Welcome Home, Cowboy

“Dammit Emma, you’re driving me crazy, you know that?”

Cash swiveled to meet her gaze, only to get so hung up in it he had no idea how to find his way out again. The words shimmered in the space between them for a moment before fading into the cushiony silence. Finally, Emma smiled, a whatchagonnado? curve to her lips that shoved Cash right over the line between then and now.

“Yeah. Same here.” She hesitated, then glided the back of her hand down his cheek, and Cash’s breath curled into a hot, dry knot in the center of his chest. “Crazier than I’ve ever been in my life.”

Emma saw Cash swallow, wanted to press her lips to those clenching muscles in his throat, to pull this man inside her—in more ways than one—so bad her own throat went dry.

“Should that be a bad thing?” he finally said.

“Don’t know. Don’t care …”

Dear Reader,

When Cash Cochran offers to help the widowed Emma Manning pull her neglected farm back from the brink of disaster, she might have thought Cash was the answer to her prayers. But now that I’ve finished their story, I’m thinking Emma was far more the answer to Cash’s … even if he didn’t know he was asking.

It’s probably pretty evident to anyone who’s read my books how often they explore themes of self-worth, redemption and forgiveness, based on my own deep-seated conviction that good ultimately always triumphs over bad. Welcome Home, Cowboy goes down those roads, and then some, with Cash being probably the most tortured hero I’ve ever written (Emma definitely had her work cut out for her!). But, oh, what a joy and privilege—for both of us!—it was to accompany him on his journey.

I hope you think so, too.

Karen Templeton

Since 1998, RITA® award winner and Waldenbooks bestseller KAREN TEMPLETON had written more than thirty books A transplanted Easterner, she now lives in New Mexico with her husband and whichever of their five sons happens to be in residence.

Welcome Home Cowboy

Karen Templeton

www.millsandboon.co.uk

To Gail, for grace and understanding and patience. My gratitude knows no bounds.

Chapter One

Cash Cochran hadn’t known what to expect, but for damn sure goats in coats hadn’t made the list.

His breath clouding his face, he frowned at the half-dozen or so beasts in the wire-fenced pen adjacent to the barn, bright-colored balloons on spindly legs. They squinted back with bemused smiles, droopy ears flicking. One gave him a questioning bleat.

I’m not sure, either, Cash thought, his gaze sweeping what had once been a sizable mamas-and-calves operation, sold off in bits and pieces until nothing remained except the house and the ten or so acres his father’d willed to Lee Manning a few years ago … a discovery that’d nearly knocked Cash right off the wagon. Except that was one level of hell he had no wish to revisit, thank you.

Not that he’d needed, or wanted, the property, nestled between two mountain ranges in northern New Mexico. Lee and his wife had been welcome to it. But the why behind the bequest had tainted the lapsed friendship with a bitter stink, one time had barely begun to dissipate.

The sun popped out from behind a doughy cloud, bringing changes into sharp relief—the fair-size, utilitarian greenhouse, the unplowed fields, a young orchard not yet in bloom. Tattered, heavy-duty plastic clinging to one side of the house—an abandoned home-improvement project would be his guess. The goats. Even so, the endless sky and pure, weightless air, the wind’s contented sigh through the pinon windbreak—those were exactly as he’d remembered.

What he’d missed.

Unlike the house itself—a ranch-style built high enough for a porch but too low for a basement, the exterior a conglomeration of stucco and fake brick and bad siding—which he hadn’t missed at all. Putrid memories punched through the paneled wood door and fake-shuttered windows, trampling the riot of egg-yolk-yellow daffodils crowding the foundation, the cutesy Welcome sign beside the recently repainted porch—

Barking its head off, an avalanche on four enormous, filthy feet roared around the side of the house and straight toward Cash.

“Bumble! Heel!”

Cash’s head jerked up, his gaze colliding with blue-green eyes as steady as they were curious. The called-off polar bear of a dog swerved at once, trotting over to plant his butt beside the red-sweatered goat his mistress held on to. A jumble of coppery hair, the bright plaid scarf hanging down her front, both glowed in contrast to the blah-colored, too-large barn coat, faded jeans, muddied boots.

“Can I help you?”

