Cowboy Crazy (25 page)

Resting her elbows on her knees, she lowered her head into her hands and let the tears fall.

Twenty minutes later, the farrier shouted out a good-bye. She answered in a cracked, quavering voice, then waved from the hay door as he climbed into his truck and drove away. She watched until the plume of dust kicked up from the truck faded away, and then she let herself cry some more.

Lane dug his heels into the side of a black-speckled bull named Dalmatian and tensed to give the nod. Shifting his weight, he tightened the rope wrapped around his riding glove, then reached up and shoved his hat down hard. The arena was clear, the crowd hushed, the clowns and pickup men standing off to the side. If only he could clear his mind and quiet the thoughts whirling through his brain.

He stared down at the bull’s blunt horns, but all he could see was Sarah. That would be all right if he could see her naked, but the pictures that kept flashing through his mind were surprisingly tame. Her flushed embarrassment after he’d kissed her. Her serious, sedate dance with the horse when she didn’t know he was watching. Her face, bright with fury when she’d confronted him about Flash.

He worked his fingers deeper into the glove and tugged himself closer to the bull’s broad shoulders. He just didn’t feel right. Maybe if he rewrapped his hand. He unwound the rosined rope and carefully laced it around his hand, tight but not too tight, staring down at the process but still thinking about Flash.

What had happened to the stallion wasn’t Roy Price’s fault, but it had been a mistake to work the horse like he did. And though Lane managed to keep the animal comfortable, he couldn’t be ridden. His potential never would have paid off. Roy had gone out on a limb buying the horse, and sooner or later, that limb would have come crashing down.

But it seemed like the one good thing Sarah had held onto all her life was her unshakable belief in her stepfather. She probably had great memories of Flash too, since she’d ridden him successfully on the barrel racing circuit. If he told her what had been wrong with the horse, she’d be horrified to learn she’d put the animal through excruciating pain.

If hating Lane helped her, he’d let her do it. That way she’d keep believing in her father and in herself. He was doing the right thing.

It took him a half second to realize he’d nodded his head at the thought and the cowboy by the gate had taken it as a signal. The iron bars swung aside and Dalmatian leapt for the opening, rearing up so high he almost dumped Lane off the back.

Damn. He wasn’t ready on the rope. He hadn’t settled into his seat. Worst of all, he wasn’t ready mentally. He felt his legs sliding backward. The rope burned his palm as it slid through his grip, twisting away. For a long, suspended second he looked down from the top of his arc and saw the bull kicking up dust, the wide-eyed wonder of the cowboy at the gate watching him fly up and away, and the faces of the crowd, a blur of color and light, tracing his descent.

The arena fence rose to meet him, the metal bars speeding closer, closer—and then a shuddering clang reverberated through every bone in his body. Stars exploded inside his head and faded to a deep, black darkness and the last thing he knew was pain.

***

By the time she trudged up the wheelchair ramp to the house, Sarah was a mess. Her boots were dusty, her hair flecked with hay. She’d splashed her face over and over with cold water from the spigot in the barn, and though it had washed away the swelling from her tears, it had left her face ruddy and pink.

She needed to talk to Trevor and find out where Lane was so she could tell him she knew she’d misjudged him. Hell, she’d misjudged her whole life, and she was ready to start over. She’d start by apologizing to Lane.

Not that it would make much difference. She’d shown her worst side to him. He knew she was angry and stubborn and hopelessly deluded. He knew the image she’d presented to the world was a false front, like a grand facade on the street side of a rickety, tumbledown shack. She’d just as soon never face him again.

But she needed to bite the bullet and tell him he was right. She hadn’t been giving her true self a chance. If she could, she’d take the job he’d offered, but she could hardly work as a stable hand when she couldn’t bring herself to get on a horse. Her riding days were over. She’d proven that this morning.

It was a shame, because she’d come to another conclusion during her long, hay-scented crying jag. Lane had been right when he’d said Two Shot made her what she was today. The specter of her past had always urged her on like a trainer with a lunge whip, pushing her to try harder. If she could stay, she could somehow pay the town back, make amends. But with no job, there was no future for her in Two Shot.

Halfway up the wheelchair ramp to the house, she almost turned around. What if she went back to the barn and tried again? Maybe a different horse would help. But those painful memories and the heart-pounding panic that accompanied them weren’t something she could face again.

Trevor was just hanging up the phone when she stepped into the kitchen. She’d kicked her boots off on the porch, so he didn’t hear her stocking feet on the hardwood floor.

