A COWBOY'S PROMISE Read online

  Cait was calm under fire. She had patched up disaster victims, delivered a baby under bomb threats, stitched up dozens of seriously wounded men. She was good at a lot of things.

  Planning weddings obviously wasn't one of them.

  Besides, an extravaganza of a wedding wasn't what she'd ever had in mind. She'd always envisioned a small intimate gathering—her closest friends, her father, her brother Wes, a few cousins, Chase and Joanna and the few people who mattered to Charlie—

  Charlie?

  Cait broke out in a cold sweat. No! Not Charlie. Steve! Steve, whom she loved! Steve whom she was going to marry! Charlie, indeed!

  How could her mind have played such a trick on her?

  Furious, she stuffed the paperwork into her bag and stood up, her hands clammy and shaking. She needed some fresh air, less stress, the opportunity to talk to someone who could set her on the right track, someone who understood about weddings, who could steer her straight.

  As soon as her appointments for the day were over, she got in her truck and drove to Mary Holt's.

  What was a foreman's wife for if you couldn't go dump wedding jitters on her? Besides, Mary had said she'd help, hadn't she?

  But Mary, looking aghast at the list Cait handed her, said, "Two hundred people? That's out of my league. We'll call Poppy. And Milly. They'll know what to do. Poppy's a pro."

  Poppy Nichols ran a florist shop in Livingston called Poppy's Garden. She was, thus, something of an expert on weddings, and Cait could see calling her.

  But Milly?

  "Wasn't it Milly's wedding that Cash crashed and slugged the usher?" Visions of Charlie pulling a stunt like that almost brought out a cold sweat.

  "That was her first wedding," Mary said. "The one Cash stopped. The one where she married him went all right, I think."

  "Still," Cait hedged, "maybe we should just call Poppy."

  Mary laughed. "Worried you might jinx things? That someone might crash your wedding?"

  "God forbid."

  "We could screen them all for weapons before they came in the church." Mary laughed.

  "I'm sure Steve's mother would be impressed by that."

  "The point of the wedding, my dear, is not your mother-in-law. If you've got the right man, you don't need anything else."

  Cait felt a sudden tightening in her chest. "What do you mean?"

  Mary blinked at the vehemence of her question. "Don't take it personally," she said with a laugh. "I was only saying that the groom is the most important thing."

  "Well, of course," Cait said, laughing it off. But the tight feeling eased only slightly.

  "Don't worry about his mother." Mary reached out and patted her arm. "You'll do fine. If you're worried, stop by the Mini-mart on your way home."

  "The Mini-mart?" Cait stopped there for bread and milk and eggs when she forgot to go to the grocery store. "Why?"

  "You can buy all the latest bridal magazines there. Read two or three of those and you'll be an expert. You'll know the best places to go on a honeymoon, the right number of courses to serve at a very formal affair, the proper wording for invitations. They'll tell you exactly what to do and when."

  "Truly?" Cait's education had obviously been lacking. She'd never read a bridal magazine in her life.

  Mary grinned and crossed her heart. "You will find everything in them you need to know. And then some. I promise."

  Cait wondered if it would tell her how to forget the wrong man.

  "Whitelaw." The voice was fuzzed. Either the connection or—

  "Hey, it's me," Charlie said.

  Chase groaned. "You all right?" His voice became suddenly rough and intense the minute he recognized Charlie's on the other end of the transatlantic call.

  "I'm all right."

  "All in one piece? Not shot?"

  "No."

  "Then do you know what the hell time it is?"

  "Er. Sorry." It was early evening in Montana, which would make it, what? Somewhere around four in the morning at the villa on Lake Como where they were staying for the week. "But…"

  But not all that sorry. He'd been stewing ever since this afternoon.

  Walt had come by again. He'd been moving some cattle and he'd stopped "to set a spell," he told Charlie. And then he'd begun muttering about Cait telling him he'd have to wear a morning suit at the wedding.

  "Hell," he'd said. "Didn't even wear a morning suit at my own weddin'."

