A Cowboy's Tears Read online

  But Mace had said nothing this morning.

  Jenny sighed and glanced at the phone.

  She paced the small kitchen and living room, then went out once more to the barn, to make sure it was Chug that Mace had ridden out this morning.

  Chug was, in fact, gone.

  So were the trailer and the truck.

  Jenny sighed and ran a hand through her hair, relieved. He had to be with Taggart or Jed. If he'd been on their own land, he wouldn't have needed to trailer Chug anywhere before riding out.

  She grained their other two horses and went back to the house, gave the stew one more stir, then picked up the phone and called the Joneses to ask Felicity where they were and when they'd be done.

  Taggart answered the phone.

  Startled, Jenny demanded, "What are you doing there?"

  "Jenn? What do you mean, what'm I doing here? I live here." She could hear the smile in Taggart's voice.

  "I thought…" She squelched the worry in her voice as best she could. "Where's Mace? Is he with you?"

  "Nope. Haven't seen him."

  "All day?"

  "Nope. I got a school starting tomorrow morning. I've been here all day getting ready." Taggart taught bull riding to rodeo rough-stock hopefuls. "Sorry. Maybe he's at Jed's."

  "Maybe," Jenny echoed. "Thanks." Slowly she put the receiver down.

  She opened the door and stared out into the darkness, willing a pair of headlights to appear over the rise. "Damn it, Mace. Where are you?"

  The phone rang.

  She practically ran to answer it. "Hello?"

  "I just went into the den," Taggart told her, "and said you were looking for Mace. Becky said she and Tuck saw his truck up by the cabin this afternoon."

  "Our cabin?" The one she and Mace had lived in when they were first married? The one Mace and Jed and Taggart had hung out in when they were kids? The one Jed and Tuck had lived in until last year?

  "Yep. Reckon maybe he was making a circle up above the creek," Taggart said. "If he's not back yet he's probably planning to stay the night."

  "Probably," Jenny agreed.

  "He'll have food and firewood up there. I'm sure he's fine."

  "I'm sure, too," Jenny said, though it wasn't food or firewood she was worried about. "Thanks, Taggart," she said.

  Of course he was fine. He just wasn't ready to talk. If he'd decided to make a circle up above the creek today of all days, he still had some thinking on his own to do. She dished up a bowl of the stew and picked at it, but she wasn't hungry. She was lonely. Worried. She wanted to put her arms around him. She wanted him to put his arms around her.

  She did up the dishes, then turned on the television. But there wasn't anything worth watching. She tried reading, but that was even harder. The blanket she'd been knitting sat waiting in the bag beside the sofa. She couldn't face it tonight.

  She left on the porch light just in case, then went in to go to bed.

  It looked like Mace had cleaned the bedroom. There was less stuff on the dresser. No comb. No spare change. No loose socks on the floor.

  She kicked off her shoes and unbuttoned her shirt, then opened the closet.

  Mace's shirts weren't there.

  Jenny stared.

  Then she turned and yanked open his dresser drawers. His shorts and undershirts were gone, too. A vise gripped her throat, disbelief choking her.

  "Mace?" She could barely get his name past her lips. Her palms were suddenly wet, her breathing quick.

  She hurried into the bathroom and jerked open the medicine chest. Hers was the only toothbrush there.

  "No." No!

  She ran back to the bedroom, then to the living room, scanning desperately, seeking futilely for some word, some note. He couldn't simply have picked up and walked out of her life!

  She flipped through the bills on the desk, riffled through the magazines on the coffee table, fanned yesterday's unread mail.

  Nothing.

  She went back into the bedroom, checked the dresser, the top of the chest. The bed.

  Still nothing.

  Then, with a growing sense of certainty, she turned and went into the bedroom across the hall. "The spare room," they called it, when other people came to stay. Mace's brother, Shane, or her sister, Teresa, were known to use it on occasion. Taggart's daughter, Becky, spent a week or a weekend with them now and then.