“Is he conscious?” he was asking.

Sarah stopped. His tone was hushed, as different from his usual bantering tone as it could be. Dread coiled in her stomach and she reached out and touched a hand to the counter to keep her balance.

“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.” He turned and caught sight of Sarah. “I’ll send somebody right over.”

He clicked the phone shut and set it on the counter, then lowered his head and closed his eyes as if marshaling all his strength.

“Lane’s hurt,” he said. “Bucked into the fence.”

Sarah felt heat behind her eyes. “Is he okay?”

“Dunno.” Trevor’s face flushed and his lips whitened, as if he was holding back emotion. “It’s a head injury. They’re working on him, but he’s unconscious.”

She pictured him in an ambulance and felt her lungs squeeze shut. The thought brought back the pictures she’d been trying to avoid—a man killed by an animal. Roy in the driveway, Roy in the ambulance, his ruddy skin gray and lifeless.

No.
Lane Carrigan was upright and vital and most of all, strong. He couldn’t end up that way. She couldn’t let the fate that had taken away Roy steal the only other man she’d ever—loved?

That couldn’t be right. Hell, she wasn’t even capable of love. Lane had given her every reason to love and trust him, and she’d still blamed him for her reception in Two Shot. Blamed him for what had happened to her family.

“Oh, God,” she said to Trevor. “When he left—I said terrible things to him. I need to get to him. I need to tell him I didn’t mean it.”

She hated herself even as she said the words. Trevor was losing his best friend, and all she could think of was herself. But she couldn’t stop replaying their parting in her head. She’d told Lane to hit the road and he’d walked away without defending himself, sparing her the pain of knowing the truth.

She needed to tell him she knew about Flash, and that she was sorry. Picturing him lying in the dirt of the arena, hurt and helpless, she knew there was one more truth she needed to face. One more puzzle piece in her future she needed to slide into place.

She loved Lane Carrigan. He couldn’t possibly love her back—not after how she’d behaved. Even a good man had his limits. But she needed to tell him.

“Where is he?” she asked.

“Casper,” he said.

“Casper? Where was the rodeo?”

“Humboldt.”

“But…” She paused, stunned. “He said he was going away. Staying somewhere else.”

“Yeah, he said he was going to stay in the trailer, then leave for Amarillo tomorrow or the next day.”

So he’d had nowhere to go. He could have stayed at the ranch.

“Why?”

The minute she asked the question, she prayed Trevor didn’t know the answer. Hopefully Lane hadn’t told Trev she was a basket case, that she was delusional, that she blamed him for all her problems and he was afraid to be alone in the house with a crazy woman. Because that was the only reason he would have stayed in the cramped trailer instead of his own cozy Love Nest.

“Dunno.” Trevor shrugged and spun the chair away from the counter.

Sarah breathed a sigh of relief. One thing about rodeo cowboys—they were not given to introspection. It was a quality she’d often criticized, but right now she was grateful for it.

“Can you drive the van?” Trevor held up his hand. It was shaking like an aspen leaf in a high breeze.

“Sure.” She was shaking a little herself, but Trevor didn’t need to know that.

Lane did, though. Lane needed to know everything.

She was through with keeping secrets.

Lane blinked, squinting his eyes against a glaring white light. He’d expected to wake up in the arena, possibly to an enormous hoof descending on his head or a high-speed view of the crowd flashing by as he hurtled through the air. But all he saw was light shimmering around him, plus occasional shadows, blurred at the edges, that came and went.

The light. He’d heard about that. It meant he was dying. How the hell had that happened? He pondered that question a while, remembering the bull, the flight through the air, and the metal fence post. Oh, yeah.

He was supposed to go toward the light, right? But he couldn’t even move. Come to think of it, most people couldn’t move when they were dying, so how the hell were you supposed to go toward anything? He tensed his muscles, but all that did was make his ribs hurt. It got the shadows moving, though. They flashed in and out of sight, making a constant and incomprehensible noise, like quacking ducks.

If heaven was full of ducks, he was in trouble. About his only contact with a duck had been shooting one on a hunting trip in 1998. He’d fed some once too, when he was a kid, but he doubted a few chunks of bread tossed into a scummy pond would offset cold-blooded duck murder. If ducks controlled the pearly gates, he was out of luck and headed for hell.

Oh, well. He’d never really expected to make the cut for heaven anyway. Too much carousing. Too many women.

