Her Cowboy Soldier. Cindi Myers

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      “Aye, aye, Grandma.” Amy straightened and snapped a mock salute at the trim, gray-haired woman in jeans and a sleeveless checked blouse who leaned on a metal walker. Amy’s grandmother, Bobbie Anderson, might be temporarily slowed down by hip surgery, but she still knew how to issue a command. “I’ll squash in more squash.”

      “Squash the squash!” Giggling, Amy’s five-year-old daughter, Chloe, twin brown ponytails like antennae high on her head, stood on tiptoe to look over the piles of the yellow vegetable that had arrived by the bushel load from the greenhouses this morning.

      “We won’t be squashing anything,” Bobbie said with mock severity. She surveyed the rows of vegetables critically. “On second thought, Amy, forget the squash for now and help with the customers. Tell Neil he can unload the truck. Chloe, come help me stack onions.”

      Amy hurried to the checkout area, where retired rancher Neal Kuchek was weighing out shiny green peppers for a young couple in matching khaki shorts. “I’ll take over here,” she told him. “Grandma wants you to unload the truck.”

      “Does she, now? That woman just loves to order me around.” But he grinned and headed toward the truck parked behind the produce stand.

      Amy finished assisting the young couple and turned to the next customer in line. “May I help you?”

      “Just these.” A man extended a plastic bag that contained three tomatoes toward her. But the hand that held the tomatoes wasn’t a hand, it was a steel hook. Amy’s smile faltered, and she lifted her gaze to meet that of her customer. He was a young man, near her own age, with the fine creases around his blue eyes of someone who had spent a lot of time squinting into the sun, and the close-cropped brown hair and erect posture that spoke of military training.

      He met her stare with a steady look of his own. “You must be Bobbie’s granddaughter,” he said. “She told me you were coming to live with her. I was sorry to hear about your husband.”

      In the week Amy had been in the little town of Hartland, Colorado, she had heard similar expressions of sympathy from almost everyone she’d met, each one heartfelt, and each one a sharp reminder that, though Brent had been killed in Iraq three years ago, the loss still hurt. “Thank you,” she murmured, looking away. “Did you know Brent?”

      “No. I didn’t have that privilege. I suspect I was already back in the States, recuperating, when he was killed.” He offered his left hand—the one that wasn’t a hook. “Josh Scofield. I teach science at the high school.”

      “Amy Marshall.” She shook hands, a brief touch that nevertheless sent a shiver up her spine, maybe because this injured soldier was such a tangible reminder of her late husband, who had never recovered from his own war wounds.

      “Hello.” Chloe climbed onto an empty apple crate beside her mother and frowned at Josh. “Why do you have a hook instead of a hand?”

      “Chloe!” Amy shushed her daughter, her face burning.

      “It’s all right,” Josh said. “Kids are always curious.” He smiled at the little girl. “A hook makes carrying my groceries easier.” He demonstrated, looping the plastic bag of tomatoes over the end.

      “But better not try to pick your nose,” Chloe said and giggled.

      “You’re right. This broke me of that habit in no time.”

      “This is my daughter, Chloe.” Amy put her hand on the girl’s shoulder. “I promise she usually has better manners.”

      “Nice to meet you, Chloe.”

      Suddenly shy, Chloe buried her face in her mother’s side.

      Josh nodded to Amy. “Maybe I’ll see you around.”

      Then he sauntered away, a tall, trim figure with a bag of tomatoes nonchalantly looped over the hook on the end of one arm.

      “Was that Josh Scofield?” Bobbie joined her granddaughter and great-granddaughter by the cash register. “I hate that I missed him.”

      “He was buying tomatoes with his hook,” Chloe said. She grinned, then skipped away, probably to “help” Neal, her current favorite person.

      Bobbie’s attention focused on Amy. “You remember Josh, don’t you? Big baseball star when he was in high school.”

      Amy shook her head. “I never met him.”

      “You didn’t?”

      “I was only here a few weeks in the summers—and I mostly stayed on the farm.” Those brief childhood visits had been precious to her, an oasis in her otherwise chaotic life.

      “Hmmph. I tried to talk your folks into letting you live here with me full-time instead of dragging you all over the world with them, but they wouldn’t hear of it. They said you needed to experience adventure while you were still young and impressionable.” She sniffed. “I think what children need is a home they know they can always come back to.”

      “And I always knew I had that with you.” Amy patted the older woman’s arm. Her parents, who managed an adventure tour company, had lived in twenty-three different places in eight countries by the time Amy graduated high school. As a girl, Amy had studied correspondence courses by lantern light in a grass hut in Zaire, made friends with native Laplanders in Greenland and visited Japanese temples with girls in kimonos. After all of that, spending a few weeks every summer in her grandmother’s apple orchard had seemed the more exotic life.

      “Josh is a great guy,” Bobbie said. “He lost his hand in Iraq.”

      “I figured as much. He said he didn’t know Brent.”

      “No. I guess they were in different units. His family’s ranch, the Bar S, backs up to our orchards on the south.”

      “But he doesn’t ranch.”

      “He helps out his dad. And the school district hired him this year to teach science and coach baseball. Word is the Wildcats might have their first winning season in four years.”

      “I guess I’ll find out tomorrow night,” Amy said. “Ed wants me to write about the baseball game for the paper. Apparently the high school kid who usually does it has come down with mono.” She’d never been particularly interested in sports, but the story would be one more credit to add to her portfolio. Her part-time job at the Hartland Herald wasn’t hard-core journalism, but she hoped the experience would help her land a better writing job in Denver or an even larger city when she left Hartland once Bobbie was on her feet again.

      “Josh is single, you know,” Bobbie said. “Not even dating anyone.”

      The overly casual way in which she shared this information didn’t fool Amy. “Are you trying to fix me up?”

      “No.” She patted Amy’s hand. “I know you loved Brent, and losing him was hard. Believe me, I know.” Amy’s grandfather had passed away five years before, after forty-six years of marriage. “But you’re still young, and sooner or later you won’t want to be alone anymore. You could marry again, have more children...and you can’t blame me for thinking if you settled down with someone local it would be a good thing.”

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