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Katie crawled onto her lap and Janey shrank from her, but Katie just leaned closer, forcing Janey to hold her or fall over backward. There was no way to get away from the child without hurting her feelings.
Janey straightened and rested one shaky hand on Katie’s knee.
Katie picked up a pastel green heart and pointed to it. “Number 4! What do the letters say?”
“Love U 4ever.”
“You, too.” Katie rested her head against Janey’s chest and put her thumb into her mouth. Bad habit, especially for a six-year-old. Cheryl never sucked her thumb. Cheryl was a good girl.
Janey gave herself a proverbial tongue-lashing after that uncharitable thought. As if Katie wasn’t a good child. The girl had lived with too much in her short life. She was allowed her weaknesses, allowed to take comfort wherever she could find it.
Janey rested her head on Katie’s peach-fuzz scalp for a second, then shoved her spine into a ramrod post again.
She felt an adult hunker down beside her in Katie’s abandoned spot and released a ragged sigh. Probably Hank coming to give her hell for being with the children.
“What are you doing?” Nope, not Hank. Amy.
Janey looked into her pretty unlined face and asked, “What do you mean?”
Amy nudged Janey’s shoulder with her own. “You know what I mean. Why are you here with all of the children?” she whispered close to Janey, her breath scented by her after-dinner coffee. “You should be avoiding them.”
“I know.” Janey smiled bleakly. “I can’t seem to help myself. I saw the candies in the store and wanted to bring some home for the children. It makes them happy.”
“While it makes you miserable.”
Janey lifted one shoulder. “Yeah.”
Amy tapped her knee with one finger. “You’re too generous for your own good.”
Not possible. She felt too much resentment against these children. Why had they survived while her Cheryl hadn’t?
Kyle jumped up from the blanket with a lollipop in his mouth. “Watch this,” he shouted and began to jump.
“Sit!” Amy and Janey ordered at the same time.
Kyle sat and poked John in the ribs. “Knock it off, buster,” Johnny yelled, as loudly as usual.
Janey picked up a ladybug near Katie’s sandal and put her in the grass away from harm. “I got a job today, Amy.”
“That’s great. Where?”
“In the candy store.”
“With C.J.? You’ll like working with him. He’s a great guy.”
Janey didn’t answer, didn’t know how to chart a course through the ocean of feelings that had troubled her today, not the least of which was her reaction to the good-looking owner of the store.
A roar went up from the crowd gathering at the fence. Someone had fallen off a bronc.
More pickup trucks pulled into the yard, parking where they could and lining the lane. The crowd along the fence grew.
One cowboy parked close to the road. Janey watched him walk up the laneway. C.J.
She stared. He walked with a long stride, his thigh muscles flexing with each step.
He wore a pair of old jeans and a plain white T-shirt and the different clothes changed him. This was how C. J. Wright was supposed to dress, like a cowboy or a rancher. Like a normal guy from a small town in Montana. Not in button-down collars and gray trousers. Who the heck wore that stuff anymore? What on earth was the guy thinking when he put those clothes on in the morning?
She wished she hadn’t seen him like this, though. He looked strong and fit and younger and so, so masculine in his cowboy hat.
Katie turned in her arms, drawing Janey’s attention away from C.J. “Are you going on a horse?”
“Nope, not a chance.” Janey’s smile felt fake. She truly hoped Katie didn’t sense that fakeness, or her discomfort in holding Katie on her lap.
When C.J. entered the yard, Angus noticed him and gave him a hard slap on the back.
C.J. grinned and returned the greeting. Janey’s breath caught. Men. So physical, so big, so attractive and so dangerous.
Why was C.J. here? He hadn’t joined the rodeo participants before. Was he going to ride a bronc?
She must have leaned forward because Katie protested.
“Give Katie to me,” Amy said, “and go have some fun.”
Janey didn’t have to be told twice. She all but dumped Katie into Amy’s lap, and then immediately missed the girl’s weight in her arms.
She was a bona fide screwball. No doubt about it. She couldn’t live with children and couldn’t live without them.
She trudged toward the far end of the fence, away from C.J. and jumped up onto the bottom rail, throwing herself into the cheering, anything to keep her mind away from fragile Katie, or loud Johnny, or attention-starved Kyle.
AT SIX O’CLOCK, C.J. had rushed through closing the shop, then had gone to the grocery store and picked up an apple, a banana, three bags of chips and two chocolate bars. So much great chocolate at work, yet sometimes he craved the cheap stuff.
At the cash he’d grabbed an energy bar and had run into the alley behind Sweet Talk and jumped into his old Jeep.
By the time he’d reached the Sheltering Arms, the food had been history and he was licking chocolate and salt from his fingers, still hungry, but there was nothing he could do about it.
He parked behind a row of pickup trucks lining Hank Shelter’s driveway.
His nerves jittered.
Before he got out of the Jeep, he put on his beige cowboy hat, settled it firmly onto his head. It changed him, made him feel stronger, as if he could handle anything.
People milled in the yard, near one of the fenced-off corrals. A cloud of dust rose from it. Everyone let out a huge cheer. Someone had fallen off a bronc, no doubt.
Despite the anxiety gnawing at his gut, C.J. remembered this much about the rodeo. The testosterone and the competition.
He stared around the Sheltering Arms. The buildings and grounds looked tended and clean.
A couple of ranch hands coaxed a bronc out of a horse trailer.
Someone slapped him on the back. Angus Kinsey.
“Hey, Angus,” C.J. said. Angus was a great guy. Like Hank, he was generous with his property, his horses and his broncs, and had let C.J. practice on his ranch as much as he’d wanted when C.J. had worked there part-time as a teenager.
“How’re things?” Angus asked. “You sold that candy store yet?”
