The Cowboy Takes a Bride (5 page)

Cassie told her never to settle, to wait for lightning to strike before giving away her heart. Otherwise, she could find herself stranded high and dry by a man who loved something more than he loved her. In Cassie’s case, that something had been cutting horses.

“How is your mother these days?”

Mariah smiled. “She finally found true love.” Then she told Clover about Cassie and Ignacio. “They had a lavish wedding. Two hundred guests. They got married at the Chicago Botanical Gardens last June. Her colors were pink and white. My boss said Mom was one of the happiest brides she’d ever seen, and she’s seen a lot of brides.”

“I’m glad to hear Cassie finally got her happy ending.” Clover’s eyes darkened. “Sounds like things haven’t yet turned out so well for you. I see there’s no ring on your finger.”

Mariah put her hand behind her back, and then for no explicable reason she said, “I . . . I lost my job.”

“I hate to hear that. It’s tough losing any job, but when you lose one that you really loved, well, that’s a tragedy. But you’re young. You’ll find where you’re supposed to be if you keep your mind open.”

She thought about Destiny, who’d given Mariah her big break and had just as easily taken it all away.

“Well, I gotta get going. Co-op duties. On my way to check in on the Marin place, feed and water their stock, collect their mail while they’re out of town.” Clover tipped her hat, clicked her tongue to Juliet, and rode away.

Mariah watched the unexpected woman until she disappeared over the rise. All her life, loneliness had weighed against her like a heavy coin tucked into a breast pocket, small but constant. A child raised without siblings, in the households of families where she didn’t belong. The remoteness of a girl longing to be accepted but unable to lower the mask that separated her from others.

She turned and regarded the ramshackle cabin once more.

Her destiny?

Optimistic, that thought.

The truth was that coming here had been her last option, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that it was a very poor one indeed.

Chapter Three

Cast your hook in the stream where you least expect to get a bite; if you hook a fish, then you’ll know you’re truly lucky.

—Dutch Callahan

A
fter Ila drove away, Joe tromped inside the house, took a shower, and got dressed. Then he slumped into the kitchen, found the aspirin, thumbed the cap off the bottle, dumped three pills into his mouth, chewed them up, and winced as he swallowed them down. Hell, even his teeth ached.

Barefooted, he padded to the pantry and got out the Froot Loops. He poured up a bowl and ate them standing up over the sink in front of the back window that looked out over the corral, but the sound of his own crunching made his eye sockets hurt.

His gaze drifted over to the hutch sitting in the corner. Becca’s hutch. Given to her by her grandmother. They’d painted it avocado green to complement the terra-cotta floor tiles. He remembered how they’d gotten paint all over each other from all the smooching and tickling they’d done during the painting process.

He’d been skeptical about the color at first, but it turned out real pretty, especially once they’d added the copper hardware shaped like horseshoes. On the top shelf of the hutch sat a framed picture of him and Becca on their honeymoon in San Antonio. They were standing in front of the Alamo, arms flung around each other, bright smiles on their faces as if they’d be young and carefree forever.

Stupid fools.

Joe dropped the bowl of soggy Froot Loops into the sink, leaned against the counter, and closed his eyes. He let out a long, slow breath of pain. Pastor Penney had told him about the five stages of grief.

Denial, that numb, no-way-this-can-be-happening-to-me phase. In his case, anger had quickly followed denial. The blind rage and self-pity dogged him for three hellish months of flayed sorrow. He’d done some damn dumb things during those three months. Things he wasn’t proud of.

Compared to the anger, bargaining had been short-lived. At that point, not knowing what else to do, he’d gone to Pastor Penney, begging for help, asking what he could do to set things straight with God. He’d known Becca was lost to him forever, but he bargained for the pain to end, promised to be a better man if the suffering could just stop for a day or two.

After that depression gutted him with a roundhouse kick to the teeth. Knocking him down for the count. Joe was certain he’d never crawl from that black pit.

But the unexpected happened and Dutch found Miracle.

The young stallion had belonged to an old cutter in another county who’d gotten Alzheimer’s and his family had been forced to put him in a home. Miracle had been skin and bones, his eyes haunted, his trust nonexistent. But Dutch had taken one look at the two-year-old quarter horse and he’d just
known.

Dutch had an uncanny horse sense. He’d been more than a horse whisperer. The man was downright horse clairvoyant. He’d given the old cutter’s kin five hundred dollars for the stallion. They’d been happy to have it. Dutch ecstatic.

That’s when Joe’s obsession truly began.

Dutch had brought Miracle back to life, but Miracle and Dutch had yanked Joe from the dark depths of despair. He’d thrown himself headlong into cutting, and it saved his life.

Just when he’d finally accepted that Becca was gone. When he’d stopped fighting the pain and let go. When he’d finally put away all her pictures in the trophy room, except this one on the hutch when they’d been at their happiest. He lost Dutch.

And damn if the awful cycle hadn’t started all over again.

Now, he hung on by a thread. Dangling. The only thing keeping him sewed together was that stallion and the certainty that together, they could take the top spot in the Fort Worth Triple Crown Futurity. At this point, his only goal was to honor Dutch’s memory.

Now there was a fly in the ointment.

Mariah Callahan.

Joe paced the kitchen floor, hands clasped behind his back, the thought of Mariah suddenly making him restless, impatient. He didn’t want her here. He hoped Ila was right. That she would win their bet. He wanted Mariah gone because the woman stirred something in him, something more than irritation and inconvenience, something he didn’t want to think about too hard in case he found he liked it. He didn’t want to like her. Didn’t want to have any feelings for her beyond indifference. Because feelings just led to pain.