“Sorry, ma’am, didn’t mean to cause a ruckus. I’m—”

“I know who you are,” the woman said with a bite to her West Texas drawl that made Cash wonder if she kept the dog around just for show. At least she’d been smiling in her wedding photo.

“I take it you’re …” He scoured his brain for her name. “Emma?”

“That’s me.”

Cash couldn’t remember the last time a woman didn’t go all swoony and tongue-tied in his presence. Longer still since such things had stoked his ego, made a lonesome young cowboy with a fair talent for guitar picking and songwriting feel like hot stuff. It’d surprised him, how fast all the attention got old. Especially when it finally penetrated that the gals were far more interested in Cash’s so-called fame than they were in him. Still, Emma Manning’s obliviousness to his so-called charms unnerved him. His attention swerved again to the goats, still watching him with squinched-up little faces.

“Why’re they dressed?”

“Had to shear ‘em before they kidded. Then the temperature dropped. Mr. Cochran … I’m sorry, but why are you here? Since I somehow doubt you dropped by to chitchat about my goats.”

He glanced back, caught the frown, the fine lines feathering the corners of those cool, calm eyes. “Guess you’d call that a loaded question. Lee around?”

Something flickered across her face—irritation, maybe—before she wordlessly led the goat back to the pen. Hot shame licked up Cash’s neck, that if he hadn’t found that letter a few months ago—a letter he hadn’t realized he’d kept—he might not even be here now. But he was, which was the important thing.

Wasn’t it?

Emma gently kneed the goat’s rump, encouraging her to rejoin her friends. Her silence, however, was anything but gentle. Even her hair—scattered across her back, nearly to her waist—seemed to crackle with anger. Anger he wasn’t totally sure he understood, truth be told.

“I know I should’ve called first,” he said, “but this morning … I just found myself heading out this way. And by that point I figured I’d better see it through before I lost my nerve. If Lee’s not here, no problem, I could come back.” From inside the pen, puzzled eyes cut to his. “I bought a house a few months ago, on the other side of town. Haven’t been there long, though. Couple, three days—”

“You moved back to Tierra Rosa?”

“For the time being, yeah. I guess …” He lowered his eyes, wrestling with this newfangled thing called honesty. Meeting her gaze again, he said, “I guess sometimes you gotta go back to the beginning before you can move forward. And part of that’s patching things up with Lee—”

“That’s not possible, Mr. Cochran,” Emma said quietly, latching the gate before facing him again. “Since Lee died last fall.”

If she’d had more than thirty seconds’ notice, Emma might’ve finessed the news a little more instead of blurting it out. Then again, she wasn’t exactly feeling too steady on her pins herself, since she’d no more expected to see Cash Cochran standing in her yard that morning than she would’ve the Lord Jesus.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “Haven’t been in touch with anybody from around here for years. I …” Giving his head a sharp shake, Cash pressed one palm against the SUV’s roof, softly swearing as he stared over it. “What happened?”

“His heart,” Emma said, refusing to indulge the lingering grief razoring the words. “Apparently it was a substandard model. Like putting a rusty, used-up four-cylinder engine in a semi.” She brushed off her hands, rammed them in the pockets of Lee’s old barn coat. Willed the fine tremor racking her body to subside. “There was some talk about a transplant, but turns out that wasn’t really an option.”

“I’m so sorry,” Cash repeated on a rough breath, the wind toying with the ragged ends of the hay-colored, shoulder-length hair visible beneath his cowboy hat. “More than I can say.”

“Yeah. Me, too.”

His jaw pulsing, he yanked open his car door. “I didn’t mean to intrude. I—” His fist slammed onto the roof. “Damn.”

A couple of the goats bleated, concerned. At Emma’s knees, Bumble let out a low growl.

“There’s coffee on,” she heard herself say, even as she thought, Please, God. No. “And pie. Peach. From the tree.”

Cash’s eyes swung to the lone peach tree down by the front fence. Between the altitude, the crazy northern New Mexico winter and Dwight Cochran’s neglect, it was a wonder the thing’d survived at all. Like the man in front of her, she thought on a slight intake of breath. Although the tree looked to be in far better shape than he was.

“Mr. Cochran?”

