Blame It on the Cowboy Read online

  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.

  Not exactly a pleasant reminder.

  Reese stood to excuse herself so she could go lie down on the air mattress. Jimena wouldn’t even question it, thank God, but before Reese could say anything, she heard the movement in the still-open doorway.

  “All the stuff is gone,” Reese said, figuring this was just another neighbor responding to her “free stuff” sign that she had taped on the side of the apartment complex’s mailboxes.

  But it wasn’t a neighbor.

  It was Dr. Gutzman.

  Since Reese had never seen the stocky gray-haired man outside his office and never dressed in anything but a white coat, it took her a moment to realize who he was. Another moment for her to think the worst.

  “Did you come to tell me there’ll be no radiation, after all?” Reese managed to ask.

  He opened his mouth, closed it. Then nodded. “You won’t be having radiation,” he confirmed.

  As much as Reese was dreading the treatments—and she was indeed dreading them—they’d been the tiny sliver of hope. Her 2 percent chance of survival. Of course, she hadn’t truly embraced that sliver, but now Dr. Gutzman had just taken it away.

  “I’d rather not die in a hospital,” Reese volunteered.

  Jimena stood and took hold of her hand. Reese could feel the bits of sticky Cheetos on her friend’s fingers.

  The doctor nodded, came in and eased the door shut. He glanced around the nearly empty room and frowned. Perhaps because of the junk-food stash.

  “You’re not going to die in a hospital,” he said. “At least, not in the next week or so from an inoperable brain tumor.”

  Reese was still on the page of thinking the worst. “Does that mean I’m going to die even sooner?”

  He huffed, glanced around as if this were the last place he wanted to be. “There was a glitch with the new electronic records system. Your images got mixed up with another patient. When I realized the mistake, I had a look at yours, and other than an enlarged left sinus cavity, you’re fine.”

  Reese couldn’t speak. She just stared at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The doctor didn’t look like a prankster, but maybe this was his idea of a really bad joke.

  “Did you hear me?” he asked.

  She had. Every word. And Reese was desperately trying to process something that just wasn’t processing in her mind.

  “So, there’s really nothing wrong with her?” Jimena asked.

  “Nothing. She’s as healthy as a horse.”

  Reese hadn’t been around too many horses to know if they were especially healthy or not, but she would take the doc’s news as gospel.

  Right after she threw up, that is.

  God, she was going to live.

  * * *

 
LOGAN SLAMMED DOWN the phone. Jason Murdock, his friend and the rancher Logan had been buying stock from for years, had just given Logan a much-too-sweet deal on some Angus.

  Hell.

  Much more of this and Logan was going to beat the crap out of somebody. Especially the next person who was overly nice to him or gave him a sweet deal on anything.

  For the past three months since the mess with Helene, nearly everybody who called or came into the office was walking on sonofabitching eggshells around him, and it not only pissed him off, it was disrespectful.

  He’d run McCord Cattle Brokers since he was nineteen, since his folks had been killed in a car crash, and he’d run it well. In those early years people had questioned his ability to handle a company this size.

  Silently questioned it, anyway.

  But Logan had built the image and reputation he needed to make sure those questions were never spoken aloud. He’d done that through ball-busting business practices where nobody but nobody walked on eggshells. Yet, here they were all still doing just that. After three months.

  Not just his family, either.

  He’d halfway expected it from Riley, Claire, Lucky and Cassie because they’d been at the scene of what Lucky was calling the great proposal fuckup. Logan expected it, too, from his assistant, Greg Larkin, since he was the sort who remembered birthdays and such shit.

  But everybody in Spring Hill who’d had a reason to come to Logan’s office door had looked at him with those sad puppy-dog eyes. He could only imagine how bad it was when those puppy-eyed people weren’t right in front of him. All the behind-the-hand whispers were no doubt mumbles about poor, pitiful Logan and what Helene had done to him.

  Logan tried to make a note on the business contract he was reading and cursed when his pen didn’t work. He yanked open his desk drawer with enough force to rip it from its runners, and got another reminder he didn’t want.

  That blasted gold watch.

  Why he still had it, Logan didn’t know, but every time he saw it he remembered his night with Julia. Or whatever the hell her name was. She should have been nothing but a distant memory now and soon would be once he found her and returned the blasted watch. Until then, he moved it to his bottom drawer next to the bottle of Glenlivet he kept there.

  Of course, if it hadn’t been for the Glenlivet, he probably wouldn’t have slept with Julia and wouldn’t have had the watch in the first place.

  Logan moved it to the bottom drawer on the other side.

  Damn it all to hell!

  The engagement ring was still there, too. The bottom drawers of his desk were metaphorical land mines, and this time he made a note. Two of them.

  Get rid of the ring.

  Find Julia and have someone return the watch.

  Logan didn’t want the ring around because he was over Helene. And as for the watch—he didn’t want it around in case there was something to the blackmail/extortion theory he’d had about her. Even though it had been three months since their encounter, that didn’t mean she wasn’t out there plotting some way to do something he wasn’t going to like. That’s why he’d hired a private investigator to find her, but so far the PI had come up empty.

  “Don’t,” Logan barked when Lucky appeared in the doorway of his office.

  He hadn’t heard his brother coming up the hall, but since Lucky was wearing his good jeans and a jacket, it probably meant he was there for a meeting. Lucky certainly wouldn’t have dressed up just to check on him.

  “Don’t interrupt you, or don’t draw my next breath?” Lucky asked. He bracketed his hands on the office door, cocked his head to the side.

  “Both if you’re here to talk about anything that doesn’t involve a cow, bull or a horse.”