Still, he’d done a few good things in his life. He’d done his best to help Trevor after his accident. He’d insulted the guy the entire time, but that was just to make everybody feel more comfortable.

And he’d helped a few horses. Flash, especially. If he did nothing else in his life, he’d always be proud he’d given that horse a chance to escape the pain he’d suffered so long.

And that brought him to Sarah. Had he helped her? Probably not. He’d done his best, but she was still deluding herself, believing in her stepfather and blaming Lane for all her family’s troubles. She didn’t realize families had troubles no matter what the circumstances.

Look at his own family. His father, who had died stern and disapproving even though a stroke had robbed him of the ability to express his disappointment in his sons. His brother, driving the company onward as it ate up land and sucked out communities’ souls along with the precious oil beneath them.

But not this time. He’d prevented that from happening to Two Shot. He was pretty sure he’d convinced his brother that taking responsibility for the community would have earned their father’s approval. And if that didn’t work, he’d had paperwork done up on the conservation easement and Trevor didn’t know it yet, but he had power of attorney if anything happened to Lane.

Anything like this.

He closed his eyes and listened to the quacking of the ducks for a while. They sounded pretty riled up. And they were pretty big ducks. One in particular loomed over him. He felt it brush against his hand, and then something stroked his face. A feather? A wingtip? Man, he was in trouble.

The duck moved away and the light hit his eyes like a laser, sending a sharp, shooting pain straight to the back of his head. He closed his eyes and tensed. It was like he’d been shot. Damn, he shouldn’t have done that to a poor innocent duck. It hadn’t even been good eating. The thing was tough as an old saddle and tasted like a bad chicken gone worse.

The wingtip brushed his face again and he opened his eyes. Things were starting to come into focus now. The illumination he’d taken for the light at the end of the tunnel to heaven was actually just a big lighted square in one of those cheap drop ceilings. The shadows weren’t ducks; they were people. Thank God. He wasn’t dead. He might have come close—but he was alive and clearly in the hospital.

He hadn’t died; he’d just been delusional. And that meant he had a second chance at life.

What was he going to do with it?

Well, first of all, he’d be nicer to ducks. Maybe he could dig a pond at the ranch, make a little duck country club for them. He pictured a duck lounging by a swimming pool on a duck-sized chaise lounge with an umbrella drink in his hand and almost laughed.

“Did he just laugh?” someone asked. It was a woman’s voice, probably a nurse. It reminded him of Sarah, but no way would Sarah be here. Sarah hated him now.

The sharp pain came again, but this time it hit his heart.

“I think he did laugh,” said a low, masculine voice. “But did you see him flinch?”

He knew that voice. It was Trevor. If Trevor had set foot in a hospital, Lane had to be in pretty bad shape.

He squinted, struggling to make out the shapes that had blurred into shadows again. He wanted to see that nurse. She really sounded a lot like Sarah. Maybe it was. Maybe…

No, it couldn’t be. If he was lucky, Sarah was still at the ranch finding the woman she was meant to be. He was hoping to have one more shot at redemption before she gave up on him completely.

But there was no way she’d come running if he got hurt. She still thought she could blame everything that ever happened to her on one single bad guy, and the bad guy was him.

That was the other thing he’d do with his second chance. It had been wrong to let her go on believing something from outside yourself could destroy your whole life. He didn’t mind playing the bad guy if she needed one, but realizing she was in control of her own life would set her free. Nobody could take success away from her if she was true to herself.

That’s what he’d tell her, but he’d find a way to tell it that sounded a little less corny.

The edges of the shadows sharpened and for a second he thought he could see, but then he realized he was still hallucinating. He had to be, because the woman sitting beside him really was Sarah—but she was dressed in gloriously dirty cowgirl clothes. She was the Sarah he’d been hoping to find, her hair windblown and tangled with little bits of straw dangling here and there. And she wasn’t wearing a shred of makeup. Her face was pink and unadorned except for a smudge of mud across her forehead.

She looked like a girl from Two Shot, Wyoming, like a woman who’d shed those prim little suits and forbidding frowns forever. She looked like a woman who held a horse and pressed her cheek against its neck, the woman who kicked rocks and danced in worn-out boots, a woman who made love in the bed of a pickup in the moonlight, a woman who danced the simple, timeless dance of trust with a horse when she thought nobody was looking.

The curtain’s metal rings zinged across the rod as a nurse whipped it back.

