Mine. My boy.
Shane felt joy pouring into him, filling the empty spaces Tara had left behind when she’d stolen his son. He was a father. He had his boy back.
Cody’s lashes fluttered, and he stirred in Shane’s arms. Shane held his breath as the boy’s eyes opened and met his.
The boy’s eyes were dark as Shane’s own. His nose was more delicate, but he was a six-year-old kid, right? Kids were delicate.
The truth was, Shane could see himself in every feature of the boy’s face. And he thought he could see his own fears and insecurities in the shadows of those sleepy eyes. He’d find a way to give the boy courage. Courage and strength. Both would flow from love unending, love that would last as long as he lived.
“Are you my dad?” the boy asked sleepily.
Shane’s voice came out hoarse from a throat tightened by emotion.
“Yes,” he said. “I’m your dad.”
Cody looked puzzled for a moment, and Shane held his breath. What if he asked where his mother was? What if he wanted to go with her?
The boy blinked twice, then nestled against Shane’s chest.
“I thought you’d be bigger,” he said and went back to sleep.
* * *
“Let’s get this sucker in the ground.” Alice Ward turned away from the gleaming casket poised above the gaping grave and tugged at her escort’s arm. “He was a good-lookin’ sumnabitch and it’s a shame he’s dead, but, Lord, that preacher about talked us all into our graves already, and here he’s getting ready to start jawing again.”
A gasp rose from the compact crowd of mourners surrounding the gravesite. Alice might look delicate, but her voice was as vibrant and clear as it had been in her brief Hollywood heyday.
“My husband won’t take kindly to me being gone so long at some stranger’s funeral,” she continued.
Bending his black-hatted head over her slight figure, Shane reminded her, as gently as possible, that the good-looking sumnabitch in the velvet-lined casket was her husband.
As foreman of the Y4 Ranch, the duty of “seeing to” Alice had fallen to Shane with the death of her husband. He stood beside her, staring down into the latest hole in the small, sad family graveyard. The cemetery held Alice’s daughter, who’d died young in a car crash, and two small graves she never spoke of. Now it would hold her husband, and Alice would be alone in the world, except for a granddaughter she hadn’t seen in years.
Knowing Alice might take a turn toward tragedy and hurl herself into her husband’s grave at any moment, Shane gripped her arm firmly. Drama was never more than a heartbeat away when Alice Ward was around, but her histrionics were usually harmless. As for Shane, he loved her like family. She’d been kind to him, and lately she’d been a substitute grandma to his son.
The trouble was, you never knew what to expect from her. She’d been inconsolable over Bud Ward’s death, which had occurred at the intersection of a cowardly cow horse and a petulant porcupine. A day later, she’d chatted with an invisible Bud over her morning eggs and ham as if he was alive and irascible as ever.
Shane actually welcomed the brief appearances of Bud’s ghost. His phantom presence kept Alice calm, and she was less liable to wander off if she believed he was out fixing fences or tending cattle.
But right now, she seemed certain he was waiting back at the house.
“Come on, cowboy.” She tugged at Shane’s arm again. “All this sad stuff is giving me a headache.”
Again the mourners stopped their sniffling and foot-shuffling, and all heads turned toward Alice. The only sound was the trill of a meadowlark, shattering the sorrowful atmosphere with unseemly joy.
Shane wished he’d given in to Alice’s urging a little sooner. The entire town of Wynott—all three blocks of it—would be buzzing with the news that Alice Ward had lost her mind. Worse yet, she’d insulted the redoubtable Reverend Bannister from First Methodist. Being from Hollywood, she and Bud had always been fodder for gossip, and Shane had a feeling that wasn’t going to change with Bud’s death.
Not that he could blame folks for their interest in the Wards. Bud had been a rough-riding stuntman and Alice a Hollywood ingenue when the two had met, and they’d made three movies together during the heyday of the Western. Bud mostly fell off horses while Alice played various meek and frightened pioneer lasses. In reality, she could ride nearly as well as her husband, and swear just as lustily. When Bud was injured in a stagecoach accident, he married Alice and carried her off to the Y4 Ranch.
Alice’s ingenue days were far behind her, but she was still bright and birdlike in a voluminous scarlet scarf that wafted around her slight figure and caught every hint of a breeze. She’d refused to wear black to the funeral.
“We were black-and-white in the movies,” she’d said when Shane protested. “Bud always said he liked me in color. And, besides, I don’t want my only granddaughter to think I’m some old crone.”
Shane nodded, doing his best not to reveal his feelings about Alice and Bud’s granddaughter. Lindsey Ward hadn’t visited in at least five years. Alice claimed she’d been busy setting up a successful veterinary practice in Charleston, South Carolina, but Shane knew something had happened between Bud and his prodigal granddaughter, something Bud had never forgiven.
