The Cowboy's Courtship (4 page)

“Would I like her?” She turned her attention back to him, serious blue eyes locking on him, expecting answers.

He hadn’t expected this, to get dragged into what should have been personal. But she was waiting, holding that kitten against her and the bowl in the other hand.

“Etta is a free spirit. Andie is, too. You’ll like them both.”

Alyson put the bowl of milk and eggs on the floor and sat the kitten on the ground next to it. They stepped back and watched as the ragged little guy hissed and slurped in turn. And then he was gone, running out of the kitchen and down the hall, paws sliding on the polished hardwood floors.

“What now?” Alyson went after the cat.

“You’ll never catch him and Etta is going to be ticked. She hates cats.”

Alyson turned, her face a little pale. “Now you tell me?”

He grinned. “Head injury, remember?”

“What do I do?”

He shrugged. “You’ll catch him and Etta will forgive you.”

How could she not forgive her granddaughter?

He shook off the mental wandering that could only lead to trouble. He didn’t have enough space in his brain for that kind of trouble. “I have to go.”

“To the camp?”

“Yeah, of course.” He pulled the notebook out of his pocket. “First to the feed store.”

He held the notebook up and the words blurred and then doubled. The ache in the back of his head tripled. He slipped the notebook back into his pocket and blinked a few times to clear his vision.

“Are you okay?” A female voice from too far away. He looked up and she was watching him, her eyes focused and full of concern. He managed a smile.

“Of course I am.”

“You look pale.” She rummaged through the cabinet and while he tried to get it together, she ran water into the mug and held it out. “Drink this.”

He pulled off the hat that suddenly seemed too tight and wiped a hand across his forehead. She pushed the water into his hand and he took it, because she was determined.

“Thanks.” He set the cup on the counter.

A cool hand was on his arm, holding him closer than he should have been to her, to someone who smelled like lavender and roses on a summer day.

She led him down the hall to the parlor. He let her, because of lavender and roses, and because he couldn’t undo her hand from his arm. And he didn’t really want to.

Which meant he wasn’t too far gone.

“Sit down.”

She backed him up to the wing chair next to the piano. He sat, closing his eyes and leaning his head back to rest, just for a minute.

The screen door slammed and he didn’t want to open his eyes. But there were footsteps and perfume that hung over the air like some kind of heavy-duty air freshener. He opened his eyes.

“What in the world is going on here?” Etta Forester stood in the doorway of the parlor, a vision in tie-dyed clothes, lavender hair and a floppy, wide-brimmed hat.

It was a bad time to be seeing double.

The woman standing next to his chair looked like she
was about to faint. He barely remembered her name, but he felt a lot like the ten-year-old Jason after he’d gotten caught playing house with Amy Baxter, his next-door neighbor at the time.

This was her grandmother? Alyson had thought she was coming to a normal, sane world. She thought she had left crazy behind. Maybe the town cat lady wasn’t as far-fetched as she thought. A giggle sneaked up on Alyson, surprising her, and she laughed. And then her grandmother laughed.

“Girl, I’ve wanted to hug you for twenty-something years. Come here.” Etta Forester took the few steps that brought them together and then her arms were around Alyson, holding tight.

Etta stepped back. “Well, it don’t look like they ruined you too awful bad. A little too much like a spit-polished boot, but you’ll do. I’d say you’ve had your first scuff marks in the last few weeks. Is that what…”

Etta jerked around, and then leaned to look under the sofa. “What in the world. Is that a nasty old cat in my house?”

Another laugh, this one deep, male. Alyson glared at the man sitting in her grandmother’s velvet wingback.

“Yes, it is a cat. He told me to bring it in and feed it.”

“I didn’t tell you to let it go.” He struggled to sit up. Alyson held out a hand and he pulled himself to his feet.

And he didn’t let go of her hand, not for a long moment, and it wasn’t easy, to untangle herself from the emotion that happened in that moment. The connection between them started in her fingers and slid down her arms, straight to her heart. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move away from his touch.

“Jason Bradshaw, what is the matter with you? Bull get you down?”

“Just a little. Some head—”

Etta waved her hand. “I read about it on the Internet. Concussion and some torn ligaments in your knee. How’s your noggin?”

“My noggin hurts and you’re pretty lucky that I remember you.”

Etta patted his cheek. “Honey, you couldn’t forget an old bird like me.”

“You
are
unforgettable.” Jason rubbed the back of his head and Alyson wondered if he was as okay as he pretended.

“There’s that cat again.” Etta pointed to the love seat. “Get that thing outta here. My goodness, you’re here for what, two days and you’re already dragging in strays. You always were animal crazy.”

Alyson turned, she held her grandmother’s gaze and she couldn’t look away. “I was animal crazy?”

