The Cowboy's Bride

Chapter Twelve

Will stood watching the town car go until it had disappeared.

Until Matthew Donnelly appeared at his side, watching the road, too. “I’m… terribly sorry, Will. It looks like I interrupted something important here.”

“It’s not your fault. It’s mine. It’s all mine.” Will ran a hand through his hair and down his face. He had to pull himself together. It was always going to be what it was. She was gone and that was that. “Let’s get that calf going. At least one thing can go right today.”

After they’d introduced the baby to the mama cow and took a few minutes to be sure they were good, they pushed the calf near the mama’s teat and she began to feed for the first time.

The relieved mama cow mooed and nuzzled the calf. “It’s the mama’s third time. She’s experienced with raising a calf. I know she’ll be a good mother,” Matthew said.

“We’re in your debt, Mr. Donnelly.”

“It’s Matthew, please. And you’re doing me a favor. A grieving cow is a bad thing. I’ve even lost some. So, this is the best of all worlds. I’m glad it worked out. Consider her on loan until that calf is weaned.” He clapped Will on the shoulder. “Again, I’m sorry if I got in the way of—”

“You didn’t,” Will assured him. “She was going to go either way.”

The older man took in the devastation in Will’s expression, even as he tried to hide it.

“An unsolicited piece of advice from an old widower? Sometimes the best conversation with a woman isn’t a conversation at all, but action.” He clapped Will on the back again, shook his hand, got in his truck and drove off.

Shay met him halfway to the house. She looked angry. “You’re just letting her go?”

“She’s not my captive. She’s free to go or stay. She chose to go.”

“Did you ask her to stay? Or did you just decide to let her go? Or was whatever was going on at the barn more important than any of that?”

“You, too?” Will said.

“Yeah, me, too. Because what is in your mind, Will? She’s crazy about you.”

“Obviously not.”

Shay threw up her hands. “Men. Are so dumb. And even though we’re twins, by the way, it’s like you come from another planet.”

“Yeah. Well, maybe I do. Maybe this was all a big mistake, like she said. And what makes you think she’s crazy about me?” he asked, unable to feign indifference.

“Because she told me… in so many words.”

“Without telling you. What did she say?”

“I asked her directly if she was in love with you and she almost started to cry. She said she would miss you when she left for her job in Seattle.”

“She doesn’t have a job in Seattle. She has nothing in Seattle. Not even a place to stay now, apparently.”

“I know. I’ve known from the beginning this story about you two was… sketchy. But I believed you when you said you were with her. Because you were.”

Will stared off at the horizon. “She was running from a bad wedding that didn’t happen and… things happened between us. Unexpected things.”

The Montana wind sifted through their hair, sweeping down from the Absaroka Mountains scenting the air with the smell of the rivers and prairie in between. He’d always loved the smell, but now it made him feel lost.

“Just answer me one question. Do you love her?”

Will shifted his feet, searching for an answer. “I might love her.”

“Might?” Shay prodded. “Then you are an idiot.”

“Thanks.” Will started back toward the house and Shay was right on his heels.

“You’re an idiot for letting this chance just walk away from you. When I know that’s not what she wanted. Or you, either. She felt humiliated in front of all of us, about the lie you told, which wasn’t even a lie but seemed like one. And you said nothing to make it better.”

“I tried. She wouldn’t—She clearly overheard a conversation I had this morning with Isaiah. My partner. And I might have said something about not wanting to be in a rebound relationship.”

“Uhhhghh,” Shay groaned. “So that’s why she was upset this morning.”

He stopped walking. “I screwed it up, okay? I was scared. After Kaylee and everything that’s happened. I just don’t… I can’t do that again.”

“Do you mean that?”

He swallowed thickly. “I don’t know.”

“Will, I’m not giving away any state secrets when I point out that you have trouble sharing your emotions. But scared is something we all feel. It’s a part of life. It’s risk. It’s do or die. Sometimes we’re the bug and sometimes we’re the windshield. But unless you try, you’ll just be alone. And I can tell you, you don’t want that. I don’t want that for you. I love you, but get it together, Will. If you lose her now, you’ll probably never find her again.” She pulled something from her back pocket. An envelope. “She left you this.”

