Brand New Cowboy Read online

  CHARLENE

  BRIGHT

  Brand New Cowboy

  Modern Cowboy Second Chance Romance Novella

  Brand New Cowboy

  Copyright © 2017 by Charlene Bright

  All rights reserved. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Brand New Cowboy

  Levi Wilcox thought he had left Morris Grove and the ghosts of his past behind him after high school. Living in Oklahoma City, he has had to deal with the anger he feels over the death of his parents. When a life altering event calls him back home, he opens his heart in unexpected ways.

  Leslie Perkins has been in love with Levi since she was twelve, but he broke her heart in high school. She has spent the last fifteen years mending her heart and building a life for her and her young daughter.

  Levi is now a single father to a four-year-old girl and when the two children meet, they form a fast friendship. Can their budding friendship bring their parents together? Is Leslie ready to give Levi a second chance?

  Prologue

  1997

  Levi unlocked the front door and dropped his backpack on the table just inside the door as he wiped his feet on the rug.

  “Anybody home?” he shouted as he headed up the stairs. He knew his parents were supposed to be out until after dinner—which was why he was getting a ride with his best friend Eric Cooper to football practice—but he thought he’d check just in case they’d gotten home early.

  No answer.

  He ran into his bedroom to grab his equipment bag and helmet and dropped them off downstairs, before going to the kitchen to make a snack. He fixed himself a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and wrapped it in the napkin just as he heard a horn from the driveway, then grabbed his football equipment on the way out the door, locking it behind him.

  Eric’s dad drove a dark-blue Chevy Blazer, and Eric was hanging out one of the back windows encouraging Levi to hurry up. He wanted to get to practice before Charlie so he could talk the coach into letting him practice as quarterback.

  “Eric, get back inside. People around here are going to think I let you ride like a dog with his head out the window,” Mr. Cooper said, as he tapped at the automatic window control to threaten him. Eric pulled back inside and turned to Levi as he hopped into the seat next to him. They snapped their seatbelts and launched into an animated discussion about who should play which position.

  It was dark by the time they were leaving the football field. Eric was teasing Levi about running in to Leslie Perkins.

  “You li-i-i-ike her,” he said in a sing-songy voice.

  “I do not!”

  “Whatever, dude. She’s gonna get you to marry her and have babies with her. Levi and Leslie, sittin’ in a tree, K-I—”

  “Boys!” growled Eric’s dad from the front. “That’s enough arguing.”

  He pulled into Levi’s driveway.

  “Hey, Levi,” he said to the young boy, “doesn’t look like your parents are home yet. Why don’t you go check? I’ll stick around here until we know for sure.”

  Levi looked up at the dark house. The front porch light was on, but he saw no other lights. He hopped out of the vehicle and keyed in the code to open the garage door. His parents’ car wasn’t there, so he walked back to the driver’s side window of his friend’s vehicle.

  “I’ll go see if they left a message inside.”

  “I’ll wait right here,” said Mr. Cooper.

  Levi nodded and carried his helmet and bag to the front door. As he was inserting the key into the lock, another car pulled into the driveway. Expecting to see his parents, he looked over, ready to complain to them for being late.

  It was his grandparents. They lived in a ranch out past the town limits, or out “in the boondocks” as his mom often called it. She’d grown up there so felt she was allowed to poke fun at the farmland where she was born and raised. But no one else had permission to put it down in her presence.

  Confused, he dropped his hand from the keys and walked toward the car as his grandparents emerged. His grandmother ran to his side while his grandfather stopped to talk to Mr. Cooper. Levi saw his friend’s father’s face show concern as his grandmother pulled him into her arms and whispered, “Let’s go inside, dear.”

  Chapter 1

  Levi Wilcox awoke from his dream in a cold sweat. He couldn’t count the number of times he’d had the nightmare in the twenty years since his parents had died. Unfortunately, the son-of-a-bitch drunk who plowed through the red light and into their car had never been identified. Perhaps if he had, Levi wouldn’t still be dreaming about the incident.

  He lay in the dark, coming into consciousness and remembered where he was. He and his four-year-old daughter, Amberlyn, had been living in his grandparents’ ranch house for less than a week. It had been her, more than anything, that had caused him to finally grow up so that when his grandma told him she and his granddad were moving into an assisted living facility, he had been mature enough to step up and move back to Morris Grove. He could be counted on now to be a responsible and kind grandson.

  Levi had spent most of the years after ‘The Night,’ as they all referred to it, causing his grandparents a good deal of worry. There had been more than one night spent in jail, mostly for driving under the influence—he shuddered to think of it now—but once for public indecency. He hoped they never had any reason to know about many of the things for which he hadn’t been caught.

  The night that he’d told them he was going to be a father, and a single one at that, they had been far less upset than he had expected. It was cause for concern, but there seemed to be some relief mixed into the emotions, as well as excitement and joy. He was now certain that they had known something he didn’t: that number one, he was capable of raising and loving a child, and that number two, it would change his life so much for the better that now he could barely conceive of a life without his daughter.

