The Texas Cowboy's Quadruplets

by Cathy Gillen Thacker

  Sure, he might be ready to settle down and would like to have someone in his life, but he wasn’t at all sure if he had the time or energy for that someone to be a woman with so many secrets in her eyes, one who seemed to face the world with her chin up and her fists out, ready to take on any threats.

  When they walked into the clinic waiting room, they found her two girls there. The older one was texting on her phone while her sister did somersaults around the room.

  Dani stopped in the doorway and seemed to swallow an exasperated sound. “Mia, honey, you’re going to have dog hair all over you.”

  “I’m a snowball rolling down the hill,” the girl said. “Can’t you see me getting bigger and bigger and bigger.”

  “You’re such a dorkupine,” her sister said, barely looking up from her phone.

  “I’m a dorkupine snowball,” Mia retorted.

  “You’re a snowball who is going to be covered in dog hair,” Dani said. “Come on, honey. Get up.”

  He could tell the moment the little girl spotted him and his dogs coming into the area behind her mother. She went still and then slowly rose to her feet, features shifting from gleeful to nervous.

  Why was she so afraid of him?

  “You make a very good snowball,” he said, pitching his voice low and calm as his father had taught him to do with all skittish creatures. “I haven’t seen anybody somersault that well in a long time.”

  She moved to her mother’s side and buried her face in Dani’s white coat—though he didn’t miss the way she reached down to pet Ollie on her way.

  “Hey again, Silver.”

  He knew the older girl from the middle school, where he served as the resource officer a few hours a week. He made it a point to learn all the students’ names and tried to talk to them individually when he had the chance, in hopes that if they had a problem at home or knew of something potentially troublesome for the school, they would feel comfortable coming to him.

  He had the impression that Silver was like her mother in many ways. Reserved, wary, slow to trust. It made him wonder just who had hurt them.

  “How are things?” he asked her now.

  For just an instant, he thought he saw sadness flicker in her gaze before she turned back to her phone with a shrug. “Fine, I guess.”

  “Are you guys ready for Christmas? It’s your first one here in Idaho. A little different from New York, isn’t it?”

  “How should we know? We haven’t lived in the city for, like, four years.”

  Dani sent her daughter a look at her tone, which seemed to border on disrespectful. “I’ve been in vet school in Boston the last four years,” she explained.

  “Boston. Then you’re used to snow and cold. We’re known for our beautiful winters around here. The lake is simply stunning in wintertime.”

  Mia tugged on her mother’s coat and when Dani bent down, she whispered something to her.

  “You can ask him,” Dani said calmly, gesturing to Ruben.

  Mia shook her head and buried her face again and after a moment, Dani sighed. “She wonders if it’s possible to ice-skate on Lake Haven. We watched the most recent Olympics and she became a little obsessed.”

  “You could say that,” Silver said. “She skated around the house in her stocking feet all day long for weeks. A dorkupine on ice.”

  “You can’t skate on the lake, I’m afraid,” Ruben answered. “Because of the underground hot springs that feed into it at various points, Lake Haven rarely freezes, except sometimes along the edges, when it’s really cold. It’s not really safe for ice skating. But the city creates a skating rink on the tennis courts at Lake View Park every year. The volunteer fire department sprays it down for a few weeks once temperatures get really cold. I saw them out there the other night so it shouldn’t be long before it’s open. Maybe a few more weeks.”

  Mia seemed to lose a little of her shyness at that prospect. She gave him a sideways look from under her mother’s arm and aimed a fleeting smile full of such sweetness that he was instantly smitten.

  “There’s also a great place for sledding up behind the high school. You can’t miss that, either. Oh, and in a few weeks we have the Lights on the Lake Festival. You’ve heard about that, right?”

  They all gave him matching blank stares, making him wonder what was wrong with the Haven Point Helping Hands that they hadn’t immediately dragged Dani into their circle. He would have to talk to Andie Bailey or his sister Angela about it. They always seemed to know what was going on in town.

  “I think some kids at school were talking about that at lunch the other day,” Silver said. “They were sitting at the next table so I didn’t hear the whole thing, though.”

  “Haven Point hosts an annual celebration a week or so before Christmas where all the local boat owners deck out their watercraft from here to Shelter Springs to welcome in the holidays and float between the two towns. There’s music, food and crafts for sale. It’s kind of a big deal around here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard about it.”

  “I’m very busy, with the practice and the girls, Deputy Morales. I don’t have a lot of time for socializing.” Though Dani tried for a lofty look, he thought he caught a hint of vulnerability there.

  She seemed...lonely. That didn’t make a lick of sense. The women in this town could be almost annoying in their efforts to include newcomers in community events. They didn’t give people much of an option, dragging them kicking and screaming into the social scene around town, like it or not.

  “Well, now you know. You really can’t miss the festival. It’s great fun for the whole family.”

  “Thank you for the information. It’s next week, you say?”

  “That’s right. Not this weekend but the one after. The whole thing starts out with the boat parade on Saturday evening, around six.”

  “We’ll put it on our social calendar.”

  “What’s a social calendar?” Mia whispered to her sister, just loud enough for Ruben to hear.

