How to Handle a Cowboy (5 page)

The junk shop was one of the last properties on the left as you headed east, a single-story shack with a sagging front porch. If the place had ever been painted, the Wyoming winds had sandblasted off every stroke of color, leaving the warped boards gray and parched by the sun. Old tools were nailed to the front wall: a rusted blade from a circular saw, an assortment of branding irons, and a few dented hubcaps. Standing guard over the collection was a whimsical, wide-eyed tin man welded together from car parts. In New York, they'd call him folk art. Here in Wynott, he was just another piece of redneck yard trash.

Sierra looked up into the carburetor man's glassy eyes and shivered. “Who lives here?”

“She doesn't like people talking about her,” Ridge said.

“It's a woman?” Sierra tried not to buy into gender stereotypes, but there was nothing feminine about this place.

“Why not?”

Why not, indeed. She was starting to think the town had been aptly named.

“Will she mind the kids being here?”

Ridge shrugged. “I doubt it. She won't be too happy about us coming around, though.”

A high fence bordered the backyard, and Sierra started to reach for the complicated latch—another masterpiece of redneck engineering constructed of a claw hammer and a complex assortment of scrap metal. Whoever owned the junk shop was a whiz with a welder, but Sierra didn't have time to appreciate that kind of skill. She just wanted her boys back, preferably undamaged by the jungle of rusty metal behind the fence.

As she started to lift the latch, Ridge put his hand on top of hers.

“Wait.” He put a finger to his lips then touched his ear.

She paused and heard the murmur of voices coming from behind the fence. One rang out higher than the others.

“Lookit me!” She recognized Frankie's voice. “I'm goin' to Vegas, baby!”

Standing on tiptoe, she peeked over the fence and decided she'd have to check the records and make sure all the boys were up to date on their shots. There were eighteen potential puncture wounds and a dozen cases of tetanus back there, along with rusty cars, washing machines, industrial equipment, and piles of bald tires. Grass sprouted from empty engine cavities, and unidentifiable vines obscured stacks of miscellaneous machinery. Over it all ruled a monstrous Caterpillar tractor, its bright yellow paint nearly obliterated by rust, its long, crooked arm hoisting a toothed bucket from which sprouted more weeds.

The boys had piled into a defunct Chevy Bel Air like a family setting out on vacation. Frankie was at the wheel, which was appropriate since he was always the ringleader when it came to getting into trouble. As always, he was wearing his favorite hat—an ancient fedora that had probably belonged to some staid businessman in the fifties. It was darkened by age and stained with mold, and made dark-eyed, olive-skinned Frankie look like a Little Rascal playing gangster. Isaiah sat beside him in the passenger seat, while Jeffrey and Carter slouched in the back like a couple of junior mob enforcers. All they needed was cigars all around and a body in the trunk.

“How come you'd go to Vegas?” That was Isaiah, challenging everyone's ideas as usual. He had a quick intelligence that would take him far if he ever had the opportunity to use it for something other than finding trouble. “Why don't you go to New York or LA?”

“'Cause I could make it in Vegas,” Frankie said. “I could be a dealer.”

“A drug dealer? Man, you're stupid,” Isaiah said.

Sierra resisted the urge to do a fist pump. Isaiah's father was in prison for dealing drugs, and like most of the boys, he clung to a fierce love for his absent father. She'd been worried he'd follow his dad down that dead-end road, but maybe the system had succeeded in breaking the cycle for once.

“You need money to be a drug dealer, and you don't got any money,” Isaiah continued.

Sierra's shoulders sagged. So much for breaking the cycle.

“Not drugs,” Frankie said. “I'd deal cards. Blackjack, in a casino. Or I could be a bouncer.”

“You're too much of a punk to be a bouncer. You'd probably be a backup dancer. For
Cher
,” Carter teased. He was a big boy, not fat but large, and he probably wanted the bouncer job for himself. Jeffrey, who sat beside him, never seemed to take up any space at all. The boy was so quiet Sierra was afraid he would disappear someday, just fade away. She didn't know what kind of tragedies festered in the boy's memory, but something had stolen his voice.

“I hate Cher,” Frankie said. “I want to do backup for somebody hot. Rihanna, maybe.”

The boys jeered as Ridge and Sierra struggled not to laugh.

“My mom likes Rihanna,” Carter protested. “We're maybe going to go to a concert sometime when she gets out of the center.”

“Your mom's never getting out,” Frankie scoffed. Sierra winced at the casual cruelty—although from what she'd read in Carter's file, Frankie was probably right.

“She is too.” Carter squared his shoulders and thrust out his jaw. “She's really committed to her recovery this time.”

Other boys knew baseball stats or rock lyrics. Sierra's boys knew the language of therapy and addiction. Sometimes it seemed as if they'd been the caretakers and their parents the children, living in an upside-down world.

