by Liz Isaacson
“No talk about the weather,” she said. “No, what I want to talk about is the food. The beaches. I bought two new swimming suits.”
“Oh, now I’m interested in the beach.”
“I can’t believe you don’t like the beach.”
“It’s not that I don’t like it. I’ve never been.”
“Yes, we went several times over the summer.” Adele loved lying on the warm sand, listening to the waves roll in. Loved snacking on grapes and sliced red peppers and potato chips while the sun sank into the ocean.
“I’ve never been in Portugal.”
“I told you we could take an Alaskan cruise.”
“In December?” He scoffed like they hadn’t discussed their honeymoon at length. Several times. “Portugal is fine.”
“Fine.”
“I didn’t mean that. It’s great.” He moved in front of her. “Anywhere with you will be wonderful. Paradise. Heaven.” He leaned down and kissed her until Adele felt lightheaded, and she stumbled back to her cabin to get ready to make her billionaire boyfriend into her cowboy husband.
And she was going to make sure he loved the beach by the time they left Portugal.
“Ready?” Scarlett asked.
“Ready,” Adele confirmed. She let her mother fix the veil one more time, and then they all left her tiny cabin. The horse-drawn carriage waited outside her back door, and the three of them got in, Adele fluffing and fixing the skirt of her dress even though it was just a short three-minute ride over to the barn.
Warm light spilled from the open doors, the scent of flowers and sugar in the air. She’d made her own wedding cake, but she’d allowed Scarlett and Jeri to cater the rest of the event.
Just inside the barn, Adele paused. Large glass containers lined one table to her right, and they held yellow, pink, and peach lemonades. They glinted under the lights, making Adele’s breath catch.
“Stay here,” Scarlett said, hurrying down the aisle. A sense of anxiety hit her hard. She wasn’t terribly close with her father, but he came toward her with a huge smile on his face.
“Baby.” He kissed her cheek.
“Hey, Daddy.” She held onto his arm like it was her lifeline, because in that moment, it literally was. The aisle was short, and the music inside the barn stopped.
Everyone stood and turned toward her. Adele smiled the way she’d practiced, still somewhat in a state of shock that she was here for a second time when she’d vowed she’d never get married again.
She stepped with her father, no bridal party going in front of her. Just Carson waiting at the altar, which was a sawhorse with flowers on it. Her eyes locked onto his, and all her fears, doubts, and panic faded away. She loved him. He loved her.
Nothing else mattered.
Her father transferred her hand from his arm to Carson’s, patted it, and went to take his seat.
Adele listened to Pastor Williams talk about love and forgiveness, about second chances and being a united team. Adele wanted to do all of those things, and every breath felt like it might be the one to make her burst.
But she didn’t. She kissed Carson after she was proclaimed his wife, and giggles poured from her. It was her expression of happiness—of joy—and she tipped up on her toes and said, “I love you so much.” She leaned her forehead against his. “Thank you for letting me have wings to go to New York. Thank you for being my safe place to fall. Thank you for coming back to Last Chance Ranch to be my last chance.”
Carson simply looked into her eyes, a softness in his that spoke of how much he adored her. Then he simply said, “I love you, Adele. You’re welcome.”
I’m so glad Adele and Carson worked things out! If you are too, leave your review now.
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Read on for a sneak peek at HER LAST MAKE-BELIEVE MARRIAGE, coming on March 5. You can preorder it now!
Sneak Peek! Her Last Make-Believe Marriage Chapter One
Jeri Bell whistled as she put on her tool belt, the cheery California sunshine lighting the day beyond her bedroom window. The days she didn’t get to work on a construction site were a waste of time in her opinion, and she’d had a lot of those lately.
“But not anymore,” she said to herself as she started gathering her copious amounts of hair into a ponytail. She knew most women would kill to have as much hair as she did, especially as hers held a curl like it was the eighties and it hadn’t gotten the memo.
Now, she worked at Last Chance Ranch, and they needed dozens of buildings built or remodeled. She was working on the new dog enclosures first, because that would allow Scarlett and the ranch more room to house more animals. And more animals was good for the partnership they had with Forever Friends, who provided a lot of grant money for the ranch.
In fact, Forever Friends provided the salary Jeri had named, right down to the penny. Of course, she’d given an even dollar amount, so there were no pennies. She grinned at herself, burying the vein of guilt that was open and never seemed to close.
She brushed it aside like she’d been doing for a few months now, since she’d come to the ranch and started surveying the land, putting in quotes, and beginning the construction.
