A Cowboy's Plan

No. She couldn’t do this. She couldn’t work under the microscope like this, in front of so many people. Not every day. The attention stifled her. She couldn’t breathe.

Crap.

She stepped back outside.

An ache danced inside her skull.

She walked down the street, studying the businesses as she went. Barbershop. Nope.

Across the street was a hardware store, Scotty’s Hardware. How hard could it be to sell nails?

She crossed the street and stepped inside.

A middle-aged man stopped what he was doing and turned to her. Must be Scotty.

“Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for work.”

The old guy’s eyes bugged out. “Here?” he said, his voice coming out in a thin squeak.

“Yeah.” Nuts, she didn’t know a thing about job-hunting. What was she supposed to say?

The owner stepped a little closer. He smelled like cough drops. “You ever worked in a hardware store before? You know anything about power tools and home renovations and paint and lumber?”

She shook her head.

The guy straightened a pile of brochures beside the register, all the while checking her out from the corner of his eye.

“’Fraid I can’t help you.”

Her pride caught in her throat again. “I can sweep floors.” Man, she had trouble saying that, but she’d lived through worse in her life. She could do this.

The guy looked up at her and there was maybe sympathy in his eyes. “I just don’t have work right now. Times are slow.”

“Yeah.” She turned to walk away. Where to now? It wasn’t as though the town was a hotbed of opportunities.

She opened the door but his voice stopped her.

“Listen,” he said. “C. J. Wright’s been advertising for a store clerk for a month now. Try there.”

Janey looked at him. She wasn’t imagining it. The guy really did seem sympathetic.

“Who is he?” she asked.

The guy stepped up to his window and pointed to the other side of the street and down a bit. “SweetTalk. The candy store.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it,” Janey said, meaning it, and left.

She studied the shop while she crossed the road. Sweet Talk. Two bright lime-green signs stood out in the window.

One sign said they needed a full-time employee and one said the store was for sale.

A full-time employee. To do what? Working in a candy store wouldn’t be rocket science, right? She could count money, could pack things into bags.

She remembered coming in here on her first day in town a year ago, with Amy, passing through on her way to the Sheltering Arms for the first time. Cheryl had been dead for a month. Janey didn’t remember a whole lot from that time, other than feeling cold and dead. Or wishing she were dead.

A sign on the door told her to watch her step. Glancing down to make sure she didn’t catch one of her big boot heels, she opened the door. She’d fallen once before in a store in the city and had earned herself a goose egg on her forehead that had hurt for days.

Sweet scents of chocolate and peppermint drifted toward her and tugged at something wonderful in her memory, but Janey knew there had been nothing in her life with her parents that had felt as warm as whatever was hovering in the far reaches of her mind.

Footprints painted on the worn wooden floor caught her attention. Or paw prints, she should say. Of rabbits and kittens and deer, in pastels, all leading to different parts of the store.

She looked up and gasped.

Warm dark wood covered the walls and candy cases, contrasting against white porcelain countertops. Jewel-bright candies shone behind the spotless glass of those cases.

Three long stained-glass lamps hung from thick chains attached to the ceiling and lit the candy displays.

Big chocolate animals stood on shelves that lined the walls, each one of them decorated with icing in every conceivable color.

She smiled.

This is a happy place.

One rabbit had been “dressed” with icing in an intricately detailed, multihued vest. A deer wore a saddle of gold and silver, as if a wee elf might hop on for a ride any minute. An owl wore a finely decorated house robe and carried an icing book tucked under one arm and a chocolate candle in the other, as if he were preparing to sit for a cozy read before he headed to bed for the night.

Cellophane, gleaming and crisp, covered the animals. A huge polka-dot bow gathered the plastic above each animal’s head.

Why would anyone want to sell this store? Was he nuts?

If she owned Sweet Talk, she’d polish the wood every day, and dust the cellophane on the animals, and smile when she sold them to customers. To children.

She covered her mouth with her hands, awed by this big, whimsical treasure box of a shop.

Around and through all of it drifted sugar and spice, scents so yummy her mouth watered.