Frankie draped one hand casually over the steering wheel, like a bored commuter, and turned to Isaiah. “Where would you go?”

Sierra gripped the fence, her knuckles whitening. This was an answer she wanted to hear. She wasn't sure what Isaiah wanted out of life, and that made it hard to motivate him. Pudding Snacks would only get her so far, and she was eager to hear what his dream destination would be.

“No place.” His dark brows arrowed downward, turning his delicate, almost elfin face into the embodiment of a bad attitude. “I'd just drive. Drive and drive and drive. Away from here.” He scrunched down in his seat and stared out the window. “Away from all of you.”

“I'd go back to Millersville.” Sierra glanced down at Josh, who was whispering his own answer to the question. He seemed to be talking to the fence posts, oblivious of Ridge and Sierra beside him. “I'd go help out my dad, 'cause there's a lot of work to do around the place.”

Sierra felt her heart break a little. Josh's dad had done everything possible to kill his son's affection and maybe even the boy himself. But children needed to love their parents, and it was amazing how long they'd cling to a version of reality that let them justify that love.

“You all don't have nowhere to go either,” Isaiah said to the boys in the car. “You're all just talk.”

As usual, his bad attitude silenced the rest of the boys. Sierra glanced at Ridge, and he nodded. The heavy latch opened with a clang and she strode into the junkyard, followed by Ridge and Josh.

“Hey,” Carter said. “Who's—oh, shit, guys. We're busted.” He ducked back into the car, banging his head on the roof. “Damn it, Josh told. I
knew
he would. I'm going to kill that kid.”

***

Ridge had once seen a rabbit caught by a coyote. At the moment it felt the beast's jaws clamp on its neck, the normally silent rabbit had let out a high, thin cry that pierced his heart. That was the sound Josh made now, as the boys turned and glared at him.

Ridge stifled the urge to put a protective hand on the boy's shoulder. The gesture would put the boy solidly on the side of the adults—a move that would make his life hell as long as he stayed with this group of boys. Instead, he shot a glance at Sierra, to see if she'd seen how much promises meant to this little gang.

“Josh didn't tell me anything,” she said.

He supposed that was true. Josh hadn't told her; he'd told Ridge.

Judging from the thunderous look the black kid shot at Josh, he wasn't buying it.

“Snitch,” he muttered.

Sierra gave the boys a sharp nod, and they immediately spilled out of the old Chevy—all but the black kid, who paused a moment and met her eyes with a hostile glare of his own. Ridge recognized that look. He'd had the same one in his own arsenal once upon a time.

“Isaiah,” Sierra said. “Out.”

Isaiah must have decided this wasn't a good time to test authority, because he quickly followed the others. He headed straight for Josh, who was doing his best to hide in Ridge's shadow.

Ridge drew himself up to his full height and looked Isaiah in the eye. That bit of body language apparently worked as well with kids as it did with horses, because Isaiah turned away and kicked at the ground, creating a little cloud of dust that settled over the toe of his running shoes. His kick uncovered an old piece of rusted metal, which he picked up and studied, those angry brows drawn down in concentration. A change of subject and he'd forget all about Josh.

“Vegas, huh?” Ridge grinned at the curly-haired kid and yanked the brim of his old hat down over his face. The kid tilted his head back and gave him a cocky grin.

“You bet. Vegas, baby! Got a gig with Rihanna.”

“I'd stay away from that chick,” Ridge said. “She's trouble.”

A lively argument ensued over whether the singer's hotness made dying at the hands of her various paramours worthwhile. Ridge could feel Josh releasing tension beside him, like a balloon slowly expelling air, as the conversation shifted from reality to fantasy.

“So, are you a real cowboy?” one of the boys asked. “With a horse and everything?”

Ridge nodded, settling for a half-truth. He did have a horse—several horses. But he was a long way from having “everything.”

He didn't have a career, for example. Or a future. Or a woman.

“So can we ride it?” the boy prodded. It was the black kid, the one who had the face of an angel until he unleashed that rebellious glare.

“No,” Sierra said. “If you want extra activities, you need to show you can be responsible. You have to make good decisions. And locking the pantry door was
not
a good decision. Leaving the house without permission was an even worse one. Did anybody get their homework done?”

The response was a lot of shuffling and mumbling.

“That's what I thought.”

Sierra turned and set off toward Phoenix House, the boys trailing behind her like chicks following a mother hen. They were very grumbly chicks, and Ridge felt like joining in. Boys needed adventure like horses needed hay, and she couldn't expect them to act like angels when they were cooped up doing homework on a day like this.

