She didn't know what she was supposed to be doing with herself. She didn't have time for a relationship. She didn't have the head space.
Did she?
#
Ashley decided she was going to stay away from Ryan all weekend. She needed some breathing room to get her head on straight.
She needed to figure out what was going on with the feed store so she could find out if she was needed there or if she should be seeking work somewhere else.
But when she and Atlas took their late-morning jog, she was shocked to see a line of people and animals outside the store. Several people greeted her as she passed the throng and went into the back of the store.
She found Ryan in the office, hunched forward in the desk chair and squinting at the computer screen, a pen clamped between his teeth.
"What's going on?" she asked.
He started and looked up at her guiltily. With one click, whatever had been on the screen disappeared, replaced by the store's logo. "Good morning, sunshine. Rethinking going on that date with me?"
"No," she said firmly. "What are you doing?"
He retained the vaguely guilty look. "Reports."
She raised her eyebrows, but he didn't say more. Was something going on? She had a stray thought that perhaps she should check the paperwork he'd given her. Would she even know what to look for if Ryan wasn't being up front about the books? How long had it been since her father had really known what was going on in the store?
But that thought almost seemed silly. Ryan would never do something like cheat her parents. Would he?
"What are all those people and animals doing outside?"
"Vet weekend."
His words made no sense to her. "Excuse me?"
"The veterinarian from the next town over comes down one Saturday a month and gives discounted services for three hours. Gets him some new customers and gets people in the store. I told you sales would pick up this weekend, didn't I?"
It did make sense. In fact, if it hadn't been Ryan, she might've said it was a brilliant idea.
It seemed like another way that Ryan had made himself invaluable to her parents. He kept the store afloat, even in a struggling economy.
He cooked them supper twice a week.
He took them to doctor's appointments.
But those were her jobs, not his.
If she couldn't do those things, what was she supposed to do?
Chapter Five
Ashley went through the previous month's time sheets again. Matched up the paychecks to the expense ledger. The expense ledger showed the same expense month after month, with very little variation.
But she still suspected something wasn't right. Something funny was going on. Ryan had blanked the computer screen twice now when she'd come into the office. What was he doing that he didn't want her to see?
She'd gone so far back in the paperwork that she'd seen her own handwritten timecards from twelve years ago. She couldn't find anything out-of-the-ordinary.
In fact, she'd given herself a headache looking at all the numbers and flipping through spreadsheet after spreadsheet.
She rubbed the back of her neck and stood up from her father's home office chair. Her mom had gone to visit a friend for the afternoon. Dad had been resting, and she'd started the project when the quiet of the house had started to get to her.
She tiptoed up the stairs to look in on him, but his bedroom was empty, late afternoon sunlight filtering in through the curtains. The bedsheets were rumpled, but he wasn't there.
"Dad?" she asked.
No answer.
She walked down the hall to the bathroom. Peeked in her bedroom, just to be sure.
Back downstairs, through the dining room and kitchen.
"Dad?" Her voice rose, and she started shaking.
Had he been moving around, and she hadn't heard because she'd been that caught up in her project?
She swept back through the house and noticed the front door was cracked. Had it been that way when she'd gone upstairs, and she'd missed it?
That's when she really started to panic. Her palm grew moist, tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth as her pulse went wild. Her mom had the car. So at least he couldn't drive anywhere.
What should she do?
Her mom had a cell phone but rarely answered it. Ash called anyway. "Come on! Pick up, pick up." When she heard her mother's familiar voice mail message, she hung up. No sense scaring her mom to death.
Should she call the police?
She ran out into the street with bare feet and looked both directions, but she couldn't see her father anywhere.
She tried her mom again. "C'mon, mom. Pick up."
She didn't know her mom's friend's phone number.
Her heart thundered in her ears as she dialed Ryan.
He picked up right away. "Hey, Ashley. What's up?"
"Um…" Tears filled her eyes, temporarily blinding her. Emotion clogged her throat. Her completely irrational reaction proved just how far from the cool-headed soldier she'd become.
"What's wrong?"
She thought she heard keys jingling in the background, like he was ready to rush to her rescue.
It calmed her, a little.
She didn't need help. She could find her dad. She just needed to think straight.
"I'm probably overreacting." She was relieved to find her voice steady. "I think my dad left the house. I can't find him—" A hiccup surprised her and broke off her sentence.
"I'll be there in two minutes."
"You don't have to—" Her rising hysteria overwhelmed her.
"Ashley." His voice was as calm and implacable, as always. "I know."
She hung up and ran inside to put her shoes on.
#
They found him in a neighbor's backyard, two streets over. Joe was wearing pajama bottoms, a T-shirt, and floppy house slippers.
Ashley ran up to him and hugged him while Ryan watched from the sidewalk.
He could barely believe she'd called him. He didn't kid himself he'd been the first dial, but she'd called him nonetheless.
And he'd been here for her. Surely she would see him differently now.
He heard the tears in her voice as she reprimanded her dad. The old man seemed shaky and tearful as well. He kept glancing at Ashley's injured arm.
