Page 10 of The Cowboy Comes Home

“My silly phone went dead. And you know there’s no such thing as a pay phone anymore, so I couldn’t call.”

“I told you, you needed a car charger,” he said, but there was nothing but love in his tone.

She liked these two, Emily thought as Angela Keppler turned to greet her.

“I’m so sorry we bothered you when you’re off duty—”

“No bother. What are neighbors for? Now,” she went on, having already noticed the awkward angle of the back end of the small SUV, “do you have a spare tire?”

“Yes. I can’t change it myself, so I called our garage, but they were already closed.”

“Well let’s get that done.”

Mr. Keppler had the jack and the spare out in a couple of minutes. She wasn’t sure how strong the older man was, but he surprised her and between the two of them they got it done.

“That spare is just a temporary,” she warned them as she wiped her hands on a cloth she kept in the back of her own vehicle, “so get that tire replaced as soon as you can.”

“We will,” he promised.

“Any idea what you ran over?” she asked. “That slice looks pretty clean.” And if there was something in the road that could do that to a fairly new tire, they needed to know and get it out of the way.

“I think it was a broken glass or bottle,” she said, waving vaguely up toward Main Street. “Probably some drunk tourist threw it out the car window leaving the saloon.”

Emily smothered a smile, both at her assumption it of course had to be a tourist, and at the idea that Slater Highwater, who ran the Last Stand Saloon, would let anybody that drunk loose with their car keys.

She supposed it was one of the ways the Highwater brothers co-existed, with one running the saloon that was also a Last Stand historical monument and the other being the Last Stand Chief of Police. When she’d first started on the force here, the tension between the two had been palpable, and some of the old hands had warned her to tread carefully. Even their other brother Sean Highwater, the department’s premier detective and a man of few words, had taken the time to say simply, “Don’t get between ’em.”

But times had changed, and the Highwater brothers had, too. She supposed falling in love, getting married and having kids did that to you.

Not that you’ll ever know.

After a command to Lobo to guard the car, she started walking in the direction Mrs. Keppler had indicated. Tried not to think about what it must be like, to have been with the same person, to still love them, after some fifty years.

You’ll never know that, either.

She grimaced at her own thought and kept going. Found the broken glass, which looked more like a broken soda bottle than alcohol, a rarity these days except for some specialty versions. With a sigh she started to clean it up so no one else would run over it.

And wished she could fix up her life as easily.

Chapter Five

Tucker was surprised.Not at the efficiency of theThorpe’s Therapy Horsesoperation—after all, he’d met both Nic and her mother, and if two women ever projected organized powerhouse, it was those two—or that it so obviously worked, brightening the lives of grief-stricken kids, or even that he felt a soothing calm spreading through him, a calm born of knowing he was back home in Texas.

What surprised him this morning was that he’d actually been recognized, and more than once, not as some guy from Hollywood but as the rodeo star he’d once been. He’d pretty much convinced himself if anybody did remember him, it would be because of the horrific way he’d exited what up until then had been his entire world, his reason to exist. It was one reason he’d left, weary beyond belief at the constant sympathy and sometimes pity people expressed.

But today one of the parents wanted to tell him he’d been there at his first championship ride, and another wanted to know if it was true that, once he’d been back on his feet, he’d gone to visit the bull that had nearly killed him. It was, Tucker confirmed to the woman whose little girl was, she said, smiling for the first time in months.

“He was a heck of a bucker, but a sweetheart when he wasn’t trying to rid himself of a pesky human.”

That had gotten him a smile from the weary-looking mother, and that had warmed him much more than he would have expected. He was quickly beginning to see how this had become a project of the heart for Jackson and Nic.

Then there was the man before him now, there with his eight-year-old, but who wanted to talk about his older son, a teenager who wanted to follow in Tucker’s footsteps.

“I don’t think I could take another tragedy,” he said. “Losing my wife took the heart right out of me. If I lost one of the boys…”

Tucker had to steady himself, wondering what on earth he should say. Finally, carefully, he tried.

“My dad felt the same way about it, when I first started. But I was stubborn, and he gave in. Or I outlasted him, maybe. Other kids did quit, because it wasn’t worth it to them to keep fighting their parents, or because something else caught their attention, something they wanted more. I’m not a dad, but I’d say make him fight for it. If it’s a whim, he’ll give up eventually. If it’s his passion, his calling, all the arguing in the world won’t stop him.”

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