Cowboys Do It Best

It took Chase less than a mile to decide that the road just didn’t look the same when you were hoofing it in cowboy boots with a burn knee.

Things could be worse, he told himself as he paused to stand, hip shot and thumb out, on the side of the highway as a big semi rumbled toward him. He could’ve broken down along one of those hundred-miles-of-nothing stretches back in Wyoming with freezing temperatures and snow for company. Around here, though, it wouldn’t be long before someone...

The semi thundered past in a rush of hot wind. Chase sighed, tugged down his hat and started walking again.

Not much traffic along this highway at one-fifteen in the afternoon.

Five minutes later, when the woman in the battered blue pickup slowed and pulled over, Chase knew his luck had finally taken a turn for the better. The woman who leaned out the window had thick arms, left bare in spite of the chilly air, with a rose tattoo on the left forearm.

She was the best thing Chase had seen all day.

As soon as the truck stopped, Chase started toward it at something like a trot in spite of his knee. A grin broke out across his face. “Hey, Rosie!” he yelled. “Have you finally decided to get rid of your old man and give me a try?”

The truck door opened, and a big woman leaned out. Her long ponytail was as red as Lady Clairol could make it, and the smile on her face puffed her cheeks out into twin moons. Her voice was as clear and pure as a church bell. “Chase McGuire, you idiot, what are you doing in Texas? Haven’t we passed a law against you or something? Come on, get in the truck, you fool.”

“That’s my Rosie,” Chase said, grinning like the fool she’d called him. He slung his tote in the back and climbed into the truck driven by the wife of an old rodeo buddy. “I can’t believe it. What are you doing around here? I thought you and Will had settled up in Oklahoma after he retired.”

“His ma isn’t doing so well. We packed up Joe—he’s the only one of the kids still at home—and came down to live with her last fall,” Rosie said, putting the gearshift through its paces with all the ease of a professional truck driver—which she had been, years ago. “She runs a couple hundred head just north of here and lives in Bita Creek. That’s Bita Creek you see dead ahead,” she added.

They were headed downhill at a steady seventy miles an hour toward a scattering of houses and buildings and trees—one of those freckle-sized towns Chase had counted on being nearby. He sorted through his recollections of Will Stafford, a man who’d been one of the best rodeo clowns in the business until stiffening joints and slowed reflexes made him retire. “I thought Will didn’t get along with his mom.”

“He don’t. And the old bat still hates my guts, too,” Rosie said cheerfully, slowing as they encountered the bar and gas station that signaled the outskirts of Bita Creek. “But what are you gonna do? She’s family.”

Chase nodded. He knew what she meant. If your family needed help, you helped. That’s all there was to it. Chase, of course, didn’t really need help. He was in a temporary bind, that was all. He could straighten this out just fine on his own, without calling Mike. Chase knew exactly how his big brother would react if he knew about Chase’s money problems.

No, Chase definitely wasn’t going to call on his family for help right now.

“You could’a knocked me down with a feather when I saw you strolling along the side of the road. What’s up? That your truck I saw broke down a couple miles back?”

Chase gave her a quick rundown of his recent past. He was good at making a story out of the banana peels life slipped under his feet, and Rosie laughed until she was wiping tears from her eyes. “Lordy,” she said, “you are one unlucky bastard, aren’t you? But don’t worry. Will knows lots of folks hereabouts, and anyone he don’t know, his ma does. He’ll find you some sort of job.” She reached over and patted his knee reassuringly.

Chase managed not to wince. Not that Rosie was the least bit rough. In spite of her manner and her build, she had gentle, almost dainty hands, as any number of wounded animals and banged-up kids over the years could testify. But even a normal pat hurt his knee right now, sore and swollen as it was from all his walking. That wasn’t Rosie’s fault. Somehow in telling Rosie about himself, Chase had neglected to mention the horse that had halfway crippled him last year.

“You know me, Rosie,” he said, with something close to his usual grin. “I never worry.”

Summer Callaway stood in the slanting light of the early morning sun in her bedroom. Twenty hours ago, the Bates’s sorrel gelding had tossed her on her left shoulder in the training pen, busting her collarbone and her budget, and plumb ruining her temper.

Summer considered herself a patient woman. She wasn’t a whiner, either. She just didn’t deal well with frustration.

Getting dressed wasn’t easy with a cracked collarbone and a dislocated shoulder, but so far she’d managed to pull on her panties, jeans and socks. It had hurt, but so did walking. Or sitting. Or breathing. She could live with that. Her hair—well, she’d gotten Maud to wash it for her last night after the pain pills kicked in, so at least it was clean. But she couldn’t pin it up or braid it or do anything to get it out of her way. It hung halfway down her back, some of the strands catching on the blasted clavicle brace Dr. O’Connor had strapped her into at the emergency room yesterday. That brace was supposed to keep her stable so she didn’t jostle her collarbone, but as far as she could tell, all it was good for was making it hell to take a shower. But she was mostly clean now and nearly dressed, and she figured Ricky could help her get her boots on before he went to school.

That left her with one little problem. Her bra.

Who’d have thought a woman who regularly mastered fifteen hundred pounds of some of the orneriest creatures God put on this earth would be defeated by a brassiere?

There was just no damned way to fasten the thing one-handed. She’d thought she could fasten it in front, then turn it around and ease her arms through the straps—but whichever end she wasn’t holding fell down.

She chewed on her lip, then stepped over to the worn, maple dresser that had been her mother’s once upon a time. By bending her knees to lower herself a bit, she managed to pin the bra between the dresser and her waist. But she couldn’t make the hooks come together by wishing, and one hand just wasn’t going to get the job done. “Damn!”