  “It’s a place where you keep track of all your invitations to parties and sleepovers and stuff.”

  “Oh. Why do we need one of those?”

  “Good question.”

  Silver looked glum for just a moment but Dani hugged her, then faced Ruben with a polite, distant smile.

  “Thank you for bringing in Ollie and Yukon. Have a good evening, Deputy Morales.”

  It was a clear dismissal, one he couldn’t ignore. Ruben gathered his dogs’ leashes and headed for the door. “Thank you. See you around. And by around, I mean next door. We kind of can’t miss each other.”

  As he hoped, this made Mia smile a little. Even Silver’s dour expression eased into what almost looked like a smile.

  As he loaded the dogs into the king cab of his pickup truck, Ruben could see Dani turning off lights and straightening up the clinic.

  What was her story? Why had she chosen to come straight from vet school in Boston to set up shop all the way across the country in a small Idaho town?

  He loved his hometown, sure, and fully acknowledged it was a beautiful place to live. It still seemed a jarring cultural and geographic shift from living back east to this little town where the biggest news of the month was a rather corny light parade that people froze their asses off to watch.

  And why did he get the impression the family wasn’t socializing much? One of the reasons most people he knew moved to small towns was a yearning for the kind of connectedness and community a place like Haven Point had in spades. What was the point in moving to a small town if you were going to keep yourself separate from everybody?

  He thought he had seen them at a few things when they first came to Haven Point but since then, Dani seemed to be keeping her little family mostly to themselves. That must be by choice. It was the only explanation that made sense. He couldn’t imagine McKenzie Kilpatrick or
Andie Bailey or any of the other Helping Hands excluding her on purpose.

  What was she so nervous about?

  He added another facet to the enigma of his next-door neighbor. He had hoped that he might be able to get a better perspective of her by bringing the dogs in to her for their routine exams. While he had confirmed his father’s belief that she appeared to be an excellent veterinarian, he now had more questions about the woman and her daughters to add to his growing list.

  Don’t miss Season of Wonder

  by RaeAnne Thayne,

  available October 2018

  wherever HQN books and ebooks are sold!

  Copyright © 2018 by RaeAnne Thayne

  Keep reading for an excerpt from The Captains’ Vegas Vows by Caro Carson.

  The Captains’ Vegas Vows

  by Caro Carson

  Chapter One

  The first time she woke up, she was surrounded by diamonds and gold.

  It was magical. It was right.

  She smiled because she wasn’t awake enough to laugh, then she slipped back into sleep.

  The second time she woke up, she blinked in the night, awake enough this time to be aware of the sounds of a city beyond the room. Beside the bed, diamonds and gold reflected the lights that filtered in, color after color, as if there were a party outside, turning the diamonds into a kaleidoscope. Since her pillow was very soft under her cheek, and since her whole body felt wonderfully soft and relaxed, too, she fell back asleep.

  The third time she woke up, the diamonds and gold were brilliantly lit by the steady, white light of the sun.

  She stared at the bedside table, an entire piece of furniture made of gold. The clear base of the lamp upon it was filled with diamonds. Why would anyone fill a lamp with diamonds?

  Her brain began to grind into gear. The table had to be brass. The diamonds had to be crystals. That was only logical; no one had the money to fill a lamp with diamonds.

  She wasn’t in her own bed—also logical. Of course she wasn’t in her own bed, because she’d moved out of her lonely house in Seattle and was driving 2,500 miles to Texas, staying in a different hotel in a different state each night.

  The trip wasn’t exciting, just routine, because she was an officer in the US Army, and she had no choice but to move when the army told her to move—which, so far, had been five times in the past eight years. Each move had been predictable, from her initial training course in Missouri to her first assignment at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, from there to a deployment overseas, then back to Bragg. Her promotion to captain had been followed by another training course in Missouri, followed by two years as a company commander at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, just south of Seattle.

  Everything occurred in the proper order on the proper timeline. Every time she was moved, she filled her car with suitcases, duffel bags and a reliable little toaster oven. The army stored her furniture, delivering it when they left her in one place for more than half a year. When it was time for the next move, the army sent workers to box it all up and store it again.

  Because her life was full of duty, predictable duty, and because every mile she traveled was the shortest distance between two army-ordered points, and perhaps because it was nearly her thirtieth birthday (although thirty wasn’t any more significant than any other age—really, it wasn’t), she had decided to add some excitement, taken a detour and stopped for the night in Las Vegas.

  Vegas, baby.

  Oh, my God, I’m in Vegas.

  Captain Helen Pallas bolted upright in the bed and realized immediately that not only was she in Vegas, she was nude, and she had a horrific headache. She pressed one hand to the side of her head and yanked the white sheet up to her neck to cover her breasts, which caused a little avalanche of rose petals to cascade down the sheet to her lap.

  She was sitting in a bed—a gold bed—full of rose petals, a thousand of them under her legs, even between her toes. She stopped pressing her palm into the side of her pain-filled head and instead ruffled her newly bobbed hair, dislodging more petals. They fluttered over her shoulders and down her spine to land with a soft tickle behind her bare backside.

  Roses are always going to make me think of sex now.

