“And no one stopped to give you a ride?”
She shook her head, dabbed at the tears again. “The streets are empty. Nearly everyone in town is already at the church waiting for the wedding.”
Just saying that punched away at some of the shock. Punched at her gut, too. Thankfully, she hadn’t eaten anything or she would have driven down her dignity another notch by puking.
“Are you, uh, drunk?” he asked.
“Maybe a little. Brantley brought me a bottle of Jose Cuervo when he delivered the news, and I had some sips.”
Actually, she wasn’t sure just how much she’d downed before climbing out the window. Sophie also suspected the tequila was the reason she hadn’t noticed the mud until it was too late to save her shoes.
And it had almost certainly influenced her decision to come up with this date plan.
Chief McKinnon huffed, scrubbed his hand over his face and then winced when he encountered that cut on his head. “Look, Miss Granger, I’m sorry for what happened to you, but instead of looking for a date, you should just go back to the church and be with your family.”
“God, no!” She couldn’t say that fast enough. “That’s the last place I need to be without a plan. One of my brothers is there. My cousin, too. My best friend. And my mother.” Especially her mother. “They’d go after Brantley and beat him up. Then you’d have to arrest just about everyone in the vicinity who’s related to me.”
He nodded. Stood. Handed her a fresh Kleenex. “I’ll go to the church and calm them down.”
“You’d stand a better chance of getting this mud off tulle. Once they learn what’s happened, there’ll be little chance of calming them down. No, the best way to handle this is my date idea.”
He cocked his head to the side, studied her as if he were indeed about to call the mental hospital to come and get her.
“Don’t you see?” she asked, but she didn’t wait for him to answer. “If you and I leave now, I can say I ran off with you. We wouldn’t really run off, of course. We could just go somewhere for a couple of hours, but I could tell my family I had second thoughts about marrying Brantley and that I couldn’t help myself, that I had to have one last fling.”
“That’s the tequila talking,” he insisted.
Possibly.
Probably, she amended.
Sophie didn’t usually have to make critical decisions and plans while under the influence, and once she sobered up and got out of the dress so she could breathe, she might be able to come up with something better. For now, though, this was all she had.
“If your family thinks you’re with me, it’ll make you look bad,” the chief added. Clearly, he was grasping at straws here.
“I don’t think I can look any worse, do you?”
He didn’t argue, not with that anyway. “Basically, you want me to lie for you?”
She nodded. “But it’s for the sake of keeping peace and preventing an assault. I hate Brantley for what he did. Hate him with every fiber of my being.”
That shock was finally wearing off. Some of the tequila, too.
Fast.
Hell in a handbasket.
How had it come to this?
The hurt shoved away the anger so fast that Sophie didn’t even know it was coming. She caught the edge of the desk to steady herself. That didn’t help, either, and since her knees were too wobbly to stand, she just sat on the edge of the desk. Of course, she knocked things over, but she couldn’t help it.
She was no longer an engaged woman. No longer about to become Brantley’s wife. In fact, she wasn’t sure who she was and prayed that was a temporary effect of the hurt and the lack of oxygen. Because at this exact moment, she felt something she’d never felt before.
Broken.
“I would ask if you’re okay,” Chief McKinnon said, “but I already know the answer. You’re not. And that’s why you’re not thinking straight. If you just go to your family with the truth—”
“But I don’t want them in jail,” she insisted just as the eighteenth round of tears came.
He glanced up at the ceiling as if seeking divine guidance. “Why me? Isn’t there someone else in town who’d have an easier time lying about this?”
It was hard to give someone a flat look while you were crying, but Sophie thought she’d managed it. “There are no other eligible straight men in town.”
He was it, period. All the others were married, too young, too old or else they worked at her family’s ranch. Dating someone who technically worked for her was a huge no-no in her brother’s eyes. Hers, as well. And there wasn’t a single breathing soul in Wrangler’s Creek who would believe she’d ditched Brantley to sow wild oats with the pig farmer everyone called Skunk. Or Ned the pharmacist, who had a germ phobia and wouldn’t touch anyone unless he was wearing latex gloves.
Sophie kept trying despite the sobs. “Plus, folks don’t know you that well since you’ve only lived here a couple of months—”
“Nine months,” he corrected. He gave her four more Kleenexes, and she needed every one of them.
“In Wrangler’s Creek time, that’s only a couple of minutes. Skunk, the pig farmer, has lived here since before I was born, and people still call him the new guy.”
At least the chief didn’t just shoot down her idea. He bunched up his forehead as if giving it some thought. Thought that ended in a head shaking. “No one has ever seen us together before now. No way would they believe you’d run off with a man you didn’t know.”
“So we could embellish the lie and say we’ve been meeting secretly.”
“Now you want embellishment?”
“It’s for a good cause,” she pressed.
But then Sophie had to consider something that she was certain she would have considered earlier if she’d been thinking straight. “Uh, are you seeing anyone, engaged, gay?”
“None of the above. That doesn’t mean I want to buy into a lie that would snowball.”
He still clearly wasn’t on board with this, so Sophie just went for broke. “I don’t want my family to see me looking this pathetic. This muddy,” she added, glancing down at her feet. “While I’m crying. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be the only sister in a family of alpha cowboys?”
