Jenna's Cowboy Hero

by Brenda Minton

  “Oh, okay. When are you coming back?” But her heart already knew the answer.

  “I got the job, Jenna. I’m signing the camp over to the church and buying the land from Jess.”

  “That’s good. I’ll let the boys know that you had to leave.” Her heart was pounding and wounded. She was so angry, so hurt. It shouldn’t feel that way to say goodbye to him.

  “Tell them I’m sorry I didn’t get to say goodbye.” He paused. “Jenna, I am sorry.”

  “I know, and I’ll tell them.” Stoic, she knew the word, knew how to be that person. “Adam, we knew this day would come. The boys knew you weren’t staying here. But they will miss you.”

  “I’ll miss them, too.” He sighed, and she remembered too much about being in his arms. “Jenna, are you okay?”

  “Of course I am.”

  “The doctor’s appointment.”

  “Oh, that. Yes, well, I’m off my feet until tomorrow. Oh, someone is here. I’m glad you called.”

  She watched Clint’s truck pull up her drive as she hung up the phone, pretending it was her idea to let Adam Mackenzie go. It felt better that way.

  Clint knocked on the door. She waved them in and held her arms out for the baby. Willow handed her over and Jenna cuddled the infant close, enjoying the feel of her, and the way she smelled, like soap and lotion.

  “You’ve been crying.” Clint leaned to hug her.

  “I haven’t.”

  Willow nodded and pointed to her own eyes. “Mascara, puffy lids. I don’t think it’s a virus.”

  Jenna bit down on her bottom lip and swallowed the sob that welled up from inside.

  “He’s gone.” Jenna sighed and said the words. “Did you know that he was gone?”

  Willow nodded. “I’m sorry. We found out yesterday evening when we went to the camp chapel service.”

  “Jenna, you knew he’d have to go.” Clint, pragmatic, brows scrunched together. “Why in the world does that bother you so much? He didn’t walk out on the camp, and that’s what you were worried about.”

  Willow punched his arm and he yelped. “You idiot, she’s in love.”

  “I’m not in love. I’m mad because he didn’t say goodbye to the boys.”

  “Who didn’t say goodbye to us?” Timmy was standing in the door of the kitchen. “Who’s gone?”

  “Honey, Adam had to leave. He had a job interview and we weren’t here.” Jenna said it like it was expected, like it shouldn’t hurt.

  Timmy was shadowed by David, and both boys stared, eyes wide and welling up with tears. “He was gonna play football with us.”

  “Hey, guys, you still have me. I know how to play football.”

  The boys stared at Clint like he’d lost it. “You’re not pro.”

  He laughed but Jenna thought he looked a little hurt. “No, I’m not pro, but I can throw a football as good as Adam Mackenzie. Why don’t you guys help me with chores, okay?”

  The one thing Jenna knew about Clint. He would always be there for them.

  She watched as her brother took the boys out the back door, listening as they talked about their pony and the dog being called Buddy now. But Adam was gone, and he was the one that told them the dog liked that name.

  Willow sat down in the chair next to the couch and she didn’t say anything. Maybe because Willow knew what it was like to have that moment when a guy broke her heart. And Willow knew that a heart couldn’t be glued back together with nice words.

  Jenna rubbed her hands over her face and told herself she really wasn’t going to cry. But tears burned her eyes and she felt the pain like a lump rising from her heart to her throat, tightening in her chest.

  “I don’t care about him.” She took the tissue that Willow handed her. “Oh, this is ridiculous. He was a nuisance. He was never planning on staying and I knew that. And what did I do?”

  “You fell in love?”

  Jenna nodded. “I fell in love. And I knew that I was falling in love.”

  “Love. Who would have thought.” Willow smiled.

  “But three weeks doesn’t a relationship make.” Jenna uncovered her face so Willow could hear her, because Willow had reminded her by touching her arm. She needed to read lips.

  “Three weeks isn’t long enough to call this love,” she repeated.

