Brenda Minton - His Little Cowgirl

How was she going to deal with Cody Jacobs? Worse, how was she going to deal with the fact that having him back in her life had turned her emotions inside out?

And then came fear. Would he take Meg away from her? Would his knowing about their daughter mean that holidays and summer vacations would be spent apart? How would she cope with sharing Meg?

Bailey stopped the downward spiral of thoughts. She wouldn’t be sharing Meg with a stranger. Cody was Meg’s dad. He had rights.

That assurance didn’t make her feel any better.

She leaned against the side of the house, waiting for the world to right itself before crossing the threshold to face her dad. The dog lumbered up the steps and belly crawled across the porch. Bailey reached down and Blue nuzzled her hand as if the dog knew she needed to be comforted.

“Thanks, girl.”

When she walked into the kitchen, her dad was there, waiting for her. Bailey pulled a pitcher of tea out of the fridge and pretended that nothing had happened. Not that she’d get away with pretending. Her dad had probably heard the entire conversation through the open window.

“Who were you talking to?” Jerry Cross was leaning on the counter, his afternoon meds in his hand. His skin had lost the healthy farmer’s tan he’d always worn. Now he just looked old and gray. And he wasn’t old.

Every time Bailey looked at him and saw him wasting away in front of her, she wanted to cry. She wanted to explain to God that it wasn’t fair. She had lost her mom when she was ten. Now she was losing her dad.

And Cody Jacobs’s RV was parked in her driveway.

“It was…” She turned to see if her daughter was in the room.

“She’s watching that goofy cartoon she likes.”

“That was Cody Jacobs.”

“Humph.”

“He came to apologize.”

“I guess he got more than he bargained for.” He coughed, the moment of breathlessness lasting longer than a week ago and leaving him weak enough that he had to sit at the kitchen table. “His RV is still here.”

“He says he’s coming back.”

Her dad looked almost pleased. “Good for him.”

“Good for him? Dad, this isn’t good for me. It isn’t good for Meg.”

“Maybe it’s good for me.” He wiped a large, work-worn hand across his face. “Maybe I need this, Bailey. Maybe I need to know that he’s here for you.”

“He showed up to apologize. That doesn’t put him in my life. I don’t want him in my life. I don’t want to be his girl of the week. Isn’t that what the announcers on the sports channel call the women who hang on to his arm?”

“We’ve both noticed a change in him since that bull trampled him last winter.” Once broad shoulders shrugged. “People change.”

Bailey couldn’t agree more. She had changed. At twenty-two she had gone to Wyoming for a summer work program, starry-eyed and thinking that all cowboys were heroes. She had come home four months later, pregnant and brokenhearted.

It had taken her more than a year to forgive herself and move on. She had struggled with the truth, that God’s grace was sufficient. She had grown and learned how to stand on her own two feet without dreams of a man rescuing her.

Now she had a dad and a little girl who needed her. She had a farm with a second mortgage, back taxes seriously in arrears and medical bills piling up in a basket on the coffee table. She had horses that needed to be fed.

“Dad, I have to get to work. You have to let me be an adult and take care of this myself.”

Moisture shimmered in her dad’s brown eyes. “I know you can take care of things, Bailey. I only wish I could help you more.”

She hugged him tightly, her heart breaking because of his continued weight loss.

“Don’t worry, Dad. We have peace, remember?”

“Peace.” He nodded as he whispered the word.

Bailey walked to the back door. “I need to walk to the back pasture to check on that cow that didn’t come up this afternoon. Can you keep an eye on Meg?”

“I’ll watch her.” He swallowed his pills before continuing. “He has a right to know his daughter.”

“I know.”

She knew, but she didn’t quite know how to deal with it, not yet. Cody now knew about Meg. It had to happen sooner or later. She wouldn’t have been able to remain out of the rodeo circuit forever. Avoiding Cody had meant avoiding people who could send horses her way for training.

Maybe God had meant for it to happen this way, with Cody driving into her life when she had the least amount of energy to fight? And maybe, just maybe, he would meet Meg and then leave town.

Bulls bellowed and snorted, the sound combining with the steady hum of the crowd and the banter of cowboys, medical staff and stock contractors. Cody leaned against the wall in a corner of the area that was almost quiet.

“What’s up with you?”

“Bradshaw, I didn’t know you were here.” Cody smiled at the guy who had been a friend for years. Rivalry had come between them a few times. And for a while Jason Bradshaw’s faith had driven a huge wedge between them.

Cody hadn’t known what to do when his friend “found religion” two years earlier. They had gone from being drinking buddies to strangers, both wanting different things out of life.

The rift had grown until the day seven months earlier when Cody had woken up in a hospital, unsure of who he was or where he was. Later he had watched tapes of the fall. The wreck of the season, they called it. He had been twisted in the bull rope, dangling from the side of a fifteen-hundred-pound animal. When Cody came loose, the bull twisted and the two butted heads with a force that had given him a huge concussion and some loss of memory.

