A COWBOY'S PROMISE Read online

  Cait grabbed the video out of the VCR and stuffed it in her tote bag. Then she strode across the room. "I'm ready," she said bluntly.

  Charlie turned his smile on her. "So am I."

  She steeled herself against it, then turned to Maddie and Angie. "See you next week."

  "Yes," Maddie said, then took Charlie's hand. "Thanks from my old knees."

  Angie grabbed his other hand. "You're coming back next week, aren't you?" This from the girl who hadn't wanted to be there in the first place.

  Charlie slanted a glance in Cait's direction. "If she'll let me."

  Cait's jaw tightened, and she had to force herself to smile. "As long as you don't upset things."

  "He won't!" Angie assured her eagerly. "He's a big help."

  Cait raised her brows in a look of polite skepticism.

  But Maddie smiled as she gave Cait's hand a squeeze. "He's a big help," she agreed.

  Cait wasn't so sure about that. She knew all about being led on by Charlie Seeks Elk, who, even when he had no intention of doing so, had a disastrous effect on the opposite sex.

  "Come on, Angie," Maddie said now. "We've got to get going."

  "You're coming, right?" Angie insisted, looking imploringly at Charlie.

  He gave a quick nod. "If it helps, I'll be here."

  Satisfied for the moment at least, Angie left with Maddie, actually smiling for the first time since Cait had met her.

  "Well, you've certainly made an impression on her," she said gruffly, leading the way out of the classroom and down the corridor.

  Charlie fell into step beside her. "Nice to make an impression on someone."

  "Just don't be leading her on."

  "I don't lead women on."

  "You might not try to. Sometimes it just happens. And Angie is susceptible."

  "I've got the point," Charlie said. He paused. "Where's her man?"

  Cait snorted. "He's not much of a man. He took off when he found out she was pregnant. Then her family kicked her out. She lived with a girlfriend for a while, then she started flirting with the girlfriend's boyfriend and got kicked out of there. She ended up in Bozeman and someone got hold of Martha Reese. Martha is a social worker. She got Maddie to take her in. Maddie's been bringing her here, trying to convince her to help herself and to take care of herself. She hasn't been exactly willing."

  "I know the feeling," Charlie said with such quiet intensity that Cait looked sideways at him. His jaw was tight and there was a grim look in his eyes. She remembered what he'd told her about his own past and realized that he would feel a certain empathy for Angie.

  "Then you realize how vulnerable she is."

  Charlie nodded.

  Cait hoped so. She didn't want to see Angie hurt further. The girl already had a big enough chip on her shoulder, and whatever Maddie and she and Martha had tried to do for her had fallen on deaf ears.

  "Where do you want to go to eat?" Charlie asked when they reached the parking lot.

  Cait had given that considerable thought. It had to be the right setting. She knew Charlie wouldn't settle for any of the fast-food places tonight, and she didn't want to go to a more expensive, intimate restaurant. That would make this look—and feel—too much like the date it wasn't.

  "The Barrel," she told him. "It's a place to go with a friend."

  "It's a bar," he protested.

  "How do you know?" she said, surprised.

  "I've been there." He didn't explain further, just scowled, then shrugged. "If that's what you want, let's go." He started toward the silver Porsche he had obviously traded for Otis's Suburban tonight.

  But Cait wasn't riding in any Porsche with Charlie. "I'll meet you there."

  He scowled again, but finally he nodded. "Suit yourself."

  "Yes." Cait was determined she would.

  The Barrel was noisy and cheerful. There were pool games going on in the back and a crowded bar up front. Many of the tables were filled, and Cait seemed to know a lot of people there. She stopped to talk to half a dozen, casually introducing him as a friend from L.A. whom she'd met overseas. It seemed to him she came down harder than necessary on the word friend.

  Everybody nodded and said hello. One or two of the women looked at him with that sort of look that good-looking men come to recognize after a while. It said they were interested. And one or two of them were pretty enough to interest most men.

  Not him.

  "Come join us," one of them, a sweet-smiling brunette, invited.

