When the Cowboy said “I Do”

by Crystal Green

  All right, she was in a corner, anyway.

  This was it—she would have to utter a fake name she’d already made up for just this sort of situation. She would have to commit herself and then suffer the consequences when this phantom fiancé never materialized.

  Or she would have to get the truth over with right now.

  It seemed like a thousand years went by as her dad sat on the edge of the settee like a predator ready to pounce on whatever came out of her mouth.

  Just as Holly thought he was about to call her on her lies, her cell phone rang in the foyer, where she’d left it in the pocket of her coat.

  She nearly jumped on her way to answer it.

  “You get back here!” her dad said.

  But she moved as fast as she safely could, shoved her hand into her coat pocket, pulled out her phone and said, “Hello?”

  When she heard a familiar yet vexing voice, she didn’t have it in her to be exasperated.

  “Holly,” Bo said, “don’t hang up.”

  Everything came together for her in that moment, no matter how little sense it made in the real world—her sheer desperation for a way out, an easy, tempting answer.

  The solution that’d been hanging in front of her, waiting for her to grab it.

  “Hi, honey,” she said.

  There was a pause at the other end of the line.

  “Where are you?” she continued.

  Her dad’s boot steps sounded on the planked floor, stopping just around the corner, where he leaned against the wall, his face red, his burly arms crossed over his chest.

  Bo’s tone was wary. “A few seconds ago, I would’ve said that you really wouldn’t want to know where I am. I might’ve even said that you would’ve chewed me out for having the presumption to get your number, but—”

  She cut him off with a smitten laugh, just for her father’s sake. “I just want to know when you’re going to get here,” she said, smiling at her dad and pointing at the phone. See, Dad, instant fiancé! “Will it be more than the few weeks you told me you’d be gone?”

  She couldn’t leave any more of a hint for Bo to play off of than that.

  God help her.

  When her dad left the foyer, clearly relieved that this fiancé was going to get to the ranch sooner or later for him to question, Holly slumped back against the door.

  She was doing this.

  Really doing it.

  Bo seemed to know something was amiss, and he didn’t skip a beat. “I can be there in a snap.”

  No turning back now.

  “How much of a snap?” she asked.

  The last sound she heard on the phone was Bo’s low, devil-may-care laugh.

  Then there was a knock on the door.

  Holly hung up the phone just as her father came back into the foyer, as bewildered as she was.

  With her head reeling—what was she going to tell her dad when he saw Bo the mayor candidate, who hadn’t been out of town at all?—she opened the door.

  And there he was—Bo Clifton in his cowboy hat, a gleam in his eyes, that killer smile on his face while he held open his arms for her.

  “Sweetheart,” he said.

  Feeling herself sliding down the rabbit hole, Holly said a rapid prayer and rushed to her “fiancé.”

  Chapter Three

  As Holly nestled into Bo’s arms, her blond curls tickled his face.

  Honey. That’s what she smelled like.

  And her body…?

  He felt every curve—the full breasts crushed against him, the lean muscles below her sweater.

  The small swell of her baby bump.

  Strangely touched, he backed away an inch, looked down at her, seeing how her cheeks flushed, her eyes shining with something between perplexity and…

  Hell, he didn’t know. But out of pure playfulness, he touched her cheek.

  “Did you miss me?” he asked, just daring her to tell him why she’d changed her mind about his offer. Seeing how far she was willing to go now that he was here. He’d been just down the drive in the hopes that he could talk her into going out for a tea or whatever pregnant women drank, and the shorter the drive to her door, the less time she would have to change her mind about listening him out just one last time.

  Sure, he was a little insistent, but Bo had always known when to go in for the kill, and Holly had sure seemed as if she’d been open to some more persuading back at the resort.

  “I sure did miss you,” she said, her voice thick with an emotion Bo couldn’t name.

  Obviously, she was acting the hell out of this.

  But as he looked down at her, it felt real enough, awareness growing like a force field between them, urging him to lower his mouth to hers. Compelling him to.

  Then her gaze went from a soft blue to an icy shade that told him she knew what kind of rascally thoughts he was thinking, and she pinched his waist under his coat, where her dad wouldn’t be able to see it.

  He let her go as she turned toward Hank Pritchett, but that certain something—that second of flickering fire—stayed with Bo, licking at his gut.

  God knows why, because he hadn’t chosen Holly as a true wife. Fire had no place here, just as it hadn’t with his parents after a while.

  “Dad,” she said. “You know Bo Clifton.”

  Her father was a barrel of a man, and right now he had the complexion of a barrel made out of redwood as he stood in the foyer with his arms crossed. But even if Bo had known him for years and occasionally spoke to him around town, he wasn’t about to act flippant with Hank, and he nodded respectfully to him.

  As the older man seethed, Bo started to catch on to the reason Holly had changed her tune about his offer. She’d been put into even more of a spot with her father, hadn’t she? Why else would she have been so relieved to hear Bo on the phone? Why else would she have given him that enthusiastic hug at the door?

  No matter right now. He would ask questions later and accept this boon from Holly.

