Never the Cowboy’s Bride Read online

  A sunbeam comes down through the skylight in the roof of the barn, and for the thousandth time in my life, I wonder why my dad put a skylight here. Maybe for times like these, when a person might be lying on their back in the loft, on the verge of moving in.

  I’m not sure where else to go.

  Getting dropped off here seemed like a good idea at the time, and now I’m here in the middle of the afternoon in a pair of hospital scrubs and a t-shirt one of the nurses had brought from home.

  “Brooke? You up there?”

  My last ranch hand, Miller, calls up through the dusty air of the barn. This place used to hum with activity, but now it’s down to me, Miller, a handful of cattle, my horse Daisy, and a single goat. And about a tenth of the crops I grew for the farmer’s market. I’d already harvested most of them, with one last batch in the works. It’s not going to be enough to get me through the winter, unless...

  Unless I win the damn contest.

  “Yeah, Miller. I’m up here.”

  “You...you okay?”

  Miller’s a sweet guy. The strong, silent type. Muscled as all get-out and with the kind of eyes you could get lost in, if you were the right kind of woman. I’m not the kind to stare into a guy’s soul for a long time. Otherwise we might’ve had a shot.

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You still wearing those scrubs?”

  I blink, long and slow. “How do you know what I’m wearing?”

  He pauses for a beat. “I was over at Bliss, and...” Miller stalls out. He’s no fool. He’s been in Paulson long enough to know that Bliss and Carson might as well be Hatfield and McCoy. It wasn’t always that way. But they got bigger and fancier and we hit rough patch after rough patch, and then....

  Then the end of high school came. Miller is only a couple years older than me, but he still knows all about it. Everyone does. Except maybe Austin Bliss, who conveniently forgets everything that makes him look like less than a saint.

  “One of them said they saw you over there.”

  My heart thunders up into my throat and I snap my jaw shut to keep it from getting out. “Which one, Miller? Which one’s spying on me?”

  “They weren’t spying,” he says quickly. “It’s just you can see from over there—”

  This isn’t his fault. “It’s fine. It’s okay.” Then something else pricks at the back of my mind. “Wait. Why were you over at Bliss?” I push myself upright in the hay and look down at him. Where the Bliss brothers have sandy hair and piercing blue eyes, Miller’s the definition of tall, dark, and handsome. A piece of hay tumbles down by my cheek and I yank it out of my hair.

  Miller shifts his weight from side to side. “I’ve been thinking of going part-time,” he says finally.

  “Part-time.”

  “Part-time over here, and part-time over there.” To his credit, he looks me in the eye. “There’s not much work, and now that the farmer’s markets are off the table...”

  Miller helped me drag the crops into the house so I could get them all bunched and priced before this morning. Now all of them are neat little piles of ashes where the back porch used to be.

  “Gotta say, you’re really kicking me when I’m down.” A tight, choking feeling slides up my throat and squeezes off my windpipe. “You couldn’t work anywhere else?”

  “I could,” he says. He really could. He’s a good ranch hand, quiet, dependable...the kind of man you’d want on your side in a storm. “But then I wouldn’t be able to help you out until you decide what you’re gonna do. It’ll take a while to rebuild the house. You know how insurance companies are.”

  I do know how insurance companies are. Insurance companies are one of Paulson’s favorite gripes. Go to any bar in town on a Friday night, and you’ll find somebody bitching about rebuilding and companies dragging their feet and being cheated. I made the first calls outside the hospital this morning. The wheels are already spinning, but he’s right on this, too—it’ll be a good long time before I have a place to live. And they might replace the value of the crops, but that’s a separate policy that makes my head spin. I didn’t have a pristine inventory, so...

  “For the Bliss brothers?” I grit my teeth to keep from crying and flop back into the hay, a cool resignation sloshing around in my gut. “I get it. You have to make a living, too.”

  “Nobody’d think less of you if you sold the ranch,” he says quietly.

  Birds chirp on the roof of the barn, and I inhale the familiar scent of old wood and hard work. Wind rustles through the gaps in the walls.

