Marry Me, Cowboy (Copper Mountain Rodeo) (14 page)

“Yeah? How about this point?” He looked across at her, letting his gaze linger on her body in a way that left her in no doubt about where his thoughts had traveled.

She had to laugh. “That point, definitely.”

“So now comes the hard part? Seeing your parents?”

“Uh, yeah. I should have talked to them more. I should have. And now I – I honestly don’t know how hard this is going to be.”

He reached across and squeezed her hand, and she said, “May I drive now?”

“Sure.” He pulled over and they both climbed out and crossed paths at the front of the rental car and he captured her in his arms for a moment. “It’s going to be better than you think.”

“Because you’re here,” she said.

“Thanks, but that’s not what I meant.”

“It’s what I meant, though.”

They reached her parents’ new street and she recognized the house from the photos as soon as she saw it. The front door stood open and Mum was in the doorway, scanning the street.

She saw the car and turned to call back into the house, summoning Tegan’s father. He arrived just as Tegan came up the steps, Jamie following behind with their bags, and so she hugged Dad first, a big, long warm moment. “Missed you,” he said. He looked older than when she’d last seen him, the tough life of an Australian farmer starting to show. “Good to see you. So good.”

And now Mum had gone all fussy, wondering whether they wanted to eat right away, or have a shower, or unpack, so somehow she and Tegan never took their turn at hugging each other and it felt like something that should have happened but couldn’t be caught up on now that it had been missed.

“In here,” Mum said, leading the way to the spare room at the back of the house, part of a near-new extension which contained a bathroom and sunroom as well.

“I’ll put the kettle on,” said Dad.

“I’ll get the rest of our stuff,” Jamie told Tegan.

“More suitcases?” said Mum, as if she disapproved the amount of luggage they’d brought.

“Just the wedding gown,” Tegan answered, hearing that it sounded like an apology.

And they still hadn’t hugged.

But then…

“Oh, can I please see it?” Mum clasped her hands together, and suddenly her eyes were shining.

“Oh, do you want to?”

“I would love to. You know I adore pretty dresses.”

And now they were hugging, at last, and Tegan was crying, and Mum was, too. “It’s like my flower-girl dress, Mum. It made me think of it as soon as I saw it in the store window in Marietta, right near where Jamie lives. Did you… end up keeping it like I asked?”

“Of course I did!”

She couldn’t hold the words back any longer, the ones she’d held bottled up for so long. “Why did you sell the farm? I’ve been so angry and upset about that. Was it just for Ben?”

“It wasn’t for Ben. Tegan, your dad kept saying you were never coming back, and he was getting so tired and dispirited, and I couldn’t argue him out of it, not when I didn’t know your plans. It was so hard, during the drought. Even when we got rain, he didn’t bounce back right away. I was angry, too.”

“With me?” This was a very new idea.

“Yes,” Mum said frankly. “Angry that you didn’t give us a firm date. You just kept saying, “When I’m ready.” I thought, what if you never were ready? What if your dad died waiting for you?”

“You never said. You never told me. I thought I was clear to Dad.”

“Not clear enough, love. Or else he just stopped believing it, because he was tired.” But they were hugging each other again as Mum said it. “Have we all made a terrible mistake?” she asked.

Had they?

Tegan thought about all the anger and hurt and loss. The farm was sold now, and they couldn’t get it back. Natalie had looked happy there, helping her parents out.

But then Jamie appeared in the doorway, the suitcase containing the wedding gown in one hand. He’d heard her mother’s question about “a terrible mistake.” Tegan could tell by the sudden tension in his face. But when she looked at him, she knew the right answer to what Mum had asked.

“No mistake,” she said. “The farm is in the best hands with Nat’s parents. And Jamie and I have a ranch to help take care of, now.”

They grinned at each other, a complicated kind of grin that said they both understood the emotional ground Tegan had covered today. “Can’t be in two places at once,” she said. “And mostly, I’m going to be in Montana.”

In the kitchen, the kettle began to whistle, and Tegan could hear Dad setting out mugs and plates. It felt like a new beginning, a kind of peace in her heart that she hadn’t had in a while, with a hope for the future that made her soul fill with promise and joy.

“Show me the dress,” her mother said. “I can’t wait for the wedding.”

“Neither can I,” Tegan answered, while Jamie just kept smiling.

About the Author

Lilian Darcy is a five-time Rita
™
Award nominee who has written over eighty romances for Harlequin, as well as several mainstream novels. She has also written for Australian theatre and television under another name, and has received two award nominations for Best Play from the Australian Writers Guild. In 1990 she was the co-recipient of an Australian Film Institute award for best TV mini-series.

An excerpt from

Tempt Me, Cowboy

Megan Crane

Copyright © 2013

She was exactly the kind of trouble he didn’t need.

Jasper Flint could see the woman from halfway down the block, like a shot of bright color against the weathered old brick of his newest acquisition. She hadn’t been there when he’d left the railway depot earlier that morning for a run around the outskirts of Marietta, Montana, his brand new home. There’d been nothing but the crisp blue dawn, the hint of the coming winter already there in the chill of the late September morning while Copper Mountain stood high above the town, a sleepy blue and purple giant slouching in the distance.

