Cowboy Comes Home. Carrie Alexander

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      “Around.” She circled the room, poking at the secondhand furnishings, as restive and uneasy as the young Meg. “Vegas, mostly. I arrived on the back of a motorcycle and left in a thirdhand Camaro with bad brakes, so you can guess how well I did there.” She rubbed her palms, drawing his eyes to the tattoos encircling her wrists. On the right, a ring of flame. The left, a blue band of waves.

      “What did you do there?”

      She pulled at her sleeves. “A little bit of everything—waitressing, clerking, answering phones at a call center. Pink-ghetto jobs. Then for nearly two years, I was on the city crew that did nothing but change lightbulbs. It was nice to be outdoors.”

      “Huh. And how many does it take to change a lightbulb?”

      She rolled her eyes. “You’re not the first to ask that eternal question. The guys’ standard answer was that now that they had a woman on the crew, the screwing had become a spectator sport. They were a rowdy bunch.”

      Rio wanted to leap to her defense, even now. “You should have found a new job.”

      “Eventually I did. There was some trouble and I was let go. So long, cushy city benefits.” Shadows shuttered the expression on her downturned face. “My dad always said I’d amount to nothing.”

      “But he left you the ranch.”

      “No one else wanted it. If he’d ever had friends, he’d chased them away long before he died.”

      “Were you here at the end?”

      She nodded behind a curtain of hair. “I came home. A neighbor—Mrs…. um…Mrs. Vaughn—she tracked me down off a Christmas card I’d sent the old man. But he didn’t want me. He told me to leave, to come back only after he was six feet deep.”

      Rio looked at her, the bed between them. He’d have liked to go to her, but again he stopped himself. Even the young Meg had been prickly about accepting affection. This Meg had Hands Off branded across every inch of her.

      “That was three years ago.” She brushed her hair over her shoulders. It was the same—long and straight, the color of pecans dipped in taffy. With her slim body and tawny skin, she’d always been camouflaged, easy to lose among the tall reeds and saplings of their endless summers. But she’d been free-spirited then. Now her camouflage seemed like the stillness of a wild creature frightened of capture.

      Rio gave a soft grunt. “Don’t worry. We’ll set the old place to rights.”

      Meg had moved to the door they’d left standing open. “I want this clear from the start—there is no ‘we.’ That’s over. I’m not looking for…you know. I don’t need a partner. You’d be just the hired hand.”

      He gazed at her. “Of course.”

      Her wide mouth pulled taut. “I’m sorry if that was harsh.”

      “No, it’s good to know where we stand. This is only a job for me.”

      “Then we’re clear.” Her eyes darkened despite what she’d said.

      “Clear enough for now.”

      “I mean it, Rio. I’m done with men.”

      He followed her out the door. She’d always been a man’s woman. Never interested in girlie things when there were horses to ride, fast cars to drive, dares to take.

      But someone had hurt her badly.

      He hoped it wasn’t him.

      CHAPTER TWO

      AS SOON AS the rattle of Rio’s retreating truck had died, Meg slammed into the house. Tears welled in her eyes. She dashed them away impatiently. She didn’t cry.

      But, oh, sometimes she really wanted to.

      She pressed her knuckles into her abdomen. If only she could have had every organ removed after the last miscarriage, instead of just getting her uterus scraped. Maybe then she’d feel nothing except emptiness.

      “For God’s sake,” she sneered after catching sight of herself in the cloudy mirror near the front door. “What a load of melodrama.”

      Her mother had been a fine melodramatist, according to her dad. Meg remembered her as being sweet, fanciful and loving. But also weak. Emotional. Needy.

      “Not fit for ranch life” had been the common diagnosis after Richard Lennox’s wife, Jolene, had slid from the occasional bleak mood into a deep depression. The townspeople had clucked over the way their daughter had been allowed to run wild.

      They hadn’t known the worst of it. Not until, at age eleven, Meg had found her mother cold and lifeless in her bed, bottles of pills scattered across the blankets. In the community, there’d been whispers of suicide. Her father had refused to accept the possibility. The autopsy had come back as an unintentional overdose.

      Meg didn’t remember much from that time, except that she’d made up her mind never to be weak like her mother. She’d been too young to realize how difficult her mother’s life had been.

      Lately, she’d begun to understand.

      Meg went into the kitchen, took a look at the clock, then inside the refrigerator. Nothing seemed appetizing. Still, she had to eat. Keep up her strength.

      She rubbed at one of her wrist tattoos. Weakness was insidious. It had grown inside her mother until she’d rarely left the bedroom. During Meg’s own bad times, she’d battled against the same urge to retreat. And given in far too often.

      Not this time. She had nowhere left to run.

      She took out the platter of leftover roast beef, added an overripe tomato, a stick of butter. The last of the lettuce had gone to brown slime. A plain sandwich would do, if the bread wasn’t moldy.

      Room and board. Good Lord. She’d have to cook halfway-decent meals for Rio. Sit with him, eat with him, converse with him.

      Incredible.

      She reached beneath her sweatshirt, laid her hand against her flat stomach. Her hip bones were prominent. The waistband of her jeans gapped.

      Rio, she thought again. Still stunned. Rio.

      She shouldn’t have agreed to give him the job, no matter how much she owed him.

      Too uneasy to sit, she carried the sandwich around the house, nibbling at it as she went from space to space. The little-used dining room. The study she avoided whenever possible. The front room, with a river-rock fireplace, her father’s dumpy chair and a carpet worn to the nub.

      The entry hall was ill lit and gloomy. On her mother’s good days, she’d kept it swept and tidy. She’d send Meg out to pick wildflowers for the pitcher on the side table. Now the space was strictly utilitarian. There remained a heap of her father’s boots, a tangle of his outdoor clothing. Fishing rods and garden tools leaned haphazardly against the wall. Clods of dried mud had collected where she’d kicked off her own dirty boots.

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