“Not really.” He finally gave in and just handed her the entire box of tissues.
Even though he looked so ready for this conversation to be over, Sophie continued. “Well, it’s hard. I’ve had to fight and scrape for every ounce of power and responsibility I have, and if they see me like this, I’ll lose that. They’ll walk on eggshells. They’ll treat me like a hurt woman.”
“Uh, aren’t you a hurt woman?”
“Yes, but I don’t want them to know that.”
More ceiling glancing, more huffing. “Follow this through. If we pretend we’re dating, the pretense will continue because there’ll have to be a fake breakup. Your family will definitely look at you as a hurt woman then. And what kind of example would that make of me? I’ve got two nephews, and I don’t want them to think I’m the kind of guy who’d carry on with an engaged woman.”
He was making sense, but Sophie still wasn’t giving up on this plan just yet. This was one of the things she had to do often at Granger Western—she had to tweak sales proposals, marketing plans and personnel assignments. This was just another situation in need of a tweaking.
But what? How?
Sophie was asking herself those very questions when she heard something she didn’t want to hear. Voices that she recognized.
Oh, God. They’d found her.
“Is my sister here?” someone barked. Garrett, her oldest brother.
Garrett sounded both concerned and pissed. Not a good combination. He was the one most likely to kick Brantley’s butt, but he would also berate her fo
rever about getting involved with the man he’d always said was all wrong for her. Of course, any man who wasn’t a cowboy would have been wrong for her in Garrett’s eyes.
“Is my baby girl all right?” Voice number two.
Her mother, Belle. The one most likely to coddle her, but the coddling would quickly turn to smothering. Then nagging. Then she’d go after Brantley with a vengeance.
“We know she’s here. We followed her muddy footprints.” Voice number three. Lawson. Her cousin. He’d berate her, coddle her and then assist Garrett and her mother when they gave Brantley that serious butt kicking.
The only Granger missing was her other brother, Roman. He’d been invited to the wedding, of course, but he hadn’t shown and probably wouldn’t. Too bad, because if Roman had come, it would have taken some of the ugly spotlight off her. A black-sheep brother could do that.
“We need to see her.” Voice number four. Her best friend, Mila Banchini. There’d be no nagging or butt kicking and only minimal coddling from her, but for the next decade Sophie would have to listen to Mila’s attempts to find her a suitable husband.
“I’m sorry,” Sophie said to the chief.
“For what?”
“This is the only tweak I can think of.” And despite its being a stupid tweak, Sophie launched herself into Chief McKinnon’s arms.
From the corner of her eye, Sophie watched her family and friend trickle in. She also felt the chief’s muscles go statue stiff and expected a similar reaction from the others.
That didn’t happen.
They were standing there. Three Grangers and Mila, who was wearing her champagne maid-of-honor dress. Each of them looked at her not with sympathy, exactly. There was something else. Something that caused her to go still.
They didn’t rush to coddle her. Didn’t issue death threats about Brantley. And they especially didn’t ask what she was doing in Chief McKinnon’s arms. The chief remedied that, though. He backed away from her, staying by her side and studying her family.
“We know about Brantley,” Garrett said. “He came and talked to us right after he spoke to you.”
Oh. Sophie hadn’t expected that from the man she was now thinking of as freshly dropped cow dung.
“I know it’s hard,” her mother added. “You’re crying.”
It was the right thing to say. The right tone, too, but the four were still standing in the same spots as if someone had glued their feet to the floor. And Lawson and her mother were dodging her gaze. Definitely not a good sign.
“Did someone die?” Sophie came out and asked. Then, she had a horrible, gut-twisting thought. “Did one of you kill Brantley?”
“No,” Garrett answered. He didn’t add more because his phone buzzed. He mumbled something about having to take the call and walked out.
That knot in her stomach got worse. Because here she was jilted and broken, something Garrett would have almost certainly realized, and yet he’d taken a call.
“Did Brantley do something to harm himself?” the chief asked.
Evidently, he was also aware that something wasn’t right about this visit. Something other than the obvious, that is, since she’d just been jilted and her family had seen her with her arms wrapped around the police chief.
“As far as I know, Brantley’s okay,” Lawson said.
There was a huge but at the end of that. Sophie could hear it. “What’s wrong?” she asked.
Her mother, Mila and Lawson volleyed glances at each other, but they didn’t say a word. They appeared to be waiting for Garrett to return, which he did a couple of moments later.
“Anything?” her mother said to him.
Garrett shook his head and drew in a long breath as if he would need it. He went to Sophie, taking her by the shoulders. “I know this is a shitty day, but I’m about to make it even shittier.”
Not possible.
But a moment later, Sophie learned she was wrong about that. A whole new level of shitty had been added to her life.
Find out what happens when Sophie’s life takes a drastic turn and Clay is there to help pick up the pieces in the first installment of the WRANGLER’S CREEK trilogy, THOSE TEXAS NIGHTS, by USA TODAY bestselling author Delores Fossen, available January 2017 from HQN Books!
Copyright © 2016 by Delores Fossen
ISBN-13: 9781460396100
Blame It on the Cowboy
Copyright © 2016 by Delores Fossen
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