A Cowboy to Remember

by Barbara Ankrum

  What you did to our marriage, she could almost hear him thinking. Because he blamed her for its failure, just as she had for so long.

  His cool, gray eyes bore black outlines around the pupils. People were fascinated by them. They had graced the covers of dozens of magazines from Horse and Rider to Details, staring out from the magazine racks, a celebrity on horseback. His icy eyes mesmerized first-time watchers. They had done so to her. Not anymore.

  A waiter came by and asked her if she wanted anything. She shook her head without taking her eyes off Kyle and the waiter backed off.

  “You can’t do this. You can’t have me followed. Or show up in places like this. And how the hell did you get my phone number?”

  “I’m not without my resources. Why haven’t you answered my letters?”

  “Because,” she said clearly, “I’ve said everything I have to say on the subject of you and me.”

  “I haven’t,” he said, leaning forward. “You should come home where you belong, Olivia. I want you back. I need you back.”

  The words stole her air for a moment. “No, you don’t. You just hate that I left you.”

  “That’s not true. I gave you everything. Taught you... everything. You’re the one who gave up on us. And you—you’re suffocating here. Hiding in your parent’s house like you’re five years old. You need to come back to New York and let me help you.”

  “Help me?”

  “You’re still not back up on a horse, are you, Olivia?”

  She started to get up, but he grabbed her hand, stopping her.

  “I can help you. I can save your career. We need each other, whether you like it or not.”

  Her breath left her in a little half-laugh and she shrugged off his hand. “Don’t do this again.”

  “I’ve changed,” he said. “I’m different now. I can be... different.”

  There was some desperation in him now. There had to be, showing up this way. He turned forty this year, she remembered as she sat there trying to figure out how to end this gracefully. She saw his age around his eyes and his mouth. All those solitary years, on the back of a horse. He looked a little thinner than he had the last time she saw him. A little more insecure. But Kyle was still and always would be...Kyle.

  “We’re not going to do this,” she said. “Go home to your horses. To your life. I don’t want you. And you don’t need me.”

  A muscle in his jaw worked. “I never stopped needing you.”

  “No, Kyle. Horses, you need. Victories? Ditto. The houses, the cars, and even your ‘resources’—you need them all just to feel... even. But a wife? A flesh and blood woman with needs of her own? You have no idea what to do with that.”

  “I never blamed you for the accident. You took that on yourself.” He grabbed his highball glass and slugged back a gulp. “But you let it end us.”

  She looked away from him. “We ended long before that accident. We just didn’t admit it to ourselves.”

  “I think,” he said, “that you never loved me.”

  That drew the stares of several people around them who whispered loud enough that she heard her name.

  Quietly, she said, “Maybe you’re right. I don’t believe I knew what love was when I married you. Maybe I thought we could help each other. Fix each other. But we can only fix ourselves, can’t we? But that wasn’t really love. Not the kind that holds people together. But whatever I felt for you once, it’s dead now. It’s over.”

  People at the tables nearby were starting to look at them. She pulled away and got to her feet, though her knees felt shaky. He followed her up and grabbed her upper arm so hard she nearly yelped.

  “You’re fucking him, aren’t you?” he asked in a voice that carried across the bar. “That ex-soldier boyfriend of yours?”

  The sound of blood rushing in her ears muted his accusation. Conversations stopped nearby. People gaped.

  Quietly, she said, “If you don’t leave here and leave me alone, I will take out a restraining order against you. So help me, if you push me, I will take you to court.”

  He pulled her up close to him. “Don’t threaten me, Olivia.”

  “That,” she said, “is not a threat.”

  “Let her go. Now.” Jake’s voice, like arctic steel, came from right beside her.

  The look on his face sent a shiver through her.

  Her heart sank. The very last thing she wanted was Jake in the middle of this.

  “It’s all right, Jake,” she said. “We’re finished here.”

  “I don’t think you heard me. I said let her go.”

  After another beat, Kyle released her arm and she rubbed it where it stung from his fingers.

