Blame It on the Cowboy (2 page)

Easier said than done.

His hair hurt.

He could feel every strand of it on his head. His eyelashes, too. Still, Logan forced himself from the bed, only to realize the soles of his feet hurt, as well. It was hard not to identify something on him that didn't hurt so he quit naming parts and put on his boxers and jeans. Then he had a look at what Julia had put in his pocket next to the box with the engagement ring.

A gold watch.

Not a modern one. It was old with a snap-up top that had a crest design on it. The initials BWS had been engraved in the center of the crest.

The inside looked just as expensive as the gold case except for the fact that the watch face crystal inside was shattered. Even though he knew little about antiques, Logan figured it was worth at least a couple hundred dollars.

So why had Julia put it in his pocket?

Since he was a skeptic, his first thought was that she might be trying to set him up, to make it look as if he'd robbed her. But Logan couldn't imagine why anyone would do that unless she was planning to try to blackmail him with it.

He dropped the watch on the bed and finished dressing, all the while staring at it. He cleared out some of the cotton in his brain and grabbed the hotel phone to call the front desk. Someone answered on the first ring.

“I'm in room…” Logan had to check the phone. “Two-sixteen, and I need to know…” He had to stop again and think. “I need to know if Julia is there in the lobby. She left something in the room.”

“No, sir. I'm afraid you just missed her. But checkout isn't until noon, and she said her guest might be staying past then so she paid for an extra day.”

“Uh, could you tell me how to spell Julia's last name? I need to leave her a note in case she comes back.”

“Oh, she said she wouldn't be coming back, that this was her goodbye party. And as for how to spell her name, well, it's Child, just like it sounds.”

Julia Child?

Right. Obviously, the clerk wasn't old enough or enough of a foodie to recognize the name of the famous chef.

“I don't suppose she paid with a credit card?” Logan asked.

“No. She paid in cash and then left a prepaid credit card for the second night.”

Of course. “What about an address?” Logan kept trying.

“I'm really not supposed to give that out—”

“She left something very expensive in the room, and I know she'll want it back.”

The guy hemmed and hawed a little, but he finally rattled off, “221B Baker Street, London, England.”

That was Sherlock Holmes's address.

Logan groaned, cursed. He didn't bother asking for a phone number because the one she left was probably for Hogwarts. He hung up and hurried to the window, hoping he could catch a glimpse of her getting into a car. Not that he intended to follow her or anything, but if she was going to blackmail him, he wanted to know as much about her as possible.

No sign of her, but Logan got a flash of something else. A memory.

Shit.

They'd taken pictures.

Or at least Julia had with the camera on her phone. He remembered nude selfies of them from the waist up. At least he hoped it was from the waist up.

Yeah, that trip to hell in a handbasket was moving even faster right now.

Logan threw on the rest of his clothes, already trying to figure out how to do damage control. He was the CEO of a multimillion-dollar company. He was the face that people put with the family business, and before last night he'd never done a thing to tarnish the image of McCord Cattle Brokers.

He couldn't say that any longer.

He was in such a hurry to rush out the door that he nearly missed the note on the desk. Maybe it was the start of the blackmail. He snatched it up, steeling himself for the worst. But if this was blackmail, then Julia sure had a funny sense of humor.

“Goodbye, hot cowboy,” she'd written. “Thanks for the sweet send-off. Don't worry. What happens in San Antonio stays in San Antonio. I'll take this to the grave.”

CHAPTER THREE

H
AVING
ONE
FOOT
in the grave was not a laughing matter, though Reese Stephens tried to make it one.

So, as the final thing on her bucket list she'd bought every joke book she could find on death, dying and other morbid things. It wasn't helping, but it wasn't hurting, either. At this point, that was as good as it was going to get for her.

She added the joke books to the stack of sex manuals she'd purchased. Donating both to the same place might be a problem so Reese decided she'd just leave them all in a stack in the corner of her apartment.

“You're sure you want to get rid of these?” Todd, her neighbor, asked. He had a box of vinyl albums under one arm and a pink stuffed elephant under the other.

Since Reese had bought the vinyls just the month before at a garage sale, it wouldn't be a great sentimental loss. She could say that about everything in her apartment, though.

Now that the watch was gone.

Reese hadn't intended to leave it with the cowboy, but it'd just felt right at the time, as if it were something he would appreciate.

As for the elephant, she'd found it by the Dumpster and couldn't stand the thought of it having the stuffing crushed out of it so Reese had given it a temporary home. Temporary was the norm for her, too, and she made a habit of not staying in one place for long.

“Take them,” Reese assured Todd. “I won't be able to bring anything with me to Cambodia.”

Reese wasn't sure why the lie about Cambodia had rolled so easily off her tongue, but it did now just as it had the first time she'd told it. So had the other lies needed to support that one because as she'd quickly learned one solo lie just led to more questions.

Questions she didn't want to answer.

As the story now went, she was moving to Cambodia to do a reality show about jungle cooking. She wouldn't be able to communicate with anyone for at least a year, and after that, the producers of the show were sending her to Vietnam. It was surprising that everyone believed her. Of course, everyone wasn't close to her. That was her fault.

