Page 2 of Road to a Cowboy

“Doesn’t it look the same as everywhere else?”

Austin gave him the stink eye. “Don’t sass me, Calvin.”

Cal didn’t smile—his smiles were as rare as a sighting of Halley’s Comet—but his lips twitched.

“And no, it doesn’t look the same everywhere.”

“If you say so.” Cal looked off to the right. “What’s with the second camera?”

Austin jerked his gaze to where he’d set up an additional tripod several feet away. “That one’s recording so I can make a time-lapse video.”

Cal grunted.

His presence was nonintrusive as the sun sank and the stars began to emerge, yet Austin was always aware of him. He was as aware of Cal as he was of the location of the moon or the image in his camera’s viewfinder.

A few minutes later, shadows bathing the landscape, Austin began packing up his equipment under a sky quickly turning to dusk. The mountains had turned nearly invisible—when it got dark out here, it got dark—and Cal was almost a silhouette against the sky. Something about him standing silently with his hands shoved in the pockets of his jeans, gazing out into the distance, screamed of both contentment and loneliness, making Austin’s heart clench.

The first memory Austin had of Cal at Windsor Ranch was of him falling into a puddle near the corral on a rainy summer day when they’d been seven or eight. Now, as the foreman of that same ranch, Cal was basically running the place. The juxtaposition between kid-Cal, covered in rain and mud as he’d blinked up at Austin with big gray eyes as though wondering how he’d fallen into the puddle, and adult-Cal, tall, strong, coolly confident, and carrying the weight of the entire ranch on his shoulders, was sometimes jarring in that strange twist-of-fate kind of way.

Austin brought the camera up to his eyes, adjusted the settings, and snapped a photo, framing Cal in the right third of the shot while he gazed off to the left, making the viewer wonder what he was looking at. Austin would call it Cowboy Against the Night. He might even put it up for sale in his gallery instead of keeping it for himself.

Maybe.

Cal must’ve heard the shutter, because he turned with a raised eyebrow.

“Smile,” Austin said, aiming his camera at him again.

Cal did the exact opposite, making Austin laugh as he took the picture anyway.

Finally, Austin packed up his equipment and shouldered his camera bags, muttering a quick thank-you to Cal when Cal grabbed the tripods, then walked over to Cal’s horse and gave his neck a scratch. “Hey, Dash.”

Dash nosed at his shirt.

“Sorry,” Austin said with a laugh. “No treats for you today.”

Dash huffed.

“Please.” Austin kissed his muzzle. “As if you’re starving.”

Cal snorted a laugh. “You’d think, with the way he’s always looking for handouts.” He grabbed Dash’s reins, and the horse fell into step next to him as the three of them ambled toward Austin’s SUV parked on the dirt access road nearby. Cal bumped their shoulders together. “How are you?”

“I’m fine,” Austin replied.

“Austin.”

In the light of day, Cal’s eyes were a gray so light they were almost silver. Under a twilit sky, further shaded by his tan cowboy hat, they were a fathomless charcoal and currently narrowed in concern.

Austin returned the shoulder bump. “I promise I’m fine.”

“It’s okay if you’re not.”

“I know that. But I am.”

June eighth. The five-year anniversary of his wife’s death.

He’d married Lindsay knowing she was sick, knowing that their time was finite.

Neither of them had expected her to take a turn for the worse so soon after their wedding, nor for the brain cancer to take her only three weeks after they were married. Twelve months after her diagnosis, and poof—the brightest soul Austin had ever known had been taken from him.

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