Cowboy Take Me Away (5 page)

As they headed back to Rainbow Valley, Luke stared out the passenger window. Shannon watched him out of the corner of her eye. Being in a compromised position brought out the defensiveness in him, and she hated it. She wanted him to put aside all the tough-guy crap and just be truthful with her. That was all.

But as the miles passed, she realized that
wasn’t
all.

Memories were one thing. Having the flesh-and-blood man who starred in those memories sitting beside her was another thing entirely. She had the sudden irrational thought that he’d turn around and she’d see it in his eyes—everything he’d felt for her all those years ago. But just as quickly, she banished the thought. She was no fool. That was never going to happen. But for some reason, the emotional side of her brain wasn’t buying that. One image after another flashed through her mind of that summer, making her nerves tighten and her pulse quicken as if she was living it all over again.

“How much is a night at the Bluebonnet Inn?” Luke asked, breaking the silence.

“Uh…at least a hundred and fifty, I think.”

He turned to her with an astonished expression. “A hundred and fifty dollars? For a dinky motel room in Rainbow Valley?”

“It’s the end of tourist season. The rates are still high.”

He exhaled, and she sensed his frustration. He tapped his fingertips against his thigh, his eyes shifting as if his mind was hard at work.

“Can you stop by an ATM?” he said finally. “I’m a little low on cash.”

“They’ll take credit cards at the motel.”

Luke frowned. “That’s not an option.”

She wondered why. Bad credit? No credit? Card at its limit? “Okay. There’s an ATM at the savings and loan. I’ll swing by it.”

Twenty minutes later, she turned her truck from the highway onto the road leading to Rainbow Valley. She turned onto Rainbow Way, pulled up in front of the savings and loan, and brought her truck to a halt. The ATM was just outside the double glass doors.

Luke got out and grabbed his crutches from the bed of the truck. When he reached the ATM, he pulled out his card, only to stop short and stare at the machine. His shoulders slumped, and he shook his head. After a moment, he smacked the machine with the heel of his hand and spit out a few curse words. Then he returned his card to his wallet and came back out to the truck.

“Problems?” she said.

“It’s temporarily unavailable.”

“Yeah, that happens a lot. So what do you want to do now?”

He tapped his fingertips on his thigh again, his lips tight with frustration. “I’ll stay at my father’s house.”

Shannon winced. She couldn’t bear the thought of anybody having to stay in that house for five minutes, much less all night.

“But I’d be happy to loan you the money,” she said.

“No, thanks.”

“But you said you don’t have enough cash for a room.”

“That’s right.”

“The ATM will probably be fixed by tomorrow, and you can pay me back.”

“I told you I’m staying at my father’s house.”

“Now, why would you want to do that when—”

“Enough, Shannon. I’m through talking about it.”

“But—”

“Will you just shut the hell
up
?”

He turned away, blowing out an angry breath. For at least thirty seconds, neither one of them spoke. The air between them was thick with tension, and Shannon hated it. All she’d tried to do was help him, and he treated her like this? She had a fleeting thought that he was just like Manny. Corner him, and he came out biting.

“Well, then,” she said finally, yanking the truck into gear, “I guess we’re going to your father’s house.”

She turned back onto Rainbow Way, taking the corner a little sharper than necessary, then hitting the gas.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said.

Shannon was silent.

“I appreciate the offer,” he went on. “But I don’t borrow money. Not just from you. From anyone.”

“Sure, Luke. Whatever you say.”

By the time Shannon turned onto his father’s property and headed down the gravel road, the sun had dipped below the horizon, and daylight was fading fast. She rounded the grove of trees to find that the house looked even worse in the faint twilight. A full moon had risen, shining through the dying oak tree and casting eerie shadows across the withered siding.

Shannon pulled her truck alongside the front porch. As Luke stared at the house, his throat convulsed with a hard swallow, and he gripped the armrest so hard that veins stood out on the back of his hand.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He whipped around. “Wrong? Nothing’s wrong.”

