A COWBOY'S PROMISE Page 4

  "I—"

  "You didn't love me," she repeated. She would not allow him to deny that! "And it hurt. I got past it, though. I'm over it. I have a life. I have a job. I have a fiancé. His name is Steve. He's a cardiologist. And yes, I know him. I also love him! And he's worth ten of you."

  He didn't say a word. He let her wind down. And a smart thing for him, too, or she'd have steamrolled right over him.

  "He probably is," Charlie said quietly. "But I love you. And you love me, too. If you didn't—" he rode right over her protest "—you wouldn't have responded at all."

  "I can't help what you read into things, Charlie. You hear what you want to hear. You see what you want to see and nothing else. You always have."

  Her arrow hit home. She saw something flicker in his gaze. A muscle ticked in his jaw.

  "I love you," he repeated. "I was wrong to leave you. I was a fool." He still sounded calm, but the calm was edged with urgency now. His stare was intent. "Don't compound it, Cait. Don't make the same mistake I did."

  "The only mistake I made, Charlie," she said with all the bravado she could muster, "was two years ago, when I fell in love with you."

  "So," Gaby's voice trilled in his ear as he lay on the motel room bed staring at the ceiling. "When's the wedding?"

  "Very funny." His voice sounded raw even to his ears.

  "Oh." Her tone changed at once. "You talked to her?"

  "Yes, I talked to her. And no, she doesn't want to marry me. She's marrying someone else."

  "Who?"

  "Some guy named Steve. Some cardiologist. And now you know everything I know," Charlie said, still angry. "So why don't you just drop it?"

  There was a moment's pause. Then, "Are you going to drop it?"

  Charlie stared at the ceiling a long moment, seeing Cait with her arms tightly folded across her breasts, defending herself against him—or against herself? He hadn't imagined that momentary response. He was sure he hadn't. He knew Cait. He knew her body, the way it reacted, the way it loved.

  But could he convince her?

  Did he have any right to try?

  Yes, of course he did. If she still loved him, she shouldn't be marrying someone else! It would be wrong-headed and downright dumb. She had to see that.

  "No," he said at last. "No, I'm not dropping it."

  It hadn't been easy to walk away from Cait the first time. He'd wanted to stay, but he'd been afraid of the commitment. Now he wasn't. Now he welcomed it.

  He wasn't going to walk away a second time.

  Not as long as he had any hope at all.

  And he did have hope. For all that she'd denied still loving him, she still felt something—even if only for an instant.

  Charlie was a photographer. He had built his life on moments caught in the blink of a shutter. That was what he'd felt in Cait's response.

  He was willing to work with that.

  "You said something about a cabin," he said to Gaby. "Some friend of yours?"

  "Brenna McCall."

  "Right. Would she rent it to me?"

  "Are we talking a long siege here?"

  "I don't know what we're talking. Will she rent it?"

  "I can call her and ask. She offered it for a few nights already, if you recall."

  Charlie hadn't been thinking about that then. He'd only been thinking about getting to Cait. Then he'd thought in the short term. Not now.

  "I'd appreciate it," he said.

  "Do you want me to tell her why? The real reason why," Gaby said, "or do you want me to blather on about you needing a place to regroup and take some pretty pictures? She knows you know Cait, but I didn't go into details."

  "Let's keep it that way," Charlie said.

  If she was engaged, he needed to move carefully. He didn't want to cause her embarrassment or pain. He simply wanted her back.

  "Just tell her I want a change of pace. Tell her I'm working on my new vision."

  Gaby chuckled. "What vision would that be?"

  "I don't know. I'll tell you when I find it."

  "I'll give her your phone number at the motel. I don't think it will be a problem. She won't be using the cabin herself for a while. She and Jed had another baby this spring, so she won't be going off to paint for a while. If you don't hear from her by tomorrow night, call me back."

  "Will do. And, Gaby, thanks."