Oooooh, Cheryl would have loved it here. Her girl would have adored it. Had she ever come in with Hank and Amy? Janey hoped so.

The wonderful feeling that was haunting her, that was calling from the darkness of vague memories, burst full-blown into her consciousness.

Grandma.

She hadn’t thought about her grandmother in years. This memory came from when Janey had been even younger than Cheryl’s six years. Grandma had visited a few times and, every time, had doled out in equal portion hugs and candy, the only times Janey had ever tasted it.

Janey gazed at the wonder of the shop, that it should, after all of these years, call a long-lost part of herself into the light.

Those visits had thrilled the solemn child Janey had been, had represented the few happy memories in her poverty-challenged life, the only good memories from her childhood.

Then Grandma had died and Janey had rarely had candy again.

She’d give anything to feel that euphoria, that joy even if only for a day. The only other time she’d felt anything better had been at Cheryl’s birth.

Man, she could definitely work here.

Children would come into this store, but Janey would deal with their parents. She could make children happy without handling them.

She felt like laughing and whispered, “Who made this store? Whose idea was it?”

“My mother’s.”

Janey startled at the sound of the voice. On the other side of the counter stood a young man, taller than her, maybe six feet, his brown hair cropped soldier-short.

She’d only met him the one time a year ago, and she’d forgotten how good-looking he was, what an impact that chiseled face made.

Perhaps five years older than her, shadows painted his brown eyes. Janey knew all about shadows. Dark lashes too thick and pretty to be masculine ringed those eyes, but the square jaw framing the deep cleft in his chin was purely male.

He didn’t smile, just wiped his hands on a towel and watched her without blinking. How long had he been watching her?

Janey sensed a kindred spirit in the woman who’d started this shop. “Can I meet your mother?”

“No,” he answered and Janey’s spirits plummeted. “She’s dead.”

“Oh,” Janey breathed, “I’m sorry.”

He smoothed a long-fingered hand down the apron he wore over a short-sleeved, blue-and-white-striped shirt with a button-down collar. She didn’t know men still wore those. Not young men, anyway.

His dark brown eyes did a perusal of her and the easy warmth of the last few minutes dissolved. She waited for the criticism she knew was about to come. She stood out too much in this small town.

Well, he could kiss her butt. She wanted this job and she was going to get it.

For a split second, his features hardened, his lips flattened, before he apparently remembered that she was a customer.

“I’m C. J. Wright. I own this place,” he said, his voice almost as rich as the chocolate she smelled melting in a pot somewhere. “Can I help you?”

C.J. HAD SEEN this woman before, when she’d stood in his store with Amy Shelter, when Amy had returned from Billings to marry Hank.

C.J.’s memory hadn’t exaggerated. She looked like a punker. Or a Goth woman.

That day the young woman with Amy had looked real sad—like she’d been crying day and night for weeks.

She didn’t look sad today, though. She looked tough and determined.

The unrelenting black of her dress echoed the big platform boots, the black lipstick and nail polish, and the half inch of mascara coating her lashes. Looked like she’d applied it with a trowel.

Her plain dress, black cotton hemmed at the knee, should have been conservative, but it hugged every curve like it was made of burned butter and hit him like a sucker punch to the gut. He’d never seen anything like her in Ordinary. With her piercings and the tiny tattoo on the inside of her left elbow, she looked too much like Vicki for comfort.

Damn.

In her defiant stance, one hip shot forward and one black-nailed hand resting on it, her head cocked to one side, tough and cynical, he saw himself as a teenager. She was no longer an adolescent, but not by much.

No way did he want her here reminding him of his younger days, of times and troubles best buried.

He threw down the towel he’d dried his hands with. He had his life under control. He’d sown all of the wild oats he ever intended to. These days he had the best reason on earth to behave well.

Something about her tough beauty called to him, but he resisted. God, how he resisted.

She wasn’t beautiful. She was trouble.

Pure, cleansing anger rushed through him—anger at himself. The days when he found a woman like this attractive were long gone. He hadn’t spent the past year reinventing himself to be drawn back into the wildness a woman like this inspired in him.

Get your shit together, buddy.

