Last Chance Cowboy

“Not a word. You know she always sided with him.”

Grey’s voice was deadly quiet. “What did you do?”

“I stuffed some clothes in a backpack and left. I had a week’s pay from my job at that fast-food restaurant. If Daddy thought I had betrayed him, he’d also betrayed me. So did my mom.”

“Where did you go? You must have gotten help somewhere.” He might have asked why she hadn’t gone to him, found a way to get to his college in Texas—he’d already gone back for the fall semester by then. But Grey waited for her reply, and Shadow was thankful. She wanted to get the whole story out before she started trying to explain herself.

“To Doc’s office.”

“Doc?” Grey echoed. “What did he say?”

Shadow didn’t meet his eyes. “‘Well, young lady, what have you got to say for yourself?’” Remembering, she blushed. She’d sat up on Doc’s cold metal table at his clinic in Barren and burst into tears. “I’d hitched a ride into town, then wandered along Main Street, my mind blank yet whirling at the same time—What should I do? Where would I go?—until, finally, I ended up at Doc’s.”

Cyrus Baxter had taken one look at her, swept out from behind the reception desk where he’d been studying a chart, passed his wife, Ida, who was talking on the phone, and ushered Shadow into the exam room, where she’d blurted out her earth-shattering news. In his late fifties then, his dark hair had been sprinkled with gray but his blue eyes were keen. Doc never wore a white coat; he believed his youngest patients found that intimidating.

“You never thought to come to me?” Grey asked now.

“Yes. I thought of finding you, instead, but after we broke up—after Jared—I couldn’t.”

In that moment she’d wished she hadn’t gone to Doc, either, but still caught up in the fallout at home, and always a breath away from crying over losing Jared, she’d completely missed Doc’s gentle tone of voice.

He’d given Shadow her vaccinations as a baby, treated her skinned knees and strep throats during childhood and offered her a birds-and-bees lecture when she entered puberty. Apparently that hadn’t done much good, but he’d cupped her shoulders in both hands as he’d done many times before, and said, “None of that now, Shadow. Tears won’t help.”

“He knew you were the father,” Shadow told Grey now, wincing at his pained expression when she spoke that last word. “His reaction was different than Daddy’s, though. I explained that you’d already left, that even if you hadn’t I could never go to you, not after what you’d done to Jared. But he interrupted me, said, ‘I’ve known Grey since he was drinking milk from a bottle. He’s never been in trouble before.’ He said he did wonder what you were all doing together that night, why there was a gun. It’s true that you and Jared didn’t run in the same circles.”

Shadow could feel the blood drain from her head toward her feet, as it had that other day. “Jared was defending my honor, I told Doc. I explained that he and Derek and Calvin Stern had gone to your ranch to teach you a lesson. And then...and then Doc told me he saw Jared. After. He saw his wounds. But even so, that we shouldn’t jump to conclusions.”

Shadow was barely holding back tears. Though she’d been grateful, earlier, for Grey’s silence, grateful that he was letting her tell the story on her terms, part of her wished he would react. Show some emotion. She wiped her eyes.

“I wanted to believe him,” she continued. “Wanted to believe you could be innocent and that we could be together again, get married and keep...our baby. I asked Doc if he though Derek and Calvin were lying about what happened, and he just told me to keep an open mind. And to talk to you—make a decision together.”

“Why didn’t you?” Grey pressed.

At first she didn’t answer. She’d gone to Doc as a last resort, but she trusted his advice. So why hadn’t she been able or willing to follow it? Shadow remembered hearing Ida, still on the phone in the outer room.

Doc’s wife was the nosiest woman Shadow knew and her mother called Ida the town’s best gossip. Suddenly, Shadow had been overcome with worry that she would walk in at any moment, that if Ida learned the truth, she’d broadcast it for sure, only adding to the scandal of Jared’s death. That was when the enormity of the situation had hit her.

“I don’t know,” she told Grey, finally. “I was so overwhelmed. Doc took me in for the night and said we could discuss the...options in the morning. And then once everything was decided—” He’d told Shadow he would handle Ida.

Before Shadow realized how Grey might interpret that, she watched another emotion cross his face. He snatched the black Stetson from his knee, clamped it on his head then stood abruptly. “What did you do, Shadow?” He didn’t wait for her answer.

“Grey—”

“No,” he said, his hand already on the doorknob. He looked confused, conflicted. Overwhelmed. He had every right to be. “I need to think about this.” He walked out, slamming the door behind him.

Shadow sank back in her chair, filled with regret. For ten years, only three other people had known about Ava—four, if she counted her deceased father. Her mother, her sister Jenna and Doc. Now Grey also knew her secret.

And she hadn’t just shocked him. She’d hurt him more deeply than she’d ever imagined.

