The Cowboy’s Outlaw Bride

by Cora Seton

  “Some of them are great. Others… could use an update,” Henry said. “And some need downright repairs. The old grocery store for one. And that post office…” He shrugged sadly. “Beautiful building in its day. But the mortar between its stones is crumbling.”

  Henry was right, Noah thought. The grocery store was kind of a mess. It was crammed into an old building that once had been a general store and retained the atmosphere of an old-timey trading post. But it had been added to haphazardly, and its rugged exterior had slipped from charming to shoddy. It could use a face-lift.

  Maybe that should be their project.

  “Can’t fix everything at once,” Carl was saying when he tuned into the conversation again.

  “No, that’s right.” Noah stiffened when he saw Olivia and Lance Cooper walk in. He knew they must be here to meet with Carl and the architect, and knew, too, he needed to get Liam out of here before his brother started something with Lance. “Hey, we’d better go see what Jed’s getting up to,” he told Liam and stood up. “Thanks for showing us your plans, Carl.” He grabbed Liam’s arm and pulled his brother along with him.

  “What’s the rush? I haven’t gotten my Danish!” Liam complained but narrowed his eyes when he caught sight of the Coopers.

  “Keep moving,” Noah told him evenly. He signaled to Christie as they went. “Can we get that pastry to go?” he asked her. “Meet you on the street,” he said to Liam. Liam took the hint and went outside. Noah breathed a sigh of relief when he was gone, although he regretted missing the chance to speak with Olivia. When they passed, he met her gaze and nodded slightly. She nodded back, a tiny movement but one that sent his heart beating harder.

  Noah found himself smiling as he paid the bill. Flirting with Olivia wasn’t smart, but it sure was fun.

  At least something was going right, Olivia thought when the meeting with Carl and Henry was over. She might not have gotten a chance to chat with Noah, who had been leaving as she had arrived, but she had to hand it to Carl—he’d come through on his promise to help her family try to win the Founder’s Prize. Not for the first time, she wished the Ridley property had simply come up for sale and her family had the money to buy it fair and square. The Founder’s Prize wasn’t going to be awarded until October. It was early June. Far too much time for something to go wrong.

  Outside Linda’s Diner, she said goodbye to the others and walked toward the grocery store to do her shopping. She stopped when someone called her name.

  “Olivia!” Caroline Selwich hurried to catch up with her. “Hey, what’s the rush?’

  “No rush, just running errands. Good to see you.”

  “You, too. How’s your aunt? I heard there was quite a fuss at the Prairie Garden.”

  “You’ve got that right.” Olivia filled her in as they walked together. Caroline knew all about Virginia. She was one of the first friends Olivia had made when she returned to Chance Creek. Caroline had grown up in Billings and moved here to take a position in the dentist’s office in town. She was friendly, kind and open-minded, and her presence in Chance Creek had done much to make life here bearable for Olivia. She wished they got to spend more time together, but Caroline’s boyfriend, Devon, demanded all her attention outside work hours. He was a loner. The kind of guy who liked a woman around and didn’t want to share her attention with friends. Olivia had never been to Caroline’s house and had only met Devon once or twice in town. She privately wondered what Caroline saw in the man, but it took all kinds, as her mother said.

  “Are you free next Sunday for lunch?” Caroline asked when they reached the grocery store.

  “Absolutely!” Olivia had learned to jump on any invitation Caroline made. She never knew when they’d get a chance to hang out, with Devon keeping her on such a short leash. “The usual place?”

  “DelMonacos at noon,” Caroline said happily. “See you there.”

  “See you.”

  Steel appeared at her side almost as soon as Caroline left.

  “What are you doing here?” Olivia asked him.

  “Snacks for the road,” he said, holding up a bag of chips. “Meeting go good?”

  “It went fine. You should have been there.”

  “I’m heading out of town.”