  But in private, to Mace and Jenny, it had always been "the baby's room," where they would put "Butch and Sundance," as Mace was wont to call their unborn children.

  She turned on the light.

  The note was on the bed.

  Jenny, she read, but her hands shook so badly she had to press the paper flat to continue. I know how much you want a family, and you deserve to have one. You won't as long as you're married to me. We'll get a divorce soon as we can. I'll take care of it, unless you want to. If you do, that's okay. I won't stand in your way. Mace.

  * * *

  Chapter 2

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  The sound of a shot jerked Mace out of a fitful sleep. A light blinded him.

  It took a moment, but when at last his muddled brain began working, he realized he hadn't heard a shot at all.

  The door had banged open. And Jenny loomed over his bed.

  "How dare you?"

  He blinked up at her, trying to shield his eyes with one hand and grope for the edge of his sleeping bag with the other. It wasn't that she hadn't seen every bit of him a million times. It was that being naked in the face of fury, even Jenny's—especially Jenny's at the moment—seemed like a pretty dangerous idea. "What?"

  "Don't 'what' me, Mace Nichols! How dare you walk out on me? How dare you write this sniveling little note and run away?"

  He didn't have to read the paper she shook in his face.

  He remembered it. He'd worked on it hard enough. "I wasn't 'running away.'" Though God knew he'd like to have. Trouble was, it wouldn't matter how long and far he ran—what he was running from would always be there.

  The injustice of her accusation infuriated him. He shoved himself back against the rough log wall of the cabin, glanced at his watch, then scowled up at her. "For God's sake, Jenn, it's almost one in the morning!"

  "I know what time it is! What I don't know is what you're doing up here!" The color was high in her cheeks. Her hair was loose, curling around her head, the way it did when he made love to her.

  He shoved that thought away.

  "You know what I'm doing," he said tightly. He jerked his chin toward the note in her hand. "I told you."

  She crumpled the paper and threw it at him. It hit his cheek and fell onto the bed. "But I didn't believe it! You're moving out. We're getting a divorce. Just like that. Honest to God, Mace, how could you do such a stupid thing?"

  He glared at her, stung. "Stupid? Like hell it is. It's the only thing that makes sense!"

  "Walking out on me after fourteen years of marriage makes sense?"

  He wasn't going to argue with her. He'd never won an argument with Jenny in his life. He wasn't good at them—wasn't good with words.

  And in this case it wouldn't matter, anyway. Whichever way it went, he lost.

  Mace clenched his jaw and looked away, digging down deep inside for every ounce of strength he had. Then, when he had all he knew he was going to get and what he desperately hoped was enough, he turned back to her.

  "Yes," he said through his teeth.

  There was total silence.

  He couldn't even hear her breathe. Outside a coyote howled. Nearer at hand, Chug whickered in the barn.

  But inside the cabin the silence went on. And on.

  Mace looked away again. He didn't want to see her distress, didn't want to face her pity. He locked his jaw and stared at the wall and wished to God she'd go away. Didn't she know how hard it had been to walk out?

  Didn't she know how hard it still was, pushing her away like this?

  Go, damn it. Just go.

  But Jenny stayed.
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  "So," she said finally with a deceptively conversational lightness, "are we finished, then, Mace? Is that it? Is it over? All we had? All we worked for? Fourteen years down the drain. Poof." Out of the corner of his eye he saw her blow a puff of air. "Gone. Worth nothing."

  Goaded, he couldn't remain silent. "You know it wasn't worth nothing!"

  "You're acting like it was worth nothing!"

  "You want a family," he said stubbornly.

  "I want you."

  "You want a child," he corrected her. "Children. You've wanted them for years! Years, damn it! That's all you could talk about. All you hoped and planned for. You know it. And—" he enunciated each word clearly "—I can't give them to you."

  "There's more than one way to have a family!"

  His fists clenched on his sleeping bag. He stared down at his white knuckles and shook his head. "It's not the same."