  “I’m not so sure about that.”

  “You don’t have to, but you could. Nobody would think less of you.”

  A lot of people would think less of me.Everly, for one. She gave me the ranch as a gift. Signed it over, the whole package. It’s the last thing we have from our parents.

  “I’ve got to make a call.”

  “Okay. I fed Daisy and the cattle. Goat’s over in the small pasture.”

  “Thanks,” I tell him, and the next time I sit up to look over the edge of the loft, he’s gone.

  I slip the new phone out of the pocket of my too-big scrubs. The farmhouse didn’t have a landline, and I haven’t seen a payphone in Paulson in ten years, unless you count the one at the Historical Museum. I bought the cheapest phone they had at the drugstore. It has a screen for texting. Barely.

  Everly picks up on the first ring. “My favorite sister!” she chimes, and in the background I hear a splash and a shout and my heart threatens to fly apart into a million pieces. I’ve seen the Bliss Resort in New York, where she lives now. It’s paradise. And I’m in a hayloft, feeling sorry for myself. “How are you doing? Tell me everything. Have you restored Sweetwater to its former glory?”

  Before I left from her wedding, we’d talked about all my plans. All my big, stupid plans. “About that.”

  “Uh oh.” The sound behind her fades and her breath picks up, like she’s walking away as fast as her legs can carry her. “You don’t sound good. What happened?”

  “Well, Everly, the house burned down.” I choke back a sob and swallow it like a sharp pebble. “Last night. I almost—” I can’t bear it. “Happened while I was sleeping. Chris Easton says it was probably faulty wiring in the kitchen—something to do with the oven.”

  “It burned down? Like down down? Down to the ground?”

  “Yeah.” Fifty feet from here, there used to be a house. Now there is nothing but a burned-out shell. “Everything’s gone.”

  “Oh, shit,” she breathes. “Oh, shit.”

  We sit there in silence, and I know she must be thinking about all the things that were in the house. My mother’s one and only quilting experiment. Family photos from a hundred years ago. The rocking chair.

  “Are you okay? Seriously. Are you hurt?” Everly’s voice is all business.

  “I’m okay.” A cough works its way out of my lungs at that moment. “I breathed in a little smoke, but otherwise I’m fine.” Because Austin came to save me. That’s the part I can’t say out loud. “But the house is gone. I mean, there are a few sticks here and there, but it’s mostly a scene out of the apocalypse.”

  “As long as you’re okay, then I don’t care about the house.” Everly takes a deep breath. “I’m sad that it burned down, but I can’t—I can’t even say—” There’s a long pause. “I’m glad you’re all right. Where are you?”

  “In the barn.” Dust motes wheel dreamily in the sunlit air. “I brought a sheet up here.”

  “A sheet up there for what?” I can see her now, nose wrinkled, brow furrowed.

  “For a bed. But it’s not like Little House on the Prairie. I suck at making beds out of hay. I think you need more than one hospital-size sheet to do it.”

  “For a bed? Oh my god, Brooke, you are not sleeping in the barn.”

  “Where else would I sleep?” A poky stalk of hay digs into my back and I shift out of the way. Half the sheet drags behind me. My bed is ruined. “I don’t have money
for a hotel, and before you—”

  “I’ll wire you money right now. Asher won’t care—”

  “Before you wire me money, just know that I will absolutely not accept it.”

  “Why not? You’re homeless.”

  “I’m not homeless. I have a barn. And I’ll figure something out. I just need some time to gather myself.”

  “You can go to Mrs. Howard. She’ll know someone with a spare room. Mom used to be friends with her back in the day, and—”

  “Can’t do that.”

  “Why?”

  I turn over onto my side. “I made a fool of myself in front of Mrs. Howard. There’s a new thing at the Harvest Festival this year, and I got into it with Austin Bliss at the signup table. And then I quit. And then I went back, begging on hands and knees—”

  Everly groans. “You did not get into it with him. Don’t you know by now he’ll just break your heart? The two of those men—”

  “I’m working with him,” I blurt out. All of this is such a train wreck. “I teamed up with him for the contest. It was the only way back in. There’s a cash prize if I win, and I can rebuild the ranch, I can get some cattle back—”

  “Cattle back? I’ve only been gone a few weeks. You sold the cattle?”

