Marry Me, Cowboy (Copper Mountain Rodeo) (3 page)

“Well, this place needed something to jazz it up.” She and Kara shared ownership of the trailer, an economical purchase that would still have been way beyond Tegan’s budget on her own. Until recently, that is. She had money in the bank now, from the sale of the farm back home, and she valued the cash less than dirt because of what it said about her loss.
Don’t think about that, Tegan.
“I’m telling you, mate, they’ll be three-quarters dead before I throw them out,” she finished, about the flowers.

Chet touched a peach-colored rose petal. “They did a nice job with them. Looks just like the picture.”

“Hey, you’re telling me you chose them by picture, not just by price? I’m touched.”

And still mad at Jamie – because somehow she always found it very helpful to be mad at Jamie - and disappointed in Chet, and hiding all of it because she didn’t want to be unfair.

He must have read her mind, and gave a big groan. “I hate that I did this to you, Tegan. You’re a good friend. The best. It kills me that I let my own stuff - ”

“No... No, Chet!” He looked terrible again, the way he’d looked at the non-wedding. “It was a heck of a lot to ask of anyone.”

She touched him and he flinched, then said in a desperate tone, “I don’t think I can live like this any more.”

“Hey, guys...” came a voice.

Bloody Jamie. Bloody, bloody Jamie.

Chet’s eyes were bloodshot and red-rimmed and he was clearly on the point of saying something hugely important. And Jamie was standing at the open rear door of the trailer - the one that led in from the horse bays - being loud and insensitive as usual. “Bar time… Saw an advertising sign for a place, on the way through town.”

Tegan turned to him, warned him off with her eyes and hissed, “Not now.”

But it was too late. Chet backed away from whatever he was going to say, looking like he’d just been pardoned for a capital crime with the noose already around his neck. “Saw it, too,” he said. “Grey’s Saloon. Can we walk? Is it too far? Or do we have to unhitch and drive? They have the streets barricaded for the dance tonight, so we won’t be able to park close.”

“We can walk,” Tegan said quickly. Maybe on the journey they could grab a minute to finish the talk they’d started, even if Chet no longer thought he wanted to.

She could push him on it, and Jamie could go jump in the lake. If there was a lake. If not, then there were some handy railroad tracks they’d crossed to get to the rodeo ground.

He could lie down on those and wait until a train came.

Or, she and Chet could just hang back while Jamie walked with Kara. They’d had a little skirmish a while back, Kara and Jamie. A flirtation, based on Kara’s brunette prettiness and Jamie’s blue bedroom eyes. Tegan didn’t think it had gone as far as actual sex, but close, maybe, and they’d been a little abrupt with each other for a while afterward. As you were, when you hooked up on the rodeo circuit and it didn’t last and you had to go on seeing each other.

But they seemed to be over that now, and were friendly enough. On Jamie’s part, this meant two-syllable conversations when he was sober, and lame jokes when he wasn’t. Kara had grown up with three brothers and none of it fazed her.

Maybe if Tegan and Kara had a word or two, she could ask Kara to keep Jamie busy on the walk into town, so that Tegan could get Chet to finish talking. Men sometimes talked better when there was no possibility of eye contact.

Didn’t work.

They finished their current bout of horse and trailer and rodeo chores, and walked back into town, passing the locals setting up for the fund-raising welcome dinner being held tonight. The main street ahead of them had now been closed off with barricades, ready for tonight’s street dance later on. There were signs advertising a pancake breakfast and charity auction tomorrow and Sunday, a steak dinner tomorrow. In the park, there were amplifiers for music, long tables and stacks of plastic chairs, and lots of busy volunteers.

Jamie said hello to a couple of them by name – Chelsea, Jenny, Mrs. Collier - and Tegan was surprised. They weren’t rodeo people - or not ones she knew, anyhow. They definitely didn’t
look
like rodeo people. How come he knew them?

She let the moment of curiosity go, because what she really wanted was to get Chet alone, but Jamie and Chet stuck to each other like grass seeds to socks, and she couldn’t work out which one of them was driving that.

Jamie, she thought. He was protecting Chet, and it was odd that he always seemed to do this, and that he was so good at it, because in any other context Tegan wouldn’t have said that Jamie MacCreadie had a protective bone in his body.

