The Cowboy on Her Trail

by Janis Reams Hudson

  “Not that I know of,” she answered. “If I have I didn’t know what it was.”

  He stopped at the lip of a ragged depression in the ground, perhaps two feet deep at its deepest in the center. “It looks pretty much like that.”

  “That? That looks like erosion.”

  “I guess that’s what it is. Erosion caused by years of big heavy animals rolling around on their backs in the same spot. They wear it down, the rain comes along and helps things along a little more, and there you have it.”

  She cocked her head and studied the wallow. “Has anyone ever tried to fill one in?”

  Justin shrugged. “I’m sure they have. We haven’t. Haven’t had a need to.” He stepped off the edge, taking Blaire with him, and walked inside the ten-foot-wide depression. “The ground in here is so hard-packed not much will grow. Besides,” he said looking around at the pasture. “With all the buffalo gone—most of them, anyway—I kinda like leaving this here, a reminder of the huge herds that used to roam here.”

  “It’s good,” she said. “That you want to preserve it.”

  Justin had never cared much one way or another whether people outside his family approved of him or not, but the approval Blaire had just given him made his chest swell.

  Still holding her hand, he led her up and out of the wallow and back along the crest to the center of the hilltop.

  “Here,” he told her, “is where I want to build a house.”

  “The view would be spectacular,” she observed.

  “It will.” He looked out over the countryside and imagined seeing it from his very own porch. With Blaire at his side. And a child at their feet.

  The picture in his mind of the three of them on their porch was so powerful it nearly brought him to his knees. He knew, in that instant, that his life, the home he hoped for, his entire future would be sadly lacking without Blaire. He was in love with her.

  Why hadn’t he seen it sooner? Why hadn’t he understood his own feelings?

  Now what did he do? Blurt it out? By the way, Blaire, I was wrong. I really do love you.

  Sure, she would believe that. What woman wouldn’t?

  He could give her flowers, but he didn’t have any. This time of year he couldn’t even come up with any wildflowers. The only flowers he’d seen lately were the yellow pansies his grandmother had planted a few days ago. He doubted she would approve of his picking them, and Blaire might not appreciate stolen flowers anyway.

  “Justin?”

  He pulled himself out of his musings to realize that he’d been crushing her fingers. “Damn. I’m sorry. Did I hurt you?”

  “I’m fine,” she assured him. “Is something wrong?”

  “Wrong? No, of course not. What could be wrong?”

  Blaire didn’t know, but something was going on. She felt a sudden new tension in and around him.

  “I think I promised you lunch,” he said.

  “I think you’re right. You did.”

  “Then lunch it is. I’ll be right back.”

  “Back?” she protested as he started down the slope toward the road. “You’re leaving me here?”

  “I’m just going to the pickup,” he called back to her.

  Blaire watched as he sprinted the last few yards. She flexed her fingers, then folded them against her palm, still feeling the warmth of his hand against hers. Still wondering what had gone through his mind a moment ago when his face had gone blank and his fingers had squeezed hers.

  In a way, it was gratifying to realize that something bothered him. He always seemed so sure of himself and positive about what he wanted. He’d brought her here to show her where he planned to build his home one day.

  His home. Not theirs. This had been his plan for a long time and had nothing to do with her or the baby.

  Why that should disappoint her, she didn’t know. What a stupid thing for her to feel, particularly when she’d been pushing him away for weeks.

  Look at him, she thought. He even walks like a man who knows exactly what he wants.

  He climbed through the fence and circled around to the driver’s side of the pickup. From behind the seat he pulled what looked to be an old quilt. From the bed he retrieved an ice chest and a gallon sized Thermos.

  Blaire met him at the fence and took the quilt and jug so he could use both hands to carry the large ice chest.

  After climbing through the fence for the third time that day, Justin eyed it critically. “Need a gate here,” he muttered.

  They carried their load up the slope and Justin picked a spot that he hoped would one day be the center of his front yard. There he spread out the quilt.

  “Lunch,” he said, placing the ice chest on one corner of the quilt, “is served, m’lady.”

  “Why, thank you, kind sir.” She dropped to her knees before the ice chest and opened the top. “What are we having?”

  They were having fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, fruit salad, and for dessert, fresh, homemade brownies, with iced tea to wash it down.

  “If you tell me you cooked all of this yourself,” she told him as she licked chocolate from her fingers, “I might change my mind and marry you after all.”

  She meant it as a joke, but he didn’t laugh. The best he had to offer was a half-smile.

  “I can’t even take credit for the ice cubes. We have an ice maker. But I’ll give you a better reason. Last week when you asked me if I loved you I said I didn’t know. Now I know. I do love you, Blaire.”

  Blaire’s heart started pounding against her ribs.

  “I love you and want to spend the rest of my life with you,” he said. “I want us to build a home here on this hill, but if you’d rather live in town, I can go along with that. As long as you marry me, because I really do love you.”

  Blaire’s hands were shaking, and so was her head. “You don’t mean that.”

  “Of course I mean it,” he claimed.