With an effort that left him shaking, he pulled himself under control.

“Can I help you?” he asked, cordially, as if she was any other customer.

She pointed out the window and said, “I want that.”

He looked out to see BizzyBelle wandering down the middle of the road. Nuts, she’d gotten out of her pen around back, again. Bizzy had to be the wiliest cow in Montana.

He turned to the woman on the other side of the counter. She still pointed out the window.

“You want my cow?” he asked. Wow, crazy.

“Your cow?” She turned a stunned face toward the window, saw Bizzy and blinked. “No, not the cow. That.”

His gaze shifted to the two bright green papers in his window and his hope soared.

“You want to buy my store?” he asked. “Really?” In four months, he hadn’t had one single nibble and time was running out.

“No,” she said. “I want the job.”

“Oh, I see.” The job. No. No, he didn’t want her here every day. Just his luck, he needed an employee and the only candidate was this Goth creature who would probably scare most of his customers away. Nuts.

“What are your qualifications?” he asked.

She shrugged, as if she didn’t care whether or not she got the job. “I can count money. I can put stuff in a bag.” She’d obviously never gone job-hunting before. She showed neither deference nor humility, nor, come to think of it, any eagerness to please.

“That’s it?” Nervy chick, coming in here with no experience.

“I’ve been working on Hank Shelter’s ranch for a year. He’ll tell you I’m a hard worker.”

She flicked her hair over her shoulder. Maybe he could get her to leave if he appealed to her vanity.

“You’d have to wear a hairnet to cover all of that.” Her shiny hair ran over her shoulders like blackstrap molasses and disappeared down her back.

How long was it? To her waist?

“Whatever,” she said.

Whatever? Rotten attitude for a job candidate.

“You want the job or not?” he asked, impatient now.

“Yeah,” she said, thinning her plump lips. “I want the job. I just told you that.”

He frowned. “You don’t sound like you want it. You’re making it real easy for me to say no.”

Panic washed over her face, quickly hidden. “I want the job. Okay?”

“You’d have to cut your nails. You can’t knead candy with those.”

Her eyes widened. “I’d be making candies?”

“Yeah, what did you think you’d be doing?”

“Selling them. You make them here?” She was suddenly pretty excited. Over making candy?

He nodded. “A lot of them.”

“Can I see where you do it?” she asked.

“Okay.” He directed her to the doorway to the back room. “I can’t let you back there without an apron and a hairnet and heavy shoes, but you can look from here.”

She glanced down at her boots and back up at him. A smile hovered at the corners of her mouth. “These aren’t heavy enough?” Her smile turned that upper lip into a pretty cupid’s bow framed by a heart-shaped jaw. Too attractive.

He reined himself in. “Those’re okay.” He sounded more like a peevish child than a twenty-six-year-old businessman.

With a puzzled frown, she turned away from him and studied the back room and the big machines that filled it, silent sentinels in a gray concrete-block room. He’d grown up with this and had no idea how a stranger would see it.

Nodding toward the machines, she asked, “You’ll teach me how to use those?”

Presumptuous chick. She thought she already had the job.

“If I hired you, I would teach you.”

She turned around to look at the candies in the cases and the chocolate animals throughout the store. She pointed to a bunny.

“You make those, too?”

He nodded.

“Can you teach me how?”

He nodded again. “We’d have to see whether you have talent for it.”

Her face turned hard. Those full lips thinned again. “Okay, listen, I want this job. What do I have to do to get it?”

Man, she was serious.

“Who else is applying for it?” she asked, aggressively.

That was the problem, wasn’t it? No one else had. Nat had left over a month ago and C.J. hadn’t found a soul to replace him. He was losing money on the apartment upstairs that sat empty now that Nat worked in the city.

How was C.J. supposed to rodeo if he could never leave the shop? He worked too many hours, six days a week.

With the Jamie Shelter Charity Rodeo only a month away, he had to practice. He needed the prize money and dammit, he’d get it. Those back taxes on Gramps’s ranch weren’t shrinking while C.J. struggled to find a way to pay them.

“No one else wants the job,” he said.

