Big Chance Cowboy

by Teri Anne Stanley

  What they’d done and not done on that swing in the dark, and how strongly those moments clung to his memory bank. They hadn’t actually done it. He’d had plenty of actual sex both before and after that little non-event, and she’d have found someone else to help ease her ache. Dean? Some fraternity dick wherever she went to college? Her high school prom date?

  “Who did you go to prom with?” he asked, interrupting her in the motion of opening her own car door.

  “Huh?” She turned to look at him.

  Her hair swung around, and he caught a whiff of that familiar scent, the scent that took him back to before. When he only thought he was jaded and bitter.

  “Never mind.” It wasn’t important. Not as important as the curve of her thigh on the upholstery of his truck right this minute, her smooth skin, the quizzical smile she sent his way.

  When they got to the front of the restaurant, he reached around her to open the door, appreciating the way she seemed to fit right in his negative spaces, even though they weren’t touching. They were in town, too. Adam should have begun to sweat and prickle by now, but he felt pretty okay.

  At least until he got a load of the couple in line ahead of them—especially the guy.

  Adam stood next to Lizzie, trying to peruse the menu board while they waited for the couple to finish arguing about their order. They were young, Adam thought, but each had a few miles on them. The woman was pregnant, her enormous belly a contrast to her thin arms and legs, making him think of the starving dog they’d just left at the vet’s office. She bore several amateurish tattoos. There was an angel on her right upper arm, a cross on her left forearm, a cartoon character on one calf, and some writing—a date—on the other thigh.

  The young man was even more inked up. Elaborate sleeve tattoos covered each bare arm, and large gauges pierced each earlobe. He was medium height—maybe five eight—and wiry. It was neither his body nor the tattoos that stirred Adam’s threat receptors, however, but the air of edgy discomfort emanating from the girl.

  “Come on. Just decide,” the guy urged. “Either a hot dog or a sundae.”

  The young woman rubbed her belly tiredly. “Fine. Give me a hot fudge sundae,” she told the counter worker. She added a sharp glare at her companion. “A small. Please.”

  Adam stepped toward the row of freezers displaying ready-made ice cream cakes and novelties, uncomfortable standing in the middle of the store with the giant plate glass window to his back. Lizzie shot him a glance, then turned her attention to the menu board. The kid turned, eyes resting on Adam appraisingly. He lifted his chin in a barely perceptible greeting and reached under his shirt.

  Oh no. He was about to pull out a gun.

  “Hey!” Adam grabbed Lizzie’s arm and pulled her next to him, ignoring her gasp of surprise. He stepped forward just as the kid produced…a wallet.

  A freaking wallet.

  The girl, her boyfriend, and the kid behind the counter all stared at Adam as though he’d grown an extra head—one with horns and green hair. The cold acid sweat that had been waiting in the wings broke through, and Adam’s skin burned. Lizzie shifted, and he knew she was looking at him, but he ignored her. No way did he want to see how she took his overreaction. Think, he told himself. Breathe.

  “Hey,” he said and cleared his throat as though that would blow away the haze of terror and embarrassment from his mind. He reached for his own wallet. “We’re, uh, celebrating. Because…I won the lottery. Lizzie said I was stupid for wasting my money on instant tickets, but I promised myself I’d buy dinner for the first people we saw if I won. So I’m buying. Get whatever you want. Add it to our bill.”

  To his amazement, Lizzie joined in his charade. “Are you getting a chili cheese dog or a regular one?” she asked the astonished pregnant girl. “Because if you’re getting chili cheese, you have to get a cotton candy Blizzard to go with it. The Oreo one is good, too.”

  “Umm…okay,” the girl said. “Yeah. Chili cheese dog, please.” She looked at Adam, like she expected him to start laughing and rescind his offer, but when he didn’t, she turned back to the cashier and said, “And an Oreo Blizzard.”

  “Dude, are you serious?” the baby daddy asked Adam, probably terrified his girlfriend was going to order half the menu and then stick him with the bill.