  “No.” She shook her head harder and scooted away from him. She couldn’t let herself believe him. “No one else in my life has ever loved me. I’m supposed to believe you just because you say so?”

  “How can I prove it to you?” he asked.

  “You can’t. You could take out a sign with two-foot letters and I wouldn’t believe it. All you want to do is control me.”

  “Dammit, Blaire, I’m not your father, and you’re not your mother.”

  “‘Get a cell phone,’” she mimicked. “I got one. ‘Get a safer car.’I didn’t. I like my car just fine. ‘Stay out of the cold.’ Ha. You like telling me what to do. I don’t like being told.”

  “I don’t want to control your life, dammit, I want to share it. I love you. I want us to become a family. You, me and the baby.”

  But Blaire was not hearing him. Her fear had turned his words into a buzzing in her ears.

  Chapter Twelve

  Blaire scarcely remembered the ride home from her picnic with Justin at the Cherokee Rose, and that was more to her shame than her credit.

  For one brief second, when he’d first told her he loved her, Blaire had allowed herself to believe.

  Then a sharp picture of her parents had intruded, and reality came crashing in around her head. She could not afford to believe. She couldn’t let herself be rushed or pressured into marriage. No matter what he said, it was all still because of the baby, and that was no reason for them to tie themselves to each other.

  As if to prove her correct, that night her parents lit into each other again, over nothing, as far as Blaire could tell. But their argument ended with the usual accusations of whose fault it was that they were stuck with each other.

  No, Blaire would not believe Justin. She would not marry him. She would not live her life the way her parents did, and she would not expose her child to such bitterness as theirs. If that left her feeling sad and lonely, as if she might be making the biggest mistake of her life…. No. She couldn’t afford to think like that.

  All she had to do now was make Justin beli
eve that she would not change her mind, that he should give up on her and get on with his life. They would work something out regarding the baby, because she had meant it when she’d said she didn’t intend to cut him out of the child’s life. Her child would know its father. She would make sure of that. But her child would never be made to feel responsible for its parents’ problems. Not as long as Blaire had breath in her body.

  Justin was not as lucky as Blaire. He remembered every second of the rest of their time together that afternoon. The painful, echoing silence. The terror and anger emanating from her.

  He thought he understood the terror, although the strength of it surprised and worried him. But the anger was new and, to him, inexplicable.

  She had told him she would not marry a man who didn’t love her. Now he loved her, and her reaction was anger? It didn’t make sense.

  Maybe it was time for him to face the fact that she didn’t return his feelings. She most especially didn’t share his desire for marriage.

  What if he got lucky and was finally able to convince her to marry him? It seemed to him that they ran the risk of making her feel trapped somewhere down the road. Did he want to marry a woman who needed her arm twisted, so to speak? Would she one day turn into her mother and throw it back in his face that getting married had never been her idea?

  God help him, he was going crazy. Was it time to push harder, or let go?

  Let go, hell. He didn’t think he was capable of that. He was nowhere near ready to give in. Which was why, two days after their picnic, he called her and asked her to lunch.

  “Indoors, this time,” he added quickly. “With a waitress and everything. No barbed-wire fences, no buffalo wallows.”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she told him. “I didn’t mind the fence, and I liked the buffalo wallow.”

  “You did?”

  “I did. But as for lunch—”

  “Tomorrow, around noon?” he asked.

  “I can’t, Justin.”

  “How about the day after?”

  “No, thank you. I’m sorry. I have to go.”

  Justin was left listening to a dial tone.

  On the other end of the line, Blaire dropped the phone into its cradle. Her hands shook so hard she couldn’t have held the receiver another ten seconds if her life had depended on it.

  She had blown it. Justin had presented her with the perfect opportunity to tell him not to ask her out again, not to call her any more. But she had panicked and hung up.

  The next time, she promised herself. If he asked her out again, she would be firm and honest and explain that she was never going to change her mind.

  But when he pulled into the parking lot two days later, her first instinct was to run so she wouldn’t have to face him.

  “When did I get to be such a total coward?” she wondered aloud.

  “Did you say something, honey?”

  Blaire slapped a hand over her heart to keep it from leaping from her chest. “Mama! I didn’t know you were there.”

  “Sorry.” Nancy Harding laughed. Then she glanced out the window of Blaire’s office and her eyes widened. “Oh, look! There’s Justin.”

  “Yes.” Blaire swallowed around the knot of nerves that rose in her throat. There was no way she could talk to Justin with her mother hanging on every word. “I was just going out to say hi. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “Oh, but don’t you want to invite him in? I’ve got a full pitcher of tea, but I could make coffee if he’d prefer that.”

  “Never mind the tea and coffee.” Blaire brushed past her mother and headed for the front door. “I doubt he’ll be staying.” In fact, it would be Blaire’s mission to see that he didn’t want to stay. That he didn’t want to return, or call or anything else.

  She squared her shoulders, screwed up her courage, and marched out to the parking lot, where she met him before he’d made it five feet from his pickup.

  “Hi.” He smiled and pulled off the cowboy hat he’d been wearing.

