Page 13 of Take Me Away, Cowboy

Still, to her it was a prison, a wall of mountains and responsibility holding her captive. Beautiful, sure, but claustrophobic.

She inhaled deeply, closing her eyes and letting her other senses take over. She smelled the unmistakable combination of mountain hemlocks and the mustiness of the fields from all the way up there. The town, though cute and not without its charms, didn’t hold a candle to this smell she could place anywhere. It was so unique to west Montana, to the Elkhorns.

She heard the call of a canyon wren in the distance, a call that used to make her hide her head under her pillow in the summers when she’d sleep with the windows open. Now, she let it call to her, willed it to help her answer the question Owen had asked her.

Because prison or not, she couldn’t placewhyshe abhorred the town, the valley that had raised her. Why she couldn’t make it her own.

She’d always been proud of the legacy her mom and dad had built. It just wasn’t her legacy to carry on. But did that mean she had to run from her family just because she didn’t want to inherit the farm?

She cozied up in the armchair by the window, trading her coffee for the glass of rum. What she had to think about required something stronger than what coffee could offer. Sweat dripped down the glass into her lap, leaving a chilly trail of moisture that staved off the heat. It was the same brand of air-conditioning she’d used on super-hot nights in Turks.

She smiled as she sipped the sweet, aromatic liquor, appreciating the slight burn as it slid down her throat, chilly and warm at the same time.

Thinking about Turks, about the farm, brought her back for the umpteenth time to the question Owen had asked her in the truck on their way home the night before. She couldn’t shake it.

This place was decidedly a kind of home she’d never found elsewhere. It always took her back no matter how long she’d been away or how different she’d become, so then what was it about Banberry that shoved her back into the world after a while?

She sighed. It wasn’t the unknown, exotic locales that called to her anymore so much as the small town she’d spent her childhood in pushing her away.

Damn Owen for shaking her beliefs to the core. Because if it wasn’t the world calling to her, could she really answer it by giving herself to it again?

The medicine was the only no-brainer, the one sure thing in the chaos of her thoughts. She loved her practice, the feel of her stethoscope around her shoulders, the way it would swing as she bent down to tickle the children’s tummies, sneaking in a listen to their small, fragile lungs as they squirmed and laughed beneath her healing hands. She missed the importance of her work, of the way she would sleep soundly at night, emotionless and exhausted to the bone, knowing she had done everything in her power to care for those entrusted to her.

Nestled into her parents’ house with its view of everything that had mattered to her as a child, she couldn’t remember a love that had fulfilled her more than medicine, not even travel.

So, what did that mean?

She was no closer to wanting to stay here than she was ready to leave, or motivated to find out what might be next by opening her laptop and getting to work.

In desperate need of a distraction from overthinking her life, she opened her book, a perfectly delightful romance she’d picked up in the airport about a young single mother whose husband was killed in military action. She tried not to imagine her strong, new neighbor, fresh from his own military service, every time she read a line about the protagonist’s “bulging muscles,” or his “steady, strong hands that looked capable of taking Sarah to new heights.”

Only once did she find herself extrapolating from the story, taking a particularly steamy love scene off the page and daydreaming about what she would do with Owen Johnson, hot young Marine, if she had him naked in her room just then. When the heat in her belly sank lower, moisture dampening the lacy panties she wore underneath her cut-off sweats, she threw her book down, frustrated.

Why couldn’t she concentrate? Or at least succumb to the mindless pleasure of reading a good book.

She stood, arching her back, stretching blood back into her upper body, and brought her rum to the window, sipping gingerly on it despite the fact that it had grown lukewarm. So much for her mobile air conditioner.

Penske, her parents’ puppy, was outside, basking in the heat of the evening, his paws outstretched and his ears twitching each time a fly would land on them. Her gaze meandered back over the property, to the main house where her parents lived, where she was raised. She took in the beams on the front porch, remembered her high school crush climbing them till he got to her balcony, only to be met by her father inside the bedroom, having seen the kid coming from a distance. At the time she’d been mortified, but now she could only laugh at the memory. She heard a while back that the kid who’d made the climb had gone on to use those skills on the North Slope of Alaska as an oil rigger. He’d been one of the few from their graduating class to make it out of Montana, along with his sister, a semi-professional rock climber.

Did it count as making it out if she’d never settled down anywhere, even if she’d never called Montana home after college? So many questions plagued her, and she attributed her unease to the handsome though unnerving stranger next door.

Her sights wandered to where his property line began and her folks’ ended. The tall grass between their properties on his side needed to be maintained.

Movement just beyond the grasses piqued her interest. Owen’s screen door opened and he came out, wearing only a tight white undershirt and jeans. Paige took in a long, slow breath, appreciating the coil of muscles under his shirt work as he dragged over a wicker chair to the edge of the porch. He sat down and propped his feet up on the railing.

Paige jumped back a foot, spilling a sip of rum on her shirt, when he looked right at her window, a crooked smile on his face. He waved once, clearly having caught her staring. Her cheeks burned with heat and her stomach flipped over.

“Shit,” she muttered, dabbing at the wasted alcohol on her shirt. She waved back, a tight smile on her lips, muttering a few more obscenities when he rose from his seat, retrieved a couple beers from a cooler she hadn’t seen tucked under the railing, and walked her direction. He crossed the property line without even a pause in the grasslands as she affectionately referred to them.

“Damn, damn, damn,” she hissed, pulling back from the window, tearing off her soiled bed shirt, and finding a cute blue tank to slip into instead. Appraising her sweat shorts, she opted to change those as well and tugged on a pair of jeans that fit her snugly. She raked her hands through her hair, glad that it still had some of the product in it from the night before and stood back to look in the mirror.

She thought about throwing on a light layer of makeup but didn’t want to look like she was trying too hard. She settled for a quick touch-up of mascara instead. Satisfied, she slid into a black pair of sandals she’d found on the island made from rubber tires and twine and headed down the stairs.

Just as she opened the door to the apartment, he headed up the walk. Her breath stopped in her chest, trapped by her inability to move, to exhale even.

She’d underestimated how handsome he was up close in such casual clothes, especially those that showed off the results of his career in the military.

The muscles in his shoulder contracted as he handed her one of the beers, somehow unlatching the gate with his hand that held the beer he’d brought for himself.

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