After a moment, he faced her, his famous silver eyes slightly unfocused. “Come on into the house. Until things settle a bit in your head.”

Bumble growled at him, louder this time, all Great Pyrenees machismo. Cash almost smiled. “You don’t want me here.”

“Wouldn’t be at the top of my list, no. But if you’re feeling a tenth of what I did when I suddenly found myself a widow a few months back, you’re in no fit condition to be driving back down that mountain.”

“I can manage—”

“Thank you, but I’m not up for taking that chance. And since my chores aren’t going away while we’re standing here, I suggest we move this conversation inside.”

* * *

Inside.

Cash glanced at the house. The memories leered. Then again, what had he expected?

Lee to be here, for starters. To buffer the pain of coming home, ease Cash through the worst of it. Like he’d always done. A stupid-ass assumption to begin with, considering how shredded things had become between them. How shredded Cash had let them get.

Now it was too late. For apologies, explanations, any of it.

“What’s to talk about?”

“Whatever led you here after all this time, I suppose.” At Cash’s hesitation, Emma said, almost sharply, “I promise you, there’s nothing in there that can hurt you anymore.” When his eyes snapped to hers, her mouth pulled tight. “Lee told me why you ran off. What your father did to you. Husbands share with their wives, Mr. Cochran,” she said to his glare. “Especially husbands trying to make sense out of why their best friend cut them off.”

“We were kids. We grew apart. I didn’t cut him off—”

“Oh, no? When Lee wrote to tell you about us getting the house, you never wrote back, never returned his calls, nothing. If that’s not cuttin’ somebody off, I don’t know what is.”

“And if you know about my father, I think it’d be perfectly obvious why I wasn’t exactly overcome with joy when I discovered Lee’d gotten buddy-buddy with the man who’d made my life a living hell—”

“Exactly what did my husband tell you? About why Dwight left us the house?”

Acid surged in Cash’s gut. “Only that some time after I left, he started working for the bastard. Helping out around the place, stuff like that.”

“And?”

“And, what? That was it.”

“Oh, Lord,” she muttered, then added, “We need to talk,” in a tone of voice that said there was more to the story. Half of him wasn’t sure he wanted to find out what that was, except.

Except if he’d come for answers, what difference did it make who he got them from?

His eyes touched hers. “How strong you make your coffee?”

“You won’t be disappointed,” Emma said, then set off toward the house. The dog gave him a Mess with her and you’re dead look, then plodded behind, only to collapse on the porch, completely ignoring Cash when he passed by.

Cash could only hope his father’s ghost would extend him the same courtesy.

“Who’s that?” Granny Annie barked at them from her “studio,” carved out of one corner of the cramped, perpetually cluttered living room. Cats, coffee cups, painting supplies, art magazines and haphazardly stacked vinyl LPs littered a conglomeration of tables and shelves; from a fifty-year-old hi-fi system, Ol’ Blue Eyes crooned loud enough to be heard in Wyoming.

“An old friend of Lee’s,” Emma yelled back, willing her pulse to settle down as she slapped her coat on the rack, then sloughed off Lee’s boots. A cat—The Red One, Emma couldn’t be bothered learning all their names, especially since half the time Annie couldn’t remember them, either—batted at the end of the scarf, dangling by Emma’s knees.

“Who?” Annie bellowed, clearly not wearing her hearing aids. Emma did not have the energy for that particular battle right now. Instead, she crossed to the record player and turned down the volume, surprised to find her hand still attached to her arm like normal, considering the recent, major hit to her entire molecular structure.

Man took intense to a whole new level. Like radioactive.

“You look familiar.” All bones and gumption, the old woman crept closer to their visitor, like a buzzard contemplating fresh carrion. A paint-spattered buzzard with dandelion-fluff hair in sore need of a perm. “Do I know you?”

“You used to, Granny Annie,” Cash said, taking her skeletal hand in his. “A long time ago. When Lee and I were kids. I’m Cash.”

Annie fiddled with her glasses, large-framed holdovers from the Reagan era. “Cash Cochran? Dwight’s youngest boy?”

