by Crane, Megan
Chet was collecting his winner’s buckle for best all-around cowboy at the Nevada Spring Creek Stampede with the announcer’s voice booming, “Che-e-et Wyndham!” from the amplifiers, while the smell of dust and dung and horse feed and hot dogs wafted all around them.
Jamie hadn’t been so lucky today, in the saddle bronc. No buckles for him. He made an effort with Tegan. “So, wedding tomorrow.”
“You’d better show up.” Tegan flicked him a quick look. More like a glare, with those deep dragon-green eyes. She’d placed seventeenth in the barrel-racing, and she wasn’t happy. Her strong chin was stuck out stubbornly, above a smooth neck that disappeared down into a bling-covered western shirt. She had a mile-wide competitive streak that matched Jamie’s own, and it amused him sometimes because you wouldn’t have guessed it to look at her. He got a kick out of the contrast.
But she’d kicked him in a different way, this time, implying he might be unreliable on Chet’s wedding day, of all times. She carried her poor opinion of him too far, and there was no call for it.
“Like I wouldn’t show,” he said on a growl. “I’m the best man.”
“Well, you don’t seem that thrilled about it.” The green eyes challenged him, and he looked quickly away.
Yeah, he wasn’t thrilled. But not for the reason she probably thought - their dislike of each other.
In fact, he didn’t know what was bothering him about Chet and Tegan getting married. This was a super-practical green card wedding so that Tegan could stay in the country and keep on with her barrel-racing career. It wasn’t some big, hot romance between the two of them that was going to disappear in a cloud of rodeo dust after the excitement wore off.
That thing flashed into Jamie’s mind. The thing Chet had hit him with a couple of months ago when he was drunk – well, when they were both drunk, in fact. The thing Jamie didn’t like to think about, and that Chet didn’t even seem to remember, the next morning. Jamie always made his thoughts veer away from it, like he was doing now, not naming it in his head, not assigning it a value.
It probably had nothing to do with his doubts about the wedding, anyhow.
“You got a dress and everything?” he asked Tegan, to distract himself.
“We’re going with rodeo-themed outfits. You have a western shirt you can wear, right? Black, if you can. I hate dresses.”
Chet finished collecting his buckle and began ambling toward them, wearing the grin that came from relief because he wasn’t in plaster or a neck collar or a brace, as well as from knowing he’d banked a four-figure sum today. Jamie had earned a small part of that, because they team-roped together and had just squeaked into the money.
“Still, you could wear a dress to your own wedding,” he said mildly.
“Oh, because you like to see women in skirts they can’t walk in, and stress-fracture shoes?”
“No, because it’s a wedding.”
She glared at him again, but this time he met the look steady and full-on, and she was the one to chicken out first. Gotcha, he thought, and watched as her fingers brushed in an uncertain way against her neck and some late afternoon sun etched the side of her jaw. Her cheeks had gone pink, and he couldn’t see her eyes anymore, just her lashes, which were so long and dark.
Then Chet arrived and the whole atmosphere changed. He was still buzzy from the win, and Tegan met him more than halfway. “I can’t believe you got a buckle for today. When I saw you the first three seconds out of the chute on that bronc, I thought you’d never stick him for the full eight. As for the team-roping, that was pure dumb luck, baby! Neither of you earned it.”
She punched Chet’s arm and he gave her a jittery hug and said, “What about you, tonight? What happened?”
“I should have shaved more off that last turn. I’m so mad at myself.”
As soon as horse-talk turned technical, Chet was in his element, and he always looked happier. He said, “Yeah, you should, but you had your foot stuck out so far, if you had shaved it, you would have kicked the barrel down.”
“Okay, you’re probably right.” Tegan gave one of her grins – the goofy one that said she knew she’d stuffed up. She had several quite different ways of smiling, Jamie had noticed, depending on her state of mind. “I need to work on my stupid feet, don’t I?”
“Let’s go spend some of this.” Chet flapped his wad of cash in the air.
“Bachelor party,” Jamie said, then wished he hadn’t.
