Marry Me, Cowboy (Copper Mountain Rodeo) (2 page)

She’d earned a massive hoof-shaped bruise on her shoulder and a fat cut lip, but her help meant that Diego had been freed and had calmed down without getting himself hurt. Anyone who shrugged off their own injuries as long as the horse was fine would earn Chet’s undying friendship. So by the time Jamie had come along an hour later, after the whole thing was over, Tegan and Chet had formed a bond that soon seemed as strong as the one between Chet and Jamie, who’d known each other five years.

A few months ago, Jamie had asked Chet in frustration, “What is it you like so much about her?” Because it definitely wasn’t based on sex. Jamie thought he would have noticed in a flash if Chet was hitting on her.

Chet had thought for a moment, then told him, “I like that her clothes don’t match her personality.”

Yeah, buddy, that makes sense.

What was it, really? Jamie was never sure.

All three of them could talk horses and live horses, and they all knew... lived... the adrenalin rush and bone-deep rightness of working in tandem with another creature ten times your own size. They knew the beauty of communication with no language, of doing something you were born to do and doing it better than most other people on the planet.

They’d become a triangle, Jamie and Chet, Chet and Tegan, but the third side of the triangle - Jamie and Tegan - didn’t connect.

“Yeah, we can hit some bars,” Jamie said. He hated to think what might happen if he wasn’t there to keep Chet under control. “But I’m your best man, remember?” He made it as light as he could. “I have a responsibility to get you sober and only slightly hung-over to your wedding ceremony, or Tegan’ll fire me from the job and make you get a new one.”

Chet looked as if sober and hangover-free wasn’t on his agenda, while Tegan just frowned. She was intense, sometimes. Built lean and tall with her tumble of streaky blond hair, she was too big to be a jockey on the race-track, but she would have had the courage for it.

She worked part-time for a bucking stock contractor, Bob Crannock, and loved her barrel-racing mare Shildara like a sister. She very openly thought Jamie was a dick, and blamed him for everything that was wrong with Chet – in other words, the drinking - and Jamie didn’t know how to handle that - how to correct her... or how to admit to it.

Maybe she was right, and he
was
a bad influence. Maybe he really didn’t know how to talk to women.

The redhead who offered to share her bed with him later that night didn’t seem to mind.

Much
later that night.

Three in the morning before they sealed the deal. She had a hotel room and he knew she wanted him in it as soon as she discovered he was a pro rodeo rider, and what his year-to-date earnings were. He didn’t tell her he sent most of it back to his dad to pay for improvements on the ranch.

He and the redhead flirted for a couple of hours and he drank more than he wanted, and Chet drank about twice as much, and Jamie didn’t especially want to go to bed with the redhead, Kristi, but it seemed like the best way to deliver Chet back to their trailer and away from the drinking. “I’m getting some action, buddy, mind if we call it a night?”

When he said to Kristi that he had to get Chet to bed first, she slipped him a key, told him the hotel and room number, and invited him to meet her there.

Chet didn’t want to let go of the evening. He swayed at the bottom of the horse-trailer steps and Jamie had to open the door and help him inside. “I love you, man,” Chet said, in a broken voice. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, buddy. But I gotta go meet Kristi. Have a drink of water.”

There, Tegan. He didn’t get arrested, and he’ll pass out in his own bed. What more could you want from a best man?

With the job done, he went off to Kristi’s hotel, but when he reached the lobby, he knew he couldn’t go through with it. He just didn’t want to. Where was the satisfaction in something so shallow and easy? Where was the bite, when you didn’t actually know each other? He turned around and left, taking a long, ambling walk back to the rodeo ground so that Chet would be deep asleep by the time he arrived back.

There, Tegan, he thought again, although this time he wasn’t sure what point he was trying to prove.

Everything fell apart the next day.

CHAPTER TWO

Tegan had a blast at her hen night. Twelve barrel-racers, not too much to drink, lots of bar food and shrieking and raunchy humor. It was a long time since she’d let her hair down that much, and she needed it.

