A Broken Cowboy (BWWM Interracial Romance)

A Broken Cowboy

Copyright 2014 Renee Phillips

CHAPTER ONE

“Why isn’t there any freakin’ cell phone service here?” Krystal whined, oblivious to the fact that her horse had stopped following the group. Bored by her lack of direction, the horse had started nibbling a patch of grass on the side of the trail while she continued to tap away on her pink-cased cellphone in vain, trying to update her Facebook status to “tired of riding this stupid horse.”

“Would you put that thing away?” Mimi asked in an exasperated voice. “We didn’t come all this way to stare at a tiny screen. Look! A prairie dog! Darn it, see there? You missed it because of that idiotic phone!” Mimi continued to stare off in the distance, scanning the landscape and the sky in hopes of seeing more sights that she couldn’t see back in Washington, DC.

“I have to stay in touch with all my friends, you know,” Krystal said, rolling her eyes. “Life didn’t stop just because we came out here, even though it feels like it from right here.”

“Those aren’t your real friends, you know. Those are just people on the other side of a computer screen. They might not even be the people they say they are, and you’re wasting this beautiful day to try to talk to them! I invited you out here on this trip to get away from this kind of stuff, not to pack it with you like yesterday’s baggage.”

Mimi tried urging her horse forward to catch up with the group, but she must have been doing it wrong. The dumbfounded animal stood completely still, actually watching the group walk away with a mournful expression on its face, like it wanted to go join them but hadn’t been told to.

“Whatever. All I know is I paid a butt-load of money to sit on the back of a horse and watch completely inept people try to rope a wooden cow. I want to know what happened last night on television
and I can’t find out because I can’t get any updates on my phone.”

Mimi rolled her eyes at her friend’s outlandish antics. The whole purpose of the week-long trip was to get away from technology, but more importantly, to get away from drama. And god knows, Mimi had plenty of drama, both in the office and in her personal life. Well, what little personal life she had. She certainly didn’t need to get updates about a phony reality show, not when she had a gorgeous setting like the ranch calling to her.

A  guide from Circle Round Ranch approached the ladies and offered to take them on a side route around the group to show them some rock formations. Mimi smiled and exclaimed, “Yes!” while Krystal rolled her eyes and emphatically answered, “No.”

Mimi shot her best friend an ugly glance before turning back to the guide, saying, “I would love to see them, thank you. Krystal, I’ll catch up with you later.”

Krystal gave a half-hearted wave over her shoulder with one hand while holding her cellphone up in the air with the other, still trying in vain to get a signal. She muttered a few choice profanities under her breath and shoved the phone disgustedly back into her purse, dangling from the saddle horn in front of her.

Mimi pulled the reins gently to the left like they had been taught on their first day on the ranch, trying to make her horse follow the guide. Instead, her horse turned in a complete circle and ended up back where it had started, facing the rest of the riders. She let her shoulders sag. At least her horse was nice, sweet even, but it’s a shame that it was possibly the dumbest horse alive.

The guide, whose name was Sarah, smiled. “Oh, looks like you tugged a little too hard. Don’t forget to nudge with your heel while you lead. It tells the horse where to go. If you only use the reins, you only make her change direction. You have to use your foot to tell her to move forward, too.”

“I just hate to kick an animal,” Mimi explained sheepishly, knowing full well that several different ranchers had been reminding her through the entire trip to nudge with her boot. It seemed like everyone out here had a nasty habit of wanting to kick a horse, even though at this very moment, Mimi was starting to understand why they might want to.

“Well, don’t think of it as kicking it. Think of it as telling the horse what you want it to do, but doing it in the language that the horse understands. How would you feel if you woke up every single morning and had to go to work, but you had no idea what you were supposed to do when you got there? Other people had to tell you what to do when you started, and you have to tell your horse. Trust me, she doesn’t want to stand there, lost and confused. She wants to take you where you want to go. So tell her.”

