Overprotective Cowboy: A Mulbury Boys Novel (Hope Eternal Ranch Romance Book 2) Read online

  Nate just knew Ted, and Ted knew Nate.

  “I don’t want to go back there,” Ted finally said, breaking this new brand of silence between them. He looked up and met Nate’s eyes.

  “That’s what I was going to say.”

  “We’ll be okay, right?” Ted said. “They’re not going to handcuff me and toss me back in Unit NF?” The sentence came out as a question, all of Ted’s fears laid out between the two of them.

  “No,” Nate said. “They won’t do that.”

  “You’re authorized to be with me when I leave the ranch.” Ted needed to reassure himself. “Ginger knows where I’m going. Heck, I even texted my parole officer.” He hadn’t had a meeting with Martin Landy yet, but they’d texted to set something up. Ted had thought it prudent to let the man know where he was going, and with who, and for how long.

  Martin had only responded with a few words about being with someone authorized to take him off the ranch.

  “It’s going to be okay,” Nate said, and he clenched his jaw—another move Ted had seen from the man before. It was like he’d simply make up his mind that a situation would be a certain way, and that was that. It would be that way, because the mighty Nathaniel Mulbury had decreed it.

  In this case, Ted sincerely hoped he was right. He drew in a deep breath and blew it out. “I’ll go talk to Connor.”

  “I’ll text Ginger.”

  Ted nodded and left his friend in the armchair. He had no idea how to talk to a crying child, and when he went downstairs, he found Spencer sitting on the couch, his feet up on the ottoman in front of him, the towheaded boy asleep against his chest.

  “He’s going to be fine,” Spencer said with a smile. “He’s sleeping down here with me tonight, and we’re going to have a great day.”

  Ted nodded, said, “Thanks,” and went back upstairs.

  The next morning, Ted worked with Nate in the stables, and he sure did like that a whole lot more than Bill or Jess. He liked them too, but he was so comfortable with Nate, and it was almost like they knew what the other was going to say or do before they did it.

  At six-fifteen, Nate took off his gloves and tucked them in his back pocket—very cowboy-like. “Let’s go get cleaned up.”

  “I have one more,” he said. “I’ll be two minutes behind you.”

  “Okay.” Nate left, his energy too much to be contained by waiting. Ted finished with Black Widow, and took an extra moment to stroke her cheek. “Have a good day, okay, Widow?”

  The horse almost nodded to him, and Ted headed down the aisle. He was about to turn left to leave the stables when he saw Ginger sitting on the low stool, feeding the foals. Surprise kicked through him. “Where’s Emma?”

  Ginger looked up at him, her eyes narrowing. “She left for the weekend.”

  “She did?” He looked down the aisle as if she were really standing at the sink, getting another bottle ready. Concern spiked through him.

  “Yep,” Ginger said, obviously not concerned, though she didn’t hold his gaze for very long. “She has every second and fourth weekend off. But last week threw some things off.” She glanced up at Ted for a fraction of a second. “So she left this week.”

  “Every second and fourth weekend? Where does she go?” He distinctly remembered her telling him she’d returned to the ranch in the middle of last week because she had nowhere to go.

  “To see her family,” Ginger said, her voice slightly false. “She’s been doing it forever. Since the day she started.” She tugged on the bottle. “Come on, Ruby. It’s empty. Let it go.” She wrestled with the filly for another moment, finally succeeding in wrestling the bottle away from the horse. She stood up. “It was part of her contract when she started here. Every second and fourth weekend off.”

  Ginger walked away, leaving Ted in her wake. Stunned, he could only stare after her. Ginger didn’t seem like this information was Earth-shattering, but to Ted, it was.

  Something as routine as that…Emma had somewhere she was definitely going. So when she’d said she didn’t have anywhere to go, that wasn’t true.

  He turned and left the stables, needing the open air to clear his thoughts. But they refused to clear, no matter how quickly he walked. He took the steps to the deck two at a time, and entered the Annex at six-twenty-five.

