Cowboy Tough (3 page)

Cat was wearing her favorite painting shirt. It was worn and comfortable—and now that she was backlit by sunlight, she realized it was practically transparent. The way the wrangler's gaze slid all over the front of it made her wish she'd chosen something else to wear. It had seemed okay in Chicago, but it was probably pretty racy for Wyoming.

Heck, a flour sack was probably racy in Wyoming. The guy had seemed to enjoy the view at first, but now he'd gotten control of those wandering eyes and seemed determined to look at the ground, the sky, the barn wall—anything but her.

She was doing a fair amount of looking herself. He'd changed out of those distracting chaps, but the jeans, worn in all the right places, were even worse. With the torn shirt displaying his biceps and the beard stubbling his chin, he looked like an ad for men's cologne.

Cowboy
, it would be called. Or
Leather
. Or maybe something more descriptive, like
Sex
on
a
Stick
.

Her thoughts broke—shattered, really—when the animal in the first stall stretched his neck toward her and let out a tremendous gasping shriek. It sounded like somebody was strangling a grizzly bear with his bare hands, along with a horse, a goat, and a whole flock of chickens. The chorus ended with a startlingly human sound.

“
Awwwwww
.”

“Holy crap.” She staggered backward. “Is he okay?”

“Sure. He's half horse, half donkey. You just heard the donkey part.”

Cat felt her lips twitching and finally let herself smile. Now that he'd shed the ridiculous cowboy costume, the guy obviously wasn't pretending to be anything other than himself. She doubted that he could.

After all the posturing and preening that took place in her world, it was refreshing. He was hot, in a rugged, natural way that had nothing to do with gym memberships and everything to do with hard work. He'd hefted that bale of hay like it was a box of Kleenex. Plus he did windows. It didn't get much better than that.

The mule sniffed the air in front of Cat's face and huffed out a straw-scented breath. He was a ridiculous-looking animal, like something from the Sunday funnies. Against a ground of dirty white, his coat was splattered with huge, irregular brown polka dots, as if someone had draped melted Salvador Dalí watches all over his body. “So is he yours?”

“Yup.” He reached up and tugged one of the mule's long ears through his hand. The gesture was so gentle and assured she was sure he'd done it a thousand times. “But Mom loves him. Calls him her grand-mule.”

The black dog sleeping by the door perked up and stared at Mack, watching him pet the mule, then rose and trotted over with a weirdly syncopated gait.

“Hey, your dog only has three legs.”

He stared down at the black lab with his eyes widened in mock horror. “Oh my gosh. Wonder what happened to the other one!”

Cat smacked his arm. “Seriously. What happened?”

“Coyote trap, I think. Don't know. The leg was gone when I found her.” His voice took on a defensive tone. “She gets along just fine, though. Runs just as fast as a normal dog. She's okay as long as she keeps moving. I call her Tippy.”

“What is this, the last resort for wayward animals?”

“There's nothing wrong with the animals.” He scrubbed Tippy's flat head with his fist, and the animal gave him a grin. Her tongue lolled off to the side as she panted, giving her expression a slightly lunatic cast. “They've just had it a little rough, that's all. It's not their fault.”

Cat wasn't sure, but she was starting to suspect he'd had a rough start himself. “Grand-mule, huh? I take it you don't have any kids.”

“I do, actually. A girl.” Again, she caught a wounded look in his eyes. “My ex hardly ever lets her come up here, though, so Mom's got to make do with what she can get. And what she can get is Rembrandt.”

“Your mule's name is Rembrandt?”

“It is now.” He came up beside her and leaned against the stall door. The mule, obviously an attention-hound, shoved its big nose between them and exhaled a long, hay-scented breath down the collar of Cat's shirt. “I figure that'll make you like him.”

“I'm pretty much getting paid to like him. I guess you are too.”

He slumped his broad shoulders and stared down at the scarred floor of the barn. “Not really. We're not exactly flush around here.” He shifted his shoulders, as if his shirt was suddenly too tight. “If I'd made it to Cheyenne…”

“Cheyenne?”

“Cheyenne Frontier Days. Big outdoor rodeo. Big money if you win.”

He shifted his gaze as if he'd said more than he intended. In the dusty shaft of daylight that was filtered through the window at the back of the stall, he looked like something out of a Wyeth painting—a rugged counterpart to Helga. She really did want to paint him, naked or not.

He shoved off the stall and strode to a cooler just inside the barn door. It looked like something from an old general store, with a Coca-Cola logo on the side and a sliding glass lid.

“Beer?” He held up a can of Coors.