He took it and opened it. A stash of bills, no doubt equaling the payment they’d agreed on at the start of this trip. He swore and closed it back up again.

“She said she left you a note,” Shay said.

He looked again and there was a small slip of paper tucked against the bills. He unfolded it and Shay touched his arm.

“They’re heading for the Bozeman airport.” She walked back to the house.

The note read—

GOODBYE, WILL. THANKS FOR ONE OF THE BEST WEEKS OF MY LIFE, IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING. NO HARD FEELINGS. TAKE CARE—ISABELLA.

He stared at the words until they blurred together. No hard feelings.

Damn.

Well, he had some feelings. He might not freaking be able to share them, but he had them! Anger, for one. Hurt, as well. And how about heartbreak? That, too. But one day, those feelings would pass, and he’d be left with only himself to blame for this fiasco.

He missed her already. He’d hurt her with those words to Isaiah. Ripped the possibility of them right out of her hands just as Theo had done before him. And why? Because he let fear make an end run on his pride. One minute he’d been holding her in his arms and the next she was gone.

Did she hate him now? She left, didn’t she? Without even giving him a chance to defend himself. He couldn’t blame her. But there was really no defense. He’d torpedoed them from below.

But he needed to say a thing or two before she disappeared from him forever.

He looked at his watch. The airport was a half hour away at best without any traffic over the pass. A quick search of flights to Seattle from the Bozeman airport on his phone said the next one left in little more than an hour and fifteen minutes. If she’d managed to get a seat on that one, he might not make it at all.

Liam appeared at the door to the house as Will went for his car.

“I need you!” Will called. “Come with me?”

Liam shifted on the doorstep, uncertain. “Need a wingman?”

“I’m gonna need more than that. And yeah, I could use one. I won’t have time to park the car.”

“You need a parking attendant, then.” Liam crossed his arms.

He shook his head. “I need my brother.”

“Oh.” He shrugged and joined Will at the car. “Well, then. Just so happens I’m pretty decent on at least one of those counts. Why don’t you tell me what’s really going on with you two?”

“Get in.”

*

Isabella had droppedher grandmother off at the Graff Hotel before going on to the airport in Bozeman. The trip had been a lot for Lucille, and she decided to wait until tomorrow to travel back to Dallas since Izzy wouldn’t allow her to come with her today. Words couldn’t express how much she loved her grandmother, not only for coming all the way to Montana to check on her, but for believing her when she told her she would be all right. No one had ever believed in her like Lucille did. And it would take all of that belief and self-confidence to do what she needed to do now—settle in a new town, make a new life, without anyone. Without Will.

In a strange way, she was grateful for this last week. For all its ups and downs, heartbreaks and happiness. It had drawn itself like a line in the sand of her life—before Theo and after. A defining line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. Between the old Izzy who accepted what she was given and the one who deserved more. She’d sworn off love for good, but in truth, she’d only just discovered what it could be.

Lucille was right about the randomness of love and how it could find you in unexpected ways. And even as she’d denied the possibility of happily ever after to her grandmother, there were, she realized, a million colors in between that were more than possible and looked entirely different from what she’d imagined for herself.

Did she want to do it all alone? No. Could she? Yes. Would it be hard? Absolutely. But when was growth ever easy?

Now, she sat at the gate as the flight attendants began readying the plane for boarding. All around her, families were traveling together. Couples, parents with babies, sisters, friends. She almost regretted not letting Lucille come with her, if only for company, while she figured out her life. But that was the point. She’d allowed herself to be codependent on her dysfunctional family and on relationships for too long.

No, it was better this way. Make the cut clean and quick. A bloodless wound.

Not quite bloodless. She actually felt like crying. Or drinking. Or both.

Gah!

He’d let her go without even a fight. Not that she’d expected one. Yes, you did. Not that it would have changed anything. Or it might have. At least it would have told her he cared.