“Of course you were. Drove your mother insane. Well, everything drove that high-maintenance female insane.”

“I’m sorry about the kitten. It was hungry.” She glanced at Jason. “And it wasn’t his fault.”

Being around her grandmother seemed to push both of them back in time about twenty years, Alyson realized. They were suddenly children, apologizing and trying to make excuses for their bad behavior.

“The kitten doesn’t have to go, but you’ll need a litter box and some food for the mangy-looking thing.”

“Since Etta is here, I think I can go now.” Jason walked to the door. He paused at the opening and leaned against
it a little and Alyson remembered he’d done that yesterday. She realized now that it wasn’t about being relaxed. He was holding himself up.

“Jason, do you need a ride home?” Etta was more observant. It didn’t take her two days to notice when a man wasn’t as strong as he pretended to be.

“No, I think I’m fine. I just need a minute to get my legs back under me. Take care of each other. Etta, I’m glad you’re home.”

“Well, thanks to you I came back early and cut short a perfectly lovely cruise with friends.”

“I did that?” Jason shook his head. “I guess I probably did.”

“We’ll blame it on Alana. She called the ship. I got off at the next port and flew to Tulsa.”

“You didn’t have to do that.” Alyson found it hard to believe that anyone would do that. And as she was taking it all in, Jason was saying goodbye. Her one familiar link in this town, a man who couldn’t remember her name.

He left, walking down the sidewalk to his truck, slow, even steps, and still that cowboy swagger. Alyson watched through the gauzy curtains as he got into his truck, pulling himself into the seat and sitting for a minute.

“We should probably drive him,” she whispered.

A hand touched her shoulder. Her grandmother stood behind her, staring out the window with her. “He wouldn’t thank you for that. A cowboy likes to take care of himself. He’s stronger than most. He’s been through a lot and came out just fine.”

“What’s he been through?”

“Now honey, if I told you that, then you wouldn’t have
the fun of getting to know him. Getting to know a man, that’s part of the adventure.”

Alyson watched him drive away. “I’m not here to get to know a man. I’m here to find out who I am.”

Her grandmother put an arm around her shoulders. “I’m glad you’re home, Alyson girl, glad you’re home.”

A
lyson stood in the center of her grandmother’s parlor and thought about Etta’s words.
Glad she was home.
Was this home? Or just a place to hide for a little while, until she figured out her next move, where she went from here?

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” Etta flipped on a light and pulled the drapes open, sending a light cloud of dust across the room.

Alyson sneezed a few times as sunlight poured into the room, the beams catching the particles of dust that had flown from the drapes. Etta didn’t seem to be bothered by the sunlight or the dust. She swiped her finger across the windowsill and shook her head before turning back to face Alyson.

“Well?” Alyson’s grandmother was a tall, thin woman with hair that wasn’t gray, but a shade of lavender. Silver hoops dangled from her ears and her clothes were breezy and tie-dyed, like the ones Alyson had found upstairs in the room with the spinning wheel.

“I needed to find you.”

Etta’s brows went up and she shook her head. She pointed to the photo albums on the sofa and glanced back at Alyson. And then it hit her, that maybe she shouldn’t be here. Maybe she should have run to anyplace but Oklahoma. She knew people in California. She had friends in Chicago. She could have gone anywhere.

And she’d picked Dawson, Oklahoma. She’d picked Etta. She wanted answers to questions that had lingered in the back of her mind for years. There had always been flashes of memory, missing pieces and unanswered questions.

She had tried to research a few years earlier, when she first moved into her own apartment, but she’d hit dead ends. Maybe because she hadn’t really known what she was searching for. It was hard to search for something that felt like childhood dreams—nothing real, nothing tangible.

“You’re here because something happened.” Etta sat down on the piano bench and ran her fingers over the keys. “You played it when you were a little bitty thing. I knew then, when you were barely talking, that you had a gift.”

A gift, or was it a curse? Etta couldn’t know the pressure. She couldn’t know what it felt like, to never really have a childhood, to always be playing, to always be
on
for the people around her. Her weekends had been spent with her mother, poring over articles written about her performances. Nothing was more fun for an eight-year-old than to read about every wrong note she’d played.

And what happened to the prodigy when she became an adult, with hands that trembled and fear that squeezed
the air from her lungs? What did she do when the pills stopped working?

“I didn’t know about you, about my family here.” Alyson walked to the window, she looked out at the quiet country lane. A truck pulling a trailer loaded with hay lumbered down the road, a Border Collie standing on the bales of hay.

Alyson turned to face her grandmother. “I had memories that I couldn’t figure out. I stopped questioning my mother years ago. She wouldn’t answer.”

“I’m sorry.” Etta stood, closing the cover over the keys of the piano and walking up behind Alyson. An arm, comforting and strong, wrapped around Alyson’s shoulders and pulled her close. “You and Andie were the victims. I couldn’t stop what they did, the way they decided to end things. I just prayed that someday you’d come back.”