In my next life I need to make more friends. And not move every few months.

But with mental memos like that came the depression. She wouldn't cry. She'd already wasted too many tears on something she couldn't change. Though if there was more time, she would have run to the store for some books on coping with grief.

“Knock, knock,” someone called out from the open door. “Food pimp has arrived.” Jimena Martinelli wiggled her away around a departing Todd, ignoring both the elephant and the heated look Todd gave her.

Jimena was the worst chef Reese had ever worked with, but she was also Reese's only friend. In every way that counted, she was like a sister.

The genetic product of an Irish-Mexican mother and Korean-Italian father, even in a blended city like San Antonio, Jimena stood out partly because she was stunning. Also partly because she drank like a fish, cursed like a sailor and ate like a pig. Her motto was
If it's not fun, don't fucking do it
, and she literally had those words tattooed on her back.

Reese had first met her when they were sixteen, homeless and trying to scrape by. At various times they'd been roommates. Other times Jimena had stayed behind to be with a boyfriend or a job she particularly liked when Reese had felt those restless stirrings to move. But eventually Jimena had felt similar stirrings—or else had gotten dumped—and had caught up with Reese.

Jimena was also the only person other than Reese's doctor who knew her diagnosis. The sole reason Reese had told her was so there'd be someone to tie up any loose ends in case the last-ditch treatment failed.

Which it almost certainly would.

A 2 percent chance pretty much spelled
failure
.

“I brought the good stuff,” Jimena announced. She breezed toward Reese and sat down on the floor beside her despite the fact Jimena was wearing shorts so tight that the movement alone could have given her an orgasm.

Jimena didn't ask what most people would have asked:
How are you feeling?
Nor did she give Reese any sad sympathetic looks. That was the reason Reese had told her. Jimena perhaps wanted to know, but asking Reese about her death diagnosis wasn't
fun
, therefore it wasn't something Jimena was going to do. And that was fine.

Especially since Reese wasn't sure how she felt, anyway.

She'd been drinking too much, eating too much, and she'd had a headache since this whole ordeal had begun. Of course, she wasn't sure how much was because of the tumor, which she'd named Myrtle, or if the overindulgence was playing into this. Reese suspected both.

“Milk Duds,” Jimena said, taking out the first item from the bag. There were at least a dozen boxes of them. “Cheetos.” Three family-size bags. “Not that reduced-fat shit, either. These are orange and greasy.” She pulled out powdered doughnuts next. “Oh, and Diet Dr. Pepper. The store clerk said, ‘Why bother?' when he saw it was diet, but I told him I try to cut calories here and there.”

Reese wished that all those food items, either separately or collectively, would have turned her stomach. After all, she was a chef with supposedly refined tastes, but she was a shallow foodie.

“I've already eaten so much my jeans are too tight,” Reese told her while she was opening the Milk Duds. “At this rate, I won't be able to fit in my coffin.”

Jimena started in on the Cheetos as if this were the most normal conversation in the world. “You said you wanted to be cremated, anyway.”

“I might not fit into my urn,” Reese amended.

“Then I'll make sure you have two urns. Eat up. You can't be miserable while eating junk food.”

Well, you could be until the sugar high kicked in, but that would no doubt happen soon.

“Making any more progress with the bucket list?” Jimena asked, taking the notepad that Reese had placed next to her.

Number one was “give away stuff.”

Now that the vinyls and elephant were gone, Reese could check that off. The only things left were the blow-up mattress she used for a bed, the books, her clothes, a box of baking soda in the fridge and a three-month-old tin of caramel popcorn that was now glued together from the humidity. She would toss it, of course, but Reese had wanted to look at the cute puppies on the tin a few more times.

Oh, and there was the backpack.

She'd named it Tootsie Roll because of the color and because it frequently contained some of the candies.

Reese tipped her head to it, the only other item in the living room. “Everything in there goes to you,” she told Jimena.

Jimena looked at the worn hiker's backpack as if it might contain gold bullion. Then snakes. “You're sure?” she asked.

“Positive.”

Jimena was taking care of her death wishes so it seemed only natural to give her the things Reese had carried with her from move to move. Most of the stuff in the backpack would just disappoint her friend, but there was a nice pair of Shun knives Jimena might like if she ever learned how to do food prep.

“Number two,” Jimena read from the list. “‘Quit job.' Well, we know that's done after what you said to Chef Dante. I heard the part about you saying you wished someone would crush his balls with a rusty garlic press.”

Yes, Reese had said that. And Dante had deserved it and worse. That was the first thing she'd checked off the list, and Reese had done it the day after she'd gotten the diagnosis. Not that she'd heard much of the actual diagnosis after Dr. Gutzman had said the words that'd changed her life.

Inoperable brain tumor. Vascularization. Radiation treatments.

She'd gone in for tests for a sinus infection and had come out with a death sentence.

Those 2 percent odds were the best she had even with intense radiation treatments, and the doctor estimated she had less than a month to live. He'd also explained in nauseating detail what the radiation treatments (the ones that stood almost no chance of working) would do to her body.