She shook her head. Stop thinking about him. It’s over. It was a thing and now it’s just a thing that happened. Chalk it up to history. Or my biggest mistakes. Or memories I’ll box up for someday. Without any warning at all, tears gathered in her eyes. She blinked them away. Dumb. Don’t cry.

You’re going to be all right. You’re going to be happy again. You’ll see.

When her actual phone rang—the one her grandmother had returned to her at the ranch—her heart jumped, hoping for a moment it was Will. But it wasn’t. It was—oh, no—Theo.

A thousand practiced responses raced through her mind, all the things she’d wanted to say to him that now seemed pointless and unnecessary. She almost let the call go to voicemail, but suddenly sure she wanted that closure once and for all, she answered it.

“Isabella?” Theo’s voice forced her up out of her chair to stand by the huge plate glass window that overlooked the runway.

“Hello, Theo.”

“Thank God! I’ve been calling you and leaving messages for a week now.” That was true. There were thirty-two messages on her phone from him. “Not that I… can blame you for not answering my calls. But everyone’s been worried about you. Where are you?”

“I’m not in Dallas,” she told him, and that was all he needed to know.

“Aha. I have no right to ask that. I know. I have no right to ask anything of you and I’m not. But—”

“Theo, I can’t really—”

“Wait. Don’t hang up,” he said, his voice going uncharacteristically desperate. “I wanted to—I need to explain about what happened. And to… apologize.”

“Thanks for that, Theo. But there’s really no need. What happened, happened. And in the end, it was for the best.”

A shocked silence stretched between them. “Do you really think that?”

She watched an airplane lift off from the runway and veer south. A contrail followed it and made her imagine all the lives aboard, leaving behind things that didn’t belong to them. “I don’t want to know why. Or when or how. I don’t need to know,” she surprised herself by saying. “All I know is that you and I would have been a mistake. You know it, too.”

“You’re probably right,” he said. “I was the one that made a terrible mistake. I admit that. And I was wrong. And wrong not to tell you. Gina is—well, I never expected her to—” He cut off the thought. “But, for the record, I did love you, Isabella.”

She had no answer for that and no stake in arguing the point anymore. “I sold the ring,” she told him unapologetically.

“It was yours to sell,” he said. “I gave it to you.” Again, silence stretched between them. Then, he said, “I guess I’ll always wonder if… from your end of things… well, if you ever really loved me? I mean before all that went down.”

Somehow, she knew he wasn’t blaming her for what happened. How could he? But he was right. She hadn’t really known before Will what real love should feel like. Even though it hadn’t worked out with Will, a new bar had been set by him. A bar she vowed now she would never allow herself to go below again.

“I thought I did,” she told Theo. “But not the way she apparently loves you, and you definitely didn’t love me the way I deserve to be loved. Whatever we had was never going to be enough for either of us. It all would have ended in some horrible divorce and neither of us wants that.”

A toddler with auburn curls ran up beside her as she stood at the window and grabbed her leg, belatedly looking up, only to realize she wasn’t her mother. Her actual mother came running over, apologizing in a whisper before swooping her child away. It made her smile, imagining that one day Will’s child would have that color hair.

She turned back to the runway, searching for distraction. “I hope you’re happy with her,” she said at last. “I mean that. And your baby. I wish you both the best. Really, I do.”

“Gina’s not speaking to me right now, either.” Theo’s voice was thick with some emotion even she had never heard before. “But that’s my problem. We’ll work something out. I never deserved you, Isabella. I hope you find what you’re looking for. And one day, you’ll be able to forgive me for what happened. Not just at the church, but all of it.”

“You want to hear something crazy? I do forgive you, Theo. For all of it. Because somehow, out of all that, I found myself. Really, for the first time, I know what I want. So, let’s both let it go. All right? Take care, Theo, okay?”

“You, too, Isabella.”

“One more thing.”

“Yeah?”

“Delete my phone number?”

