Page 21 of Cowboy

“Ever heard of a telephone?” I mutter.

“Where’s the fun of walking in on something if I called?”

Sometimes I want to strangle my brother.

“Who’s Carly?” Scarlett asks, leaning her chin against my bicep.

“Carly is our cook, housekeeper, and all-around woman about the house.”

Scarlett doesn’t respond, and I hear the coffee behind her percolating. “We’ll figure out breakfast ourselves today.”

“Dinner tonight?” Blade questions, knowing Carly likes to be informed if people are going to miss a meal.

“I’ll consider it,” I say, speaking for both Scarlett and myself.

“Dinner for two then. Wonderful,” Blade adds, making the assumption I won’t be at dinner. He sees himself out, and Scarlett presses the top of her head into my shoulder blade.

“Is that what you want in a woman? Cooking, cleaning, a person about the house?” There’s a softness to her question, and I turn to face her again. Her head remains lowered, and I lift her chin so she can look at me with those rich, dark eyes. “I didn’t really do those things in my past life. I ate out a lot. I had a cleaning service. I hardly did my own laundry as most things were dry-cleaned.” She looks toward the chimney of the wood-burning stove behind me. “I sound shallow, don’t I?”

Unable to stop myself, I brush back her hair at her forehead, tracing her hairline to push the reddish strands behind her ear.

“Not shallow, just different.” Focusing on my fingers, I scoop around her ear again.

“I have a feeling we’re a bit of Green Acres here. Farm loving and city living coming together.”

“Is that bad?” I ask.

“No, just different.” She smiles up at me, and I want to kiss her so badly I ache. The beep of the coffee machine saves me from pushing my luck.

“How about eggs?” I ask, assuming she doesn’t know how to make those.

“I’d love them,” she says, sounding relieved at the offer. She turns to reach for the coffee pot, giving me a look at her perfect backside while she pours us each a cup. Teasing me, she hands a mug over to me. “At the very least, I can pour coffee.”

8

Exposé

Scarlett

For a few days, Bull and I dance around each other. He’s up and out before I rise, and I’m off to the Busy Bean Café before he returns for breakfast. I assume he’s eating up at the main house, as he calls it, during the meals I’m not present. He told his brother we’d have dinner with the family soon, but I have yet to meet them as Bull’s been careful to keep me away from his father’s house.

“They’re special and nothing special, all rolled into one,” he tells me, explaining the relationship between the three brothers and their father as just the two of us eat dinner again.

Bull tells me how he went to college, majored in agricultural studies, and returned to this area, knowing his practical experience on the farm taught him more than any classroom. Canyon ran off to start a country band and returned home one day with a teenage child, and Blade is in love with Carly but won’t admit it.

“Unrequited love is the worst,” I tease but immediately regret the words. I mean them in reference to myself and my messed-up marriage, but when I consider Bull and me, we are in a similar position. He isn’t going to love me. He feels obligated to me. If this is his child, he wants to be here for the baby experience, not me directly. And if the baby isn’t his child, I’ll soon be looking for another place to live.

My family is right. I’m still a screwup even over forty.

Despite the confident woman I am in front of the camera or behind the scenes for research, no one can bring me down more than my mother. When I told her what happened with Shelton, she blamed it on me.

“You worked too much,” she prefaced as if that threw the ever-working doctor into the arms and bed of someone else. Even admitting his new girl was pregnant was my fault. “You should have gotten pregnant yourself, when you were younger. A child is how you keep a man.”

I could not swallow her antiquated attitude. However, it concerns me that Bull might think less of me as well. Will he think I’ve trapped him if the baby is his? We’ll be linked for life.

“Yeah, the worst,” Bull mutters, drawing me out of my head where I’ve forgotten what we are discussing.

“Excuse me?”