  "No, it's not. I agree." Her voice was quieter now, more reasonable. "But—"

  "No." He cut her off firmly, flatly. There was no being reasonable here. His whole world, his whole understanding of himself as a man, had been cut from under him. He wasn't going to talk about "other methods."

  There might be other ways to give her a family. But nothing else was going to make him a man.

  The test results were conclusive. Final. He was sterile.

  He would learn to live with it.

  But he would live with it by himself.

  He wasn't going to go through life living on her pity. And he wasn't going to make her suffer for something that was none of her fault. It wasn't his fault, either, but it was his life.

  He had to deal with it.

  "Go home, Jenny," he said heavily, still looking down. "Just go home."

  She moved closer. Her hands, her jeans were in his field of vision. "Mace…"

  "No." He closed his eyes.

  "I know it hurts. It hurts me, too. But if we talk—"

  "Talk doesn't make sperm!"

  "No, but—"

  "Nothing makes sperm, Jenny. I'm never going to give you a child. So just let it go. Let me go!"

  "No."

  "That's what you should have said that day fourteen years ago."

  "Don't be an ass."

  "I'm not. Asses aren't sterile."

  "Mace!"

  He knew the argument was going to go on—the argument he didn't want, couldn't win. And so he did the only thing he could.

  "In some ways," he lied, "it's a relief."

  Jenny blinked. Her mouth shut like a trap. She looked at him closely. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  He braced himself against the wall and drew a breath. "I mean you're the one wanted the kids, not me."

  Jenny's eyes widened. Her mouth opened, but no words came out. Only air—as if it had been punched from her. The flame in her eyes faded, then flickered to life again.

  "That's not true. You wanted kids, too!" she argued. "You know you did! That wasn't you all those nights, talking about taking Butch and Sundance—" he couldn't quite suppress the wince at the names with which they'd always jokingly referred to their kids "—about camping up by the lake with them? That wasn't you who bought that little Stetson last fall down in Bozeman? That wasn't you I found putting new wood in my old family cradle? That wasn't you—"

  "Stop it!" The words were wrung out of him. His fists strangled the sleeping bag. "Just stop," he said, his voice harsh and as ragged as if he'd run miles and miles. Even his breath came hard.

  He could hear it, could hear his heart hammering.

  There was silence again. Long. Deafening. Silence that seemed to vibrate throughout the room.

  "You wanted kids, Mace," Jenny said softly.

  Yes, all right, he had. But however much he might want them, he couldn't have them.

  And that was the truth—the whole truth.

  "It's past. Go away, Jenny," he said, his voice low. When she didn't move, he forced himself to look at her, to meet her gaze unflinchingly. "Go on. Get out. Now."

  He didn't think she was going to. He wondered for a minute if he might have to get out of the bed, after all, if he might have to march naked across the room, grab her and put her out the door, shutting it behind her.

  He wondered if he could.

  And then he heard her take a breath. "All right," she said, and her voice was firm now, strong. "I'll go. And you just sit up here and sulk. Feel sorry for yourself. Have yourself a wonderful pity party, Mace, if that's what you want. But don't bother to invite me. I wouldn't come if you did!"

  Then she turned and stalked out, her footsteps loud on the bare floor.

  The front door opened and shut. This time there was no bang.

  But that didn't make the feeling any less fatal.

  She should be shot.

  Jenny didn't know what ever had possessed her! How could she have been so insensitive? How could she, of all people, have thrown Mace's feelings in his face? She would have to apologize. Tomorrow.

  There was no way she was going back up there tonight. It had taken her almost an hour to get there the first time. Used to finding the cabin easily in the daylight on horseback, she hadn't driven the narrow mountain track in years.

  She'd missed it in the dark and had bumped around barely visible ruts, trying to gauge where she was for ages before she'd realized she'd taken the wrong turn. The delay hadn't improved her disposition any. By the time she got there, she'd been fuming.

