Cowboy in Charge (11 page)

Smiling, Layne nodded at Scott. “Thanks, Mrs. Browley. We’d love to stop in.”

“I’ll leave the door open and go put the kettle on.” She set her broom against the porch railing and went into the house.

“Mrs. Browley is a regular at SugarPie’s,” Layne said quietly to Jason as he turned the carriage up the front walk. “She’s also very lonely, I think. Her husband died about five years ago. But you would know that, since she was your next-door neighbor.”

“Yeah. Mrs. B and her husband were always good people.” He said the words almost grudgingly.

“She still is.” They followed the sound of the older woman’s voice down the short hallway to the kitchen in the rear of the house.

“I hope you don’t mind if we have our tea party in here. It’ll save us carrying everything out to the parlor. If you’ll just help me shift this table, young man—” She cut herself off and stared. “Why, Jason McAndry, is that really you?”

“Yes, ma’am, it is.” As if he felt uncomfortable under her scrutiny, he turned away to hook his Stetson on one of the kitchen chairs.

“Well, what a nice surprise. Let’s get this table out from against the wall and we can sit down and have a real chat.”

The kettle began to whistle. Without a word, he rearranged her kitchen set to accommodate them all around the small table. Layne removed Jill’s blanket and assisted Scott with his jacket.

After they were seated with steaming mugs of tea in front of them and a heaping platter of cookies in the center of the table, Mrs. Browley said, “This
is
a treat, having you all here. And you’re saving
me
from having to eat every one of these cookies myself. I would, too.” She laughed. “It’s lovely having you visiting again, Jason. I’m afraid your mother never did say where you’d gone when you left...”

The half question hung in the air. Layne wondered whether or not he would answer. He still seemed uncomfortable. She couldn’t imagine why, when no one could be less threatening than grandmotherly Mrs. Browley.

“Texas,” he said finally. “I’ve got a job wrangling at a ranch out near Dallas and spend the rest of my time competing in rodeos.”

“Well, that’s just wonderful. My husband used to say rodeo was dangerous work but nice if you can win in it.”

Jason smiled. “That’s true.”

“And do you win?”

He shrugged. “My share.”

He said it so casually, and yet years ago, it was exactly because he
didn’t
win in it that they had faced their biggest problems. Rodeo was an expensive sport, especially when you didn’t have sponsors or bring home the biggest purses. And when it took you away from the full-time job and you had bills to pay and a baby on the way.

“I haven’t heard a word from your mother since she left, either,” Mrs. Browley said. “She and Lou broke up, and a good thing, too, though of course, that’s not for me to say.” She glanced at Scott, who was busy devouring a cookie, and lowered her voice. “The yelling and carrying on that went on in that house, it was pitiful.” She shook her head. “As sorry as I was to see you move on, Jason, I think in the long run it was better for you than moving back home.”

Maybe that was why Jason had never taken her to his house. For the first time, she understood his home life might have been almost as bad as hers. Yet he had shouldered his troubles without saying a word, all the while listening to her, making more of an effort to support her than she had realized.

“But don’t mind me,” Mrs. Browley went on. “I’m just talking out of school. My husband used to say I had so many opinions about people in this town, I should have run for mayor.”

“You’d be a good candidate, I’m sure,” Layne said warmly.

Beside her, Jason reached for a cookie and sat munching it while she and Mrs. Browley—or primarily Mrs. Browley—carried the conversation.

When the platter was cleared off down to the last crumb, the older woman beamed. “I’m just going to go right ahead and send the rest of the cookies home with you. I can bake another batch later. And you’re all welcome to come by again anytime for more.”

“Tomorrow?” Scott said.

At that, even Jason laughed.

“I don’t know about tomorrow,” Layne told Scott. “But we’ll definitely stop by to say hello again sometime.”

“Good enough,” Mrs. Browley said. “Now I know to expect company, I’ll make sure to keep the cookie jar filled.”