  "Oh, I do this all the time for my clients, Charlie." She laughed. "I'll just be expecting you to name one of the girls after me."

  One of the girls. Kids with Cait.

  Scary thoughts. Notions that had sent him packing two years ago.

  And now—Charlie stared at the ceiling some more—his dearest wish.

  "Dr. Carmichael," the muttered voice was clearly sleep-fogged, and Cait felt immediately guilty for having called him so late.

  "I'm sorry, Steve. I didn't realize what time it was." Now she looked at the clock and discovered it was almost two in the morning. "I'll let you go back to sleep."

  "No. Don't hang up." He cleared his throat, yawned, then said, "What's up? Bad night?"

  Sometimes they called each other when things were rough—when he lost a patient he was sure he'd be able to save, when she had a delivery that went wrong.

  "No," Cait said hastily, because it wasn't—not like that, anyway. "I just … got lonesome."

  Panic-stricken, more like. She'd trembled all the way home after her confrontation with Charlie. She'd taken deep breaths and tried to steady her racing pulse. She'd strangled the steering wheel trying to get an emotional grip.

  It was the shock, she'd told herself. Seeing him would have been enough to set off heart palpitations. A proposal of marriage was the last thing she expected.

  Or wanted.

  She didn't need that! She didn't need him!

  And so when she got home, she'd paced furiously, then she'd taken a long shower, hoping she'd be able to wash away the memories and the jumble of thoughts chasing each other through her mind.

  But nothing had worked. Nothing had calmed her.

  Nothing would, she realized, until she talked to Steve.

  She needed to connect to the real man in her life, not the one who had just burst back onto the scene. Now she curled up in the armchair, tucked her robe around her and let the soft sleepy sound of Steve breathing settle her jangled nerves.

  There was another yawn from Steve's end of the line. She heard him stretch. "Well, good." There was a hint of a smile in his still-sleepy voice. "I always like to talk to you. Even in the middle of the night. Is your dad okay?"

  "Dad's okay. I'm just lonesome. Cash and Milly Callahan had their baby tonight."

  "Ah." Steve smiled. "The hormones are responding."

  "Maybe. Yes. That must be it." Better to think that than to think about Charlie.

  She wondered if she should tell Steve about Charlie, then decided not to.

  No man wanted to be awakened and told that his fiancée couldn't sleep because she couldn't stop thinking about the man she used to be in love with.

  "Want to meet for breakfast?" he asked her. "I'm going to be in Livingston tomorrow. I don't have any appointments here in the morning. I could come over early. We could grab one of those egg and muffin things."

  "I don't think so." There was no way she was going back to the place she'd just been with Charlie! "I have appointments in the morning. But how about tomorrow night? We could catch a movie?"

  "If your beeper doesn't go off." She could hear the smile in his voice.

  "Or if yours doesn't."

  They chuckled together. Yes, Cait thought, hugging the notion to herself, they were definitely compatible.

  "Okay. Movie it is." Steve yawned again. "Anything else?"

  Just keep talking to me, Cait wanted to say. But she couldn't make Steve stay awake all night just to stop her thinking about Charlie.

  "No. I'm all right."

  "You sure? Want me to come over?"

  Cait laughed. It was a good sixty miles
from Steve's place to hers. "No. It's okay. I just … thanks."

  "Anytime," he promised. "See you tomorrow night. I'll call you."

  "Yes," Cait said. "Please."

  "G'night. Dream of me."

  "Yes."

  But she didn't. She dreamed of Charlie.

  * * *

  Three

  « ^ »

  Charlie got the cabin. He went up the next day with Brenna leading the way. They'd lent him her father, Otis's, old Suburban. It did gravel and dirt better than Charlie's car.

  "You're sure you don't mind?" Charlie had asked.

  "Oh, I think we'll manage," Jed had said with a sly smile in the direction of the Porsche.

  They probably would. Charlie wasn't sure about himself.

