Christmas Cowboy Duet

by Marie Ferrarella

  Forever’s Country Cowboy

  His heroic rescue of a stranger caught in a flash flood just changed Liam Murphy’s life—big-time. With Whitney Marlowe’s help, the laid-back country-and-western singer could be a star. Only now, with the dynamic LA talent scout stranded in his Texas town, during the holidays no less, Liam has another dream: a permanent duet!

  The long, lean cowboy with the soulful eyes makes the most beautiful music Whitney has ever heard. Fate brought her to Forever, and the town embraced her, inviting her to help decorate the community’s Christmas tree. Though reluctant to return home, she isn’t leaving without her newest discovery. It’s dangerous mixing business and pleasure! Together, can she and Liam find their forever after?

  “Why should you go out of your way like this for someone you don’t even know?”

  Whitney had to understand his motives. First saving her from drowning and rescuing her car, and now helping her find a place to stay.

  “I did have a hand in saving your life, so that gives us a kind of bond,” he told her. “I also want you to be happy living the life I saved.”

  The man was practically a saint. Excited, relieved and feeling almost euphoric, Whitney threw her arms around his neck and declared, “You’re a lifesaver.” She said it a second before she kissed him.

  She only meant for it to be a quick pass of her lips against his, the kind of kiss one good friend gives another. But at the last second, Liam turned his head just a fraction closer in her direction. What began as a fleeting kiss turned into a great deal more.

  Something of substance and depth.

  The exuberance she had initially felt stole her breath. Her body suddenly ignited, and had his arms not gone around her when they did, she would not be standing up right now. A wave of weakness snaked through her, robbing her of the ability to stand. Forcing her to cling to him in order to remain upright.

  She shouldn’t be doing this.

  Dear Reader,

  Welcome back to Forever, that tiny Texas town filled with men and women whose hearts are as big as the state they live in. It’s a town where everyone not only knows your name, but pretty much everything else about you.

  In the two previous Forever books, we’ve met and watched two of the Murphy men find the women of their dreams. This time, the last of the Murphy men saves the woman of his dreams when Whitney Marlowe is caught up in a flash flood that engulfs her car—and her. Unable to swim, she screams for help, but is certain that she’s done for. Lucky for her, she’s wrong. And lucky for the musically inclined Liam Murphy, the woman he’d just saved from a watery grave just happens to be in the music business. But can Liam help her overcome her fear of involvement and win her over to his side? Come and watch a confirmed bachelor happily lose his heart while he tries to gain a career.

  As always, I thank you for reading, and from the bottom of my heart, I wish you someone to love who loves you back.

  All the best,

  Marie Ferrarella

  CHRISTMAS

  COWBOY DUET

  Marie Ferrarella

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  This USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award-winning author has written more than two hundred books for Harlequin, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.

  Books by Marie Ferrarella

  HARLEQUIN AMERICAN ROMANCE

  Forever, Texas

  The Sheriff’s Christmas Surprise

  Ramona and the Renegade

  The Doctor’s Forever Family

  Lassoing the Deputy

  A Baby on the Ranch

  A Forever Christmas

  His Forever Valentine

  A Small Town Thanksgiving

  The Cowboy’s Christmas Surprise

  Her Forever Cowboy

  Cowboy for Hire

  HARLEQUIN SPECIAL EDITION

  Matchmaking Mamas

  Wish Upon a Matchmaker

  Dating for Two

  Diamond in the Ruff

  Other titles by this author available in ebook format.

  To

  Dr. Seric Cusick,

  the E.R. physician

  who sewed my face back together.

  Thank you!

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Epilogue

  Excerpt

  Prologue

  She’d never learned how to swim.

  Somehow, there never seemed to be the right time to sneak in lessons.

  Since she was born and bred in Los Angeles, close to an ocean and many pools, everyone just assumed she knew how to swim. It was a given. There were all those beaches, all that tempting water seductively lapping against the shore during those glorious endless summers.

  But Whitney Marlowe had never had the time nor the inclination to get swimming lessons. Something more pressing always snagged her attention.

  For as long as Whitney could remember, she’d always had this little voice inside of her head urging her on, whispering about goals that had yet to be met.

  Swimming was recreational. Swimming was associated with fun. Even growing up, Whitney never seemed to have time for fun, except maybe for a few minutes at a time. A child of divorce, she was far too involved in making a name for herself to dwell on recreation. Everyone in her family was driven and it seemed as if from the very first moment of her life, she had been embroiled in one competition or another.

  Oh, she dearly loved her siblings, all five of them, but she loved them just a tiny bit more whenever she could best them at something. It didn’t matter what, as long as she could come out the winner.

