The Cowboy's Sweetheart

“Consequences? What consequences? You’re the one acting like we can’t even talk. It’s simple. Just get in the truck and go with me.”

“I can’t.” She tossed the brush into a bucket and the clang of wood hitting metal made Babe jump to the side.

Andie whispered to the mare and reached to untie the lead rope from the hook on the wall. “I can’t go with you, Ryder. I’m sick. My mom is here. I’m going to go inside and spend time with Etta.”

“Fine.” He walked to the door. “I’m going to be pretty busy in the next few weeks. Wyatt and the girls are going to need me.”

“I know.” She watched him walk away, but it wasn’t easy. She’d never wanted to run after a guy the way she wanted to run after him, to tell him they could forget. They could go back to being friends, to being comfortable around each other. But she couldn’t go after him and they couldn’t go back.

She stood at the gate and watched as he climbed into his truck and slammed the door.

Ryder jumped into his truck and shifted hard into first gear. He started to stomp on it, and then remembered his horse in the trailer. Man, it would have felt good to let gravel fly. If only he could be sixteen again, not dealing with losing his best friend to a one-night mistake.

Why couldn’t she just get over it and go with him? This was what they did, they went roping together. They hunted together. They got over things together.

As he eased onto the road he let his mind drift back, to the night in Phoenix. Stupid. Stupid. Stupid. They’d both been hurting. He’d been upset by Wyatt’s situation. She’d been hurting because her twin sister had arrived in town, bringing back the pain of being a kid rejected by her mother.

And then his thoughts made a big U-turn, shifting his memory back to the Mad Cow and Andie’s pale face.

He was an idiot. An absolute idiot.

Consequences. He caught himself in time to keep from slamming on the brakes. He eased to the side of the road and stopped the truck. He sat there for a long minute thinking back, thinking ahead. Thinking this really couldn’t be happening to him.

He leaned back in his seat and thought about it, and thought about his next move. A truck drove past and honked. He raised a hand in a half wave.

Glancing over his shoulder he checked the road in both directions and backed the trailer up, this time heading the way he’d come from, to Etta’s and to Andie.

As he turned into the driveway, she was coming out of the barn. She stopped in the doorway, light against the dark interior of the barn, her blond hair blowing a little in the wind. She sighed, he could see her shoulders rise and fall and then she walked toward him. And he wondered what she would say.

He parked and got out of the truck, waiting because he didn’t know what questions to ask or how to face the consequences of that night. It would have been easier to keep running. But this would have caught up with him eventually. It wasn’t as if he could run from it.

When she reached him, they stared at each other. The wind was blowing a little harder and clouds, low and heavy with rain, covered the sun. Shadows drifted across the brown, autumn grass.

“You’re back a little quicker than I expected.” She smiled, and for a minute he thought it might have been his imagination, her pale skin, the nausea.

He rubbed his face and tried to think of how a man asked a woman, a friend, this question.

“I came back because I have to ask you something.”

“Go ahead.” She slipped her hands into her front pockets.

His gaze slipped to her belly and he didn’t even mean for that to happen. It was flat, perfectly flat. She cleared her throat. He glanced up and her eyebrows shot up.

“I have a question.” Man, he felt like a fifteen-year-old kid. “Are you, um, are you having a baby?”

Chapter Four

The question she hadn’t even wanted to ask herself. Ryder, her best friend for as long as she could remember, was peering down at her with toffee-brown eyes that had never been more serious. He wasn’t a boy anymore. She wasn’t a kid.

And she didn’t want to answer this question, not today. She didn’t want to stand in front of him, with her heart pounding and her stomach still rolling a little. She looked away, to the field across the road. It was nothing spectacular, just a field with a few too many weeds and a few cattle grazing, but it gave her something else to focus on.

“Andie, come on, we have to talk about this.”

“Like we talked two months ago? Come on, Ryder, admit that neither one of us want to talk about this.”

He took off his hat and brushed his arm across his forehead. He glanced down at her and shook his head. “No, maybe this isn’t how I wanted to spend a Sunday afternoon, but this is what we’ve got.”

“I don’t want to talk about it. Not today.”

“So you are…?”

“I don’t know.” She looked down, at dusty, hard-packed earth. At his boots and hers as they stood toe-to-toe in that moment that changed both of their lives. He was just a cowboy, the kind of guy who had said he’d never get married.

And she’d claimed his conviction as her own. Because that’s what they had done for years. She had never been one of those girls dreaming of weddings, the perfect husband or babies. She didn’t play the games in school with boys’ names and honeymoon locations. Instead she’d thought about how to train the best barrel horse and what it would take to win world titles.

Babies. As much as she had wanted to pretend otherwise, her feminine side had caused her to go soft when she held a baby or watched children play. When she watched her friends with their husbands, she felt a little empty on the inside, because she shared her life with Etta—and with Ryder—but Ryder never shared his heart, not the way a woman wanted a man to share his heart.

“Andie, I’m sorry, this shouldn’t have happened.” He touched her cheek and then his hand dropped to his side and he stepped back a few steps.

“I definitely don’t want you to be sorry.” She looked up, trying her best to be determined. “Like I said, I don’t know. It could be that I caught the stomach virus some of the kids in Kansas had. When I know for sure, I’ll let you know.”

“Let me know?” He brushed a hand through his hair and shoved his hat back in place, a gesture she’d seen a few too many times and she knew exactly what it meant. Frustration.

Well she could tell him a few things about frustration. But she wasn’t in the mood. She wasn’t in the mood to spell out for him that this hadn’t been in her plans, either. He hadn’t been in her plans, not this way.

“Yeah, I’ll let you know. Look, whatever happens, whatever this is, it isn’t going to change anything.” She was glad she sounded firm, sounded strong. She felt anything but, with her insides quivering. “You’ve always been my friend and that’s how it’ll stay.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m not going to tie you down or try to drag you into this. It doesn’t change things.”

“I have news for you, Andie Forester, this changes things. This changes everything.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

He shook his head. “Are you being difficult for a reason, other than to just drive me crazy? If you’re pre…uh, having a baby, it changes a lot, now doesn’t it?”

She wanted to smile, because even the word brought a bead of sweat across his brow and his neck turned red. But she couldn’t smile, not yet.

“I’ll let you know when I find out for sure.”

“Fine, you let me know. And we’ll pretend that this isn’t important, if that’s what you really want.” He turned and walked away, a cowboy in faded jeans, the legs worn and a little more faded where he’d spent a lot of time in the saddle.

He waved as he climbed into his truck and started the engine. She waved back. And it already felt different. She’d been lying to herself, trying to tell herself it wouldn’t matter.

She watched him drive away and then she considered her next move. Go inside and face her mother, or stay in the barn and hide from reality. She liked the hiding plan the best. Facing Ryder and her mother, both in the same day, sounded like too much.

In the dark, dusty interior of the barn she could close her eyes and pretend she was the person she’d been two months ago. But she wasn’t.