  Helen clutched the sheet more tightly. Was that a real memory or had it been a dream?

  “Roses are always going to make me think of sex now.”

  “Is that a bad thing?” he murmured in her ear, laughter always underlying that deep bass. They’d just been laughing; they were going to laugh again.

  She snuggled into him a little more deeply, loving the way they fit together, spooning on their sides with her bare back against his warm chest, loving the strength in his arm as he kept her securely against his body.

  “Red roses are supposed to represent true love,” she said. “Romance. Not the hottest, wildest night of sex in your life.”

  “True love and romance.” He scooped up a handful of rose petals and pressed them to her breast, cupping them to her skin. When he slid his thumb slowly over the curve of her breast, the velvet of a petal created a fragrant friction. “Like this?”

  She shifted in response, sliding her legs together, feeling the pleasant abrasion of his masculine legs against her smooth ones, enjoying the casual intimacy of their bare feet touching. “No, I mean a wholesome, pure kind of love. You’re using roses to make me think of hot sex again. Right this second—yes, just like that. That’s sexy.”

  He slid the handful of rose petals down her body, their softness exquisite, her skin more sensitive than she’d known it could be. Everything with him was better than she’d known it could be. She smiled even as she shivered when his hand stopped just below her belly button.

  He kissed her shoulder, scraped his teeth along it gently, then a little lick, another kiss. “But the roses came after I pledged myself to you. So did the sex.”

  He slid the petals lower still, down to the most sensitive part of her body, and gently pressed them in a firm circle, or two, or three. She tried to breathe deeply, but anticipation had her panting. He let go of the petals to slip his hand under her thigh, to lift her leg and position her a little differently. A little better. “First, we promised true love.”

  She ached with desire as she listened to his voice.

  “They showered us with rose petals after.” He held her in place with a strong hand on her hip, and stroked into her, joining their bodies. They sucked in their breaths, in unison, at the sensation. “Love first, then roses.” Another smooth stroke, his velvet friction inside her, the velvet roses all around her. “So rose-scented sex, hot sex, all the wild nights in our future—” his body inside hers, his hands on her skin, his words in her heart “—started with pure, wholesome, true love. Wouldn’t you agree—”

  Stroke.

  “—Mrs.—”

  Stroke.

  “—Cross?”

  “Oh, my God.” Helen whispered the words in a panic. Her head throbbed. Her mouth was dry. She was married.

  Was she?

  She grabbed a fistful of her hair and tugged gently, but she couldn’t remember anything else. The night wasn’t even a blur in her memory; it just wasn’t there at all. Yet here she was, naked in a bed, panicking on a pile of petals.

  Mrs. Cross?

  No. Please no. I would never—

  She wasn’t Mrs. Anyone. She was Captain Helen Pallas, and she was never going to change that for a man, never again, no way, no how. Her divorce had been final just two days ago. She’d gotten the court papers, gotten her army orders, gotten on the highway.

  She let go of her hair and slowly held out her left hand. Diamonds and gold surrounded her ring finger, glittering in the morning light as she trembled.

  She’d gotten married.

  A doorbell rang. Helen snatched her hand back to clutch the sheet more tightly around her neck. Th
is bedroom was part of a suite, because the door was open a few inches and she could see a little bit of a Liberace-worthy candelabra and a shiny satin sofa in the next room. It sounded like a door in that living room opened, then men’s voices murmured. She looked frantically around the floor, but not one piece of clothing cluttered the carpet. She kept the sheet clutched to her neck with one hand as she stood and started jerking the rest of the sheet off the bed with her other hand, petals fluttering in the air like startled butterflies.

  “Will that be all, sir?” asked one male voice.

  “Yes.”

  Helen stopped moving. That one syllable, yes, was spoken in a voice so deep, she knew it was the man who had said other syllables, words like sex and love, words that had made her melt.

  Dark hair—he’d had dark hair. And he was big, not just tall but broad shouldered, hard muscled and—and tan skin, and—

  And—

  She could only hiss at herself for not knowing who had put a ring on her finger. She yanked the giant California-king-size sheet free and started wrapping it around herself. The sheet was white, but the red petals had left pink splotches everywhere. She’d heard of sprinkling rose petals on a bed, of course, but she’d never heard that the luxurious, romantic gesture caused stains. No one mentioned that part.

  Of course it ruined the sheets. What romantic gesture didn’t turn into a disaster?

  “Thank you, sir.” The more-talkative man sounded so cheerful, Helen could only assume he’d gotten a generous tip. “Congratulations again to you both. Just call us if you need anything else, anything else at all.”

  Helen held her breath, but the deep voice she listened for didn’t make any answer. The outer door opened and shut again. With the sheet wrapped around her chest and securely tucked under her arms, she braced herself for the coming confrontation. She stood still, practically at attention, and waited for the man who’d said yes to come into the bedroom to talk to her, his new bride.

  A bride. Good God, Helen, what is wrong with you?

  She’d been through this once already, and once had been one time too many. If this Mr. Cross was any kind of decent human being, he’d know—he must know—that she’d been drunk last night, and he wouldn’t dream of holding her to any drunken promises she might have made.