The Cowboy Way

by Linda Lael Miller

  Jared stumbled forward and headed away from the stand. Then he turned to Eli, shouting obscenities that all ran together in a blur, before he stopped, like he intended to come back. Until Connor walked into view, from the direction of the main house.

  He wrapped his hand around the back of Jared’s neck, holding him steady. Eli was pretty big. Eli was threatening. But bearded Connor, who was broad and thick, every bit of him heavily muscled and with rage pouring off him, was terrifying. “I think my brother asked you to go,” he said. If Eli hadn’t been deterrent enough, Connor was there for backup.

  Jared looked back at Eli one more time before turning and walking away, spitting profanities as he went.

  Connor moved forward and joined the group. “Well, what an asshole. Sorry.” He directed the apology to Alison, who was wide-eyed and shaking. “But seriously.”

  “Are you okay?” Sadie asked Alison.

  Alison nodded, then shook her head, closing her eyes. “I don’t know.”

  “Fair enough,” Sadie said.

  “I’m embarrassed. I’m so embarrassed that I’m still married to him,” she said, her voice breaking. “But it’s...”

  “I know,” Sadie said. “And trust me, I have spoken to a lot of women who’ve dealt with this, professionally. And unprofessionally...my mother has never left, Alison. She’s stayed and stayed. For more than thirty years. I’ve seen what it does to someone. I’ve seen what they can make you think about yourself. But you have to know, whatever he’s said, it’s a lie.”

  She nodded. “I know. I do.”

  “Please don’t go back to him. Don’t go home tonight.”

  Connor shifted his stance. “Especially don’t go home tonight. He’s a coward with us, and that means he’ll take it out on you.”

  “Is there somewhere you can go?” Eli asked.

  She nodded. “My...my mom and dad live in Tolowa. I can go there. Not sure what they’ll think when I show up, since I don’t really... I’ve been so embarrassed.”

  “You can call them if you like,” Sadie said.

  Alison shook her head. “Right now? I just want to serve pie. Because that’s what I’m here for. And now that... I have a feeling I’m going to need this. This business. The pie.”

  “Well, I’ll buy a few a week at least for my B and B,” Sadie said, determined. No matter how good her cooking skills were, she wasn’t going to produce a pie as amazing as Alison’s. “And I’ll be around. Whatever you need.”

  “And if he ever comes near you again,” Eli said, “if he hits you or threatens you...”

  “I’ll report him,” she said. “I promise I will.” She took a deep breath and straightened, and for the first time, Sadie saw an echo of the girl she’d known in the woman who stood before her. Someone a little scrappy. A lot angry. Someone who was ready to fight. “Now, I have pie to serve.”

  She turned and went back to slicing her pies and Eli, Connor and Sadie moved away.

  “What are you doing out?” Eli asked Connor.

  Connor shrugged. “Liss is going to meet me to watch Kate ride. You know I like to watch her do her thing.”

  “Yeah,” Eli said. “She’s great.”

  Sadie looked behind Connor’s shoulder and saw red waves bouncing just before Liss came into view, jogging up behind him. “I made it. I’m late but I made it.”

  “You’re chronically late,” Connor said, turning to face her. “It’s an illness.”

  “I’m bizay, Connor,” she said, poking him in the side. “You don’t know anything about that, obviously.”

  “No,” Connor said, “I just run a whole fricking ranch, Liss. I know nothing of your busyness. I bet all that paperwork is a real strain. Wanna trade?”

  “Eff no. I am not roping cows.”

  The ghost of a smile touched Connor’s lips when he looked at his friend. “The cows don’t like you much, either, honey.”

  “Glad to know it’s mutual. The cows and I can go on giving each other the evil eye. Then I’ll eat a burger because I’m human and I win.”

  “Come on, then, let’s go,” Connor said, putting his hands in his pockets and jerking his head in the direction of the arena.

  “We haven’t eaten yet,” Eli said, and his referring to them as a “we” made Sadie feel a little warm and fuzzy.

  “Go get some food, then. We’ll see you over there,” Connor said, eyeing them both, and Sadie felt her cheeks heat a little.

  “So that was Connor in a good mood?” Sadie asked, when he and Liss were out of earshot.

  “Pretty much. He got to threaten bodily harm to someone so I fail to see how he could have had a better day.”

  She started back over to the barbecue line, chewing on her lip. “Are you worried?” she asked. “About how all that might affect your campaign?”

  He frowned. “I didn’t even think of that. Which is...weird. I usually think of everything.”

  “Well, I don’t want to add concerns that you don’t really need.”

  “No,” he said, “I think it’s interesting. I don’t care,” he said, meeting her gaze. “I just don’t care. Because I still want to be sheriff. I still think I’d do a damn good job, but I do a good job at what I do now. And...whether or not it was a popular thing or easy thing or good thing...punching that asshole in the face was the right thing to do.”

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and hugged him, then quickly stepped back, embarrassed by her public demonstration. “It was,” she said.

  “Somehow, knowing that, believing that, makes me not care very much what the consequences are.”

  “I think you’re amazing,” she said, looking ahead, smiling. “I mean, if that matters.”

