Forever Falcon Ridge (The McLendon Family Saga Book 7)
Page 1
Forever Falcon Ridge
The McLendon Family Saga Book 7
D.L. Roan
Copyright © D.L. Roan
Contents
Description
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Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
The McLendon Family Saga Reading Order
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About the Author
Description
A third-generation rancher, Dani McLendon is destined to become the first woman to ever manage her family’s ranch. Running Falcon Ridge is her birthright, her honor, her responsibility. It’s all she’s ever dreamed of doing, until a long-legged, cowboy-built Texan saunters into their barn with his dimpled smile and changes everything with a risky dare.
One of the most important lessons Clay Sterling’s father taught him about working with a high-spirited filly is to work with her, not against her. Clay’s wanted Dani since the moment he laid eyes on her. He needs her as a partner in his latest business venture, and he wants her in his bed. Convincing the spitfire of a cowgirl to take a chance on him will be the fight of his life. He’s ready to go all twelve seducing rounds, but his prize in the end may be more than he bargained for. Winning Dani McLendon may just cost him his heart.
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More Books by D.L. Roan
The Heart of Falcon Ridge
A McLendon Christmas
Rock Star Cowboys
Rock Star Cowboys: The Honeymoon
The Hardest Goodbyes
Return to Falcon Ridge
Forever Falcon Ridge
Survivors’ Justice Series
Blindfold Fantasy: A Novel Menage
Forever Falcon Ridge – The McLendon Family Saga Book 7
Copyright © D.L. Roan, 2017
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system without prior written permission of the author and publisher.
www.dlroan.com
ISBN-13: 978-1548801601
ISBN-10: 1548801607
All characters, events, and locations in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or living, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover Design by JAB Designs
Copy Editing by Violetta Rand
Proof Reading by Read by Rose
Interior eBook Design by D.L. Roan
Chapter One
Dani McLendon dialed her twin brother’s number for the eighth time in an hour, cradling the phone with her shoulder as she folded and packed the last of her clothes into her suitcase.
Jonah, pick up!
“Hey, are you done with the—oh.” Molly, her roommate, paused in the open doorway and mouthed sorry when she noticed Dani on the phone.
Dani waved her in as the call clicked over to Jonah’s voicemail, yet again. She gritted her teeth as she waited for the beep.
“Hey jerkwad!” she snapped into the phone when the recording came to an end. “You know, I thought Con and Car were my learning impaired brothers, but apparently, you’ve been spending way too much time huffing gas fumes at that shop of yours. Call. Me. Back. Please.”
Molly arched a brow as Dani hung up and tossed the phone onto the bed. “Um, should I come back later?” she asked.
“No.” Dani ran her hands through her hair and collapsed onto the bed beside her suitcase. “Sorry. I’ve been trying to get an update on Uncle Cade all day, but nobody’s calling me back. You’d think between five grandparents, three dads, my mom, and four brothers, someone would answer their phone or text messages.”
“It’s just a few tests. The news can’t be too bad or someone would have called, right?” Molly sat on the mattress beside her. “Count your blessings. We’re almost seniors and my mom still calls me three times a day.”
Dani stared up at the ceiling as a myriad of terrifying thoughts raced through her mind. “You don’t know my family. They go radio-silent when there’s bad news.”
Uncle Cade’s doctors had only given him eight to ten months to live when they first discovered the tumor on his pancreas six months ago. When she’d returned home for Jonah’s wedding, she could see the toll the cancer was taking. Cade and Papa Daniel had just returned from their honeymoon, and though he’d tried to hide it, she wasn’t the only one who’d noticed the weariness in Cade’s usually sharp eyes.
“Call your sister-in-law again,” Molly suggested, reaching across the bed for Dani’s discarded phone.
Dani shook her head. “I already tried. Breezy and my brothers are on a flight back from Nashville. They don’t land for another two hours.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Molly laid back on the mattress beside her, her lips pulled into a dreamy smile. “Man, what I wouldn’t give to be her for just one night.”
“Eww! Please don’t start that again.” Dani laughed, and Molly’s grin widened.
Her best friend had had it bad for Dani’s country music star brothers, Connor and Carson, since she was in high school.
Dani shivered. “You didn’t have to share a bathroom with them growing up.”
“La-la-la-la-la,” Molly sang as she covered her ears and rolled away. “Don’t ruin the fantasy for me! And say all you want.” She flipped onto her stomach and propped her chin on her hand. “Your brothers are hot, and if I wasn’t your best friend, and Breezy wasn’t so nice, I’d be their worst stalker nightmare. Hey…” She popped up onto her elbows with a curious grin. “Do you think they’d go for a fourth? I can so totally do kinky with them.”
