Betting on the Cowboy

“She did her best,” Bree said loyally. “She wasn’t even related to us, you know. She didn’t have to take me in.”

“I know.” Penny’s laughter faded away. “That was a dumb thing to say. I’m sorry.”

They were silent a moment, remembering, though it was like remembering a nightmare they’d inexplicably all dreamed at exactly the same time. Such horrors couldn’t exist in the real world, surely. Their beautiful mother, lying broken and bleeding at the foot of the staircase. Sweet little Penny, so pitiful and bewildered. Penny, who had turned eleven that day, and was unaware that her birthday dress trailed through the blood as she knelt beside the silent body, begging her mother to wake up.

Their father, hauled off to jail for deliberately pushing his unfaithful wife over the railing. A phantasmagoric trial, in which their pathetic, shameful family secrets were trotted out, naked, for all the world to gawk at.

Johnny Wright...rotting in jail for years, so intractably angry. Rejecting the few overtures the sisters could bring themselves to make. Finally dying there of a brain tumor that may well have caused his irrational behavior from the start.

But worst of all was the ripping apart of the sisters, all of them just children, really, as well-meaning social workers, remote family connections and dutiful family friends stepped up, one by one, to offer them a place to live.

Bree shook the memories away. She couldn’t let herself drown in them, not after all these years.

She smiled at Penny to show she wasn’t angry. They both felt the same grateful loyalty to their respective saviors. Ruth and Kitty weren’t perfect, but they’d voluntarily offered the drowning girls harbors in the storm. Ruth had provided stability and an almost cloistered quiet, which Penny’s personality had needed. And Kitty, the compulsively smiling divorcée, had, in her own weird, Stepford way, shown Bree how to snap herself out of the trance of shock and grief.

“The point is that they’re all saying the same thing,” Bree went on. “It’s as if they’re reading from the same script. They say I am self-righteous, judgmental. I think I know better than everyone else. I’m never willing to trust other people to do things right on their own.”

She tucked her hair behind her ear and looked away, over toward Penny’s soothing painting of birch trunks. “They can’t all be wrong. There must be some truth in it.”

Penny didn’t respond right away. She tapped her pencil against the sketch pad and ran her lower lip through her teeth softly.

“Well, even if there is...even if you do find it difficult to trust other people...is that so strange, given what happened to us? Why shouldn’t you be afraid that people will let you down? Who, in the end, didn’t let us down?”

And that, too, had the ring of truth. For a minute, Bree couldn’t respond. All she had to do was think back, and she could see that the troubles had begun long before the murder. A mother who had always been emotionally absent...a father who couldn’t control his jealous rages. Three little girls who practically raised themselves.

There’d been a whole year—Bree realized now that her mother must have taken a new lover—when a ten-year-old Bree had scavenged in the kitchen almost every night, trying to find something to feed Penny. Rowena, as usual, simply hadn’t eaten.

One night Bree turned dinner into a hunt for pirate treasure, filling the bread box with carrot “coins” and radish “rubies.” She’d felt such triumph, because Penny, only six at the time, had been enchanted. She had never guessed that she feasted on pirate carrots because there wasn’t anything else to eat.

“It did something to all of us,” Penny went on softly. “Think about Rowena. She was always so angry. She wouldn’t get close to anyone for years. At least you try.”

Suddenly, in the midst of her stupid self-absorption, Bree realized that Penny’s face had grown sad, too. If she’d had any artistic talent, she could have sketched a portrait of Penny that was every bit as melancholy as the one of herself she held in her hand right now.

“What about you, sweetpea?” She lowered her voice, just in case Ruth was awake. “What did it do to you?”

Penny smiled vaguely. For a minute, Bree thought her sister might not even answer. But after several seconds, Penny held out a hand and swept it from left to right, as if to encompass the whole town house.

“It made me cautious. Too cautious. It made me hide out here,” she said. “All these years. Here, where the storm can’t touch me.”

Oh.... Her heart stabbed, Bree stretched across the footboard and took her little sister’s hand. She held it tightly, palm to palm, fingers wrapped around the fragile bones and satiny skin.

They really were like two shipwrecked sailors, holding fast to each other for fear the current would sweep them apart and make them struggle alone.

“We’ll be all right, Pea. Somehow, we’ll figure it out. We’ll find a way to put the past behind us, and we’ll be happy again. Who knows? Maybe we’ll even find a way to be...normal.”

She hoped the joke would lighten the mood, but her voice trembled, and it didn’t come out quite as humorously as she’d hoped.