  “It does,” he said.

  “And...thank you. Because she’s my friend. Because she reminded me too much of my mom. And... I’m always afraid people like that will never leave.”

  “A lot of times they go back,” he said, his voice rough.

  “I know. But we’ll help her.”

  “Yes,” he said, “we will.”

  Yet again, she didn’t know what to do with him. She felt so close to him right now, and she couldn’t kiss him here. She wanted to ask him to hold her. She wanted to tell him something about herself. Wanted him to decide that, much like punching a guy in front of the whole town, she was okay, too.

  And right then, she thought of the one place she hadn’t been yet. She’d driven by the house where she’d grown up, but she hadn’t been back to her clearing. Even though it was within walking distance of the B and B. She’d avoided serious thoughts of it since the first day back.

  Again, a prickling sensation dotted the back of her neck.

  There are no ghosts there. And if there are...maybe this will put some of them to rest.

  She let out a long, slow breath, trying to gather her nerve. “Can I show you something?”

  “My mom warned me about girls like you,” he said, a smile teasing the corners of his lips.

  “Did she?”

  “No, my mom wasn’t here.”

  “That’s a dire punch line.”

  He lifted a shoulder. “Sometimes life is so dire you have to make a joke about it, right?”

  “I think you’ve learned too much from me.”

  “Or not enough,” he said.

  “Hey, I’ll get our food. Can you get a blanket for us to sit on?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  She finished waiting through the line and got small portions of everything on offer, making small talk with the men and women manning the grills and scooping up sides. It was hard to do, though, since she was all jittery and fluttery inside over what she was about to do.

  And there was no real logical reason why. Just that it seemed like a big deal. Bigger in some ways than what she’d shared about her father.

  Because this was something she’d avoided. The last bit of Copper Ridge she hadn’t revisited. And she wasn’t going to test it alone to be sure she was okay. To
be certain she could visit it without betraying her emotions.

  She was going to let him see. All of it.

  She wandered over to where he stood on the edge of the lawn, where people were sitting at the tables that had been set up, and on blankets spread out like a rainbow patchwork over the green grass.

  “Okay,” he said, “what do you have to show me?”

  “I hope you’re ready for a hike.”

  * * *

  IT WAS ONLY a five-minute walk, through the trees behind the B and B, just over the Garretts’ property line. But the path was thick with brush and branches, the narrow trail overgrown in the years since Sadie and her friends had used it.

  She and Eli wound through the evergreens, needles reaching out and grabbing her T-shirt. Then the grove thinned out, and beyond that was her clearing.

  It was overgrown now, moss covering the ground, ferns encroaching. There was still a fire ring. Stumps, some on their sides, some still positioned like stools.

  It had definitely been used by other people in the past decade, but not, it appeared, very recently.

  “This,” she said, “was my home away from home.”

  Her chest swelled up with emotion just looking at it, being in it. She wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t sure why this felt so big. Why she felt so naked.

  But, like all her big feelings concerning Eli, the flip side was that as much as it hurt, she wanted him to know this part of her.

  She wanted him to know her. There wasn’t, she realized, another person on the whole planet—except Toby—who did.

  “Alison, Matt, Josh, Brooke and a few others and I all hung out here in the afternoons. Sometimes when we were supposed to be in school. Usually on weekends.”

  “Doing what?” he asked.

  “Drinking. Smoking...things of varying degrees of legality. Like you do. Well, not like you do, but like a lot of teenage ne’er-do-wells do.”

  He looked up at the canopy of trees overheard, then back at her. “I bet it was a great place for that.”

  ‘Perfect,” she said. “You never arrested me here.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “But then, in fairness, I never lit the woods on fire.”

  “That is true enough.”

  He set the blanket down in the middle of the clearing and they sat, putting their food in front of them. Sadie sat on her knees and started to poke at her potato salad.

  “I lost my virginity here.” Next to her Eli made a choking sound and she laughed. “Sorry,” she said, “just a Sadie fun fact.” It wasn’t, though. She was minimizing it again. Minimizing why she’d told him. She always did that. So that if what she’d offered was rejected, she could pretend it didn’t hurt.

  She shoved her plate to the side and took a deep breath. “Sorry.” She started over. “I told you because it seemed... This is where I learned to run,” she said. “Where I learned to escape. None of us could handle the things that were happening at home and so we came here. Did a bunch of things that made us feel good. Sex was just another thing to do. But that’s changing for me. All the way until I met you, sex was just a part of the logical steps in a relationship. A way to pretend that I was intimate with someone without ever really having to be. And this? Telling you this, showing you this, it’s more intimate than anything I’ve ever done. But that’s fitting, because when we’re together...when we... It was never part of a logical step. It was just a thing we couldn’t not do. And that’s different, too.”

  “You’re...different for me, too,” he said.

  She wanted him to say more. And she didn’t know what more, but she did. She wanted to say more, but again, she wasn’t sure what else. Wasn’t sure what she could say that wouldn’t scare her off.

  She was a flight risk of the highest order, putting herself in a situation that scared her to death.

