Love at First Bark (Free Short Story) Read online

“Swallowed wrong.”

  Might as well get the silly breakfast going and over with, so she handed out plates and prepared to scoop him a serving.

  He caught her hand, which surprised her into dropping the spatula. “Oh, sorry. My mom taught us to hold hands when we said grace. Is that okay with you?”

  She felt her annoyance slipping away at the sincerity in his blue eyes. “Oh. Um, sure. Yes.” This cowboy was complex… a person who thought deeply and prayed simply and earnestly. Her body went warm all over as she took his hand and he said a simple prayer. He accepted the plate of steamy French toast and took a bite.

  His eyes rolled, and he tipped his head back with a sigh. “Oh, wow. This is spectacular. Family recipe?”

  “An adaptation of my mother’s.”

  “Your mother must be a great cook too.”

  Marcy laughed. “That’s what all the patrons at our diner say. Does your mother cook?”

  “No, and she’ll be the first to tell you the only thing she can make without setting fire to something is scrambled eggs.”

  Marcy could not hide her surprise. “Oh, I just pictured your mother on a ranch somewhere feeding hungry cowpokes.”

  He laughed. “My mother and father are both dentists, as is my brother. They run an office together in Des Moines.”

  “Well that just blew my mental picture of you as a kid.”

  “I’m the only oddball in the family. Fell in love with horses when I visited my buddy’s ranch during my freshman year of high school. My parents think I’ll snap out of it someday and go to dental school.” He looked sad. “I’m a disappointment to them, I’m afraid.”

  She enjoyed a succulent bite of her breakfast. “I can relate. My family figures I’ll be back to help run the diner once this wacky novelist thing goes belly-up like all my other ventures. My mother wonders why they scraped and saved to send me to college.”

  “I never did any college. That cut my dad right to the core.”

  “You seem to be doing just fine anyway.”

  He shrugged. “I love it here at the Quarter Moon. Today we’ve got a group of special-needs kids coming in, and we take them riding and such. They enjoy the Family Fun Nights especially. I just feel like…” He shook his head.

  “Feel like what?”

  “Like this is what the Lord wants me to do with my life, you know? Do you feel like that about your writing?”

  She sighed. “I… I know I will someday. Maybe.”

  He ate another bite, and she thrilled at the pleasure on his face. “But you’re a big-name writer and all that. Not happy with it?”

  And then she found herself saying the truth that had been plaguing her, twisting around inside her heart. “I just wanted to tell a story, a daydream I had about a prince. I never wanted to be a writer, not a romance writer anyway. I… um… I had a really bad relationship and I… I was trying to invent the perfect hero, so the prince galloped in. I think the only reason so many people loved him was because they wanted a hero like that too.”

  Charlie pawed Jackson’s leg, and he let the dog loose on the floor. “Is that really what women want? A rich prince with a perfect face?”

  “It’s not about that, it’s about…” She toyed with her balled-up napkin. “It’s about having someone who adores you and won’t let you down. Someone amazing.”

  He examined the toe of his boot. “There are real-life guys around who fit the bill.”

  “And some who don’t,” she snapped.

  “Who was the guy who let you down?” he asked softly.

  She hesitated. It was so private, so embarrassing, yet she found herself spilling it all. “His name was Phillip—a strapping, dark-haired, green-eyed looker who laid on the charm—and I believed everything he told me because I was a dope and I really wanted to believe someone loved me.”

  Jackson raised an eyebrow. “Not a truthful guy?”

  “He was a Marine, or so he said. He even showed up in uniform one night with a dozen roses. Turned out the uniform was snitched from his friend. He actually worked at a gas station.”

  “Ah.”

  “But that wasn’t the problem, you know? I wouldn’t care where he worked—I dated a pizza delivery guy for a long time—but Philip lied to me. He told me all the things I thought I wanted to hear. Come to find out he had another girl he was lying to also. What really hurt was that I fell for it, fell for a guy who was pretending to be something he wasn’t. It was humiliating.”

  Jackson looked away.

  “What?”

  “Oh, nothing.”