  Nate came out of the hallway with his backpack. “I’ll come back and get yours while you shower.”

  “I’ll be five minutes.”

  “I know.” Nate had obviously already showered, and he carried his cowboy hat under one arm, because his hair was still damp. He wore a new pair of jeans, a spotless white polo, and a plain pair of sneakers. Since they’d have to dress down to go in, simpler was always better.

  Ted hurried into the shower, letting his ranch clothes drop to the floor for once. No one was there to write him a ticket anyway.

  Something wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put his finger on exactly what. No, Emma hadn’t always been truthful with him, but all he had to do was ask and he felt sure she’d tell him. They’d agreed to that, at least.

  He joined Nate in his fancy truck with the heated and cooled seats, and said, “Ready.”

  Nate pulled out of the garage at six-thirty-two, and Ted thought that was pretty dang good for what they’d done that morning.

  Only five minutes down the road, a light bulb clicked on inside his brain.

  “She’s not visiting family,” he blurted out.

  “What?” Nate asked, and Ted looked at him with wide eyes.

  Emma had told him that she “hardly ever” saw her family, so there was no way she was going to visit them every other weekend, for ten straight years.

  So where was she going? And to see who?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Emma pulled up to the perfectly suburban house on the east side of San Antonio. It wasn’t where Fran and Matt lived with Missy, because Emma refused to take any chances with anyone following her.

  She’d left the ranch on Friday night—late—instead of Saturday morning. That one deviation from what she normally did might throw off someone watching her. She’d always been a little paranoid when she came to see Missy, but nothing like this trip.

  She’d driven to a bus station an hour away and parked. She sat in her car for twenty minutes just to see if any cars were trolling the lot, looking for her. Satisfied, she’d gone inside and slipped into the bathroom. After pulling up her hair and covering it with a cap, she’d changed her clothes and taken out the folded reusable shopping bag from her purse. She put all her stuff in that next, making herself someone different who’d gone in. She wanted anyone looking to think she’d just gotten off the midnight bus and was headed home after a long week of work.

  She’d left the bus station a half an hour later and joined the cab line, where she’d taken a taxi to a faceless motel. She hadn’t seen a single person besides the man who’d given her the key, and in the morning, she’d walked the mile to pick up her rental car.

  Then she’d made the drive north, where she’d exchanged the car for a different one after complaining that the engine had been making a funny noise. It hadn’t been, but she wanted a different car.

  Now, she sat in that car—after driving around the city for a good two hours and checking her rear-view and side mirrors every few seconds—three houses down from where her daughter lived.

  Fran and Matt were expecting her in ten minutes, and Emma kept her hyper-vigilance up. She would not put any of them in danger, and her string of changes, hops, skips, and wild goose chases had to have thrown anyone off her trail.

  No one came down this street. No blue trucks, no slow moving cars. Emma felt like she’d succeeded in making sure no one knew where she’d gone or how she’d gotten there, and with that assurance in her mind, she eased down the curb to the right house.

  Almost before she’d put the car in park, the front door to Fran and Matt’s house opened, and her daughter came spilling outside.

  Joy filled Emma, and she co
uldn’t get her seatbelt unbuckled fast enough. She fumbled the latch, her emotion catching her in the chest, the back of her throat, and behind her eyes. By the time she got out of the car, her daughter waited on the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the curb.

  “Momma,” the little girl said, and Emma swept the dark-haired beauty into her arms. She quieted the sob, but it shook through her whole body.

  “Oh, my baby,” she whispered, holding her tight and never wanting to let her go. She almost had an out-of-body experience, standing there on the side of the road, holding her daughter.

  She couldn’t believe this was the life she had with Missy, and everything felt so heavy in her life. So, so heavy.