Shannon wanted to hold on to her anger, but when she saw Luke’s face, it slowly slipped away. Nobody should have to stay in a place like that. For any reason.

“You know,” Shannon said, “I just happened to think. George quit a few weeks ago, I haven’t been able to find anybody to take his place, so the caretaker’s apartment is empty. Why don’t you just stay there tonight?” She forced a smile. “Of course, I can’t guarantee you won’t end up sharing your bed with a really pushy cat.”

“No. This will be just fine.”

Her smile faded. “Luke,” she said, her voice hushed, “look at that place. I mean—” She exhaled. “Surely you don’t want to stay there, do you?”

His eyes narrowed, his expression turning cold and bitter. “Why not? After all, I stayed there for eighteen years, didn’t I?”

He yanked open the door and got out, putting minimal weight on his injured knee. He grabbed the crutches from the bed of her pickup and headed for the house. He made his way up the steps, carefully sidestepping the gaping hole in the porch decking.

He stopped at the door. Reached for the doorknob. Strangely, though, he didn’t go inside. Instead, he pulled his hand back. He dropped it to his side, flexing his fingers. After a moment, he reached for the doorknob again, his hand hovering over it.

And again he pulled it back.

In that moment, Shannon realized the truth.
He can’t do it. He can’t even step inside that house.

Luke looked back over his shoulder. In the weak light of dusk, their eyes met, and even with the distance between them, she could feel his hesitancy. His indecision.

His desire to be anywhere else.

Finally he turned away from the door. He hobbled back across the porch and down the steps. But instead of going to her truck, he headed for his. Shannon opened the door of her truck and stepped out.

“Luke! What are you doing?”

“Can’t stay,” he said brusquely. “I forgot I had the utilities turned off. No lights, no air conditioning.” He got into his truck, shoving the crutches into the passenger area beside him.

“But you shouldn’t drive. The doctor said—”

He slammed the driver’s door.

“Money,” Shannon said. “What about money?”

Luke started the engine and pulled away from the house. He hit the gas hard enough that his tires spun on the gravel, then caught traction and propelled the truck up the road to disappear around the bend. Frustration ran wild inside her.
Will you stop being a fool? For God’s sake, let me help you!

But that wasn’t going to happen. It had to hurt like hell to drive, but he was doing it anyway. And that meant he was still holding a grudge. A big one.

Fine. If that’s the way you want it, good-bye and good riddance!

But as she watched his taillights disappear into the darkness, she felt the most uncanny sense of loss, as if there was something left undone. Something she should have said and hadn’t. But if he’d been standing in front of her right then, she wouldn’t have had a clue what to say.

She got back into her truck, put it in gear, and started back up the road to the highway. Just before she rounded the thick stand of trees, she glanced in her rearview mirror. At the angle she was at, she could just make out a window on the side of the house. Probably a bathroom window, given how high it was.

And light shone through it.

She told herself he couldn’t bring himself to turn the doorknob, much less stay the night, because his father had died there. Rumor had it that he’d been found face down in the kitchen, still clutching an empty whiskey bottle. She understood how hard it was to face losing a loved one, but there had been no love lost between Luke and his father. And the Luke she knew was grounded enough in reality that a fear of lingering spirits, even in that god-a
wfu
l house at nightfall, wasn’t even a possibility.

So what had kept him from opening that door?

L
uke still felt bleary from the anesthesia he'd been given during his knee surgery, but that didn’t stop the woman’s voice from stabbing at his nerves like a knife through a butcher’s block. He still couldn’t believe he’d gotten trapped in the passenger seat of her Volvo station wagon for the drive back to his motel, but in the end, he hadn’t had much choice.