  Cait smiled. "Thanks. We'd love—"

  "—to, but we've got some catching up to do." Charlie gave the woman a nod and a smile, took hold of Cait's arm and steered her right on past.

  "How rude was that?" Cait muttered.

  "I don't know. How rude was it?" Charlie found them a relatively secluded table, pulled out the chair facing away from the room so she couldn't spend time looking for a little help from her friends, and waited until she had no alternative but to sit in the chair he held for her.

  Like the gentleman he could be when he chose, he pushed it in for her and took the seat opposite. "There now. Isn't this nice?"

  Cait looked as if she didn't know what to say to that.

  Charlie was pleased. "I liked your class."

  "Makes you want to run right out and have a baby, hmm?"

  "Made me aware of how strong women are. I'd never seen a baby born before."

  Chase had told him that, after his firstborn twins, Emerson and Alexander, arrived, if he'd known what labor really meant he would never have got Joanna pregnant.

  Charlie, a clueless nineteen-year-old at the time, hadn't given it much thought. Sex was fun, that was all he knew. That it could be better when people loved each other, he'd supposed might be true. At least Chase and Joanna's relationship seemed to imply that it was. But the consequences for the woman had never really hit home until he watched that video tonight.

  He couldn't quite imagine watching Cait go through that.

  "It's hard work," he said, which was putting it mildly.

  Cait nodded. "But it's only the start. Raising them is harder."

  "Yeah." He smiled faintly. "Just ask mother bear."

  "Did you see her again?"

  He nodded. "This afternoon. Your dad showed me a good spying spot."

  She looked startled. "My dad?"

  "Yeah. He came by this morning just as I was leaving to look for the bears again." He could tell that surprised her. "Why? Don't you want us fraternizing?"

  But she looked bewildered, not angry. "I'm just … I can't imagine what he was doing up there." She shook her head. "He's barely left the house since he got home from the hospital after his heart attack."

  "I thought that was last summer."

  "Last fall. He was in the hospital until early October. He came home right before round-up. He wasn't well enough to do that, and after round-up it was cold, and I didn't encourage him. I thought he'd start doing things again come spring. But he didn't. He's just been sitting at home staring out the window or…" She paused and didn't finish the sentence. "He actually came up to the cabin? Did he say what he was doing up there?"

  "Came to check on some cattle, he said."

  Cait stared. "He didn't drive his truck? He rode?" Now she looked alarmed.

  Charlie shrugged. "He seemed to do all right. We rode up to some creek above your pasture and then we walked and—"

  Her jaw sagged. "He walked?"

  "He's not at death's door, Cait!" Charlie protested, but now he was starting to get worried, too.

  "I need to call him," Cait said. "To see if he's all right. Whatever did you say to him yesterday that would have made him do that?"

  "What did I say to him?"

  But she had jumped up and was heading for the phone, leaving Charlie to hurry after her.

  Walt answered the phone. From the conversation, at first solicitous and concerned on Cait's end and finally terse, Charlie gathered that Walt had assured Cait that he was fine. "I a
m not fussing!" she protested. "Fine. Goodbye."

  She got off the phone a few minutes later looking miffed and perplexed both. "He acts like it was a perfectly normal thing for him to do," she muttered, heading back to their table.

  Charlie shrugged. "Maybe it was."

  But Cait was shaking her head. "To just get up after all these months and go see you to show you where he'd seen some bears?" Cait's eyes narrowed. "What did you talk about?"

  "Bears."

  "That's all?"

  He thought about it. "My book," he added after a moment. "And Vietnam."

  "He talked to you about Vietnam?"

  "Yeah."

  The waitress came over then and took their orders. When she left, Cait looked right at him and said, "He's never talked to anyone about Vietnam."

  Charlie lifted his shoulders. "Sometimes it takes a while. You know as well as I do that what you see in places like that isn't something you come home and blab about."

  Cait nodded. "Yes, but…" She paused. "But your book showed what it was like." She murmured the words, hesitated, then asked, "What did he say?"

  "Just talked about how different everything was. The noises. The colors. How vivid it was. Like technicolor. Not the real world. Another world. Another universe."

