The Cowboy's Valentine Bride Read online

  Brody and his father didn’t have a talkative relationship, and Brody gave his father a silent nod. Ken slowly unzipped his jacket, then cleared his throat.

  “I fired Nick Sutton,” he said.

  Brody nodded. “Good.”

  “You might have been right about him.” Ken’s expression betrayed how difficult those words were for him, and Brody eyed his father in surprise.

  “Really?”

  “He spat on my boot and cursed me to my face.”

  “So no reference?” Brody asked wryly.

  Ken let out a grunt of a laugh. “Guess not.”

  Brody turned toward the sitting room. He’d have to savor this one—this kind of victory was a rarity around here.

  “When you were little I wouldn’t let you swim in the deep part of the creek,” his father said, his voice like gravel. The words—and the sentiment—came as a surprise. Weren’t they supposed to be talking about firing someone?

  Brody frowned, turned back. “Yeah. House rules.” What was his father getting at?

  “And I taught you to never surprise a cow from behind.” His father nodded slowly. “And never, ever to take a dare.”

  Brody stayed silent, watching his father uncertainly. The man’s face was creased by weather and time, and his blue eyes looked watery in this midmorning light. He rubbed his calloused hands together.

  “It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you, or that I didn’t think you could handle yourself,” his father said. “But you were my child. And as a father, I had to protect you.” Ken paused, shoved his hands into his front pockets. “That’s why I didn’t want you to join the army. It wasn’t that I didn’t think you could handle yourself. I knew you could. I just wanted to make sure you stayed safe.”

  “I was helping keep America safe,” Brody said.

  Ken nodded. “And I was supposed to be proud.”

  The words hit Brody in the chest. Supposed to be proud. His father had gone quiet when Brody enlisted in the army, and while aunts and uncles told him that they were so proud of him, his father had never said a word. That silence had been deafening.

  “Sorry to disappoint,” Brody said bitterly.

  “Do you know how it would feel to be given a flag and a few condolences?” Ken asked. “As a parent, do you know how that would feel?”

  Brody shook his head. “I came back alive, Dad.”

  “But your buddies didn’t.”

  As if Brody needed a reminder of that, and he couldn’t help the anger that simmered inside of him. His father slowly looked up and met Brody’s gaze.

  “I couldn’t bury you.” Ken’s voice shook and he pressed his lips together. It wasn’t enough to stop his chin from trembling. Brody had never seen his father cry, and his throat grew tight.

  “Dad—” Brody started.

  “No, I have to say this,” his father said, sucking in a deep breath. “I get that a young man needs to follow his own dreams. I was young once, too. But I’m asking you as your father to stay down...tap out. Run this place with me. But please, don’t go back there. If I had to bury you, I don’t think I’d survive it.”

  That was the thing his father didn’t understand—Brody wasn’t living his life to make other people comfortable. He had to find somewhere he could contribute, somewhere these memories could fit back in and make sense, because they sure didn’t make any sense here on the ranch.

  “Tap out?” Brody asked incredulously.

  “Bad choice of words.” His father winced. “Stay home. I’d ask you not to break your mother’s heart, but that wouldn’t be honest. Don’t break mine.”

  Tears misted Brody’s eyes and he looked away. His father had never spoken to him this directly before, but he was asking for too much.

  “Dad, I’m not the same,” he said quietly.

  “That’s okay.” His father swallowed hard. “You don’t have to be.”

  And for his father, maybe he didn’t. But Brody was the one carrying the burden. He couldn’t package up Afghanistan and put it on a shelf. This wasn’t a summer of travel after high school. Because if that horror didn’t have meaning, then it would crush him.

  “I saw stuff, Dad.” Brody hadn’t spoken of this before—not to a civilian. “When villages have no government to hold them together, the worst people start doing the things that society would have stopped. And as a soldier, you have to choose what you’re going to stop and what you’re going to look away from. You can’t stop it all. And there were too many atrocities I couldn’t stop, Dad.”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” his father said.

  “But I had to choose who I helped and who I didn’t,” Brody went on. “I remember their faces. The kids, the women, a teenage boy—”

  His voice was choked off. It was just as well. He couldn’t burden his old man with this stuff. Civilians didn’t know how to cope with this. Neither did soldiers most of the time. That’s why they all had the nightmares.

  “Even when I didn’t have a choice, I feel guilt as if I did—because I might have been able to choose differently, make a better call.”

  “You made a good call with Nick,” his father said.

  The situation with Nick was so much smaller than the kind of pain he was carrying around.

  “But that wasn’t life-or-death,” Brody said bitterly. “That was just a creep who needed to move on.”

  His father shrugged sadly. “You’d never have to see that again if you stayed home.”

  Brody sighed. If only it were just a matter of choosing a place to live. It was more than that—it was choosing a place where he could go on living.

  “I don’t know what to say,” Brody said at last. He had no answers, no solutions. He had no absolution for the friends who had died, the innocent civilians who had looked to him to intervene...

  “It’s okay,” his father said. “I’ve got a fence to mend. I just wanted to say my bit. Give it some thought.”

