by Deb Kastner
“No. Not really. It aches a little when we have a cold snap or if I crouch one too many times in a day. Nothing that taking an anti-inflammatory can’t fix.”
“But you walk with a limp.”
“I’ll never be at one hundred percent. My leg drags a little when I’m not paying attention or I get too tired. But again, I’ve learned to live with it and it doesn’t bother me. Honestly.”
He sat down and rolled his shoulders. “My muscles ache more from daily ranch work than from a rodeo injury that happened years ago.”
Angelica couldn’t help the way her gaze took him in—his broad shoulders sloping to a lean waist. A well-muscled chest and firm biceps carved from a life of picking up hay bales and feed sacks. Strong legs from walking endless fields and riding horses.
He had no need of a gym. His lifestyle was quite enough to keep him in tip-top condition.
He tilted his head and caught her gaze, and she realized she’d been caught staring—and not only that, but caught staring appreciatively.
A spark of humor lit his blue eyes and the heat in her face became a bonfire. Her pulse raced, and it wasn’t just because she’d been caught, nor that Rowdy had clearly followed the train of her thoughts.
She was reacting to him.
The man sitting just across the desk from her.
Not the boy who’d believed in her when no one else would give her a chance, nor even the one whose life she’d wrecked with her careless words and actions.
Just Rowdy, the cowboy Granny had recently sent her off on an adventure with.
An adventure they were far from having finished.
She hated to douse the spark in his eyes, or bring the stress back when he’d just now started to relax. His body language said it all.
Suddenly, the baby monitor crackled to life as Toby wakened. Angelica excused herself long enough to bring Toby and his bouncer into the office.
By this time, Rowdy was slumped back in his seat with one ankle crossed over the other knee. The muscles in his shoulders had loosened and he’d laced his fingers over his flat stomach.
“We still have to talk about this,” she said, avoiding his gaze.
“Yeah. We do.”
* * *
Of course. Ange had hit the nail right on the head.
Confronting the past. Laying to rest every nightmare that lingered. Not only revisiting it, but closing that chapter so they could both move on with their lives.
Move on.
He with an expanded acreage and an increase in stock. Ange and Toby with enough money to see them settled for at least the immediate future. Maybe Ange could even start a trust fund for Toby’s long-term care out of the sale of Granny Frances’s ranch.
A win-win for everyone concerned.
So why didn’t it feel like a win to him?
“The accident,” he said grimly.
When their eyes had met a moment ago, he’d been certain she’d been giving him a flattering once-over, which only served to make his own attraction for her more undeniable as his pulse quickened.
Some of her allure was her pretty face and hourglass figure, but that wasn’t everything.
He’d been drawn to her from the moment they entered kindergarten and she’d been sent to the principal’s office on the first day of school for fighting.
Rowdy had seen the whole thing and he knew what had really happened. Ange had stepped into the middle of an unfair struggle with a big bully of a girl who had pushed another, smaller girl to the ground at recess and was pulling her hair until the little girl was screaming in pain.
The other girl had gotten away with nothing more than a reprimand. Ange had come out of the escapade with a black eye and detention, despite the little girls she’d rescued coming to her defense. The situation was made worse by the fact that she was the pastor’s daughter and consequently held to a higher standard of behavior.
And yet she’d never said a word to defend her own actions.
Ange was a scrappy little thing, defending the defenseless and taking the brunt of the blame with no care for herself.
Whenever good-little-Christian Rowdy stepped in to help, he was praised, whereas Ange, who defied her faith and her parents, was unfairly criticized, all because teachers and staff had labeled her a troublemaker.
By high school, she was understandably rebellious, skipping school and hanging out with a bad crowd, while Rowdy, though he struggled with academics, was a model student who worked his sheep farm alongside his parents rather than participate in extracurricular activities or sports.
It was Granny Frances who had originally set him up with Ange, inviting both of them to her house at the same time and then acting as if it hadn’t been planned. And though on paper a relationship between Rowdy and Ange should never have worked, it did.
Or at least, it had.
Until he got injured at that wretched ranch rodeo. He shouldn’t have been saddle bronc riding in the first place. But he’d been young and stupid and had believed, as most youth did, that he was invincible.
“You’re right,” he acknowledged, knowing that Ange had been waiting for his response. “The ranch rodeo changed everything for us.”
She flinched and her lips pressed into a thin, straight line. She squeezed her eyes closed and he wondered if she was holding back tears.
His own eyes were burning as he took a deep breath and plunged into the deep.
“You—you were right to call off the wedding.”
There.
He’d said it aloud, words that he had never even dared to admit to himself, much less tell another.
It had been so much easier to point the finger at Ange and harbor resentment toward her than to take the responsibility that belonged only to him.
The truth was so much more complicated than casting blame.
“I was wrong to—” Ange started, but then her words skidded to a halt midsentence. “What did you say?”
This time he didn’t stutter or falter in his words.
