My Heart Lingers (A Hearts of Misty Mesa Story): BWWM Interracial Romance (2 page)

It took most of what he inherited from his parents to transform a portion of the family ranch into a recreational place for the young people of Misty Mesa. The money left over went to getting the various programs up and running. As the center director, he refused to take a salary. Better for the money to go into paying the employees who kept the center running: the horseback riding instructors, folk musicians, cooks, artists, and administrative staff. He earned enough from the work he did on his ranch when he wasn’t at the center.

Cole grumbled as he scrolled down the spreadsheet. Unfortunately, the lawyers in town regarded his ranch and youth center as a profitable business. A number of them were transplants from larger cities, unable to cut it in Houston or Shreveport, so they moved out to the small Texas towns to make a fast buck from who they assumed were simple country folk. Given the size of Cole’s ranch, they also assumed he could easily part with tens of thousands of dollars to retain their services.

No deal. Cole was clear on his intentions from the beginning. The money the center generated was to go into the community and improve the lives of children, not to fill the already bulging pockets of law firms so they could treat their associates to filet mignon and three-martini lunches every week.

He closed the program on his computer. If he wanted the center to get accredited, he’d have to break down eventually and hire somebody, but whom? He talked to people at almost every one of the firms downtown, and had his doubts if any would take the time to do a thorough job. He didn’t trust their wheeler-dealer ways.

He looked up from his computer when a knock came from the door. It was eight o’ clock, an hour past the center’s closing time. He locked the front doors and the ranch’s main gate for the night. It had to be one of the center’s employees. “Door’s open,” he said.

Ron, the center’s head cook, entered. He raised his glasses and wiped sweat from his face. “Hey, boss, sorry to bother you, but I’m going to need a hand with all the food I bought from the store.”

“No problem. I’ll be right there.” Cole shut down his laptop and got up from the desk chair. He had enough eye strain from staring at spreadsheets for one day. He turned out the lights and locked the door to his office behind him.

He followed Ron down the hall of the youth center. The floors and walls of the building were made of wood paneling, fashioned to resemble an old-fashioned cowboy bunkhouse. The kids loved it, especially the saddle mounts and pairs of longhorn cattle horns decorating the main rooms where they gathered to learn and do projects. “What did you get from the store this week?”

Ron took two steps for his every one. “I bought more of those snack packs we ran out of. You’d think the kids would appreciate all the fresh beef and chicken we supply on the ranch, but they love those chips and candy just as much, if not more.”

“Kids will be kids.” Cole smiled. He enjoyed having children on the ranch. They brought life and laughter to an otherwise quiet place. “You left here at five-thirty to get groceries, didn’t you?”

“I did, but I ended up talking to someone in the store.”

Cole laughed as they went into the center’s kitchen. “Come on. You’re not gonna tell me you got sidetracked by chatting up a pretty woman while she was shopping for cantaloupes.”

“Actually, she was shopping for vegetables. The situation wasn’t like how you think it was. I used to know her in high school.”

Cole hoisted a pack of water bottles on his shoulder. “So she was a pretty woman?”

“Yes.” Ron scratched behind his ear. “I don’t know if I should say anything else.”

“You have to now.” Cole liked to joke with his friend, given Ron’s shyness around the opposite sex. “So is she your type, small with big hair?”

“Ha. Ha.” Ron’s eyes hooded with sarcasm. “No, I’d say she’s more your type.”

Cole set the water bottles inside the large refrigerator. “Is that right? What do you know about my preferences in women?” One of the things he prided himself on was not mixing business with pleasure. He never brought any of his dates out to the commercial side of the ranch, especially not where the youth center was located.

Ron kept scratching his ear to the point where it turned red. In fact, his whole face was changing color to catch up. “I saw Kyra Grayson at the store.”

Cole’s humor disappeared, replaced by surprise. He never thought he would hear her name again. As soon as Ron uttered it, he pictured her beautiful face. Kyra’s dark brown skin glowed with bronze undertones. Her eyes were the color of amber. He closed his eyes for a split second, thinking of her full pink lips, how they formed an attractive smile, and how they once parted for him to taste the soft sweetness of her mouth.