“I guess your prayers have been answered.” The words were empty, because Alyson had never prayed, not real prayers that counted. She’d prayed to go to Europe, to have a pony, and to survive. That had been a prayer that counted. She just hadn’t realized it at the time.

“Yes, my prayers have been answered. But it isn’t all about having you here. It’s about having you happy.”

Alyson walked away from the window, away from her grandmother’s embrace. She stopped in front of the photo albums she’d left on the coffee table. She’d found pictures of herself in those albums, a toddler who smiled.

How did she tell her grandmother about the pills she took for anxiety, and about falling apart? How did she talk about how it felt to look in the mirror and see a fraud,
someone so far from the perfect person everyone thought she was, that she didn’t even recognize the person looking back at her?

She picked up the album and opened to pictures of her father and her sister. Andie. She whispered the name and closed her eyes. There were so many missing pieces of her life she wondered how she had ever felt whole.

Had she ever felt whole?

She wasn’t sure that she was even there yet, not even with this knowledge, with this family she had missed out on, and with Etta standing next to her.

“He loved you.”

Alyson closed her eyes and tried to remember that love, those arms, and how it had felt to be a part of their lives, a part of Etta’s home and her family. Vaguely, she vaguely remembered him tossing her into the air and catching her.

There were other memories, memories that made her want to cry. She shook her head to clear the images of driving away. Images that had been explained away as childhood nightmares.

“I wish he would have come after me, after us.” Alyson didn’t mean to make it an accusation against a man who could no longer defend himself, but it happened.

“Aly, he couldn’t. They made a deal. Your mother and father were two different people. James was a country boy. Caroline was city. He grew up in church. Your mother didn’t. They couldn’t find a middle ground.”

“So he let her leave? With me?”

“That was the deal. He took Andie, she got you.”

“
Parent Trap
was cute and funny, and it had a happy
ending. My parents really did this to their children.” As if they were property, as if their feelings hadn’t mattered.

“I know.” Her grandmother’s voice was soft, unlike her image in those tie-dyed clothes.

And now the most difficult question. “How did they decide who kept whom? Why did he keep Andie?”

Etta sighed. “Andie wouldn’t have survived your mother.”

Alyson shook her head. Did that make her a survivor? Did they honestly see her as the strong one? When she looked at those pictures of Andie, smiling, laughing on the back of a horse, and then she thought of her own childhood, she didn’t get that.

Andie looked stronger than Alyson had ever felt.

“How is Andie?”

“Andie’s good. She’s a free spirit, going all over the country, from rodeo to rodeo. She’s going to love you, though.”

The empty space in her heart grew and there didn’t seem to be a way to fill it. This could have been her world, her life, and instead she had been her mother’s prized possession, but never a daughter—that position had gone to her younger siblings.

Alyson’s childhood had been spent performing. She had been paraded on programs, on stages, where they would test her with a song and then she’d play it. She remembered them trying to trick her, to break her with a song she might not know.

She had worn the responsibility of not letting her parents down, not letting her family down.

“We’ll work through this, Alyson. I want you here, and
you can stay as long as you’d like.” Etta smiled big. “Honey, you can stay forever if that’s what you want. It’s whatever you decide.”

Alyson could decide. Of course she could, but she also knew that there were obligations looming that she couldn’t avoid. Sooner or later she would have to return to her life.

But for now, Alyson Anderson was Alyson Forester and that required a change.

“Do you think we could go shopping?”

Etta smiled. “Honey, now you’re speaking my language.”

As they turned to walk out of the room, the kitten shot past them, a ragged little feline with cobwebs on his whiskers.

“I can’t believe you brought that animal into my house.”

“He’s cute, though.”

Etta laughed. “Mangy is never cute. Now don’t let me forget that we need comfortable shoes if we’re going to work at Camp Hope.”

The shift in conversation took Alyson by surprise. “When do we do that?”

“Next week.” Etta grabbed her purse and keys that she’d dropped on the table just inside the front door. “We’ll stop by later and talk to Jenna and Adam.”

As they walked out the door, Alyson was thinking of Camp Hope, then her thoughts turned to Jason Bradshaw. She wanted him to remember her, because memories shouldn’t be one-sided.

Jason landed wrong when he jumped out of his truck at Camp Hope. Too bad the pills he’d taken for his head
weren’t going to undo this. He leaned against his truck and flexed his leg, grimacing at the pull in his knee. He had more problems with his body than someone thirty years older than him. Or that’s what the doctor had said the last time Jason had kept an appointment.

And with that verdict the doctor had also told him it was about time for him to think about retiring from bull riding. Jason shrugged off the advice, and didn’t want to think about it, even now.