During his preoperative consultation, they told him that even though it was minor surgery, he’d have just enough anesthesia in his system that he’d be a hazard behind the wheel. But that was no problem, they said, because they had volunteers from local churches who’d be happy to transport him. In Luke’s mind, “volunteer” became “social worker,” then “charity,” then “handout,” and he’d had enough of those things to last him a lifetime. So he decided a cab would be in order. Unfortunately, it had cost him nearly fifty bucks to make the trip from his motel on the outskirts of Austin to the hospital, with a tip on top of that. So for the ride home, he decided to swallow the way he felt about the whole thing and go with Church Lady. She talked ninety miles an hour at the same time she drove about thirty, which made him wonder why her words weren’t already ten miles down the road.

“So how are you feeling?” Church Lady asked in a voice so chipper she made Alvin the Chipmunk sound like Hannibal Lecter. “Any pain? Did you take the Percocet the doctor gave you? They always give Percocet. I know men think they should just endure the pain, but if the doctor prescribes it, you simply must take it.”

“I don’t need any pain medication,” Luke told her.

“Oh, but you do! You need to stay ahead of the pain. Even if it doesn’t hurt much now, it might in an hour, but if you wait until then to take the pain medication and it takes an hour to work, you’ll end up suffering needlessly.”

No. Lack of Percocet did not equal suffering. Right now his knee was about a one where pain was concerned. What was a ten? Getting slammed into a fence by a bull named Holy Roller and breaking three ribs, his wrist, and his collarbone.

Now,
that
was pain.

The night Luke left Rainbow Valley, he’d driven back to Austin, found an ATM that was working, and drew out some cash. Then he checked into the Starlight Motel on Highway 23 several miles east of Austin, the cheapest motel he could find where the plumbing worked and he didn’t have to carry a gun. His knee had hurt like a son of a bitch, but staying at the shelter hadn’t been an option. He had no idea why Shannon had offered him the caretaker’s apartment, except that taking in helpless strays was her forte, and she clearly saw him as just one more.

A few minutes later, Church Lady pulled into a parking space in front of room 14. Her wide-eyed gaze fanned across the rooms facing the parking lot, taking in the crumbling cinder blocks, peeling paint, and cracked sidewalks. Judging from the look on her face, her charitable heart was at war with her sense of self-preservation.

“Thanks so much,” Luke said. “I can take it from here.”

“Nonsense,” she said, focusing once again on her God-given mission.”You need help inside.”

She got out, circled the car, and opened the back passenger door. She grabbed Luke’s crutches and handed them to him. He headed for his motel room, where he unlocked the door and went inside. She came to the doorway and stopped, her eyes growing wide all over again. But given the state of the room, could he really blame her?

A gold chenille bedspread lay in lumps across the saggy double bed, its threads pulled as if a cat had attacked it. The carpet was blotchy with unidentifiable stains. Scattered on the walls were starving-artist-quality oil paintings of sea-swept coastlines in lurid shades of blue and orange.

“I know you’re supposed to stay off your knee, so I went by the church this morning and picked up some reading material to help you pass the time,” Church Lady said. “We have a swap. Bring one, take one.”

That’s what televisions are for.
“Thank you,” Luke said. “That’s real sweet.”

She laid magazines and a newspaper on the nightstand. “Now, as for food—”

“All I needed was a ride. I’m going to be just fine.”

“Well, I’d bring over a couple of casseroles, but since you’re in a motel room…”

Her voice faded away, as if she didn’t know what to do with herself when there wasn’t a kitchen, a fridge, and fussy furniture with doilies on the arms. She was just like the Church Ladies from his childhood, sixty-somethings in stretch pants and thin pastel sweaters with tiny pearl buttons, wearing beatific smiles as they dispensed canned food, used clothing, and prayers. But he hadn’t been very old before he’d been able to see right through them, as if their skin had melted away and he saw the judgmental bones beneath.

You’re such a sweet little boy
, they used to say to him at the thrift store, as his father was three aisles over, shoplifting jewelry and silverware and anything else he might be able to pawn.
Look at those beautiful brown eyes!