  Why did coming home have to be so complicated? He had sins to atone for, and he couldn’t atone by mending fences and wrangling cattle. And he bloody well didn’t deserve the peace he longed for.

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning, Brody sat in front of the TV watching the news channel. He’d never been a huge news watcher in the past, having the pessimistic view that anything real wouldn’t make it onto the news networks anyway, but since coming back, he found himself hypervigilant. The news might be exaggerated and biased, but it was a glimpse into the outside world, that vast space just past the confines of Hope.

  An army correspondent came on the screen, one finger pressed into her ear, and a microphone held close to her mouth. Overhead the whistle of a missile made her hunch down, and then the sky in the distance glowed red with an explosion. Brody’s pulse hammered in his neck and he flicked off the TV. It was one thing to be in a battle zone when you had orders to follow and you could do something. It was altogether different to watch from the easy chair in the living room, his morning coffee getting cold beside him.

  Nothing was the same anymore, and he knew that to think all this through he needed to ride and there was no way he was going to get Kaitlyn’s support in that so early.

  Kaitlyn. What was it about her that kept his mind coming back to her? He was a glutton for punishment—rejected by one sister and falling for the other. Maybe those words were too strong—he was most certainly not falling for his pretty nurse. She was just that perfect mixture of strength and innocence that made him hope for some sort of comfort.

  It wasn’t just their shared history, either, because she was no longer the college student in a ponytail. She was now his nurse...and currently, she was running a few errands while he was supposed to be resting.

  Resting! He wasn’t an old man or an invalid, but Kaitlyn insisted that he al
low his body time to heal. Rest wasn’t helping—not mentally, at least. The last thing he needed was more uninterrupted time with his own thoughts.

  “I’m spending too much time inside,” he muttered, pushing himself up from the easy chair. The news channel wasn’t helping matters, and neither were his family’s hopes that he’d stay in Hope. He needed to ride. Wasn’t that what he’d been saying all along? Besides, Kaitlyn wasn’t here to talk him out of it, so now was the time to make it happen.

  His leg ached, but not as badly as before, and he tested his range of motion cautiously. His muscles didn’t have the same flexibility he used to have, and he could feel the fresh scars tug as he stretched his leg out, then pulled his knee as high as he was able. That hurt.

  Brody limped over to the hook where his hat hung and dropped it onto his head. If he waited for the pain to stop, he’d be sitting by the fire for the rest of his life, and that wasn’t an option. An image of Kaitlyn’s angry face rose in his mind, and he grimaced. She’d be furious if she arrived to find him missing, so he’d do the considerate thing. He scribbled a note on a scrap of paper, left it on the kitchen table and pulled open the door.

  Ten minutes later, Brody was limping down the gravel drive that led to the barn. The cold air stung his face, and his breath came out in a cloud. The fields glistened like crushed diamonds, and the barn, freshly painted red, brought with it all those feelings of home. In moments like this, he wished he could stay. Brody paused to catch his breath and leaned forward, putting a hand on his thigh. His leg ached from the exertion, and he found himself idly longing for the warmth of the fire to soak away a bit of the pain. The mental image of an old man by the hearth kept him moving in the right direction.

  Never before had this road seemed so arduous or long, but he wasn’t about to give up. He needed this more than anyone seemed to realize. Before he’d left for the army, Brody had known who he was. He was the son of a grisly rancher, and he was determined to make a career for himself as far from home as possible. But it turned out that no matter how far you roamed, home sat inside of you and it seemed all the more achingly beautiful for how far you’d gone. He was home—right back to the place he’d dreamed of and longed for when he was dodging bullets—and he’d never felt further away.

  Brody straightened and started his limping gait once more. He needed to ride, and that was his single-minded mission of the day. He’d ride Champ, or he’d pass out in the attempt.

  * * *

  KAITLYN LOOKED DOWN at the note in the center of the kitchen table:

  Kate, I’ve gone riding. Care to join me?

  This wasn’t exactly a surprise. He’d been pushing himself to the limit since he’d returned, and she knew he longed to be on horseback again. Her heart dropped, though, because of what this meant. Brody wasn’t going to stay in Hope. He had nothing left here—nothing that mattered to him, at least. He wasn’t aiming to ranch and ride and rope. He was pushing this hard to get out for good.

  And it was her job to help him recover, except the pace he’d set for himself was inhuman. He couldn’t keep this up without doing some major damage to his already-wounded body. It was selfish and horrible, but she did hope that regaining full mobility took a little longer. She didn’t want him to suffer. She just wanted him to stay.

  Kaitlyn didn’t bother taking off her coat or gloves, and she headed back out the door and down the steps. She’d take her truck to the barn—Heaven knew what shape he’d be in by the time she got to him, and she highly doubted he’d be in any condition to walk uphill to the house.

  She hopped into the truck and turned the key, muttering to herself about the stupidity of stubborn men. Griping was easier than crying right now. She could deal with grumpy old men or forgetful old ladies who thought she was their dead husbands’ mistress... None of that was personal. Brody was worse, because he insisted on relating to her as Kate, not as his professional medical care provider, tugging her closer and closer, all with the intention of walking away. But while he was here, he needed her for more than just nursing care—he needed her friendship, her emotional support. There was nothing simple about this position. Brody took a job and made it achingly personal.