  “Not nothing. What?”

  “Aren’t you, uh, sort of pretending now too?” He shook his head. “Never mind. I shouldn’t say it.”

  “Spill it, cowboy. What do you mean?”

  “Different scenario of course, but you don’t really want to be a romance writer, do you? Yet you’re trying to convince yourself you do so you can feel successful. You’re misleading yourself in a way.”

  Her body prickled with anger and then shame. “What choice do I have?”

  “Walk away. Write what you want, or don’t write at all.”

  “It’s not so easy.” Cheeks ablaze, she sighed. “I have to write more books.”

  “Why?”

  She let loose in a rush of words. “Because I’m finally a success and my agent wants another book and my mother introduces me as her ‘daughter the novelist’ and zillions of other writers would kill for my opportunity.”

  He quirked a lip at her. “But you’d rather be writing a cookbook.”

  She almost dropped her fork. “How did you know that?”

  He chuckled, and Charlie licked his hand. “Not a difficult leap. You have every condiment known to man and you write copious notes about anchovies.”

  Though she wanted to be mad at him for exposing her soft vulnerable spot, she found herself chuckling too. “I guess that would be my dream job.”

  “I’d buy your cookbook. This French toast is fantastic.” Fantastic. That one word topped all the reviews she’d ever gotten for the Prince series.

  “Thank you,” she said humbly. “But God gave me success writing novels, so I have to go for it. It won’t be pretending if I can make it true.”

  Jackson took her hand, his wide fingers enveloping hers. The feel of his calloused palm on her skin made her breath quicken. “Maybe God used all that writing business just to get you to this rickety cabin so you could realize you’re supposed to be writing cookbooks. Did you ever consider that?”

  She blinked. “How could that possibly be true?”

  He let her go and picked up the copy of The Prince and the Pirate Queen. “Heroes are harder to come by in real life, aren’t they? Always wondered why women want to read about Navy Seals and cops and FBI agents instead of regular guys.”

  “And cowboys too. That’s a pretty big romance niche.”

  “Yeah. I figured that one out on my own. Like I said, I got plenty of attention when I was on the rodeo circuit. It was hard not to notice that women have a thing for cowboys, or at least their idealized version of one.”

  “All that macho riding, roping, and wrestling steers.”

  “Mostly it’s just hard, sweaty work. And cowboys like normal things too, like reading and classical music and computers.”

  “That won’t make it into a romance novel.”

  “Can’t a cowboy be a regular guy too?”

  “I suppose.”

  “But he’ll never be anybody’s hero if he knits baby blankets or runs a home for old folks. I never met a girl on the rodeo circuit who wanted to know about real things, so I guess I sort of gave up looking for one.”

  The guy was an everyman, a gentleman, trapped in the body of a romantic cliché. It might have been funny, but Marcy saw sadness in his eyes, and she wanted to soothe him. But it was too intimate, too close, and her own feelings scared her. Instead she tried for a joke. “Do you knit baby blankets, Jackson?”

  “Nah,” he said. �
�That was just an example. I was just wondering why being a normal, honest, hardworking guy isn’t heroic.”

  “What does the real Cowboy Jackson like to do when he’s not riding horses?”

  He must have heard the teasing in her tone because he turned his amazing blue eyes down to the dog. “Nothing special.” He sighed and picked up Charlie, who licked his chin. “That’s the good thing about dogs, isn’t it? They look at you like you’re a hero just for loving them.”

  Indeed, Charlie was staring at Jackson with soulful black eyes, as if he felt Jackson’s melancholy. She wished she had not teased him. “I do think normal men can be heroic.”

  “But they’re not as good as princes, right?” He shook his head before she could answer. “I’ve stayed too long. Thanks for the breakfast.” He started to clear the table, but she stopped him.

  “I’ve got it. Thanks anyway.”

  “I’ll take Charlie back to camp. Good luck cooking up your hero, Marcy.”

  She found she did not want him to leave, but she could not think of anything to say that might be a reason for him to stay. “I…” She touched his forearm. “Thank you very much.”