  “Of course he’s serious,” Lizzie told him. “What about you? I bet you’re a chicken finger guy. That’s what Adam likes, right, babe?”

  * * *

  Adam didn’t speak again until they’d taken their food to the picnic tables in front of the restaurant. He put their trays down. “I forgot napkins. I’ll be right back.” In about two steps, he was back inside the Dairy Queen.

  Lizzie settled onto the picnic bench and watched through the smudged glass as he reached one long arm over the back of the nearest booth to raid the dispenser on the table. He appeared to have lost none of the muscle he’d built as a soldier.

  She already found him distractingly attractive, even though he usually seemed to wish she were anywhere else but with him. Unfortunately for him, the hot-guy-to-the-puppy-rescue thing this afternoon and tonight’s sensitive generosity made her want him more, no matter how much she’d tried to avoid it. With everything on her plate—taking over Dad’s workload, worrying about Dad’s cancer, worrying about Mom’s worry over Dad’s cancer, D-Day, and the idea she had for the Mill Creek property—she didn’t have time to moon over Adam every time he took a breath.

  Or shoot her an actual smile as he pushed the door open on his way back outside.

  A honk sounded, and she turned to wave goodbye to their new friends, Clint and Crystal, as they backed out of their parking space. Lizzie hoped their rattletrap vehicle would get them wherever they were going. If not, there were at least a million more beat-up white pickup trucks they could choose from as a replacement. This one was almost identical to the one that had whizzed out of Mill Creek Road that day she and Emma had taken D-Day to Adam’s place.

  Clint and Crystal sent them a wave as they rumbled past, and Adam stared at them until they were safely around the corner, then took a deep breath and sat down across from her.

  “What’s the deal with all the white trucks?” she asked Adam as he handed her a small mountain of paper napkins.

  He snorted. “According to Emma, when the economy went bust a few years ago, Big Chance Chevrolet had just ordered a fleet of new trucks for some business that was moving into town. The company went bankrupt, didn’t come here, so the dealer had a fire sale.”

  As if to punctuate his story, another beat-up white truck rolled by, engine coughing and gagging. Adam stared at it until it was out of sight.

  “Thanks. Are you sure you want to sit out here?” she asked.

  “Yeah. This is great.” He wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist and unwrapped his chicken fingers.

  He started to take a bite but then stopped. He looked away, out into the Texas night, then met her eyes and said, “Thanks. For going along with that.”

  She was momentarily stunned, had been prepared to pretend nothing had happened. But since he was talking, she said, “No problem. For what it’s worth, that guy seemed creepy to me, too.”

  He didn’t comment, just took another bite.

  “Does that happen often?” she asked.

  He stopped chewing for the briefest instant, then swallowed and shrugged, shoveling another piece of chicken into his mouth.

  Well, all-righty, then. Not okay to talk about. “Sorry. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable. Just trying to understand.”

  “Nothing to understand.” He was so nonchalant about it that she almost believed she’d imagined his tension a few minutes ago, the air that quivered electrically over hard muscles as his breath had gotten choppy. That had happened.

  “It really was nice of you to pay for their food. That poor girl looked like she h
adn’t had a full meal in nine months.”

  His only response was a grunt, then, after a moment, “Are you going to eat those?” he asked, indicating her fries.

  “Be my guest.” She snatched the last bite of hot dog from the basket and shoved the remains of her dinner in his direction. “Well, anyway,” she said, “you’re good with dogs and people. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to keep working with them. Maybe you could open a dog training school. Teach people like me to handle their exuberant pets.”

  He heaved out a heavy breath. “I don’t work with pets.” He said it with a slight derisive curl in his upper lip.

  Yes, he did. He worked with her pet. Well, her sort-of pet, anyway. “What’s wrong with pets?”

  “Pets take up space. A real dog is equipment—it does something useful.”

  “Okay, then. You can train police dogs or airport drug-sniffing dogs.”