Mimi did as she was told, barely poking the animal in the flank with the back of her boot. Her horse began to move slightly, but then stopped. She tried again, just a little more forcefully this time while tugging lightly on her reins. Amazingly, her horse followed Sarah’s horse up over a small ridge of grassy hillside until the two of them stood side by side on the top.

Mimi’s heart stopped at the view. Below her, miles of unbroken landscape stretched out before her, ringed on three sides by beautiful rust-colored rock that reached upward, forming walls around the valley that blocked the wind, leaving the grasses and wildflowers below them untouched.

“Oh, it’s gorgeous,” Mimi exclaimed, delighting for the hundredth time in a new sight or new experience. When she had first found the ad for the week-long cowboy vacation, her co-workers had laughed at her in a good-natured way, imagining Mimi as a black cowgirl. She had even heard them jokingly refer to her as Tumble Weave. She’d laughed along in the way that she always did, that peacemaker way she had of not letting others know she was offended or upset, but now she was the one getting the last laugh. All those jerks back in their cubicles at the IRS building were stuck inside staring at computer screens while she was being enchanted by the glorious, mostly untouched landscape.

She took
a deep breath of untainted air. There was nothing like this feeling back home in Washington, DC.
The only parts of the city she ever saw were the office, the metro train, and her condo. Lather, rinse, repeat, day in and day out.

“What is that building down there?” Mimi asked, pointing to a small dot to the left. Sarah lifted her hand to adjust her hat so she could see where the other woman was pointing.

“You can’t see it from this distance, but that’s actually two buildings. One is the cabin, the other is the barn. That’s an old farm, used to be called The Watering Hole.”

“Really? Just sitting there in the middle of nowhere like that?” Mimi was perplexed that someone could live out here, all alone.

“Well, no, it’s not in the middle of nowhere. The whole thing is the farm. It’s about five hundred acres,” Sarah explained. “No one lives there now, but once upon it a time it was a pretty little place. They raised a few head of livestock, nothing massive, but the owner died suddenly—I think it was about two years ago—and it reverted to the bank. The bank has been trying to sell it ever since.”

As the two women turned to catch back up to the group, Mimi caught up with Krystal and shared her news, ready to burst. “I know why I had to come out here. I figured it out.”

Krystal looked at her over the top of her oversized and out of place Prada sunglasses, resorting to scrolling through old text messages on her phone to pass the time. “And what exactly is this vision quest you just had in the last five minutes?” she asked sarcastically.

“I’m buying a farm.” Mimi braced herself for the impact of Krystal’s expected onslaught, but was actually vaguely disappointed when Krystal didn’t even react. She simply dismissed Mimi’s remark with a wave in her direction.

“Girl, you got heat stroke or something. I ain’t even talking to you ‘til you get right in the head.”

“I’m not kidding, Krystal, I’m deadly serious. I’m buying a farm. I’m staying here.” Mimi stuck her jaw out and sat ramrod-straight in her saddle. It wasn’t a position she used very often, but when she did, it was a done deal. She had made up her mind.

“And what am I supposed to do? Go back to Washington and tell everybody you decided to play Little House on the Prairie while we were out here? Girl, please.”

“I don’t care what you tell them. But I’m staying.” Mimi looked off in the distance, trying to see that small ranch that was calling to her.

“And what about your house, Miss Cowgirl? Your car? Oh, and you know…YOUR JOB?”

“I don’t care about any of that. I saw the farm I want, and I’m staying. I want you to sell my house and my car, and as for my job, I’ll send them a politely worded letter telling them I will no longer require their services.”

“What services? You’re a tax agent, you’re the one doing the servicing!”

“Exactly!” Mimi said with a laugh.

“Whatever,” Krystal answered, still not convinced that Mimi wasn’t playing with her. “If you want to stay out here and keep pretending to be Tumble Weave, I ain’t gonna stop you. But I ain’t gonna stay, neither. I got a life back home and I like it, thank you very much. You can stay out here and sleep with rocks for pillows and pee behind some old cactus all you want. I’m outta here.”

