Her Valentine Cowboy
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Kit Hawthorne
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CHAPTER ONE
ROQUE FIDALGO LAY flat on his back on the full-size mattress that made up the sleeping quarters of his live-in horse trailer. The mattress was shoehorned in over the trailer’s gooseneck hitch, which put the ceiling about a foot and a half away from his face. Tiny curtainless windows ran down the narrow strips of wall on two sides, but there was nothing to see through the dirty glass except the rusted corrugated metal of the old barn that the trailer was parked inside.
Sometimes in the mornings, if Roque didn’t hop right out of bed the minute his alarm went off and start filling Cisco’s feed bucket with grain, Cisco would saunter over into the barn and eyeball him through one of the windows. If that didn’t work, he’d lean his thousand pounds or so of horseflesh against the side of the trailer and rock it back and forth until Roque finally rolled out of bed.
But Cisco hadn’t done that this morning. Maybe he was standing hock-deep in snow out in his sorry excuse for a pasture, too downhearted to even care. Or staring across the road at the huddled buildings of the frozen Texas town, wondering how his life had come to this and what was the point of it all.
Roque eased his body out of his sleeping area, down the ladder and onto the nine square feet of floor space, trying not to bump into the little drop-down table where he kept his electric kettle and French press, but bumping into it anyway. A minifridge and microwave were stacked in the corner between the table and the door. That was the kitchen. There wasn’t any stove. As far as food went, if it couldn’t be nuked, reconstituted, eaten straight from the package or bought ready-made, Roque didn’t eat it.
He could hear the whine of the faucet he’d left streaming into the rust-stained bathroom sink on the other side of the pleated folding door. At least his pipes hadn’t frozen.
Lately Roque had been making a lot of these at least statements to himself. At least he had his health. At least his truck still ran. At least his bank balance was somewhat above zero. At least he had his horse. He held on to these things like handholds on the side of a cliff.
He rolled his left shoulder a few times, trying to ease the deep ache out of the deltoid and pectoral muscles. Over a year since he’d been hurt, and he still wasn’t back to a hundred percent. A couple of 9-millimeter bullets could do that to a guy.
He picked up his jeans from the floor and pulled them on, leaning his hip against the ladder for balance, then stepped into his cowboy boots. His entire living space was smaller than most modern closets—and as a frame carpenter who’d built his share of closets, Roque ought to know. It was all right as a place to crash and keep his clothes, but as a place to hang out for hours on end with nothing to do but think about his life, it sucked.
He’d been snowbound for the past four days, and stir-crazy didn’t even begin to cover it. Power outages had kept the light and heat off more often than not, but he’d wasted precious phone juice watching action movies until the Internet went out completely on the third day, after which he’d just stared at the fake wood grain on the warped ceiling panels, and thought.
And thought.
And thought.
An insulated coffee mug stood on the little triangular corner space above the microwave, next to a tower of empty Styrofoam cup-o-noodle containers and a pair of spurs. Roque picked up the mug and drained the last of yesterday’s coffee. It was ice-cold and tasted like diesel fuel.
The cold air outside his trailer door hit him like a slap in the face. There were two trailers parked inside the metal barn—one for living in, and one for hauling Cisco around. The live-in one was of eighties’ vintage, solid steel and ridiculously heavy to tow by today’s standards. The other, the one Granddad had left him in his will, was newer and lighter, but didn’t have living quarters.
The barn’s big sliding door stayed open so Cisco could come and go as he pleased. Most mornings, he was ready and waiting at the back of the live-in trailer, where Roque kept the feed, but not today. Roque opened the loading door and filled the bucket without Cisco whuffling in his ear or nudging him in the back to hurry him along.
He walked out into the pasture—really just a one-acre lot on the edge of town, roughly fenced with scrounged materials.
“Cisco!” he called. “Come and get your breakfast, buddy!”
The gray morning swallowed up the sound of his voice. No answering neigh came back to him, no clop of hooves headed his way.