He exhaled a chuckle. “That’s the least I can do. Bye, Isabella.”

“Goodbye, Theo.”

For a long time after she ended the call, she stood, looking out the window feeling happy to have put all that behind her. Maybe she would pull it out to think about it sometimes, but the end of her and Theo wouldn’t sting like it had before. And that was a relief. She was cleaning the slates, getting ready for the new, whatever that was going to be.

The airline attendant announced the first group to board and people began to line up. She gathered up her bag and got in line. Outside the huge glass windows, the 737 waited, all shiny and ready to carry all of them off on some new adventure. She wanted that, too, even though she had no idea what that would look like.

Surely, they offered something to spike her coffee onboard. A little something in her drink wouldn’t hurt her feelings at all.

Behind her, she heard someone moving through the line, excusing himself again and again. She turned and her heart leapt at the sight of—

Will.

He was standing a few feet away, looking all fierce and broken at the same time. Torn between wanting to throw her arms around him and running onto the plane, she found she could do neither of those things.

Self-conscious now, she glanced at the crowd around her. “Wh-what are you doing here, Will?”

“I couldn’t let you just get on that plane without a word.”

“But… how are you… how’d you get through security?”

He held up a boarding pass. “I just bought a ticket. The first thing I could find a seat on. Not this plane because apparently you bought the last seat.”

“You… you bought a ticket to… Minnesota so you could say goodbye again?”

She heard an under the breath Awww from a couple in line near her. And others began to listen in.

“No, but I’ve done dumber things,” he said, not caring at all who was watching. “Like letting you drive away from the ranch without getting the chance to explain.”

“Explain what, exactly?” she asked, tamping down the hope rising in her.

The flight attendant was checking people in with a little ding-ding-ding and the line began moving forward. She moved with it. He followed.

“To explain myself and what you overheard this morning on the phone.”

“I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but what I heard seemed pretty clear to me,” she said, clutching her boarding pass as if it could protect her from the despair in his eyes.

“What I told Isaiah was just my own fear talking,” he said, forcing her to meet his gaze. “’Cause you and me, well, what happened is a little crazy, you’ve got to admit. And that feeling that the other shoe’s gonna drop is just something that’s etched into my DNA. I’m working on that. But Isaiah was right. Good things can happen when you least expect them. When you’re the least prepared for them.”

But none of that matters if you don’t want it to happen.

Ding-ding-ding.

She was nearly at the front of the line. She shook her head. “The plane’s boarding, Will. I have to—”

He grabbed her hand, seemingly not caring that everyone was staring at him. “I was trying to protect you with the lie to my family but also trying to protect myself. I’ve been trying damn hard not to get hurt again for a long time now. And at first, I thought I could do that with you, too.”

“I know that.” How could she not? He was afraid to let his own family love him. “But you never said—”

“I never said a lot of things. Like the truth to you or to my family about how I feel about you. And how the thought of you disappearing from my life—even after this short time together—feels impossible because… well, because I’ve fallen hard for you. I’m in love with you, Izzy. I love the way you stand up for what you want. And tell me off when I’m wrong. I love the way you make me laugh, the way you jump, feet first, into life. I love the way your eyes sparkle when you’re happy. I love all of you. And I should have said all that sooner. I heard you say it the other night and I was too damned scared to say it back, because I thought you wanted to go.”

Tears stung her eyes at his words. I didn’t. I don’t.

“But rebound or no, I found you because Theo didn’t have the good sense to love you the way you deserve to be loved. And I want to change that. Please don’t go, Izzy. Give us a chance. Stay with me.”

The brown-haired girl standing behind her swiped at her cheek and sighed. “How come nobody ever says stuff like that to me?” she whispered to her friend standing next to her.

Isabella’s throat tightened. She stepped out of the line and pulled Will aside. “It’s not that easy.”

“It can be. It can be that easy. Just say yes. We can go to Seattle if you want, if that’s what makes you happy.”