  Levi rolled over and looked at the bright red numbers of the clock in the dark: 5:06. He put his arms behind his head and stared up into the darkness, imagining the ceiling above him. The sun would be rising soon, he thought, so he might as well get up. But another voice crept in, reminding him that he did not have a job to rush to or a daycare for Amberlyn yet. Hopefully that would change today, though, or at least head in that direction.

  He’d heard that a high school classmate ran an at-home daycare center. He planned on calling her later that morning to see if she had any openings. Then later this week he was meeting with his old buddy Eric about partnering on a construction business. He’d spent the last ten years in construction and had found not only that he did it well, but that he was interested in pursuing it. It had helped rebuild his bank account after he’d mostly squandered the money left to him by his parents. One thing he did not regret spending that money on, however, was his daughter.

  Amberlyn’s mother had not been interested in having a child at the juncture of her life when she’d found herself pregnant. Levi barely remembered the night he met Tanya. A friend in Oklahoma City had hosted a party. After an hour of excessive drinking and flirting, Levi and Tanya found themselves locked in a bedroom upstairs at the buddy’s house. When he left, he’d promised, insincerely, to call her. A couple of months later, she called him.

  At first, he h
adn’t believed her when she said she was positive it was his baby. He had planned to wait until after the baby’s birth and get a DNA test and then decide what role he’d play in the child’s life, but Tanya was planning an abortion and begging for his help. Without really understanding why he’d done it, he offered to pay her to have the child, using the balance of his trust fund, and let him raise it.

  For the next seven months, he prepared his home for a baby, went to parenting classes, stopped drinking, and attended every doctor’s appointment with Tanya. She remained uninterested in raising the child, considering herself as only a surrogate. Honoring their agreement, she named him the father on the birth certificate and signed over all parental rights.

  He never saw her again and doubted she’d ever even told her parents that they had a grandchild. Levi struggled regularly with whether he should find Tanya’s parents and let them know about Amberlyn. He worried about what he would tell his little girl when she inevitably wanted to know about her mother and her mother’s family, but had decided he’d just cross that bridge when they came to it.

  He named the baby after the two most important women in his life, his mother Amber, and his grandmother’s middle name. Sandra and Alton Paulson were delighted with their great-grandchild and with the father Levi had become. They doted on Amberlyn, much the way they had doted on him when he was young and in their care. Levi never felt alone in raising his daughter.

  Now having to come face to face with their mortality, he had started to feel alone and hoped he’d still be able to offer his daughter all the care she deserved.

  Levi started to roll over and close his eyes again, to get in a few more winks, when his bedroom door burst open and a four-year-old girl pattered into the room and leapt onto the bed. He had acknowledged that there might come a day when he would need to start locking his bedroom door, but he’d had very little time for girlfriends in his new life, and he figured it would be another bridge they’d cross at a later time. For now, he enjoyed the morning snuggles with his baby girl and was not particularly looking forward to the day when she no longer enjoyed them as well.

  “Daddy!” she squealed as she crawled over to him and lay her head on his shoulder. “Are we gonna see Nanny and Poppy today?”

  “We sure are,” he said, putting his arm around her and trying not to think of the day when she would be too big to hold like this. “And we might even make some new friends today.”

  “Really?”

  He imagined her eyes getting wide beneath her blond bangs. Amberlyn was a very friendly child and made friends easily. She would be excited at the possibility, especially since she didn’t have friends yet in Morris Grove.

  “Really,” he answered. “Would you like that?”

  She squealed again and jumped off the bed.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To find presents to give my new friends!”

  ***

  Leslie Perkins took the backpack from the young mother whose two-year-old son took off for the playroom as soon as his toes touched the floor. There were already three other children playing with blocks. Leslie’s daycare had five children enrolled, counting her own three-year-old daughter, Ava. One of those was an eight-month-old who was home sick today. If she took on any more children, she’d need to hire an assistant, which she’d considered doing anyway. Her at-home daycare had been doing well enough to consider expanding. She’d been thinking off and on for two years about opening a center and hiring other caregivers and had recently begun the process, having toured an empty insurance office with five rooms, a small kitchen, and a nice, large lobby space, which would make a great playroom.

  “He’s got a little bit of a sniffle,” the mother was saying, “but the doctor says it’s allergies and not anything contagious.”

  “Thanks for letting me know, Kim. I’ll keep an eye out and let you know if he starts feeling bad.”

  Kim nodded and reached into her purse. “Here’s some Children’s Claritin if his eyes start itching and watering.”

  Leslie took the medicine and thanked the young woman before heading into the playroom where four children between the ages of two and four were playing.

  She had just popped a Disney move in the DVD player when her cell phone rang. It was her friend, Becca, the mother of the sick eight-month-old.