  Steel was always heading out of town these days, and he never answered her questions when she asked where he was going. “I talked to Virginia this morning,” he went on. He followed her as she filled a basket with the supplies she needed. He was tall, with short, iron-dark hair. She knew other people found him intimidating, and he’d been a pain in the ass as a kid, but now he seemed to have elected himself her personal protector.

  She wasn’t sure how she felt about that.

  “Oh yeah? What about?” she asked lightly.

  “She wants us to throw a party.”

  “A party?” Olivia stopped short. “What kind of a party?”

  “A big event. Her words, not mine. To shore up support for the school upgrade. Not everyone at the high school was on board with the renovations. Some people still aren’t. They think we’re rushing things. They might have a point.”

  Olivia blinked at him. “Wait, you don’t think the school needs the upgrade?”

  He shook his head. “It needs the upgrade: the issue is with the time frame. If we pushed it to next summer, everyone would have a lot more time to prepare for it. To be honest, the only logical reason to rush it like this—”

  “Is to have it finished before the Founder’s Prize gets awarded,” Olivia finished for him.

  “Right. Luckily Martin Fulsom bought the company that’s doing the renovation. That man loves to be in front of a camera. We’re going to throw him a party and give him all the attention he can handle.”

  “How would that help?”

  “When Fulsom gets in front of a camera, the nation watches,” Steel said. “It won’t take much prodding to get him to spout off about how great this project is going to be—and how fast he’s going to get it done.”

  “And then everyone will be on board with the time frame.” Olivia nodded slowly. “Because the whole country will be watching to see how it turns out.”

  “Exactly. So you’ll take care of the party?”

  “Me?” Heck, she wouldn’t know where to start. Party wasn’t even the right word for what Virginia had in mind. Gala was more like it. None of the Coopers had any experience with galas.

  Least of all her.

  “Better get Carl to do that.”

  “Carl’s busy.”

  “What about Lance?”

  “He’ll help, but he’s not a detail man. This… event… is going to take a lot of detail work.”

  “What about you?”

  “Me? Come on.”

  She understood what he meant. Most of Chance Creek gave Steel a wide berth.

  “So it’s me or no one, huh?” Was she supposed to feel gratified?

  They paused at Steel’s truck. “That’s right, and I need you to take this seriously. Don’t flake out on me, okay?

  “I’m not a flake—”

  She just trusted the wrong people sometimes.

  “I’ll take it seriously,” she told Steel. “I still think we’re in over our heads.”

  “Then we’d better swim fast.”

  Chapter Two

  “Grocery store? You want us to refurbish the grocery store?” Jed said later that night when Maya and Stella had served up a meatloaf dinner.

  “The outside’s seen better days,” Noah said. “We can spiff it up.”

  “The grocery store,” Jed repeated.

  The more he said it, the less of a good idea it sounded. “The post office, then?” Noah suggested.

  “What’s wrong with the post office?”

  “I… don’t know,” Noah admitted. “What do you think we should fix up?” He’d been preoccupied with the state of the Flying W so long, he honestly hadn’t thought too much about the rest of the town.

  “We don’t need to fix up a
nything. I’ve got a better idea,” Liam said.

  Noah turned to him. “Oh yeah? What?”

  “A smear campaign.” He picked up the newspaper Jed had been reading that morning and opened it. “Letters to the editor.” He pointed at the page. “People complain in there all the time about all kinds of things.”

  “So?” Noah said.

  “So we’ll get them to complain about the school upgrade. There’ll be letters to the editor about it every day—until everyone thinks it’s a bad idea.”

  “Who’s going to write letters like that? Us? We’ll look like fools.” Noah was getting sick of the whole Founder’s Prize thing. He had enough on his plate to worry about without this. He realized he never did talk to Christie. Probably better stop in at Linda’s Diner again soon to see her.

  “Not us. Other people. People who don’t like the Coopers.”

  “A lot of people like the Coopers,” Noah pointed out.

  “But not everyone. You’ll see.”