  Willow laughed. “Right, tell that to your heart.”

  “My heart is obviously defective. It always picks the guys that aren’t going to stay around.” She gasped. “That’s it. I am defective. I purposely form relationships with men who aren’t dependable. That means I’m not really looking for a relationship. I’m sabotaging myself, which means…”

  Willow shook her head. “Give it up. You love him. He was dependable. He was kind to you and the boys. He was gentle. Of course you fell in love with him.”

  “Three weeks. He’ll be easy to get over.” Jenna looked at her sister-in-law and sighed words she knew. “I need chocolate.”

  “Right. But I don’t think they make enough chocolate to fix this.”

  And her boys. They would miss him. And she wasn’t going to do this again. Next time she really would know better than to let her heart get involved.

  Adam started his new job on Monday. He sat behind his new desk, in his new office, and he took phone calls. He made phone calls. He answered questions. He planned travel for the games he’d be announcing.

  And he hated it.

  A fist rapped on the door, short knocks, and it opened. A familiar face, blond-headed and a cheery smile. Adam leaned back and groaned. He didn’t need cheering up. He didn’t need optimism.

  “How does it feel?” Will closed the door behind him. He stood in the center of the room, surveying the office with the dream view of Atlanta.

  “It feels…” Adam leaned back in the chair and shrugged. “It feels like torture. It feels like a cage.”

  “Buddy, don’t do this to me. This is your dream, right? This is still what you want, isn’t it? Because we’re still negotiating a few details on your contract and if you’re going to flake out, I need to know.”

  “I’m not flaking.”

  Will sat down in the seat on the opposite side of the desk. He lifted his left leg, situating it over his right and leaning back, his arms folded behind his head. “Tell me who she is. Do we need to pay her off?”

  Adam sat up, no longer amused. “That isn’t funny.”

  Will put his foot down and leaned forward. “I know. But sometimes it’s the only way to get your attention. It’s the girl from the camp.”

  “Woman.”

  “Fine, woman with two kids.” Will shook his head. “As much as I wanted this for you, I really wanted it to happen here, in Atlanta. Settle down, I told you. Find some nice woman.”

  “I’m not thinking about settling down. We were talking about this job.”

  “Torture. I think that was the word you used.”

  Adam turned his chair to look out the window. He’d been doing that all morning, and comparing it to his view from the front deck of the mobile home in Dawson. He’d been thinking about Jenna driving up the road in her old truck, the two boys buckled in behind her.

  Jenna Cameron was five feet of temptation that he couldn’t get off his mind, because she’d taken his leaving and acted as if it didn’t matter. Maybe it didn’t matter.

  His life was going in the direction he had planned. “This is what I want, Will. I planned this. It’s one of the few things in my life that I planned for myself. I own this decision.”

  “Alrighty then.” Will smiled big. “And you’re not defensive. You’ve made other decisions for yourself. The camp. You made a decision to keep it going.”

  “Yeah, well, God might have had something to do with that.”

  Jenna was a distraction. He knew when he met her that she wasn’t a summer romance. She was the type of woman a man married, the type he took home to meet his family. And he wasn’t the type of man who married a woman like that.

  She wasn
’t a Friday night and unreturned phone calls when things got too confining.

  But man, she’d made him a better person.

  “She made me feel like the kind of guy who could love a woman like her forever.”

  “Whoa!” Will coughed. “That’s not what I thought I’d hear. I was just razzing you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ve had nearly a week to think about the fact that I miss her more than I’ve ever missed anyone. I miss her boys.”

  “Kids. You miss kids? If you tell me you remember my daughter’s name, I’m going to know that something happened to you in Oklahoma.”

  “Kaitlin.”

  Will stood up. “I’ll hold off on the contract until you decide if you are positive about this job.”

  Positive about the job. Adam looked out the window. And he had to be positive about what he was feeling for Jenna and her kids. He couldn’t go back if he didn’t know for sure.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Jenna watched the boys play in the water hose. It was the second week of July and hotter than ever. Hotter than a flitter—whatever a flitter was. But Adam wasn’t there to laugh at the joke, so it wasn’t as funny.

