Lonesome Cowboy (Honky Tonk Hearts) (10 page)

His soft chuckle that followed stole her breath and burned behind her eyes. He’d always seemed to get her like no one ever had, not even her own mother. But Marshall always had; she never knew how, never needed to know back then, it was just…right.

So much lost. So much that should have been if only I’d…

No. She wasn’t going to go there. Her daughter’s bright eyes, staring at the newness of the world, pulled her back to the present. Charlotte was her world now, and she planned to make it the best she could. Maybe, just maybe this B&B could be that, a new start, for both of them.

And if somewhere down the line Marshall could ever find it in himself to forgive her, and they were lucky enough to have him as a friend again, then she’d add that to her blessing count every night. And if she spent those lonely nights dreaming about him and what might have been, then that would be her private hell to endure.

When she could focus through the watery haze, his deep blue eyes were staring up at her, and she was too afraid to interpret the soft smile on his rugged face as hope.

Marshall tipped his head, the haunting expression on Amy’s face cutting him to the core. What was wrong? Was it the house? Her daughter? Could it have something to do with him?

The last disturbed him the most. Look at what happened last time he let his heart go there.

He pointed back through the dining room. “If you go this way, you’ll get a chance to see the kitchen,” he offered in hopes of distracting her from her sad thoughts and focus both their attention elsewhere. “There’s a back door through the mudroom at the back, too.”

She nodded, but the smile gracing the rose lips didn’t reach her eyes as she hurried down the stairs. Closing white knuckles over the stroller handle, she pushed it past him without raising her gaze.

The wheels of the carriage took on a hollow tone over the linoleum floor, echoing in the empty kitchen as he followed at a slower pace, stopping to lean against the doorframe. She looked so right there in a big country kitchen. The sun coming in through the large window above the sink cast an alternate image over the current one: hair soft around her face, a streak of flour on her cheek as she kneaded dough and laughed at her daughter in a little playpen in the corner…

“Marshall…Marshall?”

He blinked out of the remarkably clear picture. “Sorry, what did you say?”

“I asked if you were okay. You had kind of a funny look on your face.”

When the back of her fingers reached toward his cheek, he cleared his throat, shook his head and extended a hand toward the screen door at the back of the kitchen. “You need to see the backyard. Like I said, there’s a creek there, and swings. I bet Charlotte would like them when she gets older.”

Amy dropped her hand, a nervous smile trembling her lips. “Are you sure you’re not getting commission for this? You’re an awfully good salesperson.”

He choked out a laugh, taking the reins of the stroller to maneuver it for her through the mudroom and out on the back patio deck. “Nope.”

A snorted snuffle came from the car seat, and she reached down to shake a pink rattle thing connected to the side of the carrier. Charlotte’s big eyes, just like her mother’s, turned to find the new sound.

Amy commandeered the stroller to park it next to the porch swing. She then moved to stand by the railing, gazing out over the gardens, bungalows and gazebo. “This is really beautiful, has so much potential.”

Marshall watched her, couldn’t help it. The dip of her left brow over one eye was a sure sign she was thinking hard about this. He glanced around the yard, back at the porch and through the kitchen door. She could do this, he had no doubt. Many a night he’d watched her deal with guests or various employees as he’d waited for her after work. No matter the crisis, she’d kept her cool and taken care of it, all with a smile on her face, just like she wore now.

The wind picked up a floret of her peach scent and spun it around him until he was dizzy with it, and his boots echoed against the wooden boards of the porch to stand beside her.

She slumped a hip onto the rail and leaned her head against the beam. “This is silly. What am I doing? Even if there was some way I could afford to buy the place, there would be so many things to do to get it ready for guests. And I have Charlotte to think about now.” Twinkle-tinged hazel eyes turned toward him. “Am I crazy to even consider it?”

The playful wind whipped a tendril of her burnished copper hair across her cheek, and the need to reassure her won out over the need to keep his distance. His finger rose of its own accord to brush the wayward strand back behind her ear, the movement both old and new at the same time.

“I don’t think you’re crazy. And I
know
you can do this.” His gaze roamed over her face. “When you have a chance at fulfilling your dreams, you have to take it, grab onto it with both hands and don’t let it go. If you don’t, sometimes it can get swept right out from under you.”

“Marshall, I’m so—”

He moved his hand to her mouth and shook his head. “Don’t, please. It’s okay.” Maybe not totally, but the last thing he wanted was for her to apologize again. The words had just slipped out; he honestly hadn’t meant them in any accusing way.

Her hand covered his, pulling it away from her face and clasping it tight against her chest. It rose and fell as a heavy breath escaped her lips before she spoke. “There’s something I need to ask you.”

Weakened by the beautiful face staring at him so earnestly, he nodded.

“That night, at the honky tonk, you said…you said you came back with a ring. W-was that…true?”

Chapter Ten

Every muscle in his body tightened, his jaw so rigid he couldn’t speak even if he wanted to. He wrenched his hand from her grasp and turned away from her searching gaze.

A quick intake of breath sounded behind him.

“It
is
true.”

He grasped the porch railing tight enough to split it in two. This wasn’t a conversation he wanted right now.

“My God, Marshall. If you wanted to marry me, why didn’t you tell me, or at least call? One call that first night away and then not a word from you in
five months
and—”

“Whoa, hold it right there.” He spun on her, his control snapping. What right did she have to be angry? “I called,
constantly
. I left messages with your mother, on the answering machine, and when Beverly said you were home, I’d be on hold waiting for you to pick up, until your mom came back on with some excuse of you being busy or just left. But I kept calling, kept the faith even when…”

Her chestnut hair shook incessantly. “N-no, you didn’t. You couldn’t have. I waited, I checked the answering machine…I believed for weeks that you would call, defended you to everyone, especially my mother. But you never did. You
never
called.”