  She saw no way out of it either. She didn’t own a home. Ginger paid her well enough, but she didn’t want to leave the ranch. She never wanted Rob to know about Missy, and she knew it was getting to be time for her to tell the girl why she lived with Fran and Matt and had her mother come visit every other weekend.

  Emma finally released her daughter and stepped back. She wiped her eyes as she asked, “How was Florida, baby?”

  “So much fun,” Missy said, looking at her with smiling eyes. They were the color of gray tea, and Emma saw herself in them. “Matt booked the sea ponies, Momma. Can you believe it?”

  “Horses on the beach,” Emma said, glancing toward the front door. Fran and Matt stood there, watching. Fran leaned against the pillar on the porch, and Matt has his arm around his wife. “That sounds like a dream come true for you.”

  “It was,” Missy said, putting her hand in Emma’s as they crossed the lawn. “They had a stool to help me get on, because they were big horses, Momma. They weren’t ponies.” She looked up at her. “And I still want to come to your ranch to ride.”

  “Hmm,” Emma said, because she’d never told Missy more than she worked on a ranch. She wouldn’t tell her the name of it or anything. She looked up at Fran, who wore a beautiful smile on her face.

  “Hello, Em,” she said, coming down the steps.

  Emma embraced her and held her tight. “Hey, Fran.” She had not known Fran before she’d shown up on the woman’s front porch, a pink bundle of joy in her arms. They’d connected randomly through a community chat board about adoption. The thread had actually been about temporary stewardship, and Emma had been very interested in it.

  Fran had said she would take a child even if she could never adopt it, and Emma had messaged her off the board. Things had gone from there, and Fran had been raising Missy for almost eleven years. Never once had she asked if she and Matt could adopt Missy. Never once had she or Matt ever done anything against the agreement they’d signed with Emma.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered to Fran.

  “Nothing to be sorry about. Come inside and have some sweet tea.” She stepped back, that smile still in place. Emma reached for Missy’s hand, and they went up the wide staircase together. Emma hugged Matt too, because he had to be the most patient man on Earth.

  Her emotions quivered so close to the surface, but Emma managed to bite them back. They went inside, and with the front door closed and locked behind her, Emma finally started to relax.

  Her tears had dried up about halfway back to the ranch, and as Emma pulled across the bridge, her face felt dry and cracked. It had been a great weekend with her daughter, and while they didn’t get out and do as much as they otherwise might have, she’d still enjoyed the basement movie afternoons, and the roller skating in the backyard.

  Matt had put in a huge cement pad, and Missy had started to choreograph a routine to her favorite pop song—all while wearing roller skates. Emma smiled just thinking about it, and she had a video on her phone she’d have to erase before she went into the West Wing.

  No one looked at her phone but her, but it was part of the pact Emma made with herself to keep Missy safe. She couldn’t be caught watching a video of a girl who looked a lot like her. There would be too many questions, and all of her secrets would come out.

  She brought her car to a stop far enough back that someone who’d parked in the garages would be able to get out, and she reached for her phone. A fresh wave of emotion threatened to pull her under as she looked through her photos and videos. For the first few years of Missy’s life, she’d invested in cloud storage—password and authenticator protected—so she had lots of baby pictures.

  But it had gotten expensive, and she’d found herself combing through the pictures and videos far too often, her heart cracking a little more with every photo she flipped through. She’d cancelled the subscription, but she could get to her photos and reactivate at any time.

  “Maybe it’s time,” she whispered to herself. Then she could add the pictures and videos she’d taken that weekend.

  She tapped on her gallery and the first picture that came up made her breath catch between her lungs and her throbbing heart. It was her and Missy, looking right into the camera, laughter in their eyes and sitting in the lines around their mouths.

  She looked so much like Emma, with her dark hair, her smattering of freckles, the shape of her nose. Rob had manifested himself in the slope of her chin and the width of her forehead. They both had dark eyes, which had given Missy a stunning pair of eyes that lit up from within whenever she laughed.