  She hadn’t heard from him since he left.

  The toughest part of that was that she hadn’t expected to miss him so much. Two weeks of missing him shouldn’t feel like two weeks separated from oxygen. The boys were laughing, spraying each other, and it wasn’t about them, because they believed Adam would come back to see them.

  Or maybe they were waiting for God to answer their prayers, the ones they prayed each night when they thought she wasn’t listening. That Adam would be their dad. The first time she’d heard them, she’d tried to explain that for them to have a dad, she would need a husband. And she didn’t want a husband. So then they’d started praying that she’d want a husband.

  As much as it hurt, she smiled, because they were so sweet and she loved them so much.

  “Guys, I have to feed the horses. Stay here, okay?” She walked past them and they laughed, spraying at her, but not getting close enough to hit her with the spray of water.

  A car pulled up the drive. Jenna held her breath the way she always did when she heard a car, thinking it might be Adam. And it never was, and she couldn’t believe she missed him this way.

  It was Pastor Todd. He stopped and got out. She waited for him. He made a wide path around the boys and met her at the front of the red-painted barn. His wife had gotten out of the passenger side. She wasn’t afraid of the boys and the water hose.

  “What brings you out here?” She walked into the barn, enjoying that it smelled like horses, hay and grain. She had always loved this barn. Even as a child this had been her hiding place.

  “I came out to tell you that we’re going to do a ladies’ retreat at the camp, maybe in September.”

  He didn’t drive all the way out to her house to tell her that. She turned, giving him a look, and he blushed a little. “Really?”

  “I came out to check on you.” He looked into the stalls as they walked through the barn. “And to tell you that Adam called. He asked about you.”

  “Did he?” She pretended not to care, shrugging it off as she opened the door to the feed room. “And you told him that we’re fine, right?”

  She filled the bucket and walked out into the sunshine. The three horses in the corral nosed in, doing their typical chasing dance until they each settled on one of the tubs of feed.

  “I told him we all miss him.” He smiled as he answered.

  “I guess we probably do.” She stood next to Pastor Todd, watching the tank as the water level rose. The horses came up, sucking up the cool water and then playing in it, splashing with their faces in the water.

  “Would you mind playing this Sunday at church?” Todd reached out and rubbed the face of the bay mare she’d bought the previous week. The horse left the water and walked up to the fence, wanting more attention.

  That personality was why Jenna had bought her. She had seen the mare on the Internet and liked her eyes. It was always in the eyes—kindness or shiftiness. Even in people. She closed her eyes, remembering Adam’s face, his eyes.

  He had good eyes, full of light and laughter. That’s what she’d seen in his interviews, that hidden part of him—maybe hidden from himself, not just from the cameras.

  “Is there anything else I can do around here before I leave?” Todd pulled the water hose back and dragged it to the barn to turn it off.

  “No, I’m good. Do you know the songs for Sunday?”

  “Kate can give you a list. Jenna, do you love Adam Mackenzie?”

  She turned, not sure how to answer, surprised that he’d ask the question. “I didn’t know him long enough to love him.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe love at first sight is really attraction or chemistry at first sight. But love, that grows from knowing someone, from the way they make us feel about ourselves—how we feel when we’re with them.”

  Love. She blinked a few times, because her heart breaking wasn’t about attraction. It was about losing someone who had changed how she felt about herself. He had called her beautiful and she had wanted to believe that he really thought she was.

  They finished feeding, turned out the lights in the barn and walked back into the bright sunlight, where the boys were playing with their trucks in the mud they’d created with the hose and Pastor Todd’s wife was talking to them, complimenting their trails and hills.

  “Mom, can we go see our turtle?” David pushed his truck over a pile of rocks.

  “Turtle?” She stayed a safe distance from the mud puddle.

