The Cowboy Takes a Bride (4 page)

“You gotta move on. Jose ain’t the answer.”

“I know,” he said morosely, and bent to pick up the tequila bottle. The morning breeze was cold on his wet skin, and his teeth chattered. Perversely, he liked the discomfort. He had the privilege of being uncomfortable. Becca and Dutch did not. “But for about half an hour last night, I managed to drink every nerve ending into submission.”

“Becca wouldn’t want you grieving so hard.”

“Sure she would. Becca loved attention.”

“I’ll give you that,” Ila conceded. “But we’re talking about your mental health here. Just accept that there’s a bigger plan for your life, even though you can’t see it yet. You’ll love again someday.”

“I’ve had my shot at my one true love. It’s why I’ve thrown my heart and soul into cutting. I was lucky to have Becca for what time I had her. Lightning doesn’t strike twice.”

“Tell that to Cooter Johnston. He’s been hit by lightning three times.”

“Because the man doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of a thunderstorm.

Ila cleared her throat, eyed the tequila bottle in his hand. “That’s a bit like Fort Knox calling the horse trough gold.”

“I suppose it is.”

“I’m just saying it’s narrow-minded to assume you only get one shot at this love business,” Ila said. “You might find something even better than what you and Becca had.”

“What do you know?” he groused, his feelings still too raw. “You’ve never been in love.”

A strange expression crossed Ila’s face. “Clueless,” she muttered.

“What?”

“I said maybe you should stand closer to Cooter.”

“You want me to get struck by lightning?”

“Maybe a lightning bolt would get through your thick skull.”

“Tell me again, how come you’re here?” Joe asked, irritated and a bit confused. Outspoken Ila wasn’t normally cryptic.

“Excuse me for being worried about you. I know how close you and Dutch were. I just wanted to make sure you were all right.”

He did value her friendship and he had no business taking things out on her simply because she was here and Becca wasn’t. “Sorry,” he mumbled. “I’m being a tool.”

“Not disagreeing with you.”

Joe folded his arms over his chest, nodded toward Dutch’s ranch. “Wanna bet on how long it takes Little Bit to turn tail and run?”

“You’re on.” Her grin forgave him. “A Benjamin says one look at the inside of Dutch’s cabin, and she’s outta there before noon.”

“I don’t know about that. She might be feistier than she looks. I’ll give her till Monday.”

“You think she’ll spend even one night in that cabin? Did you not see her? Designer sweater, trendy yoga pants, fake nails, expensive haircut? Horseshoe to a doughnut, at the very least, she’ll hightail it back to Jubilee to the Motel 6.”

“If she spends one night in the cabin I win,” he said.

“Deal. Now go put some pants on before I run you in for indecent exposure.”

I
la left Green Ridge feeling down in the dumps. Was she going to have to club Joe over the head to get him to notice her as a woman? She flipped on the radio, and Garth Brooks was singing “Unanswered Prayers.”

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music. She and Joe were kindred spirits, cut from the same cloth. When would he finally realize that they were meant to be?

All her life Ila lived in the brilliant glow of her beautiful younger half sister. Death canonized Becca. No matter what Ila did, she could never measure up. She’d forever be that klutzy, skinny, tomboy cop, uncomfortable in her own skin.

She’d been accepted into the police academy at eighteen, but no one had noticed because that was the same day Becca had been crowned homecoming queen. Then during the same week that she’d become the youngest female ever hired by the sheriff’s department, Becca had won the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association barrel-racing championship. And the month Ila got shot in the line of duty, Becca had been killed.

Upstaged by her baby sister one last time.

It was petty to hold on to her disappointments, Ila knew that. She didn’t like feeling this way. She wanted to be magnanimous and loving and forgiving. Instead, she felt as if she was always drawing the short straw. It had taken every bit of strength she had to smile happily at Joe and Becca’s wedding. To stand there as the maid of honor while her sister married the man she loved.