As they left Mrs. Browley waving goodbye to them from the porch, Layne glanced toward the blue house next door. But when they reached the sidewalk, Jason turned the carriage resolutely in the other direction as if he didn’t want to walk past his former home. Or didn’t want to revive any more memories.

Chapter Eleven

When they arrived home again, Jason and Scott immediately settled down in the living room.

“I’m taking this little girl in for a change,” Layne told them. But once she lay Jill in the crib, the baby began to squirm, pursing her lips and turning her head toward the mattress. “Uh-oh. Mommy knows those signs. Somebody wants to eat.”

Tired from their walk, Layne curled up on Scott’s bed and held Jill close.

The afternoon with the four of them together had eased some of her tension. To her surprise, she had begun to feel comfortable with having Jason around the kids. Unfortunately, she was also beginning to feel much too comfortable with him herself.

He had things on his mind he wasn’t sharing with her, but he didn’t need to tell her so. Just as with Jill’s hunger, she could read his unspoken signs. She wanted to know why he’d been so quiet at Mrs. Browley’s.

Jill finished nursing, and Layne held the baby upright, lightly patting her back. She heard Jason’s boot steps in the hall. A moment later, he stood framed in the doorway. Jill let out a loud burp, and they both laughed.

“What are you feeding that kid—beer?”

“Now, that’s one thing she’s never tasted.” He stepped into the room. Whatever tension had eased inside her immediately snapped to attention again.

“She ready to go down for her nap?”

She nodded. When he reached out, she hesitated for only a moment before letting him take the baby. She watched as he carefully cradled Jill in his big hands.

“That’s right,” he murmured to her, “time for you to hit the hay.”

Layne blinked and had to tear her gaze from them.

This
was what their lives would be like if they could have made their relationship work. The thought filled her with warmth at the same time it left her breathless, battling too many thoughts to take in at once.

Over this past week, almost without her being aware of it, moments like these had become normal parts of their day. Feelings she hadn’t expected—good and bad—had taken root inside her. A longing to be with Jason again. Her worry the problems between them were her fault. The growing fear she had driven him away.

But she couldn’t allow herself to believe that. It took two to make a marriage work.

She watched him settle her daughter in her crib and thought of all her son had missed. All
she
had missed.

Her eyes blurred and she blinked, but not fast enough to hold back a tear. Quickly she brushed it away. She couldn’t let Jason see her breaking down just because he’d put Jill in her crib. But he turned around and caught her with her hand on her cheek, and to her dismay, another tear fell.

He came to sit beside her and reached up to wipe the moisture away. “Don’t,” he said. He lingered, brushing his thumb across her cheek and tucking his fingers beneath her chin.

“I can’t help it. I...”

“I know.” He tilted his head to rest his chin against her hair.

She could smell his aftershave, his shampoo, the soap she kept in the shower. The good clean scents she had always associated with him. For a moment, she felt tempted to lean against him, simply to get close to him, the way Scott and Jill cuddled against her. A basic instinct born of the need to touch, to be touched. To connect without words.

As if he felt the same, he leaned back and looked down at her. He lifted her chin and stared at her mouth and then, slowly, raised his eyes to meet hers. Her heart tripped a beat, and she knew she was losing that heart to him all over again.

Silently, he lowered his head. She tilted her face up to his. She felt the brush of his breath against her lips, a welcome caress. She felt the heat of his mouth just an inch away...

The heat warned her, reminding her how quickly their kisses could go from a gentle warmth to a raging fire.

She shook her head, breaking away from the contact she longed for. Trying not to think of the closeness she craved. “No. What if Scott walked in? We’re sending him enough mixed messages as it is.”

“You’re sending me a few, too.”

She shivered. She wasn’t the only one who could read signals and, this close, he hadn’t missed hers. “That was always the issue, wasn’t it?”

But now, she was confused by the messages she was sending herself. Seeing Jason with the kids, doing the things daddies do, made her long to believe he could be the husband she had always wanted.

But she had tried that once...

Twice...

How could she know
what
she wanted in a husband? She couldn’t trust herself to pick the right man—
any
man—to fill that role.