“That’s right,” he said, pain flashing briefly in his eyes. “I was so sorry to hear about his passing—”

Annie snatched back her hand, looking like she might smack Cash with the brush. Deaf she might be, but Emma’d put her money on the old gal in a back-alley brawl any day. “He’s been gone how long now? And you’re only now showing up?” Her thin, wrinkled lips smashed flat, she inched back to the canvas to jab “leaves” on “trees.” “Everybody loved that boy. Everybody. Seems to me a friend would’ve at least come to his funeral—”

“He didn’t know, Annie. Really.” At Annie’s if-you-say-so shrug, Emma said to Cash, “Why don’t you help yourself to that coffee while I check on my daughter? She’s home from school with a cold, nothing serious. I’ll be right there.”

Then she hightailed it down the hall, stealing a few seconds to deal with the blow of discovering her husband had lied to her. Not to mention escape Cash’s eyes. Big, hurting eyes that made a woman want to get inside and tinker. Fix things.

Like she didn’t have enough to fix already.

Too bad she couldn’t lock up her nurturing instincts as easily as she had her libido. Between widowhood and being pregnant and the farm and everything else, all thoughts of hanky-panky had been shoved into a locked file drawer marked “Expired.” But her chronic attraction to the brokenhearted? To the grave, baby. To the grave.

She’d long since given up trying to figure out her penchant for the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to break free of whatever put expressions like that on their faces. Lee had razzed her about it all the time, even as he said that was why he loved her, because her heart was even bigger than her butt.

A comment only Lee could have gotten away with, she mused, pausing outside Zoey’s door. Lee, who’d also always wanted to make everybody happy. Even if that meant—in his case—keeping one or more parties in the dark.

Leaving Emma with the tidying up.

Thinking, So what else is new? she finally peeked through Zoey’s partially open door into an explosion of sour-apple green and bubble-gum pink. A conglomeration of skinny appendages, freckles and wayward hair, her daughter was drawing, sprawled on the rag rug Annie’d made for her when she was a baby, in the same colors that had inspired the prissy color scheme. Beside her towered a mountain of used pink tissues, like blobs of cotton candy.

“How’re you doing, baby? And throw those tissues in the garbage.”

“They’re yucky.”

“Which is why you get to throw them away. Not me.”

With a sigh strong enough to rustle the offending tissues, the child gathered them up, then stood and dumped them into her trash can, decorated with a big-eyed Disney princess. “Is the man gone?”

Apprehension curled in the pit of Emma’s stomach. Not eagerly anticipating the upcoming conversation, nope. “How’d you know about him?”

“Saw him out the window.” Blue eyes, no less sharp for their wateriness, shot to Emma’s. “Who is he?” she croaked, like a baby bullfrog.

“An old friend of your daddy’s. And keep your voice down, he’s right in the kitchen.”

“How come?”

“Because he and I have stuff to talk over. Grown-up stuff.”

Zoey sniffed out a put-upon sigh, a trait she’d perfected by two, before blowing her nose again. “He looks like that guy Daddy used to listen to all the time on the country music station.”

“That’s because he is.”

Eyes popped. “You serious?”

“Yes. And no, you can’t tell anybody.”

“Is he gonna stay?”

“Here? No, of course not. He’s got his own place.” Emma paused, briefly considering the weirdness that was Cash Cochran moving back to Tierra Rosa. “He used to live here. In this house, I mean.”

“No way!”

“Yep.”

Pale eyebrows pushed together. “He doesn’t want it back, does he?”

“I highly doubt it. And even if he did, it’s ours now. Nobody can take it from us.” At least, that was the plan. “You want more juice?”

“No, I’m good,” Zoey said, handing Emma her empty glass before flopping back onto her tummy on the rug, like she didn’t have a care in the world. Considering how attached Zoey’d been to her daddy, the child must’ve inherited Emma’s fake-it-till-you-make-it gene. However, her recent disposition to inviting in every cold virus that passed through town led Emma to suspect she wasn’t over her daddy’s death nearly as much as she let on.

“Hey,” Emma said. Zoey looked up. “Love you.”

That got a holey smile in response. “Love you, too, Mama.”

Releasing a breath, Emma tromped back down the hall to discover Cash—clearly not inclined to stay where he’d been put—standing in her tiny dining room, his fingers curled around a mug, staring at the sixteen-by-twenty J.C. Penney photo special taking up a good chunk of the paneled wall by the window.