Triumph glittered in her eyes.

Man, he wanted to say no, didn’t know what the townspeople would think of her. What if they stopped shopping here because of her? But the desperation he’d been feeling for weeks rushed through him tenfold, urging him to take a chance on her. He could handle any attraction or call of the wild her appearance sparked—her rotten attitude and prickly personality would help. With a little discipline and keeping his eye on the end goal, he’d get over his impulses.

“Okay. You’ve got the job.” If the townspeople didn’t like her, he could always fire her.

She perked up.

“Can you start tomorrow?” C.J. asked. The sooner he could put in more rodeo hours the better. “9:00 a.m.?”

She nodded.

“Okay, see you then.” He spun away as if dismissing her, but she didn’t leave.

She stepped back around to the customer side of the counter. “I want to buy candy.”

“Sure. What’ll you have?”

TOUCHING THE COOL WINDOW of the display case, Janey stared at the assortment of commercial candies available—Swee-Tarts, candy buttons, licorice pipes, Pixy Stix, Mike and Ikes, marshmallow cones—and secretly rejoiced. She’d gotten the job.

She needed to celebrate. She’d get candy for the kids on the ranch, even if it would kill her to spend enough time with them to pass the candy around. Just because it was hard for her to be with them didn’t mean she didn’t want to see them happy.

They were poor, inner-city kids who’d survived cancer. They deserved a lot of happy.

C.J. filled bags with the candies she pointed to.

Another case held the homemade candies.

She asked for a scoop each of saltwater taffy and humbugs. C.J. added the total. “Twenty dollars and five cents.”

She handed him two of her twenties.

“Do you have any change?” he asked.

She shook her head. Donna had given her only twenties.

“Okay.” He handed her back one of the twenties.

“I don’t have the nickel.”

“Doesn’t matter. I’m not gonna change a twenty for five cents. I won’t go broke if I lose a nickel.”

Nope, she couldn’t let him do that. It went against the grain to take anything for free from a man, especially a stranger.

“Take some candies out of the bag,” she said.

“What? Get real.” He waved her away.

“Take some candies out,” she ordered, unyielding.

He frowned, took a couple of Tootsie Rolls out of a bag and threw them back into the case. Then he handed her the three bags.

“Okay?” he asked in a tone that said are you satisfied?

“O-kay,” she replied, and meant it. Now, it felt all right. “Thank you.”

She turned and walked to the door. If she had her way, that guy wouldn’t be here, and she could sit among all these beautiful animals and drink in the atmosphere of the shop for the rest of the afternoon.

Just as she stepped through the door, C.J. called, “Hey. I don’t know your name.”

“Janey Wilson.” She closed the door behind her and, through the oval window decorated with the store’s name in black-and-gold letters, watched him walk into the back room.

She took a couple of steps, then decided she wanted a candy.

Just as she reached into the bag of humbugs, someone hit her from behind, a massive man who shoved her against Sweet Talk’s window. The scream that should have roared from her died in her throat.

CHAPTER THREE

POUNDING HEART, trembling fists, throat aching with screams she couldn’t release—terror immobilized her.

An odd smell floated around her. The foul aroma deepened and she realized it came from the man behind her, along with a wall of heat.

She turned her head a fraction, caught a glimpse of someone brown, huge. Wearing a fur coat? In September?

He shoved her in the middle of her back, slamming her against the plate glass. Her head hit hard. Pinpricks of light floated against her eyelids.

This can’t be happening. Not again. Not in broad daylight. Not in Ordinary. The town disappeared. Darkness fell and she was on her way home from school after a basketball game. Someone shoved her into the bushes, someone strong who bruised and scratched her. She smelled sweat and garbage and city dirt and cigarette breath. And the pain. Too much pain.

She couldn’t breathe.

The man grunted and she was back in Ordinary in the middle of the day. She got mad. She was supposed to be safe in Ordinary, the safest place on earth, Hank said.

“Nooooooo.” Her voice croaked out of her.

The man’s hold on her was so strong and massive she couldn’t get free. No hands to grab, no wrists to break. He was behind her and she couldn’t turn.