Her crew was usually at least a dozen men, and she’d become extraordinarily good at managing them over the past twenty years of her life. But out here, it was her and whichever cowboy she could scrounge from his regular chores if there was something that required more than two hands.
That was almost always Hudson, Scarlett’s boyfriend, or Sawyer, the cowboy who lived right next door to her. Jeri looked south as if she had superpowers and could see through cabin walls to the cowboy’s place next door.
He had an amazing dog that followed him around the ranch like, well, a puppy, and Jeri mourned the loss of her canine. The chickens she’d brought with her hardly counted, as one of them had a crazy eye that seemed to look everywhere but where it was going. Still, she loved Spot and Feathers, and she left her ponytail to be bumpy so she could go feed them before she hurried over to the construction site.
Her yard wasn’t fenced, but the chickens never seemed to stray too far from the source of their food, and Jeri found them at the bottom of the steps just outside the back door, clucking away.
“Hey, guys,” she said, reaching for the wooden lid on the box she’d built to keep the feed in. She grabbed a handful and scattered it over the grass near them. Spot did his funky chicken run as he went after the food.
She laughed at them and threw more feed than they needed. Feathers, a brown and black chicken, would try to follow her over to the construction site. Then she’d realize that it was way too far for her two short feet, and she’d eventually make her way back to the yard.
“I’m going to get that house finished,” she promised them, looking at the half-finished coop Scarlett had given her permission to build. “I am. Tonight. I’ll work on it tonight.”
She was usually exhausted by the time she finished over in Canine Club, and really, she was never finished. She worked until her back ached and she reached a spot where she could pick up the next day. But by the time she got home, she was lucky to stick something in the microwave and collapse on the couch after eating it.
So her diet wasn’t the best. She often skipped breakfast and lunch, drinking only water so she didn’t faint in the summer heat as she hammered and measured and nailed.
While she worked a lot, she hadn’t lost much weight, because her eating habits crammed all her calories—high-density ones—into one meal.
It was fine. It was her life again, and she was grateful for that. In fact, she thought, Thank you for bringing me here as she walked away from the chickens and around to the dirt road in front of her cabin. She couldn’t help glancing at Sawyer’s front door, where sometimes the cowboy sat on the steps with his Australian shepherd at his feet and his guitar balanced against the post holding up the porch.
Whenever he sat outside at night and played, Jeri would make sure her windows were open. A few times she’d even gone out onto her back porch and listened to him sing in his beautiful tenor voice.
So maybe she had a little crush on the cowboy next door. Maybe.
Her heart pumped out an extra beat, and she reminded herself that she had done the boyfriend thing. The husband thing. The family thing. The in-a-new-relationship-with-someone-she-worked-with thing.
And she wasn’t going to do any of it again.
The price was too high—and she knew. She’d lost everything over the years, and she could only count on herself to rebuild her life.
Which is what I’m doing, she thought as she caught sight of Hudson’s truck rounding the corner and coming toward her. She put a smile on her face and waved to him as he passed, because through her divorce, the loss of her business, her crew, and all of her friends, she’d learned that it was easier to smile than to frown.
Scarlett had often said how much she appreciated how bubbly and optimistic Jeri was around the ranch, and Jeri appreciated the comments. She wasn’t exactly faking, but she did like looking at the bright side of things more than the dark. The glass was half-full and not half-empty.
After all, she’d picked herself up from some pretty awful things. Things she didn’t want to think about right now.
No, right now, she needed to get the inside walls of the third dog enclosure up today. When the structures were finished, they’d be temperature regulated, but right now they weren’t. She worked through the morning, sweating and replacing the fluids with as much water as her stomach and bladder could hold.
She knew it was lunch only because the sun shone directly overhead—and Scarlett brought her a chicken Caesar salad.
Something was up. The owner was nice, and Jeri considered Scarlett a friend. Probably the best female friend Jeri had ever had. But she didn’t bring Jeri food very often, so Jeri asked, “What’s going on?” as she took the salad and the plastic fork from her boss.
Scarlett sighed and looked around the enclosure. “Wow, it’s hot in here.”
“Yeah,” Jeri said, opening the salad and pouring the dressing over it. “Thanks for getting this. Why’d you go down to town?”
“I was meeting with Jewel.”
Jeri stuffed her mouth full of lettuce and parmesan so she could buy herself some time to answer.
“She wants to make sure all of our paperwork is up to date,” Scarlett said.
“And you need my license,” Jeri said, licking her fork like there wasn’t a problem. She could produce her non-existent contractor’s license in a jiffy. No big deal.
Except it was a big deal. Her application had been turned down again, and the salad suddenly tasted sour. An image of her former foreman filled her mind—Brenden Evans. If she could just get a hearing with the committee, she could give her side of the story.