Dani laughed again and jackknifed off the bed, picking up another shirt from the pile of unfolded laundry and stuffing it into her bag. “Trust me. You do not want to go there. Besides, you know poly marriages aren’t like that.”
“Yeah-yeah. But tell me you’re not at least curious.”
Dani scrunched up her nose. “Not one bit.”
“Sandwiched between two hard, sweaty bodies.” Molly rolled onto her back, her head thrown back in feigned ecstasy. “Two sets of hands. Two sexy mouths. Two....Oh yes! Yes! Yes!”
“Stop! Please!” Dani threw a pair of wadded up jeans at her.
“Oh, c’mon, Dani. You can’t hold onto your V-card forever. It’s not natural. How you’ve made it this far without having sex is beyond bizarre. I mean, I’m not saying you’re a freak of nature or anything, but—okay, maybe an obscure anomaly, but still…�
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Dani rolled her eyes and grabbed another shirt to fold. “I just don’t see the big deal. And what does you wanting to have sex with my brothers have to do with my V-card anyway? Oh, and FYI, I don’t need two guys to lose my virginity. Technically, I don’t even need one.”
She probably couldn’t call herself a virgin anyway. After years of riding horses, she’d figured she’d long since lost that little token from mother nature. And it wasn’t as if she didn’t like guys. She did.
She’d fooled around enough to know about sex, and she’d almost done it with Molly’s boyfriend’s brother, Nathan, once. Someone had set off the fire alarm in the apartment building before they’d actually done it, but they’d done plenty of other things before the fire department evacuated the building.
She’d been more frustrated than disappointed, really. Nathan may not have been the one, but she’d finally been ready to shed the moniker of the only virgin McLendon left on the planet once and for all. Apparently, the world had other plans.
Though, if she hadn’t known her three dads were out of state at an auction that night, she’d have sworn one of them had pulled the alarm. Dads Matt and Mason were iffy, but she certainly wouldn’t have put it past Grey to spy on her. If he had his way, she’d be a virgin forever.
When Molly and her boyfriend broke up a few days after the fire alarm incident, Nathan started dodging her calls, too, so that was the end of that. Since then, there just hadn’t been any guys who’d made her want to have sex. Well, except one.
Clay Sterling
“What’s that face for?” Molly asked. “You look like one of my mom’s cats when it’s about to spew a hairball.”
Dani pursed her lips and pushed the annoying thought away, tossing the rest of the clothes into her suitcase without bothering to fold them. Nope. She wasn’t going there. Clay Sterling didn’t deserve one more single second inside her head.
So what if he was hot, smart, and owned his own agriculture tech company, and flew his own plane. He was also a jerk. A self-centered ass who’d wasted two months of her time working on his herd monitoring system as her modern agriculture project, only for him to up and abandon her before they’d even gotten the first drone off the ground. Thanks to him, she’d bombed the project and failed her final exam—her first failing grade ever—ruining the straight-A record she’d held since the first grade.
“Please don’t tell me you’re still obsessing over that Texas cowboy.”
“I’m not obsessing,” Dani insisted as she zipped her suitcase and then lugged it over to the door. “I never obsess. I’m not even thinking about him.”
“Liar.” Molly rolled her eyes. “And isn’t he too old for you anyway?”
“He’s the same age as Con and Car, and that doesn’t seem to bother you about them,” Dani snipped back. Geez. What was it with the age thing? Eight years wasn’t a big deal.
“Ha! So you have thought about him!” Molly bounced to the end of the bed and sprang to her feet. “Call him! Invite him to the party tonight.”
Dani glanced over her shoulder at her friend. “Uh, hello? He lives in Texas.”
Molly held up Dani’s cellphone and began scrolling through her contacts. “Uh, hello? He flies his own plane.”
“Don’t you dare!” Dani lunged for the phone and Molly twisted away with a giggle.
“Is he listed under C or S? What was his company’s name?”
Dani managed to snatch the phone away and tuck it safely into her back pocket before Molly could do any irreparable damage. “I’m not calling Clay. And I’m not going to the party.”
“What?” Molly reached for the box in Dani’s hands, but Dani twisted away, setting the box on the bed and tossing in the remnants of her cluttered desk. “Dani, you promised!”
“I know! I’m sorry, but I need to get home and check on Uncle Cade.”
“But it’s the last party of the year!”
A quick glance around the room confirmed she’d packed the last of her things. Dani set the box on the floor beside her suitcase and turned to her pouting friend. “It’s just a party, Moll.”
