The Cowboy's Claim (2 page)

“He needs you, Nick,” Mary said, and then looked back toward the kitchen area behind the counter. “I’ve got to get back there. I’m teaching Junior how to make an apple pie, and if I’m not there watching his every move he’ll have that pie crust turned into a smiley face. I’ll send a waitress right out to take care of you.”

“Thanks,” Nick replied. He smiled as he thought of Junior Lempke. The shy, mentally challenged man in his mid-thirties had worked for Mary since she’d bought the place. He’d started as a busboy, with the simple task of clearing tables after diners left. It hadn’t taken long for Mary to recognize that he was capable of doing more under close supervision.

It was nice to think Mary was now working with Junior to do some of the cooking. Although extremely shy and withdrawn with most people, Junior appeared not to have a mean bone in his big body.

Nick pulled the menu from where it stood between the salt and pepper shakers and opened it, although he already knew that his stomach was crying out for one of Mary’s famous burgers and a side of her thick-cut, deep-fried onion rings.

What he didn’t want to think about was the mess that had once been his family. Sam was in jail for attempted murder, Cherry was dead from a car accident and Adam was on an alcoholic downward spiral to disaster. Welcome home, he thought ruefully.

He sensed somebody moving to his side and looked up. He wasn’t sure who radiated more stunned surprise, him or the woman clad in the black Cowboy Café
T-shirt and tight jeans, the dark-haired woman he’d spent the past two years trying to forget.

“Courtney...” Her name fell from his lips in utter shock. “Wha...what are you doing here?”

The surprise that had momentarily flittered across her pretty features was usurped by a black stare that displayed no emotion whatsoever. “What does it look like I’m doing? I’m working. Now, what can I get for you?”

Her features might not show any emotion, but he couldn’t help but notice the slight tremble of her hands as she clutched an order pad and pencil.

“But why aren’t you in Evanston?” he asked. Evanston was a small town almost thirty miles away where she had lived with her parents when he’d left town. He’d just assumed by now she’d be married to one of the respectable, financially well-off suitors her parents had paraded before her as potential husband material.

“I’m not in Evanston because I’m here,” she replied tersely. “Are you ready to order or not?”

She was lovelier now than she’d been when they’d dated, before he’d blown out of town on a wild wind of grief. Her dark hair was longer and her features had matured from pretty to almost beautiful. She’d always been slender, but now there was a little more curve to her body.

Why was she waitressing in Grady Gulch when she could be in Evanston, where her father was the mayor and her mother ruled the social scene?

“You know, I’ve never stopped thinking about you,” he said softly. He’d tried. God, he’d tried to forget her.

“You want a cup of coffee to go with that plate of crap?”

He sat back in the booth, as if physically thrown there by both the vitriol in her voice and the hardness that gleamed in her emerald-green eyes. For a long moment he was speechless.

“Order up or move along,” she said. “I’ve got other customers and things to deal with.”

He frowned. “I’ll have a cheeseburger and onion rings and a tall glass of milk.”

“Got it,” she replied and then whirled away to leave the booth as if chased by the very devil himself.

Nick stared after her and wondered what had happened in the past two years that had brought her to this place in time, working as a waitress thirty miles from her hometown.

In the two years that he’d been gone, had the world gone crazy? George Wilton looked perfectly content at the counter as he finished his meal. Adam had become a drunken shadow of the man he’d once been, and the woman he’d once loved with all his heart was in a place where she didn’t belong.

The worst part was he had a dreadful feeling this was just the beginning, that things were going to get crazier before they got better. He’d better prepare himself for more surprises that lie ahead.

* * *

Courtney Chambers placed Nick’s order with Rusty the cook and then sank down in a chair in the kitchen area, her legs shaking so hard she might never walk again.

She should have expected that he’d eventually come back home, especially after Sam and Adam’s recurrent plunge into despair. And she should have expected that if he did come back to Grady Gulch, he’d eventually make his way back into the Cowboy Café.