On his sixth pass in front of the window, Joe caught sight of something from his peripheral vision. Something that stalled him in midstep.

The two top boards on the back side of the corral fence had been knocked down. No Miracle in sight.

The ornery stallion had broken out again, and Joe knew exactly where he was headed.

M
emories pummeled Mariah as she climbed up the precarious wooden porch riddled with termite holes. She, Dutch, and Cassie had lived in similar hovels just like this, one after another, quick as the turn of a radio dial. The location changed, but the houses were all the same—dinky, desperate, and dilapidated.

A horseshoe hung over the front door. The ends pointed upward so all the luck wouldn’t run out.

“Didn’t help, did it, Dutch?” she mumbled past the lump clogging her throat.

The only thing that had changed from her childhood was that her father owned the property instead of renting it.

She knew without even entering it that the horse barn would be stocked with the finest equestrian equipment that money could buy. Dutch had been the kind of man who’d buy a new blanket for his horse before buying new shoes for his child. She recalled the vicious fights he and Cassie had over money. Dutch arguing that he had to spend money to make money. Whereas Cassie would point out he cared more about his damn horses than he did his family. Dutch would counter that the horses were what put food on the table.

That had been his delusion. His self-defense. That his constant chasing of a dream would eventually end in success. Clearly it had not.

Mariah sighed, braced herself for what she would find inside, and opened the door.

Her ballet slippers made a shuffling sound against the worn hardwood. Newspapers, horse magazines, and old clothing littered the floor—faded jeans, stained Western shirts, scuffed boots, athletic socks, battered cowboy hats, red bandanas.

A brand new cutting saddle sat on the stained, floral-print, 1970s-era sofa like a crown on the head of a rag doll. It surprised Mariah that she could identify a cutting saddle. More memories flashed through her.

“Look here, Flaxey,” she recalled Dutch saying to her one day when he’d taken her with him to pick out a saddle. He took her little hand in his and ran it over the saddle’s seat. “A good cutting saddle allows you to ‘sit the stop.’ Do you know what that means?”

She’d shaken her head. She didn’t understand, but it seemed to matter to her daddy, so she listened real hard.

“It means the seat should lie close to the horse’s back. You want as close as you can get. The pocket should be in the middle of the seat. See here.” He pointed to another saddle. “This one sits too far back. It’ll force the rider against the cantle and put him up on the swells.”

Mariah hadn’t known what he’d been talking about, but she made note of the lesson and now, twenty years later, it came rushing back. All this time she thought she’d forgotten her father’s early lessons on horse care, but they weren’t gone. They were still there lurking, hiding just below the surface, waiting to be unearthed.

The coffee table lay buried under horse tack—a German martingale, snaffle bits, headstalls, and reins. The smell of leather and horses rose up from the table, a scent that stroked the past and lit a fire in Mariah’s brain.

The kitchen was no different from the living area. It was cramped and cluttered. More horse gear. A small dormitory-sized refrigerator held a six-pack of Coors beer, half a stick of summer sausage, and a block of rattrap cheese. The floor was a quarter-inch deep in sand, and dust covered everything. In the pantry sat a box of saltine crackers, a bag of beef jerky, a can of sardines, and a sack of horse feed. In the tiny laundry room she found an apartment-sized washer/dryer combo and an unusually large number of metal feed buckets.

She paced the kitchen, kicking up sand, trying to shuck off the feelings tightening around her throat. Anxiety bathed her back. She felt sweaty and claustrophobic. The creak of the floorboards echoed in her ears, old and cranky. The melody of “Camptown Races”—as solid as if someone was singing it—riffled through her head. A song Dutch used to whistle while he worked.

The photographs on the wall were all of Dutch and horses and various other cowboys. In one close-up, Dutch and Joe Daniels grinned at the camera, holding a trophy between them, but in Joe’s eyes, beneath the smile, she saw pain. What haunted him?

Joe Daniels.

Everything about the man radiated dark, dangerous energy. Brooding, rugged, cocky. The worst kind of trouble. She should stay far away from him. She couldn’t wait to sell this dump and leave Jubilee in her rearview mirror.

The neglected house was only about eight hundred square feet and covered with years of grime. Any rational person would throw her hands up in despair and have the property condemned.

Another thing that struck her was what was missing. No television set, no computer, no Internet service. The house echoed what she already knew about her father. Dutch cared about one thing and one thing only.

Horses.

The single bedroom had one twin bed with a thin mattress and a chair covered with more horse supplies. The bedside table was laden with books on the care and training of cutting horses and entry forms for upcoming cutting events. The lamp was made from deer horns. The shabby, discolored curtains were adorned with galloping horses.

He was here. Her father. She could feel him. Could almost hear his voice, a deep, rolling bass that sounded like thunder mumbling behind a cloud.

His home. Such as it was. He’d left it to her.

Mariah sank down on the end of her bed, felt an involuntary smile curl her lips. She drew her knees to her chest, wrapped her arms around her legs, took a deep breath, and inhaled the stale, horsey scent of the bed linens.

She felt Dutch around her, like a flash of lightning. Hot and close.

A strange fissure of joy cleaved her. Against all common sense, she felt a strange skip of inexplicable homecoming.

And that’s when she saw the rattlesnake.

J
oe stopped his Ford F–150 King Ranch, which was pulling a horse trailer, beside Dutch’s battered old Dodge Ram dually.

His friend had been dead only a few days and Joe hadn’t had the heart to step foot into the cabin. He had no idea what kind of mess Mariah had walked into. Actually, he didn’t care. All he wanted was for her to go away.

Right now, he was here to retrieve his horse.

He wasn’t about to let Mariah sidetrack him, no matter how much she reminded him of Becca.