The way Angus said candy store left no doubt what he thought of C.J. owning one. C.J. shook his head and laughed. Raging cowboy testosterone. “Not yet.”
“You need to get rid of it and start ranching, boy.”
“Amen,” C.J. answered.
This was what he wanted. A life of hard labor on a ranch with other cowboys. With camaraderie and sharing the highs and the lows of cattle ranching, with earning a living with his hands and body then falling into bed at night exhausted from a day of good solid work, and teaching his son how to ranch. His greatest desire? To give his son a future.
His own future did not include candy-making.
When he glanced along the bodies lining the white fence, arms and elbows resting along the top of it, his sights zoomed in on Janey before any other individual, and that bothered him.
She stood on a lower rung watching someone in the corral. When she leaned forward, her dress hiked up the backs of her legs, well above her knees.
Lord, for a petite woman, she had great thighs.
He inserted himself among the spectators. He felt Janey watching him and looked her way. The black lipstick she’d had on earlier was gone. Her own natural pink shone on her full lips. They looked soft and moist and pretty. Damn.
“Hey, C.J.!” Hank picked himself up from the dusty ground inside the corral, where the bronc had just dropped him, and grinned. “You want to go a round on Dusty here?”
“Sure,” C.J. called, but his pulse suddenly raced. Do it. Just get in there and do it.
He felt her eyes on him when he climbed over the fence.
He hadn’t done this in four years, since the day Davey died.
“Davey,” he whispered beneath his breath as he approached Dusty, “help me.”
The bronc shied away from him.
Kelly Cooper caught Dusty and held him still. C.J. climbed on and settled himself in the saddle, grinning at Kelly as though there weren’t ten devils dancing in his chest. God.
The second Kelly let the bronc loose, the animal bucked.
The bronc’s first buck slammed through C.J., made his teeth snap together, nearly threw him out of the saddle. He curled his fist around the rope, ignored that it cut off circulation.
He tightened his knees against the horse, used his uncanny sense of balance to stay astride.
Each kick and landing thudded through his back, his arms, legs and butt. His blood pounded. Dust flew into his eyes.
Yelling and cheering swirled around him.
His right arm ached, his fist wrapped in the rigging burned, and every particle of his spine felt as if it was being permanently twisted. But he hung on, breathed hard and felt the buzz, the high that had always trumped everything else. Common sense had never, ever stood a chance.
He jumped from the bronc, ran away from those dangerous hooves and laughed. And laughed. Taking off his cowboy hat, he waved it in the air and shouted, “Whooooohooooo.”
The applause of the audience coursed through his body like the beat of his blood. He jumped over the fence and accepted the handshakes and slaps on his shoulders.
“It’s good to have you back,” Angus said, and C.J. knew what he meant. It had been too long since his last rodeo. Four long years filled with bitterness and anger.
He banged his hat against his leg and a puff of dust rose from his jeans. He laughed again for the pure pleasure of it.
C.J. got up on a bronc three times during the evening, each time more thrilling than the last and, at the end, headed to his truck in the hush of dusk, willing his heart rate to slow and his body to relax, to come down from the high he hadn’t experienced in so long.
From behind him, Shane MacGraw tapped C.J.’s hat forward over his face. “Hey, glad you got over whatever kept you away from rodeo, man.”
C.J. caught his hat, shoved it back onto his head and grinned. “Thanks, Shane.”
He slipped into the driver’s side of his Jeep and sat still for a moment. He knew what Shane had assumed, what they had all thought—that after Davey’s death he’d been afraid to get back on a bronc or a bull. That he was afraid he, too, would get killed. That he hadn’t overcome his fear tonight to ride again.
Let them think that. The truth was far worse for him. It was eating him alive. He hadn’t feared the broncs or the bulls or that he might not like riding anymore, or performing.
He feared that he’d like those seductive sensations too much—of his blood whipping through his body, of excitement buzzing in his head, and of the adoration of the crowd. That he’d crave it even more than he used to in the old days, like a demon that had sunk in its claws and C.J. couldn’t shake free. He didn’t want that demon dogging him again. What if he couldn’t control it this time?
Who would take care of Liam then? Liam deserved someone whole and responsible.
C.J. had hoped he was over that wildness that reminded him too much of his pretty impetuous mother and of his own crazy period after Davey died, of his life in the city and a dangerous flirtation with drugs and booze. He had to force himself to be done with all of that shit.
By the time he pulled into the driveway of the Hanging W and stopped in the yard, he had himself under control and the demons of his past put to bed for the night. He could control them.
One arm resting on the open window, he drummed his fingers on the door and studied the small house. The place was dark. Gramps must be in the back room watching TV, as usual.
There hadn’t been a female in the Wright family in too many years. And it showed in the details—the house was clean, but didn’t sparkle. No flowers graced the dirt around the foundation. The furniture was only serviceable, the decorations nonexistent.
C.J. stepped out of the car and up onto the veranda, avoiding the third step that looked to fall apart any day now.
He walked into the house and called, “Gramps?”
“Back here,” came the muffled response.
Gramps sat in the closed-in back porch, watching a small TV propped on a rickety table. Dancing with the Stars blared. He slurped tea from a heavy china mug.
Moths beat against the screens of the open windows.
Liam sprawled on the sofa beside Gramps asleep, one leg hanging over the edge, his small hands curled into fists.
C.J. bent over and kissed his sweaty head. How come kid sweat smelled so much better than man sweat?
“How long has he been asleep?” C.J. asked.
“’Bout an hour.” Gramps patted the boy’s leg with one gnarled hand.
C.J. picked up his son. Liam rested boneless in his arms, as trusting as a newborn kitten. C.J. would do anything to have Liam trust him half as much when he was awake.