And the quiet. The blessed quiet and more of the same on the wind. A far cry from the noisy, frantic, nonstop life he’d left behind in Dallas.

An hour and a leisurely five miles later, Jasper was more than ready to face a long day of renovations, the current highlight of the best decision he’d ever made: his early retirement at thirty-five. He was ready to lose himself in the simple joy of making instead of taking, the sheer, hard won happiness in transforming somet
hing old into something new. He wasn’t ready for whatever trouble this woman had brought with her, the storm of it swirling around her despite the early morning sunlight and the clear fall day, practically casting the whole street in her shadow.

It was there in the way she stood waiting for him, impatient hands on her sweet hips and her chin tilted up—belligerent and scrappy, like she wanted to exchange a few punches right there in the street. It made him smile. He wouldn’t mind getting his hands on her, blonde and cute and with legs that could inspire a man to wax a little poetic even in the blandly conservative clothes she wore, and preferably before she opened her mouth and ruined the perfectly decent fantasy he already had going on.

But he knew her type. Prissy and disapproving, spring-loaded way too tight and, unless he misread that downturned mouth of hers and the glare she aimed at him like she already knew him, constitutionally unhappy.

Not—it went without saying—the sort of woman he usually found hanging around, waiting for him to show up. Not enough cleavage, for one thing. And definitely not enough teased hair. He liked his women cheap and obvious and all but flashing neon signs above their heads to shout out their availability.

This woman looked like trouble. Expensive trouble and a whole lot of work. He was in the market for neither.

Jasper slowed to a stroll as he drew near, eyeing her not-nearly-tight-enough pants and definitely-not-slinky-enough top, that thick blonde hair twisted back from her face in a way that shouted sensible, with something uncomfortably close to regret. He wondered what it would be like to have a woman like this—her figure concealed by her outfit instead of starkly presented to him like a Vegas buffet—throw herself at him the way the bimbos did so easily. But that was the paradox, of course. The good girls had steered well clear of him even before he’d had money, like he had darkness grafted on to his very bones and they could scent it in the wind.

He’d learned to live with cheap and calculating. He’d even have said he liked it, the predictability and the ease of that kind of woman, the uncomplicated nature of such mercenary transactions, until now.

“Sorry,” he said when he was close, letting his Texas roots have their way with his drawl, and surprised to discover he meant it. “You’re not really my type.”

She blinked, her lips parting slightly, which drew his attention to what might have been the most carnal mouth in the whole of the West. It hit him like a hammer, pounding an impossible lust through his body to pool in his sex.

What the hell? “I–what?” It was like she could read his mind, and it made her stammer.

“I like easy and sleazy.” He grinned slightly, imagining that mouth of hers engaged in practices that would fall under both headings. “I’m afraid I’m true to my redneck roots.” He flipped the bottom of his ratty green Stars t-shirt up to wipe at his face, and when he lowered it, was more delighted than he should have been to find her staring at his abdomen with a look on her face that suggested he’d smacked her over the head with a hammer of his own. His grin widened. “I don’t really go for the disapproving schoolmarm thing. But I sure do appreciate the thought.”

She blinked again. Then understanding flooded over her surprisingly readable face and Jasper watched in fascination as she went pale, then a deep red. A blush? When was the last time he’d seen a woman blush? His ex-wife had been incapable of it—and, for that matter, just about everything else it turned out a marriage required.

Jasper banished thoughts of that blessedly short-lived disaster, and concentrated on the woman in front of him instead. He couldn’t seem to keep himself from imagining what that blush might look like in far more interesting places. And were those freckles across her delicate cheeks, complicating the creamy sweep of her skin?

He didn’t understand why he found that so intriguing. Or why it made him want in a way he hadn’t felt in so long, it took him a moment or two to recognize what that particular feeling, sharp and intense and roaring in him so loudly, even was.

“It’s seven thirty in the morning.” She sounded scandalized. Her eyes were a blue to rival the Montana sky, and they widened in what had to be horror, which he felt like a heat wave throughout his body, reminding him how dark and perverse he was compared to an undoubtedly pure, small town sweetheart like this one. “On a Monday.”

“It wouldn’t matter if it was the sweet spot of a Saturday night,” he told her, enjoying himself immensely despite his own twisted soul. It wasn’t like he could do anything about it, could he? “It still wouldn’t work out, unless you’re hiding a honky tonk or two beneath that Head of the PTA outfit of yours.”

“I most certainly am not.” But her hands moved to the ruffled part of her blouse, then her quiet little belt buckle, as if she’d forgotten what she was wearing and had to remind herself by touch. Or make sure it was still there.

Or maybe she was as baffled by these garments, neither of which he’d ever seen on a woman under sixty-five years of age, as he was.

“I’m afraid we’re just not meant to be, darlin’,” he drawled, more Texas in his voice than usual and a fire he couldn’t quite control beneath it.

That rattled her for a moment, he could see it in that intense blue of her eyes, but then she squared her shoulders and tilted that chin of hers back up anyway. Scrappy, he thought again, and with a purely male jolt of approval that boded ill for the both of them, he just knew it.

“What on earth would make you think someone would show up and proposition you at this hour?” she demanded. “What kind of degenerate are you?”