“That’s another quarter, Mom!” called her son’s voice.

“Right,” she muttered, standing straight and letting the stupid bra fall to the floor. Summer never went braless. Not only was it impractical for a 36-C woman who rode horses to forgo support, she didn’t... well, she just didn’t.

Today, though, it looked like she would.

“That’s seventy-five cents you owe the penalty box so far this morning,” Ricky said from the bathroom. She heard the water come on. The rest of her son’s words were distorted by the toothbrush he tried to talk around. “And a buck seventy-five from yesterday.”

“Yesterday didn’t count,” Summer said automatically. She began the laborious process of getting her left arm into the sleeve of a flannel shirt, holding her wrist in her good hand and guiding it through the armhole. “Maud agreed. Those pain pills had me temporarily incapacitated.” Ow, ow, ow and damn. Summer managed to keep the curse silent this time.

She heard Ricky enthusiastically spitting out the toothpaste. Spitting was the one part of toothbrushing he liked. “Yeah, but you said fifty cents’ worth before Aunt Maud got you to take the pain stuff.”

Strictly speaking, she’d said a good deal more than that, but Ricky hadn’t been around to hear it. She’d injured herself while he was at school. His “Aunt Maud”—a friend and neighbor, actually, rather than a blood relation—had driven Summer to the emergency room and waited with her. Maud had called the parents of the students Summer was supposed to teach riding to that day, too. She felt mortified just thinking about it. A riding teacher didn’t build confidence in the students or their parents by falling off her horse.

Maud had insisted on hanging around after bringing Summer home, fixing supper and nagging until bedtime. Summer hadn’t protested very hard. Not only had she been hurting like hellfire, there wasn’t much point. People mostly did do what Maud Hoppy told them to do. Even Summer.

Buttoning the shirt one-handed wasn’t so bad. It only took her twice as long as usual.

“I tell you what, champ,” Summer said when she heard the water in the bathroom cut off. She blinked rapidly to make her eyes stop watering and reached for the pale blue sling they’d given her yesterday. “I’ll pay up for yesterday if you can tell me what I owe, counting today. That’s fifty cents plus seventy-five cents.”

Silence. Math wasn’t one of her seven-year-old son’s strong points. Ricky took an avid interest in money, though, which was one of the reasons for the penalty box they both contributed to for minor infractions. Summer was confident she’d end up paying that box for her bad language yesterday and today. There was a new superhero movie showing in town, and the penalty box didn’t have quite enough in it yet to cover their tickets.

Settling her arm in the sling helped. She took a deep breath before opening the door, feeling more unsteady than she wanted to admit. She’d already taken ibuprofin, and she was determined not to fuzz up her head with a pain pill during the day. She’d get by. She was good at that, wasn’t she?

All the rooms in her little two-bedroom house were practically on top of each other, so she saw right away that the bathroom was empty. It was surprisingly tidy, though. Ricky’s pajamas weren’t in their usual morning spot on the floor. She glanced down the hall.

The bedroom at the end of the hall was Ricky’s. She saw right away that he had drawn his bedspread up over his pillow in his best effort at bed making. Action heroes climbed, crawled, leaped and mutated all over the twin bed.

That’s love, she thought, a lump in her throat. That’s real love. He’d already helped out by getting up early and going over to the kennel with her to feed their canine boarders. But bed making was about the most useless activity Ricky could imagine, something mothers insisted on for mysterious feminine reasons no seven-year-old boy could hope to understand. He’d made his up bed simply because it was important to her.

How had she ever gotten so lucky? Lord knew Ricky hadn’t drawn the best parent material. She did her best, but she didn’t know much about being a mother, having been raised without one herself. She’d been winging it since the day he was born. As for his father... whatever Jimmie’s sins had been, Summer reminded herself as she started down the short hall towards the kitchen, he’d paid for them. Paid dearly.

“You hungry this morning, champ?” she asked dryly as she entered the kitchen. Ricky was already at the table piling cereal into his mouth with that dribbly, rapid-action motion of his, greedy as any baby bird. The part in his dark hair was crooked, but he’d remembered to put on clean jeans as well as a clean shirt. The crumbs scattered around the cereal bowl told her he’d had one or more of the leftover muffins and hadn’t bothered with a plate. As usual.

She skipped the plate lecture and went to the cupboard for a coffee mug. When she reached up, though, even with her good arm, the motion pulled on the muscles attached to her collarbone.

Damn damn damn damn...

“Mom? You okay?”

“Sure,” she managed to say, and got the mug. “Did you feed Amos?” Since the huge orange tabby was sitting in her chair, daring her smugly to move him, she figured Ricky had already taken care of the cat. She just wanted to get his attention away from her for a minute, until she got her breath back.

How was she going to get through half the things that had to be done that day? Some of it she flat couldn’t do, like cleaning the kennels. She’d have to hire someone. Only there was no way she could afford it. The electric bill was due. Her quarterly tax payment was coming up. Then there were the property taxes, which had doubled this year. They were past due.

About the only thing paid up-to-date was the note she’d been forced to take out on the land when she inherited a rundown stable operation and a pile of medical bills after her father died. Summer paid that bill religiously. Maybe her priorities had been screwed up when she was eighteen, but not anymore. Nothing could be allowed to endanger her land.

“One twenty-five,” Ricky announced suddenly. “You owe the box a buck twenty-five, Mom.”

“I guess you got me.” She ruffled his hair with her good hand, making him duck and grimace, as she brought her coffee over to the table.