The two men walked in lockstep, two pairs of scuffed boots crunching on the gravel or the blacktop, upper bodies rocking in the way of muscle-bound horsemen who’d had more injuries than they could remember, dark hair just short enough to show two very nice tanned necks, without their hats. Tegan wasn’t going to get anything more out of Chet yet, she could tell.

They stayed in the bar for an hour, downing a tray load of Big Sky beers among the four of them as well as a huge dish of onion rings. It was one of those dark, cozy places with quirky bric-a-brac for decoration. It looked as if it had been serving up beer and food uninterrupted for about a hundred years, and the onion rings were very, very good. Tegan sat back and didn’t say much, just let the different conversations flow over her.

At their own table, the talk was all about the rodeo - who was out for the season, who’d drawn a bad bull on their last ride. Behind her, up at the bar, she could hear snatches of conversation from the locals.

“...can’t believe how well Colton Thorpe’s done for himself...”

“...heard he’s competing in the bull-riding...”

“...thought Annabeth was going to spit nails...”

“...mighty fine looking piece of machinery, that motor-cycle...”

“Mighty fine looking piece of man, you mean.”

“...think it’s his little girl, but I’m not sure...”

Snippets of gossip just floating by on a cloud of beer foam, flavored with crispy, salty-sweet onion rings.

Then they headed back to the park for the welcome dinner, hitting a shower of rain as they walked.

It passed quickly. The sky lightened again just as they reached the open-air setup, and the panicked flurry of activity from the local organizers switched to a sigh of relief and a resumption of normal operations. Country music started playing over the speaker system, and Tegan recognized the delectable voice of Landry Bell, singing
Rodeo Nights.
Someone else greeted Jamie, a man in his fifties. “Hey, you came for it.”

“Yeah, seemed like I should,” he said gruffly.

“Seen your folks?”

“Not yet.”

“But you will.”

“Course I will.”

“You’re
from
here?” Tegan said, in amazement as they moved on. He hadn’t said a word about it. Ever. She vaguely knew he was from Montana, but it was a big state.

Still he didn’t say a word. Just shrugged those hard, square shoulders.

Okay, Jamie, great, that’s so informative.

After a moment, he added reluctantly, defensively, “Colton Thorpe’s from here, too. It’s a good area for rodeo. He was my hero, when I was in my teens.”

“He’s the honorary rodeo chair. Pretty big name.”

“I know. Someone said he was riding, too.”

Chet drank as doggedly at the dinner as he had at the bar, and Tegan couldn’t work out for sure if Jamie was trying to keep up with him or trying to hold him back.

Maybe neither.

There was a whole group of them, now. Steer wrestlers, barrel racers, pickup riders. They started to get noisy, along with the locals who were about to head off to the street dance back in town, and it was a fine old night.

Until someone who didn’t know them that well asked her and Chet, “Hey, so, did you two get married?”

They both froze, and Chet looked as if he’d swallowed a pack of razor blades.

“Chet bailed,” Kara said, stepping into the breach. “Decided Tegan was just too much woman for one feeble cowboy to take on.”

“So what happens now about your green card, Tegan?”

“Looking for husband number two,” Tegan said. She took her cue from Kara and made it as flippant as she could.

But she wasn’t really looking for another green card marriage. That ship had sailed. There was no one else she trusted enough, even as a temporary husband. If she couldn’t find another way to extend her visa within the next couple of weeks, she’d just have to leave. No other choice.

Sell Shildara.

Get Kara to buy out her half of the gooseneck or help her find another hauling partner.

Buy an airline ticket, email a couple of friends in Tamworth or Armidale to see if she could stay with them until she regrouped and worked out her next move. She wasn’t going to stay with Mum and Dad, or Ben. She was still too angry and hurt.

She didn’t want to overstay her US visa, though, because then it would be incredibly difficult to come back legally for another try in the future, and when she thought about just staying in Australia for keeps, with all that this implied about her torn-up roots there, she felt ill.