She scooted to the other side of the bed and stood.

“What was that about ‘the issue’?” he asked.

“Our problem,” she clarified. “We had always been good at...going wild and crazy. But when it came to everything else, we couldn’t handle it. And a relationship built on wild and crazy isn’t a relationship at all.”

She turned her back to him. He said nothing else. She leaned over the crib and, with one finger, stroked Jill’s cheek.

Behind her, she heard his boots hit the floor as he left the room.

She touched her daughter’s hand. Jill’s tiny fingers tightened around hers. The connection coursed through her, creating a wave of pure love.

Her thoughts jumbled inside her head again, triggering a wave of complete panic.

What was she doing getting so close to Jason, coming so close to kissing him, doubting so many of the decisions she had made? Hadn’t she learned her lesson yet? How could she risk hurting her kids by falling—again—for a man she couldn’t trust?

* * *

L
AYNE
CURLED
UP
on the couch in the living room, now lit only by a single table lamp. Jason had gone to read Scott his bedtime story and tuck him in.

A few minutes later, he joined her.

Each night, he had begun emptying the contents of his pockets—his key ring, his wallet, his money clip—into the drawer of the coffee table. She envisioned him instead using the bedside table in her bedroom. Imagined him sharing her bed...

Would she never stop having thoughts like those about him?

Swallowing a sigh, she shifted on the couch.

They had made dinner and cleaned up afterward without a single word about what had happened—or not happened—in the kids’ bedroom. Everything had seemed normal. Familiar. Routine.

As if they were just a couple of old married folks.

He reached for the remote. “I’ll keep this turned down so you can hear the kids.”

“Thanks.”

More thoughts tumbled inside her head. More questions. If he’d been around from the time Scott was born, would he always have been this considerate? Or in the space of those three years, had he matured as much as she had? Could she take the risk of finding out?

The TV droned on, the murmur occasionally punctuated by a noisier commercial or a laugh track as he flipped through the stations. The flickering of the screen against the surrounding dimness made her squint. In the background, the dishwasher in the kitchen made a rhythmic hum. Her eyelids felt as if she’d balanced a weight on them.

“Hey, Layne.” Dimly, she heard his voice. “Hey, Layne,” he said again softly. “Time for bed, don’t you think?”

She had fallen asleep. Yawning, she stretched her arms over her head. When she saw he sat watching her, she self-consciously lowered her hands to twine her fingers together in her lap. “The baby will be up for a feeding before too long. I would be better off trying to stay awake.”

“How ’bout a game of cards, then?”

“Cards?”

“Yeah. Gin rummy, a penny a point, like the old days.”

“I don’t think so. I haven’t played cards in forever.”

“What do you do with yourself after the kids go to bed?”

“Read a magazine. Watch television. Throw in a load of laundry. We run out of clean socks, too.” Instantly, she envisioned him standing in front of her with his shirt in his hand. She regretted the words as soon as she’d said them, but he simply laughed, making her feel better about her misguided attempt to keep things light.

“I’ll bet.” He changed position in the chair to face her more comfortably. “Don’t you ever leave the kids with a sitter and have a night on the town?”

“Oh, right. Like the old days?” she repeated mockingly. “The highlights of our high-school years? Live it up at the Bowl-a-Rama and then hit the Big Dipper or SugarPie’s a half hour before closing?”

“They were fun days.”

She nodded. “And you were always all about the fun.”

“
Me?
Most of the time you were the one who didn’t want to go home.”

To her surprise, she realized he was right.

“Sugar had to kick you out.”

“Sometimes.” Reluctantly, she admitted, “It was better to be out of the house than dealing with my dad.” She had told him what it was like for her at home, with neither of her parents paying her or Cole much attention, except when her dad found something to complain about or criticize.

“Yeah,” he said, “when I first met you, I thought you were lucky. At least you had two parents.”