  He'd talked about hundreds of people and Cait figuring only the town hall would be big enough to hold them all and how he was going to have to be Walter Francis Blasingame on the invitations and how there wasn't a soul in the county who'd know who that was.

  "Always been Walt," he'd said. "Always." He'd snorted. "Not even my sainted ma called me Walter Francis."

  It had all sounded very definite to Charlie—and his policy of letting Cait come to her senses in her own time was looking pretty disastrous. When Walt left he'd paced around the cabin wondering if he was doing the right thing by not just going in and grabbing Cait by the hair and hauling her off.

  "I mean, they did it to the Sabine women, didn't they?" he asked Chase now.

  "Um," Chase mumbled. "Not so sure that's a good idea, pal."

  "Well, I've got to do something!"

  "Hang on." Charlie heard him say something quietly and heard Joanna's muffled sleepy reply.

  "Tell him I love him," he heard.

  "She loves you," Chase said a moment later. "But then," he added grimly, "she's not talking to you at four-fifteen in the morning, standing on a balcony in her undershorts."

  Charlie smiled. "You're a good friend."

  "I'm more than a friend."

  "I know." He was the closest thing to a father Charlie had. He would have been Charlie's adopted father if Charlie had permitted it. He hadn't.

  But Chase and Joanna hadn't let him turn away. They'd simply said, "Fine. You don't want to be a Whitelaw, that's okay. But you're still part of the family."

  And despite his determination to hold himself aloof, he was.

  "You're a good dad," Charlie said now. There was a moment's silence. A long moment's silence.

  Then, "Well, thanks," Chase said at last. "Now, let's see if I deserve the praise. What's up?"

  "She's marryin' the wrong guy!"

  "Not you, in other words," Chase said dryly.

  "Not me. She's got bride magazines all over the house, according to her dad. She's talking about hundreds of people. Morning suits. Sit-down dinners."

  "Tell me about it," Chase muttered, and Charlie remembered the event that had been shoved down his and Joanna's throats.

  "Then you know how serious it is," Charlie said. "Nobody puts out that kind of effort and then backs out."

  "Joanna did," Chase reminded him.

  "What? Oh, God, yeah."

  Charlie suddenly remembered that five years before Joanna and Chase were actually married, they had been engaged. They had gone through a huge society wedding right up to the vows and then Joanna had stopped.

  She'd said, "I can't." She'd run off and left Chase to do the explaining.

  Now Charlie cursed himself for bringing it up quite like that. "Sorry," he muttered.

  "Don't be. It was educational," Chase said. "I learned from it. You can, too. The point is—you can't force someone to marry you. I wanted to marry Joanna. But when push came to shove, she didn't want to marry me."

  "She was too young." Charlie remembered that.

  "For whatever reason, she didn't want to do it. She felt pressured and she went along with it—up to a point. And then she balked. You don't want your lady doing that to you."

  "No."

  God, no. He didn't want that.

  "So take my advice, don't push. Don't grab her by the hair, throw her over your shoulder and attempt to make her see things your way. You weren't ready two years ago," Chase reminded him.

  "I am now."

  "And she's not. That happened to me and Joanna, too. When
she was finally ready, I wasn't. I had just discovered that everything I thought I knew about my family wasn't really true. I needed to find out who I was before I could commit. It isn't going to work if it isn't right for both of you."

  "You're saying, just wait?" Charlie was appalled. "Don't do anything?"

  "Just wait," Chase said, exactly the way Charlie wished he wouldn't. "If it's going to happen, it's going to happen. You have to trust."

  "What if," Charlie finally voiced his biggest fear, "she's never ready?"

  "God help you," said Chase.

  It would have been harder if it hadn't been for Walt. He dropped by every day, inviting Charlie to accompany him while he rode out to check some cattle or mend some fence. Sometimes he wanted to show Charlie a good spot from which to look for wildlife. Sometimes he thought maybe Charlie would like to know how to rope a calf or use a running iron.

  Sometimes he just wanted to talk.

  Most days Walt talked. About the ranch. About his wife, Margie, who had died ten years before, about his kids, Wes and Cait, about his hopes, about his dreams, about the war.