Cat started to shake her head, then shrugged and took one. She was on the job, but part of that job was making nice with the natives. Lewis and Clark had accepted peace offerings from the Mandans, so she could probably hoist a beer with this cowboy. Besides, she didn't have students coming until tomorrow, and there wasn't a thing she could do about this dude ranch disaster, drunk or sober.

He popped the top and handed her the can, then opened one for himself. Tilting her head back, she savored the cold, refreshing draught a little too enthusiastically. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand as beer dribbled down her chin.

Mack handed her the bandanna out of his pocket. He was apparently accustomed to drooling woman, and no wonder. Leaning against the wall beside her, he looked moody and tragic and hard, like the hero of an old-fashioned Western.

She sipped the cold beer and contemplated the land stretching from the doorway. It was a wide canvas of russet and gold, broken by rocky outcroppings and the listing silhouettes of the two bunkhouses. The open ground was edged with crooked trees and spires of pine. Clouds streaked the sky like careless slanted brushstrokes, wispy white over the deepest blue she'd ever seen.

She might be disappointed in the accommodations, but the landscape was way beyond her expectations. So much land, so much sky.

She had a sudden urge to spread her arms and take off running, like a kid cut loose from school. It must be the beer. She took another swallow as a few crickets started up a hesitant orchestral accompaniment—or were those cicadas? The only insects in Chicago were roaches and houseflies, and she did her best to avoid both. This was nice, though. The soft rhythm seeped into her senses and stilled the panic that had plagued her since she'd arrived.

She looked up to see Mack watching her with a gaze that was surprisingly gentle, almost pitying. There was a breath, a heartbeat, where she felt an almost uncontrollable urge to step toward him. She knew, just knew, he'd meet her halfway and something would start between them—something like a kiss, or maybe more.

She needed a distraction—something that would reestablish the casual, bantering tone they'd had before. Because standing beside him and sharing the landscape suddenly seemed far too intimate.

Cat bit her lip and gazed out at the rocky plains stretching into the distance. The leaning fence posts and drooping barbed wire surrounding the pasture looked far too fragile to hold the rugged land. Men like Mack had pounded those posts into the rocky ground, strung that wire, and tried to cut the endless open spaces into something they could tame.

She watched his biceps swell as he folded his arms over his chest. Cautiously, she brought one hand up to dab at the corners of her lips. No drool. So far, so good.

“So.” She tried to think of a topic of conversation. Something they had in common. “Um—so.”

Rodeo. He said he did rodeo. Men liked to talk about themselves, right?

“You do the—you're in the—what was that about rodeo?”

“I ride broncs.” He lifted one eyebrow. “Mack Boyd?”

She gave him a blank stare.

“Guess you don't follow that stuff where you're from.”

“No, we don't. We're too busy breathing our fancy air.”

He had the decency to duck his head. “Sorry about that.” He kicked a few strands of loose straw into a pile with the toe of his boot. “I've been riding broncs most of my life. Doing all right, too. But my mom—her husband left and there's been some… trouble.”

“Your dad left?”

“Nope. My dad's—gone.” He kicked the pile of straw and it scattered, one piece flipping onto the toe of Cat's boot. “This is her second husband.
Was
, I mean.” He swept his foot through the scattered straw. “So I'm a dude ranch wrangler now.”

“And a window washer.”

He grinned. “And a window washer.”

“Yeah, I'm in the middle of a career change too,” she said. “Guess I'm getting my midlife crisis over with early.”

She stared out at the landscape and thought how much things had changed, and how they'd change even more if everything went right with this trip.

***

A week ago, Cat had been sitting at a conference table at the Trainer and Crock advertising agency, battling boredom and watching the bubbles rise in her Diet Pepsi. She'd survived the stultifying boredom of those meetings every week for six years and dutifully executed the projects they planned there.

But two weeks of leave for her sister's funeral had changed everything.

It was her first day back, and she smothered a yawn as she trailed her finger through the frost on her Diet Pepsi and watched her boss Ted hold forth from the head of the conference table. The rising bubbles made her think of what the minister had said at Edie's funeral. Something about souls rising to heaven. Her sister's soul. A bubble.
Pop.

Gone.

“You've seen these bears Charmin has, right?” Ted pointed to the substantial derriere of a grinning teddy bear. “They're adorable, right? They make the customer see the product in a positive light.”

Ted was the company's art director, and he'd grown old in the service of advertising. Everything about him was flat—his voice, his face, even his skinny behind. He was so dedicated to his craft that he had dwindled down to two dimensions, like the cartoon characters he featured in his ad campaigns.