But she hadn’t been expecting it to be today, and in the very depths of her heart she’d hoped she’d never see him again. Just looking into the brightness of his blue eyes had brought back all the heartbreak, all the anguish he’d left behind when he’d disappeared from Grady Gulch without a word on the day that his sister had been buried.

She’d loved him as she’d never loved another man, had given herself to him and only him with the notion that eventually they’d get married and raise a family together. And then he’d disappeared and she’d never heard from him again.

She straightened in her chair as Mary touched her shoulder. “Are you okay?” Mary looked at her worriedly.

“I’m fine,” Courtney said with forced reassurance. The last thing she wanted to do was bother her boss, the woman who had been equal parts employer and surrogate mother to her for the past two years.

“Are you sure?” Mary raised a pale blond eyebrow.

“I’m good. Just resting my feet for a minute or two while Rusty gets my order ready,” she replied, knowing that it was very rare she simply sat to wait for an order.

Mary eyed her skeptically for a long moment and then nodded and moved back to where she had been working with Junior. Courtney sighed in relief. She didn’t want to lie to Mary, who had been so good to her, but she also didn’t want anyone to know how badly seeing Nick again had affected her. She’d thought she was emotionally dead where he was concerned, but she was apparently wrong.

“Order up,” Rusty said, and Courtney reluctantly got to her feet, knowing she’d have to look at
him
again. She filled a big glass with milk and then grabbed the plate from the pass window and headed back to the booth where Nick sat.

Why hadn’t he gotten obese in the two years since she’d last seen him? Why hadn’t he grown a beer belly and jowls? Why hadn’t that charming cleft in his chin fallen off his handsome face? Or his broad shoulders turned to toothpicks?

Why, oh why, after everything that had happened, did her heart still lurch more than a little bit at the sight of his thick dark hair, his chiseled features and those amazing blue eyes?

She was so over him. She’d moved on, and he had no place in her heart, in her life. He deserved nothing from her but the plate of food she slid down in front of him along with the glass of milk and the edge of contempt that welled up inside her.

She started to leave the table but gasped in surprise as he grabbed her by the wrist to stop her escape. “It isn’t that busy,” he said. “Why don’t you sit with me for a minute or two?”

“Why would I want to do that?” she replied as she pulled her wrist from his grasp. Her need to escape was overwhelming, but she didn’t want him to see that he bothered her in any way, that he still had any power at all over her.

“I don’t know. I thought maybe we could catch up a little bit.”

“Why?” She forced a light laugh. “I mean honestly, Nick, what on earth would we have to talk about? You’ve been gone for two years. We’ve both moved on with our lives.”

He studied her intently, and she kept her features carefully schooled so as not to display any of the turmoil that twirled around in her stomach. “I should have called you,” he finally said.

Her stomach clenched. “Yes, you should have,” she agreed. “But, you didn’t, and time went by and life went on. It’s all water under the bridge. Now, is there anything else I can get for you?”

“Not at the moment,” he replied after a long hesitation.

She turned and left the booth, but she was aware of his gaze lingering on her, heating the center of her back. She escaped back to the safety of the kitchen and once again pasted a smile on her lips.

Instead of keeping Nick Benson in her mind, she thought of Grant Hubert, the man she’d been dating for the past two months.

Grant was everything Nick hadn’t been...dependable and mature. He was thirty-five, the vice president of the local bank, and he’d been the first man she’d allowed into her life in any way since Nick.

Grant didn’t stir in her the same crazy emotions that Nick had once evoked. Instead he felt solid and predictable, and that was exactly what she needed in her life at this moment.

She knew what had brought Nick back to town, but the Bensons weren’t the only ones who had gone through trauma in the past couple of months.

Certainly everyone had been shocked when Sam Benson had tried to kill Courtney’s friend and fellow waitress, Lizzy Wiles, but before that the entire town had been equally shocked when another waitress from the café had been brutally murdered.

That murder had not yet been solved and hadn’t been related to Sam’s attack on Lizzy. At the time, Courtney, Lizzy and Candy, the murdered young woman, had been living in three of the four little cottages just behind the café.