Tegan loved the idea. “Yeah, Chet, you should.” She clapped her hands.
“We don’t need that,” he protested, but it was half-hearted. Jamie could already see the intention growing in him.
Chet would get pass-out drunk, the night before his wedding. There would be yelling and destruction, and Chet would get himself arrested if he could possibly manage it. Who planned that?
“Get some of the guys,” Tegan was saying. She had the same spark of life in her face as she did after she’d had a good run with the barrels. “I’ll grab some girls and have a hen night.”
“A what?” Jamie said.
“Hen night. Stag night for girls. Bachelorette party. I don’t know what language I’m speaking any more, what’s Australian and what’s not.”
“We don’t need a lot of guys,” Chet said. “Maybe just the two of us. Wanna hit some bars, Jamie?”
Not really. Not at all.
But he sensed his friend’s need. And, after all, the guy was getting married tomorrow. Maybe that would solve a few things.
Maybe it wouldn’t.
Chet was a phenomenal horseman. This was the bedrock of Jamie and Chet’s friendship, their professional partnership, and Chet’s friendship with Tegan as well, Jamie had to think. The two of them had met at the Fiesta de los Vaqueros in Tucson in February last year. Chet had been battling to free his best horse, Diego, who’d somehow gotten himself caught in the rails of his yard and panicked as a result. Tegan had seen the problem and helped out.
She’d earned a massive hoof-shaped bruise on her shoulder and a fat cut lip, but her help meant that Diego had been freed and had calmed down without getting himself hurt. Anyone who shrugged off their own injuries as long as the horse was fine would have Chet’s undying friendship, so by the time Jamie had come along an hour later, after the whole thing was over, Tegan and Chet had formed a bond that soon seemed as strong as the one between Chet and Jamie, who’d known each other five years.
A few months ago, Jamie had asked Chet in frustration, “What is it you like so much about her?” Because it definitely wasn’t based on sex. Jamie thought he would have noticed in a flash if Chet was hitting on her.
Chet had thought for a moment, then told him, “I like that her clothes don’t match her personality.”
Yeah, buddy, that makes sense.
What was it, really? Jamie was never sure.
All three of them could talk horses and live horses, and they all knew... lived... the adrenalin rush and bone-deep rightness of working in tandem with another creature ten times your own size. They knew the beauty of communication with no language, of doing something you were born to do and doing it better than most other people on the planet.
They’d become a triangle, Jamie and Chet, Chet and Tegan, but the third side of the triangle - Jamie and Tegan - didn’t connect.
“Yeah, we can hit some bars,” Jamie said. He hated to think what might happen if he wasn’t there to keep Chet under control. “But I’m your best man, remember?” He made it as light as he could. “I have a responsibility to get you sober and only slightly hung-over to your wedding ceremony, or Tegan’ll fire me from the job and make you get a new one.”
Chet looked as if sober and hangover-free wasn’t on his agenda, while Tegan just frowned. She was intense, sometimes. Built lean and tall with her tumble of streaky blond hair, she was too big to be a jockey on the race-track, but she would have had the courage for it.
She worked part-time for a bucking stock contractor, Bob Crannock, and love
d her barrel-racing mare Shildara like a sister. She very openly thought Jamie was a dick, and blamed him for everything that was wrong with Chet – in other words, the drinking - and Jamie didn’t know how to handle that - how to correct her... or how to admit to it.
Maybe she was right, and he was a bad influence. Maybe he really didn’t know how to talk to women.
The redhead who offered to share her bed with him later that night didn’t seem to mind.
Much later that night.
Three in the morning before they sealed the deal. She had a hotel room and he knew she wanted him in it as soon as she discovered he was a pro rodeo rider, and what his year-to-date earnings were. He didn’t tell her he sent most of it back to his dad to pay for improvements on the ranch.
He and the redhead flirted for a couple of hours and he drank more than he wanted, and Chet drank about twice as much, and Jamie didn’t especially want to go to bed with the redhead, Kristi, but it seemed like the best way to deliver Chet back to their trailer and away from the drinking. “I’m getting some action, buddy, mind if we call it a night?”