  “All but four,” I admit to her. “The money—I couldn’t figure out how to make it work at that scale. We were losing on the ranch hands, we were losing on the cattle, Daisy’s the last horse and Mom’s breeding program bit the dust years ago—”

  “I’m coming back.” There’s a thumping sound over the line that tells me she’s talking while she types on the screen of her phone. “I’m booking the next flight.”

  “Don’t.”

  “You can’t stop me.”

  I sit up straight on my poky, ruined bed. “Do not come back here, Everly. I forbid it.”

  She laughs, the sound bright and warm despite everything. “You can’t forbid me to do anything. I’m your older sister. I was born first.”

  “That’s what older sister means.” I push my hair back away from my face. “You can’t come back here. You’re—” Another stupid, ugly sob pushes itself up from my chest. “You’re happy over there. I’ve got this under control.” I am sleeping in a barn. “Don’t come back here, Ev, or I’ll never forgive you.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  No, I want to scream. Come back and bail me out. I don’t want to do this without you. I never wanted to do this without you. I’m not cut out for it. “Yes. Everything’s well in hand. We’ll start small and rise from the ashes.” My laugh turns into a cough. “Literally.”

  I listen to my sister breathe on the other end of the line and hold my own breath. If she comes back here, I might not be able to let her leave. And that would be worse than anything.

  “Okay,” she says on a big exhale. “But when you change your mind about the money, you text me. I’ll send it.”

  “I’m not going to change my mind.”

  “I love you, Brooke.”

  “I love you too. I’ve got to go. Work to do.” I hang up before I start to cry and toss the phone onto the sheet. It slides off into the hay. “You can give me money over my dead body,” I tell the empty barn.

  “Are you a dead body?”

  “Not yet, Miller.”

  “Not Miller.”

  The second the words are out of his mouth, I know it’s not Miller. My heart jolts to life, fingers tingling. “What are you doing back on my property, Austin?” My face feels like it’s on the verge of combustion but I sit up anyway. He’s down in the doorway of the barn, the sun streaming in around him like he’s some kind of god. The outline of him is all I need to be able to picture him naked in the stream, wet and gleaming.

  He looks up, his cowboy hat shading his face. Even the way the shadow cuts across his skin is infuriatingly perfect. He purses his lips, like this is maybe not something he wants to be doing. “A little birdie told me you’re planning to sleep up here in old clothes and a hospital sheet.”

  “You should fire that little birdie, just like I’m about to do.”

  “But Miller’s so nice. And now I’ve ratted him out.”

  “He ratted himself out.” A fat bumblebee, clearly lost, buzzes near my head. “Came over just now to tell me he’s working for my worst enemy on the planet. Get out of my barn, Austin.”

  “You can’t sleep in here.”

  “Can, and I will.” I wriggle around, trying to get my ass in a spot on the hay that’s not quite so horribly uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly, I fail. “I’ll be over tomorrow so we can talk about the horses for the contest.”

  “Okay.” He pushes one sleeve up over his elbow, then the other, and I’m going to die. I tear my eyes away from the rolled-up-sleeve sexiness that I do not want to be seeing and stare at the bumblebee. “I’m coming up.”

  My heart tears out of the starting gate and races across clear, open pastures. “No you’re not.”

  “I’m coming up there.” He’s already at the ladder. “You’re not sleeping in the barn. I’m not going to have this entire town thinking I’m the kind of asshole who’d leave my neighbor in her barn. Alone. This thing’s not even weather-proof.” The loft rattles with his weight on the first step. A warm front comes in, sweeping over me in a disgusting montage of the things that could happen in the hay. My pulse is shooting through my fingertips. “You might not think much of me—”

  “You hate me as well,” I say in a voice that’s just the worst, it’s so breathless and high and not mine.

