Roping the Rancher

When he’d been shipped to Afghanistan, his younger brother came to Colorado to stay with Jess. Reed, a bachelor, made more than a few mistakes, and Jess ran away. What could have happened to her, now that gave Colt real nightmares. Pimps. Drug dealers. General crazies waiting to prey on a naive fourteen-year-old. He thanked God every day that Reed and Avery, now Reed’s wife, found Jess at the Denver airport before she got into any serious trouble.

Jess’s running away had been a hard kick to the head for Colt. This time he got the message. She was the most important thing in his life and it was high time he proved it. So he asked for a hardship discharge, left the National Guard Reserves and returned to Estes Park.

Looking at her now standing in his office, he realized every day she looked more like her mother. Same petite frame, long chestnut hair and warm coffee-colored eyes as her mother. Jess was the constant reminder of how young and in love he’d once been. Sometimes he looked at her and tried to find bits of himself. Today he didn’t have any trouble finding a similarity. Her chin pointed at him in stubborn defiance she inherited from him. He braced himself for whatever hand grenade she was about to throw his way.

“Cody Simmons asked me out to a movie on Saturday. Can I go?”

He closed his eyes for a second to regroup. Times like these he missed having her mother around to tell him whether or not he was being too much of a hard-ass. “As in out for a date, asked you out?”

“The word date was never mentioned.”

“I’m not falling for that one again.” She’d burned him with technicalities more than once before he learned to choose his words very carefully and scrutinize every one of hers for land mines. “Would you be going with a group of friends?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Then it’s a date, and the answer is no.”

Cody was a good kid. He was an honor student, worked part-time at the Cinemaplex and was a pretty good bronc rider in the junior rodeo circuit, but none of that mattered to Colt. Just thinking about Jess dating shoved his panic into overdrive, especially since he knew what seventeen-year-old boys were like. Basically a bundle of hormones fantasizing about sex every thirty seconds. He hadn’t been much older than Cody when he and Lynn started having sex. By graduation she’d been pregnant and they were planning a quickie wedding.

No way did he want history repeating itself with his daughter.

“Your ‘no dating until I’m sixteen’ rule is so old-fashioned.”

“Then you better go get your bonnet, missy.”

Three more months were all he had before he started greeting boys at the door with a shotgun and giving them his own version of the Spanish Inquisition before he let them out the door with his daughter. He now understood why man invented the chastity belt.

“All my friends have been dating since they were fifteen. What difference will a few months make?”

“What difference will it make to wait?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, shifted her weight onto one foot and glared at him. Such determination and strength, and yet so much hurt behind those beautiful brown eyes. How could a mother walk out on such a wonderful child?

Leaving him, he got. He and Lynn had troubles from the moment the ink dried on their marriage license. She wanted so much that he couldn’t give her. Bright lights, the big city, adventure. Being a military wife and later a rancher’s wife weren’t what she had in mind.

If only he’d known that earlier, but they’d been high-school sweethearts who swore the love they felt would last forever. They were too young and foolish to know what they didn’t know. He wondered now if their relationship would’ve run its course sooner if Lynn hadn’t gotten pregnant.

But then he wouldn’t have Jess, and he wouldn’t trade being her father for anything. She was the only good thing that came out of his marriage.

“You don’t understand what it’s like being the only one who can’t date. I’ll become a social outcast.”

He bit his lip to keep from laughing at her woeful my-life-is-over look and drama queen voice. To a teenage girl everything turned into a Greek tragedy. Life with her was like walking a tightrope. One misstep, either with being too strict or too permissive, could lead to a big fall.

“In a couple of days everyone will forget that your hard-ass dad won’t let you date.”

“If I say no, Cody will probably ask another girl to go with him.”

Good. All the better.

Instead, Colt said, “If he really likes you, he’ll wait until you turn sixteen.”

“Guys have needs—”

“What the hell do you know about that?”

