Coulda Been a Cowboy. Brenda Novak

started from the blow she’d sustained to her mouth. She couldn’t turn her back on her father now. She was all he had. “I’m sorry. I can’t leave Dundee. I have to stay with him.”

      “I just told you he’ll have someone looking after him.”

      “It won’t be the same. No one else really cares about him.”

      Tyson moved close and tipped up her chin, making a point of studying her fat lip. “You have nothing here.”

      She jerked away. “I have my self-respect. If I turned my back on the one person who really needs me, I wouldn’t even have that.”

      She started into the house, but he caught her elbow. “If you go back, they’ll put him in jail. They’ve had it, Dakota. I spoke to Chief Clanahan myself.”

      “They can’t. I’m fine, so there’s no need. And he’s sick.”

      “That doesn’t mean they’ll keep putting up with his behavior. He could really hurt you, and then they’d be partially to blame because they didn’t stop him when they had the chance.”

      Her head was pounding too hard to make such a difficult decision. “So what do I do?” she asked. She wasn’t really talking to him—it was more of a rhetorical question to herself—but he answered.

      “Stay here for a couple weeks. You can go into town every afternoon if you want—check in on him, make sure the new guy is doing a good job, cook his dinner, whatever. The fact that you’re not living with him should mollify the police and your neighbors. Then…we’ll see where things go from there.”

      The warmth of his fingers sank through the thin sleeve of her blouse, but she doubted he even knew he was still holding on to her. “Is this really about helping me?” she asked skeptically.

      He glanced at the house. “I need you and you need me,” he said simply and let go.

      He was talking about Braden. She could tell he wanted to leave it right there, but she couldn’t. Lowering her voice, she asked, “If you didn’t really want him, why’d you take him?”

      He stared at some mysterious point over her shoulder for so long she thought he wasn’t going to answer. Finally he spoke. “I had no choice.”

      “You could’ve left him with his mother.”

      “Then I would’ve lost my self-respect,” he said and went inside.

      A KNOCK AT THE DOOR woke Tyson early. He scowled, but then something became apparent to him that quickly countered his irritation at being disturbed before he was ready. He couldn’t hear any crying. Not one cursed peep.

      He opened his eyes and lay still for a moment, holding his breath.

      Yep, no crying.

      “God that feels good.” Rolling over, he started drifting off to sleep again when a second knock reminded him that someone was at his door.

      “Come in.” His voice was muffled by a pillow, but Dakota must’ve heard him because the door opened, and she poked her head in. “You have a phone call.”

      He sat up and rubbed his eyes. “I do?”

      “It’s Greg Higgins.”

      His agent. “Oh.” He fell back onto the bed. “Tell him I’ll call him later.”

      “I already told him you weren’t up yet. He said it’s important.”

      With Greg, “important” was always relative. He might be calling simply to pass along a compliment the owner of the Stingrays had paid him. Or it could have to do with Rachelle. When Tyson forked over the one mil in exchange for her signature on the custody papers, she’d agreed not to disclose the terms of their agreement—and it made Greg even madder than Tyson that she’d flagrantly disregarded that stipulation. They couldn’t fix it now, but maybe something else had happened. Or maybe she was trying to renege on their deal.

      “Fine.” He reached for the telephone next to the bed, but Dakota spoke as his hand closed around the receiver.

      “He called on line two, which I finally figured out is only in the office.”

      “How’d he get that number?” Tyson asked.

      “It must be the one you gave him.”

      Which meant it had originally come from Gabe. Tyson hadn’t expected two lines. This was supposed to be a remote cabin.

      When he started to get up, the door closed so fast Tyson startled, then realized he’d fallen into bed in just his briefs last night. When he’d thrown off the covers, he hadn’t even considered that his near nudity might offend Dakota. He’d lost all sensitivity to modesty after spending the past decade dressing and undressing in a locker room that allowed female reporters to wander through at will. But he found it interesting that Dakota had beat such a quick retreat.

      He grinned at the memory as he pulled on a pair of sweatpants and headed down the hall to the office. And that was when he caught the scent of bacon, eggs and…waffles? There was coffee, too. This was certainly a better morning than the one he’d spent yesterday. He couldn’t wait to gorge himself. He hadn’t had a solid meal since he’d picked up Braden.

      The receiver was resting on the ink blotter next to the football player he’d drawn yesterday. He brought it to his ear and said hello, then realized that someone had added a number to the jersey on the paper. His number. Imagine that. Dakota had never mentioned football, and yet she knew his number.

      “We’ve got problems,” Greg said.

      Pasty-skinned and habitually nervous, with what he called a “power haircut” and football tattoos on both forearms that looked like a failed attempt to fit in rather than an extension of his own personality, Greg worried about everything, which drove Tyson crazy. But it was also one of the reasons Tyson kept him around. Tyson viewed life as one big picture; Greg minded the minutiae.

      “What kind of problems?” Tyson wasn’t nervous. Buying the wrong kind of toilet paper could be a serious problem for Greg.

      “That bitch went on Montel Williams yesterday.”

      “That bitch” was, of course, Rachelle. “She already disclosed the terms of our agreement,” he said, wondering why Greg had to wake him up for this. “No use getting our jocks in a knot over that.”

      “But that’s not all,” his agent went on. “She hinted that you took advantage of her when she was down on her luck.”

      Tyson sat up straighter. Now he was worried. “I took advantage of her?”

      “Yeah. She led everyone to believe…” Greg hesitated.

      “What?” Tyson snapped.

      “You’re not going to like it.”

      “Say it anyway.”

      “That you forced her to have sex with you.”

      The image of Rachelle climbing into his bed filled Tyson’s mind. Sleeping together had been her idea. He hadn’t demanded, or even asked, for anything.

      He rubbed his left temple. “Shit.”

      “I contacted her, told her you’d sue her for libel if she ever said that again.”

      “Good. I will.”

      “It doesn’t end there.”

      Why not? It should. He’d fulfilled his end of the bargain, and now he was trying to live with the fallout. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

      “She…she said she was thinking of going to the police and telling them the same story.”

      “That I raped her? The only thing I forced her to do was get the hell out of my house!” He drummed his fingers on the desktop. This couldn’t be happening.

      “It’s