  Fran had taken this picture of the two of them on the couch only a few minutes before Emma had left. Missy said she needed a photo of someone important to her for a school project, and she wanted that to be of her mother.

  I have to do an interview too, Missy had said. Can I call you this week?

  Emma couldn’t say no to that, and she’d simply make sure she was alone when the call came in. She didn’t have Missy’s name in her phone, but she’d labeled the contact as Fran2.

  Suddenly unwilling to delete this weekend from her phone, Emma quickly made a folder in her gallery, labeled it my babies, and moved all the items into it. If anyone saw it, they’d think it was full of baby horse pictures. In fact, Emma would take a bunch tomorrow morning and put them in the folder too, covering up the other items.

  Done with that, and ready to be in her room so she could cry some more if she needed to, Emma pocketed her phone, grabbed her bag from the passenger seat, and went inside. She didn’t see Nate’s truck, which meant Ted wasn’t back from his weekend visit with his friend still in prison.

  Good, Emma thought. The last thing she needed was to have to explain to him where she’d been all weekend, and what she’d been doing. At the same time, she had the very powerful thought that she’d like to have someone she could trust enough to tell—and that that person would be Ted.

  She thought about showing Ginger the pictures of her daughter as she went inside, but in the end, Emma was so used to keeping her secret that she just went down the hall to her room without saying anything.

  She didn’t see Ted the next morning in the stables, and he didn’t come to her office in the afternoon either.

  By then, Emma knew something was wrong. Ted was a creature of habit, she’d learned that. He liked to do the same things, in the same order, each day. He thrived on it, he’d told her. He felt accomplished when he did, because he knew what had to get done, and he got it done.

  Unable to focus, she finally picked up her phone and texted him. Where are you right now? I usually see you in my office by now.

  Algae bloom in one of the ponds, he said. Ginger called us all out to help. Lots of dead animals and stuff.

  Oh no, Emma typed, her stomach churning. She realized she hadn’t eaten lunch, and she got up to get a granola bar and an apple. Maybe I’ll see you in the stables tonight.

  He’d kissed her passionately while he pressed her against the wall beside the sink where she washed out the bottles. Several times. She wanted that connection again, and she could admit she missed Ted.

  She was best friends with Ginger, but Emma had purposely kept some distance between them. Ginger had let her, because Ginger wasn’t a super touchy-feely kind of woman to begin with
. Emma loved her fiercely, though, and she wondered how she could start to let some of the most important people into her life and keep her daughter safe.

  She’d never thought that was possible before, but in the two weeks since Ted had come to Hope Eternal Ranch, he’d started to make her think differently.

  I’ll try, Ted texted, and Emma supposed that was all she could ask for.

  That evening, she lingered with the horses after she’d finished feeding them, hoping and praying Ted would walk through the doors. She hadn’t seen him in far too long, and she didn’t like the dark cloud that had been following her around for a few hours now.

  He didn’t come, and Emma left the stables alone, the dusky night around her deeper than normal. She didn’t like being out here alone, and she hastened to return to the brightly lit homestead. Instead of going into the garage and up the steps to the West Wing, she went to the Annex’s back door and knocked.

  Her heartbeat knocked through her veins while she stood there waiting. No one came. Helplessness filled her, and she turned around to leave. But she couldn’t make herself do it.

  Ted was avoiding her, and she wanted to know why. With her breathing hitching in her throat, she turned back to the door and knocked again, this time trying the doorknob. It gave under her grip, and she opened the door. “Hello?” she called. “It’s Emma.” She took a tentative step into the back of the kitchen, sweeping it quickly.

  There was no one there, and only a light on above the stove. “Hello?” she called again, a little louder this time. “Teddy?”

  Footsteps came down the hall, and Nate appeared, wearing a pair of gym shorts and nothing else. “Emma,” he said, pure surprise in his voice. He reached up and ran his hand through his hair. “Let me get Ted.”