Memories of Joe tumbled through her head. Sitting next to him in Miss Coltrane’s first grade class, playing hooky together in fifth grade to go fishing at Solider Springs Park, the time she’d kissed him under the bleachers at the Fourth of July rodeo when they were sixteen.

Shame shot through her at the old memories that the years seemed to sharpen instead of fade. She’d thrown her arms around him and plastered her lips against his and . . .

He hadn’t kissed her back.

Joe had waited patiently for her to finish, and then he’d given her a funny look that knotted her up inside. “You’re my best friend, Il,” he said. “Let’s not mess it up with that mushy stuff.”

“Of course,” she’d blathered. “You’re right.” She shrugged like the kiss hadn’t meant a damn thing to her.

But she’d never stopped loving him. Not even when five years later he started dating Becca. It stung, but she forgave him. She forgave Joe everything.

She’d been shattered by Becca’s death too. Her entire family crippled by the blow. But as she and Joe comforted each other, she secretly started thinking,
What if?

This morning, she’d woken up with a strange premonition that something wasn’t right. Joe didn’t drink often—he cared too much about his horses to let anything get in the way of that—but when he celebrated or mourned, well, Katy bar the door. And he was mourning Dutch something fierce.

He buried his grief after Becca’s passing by partnering up with Dutch and throwing himself into training Dutch’s prize-winning stallion, Some Kind of Miracle.

Ila had been Joe’s friend, his crying shoulder. She’d hung around, and just when she was beginning to hope that maybe, just maybe, she had a shot with Joe, here comes Dutch’s daughter strutting into the picture.

Ila hadn’t missed the way Joe looked at Mariah Callahan. With hot eyes and lusty intent. The way she wished he’d look at
her.
What was the big deal about Mariah? She was blond. Whoop-de-do. And yes, she was all cute and cuddly small while at the same time managing to look chic and stylish. Even so, she wasn’t nearly as pretty as Becca had been, but the minute Ila spotted the interloper, she’d thought,
Uh-oh
, and her stomach had gone queasy.

Face it, Joe has a type and it isn’t you. Stop pining for a guy who doesn’t want you.

That would be the smart thing to do, but Ila’s heart wanted what it wanted.

Joe.

And she knew she couldn’t win his love if there was a Becca look-alike within spitting distance.

Chicago Barbie had to go.

T
he second Mariah saw the cabin, her heart started a slow, hard pounding.

She felt stupid for having mistaken Joe Daniels’s ranch for Dutch’s place. Darn GPS. They could be so inaccurate.

Honestly, she should have known better. Her mother had warned her not to expect too much when Mariah had called her in Argentina and told her about Dutch’s bequest.

Last year, Cassie had found true love at long last. Her soul mate. She married a retired Argentinean jockey-turned-horse-trainer named Ignacio Rodrigo, who was a shorter but more successful version of Dutch. Mariah was happy for her, but she did miss the anchor of her mother’s presence in her daily life. The distance between them had made the last few months that much harder to bear.

The cabin leaned like a drunken cowboy. A tin smokestack poked up from a roof that was missing more than a few shingles. A rusted old plow lumped up against the side of the house. Paint peeled off the sun-baked structure in long, gray, weathered strips. A derelict barbwire fence encircled the place, but at the back of the erratic enclosure sat an expansive barn, gleaming bright with fresh metal and surrounded by a solid rail horse fence.

Mariah parked beside the decrepit house and stepped out into knee-high Johnson grass. She stood eyeing the cabin, working up the courage to go inside, when a horse’s whinny drew her attention.

She turned to see a woman riding up on horseback wearing faded jeans, a turquoise Western-style shirt, dusty boots, and a battered straw cowboy hat, with the brim curled up like a tunnel, gracing silvery curls that sprang out from her head like bedsprings. The lines on her face said she was closer to seventy than sixty, but her body was as athletic as that of someone twenty years younger.