  “Sir,” he said to Hank, recalling what Holly had told him on the phone about a three week absence and putting it together with all the information he’d culled from eavesdropping earlier. “Holly made me promise that she wasn’t going to let you in on our secret until after the election, and it looks as if she made good on that.”

  Hank didn’t seem to be hearing him. “Holly, you told me that your fiancé was out of town.”

  She clasped her hands, and Bo wondered if a woman with her steel would actually start wringing them.

  He was all too glad to step in.

  He rested his hand on Holly’s back, felt her stiffen ever so slightly before she put that lovey-dovey smile back on her face and glanced at him with those big blue doe eyes.

  “Hank,” he said, “I know we’ve got a lot of explaining to do. But before we get into it, I want to let you know that I’ve been waiting far too long to get married to your daughter, and I intend to make her the happiest woman in the world.”

  With that, Bo motioned toward the parlor. Hank gave him a half-stink eye—a cautious glare, really—and disappeared behind the corner into the other room.

  The second he was gone, Holly grabbed Bo’s coat lapels, whispering, “I didn’t give Dad a name for my fiancé…just said he owns two ranches and has varied business interests.”

  “Two ranches, huh?” Bo whispered back. “He sounds just like me.”

  “Don’t get cocky.” She narrowed her eyes. “And don’t think I was modeling this fiancé after you or something.”

  “Why would I think that?”

  Bo grinned, heading toward the parlor. When Holly began to follow, he held up a finger.

  “I don’t mind taking it from here.”

  She opened her mouth to protest, but Bo pressed his finger against her lips. He’d meant to do it out of more playfulness, but when her eyes widened and her mouth parted, a blast of desire singed him.

  For a burning moment, he imagined bending just a few inches forward, closing the spa
ce between them, molding his lips to hers to see what it might feel like. How she might taste…

  Hank’s voice came from the parlor. “I ain’t got all night.”

  It was as if Bo was a teenager who’d been caught in the backseat of a Cadillac with Hank Pritchett’s daughter, and he stepped away from Holly. He recovered quickly though, doffing his coat and hat, handing them to her, then winking.

  She rolled her eyes but didn’t go anywhere, just waited while clutching his belongings.

  When he arrived in the parlor, Hank was sitting before a fire, the orange light suffusing him, making him look even ten times hotter in the head than Bo would’ve liked.

  Bo sat in a wingback chair opposite his future father-in-law’s settee, but his rear had barely touched the seat before Hank drilled into him.

  “You, of all men, Bo, taking advantage of Holly.”

  “Hank, I assure you—”

  “Walking out on her.”

  “There was no walking, believe me. And definitely no running. Only a man out of his mind would let her go. I should explain why this situation seems out of sorts.”

  He paused, willing to let Hank get out more of his frustration before Bo segued into the next phase of persuasion—the part where he won over Holly’s father.

  When Hank didn’t say anything more, Bo took that for a good sign, and off he went.

  “While Holly was in Bozeman, at college, we ran into each other in town. I barely recognized her from years ago, but there she was, the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen.” A whooping good start, and Bo realized that the telling of it wasn’t hard in the least. All he had to do was recall earlier tonight, when he’d first seen Holly in the restaurant: blond curls, lively blue eyes—a woman he really did think to be beautiful.

  “I was lost to her in that second,” he added.

  A lie, of course. But as something rotated in his chest, it felt as if it had really happened that way.

  Hank had one hand buried in a varied-colored afghan, grasping it as if he might just be throwing a cushioned punch at Bo.

  Time to explain more. “I knew right then that I had to spend the rest of my life with Holly.”

  “And what about her getting pregnant before you even brought her to the altar?”

  Hank was leveling a death stare, and Bo had to remind himself that he wasn’t the man who’d left Holly. He was just the guy who was lying to her father now, although it was for a greater good.

  It was for Thunder Canyon.

  His mind whirred, spinning more story. “We kept our relationship quiet. Holly is discreet, as you know.”

  “Obviously,” Hank said.

  Stay on target. “Before we got pregnant, we’d been planning on getting married for months, but Holly wanted to finish school first. That was important to her—to finish what she’d started with her degree before embarking on a new stage in life, which we thought should include law school after we got settled. Those plans made sense to me, because she’d have to deal with finals and graduating, and adding all that wedding planning would’ve been far too much at that point.”

  Bo measured Hank’s reaction, but the man hadn’t moved a muscle, not even in his face.

  So far, so good.

  “Then I started thinking about running for mayor and she loved the idea. But you know Holly—she’s the practical one. She added this to the pile of reasons to wait and announce our engagement. She said it would look better for me to be dating a graduate rather than a student.” Bo lowered his voice, as if sharing a confidence with Hank. “She’s been real sensitive about our age difference, and she believed that voters here in town might be the same.”

  Hank grunted, then said, “She’s a decade or more younger than you. No one wants the kind of mayor who steals everyone’s young daughters.”

  Okay, so he and Hank weren’t quite there yet. But Bo understood. Holly’s father was finding it tough to blame his daughter for this situation. She was Hank’s little girl, and she always would be.

  Bo got to the hardest part. “Then the baby came along.”