He limped away from his truck and started toward the dorm where Clint and Adam were working. Clint was on the ladder. Distracted, Jason didn’t see the two boys running toward him until they hit him head on, wrapping six-year-old arms around his waist and nearly knocking him off his feet.

“Whoa, guys, what’s up?” He hugged them close and they did what they’d always done, each claimed a leg to hug and he would walk with them holding tight.

“We’ve missed you.” Both boys shouted. This must be what a sugar high looked like.

“I missed you guys, too. But did you maybe have too much candy today?” He stopped, grimacing because they were heavier than when they started this game a few years back. “Do you think you could give an old guy a break and walk with me today?”

They let go of his legs and sat back on the ground, star ing up as if he’d lost his mind. “Do we gotta?” David asked.

“Yeah, sorry guys, today we gotta.” He held out his hands and the two grabbed, one on each hand. “Where is everybody?”

As in their parents, Jenna and Adam, and their uncle Clint.

“They have to get this place ready for kids.” Timmy, always the mimic.

“They’re fixing the roof of the dorm.” David, more serious and quiet. “Cleaning, guttering.”

“Let’s head that way. Maybe they need my help.”

“You won’t remember, will you?” Timmy asked. “Because you’ve damaged stuff inside your head.”

“Yeah, I guess I have.”

A truck pulled down the drive of Camp Hope. Beth. What in the world would she be doing there? The camp was too much like church for his sister’s comfort.

“Is that Beth?” David stood next to him, leaning in slightly, his bare feet scrunching in the dirt.

“Yeah, it’s Beth.”

“Are you serious?” Timmy shouted. “She wouldn’t come near here with a ten-foot pole.”

Jason laughed, because that was pretty close to right. “Let’s see what she wants.”

“Do we hafta?” Timmy pulled loose from his hand. “We kind of wanted to play with tanks and stuff, or maybe play with you. But we don’t want to talk to a girl.”

“Fine, I’ll catch up with you.” Jason headed back in the direction of his sister. She was getting out of her truck and looked about as happy as Timmy had. “What’s up, Sis?”

“Antibiotics?”

“Antibiotics?”

“For my horse. You were going to pick them up and bring them home. You drove past the house, so I thought I’d better run over here and see if you remembered.”

If he remembered. He rubbed a hand over his face and tried to think back, to the remembering part. Nothing. He closed his eyes and worked backwards, retracing where he’d been. And he could only remember one thing, lavender and roses.

“Jason, this isn’t good. You really need to go back to the neurologist.” Beth walked him over to his truck. “I’ll go with you.”

“I know you would.” He opened the door of the truck as his phone rang. Beth climbed in, he took the call. As she hunted through his truck, he walked away.

Beth chased after him, catching him as he ended the call.

“Who was that?” She held the antibiotics up for him to see. “You remembered.”

“That’s good to know.” He slipped the phone into his pocket. “That was Roy Cummings. He wanted to know how I’m feeling and if I plan on getting back on tour.”

“You can’t.” Beth shook her head. “Jason, you can’t be thinking about it, can you?”

“I don’t know. What else can I do, Beth? I’m a bull rider.”

“You’re a bull rider who suffered a serious head injury. You could get hurt worse. You could…”

Jason hugged her. “I know what could happen. I’ve talked to the sports medicine team. I’ve talked to the neurologist. My short-term memory is damaged, Beth. I know all that. But I also know that I can’t throw it all away without trying to fight back.”

“Why do you need this so much?” Beth glanced over her shoulder at a car coming up the drive. “Seriously, Jason, you have your ranch. You have this community.”

Jason couldn’t give her the answer she wanted.

All his friends were settling down, having families and building lives. And he couldn’t remember going to the store for his sister.

A car pulled up the drive and parked. Etta’s car. He couldn’t remember the name of the woman getting out of the passenger’s side. But he knew her.

“Is that the reason you had to go to Etta’s this morning?”

He had no trouble remembering his sister, standing there staring at him, a smirk of a smile on her face. He pulled the paper out of his pocket and glanced over it, at the note telling him to go to the feed store and at the bottom of the page, the name Alyson.

“Yeah, I think so. That’s Alyson. She’s Etta’s granddaughter.”

“Some things haven’t changed. You can still remember a woman’s name.” She watched Etta and her granddaughter. “But since she’s with Etta, I think you should be careful. Break her heart and Etta will break your neck.”

“You think?”

“I’m pretty sure of it. Did you know that someone bought the old church on Back Street?”

“I guess I didn’t know that.”

The church they had attended with their mother. It had been closed down for years. People had left the small country church behind, looking for more. If he closed his eyes, he could remember in detail the inside of that old building. He could remember how it felt to sit next to his mom and sing “In the Garden.”