  Brenna had come up on horseback, bringing a mount she'd said he could pasture here and use in the hills. He hadn't been sure about that, but she'd insisted.

  "You won't want to walk everywhere. Babe is easy. You'll like her."

  She showed him how the generator worked. She pointed out the firewood pile in case he wanted a little warmth in the cool summer evenings. Then she stood on the porch, breathed deeply and said, "You'll love it here. Whatever you're looking for, you'll find it." Charlie hoped she was right.

  He dug in, barracked down, and told himself that just being in the vicinity was a start, that while he was here he'd think of a game plan, a way to convince Cait to fall into his arms.

  He had no idea what he was getting himself into.

  If Montana was the "last best place"—as many of its natives, its literature and its advertising campaigns would have you believe—it was also, in Charlie's mind, the strangest.

  When Brenna left him, he was alone. Totally alone. He didn't think he'd ever been alone before in his life.

  The sheer silence was unnerving.

  Weird, he thought. Very very weird.

  He walked around the cabin, admired the view across the Shields Valley toward what Brenna told him were the Crazy Mountains.

  "Crazy?"

  "They say an old woman went crazy from loneliness up there," she'd told him.

  As afternoon turned into evening and evening into night and he still didn't see anyone else or hear anyone else, Charlie began to understand what she meant.

  He had a hard time falling asleep that night. It was too quiet. He had too much time to think.

  That's what he told himself.

  But then he started thinking about Cait and remembering the stories she'd told about her home. He was here now.

  He could hear the horse whickering. Some cows were lowing. There was an odd soft rushing sound he didn't recognize. It took him a while but he finally worked out what it was—the wind soughing through the pine trees.

  He was here. In Cait's state. In the land she called home.

  He didn't awaken until midday.

  He'd never slept so soundly. He'd barely ever slept so long. It was the altitude, he told himself. But he didn't feel tired, he felt energized, curious about this new world he was inhabiting.

  The first full day he spent at the cabin, he never saw another person. He never heard another person. He never talked to anyone.

  The only things he heard were the whinnies of Babe, the horse, the cawing of a couple of jays, the occasional hoot of something that was probably an owl, the sound of his own footsteps as he moved around the small spartan cabin. And he heard the wind.

  Sometimes it was the soft rushing sound he'd heard in the night. Sometimes it shifted and sawed through the trees. He went outside for a walk and heard it whistling through the long grass, saw the stalks bending in the breeze.

  He began to hear the wind play an orchestra's worth of nature's instruments and found himself bewitched by every one. It almost seemed to talk to him.

  And once he got past the strangeness, he liked hearing what it had to say.

  In its whisper, he heard echoes of stories Cait had told of her childhood here. He remembered her talking about lying awake at night in a sleeping bag on the mountainside listening to the wind, and he had tried to imagine it.

  Now he didn't have to imagine.

  He could hear what she had heard.

  The sounds and the memories of Cait's stories, of Cait herself, mingled together and exhilarated him.

  They also grounded him—and challenged him. But it wasn't the desperate challenge he'd felt when she'd said she was engaged. It wasn't the frantic need to turn her head and argue with her to make her see she was wrong.

  He couldn't make her see.

  Like Chase said, he had to get himself balanced, get in harmony with this world in which he found himself, this world to which she belonged. He had to be.

  Then, God willing, she would see for herself.

  The first few days weren't easy. The old Charlie periodically wanted to rev his engine, go down the mountain and bulldoze his way back into Cait's life.

  But the longer he stayed, the more he understood that bulldozing was out of place.

  He remembered Chase once telling him about the time he'd met his father and had decided to stay on the Navajo reservation.

  "It took some getting used to," he'd said with what Charlie imagined was his usual understatement. "But I needed it. I had to do it. I had to find out who I was."

  That had surprised Charlie at the time. Chase had seemed pretty well sorted out to him. Now he understood that a man could look sorted out and still have pieces missing.

  He'd come to find Cait, but he was starting to find himself, too.