Why were men such cowards?

This time she was going to see the face of her attacker.

She pushed against him, but he shoved her harder, knocking her head again.

More starbursts of pain.

He smelled of hay and dirt and, oh, God, the stench. What had he been eating?

She waited for the pain to start, down there, but he wasn’t doing anything, just leaning into her with what felt like hundreds of pounds of weight. What did he want?

“Help,” she tried to yell. It came out a little stronger. He didn’t stop her with a hand across her mouth the way the other man had.

Her blood boiled and she pushed until her arms shook with the strain. He didn’t budge.

She opened her mouth to scream again and the man behind her let out an enormous, ungodly….moo? She covered her ears. The bags in her hands slammed against her cheeks. The sound roared on, deafening her, stunning her.

She took advantage of an easing of pressure and spun around. A huge hairy nose chucked her chin. Enormous brown bovine eyes stared her down. Oh, lord, a cow. C.J.’s cow. The one he’d thought she’d wanted.

She couldn’t relax. Couldn’t laugh about this. That dirty street, that darkness, that pain still lingered in her mind, floated out of her and played across the blue sky like film noir.

Forcing herself to recognize that she was in Ordinary, on Main Street, she breathed in the heat of the September sun to banish the chill she felt in her bones.

The nose mashed her back against the store window. The animal sniffed her bags, tried to take one from her. She closed her eyes and held on.

The door of the shop opened and she heard C.J.’s voice. “Hey, Bizzy, back off.”

Then the pressure eased. She opened her eyes. C.J. stood beside her, holding the cow at arm’s length, a frown between his eyebrows.

“You okay?” he asked.

She shook her head. Her tongue wouldn’t work, wouldn’t form words. The bags of candies fell from her nerveless fingers. The cow grabbed one of the bags and started chewing on it, paper and all. C.J. snatched the other two from the ground.

“I ran out when I heard something hit my window,” he said.

At that moment, an even stronger odor emanated from the cow’s rear end. Janey gagged.

C.J. shrugged. “Candy makes her pass gas.” He shoved the cow. “Take a hike, BizzyBelle.”

When the cow tried to lick his hands, he pushed her harder. “Buzz off.”

The cow ambled away, running her enormous tongue over her big hairy lips.

“You have to show them who’s boss,” he said. “Just like any animal.”

Janey remembered that lesson from Hank, from when he’d taught her how to deal with horses. Her nerves skittered too badly and those memories were too devastating for her to feel like the boss right now.

“Come here,” C.J. said, reaching for her arm.

She flinched away. Her teeth ground together.

C.J. raised his hands, palms out. “Okay. C’mon into the store. We need to get something cold on that bump.” He pointed to her forehead.

He gestured for her to precede him through the door.

She stood just inside the shop and felt lost. She needed her equilibrium back, needed to get away from those old images. A terrible urgency raced through her.

“I need to wash my hands,” she said.

She felt C.J.’s warmth behind her. “Head through the workroom to the washroom at the back.”

She ran past the candy machines to the bathroom and found a sliver of soap beside the faucet. She carefully set down the remaining bags then turned on the water as hot as she could stand it, then washed her hands. She rinsed, then washed her hands two more times, until she felt the stain of those memories flow down the drain.

She couldn’t find a towel. With her hands still wet, she fell onto the closed toilet lid and rested her forearms on her knees. Droplets of water fell from her hands onto the worn black-and-white linoleum floor. She saw C.J.’s boots enter her line of sight.

He ran the water, washed his hands, then handed something to her. She sensed him holding himself back. Probably afraid to touch her after she flinched away from him out front. How embarrassing. She could imagine how stupid he must think her.

“Your forehead is swelling.” He pointed to her face and handed her a wet cloth. “You’re going to have a bump.”

She pressed it to her forehead, weakly. The memories exhausted her. Always.

“I can show you how to make friends with BizzyBelle for next time,” C.J. said.

She stared at him, heard the words but had trouble understanding their meaning.

Her head buzzed and she breathed hard as if she’d run a marathon.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Give me a minute,” she answered but her voice sounded thin. She hated her weakness for showing.