Boot Scootin' Secret Baby. Natalie Patrick
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I’ve stored in my heart since that horrible argument. A thousand things that can be distilled to only two—I love you, Cub Goodacre, and goodbye.
For so long I wanted you to come back so we could try to work things out. I can no longer hope for that. I’ve moved on with my life.
Though I realize I will always love you in that wild, intense way that so suits a reckless cowboy like you, I have to let go of the dream that we could ever become equal partners in a relationship. I want nothing less than that and you want—well, you want what you want.
You wanted someone to shelter and protect, someone to take care of. I wanted the chance to become my own person, a person respected for her hard work, intelligence and generous heart.
I am that person today. I’m a new woman about to begin a whole new life, to take another chance at making it on my own. And in a funny way—funny in that way that could almost break your heart—you. Cub, did help me to become this confident woman, ready to take on the world.
My one regret is that you don’t even know about the source of my inspiration, our two-year-old daughter, Jayne Cartwright Goodacre, or Jaycie as we all call her.
No. I take that back. I refuse to go into this new and exciting phase of my life with any regrets holding me back, tying me to you. That’s why I wish you would come back, for closure and so I can let you know about the precious life our brief love created.
Yes, I tried at first to contact you, to let you know about your child. I tried desperately. But you had taken to the rodeo circuit like fire through a dry patch. I had always just missed you and you just kept moving on. I knew when I did finally manage to get through to you and you returned my letters unopened that you were trying to pay me back. If you had just opened one of those letters you might have forgiven me and we might...
But that time has passed. I don’t want your forgiveness anymore. I don’t need it.
On the day of Jaycie’s birth, I only had to look in her eyes to know it was time to stop living for a man who simply wasn’t there for us and start living for myself, my daughter and our future.
What will I tell our daughter when she is old enough to ask about her father? I think this, Cub—that her father was a good man with a great capacity to love but a very narrow definition of what that meant. A man who did not understand that one partner could not grow tall and strong if always in the protective shade of the other partner. He thought he could save me from my own mistakes—and that was the biggest mistake of all.
What will I tell myself each evening when I kiss our baby good-night and climb in bed alone? That I am strong and smart and do not need you or anyone to smooth my path for me. I can make my own way and be a proud example for our child.
Alyssa Cartwright scrawled her name across the bottom of the page, then laid her pen aside and slumped back in her chair.
She blinked to clear the dampness from her eyes. She would not cry. This was a time for celebration, not tears. Tomorrow marked her very own independence day.
Slowly, she turned the pale yellow paper over to admire the other side, her first PR job for her new partnership with Crowder and Cartwright, Western Management Company. Yes, it had been a publicity flyer for her parents’ famous kick-off party for the Summit City Rodeo Days. But then, how better to prove her skill than by satisfying the people who doubted her capabilities most?
Both Yip and Dolly Cartwright had agreed that this was the very best flyer, bar none, ever done to announce their enormous barbecue. Of course they felt that way; not because their daughter had done the work, but because she had used their granddaughter, their pride and joy, as the model.
Alyssa swept one fingertip over the adorable picture of her baby, stroking the big black hat on Jaycie’s head. Her finger skimmed over the bandanna that fell over the baby’s bare chest and round belly, then brushed over the white diaper with cowboy-gun pins holding it up. Then she reached the boots. Cub’s boots.
He’d left those boots behind the day he, for all intents and purposes, walked out of their marriage. Alyssa traced the outline of the boots right down to the nick in the heel, the nick he’d asked her to have repaired. Asked? Make that told—just like he told her everything.
“I went in with Price Wellman and bought us a ranch,” he told her the day they’d arrived back from their short honeymoon. Then he’d said, “I’ve rented us a house to stay in until the deal goes through and we can build our own ranch house.”
Two months later, he told her, “Price got busted up bad in a bull-riding wreck. He can’t throw in with us on the ranch.”
What Alyssa had seen as an opportunity for her to contribute to the marriage and to Cub’s dream he had seen as another time to tell her how he saw things. “No wife of mine will have a job in town, especially not waitressing for love-starved cowboys. A good bull rider makes good money, darlin’. I know I promised I’d quit if you’d marry me, but looks like I got to take on one more season, maybe two. Then we can buy us a ranch outright and be set.”
She’d tried to tell him a thing or two, like the fact that she suspected she might be pregnant, but he didn’t give her that chance. She’d never stood a chance, for that matter, when Cub took her in his arms. They’d made wild passionate love that night and in the morning, he’d left a note telling her to get the boots repaired and saying he’d call later.
She wasn’t there to take his call, or any of his calls until he tracked her down at her parents’ home.
Alyssa shut her eyes to blot out the memory of the horrible argument they’d had then, of the terrible threat she’d made to nullify their marriage, the threat that led Cub to tell her one last thing.
“Everything I’ve done, I’ve done for you and the good of our future. If you can’t see that, then I guess I’ve let you down. I guess you have a right to want to be rid of me. You do what you have to do. You get your rich, famous daddy to pull strings and get a paper that says our marriage isn’t real. I’ll abide by the law of it, even if I never accept it in my heart. And I will promise you this—I’m coming home to you, Alyssa Goodacre, coming home a success, worthy of a woman like you, or I ain’t comin’ home at all.”
The words rang just as clear in her mind as they had when he first spoke them, and cut just as deep. Alyssa swallowed hard and turned her attention to the picture again. Cub hadn’t come home and though she doubted he would ever show his face in Summit City again, some part of her hoped—
Well, why else would she use his boots on his daughter in an advertisement every rodeo rider haunting this part of the circuit would see? Why else would she pen her farewell to him on the back of one of those flyers?
She plucked the paper up from the writing desk and went out onto the balcony just off her bedroom.
The stars twinkled above in the black velvet of the South Dakota sky. The brisk wind thrashed at her hair. She drew in the crisp scent of late summer and gazed out at the bustling preparations still in full swing for her parents’ barbecue tomorrow evening.
Tonight, she thought, she still lived at home, still felt like the gangly child who could never learn the riding and roping tricks that were her parents’ stock-in-trade. Tonight she was still the girl who had one time disobeyed her father’s edict “Love any boy but a cowboy, marry any man but a rodeo man,” and had paid the price with her heart, her future and her self-esteem.
But come tomorrow that would all be behind her. Tomorrow, she would set herself on the path that would lead to success and financial independence. In a few months she’d have the money to move with her child into their own home. Nothing was going to stop her from building a terrific future. Especially not the past.
She lifted the paper; it cracked in the wind once, tore away from her fingers and went sailing into the night. She watched it somersault away, then whispered one last time the words she hoped her husband would someday hear, so she could finally close this chapter in her life. “Come home.”
Chapter