His blood pressure approaching stroke levels, he prayed his daughter wasn’t talking about the kind of needs he knew about all too well. His ate him up so bad sometimes he couldn’t sleep at night. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten laid. Sure he’d taken the edge off, but that wasn’t the same as being with a woman. Sometimes holding one, losing himself in her warm curves and pretending they cared about each other was the only thing that would ease the ache.

For about five minutes when he’d first returned from Afghanistan, he considered dating. Then he remembered what it was like living in the small town he grew up in where gossiping was a town sport. The last thing he wanted was people talking about his love life and his teenage daughter hearing the stories.

On top of that, a casual relationship, in a lot of ways, sounded worse to him than no relationship at all, but he refused to have any other kind. One disastrous marriage was enough.

“Guys have fragile egos,” Jess said, easing his panic somewhat. “Getting turned down for a date is hard on their self-esteem. He’ll find someone who can go out with him.”

“She’s not my concern.”

“I know. I am.”

“That’s right.”

“Just because you don’t have a life, doesn’t mean I can’t have one.”

Ouch. He’d died and gone to hell, and this conversation was his punishment. “I’ve got a life.”

But her words got him thinking. What did he have other than Jess? A brother and sister-in-law. The ranch he grew up on. His therapy program, Healing Horses. Was that enough? It had to be right now. He couldn’t handle anything else. Definitely not dating and the emotional pitfalls that went along with trying to maintain a romantic relationship. Life with a teenager was exhausting enough.

“A monk has a more exciting life than you do,” his daughter said. “You’ve got work. That’s not the same. What’re you going to do when I go to college in two years? I don’t want you to end up being one of those weird old men who lives alone and talks to himself all day long.”

Apparently he hadn’t been the only one wondering what his life would be like when Jess went off to college. Part of him dreaded her leaving, while a piece of him looked forward to the freedom he’d have. For as long as he could remember responsibilities ruled his life. From the time he and Reed were strong enough to lift a saddle his father had worked his sons harder than any ranch hand. As the big brother, he’d watched out for Reed. Colt had stepped in to defuse things once their mother, the family peacemaker and punching bag, died. Then at eighteen he’d found himself in the military responsible for a wife with a baby on the way.

An empty nest and the chance to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life sounded pretty good right now.

“Your life shouldn’t stop because you’ve got me to raise.”

“It hasn’t.” He picked up the top bill and scanned the paper, hoping his daughter would take the hint that he was done discussing her dating and his.

“Why don’t you trust me?” Jess accused. “I thought you’d forgiven me for running away.”

Jess’s quiet words and the clear pain in her expressive brown eyes hit Colt hard like a kick from an angry mule. He replaced the bill on the stack. “I have. I know if you’re ever that upset again, you’ll come to me, and we’ll work things out. I don’t want you to ever be afraid to tell me anything.”

Unlike how he and Reed had been with their father, who they tried every trick to avoid. The old man was as likely to greet a simple good morning from his sons with a slap upside the head as a smile, and there was never a way to predict which they’d get or change the outcome. “I trust you. It’s the boys that scare the hell out of me.”

“We’d just being going to a movie.”

He’d told himself he wouldn’t be the hard liner his father had been. He wouldn’t drive his daughter away. The last thing he wanted her thinking was that he didn’t trust her. He sighed. Time to cowboy up and prove the fact. “I’ll compromise. Make it a double date, and you can go.”

His daughter charged around his desk, flung her arms around him and squeezed him tight. “I won’t let you down,” she whispered in his ear and kissed him on the cheek. Then with one last grin, she headed for the door as Nannette McAlister, his assistant at Healing Horses, strolled in. “You’ll never guess what happened. Dad said I could go out on a double date this Friday.”

“You finally wore him down, huh?” Nannette was the kind of mother every child should have. She loved and encouraged her three children, and their friends were always welcome in the McAlister home. All she wanted was for them to be happy. His brother had found that out firsthand.