A Cowboy's Heart

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Questions for Discussion

Chapter One

Country music crackled from aging PA speakers that hung from the announcer’s stand next to the rodeo arena, and dozens of conversations buzzed around Willow Michaels. It was hard to discern one sound from another, and harder still to know if the queasy nervousness in her stomach was due to her bulls about to compete, or the way sounds faded in and out.

A hand touched her arm. She smiled at her aunt Janie, who had insisted on attending with her, because it was a short drive from home, and well, because Aunt Janie went nearly everywhere that Willow went.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Janie asked.

“Of course I did.”

“No, you didn’t. I’ve asked you the same thing three times.”

“I’m sorry, I’m just distracted.” Willow slid her finger up the back of her ear. The hearing aid was at its maximum. And Janie was waiting for an answer that Willow didn’t have.

“I said, I have a friend I want you to meet.” Janie searched Willow’s face, her growing concern evident in her eyes.

“Don’t, Janie, please don’t give me that look. It’s the batteries, nothing more.”

“Make an appointment with your doctor.”

“Who’s the friend?” Willow went back to the previous conversation. At that moment, even if it meant meeting a man, Willow wanted to avoid discussing the fact that she hadn’t heard her aunt. Discussing it would only make her deteriorating hearing more real.

“My old neighbor, Clint Cameron, is here.”

“Clint?” Not a stranger, but a forgotten crush. Willow remembered now, and she didn’t want to remember.

She was too old for high-school crushes, and she had experienced too much heartache to go back to being that girl who dreamed of forever.

Her marriage to Brad Michaels had been a hard lesson in reality. Willow was still forgiving him and still letting go of her own forever-dreams that had ended five years ago, with divorce.

She was still forgetting, and still healing.

She was still finding faith, a faith that had been a whisper of something intangible for most of her life. Now it was real and sustaining. Somewhere along the road she had realized that she wasn’t flawed, and she didn’t have to be perfect.

Janie touched her arm again. “Are you with me?”

“I’m with you.”

“It won’t hurt, Willow.”

“You think?”

Janie laughed, “It won’t hurt, I promise.”

“Of course it won’t. I’m just amazed that I unloaded the bulls, fed them, and you found a friend.”

“The Lord works…”

“In mysterious ways.” Willow wanted to sigh. Instead she smiled for her aunt. “Okay, let me make sure my bulls have water, and I’ll come find you.”

“Good.” Janie smiled a little too big. “He’s parked on the other side of the pens.”

Willow waited until Janie walked away and then started toward the pens that held her bulls. If she had any sense at all, she would hide and avoid meeting Clint Cameron for a second time. The first meeting had been a pretty big disaster.

The bulls milled around their pen, big animals with flies swarming their thick hides. They stomped in an effort to rid themselves of the flying pests, big hooves sloshing in the mud left behind after last night’s rain.

Willow leaned against the metal gate, needing that moment to pull it together, to let go of fear. The water trough was full—taking her last option for avoiding Janie and her friend.

She had accomplished a lot in the last few years. She’d made it in a man’s world, raising some of the best bucking bulls in the country and supplying stock for some of the biggest bull-riding events in the world.

She had survived Brad’s rejection. His rejection had hurt worse than the ones that came before him. She’d really thought that he meant their marriage vows.

He hadn’t. He hadn’t meant it when he repeated “in sickness and in health,” or “till death do us part.” He hadn’t meant it when he said she was the only woman for him.

Willow watched her bulls for a few more minutes, and then she turned to go in search of her aunt and Clint Cameron.

She remembered the first time she’d met him, a cowboy in faded jeans, torn at the knees. She remembered a smile that had put her teenage dreams of forever into overdrive. She’d spent the next year wrapped in daydreams of a guy that she’d been afraid to talk to.

In search of Janie, she made her way through the crowd, greeting a few people who called out or waved. Bulls were being run through the gates of the nearest pens to the chutes where the riders would climb on for the ride of their lives. A few men were getting bull ropes ready for their rides.

She finally spotted her aunt. Janie stood at the edge of the crowd. Next to her was a man Willow didn’t recognize. He looked nothing like the blurred memory of a gangly teen with faded jeans and a stained T-shirt. This man wore a bent-up cowboy hat with the faded imprint of a hoof. The strong angles of his jaw proved he was no longer a kid.

His Kevlar vest, worn to protect his torso from the horns—or hooves—of an angry bull, was open, exposing a pale-blue paisley shirt. Tan leather chaps covered his jean-clad legs, brushing the tops of his boots. As Willow approached, he bent to catch something her aunt was saying.

Janie waved, motioning her forward. Willow waved back, reminding herself that she was stronger now than she’d ever been. But feeling strong when faced with a childhood dream wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. Especially when the dream was now a flesh-and-blood man with a wide smile and his arm wrapped protectively around her aunt.

Willow reached down deep and found strength, reminding herself that her new dream wasn’t about happy-ever-after with a man. Her goals were now being achieved with a truck-load of bulls and success in the sport of bull riding.

But she wondered if he remembered her. Did he remember how she had said hello some sixteen years earlier, and then disappeared into Janie’s house to watch from the window? He had spotted her there, waving when no one was watching. Even now the memory brought a flush of heat to her cheeks.