  “It’ll backfire. When it’s over, and everyone’s mad, they’re going to remember we’re the ones who stirred things up. That won’t win us any prizes.” Noah turned the idea over in his mind. There had to be a better way—and to his surprise, one dawned on him. “On the other hand, people like to be nostalgic for the good old days.”

  “So?” Liam played with his water glass, clearly unhappy Noah had shot down his idea.

  “So turn your plan around. Don’t have people complain about what’s coming—have them sing the praises of what we already have. Get people to write in about all their best memories about the school as it is. Plant the first few letters to really play up how changing anything about the school—even modernizing it—will ruin it. Use nostalgia as a weapon. Other people will join in. Everyone likes talking about themselves. Get them to talk about specific incidents that wouldn’t have happened if everything was high-tech.”

  “I like it. It’s devious,” Jed said.

  “Hell, Noah, you’re an evil genius.” Liam grinned.

  Noah frowned. Liam was right; he’d gotten carried away. “We’re not trying to stop the project,” he hurried to say.

  “But—” Liam started.

  Noah cut him off. “We want to cause enough pushback that they miss the deadline, that’s all. The money is there. The plans are there. Once we win what’s rightfully ours, we’ll let it go through next summer. In fact, we’ll even help it along next year if that’s what it takes, because that’s what’s best for the town.”

  Jed and Liam made noncommittal noises, but Noah was resolute.

  They were Turners, and that still meant something.

  “Honey, you need to cut your losses. I don’t know what made you go back to Chance Creek in the first place,” Olivia’s mother, Enid, said the following afternoon. Olivia’s fingers tightened on her cell phone as she stood by her bedroom window and looked out over the pastures spreading behind her house. She should be out there working with her brothers, but she’d been unsettled all day and needed to touch base with someone outside of Chance Creek. “The Coopers burned their bridges there a long time ago, and new ones aren’t worth building. Come to New Mexico. You’d love it here.”

  It wasn’t the first time her mother had extended the invitation, but Olivia knew she’d never accept. Chance Creek was in her bones. When everything had gone wrong for her family, Enid had divorced Dale so fast her parents’ marriage seemed over before they reached Idaho. Looking back, Olivia realized her mother must have offered Dale a stunning deal, and her father must have cooperated. Enid hadn’t asked for a share of the ranch, and he hadn’t contested the divorce. He’d felt so guilty about taking them all down.

  Olivia felt guilty, too.

  Almost as soon as Enid had taken them to her sister’s ranch in Idaho, she’d left again to go looking for work. That’s what she’d told them, anyway. Later they found out she’d left town with a man. A high roller who’d wined and dined Enid, told her he loved her, squired her around the country for a few months and then admitted he already had a wife. Enid had found a job in New Mexico, where an old friend had settled down, but by the time she’d gotten her act together, Olivia and her siblings had put down tentative roots in Idaho, and Aunt Joan, disgusted by Enid’s behavior, had allowed them to stay. Olivia’s family had fractured again.

  As years went by, Olivia saw little of her father, visiting him in jail only once or twice. Dale didn’t like her to see him like that, and he wasn’t much of a letter-writer, either. He never mentioned Thorn Hill, so neither did she, figuring the bank had probably repossessed the ranch and sold it off to pay the mortgage. When Dale died, she and her siblings learned they would inherit the ranch, after all. Some anonymous partner of his had been renting it out to a tenant to keep it running all those years. Olivia could only wonder why her father had never explained that.

  Now she was back in Chance Creek, and she meant to stay. Besides, she still found it hard to forgive Enid for leaving her and her siblings behind when she’d made her break for freedom. Olivia turned her back on the view outside her window as Enid went on.

  “I know I let you down in the past, but that was a long time ago. I’m a different person now. I think everyone is entitled to one screwup, don’t you think?”

  “I’m settled here. For now, at least.” Olivia didn’t want to argue over the past. Turning to the window again, she watched a crow fly across the pasture, circle around and head in the other direction.