  Charlie had understood completely. Sometimes the places he'd been and the things he'd seen had seemed that way to him, too.

  The waitress brought their beers and he wrapped a hand around his glass. "He talked about the people. Guys in his outfit. People who lived there. A teacher he'd met. He asked if I ever got close to the people where I worked."

  Their eyes met, and there was no doubt they were both remembering how close they'd been.

  Then abruptly Cait looked away. She picked up her glass and turned her head to stare across the room, to watch the pool players and the barmaids. The jukebox moaned a loved-'em-and-left-'em song.

  Charlie ran his tongue over his lips. "We talked about Resi."

  It seemed, for just an instant, as if there was the hard click of pool ball on pool ball—and then silence.

  He laid his hands flat on the table and looked across it at her. "We haven't talked about Resi."

  She swallowed. Her knuckles were white on her glass. She lifted her shoulders in a tiny shrug, as if doing any more than that would hurt too much. It hurt him to see it. He knew he deserved to be hurt.

  "Why should we talk about Resi," she said evenly after a moment.

  "Because she matters."

  "To me."

  "And to me, too. Though," he admitted, "I was afraid to let her matter too much."

  She looked surprised, but she didn't say anything.

  "Your dad says some friends of yours adopted her?"

  Cait nodded. "Morse and his wife."

  Charlie stared. "Morse? Morse Griffin? Mr. I'm-on-the-Next-Plane-Out-of-Here Griffin? Mr. Nothing-Touches-Me Griffin?"

  "Resi touched him," Cait said simply.

  He just sat there, stunned. Of all the people they'd known in Abuk who might have done such a thing, Morse Griffin was the last person Charlie would have expected to do it. Although he was married, Morse seemed to have had even itchier feet that Charlie had.

  "Are they … is it…" He couldn't seem to find the words. "Are you all right with that?"

  "Of course I'm all right with it," Cait said sharply. "Morse and Jeannie are good parents."

  "Yeah, but…" His voice trailed off and he shook his head. "You wanted…"

  "I wanted to adopt her. But I was single, and that wasn't going to fly. The government had certain requirements."

  "Yeah. But Morse? I never would have figured." Charlie gave another disbelieving half laugh. "He didn't have a near-death experience, did he?"

  "Not exactly." The waitress arrived then, bringing them steaks and salad. Cait waited until she had departed before continuing. "Part of Morse's being on the go all the time wasn't because he loved it so much. It was to avoid being home."

  Charlie cocked a brow. "And now that they have Resi, that's all changed?" It didn't seem likely.

  But Cait nodded. Her eyes softened. "Actually, yes." She smiled faintly. "Because he was finally able to give Jeannie what she wanted—a child."

  Charlie stared. The song was a hard-driving Brooks and Dunn number now. Someone was whooping at the bar. He sat very still, thinking it through. "You mean … Jeannie wanted kids and … Morse couldn't have 'em?"

  Cait folded her hands on the table. "Yes."

  The implications of that took a moment to sink in. "Whoa."

  "It happens," Cait said almost defensively. "It doesn't make him less of a man."

  Intellectually Charlie agreed with her. But he was a man—and he could guess how the knowledge that he was shooting blanks would make Morse feel.

  He sat back in his chair, took a breath and let it out slowly. "A guy would have to come to terms with it," he said at last. "And it might take a while."

  "It did. And I don't know that he would ever have considered adoption if it hadn't been Resi. But she was there … needing a home … and well, when you stopped coming in to see her, he started. It just sort of went from there."

  Morse was the one he'd roped into grabbing his news van and taking him to the airport the morning he'd left. All the way there Morse had badgered him about where he was going, asking where on earth there was more devastation than they were seeing right there.

  He'd thought Charlie was running to something, not away.

  Finally at the airport he'd looked at Charlie narrowly and said, "There isn't anything urgent out there, is there?"

  And Charlie had shrugged. "Just … gotta get away."

  Morse had understood. Morse had stepped in. He'd done what Charlie couldn't do.

  And he was now Resi's father.