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek, his lips sending warmth flooding through her senses. “You’re welcome,” he murmured in her ear.

  The kiss made her legs wobbly as she followed him outside. It was just a kiss, a neighborly gesture, so why was her heart beating time like a hundred-piece brass band? Knock it off, Marcy, she told herself. You’ve only just met, and he’s not your type. Because he was a good and honest man and she tended to pick liars?

  As he mounted his horse and rode slowly away, his words rang through her mind. “You don’t really want to be a romance writer, do you? Yet you’re trying to convince yourself you do so you can feel successful.” Was she really lying to herself? For a guy she’d only just met, he sure felt comfortable offering insights about her life.

  It wasn’t pretense. She was going to make herself into a romance writer if it was the last thing she did. God wouldn’t have blessed her first series so abundantly if He hadn’t wanted her to make a career of it, would He?

  With her stomach not quite settled and her knees still a tad wobbly, she returned to the tiny cabin and closed the door.

  Six

  Marcy hammered away at her keyboard for hours. Between her breakfast with Jackson and her midmorning snack of grilled bacon and cheese with just a touch, mind you, of tomato tapenade, she’d produced one very fine paragraph. It was a lovely description of the mountainous town in a fictional kingdom which would, she knew, be hacked out directly by her editor.

  “Where’s the hero?” she could hear Rhonda saying. “I want him on page one, every rugged square inch of him. Don’t bore me with skies and bushes and buttercups.”

  But that was the trouble. Even after she’d toiled away at another paragraph, she simply could not conjure up a hero. Images of Jackson kept popping into her brain, but she could not make herself use him as inspiration. He was too real, too delightfully contradictory for her to wrestle him onto the page, and she found she didn’t want to anyway. A cowboy hero would have to wait for another series.

  What is the matter with you, Marcy Deveraux? Writers dash off these proposals at the drop of a hat. Tossing a pillow onto the floor in frustration, she felt like throwing an all-out temper tantrum.

  She was not surprised when she heard a scratching at the door. She admitted Charlie, who sat on the floor, tail wagging and looking with such a hopeful expression that she gave him one bite of the succulent hickory bacon she’d fried up for her sandwich. Content, he snuggled in next to her on the sofa. She stroked his warm side while she stared at her one measly paragraph on the iPad screen. Every so often Charlie would reach out a tiny paw and tap her knee as if to say, “You got this, Marcy. I believe in you.” Charlie was beginning to grow on her.

  Her phone buzzed with a text from Agent Rhonda.

  “Who’s the hero?” Rhonda demanded.

  Charlie, disturbed by her movement, rolled on his back to offer up a fuzzy tummy for scratching. Frantically, she dashed off the first reply she thought of. “The hero is Charles, a roguish, dark-eyed scoundrel.”

  With breath held she waited for the reply.

  Rhonda’s reply materialized on her screen. “Love it. Rakes are in right now. Work faster. I will call at 6 a.m. tomorrow.”

  Marcy tossed the phone down on the sofa. “Hear that, Charlie? She loves it.”

  Charlie lay on his back, frozen with all four legs in the air, still waiting for the tummy scratch. Laughing, she obliged. “Doesn’t take much to make you happy, does it?”

  Even with Charlie as inspiration, Marcy plugged away unsuccessfully at a first chapter. Snippets of her conversation with Jackson circled in her brain.

  “But he’ll never be anybody’s hero if he knits baby blankets or runs a home for old folks.” She recalled her absolute infatuation with Phillip. With a guilty start, she realized she had not wanted to see the real things, so blinded was she by the stereotypical romantic trappings. She’d elevated him to a prince in her own mind, and that had made her an easy target for his lies. Maybe if she’d been looking for a real man, the guy who knit or ran an old folk’s home…

  Or helped disabled kids ride horses?

  She shoved the uncomfortable thought away. In a matter of hours she would be gone. Storyline submitted. Back to her San Francisco apartment, helping with the diner in the daytime and writing at night.

  Charlie nosed at her thigh. What would happen to the little dog? Maybe he would stay with Jackson, a man he seemed to adore.