Cole opened his eyes and remembered he had the refrigerator door hanging wide open. He pushed it closed. “Kyra’s in Misty Mesa? I thought she left town years ago.”

Ron shrugged. “So did I, but she’s back. We didn’t talk much. She had another store to go to and I had to head to the ranch before the ice cream melted.”

Cole helped him put the buckets of rocky road and Neapolitan in the freezer. While his hands worked to put up the groceries, his mind was busy thinking about the girl he fell in love with in high school. She wasn’t a girl anymore. She was twenty-eight, three months younger than him. He remembered that little fact because he never forgot anything about her. Not the sound of her voice, the way she glided into a room, or the way her wavy ebony hair passed through his fingers.

Maybe he ought to start trying to forget. She did hurt him, after all. It started right after high school graduation, when she abruptly and inexplicably became distant, making excuses to not be around him and “forgetting” to return his calls. She let him get on a plane and fly thousands of miles away before word got out that she was pregnant with their child. And once he did find out in an email from one of Kyra’s former classmates about the life she carried, Kyra had skipped town. Rumor had it she was no longer pregnant.

Cole released a ragged sigh. He spent years trying to track her down, attempting to get answers, but he never could find her contact information on the internet or through their mutual high school friends. She didn’t tell anyone her whereabouts. He wondered how Kyra could keep her pregnancy a secret from him. What had she been thinking?

So now Kyra was back in town. Curiosity made him ponder why she decided to return to Misty Mesa after being away for a decade. Her parents moved to Florida right after her father retired four years ago. Most of the friends she grew up with either left town or settled down with their own families. What reason could she possibly have for returning?

Cole shook his head. It wasn’t any of his business. He didn’t need to go sticking his nose where it didn’t belong. Hadn’t Kyra made it very clear years ago that she didn’t want him in her life?

“Look, I know you and Kyra had a really bad breakup after high school,” Ron voiced in a hesitant tone, after they finished putting the groceries away. “I just thought you should know why I was late getting back to the ranch.”

“No, problem, Ron. Thanks for telling me.”

Ron nodded. His hand passed uneasily behind his other ear this time. “So are you going to ride in the rodeo this Sunday?”

“I haven’t decided. I need to train my new horse, get him used to being around crowds. I might ride him into town tomorrow morning.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. You have up until the rodeo starts to register.”

“I might enter the roping contest. Who knows? I could use a break from sitting behind a desk all week.” Cole decided then and there to do his best to put the matter of Kyra to rest. He had a lifestyle he enjoyed. He had a ranch and a youth center to take care of. Those things were in his power to love and protect. Kyra threw away everything he had to give her a long time ago.

***

The next morning, Kyra got off the phone with her mother and started cleaning the house. Last night she picked up around the living room, but a professional cleaner was going to have to get the stale food smell out of the carpet. She scheduled for one to come early next week.

Today she concentrated on the kitchen. She scrubbed hard to get the dried mud shoeprints from the floor. As she put elbow grease to the last one, her cell phone rang. It was the top senior partner from the firm in Chicago.

“Kyra,” he said, “I have some bad news. I didn’t want to do this over the phone. I wanted to wait until you got back to tell you, but it looks like the firm has to restructure. As one of our junior associates, we have to let you go.”

Kyra let the mop fall from her hands. It clattered against the kitchen sink before it fell to the floor. “You’re firing me? But why? I don’t understand.”

The senior partner tried to sound calm and collected, but she could hear the strain in his voice on the other end. “You’re not being fired. That’s the wrong word. This was a decision the senior partners came to overnight. Our accountants went through the books and found that George spent the last several years committing tax fraud.”

Kyra was shocked to hear the news. She and several other young attorneys worked beneath him as part of his legal team. “I had no idea.”

“We know you didn’t. He hid everything, even from the rest of the senior partners.”