  "He never said," he muttered.

  "It's not the sort of thing people talk about except to their nearest and dearest," Cait pointed out. "And sometimes not even then."

  "Yeah." Charlie's steak was getting cold, and the waitress came and asked if everything was all right. He nodded and started to eat. It was good, he supposed. But he didn't taste it really. "Do you see them?" he asked finally.

  Cait smiled. It was a little wistful, but not really unhappy. "I saw them in February. They adopted a baby boy. Travis Mark. They're very happy."

  "Even Resi?"

  "Resi most of all. She's done very well. She's almost seven now, you know. Starting second grade in the fall. A big girl, she told Morse and Jeannie, and tired of being an only child. She wanted a baby sister or brother." Cait's smile grew lopsided. "She was ready to share. Travis is Resi's baby."

  Charlie could see tears in her eyes. He could feel them pricking behind the lids of his own. His throat squeezed shut on the steak he was trying to swallow. At least it saved him having to say something and the embarrassment of hearing his voice crack with emotion.

  "So," Cait said finally, briskly, "you did them a favor."

  "Yeah," Charlie said slowly.

  It wasn't all that comforting a thought.

  * * *

  Six

  « ^ »

  She had handled it well. All of it.

  She'd got through the birthing classes without letting Charlie see how aware of him she was. She'd survived last night's dinner at the Barrel very nicely. She'd even managed to talk about Resi with equanimity, stressing the positive aspects of her adoption. It was true, in fact, what she'd said when she told him he'd done them all a favor.

  He'd done her a favor, too.

  And she was determined to believe it.

  "Earth to Ms. Blasingame." A teasing male voice infiltrated her consciousness above the hospital hub-bub that she routinely tuned out.

  "Oh!" She glanced up from the paperwork she'd been staring at for the past ten minutes to see Steve grinning down at her. She shoved an escaping tendril of hair off her cheek and met his grin with a smile of her own. "Hi."

  "Hi, yourself. Glad I caught yo
u." He reached inside his shirt pocket, pulled out a much-folded piece of paper and held it out to her. "Here."

  Cait took it. "What's this?"

  "Guest list. The start, anyway."

  Cait, unfolding it, found her eyes widening. There were at least a hundred names. "The start?" she said when she had swallowed.

  "Doctors at the hospitals here and in Bozeman. Their wives. Our office staff. A couple of the guys I play golf with… I figured, since we were getting sort of a late start, I should come up with something pretty quick. I talked to my mother last night. She has another hundred or so."

  "Another … hundred?"

  "That's not a problem, is it?"

  "I, er, no. I just … hadn't given it a lot of thought." Frankly, thinking about it was terrifying. What did she know about planning a wedding?

  "I'll help," Steve said. "And my mother said she'd fly out from Boston any time you want her to. She's thrilled. She was sure I was playing some sort of practical joke on her when I said we were getting married but could never come up with a date."

  Cait had only met Steve's mother once. Carolyn Carmichael was The World's Most Organized Woman and she liked nothing better than to prove it by organizing people. Cait didn't need a human bulldozer right now, no matter how eager and well-intentioned she was.

  "Um, thanks." Cait managed a bright smile. "Tell her I'll be in touch. I … need to check some things out first."

  "Right." Steve dropped a kiss on her hair, started to leave, then turned back. "Don't worry about the rehearsal dinner."

  "Rehearsal dinner?" Cait hadn't even considered one. Steve grinned. "That's my responsibility, my mother says. We'll take care of that."

  She probably already had, Cait thought glumly. "Well, good. Something I can take off my list," she said with all the cheer she could muster.

  "I'll call you when I get a full list," Steve said. "And we can—"

  Mercifully whatever they were going to be able to do was cut off when his beeper sounded.

  "Gotta run. Talk to you later." He bent once more and gave her a swift kiss before hurrying off toward the operating room.

  Cait sat in silence staring at the list in her hand. Where on earth was she going to find a place to put two hundred of Steve's nearest and dearest friends and relatives? What was she going to feed them? Where would they all stay? A thousand panicky questions reeled through her mind.