  In the end, Charlie realized, it always came back to the war. The places he saw, the experiences he had, the people he met, the impact it had on life as he had known it back home.

  "Sorta got engaged before I went to 'Nam," he told Charlie one afternoon. "Me an' Margie were this close to gettin' hitched." He held his fingers half an inch apart. "But I told her we'd better wait. Didn't want her sittin' there waitin' for me if I went missin' or grievin' if I got blowed to bits."

  From everything Walt had said about his wife, Charlie suspected that Margie would have grieved whether or not they'd been married had Walt been "blowed to bits." But he didn't say so. He just rode Babe alongside the older man as they checked the fence line. And he listened.

  "There now," Walt said nodding toward a loose wire in the fence, then dismounting to fix it. "No, sir," he said, eyeballing the slack wire, "didn't want her sittin' around waitin' if anything happened. Told her so. An' she said, 'I'll wait, Walt. You know I'll wait.' Hand me the splicer," he said to Charlie.

  By now Charlie knew what to do. He handed over the splicer. He'd been watching Walt mend fences for the past five days. It was like watching a skillful surgeon. With years of practice, Walt made it look like child's play.

  The first time Charlie had tried it, he'd scratched himself on the wire and dropped the pliers, and the wire had sagged when he was done.

  "Walt had watched in silence, then let him try it again, showing him how until Charlie finally got it right.

  But today Walt needed to do something with his hands, apparently. So Charlie watched and handed, and Walt did it himself, by rote, not even thinking about it.

  "Met a lot of people there," he went on. "Women. Met this one lady schoolteacher. Pretty little thing. Sue, I called her. She wanted me to teach her English, said she wanted to come to the States sometime. Asked me all about it. I told her stories."

  Like Cait had told him stories? Charlie wondered. Had this young Vietnamese woman been as enchanted with Walt's stories as he had been with Cait's?

  "Talkin' about it made it some easier," Walt said, splicing new wire in with the old. "I liked talkin' to Sue. Made me a little less homesick. She was sweet and gentle—like Margie—and she laughed a lot. There we were in the middle of a war and sometimes she could still make me laugh." He shook his head, tested the wire, nodded his satisfaction and got back on his horse.

  Charlie followed suit. They rode on.

  "Sue was a sweet gal. And she was there. All I had from Margie was letters. Kept me from bein' homesick a little. But hell, sometimes it seemed like she was a million miles away. Reckon she must have thought that way about me, too. I figured she'd find someone else." He said the words more to himself than to Charlie.

  They rode on. The breeze ruffled their shirtsleeves. The sun beat down on their backs.

  "And then I got notice that I was gettin' some R&R," Walt told him. "A week in Hawaii, they said. Sounded like a week in heaven. I wrote Margie and told her she could meet me there." He slanted a wry smile in Charlie's direction. "You know, I really didn't reckon she would. I'd been gone a long time. She was just nineteen and damn pretty. Fellas were always sniffin' around. I figured she prob'ly had one and just hadn't told me 'cause of maybe makin' me walk in front of a bullet. I thought when I told her about Hawaii, I'd get a Dear John for sure."

  The horses picked their way along the line of the fence as it rose over a hill and down the other side.

  Walt shook his head. "But not from Margie. She wrote back, 'Name the day. Name the place. I'll be there.' An' five weeks later she was. R&R." He shook his head. "Hell of a thing."

  Charlie understood what he meant. He'd been in a war zone one day and on a beach in Hawaii twenty-four hours later. It was mind-boggling. Unbelievable. It made you wonder what reality really was.

  "We had six days. Sun an' sand an' each other. It didn't seem real. And yet it was more real than anything that had happened in 'Nam. She was real. We got married in Hawaii. First the honeymoon, then the weddin'." He smiled at the memory, and then the smile faded. "An' then I got back on a plane to Vietnam and she went home to Montana, and I didn't see her for another year."

  "Must have been tough."

  Walt smiled faintly. "You don't know the half of it."

  The last thing Cait wanted to do was ask Charlie for a favor.