  “The one at Adam’s trailer. Could we go tonight and make sure he has food?”

  “Not tonight, David. And he does have food. He’s a turtle, and God gave them instincts so that they would know how to feed themselves.”

  “God gave them insects?” Timmy’s nose scrunched.

  “Instincts, Timmy. They know, without being told, how to eat, how to keep safe, where to go in storms.”

  “Sounds like a Bible lesson, doesn’t it?” Pastor Todd patted her shoulder. “Turtles know when to duck into their shell, they know where to go for shelter.”

  Jenna groaned. “I bet we’ll hear that on Sunday morning.”

  “You’d better believe it.” He bent down and picked up a toy truck. The boys smiled up at him when he rolled it through the dirt and then parked it back on the pile of rocks. “You guys take care of your mom.”

  They looked up, nodding at him. They always took care of her. Even their prayers were about taking care of her. And hers were all about taking care of them.

  And that’s the way it should be, a mom taking care of her boys. No one was going to hurt them again. It seemed as if she’d learned that lesson more than once, but her heart kept taking chances, trying again.

  She smiled at the boys. Pastor Todd was getting into the car with his wife. The dog was nipping at their tires. Timmy and David were looking up at her, as if they were waiting for an answer to a question she didn’t know.

  That meant they weren’t giving up on the camp idea. They wanted to see the turtle. She knew what they were thinking. They probably thought Adam would be there. He wasn’t. Adam was somewhere in Atlanta. He had called to check on them. But that wasn’t enough. That would never feel like enough.

  “Guys, we’ll go see the turtle tomorrow. Tonight we’re going to take it easy. We’re going to have a big dinner with food from the garden and watch a movie together.”

  The boys didn’t look as if they thought that was the best plan. She hugged them close and walked toward the house, one on each side of her. But her gaze drifted, across the road, and down. No lights shined from Camp Hope, because he was gone. He had found his dream in Atlanta.

  And she was still dreaming in Oklahoma, no longer dreams of the darkness and pain, but dreams of what it had felt like in his arms. These dreams were just as painful as the nightmares they’d replaced.

  Adam had
driven all night, but he wasn’t tired. He was wide awake, watching the sun come up over the Oklahoma horizon, turning the fields pink and gold. The horses were grazing in the field and as he poured a cup of coffee, a deer ran through the yard, right outside his kitchen window. Adam stretched and pulled his shirt down.

  It was good to be home. He smiled at that thought, at how this place had become his home. This was his place. He picked up his coffee and walked outside, wondering how long it would take Jenna to find out that he was back, and what she’d say.

  Maybe she’d tell him to take a hike. Or maybe she would say they could still be friends. He had a list of things he wanted to tell her about his job, about dreams and about Atlanta.

  In the quiet of the morning he heard the distant roar of a truck engine coming to life. He sat down at the patio table and watched the field, the road, looking for the deer.

  And then her truck came up the road, totally unexpected in the gray of early morning. He didn’t stand, just waited, wondering what she was up to. She couldn’t know he was here, not yet. Her truck idled up his driveway and came to a stop a short distance from the deck. She didn’t get out. She sat in the truck, staring through the windshield, her eyes wide, surprised. Or maybe he imagined that look, like maybe she was glad to see him.

  He stood and walked to the edge of the porch. The back door on the truck opened and the boys tumbled out, messy hair and still in their pajamas, with flip-flops on their feet. Jenna was slower getting out. She walked around the front of the truck and paused, but not the boys. They rushed him, running up the steps and tackling his legs.

  “We knew you’d come back.” Timmy hugged tightest. “But Mom said God didn’t answer prayers that were wishes. But it was really a prayer, not a wish.”

  “Okay, guys, let him breathe. He’s here to check on the camp and we surprised him.” She looked up, a cowgirl in denim shorts, a T-shirt and canvas sneakers, her hair in a loose bun. “We came to check on the turtle. They didn’t believe me that it could take care of itself. And that we probably can’t find it.”