“Trust me,” she said drily, “anyone seeing us at home would never have known we had even
one
. I don’t know what I’d have done without Cole.” She had been open with Jason about her family situation. To a point. He had always been closed up tight about his. Their hostess’s conversation at the tea party that afternoon had given her information about his mother’s relationship that she had never known. “I didn’t realize your mom and her boyfriend had split up. Where did she go? As Mrs. Browley said, she moved away from Cowboy Creek not long after you did.”

“Yeah.” Not looking at her, he reached for one of Scott’s storybooks on the coffee table and sat riffling the pages. “She got fed up with Lou and went to stay with one of her sisters in Albuquerque.”

“How is she doing?”

He shrugged. “I left a couple of messages not long after. When she finally called me back, she made it plain she had a new life with a new guy and it didn’t include having a grown-up son.”

“Oh, Jason. I’m sorry.” Rejection from a distance had to hurt less than being ignored by someone who sat in the same room with you. But it wouldn’t help him to hear that. She hesitated, then said, “In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never talked about your dad.”

“There was nothing to say. I never had one.”

“Never?”

“Not one I ever saw.”

“Did...did he die?”

“Nope. My mother got fed up with him, too, I guess. It was just me and her, until she hooked up with Lou and he moved us here to Cowboy Creek.” He glanced at the television again. His profile in the flickering light looked hard-jawed and grim.

His admission bothered her. From the time she had met him, she knew his father wasn’t in the picture, but she hadn’t known Jason had never seen the man.

Though she would be the first to attest he might not have missed much, no one could really say for sure. Just as she could never know what it would have been like for her son to grow up having a father at home.

But now, she certainly couldn’t miss these clues Jason had given her. Even if he’d wanted to, he might not have known how to be a daddy.

* * *

T
HE
MINUTE
J
ASON
walked into SugarPie’s late the next morning, he saw Layne’s attention zero in on him. Her face took on the familiar blank expression she used to hide her surprise, but the widening of her blue eyes gave her away.

She should have known he would come by to pick her up at the end of her shift.

This close to lunchtime, the booths in the back had filled. He slid into a chair at a small round table off to one side of the room. From there, he could see her a few tables down, taking an order from an elderly couple, probably there early for the lunchtime special.

It was her first day back to work, and that morning, he’d insisted on driving her to take the kids to the sitter and then dropping her at the sandwich shop. “I’ve got nothing else to do but kill time,” he had argued, “and it’ll save you gas money.”

“Normally I walk.”

“Not today,” he’d countered, and her lack of argument proved to him her energy levels weren’t back to normal. The way she’d tossed and turned in her bed for yet another night told him how much being sick from the flu and having a brand-new baby must have messed up her sleep schedule. He’d heard her movements again because—no matter the relative comfort of the short couch over the armchair—he’d been up half the night himself.

Notepad and pencil in hand, she made her way to his table. “What can I get you?”

“Into trouble?” He grinned.

“We’d done enough of that a long time ago.” She waggled the notepad impatiently.

“I’ll wait for you.”

“I won’t have time to eat here. Since Sugar wouldn’t let me put in a full shift, I told Rhea I’d pick the kids up as soon as I finish at noon.”

“And while you went to get the baby settled in the playpen, I told Rhea it’d be closer to one.”

She gasped. “You
what
?”

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of paying her for the extra time.”

“Jason,” she hissed, “that’s not the point. You can’t rearrange my life to suit yours.”

“I did it for
you
. After being on your feet all morning, you’ll need a break and something to eat. To fortify you before you have to deal with the kids again.”

Her mouth opened, then closed, as if she didn’t trust herself to speak. Again, her eyes gave her away. She blinked several times, and he’d wager she was trying to hold back tears. For a moment, his gut clenched. He sure didn’t want her crying here. The night before in the kids’ room, she had shed a couple tears and they had nearly done him in. The two of them had almost started that trouble he’d jokingly mentioned just now—though last night, he had felt no urge at all to laugh.

When he’d wiped the moisture from her cheek, she had jumped away from him the way a greenhorn shied from a skittish horse. That was about the only thing that had stopped him from leaning closer and stealing a kiss. But if she cried now, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from wiping away her tears.