  “Not as much as I hate looking like a criminal in front of the entire town.”

  “I’d argue that climbing up here to remove me against my will is more criminal than—”

  His head pops up above the ledge, and I scramble backward into the hay. His arm around my waist. His hands on my hips, lifting me out the window. “Marry me.”

  “What?”

  “Marry me.” Austin shrugs one of his perfectly toned shoulders. “Marry me, and you’ll have access to all my assets. Nobody will blink an eye. It’s an easy solution. Gets you out of the barn, and we can work this out.”

  “Work what out, you psycho?”

  He gives me a broad grin. “Well, sweet thing, you’re moving in with me.”

  Chapter Nine

  Austin

  I had no idea how bad things had gotten at Sweetwater until Brooke moved in.

  It took three hours, and that’s because her goat didn’t want to leave his pasture. It took her three seconds to refuse my proposal and twenty more to negotiate for the spare room. Her pathetic herd came right on over to ours and started to mingle. Her horse settled into the stall next to Connecticut. And the goat threw a fit.

  “Maybe if you call him by his name, he’d be nicer,” she said as I tried to coax him out of the pasture.

  “What’s his name?” Being so close to her was like getting a sunburn, over and over and over.

  “Goatie.” She squared off her jaw and looked me in the eye.

  “Goatie. Your goat’s name is Goatie.”

  Brooke nodded, daring me to say something about it. Lightning-strike energy poured off her skin

  Damn it, I took the bait.

  “Goatie. Two grown, educated women named a goat Goatie. You couldn’t think of anything better than Goatie?”

  “Some people’s kids are named Austin.” She folded her fingernails into her palm and looked at them, like she’d find anything other than dirt in her cuticles.

  “Better than having a goat for a child, if that’s what you’re saying.”

  “If Goatie was my child, I’d be prouder of him than anybody is of you.”

  I couldn’t help it. I took a fighting stance. “You’re being awfully ornery, Brooke. I think I might have to put you in time out.”

  She put both her hands up, that same color coming to her cheeks. I can’t be addicted to that color—I can’t. And yet... “Don’t you dare carry me anywhere, Austin Bliss. I’ll scream.
”

  “Scream all you want. Doesn’t bother me.”

  “Oh, yeah?” Her breath came quick and shallow, and she danced back a foot, somehow looking graceful even in oversized hospital scrubs. “You know, if you’re making women scream so much, you might want to reconsider your methods.”

  She’d walked into a trap, and she knew it. Her hand was at her mouth before I opened mine. “Oh, I make them scream.” I let a slow smile come over my face. Brooke can’t help it. She smiles back. Victory. I don’t know why it’s a victory. I’ve never cared about making her smile before. But maybe now that she’s hated me for so long...yes. It’s the challenge. “When’s the last time a man made you scream?”

  “You’re gross.”

  “Challenge accepted.”

  Her blush spread from her forehead down to her chin. “Here’s a challenge for you. Get Goatie over to your place. I’ll be waiting.”

  Now she stood in the kitchen, tapping absently at the phone in the pocket of her scrubs. Her shoulders tensed, up by her ears. She had been waiting for him—sitting out on the front porch, like she might be scared to go inside. I ushered her in. Even if she is my worst enemy, I’m going to provide her with the hospitality that my mother expected. At least enough of it that she wouldn’t be embarrassed by me. Can’t stand the thought.

  “You hungry?”

  “No. Being proposed to makes me loose my appetite.”

  “Oh? You got fellas beating down the door, is that it?”

  She rolls her eyes and shakes out her shoulders.

  By God, she looks deliciously rumpled. She did up her hair at the hospital, but the scrubs and the oversized t-shirt...they’re doing things for me. Brooke stretches her arms over her head, as self-conscious as I’ve ever seen her, and I get a peek at the soft skin of her belly.

  Shit. Bad habit to get into, if she’s going to be staying in the guest bedroom.

  Her stomach growls.