The Cowboy Takes a Bride Page 3

  “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.”

  Ila 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.

  The 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 accept
ed 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.

  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

  After 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 thi
ngs 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.