Still, Reese would have them, starting tomorrow morning, because an almost chance was the only chance she had. However, she'd wanted this time to get her life in order while she still had the mind to do it.

“Number three,” Jimena continued to read. “‘Donate money to charity.' You finished that?” she asked, stuffing eight puffy Cheetos into her mouth at once.

Reese nodded. “It's all done. I kept just enough for me to live on…” Or rather, die on. She didn't have much, but she had tried to figure out where it would do the most good. “I divided it between Save the Whales, a local culinary academy and a fund for cosmetology scholarships at a beauty school.”

Because on one of her find-the-best-tequila quests, Reese had decided the world needed more beauty, good food and whale protection.

Number four was “find the best tequila.”

She'd checked that off only because they'd all started to taste the same.

Number five was dye her hair pink, and number six was eat whatever she wanted and in any amount she wanted. Reese wasn't sure exactly how much weight she'd gained, but she had been forced to wear a T-shirt and a skirt with an elastic waist.

And yet she'd still managed to accomplish number seven.

Have sex with a hot cowboy.

“It's ticked off,” Jimena said, looking at number seven. “You actually went through with it? You didn't chicken out?”

Reese nodded. No chickening for her.

“Any, well, you know, bad memories?” Jimena asked. “And sorry if I'm bringing up bad memories just by asking if it brought up bad memories. Because you know the last thing I want is for you to remember the bad shit.”

Despite the semirambling apology, Reese knew what Jimena meant and dismissed it. “No bad memories.” It was true. There hadn't been, but the bad memories always felt just a heartbeat away. Because they were. “It was nice.
He
was nice.”

Jimena smiled, and yes, she did it with that mouthful of chewed-up Cheetos. “So, how nice is nice? Tell me all about it.”

“It was good.” Reese wouldn't do the tell-all, though. The cowboy was the bright spot in all of this, and the last thing on her bucket list she'd gotten around to doing.

Jimena stared at her. “That's it?
Good?
If you checked it off, it must have been better than just good, or you'd be looking for another one.”

It was more than just good, but even if it hadn't been, Reese wouldn't have looked for another one. No time. After the radiation treatments started tomorrow, she'd be too sick and tired to pick up a cowboy in a hotel bar.

“He was hot,” Reese settled for saying, and she showed Jimena the picture she had taken on her phone. Definitely not an Instagram-worthy shot, but Reese had wanted something to look at after she left him.

Jimena squealed. “Yeah, he's hot. Like on a scale of one to ten—he's like a six-hundred kind of hot.”

She made a hmm-ing sound, looked at Reese, and even though Jimena didn't say it, she was no doubt thinking how the heck had Reese managed to get him into bed. He was a six hundred, and Reese was a six on a really good day.

Last night hadn't been a really good day.

Jimena took the phone, studied the picture. “You know, he looks kinda familiar. Is he an actor or somebody famous?”

Reese had another look for herself. He didn't look familiar to her, but he was special. He'd given her the best sex of her life. Right in the nick of time, too, since he would be her last lover.

“Are you going to try to see him again?” Jimena asked.

“No. I don't even know his name. Besides, this morning I found an engagement ring box in his pocket so I think last night for him must have been a sow-your-wild-oats kind of thing.”

“Ewww.” She jabbed the button to close the photo. “Then he's a hot asshole cowboy.”

Yes, he was, if that's what had happened. “But it's possible his girlfriend turned him down. I figure there's a reason he was drinking all that Scotch, and he seemed almost as miserable as I was.”

At least, that's how Reese was choosing to see it.

“And the watch?” Jimena pressed.

“The cowboy has it.”

However, if Reese had seen that ring the night before, she wouldn't have landed in bed with him or given him the watch. Which meant, of course, that she'd given her most prized possession to a potential hot a-hole, but since this was her fantasy, she preferred to believe that he would treasure it as a reminder of their one incredible night together.

“Good.” Jimena made a shivery, ick sound. And Reese knew why. Jimena had this aversion to antiques or rather what she called “old shit previously owned by dead people.” That's the reason Reese hadn't given the watch to her one and only friend.

“So, what's left?” Jimena said, looking at the bucket list again.

“Nothing.”

And no, Reese wasn't counting throwing away the popcorn glue. Since she'd traveled all over the world, there weren't any places left that she really wanted to see. Besides, she'd learned about four moves ago somewhere around Tulsa that, like tequila, places were really all just the same.

So, there it was—everything important ticked off her bucket list.

For the past week there'd been times when it felt as if a meaty fist had clamped on to her heart to give it a squeeze. That fist was doing a lot of squeezing now.

“I started my own bucket list of sorts,” Jimena said. “I've decided to sleep my way through the alphabet so last night I had sex with that busboy named Aaron.”

Most people put travel and such on their bucket lists, but this was so Jimena. She didn't have any filters when it came to sex and saw it more as a recreational sport. Unlike Reese. Sex for her was more like forbidden fruit. It meant tearing down barriers, letting someone into her life, and while it had been an amazing night with the cowboy, part of that amazement was that he hadn't known who she really was.