The Cowboy's Sweetheart (3 page)

He brushed a hand through his hair and for the first time, Wyatt smiled. “Yeah, you might want to get a haircut.”

“Probably.” He slid his feet into boots and finished buttoning his shirt. “I guess just help yourself to anything you can find. The coffee's ready.”

A brother and two kids, living in his house. Now that just about beat all. It was really going to put a kink in his life.

But then, hadn't Andie already done that? No, not Andie, not really.

When he walked out the back door, his dog, Bear, was waiting for him.

“Bear, this is not our life.” But it was. He could look around, at the ranch his dad had built. He could smell rain in the air and hear geese on a nearby pond.

It was his life. But something had shaken it all up, leaving it nearly unrecognizable. Like a snow globe, shaken by some unseen hand. He looked up, because it was Sunday and a good day for thinking about God, about faith. He didn't go to church, but that didn't mean he had forgotten faith.

So now he had questions. How did he do this? His brother was home—with two kids, no less. His best friend was now his one-night stand. He had more guilt
rolling around in his stomach than a bottle of antacid could ever cure.

Did this have something to do with his crazy prayers before he got on the back of a bull a month or so earlier. Did the words
God help me
count as a prayer? Or maybe it was payback for the bad things he'd done in his life?

Whatever had happened, he had to fix it—because he didn't like having his life turned upside down. But first he had to go to town and get groceries, something to feed two little girls.

 

Church had ended ten minutes ago and Andie had seen Ryder's truck driving past on his way to the farm. But they'd been stalled by people wanting to talk with she and her grandmother. Caroline had managed to smile and hang at the periphery of the crowds.

“We need to check on Ryder and Wyatt.” Etta started her old Caddy, smiling with a certain pride that Andie recognized. Her granny loved that car. She'd loved it for more than twenty years, refusing to part with it for something new.

What could be more dependable, Etta always said, than a car that she'd taken care of since the day she drove it off the lot?

Dependable wasn't a word Andie really wanted to dwell on, not at that moment. Not when her grandmother was talking about Ryder.

“I think Ryder and Wyatt are able to take care of themselves.” After her mother climbed into the front seat beside Etta, Andie slid into the back and buckled her seat belt. Etta eased through the church parking lot.

It hadn't been such a bad first Sunday back in church. The members of Dawson Community Church
were friends, neighbors and sometimes a distant relative. They all knew her. Most of them knew that she'd gone on strike from church when Ryder stopped going. Because they'd been best friends, and a girl had to do something when her best friend cried angry tears over what his father had done, and over a moment in church that changed their lives. A girl had to take a stand when her best friend threw rocks into the creek with a fury she couldn't understand because life had never been that cruel to her.

Her strike had been more imaginary than real. Most of the time Etta managed to drag her along. But Andie had let her feelings be known. At ten she'd been pretty outspoken.

“How long have you known Ryder and Wyatt?” Caroline asked, and Andie wanted to tell her that she should know that. A mother should know the answer to that question.

“Forever.” Andie leaned back in the seat and looked out the window, remembering being a kid in this very car, this very backseat. Her dad had driven and Etta had sat in the passenger side. The car had been new then. She'd been more innocent.

She'd heard them whispering about what Ryder's dad had done. She'd been too young to really get it. When she got home from church that day she'd run down the road and Ryder had met her in the field.

“Forever?” Caroline asked, glancing back over her shoulder.

“We've known each other since Ryder was five, and I was three. That's when they moved to Dawson. I guess about the time you left.”

Silence hung over the car, crackling with tension and
recrimination. Okay, maybe she'd gone too far. Andie sighed. “I'm sorry.”

Etta cleared her throat and turned the old radio on low. “We'll stop by the Mad Cow and get takeout chicken. Knowing Ryder, he doesn't have a thing in that house for Wyatt and the girls to eat.”

“What happened to Wyatt's wife?” Caroline asked.

Stop asking questions.
Andie closed her eyes and leaned back into the leather seat. She wouldn't answer. She wouldn't say something that would hurt. She was working on forgiving. God had to know that wasn't easy. Shouldn't God cut her a little slack?

Etta answered Caroline's question. “She committed suicide last year. Postpartum depression.”

It still hurt. Andie hadn't really known Wendy, but it hurt, because it was about Ryder, Wyatt and two little girls.

“I'm so sorry.” Caroline glanced out the window. “It isn't easy to deal with depression.”

Clues to who her mother was. In a sense, Andie thought these might also be clues to who she was. She waited, wanting her mother to say more. She didn't. Etta didn't push. Instead she turned the Caddy into the parking lot of the Mad Cow. And Ryder was already there. He was getting out of his truck and a little girl with dark hair was clinging to his neck. He looked like a guy wearing new boots. Not too comfortable in the shoes he'd been forced to wear.

