Page 9 of Risking it for the Cowboy

Somehow, as they drove, their fingers ended up woven with each other’s, tension brimming with unknowns, with something contemplative and unspoken, as they rolled through pastureland, to the old clapboard farmhouse she’d spent a lifetime trying to escape, all the while the ache in his voice over his admission about a family farm swirling in her head. Something he’d wanted but hadn’t been deemed good enough for. A legacy. Roots in the ground. Purpose. This talented guy did odd jobs tinkering with engines and working as farm labor for the farm he’d hoped to inherit? Jason had never had such a normal ambition before.

Wind whipping her hair around her face; their lone set of headlights flashed through the East Texas hollers, until coming upon a single glowing porch light.

“We’re here,” she said, pointing to her driveway.

He rumbled onto the gravel.

She returned her phone to her pocket as he popped the stick out of gear and cranking the parking brake, killing the engine.

He hopped out while she set aside his guitar, and as she opened the passenger door, he was already there, taking her hand like a Southern gentleman to help her down. Silence. Nighttime symphony of insects. Dark silhouettes of hills in the distance against the midnight sky beneath the full moon’s glow.

Her shaggy, Great Pyrenees mix leapt up from her porch overflowing with potted flowers, where he’d been flopped in the summer heat, and barked, trotting down the front walk to inspect the newcomer.

“Oh, don’t be alarmed. He’s huge, but he’d never…” Charlie’s words trailed off as McClintock, anything but scared, held his hand out to her dog to sniff, scratching behind his shaggy ears and scuffing his neck. “Meet Artex,” Charlie said. “And whoa … he’s usually a lot more guarded at first, but he seems to like you.”

“What’s not to like?” McClintock teased with that swagger that had earned him some flashed tits at the show.

He squatted down, chuckling as she shook her head, and gave the dog scratches up and down his neck.

“Nah, he knows a dog person when he meets ’em. Hey, big fella.”

“He’s got the scent equivalent of a photographic memory. He’ll never forget you now.”

“I’m unforgettable.” He grinned, and yet, as she fished her key out of her pocket, thought she heard him murmur, “Kinda nice to know someone won’t.”

McClintock pushed to standing as she took his hand, linking her fingers in his, and led him around the side of the house to a tall, boarded fence. She unlocked the padlock on the gate.

“You sneaking me into a secret lab or something?” He waggled his brows, but was he … hesitating?

An easy laugh caught her off guard. “I am, actually.”

“I thought this was your house.”

“It is, was, well…”

She ushered him through the gate, but he held it open and instead, gestured for her to go first. Ah, the Texas gentleman charm. She indulged him, then shut the gate as Artex slipped through and trotted around the backyard, sniffing and searching for hazards as he’d been trained to do.

“What do you mean by that?”

She sighed as she relocked the gate. “I sold it to the university. Had a debt I had to pay, and the university needed land for my project, which has to be on university property. But I get to rent it now at a discount so long as I stay on as the property caretaker and, of course, they gave me this space for my experiment.”

“You sound thrilled by that.” He chuckled.

She shook her head and laughed, too, weaving her fingers with his offered hand as the moths fluttering around the porch light, leading him toward a darkened monstrosity as a filtration fan droned louder and louder.

“I tried to get away from this place.” She laughed wryly. “Just my luck I end up stuck with it forever, like some cosmic joke.”

They padded through the damp grass, through a chain-link gate. Up to her galvanized steel tunnel.

“Damn, Flower Girl. You got a Weeds operation growin’ back here you don’t want anyone to see?”

She laughed again. It was so … easy to laugh with him. Don’t be fooled.

“Nope. Worse. Formerly extinct angiosperms. And they’re just beginning to blossom.” Then she hedged, biting her lip, “You wanna see around?”

He looked to the door as if looking into another world, then back at the gate, as if he wanted to bolt.

Notched his chin at her. “A real-life science experiment? Extinct, like some Jurassic Park stuff?”