  “Hey, Becca,” she answered.

  “Hey,” the woman replied with a marked lack of enthusiasm.

  “Something going on with Jacob?”

  “No, he’s fine, but I do have some bad news.”

  Leslie looked over at the children who were lying on a blanket on the floor, eyes glued to the television. She stepped into the hallway where she could talk more privately but still see the kids.

  “Mark was laid off today,” her friend said.

  “Oh no. I’m so sorry to hear that.”

  “Tell me about it,” Becca sighed. “We knew it was coming when CVS moved in. It’s not the first independent pharmacy to go under because of the giants moving into small-town America.”

  “No, I guess not. So, do you think he’ll try to get on at CVS?”

  “Not sure. We’re hoping he doesn’t have to. Right now, it would feel like joining the enemy, but we’re not ruling it out. Luckily my practice can sustain us until we decide what to do, and Mark’s been so good at keeping up our emergency fund. It could be so much worse.”

  “Yeah, it’s still difficult, I bet.”

  “Yep. It does mean that we won’t need daycare for Jacob for a while and I know you sometimes have to turn away folks.”

  Leslie pulled the phone away from her mouth. “Billy, we don’t wipe our noses on the blanket,” she said into the room. “Please get a tissue from the supplies box.” She turned her attention back to the phone. “Sorry about that.”

  Becca giggled. “You’re so good at that, you know. Look, I’m still working on our plan. I’m not cancelling our dinner tomorrow night. We’re still going to finish up this paperwork for you to get a facility and the license to own a larger daycare center.”

  Leslie smiled. Becca was one of the few attorneys in the area and often in demand, but she always made time to help her friend pursue her dream.

  “Oh, I almost forgot to tell you,” Becca said. “Guess who I’m meeting with on Thursday.”

  “Um, the pope?” teased Leslie.

  “Yes, Leslie,” her friend deadpanned. “My rabbi thought it would be good for us to make some inroads with the Catholics and try to merge our religions.”

  The two women giggled.

  “No, I’m meeting with Eric Cooper and his old buddy Levi Wilcox. He’s moved back here with his daughter and is taking over his grandparents’ ranch. You know, since Mr. and Mrs. Paulson moved into Shady Tree Retirement Center.”

  Leslie had heard about the Paulsons and wondered if Levi would be returning to Morris Grove.

  “Interesting,” she said absent-mindedly as she thought about times Levi had teased and embarrassed her for her crush on him in high school. “Didn’t know he had a daughter.”

  “I don’t know anything about his child, but he didn’t mention a wife.”

  A single father? The thought nearly made Leslie laugh out loud. Levi Wilcox was about as far from a caring parent as anyone could get. Not only had he been a jerk to almost everyone at school, he’d also been in trouble more times than she could count. She worried for the child and looked at her own daughter who had turned over on her back, her brown curls encircling her head, not watching the movie.

  “Hey, Becca, I gotta go.”

  “Oh, of course. Didn’t meant to keep you.”

  “No problem. Thanks for letting me know about Mark. I hope Jacob is feeling better soon. Keep me posted.”

  “Will do. Talk to you later.”

  She set her phone on the bookshelf as she walked over to her daughter whose arm was draped over her forehead. “Mama, do I have a fever?”

  Leslie smiled and sat in the arm chair. �
��I don’t know. Come here and let me feel.” Her daughter was prone to being dramatic and craving attention, but Leslie was careful to listen to her and not brush her off. She wanted her to feel comfortable telling her mother when she wasn’t feeling well, and not ever feel embarrassed or afraid to tell her when something was really wrong. Those incidences also made for good teaching moments about the difference between feeling bad emotionally and feeling bad physically. It could be a difficult distinction for a three-year-old.

  And as far as craving attention, Leslie could hardly blame her. It had only been the two of them since the day she was born and her mother’s attention had to be shared so often with other children. Leslie found herself walking carefully the balance beam between being too indulgent and encouraging manipulative behavior, and making sure her daughter knew she would always come first in her life.

  Mother and child talked often about being honest about feelings and needs and asking for things appropriately instead of trying to ‘trick’ them out of someone. Still, Ava was only three and many of her needs and tactics were developmentally appropriate, so Leslie was careful to choose her battles.

  Ava crawled on her stomach over to her mother, drawing another smile from Leslie’s face. Ava stood so that Leslie could put her hand on the child’s forehead. She turned her hand over and laid the back of it on her cheek, then put her palms on both cheeks and pulled her daughter into a kiss. “You feel fine to me.”

  “Are you sure? I feel hot.”

  “I’m sure, but we’ll check again in a few minutes. You want some cold juice to help you cool down?”

  The little girl nodded and Leslie went into the kitchen, unlocked the childproof gadget, and pulled out a sippy cup three-quarters full of apple juice. Every morning, she prepared several drinks for the children so she could spend as little time out of their sight as possible.