  “And there he is, on cue,” Kyle announced to the patrons sitting nearby who had started to clear the area. “The big hero of small town Marietta, Montana. Jake Lassen. Come to rescue poor, broken little Olivia.”

  “Shut up, Hightower,” Jake said.

  “What is it Lassen? You haven’t fucked my wife enough yet to know how pathetic she really is?”

  She didn’t even see the punch coming, it happened so fast. Kyle tumbled backward, falling over the chair behind him and sprawling on the floor. Blood spurted from his mouth and, dazed, he reached a hand up to touch it. Customers scattered out of the way. The bartender started to come around the bar but Jake bent down and dragged Kyle up by his five-hundred dollar shirtfront.

  “Stop!” she cried, but Jake pulled Kyle out of the bar and through the front doors, tossing him toward the valet. Olivia grabbed for Jake’s arm, but he shrugged her off. Behind them, patrons were pressed up against the windows, watching everything.

  “You want me?” Jake said. “C’mon.”

  Kyle threw a punch at Jake that glanced off Jake’s shoulder and Jake came right back with another one of his own that had Kyle spinning sideways. He bent over his knees and spit something into the grass along with a curse.

  “The first one was for her.” Jake flexed his bleeding fist. “That one was for me.”

  Kyle staggered a little, recalculating his odds. Jake had three inches and forty pounds on Kyle. And that last punch had been a doozy. The restaurant owner, Beck Hartnett, stepped outside with the bartender, looking grim. “Gentlemen, please—this can’t happen here.”

  “Jake...” Olivia begged, “Enough.”

  “You see?” Kyle said. “She’s still worrying about me, Lassen.”

  Olivia spun on him. “No, you’re wrong. If I cared enough about you to hate you, I would. But hate isn’t the opposite of love. Apathy is. And that’s what I feel for you now. Nothing.”

  Kyle dropped his fists, his narrowed gaze going between her and Jake. “Well, I’m glad we got this straightened out, Olivia. Then, take her, Lassen.” He swiped the blood from his lip with the back of his sleeve. “You’re welcome to her. I give her to you.”

  “You can’t give me shit, Hightower. She doesn’t belong to you. She never did.” Jake pulled a hundred dollar bill from his wallet and handed it to Beck Hartnett with a sincere apology. Then, taking Olivia’s hand and he tugged her toward her car, leaving Kyle swaying, alone on the walkway.

  “You’re mad,” Jake said as they drove down the darkened road, breaking the silence that had descended on them the minute they’d gotten in the car.

  Olivia was headed toward his house, her fingers bloodless on the steering wheel.

  “Don’t expect me to apologize for what happened. I won’t. He had that coming.”

  “I had it handled.”

  “That dumbass was drunk and jealous and he had no right to talk about you that way.” He wrapped a bandana around his bleeding knuckles.

  “And I told you I had it handled.”

  “I think you thought you did. But he might as well have had his finger on the pull-pin of a grenade. Guys like him... they escalate until something happens. You know I’m right.”

  Maybe he was. But it was all too complicated to be that simple.

  “I am not a litt
le girl who needs you to rescue me, Jake. I straight up admit I stayed with him years longer than I should have. And yes, maybe I didn’t have the guts to get out of it sooner. But I managed to do it all on my own, eventually, without any help from you, thank you very much.”

  “We’re not talking about your divorce. We’re talking about a moment. In a bar. Between you and him and, apparently, me. How the hell did he happen to be there anyway? And why haven’t you blocked him on your phone?”

  “I’ve changed my entire number. I have no idea how he got my new one or how he found me there. Maybe he... I don’t know... triangulated me. He probably had someone watching me, waiting for me to step out of my cave.”

  “Really.” Jake scrubbed his hands through his hair. “I’m officially creeped out by that, aren’t you? I mean... stalking? Hell. No dangerous precedents there.”

  “He’s just jealous because of you, Jake. Competitive. And it’s not even that he wants me. It’s that he doesn’t want to lose to someone else.”

