How to Wrangle a Cowboy by Joanne Kennedy Read Free Book Online

as if he knew the truth about his mother and was completely unaffected by it.
    Shane had used that tone himself, time and again, to shut down helpful foster parents who wanted to know how he felt about everything. Didn’t they know feelings were private? If people knew your feelings, they knew what hurt you and what didn’t. It was like handing them a knife so they could stab you in the heart. He’d never trusted anyone with that knife. Ever.
    It looked like his son already knew about the knife and had learned to hold it close.
    The boy looked up at Shane with a surprisingly critical squint. Maybe he didn’t like Shane’s haircut. Shane kept his hair short, so it was easy to take care of, but Cody’s hair was long, with a little tail in the back. It was kind of cute.
    Cody looked back at the spider. “I thought you were a cowboy.”
    “I am.”
    “There’s no horses.”
    “Yeah, there are,” Shane said. “They’re out to pasture right now.”
    “Oh.” Cody thought about that for a moment. “Are they old?”
    “No, they’re not old.” That wasn’t quite true. Shane had a few good cow horses he and the hands used, but most of the horses at the Lazy Q were broken-down nags Grace had rescued from various animal abusers. Grace might be tiny and frail, and there were days she couldn’t remember her name, but when she turned up towing her battered horse trailer and told some white-trash, beer-drinking, horse-hitting sumnabitch she was taking his horse, the horse-hitting sumnabitch never said no.
    “What makes you think they’re old?” he asked Cody.
    “’Cause that’s what Mom says. That it’s time to put her out to pasture, ’cause she’s getting old.”
    “Your mom’s not even thirty .”
    “She says guys like Edward like younger girls.”
    Shane’s stomach flopped over, sloshing like a fat man in a bathtub. He’d never met Edward, but he didn’t like him.
    “So where’s this pasture?” The boy pointedly looked right, then left. “I don’t see any horses.”
    “This ranch is forty thousand acres,” Shane said. “The horses can wander pretty far.”
    “Oh.”
    The boy watched the spider for a while. Shane tried to think of something to say, something they could bond over, but his mind was completely blank. So he watched the spider too.
    He ought to talk about the spider. Teach his son something. But he didn’t know what kind it was or why it was weaving that web or anything else about it.
    “That’s quite a web,” he said.
    Lame. The kid didn’t even respond, except to stop watching the spider and stare off into the distance, as if measuring the distance to the horizon.
    “How big is forty thousand acres?” he asked.
    “Big,” Shane said.
    “So are you rich?” Cody looked up with a hopeful light in his dark eyes.
    For the first time since he was a kid, Shane actually wished he was rich. He’d always felt like he had more than enough for himself—a place to live, a job to do—but he wanted more for Cody. “No,” he admitted. “This isn’t my ranch. It’s Mr. Ward’s. But I have a lot of money saved up.”
    Cody looked disappointed, and Shane felt a mix of anger, helplessness, and sorrow swirling in his gut. Kids didn’t care about money in the bank. He ought to have more stuff, like other people. Knowing Cody was out there should have made him more ambitious, maybe, so he’d have something to offer his son besides a little cabin that wasn’t even his and a couple of good stock horses that were.
    Cody stared out at the tree line that marked the edge of the hay field, lost in thought. Maybe he was comparing Shane to his mother’s rich boyfriend. Shane probably didn’t measure up in Cody’s eyes. Like his mother, Cody thought he was just an ordinary cowboy. And kids didn’t care about levels of responsibility or acreage or barons. When it came right down to it, Shane didn’t have much to offer a six-year-old boy.
    The kid was studying Shane’s face now, as if he