Chapter 13 - Beth
Beth
The next Friday morning, Beau asks if I want to join them all down at the Silver Spur that night.
No one but Cole knows I got a little tipsy last time, and no one but us knows what happened afterward.
There’s no way he’s told his brothers, Caleb or Mackenzie, or I’d have known.
Beau wouldn’t have been able to keep his big mouth shut about it, for one thing.
So, the invitation is just as simple as that. Did I want to go for dinner and a bit of dancing?
‘Okay,’ I find myself agreeing, with a little pop of anticipation firing inside me. ‘Sure. Why not?’
Cole shoots me a glance over his coffee cup, then turns his attention back to the article he’s reading. My anticipation fizzes out.
Did he expect me to say no? Want me to say no?
But when I’m ready to head into town that evening, he steps out of our shared office. He’s wearing his usual cowboy get-up, but not the same as he would out on the ranch. These are newer jeans, darker, and boots that don’t have dust on them. He looks so darn good I could weep.
‘You ready to go?’ he asks.
‘I was just heading into town, yeah.’
‘How ’bout I drive?’ he suggests, and I grimace a little with embarrassment at the way he’d had to carry me home last time. ‘Makes more sense than taking two cars,’ he points out. Like a true gentleman, he makes it about logistics rather than my inability to hold my drink.
‘Okay, if you’re sure.’
‘Yeah, I’m sure, Beth,’ he says, and I realise he hasn’t called me ‘city girl’ in a while, and that I miss it.
I toy with my necklace, then hear Christopher’s voice, chastising me for fidgeting, and drop my hand abruptly.
‘I’ll wait outside,’ I say, simply because being this close to him, in here, is setting the hairs on my neck on end, in a way that makes my tummy all knotty and weird.
It’s a warm evening, the breeze coming off the plains still showing the heat of the day. I’m wearing jeans and a floaty linen singlet top, loose and comfortable, and as a gentle breeze rustles past, it lifts to expose a hint of my stomach.
The front door slams shut and seconds later, Cole’s coming down the steps. ‘Ready?’
My tongue feels unnaturally thick, making speech difficult, so I just jerk my head in agreement.
The drive to the tavern is mostly completed in silence. The air between us seems to crackle with tension, and I can’t even say why. Only that I feel like we’re both holding back, not saying something we’re thinking.
As we approach the main street, I ask, ‘Where are the others?’
‘Already there.’
I chew on my lip, searching around for conversation. ‘Mackenzie seems like one of the family.’
He visibly relaxes, so I realise it’s not just me who’s wound up. ‘She is,’ he agrees, finally.
‘You said she’s been here a couple of years?’
His head shifts slightly in agreement.
‘Are there many women working on ranches?’
‘Not like Mackenzie,’ he says with a grin as he pulls the truck into a space a little way down from the bar. ‘She’s a one-off.’
‘I can tell.’
‘She’ll want to fight Caleb to run the place, if anything happens to me.’
My blood chills to think of this big, vital man not being around anymore.
But accidents happen. Look at Christopher.
What were the chances of him stepping out to cross the street at the exact moment a drunk driver ran a red light?
He shouldn’t have even been there that night.
A muscle throbs in my chest—a familiar pain of betrayal.
‘Beth? You okay?’
I glance at him, and from the way his expression shows concern, I gather my thoughts are all over my face. I put my hand on the door. ‘Sure am. Let’s go, cowboy.’
I step out of the truck before he can question me further and walk toward the Silver Spur. Across the street there’s a place I haven’t been to, but it’s crowded as well. A diner. The Wild Hog, the bright red neon sign says.
Cole is right behind me, all sexy swagger and heady pine forest cologne. When we get close to the saloon doors, he moves quickly to open them for me and tips his head a little as I walk past. My heart twists at those subtle, old-fashioned good manners.
Inside, the place is crammed full of people, and loud. A band’s playing a well-known country song and at least half of the town is on the floor, dancing along to it.
‘It’s packed,’ I say to Cole.
‘What?’ He cups his ear.
I stand up on the tips of my toes and steady myself by putting a hand on his chest. Not strictly necessary, but far too tempting to resist. ‘It’s so busy.’
He shifts his head in agreement. ‘Friday night. People always come in to blow off some steam. What can I get you?’
I glance at the bar. ‘Just a soda, thanks.’
He puts a hand in the small of my back, guiding me deeper into the crowd.