And then one of the ladies would stop folding hand towels and grab a Dum-Dum sucker from a jar at the register and hand it to him. As he stuck it in his mouth, they’d cluck to each other in hushed tones about how sad it was that such a beautiful little boy had a father like Glenn Dawson. Looking back, Luke figured the ladies knew his father paid for only about half of what he walked out of the store with, but none of them had the nerve to stop him. Luke overheard one of those charitable ladies say once that Glenn Dawson was a hard-edged man with cold, dead eyes that made nice folks think they were staring straight into the face of the devil. And from that moment on, that was exactly what Luke saw when he looked at his own father.

Then he got older, and all that sweetness they saw in that little boy turned into wariness, soon to become anger and resentment. One summer when he was twelve, he grew four inches and became a hundred times more insolent. After that, nobody said he was sweet anymore.

It was on this woman’s face, too, that smile that said she was ready to help, willing to help, it was her
heavenly assignment
to help, but he knew what she was thinking.
You have nobody.
That’s pitiful. Why are you in this terrible place with nobody to help you?

He believed she truly felt bad for him. But he’d come so far from being that person for whom other people felt bad, and he never wanted to go back there again. The truth was that he didn’t
need
anybody. He was making his own way in this world, climbing that sharp, craggy mountain to the summit, where people would be forced to look up to him whether they liked it or not.

Luke thanked the woman again, and she finally left. Still feeling a little woozy, he sat down on the bed, leaned against the headboard, and closed his eyes. Come hell or high water, he was climbing back on a bull the first week of November.

But in the meantime, how was he going to make ends meet?

He opened his eyes and looked around the room. Even at the price of this place, he couldn’t afford to stay much longer. He had plenty of friends, but they were other cowboys who were on the road most of the year and no more stable than he was. They were a great bunch of guys who’d help out anybody in a crisis, but you didn’t ask if there was any other way. What Luke needed most was money, and he’d be a dead man before he went begging for that.

If only he could get a job, at least he could support himself. Unfortunately, he was qualified to do only one thing besides riding bulls, and that was ranch work. But roping and bulldogging would only aggravate his damaged knee further right now. Even if he could find another job, it would likely involve heavy manual labor, and it was going to be a few weeks before he’d be able to use his knee the way he was supposed to. Still, he’d tried going to a few job search websites on his phone to look for other possibilities, but since this crappy little motel didn’t have Wi-Fi, he’d chewed through his minutes faster than a pit bull gnawing through a T-bone.

Then he’d thought about Bubba Daniels, who had quit the circuit two years ago after his fifth concussion, taking it as a sign that he was pushing his luck. Thinking he might have a spare bunk, Luke had called him, only to find out that Bubba had gotten married, left his family ranch in southern Idaho, and was living in an apartment in Boise selling used cars. The most unsettling feeling had come over Luke, as if Bubba’s future would be his, too, if he lost the championship. Sooner or later he’d be wearing a bad suit and persuading people to buy beat-up cars with more miles on them than the space shuttle.

Then he turned and saw the Austin newspaper Church Lady had left on the nightstand. He picked it up and flipped to the Help Wanted section, which consisted of exactly half a page of ads. Waiter at Red’s Barbecue? Not if he couldn’t walk for hours on end. Receptionist for a real estate company? Yeah, he could answer a phone, but he didn’t quite fit the expectation of what a receptionist was supposed to look like. Nursing, no…accounting, no…forklift operator? He could probably learn that pretty quickly, except there were probably a hundred other guys ahead of him who could already drive one with their eyes closed.

Frustrated, he started to toss the paper down, only to have something in the “Miscellaneous” section catch his eye.

Caretaker at an animal shelter?

Minimum wage plus small apartment. Frequent late hours. Must enjoy working with animals and be willing to relocate to Rainbow Valley.

He stared at the ad, but it took several seconds for his brain to react.

The caretaker’s job would solve every problem he had.