When he said to Kristi that he had to get Chet to bed first, she slipped him a key, told him the hotel and room number, and invited him to meet her there.
Chet didn’t want to let go of the evening. He swayed at the bottom of the horse-trailer steps and Jamie had to open the door and help him inside. “I love you, man,” Chet said, in a broken voice. “I love you.”
“I love you, too, buddy. But I gotta go meet Kristi. Have a drink of water.”
There, Tegan. He didn’t get arrested, and he’ll pass out in his own bed. What more could you want from a best man?
With the job done, he went off to Kristi’s hotel, but when he reached the lobby, he knew he couldn’t go through with it. He just didn’t want to. Where was the satisfaction in something so shallow and easy? Where was the bite? He turned around and left, taking a long, ambling walk back to the rodeo ground so that Chet would be deep asleep by the time he arrived back.
There, Tegan, he thought again, although this time he wasn’t sure what point he was trying to prove.
Everything fell apart the next day.
Tegan had a blast at her hen night. Twelve barrel-racers, not too much to drink, lots of bar food and shrieking and raunchy humor. It was a long time since she’d let her hair down that much, and she needed it.
All the girls wanted to know if they could come to the wedding and she told them, sure, but it really wouldn’t be much of an event. Since some of them were heading to Texas and others to New Jersey, and the ones going to Lewiston in Idaho, or to the 75th Annual Copper Mountain Rodeo in Montana next weekend had the short journey, each less than fifteen hours, then they should probably start driving, she suggested, rather than hanging around until eleven in the morning for a five-minute event in a country-town Nevada wedding chapel.
In the end, it wasn’t an event at all - although the non-event was probably more dramatic and gossip-worthy than the wedding would have been.
Chet and Jamie stood at the top of the wedding chapel’s cheesy aisle. Feeling way more churned up and nervous than she would have expected, Tegan walked toward them in her fringed white satin shirt with the rhinestones, her white canvas jeans, and her favorite custom hand-painted cowgirl boots in white, gold, turquoise and tan, with her trailer-hauling partner Kara, who’d been roped in as a bridesmaid and was similarly dressed. They’d hot-rollered their hair half-way to Christmas and back, one blonde and one brunette, and only at the last minute had they decided not to wear their favorite cowgirl hats in case they squashed the hair.
“I mean, it is possible to take the rodeo queen look too far,” Kara had decided for both of them.
For once Chet seemed oblivious to the impressive effort they’d made. Tegan’s heart went out to him, and she forgot her own nerves in a rush of tenderness. Shoot, he’d promised her that he wanted to do this, so she could stay in the country! But he didn’t look as if he wanted to, today.
Instead, he looked miserable and/or hung-over, and/or about to have a stress breakdown. He and Jamie both held themselves as stiff as boards, their ropey, muscular frames hard and unmoving in their crisp new jeans, black cowboy shirts and black and tan boots. Two sets of blue eyes, one bloodshot, one clear. Two shocks of dark hair. Jamie’s was getting a little long around the collar.
He took a quick, sideways look at Chet, and Tegan could see that he was worried about Chet, too. His smooth bow of a mouth was set flat and his eyes had narrowed, and when he looked back down the aisle at Tegan, they narrowed more. Instantly, she felt to blame, although she didn’t know what for, and went hot and aware all over.
Why did Jamie always make her feel so uncomfortable inside her own skin? He drove her crazy.
She reached them, and tried to smile at Chet, and he greeted her with the words, “I can’t do this, Tegan. I can’t marry you.”
He flashed an agonized look at Jamie, while Tegan hid her painfully intense disappointment and rage. She was pretty sure what that look meant, now, and pretty sure about the meaning of Jamie’s narrowed eyes. He must have tried to argue Chet out of the marriage idea last night, and unfortunately Chet hadn’t been too drunk to remember the arguments this morning. She didn’t know what to do, or how to feel.
Guys, I need this wedding. You know that.
