The Cowboy Finds a Family Read online

  “Mace?”

  She heard a weary exhalation of breath. “What?”

  She pushed herself up on one elbow, then didn’t know what to say. “I’ve . . . just been . . . waiting for you.”

  “Why?” There was a wealth of bitter self-deprecation in just that one word.

  “Because I love you, Mace. Because I know you’re hurting.” She pushed up to a sitting position, hesitated, then admitted, “Because I’m hurting, too.”

  The floorboards creaked beneath his feet as he came closer to the bed. “I know that.” His voice was so low she barely heard the words. She reached out to him.

  “Come to bed, Mace.”

  There was only silence then. No floorboards. No footsteps. Just silence. So much silence that she thought she could hear him take a breath. It seemed an eternity until he let it out again.

  Then, slowly, he came to bed.

  The mattress sagged beneath his weight. He stretched out carefully, the way he did sometimes when he’d pulled a muscle or taken a spill, as if all his muscles hurt. He lay flat on his back and folded his arms under his head.

  Carefully, as if his pain were physical, Jenny rolled close to him and put her arm across his chest, snuggling into his side.

  Any other night one of his arms would have come around her and pulled her even closer. One of his legs would have tangled with hers.

  He didn’t move.

  She edged up and pressed her lips to his jaw. But he didn’t turn his face to touch his mouth to hers.

  He didn’t do anything at all.

  She sighed and nestled closer, hugged him tighter. “I love you, Mace,” she whispered.

  He didn’t say a word.

  He didn’t say anything at breakfast the next morning, either. He had already shaved by the time she got up. He came out of the bathroom as she was rubbing the sleep out of her eyes.

  “Morning.” She smiled at him.

  It was still too dark to see if she got one in return.

  He had the oatmeal cooking by the time she finished in the bathroom. There were two bowls on the table, and he was putting slices of bread in the toaster. The orange juice was already poured. Breakfast as usual.

  Jenny breathed a sigh of relief.

  They would cope.

  They would get through this day—Mace on the range and she at school. They would find their bearings in the commonplace activities of every day—and then tonight they would be able to talk about this blow fate had dealt them.

  It would be easier by then. They would each have had a chance to get used to the idea. They would each have space. Mace needed more than she did, but she was willing to wait for him. And then they would figure out together what to do about the family they had wanted so long.

  At least that had been the plan.

  But Mace wasn’t home.

  He wasn’t there when she got back from school that afternoon. Of course even at nearly six o’clock, the sun was still high in the June sky. And Mace had cattle to move, others to check. Some field work to do.

  Fine, Jenny thought. She dropped her bag from school and set to work making a pot of green chile stew. It was Mace’s favorite, and she figured he might think she was trying too hard, but she didn’t care. She loved him. She wanted him to know that.

  The stew took two hours to simmer. She’d thought for sure Mace would be home by the time it was ready, but it was nearly eight o’clock now and Mace still wasn’t there.

  Jenny went out onto the porch and looked around. The sun had dropped well below the Bridgers now. There was still a long summer twilight, but she went out to turn on the light by the barn.

  Mace was such a good horseman that, over the years, she had learned not to fret about accidents when he didn’t show up. Of course things could happen, but he was careful, not a man to take unnecessary chances. And when he was riding Chug, his sorrel gelding, she knew he was on the best possible mount.

  So she went back to the kitchen and stirred the stew once more, then turned the flame under it even lower, and told herself he’d be along.

  By ten, though, she knew something was wrong.

  He should have been back by now. She wished he’d said if he was going to be working their cattle today or if he would be helping Jed or Taggart.

  But Mace hadn’t said nothing this morning.

  Jenny picked up the phone. Mace had a cell phone, but he rarely used it.

  “No point,” he said. “No reception up in the mountains.”

  Not much anyway. Every once in a while she got through, but mostly she knew better than to try. Now she did try but wasn’t surprised when the call went straight to voice mail. Jenny sighed. She tried again ten minutes later, then ten minutes after that. Nothing.

  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 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 before riding out.

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

  She was surprised when Taggart answered the phone.

  “What are you doing there?” Jenny demanded.

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

  “I thought—” She squelched a sudden spike of worry. “Where’s Mace? Is he with you?”

  “Nope. Sorry. 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. “Maybe he’s at Jed’s.”

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

  Numbly, she went to the door and opened it to stare out into the darkness, willing a pair of headlights to appear over the rise. “Damn it, Mace,” she breathed. “Where are you?”

  The phone rang and she jerked around, then practically ran to answer it. “Hello?”

  “I just went in the den,” Taggart told her, “and said you were looking for Mace. Becky said she and Tuck saw his truck heading up toward 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 offered. “If he’s not back yet he’s probably planning to stay the night.”

  “Probably,” Jenny agreed, but her voice was hollow.

  “He’ll have food and firewood up there. I’m sure he’s fine.”

  “Of course he is,” Jenny said, though it wasn’t food or firewood she was worried about. “Thanks, Taggart.”

  She was sure Mace 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 carried it to the table. She sat down and picked at it, but she wasn’t hungry. She was lonely. Worried. She wanted to put her arms around Mace. 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 baby 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 headed for the bedroom where she flicked on the light.

  It looked as if Mace had cleaned the room. There was less stuff on the dresser. No comb. No spare change. There were 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 choked 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 opened 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 picked up the bills on the desk, rifled through the magazines on the coffee table, flipped through yesterday’s unread mail.

  Nothing.

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

  Still nothing.

  Then, with a growing sense of certainly, 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 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. Love, Mace.

  Chapter Two

  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. The overhead light was glaring in his eyes. Jenny loomed over his bed.

  “How dare you?” Her voice was ragged.

  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 dangerous idea.

  “What?” he ground out.

  “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 was a part of him.

  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. You shouldn’t have come,” he went on stubbornly. “That road can be treacherous in the dark. You know that! Stupid . . .” he muttered, grinding his teeth.

  Jenny crumpled the paper and threw it at him. It hit his cheek and fell onto the bed. “I’m stupid?” she demanded. “And you’re the soul of reason? You’re moving out? We’re getting a divorce? Just like that. Honest to God, Mace, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard!”

  He glared at her, stung. “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. He’d already lost the only thing that mattered.

  Now Mace clenched his jaw and looked away and dug 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 face her.

  “It makes sense,” he said through his teeth. “It’s the right thing to do. The only thing to do.”

  There was total silence as Jenny stared at him, unblinking.

  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 didn’t move an inch.

  “So,” she said finally with a deceptively conversational lightness, “that’s it then? We’re finished, Mace? It’s 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 an imaginary 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!”

  “Because we can’t have it. 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.”

  “Maybe not in how we get them, but there are other methods—” Her voice was quieter now, more reasonable, but he cut her off.

  “No.” 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 hand, 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 fourteen years ago when I asked you to marry me.”

  “Don’t be an ass.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Mace!”

  He knew the argument was going to go on—the argument he didn’t want, co
uldn’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 that 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 “—camping up by the lake? 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!”