Linda Lael - Cowboy Country

Carolyn had to laugh, though the sound was hoarse and it hurt her throat coming out. “That was visual,” she said. “And what an imagination you have, Tricia Creed. If there was anything ‘arcing’ between Brody and me, it was hostility.”

“Sure,” Tricia agreed smoothly, and a little too readily, fussing with a display of sachet packets beside the cash register. Unless a tour bus came through unexpectedly, they probably wouldn’t be very busy that day, and Carolyn’s heart sank at the prospect of long hours spent making work where none existed.

“I’ll check for internet orders,” Carolyn said, desperate to change the course of their conversation before it meandered any deeper into Brody Territory. They kept the shop computer in their small office, a converted bedroom, off the living room. “Maybe we’ve sold a few more aprons online.”

“Maybe,” Tricia said, shooting another glance at Carolyn as she was about to turn and walk away. Then she came right out with it. “How come you didn’t mention signing up for cyberdates to me, but Kim knew?”

Carolyn wanted to lie, but she simply couldn’t. Not to Tricia, one of the first real friends she’d ever had. “I wasn’t planning on telling anybody,” she admitted ruefully, folding her arms. “Kim and I were upstairs, having lunch, and this message just popped up on my laptop screen.” She drew in a breath, huffed it out again. “That website—Friendly Faces, I mean—is a little scary. The thing talks. If the computer is on, and a message comes in, it just pipes right up with the news. ‘Somebody likes you!’” She threw her arms out wide, let her hands slap against her sides. “When that happened, Kim was onto my secret and I had no choice but to explain.”

Tricia smiled. “Relax,” she said. “It’s a new world. Lots of people connect online before they meet in person.”

“Easy for you to say,” Carolyn pointed out. “You don’t have to resort to desperate measures—you’re already married.”

Tricia gave a dreamy sigh. “Yes,” she said. “I am most definitely married.”

Carolyn barely kept from rolling her eyes.

Tricia came back from the land of hearts and flowers and cartoon birds swooping around with ribbons in their beaks and studied Carolyn with slightly narrowed eyes. “I just have one question,” she said.

“Of course you do,” Carolyn said, resigned. This was the troublesome thing about friendships—they opened up all these private places a person liked to keep hidden.

“Why go online and meet strangers when the perfect man is right in front of you?”

Carolyn pretended to look around the surrounding area in search of this “perfect man” of Tricia’s. Arched her eyebrows in feigned confusion and set her hands on her hips. “He is? I don’t see him.”

“You know I’m talking about Brody,” Tricia replied, going all twinkly and flushed again. She might have been talking about Brody, but it was a good bet she was thinking about Conner.

Carolyn reminded herself that Tricia meant well, just as Kim did. She was being prickly with her friend, and she regretted it.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

“For what?” Tricia wanted to know.

“I might have been a little snappish.”

“And I might have been meddling,” Tricia said. Another long pause followed, then she added, “Was it really so bad, whatever happened between you and Brody?”

Carolyn opened her mouth, closed it again, stumped for an answer.

Tricia touched Carolyn’s arm. “There I go, meddling again.”

“Could we not talk about Brody, please?” Carolyn asked, after a long time. She realized she was hugging herself with both arms, as though a cold wind had blown through the shop and chilled her to the bone.

“Of course,” Tricia said, her eyes filling. “Of course.”

Carolyn turned on her heel and marched off to the bedroom-office, keeping her spine straight.

Was it really so bad, whatever happened between you and Brody?

Yes, answered some voice within Carolyn, too deep to be uttered aloud. He was the first man I ever dared to love. I gave Brody Creed everything I had, everything I was and ever planned to be. I thought he was different from all the others—Mom, the social workers, the foster families—so I trusted him. In the end, though, he threw me away, just like they did. He left and I watched the road for him for months, hoping and praying he’d come back, and he stayed gone.

So much for hope and prayer. When had either one of them ever done her any good at all?

Reaching the office, Carolyn booted up the computer, only to be rewarded with an all-too-familiar greeting as soon as she went online.

“Somebody likes you!”

“Imagine that,” she muttered.

Why was this happening? She hadn’t signed on to Friendly Faces through this computer; she’d used the laptop upstairs.

It was creepy.

On an annoyed impulse, Carolyn clicked on the Show Me! icon.

And there was a picture of a buckskin horse.

Give me a chance, read the message beneath the photo.

It had been posted in the middle of the night, and it was signed, Brody.

Carolyn put a hand to her mouth. Then, in a shaky voice, she called out, “Tricia?”

Her friend appeared almost immediately. Tricia was light on her feet, for someone so profoundly pregnant.

“Is something wrong?” she asked, from the doorway.

“Am I seeing things?” Carolyn countered, gesturing toward the screen.

Tricia crept forward and peered at the monitor. “That’s Brody’s horse,” she said, very quietly. “Moonshine.”

“Apparently,” Carolyn quipped, “Moonshine is looking for action.”

Tricia giggled, but it was a nervous sound. “Brody sent you a message through Friendly Faces?” she marveled. “Wow. He must really like you.”

Carolyn felt a crazy thrill. “Yeah,” she retorted. “That would be why he’s hiding behind his horse.”

“He knows you like horses,” Tricia reasoned. It was a weak argument.

“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Carolyn scoffed.

“You registered as ‘Carol’?” Tricia asked, frowning a little.

“Never mind that,” Carolyn said briskly. “What do I do now?”

“Go out with Brody?”

“Oh, right.”

“What can it hurt? The two of you go out for a bite to eat, maybe take in a movie? Harmless fun.”

“Nothing about Brody Creed is harmless,” Carolyn said, with conviction.

“True,” Tricia agreed, wide-eyed. “But is that the kind of man you really want? Somebody harmless, who makes zero impact?”

“He scares me,” Carolyn admitted. The words were out before she’d had a chance to vet them as something she actually wanted to say out loud. And Brody did scare her, because no one, not even her feckless mother, had ever had as much power to hurt her, to crush her, as he did.

“One date,” Tricia negotiated. “You set the terms. How bad can that be?”

“Trust me,” Carolyn said, “it can be really bad.”

“He must have done you a number,” Tricia ventured, meddling again and showing no signs of apologizing for it. “You can tell me, Carolyn.”

“Like I told Kim?”

Tricia made the cross-my-heart motion with her right hand and then held it up in the oath position. “I will tell no one. Not even Conner.”

Carolyn sighed. She turned to Tricia and, against years of conditioning, took a chance. “Brody was passing through Lonesome Bend,” she said wearily, like an old-fashioned record player on slow speed. “It was years ago. I was house-sitting for Kim and Davis, and he—well, he just showed up on their doorstep. Something happened. Then something else happened. The next thing I knew, we’d been sharing a bed for a week and I was crazy in love with Brody Creed. We were making plans for a future together—babies, pets, a house somewhere on the ranch, the whole thing. Brody was going to reconcile with Conner, and with his aunt and uncle, and we were going to get married. Then, one morning, I woke up and found a note. ‘Something came up,’ he said, and he had to leave. That was it. He was gone.”