  “Lucky dog,” she found herself saying as she refocused on her nemesis, the stubborn cursor blinking at her with ruthless regularity.

  Seven

  At high noon Marcy was awakened from her unscheduled snooze with Charlie on the sofa by the sound of a horse pounding to a stop in front of the cabin. She thought she might be dreaming, lost in the tangle of half-baked heroes dancing around her mind, but the whack of a fist on the door brought her to her feet, heart thumping. She wrenched it open to find a wide-eyed Jackson. His face was pale, tension written in the faint lines on his forehead and his pinched mouth. Charlie greeted him and trotted outside to sniff the horse.

  “What? What is it?” she said, alarmed.

  Jackson swallowed hard. “A little boy, Simon, one of our campers. He’s six years old. He’s lost. We’ve scoured the campground, and there’s no sign of him.” He shoved his hat off and scrubbed a hand over his face. “He wandered away during our lunchtime walk while we were looking at some bird feathers. Everyone is looking for him. I thought he might have come up this way.”

  She grabbed her phone. “I’ll help.”

  Sheer panic washed over Jackson’s face. “How far could he have gotten? The river…” Jackson’s face blanched even paler. “A bunch of people went to check, but he might have gone to the bridge.” His lips moved but nothing came out. “I’m running out of places to check.”

  She gripped his forearm. “We’ll find him. You help at the river. Charlie and I will walk the woods around these cabins.”

  He held on to her hand. “Simon doesn’t talk. He can’t communicate with words. His mother is frantic.” The muscles in Jackson’s mouth twitched. “I’ve been praying like crazy, but there’s just no sign of him.”

  She spoke in a voice so calm she did not recognize it as she stroked a palm over his fingers. “I’ll pray too, and we’ll find him, Jackson. I know it.”

  Jackson bent and kissed her. The connection sizzled between them, and she hoped that he drew some comfort and strength from her. He squeezed her to him for just a moment, and she could feel the frantic hammering of the pulse in his neck. “Let’s exchange cell phone numbers. Text me if there’s any news.”

  They tapped in the numbers, and with a nod, he swung into the saddle and galloped away. She headed down the path, praying as she went, Charlie sniffing every bush and pine needle. A little
boy, lost—every parent’s worst nightmare. She recalled the time she’d lost her niece in a shoe store. One minute she was there, the next, gone.

  Marcy had run the aisles, her hollering growing louder and more hysterical until the clerk led Tina by the hand back into the store from the storage room where she’d wandered. Marcy could still feel herself squeezing Tina in a death grip, both of them crying, and her profound sense of relief. But now, with a sprawl of wilderness everywhere, a river, a child who couldn’t speak, couldn’t cry out for help…

  She quickened her pace.

  “Simon. Where are you?” From the far side of the glade she could hear others calling faintly, yelling Simon’s name, their voices high pitched with fear.

  Far away the river murmured its own insistent rhythm. Had Simon gone there? What would happen to a boy alone and scared? She thought again of her niece and nephew, nerves growing tighter and tighter.

  For what seemed like hours, she searched under every log and behind countless rock piles along the trail that connected the cabins. Sweat dampened her forehead. So far she and Charlie had flushed out a rabbit and something that may or may not have turned out to be a snake if she’d gotten close enough to see it.

  Charlie scampered along, thrilled with the game.

  It’s not a game, she wanted to tell the dog. And we can’t lose.

  At the end of the trail where the property ran into a steep, rocky slope, she stopped. It was unlikely Simon would have climbed up, and she was now a good twenty minutes from the last cabin. Her cell phone read almost two o’clock. Every moment that ticked by, she hoped for a text to say Simon had been found. The screen remained stubbornly blank.

  She hollered his name again before she turned around. There seemed to be no other option but to head back toward the cabins and take the road back to the Quarter Moon, searching along the way, praying to hear the victorious shout of someone who had found the little boy.

  “Come on, Charlie. Let’s go.”

  Charlie gave her his most mischievous look, bottom high, head low, tail whipping back and forth. It was still nothing more than a grand adventure to the intractable animal.