  “I don’t give a shit about him or his reasons for coming here to harass you, because if he ever comes near you again, what happened today will just be a fond memory compared to what I’ll do to him then.”

  She stared straight ahead at the twin cones of light on the road. He won’t come again. Jake had humiliated Kyle and he didn’t have a prayer of redemption. No, he wouldn’t come back unless he had a death wish. But Jake didn’t seem to grasp the implications of a scene like they’d created back there.

  “Everyone, and I mean everyone saw it,” she said. “They had their faces pressed up to the window like kids at a candy store. It will be all over town by morning. Because there aren’t enough people talking already.”

  “So what? Let ‘em talk. What do you care what they think?”

  She nearly swerved, jerking a look at him. “What do I care? I have to live here, even if you don’t. Already they’re spreading—” She stopped.

  It was bad enough that she’d heard the awful rumors.

  But he didn’t miss a beat. “Spreading what?”

  Heaven help her. “Rumors. About us.”

  “Us?” he repeated. “As in you and me?”

  “Yes. As in our helicopter date, etcetera...”

  Inconceivably, he smiled. One of his heart-stuttering smiles that had, lately, made her go all soft and melty. Damn him. She forced her eyes back on the road and scowled.

  “Exactly what about this situation justifies a smile right now?”

  “The etcetera part.” He reached for her knee and curled his hand over it like he’d been doing that forever. “Look, people don’t talk about smoke, if there’s no fire behind it.”

  Oh, there was fire. There was plenty of fire. That was the problem.

  “That,” she said, “is not a good thing.”

  “I think it’s good. Yeah...” He nodded, as if he’d just figured out the final Jeopardy answer. “I like it.”

  “I can’t believe you,” she muttered.

  “What can’t you believe? That I’d want to protect you? Or that I just kicked your ex-husband’s ass and enjoyed it?”

  Olivia turned down the long tree lined drive that led to Jake’s parents’ house. In the dark, spires of pines fluttered against the midnight blue sky and incredible wash of stars. The full moon cast long, shivering shadows on the ground. She parked in front of his house and he got out. He came around and opened her door. After a beat, she got out and followed him around to the other side of the car. But she stopped and leaned against the door instead of following him down the sidewalk.

  He turned back when he realized she wasn’t beside him and walked back to her.

  “What?” he asked and took her hand in both of his. “Come in.”

  She curled her fingers around his. “My parents probably think I’ve been kidnapped.”

  “Or, abducted.” He pointed up to the sky and grinned. “You can call them when we get inside.”

  She had to look up at him when he stood close. His eyes were pinning her to the spot, those Absaroka-blue eyes that never missed anything. His nostrils flared on his once-broken nose—from what other fight?—and his mouth... his mouth, so beautiful, had already sensed what she was about to say. He wasn’t smiling anymore.

  She pressed her back against the cool metal of the car. “My staying... it’s not a good idea tonight.”

  “Yes, it is. Ben’s gone. We have the place to ourselves.”

  “I think I should go home. This is all”—she swallowed thickly and looked away—“going too fast.”

  Though she was staring at the ground, she could still feel his eyes on her, as if he was trying to see into her, as if he couldn’t imagine what she was doing right now. “Too fast? Not for me, Liv. I say its taken twelve years too long.”

  “That’s just it. Twelve years. You don’t really know me anymore. I’m not that girl. The Olivia you think you remember. I’ll disappoint you. Maybe even break your heart.” Or mine.

  “Why don’t you let me worry about that?”

  “Because,” she said, “seeing Kyle tonight reminded me of all the things I promised myself when I got out of my marriage. And all the things I’ve already failed at. But I don’t want a man to save me, Jake. I want to save myself. And I don’t want to be a victim anymore. I don’t want people to look at me that way. But you can’t fix it for me. Only I can.”

  “Don’t do this, Liv.”

  She swiped a hand across the moisture on her cheek, silent.

  Jake tilted his face up to the full moon, perched so haphazardly in the sky. “What are you afraid of? Us? Me? Being happy?”