“If you know I had nothing to do with it, then why are you letting me go?” She could hear the attorney sigh on the other end. She wanted to scream.

“We’re a prestigious firm, and we want this to be handled swiftly and discreetly before news reaches the media. We hired a public relations specialist and an independent legal investigation team. They advised us that the best course of action is to disband George’s list of clients and reintegrate them among the senior partners.”

Kyra cut through all the public relations spiel and political correctness to get to the heart of the matter. “What about those of us who worked on cases with him?”

“You’re not the only one being released from the firm. I met with the other associates on your team this morning. They have twenty-four hours to clear their office space. All of you will receive severance pay and your contributions to the firm’s retirement fund will be returned with five percent interest. It’s the least we can do for your hard work.”

The least they could do, indeed. The top senior partner talked like he was doing her a favor. Kyra felt like she was going to be sick. Just yesterday morning, she was at the law firm and everything seemed to be fine. Now her world had been yanked out from under her.

“Are you still there, Kyra?”

“I’m here,” she answered her boss in a hoarse voice. “You know I’m in Texas. I can see about getting a flight to Chicago today, but I don’t know if I’ll make the deadline.”

“We had a moving service come in and clear your office space. Your belongings are being shipped to your home address as we speak. Good luck to you, Kyra.”

She stood with the phone at her ear even though he ended the call. The firm already had her office supplies prepared to be sent to her apartment before they notified her. It was a clear, decisive, and cold action. They treated her and the other associates like criminals, although they weren’t the ones who committed tax fraud.

Kyra was unable to think. She put the phone on the kitchen counter and picked up the mop. Her arm movements were jerky and awkward as she swept it across the floor. She gave up and dropped the mop into the water bucket. She couldn’t simply return to doing housework as though her last call had been a pesky telemarketer or a wrong number. She needed to get out of the house and clear her head. Maybe then she could figure out her next step.

She went into her old bedroom where her suitcases were and unpacked her running shoes.

***

Kyra never ran so far and so fast in her life. She started by jogging around her neighborhood. Then she switched to sprints. The asphalt road and concrete sidewalks soon gave way to the rural section of Misty Mesa. Kyra’s feet pounded in the dirt as she took off.

Her initial shock at learning she had been fired turned into anger. She used it as fuel to power her legs and feet. Noon approached. The late morning sun was already threatening to bore a hole through her thin t-shirt and shorts, but she ignored the heat and kept running. The mesa landscape was quiet and rugged. All she heard was the sound of her own feet pounding the ground and her breath coming from her lungs in hard, rhythmic puffs.

She shot past another runner and a bicyclist out for a leisurely ride. Next to the road, someone rode a horse across the flat expanse of land, but she didn’t pay horse and rider any mind. All she wanted to do was burn through her anger. She worked hard to get where she was in life. It was cruel how one measly phone call on a Saturday morning could take it all away.

What was up ahead on the road? Kyra lifted the brim of her baseball cap and spotted an adolescent boy walking a golden retriever. Though large, the dog looked like it was still a juvenile, unable to walk in a straight line as it pulled on its leash. The boy didn’t have a firm hold. The retriever tugged suddenly, and the leash flew from the boy’s hand. The dog bounded towards Kyra.

She was in mid-sprint as the dog met her. Not wanting to get in the road, she turned abruptly on her left foot to avoid colliding into the canine. A sharp twinge of pain shot up her ankle. Her right foot upended a loose rock in the gravel. Kyra went tumbling to the ground.

She heard the boy call to his dog. She didn’t know where it went. The force and angle of the fall made her momentarily dizzy. She closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, the horse and rider she saw earlier were coming towards her.

As they got closer, she recognized the rider. It was Cole.

Kyra moved to sit up as Cole approached her on his horse. Her baseball cap became displaced and fell over the top half of her face.

“Don’t move, ma’am. You took a nasty fall.” She recognized the strong, calm tone of Cole’s voice. The years had matured it to a deep baritone.