It had been Candy’s murder and the attack on Lizzy that had prompted Sheriff Cameron Evans to arrange for Courtney to move from the cottage to a nearby motel. In the past two months the motel room, with its kitchenette, had finally begun to feel like home.

Thankfully, when she returned to the booth where Nick had sat enough money to pay his tab and a generous tip for her was all that remained.

She rang up his order, pocketed her tip and told herself she absolutely refused to spend another minute of her time thinking about Nick Benson. Besides, there was plenty to do to prepare for the evening dinner rush. That would keep her mind sufficiently occupied.

Since the time she’d moved to Grady Gulch, she’d come to love the people of the small town. Even George Wilton, who complained about the bitterness of the coffee, the dryness of the meat loaf and the laziness of today’s youth, held a certain charm all his own.

The dinner rush that evening seemed busier than usual, and despite her desire not to think about Nick Benson, he seemed to be the topic of conversation on everyone’s lips.

“They’ve all come to bad ends,” Susan Walker said to her husband as Courtney served them the nightly special. “One dead, one a convict, one a drunk, and Nick always was a bit of a hellion.” She shook her head ruefully. “Guess that’s what happens to kids when their parents die too young.”

“All of them spent too much time down at The Corral,” David Bentz said to his wife as Courtney delivered their drinks to their table. “I heard through the grapevine that Nick has come back to somehow save Adam from himself.” David snorted. “That’s kind of like the pot calling the kettle to ask for advice.”

Courtney grimaced, fighting the impulse to say something in defense of all the Bensons. She’d never liked David Bentz much anyway. He always smelled just a little bit like cow manure.

“How are you doing tonight, Courtney?” Abigail Swisher asked as Courtney stopped at her table.

“Good. And where’s that handsome husband of yours?” she asked. It was unusual for Abigail to show up at the café without her husband, Fred.

“He’s on a business trip, and I decided I didn’t feel like cooking tonight. The house was just too darned quiet.” Abigail gave her a sweet smile and swept a strand of her light brown hair behind an ear. Courtney caught a pleasant scent of spring flowers wafting from the woman.

“Good for you,” Courtney replied. She knew the couple didn’t have children. Abigail had suffered a miscarriage, but rumor had it they were trying desperately for another child.

She took Abigail’s order, and by the time the dinner rush was over Courtney was sick of hearing all the negative stories about Nick—and even more sick that in each case she’d wanted to somehow jump to his defense.

It was after eight when Courtney finally sat down to take a break with fellow waitress Lynette Shiver. Lynette was twenty-three and had been working at the café for only about a month.

She’d been hired when Lizzy had quit her job as a waitress to move in with her future husband, Daniel Jefferson. Lizzy seemed perfectly content helping Daniel around the ranch and planning a wedding for the near future.

“Would you please tell me about the Benson family?” Lynette exclaimed. “That’s all I’ve heard about all night, and I didn’t know what anyone was talking about. Sounds like a nice plate of juicy gossip.”

“It’s actually a tragic story on several levels,” Courtney replied with a sigh of resignation. As much as she hadn’t wanted to talk about Nick, she knew there was no way she could avoid the topic while explaining to Lynette what had happened before she’d come to the small town.

“The Benson family consisted of Sam, who was the eldest, Adam, Cherry and Nick. Their parents died years ago, and Sam took the reins of the family ranch and worked hard to keep them all together. Then two years ago Cherry was killed in a car accident.”

Courtney took a sip of her iced tea and tried not to remember that night. She’d been in her bedroom in her parents’ house and had gotten a text from Nick to meet him at the place where they always rendezvoused away from prying eyes.

When she’d finally gotten to the old Yates place, she’d driven past the old house that had been foreclosed on years ago and never resold and drove straight down the lane that took her to the old barn.

Nick’s pickup was already there, and when she entered the horse stall that had been their special place for the past seven months, he’d grabbed her and pulled her to him as he wept.

They’d made love, silently, emotionally, and then he’d left the barn without saying a word. She’d known his grief was too great for words, and she’d let him go that night assuming they’d have time together the next day or the day after that. And then he was gone from Grady Gulch, from her.