Shane didn’t really care what the problem was. Abandoning folks as good-hearted as Bud and Alice must mean the granddaughter had no heart at all.
Supposedly, she was flying in from Charleston, but she’d missed the funeral. Shane doubted she’d show up at all, unless it was for the reading of the will. If love for the two fine people she was fortunate enough to call family hadn’t drawn her to Wyoming, maybe inheriting some portion of Bud’s millions would do it. Shrewd investments and a fine head for cattle breeding had made Bud a wealthy man.
As the minister droned on, Shane noticed a slight figure climbing the dirt trail that led to the Ward family cemetery, which was set high on a hill behind the ranch house. The latecomer, a slender, dark-haired woman perched on impossibly high heels, paused briefly to stand on one leg like a heron. She removed a shoe, then rubbed her foot and replaced the shoe without wavering, but she nearly fell when she skidded on a patch of gravel at the graveyard gate.
“Lindsey!” Alice lurched away from Shane and enveloped the new arrival in a generous hug. Despite her small frame, Alice was enormous in her affections and expressed her feelings with verve.
While Alice greeted her long-lost granddaughter, Shane couldn’t help staring. Not because Lindsey was young, slim, and lovely—though she was—but because the sight of her made something in his heart clench and twist, and not in a good way. Dark hair flowing down her back; large, heavy-lidded blue eyes; an angular, well-formed face; and a fine jaw with a determined chin made her just Shane’s type.
The type he needed to avoid.
“I’m so sorry, Grandma,” the woman said. Her sky-high heels made her tower over Alice, but she shared her grandma’s petite build. “I had an emergency with a cockapoo.”
A cocka-what? Judging from Alice’s effusive greeting—which had earned a stern glare from the reverend—all was forgiven where Lindsey was concerned. And yet a cockapee—which sounded like some sort of exotic bird—was more important to her than her own grandfather’s funeral.
Hopefully, Lindsey Ward wouldn’t stay long. After all, she had that successful veterinary practice. With any luck, she’d spend a few days at the ranch, admire how smoothly and profitably it ran under Shane’s guidance, and go back to her cockapees.
Shane felt his son clutch at his pant leg and glanced down to smooth the boy’s hair. He expected Cody’s eyes to be fixed on the casket as it was lowered into the grave, but instead the boy was gazing wide-eyed at the new arrival.
Of course he was. She was a woman. She had dark hair. And she was pretty, if you went for that type.
Which Sh
ane didn’t. No way. Not anymore.
But his son looked like he’d just seen a fairy godmother, Glinda the Good Witch, and his runaway mother, all rolled into one.
Chapter 2
Lindsey stepped into the front hall and was instantly enveloped by the sweet scent of home. Even after all these years, the masculine, outdoorsy scents of sage, saddle leather, and dust, combined with the more civilized odors of home-baked cookies, Lemon Pledge, and her grandmother’s perfume, overwhelmed her with a rush of nostalgia.
The front room was filled with mourners standing awkwardly about, balancing plates of cheese pinwheels, shrimp with cocktail sauce, and ambrosia salad, all brought by neighbors.
Edging past the door and into the dim hallway that led to the back of the house, she dabbed at her eyes. Her sorrow over the loss of her grandfather was almost overwhelming, but she didn’t want to break down in front of this crowd. She’d never really understood funerals. Grief, for her, needed to be nursed in private. She’d experienced enough loss to know.
There was only a faint bar of light showing from under her grandfather’s study door. Later, the will would be read there. That laconic foreman, Shane Lockhart, and some hired hands had set up rows of folding chairs rented from the community hall, so everyone could sit and hear Bud’s last will and testament.
Beyond the study, the hall turned toward the more private parts of the house, including the bedrooms. Lindsey could swear she heard a rustling sound coming from the darkness, and then a board creaked.
Holding one hand over her rapidly beating heart, she felt a prickle of awareness, as if a cold shadow had fallen over the spot where she stood. Slipping off her borrowed shoes, she padded down the hall and peered around the corner.
An old oak china closet stood against the wall, filled with rodeo trophies and mementos of Bud’s and Alice’s film careers. Lindsey had always loved to explore the contents, begging her grandfather to tell the stories connected with each object—a gold buckle, a pair of spurs, a diamond necklace, an ancient rodeo program.
Apparently, she wasn’t the only one interested in the contents of the hutch. A tall stranger stood before it with the door wide open. He held a buckle in his hand and was tracing the raised image of a bucking horse with one finger.
The Pendleton buckle. Lindsey held her breath. It would be easy for the man to slip it into his pocket. What would she do if he turned out to be a thief?
Get Shane.