All the girls wanted to know if they could come to the wedding and she told them, sure, but it really wouldn’t be much of an event. Since some of them were heading to Texas and others to New Jersey, and the ones going to Lewiston in Idaho, or to the 75th Annual Copper Mountain Rodeo in Montana next weekend had the
short
journey, each less than fifteen hours, then they should probably start driving, she suggested, rather than hanging around until eleven in the morning for a five-minute event in a country-town Nevada wedding chapel.

In the end, it wasn’t an event at all - although the non-event was probably more dramatic and gossip-worthy than the wedding would have been.

Chet and Jamie stood at the top of the wedding chapel’s cheesy aisle. Feeling way more churned up and nervous than she would have expected, Tegan walked toward them in her fringed white satin shirt with the rhinestones, her white canvas jeans, and her favorite custom hand-painted cowgirl boots in white, gold, turquoise and tan, with her trailer-hauling partner Kara, who’d been roped in as a bridesmaid and was similarly dressed. They’d hot-rollered their hair half-way to Christmas and back, one blonde and one brunette, and only at the last minute had they decided
not
to wear their favorite cowgirl hats in case they squashed the hair.

“I mean, it is possible to take the rodeo queen look too far,” Kara had decided for both of them.

For once Chet seemed oblivious to the impressive effort they’d made. Tegan’s heart went out to him, and she forgot her own nerves in a rush of tenderness. Shoot, he’d
promised
her that he wanted to do this, so she could stay in the country! But he didn’t look as if he wanted to, today.

Instead, he looked miserable and/or hung-over, and/or about to have a stress breakdown. He and Jamie both held themselves as stiff as boards, their ropey, muscular frames hard and unmoving in their crisp new jeans, black cowboy shirts and black and tan boots. Two sets of blue eyes, one bloodshot, one clear. Two shocks of dark hair. Jamie’s was getting a little long around the collar.

He took a quick, sideways look at Chet, and Tegan could see that he was worried about Chet, too. Jamie’s smooth bow of a mouth was set flat and his eyes had narrowed, and when he looked back down the aisle at Tegan, they narrowed more. Instantly, she felt to blame, although she didn’t know what for, and went hot and aware all over.

Why did Jamie always make her feel so uncomfortable inside her own skin? He drove her crazy.

She reached them, and tried to smile at Chet, and he greeted her with the words, “I can’t do this, Tegan. I can’t marry you.”

He flashed an agonized look at Jamie, while Tegan hid her painfully intense disappointment and rage. She was pretty sure what that look meant, now, and pretty sure about the meaning of Jamie’s narrowed eyes. He must have tried to argue Chet out of the marriage idea last night, and unfortunately Chet hadn’t been too drunk to remember the arguments this morning. She didn’t know what to do, or how to feel.

Guys, I need this wedding. You know that.

Her visa ran out in six weeks, there was nothing for her at home any more - Ah, jeesh, that still hurt so much! - and Bob Crannock had lost interest in helping her.

When he’d seen her on the rodeo circuit in Australia on a visit there two years ago, he’d made huge promises about her potential in barrel-racing and what he could do for her. He’d brought her over here on a temporary working visa, helped her find a good horse, given her a part-time job so she could make ends meet, hadn’t hit on her once.

Well, not seriously, anyhow.

But although she’d had some great wins, her success so far hadn’t been as fast or as stellar as he’d wanted. She’d made it to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas last December, but she’d only placed fourteenth, and she wasn’t his flavor of the month, any more. There were other, younger, hotter and more well-connected barrel-racers coming through, and he was backing them instead. As far as he was concerned, it was bye-bye, Tegan.

And maybe she should just have sold her horse and her half-share in the horse trailer and gone home, but she had nothing to go home
to.

Not now that Dad had sold the farm.

Not now that she understood the painfully false foundation underpinning her whole life. Or was she wrong about that?

Don’t think about it.

She was stubborn and she had something to prove, now more than ever, and she’d given so much to this quest already.
Lost
so much to it. She wasn’t going to let Bob Crannock’s shallow faith and short attention span dictate her life, nor the fact that she had no real home.

Hence, the wedding plan.