“This is real nice,” he said, in the manner of somebody who realized he’d missed out on a thing or two.

Emma forced her eyes to the portrait, even though it made her heart ache. Lee’d gone on Weight Watchers the year before; he’d been so proud of how much he’d slimmed down he’d insisted they get their picture taken. Although slimmed was a relative term. For both of them. Now, though, she was glad she’d shoved her pride where the sun don’t shine and done what Lee’d wanted. Aside from their wedding album, it was the best picture she had of him. If she’d had any part in making him as happy as he seemed in that picture, she supposed she’d done okay.

Sure, she was ticked that Lee’d skirted the truth about what he’d told Cash, but no doubt he had his reasons. He always did. She sighed over the dull pang that became fuzzier around the edges every day. Heaven knew neither of them was perfect, but they’d been good together. Real good. The kind of good a smart woman knew better than to expect more than once in her lifetime—

“Your boy—he okay?”

Wrapped in his father’s arms from behind, Hunter beamed his customary infectious grin at the camera, his glasses crooked as usual. But how could she have forgotten, even for a moment, that the rest of the world saw “normal” through a completely different lens than she did? That to most people her boy’s slanted eyes and thick neck and fine hair defined him in a way that provoked either pity or discomfort, if not both. If Cash was feeling either of those things, though, she couldn’t tell.

Emma smiled. “He’s doing great. Nobody gets a bigger kick out of life than Hunter. A life that’s perfectly normal. For him. Us, too.”

When she turned, Cash’s eyes were fixed on her belly.

“Yeah, there’s another baby in there,” she said, going into the kitchen, where she finally unwound the scarf and draped it over the back of a kitchen chair before scooting across the floor toward the pie. At least, in her head she was scooting. In reality she felt like a hippopotamus slogging through hip-high mud.

“Didn’t know this one was coming until a couple of weeks after Lee died. It’s okay,” she said when Cash’s brows dipped, signaling the doubt demons to swarm, taunting her about all the responsibilities balanced on her not-quite-broad-enough shoulders. Sometimes she truly wondered how she wasn’t curled up in a fetal position herself, sucking her thumb. She flashed him a smile and scooped up the pie. “Everything’s under control. Really.”

And the sooner she did that tidying-up thing with Cash about his father, the sooner he’d be gone and she could get back to figuring out the rest of her life.

She turned, the pie cradled in her hands, catching the barely banked blend of disgust and horror on Cash’s face as he scanned the kitchen. Meaning, most likely, that a few coats of paint weren’t doing a blamed thing to eradicate the bad mojo that had not only sent Cash running but had kept him away for twenty years.

Somehow, she highly doubted the truth would, either.

Don’t remember this being part of the marriage vows, she thought, setting the pie on the table.

Chapter Two

At least the house smelled good. Damn good. Like strong coffee and baking and that flowery stuff women liked to keep around. But man, being here was doing a number on Cash’s head. In fact, as he watched Emma serve up a huge piece of pie, he felt like somebody with ADD was controlling the remote to his brain.

Cats lazed and groomed in the midmorning sunlight splashing across the dull butcherblock counters, the gouged tile floor—old, faded dreams struggling for purchase in a scary sea of color. Orange walls. Turquoise cabinets. Yellow curtains. Hell, even the table was fire-engine red—

“Bright colors help stimulate the brain,” Emma said quietly, setting a plate in front of him and licking her thumb. “We did it mainly for Hunter.”

“Did it help?”

Through the calm, Cash caught a glimpse of the worry that was most likely a constant companion. “I don’t think it hurt,” she said with a slight smile, and his heebie-jeebies about being in the house morphed to apprehension about what she wanted to tell him, which then slid into a skin-prickling, inexplicable awareness of the woman herself—

“Let me get you a refill,” she said, whisking away his mug.

—which in turn stirred up a whole mess of conflicting feelings, most of which he’d pretty much lost touch with over the years … none of which he was the least bit inclined to examine now. If ever. The weird, inexplicable spurt of protectiveness notwithstanding—even more weird since he doubted there was a woman on the face of the earth who needed protecting less than Emma Manning—he wasn’t the protective type.