“Looks like he’ll be okay,” she said. “He’ll have one heck of a headache, and he might not be much use for a few days, but tests show no real damage.”

Her voice didn’t sound one bit like Sarah’s. In fact, if he couldn’t see her, he’d think he’d been right about the ducks. But Sarah was there, standing beside the cot, and Trevor was sitting in his wheelchair in a corner of the cubicle, his eyes suspiciously bright.

“He was never any use anyway. Can we take him home?”

“Soon as he’s okay to get up.”

Sarah—it really was Sarah—smiled at him and he almost thought he was dying again, she glowed so bright. The last time he’d had a wreck he’d seen her holding that horse and he’d thought she was some sweet equestrian angel come to take him away. Now he knew she was no angel.

But if she’d just drop her guard she’d be the kind of woman he needed. He reached out a hand and brushed a strand of hair away from her face. She reached up at the same time and he trapped her hand in his. He knew what they meant now when they said you’d been shot by Cupid’s arrow. He felt like that duck, downed by a single shot.

“It’s you,” he said.

“Yeah.” She even talked like a small-town girl now. Maybe he really had died and gone to heaven.

“No, I mean, it’s really you.”

She laughed and spread her arms. “That’s for sure. Complete and unadulterated. Unbathed, too. Sorry. I was playing with your horses all day.”

Playing.
That’s just what he’d hoped she’d do.

“Don’t be sorry.” He squeezed her hand and felt his own heart expand in response. “This is the way I love you.”

The smile faded. “You don’t mean that.”

“Sure I do.” He’d vowed to tell her the truth, and there it was. Something in her heart called to his, and no matter who she decided to be from here on out, he’d always love her. “I know you don’t want to hear it. I know you think I took your life away from you. But Sarah, I didn’t. I…”

“I know.” Her eyes brightened with unshed tears and she looked even more like an angel as she wrapped her other hand around his. “I know what happened with Flash. I know you helped him, and you didn’t steal him. You saved him.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I think you might have saved me too.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he figured he’d talk about the horse. He suspected the two of them would do that a lot if they ended up together, and that was fine with him. “I was lucky. I could afford the best vets, the best tests to find out what was wrong. You would have done the same thing.”

“I know. You’re right.” She smiled and she seemed okay now, the hoarseness gone from her voice. “We ran up one heck of a vet bill trying to figure it out. But then we had to give up and work around it.”

A single tear escaped her eye, flowing in a slow, crooked line down her cheek. “He suffered. I feel so bad.”

“You couldn’t know.”

“It’s just—if a horse is hurting, he’s supposed to limp. It should show in his gait. Flash never showed it.”

“He just powered through it. He never stopped trying, and he wouldn’t admit to weakness.” He reached up and wiped the tear away with the pad of his thumb. “He was a lot like you. You were hurt, and you just powered through it.”

“I did it all wrong.”

“You did your best, and it was damn good. You took care of your sister, and you built yourself a future.”

“Which came crumbling down when your brother fired me.”

“It didn’t fall down. It just changed.” He reached up and stroked her jawline and she turned her head, rubbing her cheek on his hand like a cat. He cupped it, loving the feel of her warm skin against his palm, and watched her close her eyes. She might be tough, she might be hard as nails when she needed to be, but there was a sweetness at the core of her that he wanted to cherish. Sarah would always take care of herself, but he’d be there for her when things went wrong. Always.

“You know you have a future on the ranch if you want it,” he said.

She pulled away and shook her head. “I can’t, Lane. I just—can’t.” A shadow crossed her face and he knew there was still something holding her back. “But whatever I do from here, wherever I go, you’re part of it.” A tear welled up in the corner of one eye and she swiped it away. “I guess I always knew it. Dangit, remember that first day you came to the office? I knew you could see right through me. At first I thought it was a sex thing, but it was more.” She bit her lip. “A lot more.”

She bent down and brushed his lips with hers. It felt so good he tried to rise, but that pain shot through his head again and he couldn’t. But she bent again, and this time it was more than a brush. She kissed him with all the passion and power he’d sensed was hiding behind the mask. When she finally drew away, her face was flushed.

“I love you, princess,” he said.

“Don’t call me that.” She said it reflexively, but this time she said it with a smile. “I’m not like that. I’m not precious and prim and spoiled like a princess. I’m real, and I could kick your butt if I wanted to.”

“I know that. I always did,” he said. “I’m just glad you figured it out too.”