mean by indiscretion?”

  Her surprise and confusion only intensified. “Isn’t…isn’t that obvious?” she floundered. Her extreme discomfort forced her to a stilted, formal language that she detested even as she used it. “Obviously I’m speaking of our night together. Our liaison.”

  “‘Liaison,”’ he repeated, his tone mocking the word.