Her visa ran out in six weeks, there was nothing for her at home any more - Ah, jeesh, that still hurt so much! - and Bob Crannock had lost interest in helping her. When he’d seen her on the rodeo circuit in Australia on a visit there two years ago, he’d made huge promises about her potential in barrel-racing and what he could do for her. He’d brought her over here on a temporary working visa, helped her find a good horse, given her a part-time job so she could make ends meet, hadn’t hit on her once.
Well, not seriously, anyhow.
But although she’d had some great wins, her success so far hadn’t been as fast or as stellar as he’d wanted. She’d made it to the National Finals Rodeo in Las Vegas last December, but she’d only placed fourteenth, and she wasn’t his flavor of the month, any more. There were other, younger, hotter and more well-connected barrel-racers coming through, and he was backing them instead. As far as he was concerned, it was bye-bye, Tegan.
And maybe she should just have sold her horse and her half-share in the horse trailer and gone home, but she had nothing to go home to.
Not now that Dad had sold the farm.
Not now that she understood the painfully false foundation underpinning her whole life.
Don’t think about it.
She was stubborn and she had something to prove, now more than ever, and she’d given so much to this quest already. Lost so much to it. She wasn’t going to let Bob Crannock’s shallow faith and short attention span dictate her life.
Hence, the wedding plan.
Chet had been the obvious candidate for groom. They liked each other, and yet there was no hint of awkward attraction getting in the way. It was the absolute opposite of how she felt about Jamie – no, wait, except for the attraction bit. Chet had agreed to the marriage plan right away, with an air of deep inner relief, almost as if he’d needed something like this to happen. As if it was a lifeline of some kind.
“Of course I’ll marry you,” he’d said. “Wow. Of course. It’ll be great. So good. Perfect.”
And now he was jilting her at the altar with a look of such pain on his face that she couldn’t let him see that she was mad at him. She just couldn’t. She cared about him too much. There was something deep inside him that called to her instincts and made her want to protect him, the same way Jamie did.
Maybe she wasn’t mad at Chet. Maybe it really was all down to Jamie, and whatever had happened with the two of them last night at their wretched stag night, and this would be typical because Jamie was a bad influence - a very good-looking, stubborn and immovable bad influence - and she didn’t have the slightest clue why Chet liked him so much.
“It’s okay,” she said to both of them brightly. “I’ll find someone else.”
The man officiating looked a little startled at this, but had probably seen a lot worse. They got themselves out of there, because they’d only had a ten-minute slot booked for the ceremony and another wedding group was probably due in.
Then they got on with their lives.
In other words, they loaded horses into gooseneck trailers, filled guzzling gas tanks with a giant amount of fuel, and hit the road.
Over the next four days, Chet apologized to her about a thousand times, in person, on the phone, via text, in a card. He even sent her chocolates and flowers, just about the prettiest arrangement she’d ever seen, with another card that read, “I have stuff I’m working out. You got caught in the middle. I’m really, really more sorry than you can possibly know.”
All of which only made her blame Jamie MacCreadie more.
Marry Me, Cowboy coming September 24, 2013!
Excerpt: Promise Me, Cowboy
(Copper Mountain Rodeo #3)
C.J. Carmichael
Chapter One
A lot of people believe you can’t keep a secret in a small town, but that simply wasn’t true. Sage Carrigan was only twenty-nine years old and already she had two that would blow the minds of her sisters and her father and the girlfriends who thought they knew every little thing about her.
And one of those secrets was just now stepping into her chocolate shop.
Sage stepped behind the counter, needing something solid to lean on. It was really him, Dawson O’Dell, her biggest secret, her biggest mistake...her biggest weakness.
Right now O’Dell was one of the top ranked cowboys in professional rodeo. She’d met him back in her barrel-racing days, but five years hadn’t changed him much. He still dressed like the bronc-rider he was, in Wrangler jeans and dusty boots, western shirt unbuttoned to the white T shirt beneath. His dark blonde hair was a little too long, and his green eyes a little too astute.
