The Cowboy (6 page)

There were two empty seats on the opposite side of the table. One had been occupied by Nolan. The other belonged to her sister Bayleigh, who was away completing her final year of clinical work toward her degree in veterinary medicine at Texas A&M. They had both been her allies in a household that was divided by the difficult financial choices that were constantly being forced upon them. Like the one they would have to make now.

“Your father has been telling me we can’t expect to recover the stolen fillies,” her mother said as Callie served herself a spoonful of scrambled eggs and two slices of bacon.

“It’s doubtful,” Callie conceded. She saw Freckles
Fancy in her mind’s eye, then thought of the playful filly cut up for steaks. Suddenly, she had no appetite.

“What are we supposed to do now?” Luke asked. “I told you we should have gotten some insurance.”

“We couldn’t afford insurance,” Callie reminded him. She heard the fear in Luke’s voice. At sixteen, her brother was old enough to understand the desperate nature of their financial situation, but still too young to be of any real help improving it. Callie took a deep breath and said, “We’ll just have to lease our pasture to hunters for the season.”

“No,” her father said in a hard voice. “I won’t have those corporate bigwigs from Dallas and Houston tramping around my property pretending to be the Great White Hunter and mistaking my fence posts for turkeys, my trucks for wild boar, and my cows for deer!”

Sam, Luke, and Eli laughed, and Callie couldn’t help smiling at the picture her father had painted. Actually, he wasn’t far off the mark. The corporate honchos from around the country who leased tracts of Texas pasture for hunting were likely to be novices. It was entirely possible they would lose a cow or two to a stray bullet or find one of their trucks peppered with buckshot pellets.

But they could earn far more leasing the land for hunting than they could putting it to use merely as pasture for cattle, and the land would do double duty if it were leased, since they could still use it to graze their stock. Unlike the Blackthornes, they had no oil under their land to provide a financial cushion in hard times.

“We need the money,” she said flatly.

“How much can we realistically expect to get if we lease the land to hunters?” Sam asked.

“The going rate is $10,000 per gun, per season, and that’s for a small pasture of ten thousand acres,” Callie said.

Luke whistled, and his brown eyes lit up. “We could make a fortune, Dad. I could get a Harley!”

“No motorcycle, Luke,” her mother said. “They’re too dangerous.”

Her father’s features remained obdurate. “We’d have strangers all over the damned place.”

“I think that’s a price we have to pay,” Callie said.

“Never.”

“What else can we do?” Callie asked.

“I’ll borrow from the bank,” her father said.

“They won’t loan us any more money. Three Oaks is mortgaged to the hilt. We’re in hock with every supplier we have. The market for beef is down, and without some form of income, now that the two-year-olds I planned to sell at the Futurity auction are gone, we’ll be lucky to make it past Christmas without going belly-up.”

“Blackjack did this,” her father muttered. “He stole those fillies. I know he did.”

“We don’t know that,” Callie said. “We certainly can’t prove it. Right now, we have to figure out how to replace our missing stock. And the best way to get some quick capital is to lease our pasture for hunting.”

To Callie’s surprise, her mother took her side in the argument. “Sometimes we have to make sacrifices,” she said. “Do what’s best, even if it isn’t what we’d like.”

The words were familiar to Callie, a refrain she’d heard all her life.
Sacrifices have to be made.
She had her mother as an example, who did without Vera Wang dresses or season tickets to the Houston Opera or a racy
little Mercedes Benz coupe or any of the other luxuries she might have expected from life on a ranch the size of Three Oaks—which was small only in comparison to an operation like the Bitter Creek Cattle Company—and never complained.

She admired her mother and had tried hard all her life to emulate her. “Mom’s right, Dad,” she said. “We have to do what’s necessary to survive, whether we like it or not.”

“It’s only for a year, Jesse,” her mother said.

“It’s only for a year, Jesse,” Callie’s four-year-old daughter chirped.