Fall didn't last long in Wyoming. Soon the wind would blow the trees bare and swirl a thick coat of snow on the ground. But for now, the aspens burned bright as candle flames against the sky, and crisp grass crackled under their feet. Hitcher seeds clung to socks and pant legs, and fallen leaves colored the sidewalk like spilled paint—maple red, oak brown, and aspen yellow. Autumn had splashed the whole world with bright, festive color.

It was time for touch football, for wrestling in the grass, for saddling up and riding just to feel the wind in your face. If Sierra wanted the kids to do something constructive, she should let them rake leaves. And then she should let them jump in the piles until they'd made a bigger mess than they started with.

That's what he'd do if he ran the place, or if he had kids of his own someday.

He wouldn't. He knew that. But he also knew what childhood should be and rarely ever was.

“Spider-Man don't do math,” Isaiah mumbled. “Spider-Man got better things to do.”

“Not in Wynott, he doesn't,” said Sierra.

“Damn—darn straight,” the kid said. “Nothin' good to do around here, not even for Spider-Man.”

The clear, high notes of Sierra's laughter rose in the still air of the quiet little town, riding the breeze like sudden birdsong. She'd let out that same careless, all-out laughter in the closet, but Ridge hadn't seen her smile in daylight, and he hadn't seen how her green eyes caught the sunlight filtering through the leaves. He felt dazed, like a kid who'd just spun around and around for the dizzy pleasure of tumbling to the ground.

He wanted to grab her hands in his and do just that, he realized. He wanted to spin and spin until the outside world didn't exist, until there was just the two of them again—like back there in the closet. He wanted Sierra Dunn, more than he'd wanted a woman in a long time.

Which was not good. He'd returned to Wynott to recover from his injury and find a new path in life now that his rodeo career was over. That path didn't include a woman, and it certainly didn't include a bunch of kids, but he could feel Sierra and her little band of misfits tearing down the barriers he'd built around his heart. The fragile walls were collapsing like a pup tent in a windstorm.

He'd built those barriers because his last long-term relationship owed more to his ex's determination and perseverance than it did to his own feelings, which had been mild at best and annoyed at worst. Shelley had been dead set on turning the two of them into a couple, with wedding bells ringing and two-point-five kids in the yard. When she'd finally given up, he'd felt relief and guilt in equal measure.

A quick mental flashback of Shelley's face, swollen and tearstained, made his gut clench.

You
don't need the things other people need,
she'd said.
You
think
that
makes
you
strong. But it doesn't. It just makes you alone.

She was right. When it came to women, he had nothing to offer. He'd tried, especially with Shelley. But he'd had no deeper feelings toward her than he had toward the various one-night stands that rodeo cowboys gathered along with their gold buckles and broken legs.

He glanced at Sierra, who was helping one of the boys with the snaps on his jacket. She cared so much about these kids. You could see it in her eyes—the way they'd teared up when she'd been worried about losing them, and the way they glowed every time one of them said something funny or kind. He hoped she'd find a nice guy and get married someday, have kids of her own.

But he was not that guy. Nobody had ever accused him of being nice, and if Sierra gave him her heart, he'd probably break it into a million little pieces. She deserved better, so he was backing away—now. Right now. He'd promised her nothing would hurt her, and he was probably the number one thing she needed protection from.

It was too bad for the kids, but hell, they'd probably hijack his heart too, and then where would he be?

When they reached the top of the porch steps at Phoenix House, Sierra flashed him a bright smile. “Did you want to schedule a visit, then? Maybe Saturday?”

“Nope.”

“What?” She looked hurt.

He looked away, scuffing one foot in the dust. “You told 'em they weren't allowed. I think that was the right call.”

“I changed my mind. You're great with the kids. And waiting for the weekend is punishment enough.” She smiled again, and again it was like the sun had come out from behind a cloud. “You know how time stretches out when you're a kid. It'll seem like forever to them. And I suspect your place has a lot more to offer than Pudding Snacks. A ranch would be paradise for these guys.”

“Maybe not mine.” He believed in facing his fears, though, so he forced himself to look her right dead in the eye, the same way he'd face an ornery bull. “Look, you said it yourself. It's not real safe, and they're kind of young for rodeo. Now that I met them, I think you were right.”

There. He'd made the break without making her feel bad. He'd told her she was right and kept her from bringing the boys into a situation she thought was dangerous.

He'd treated her well, really.

Pressing his hat low over his eyes, he jogged down the steps and headed down the cracked sidewalk, walking fast, putting as much distance as he could between himself and temptation.

Because he wanted to go back. He wanted to tell her to bring the boys out now, to come tomorrow too. Heck, forget the boys; he wanted her to come out on her own, just her.

But he clenched his teeth and kept on walking. He was half a block away before he heard her speak.

“Bye.” It sounded like a question, a slightly doubtful, bewildered question.

He didn't answer. He didn't even look back.

He just kept on walking.