  And Mace had borne the brunt of it. She'd seen the suffering in his face the moment she'd flicked on the light. Even though he'd tried not to show it, she'd seen the telltale bunching of muscle when his jaw had tightened and the way his knuckles had gone white as they'd clenched the sleeping bag. But she'd been too angry to stop and think at that point. And now?

  "Oh, Mace."

  She turned onto her side and reached out her hand to touch the pillow where for fourteen years her husband had laid his head.

  Jenny drew his pillow into her arms and pressed her face into it.

  She found the scent of him there in the cotton against her cheek—that trace of soap and shampoo and shaving cream, the tantalizing scent of leather and lime and, always, the faint hint of horses, all of it combining indefinably into a scent that was purely Mace—but not all of Mace.

  She had thought last night was the worst night of her life.

  Tonight she knew better.

  She pressed her face into the pillow and cried.

  He was there again today.

  Becky was surprised. She hadn't expected it. She knew as well as anybody that cowboys never stayed in one place for long, especially when they ought to be moving the herd to summer pasture. But Mace's truck had been parked by the old cabin yesterday when she and Tuck had ridden out to get away from "the baby brigade"—which was what they called the sudden explosion of infants in their respective households—and it was there again today.

  Becky thought that was sort of odd.

  But lately she thought the whole world was a pretty odd place.

  She used to think that once she got her dad married off, things would settle down and she would have a normal life. She didn't expect to have all her problems solved in half an hour like they did on television. But she did expect that they wouldn't keep getting worse.

  Now she wasn't so sure.

  Nothing in her life seemed to quite fit anymore. Least of all her.

  Her whole life she'd been "Taggart Jones's kid." They'd been a twosome—just she and her dad.

  Now there was Felicity, of course. Becky wasn't sorry at all that her dad had married Felicity.

  But she hadn't figured on it changing who she was. It had. She wasn't the only one who was "Taggart Jones's kid" these days. Now there were two more. Twins.

  It wasn't that she didn't like her new brother and sister. She did. Most of the time she thought they were pretty amazing creatures. Like puppies or newborn lambs. Kind of cute and sort of cuddly—when they weren't crying or spitting up on her. />
  But they had changed everything. Nobody had any time anymore. Felicity was constantly changing them or feeding them or walking them around or rocking them in the rocking chair or reading in one of those stupid books that tell you you're doing everything wrong.

  She really seemed to be afraid she was doing everything wrong. And even Taggart, who had managed one baby all right when it was Becky, seemed to be over his head in infants every time she looked at him.

  There didn't seem to be any hands—or time—left over for her.

  Every time she thought that, though, Becky felt crummy. Like she was a bad person for thinking it.

  Probably she was a bad person for thinking it. She didn't know anyone else who resented two helpless little kids.

  Susannah, her best friend, seemed to cope with her two little brothers all right. She played chopsticks on the piano with them and didn't care if they just banged their fists on the keys. She played ball with Clay, the older one, and didn't try to strike him out. She built towers with Scott, and usually didn't get mad when he knocked them over before she was done. She even baby-sat them sometimes when her mom and dad went out.

  The very thought terrified Becky.

  Puppies she could handle. Lambs were okay. Colts were actually fun. Even calves weren't too bad. They were interesting—and sturdy.

  Becky liked sturdy. Nobody ever yelled at you to be sure you held its head up when you gave a leppie calf a bottle.

  Tuck, who had been her friend forever, said not to worry, that the twins were close to three months old and pretty soon would be able to hold their heads up on their own.

  It couldn't happen soon enough for Becky.

  It seemed to her that even Tuck coped better than she did—and Neile wasn't even his real half sister. He even lugged her around in a backpack sometimes.

  "Gotta show 'er the ropes," he'd say.

  And he never got mad at all—except when Neile broke the points of his pencils and put his drawing charcoal in her mouth.

  Becky looked forward to the day when Willy and Abby were old enough to toddle around and put things in their mouths.

  It would be nice when they stopped waking up ten times a night and let people get some sleep for a change.