“I said you were right not to marry me.”
Hurt and shock crossed her expression.
“What?”
“You only did what I told you to do. I was the one who said we ought to break it off before the wedding.”
“And you meant it?”
He shook his head. “No. I was immature and resentful about my injury. I believed I wasn’t any good to anyone, especially you. I didn’t know if I would ever walk again, and I couldn’t ask you to tie yourself to a man in a wheelchair. I couldn’t provide for you if I couldn’t work the ranch.”
“How could you even think that?” she asked, her voice strained. “I was ready to recite vows that included for better or for worse.”
“No marriage should start with worse.”
“What?” she squeaked.
“Didn’t you have your doubts?”
“Of course I did. But not about you being in a wheelchair. Like you said, we were both young and immature. I doubted myself, not you.”
“If you did, it was because I hadn’t offered you the support you needed to believe in yourself. I was focused on myself, on regaining my own strength, and in the process, I shut you out.”
“That’s not it at all. I’m talking about how you got injured in the first place. Rowdy, I was responsible for your accident. You wouldn’t have been on that horse at all if it wasn’t for me. You got hurt because of me.”
He stared at her in confusion, utterly bewildered.
“You don’t even remember, do you?” She sounded flabbergasted. “I dared you to do the saddle bronc riding—pressured you into it, even when you told me that saddle bronc riding wasn’t really your thing. If it wasn’t for me, you wouldn’t have participated. You wouldn’t have ridden that bronc, and you wouldn’t have had that accident.”
> She scoffed. “Stupid me. Saddle bronc riding is the most dangerous event in ranch rodeo, and I wanted my fiancé to show off and win so that I could have bragging rights. I didn’t give a second’s thought as to what I might be doing to you. Some loving fiancée I was. It still makes me sick just to think about it.”
Rowdy frowned. “How many times do I have to tell you this? I am my own man and I always have been. I wouldn’t have signed up for that event unless I wanted to.”
“Yes, but that’s my point. Why did you want to ride? It was because I kept bringing it up and encouraging you to sign up. I wouldn’t take no for an answer.”
He jerked his head in acknowledgment. “That was part of it. I thought I had something to prove to you, something that riding a bronc would do. But I had something to prove to myself, as well.
“I’ve always lived a fairly isolated life out on my ranch, even when I was a teenager. I never played sports or did any extracurricular activities. I saw the ranch rodeo as something I could do to become more involved with the community, and maybe I had something to prove to the cattle ranchers. The Triple X Ranch needed a saddle bronc rider, and none of their wranglers wanted to tackle it, so I signed up.”
“Even though bronc riding wasn’t in your skill set. The point of a ranch rodeo is to mimic the work wranglers actually perform on their ranches. Starting and training horses is a big part of the work on some ranches, but not yours. You never rode broncs.”
She sighed. “You would have been better served in an event like paint branding or trailer loading. And you might be the best man in town at stray gathering.”
“It sounds foolish and not at all well thought through when you put it that way,” he admitted. “But I was nearly twenty-one, in prime physical condition, and I was on top of my world. My dreams were coming true. I was about to marry the most wonderful woman I’d ever known and then we were going to settle down and raise a wonderful family on the land I loved. I got cocky, and then I got hurt.”
“I still think I’m to blame,” Angelica insisted. “I was the one who put the idea in your head in the first place.”
“Maybe so, but there is no way you could have foreseen what would happen. It was a freak accident. Everyone said so, including the saddle bronc experts. My horse panicked and hit the wall, crushing my knee. I couldn’t have seen it coming, nor could I have responded quickly enough to have avoided the collision, especially since my focus was on getting to the end of those eight seconds any way I could. I didn’t know what my horse was going to do.”
He scrubbed a hand across his jaw. “At the end of the day, I rode because I wanted to show off for you. But it wasn’t your fault I got hurt.”
Toby made a mewling sound from his bouncer, which Rowdy now recognized as his precursor to crying.
“What is it, little man? You think you need to be part of this conversation?” Ange lifted Toby into her arms.
“I know I was a jerk to you after the accident,” Rowdy said. “In my anger and frustration at being crippled, I pushed you away.”
“You did push me away, but I should never have gone. I understood your exasperation at being confined to a wheelchair. You are a man of the land, and not being able to do your ranch work must have made you feel inadequate.
“Yet no injury of any kind should ever have pulled me from your side.”
She paused and ran a hand across her cheek as if to wipe away a tear. “I never told you how much I admired your determination to work through the pain of physical therapy. I know it wasn’t easy for you.”
“I’m a proud man,” he acknowledged. “Too proud, sometimes. I should have let you in, dealt with this crisis together as a couple should, and instead I told you that you didn’t want to marry a cripple. The fact that I didn’t really mean the words doesn’t negate the fact that they were said.”
“I wanted to marry you, Rowdy. Like I said before. For better or for worse.”