“That's how you sell toilet paper,” he continued. “Cuteness. I was thinking maybe we could do a baby.”

“A baby.” Cat grimaced. Ted always wanted babies. At the age of fifty-nine, he'd evidently developed the biological clock of a thirty-year-old woman. Her own clock ticked steadily but softly, background noise in a life dedicated—for now—to her career. When the ticking threatened to grow louder, she smothered her maternal instincts by doting on her niece.

Who no longer had a mother. Who had endured the funeral with her thin shoulders painfully straight and her sharp, fragile face pale and expressionless. Dora had been a troubled child before her mother had died, a teenager with issues. Cat had told herself it was normal, but now that Edie was gone it was her problem, normal or not.

“Yeah, I'm thinking a baby, Cat,” Ted continued. “Or maybe a kitten. It plays with the roll, you know? Gets all tangled up in it. Then it falls asleep, because it's so soft. Softness, that's our theme. Softness and cuteness.”

Cat slid down in her chair, rolling her gaze toward the ceiling.
Cute
was Trainer and Crock's stock-in-trade.
Cute
was the watchword in their office, the magic trick that sold everything from floral delivery to flashlights.

Cute
was starting to make her teeth hurt.

“Can't you put me on a campaign for chainsaws or shotguns or something?” she muttered.

“What was that?” Ted slid his half-glasses down his nose and shot her a stern look. She straightened in her chair and drew a happy face on the sketchbook in front of her.

She added fangs to the face, then devil horns.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing. Just thinking out loud.”

Later that night, she spent half an hour staring at a pathetic shred of ivy that had managed to root itself in the brick wall outside her apartment window. Her drafting table was littered with graphite sticks and colored pencils, the floor behind it buried under a chaotic layer of discarded sketches.

Her efforts to create the Fluff Enuff Toilet Paper baby had resulted in fifteen or twenty sketches of what appeared to be a demonic imp from hell. No matter how hard she tried, the baby sported an evil leer and wielded the roll of toilet paper like a weapon.

So she'd moved on, tried a kitten. That had gone well until she began to add detail to the face. Despite her best efforts, the eyes took on a ferocious glint, and the little animal's salient feature was its very small, very sharp teeth.

Clearly, cute wasn't going to work for her. She needed a new concept. Leaning back in her drafting chair, she stared at the resolute sprig of ivy as it struggled to conquer the unforgiving brick.

Sometimes, making a living as an artist seemed to require the same kind of tenacity. But her roots hadn't been tough enough to take hold.

Tough.
That's what was needed here. Not cuteness.
Toughness.

The next morning, she staggered into Ted's office bleary-eyed and dazed, tossing a folder full of drawings on his desk.

“I pulled an all-nighter, Ted, but I think I've got a real winner here.” She cleared her throat, suddenly doubting what she'd done. It had looked terrific the night before, but in the clear light of day she wasn't so sure of herself.

“Let's take a look.” He opened the folder with a flourish and stared down at her first renderings of the Fluff Enuff pit bull. The animal was snake-hipped and broad-shouldered, and his face was set in a permanent snarl inspired by John Wayne in
The
Green
Berets
. He was presenting a roll of toilet paper to the viewer with a gesture that demanded obedience. Across the bottom of the page, a line of text bracketed by crossed rifles read “Fluff Enuff Kicks Butt.”

Ted sat in silence for a few too many beats.

“Great, huh?” she said hesitantly. “I know it's not what you asked for, but I thought we needed to set ourselves apart from the competition.”

“Where's my
baby
?” Ted looked absolutely bereft, as if she'd snatched his beloved firstborn from his arms.

“I thought this was better. Toilet paper has to be tough. Think about it, Ted. Toilet paper takes a lot of abuse.”

“I really don't want to think about that. And I don't think our customers do, either.”

“You don't want the buying public to think Fluff Enuff is sissy toilet paper, do you? You want them to know it's
tough
.” She punched a fist through the air. “Fluff Enuff can take it.”

“Didn't you do any babies?”

She rummaged through the portfolio, pulling out a sheaf of papers and slapping them on his desk. As he flipped through them, Ted's face became grave.

“These are terrible,” he said.

If she'd learned nothing else in art school, she'd learned to take criticism. Art teachers rarely told students what to do—they just sent you off to do it so they could rip your efforts to shreds later. But four years of shred-ripping hadn't prepared her for this kind of failure.

Because it
was
failure, no matter how well she'd drawn the pit bull character. She'd had a job to do, and she hadn't been able to do it.

