Cowboy Crazy (27 page)

The red ribbon fluttered from Sarah’s hands as she made her fourteenth effort at tying it to a tilting fence post. There was a pretty stiff breeze blowing, promising a late-afternoon rainstorm, but it really wouldn’t be that hard to get the job done if Lane would quit trying to help her.

“I’ve got it.” She shoved him sideways and grabbed the runaway end of the ribbon.

“Do you need some help?” Sarah turned to see Emmy standing beside her, hands clasped shyly behind her back. But her shoulders weren’t slumped, and as Sarah stepped away, she took the ribbon and tied it into a quick, assured bow around the post.

“They teach you that at UW?” Lane teased.

“No. They’re teaching me what kind of formations you look for to find oil, and how to access it, and—oh.” She paused, mortified, and proved her newfound confidence hadn’t affected her ability to blush. “You don’t want to hear about that, do you? You’re against it.”

“Not if it’s done right,” he said. “Just learn how to do it right, and then make sure it happens when you get your first job.” He grinned. “Maybe you could work for Carrigan. What do you think, Bro?”

Eric had taken off his jacket and was carefully rolling his shirtsleeves to the elbow. “Probably. But she’ll be done with graduate school by the time you and I agree on anything.”

“I hope so,” Lane said. “But at least I’ll have one engineer on my side.”

Emmy nodded enthusiastically, then frowned. “I’m on Sarah’s side, though.”

Lane rolled his eyes. “Everybody loves my wife.”

Sarah punched his arm and he winced. “Me most of all.”

Gloria, who was honoring the occasion with a magnificently inappropriate sequined red dress, gave Sarah a friendly nudge with her shoulder. “I told you the cowboy brother was the one for you.” She glanced over at Eric, who had flung his jacket over his shoulder with a
GQ
flourish. “Opposites attract.”

Lane grinned and settled an arm around Sarah’s shoulders. “Sometimes opposites aren’t as different as they seem,” he said. “Sometimes, deep down, they belong together.”

A crowd gathered gradually. First the poker gang arrived, decked out in their Sunday best. Sarah had never seen most of them in suit jackets before, let alone ties and shiny shoes. Joe was probably wearing his best clothes too, but that just meant there weren’t any holes in his jeans or swear words on his T-shirt.

Kelsey and Mike picked their way across the uneven ground, Mike lugging Katie in his arms. She was almost too big to carry, and she started squirming the moment she saw Lane and Sarah. Mike set her down and she ran across the open field, dodging sagebrush with her arms outstretched. She slammed into Lane’s legs and looked up at Sarah, then at Lane, her smile as wide and sunny as the summer sky.

“Hey, short stuff.” Lane rumpled her hair and the smile widened. Catching sight of Willie, she toddled off to watch as he dug furiously at an old prairie dog hole.

Suze arrived late, but the crowd parted for her like the Red Sea as she made her way to the front where Lane and Sarah were standing by the fence post.

“You all are determined to do this, aren’t you.” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement.

Sarah nodded. “It’s green construction, though. All local materials so it blends with the landscape, and most of the power will be wind and solar.”

She scanned the crowd. Just about everybody in town had showed up, even Eddie, who stood at the back in his ever-present white cap and apron.

“Suze, who’s manning the grill?” Lane asked.

“Nobody.” Suze folded her arms over her ample chest and scowled. “Place is closed for the ceremony.”

“Wow,” Lane said with a glint in his eye. “I don’t think the diner’s ever been closed before. If we’d known the ribbon-cutting was that important to you, we’d have done it after hours.”

“It’s not important to me,” she grunted. “Eddie wanted to come, and when he gets a bug up his butt about something there’s no stopping him.”

“Well, hopefully we’ll have a doctor who can deal with the bug issue,” Lane said.

Suze snorted. “You gonna cut that ribbon or talk all day?”

“Talk all day,” Sarah said. “You can’t have a ribbon-cutting without a speech.”

“Shit,” Suze mumbled, backing into the crowd.

Sarah scanned the crowd and caught sight of Trevor in the front row. He was no longer the rail-thin cowboy she’d met months ago. His shoulders had filled out and his biceps swelled from his shirt. Working at the ranch had done him more good than a year’s worth of physical therapy.

Not that physical therapy wouldn’t help. Especially since he wouldn’t have to go to Casper for it once the clinic was built.

“Speech!” somebody at the back of the crowd yelled.

“Get on with it!” hollered another voice.

Sarah cleared her throat. “I’ll make this quick,” she said.

Cheers rose from the crowd. Small-town folks weren’t much for standing in one place, and she was eager to get to the end of her speech too.

“A lot of you know there was a time in my life when Two Shot wasn’t my favorite place in the world.”

There was a smattering of laughter.