  “Not gonna happen.” He took a long drink of his Coke and said, “You forget. I’m moving on as soon as the ranch is sold.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got a few options.”

  Well, that was informative. Fishing around for a change of subject, she said, “So Jake and Marcus are nice.”

  A grunt.

  “I take it you were all in the same, um, unit? Platoon? Whatever?”

  “I think ‘whatever’ might be a good name for it. We did a lot of work together in the Middle East.” Adam sighed and rubbed his hand over his face. “And then we got blown up together.”

  The blast from that statement was too powerful for Lizzie to look at directly. “That’s, um, quite a bonding exercise.” Oh geez. What a stupid thing to say. She opened her mouth to apologize, but then he spoke again.

  “You have no idea.”

  “No. I don’t.”

  “One guy, Emilio Garcia, died, left behind a wife and four boys. Max Zimmerman got burned pretty badly. You’ve met Jake, who had a TBI—traumatic brain injury. Can’t find his way out of a cereal box now and has trouble communicating, along with some physical stuff.” He spoke as though he were reciting a grocery list. “Talbott’s back is completely jacked. He fakes it really well, but he takes a ton of meds, and it’s probably going to get worse as he gets older, though he won’t admit it. He works out like crazy to try to keep it strong, but I think he might be making it worse.” He stopped talking and gathered their trash.

  That couldn’t be the whole story. “And you? What happened to you?”

  He didn’t meet her eyes when he said, “Nothing.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “That’s right,” he said. “Are you ready to go?”

  Chapter 10

  Adam wasn’t surprised that Lizzie didn’t say much on the ride from town to the ranch, since he’d weirded out and then shared a chunk of his shitty history, but she also hadn’t gone running into the night to get away from him.

  And now, instead of the buzzing, prickling anxiety that normally swamped him when he thought about that last mission—or any mission, for that matter—he felt a different kind of tension. He felt as if his skin were reaching out into the air, searching for something, almost like anticipation.

  It didn’t help that the truck was filled with Lizzie. Her scent, her energy, her self all combined to tease him.

  It was probably some new post-traumatic flashback endorphin thing caused by the stress of eating chicken fingers after almost going SWAT team on that kid in Dairy Queen. Lizzie was probably quiet now because she was thinking up an excuse for canceling future dog training appointments. Good. She should.

  There were his old friends, self-loathing and pessimism.

  He was surprised when she spoke. “Do you think those two were from Big Chance?”

  He switched topics gratefully. “The pregnant couple?”

  “Yeah.”

  He thought about it. “I don’t know. The kid looked kind of familiar, but I don’t know why I’d recognize him. He’d have been in preschool when I left town.”

  “You never came back at all?” she asked.

  He felt her watching him but knew his face wouldn’t give anything away. “Not really. Coupla times to see Granddad and Emma. Didn’t come to town.” Except one Christmas. He’d been so full of himself and his ambitions. Halfway through MP school, ready to walk up to Lizzie’s front door and ask her out on a real date. He’d stopped in to the Feed and Seed to see Todd first, though. He’d been about to ask about Lizzie, when there she was, walking past the store—snug and dry under an umbrella with Joe Chance, who was home from Loyola for break. “Why didn’t things work out with you and Joe Chance?” he asked before he could stop himself.

  “Huh?” A quick glance showed him a mask of confusion. “Joe Chance?”

  “Yeah. You know, the mayor? Football captain, student body everything?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He wasn’t about to admit that he’d watched her, arms wrapped around one of Joe’s, talking and laughing while Adam’s heart thudded heavily once or twice before leaking out onto the floor. “I, ah…I thought I remembered hearing you were going out with him.”

  She was quiet for a while, but her gaze peppered him with questions. Finally, she said, “Nope. We hung sometimes when we were both home on vacation, but it wasn’t, like, romantic or anything.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Adam swallowed twelve years of regret that tried to suffocate him. He’d thought he was being all adult, staying out of the way because she was with a better man anyway.

  “Someone really said we were going out?”

  He cleared his throat. “Yeah. I think Todd said something.”