Her father’s eyes focused on Hannah’s tiny, cherubic face, before he met her mother’s steady gaze. Callie watched her father’s shoulders sag in defeat.

“Aw, hell,” he said. “Lease the damned land. I’ll roast in hell before I let Blackjack beat me.”

“All right, Dad. I’ll take care of it.” Callie had won, but she didn’t feel triumphant.

“The Ratter S put a Notice of Auction in the
Bitter Creek Chronicle
,” Sam said. “Dusty Simpson ought to have some pretty good stock we can buy at bargain prices.”

“Thanks, Sam,” Callie said.

“We might as well pick up whatever scraps Blackjack has left,” her father muttered.

“What do you mean?” Callie asked.

“Blackjack stole the Rafter S from Dusty Simpson the same way he’s been trying all these years to steal Three Oaks from me.”

“Dusty Simpson lost his ranch because he lost his leg in a car accident,” Callie said.

“What makes you think that ‘accident’ was an ‘accident’?” her father said, lifting a brow. “You only have to take one look at your brother to know the depths the Blackthornes will sink to when they want something. The only way Clay Blackthorne could become wide receiver for the Bitter Creek Coyotes was if Sam was out of the way. So Owen took care of the matter for him.”

“It was an accident,” Callie protested.

“Yeah,” her father said sarcastically. “Like Dusty Simpson ‘accidentally’ lost his leg in a hit-and-run. And those four fillies were ‘accidentally’ stolen a few months before the Futurity sale.”

Callie was disturbed by her father’s fixation on Jackson Blackthorne as the root of all evil. She couldn’t believe Blackjack would resort to such underhanded methods to get what he wanted. He was simply too rich to need Dusty Simpson’s small ranch. And though she didn’t doubt Blackjack wanted Three Oaks, he wasn’t entirely responsible for their current financial straits. As Owen had pointed out, Blackjack could hardly have much use for four two-year-old quarter horses. They wouldn’t even be eligible to enter the major cutting competitions for another year.

But her father’s suspicions were grounded on facts. Clay Blackthorne had become the wide receiver for the Bitter Creek Coyotes. Someone had managed to get a horse trailer in and out of Three Oaks without being noticed by anyone on Blackthorne property. And the Blackthornes had ended up with Dusty Simpson’s ranch.

“Too bad the days of frontier justice are past, when you could hang a horse thief,” her father said. “I’d pay
good money to see Jackson Blackthorne jerking at the end of a rope.”

Callie heard a gasp. Her gaze darted to her mother, whose eyes were wide with shock and dismay.

“There will be no more of that kind of talk,” she said.

“You can’t deny—”

“Jesse, please,” her mother said, cutting off her father.

“Jesse, please,” Hannah mimicked.

Callie clamped a hand over her daughter’s mouth. She could feel the tension stretching the distance of the table between her parents, like a piece of barbed wire strung too tight and ready to snap.

Callie had heard enough arguments between her parents over the years to know her father was still jealous of her mother’s long-ago relationship with Jackson Blackthorne. She had never even seen her mother speak to Blackjack, but to hear her father talk, their romance had never ended.

It was impossible for Callie to imagine her mother in love with Jackson Blackthorne. Even more difficult to imagine Blackjack in love with her mother. And if they’d been in love with one another, as her father suspected, why hadn’t they gotten married? To hear her father talk, all Blackjack would have needed to do was crook his finger, and her mother would have come running. So what had gone wrong?

Callie had never asked. Would never ask. And her mother had never volunteered to tell. But Callie couldn’t help wondering. Was rage over losing her mother the reason Blackjack seemed so determined to ruin them financially? Or was he merely carrying on the tradition begun by previous generations of Blackthornes and Creeds?

In the end, her father was no match for the pleading look in her mother’s eyes. “All right, Ren,” he said. “I’ll let it go … and see about getting some flak jackets for my cows.”

Her mother smiled. “Thank you, Jesse.”

“Will you come to the auction at the Rafter S with me, Dad?” Callie asked. “I could use your help.” With everything at risk, she didn’t want to make a mistake.