Now it was his turn to be confused at her adamancy. Marshall wiped a hand down his chin and took a deep breath, trying to focus, to formulate a coherent answer amongst the painful ghosts screaming for justice.

He turned away to lean once again on the railing. He couldn’t look at the disbelief and concern in her eyes, because if they were real, if she was telling the truth…

Small, jagged pieces of a cruel puzzle began to form.

“I left messages with your mom or on the machine every day for the first month,” he began, focusing on the pasture fence in the distance to keep the anger at the memory from bursting forth. “One of the last times she said point-blank that I wasn’t good enough for you—that you wanted, and deserved, more than a rodeo cowboy jumping from town to town and bed to bed.”

He bit the last word off, his eyes squeezing shut against the realization of his own mistakes, the responsibility of his own bad choices in this whole mess. When he finally opened them, he turned his chin toward her, but couldn’t meet her gaze. “And she was right. You did deserve more. So, I stayed, and rode harder, pushed myself to be better. I thought if I could win the season, I’d have enough for a down payment for your dre—”

Marshall’s words broke off at the keen half-gasp, half-whimper as Amy’s hands wrapped around her middle. She stumbled away from him, her face crumbled into a mask of confusion and pain.

She shook her head in denial. “No, y-you didn’t call. Mom would have told me. And I checked my machine every night after work…she wouldn’t have,” she repeated to herself.

“Amy.” He stepped forward, hesitated, and clasped her shoulders, squeezing the cold skin gently until she looked up at him.

The despair in her watery gaze revealed an agonizing truth, and the years’ worth of anger at her spun back in a one-eighty onto himself, too blinded by his own mission and beliefs to even consider someone would be out to sabotage them.

Marshall forced himself to hold her pain-filled gaze. “I swear to you, Amy. I called,
every
day for that first month. Even when your mother told me I didn’t deserve you, I still called weekly. When you still wouldn’t talk to me—when I
thought
you still wouldn’t talk to me—then yes, I stopped to focus on one thing…becoming someone you did deserve.”

“But you already were,” she said so quietly, her eyes filled with so much that it clogged his throat.

Amy shook out of the moment and pushed away from him. Marshall was wrong; he had to be. “No,
no
,” she repeated adamantly, a hand running through her hair. “My mother wouldn’t do that to me. She knew how much I cared about you, saw what a wreck I was because you didn’t call.” Anger burned her tear-stained face and sharpened her steps pacing the patio. “I told her you would. I
knew
you would. Every part of my being knew you’d be back. B-but I believed her when I’d come home from work and she said you didn’t call. And there were never any messages on the machine…actually, there were never
any
messages at all.”

She slowed and stared out over the gardens. Her mother had always been a bit selfish and manipulative, but this? Sabotaging a relationship was a far cry from playing the constant pity card to get her way.

“She was far from perfect, but I trusted her, she was my mother.” She pinched the ridge of her nose, fighting a losing battle, again. “When weeks and months went by, I started doubting…us. Believing her when she said you weren’t coming back. Believing everyone. Everyone…as in all
her
friends.” She slapped the railing. “My God, how could she do that to me? I believed her. I…I gave up on us because…”

Amy pushed herself slowly away and brushed the tears from her eyes. This wasn’t happening. Everything she’d believed in turned out to be a lie—first with Hank and now her mother. It was all rushing back, all those little innuendoes her mother subtly tossed into a conversation, playing Hank up the whole time Marshall was gone. Now she understood everything. She’d been played,
by everyone
.

“How naive can one person be?” Betrayal and shame twisted her stomach until she thought she was going to be sick.

“Amy, don’t.”

Firm hands grasped her shoulders and pulled her back. Settled in a cocoon of security and warmth against Marshall’s chest almost started another bout of tears. But she refused to shed one more for the sins of the past.

“No, it’s true. You don’t understand.”
But I finally do
.

She cleared her throat and glanced to Charlotte, the one and only spark of light in this whole maniacal farce.

He squeezed her shoulders. “Then help me understand.”

Amy threw up her hands and stepped out of the comfort she didn’t deserve. “Why not? You of all people deserve the whole truth…or, I guess more apt, all the lies.”

She stepped around him and pushed her hair behind her ear, working up the courage to get through the rest of this humiliation.

“It wasn’t a good time for me. I was…heartbroken, still fighting every day just to get up in the morning, thinking you’d abandoned me…and then Mom died.”

The shuffle of a footstep closer pulled her hand up between them. If he touched her now, she’d never get through this without falling apart. But he needed to know, needed to know how close he came to picking the wrong girl—a stupid,
stupid
girl. Maybe her closet would be full of ghosts forever, but at least she could free his.

“What happened to her?”

“Workplace accident at the factory.”

Amy cleared her throat and sat down on the porch swing to lean her arms on her knees, folding her hands in a tight ball. The chains squealed tight with the motion. A more apt sound if she ever heard one.

“There were obvious legal issues, and Hank was there to save the day. He was there when I thought everyone else had left me.” Her hands fanned open of their own accord. “I didn’t have to think anymore, he just took care of things. Everything had happened so fast and I was…numb. So, when he asked me to marry him I thought…why not? I had lost you—I
thought
I had lost you—and I had lost Mom. Andee had her business and new baby on the way…” Closing her eyes, she leaned forward and brushed a hand through her hair, ending at her nape where she rubbed the tense knot of hard memories. “I admit, I was weak, and alone, and scared the emptiness inside would consume me. So I said yes.”