Page 14 of The Cowboy Comes Home

He rolled his eyes. “There’s not enough luck in the world to make that worth the time.”

She laughed and stood up. Lobo was immediately on his feet, his gaze now fastened on her for a signal. “Let’s go,” she said, and with a last glance at the man whose office they were departing, he headed for the door. He sat politely there, waiting for her.

“Yeah, he’s doing well,” the chief said with a laugh.

So it was with a big smile that Emily headed out to her day’s work with her new partner.

And she couldn’t help wondering if Tucker Culhane was staying with his buddy the big TV star.

Chapter Seven

“You’re really gonnastay?”

Jeremy asked it excitedly, ignoring the milk dripping down his chin as he tried to talk and chew his breakfast cereal at the same time. Jackson had just told him Tucker had agreed to help out, temporarily.

Maybe temporarily.

“For a while,” Tucker said carefully. “The summer, at least.”

His nephew by choice considered this for a moment. “That’s a pretty long time, isn’t it?”

“Months,” Tucker said.

Jeremy grinned. “Okay, then.”

The boy happily dug back into his cereal while Tucker scooped up the last bite of delicious hash browns that Nic had fixed to go with Jackson’s familiar scrambled eggs. His own contribution had been limited to toast and coffee, since they’d insisted he was still a guest.

“Until after the morning therapy session anyway,” Nic said, laughing. “Then we give you the worker tour, as opposed to the visitor tour.”

He smiled back at her. It was hard not to—that happy laugh was infectious. And he would have anyway, if only for the change in his best friend. He hadn’t quite realized how beaten down Jackson had been by Leah’s death until he saw him now, almost three years later.

And he hadn’t quite realized how despondent he himself had been, with the shutting down ofStonewalland suddenly being out of work. He’d been offered a couple of temporary jobs, filling in for an injured crew member, and that had held him for a while, but it wasn’t the same. OnStonewallhe’d been part of something huge, something that had dominated the popular culture of the entire country. Sure, it had been largely fake, with chunks of California filling in for his native Texas, but it was fiction, entertainment, not a documentary.

Or maybe he’d just been gone too long, had started thinking of himself as a West Coaster instead of an Amarillo boy born and bred. He nearly laughed aloud at the thought.

But he understood why Texans could be a bit peeved, as Nic had been, about the façade the show had presented. He smiled inwardly as he remembered Jackson telling him how Nic had hated him in the beginning, because of how she felt about the show. Nic, who right now was leaning over to plant a sloppy kiss on Jackson’s cheek, making his friend grin almost goofily.

“We embarrassing you?” Nic asked teasingly when she straightened back up and saw him watching them.

“No,” he said quietly. “Making me happy for you.”

Nic’s playful manner vanished. Very serious now, she reached across the table and put a hand over his. “Thank you, Tucker. That means more than I can say, coming from you.”

“They kiss a lot,” Jeremy observed with no apparent unease as he set down his now empty milk glass.

“Do they?” Tucker asked, smiling again.

“All the time,” Jeremy said with a bored wave of his hand. “Well, almost.” He shifted his gaze to his father. “Can we go now? I want to go see Pie.”

Jackson glanced at his watch. “You’ve got just enough time to brush your teeth. Get.”

The boy scrambled out of the chair, started to run down the hall, stopped, came back, grabbed his cereal bowl and glass and carried them into the kitchen and put them in the sink. Then he spun on his heel and dashed back in the direction he’d started.

“Wow. Housebroken even,” Tucker said.

“He’s happy again,” Jackson said, relief echoing in his voice. “He still misses his mom—”

“As well he should,” put in Nic.

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