The Rancher Needs A Wife

A silence fell between them, the pale wisps of their breath mingling and dissipating in the moonlit air. He straightened away from the truck, and his dark eyes gleamed down at her. “What exactly is it you want from me, Maggie?”

“I want your promise to consider my proposal with an open mind.”

“I’ll consider that proposal of yours, if you’ll consider the possibility that my mind was open to it in the first place.”

She squelched the urge to argue his last point, deciding it would be better to let it go and close the deal. “All right,” she said, extending her right hand. “I will.”

He pulled his hands from his pockets and slid one of them against her palm. It was wide and warm and rough with calluses.

His long fingers slowly closed around hers. “That’s something, anyway,” he said. “Guess I’ll find out whether or not it’s something I can work with.”

“TEAM CAPTAIN and two-time All-Countyquarterback, Wayne Hammond!”

The dull roar of the homecoming crowd inthe stands drowned out the electronic echoof the voice blaring from the speakers, andhe throttled back the fear so his feet couldmove. He aimed for the straggly group of hissenior class teammates arranged around thefifty-yard line and started across the field.

The jounce of the padding, the salty stinkof his sweat, the hot puffs of breath shreddingin the knife-cold night air as his uniform shirtshoved through them—he took it all in, everycrystalline sensation, to crowd aside theswelling lump of panic. Trampled grass,slippery mud, the ground so hard beneathcleated feet, jarring his aching knee withevery step.

It didn’t hurt, not really, not enough to betaken out of the game. He didn’t favor the leg,didn’t show the pain.

Didn’t let them know it hurt.

He used the pain. Focused on it—that’swhat he always did. He pulled tight, pulledin, shut out the rest and went through themotions. Shook hands, Jed’s and Grizzle’sand Trace’s. Faced the stands, nodded andraised a hand. Stared into the lights, the icywhite glare. Let the lights blind him to whatwas beyond—the faces, the people.

This was what he’d worked for, and waitedfor, and dreamed of and dreaded. All thosepractices, all those hits, all those sweet,sweet moments of release, of the ball takingflight, sailing toward the target on an invisiblethread of energy connecting perfectmotion with victory. Bones and muscles andimagination and will. Physics, just like thewords on the tattered pages of the fattextbook resting in his locker.

He craved the quiet pleasure of that successand all the other victories, craved the darksilence of the room at home as he tuckedanother paper memento into the box beneaththe bed. But it didn’t matter. Not really.

It wasn’t real, not any of it.

This moment wasn’t quiet, this sensationwasn’t pleasure. This was public—whistlesand yells, the slap of fleshy palm to palm, thesmell of popcorn oil and spilled beer, thestaring eyes. Too many eyes, all aimed athim.

“Wayne!” The drink-slurred voice roseabove the others. “Wayne!”

The old man. Drunk, as usual. But not toodrunk to climb into a truck and get himselfout here. He’d have to rush out of the lockerroom after the game, find a way to get hiskeys, make sure he didn’t kill himself—orsomeone else—getting home.

If he made it home tonight.

He pulled back, pulled deeper inside.Stared into the lights, focused on the pain,kept his chin high. He held, held.

It didn’t bother him, it didn’t matter. Nothis fault, not his doing. It wasn’t real.

“Wayne!”

Someone laughed. The noise shifted. Thecrowd, the many-bodied, fickle, viciousthing in the stands, wavered in the darkshadows beneath the lights. A groan, ahush—the mangled-play, bad-call, missed-pass kind of noise.

His focus slipped, and he lost his way inthe darkness, and the scene came into view,indistinct, a nimbus of cold, electric-whitesparks at the edges. His father stumbleddown the stands toward the fence at the edgeof the field.

The faces, the stares. Horror, embarrassment,curiosity, pity.

The pity sliced at him, cut away bits andpieces of his resolve.

The panic clawed at him, ripped throughhim, tried to drag him away from the torture,away from the pain.

He stood and held, chin up. He didn’tmove. Couldn’t move.

Couldn’t let them know how much it hurt.

“Wayne!”

“Wayne!” Someone in the crowd echoedhis father’s loose-jawed, calflike bellow.“Wayne!” Someone else laughed.

He turned and saw…

No.

It doesn’t matter. It’s not real.

It’s only a dream.

A dream. Only a dream, nothing real. Only a memory. Too long ago to matter.

None of it mattered, not anymore.

Wayne groaned and kicked away the covers, rolling to sprawl on his back in his empty lake of a bed. Boone, his elderly yellow Lab, whined and padded across the floor and lifted his head to fit beneath his master’s waiting hand. Wayne stroked the dog’s fur, finding comfort in the contact with another living being as he lay waiting for the sweat to cool, waiting for the slick, queasy tremors to subside. They always did, after a while.

He stared at the shadows cast across his ceiling. His ceiling, his room, his house. Thick, sturdy lengths of roughhewn pine stretching to the lofty peak above him, dotted with familiar knots. There’s the one thatcurves like an Egyptian’s painted eye.There’s the one with the crack like a fishhook.

He inhaled deeply, settling, and scratched Boone’s ear the way the old dog liked it. In another moment or two he’d head down to the kitchen to start up the coffee and then climb back up here to shower. It didn’t matter what time it was. He’d begin the day, begin his routine.

He always did, after the dream. The work helped to sweep away the dregs of lingering shame. The dream didn’t matter when he had chores to do.

He rose and moved through the familiar motions, grateful in these predawn moments for the silence and solitude of his big, empty house. He ran his palm along the satiny surface of the long oak handrail to the ground floor and passed through dim rooms of richly grained wood and stacked rock, rooms done up in the tans and greens that reminded him of the forests at the eastern edges of his land.

The loneliness faded into the background for a while on nights like this. It took too much energy to pull in, to pull tight, to shove things back inside the shadows he’d fashioned for himself. He was relieved he didn’t have to hide his midnight pain from anyone else.

He measured coffee and poured water, while the bright lights of his kitchen banished the afterimages of the nightmare. He supposed those moments at the school board table the evening before—that replay of the old panic, when the sweat prickled on his skin and his voice box locked up and refused to move—he supposed it had been a kind of trigger. Most of the time he could control his fear of appearing in a public way. He’d faced it down, often enough, dragging himself behind any number of microphones, forcing himself to take on the presidency of the Cattlemen’s Association and settle into his supervisor’s seat at the county courthouse.

But when the shower spray hit him, hard and hot, the last bit of his dream came back to pummel him like the water. That last moment, before he’d struggled to full consciousness—that last moment had been a new torture, something he’d never before experienced.

Maybe he’d never dreamed that part because it hadn’t happened. Maybe he’d invented it—maybe the panic of the evening before had added some new layer to trick his mind and tease at his self control.

All his calm rationalizing and logical explanations deserted him, sliding and trickling like water down zigzag paths, swirling in a maelstrom as if to disappear down the drain.

It was no dream. It was a memory, something so painful he’d never revisited it.

He’d turned and seen…her.

Maggie Harrison, the most beautiful girl in the senior class. Tall and boyishly slim, cool and self-contained, supremely confident in her brains and her beauty and her close-knit, loving family. She’d held the kind of powerful popularity bestowed on those who let the world know they didn’t care whether or not they possessed it. And the fact that she never used it carelessly only increased its gravitational pull on her captivated friends.