  He smiled like a happy father would, and, truthfully, Bo did have a soft spot for kids, so it wasn’t a stretch. It was just that he hadn’t ever thought he’d be the kind of man to have any children of his own—not with maintaining two ranches and having a pretty damned good time dating around. And certainly not with the example his parents had set with their divorce.

  Then it hit him—he was going to be a father.

  While the realization swam through his head, Bo felt Hank watching closely, so he got himself together.

  “You also know how stubborn Holly is,” he continued. “She insisted on a secret engagement while I ran for mayor. She didn’t want Arthur Swinton to have a leg up in the campaign because she knew he’d twist the pregnancy into some kind of moral shortcoming for us, when that just isn’t the case at all. She thought he’d turn everything into an ugly scandal and Thunder Canyon would come out the biggest loser in the end.”

  Hank looked into the fire. “Holly believes in you that much, does she?”

  “Yes. But I didn’t give up on changing her mind that easily. I wanted to shout out loud how we feel about each other because, surely, when the public could see how much I love her, they’d be just fine with voting for me, no matter what Arthur Swinton might say.”

  Hank exhaled, and suddenly, he seemed like an old man who’d been put out to pasture, unneeded, set aside. “I wish she’d at least told her father what was happening.”

  Bo came over to the settee, and it wasn’t even because it was part of a plan to ingratiate himself with Hank. The guy just looked so sad.

  “Holly relented tonight,” Bo said, thinking Hank would like to hear this, even if the truth was being stretched. “She decided you should know after she saw how much it hurt you not to have known about the baby. She called me after she left the house, and I met her and Erika at the Rib Shack. She was only waiting until I got here to tell you everything.”

  “Even so…” Hank said, trailing off, still wounded.

  “I’ve been counting down the days until I could finally do this the right way with Holly,” Bo said. “That’s why I came right over to ask you for her hand in marriage.”

  The older man looked away from the fire, and it was obvious that Bo had spoken to something within him.

  Bo wasn’t the cur who’d taken advantage of his daughter—not anymore. Bo might’ve even been on track to becoming a decent guy again in Hank’s eyes.

  “I’m going to love your daughter and our baby more than any man ever could,” Bo said. “You can depend on that.”

  At least for six months….

  Guilt tried to worm its way into Bo’s gut, but he shut it out.

  Still, when Hank gave a slow nod and glanced back into the fire while grasping that afghan, Bo didn’t feel any sense of victory at all.

  Around the corner, Holly nearly hugged the wall as she overheard the conversation.

  I’m going to love your daughter and our baby more than any man ever could….

  It should’ve been Alan the Rat saying those things to her dad.

  But he’d never loved her, and she knew it. She’d ached for months after accepting that fact, too.

  So why did it hurt so much to hear Bo in there talking to her dad now? Did the pain have something to do with how Bo sounded like he meant every last syllable, even though all of his promises were just as false as Alan’s?

  As Holly pushed herself away from the wall, she felt sick again. She rubbed her stomach, as if to show her baby that no matter what happened, Mommy would always, always be there for him or her, even without a father.

  Meanwhile, Bo and her dad talked for a few more minutes, but Holly didn’t really hear what they said. She just kept replaying the part about Bo vowing to love her and the baby.

  But what if…?

  Nah. She shouldn’t go there, fantasizing, even for a second, that someone like Bo even had the capacity to utter
these things to her and mean them.

  She heard him say good-night to her father, then walk out of the parlor. When he rounded the corner, her pulse gave a jerk, then sputtered back to its normal cadence.

  But when she looked into Bo’s eyes, her heartbeat went full speed ahead.

  She gestured for him to follow her to the kitchen, where they stood by counters littered with crumbs, unwashed plates and peanut butter and jelly jars with skewed lids. Her brothers had clearly been in here, too.

  The stone hearth was dark, unlike the one in the parlor. From the back of the cabin, she heard the door slam. Seconds later, she saw her father through the window, clad in his coat and cowboy hat. A sting of red light showed that he’d lit up a smoke.

  Holly picked up a jar, screwing the lid on properly. “You’re a magnificent storyteller.”

  He’d brought the rib box out of the parlor with him, and he put it in the fridge. “I had enough information to go off of, based on what I heard tonight and what I already know about you. And what people say here in Thunder Canyon about Holly Pritchett.”

  She didn’t want to know what they said. All she cared about was her family. “How do you think it went?”

  “He’ll come around even more. He just needs some thinking time.”

  Bo fetched a couple of tin plates and put them in the sink. A guy who knew how to clean up. Little by little, he was racking up the points.

  “And…?” she urged.

  “Are you asking what happens next?”

  He had that canary-eating grin again.

  “I guess I am,” she said, ignoring the lure of him. “I’m new to this faux-marriage drill, so I’m just not sure.”

  “Me, too, but we’ll navigate it fine.” He turned on the water to rinse the plates as she put the jelly and peanut butter jars in the pantry. “We’ll have to set a date soon.”

  A date for the wedding.

  Oh, this really was coming at her now…zooming…tearing up her head…

  “I’d also appreciate it,” Bo said, “if you’d start accompanying me on some campaign outings. Not too many. I don’t want to tax you. But since our secret’s going to be out in the open come tomorrow…”