Jason said it must have knocked some sense into him, because the Sunday after his release from the hospital Cody gave in to the urge to attend the church service the bull riders held each week. He had stood next to his friend, hearing a message his grandfather had tried to tell him when he had been too young to understand. Later on in life he had thought he didn’t need it.

That Sunday he knew he needed it. He knew that he needed to be forgiven. He needed the promise contained in those words, and he needed a fresh start.

He had never dreamed his second chance would lead him to Gibson, Missouri, and a little girl named Meg.

“You look like you got hit by a semitruck.” Jason nudged Cody’s side, gaining his attention.

“Something like that.”

“Did you see Bailey?”

Cody moved to the side to see why the crowd was roaring. He watched a young rider make it to eight seconds and then some. The kids on tour were going great guns with enthusiasm and bodies that weren’t being kept mobile with cortisone injections, Ace bandages and a diet of ibuprofen.

“Remember what that felt like?” Jason laughed and watched as the kid on the bull jumped off, landing on his feet and running out of the arena without a limp.

“Vaguely.” He remembered what yesterday felt like, when he knew who he was and that his life was all about winning the bull-riding championship and walking away with a seven-figure check. Now his goals were as scrambled as his insides.

“I found out today that I’m a dad. I have a five-year-old daughter named Meg.”

Jason took off his hat and ran a hand through short red hair, his eyes widening as he leaned back against the wall. His being speechless didn’t happen often. Cody was sort of glad his friend reacted with stunned silence. His surprise validated Cody’s own feelings of disbelief.

“Wow.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

Jason laughed and shrugged his shoulders. “Congratulations?”

“Thanks. I think.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Well, if Bailey was seventeen and madly in love with me, I’d do the right thing and marry her. Right now she’s about twenty-eight, and I’m pretty sure she hates me. So that leaves the little girl. I might have a chance with her, but I’m not sure.”

His daughter, a sprite with her mother’s perky nose, heart-shaped face and flaxen hair. Cowgirls were hard to beat. They were tough as nails and soft as down. Until you made them mad. Bailey was definitely mad. She had a right to be, but that didn’t help Cody.

He had a daughter. It was still sinking in. Thinking back, he remembered the luminous look in Bailey’s eyes when she said she loved him, and then the tears when he teased her about cowgirls always thinking they were in love. Finally there were the frantic phone calls that lasted five or six months after she left Wyoming. It all made sense now.

He looked down, shaking his head at the tumble of thoughts rolling through his mind. He had missed out on five years. Without knowing it, he had become his own dad.

“Cody, don’t beat yourself up for something you didn’t know about.”

“If I had called her back, I would have known. Instead I went on my merry way, thinking she just wanted to cry and try to drag me back into her life.” He fastened the Kevlar vest that bull riders wore for protection and tried to concentrate on the ride about to take place. “I should have known Bailey better than to think that about her.”

“You know, I think you only ran because you were so stinking in love with her.” Jason laughed as he said the words, his loud outburst drawing the quick glances of a dozen men in the area.

“Do you think you could announce it to the whole world?”

“Sorry, but I think they’re going to find out sooner or later.”

Cody pulled off his hat and ran shaking fingers through his hair. “I could use a…”

“Friend to pray with?” Jason smiled as he replaced the word with something that wouldn’t undo six months of sobriety.

“Yes, prayer.” His new way of dealing with stress. “I have a daughter, Jason. What in the world am I going to do with her?”

“Buy her a pony?”

“My dad bought me a pony.”

Jason slapped him on the back. “Go back to Gibson, Missouri, and get to know your daughter. You’ve got enough money in the bank to last more than a few years, and a good herd of cattle down in Oklahoma. Maybe it’s time to start using your nest egg to build a nest? You could even use that business degree of yours for something other than balancing a feed bill and tallying your earnings.”

“What if I can’t be a dad?” He didn’t know how to be something he’d never had. That’s why he’d run from girls looking for “forever.”

“No one really knows how. I think you just learn as you go. It’s probably a lot like bull riding, the more you work at it, the better you get.”

Someone shouted Cody’s name. He was up soon. He tipped his hat to Jason and told him he probably would lay off the tour after this event, at least for a few weeks, at least until he settled things with Bailey.

And he would give up ever being a world champion. His goal and his dream for more years than he could remember had been within his grasp, but one afternoon in Gibson, Missouri, had changed everything.

Five minutes later he was slipping onto the back of a bull named Outta Control. He hated that bull. It was part Mexican fighting bull and part insane. As he pulled his bull rope tight, wrapping it around his gloved hand, the bull jerked and snorted. The crazy animal obviously thought the eight seconds started before the gate opened.

Cody squeezed his knees against the animal’s heaving sides and hunched forward, preparing for the moment that the gate would open. Foam and slobber slung around his face as the bull bellowed and shook his mammoth head.