He saw them and he stopped. Etta parked next to his truck.

As they got out, Wyatt came around the side of the truck. The older of the two girls was in his arms. She didn't smile the way the other child smiled.

“We didn't beat the church crowd.” Ryder tossed the observation to Wyatt but he smiled as he said it.

“No, you didn't, but you can eat lunch with us.” Etta slipped an arm around Wyatt, even as she addressed the response at Ryder. “And you'll behave yourself, Ryder Johnson.”

“I always do.” He winked at the little girl in his arms and she giggled. And she wasn't even old enough to know what that wink could do to a girl, how it could make her feel like her toes were melting in her high heels.

Andie wished she didn't know what that wink could do to a girl. Or a woman. She didn't want to care that he looked cuter than ever with a two-year-old in his arms. He looked like someone who should have kids.

But he didn't want kids. He had never wanted children of his own. He said the only thing his childhood had prepared him for was being single and no one to mess up but himself.

“You look nice.” He stepped closer, switching his niece to the opposite arm as he leaned close to Andie. “You smell good, too.”

Andie smiled, because every answer seemed wrong. Sarcasm, anger, the words “Is this the first time you've noticed how I look?” and so on.

She didn't feel like fighting with him. She felt like going home to a cup of ginger tea and a good romance novel. She felt like hitching the trailer back to her truck and hitting the road with Dusty, because she could always count on her horse and the next rodeo to cheer her up. She could head down to Texas.

“You look a little pale.” Caroline stood next to her, another problem that Andie didn't want to deal with. She felt like a tiny ant and people were shoveling stuff
over the top of her, without caring that she was getting buried beneath it all.

“I'm fine.”

“You really don't look so hot,” Ryder added.

“You just said I look nice. Which is it, Ryder?”

“Nice, in a pale, illusive, gonna-kick-somebody-to-the-curb sort of way.” He teased in the way that normally worked on her bad moods. Ryder knew how to drag her out of the pits.

But not today.

Today she wanted to be alone, to figure out the next phase of her life. And she didn't want to think about how Ryder would have to be a part of that future.

Or how he was going to feel about it.

“W
hy aren't you eating?” Ryder had tried to ignore Andie, the same way she'd obviously been ignoring him. She had talked to Wyatt, to the girls, even to her mother.

She was ignoring him the same way she was ignoring the chicken-fried steak on her dinner plate. And her mother was right. She did look pale.

“I'm eating.” She smiled and cut a bite of the gravy-covered steak. “See.”

She ate the bite, swallowing in a way that looked painful.

“Are you sick?”

She looked up to the heavens and shook her head. “No, I'm not sick.”

“You act sick.” He grinned a little, because he just knew he had to say what was on his mind. He couldn't stop himself. “You look like something the cat yacked up.”

His nieces laughed. Even Molly. At least they appreciated his humor. He sat back in his chair, his hands behind his head, smiling at Andie. Kat giggled like she knew exactly what her Uncle Ryder had said. He hadn't
expected to really like a two-year-old this much, but she already had him wrapped around her little finger.

He didn't think Andie was as thrilled with him. As a matter of fact she glared at him as if he was about her least favorite person on the planet. And with her mother, Caroline, sitting at the same table, he was pretty shocked that he'd be Andie's least favorite person.

“That's pleasant, Ryder. I'm sick of you asking me what's wrong. You haven't seen me in two months. Do you have something else you'd like to say to me?”

“Right here, right now?” That made his hands a little sweaty, especially when everyone at the table stared, including his nieces. Kat, who sat closest to him, looked a little worried. “No, I guess not. Well, other than wanting to know if you'd like to go the arena with me tonight. I could use a flank man.”

“I'm not a man.”

“Good point,” Wyatt mumbled.

Ryder shot his brother a look. “Keep out of this.”

Kat, two and innocent, clapped her hands and laughed.

A chair scooted on the linoleum floor. Ryder flicked his attention back to Andie. She was standing up, looking a little green and wobbly. Maybe it was the dress, or the three-inch heels. He stood, thinking he might have to catch her.

“What's wrong?” Etta started to stand up.

“I'm going outside. I need fresh air.”

“I'll go with you.” Ryder grabbed his hat off the back of the chair and moved fast, because she was practically running for the door.

She didn't go far, just to the edge of the building. He stood behind her as she leaned, gasping deep breaths of air.

“What's going on with you?”

“Stop.” She kept her face turned, resting her forehead against the old concrete block building. “I must have caught something from Joy's kids when I stopped in Kansas. One of them was sick.”