* * *

BACK AT WILSON CATTLE, Grey shook his head. Cody had failed to properly mend the broken fence yesterday—call him Mr. Reliable—and Grey propped both hands on his hips to study the gap that was still there, the few strands of barbed wire hanging where Cody had hastily twisted them together as a temporary fix. Lazy, he thought, and it hadn’t worked. Grey had spent half the afternoon rounding up strays. Standing beside Logan Hunter, his friend and neighbor, he studied both sides of the property line.

“This fence was deliberately cut,” Grey said, but he was having a hard time keeping his mind on that fact or even that Cody had let him down. He kept hearing Shadow’s words. He’d had a kid, a child he’d never known about until now. He couldn’t quite wrap his head around that. Couldn’t believe she’d gone to Doc instead of him. Whatever decision she’d made, their baby was his business, not Doc’s.

Logan ran a hand over the nape of his neck. “Deliberate, all right. Same as mine was. Not the usual teardown by some cow determined to get free.”

“You missing any cattle? I mean, bison?”

Years ago Logan’s grandfather Sam had switched from raising beef, although Grey still wondered why. The bison could be mean critters, more aggressive than the Angus breeding bulls Grey ran, any day. If he needed proof, all he had to do was look at Logan’s grandfather, who’d been tossed weeks ago by one of his bison and badly broken his leg. His cast was off but he still had a limp.

“I’ll have to ask Willy or Tobias,” Logan said, referring to two of his cowboys. His already deep-blue eyes had darkened. “I’ve been too busy with the wedding plans to count bison cows or ride fence. Darned if I don’t miss that.”

Grey wanted to smile but couldn’t. The constant chore was nobody’s favorite, and to help his injured grandfather, Logan, who was by profession a test pilot, had become a temporary cowboy again—until he and Blossom fell in love and the ranch gained new appeal for him. Which only made Grey think of Shadow. “You don’t look unhappy. The break from flying jets must agree with you.”

“Yeah, but I’ll have to make some real decisions soon. I’ve got applications in with other aircraft manufacturers in Wichita, but there’s not a lot of demand right now.”

With his gloved hands, Grey retwisted some wires together, enough to keep his cows in until he could fix the fence himself.

“You’d quit?” he asked. “I thought you were just taking a short leave.”

“We’ll see. The ranch will always be home to Blossom and me, at least in part, depending on what I decide to do about flying for a living. Sam still needs help here.”

Grey glanced at him. He and Logan had grown up together, although Logan was two years older and Grey had always seen him as an older brother—the way he looked after Cody now. “It’d be great if you could stay, Logan.” He shook his head again. “I know I’ll never leave this place.” Not willingly, anyway. His stomach twisted at the thought of the loan Barney had denied him.

Logan frowned. “Why would you leave? Running Wilson Cattle is all you ever wanted to do, Grey. This ranch has been in your family even longer than the Circle H has been in mine.”

His gut tightened. Grey’s great-great-something-grandfather had bought this acreage right after the Civil War when land was cheap. As Logan knew, too, the old man was buried in the family plot just over the hill with the generations that had come after him. Grey had always wanted children who would inherit Wilson Cattle from him, but now... He had to steady his voice before he spoke.

“Yep. Wilson Cattle is in my blood, in my bones.”

Logan clapped a hand on his shoulder. “Talk about old times. Remember when you and I—and my brother—scared ourselves crazy every Halloween in the graveyard? And rode all over both ranches, yelling like banshees, playing we were grown-up cowboys like your dad and Sam? Spooking the cattle? Pretending we were on some everlasting roundup?”

“Until we had to surrender our horses. Grounded,” Grey said. “We gave my dad and your grandfather more gray hairs...” Clearing his throat, he squinted into the far distance, listening for the reassuring sounds from the Black Angus herd that would tell him everything was fine. He knew each shuffle of hooves, each calf’s bleat or cow’s bellow, though unlike Sam Hunter he didn’t name the animals.

“Yeah,” Logan said, “but I regret that I spent more time off the Circle H than on for too many years. Now, because of Blossom, that’s finally changed. At least for now.”

Grey envied them. Shadow’s earlier words spun through his brain again like a McCormick reaper in a ripe hayfield. Years ago, he’d thought they were headed for the altar, like Logan and Blossom were now—until their last fight. Then Jared had died and Grey got blamed for it, at least in the court of public opinion. And sometimes within himself. All of which had prevented any reconciliation between him and Shadow. Logan had obviously picked up on his mood. Which of Doc’s options had she taken? He hadn’t let Shadow tell him what they were, or what she’d done.

“What’s wrong, Grey? Except for this barbed wire.”

“Plenty,” he admitted, “but I’ll get through it.”

Logan dragged a hand through his dark hair. “Whatever you say stops here.”

“I know, but...”

“If there’s anything I can do—”