But when he saw Ryan, his face relaxed.
"You scared us, Joe," Ryan said, moving forward and clapping the older man on the shoulder.
"I'm…sorry."
Joe was docile as they loaded him into the passenger side of Ryan's truck. Ashley walked around the truck with Ryan, so she could slide into the middle seat.
"Thank you for coming," she said, face to the ground. "Even though you didn't have to."
Maybe she was embarrassed that she'd needed help.
He could still see the tremor in her hand.
It gave him the courage to pull her into his arms. She came willingly, and her arm slipped around his back.
He breathed into the crown of her hair and held her. And she hung on to him. And that gave him hope.
Finally, her tremors slowed.
"Why did you come?" she whispered.
She eased back in his arms, but he'd finally gotten her here, and he wasn't in a hurry to let go. He kept one arm loosely around her waist and raised the other to cup her face gently. "You know why."
He let his thumb slide across the softness of her cheek. "I love you, Ashley."
Her eyes flicked down, closing him off from the vibrant blue depths. A little crease appeared between her eyebrows, and she shook her head minutely, like she could refute the fact.
She couldn't.
"But I… You haven't even seen me in years," she breathed. "And I don't know what I'm doing. I barely know my own parents any more. And what kind of a person lets that happen? I don't know what I'm going to do next…"
Her words trailed off and she shook her head, half-turning her face into his palm.
"I have
always loved you, Ash."
Her eyes opened, gaze flying up to meet his. He read the vulnerability in their depths, the questioning…maybe even the yearning.
He couldn't resist. He dipped his head and kissed her.
It wasn't the time for something big, not with Joe in the truck and Ashley still upset, so he just let it be a sweet brush of his lips against hers, then backed off.
He tucked her into the cab of the truck and slid in beside her.
"Since I did come to your rescue, I figure you owe me." He winked when she tipped her head at him. "Go out with me next weekend. I've got this family thing. Actually, I'm kind of getting an award. You can be my date."
She shook her head slightly. Did that mean no? Or what? But now wasn't the time to push her.
When they pulled into Ashley's driveway, her mom was standing on the porch steps, wringing her hands.
He helped Ashley out of the car, and she grabbed his hand, completely stalling his heart.
"Okay."
Then she shocked the life back into him when she leaned up and brushed a kiss across his cheek. "And thank you," she whispered before she rounded the truck to tell her mom what happened.
#
Later that night, after they'd had a quiet supper and she and her mom had gotten her dad tucked into bed, Ashley sat down across the table from her mom, where both of them nursed cups of hot tea.
"I wish you'd told me how bad Dad had gotten," she said softly.
Her mom wrapped one hand around the teacup, looking down. "We'd already grown so far apart."
Ashley's chest tightened. Tighter than it had been. "I know. I'm sorry, Mom. I was…I was wrong to stay away."
Ashley set her teacup on the table, and her mom reached out. She grabbed Ashley's hand and held on. Tears pricked Ashley's eyes.
"Your dad and I never meant to hurt you. We should've told you sooner that you were adopted. But, as far as we were concerned, you were our daughter." She shrugged a little. "We never thought of you as anything else."
Ashley squeezed her mom's hand. "I just…I forgot."
She took a deep breath, took a moment to push back the threatening tears. "I'm sorry you didn't feel like you could tell me about Dad."
"What would you have done? Given up your career to come home and sit with him? You wouldn't have been happy."
"Sometimes life isn't about being happy. It's about being with the people you love. Who need you."
Saying the words aloud brought her mind to Ryan.
He'd been there for her parents when she couldn't. He hadn't been out chasing his dream of owning land and horses. He'd changed his college plans to study part-time so he could take on more hours, more responsibility for the store.
Thinking about Ryan immediately led her to think about his declaration. She'd managed to keep her mind on other things, skittering around his I love you, but now, with the house quiet around them, it came back to her.
Could she really trust in his love?
He wasn't anything like the ornery, fun-loving teenager she remembered. He was still full of laughter and joked around, easy-going and patient.
But he was more than that. She was learning he was a man she could depend on.
Her mother squeezed her hand and brought her back to the moment. "At first, your dad didn't want you to worry. We knew you were in danger overseas, and if you were worrying about him, you might not be thinking enough about yourself. Then…"
Her mom wiped beneath her eyes with her free hand.
Dad's situation was hard on all of them. The mood swings, the way he didn't always know who they were. Most distressing was his reaction to her arm. Since he couldn't remember it had happened, every time he saw it from his Alzheimer's-muddled mind, he grieved all over again. She hated the way seeing her gave him such pain.
And it must've been ten times worse on her mom.
"And then your heart attack. I can't believe you didn't tell me when you came to Maryland."
Her mom clasped Ashley's hand, squeezing hard. "I wanted you to get better. You were so weak, so out of it. It hurt to see you like that."
"It hurt to find out from someone else that I'd missed something that scary in my mother's life."
The tears pooled in Ashley's eyes. She gently removed her hand from her mother's and wiped them away with her fingertips. She wasn't one to cry, but the whole situation with her parents was a minefield of emotions.