“I could take you home,” he offered quietly, because he had a feeling she didn't need more questions at the moment.

“I'm fine now. I would just hate to make the girls sick. They don't need that.” She turned, smiling, but perspiration beaded along her forehead and under her eyes. She was still pale.

“No,” he agreed, “the girls don't need to get sick. I don't think I could handle that.”

“They're just little girls.”

“Yeah, and I'm not anyone's dad. That's Wyatt's job. He's always been more cut out for the husband and father gig.”

And saying the words made him feel hollow on the inside, because he remembered standing next to Wyatt at his wife's funeral. He remembered what it felt like to stand next to a man whose heart was breaking.

Ryder hadn't ever experienced heartbreak and he didn't plan on it. He enjoyed his single life, without strings, attachments or complications.

“You're good with the girls,” Andie insisted, his friend again, for the moment. “Just don't slip into your old ways, not while they're living with you.”

“Right.” He slid his hand down her back. “I'll be good. So, are you okay?”

“I'm good. I'm going back inside.” She took a step past him, but he caught her hand and held her next to him.

“Andie, I don't want to lose my best friend. I'm sorry
for that night. I'm sorry that I didn't walk away…before. And I'm sorry I walked away afterward.”

She didn't look at him. He looked down, at the ground she was staring at—at dandelions peeking up through the gravel and a few pieces of broken glass. He touched her cheek and ran his finger down to her chin, lifting her face so she had to look at him.

“I'm sorry, too,” she whispered. “I just don't know how to go back. We've always kept the line between us, Ryder. This is why.”

“We don't have to stop being friends,” he insisted, hoping he didn't sound like a kid.

“No, we don't. But you have to accept that things have changed.”

“Okay, things have changed.” More than things. She had changed. He could see it in her eyes in the way she smiled as she turned and walked away, back into the Mad Cow.

A crazy thought, that he had changed, too. He brushed it off and followed her into the diner. He hadn't changed at all. He still wanted the same things he'd always wanted. Some things weren't meant to be domesticated, like raccoons, foxes…and him.

 

When they got home, Andie changed into jeans and a T-shirt and headed for the barn. She was brushing Babe, her old mare, when Etta walked through the double doors at the end of the building.

“What's going on with you?” Etta, arm's crossed, stood with the sun to her back, her face in shadows.

The barn cat wandered in and Etta stepped away from the feline.

“There's nothing wrong.” Andie brushed the horse's rump and the bay mare twitched her dark tail and
stomped a fly away from her leg. “Okay, something is wrong. Caroline is here. I don't know what she wants from me. I don't know why she expects to walk into my life and have me happy to be graced with her presence.”

“She doesn't expect that.”

Andie stopped brushing and turned. “So now you're on her side.”

“Don't sound like a five-year-old. I'm not on her side. I'm on your side. I want you to forgive her. I want you to have her in your life. I have to forgive her, too. She broke my son's heart. She broke your heart.”

Andie shook off the anger. Her heart hadn't been broken, not by Caroline or anyone else.

“I'm fine.” She brushed Babe's neck and the mare leaned toward her, her eyes closing slightly.

“You're not fine. And this isn't about Caroline, it's about you and Ryder. What happened?”

“Nothing. Or at least nothing a little time won't take care of.”

Etta walked closer. “I guess it's too late for the talk that we should have had fifteen years ago,” she said with a sigh.

Andie swallowed and nodded. And the words freed the tears that had been hovering. “Too late.”

“It's okay.” Etta stepped closer, her arm going around Andie's waist.

“No, it isn't. I messed up. I really messed up. This is something I can't take back.”

“So you went to church?”

“Not just because of this. I went because I had to go. As much as I've always claimed I was strong, every time I was at the end of my rope, it was God that I turned to.
I've always prayed. And that Sunday morning, I wanted to be in church.”

“Andie, did you use…”

Andie's face flamed and she shook her head.

“Do you think you might be…”

They were playing fill-in-the-blank. Andie wanted option C, not A. She wanted the answer to be sick with a stomach virus. They didn't want to say the hard words, or face the difficult answers. She wasn't a fifteen-year-old kid. Funny, but until now she had controlled herself. She hadn't made these choices. She hadn't gotten herself into a situation like this.

She was trying to connect it all: her mistake, her relationship with God, and her friendship with Ryder. How could she put it all together and make it okay?

“Maybe it's a virus. Joy's kids had a stomach virus.”

“It could be.” Etta patted her back. “It really could be.”

And then a truck turned into the drive. Ryder's truck. And he was pulling a trailer. Andie closed her eyes and Etta hugged her close.

