One Brave Cowboy. Kathleen Eagle
He’ll show nicely.”
“He’ll cost you,” Sally said.
Sally Drexler Night Horse had a way of filling a room with energy. She was the positive charge in the Double D’s power grid, and her latest project had her chugging ahead full steam, even when she had to power up her wheelchair. Her office furniture gave her wide berth, and even though she wasn’t tied to the chair, she wasn’t apt to explain or deny it, either. Sally was in charge.
Clearly when she said pay up, a guy was expected to ask, “How much?”
“Your cowboy ass planted firmly on the line. Or the fence.” Sally leaned to one side as though she were trying to get a look at the new applicant’s backside. “In the saddle is good, too. We need eye candy for a documentary we’re shooting.”
“That Paint is pretty sweet.” Cougar slid Logan a what’s-up-with-this look. Logan chuckled.
“True, but you’re the real bonbon. Put the two of you together…” She gave Cougar a sassy wink. “YouTube, here we come. And we’ll be goin’ viral.”
“What do I have to do?” Cougar asked. He barely knew what YouTube was, which was already considerably more than he cared to know.
“The woman who’s doing the video—Skyler Quinn—Logan’s son, Trace, knows her pretty well. Right, Logan? The Double D is giving Match.com a run for their money lately. They hook you up on paper—or what passes for paper these days—but we make matches on the ground right here in horse heaven.”
Logan laughed. “Skyler has Trace carrying her camera bags and loving every minute of it, all right.”
“Sally’s got talent,” Sally quipped as she started scanning his application. “My husband, Hank, may be the singer in the family, but I know a thing or two about harmony. I know future soul mates when I see them.”
She glanced over the edge of the paper and gave Cougar a loaded look with an enigmatic smile, which almost scared him. He was a private man, and right now she was holding some of the keys to his privacy on what had always passed for paper.
She went on reading, all innocence.
“Anyway, Skyler’s out in Wyoming, and you’re located in that beautiful, rugged, picturesque Wind River country. She’ll love that.” Sally flipped the application in Cougar’s direction and pointed to a blank space. “You forgot to fill out this part. Location, location, location.”
“I’m… kinda between locations.”
“What does that mean?”
“Between a VA hospital and a home site in Shoshone country,” he said impatiently.
The sergeant was supposed to have laid the groundwork here. If anybody had a problem with his recent history, he wasn’t going to waste his time with any damned application. He’d been banged up a little and spent some time getting his head straight. He wasn’t about to open up his medical records to get into a horse contest.
“But you ranch,” Sally affirmed, adjusting her glasses as she took another look at what he was beginning to regard as his test paper.
“Did I say I’m ranching now?” The muscles in the back of his neck were threatening to knot up beneath the short hairs she was tugging on. “It doesn’t say I’m still ranching. It says that’s one of my qualifications. Right?”
In the time it took him to draw one of those cleansing breaths he’d been taught to practice, he was able to put everyone in the room out of his mind. It was just a piece of paper. “The answer to this question is ranching,” he said calmly as he tapped the word with an instructive finger. “And this one… Wind River is where I’m from.” He pushed the paper across the desk. “I put Sergeant Tutan down as a reference. Call her.”
Sally turned the paper over. “Mary’s your only reference?”
“Why didn’t you put me down?” Logan asked him. “You’re bringing the mustang over to my place.”
“For a few days.” Had he accidently walked into a damn bank? He had half a mind to turn on his heel and walk out.
But his other half a mind remembered how far he’d have to walk to get to Sinte, where he’d left his roof and his ride—the two things he owned the keys to.
And the whole of his mind was set on taking on that Paint gelding with the sweet brown “cap” pulled down over his ears. He had no idea what kind of endurance horse he’d make, but he didn’t care about winning an endurance event. Running it from start to finish would do fine.
“I have a few acres. My brother and I turned our lease back and sold…” Be damned if he was going to stand here and recite his whole life story. He was glad Celia had gone back to the straightforward BS in the barn. “Look, I’m a civilian now, pretty much starting over.”
Sally looked up with a genuine, no BS smile. “All we need is a location and a description of your facilities.”
“Put down my place,” Logan told her. “Are you coming to the celebration? You and Hank?”
“Wouldn’t miss it. I hear Mary’s coming home.”
He turned to Cougar, grinning like a proud papa. “Don’t say anything, but the celebration’s for her. She just got a Commendation medal. Meritorious achievement. Did she tell you?”
“She didn’t. That’s some eagle feather to cap off a career.”
“No kidding.” Logan tapped Cougar’s chest with the back of his hand. “You’re coming, right? I need a color guard. You got your uniform packed away in that trailer of yours?”
“Your Lakota VFW will want to do the honors.” Cougar had put his army green away for good. “But I’ll be there. I’ll step up to the microphone and pay tribute to her the Indian way.”
“Put down my place,” Logan urged Sally with the distinctively Indian version of a chin jerk.
“Cougar?” She wanted his word.
“Is that okay with you?” Cougar asked her.
“For now,” she said. “But if anything changes…”
“I’m not gonna run off with your horse.”
“I’m not worried about that, Cougar, and he’s not my horse. I answer to the Bureau of Land Management, and you know how that goes. Red tape from here to Texas.”
“Stand down, soldier,” Logan said. “You’re set for now. But you’ll have to let Sally get some of that Shoshone country video footage she’s lookin’ for.”
“Footage is boring,” Sally said as she signed the form. She swung her chair and fed Cougar’s commitment into her copier. She punched a button and followed up with a punch to the air. “Woo-hoo! Chalk up another Indian cowboy for the cause. Women are our target market, and they’re not looking at your boots, boys.”
Cougar had to laugh. He took damn good care of his boots. Spit and Shinola.
“You have a clean barn, Sally.”
Cougar turned toward the voice. Celia stood in the office doorway, her shiny pink face framed by zigzagging tendrils of damp hair. The smudge on her jaw—some kind of boot polish, no doubt—called out for a friendly thumb to wipe it off. He rubbed his itchy palm on the outside seam of his jeans.
“Hey, Celia, thanks,” Sally said. “You want some lunch?”
“I wondered if you wanted me to grain the horses they just brought in.”
“Actually, I’m short-handed today, and there’s something else I had in mind for you.” Sally’s dramatic pause drew Cougar’s attention. “We really depend on our volunteers. They’re mostly women, and I just hate piling so much on such slim shoulders.”
Celia