After the group made its way back to the ranch, Mimi pulled Sarah aside to ask her some questions about The Watering Hole. “How do I get in touch with that bank?” she asked, waiting for Sarah to laugh at her like everyone else she knew.

“I’m sure Boss has the number in the main house, I can check with him,” Sarah offered. “But, you do realize that’s a primitive farm, right? There’s no fancy air conditioned tractors or massive combines like on TV. Anything you decided to do with it is going to have to be fairly simple.”

“I hadn’t even thought about what I would do with it!” Mimi laughed. “I just know I want to stay out here and breathe in fresh air every day for the rest of my life.”

“Spoken like a true cowboy! Well, cowgirl!” Sarah said, throwing an arm around the woman’s shoulders and walking with her to the barn to groom their horses before lunch. “I’ll go talk to Boss, and if he has a name, we can even take the truck into town before you have to head home.”

“Oh, I’m not planning on going home. There’s nothing there that I want.”

“Really?” Sarah asked, concern showing on her face. “Hang on a second, I thought you were interested in buying the farm so you’d own a little property out here, maybe come back and visit every so often when you feel like getting away from it all. Are you talking about buying and actually living there? Like, now?”

“Yes, I am,” Mimi replied confidently. “I’ve been stuck in a city all my life and never even knew people live like you guys do on this ranch. I know you get some people—no names mentioned—who come out here and play cowboy for a week, then can’t wait to get back to their cars with the heated seats and their Chinese food delivery. I don’t want to go back to that life. I don’t want this to end.”

Sarah eyed Mimi skeptically before nodding her head thoughtfully as she brushed her horse. “I completely understand. I couldn’t imagine living in a place where there’s no grass growing between my feet.”

“I can imagine it, because I’ve lived it my whole life,” Mimi interrupted as she placed her saddle on the wall rack and aimed a hose from the wall at her horse’s sweaty side, raking with her fingernails at the place where the hair was pushed down from being pressed under the saddle. Some people would be too disgusted to run their carefully manicured nails over the side of a dirty horse, but Mimi loved the feeling of its wiry hair beneath her hands. This animal had just carried her out over the plain all morning, and now it was her turn to take away some of that stress she had put on it. Plus, the loving nuzzling from the horse after every grooming made it all worth it.

Sarah didn’t look convinced. “But there’s more to ranching than just putting on a cowboy hat and saddling up a horse. It’s going to be hard work. There’s a reason these farms come up for sale from time to time. Either the owner dies and no one in the family wants to live like this, or the owner himself can’t take it anymore and he heads for a town. We’ve even seen some farmers who just turn their animals out loose to fend for themselves and lock the door behind them, not even bothering to put the place up for sale. They just walk away.”

“I appreciate you telling me all that. I know it will be hard, but it can’t be worse than waking up every day to ride jammed tight together on a train, go to work in one of the most hated industries in the country, then go home to my empty condo. I can’t breathe when I think of going back there, not when I’ve been out here where my lungs have had the first chance in my whole life to fill up as much as they want, to get as big as they can on fresh air.”

Sarah smiled as they led their haltered horses to the fenced in pasture next to the barn to get some rest and munch on the hay piled in the middle. “Well, you’ve just described what is possibly the best reason I’ve ever heard for someone taking to country life. I can’t argue with that logic. C’mon, let’s go in the house and talk to Boss.”

The owner of Circle Round, Jim Miller, gave her the phone number for the bank, but cautioned her as gently as he could. “Mimi, it’s one thing to come out here for a week and rough it a little for a week. It’s something else all together to try to live off the land. I’d be irresponsible if I let one of my guests come out here and get swept away by the cowboy lifestyle. I mean, think about it this way…you couldn’t even come out here for a week on the ranch without bringing your friend from home. You’re about to leave everything you’ve known and spend a lot of your money to do it. Are you sure you’ve thought this through?”