It would give him a place to live. A small salary. It would be a few weeks before he could do much physical labor, but in the meantime, he knew of a dozen smaller tasks he could take care of around there. Shannon was clearly having trouble filling the job, or she wouldn’t have advertised in the newspaper of a town an hour away, so when it came to hiring him, she might actually—

He dropped the newspaper to his lap. Wait a minute. Was he actually
considering
this? He’d injured his knee, not his head. He’d kissed that place good-bye for the last time, and he wasn’t going back.

A few minutes later, Luke’s phone rang. He checked the caller ID. There was no name, and he didn’t recognize the number. He hit the
Answer
button.

“Luke Dawson.”

“Hey, Luke,” a woman’s voice said. “It’s been a while.”

For a moment, Luke wasn’t sure whom he was talking to. Then all at once, light dawned.
Crap.
Why the hell had he answered his phone?

“Mary Lou? How did you get this number?”

“Now, if I told you that, I’d be revealing my journalistic secrets.”

Journalistic secrets, hell. She was a blogger, not Dan Rather. The self-proclaimed Queen of the Buckle Bunnies, she chased after rodeo cowboys with all the subtlety of a honey badger going after a cobra, then blogged about her exploits. Her bait? Tightly toned abs from hours at the gym, bronzed skin from over-tanning, denim skirts up to her ass, and enough sparkles and spangles to make a Vegas showgirl jealous.

“I can’t talk right now,” he said.

“Now, I kinda doubt that, honey, seeing as how you’re laid up the way you are. Couldn’t believe it when I saw you on the injury list, and you weren’t even riding when it happened.”

“Minor injury. Just twisted my knee a little.”

“I hear you canceled out of both Albuquerque and Carson City in addition to Phoenix. How much longer are we talking?”

“You’ll see me again soon enough.”

“Better make it quick. Carter Hanson’s telling everybody he’s going to pass you up in prize money and then take the world title.”

Just the mention of that name made Luke grit his teeth. “He’s got a ways to go before he’ll ever overtake me.”

“He seems to think it’s a done deal.”

“That’s because Carter’s full of crap.”

“He does like to talk big, that’s for sure. But he also has a shot at the title, depending on how long you’re out.”

It was going to be longer than Luke was letting on, but that was nobody’s business but his. He just prayed that in the meantime he could hold on to a spot in the top ten. The very idea that a self-important little bastard like Carter Hanson could take the title instead of him made his blood boil.

“So where are you staying?” Mary Lou asked.

“I’d just as soon keep that to myself.”

“I could visit. Help you recuperate.” Her voice dropped an octave. “I could do all kinds of things for you.”

“No, thanks,” Luke said. “But I do appreciate the offer.”

“I could give the term ‘physical therapy’ an entirely new meaning.”

“Sorry. Can’t.”

“Come on, Luke,” she said, her voice slipping from sexy right down into carnal. “You and me…we go way back.”

“I said I can’t. Not right now.”

“Then you just say when, honey, and I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

“Actually, Mary Lou, by ‘not right now,’ I mean ‘not ever.’”

There was silence on the line, and when she spoke again, her tone was icy. “Well, then. Maybe I’ll give Carter a call instead. After all, I hate losers. If you don’t get your ass back on the circuit, that’s exactly what you’re going to be.”

When the line went dead, Luke tossed his phone aside, trying not to let Mary Lou’s call affect him. And it might not have, if only she hadn’t spoken Carter Hanson’s name.

Luke flipped on the TV. Watched a little sports news. His mind drifted, and pretty soon his gaze went back to that newspaper. A week ago he hadn’t even wanted to stay overnight in Rainbow Valley, and now he was considering staying for months?

No. No way.

He ignored the issue through the whole Rangers game, but by the time it was over, he was thinking about the caretaker job all over again. He’d be getting paid just enough to put food on his table and gas in his truck to get to and from Austin for physical therapy. And he’d have a place to stay that didn’t cost him a dime. It could keep him afloat until the World Championship, at which time he intended to beat the crap out of Carter Hanson and then laugh all the way to the bank. It was the perfect solution.