As usual, Penny was the one who knew exactly what to say. She squeezed Bree’s hand, straightened her spine and gave her a mischievous grin.

“Of course we will,” she said, “Look at Rowena! After all those years of being the world’s prickliest female, she married her true love, became a stepmother—”

Bree laughed. “To a little hellion.”

“Maybe, but he worships the ground she walks on. And she’s making her dude-ranch dream come true. Frankly, she’s so darn normal it’s disgusting.”

Bree laughed and let go of her sister’s hand. “How long before she finds a way to screw all that up, do you think?”

“Brianna.” Penny frowned. “That’s not fair.”

Bree shrugged. She loved Rowena, but she didn’t trust her. Ro had pushed everyone away for so long, closing off her heart. It had made her cold and selfish, and it had meant that loving her was dangerous. Marriage seemed to have mellowed her, but Bree was too cynical to believe the change was permanent.

Penny set her sketchbook on the end table and lay her pencil on top of it gently. She stretched, yawned and then rested her head on the arm of the chair, her luminous brown eyes gazing, doelike, at Bree.

“Ro seems absolutely blissful,” Penny insisted softly. “Everything’s going so well. The ranch has its soft opening in about a week.”

“I know.” Ten days, in fact. Bree kept tabs on the progress of the ranch more closely than Penny could imagine. It was their inheritance, too, and she didn’t intend to let Rowena lose everything.

Ro was passionate, sure, but she wasn’t good at the long haul. Every week, Bree half expected to hear that her restless, fiery older sister had grown bored, or fought with Dallas, or come down with her old gypsy fever. “Well, I guess they’ll have the opening...if she doesn’t get claustrophobic and run away again.”

The silence that followed Bree’s acidic comment made her flush uncomfortably. She heard how bitter and unforgiving she sounded. She wanted to take the words back, but that wouldn’t be quite honest.

She had tried to forgive and forget, to believe that change was possible. And yet...she still had a rough, scarred-over spot inside her heart where her trust in Rowena used to be.

“I don’t know,” she said, trying to explain. “It’s just that...” But she couldn’t finish the sentence. She’d said it all before, and she knew Penny didn’t agree.

“Oh, Bree.” Finally, Penny smiled. “You know, if you really think you should try to be less judgmental, Rowena might be a pretty good place to start.”

* * *

OF HIS ALMOST thirty-one years of life, Gray had resided in Silverdell full time only about five—from the age of thirteen, when his parents died, until eighteen, when he went off to college. Before the accident, he lived wherever his dad’s newest doomed venture took them—a horse ranch in Crawford, a pig farm in Butte. After high school, Gray had never come back to Silverdell, not even when he had flunked out of college and his grandfather cut off all funds.

But those five years had been notable for their intense resentment and rebellion. And for the salt-of-the-earth Dellians, they’d apparently been unforgettable. He must have been even more obnoxious than he remembered, because he couldn’t find a soul in town willing to hire him to so much as change a lightbulb.

It was only noon, the Monday after his talk with his grandfather, and he’d already struck out at the hardware store, the brickyard and the ranch over at Windy River. Those businesses were all hiring. They just weren’t hiring Grayson Harper’s black-sheep grandson, who had always been a troublemaker and a wiseass and clearly had condescended to return to Silverdell only so that he could sniff around the old man’s will.

But Gray wasn’t giving up. In fact, the rejection felt like the kind of challenge he loved. There had to be someone in this town who didn’t hold his youth against him. Someone, perhaps, who wasn’t a fan of Grayson Harper and might be sympathetic to the orphan who had found himself under his dictatorial thumb.

Crusty old coots like his grandfather made enemies, and all Gray had to do was find one.

Meanwhile, the April sun was climbing up a cloudless turquoise sky, and Gray was hot, tired and hungry. Lunch and another study of the classifieds sounded perfect. Luckily, Silverdell had just about the best barbecue in Colorado.

He glanced down Elk Avenue, remembering that someone had said Marianne Donovan was back in town and she’d opened a café that was pretty good.

She might be the perfect place to start. Not that Marianne qualified as old Grayson’s enemy—far from it. Her mother had been Gray’s grandmother’s nurse, years ago, and the families were still close.

But Marianne had always had a soft spot for Gray, too, the way gentle good girls sometimes did when they met a certain kind of bad boy.

He began walking the main street, noting all the new storefronts, checking for her place. She’d been an instinctively domestic female, even as a teenager, so her restaurant was probably great. Besides, seeing her again would be a pleasant fringe benefit of this visit. She’d been such a nice kid—he had actually found himself being careful with her, treating her with a respect he rarely offered anyone during those angry years.