  “I don’t know.” She felt nauseous. Sick. Frozen. Seeing Kyle again had churned up everything in her mind like she was under a giant wave that just kept spinning her and pushing her down. What was she afraid of? Believing she might be loveable? That if she risked it again, she might just drown and never come up?

  “You asked me the other night why I came back here, if it was just for that promise we made. I came back for you, Olivia. For the possibility of us.”

  Olivia pressed her fingers against his mouth, trying to stop him, but he wouldn’t be stopped.

  “No,” he said, pulling her hand away. “I need to say this. Whether you think I’m crazy, or it’s too fast or... whatever. I know. I want you. I’ve spent the last twelve years wanting you.”

  He spread his arms wide. “There it is. That’s it, right there on the table. I want to spend every day with you for the rest of my life. I want to sleep next to you, make love to you, make a family with you. And, yeah, I want to protect you and save you and I want you to do the same for me. Because that’s what two people who love each other do. I think. Tell me if I’m wrong. If I am, then I’m flat wrong about everything.”

  “I can’t...”

  “Can’t what? Say I’m wrong or accept that I’m right?”

  She slammed her eyes shut, unable to speak. She’d warned him, hadn’t she? Oh, what the hell did warnings matter when he made her feel this way?

  “Tell me you don’t want me, Liv, and I’ll go. I’ll leave you alone. Tell me you don’t feel like I do, like some piece of you that’s been long gone has fitted itself back inside you when we’re together. That the last twelve years of hard times haven’t funneled us right back here, where we found each other again.” He put his hands on her upper arms. “Go on, say it.”

  Tears leaked down her cheeks. “I—don’t want to lose you, Jake.”

  “Then don’t.” A stark plea from a man not given to pleading.

  “Can’t we just—”

  “Maybe you can, but I can’t.”

  She shook her head, and tried to pull away from him, but he pressed her back against the car, letting her feel his opinion on the subject as his hips settled against hers. He tipped her chin toward him, dropped his mouth down on hers and kissed her. It was a kiss that left no doubt about what he wanted. He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her against him—his tongu
e swirling against hers, taking and giving and wanting and promising all at the same time—until he’d kissed her insensible and she felt utterly confused.

  And just as suddenly as he’d kissed her, he let her go and took a step back. Olivia braced herself against the car so she wouldn’t fall. Every female bit of her was aflame and there was nothing she wanted more than to follow him into his house and make love to him, one more time. But if she did, she would surely be lost.

  “Do what you have to do, Liv,” he said. “But I won’t wait another twelve years for you. I can’t.”

  And with those stark words, he turned and walked into his house, where Monday was waiting for him. He shut the door behind him, and she felt something crack inside her. And she knew it was the sound of fear, winning.

  Chapter Ten

  On Thursday morning, her mother threw open the blind, flooding Olivia’s bedroom with sunlight. She moaned, flung the blankets over her head and curled into a tighter ball.

  “Time to get up, Olivia, and face the day,” Jaycee said in a voice that brooked no argument. “It’s noon. Ry Barros and his daughter are here, shoeing Jinx, and it’s impolite to not at least go say hello.”

  She argued anyway. “You say hello. I’m sleeping.” Her hair was a rat’s nest of tangle and her mouth felt like a tumbleweed had found its way inside.

  “No, you’re not. Thirty-six hours is long enough for any human being to sleep. You’re getting up.” She flung off Olivia’s covers with a billowing flourish and began pulling the bedding off the bed at the corners.

  She sat up, wearing only a tee-shirt and panties. “Wh-what are you doing?”

  “Washing the sheets.”

  She tugged the sheets back. “Mom!”

  Jaycee put her hands on her hips and gave her one of her most motherly scowls. The one she’d given her when Olivia had pretended to be too sick to go to school or to visit her father before he’d died. “What, Olivia? What? Do you expect us to stand by and watch you disappear? You haven’t eaten, haven’t spoken, haven’t gotten out of this bed since the night of the birthday dinner. You can’t stay in here forever.”