"So what do we do now?" Ashley asked. "I can take over whatever needs to be done with the feed store—"
"Ryan manages things well," her mom said. "There's not much to do."
"Unless I took over the manager job, like dad always did."
"And put Ryan out of a job? He's been a big help to us—"
"I know." Ashley rubbed her forehead. "But his position also eats into our profits. And if dad eventually needs to go to a care center, that's going to be expensive."
"We've got a lease on the farmland," Mom said. "That brings in some revenue every harvest."
"I thought the farm had been sold. Didn't you say Dad was thinking about selling?" Her parents had owned a couple hundred acres outside of town. When they'd been Ashley's age, they'd run crops and kept animals, but the feed store had become their main income, and the farm had become nothing more than her dad's unrealized childhood dream. She remembered a tinny long-distance phone call about selling the land, but that had been maybe three years ago…
"We stopped being able to plant and harvest, but your father wasn't ready to sell. The lease brings in money."
"But wouldn't it bring a whole lot more if we sold it?"
"Your father would never want to do that."
"He wouldn't want things to be hard on you either, even if he can't tell you that."
Her mother's eyes were washed in tears, and Ashley figured maybe it was time to stop talking about hard things. For now. It had been an emotional day for them all.
She got up and gave her mom a hug. "I'm here now. We're going to work through things together."
It wasn't direction, like Ashley had been hoping for. Waiting on her father patiently was probably going to be harder than anything she'd done on the front lines.
Inaction wasn't easy for her.
But her father had supported her military career and never asked for anything. Ashley owed this to him. After the way she'd treated her parents when she found out she'd been adopted, she owed them both.
If Ryan could be there for her father, she could, too.
She didn't know what to do about the handsome cowboy-slash-manager. She'd agreed to a date—in a moment of weakness—but with everything going on in her family, she wasn't sure she could open her heart.
Was she wrong to take the risk?
Chapter Six
Ryan's big date turned out to be his college graduation. The small regional campus was a forty-five drive from Redbud Trails. How had Ryan kept up with his education, working full-time?
She was a little offended that he hadn't told her he was about to graduate when she'd found the textbooks in his apartment.
"Ryan ain't one to brag about himself," his cousin Maddox told her from two seats down in the noisy auditorium. "But we're real proud of him."
Ryan had disappeared to dress for the graduation ceremony, leaving her with his family. Trusting that she would fit in.
She'd been absorbed by his somewhat-noisy family. Maddox was a quiet, serious cowboy, while Justin, Maddox's brother, teased almost as must as Ryan did. He used a crutch to get around, and he didn't have a cast or anything indicating a recent injury. She hadn't been brave enough to ask what had happened.
Ryan's mother hadn't been able to come from out-of-state, but Justin fiddled with a video camera, determined to tape the ceremony for her.
Maddox's girlfriend Haley and niece Livy, a little girl that Maddox had custody of, had provided some buffer from the two cowboys who seemed determined to tease their cousin mercilessly. Ryan took it all with good grace—which
was not a big surprise.
The ceremony started with an invocation and two long speeches. Finally, the procession began. She saw Ryan's blond curls where he stood in line along one wall of the gym.
"You don't think he'd do something ornery, do you?" she asked Haley in a whisper. Like toss a football into the crowd or other hijinks she'd heard of ornery grads doing?
"Ryan?" Haley asked, surprised by the question. "I doubt it. He's pretty responsible. He helped out Maddox a lot right after Justin's accident last year."
Of course he had.
Ryan made his way across the stage with no pomp, only a smile and wave when Justin wolf-whistled at him. The crowd chuckled.
When they'd been dismissed and he made his way through the crowd, his gaze kept colliding with hers. Each time it sent a rush of sweet emotion through her.
He joined the circle of their family and accepted handshakes and slaps on the back from his cousins.
She met him with a hug and a whispered, "Congratulations." Her good wishes felt like so little, too little.
She couldn't believe he'd accomplished this on top of everything else. He'd said before that there was plenty of time for his dreams, for his land and horses.
But she would never be as patient as he was. Hadn't she been out chasing her dreams, finding herself when she'd lost everything?
He was almost too good to be true.
After they left the auditorium, the whole group went out for a celebratory meal to a chain American-style restaurant. She found herself squished between him and the girl, Livy.
"Do you like ice cream?" the little girl asked.
"Oh yes," Ashley replied.
"She's a chocolate girl," Ryan confirmed, sliding his arm casually around the back of the curved booth to rest around Ashley's shoulders. She went hot, but didn't shake off his overture.
"Are we going to order some?" Ashley asked.
Livy looked offended, and Ryan laughed.
Maddox and Haley peered over from where they'd been talking to Justin.
"Livy owns a gourmet ice cream business," Ryan explained.
"Oh. How old are you?" Ashley asked.
Livy's chest puffed out with pride. "Twelve. Haley is my business partner."
With Love, Cowboy [Love Letters from Cowboy] Page 5