“There was a time in my life I couldn’t get out of this town fast enough,” she continued. “And now there’s no place I’d rather be.” She smiled at Lane, who stood in his typical pose, legs apart, arms folded over his chest, totally unaware that he stood head-and-shoulders above every man in the crowd.

In her eyes, he stood above every man in the world.

“I wanted to leave Two Shot because I felt like I was stuck. Like the town would never change. It would always be Two Shot Wyoming, Population 245. It would never grow, and neither would I.

“I was right about being stuck, but the town wasn’t the problem. I was the one who needed to change. And thanks to Lane and to all of you, I did.

“But Two Shot is changing too,” she said. “We’re getting the Carrigan Clinic built, and soon there’ll be a police station too.” She glanced at Lane. “The Roy Price Memorial Building, named after my stepdad. And there’s one other thing that’s changing.” She scanned the crowd, then focused on Lane as she delivered the last line of her speech.

“In about six months, the population will be two hundred forty-six.” She put a hand on her belly and waited for the news to sink in.

The crowd caught on right away, whooping and cheering, but Lane stood as if he was frozen to the ground despite the summer heat.

“Two hundred forty-six?” he said as the cheers died down.

“Two hundred forty-six,” she said. “And number two hundred forty-six is going to be a little Carrigan cowboy. Or maybe a cowgirl.”

He took a step forward, still looking stunned, and then a smile spread across his face and he swept her into his arms. She clasped her hands around his neck and he lifted her into the air. She watched the landscape whirl past as he spun her in a circle, the landscape and then the crowd, a sea of smiling faces. Her family.

He set her down and Emmy handed her an enormous pair of silver scissors that glinted in the sunlight. With Lane’s arms draped over her shoulders, she snipped the red ribbon and stepped away.

As the bow unfurled and the ribbon fell, she and Lane stepped through the opening and they each grabbed a waiting shovel. As the blades dug into the hard Wyoming earth, she felt like she was breaking ground on much more than a medical clinic or even a new era for Two Shot.

She was breaking ground on a whole new life.

Read on for an excerpt from

Cowboy Trouble

Available now from
Sourcebooks Casablanca

A chicken will never break your heart.

Not that you can’t love a chicken. There are some people in this world who can love just about anything.

But a chicken will never love you back. When you look deep into their beady little eyes, there’s not a lot of warmth there—just an avarice for worms and bugs and, if it’s a rooster, a lot of suppressed anger and sexual frustration. They don’t return your affection in any way.

Expectations, relationship-wise, are right at rock bottom.

That’s why Libby Brown decided to start a chicken farm. She wanted some company, and she wanted a farm, but she didn’t want to go getting attached to things like she had in the past.

She’d been obsessed with farms since she was a kid. It all started with her Fisher Price Farmer Joe Play Set: a plastic barn, some toy animals, and a pair of round-headed baby dolls clutching pitchforks like some simple-minded version of American Gothic.

A Fisher Price life was the life for her.

Take Atlanta—just give her that countryside.

***

Libby had her pickup half unloaded when her new neighbor showed up. She didn’t see him coming, so he got a prime view of her posterior as she bent over the tailgate, wrestling with the last of her chrome dinette chairs. The chair was entangled in the electric cord from the toaster, so he got a prime introduction to her vocabulary too.

“Howdy,” he said.

Howdy?
She turned to face him and stifled a snort.

Halloween was three months away, but this guy was ready with his cowboy costume. Surely no one actually wore chaps in real life, even in Wyoming. His boots looked like the real thing, though; they were worn and dirty as if they’d kicked around God-knows-what in the old corral, and his gray felt Stetson was all dented, like a horse had stepped on it. A square, stubbled chin gave his face a masculine cast, but there was something soft about his mouth that added a hint of vulnerability.

She hopped down from the tailgate. From her perch on the truck, he’d looked like the Marlboro Man on a rough day, but now that they were on the same level, she could see he was kind of cute—like a young Clint Eastwood with a little touch of Elvis.

“Howdy,” he said again. He actually tipped his hat and she almost laughed for the first time in a month.

“I’m Luke Rawlins, from down the road,” he continued. The man obviously had no idea how absurd he looked, decked out like a slightly used version of Hopalong Cassidy. “Thought maybe you’d need some help moving in. And I brought you a casserole—Chicken Artichoke Supreme. It’s my specialty.” He held out a massive ceramic dish with the pride of a caveman returning from the hunt. “Or maybe you could use a hand getting that chair broke to ride.”

Great. She had the bastard son of John Wayne and Martha Stewart for a neighbor. And he thought he was funny.

Worse yet, he thought she was funny.

“Thanks.” She took the casserole. “I’m Libby Brown. Are you from that farm with the big barn?”

“Farm? I’m not from any farm.” Narrowing his eyes, he slouched against the truck and folded his arms. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“What makes you say that?”

“You calling my ranch a farm, that’s what.” A blade of wheatgrass bobbed from one corner of his mouth as he looked her up and down with masculine arrogance. “There’s no such thing as a farm in Wyoming,” he said.