“Just a—Jason Stanly will be there! He’s totally into you!”
Dani laughed. “He’s also into half the cheerleading squad, and I’m pretty sure he’s been ‘into’ ninety percent of the buckle bunnies who follow him around the rodeo circuit, too. And weren’t you just telling me to call Clay Sterling?”
“You need to get laid!” Molly insisted with a whine. “Either-or, it doesn’t matter, just come to the party! You’re not leaving until tomorrow anyway. It’s our last night of independence before we go home for the summer.”
Her mind made up, Dani shouldered her purse. “I can’t, Moll. I need to get home now. Besides, I have a ranch I’m trying to upgrade into the twenty-first century this summer, and my dads aren’t going to take me seriously if I show up with a hangover.” She pulled Molly into a hug. “It’s just a few weeks. We’ll be back before you know it.”
“And we’ll be seniors.” Molly hugged her back. “Just so you know, you’re not going to get away with ditching me like this next year.”
Dani let her go with a nod. “I promise. I won’t.”
Molly arched a brow. “Yeah, like that means anything.”
Now she felt like a total jerk.
“I didn’t mean it.” Molly picked up the box from beside Dani’s suitcase and handed it to her. “Just call me if you get laid by some hot cowboy this summer. I want details.”
Now it was Dani’s turn to laugh. “Not a chance in hell. Three dads, remember?”
“Then just send me pics of your brothers when you can.”
Dani shook her head and reached for her suitcase. “Not gonna happen.” She loved Molly like a sister, but she’d learned her lesson about random pictures of Con and Car. They all eventually wound up on the internet one way or another. Her brothers were a pain in the ass, but she wouldn’t invade their privacy like that, not even for Molly.
“Tease!” Molly shouted down the hall as Dani retreated to her truck.
“See you in August!” she shouted over her shoulder. “And tell your mom I said hi!”
Her bags loaded into her truck, Dani said one final goodbye to her junior year as she pulled onto the highway. Three years down, one to go.
Once out of the city, she rolled down the window and cranked up the music to drown out her worrisome thoughts. Finals had helped distract her the last few weeks, but now that the semester was over and she was on the road home for the summer, losing Uncle Cade weighed heavily on her heart.
How much time did he have? What would life be like when he was gone? She’d never lost anyone she loved. Losing him would be like losing an uncle, a dad, brother, and best friend all rolled into one. And what would Papa Daniel do?
Papa Daniel will be devastated.
They’d been a couple since before she was born and had just gotten married. He and Cade were trying to be strong and brave and act like nothing was wrong, but everything was changing. Gran wasn’t much younger than Uncle Cade. What if she got sick, too? Or Papa Joe had another stroke? Papa Nate had even been admitted to the hospital last winter with pneumonia.
Time was running out. Soon, the family she loved would never be the same and there was nothing she could do to stop it. Her throat began to ache at the thought and she swallowed back the knot that threatened to choke her.
The sound of her cellphone ringing bled through the loud music and she snatched it from the cup holder, answering before she’d even seen who was calling.
“Hello?”
“Dani? Hey, it’s Clay Sterling.”
Dani pulled the phone from her ear to look at her caller ID, saying a silent curse for not blocking his number when she’d had the chance. Something I plan to remedy the second I get home.
“I didn’t expect you to answer,” he continued in his deep, sexy voice, every word dripping with his Texan accent.
“That makes two of us,”
she snipped back, her voice a little shakier than she’d anticipated.
“Are you okay?”
What? Why would he care?
“You sound like you’ve been crying.”
Dani cleared her throat and sat upright behind the wheel. “Nope.” Sobered, she pressed the speaker button, settled the phone back into the cup holder, and refocused her attention on the road ahead. “Why are you calling, Clay? I’m driving and shouldn’t be on the phone.”
Clay chuckled. She could almost picture his full lips turned up into his cocky grin. “You’re still sore at me about the drone project, huh?”
“Sore?” Sore wasn’t even close. “Sore is something you get when someone cancels a date, or-or-or forgets to put the toilet seat down, not when someone walks out on a project that my entire semester depended on.”
And who says sore? Christ, Molly was right. He is too old. Before she bit out those exact words, or worse, she clamped down on her bottom lip, biting it so hard she could have sworn she tasted blood.
“I can’t apologize more than I already have, Dani. If I could have stayed and finished the project I would have, but you know—”
“I’ve already told you. I don’t need another apology, and I’m hanging up. Traffic is really bad.” She glanced in the rearview mirror, raising a brow at the lone truck behind her. Whatever. He’d never know.