“They look like devil babies.” Ted turned the page. “And look at this kitten. It wants to rip my lungs out.”

He tapped his pencil on the desktop, eyeing her over the tops of his glasses.

“Burnout,” he said.

Cat nodded, scanning the conference room for a Kleenex. Ted shoved a sample roll of Fluff Enuff her way, and she tore off a couple of squares. It was incredibly soft, which only made it harder to hold off the tears.

What she had was a lot worse than burnout. Watching her sister fight the cancer she'd discovered too late had made her reevaluate her whole life, and she'd come to the conclusion there were more important things in life than a career. Dora, for starters.

She'd asked for a leave of absence from Trainer and Crock and taken the job with Art Treks so she and her niece could spend some time together. She'd be instructing workshops, but more important, she'd be seeing the world with Dora—and they'd both be painting, so Dora could exercise the talent she'd inherited from her mother. If the trip went well, Cat would continue to travel with the company, taking Dora along whenever she could. And she'd be able to leave Ted and his babies behind forever.

She looked straight through Ted, through the window behind his desk, and saw herself painting. Painting a temple in Tibet. Painting a meadow in Tuscany. Painting the idyllic Yorkshire Dales.

“It's good you're taking this time off,” Ted said. He gave her a sharp sideways look. “You coming back?”

“Yes. I mean, I'm planning to. If this…” She waved at the drawings. “If this doesn't get me fired.”

“We won't fire you, Cat. But I know you're not happy here. And since your sister passed, I know you must be rethinking things. It's only natural.”

She sniffed and wiped her nose with the square of Fluff Enuff. “She was so talented, Ted. And all she left behind was two sketchbooks and her student paintings. And Dora, Dora will never know how talented her mother was. What she could have done. Her paintings—they mattered. They made you see things differently.”

He nodded gravely. “This job isn't enough for you, is it?”

She felt a spasm of remorse. “It's enough. It's fine.” She began stuffing the drawings into her portfolio. “I'm sorry about the pit bull. I'll knuckle down and give you a baby before I go. I promise.”

They both laughed at the double entendre.

“Your work here matters, you know,” he said. “Millions of people are touched by what you do.”

“I know. But I want to make people do more than clip a coupon,” she said. “I want to make them think. I want—something.”

He plucked a number-two pencil from behind his ear and tapped it on the desk. “So did I, once,” he said. “But once I married Joyce, had the kids, it turned out this was enough.”

“I don't think it's going to turn out that way for me,” she said. The picture of the homicidal kitten fluttered to the floor, and she hastened to shove it into the case.

Ted smiled, his kind eyes creasing at the corners. “You never know,” he said. “You just never know.”

***

When Cat blinked out of her reverie, the cowboy was still talking. She wondered how long she'd been trucking down Memory Lane. He didn't seem to have noticed her departure from the conversation.

“I thought I'd be wrangling cattle, not artists,” he was saying. “Kind of a surprise.”

She gave him a bright smile, wondering what she'd missed while she was daydreaming. “Well, we're probably better behaved than cows.”

“Doubt it. Cattle are very—accepting. They live in the moment. Take whatever comes.”

“Zen and the Art of Cowboying,” she said.

“Kind of.” He chuckled, clearly getting the reference. If it turned out there were brains under all that brawn, he was going to be hard to resist.

Standing in the doorway, they fell silent and scanned the land stretching off to the horizon. The silence between them should have been uncomfortable, but somehow, she didn't mind. Maybe the cowboy himself was kind of Zen, too. There were apparently a lot of changes swirling around him—leaving the rodeo, turning the ranch into a tourist spot—and yet there was a solid stillness to him she'd never had in her own life.

Finally he spoke. “It must be a nice change for you. From the city, I mean.”

She shrugged.

“I can't imagine living with all those people around, no green things, everybody in such a hurry…” He scanned her from head to foot, but this time the assessment wasn't quite as insulting, maybe because she was getting to know him, or maybe because he seemed to be truly seeing her this time. “You don't look like the type for that kind of life.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “It was the life I always wanted, but it didn't really work out, so maybe you're right.”

Deep down she knew the problem wasn't whether she was a city mouse or a country mouse. The problem was the gap between what she'd dreamed of and what she'd managed to accomplish. She'd steered herself by the wrong star, and now she was so far off course she didn't know how to find her way home.

She looked at the man beside her. He'd had to leave his own dreams behind for the sake of his family. Now he was setting a new course, reaching for new goals.

Maybe she needed to do the same.

But Dora had to come first.