Page 81 of One Lucky Cowboy

“You can talk to me about anything, Ren. I’ll never be mad, and you’ll never lose me, okay?”

“Promise?”

Jax’s heart thumped twice in quick succession then shattered into a million pieces. “Yeah. I can’t promise much, but that I can.”

Ren sighed and sat down on the edge of the porch. Jax joined him, putting half his width of space between them; that thin line of how much space a teenager needed still eluded him.

While Jax gave him space to drum up the courage or words or both, he listened to the ranching sounds that had transfixed Ren.

Manny was whooping and hollering at Sassy. His shouts echoed off the canyon, punctuated by the staccato chirps of the yellow-billed cuckoo looking for someone to share his days with. Beneath both was the gentle, persistent babbling of the creek as it provided life to everything else at the ranch.

Who needed white noise when life was this rich, this teeming with its own harmony?

Ren’s jaw was still set, and he didn’t meet Jax’s gaze, letting his sight settle on the bend in the water where the tire swing from the Marshall boys’ youth still hung. Bennett had recently restored it.

“I’m mad at her. Like, seething, tear things apart mad,” Ren finally said.

Jax nodded, even though Ren couldn’t see him. “Your mom?”

“Yeah.” When Ren finally turned his head, Jax bit his lip until searing pain shot through it.

Ren’s eyes were brimming with tears, and if Jax thought he knew what it meant to protect and care for a son before, it was nothing compared to the protective rage that consumed him in that moment.

“I mean, I get it if she wanted to protect me from a jerk, you know? But you’re not one, and to be honest, you’re a better parent now than she ever was. And I never got to know that.”

A tear fell on Ren’s plaid Henley, staining the blue fabric dark.

Jax scooted closer and put his arm around Ren’s shoulder. “Did your grandfather tell you how your mom and I met?” he asked.

Ren shook his head. “I think he was mad at you for getting my mom pregnant, so when he told me about you, he just gave me the basics, and her letter didn’t say anything, either.”

“Do you want to know?” He was raving mad about the whole missing-his-son’s-life thing, too, but what could they do now but move forward? Besides, tearing Nora apart would only hurt Ren more in the long run when the anger subsided. After all, the boy was half each of them, for better or worse.

Ren shrugged as if couldn’t care less, but Jax caught the Marshall lip bite that told a different story.

“We were young, but you knew that much.” A nod from Ren confirmed that. “But the second I saw her at the rodeo I was riding in, I had to talk to her. So, after my competition—which I won, by the way; no way I was meeting her without the buckle to show off—I walked right up to her and told her I could give up rodeo right then and there, but I couldn’t live another day without knowing her name and the chance to get to know her. She laughed, but she gave me both, and I never looked back. Man, she was incredible. Changed my life meeting her and look—she still is.” Jax nudged Ren’s arm.

A wave of nostalgia rolled over him. Jax’s house stood where the old ranch house used to be, so he’d been not much older than Ren when he’d stood there and watched Nora ride away for the last time. Everyone assumed she’d been a cheap one-night stand when she stayed over that night after buying his father’s horses for her dad. But he’d been seeing her for months before that night at his house—the night Maggie saw her and assumed it was Bennett kissing the woman on the porch.

Nora had altered more than just Jax’s life that night. They’d created Ren, destroyed Maggie and Bennett’s childhood love, and sent Jax on a bender of self-loathing that still lingered in his darkest moments.

A stillness settled over the two men as the truth of the love story that started it all fluttered to their feet.

“You rode in rodeos?” Ren finally asked.

Awe shaped his eyes into globes. Jax laughed, doubled over his stomach. Of course, that was the part of the story Ren would home in on. Not that he blamed the kid. He’d have latched onto that detail like a bull rider to the horn.

“I did. So’d your mom, actually.”

“No way,” Ren said, kicking at the dirt. “Not my mom. She was way too protective. She never even let me climb trees growing up.”

Jax released Ren’s shoulder. “I know it sounds crazy, but parents get that way around their kids. You should see how protective your uncle Bennett is around Aunt Maggie and she’s barely halfway into her pregnancy. He won’t even let her sip tea that isn’t organic and steeped to just the right temperature. Never mind if she wants to drink out of the hose at the end of her morning walks. And this is the guy who did shots of tequila out of dirty glasses in Juarez for his eighteenth birthday.” Ren laughed. “Even I’m a little overprotective when it comes to you, and we’ve only been in each other’s lives a few weeks.”

“Is that why you won’t date Jill? Because you’re trying to protect me?”

Jax felt like someone kicked him in the stomach.

Was it? It would be simpler if that was the whole answer, but Jax couldn’t be sure it wasn’t abject fear he’d screw it up while he was focused on getting to know Ren. He gave the ol’ Marshall shrug.

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