He walked out past the old slab foundation of the house that had been started decades ago and then abandoned. The edges were all grown up with dried weed stalks and brushy tree limbs tall and thick enough to hide a horse.
He came around the edge, then stopped in his tracks.
The wooden fence post on the corner of the lot had split near the ground, and the wire fencing on either side of it lay flat.
He turned, slowly scanning the lot. Cisco wasn’t there.
A wave of nausea rose in his throat. He heard his breath going in and out fast, and saw it making a cloud of fog in front of his face. He shut his eyes and took a deep breath.
“Okay, okay,” he muttered. He had to get his head right and figure this thing out.
He opened his eyes. To the north and east of him lay the downtown area of Limestone Springs. Southward were mostly big residential lots like this one, anywhere from one to ten acres in size, but with actual houses on them, not bare slab foundations like on this one. Westward, the land opened up into ranches and farms along Highway 281. The roads were empty now, as they had been for most of the past four days, but that didn’t mean Cisco hadn’t been hit by an out-of-control vehicle. He could be lying in a bar ditch right now, or on the side of the road, hurt and cold and alone.
Roque walked over to the flattened section of fence. Cisco’s tracks were clearly marked in the snow, leading west. But there was no trace of him now.
Roque thought fast. Should he track Cisco on foot, or take the truck? The roads were still slick, with no salt or sand to provide traction, but at least there weren’t any other motorists to crash into him. Yeah, he’d take the truck so he could follow Cisco’s tracks while they were still clear. The main thing was to find the horse quickly, before he got hurt. Once Roque did that—he refused to think in terms of if—he could find a way to secure him and then come back with his hauling trailer to bring him home.
He hurried back to his living quarters to get his keys, then grabbed a lead rope and halter out of the hauling trailer. Within a few minutes, he was on his way.
The icy roads were eerily empty beneath a chilly gray sky. Swags of snow-topped green garland hung on the front fencing of a neighboring pasture, with jaunty red bows on the posts in between. Somehow the cheery decor made the desolation worse. The whole town looked blank and cold, like a movie set after the filming was done and the actors and film crew had all gone home.
It was the day after Christmas, about three weeks shy of a year since Roque had first driven the eighteen hundred miles or so from Jersey City to Limestone Springs, with nothing but a pickup truck and a headful of dreams, ready to claim his inheritance and become a cowboy. In the months since, he’d had more setbacks than victories, but that hadn’t fazed him. He hadn’t expected it to be easy, and he liked a challenge—the harder, the better. Being told he couldn’t do something only made him want to prove that he could.
That was the attitude that had kept him going the past eleven months. His step-cousin Dirk, his family back in New Jersey and everyone who’d ever given him the stink eye in the feed store—he’d show them all. He had his horse and saddle, his muscles and skills, and the thing inside him that wouldn’t quit.
But that was before he’d spent four days trapped in his dismal tin can of a home—over Christmas, no less—with nothing to distract him from the fact that he was alone and underemployed, in a community that didn’t want him, with a dwindling bank balance and no prospects for improvement.
And now...
Now even his horse was gone.
He swallowed hard. He loved that big bay horse like a brother. The words of Granddad’s last message to him, words of hope in those dark days in that hospital room over a year ago, came drifting up like smoke from a doused fire. I’m sorry I can’t do more for you. I hope it’s enough for a fresh start. As if he’d had a glimpse into the future, and known that a fresh start was exactly what Roque would need. Losing Cisco meant losing that chance, and letting Granddad down.
It felt like a sign. Maybe it was time for Roque to cut his losses. Dirk had made a standing offer to buy back Cisco and the trailer if ever he decided to give up and go home. Maybe Roque ought to take him up on it—for Cisco’s sake, if not for his own.
He shook his head hard. No! This was his chance to make something of his life, given to him by the one person who’d still believed in him. He couldn’t throw that away.
He had to get Cisco back.