“You're going to have to tell him.”

“I don't know anything, not yet. I don't know if I can face this. I'm trying so hard to get my act together and I can't pull Ryder into this.”

“Soon.” Etta kissed her cheek.

“When I know for sure.”

Ryder was out of his truck. And he was dressed for roping, in his faded jeans, a black T-shirt and nearly worn-out roper boots.

“You going with me?” He tossed the question before he reached the barn. His grin was big, and he was acting
as if there was nothing wrong between them. Andie wished she could do the same.

“I don't know.”

Etta's brows went up and she shrugged. “I'm going in the house. I have a roast on and it needs potatoes.”

Andie watched her grandmother walk away and then she turned her attention back to Ryder. He scratched his chin and waited. And she didn't know what he wanted to hear.

“Come on, Andie, we've always roped on Sunday evenings.”

It was what they'd done, as best friends. And they hadn't minded separating from time to time. She'd go out with James or one of the other guys. She'd watch, without jealousy, when he helped Vicki Summers into his truck. No jealousy at all.

Because they'd been best friends.

But today nausea rolled in her stomach and she couldn't think about leaving with him, or him leaving with Vicki afterward. And that wasn't the way it was supposed to happen.

“I can't go, not tonight.”

“I don't want to lose you.” He took off his white cowboy hat and held it at his side. “I wish we could go back and…”

“Think a little more clearly? Take time to breathe deep and walk away?” She shook her head. “We can't. We made a choice and now we have the consequences of that choice.”

“Consequences? What consequences? You're the one acting like we can't even talk. It's simple. Just get in the truck and go with me.”

“I can't.” She tossed the brush into a bucket and the clang of wood hitting metal made Babe jump to the side.

Andie whispered to the mare and reached to untie the lead rope from the hook on the wall. “I can't go with you, Ryder. I'm sick. My mom is here. I'm going to go inside and spend time with Etta.”

“Fine.” He walked to the door. “I'm going to be pretty busy in the next few weeks. Wyatt and the girls are going to need me.”

“I know.” She watched him walk away, but it wasn't easy. She'd never wanted to run after a guy the way she wanted to run after him, to tell him they could forget. They could go back to being friends, to being comfortable around each other. But she couldn't go after him and they couldn't go back.

She stood at the gate and watched as he climbed into his truck and slammed the door.

 

Ryder jumped into his truck and shifted hard into first gear. He started to stomp on it, and then remembered his horse in the trailer. Man, it would have felt good to let gravel fly. If only he could be sixteen again, not dealing with losing his best friend to a one-night mistake.

Why couldn't she just get over it and go with him? This was what they did, they went roping together. They hunted together. They got over things together.

As he eased onto the road he let his mind drift back, to the night in Phoenix. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. They'd both been hurting. He'd been upset by Wyatt's situation. She'd been hurting because her twin sister had arrived in town, bringing back the pain of being a kid rejected by her mother.

And then his thoughts made a big U-turn, shifting his memory back to the Mad Cow and Andie's pale face.

He was an idiot. An absolute idiot.

Consequences. He caught himself in time to keep
from slamming on the brakes. He eased to the side of the road and stopped the truck. He sat there for a long minute thinking back, thinking ahead. Thinking this really couldn't be happening to him.

He leaned back in his seat and thought about it, and thought about his next move. A truck drove past and honked. He raised a hand in a half wave.

Glancing over his shoulder he checked the road in both directions and backed the trailer up, this time heading the way he'd come from, to Etta's and to Andie.

As he turned into the driveway, she was coming out of the barn. She stopped in the doorway, light against the dark interior of the barn, her blond hair blowing a little in the wind. She sighed, he could see her shoulders rise and fall and then she walked toward him. And he wondered what she would say.

He parked and got out of the truck, waiting because he didn't know what questions to ask or how to face the consequences of that night. It would have been easier to keep running. But this would have caught up with him eventually. It wasn't as if he could run from it.

When she reached him, they stared at each other. The wind was blowing a little harder and clouds, low and heavy with rain, covered the sun. Shadows drifted across the brown, autumn grass.

“You're back a little quicker than I expected.” She smiled, and for a minute he thought it might have been his imagination, her pale skin, the nausea.

He rubbed his face and tried to think of how a man asked a woman, a friend, this question.

“I came back because I have to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.” She slipped her hands into her front pockets.

His gaze slipped to her belly and he didn't even mean for that to happen. It was flat, perfectly flat. She cleared her throat. He glanced up and her eyebrows shot up.

“I have a question.” Man, he felt like a fifteen-year-old kid. “Are you, um, are you having a baby?”