  But Maddie Fletcher had called this morning, and now she didn't have any choice. Of course, he might not show up.

  She'd told Maddie that. "I don't know if he'll even come to class. He might have got what he wanted." Photos, she meant, though she really didn't believe it much. It was just a subterfuge, just talk.

  She knew Charlie hadn't got what he said he really wanted—her.

  "Well, if he does," Maddie had persisted, "put it to him. Since he worked with Angie last week I've finally seen a spark of interest in her."

  "Interest in Charlie," Cait translated and was still annoyed at the thought. It was purely on Angie's behalf, she told herself. She didn't want the girl getting all starry-eyed over a man who wasn't interested in her. Cait knew the feeling—had herself felt the humiliation of the consequences.

  "Oh, absolutely," Maddie said with a smile in her voice. "But you learn, when you've been around kids like Angie as much as I have, to take any interest at all and go with it."

  "You don't think it's … dangerous. I mean he's not interested in her."

  "I know that," Maddie said. "I can see which way the wind blows."

  Cait wondered which way Maddie thought the wind was blowing. But she refused to ask.

  Maddie went on, "But if his being there, working with her, can get Angie involved, it will be good for the baby and good for her in the long run."

  "But she'll expect—"

  "You have to take things a step at a time, Cait," Maddie said. "We're not omniscient here. We can't play God. We can't see the end result. But we can do what we think best. In this case I think it's having Charlie work with Angie. And then we trust."

  Trust Charlie?

  Cait closed her eyes.

  "So, would you ask him?" Maddie said after a moment. "I'd rather it was planned ahead of time."

  Cait sighed. "If he shows up."

  She still hoped he wouldn't. She hoped he'd got the point by now: that once upon a time she'd been interested in him enough to want to marry him—but he'd turned away, and now, when he said he was interested, she had, so to speak, other fish to fry.

  No hard feelings. That was just the way it was.

  She loved Steve. And all Charlie's persistence wasn't fazing her in the least. She didn't have time to even think about him. She was, with the help of a half a dozen bridal magazines, planning what her father had taken to calling "The Wedding That Ate Montana."

  She had drawn up lists, called caterers, talked to Poppy about flowers, and had discussed with Polly McMaster renting the Elmer town ha
ll. She had become a connoisseur of wedding invitations, formal and informal. She dreamed about ivory paper versus ash, rough edges versus smooth, italic versus bold. She chose type fonts in her sleep.

  It was unutterably boring.

  But it was better than dreaming about Charlie.

  Why wasn't she dreaming about Steve? He was the man she loved, the man she was going to spend the rest of her life with, the man who had called just this afternoon to ask her to go to Denver with him this weekend to look for a place to live.

  "It'd be great if you'd come," he said. "A whole weekend to ourselves."

  It did sound great. But she didn't think she ought to leave her father that long, and she said so.

  "He's going to be on his own when we get married," Steve reminded her.

  "I know. I know. But he's just getting back on his feet. It's taken a while."

  In fact, her father was progressing by leaps and bounds. He was riding again, checking cattle, mending fences, taking an interest in the ranch.

  "He's doing stuff finally?" Steve said, obviously heartened. "When did this start?"

  "A couple of weeks ago." Ever since he'd met Charlie.

  He was seeing way too much of Charlie. At first she'd attributed their encounters to Charlie turning up where her dad was. But from what her father said, that wasn't true. He was the one seeking out Charlie.

  "Showed Charlie where I saw the bears last year," he said one day.

  "Me 'n' Charlie rode up Hill Lake way," he said another. "I been showin' him how to mend fence." Mend fence?

  "You're teaching Charlie to mend fence?"

  "He's turnin' into a fair hand," her father said. "Knows somethin' about horses. Learnin' about cattle. Quick study, he is."

  What was going on? Why was Charlie turning himself into a cowboy? Why was her father taking such an interest in some tenderfoot urban photographer?

  But she didn't ask, because she didn't want to know. She didn't want to talk about Charlie.

  She hoped against hope that he wouldn't show up tonight. But she wasn't surprised to see him standing in the hallway waiting for her when she came around the corner.