But she already had, and they’d still taken her license away.
The only way she could get a new license was to use a different name. But she needed legal documentation with the name, and the only way to get that was to lie, or pay for forged documents, or get married.
She couldn’t do the first two, because she didn’t need to go to jail on top of everything else. She still went to church every chance she got, and she’d begged the Lord for a solution that was legal and would allow her to keep building this life at Last Chance Ranch.
If she could find someone willing to marry her just for a few months….
Just like all the other times she’d thought about this exact thing, no one came to mind. Most sane men didn’t just marry female carpenters for a favor.
“I’ll go check on the status of it tomorrow,” Jeri said, forking another bite of chicken and lettuce into her mouth. She chewed and swallowed. “Maybe I did something wrong.”
“We just need the application and where it is,” Scarlett said, still looking around. “This is going so great, Jeri.”
She put that smile on her face, nodded, and said, “Thanks.” She stirred her salad around, the ever-present guilt blooming and growing into a raging river in her system.
She knew the status of her contractor license, and all she could do is apply again. Make up a little white lie about how she’d done something wrong and had to re-file, and give Scarlett that application status.
It would buy her another few weeks, at least.
Scarlett said goodbye and left the half-finished enclosure, leaving Jeri to her worries and doubts. She couldn’t eat any more salad—number one, she disliked salad. Number two, she wasn’t used to eating in the middle of the day.
She got back to work. Decided to stop while it was still light—and before she lopped off a thumb because she couldn’t focus. Her mind hadn’t stopped circling her problem, and she still had no idea what to do about it.
Her stomach growled as she walked back to the main road and around to the Cabin Community. Her feet crunched against the gravel, and she went through every able-bodied man she knew. Before the disaster that had lost her the license, she would’ve had a crew of fifteen men she could ask for a favor like this.
Now, while she liked this life a lot, she didn’t have anyone the way she used to. No one to really call on in a sticky situation like the one she currently found herself in.
Loneliness engulfed her, and she turned down the driveway that led to her back yard when she heard the clucking.
Up the steps her feet took her, and she went in the front door, her thoughts turning to dinner and what she had in the freezer. Three steps inside the cabin, she realized something was very wrong.
This didn’t smell like her house.
“Hullo, Jeri,” a man said, causing her to yelp and spin toward the sound. Her heart banged against her ribs as she realized she wasn’t staring at an enemy, but Sawyer Smith.
She’d gone in the wrong house. She scanned him from head to toe, noticing his hair was damp and curling in a very sexy way around his ears. He looked totally different without that cowboy hat on his head, and every female part in Jeri started rejoicing that she’d made this particular mistake.
Has she goes in the wrong house though? Maybe Sawyer can help Jeri with her marriage problem… You can preorder HER LAST MAKE-BEIEVE MARRIAGE by tapping here.
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Read More by Liz Isaacson
Want to stay at Last Chance Ranch? Great! Preorder HER LAST MAKE-BELIEVE MARRIAGE, which features Jeri and Sawyer as they work through some difficult things. Coming on March 5!
Love billionaire cowboys? I’ve got you covered for both! Read CHARMING THE COWBOY, Book 2 in the Grape Seed Falls Romance series.
Love small town western romance? Who doesn’t, right? Try SECOND CHANCE RANCH, and journey to Three Rivers Ranch for the best cowboy romance there is. Only 99¢!
About Liz
Liz Isaacson is the author of the #1 bestselling Three Rivers Ranch Romance series, the #1 bestselling Gold Valley Romance series, the Brush Creek Brides series, the USA Today bestselling Steeple Ridge Romance series (Buttars Brothers novels), the Grape Seed Falls Romance series, the Christmas in Coral Canyon Romance series, and the Last Chance Ranch Romance series.
She writes inspirational romance, usually set in Texas and Montana, or anywhere else horses and cowboys exist. She lives in Utah, where she teaches elementary school, taxis her daughter to dance several times a week, and eats a lot of Ferrero Rocher while writing.
Learn more about all her books here. Find her on Facebook, twitter, and her website.
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HER LAST BILLIONAIRE BOYFRIEND
Book Two in the Last Chance Ranch Romance series
by Liz Isaacson
Copyright © 2019 by Elana Johnson, writing as Liz Isaacson
Published by AEJ Creative Works
All Rights Reserved
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this book can be reproduced in any form or by electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without the express written permission of the author. The only exception is by a reviewer who may quote short excerpts in a review. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in, or encourage, the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
Cover by Victorine E. Lieske
Interior Design by AEJ Creative Works