  Her father had promoted this spirit of competition, telling his children that it would better equip them when they went out into the world. He’d been a hard taskmaster.

  But right now, all those goals, all those triumphant moments, none of them mattered. None of them meant anything because the sum total of all that wasn’t going to save her.

  This was it, Whitney thought in frantic despair.

  This was the place where she was going to die. Outside of a town that hadn’t even been much more than an imperceptible dot on her map. A stupid little town prophetically named Forever. Because her car—and most likely her body—were going to become one with this godforsaken place. She would become eternally part of Forever’s terrain and nobody was even going to realize it because she would live at the bottom of some body of water.

  Forever.

  Oh, why had she taken this so-called “shortcut”? she upbraided herself. Why hadn’t she just gone the long way to Laredo the way she’d initially intended? It wasn’t as if she was trying to outdo her brother in trying to land this new account for the family recording label. She was the only one who’d been dispatched to audition the new band The Lonely Wolves. Desperate for their big break, the band would have waited for her to come until hell froze over.

  Unfortunately, it wasn’t hell freezing over that was about to be
the cause of her demise; it was the torrential rains, all but unheard of in this part of the country at this time of year.

  And yet, here it was, a downpour the likes of which she had never witnessed before. The kind that would have had Noah quickly boarding up the door of his ark and nervously setting sail.

  The rains had fallen so fast and so heavily, the dry, parched ground—clay for the most part—couldn’t begin to absorb it. One minute, she was driving through a basin, her windshield wipers going so fast, she thought they were in danger of just flying off into the wind. The next, the rain was falling so hard that the poor windshield wipers had met their match and did absolutely no good at all.

  Stunned, Whitney had done her best, struggling to keep her vehicle straight, all the while getting that sinking feeling that she was fighting a losing battle. Before she knew it, her tires were no longer touching solid ground.

  The rains were filling up the basin, turning the cracked, dusty depression into what amounted to a giant container for all this displaced, swiftly accumulating water.

  She gave up trying to steer because nothing short of a rudder would have any effect on regaining control of her vehicle. She’d been driving the sports car with the top down and when the rains hit, they came so fast and so heavy, she couldn’t get the top to go back up. Now her car swayed and bobbed as well as filled up with water. It didn’t take a genius to know what would happen next.

  She would be thrown from her car into the swirling waters—which meant that her life was over. She would die flailing frantically in the waters of a miniscule, backwater town.

  She wasn’t ready to die.

  She wasn’t!

  Whitney opened her mouth to yell for help as loudly as she could. But the second she did, her mouth was immediately filled with water.

  Holding on to the sides of the vehicle to steady herself, she tried to yell again. But the car, now at the mercy of the floodwaters, was utterly unsteady. Water was sloshing everywhere. As it crashed against her car, tipping it, Whitney lost her grip.

  And then, just like that, she was separated from the vehicle. The forward motion had her all but flying from the car. The next second, she found herself immersed in the dark, swirling waters—waters that hadn’t been there a few short heartbeats ago.

  Whitney tried desperately to get a second grip on any part of her car, hoping to somehow stay afloat, but the car was sinking.

  There was no help coming from anywhere. No one knew she’d taken this shortcut. No one back home really bothered to trace her route—that was partially because she had insisted years ago not to be treated like a child. She could make her own decisions, her own waves, as well. Certainly, at thirty, she was no longer an unsteady child.

  So other than competing with her, her siblings—except for Wilson, the oldest—all stayed clear of her, making a point not to get in her way. After all, she was the second oldest in the family.

  Tears filled Whitney’s eyes before the rains could lash at them. This wasn’t how she wanted to die. And certainly not the age she wanted to die, either.

  As if she had a choice, the little voice in her head mocked.

  Nevertheless, just before she went under, Whitney screamed the word Help! again, screamed it as loudly as she could.

  She swallowed more water.

  And then the waters swallowed her.

  Chapter One

  The deluge seemed to come out of nowhere.

  On his way back to town after a better-than-average rehearsal session with the band he’d helped put together, Liam and the Forever Band, Liam Murphy immediately made his way to high ground at the first sign of a serious rainfall.

  Traveling alone out here, the youngest of the Murphy brothers was taking no chances—just in case. Flash floods didn’t occur often around here, but they did occur and “better safe than sorry” had been a phrase that had been drummed into his head by his older brother Brett from the time he and his other brother Finn had been knee-high to a grasshopper.

  As it turned out, Liam had made it to high ground just in time. Rain fell with a vengeance, as if the very sky had been slashed open. As he watched in awed fascination, in less than ten minutes, the onslaught of rain turned the basin below from a virtual dust bowl to a veritable swimming pool—one filled with swirling waters.