  “Well, he was wrong. Joe fell in love the first week of college. His girlfriend told him she was pregnant right before Christmas break that year, and he proposed to her the day they got back to school. I even helped him pick out an engagement ring.”

  He shook his head. “No, I don’t remember hearing anything about that. I was pretty busy.”

  “Hmm.”

  What did hmm mean?

  “Well, anyway,” she said, as though their conversation hadn’t been detoured through chapter 19 of Adam’s Fucked Up History, “I just wondered if those two had grown up here or if they moved here for some reason.”

  “If you see them again, you can ask.” He sounded abrupt, even to himself.

  Lizzie didn’t seem offended, though. “I certainly can.”

  She sounded so prim and certain that Adam stopped mentally beating himself about the face and head long enough to laugh. “Why do you care?”

  “I don’t know. Why do people live in Big Chance?”

  “They’re too dumb to chew through their ropes?”

  She snorted. “It’s not that bad.”

  He didn’t reply.

  With a sigh, she said, “Okay. It’s not like there are tons of great jobs here, and we’re a million miles from anywhere with employment opportunities. So if they didn’t grow up here, what would make someone choose to move to Big Chance?”

  “I can give you a million reasons to leave, if you want.”

  “You’re not helping,” she said, giving his shoulder a playful punch. “I’m trying to brainstorm about bringing new people to town and keeping the people who are already here employed and contributing to society.”

  “I might be the pot calling the kettle black,” he said, “but those two didn’t strike me as a couple who are going to be joining the Chance County Chamber of Commerce anytime soon.”

  “Yeah…but at least he wasn’t stupid enough to hold up the Dairy Queen.”

  He caught her slight smile and raised eyebrow from the corner of his eye and wasn’t overcome with shame over his near miss. Actually, he felt a strange sort of acceptance. Emma would tell him he was being aff
licted with the feels, and he wasn’t sure he liked it, but it beat cold sweat and stomach cramps.

  Lizzie went on. “Anyway, I doubt stealing the cash there would have been worth the trouble. Surely, we can attract a slightly better—or worse, as the case may be—class of criminal.”

  He burst out with a laugh. “Is your goal to get Big Chance on the U.S. News and World Report’s list of best small towns for high-class criminals?”

  She grinned. “It’s a start.”

  “Your mind goes some interesting places.” And he was tempted to follow.

  “I guess I was thinking that, with the possibility of dogfighting going on near your place and people who can’t afford date night at Dairy Queen, Big Chance might take more work than I expected.”

  “More work? What do you mean?”

  She hesitated. “This probably sounds stupid,” she finally said, “but I always thought Big Chance could be restored to its former glory as somewhere people visit, instead of a struggling collection of businesses threatened with extinction by the big box stores…” she trailed off. “Yeesh. I sound like a brochure.”

  Adam chuckled. “What kind of former glory? It’s been like this as long as I can remember, except there were a few more places to eat and shop.”

  “Apparently my great, great something or other grandfather came here in the mid-1800s to help build the town. It had been a trading post when Texas belonged to Mexico, and then after independence, it was a stagecoach stop, and then a railroad stop for all the farms that started to grow up around here. And at some point, someone found gold in the Mill Creek.”

  “In Texas?”

  “That’s the story my dad tells. Apparently, that’s where the Babcocks—remember Mitch? That jerky guy?”

  Oh yes. Adam remembered Mitch Babcock. Though he’d use a stronger description than jerk.

  “Anyway, I think that’s where the original Babcock made enough money to buy the land for the Mill Creek farm once the gold was panned out. I don’t think it was a huge gold rush, but it did give Big Chance a short moment of notoriety as a party town. Saloons, gunfighters, the whole shebang. But then there was a drought, and the Civil War happened, and everyone kind of forgot about the gold. My dad’s done a ton of research about the history, and I think it would be cool to see the whole area come back to life. I’d love to—” She shook her head. “I don’t know. Do something that would bring people out here because it’s a neat place to be.”