Her Cowboy Soldier

With school districts cutting budgets all over the country, plenty of coaches and teachers with more experience than Josh were looking for work. He wasn’t naive enough to believe his position as a wounded veteran and the son of a local rancher hadn’t influenced the school board’s decision to choose him over half a dozen other candidates for the job. The knowledge didn’t sit easy with him. He’d always wanted to be judged on his accomplishments, not his circumstances or his name.

“Coach, do you have a minute to answer a few questions?”

The feminine voice made both men turn around. Josh found himself staring into the warm brown eyes of Amy Marshall. He felt again the little jolt that had hit him when he’d looked into those eyes yesterday at her grandmother’s produce stand. “Hello again,” he said.

“Where’s Cody?” Zach asked. “Not that you aren’t an improvement.” He grinned.

She ignored the compliment. “Cody’s out sick. I’m covering the game for the Herald.” She extended a mini recorder toward him. “What’s the significance of tonight’s win?”

Zach clapped Josh on the shoulder. “I’ll just leave you two alone.” He slung the strap of one of the equipment duffels over his shoulder and shambled away.

Josh focused his attention on Amy once more, and shifted into interview mode. “Some people might say this win is meaningless, since we’re already eliminated from the finals,” he said. “But I don’t look at it that way at all. The team has overcome a lot this season, and the players have worked together to improve. Every win builds their confidence and skills—things they’ll take forward with them into next season, and into life.”

“Had you ever coached baseball before you were hired to coach the Wildcats?” she asked.

The question surprised Josh, but he didn’t let it rattle him. “I hadn’t had that opportunity. But I played for many years.”

“Since you don’t have any experience coaching, to what do you attribute your success?”

He shifted from one foot to the other. What did these questions have to do with tonight’s game? The focus should be on the players, not him. “I’m working with a great group of kids,” he said. “I try to teach them what I know, but they’ve done the rest with their hard work.”

“Would you say luck had anything to do with your winning record?”

“Luck always plays a part in this game, but I give the credit to the team’s hard work.”

She punched the button to switch off the recorder. “Thanks. If I have any more questions, I’ll give you a call.”

“Don’t you want to ask anything about tonight’s game?”

“I got a copy of the official scorecard from Dirk Fischer and a nice quote from Chase Wilson, so I think I’m good. But I’ll let you know.” She turned to leave. By this time the area around the field was all but deserted, the stands and most of the parking lot emptied.

Josh followed her up the steps out of the dugout. “Let me walk you to your car,” he said.

“You don’t need to do that.”

“No, but it goes against my grain to let a woman walk off into a dark, deserted parking lot alone, so humor me.”

She looked out across the parking lot, which was indeed dark, and empty save for a few cars. “All right. Thank you.”

He followed her across the gravel-and-dirt lot to a dusty blue Subaru. She paused beside the door, keys in hand. “Thanks for seeing me to my car,” she said. “I forget sometimes how dark it can be out here, away from the city lights.”

“We see more stars here, though.” He looked up at a sky filled with sparks of light, as if some kid had spilled a whole bottle of glitter.

She tilted her head back to join him in admiring the sky. “Beautiful.”

“The stars are like this in Iraq, too, at least with the blackouts for the war.” Why had he brought up the war, a subject she probably didn’t want to discuss, considering she’d lost her husband over there? But she regarded him calmly, as if waiting for him to continue. “When I had guard duty I’d stand at my checkpoint and stare up at the sky and imagine I was back here at home,” he explained.

She tilted her head up toward the sky again. “Afghanistan has stars like this, too.”

“Your husband was in Afghanistan?”

“I was in Afghanistan, before the war. Well, he was, too. We were in the Peace Corps there. That’s how we met. When the war broke out, he wanted to help. He thought with his familiarity with the country and the language, they could use him in Afghanistan, but the army had other ideas.”

“Where did you live before you came back here?”

“Chloe and I were in Denver. Then my grandmother fell and broke her hip and I knew she needed help with the orchard. And I needed a place to pull myself together and decide what to do next.”

“This is a good place for that kind of thinking.” He’d spent plenty of hours in his cabin on his parents’ ranch trying to answer that same question.

“Is that why you’re here?” she asked. “To decide what to do next?”

He told himself it was a logical question. But he couldn’t help feeling her quiet gaze assessed him more accurately than he was used to. Amy Marshall had an air of perceptiveness that was both intriguing and unsettling. “I’m here because this is home,” he said. “The whole time I was away, all I could think of was getting back.”

Her expression grew pensive. “I lived all over the place growing up, so I never really had that kind of attachment to one spot.”

“I didn’t think I did, until I went away. After this—” he held up the hook “—I decided Hartland was where I belonged.”

She tilted her head. “Can I ask a question?”

“Anything.” He could always refuse to answer, though he doubted this woman could ask anything he wouldn’t be happy to tell her. He believed in being up front with people. Losing his hand—and almost losing his life—had erased any patience he might have once had for dissembling.

“Why a hook? Don’t they make pretty realistic-looking prosthetic hands?”

“They make hands that look good, but a hook is more practical.” He opened and closed the pincer ends. He’d become adept at manipulating most items with this simple tool. “And a hook is a little more in your face.” His method of confronting his loss had been to embrace it head-on. He’d told himself denial was for cowards. “This is who I am now and I wanted it out there for everyone to see. If they don’t like it, that’s their problem.”

“Do people have a problem with it?”

“A few.” He thought of Rick, who’d told one of the city council members—who’d passed the news on to Josh—that it made the school look bad to have a “gimp” for a coach.

Time to change the subject, though. Shift the focus away from him. “Do you like writing for the paper?” he asked.

She looked pleased. “I like to write, and this gives me a chance to get a few credits to my name, and some experience. Though the subject matter isn’t always that exciting.”

“I don’t know about that. I’ve seen some of your articles. You did a good job of making a city council discussion of sewer repairs interesting.”

She laughed, a light, musical sound that transformed her expression into one of startling beauty. Her eyes held a new light and the muscles of her face relaxed and softened. A soft blush suffused her cheeks and her lips curved invitingly.

He realized he’d been staring when she looked away. “I really have to go,” she said. “Thanks for your help.”

“Anytime.” He wanted to say more—that talking with her had been the best conversation he’d had since coming home. That he liked the way her eyes crinkled at the corners when she laughed.

But the words stuck in his throat. So he let her get into her car and drive away without saying any of these things. When she was gone, he looked up at the stars again. Those stars had saved him from losing it some nights on duty—the nights after he’d lost friends or seen children die, and the nights after days of endless tension and boredom. He’d imagined himself back here, in this little corner of Colorado he’d once wanted so badly to leave.

War was a sure cure for wanderlust, he’d decided. If he never left Hartland again, that would be fine with him. For better or worse, he was home now.

* * *

AMY GRIPPED THE steering wheel and tried to get as tight a hold on her emotions. What had just happened? One moment she’d been standing, chatting with Josh as if they were old friends and then wham, she’d been aware of the two of them, alone in the darkness. The moment felt too intimate, as if at any second he might pull her close and kiss her.