  More like a whirlpool, Liam silently amended, because the waters were sweeping so angrily over the terrain, mimicking the turbulent waters in a Jacuzzi.

  Liam glanced at the clock on his dashboard. Depending on when this was going to let up, he was either going to be late, or very late. This, after he’d promised Brett he’d be in to work early. He was due at Murphy’s, Forever’s only saloon. Fortunately, it belonged to his brothers and him, but Brett was still not going to be happy about this turn of events.

  Liam took out his phone, automatically glancing at the upper left-hand corner to see if there were any bars available.

  There were.

  “Not bad,” he murmured to himself when he saw the three small bars. “Service must be improving,” he noted with some relief.

  There’d been a time, not all that long ago, when no bars were the norm. A few short years ago, the region around Forever, for all intents and purposes, was a dead zone. But progress could only be held off for so long. Civilization had gotten a foothold in the town, though it had to be all but dragged in, kicking and screaming. Even now, on occasion, the strength of the signal was touch and go.

  Liam pressed the appropriate buttons. It took a very long minute before the call connected and he could hear the line on the other end ringing. He silently began to count off the number of times the other phone rang.

  He was up to four—one more and it went to voice mail—when he heard the cell phone being picked up.

  There was an almost deafening crackle and then he heard, “Murphy’s.”

  The deep, baritone voice could only belong to Brett, the oldest Murphy brother, the one who had been responsible for keeping him and Finn from becoming wards of the state when their uncle died a mere eighteen months after both their parents had passed on. Brett had done it at great personal cost, but that was something he and Finn had only found out about years after the fact.

  “Brett? It’s Liam. Looks like I’m going to be late for my shift,” he told his brother. The rain was beating against the rolled-up windows of his truck with a vengeance as if determined to gain access. All that was missing was a big, bad wolf ranting about huffing and puffing.

  “Don’t tell me, you got caught in this storm.”

  Liam could hear the concern in his brother’s voice—not that Brett would say as much. But it was understood. “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  He heard Brett sigh. “I always knew you didn’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain. Were you at least smart enough to get to high ground?”

  “Yes, big brother, the truck and I are on high ground.” Even as he said the words, his windows stopped rattling and the rain stopped coming down in buckets. He looked up through the front windshield. It seemed to have stopped coming down at all. “Matter of fact,” he said, pausing for a moment as he rolled down the driver’s-side window and stuck his hand out, palm up, “I think it just stopped raining.”

  It never ceased to amaze him just how fast rain seemed to turn itself on and then off again in this part of the country.

  “I’d still give it a little time,” Brett warned. “In case it starts up again. I’d rather have you late than dead.”

  Liam laughed shortly. “And on that heartwarming note, I think I’m going to end this call. See you later,” he said to his brother. The next moment, Liam hit the glowing red light on his screen, terminating the connection.

  Tucking the phone into his back pocket, he continued driving very slowly. As he began guiding his truck back down the incline, he
could have sworn he heard a woman’s scream.

  Liam froze for a second, listening intently.

  Nothing.

  Had to be one of the ravens, he decided. Most likely a disgruntled bird that hadn’t managed to find shelter before the rains hit, although he hadn’t seen one just now.

  Still, even though he was now driving down the incline to the trail he’d abandoned earlier, Liam kept listening, just to make sure that it was only his imagination—or some wayward animal—that was responsible for the scream he’d thought he’d heard.

  If it was his imagination, it was given to re-creating an extremely high-pitched scream, Liam decided, because he’d heard the cry for help again, fainter this time but still urgent, still high—and resoundingly full of absolute terror.

  Someone was in trouble, Liam thought, searching for the source of the scream.

  Throwing caution to the wind, he pushed down on the accelerator. The truck all but danced down the remainder of the incline in what amounted to a jerky motion. He had a death grip on the steering wheel as he proceeded to scan as much of the area around him as humanly possible.

  Liam saw that the basin had completely filled up with rainwater. Something like that was enough to compromise any one of a number of people, even those who were familiar with this sort of occurrence and had lived in and around Forever most of their lives.

  The water could rush at an unsuspecting driver with the speed of an oncoming train. Sadly, drownings in a flash flood were not unheard of.

  With his eyes intently focused, Liam scanned the area again.

  And again, he saw nothing except brackish-looking water.

  “Maybe it was just the wind,” Liam murmured under his breath.

  He knew that there were times when the wind could sound exactly like a mournful woman pining after a missing lover.

  If Brett were here with him, his older brother would have told him to get his tail on home.

  Stop letting your imagination run away with you, Brett would have chided.