  “Eli... I...” She wanted to say something big. She wanted to try to express what she was feeling but she couldn’t even quantify it to herself.

  The thing she wanted to say was the thing she couldn’t say. Because to say it was too much. And way more than this was ever supposed to be.

  The one thing she knew for sure, and the thing that terrified her to her bones, was that she wanted to have him here. In this place. The moments of weighted silence, punctuated by heavy sighs and long drags on cigarettes. Days when they’d come and sat in the rain and talked and swore as loud as they wanted, because screw the world. They were in their own world. When she’d come alone with Josh and kissed him and, eventually, taken things further because they’d both just needed someone to touch.

  In this place where she’d been with her first guy, she wanted to be with Eli. The last one.

  Shock skittered over her skin in an electric current. At the weight of the thought, the depth of it, the truth of it.

  So she just said what she could.

  “I want you.”

  “I thought you wanted potato salad.”

  She tried to laugh, shaking from the inside out. “No. Just you.”

  He seemed to sense the shift in tone. Another luxury of being with him. Of having him know her. He seemed to know what was happening inside her without her having to say it.

  He set his plate off the blanket, too, cupping her cheek and leaning in for a kiss. She returned it, her chest filling, swelling, making it impossible to breathe. But breathing seemed secondary at the moment. Because of Eli.

  She wrapped her arms around his neck and he slipped one hand down her back, holding her waist tight as he lowered her to the blanket, his body solid and warm above her. They sat together, his hands stroking her face, her hair.

  He kissed her deeper and she laced her fingers through his hair. She felt everything happening on the surface of her skin. The scrape of his stubble against her neck as he kissed her there. As his hands moved over her T-shirt, the warmth of his touch seeping through to her skin.

  But it was the echo beneath the surface that really hit. That anchored her to him, to the world. It was like a deep bass note that resonated through her, vibrating along every vein, moving deep to the core of her being.

  They broke the kiss, looking at each other, and her eyes met his, emotion building in her chest, bigger and stronger than any sexual climax.

  It was painful and beautiful. She didn’t think she could stand it for another moment, and she didn’t want it to end. In that moment, she felt it all, the good, bad and scary, bound together, inescapable.

  She was drowning in it, drowning in him. In what he made her feel. She couldn’t run from it, couldn’t make light of it. Couldn’t shove it to the side.

  All she could do was embrace it.

  She held on to him, hoping his strength would hold her together because at this point, she didn’t trust her own. And that was a damn scary place to be. But she was with Eli, so it had to be safe, too.

  “When I’m with you, I don’t want to be anywhere else,” he said, moving his hand over her hair, sliding his fingers through the strands.

  “Me, either,” she said.

  It was true. And for a woman who was always so keen to move on to the next place, the next thing, it was a huge and frightening admission.

  He shifted their positions so that she was sitting between his thighs, her back to his chest, his fingers gentle as he laced them through her hair. She closed her eyes, a tightening moving from her chest, up her throat, making it hard to breathe. Making her ache.

  “Is this what you used to do here?” he asked.

  She laughed, a shaky sound that didn’t do anything to loosen the knot of emotion inside her. “Not exactly. I’ve never done anything quite like this.”

  “Me, either.”

  He tugged lightly on her hair, once, then again. She turned and looked at him, and he kept hold of her. “What are you doing?” she asked.

  He cocked his head to the side, a rueful smile on his face. “Braiding your hair.” He kept his eyes on hers as he wove another section together. “Is that okay?”<
br />
  She looked at his face, at the sincerity in his eyes. Sincerity and caring she’d never had directed at her before, and that she’d never hoped to deserve. The walls inside her cracked and she had to fight to keep the tears that welled up in her eyes from spilling down her cheeks.

  Because when he said that, what she heard was I’m taking care of you.

  “Yeah,” she said, the word a whisper. “It’s okay.”

  She closed her eyes while he finished, focusing on breathing. On not breaking down completely over this moment. On not betraying everything she felt.

  He slid his thumb down the side of her neck, his touch gentle. “Done.”

  She turned back to him again. She wanted to say so much. And nothing, and everything.

  He leaned in slowly, his breath fanning across her cheek. Then he kissed her, and she let herself get lost in it. In a kiss that wasn’t meant to start anything, wasn’t meant to arouse. A kiss that was meant to forge a connection. An outpouring of all the emotion their joining had brought to the surface.

  Panic clawed at her as she realized the kiss would have to end. This moment would have to end.

  She didn’t want the kiss to end, because when it did, they would have to deal with what happened next. And part of her was already panicking about that. Part of her was feeling the need to run.

  This was deep. And it was real. And the most terrifying four-letter word she could think of was pushing into her consciousness, hovering on the edge of her lips, burrowing into her heart.

  And that was the one thing she hadn’t wanted. The thing she feared more than anything.

  But the kiss had to end. And it did. When they parted he slid his thumb over the edge of her lip. “Sadie...”

  “We should go,” she said, terror gnawing at her. Terror that he was going to say what she was trying not to think. That he wouldn’t say it. That he would never say it. Or that he would now when she wasn’t sure she could deal with hearing it.