“This trip to Seattle wasn’t really about Seattle at all. It started out being all about getting as far away from my past as I could. But along the way, I ended up finding myself again. And you helped me do that. Because I’ve spent half my life—well, most of my life—trying to please everyone but myself. I was the good daughter or the good girlfriend. The one who didn’t make waves. I was always trying to prove myself worthy to them. Trying to justify who I am, why I am. But I can’t do that anymore.”

“You don’t have to justify yourself to me. Or anyone. Not your grandmother or my family either,” he told her.

She lowered her head. “But you never said you wanted this to be anything but temporary, even as things changed between us.”

“I saw you waiting for your documents in the mail every day,” he said. “I thought you wanted to go.”

She nodded. “I just wanted my things back. The only things that are truly mine. My independence. My choices. And in case things didn’t work out, I didn’t want to be a burden to you or your family. But I can see how that must have looked.”

He shook his head. “What happened between us happened because just for a minute we let go of all that stuff we don’t need anymore,” he said, taking her other hand. “All that crap that’s crushed old dreams and kept us from moving forward. But the risk here for me, I realized watching you drive away, isn’t loving you, Izzy. It’s losing you.” His jaw tightened. “I don’t want to lose you. But I want you to be happy. Whether it’s with me or not. But if you tell me that you don’t love me, that it was all a mistake, that I’m wrong about us—if you can honestly do that, then I’ll walk away. You can get on that plane and go find your life in Seattle. But if you can’t, Izzy, if you can’t say you don’t love me, then stay with me. Give us a chance.”

The last of the passengers were passing through the gate and the attendant was looking directly at her, waiting for her decision. If she got on that plane, she’d regret it for the rest of her life, because going forward without him wasn’t really an option for her either. Not because she needed him. No, it was more than that. Because finally, she knew where she belonged.

Over the loudspeaker, the attendant called last call for the flight. Izzy shook her head at the attendant at the security door and she closed it.

Tears filled her eyes as she looked back at Will who looked hopeful for the first time. She lifted his hand to her mouth and kissed him there. “You probably don’t know this, but I kinda fell in love with you the moment you broke that JUST MARRIED sign over your knee, tossed it to the curb, and stood up to Theo. And when you put your jacket over my shoulders in that limo and when you held me in that awful motel, I knew. Against all odds, I met you at the craziest moment of my life and you made everything suddenly make sense. And no. I don’t want to go forward without you either. I don’t care about Seattle or if I’m your rebound or you’re mine. It doesn’t matter how we found each other. It only matters that we did. So, yes, Will. Yes. I’ll stay with you. Let’s go back and make a life together.”

His smile grew and he pulled her close and kissed her. “Thank God,” he murmured against her mouth. It was a permanent kind of kiss, the kind that made her knees go weak and her heart swell. He pulled her up against him, his fingers in her hair, his kiss full of all the things he’d tried to say and all the things he’d left unsaid.

Behind them their uninvited audience of airline attendants began to applaud. They pulled apart then and, embarrassed, she sent them a final smile over her shoulder as they walked away from the gate, hand in hand.

She rested her cheek against his shoulder. “Your family must think we’re—”

“Don’t you worry about them,” he said. “They’re all nuts about you. The lie I told them—which turned out not to be a lie after all—is on me, so they have to forgive me. Or…” he added optimistically, “they’ll dump all their chores on me for months to come as payback.”

“Hmm. And you might just deserve that,” she whispered in his ear.

He grinned back. “Well, love, if you really want to teach me a lesson, I can think of other, more creative ways.”

“Oh, really,” she said, breathlessly. “I bet you can.”

With his arm around her shoulder, he laughed and gave her a gentle squeeze. “What do you say? Let’s go home.”

That word, home, had always been a loaded word for her. But now, for the first time in her life, she began to imagine herself belonging—in the home that they’d make together and in the love they’d share with his family.

This, she thought—this was how it should feel, this complicated, crazy thing called love. Not full of doubts or fear, but a knowing that it felt absolutely right and true.

Because here Will was, with his arms around her reminding her that, for the record, she’d always believed in love.

The End