“Sure,” he said. “Count me in.”

“Can I come, Mom?” Eli asked.

“Can I come, Mom?” Hannah echoed.

“We’ll see,” Callie said.

“That means no,” Eli moaned. “Can I come, Grampa?”

“We’ll see,” he said with a smile and a glance at Callie.

Callie made a face at her father. Eli was more excited by a flashy-looking horse than one with the right bloodlines, but maybe she ought to take him along. It wasn’t too early for Eli to start learning what he needed to know. Someday he’d be helping Luke to manage the ranch.

Assuming Blackjack didn’t figure out a way to swallow Three Oaks whole … and spit the Creeds back out.

“I’
VE FOUND A HORSE
I
THINK CAN WIN THAT
bet for me,” Trace said. “He’s being auctioned here at the Rafter S this afternoon. I want your okay to buy him.”

Blackjack thumbed away the condensation on the ice-cold bottle of Lone Star that sat on the red-checked tablecloth before him, then looked up and said, “You’re wasting your time.”

“It’s my time.”

“But my money,” Blackjack pointed out.

Trace didn’t plead. He didn’t cajole. He didn’t demand. He kept his eyes shuttered, his body still, as though his father’s answer mattered not at all.

“All right. Go ahead,” Blackjack said at last. “If you see anything else you like, help yourself. I’ve got deep pockets.”

Trace forcibly held his tongue.

“Hey, Boss!” a cowboy called.

“What is it—”

“What do you want—”

Trace cut himself off, realizing he and Blackjack had
both answered the summons. Trace tipped his head, conceding the role to his father.

“What is it, Whitey?” Blackjack asked.

“Uh … I was …” The cowboy took off his sweat-stained hat and swatted it against his jeans, raising a cloud of dust.

“Spit it out,” Blackjack ordered.

“Trace said I was to come and get him when the auctioneer got around to the cutting stock,” the cowboy answered.

Trace felt his gut twist as an anguished look flickered briefly in his father’s eyes.

“You’ve delivered your message,” Blackjack said, dismissing the cowboy. He took one last swallow of his beer, then, without another word, shoved his chair back and headed toward the corral where Dusty Simpson’s stock was being sold. Trace followed a respectful step behind him.

Trace was more than willing to play the dutiful son for the benefit of their neighbors, not to mention the myriad strangers who’d shown up at the Rafter S wearing Larry Mahan hats, silver belt buckles, and ostrich boots. It seemed half the state of Texas was hoping to buy a small piece of Dusty Simpson’s life.

The auction had the look of an upscale fair, with a striped food tent that offered the choice of free champagne, cold beer, or iced tea with the catered barbecue. A clown entertained the children with balloon tricks, and bleachers had been set up near the corral where several girls in tight jeans and white hats handed out printed four-color brochures giving details of the sale. The late August day was sunny and hot, with no threat of rain.

“You two hold up there while I get your picture.”

“Sure, Mom.” Trace waited for his father to sling an arm around him and pull him close, as he might have when Trace was a boy, but Blackjack stuck his thumbs in his front pockets. Trace stood next to him, his hip cocked, as his mother snapped away with her Nikon. She did all of her paintings from photographs and had come along with them to the Rafter S, camera in hand, in search of a subject for her next work.

“Smile, Trace,” his mother coaxed

Trace tipped his hat back off his forehead and bared his teeth.

“You, too, Jackson,” his mother ordered his father, snapping away.

He and his father glanced at each other, saw the corresponding grimaces, and broke out laughing.

“Wonderful!” his mother said.

Trace’s gaze slid beyond his father to a commotion in front of the reviewing stands near the corral. A sorrel stallion with the numeral
2
painted on its hip was rearing, trumpeting its fear and rage as it struggled to pull free of the handler showing it off in the ring. Trace’s smile faded as he recognized the woman hauling a boy off his perch on the corral and out of harm’s way.

“Callie,” he murmured.