Chet had been the obvious candidate for groom. They liked each other, and yet there was no hint of awkward attraction getting in the way. It was the absolute opposite of how she felt about Jamie – no, wait, except for the attraction bit. Chet had agreed to the marriage plan right away, with an air of deep inner relief, almost as if he’d needed something like this to happen. As if it was a lifeline of some kind.

“Of course I’ll marry you,” he’d said. “Wow. Of course. It’ll be great. So good. Perfect.”

And now he was jilting her at the altar with a look of such pain on his face that she couldn’t let him see that she was mad at him. She just couldn’t. She cared about him too much. There was something deep inside him that called to her instincts and made her want to protect him, the same way Jamie always did.

Maybe she wasn’t mad at Chet. Maybe it really was all down to Jamie, and whatever had happened with the two of them last night at their wretched stag night, and this would be typical because Jamie was a bad influence - a very good-looking, stubborn and immovable bad influence - and she didn’t have the slightest clue why Chet liked him so much.

“It’s okay,” she said to both of them brightly. “I’ll find someone else.”

The man officiating looked a little startled at this, but had probably seen a lot worse. They got themselves out of there, because they’d only had a ten-minute slot booked for the ceremony and another wedding group was probably due in.

Then they got on with their lives.

In other words, they loaded horses into gooseneck trailers, filled guzzling gas tanks with a giant amount of fuel, and hit the road.

Over the next four days, Chet apologized to her about a thousand times, in person, on the phone, via text, in a card. He even sent her chocolates and flowers, just about the prettiest arrangement she’d ever seen, with
another
card that read, “I have stuff I’m working out. You got caught in the middle. I’m really, really more sorry than you can possibly know.”

All of which only made her blame Jamie MacCreadie more.

CHAPTER THREE

The Copper Mountain Rodeo in Marietta, Montana was one Tegan and her hauling partner Kara hadn’t been to before. This year was their 75th anniversary event, so it was much bigger than usual, with much better purses, therefore drawing more and better competitors. Winning the barrels would be tougher, but more lucrative for whichever girl could pull it off.

Tegan and Kara drove their beat-up Chevy pickup and even more beat-up four-horse Cimarron gooseneck into town at three o’clock on Friday afternoon after the drive from Nevada via Bob Crannock’s bucking stock ranch near Casper, Wyoming.

This was where Chet’s flowers had reached her, and they must have cost him a mint because the florist’s van had had to drive ten miles out of town to get to Bob’s ranch. Tegan and Kara had stayed three nights at Bob’s, helping him with some new horses and keeping their own mares fit, before hitting the road early this morning to start the almost seven-hour drive.

There was rain threatened in the forecast and they hoped it would hold off until they’d set up. Unloading, yarding, feeding and rugging horses in the rain was almost as uncomfortable as riding horses in the rain. Tegan had done all of these things plenty of times, but she always crossed her fingers and begged the weather gods, “Not today.” So far the weather gods were smiling.

Marietta would have been a pretty town in any setting, with its classic western storefronts, but the mountains you could see in every direction made it truly beautiful. Above the square and solid fronts of Nineteenth Century western-style buildings, you would suddenly see a row of rugged peaks, with streaks of snow still visible in the highest and most sheltered places.

It was the first weekend in October, and soon there’d be fresh falls covering the whole range. The closest and most dominant peak was Copper Mountain, after which the rodeo had been named, and its jagged shape featured on all the posters and banners that filled the town.

The rodeo ground lay on the outskirts of Marietta, and looked like any of the scores of such grounds Tegan had seen over the years. She was at home in places like this, and she loved them. The yards and chutes and bleachers made of sturdy metal with peeling paint. The rodeo ring itself, thick with a pungent mix of sawdust and old manure and dirt. Clusters of modest-sized bathroom blocks and canteens and sheds. Open areas out the back that were already beginning to fill with pickups and trailers.

If you lived close enough, you came for the day and went home again at night. If you’d traveled like Chet and Jamie and Kara and Tegan, you camped.

Kara was feeding the horses and Tegan was sweeping out the trailer’s living area, when Chet appeared at its open doorway. “Oh, you still have the flowers?” he said, standing on the top step and leaning on the door handle.