  “Well, any time you change your mind, you know where I am. I miss you. All of you. How’s Tory?”

  Olivia wasn’t fooled by her mother’s nonchalance. She’d always been uncomfortable with her role as messenger between Tory and their mother. “Good, as far as I know. Busy.” Tory had been a massage therapist in Seattle for years now and seemed to have no intention of coming back. She called about once a month, and they chatted over their news, but Olivia felt like her sister was slipping away.

  “Everyone’s always busy,” Enid said. “Or something else.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “I think all of you kids are stuck in the past. Punishing yourselves—and me—for what went wrong instead of getting over it and moving on. Take you, for example. Nothing that happened back then is your fault. You know that, right?”

  No. She didn’t know that. She was the one who’d brought the sheriff to their door.

  If she was being honest with herself, she was the reason Enid left, too. As angry as Olivia was that her mother had abandoned her, she supposed she couldn’t blame Enid for not wanting to stick around when her husband went to jail.

  And Dale only went to jail because of what she’d allowed Maya Turner to see in her family’s barn. Her real mistake had been to imagine that a Turner could ever be a true friend to a Cooper.

  “I’m not stuck in the past,” she said. “I like it here.” For some reason she thought of Noah Turner.

  “You want to be a rancher?”

  The conversation was becoming far too uncomfortable. Olivia wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. “If there was another career I wanted to pursue, I would,” she told her mother. “Hey, it’s getting late. I’ve got to go.”

  Her mother sighed but didn’t push the matter. “Before you do, one thing. I’m sending you a book.”

  “A book?”

  Enid chuckled. “It’s the darndest thing. You know I had a storage container.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I finally went through all that old stuff. No sense paying to keep things I don’t need, right? Anyway, I was going through a bunch of old books and found one from the library. The Chance Creek library. I figure I’d better return it.”

  “After all this time?” Olivia laughed. “I doubt they want it back.”

  “I know… I was going to take it to a thrift store, but there’s something unsettling about not bringing a library book back where it belongs. It’s a loose thread from my past. If I send it to you, will you deal w
ith it?”

  “Why not send it right to the library?” Olivia crossed to her mirror and checked her reflection, wondering what Noah saw when he looked at her. His kisses kept running through her mind. That’s why she’d called her mother to begin with—to distract herself.

  “I want to know it got there. I need closure.”

  “What if they fine you a million dollars?”

  “Don’t even tease me about that. It’s been keeping me up at night.” Her mother laughed again, but Olivia heard the strain there. This was about more than a library book, she thought suddenly. This was about making sure the past stayed in the past. Pain shot through Olivia. For her mother, Chance Creek was the past, not the present. Was she making a mistake trying to create her present here?

  “Come see me soon, okay?” her mother said.

  “Sure, Mom.” Olivia hung up, suddenly restless.

  She needed to figure out what she really wanted to do with her life. Like her mom said: stop living in the past and start building her own future.

  Right after she figured out how to put on a gala for an eccentric billionaire and his entourage of socialites and investors.

  Olivia sighed and left her bedroom. If she wanted to pull this off, she needed help, but from whom?

  She considered all the likely people in town. Mia Matheson was a wedding planner. She probably could branch out, but it was nearly summer, and Olivia had a feeling she’d be booked back-to-back right now. There was Autumn Cruz. While Olivia knew Ethan Cruz to speak to, she was less familiar with his wife, who ran a lovely bed-and-breakfast on their ranch, which would probably be hopping right now, too.

  For some reason her thoughts kept trailing back to the Halls. Ella Hall, to be precise. She didn’t do events—she ran an equine therapy program. But she’d once been a Hollywood actress, and she must have gone to dozens of galas. She’d know exactly what it took to impress a bunch of media moguls. Since she wasn’t in the hospitality business, she wouldn’t be wrapped up with other events.