She gave her head a quick shake, annoyed that the foreman had come so quickly to mind. She didn’t need Shane Lockhart to help her. The man wasn’t going to attack her—especially not if she announced her presence before he’d taken anything.
She cleared her throat, and the man gave a guilty start. Replacing the buckle, he shoved his hands in his pockets.
“He was quite a guy, wasn’t he?” His tone held a heartiness that struck her as utterly false. “Quite a guy.”
“Yes, he was. And who are you?”
“Oh, I’m nobody,” the man said, his smile tentative and unsteady. “Nobody at all. Not compared to Bud, you know.”
Lindsey remembered a poem she’d read in school.
I’m nobody. Who are you? I’m nobody too.
“No, really. Who…?”
The man shoved past her and headed back toward the front of the house.
She really should put aside her foolish pride and find Shane Lockhart. He might be rude, but in this case, that could be a good thing. If he didn’t know him, maybe he’d eject the man from the premises. That would be something to see. Lindsey smiled to herself, picturing the foreman’s dark brows, his square jaw. He was cute when he was angry.
She set out to find him. He wasn’t in the room with the food, where a group of men were drinking and reminiscing. He wasn’t with Alice, who was chatting with a group of ladies in the kitchen.
Pausing at the back door, she glanced out at the hillside where her grandfather lay. And there he was, a lone figure silhouetted against the sky. The black hat was off, pressed against his chest as he stared down at her grandfather’s grave. But there was no mistaking Shane’s erect figure, even with his head bowed.
Slipping back into the torturous shoes, her ankles aching from the unaccustomed exercise, Lindsey started the long walk up to the family plot.
Acknowledgments
This is my eighth book, the second in the Cowboys of Decker Ranch series. I believe I’ve thanked most everybody by now, so for once I’ll spare the typesetter and keep my gratitude short and sweet. Mind you, that’s not easy. I’ve had a couple of difficult years, and everyone who’s touched my life deserves a big dose of gratitude. So please know that I appreciate all of you, even if you’re not mentioned by name. You know who you are, and so do I.
I’d like to thank Deb Werksman, Danielle Dresser, Susie Benton, Skye Agnew, Eliza Smith, Dominique Raccah, and the whole Sourcebooks family for sharing my successes and sticking with me through the tough times. I’m also grateful to my agent, Elaine English, who has nurtured my career from the start and has never let me down.
I’d like to thank Brian Davis for making it through pilot training, for selling us his sweet Jeep, and for making the world safe for democracy. I’d like to thank Alycia Fleury for sharing her awesome kids (that’s you, Ashton and Kaelan and Myla!), and Scott McCauley and Aminda O’Hare for huckleberry bear claws and the most amazing wedding ever.
I’d like to thank the Southern contingent of the McCauley family for being my friends as well as my relatives.
Most of all, I want to thank Scrape McCauley for loving me always, and for realizing that great risks bring great rewards. Thank you for believing in the Stillwater Nation, and for believing in me.
Thank you for reading!
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How to Handle a Cowboy
Cowboys of Decker Ranch Series
by Joanne Kennedy
His rodeo days may be over…
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“Realistic and romantic… Kennedy’s forte is in making relationships genuine and heartfelt as she exposes vulnerabilities with tenderness and good humor.”—Booklist Starred Review
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For more Joanne Kennedy, visit:
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“Delightful, funny, page-turning steamy sexy, and the romance makes you wish you could pull Victoria’s characters straight off the page.” —Unwrapping Romance
For more Victoria Vane, visit:
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Hot Cowboy Nights Series
by Victoria Vane
Old flames burn the hottest…
Janice Combes has adored Dirk Knowlton from the rodeo sidelines for years. She knows she’ll never be able to compete with the dazzling all-American rodeo queen who’s set her sights on Dirk. Playful banter is all Janice and Dirk will ever have…
Until the stormy night when he shows up at her door, injured and alone. Dirk’s dripping wet, needs a place to stay, and Janice remembers why she could never settle for any other cowboy…
Praise for Victoria Vane:
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“The Mistress of Sensuality does it again!” —Swept Away by Romance
For more Victoria Vane, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
The Trouble with Texas Cowboys
by Carolyn Brown
New York Times and USA Today Bestselling Author
Can a girl ever have too many cowboys?
No sooner does pint-sized spitfire Jill Cleary set foot on Fiddle Creek Ranch than she finds herself in the middle of a hundred-year-old feud. Quaid Brennan and Tyrell Gallagher are both tall, handsome, and rich, and both are courting Jill to within an inch of her life. She’s doing her best to give these feuding ranchers equal time—too bad it’s dark-eyed Sawyer O’Donnell who makes her blood boil and her hormones hum…
How to Kiss a Cowboy Page 37