“Dean? You up for it?” Kara said to one of the other guys. She was doing her best to help, because she could see that Chet’s change of heart was killing him, just as Tegan could. Everyone else except Jamie seemed oblivious. “Wanna marry my travel-buddy?”

Dean laughed and shook his head. He gave Kara a look that said if
she
was the one in need of a husband he might have been happy to give her a test drive for the job, in bed. She gave him a look in return that said she might have been happy to oblige. This little exchange took both of them out of the picture for pretty much the rest of the weekend.

Jamie had been looking sideways at Chet, trying not to let anyone see. Tegan was probably the only one who could pick up on the alarm in his eyes, because she was alarmed, too. Chet was still hopelessly miserable about ditching Tegan at the altar. She wanted to reassure him about it, but there were too many people listening, or in the way.

Jamie was stirring in his seat, now, going from one laid-back, crooked pose to another in a way that told Tegan he’d had a little too much to drink.

As if she’d been in any doubt.

“I’ll marry you, Tegan,” he said.

Off-hand, but faking it.

Hiding something. Hiding his concern for Chet.

Or just slurred from beer.

Pretending
to be slurred from beer? Tegan tried to think how many he’d actually had, but couldn’t. Still, it suddenly seemed to her, looking back, that maybe he quite often pretended to have drunk more than he really had, when he and Chet were together.

Why would he do that?

In his new position, legs extended and crossed, elbow on the hard armrest of the plastic chair, she could see the bulge of a nice-looking, denim-clad package at his crotch. It was only the way he was sitting. It wasn’t the old Mae West scenario -
Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

“You’re drunk, Jamie,” Chet pointed out to him, gathering himself to speak at last.

Tegan knew it was Chet himself who deserved that accusation. He was staring at Jamie out of those baleful, red-veined, bull-like eyes with an intensity of focus that suggested he needed to fix his gaze on a solid object in order to stop himself from falling over or throwing up.

Jamie didn’t deny his friend’s accusation. “Yeah, but I mean it.”

He shifted again, sitting up and leaning forward, and this time it was his upper body that was on show, hard brown forearms below the half-rolled sleeves of his shirt. Unbuttoned neck of the shirt gaping so that Tegan could see inside, down to the start of the sprinkled dark hair on his chest. He wasn’t the kind of guy who waxed.

She felt irritated with herself, and with Jamie, for the fact that she so often noticed these things about him. It had been getting worse lately, too. She hated it. Maybe she should have stopped at one beer.

“Everybody means everything when they’re drunk,” Chet said.

“You had your chance, buddy, and you ditched her at the altar,” Jamie told him. “Now it’s my turn.” He didn’t mean that at all. He was saying this to help Chet, but he was on the wrong track, there.

Dean Davis laughed. “Jamie, everybody knows Tegan can’t stand you... Why the hell would she marry you?”

Exactly.

“Because she needs a green card.”

“...And you can’t stand her.”

“And my buddy Chet let her down, and he’s feeling bad about it, so I’m gonna help both of them
out
, by stepping
in
. It’s not personal. It’s not because I
like
her.” He seemed utterly scornful of the possibility.

As well he might be. Tegan was scornful, too.

“Don’t need that kind of help,” Chet said. “Don’t want it. That’s not what I want from you, Jamie.” He seemed to be trying to say something deeper with the words, and to feel that Jamie wasn’t getting it.

Somehow, everything felt really weird. Jamie was still looking at Tegan and there was a feeling between them that had never been there before.

Or, okay, not
never.

But she’d never been in any danger of giving in to it before, or of letting it take hold. Now, for the very first time in nearly two years of knowing him, she stopped thinking about how much she disliked him, and surrendered to those other thoughts, the much less comfortable ones, about the things she tried not to see.

Jamie’s outdoor tan. That bulge in the denim crotch of his jeans. The veiled light in his blue eyes. The way he smelled, like well-kept leather and clean male, freshened up with some shaving product, no doubt slapped haphazardly in place.

She thought about his mouth, and the way it was so neat and smooth, with lips that were neither fat nor thin but just right. And there was the way he moved on a horse, and the way he moved on the ground. The way he laughed, not when he’d had a drink or three, but during the day, leaning on a rail and watching riders and bulls, or the queen of the rodeo galloping through the arena.