Carrie Alexander - Cowboy Comes Home

Rio was already filling the hay net. “Give me a week,” he said. “A trial.”

Her head snapped back. Trial. He’d used the word twice now. On purpose? To remind her what she owed him, after almost putting him on trial for a crime he hadn’t committed?

She secured the bottom half of the Dutch door. No, Rio wouldn’t taunt her with the past. Her guilty conscience was talking again, a voice she’d managed to drown out for the past ten years with a loud life that had ultimately said nothing at all.

At Wild River, the silence spoke. Too loudly. She’d be grateful to have another person around. They might even be able to reestablish their old friendship.

But never their status as lovers. Never.

“I’ll show you the bunkhouse,” she said abruptly. “You might change your mind.”

RIO REMEMBERED the bunkhouse. Even back then the one-room cabin had been run down, as dark as a cave. The Lennoxes had had a hired man, an old cowboy named Rooney. He’d chewed tobacco, tied flies that never caught fish, kept a string of sleazy paperbacks in his back pocket that he’d read in the barn in between chores. Meg had been the bane of his existence, with her mischief making and harum-scarum horseback riding.

Rio lifted the limp curtain that hung at the cabin’s only window. The view was of the river that cut through the property, deep, black and turbulent. Rooney had fished there, futilely. Rio and Meg had shot the rapids on their backsides.

“Do you remember the time you put cayenne pepper into Rooney’s tobacco tin?”

Meg almost smiled. “He’s dead now.” She bent over a small square table, wiping a thick layer of dust with her sleeve. “He’s dead, too,” she added to herself.

“He must have been seventy when I knew him.” Rio tried the lamp. “There’s electricity.” He crossed to the bathroom, outfitted with a rust-spotted claw-foot tub and cast-iron sink. The pipes clattered before blatting a brown stream into the bowl. “And water.”

Meg had pried a book from beneath the table leg. The table wobbled when she dropped the curled paperback on top of it. “The place needs work. I’ll clean it out and get a new mattress. Set some mousetraps.”

Rio moved over to examine the faded cover of the book. A buxom blonde with a gun winked up at him. Jezebel’s Revenge. Cover price forty-five cents.

“Are you saying I have the job?”

“If you want it.”

“I want it.”

She let out a breath, clearly exasperated with him. “Have you turned crazy in your old age, Rio Carefoot?”

He’d been crazy for her. Crazy for a green-eyed girl with rebellion streaming through her veins. The Meg of his youth hadn’t given a flying fig that he was a rootless outsider, halfway Crow, who’d never had a home of his own.

No real father either. But there’d always been his mother, who’d wanted him only to be good and get along. Virginia Carefoot hadn’t approved of her son’s fatal-attraction friendship with Meg, but after sending him away to one failed summer at the Montana rez with his grandparents, she’d run out of ways to keep them apart.

“What about you?” he asked Meg abruptly, not willing to acknowledge that, for him, the attraction hadn’t faded. She was still a part of him, even though he’d been sure he’d never see her again. “Where have you been all this time?”

“Around.” She circled the room, poking at the secondhand furnishings, as restive and uneasy as the young Meg. “Vegas, mostly. I arrived on the back of a motorcycle and left in a thirdhand Camaro with bad brakes, so you can guess how well I did there.” She rubbed her palms, drawing his eyes to the tattoos encircling her wrists. On the right, a ring of flame. The left, a blue band of waves.

“What did you do there?”

She pulled at her sleeves. “A little bit of everything—waitressing, clerking, answering phones at a call center. Pink-ghetto jobs. Then for nearly two years, I was on the city crew that did nothing but change lightbulbs. It was nice to be outdoors.”

“Huh. And how many does it take to change a lightbulb?”

She rolled her eyes. “You’re not the first to ask that eternal question. The guys’ standard answer was that now that they had a woman on the crew, the screwing had become a spectator sport. They were a rowdy bunch.”

Rio wanted to leap to her defense, even now. “You should have found a new job.”

“Eventually I did. There was some trouble and I was let go. So long, cushy city benefits.” Shadows shuttered the expression on her downturned face. “My dad always said I’d amount to nothing.”

“But he left you the ranch.”

“No one else wanted it. If he’d ever had friends, he’d chased them away long before he died.”

“Were you here at the end?”

She nodded behind a curtain of hair. “I came home. A neighbor—Mrs…. um…Mrs. Vaughn—she tracked me down off a Christmas card I’d sent the old man. But he didn’t want me. He told me to leave, to come back only after he was six feet deep.”

Rio looked at her, the bed between them. He’d have liked to go to her, but again he stopped himself. Even the young Meg had been prickly about accepting affection. This Meg had Hands Off branded across every inch of her.

“That was three years ago.” She brushed her hair over her shoulders. It was the same—long and straight, the color of pecans dipped in taffy. With her slim body and tawny skin, she’d always been camouflaged, easy to lose among the tall reeds and saplings of their endless summers. But she’d been free-spirited then. Now her camouflage seemed like the stillness of a wild creature frightened of capture.

Rio gave a soft grunt. “Don’t worry. We’ll set the old place to rights.”

Meg had moved to the door they’d left standing open. “I want this clear from the start—there is no ‘we.’ That’s over. I’m not looking for…you know. I don’t need a partner. You’d be just the hired hand.”

He gazed at her. “Of course.”

Her wide mouth pulled taut. “I’m sorry if that was harsh.”

“No, it’s good to know where we stand. This is only a job for me.”

“Then we’re clear.” Her eyes darkened despite what she’d said.

“Clear enough for now.”

“I mean it, Rio. I’m done with men.”

He followed her out the door. She’d always been a man’s woman. Never interested in girlie things when there were horses to ride, fast cars to drive, dares to take.

But someone had hurt her badly.

He hoped it wasn’t him.

AS SOON AS the rattle of Rio’s retreating truck had died, Meg slammed into the house. Tears welled in her eyes. She dashed them away impatiently. She didn’t cry.

But, oh, sometimes she really wanted to.

She pressed her knuckles into her abdomen. If only she could have had every organ removed after the last miscarriage, instead of just getting her uterus scraped. Maybe then she’d feel nothing except emptiness.

“For God’s sake,” she sneered after catching sight of herself in the cloudy mirror near the front door. “What a load of melodrama.”

Her mother had been a fine melodramatist, according to her dad. Meg remembered her as being sweet, fanciful and loving. But also weak. Emotional. Needy.

“Not fit for ranch life” had been the common diagnosis after Richard Lennox’s wife, Jolene, had slid from the occasional bleak mood into a deep depression. The townspeople had clucked over the way their daughter had been allowed to run wild.

They hadn’t known the worst of it. Not until, at age eleven, Meg had found her mother cold and lifeless in her bed, bottles of pills scattered across the blankets. In the community, there’d been whispers of suicide. Her father had refused to accept the possibility. The autopsy had come back as an unintentional overdose.