A Cowboy's Pride. Karen Rock

on the small of her back as he guided her across the uneven terrain. When they stopped at the fence, she climbed up one slat, heels and all, to lean over the top rail.

      “Oh! He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” she breathed then turned her sparkling smile on him, full wattage. His mind seized like an overheating engine. Total meltdown. Speaking was clearly not an option. Luckily for him, Katie-Lynn had always been able to talk enough for them both.

      “I love Brahmans,” she babbled on, and he closed his eyes and let his ears drink in the rushing, soothing sound. “They’ve always been my favorite. Their gray coats. The hump in their backs. So unique. Plus, they have the best temperaments. Look how sweet his mother is being to him. He’s nursing like a champ. When did you say he was born? Cole? You in there?”

      His lids flew open. “A couple of hours ago.”

      “Were you up all night watching her?”

      He nodded.

      Her nails, perfect red ovals to match her lipstick, lightly scraped his hand when she patted it. “You must be exhausted. I remember pulling those all-nighters with you. Remember the time when the calf was breach, and we turned it with the rope?”

      “Surprised you remember.”

      “There isn’t much I’ve forgotten about us.” She ducked her head and fiddled with the short zipper on the side of her dress.

      He glanced at her bare ring finger, picturing the small, heart-shaped diamond he’d once placed there...the one still resting in his bedside drawer. “You’re not married?”

      “No. Too busy for romance. You?”

      He exhaled the air stuck in his lungs. What was it to him if she dated anyone? Yet it mattered, more than it should. “Same.”

      They watched the nursing calf in silence. The loamy smells of fresh earth and dew-tipped grass was in the air, and a crisp wind blew down from the mountains. “You got rid of the pool.”

      “The year after you left.” He hid his wince, recalling their first date at his sixteenth birthday party and his mother’s drowning. Katie had been by his side when he’d found his mother.

      Back then Katie-Lynn had chattered when he couldn’t speak, held him when he couldn’t stand and touched him when he couldn’t feel. She’d acted as his buffer, allowing him to deal with the world from a distance, filtered through her sunshine.

      “A lot has changed since then.” The Brahman heifer bellowed when she spied them on the fence, protective of her newborn.

      “Your freckles,” he observed, watching the calf suckle.

      “Freckles?”

      He cocked his head and studied Katie-Lynn’s smooth, flawless skin. It resembled porcelain—fragile and untouchable—so unlike the country girl-next-door he’d known. Loved. “What happened to them?”

      “My plastic surgeon lasered them off.” She said it like someone might say, “My dentist cleaned my teeth.” As though having a plastic surgeon was no big deal, and maybe it wasn’t in Hollywood.

      “Why do you have a plastic surgeon?”

      “To make me beautiful.”

      He shook his head, marveling. “You already were pretty.”

      He preferred pretty to beautiful the way he liked a daisy better than an orchid. One was fresh, open and bright. The other was perfect, waxy and exotic, which was why people prized them, he guessed. He’d always been more partial to natural wonders.

      “Not pretty enough. Not by Hollywood standards.” She ran her hands through her tousled strands, smoothing them flat to her skull like a ribbon of golden silk.

      “Why’d you dye your hair?”

      “Platinum looks better on screen. You don’t like it?” Her teeth appeared on her bottom lip, white against scarlet, and he had the crazy urge to kiss her lipstick off to reveal her natural rose mouth underneath.

      “It’s different. I liked it darker. Honey-brown.”

      She tilted her face to the sun and closed her eyes. “I’m different.”

      “I noticed.” She’d changed, and he hadn’t, living a hermit’s life except for volunteering at Fresh Start, a local rehab and mental health facility, and working the ranch with two of his siblings, Heath and Daryl. The chasm that’d opened between him and Katie-Lynn when they’d argued over their wedding yawned again at his feet, still too wide to be spanned.

      “Wow! I forgot what cold felt like!” Katie-Lynn’s dress collar lifted in the wind and she hugged herself, shivering. His arm wrapped around her shoulders protectively, settling her against him, warm and snug. The remembered feel of her, the seamless fit, the sense of completeness, returned to him, sharp and sweet. Then she ducked away and slid a small distance down the fence. “I’m sorry your dad sprang me on you.”

      “If I’d known, I never would’ve let you come.”

      She fussed with the black-and-white concentric rings encircling her neck on a silver chain. “Why’s that?”

      He hesitated a second. “Because I would have asked you... Heck...I am asking you to stop this production before it starts.”

      Her perfectly shaped eyebrows came together as she frowned. “I can’t.”

      “Yes, you can. You’re the star.”

      “I don’t have that kind of power.”

      His breath hissed between clenched teeth, and he forced himself to simmer down. “Who came up with this idea?”

      She stiffened. “I did.”

      Her words knocked thought clean out of his head, so he stared at her, mute.

      “I’m sorry, Cole. I am.” She sighed and stuffed her hands in her pockets. “I would never have come back unless...”

      “Unless what?” he managed, reeling. She’d dealt his family this blow on purpose. She’d caused it, just like the wound she’d inflicted when she walked away from him and the life he’d offered.

      “Nothing.” She stared straight ahead again. Overhead, barn swallows swooped and dived against a cloudless sky.

      “Katie-Lynn—”

      She held up a hand, interrupting him. “It’s Katlynn now.”

      “Not for me. Because Katie-Lynn knows, better than anyone, why my family doesn’t need media digging up old secrets. Tell them you did some investigating and the story’s fake.”

      “You’re in foreclosure. You need this money.”

      He looked down at her; she was staring at the mother and calf. “I need my pa to have a peaceful, happy wedding. Quiet and uneventful.”

      “Sounds like the one you wanted for us.”

      He pointed to Mount Sopris, where one lonely hawk circled. “On a mountaintop, just our families and the preacher. What was wrong with that?”

      Their disagreements while planning the wedding had revealed fundamental differences. Katie-Lynn wanted a large affair too showy for him. Worse, he would have gone into debt funding it given his family’s limited means.

      “You knew how much I wanted a big wedding. Lots of people.”

      “Lots of strangers,” he interjected. “People just coming for cake and booze. Why want them there?”

      “Because I wanted them to know I was there. No one ever noticed me, and I wanted my wedding to be different. Just one day where I felt special, but you didn’t understand that, or me.”

      “You wanted everyone’s attention. I wasn’t enough.” Because of their wedding arguments, he’d sensed, deep down,