  “Hi.” She resisted the urge to wipe her sweaty palms on her jeans. “Justin, I—”

  “Sunday after church the whole family eats at Lucille’s,” he told her. “I was hoping you’d join us this Sunday. It’s public, so you’d be able to get up and leave any time you wanted. I thought that might make your first meal with the whole clan a little less stressful.”

  “Justin, this isn’t going to work.”

  “What isn’t going to work?”

  “None of it,” she said earnestly. “You and me. We’re not going to work.”

  He stared at her so long that she shifted her weight several times from one foot to the other.

  “We’re not?” he asked.

  “No.” She swallowed again. “I’m sorry. But I can’t marry you, and I won’t change my mind.”

  He moved a step closer to her. “You don’t care that I’m in love with you? It means nothing?”

  “It might, but I don’t think you do love me, Justin, and I don’t trust myself enough to be able to tell. I can’t risk it.”

  “You can’t risk it? This is our lives we’re talking about. Our child’s life. Life doesn’t come with guarantees.”

  “I know that,” she cried. “I’m not asking you for one. I just have to feel it, down deep inside. Feel that I can trust myself, trust you, and I don’t feel that. To be honest, I think I’m too scared to feel it.”

  “Scared of what? Of me?” he cried, incredulous. “You think I would ever knowingly hurt you? I couldn’t, Blaire. I simply couldn’t. I love you.”

  She shook her head hard and backed away from him. “Justin, please.”

  “Please what? Please don’t love you?”

  “Don’t push me. The harder you push, the more I want to resist.”

  “I’ve noticed,” he said harshly. “I supposed now you’re going to run.”

  “Run?”

  “That’s what you do, isn’t it? When things get uncomfortable. Which cousin will you go see this time?”

  The fact that she had been contemplating doing just as he accused sent heat rushing to her cheeks.

  “Aha!” He pointed a finger at her face. “I’m right, aren’t I? It’s right there on your face.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. If I want to go visit my cousins, I’ll go, and you don’t have anything to say about it. Go home, Justin, and don’t call me anymore. The baby’s not due until September. I’ll let you know when it comes.”

  “September?” His eyebrows rose at least an inch, his voice at least an octave. “If you think for one minute I’m going to stand back and not involve myself in your life until after the baby is born, you’ve got another think coming.”

  Blaire closed her eyes and tried to pull her hair out with both hands at her temples. “I didn’t mean that we wouldn’t have any contact. I didn’t mean it like that. You make me crazy. I won’t go out with you, I won’t date you, I won’t spend the night with you. I won’t marry you. I will talk with you, about the baby, but I don’t want you calling me every day, or even every week.”

  “Sometimes, sweetheart, we don’t always get what we want.”

  Blaire would have demanded to know what he meant by that, but for a moment she was too astounded by his words to speak. By the time she found her voice and her wits, he was back in his pickup and pulling out into the street.

  By the time Justin got home he had a red mark on the outer edge of his hand from pounding his fist against the steering wheel in frustration.

  How could he have been so stupid as to push her the way he had? And that stupid parting comment of his—Sometimes, sweetheart, we don’t always get what we want. Where the hell had that come from?

  But he knew the answer there. It had come from his gut. She said she didn’t want him. For one knife-edged moment, he had believed her, and that knife-edge had sliced deep.

  Then he’d seen the lie in her eyes. It wasn’t that she didn’t want him, it was that she was afraid to trust. Not him, but h
erself. She still had it in her head that the two of them would end up bickering for the next thirty years the way her parents did.

  Justin shuddered at the thought. It couldn’t happen, because he wasn’t a man to bicker. He had never played the blame game, or griped about his problems. He was more into practical jokes and tending his cattle and horses.

  But Blaire didn’t know that about him. She didn’t know much of anything about him, he realized. How could he expect her to simply take his word that things would work out between them?

  Before that would happen, she had to believe that he truly loved her.

  You could take out a sign with two-foot letters and I wouldn’t believe it.

  “Blaire Harding, you’re gonna eat those words.”

  In less than an hour, Justin had a full-fledged plan for convincing Blaire that his feelings were true. But he wouldn’t be able to do it alone. He enlisted both of his brothers and his two sisters-in-law. His grandmother agreed to take care of Janie and Libby for the night.

  On the Internet he found the company he needed, located in Oklahoma City. He called in a rush order, then drove to the city to pick it up. When he got home late that night, that’s when he would need his brothers and their wives.

  It was going to be a long night.

  His entire future rested on the outcome.

  He was scared spitless that it wouldn’t work, but he’d be damned if he could think of anything else to do.

  Blaire cried herself to sleep that night. If she had been uncertain before, there was no question left now in her mind or heart. She was in love with Justin Chisholm.

  He said he was in love with her. Why couldn’t she take him at his word and accept his proposal? Why did she have to think up all these damn problems that might not ever arise between them? Why did she work so hard to convince herself that he didn’t really love her?

  What did she think, that he was lying? Simply trying to get her to marry him so he could get his hands on their child?

  What kind of sense did that make?

  Sure, she knew family was the most important thing to a Chisholm, but would he really go to the trouble of lying to her and marrying her just to have a family of his own?