“Then why did you run away?”
Angelica stared down at Toby for a moment, as if searching for the right words with which to answer his question.
At last, she hitched in a breath and plunged forward.
“Because I was afraid.”
Rowdy’s brow furrowed and he scrubbed a hand through his thick hair.
“And I heard you.”
“You heard me? You heard me what?”
“Laughing. Joking around with your groomsmen after the wedding rehearsal.”
“On the day before our wedding? Of course I was laughing. I was elated, over the moon with joy.”
Her face flushed a furious red. “You don’t understand.”
“Then enlighten me.”
“You’d been so cross and moody since your accident, which was nothing like you. And as I said, I blamed myself for that.
“I know we were getting along better as our wedding day approached, but we were still working out our problems. When I heard you with your groomsmen, you sounded so happy and carefree. Far more than you’d been with me at any time after the accident.”
All this time, he had thought Ange had left him because she’d realized he wasn’t good enough for her, that he couldn’t provide for her. That she didn’t want to be saddled with a man who was less than one hundred percent.
But now he realized it was far more complicated than he’d could ever have imagined.
Ange had dropped her gaze and was nuzzling Toby’s neck, whispering soft reassurances that Rowdy suspected were as much for her benefit as they were for Toby’s.
“You heard me laughing,” he repeated, his throat tightening around the words. “Honey, you should have said something if it bothered you.”
“I know that now. But back then, I wasn’t strong enough to face you. I wanted you to be happy, truly happy, and I convinced myself I was the last woman in the world who could give you that joy. I had suspected it for a long time and my fear grew until it overwhelmed me. I realized how wrong the two of us were together. Whether I’d meant to or not, I’d hurt you by insisting you ride in that ranch rodeo, and I knew I was bad news for you.
Maybe it would have been something different, but something else would have happened, again and again. I’m no good for you.”
Fresh tears welled in her eyes. Toby made a distressed mewl. Even though he was only a few weeks old, Toby could tell something was wrong. He didn’t like his mama sad and crying.
Rowdy didn’t want that, either. He picked up a stuffed blue bunny from the bouncer and reached for Toby, giving Ange a moment to compose herself.
He hummed a few bars of a Texas two-step and shuffled and danced around the room with Toby, who appeared to love the attention and the rhythm of the song and dance.
“Don’t you think I should have been the judge of that?” he asked between beats.
“Yes. I see that now. But back then I was afraid that if I talked to you, you would convince me to stay, and that was the one thing I couldn’t do—not when I believed I wasn’t the right person for you to share your life with. I wrongly assumed that after I left, you probably thanked God every day that you hadn’t been saddled with someone so inherently wrong for you. Someone who would not be a good partner to you in your daily work and life.”
“But we talked about that, how you would contribute to running the ranch. Though of course things had changed after the accident. I couldn’t do my work, and my church friends couldn’t keep running my ranch in my absence forever. Is that what it was?” Because that was the only conclusion that made sense to Rowdy, then or now.
“Injured or not, I didn’t come from a ranching background. I had been deluding myself to think I could truly be a life mate to you, to contribute in a way that would make you proud. My life has been a series of one mistake after another. Eventually, I would have dragged you down with me.”
“I don’t believe that,” he said,
his voice the consistency of gravel.
“I should have trusted in my love for you,” Ange said at last. “I let my hurt feelings get in the way of my good judgment. You’ll never know how sorry I am.”
Rowdy thought he might.
Because he was sorry, too.
Sorry that she’d judged herself and had come up wanting, when she was nothing like the person she saw in the mirror.
Sorry he hadn’t lent her the strength and courage to believe in herself, to see what he saw every time he looked at her.
He’d known that underneath the tough exterior she presented to the world, she was soft and vulnerable. And he hadn’t protected her enough to let that part of her personality see the light of day.
Ange sighed. “If only things had turned out differently. Maybe there would have been hope for the two of us. But it’s too late now. We made our choices and we have to live with them.”
Rowdy wasn’t sure he agreed with that last bit.
Yes, they had lost each other in the past, but did that necessarily mean there was no chance for them in the future? Not starting over, exactly, nor picking up where they left off. Too much had happened and too many years had passed for that.
But what about tentatively exploring something new between them, a relationship that not only encompassed the two of them, but Toby, as well?
And God.
The Lord had been missing from their equation back then, but He would be at the forefront of any new relationship they built together.
He studied Ange, wondering if he should suggest they make no permanent decisions until they’d had more time to let all of these new revelations sink in, but she had already shut down, her expression stoic and determined.
He’d seen that look before, and there was no getting through it.
“We’d better get to planning if we’re going to get this ranch rodeo up and running by the Fourth of July,” she said in a patently false tone.
Rowdy’s chest felt like it was being squeezed in a vise. Ange was doing what she always did when confronted with something she didn’t want to hear—pulling back into herself and blocking everything and everybody else out.