‘Everyone’s over there,’ he says, and I look in the direction he’s gesturing, to see Beau and Austin at a table beneath a huge stag’s head.
Beau lifts a hand in salute. I don’t want to move away from Cole.
Just the way his hand is resting at the base of my spine brings back a thousand memories.
I would do anything to go back in time to that night and not stop what was happening between us.
But his hand falls away and he goes to the bar, leaving me to weave through the tables alone.
Beau and Austin stand as I approach and even Mackenzie smiles.
Caleb walks up almost directly after me.
The table this week is bigger and I take one of the empty seats, aware that there’s an empty one beside it and another spare seat down the end.
‘Hey, Manhattan. You got a drink?’
‘Cole’s grabbing it.’
He appears almost straight away, two sodas in his hands, one of which he passes to me.
I can hardly breathe, waiting to see where he’ll sit.
My nerves stretch and pull, hoping, silently willing him to take the seat to my left, but he doesn’t.
He says something to Austin, who gestures to the seat beside him, and Cole saunters around to it without a backward glance.
The disappointment is real.
Beau starts up a conversation and Mackenzie joins in, correcting him half the time, sassing him the rest, and I can hardly keep up because they so obviously have a well-worn routine. She looks so young, but she can clearly hold her own with these guys and out on the property.
They’ve been talking about moving the herd—I really have no idea what that involves but I gather they go out on horseback and ride behind the cows, shifting them across the fields—and Mackenzie is a part of that.
A part of all of this. I wonder if she finished school or wanted to go to college.
Or maybe being out here on a ranch was always it for her?
When Beau heads to the bar to order some food, I ask her, ‘Did you grow up around here?’
Her features tighten perceptibly. ‘No.’ She sips her drink.
‘But you must have grown up on a ranch?’
She shakes her head.
‘Well,’ I say, ‘you seem like a natural.’ It’s obviously not something she wants to talk about, so I let it go—who am I to push someone when I have so many secrets I’m keeping?
I glance across the table to find Cole’s eyes resting heavily on my face. Caleb’s talking to him and he’s nodding, but his eyes are just … on me. Like he doesn’t even realise he’s looking. My skin lifts with goosebumps; my blood turns to lava.
‘I’m from just outside of Phoenix.’
Mackenzie’s voice draws my attention back.
‘Just a small suburb, on the outskirts.’
I sip my drink, waiting to see if she wants to give up anything else, or if that’s it.
‘It was only my mom and me. And we never really saw eye to eye, you know?’ She stabs her straw in her drink, swirls it around so the ice clinks against the glass. ‘When I was fifteen, we got in a huge fight, and she told me to pack my things and get out. So I did.’
My jaw drops but I quickly mask it. She doesn’t want sympathy or surprise. Mackenzie is as tough as nails and her upbringing, I gather, is a part of that.
‘How did you end up here?’
She looks at me like she’s sizing me up, working out if she can trust me. After a moment, she shrugs. ‘I didn’t. Not straight away.’ Her eyes take on a hardness, a look of remembering and not liking. ‘Sure wish I had, though.’
I swallow, feeling sorry for the fifteen-year-old she’d been.
‘I spent a couple of years on the streets.’
I can’t help it. I make a soft sound of surprise.
‘It’s okay, you get by.’
It was not okay. ‘You must have wanted to go home.’
She pulls a face. ‘After I was told to leave? No way.’
‘But your mom …’
‘Didn’t want me.’
‘Oh, Mackenzie,’ I say, softly. No parent, surely, would really feel that way about their child. Then again, my dad had been a no-show my whole life—what conclusion could I draw other than he hadn’t wanted me either?
‘Anyway, I decided to try Vegas. Thought it might bring me some new luck. I hitched a ride, but the guy dropped me off on the road into Goodnight. That was as far as he was going. I was trying to catch another lift when Cole—Cole Senior, I mean—stopped to pick me up.’
Mackenzie’s face has softened. Her memories of Cole’s dad are obviously warm.
‘He told me he’d take me to Vegas, but only if I came home and had a good meal first. I was so hungry, I didn’t stop to think how stupid it was to go to some old dude’s place.’ She grinned at the memory. ‘Something he never let me hear the end of, either.’
I smile at that.
‘I must have eaten everything in that place. It felt so good to have food. And so much food. Not to mention a clean, safe room to sleep in. But I was scared. What did he want from me? Why was he giving me all this? So, I was gonna bolt early the next morning, at first light, get back on the road and find that lift to Vegas.’
‘What happened?’