  At first Charlie didn't explore much. His leg bothered him every day. It was weak, and the ground was uneven. He saddled Babe and rode her a few times, but the two of them scared off the wildlife. And the longer he was there, the more Charlie wanted to see the animals that Cait had talked about. So he began leaving Babe behind and going out on his own.

  He preferred hiking. It was easier to see, to stop, to listen.

  This world was completely different from the one he knew. He might as well have been on another planet. Weaned on concrete and broken glass, window bars and concertina wire, Charlie now saw mountain peaks and prairie grasses, frolicking horses and ambling cattle.

  He shot photo after photo, feeling like a kid in a candy store.

  A lot of them were garden-variety calendar shots. Pretty pictures of the sort that he used to disdain. But where he once looked for despair and pain and inhumanity and, with his camera, trapped it, now he saw more.

  His eye found beauty in the opening of a flower, in the soaring of a hawk, in the gathering bank of clouds that presaged a summer storm.

  Now that he'd seen the "wilds" of Montana, he found another reason to be grateful he hadn't been killed four months ago—he not only wouldn't have had Cait, he'd have missed all this.

  For a week Cait waited for the other shoe to drop.

  She came around corners warily, always expecting to see Charlie. She picked up the phone nervously, sure that she would hear him there.

  But days turned into a week without a sign of him. One week turned into two and he wasn't anywhere.

  Not anywhere here.

  She almost felt as if she'd dreamed the whole thing.

  "What were you on about?" Steve had asked her. "Calling in the middle of the night like that?"

  "You were right. It was just the Callahans' baby. I was thinking. That's all."

  "Well, think about setting a wedding date, then," Steve said.

  "Yes," Cait agreed. "I'll do that. Maybe this weekend we can—"

  But just then Steve's beeper went off.

  Each day Charlie moved a little farther afield. His leg got stronger.

  He would always limp, the doctor had told him. But with each hike, his stamina improved, his muscles strengthened, and the next time he went out, he walked farther still.

  He had rarely walked anywhere when he was back home. Why would he, when he had his Porsche?

  The car had been one of his most fervent youthful dream
s. Chase had had a Porsche when Charlie had first met him. It had been stolen and Charlie had found it, then helped Chase steal it back. It was the moment he and Chase had bonded, for real.

  After that he'd deliberately patterned his life after Chase's. And when he could afford it, the Porsche was the first thing he bought.

  He couldn't understand Chase selling his Porsche after he married Joanna. But just as Chase had moved beyond the Porsche to a more family oriented vehicle, so Charlie began to think for the first time that maybe the Porsche wasn't what he wanted anymore, either.

  It certainly didn't do as well on country gravel as Otis's old Suburban.

  A red Ford truck had a certain appeal, too.

  So did Babe, though he didn't ride her much. He talked to her every night when he went down to the pasture to give her a sugar cube or two.

  She was the only one he talked to.

  He could have called anyone on his cell phone. He shut it off. If Gaby wanted to call, she could leave a message with Brenna and Jed.

  He didn't want to be bothered. He had a new rhythm to his life.

  The strangeness he'd found the first day didn't seem so strange a few days later. The quiet didn't even seem so quiet. Nature had sounds and rhythms all its own. It just took a different sort of hearing to pick them up.

  Six months ago he'd have been drumming his fingers, itching to be moving, eager to get back to where the action was.

  Now he liked this action. He liked this place.

  And even though he didn't see her, didn't talk to her, didn't even pretend to believe she wanted to see or talk to him again, he felt connected to Cait.

  It was her stories that ran through his head as he went to sleep at night. Her words, her memories came back to him as he hiked the mountains during the day.

  It was as if she was with him, walking beside him, sharing her home.

  It was the knowledge that all this beauty was here waiting for her that kept her going, she'd once told him. If she'd thought the whole world was as strife-ridden and anguished as the part she saw every day, she had confessed one night, she couldn't have borne it.