“Well, what do you call this, then?” Libby gestured toward the sun-baked outbuildings that tilted drunkenly around her own personal patch of prairie.

“A ranch.”

“That’s not what I call it. I call it ‘Lackaduck Farm.’” She pointed to the faded letters arched over the barn’s wide double doors. “That’s what the people before me called it too. It’s even painted on the barn.”

“Yeah, well, they weren’t from around here either. They were New Yorkers and got smacked on the bottom and sent home by Mother Nature. Thought they’d retire out here on some cheap real estate and be gentleman farmers. They didn’t realize there’s a reason the real estate’s cheap. It’s tough living.” He looked her in the eye, no doubt judging her unfit for a life only real men could endure. “You think you’re up to it?”

“As a matter of fact, I am.” Libby hoped she sounded a lot more confident than she felt. “This is what I’ve always wanted, and I’m going to make it work.”

She didn’t mention the fact that she had to make it work. She didn’t have anything else. No career—not even much of a job. And no boyfriend. Not even a dog.

The dog died in September, right before the boyfriend ran off. Lucky couldn’t help it, but Bill Cooperman could have stuck around if he’d only tried. He just had a wandering eye, and it finally wandered off for good with a hotshot editor from the
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
. The hotshot editor was also Libby’s boss, so she basically lost everything in the space of about six weeks. All she had left was a broken heart, a cherry red pickup, and the contents of her desk in a battered cardboard box.

Since her professional and romantic aspirations were a bust, she’d sold her one-bedroom condo in downtown Atlanta and literally bought the farm. She was now the proud owner of thirty-five acres of sagebrush and a quaint clapboard farmhouse in Lackaduck, Wyoming. At the moment, tumbleweeds were her primary crop and grasshoppers her only livestock, but the place was as far from Atlanta as she could get, and she figured a fresh coat of paint and a flock of free-range chickens would make it her dream home—one utterly unlike the one she’d left behind. So far, Wyoming was like another planet, and that was fine with her.

“I’m definitely going to make this work,” she repeated, as much to herself as to her new neighbor.

The cowboy reached over the truck’s battered tailgate for the dinette chair, which freed itself from the toaster cord the minute he touched it.

“Guess you’ll be glad to get some help then.”

He swung the chair over his shoulder and headed for the house.

Libby sighed. She had her pride, but she wasn’t about to turn her bad back on an able-bodied man who was willing to tote furniture for her. Beggars can’t be choosers, and Luke Rawlins wasn’t really such a bad choice, anyway. She wasn’t in the market for his brand of talent, but it sure was fun to watch him move furniture. Those chaps, with their swaying leather fringe, must have been designed by the early cowboys to highlight a man’s best assets.

***

Luke set the chair in the kitchen, then traipsed back out and scanned the contents of the truck bed. He’d been worried when they sold the Lackaduck place, but the new neighbor seemed all right. More than all right. When he’d first seen her, tussling with her furniture in the back of the pickup, he’d thought love might have finally come to Lackaduck. Then he’d realized all he could see was her backside and decided it was probably just lust.

Besides, her sofa was definitely a deal breaker.

It was enormous. And hideous. Once they wrestled the dang thing inside, it dominated the homestead’s tiny front room like some evil crouching monster. Carved cherubs on each corner lofted a complicated scrollwork banner in their pudgy fists. They were probably supposed to be cute, but Luke thought they looked like evil leering babies, preparing to strangle unsuspecting sofa sitters with their long wooden ribbon. He made a silent vow to stay as far away from that piece of furniture as he could.

“Careful,” Libby said as they swung it into place. “It’s an antique.”

“Antique?” He did his best not to sound judgmental.

She tipped her lightly freckled nose in the air and flashed him a hard look. “French Victorian Baroque Provincial,” she said. “That’s what the dealer said.”

French, he could believe. And Victorian, and all that. But mostly, the thing was plain ugly. It seemed like a city girl should have better taste—especially one who was obviously educated. There were at least fourteen boxes of books in the bed of the truck. It took him a good twenty minutes to haul them all into the house and stack them in the front hall.

“You a schoolmarm, or what?” He set down the last box and parked his Stetson on the newel post.

“I’m a journalist. I have to read a lot.” She picked up his hat and tipped it onto her head for a half second, then whipped it off and plopped it back on the banister.

“A journalist? Well, good luck finding a job around here,” Luke said. “We’ve only got one newspaper, and it’s barely surviving, because there isn’t any news at all.” He picked up the hat and set it back on her head, adjusting it to a rakish angle. “Don’t take that off,” he said. “It suits you.”

“No thanks.” She took it off and shook her springy brown curls back into free-form disarray, and he had to agree the wild, untamed look suited her way better than the hat.

“So I guess my new job will be a challenge,” she said.