  She turned onto the road that led to the barn and followed it, steering around the potholes. When she parked, she hopped out of the truck and headed toward the open corral door.

  “Brody?”

  As she came around the side of the barn, she saw Brody standing on the block used for teaching kids how to mount. In Brody’s condition, he would never get onto Champ’s back by simply swinging up, and she silently wished he hadn’t thought of the block. It would be a whole lot easier to argue him down if he weren’t already in the saddle.

  “Hey,” Brody said, glancing back. “I see you got my note.”

  “I did.” Her tone was dry and she shook her head. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  “Disobeying orders.” He shot her a teasing grin. “You aren’t half as scary as an army general, you know.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I’m not trying to be scary. I’m trying to point out reason. That’s going to hurt a lot, you know.”

  “It already does,” he retorted. “Are you going to help me or let me tear something?”

  Help him? Was he serious? What he needed was another week of rest, and then several weeks of physiotherapy. This was not good for him.

  “If you allow your body to heal more before you start riding again, you can do this without the pain.” She’d try logic. Maybe he’d respond to that.

  “It’s going to hurt when I start riding again, regardless,” he shot back.

  “It’ll hurt significantly less if you’ve healed!” Why was he being so bullheaded? Was he in that much of a hurry to get away?

  Brody turned and caught her eye with his dark magnetic gaze, and the memory of lips hovering over hers came back so strongly that her cheeks grew warm. She broke eye contact and looked away.

  He said quietly, “I’m going to give this a try with or without your help. It’ll hurt—I know that—but I have a theory that it’ll hurt less if you give me a hand.”

  That wasn’t even fair. She sighed and opened the gate in the side of the paddock and came around to where Champ stood, breathing out great billows of steam. She guided Champ closer to the block—taking a quick tug on the straps to make sure they were tight—then angled around Champ’s rippling shoulder.

  “You sure about this?” she asked.

  He shot her a grin. “Nope, but I’m doing it anyway.”

  Brody put his foot in the stirrup, then grimaced as he tried to swing his injured leg up, but it wouldn’t go high enough. That was what physiotherapy would be for—and that wouldn’t start until she’d deemed him healed enough for the stretching.

  Or would he leave before he could ride? It was a possibility that occurred to her only now. His leg came back down to the block and he let out a huff of breath. Champ looked back at Brody, liquid eyes pinned questioningly to his master. She could see how he would have to do this...was she really going to suggest a way to make this insanity possible?

  “You’ll have to put your bad leg in the stirrup,” Kaitlyn said. “Do you think you could hold your weight for that long?”

  Brody shrugged. “Let’s find out.”

  “I don’t like this,” she said, for the record.

  “Right now, you aren’t my nurse,” he said, one side of his mouth turning up in a smile.

  “I most certainly am!” she retorted.

  “We’ll have to agree to disagree on that one,” he said, coming down from the mounting block and walking Champ around so he could mount from the other side.

  Kaitlyn stood next to Champ’s shoulder and this time, when he put his boot into the stirrup, she put a supporting hand on his calf to help hold him steady as he swung the other leg over. The
blood drained from his face with the effort, but he was mounted, and he breathed heavily for a moment before he glanced down and caught her eye.

  “I’m going to do this every day until it doesn’t hurt anymore.”

  Brody make a clicking sound with his mouth, and he and Champ started out at a walk. Even at that slow pace, the movement would be excruciating for Brody, and she wished he would listen to her. But then, he wouldn’t be Brody Mason, would he? He didn’t leave the corral, and as he rode slowly around the perimeter, she could tell that Champ was doing his best to be gentle.

  He was going to do this every day until it stopped hurting—much like she was doing right now by forcing herself to put a professional smile on her face and pretend that she felt nothing more than friendly concern or medical caution.

  Perhaps they weren’t so different after all, because she had the same mantra—you got out by going through. Except, the pain that Brody was pushing himself through was different than hers. His would heal, and over time he’d lose most of his limp and the scars would cover that tender place where the pain had been the worst. He’d move on. He’d find another woman to love, and Kaitlyn would be nothing but a memory—the sister of the woman he almost married, who acted as his nurse for a few weeks.

  But what about her? Would she be able to move on without an emotional hitch? She’d hoped that this process would be her healing, too, but now she wasn’t so sure. If Brody had been the same laughing goof he was when he left, it might have been possible, but he wasn’t. He’d deepened and broadened, and if it were possible, she was risking falling for him in a much more dangerous way.

  Chapter Nine

  The next few days, Kaitlyn watched as Brody made good on his promise to ride daily. Every afternoon, he limped to the corral and he rode Champ. The third day, he took the horse out of the corral and into the field and Kaitlyn stood by the fence watching them. There was something about Brody on horseback—she could almost feel his burdens lifting in the whistle of the winter wind. Brody was much like Dakota in the skill he used handling horses, and watching him ride reminded her that this instinct went bone deep in the Masons. He might have changed over the last year, experienced things that would haunt him for the rest of his life, but if he was going to heal on the inside, he needed to find a piece of his old self again.