“You look like you took a wrong turn off the freeway,” the woman said in a whiskey voice. “Where do you belong?”

The question startled her, because it was one Mariah had been asking herself her whole life. She did her best to fit, blending in with whatever landscape she found herself inhabiting, but she never felt like she truly belonged anywhere. She’d grown up with rich kids, but because her mother had been a housekeeper, she hadn’t been accepted into their cliques. What she never admitted out loud to anyone was her darkest fear of being utterly alone. She had a recurring nightmare where she was an astronaut walking outside her spaceship and fell into an endless black hole. Her fate, for the rest of eternity, was to drift alone in space, no contact with anyone, completely abandoned. She always woke from the dream in a cold sweat, breathing hard and clinging to her pillow like a lifeline.

“I . . . I’m from Chicago,” she said, not really answering the woman’s question because she didn’t know how.

The woman loped closer, and then stopped the horse just a few feet from where Mariah stood. She loosened the reins so the horse could lower its head and graze on the Johnson grass. The woman lifted white eyebrows arched into a perfect V and studied her for a long moment. “You’re Dutch’s girl.”

“I am.”

The woman nodded. “You’ve got his mouth and his forehead. Eyes like your mama though. Welcome to Jubilee. Name’s Clover Dempsey. I’m the president of the Jubilee Cutters Co-op and owner of the Silver Horseshoe.”

“Okay.” Mariah still didn’t know why the woman was here.

“Dutch talked about you all the time. He was real proud of you and he was sorry about the way things were between you.”

“Yeah,” she said, unable to keep the sarcasm from her voice. “Me too.”

“Don’t be that way, hon. It don’t pay to hold on to anger. Makes you all sick inside.”

Mariah kneaded her brow with two fingers, trying to smooth out the tension. The last twenty-four hours had extracted a toll.

“So here you are. Dutch’s Flaxey.”

Flaxey.

Dutch’s childhood nickname for her because she had blond hair.

Mariah forced a smile. It wasn’t this woman’s fault she and her father barely had a relationship.

“You don’t remember me, do you?” the woman asked.

“Should I?”

A faraway look came into her blue eyes. “My husband, Carl, and I used to babysit you for Dutch and Cassie. We couldn’t have kids of our own so we spoiled you something rotten.”

“When was this?” Mariah asked, remembering none of it.

Clover waved as if shooing off a fly. “Oh, years and years ago. You were just a little thing, barely walking.”

“Where was this?”

“All over. Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, California. We followed the cutting horse circuit together. Your daddy, he had a real gift for training cutting horses. Best I ever saw.”

“Is this a cutting horse?” Mariah indicated Clover’s mount.

“Nah, Juliet is just an old broomtail like me.” Clover reached out a hand to pat the mare’s neck. “So I hear you own some highfalutin wedding planning business in the Windy City?”

“I didn’t own it. I was just an assistant.” She was more pleased than she should be to realize Dutch had followed her career. Had known what she was doing, even if, apparently, he exaggerated her role.

So what? It was easy to follow someone from afar. Much harder to get intimate with them in person.

He tried. You turned him away.

Once. He’d tried once. And she’d been a kid. Still, she couldn’t tamp down the guilt.

“Ha,” Clover said. “Assistants are the ones who really rule the world. Where would those CEOs be without ’em? Lost, that’s where.” Clover eyed Mariah. “So why wedding planning?”

Mariah shrugged. “From the time I was a little girl, I was attracted to weddings. Mom said I was besotted with brides. When it came to dolls, I didn’t want infants. I wanted bride dolls.”

“Your parents got hitched at the city hall in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Carl and I were witnesses.”

Mariah knew her parents had gotten married by the justice of the peace and only because Cassie had been pregnant. Her mother told her that while she’d been attracted to Dutch and found him exciting, she’d always known he wasn’t the love of her life. She’d said it over the years with a wistful sigh of longing, often after she read Cinderella stories about happily-ever-after to Mariah.