  “How about bullshit?”

  Logan looked up from the contract to see if Lucky was serious. He appeared to be. Just in case, Logan decided to clarify. “Bullshit that’s not specifically related to anything that involves my ex?”

  “Well, unless Helene has started secretly pooping in the pastures, it doesn’t,” Lucky confirmed.

  Logan was almost afraid to motion for Lucky to continue, but he finally did. Curiosity was a sick thing sometimes.

  “You haven’t been to the house, well, in a couple of months,” Lucky went on, “but I had thirty bulls delivered to those pastures and corrals we talked about using.”

  So, definitely not a Helene problem. And Logan knew which pastures and corrals Lucky meant. The pastures were on the east side of the house, and with the right mixture of grasses for the young bulls they’d bought so they could be trained for the rodeo.

  “The wind must have shifted or something because, this morning, all you could smell was bullshit in the house. Everybody’s complaining, even Mia,” Lucky added.

  A first for Mia. To the best of Logan’s knowledge, the four-year-old girl never complained about anything. Unlike her thirteen-year-old sister, Mackenzie. Lucky and Cassie had guardianship of the pair, but the girls were yin and yang. If Mia was complaining, Logan didn’t want to know how much Mackenzie was carrying on. Or the longtime housekeepers, Della and Stella, who also lived at the ranch.

  “You’re sure it’s bullshit and not cat shit?” Logan asked. Because along with inheriting guardianship of the girls, Lucky and Cassie had also inherited six cats. Five of those cats were now at the ranch.

  Lucky shook his head. “Definitely bullshit, and I should know because I’m a bullshit connoisseur.”

  Since Lucky had been riding rodeo bulls for more than a decade, that did indeed make him an expert. Not just on the crap but the bulls themselves.

  “That means I’m going to need to move them,” Lucky went on, “and I was thinking about the back pastures. But Rico said you were planning on putting some horses back there.”

  He was. Or rather, Riley was since he was in charge of the new cutting horse program that they’d started. And Riley and Logan had indeed discussed that with Rico Callahan, one of their top ranch hands.

  Logan sat there, debating on which would smell worse—horseshit or bullshit. It was a toss-up. “Move the bulls to the back pastures,” Logan finally said. “When the horses arrive, I’ll have Riley split them in the other pastures for the time being.”

  It was a temporary fix since Riley would eventually want the cutting horses together so they’d be easier to train, and that meant they needed to prep one of the other two pastures they weren’t using. The problem at the McCord Ranch wasn’t enough land—there was plenty of that—but with their operation expanding, they needed someone who could manage the ranch grounds themselves. Someone more than just the hands.

  “Hire whoever you need to fix this,” Logan told his brother.

  Whenever he was talking to Lucky, his twin, Logan always tried to tone down his voice. After all, Lucky could have been co-CEO, but in his will, their father had named only Logan. Logan supposed he felt guilty about that, but then until recently Lucky had shown zero interest in being part of McCord Cattle Brokers. Since it was something Logan had always wanted—all of his siblings helping him with the family business—he didn’t want to push any of Lucky’s buttons that might be waiting to be pushed.

  Lucky mumbled that he would hire someone and checked his watch. “Say, it’s lunchtime. Wanna go over to the Fork and Spoon and grab something to eat?”

  Logan figured that was Lucky’s plan all along, to get him out of the office because Lucky could have just called with the bullshit problem. Lucky did have an office just up the hall, but he rarely used it. He wasn’t a behind-the-desk kind of guy. Plus, he still had his own rodeo promotion company to run. What with raising two kids and being in a fairly new relationship, Lucky didn’t have a lot of free time.

  Which meant this was a coddling attempt on Lucky’s part.

  “No.” Lucky held up his hands
in defense as if he knew what Logan was thinking. Maybe he did. Logan had never experienced that twin telepathy thing, but it was possible Lucky did. Of course, telepathy wasn’t needed since Lucky had seen what Helene had done.

  “You’re not here to check on me?” Logan clarified.

  Lucky shook his head. “Della’s on a health kick and is making baked chicken and salad for lunch. I want a mystery-meat grease burger and soggy fries from the Fork and Spoon.”

  Logan gestured for him to go for it.

  Lucky huffed. “The waitresses,” he said.

  And Logan got it then. Not from telepathy, either. But Lucky had a reputation as a player, and despite the fact that he was now involved with Cassie, the waitresses and some other women in town seemed to enjoy testing Lucky’s commitment to Cassie. His brother must want that burger pretty bad to go through another round of that.

  “I’m not running interference for you with women,” Logan warned him.

  “No need. They’ll be feeling so sorry for you that they’ll leave me the heck alone. The last time I was in there, Sissy Lee spilled ice tea on my crotch and proceeded to wipe it off. Really hard and fast. I think she was trying her damnedest to give me a hand job.”

  If that had come from any other man, Logan would have considered it an exaggeration, but women did stuff like that to Lucky all the time, and it’d started around the time they hit puberty. Logan didn’t get it. Lucky and he were identical, but if you put them in the middle of a bunch of horny women, 90 percent of them would go after Lucky first.

  “You won’t run into Helene,” Lucky continued. “She hasn’t come back to town since everything happened.”

  Yeah, Greg had mentioned that, but when his assistant had tried to give him more details, Logan had told him to get his butt back to work. He didn’t need details about anything that involved Helene.

  “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from her?” Lucky asked.

  Logan managed to stave off a scowl. “No. And I don’t expect she’ll call because I doubt she’ll want to explain what was going on in her office that night.”