Maybe she should’ve dressed up as an unfeeling ghoul.
Dana touched Laila’s arm, said she would be right back, then made her way through the crowd toward the hallway.
Laila was just about to force herself to join most of her sisters—who were dressed alike as Greek muses—when someone new walked into the room.
It was Dean Pritchett, and he was with his brother Nick, neither of whom had dressed up as more than Western outlaws with fake guns and holsters by their sides.
Was it Laila’s imagination, or did Abby perk up a little on her side of the room?
Just as Laila thought she might have, her little sister seemed to lose interest in the Pritchett brothers.
Something told Laila that it was because Cade wasn’t with them, but she shushed that thought away. Abby had explained about her friendship with Cade, and it was ridiculous to doubt her.
Dean spotted Laila and came over while Nick joined her other sisters, hugging Jazzy, Jordyn then Annabel hello.
Greeting Laila with a friendly embrace, Dean started up some small talk before he broke the real ice and said, “Cade is working overtime on a project, so he won’t be around for a while tonight.”
She knew how Cade got with his woodworking, but she also wondered if he had stayed away from the party because he thought she would be here with Jackson.
What a tangled web.
Dean spotted her parents and waved them over to say hi. Dad was dressed as Buffalo Bill Cody, fake beard and all, and Mom was Annie Oakley. And if all of them were attempting to entertain Laila and put Jackson out of her mind by being extra lively and talkative, it almost worked.
Almost, because in her chest, she could still feel that injury he had left—the soreness around her heart. Why couldn’t she give him one more chance to tell her who he might be now instead of who he had been a few weeks ago? Didn’t she owe herself at least that? Some closure?
All Laila could hear were moaning creaks and cackles from the haunted house sound track.
She must have looked pretty pathetic standing there alone in the crowd, because Mike Trudeau even came over to talk to her. He was dressed as a huntsman and actually hadn’t even been around the bank all week, due to another trip to the woods.
“Evening, Laila,” her boss said.
“Hi, Mike.”
He tapped his fingers against his punch glass, apparently trying to whip up the courage to say something to her.
He finally found it. “Being out of town this week, I’m afraid I didn’t get around to apologizing for something that requires it. Maybe Jackson already told you, but…”
Jackson…
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about,” Laila said, although she suspected this had something to do with the chat Mike and Jackson had been having at the town hall, when it seemed as if Jackson wasn’t too happy with her boss.
“He didn’t tell you?” he said.
“No…”
Her words disappeared. She hadn’t asked Jackson what he had been talking about with Mike Trudeau. Hadn’t wanted to know because it went against all the “fling” and “temporary” markers that they had forced on themselves.
Her boss pursed his lips, then came out with it. “I haven’t been entirely fair to you in work matters, Laila, and Jackson pointed that out to me. He about tore my head off, as a matter of fact.” He nodded. “You deserve to have someone like him around, taking up your back as he does. Frankly, I’m surprised that he didn’t crow to you about how he came to your rescue.”
…taking up your back like he does…
Her boss motioned toward the entryway. “It’s just that I thought I should get in my apologies to you before he came inside the house to make sure that I—”
She had already put her punch glass down on the piano, going toward the door.
“Laila?” called Dana from somewhere inside the party.
She smacked into a wall of man, gasped, looking up into the one face she had been aching to see.
An implosion rocked her. He hadn’t dressed in costume—he was who he was in a long-sleeved Western shirt, jeans and boots. His hair was tousled from having taken off his hat, and, in one hand, he was holding a bunch of long-stemmed red roses.
They locked gazes for a moment that was battered by the anguish of yesterday. But there was something else in it, too.
As Laila stood away from him, her hand to her chest, her heart raced, as if it wanted to take off.
Or push her back into his arms.
“Evelyn,” said Jackson. Her mom had come up behind them. “Thank you for extending the invitation.”
Invitation?
As Mom stood beside Jackson, she gave Laila an innocent look, then grabbed onto Dad’s hand as he arrived, too. He seemed on guard, although Laila knew he had taken a gruff shine to Jackson by the end of Football Day. It was clear, though, that Mom had explained to him what was going on right now, and he was behind whatever plans she had concocted.
Had Jackson gotten together with Mom to broker a truce and now everyone was in on this?
Laila thought of how Dana had made sure she had gotten here, no excuses tolerated, and how her siblings had welcomed her with overly open arms.
Her brother, sisters and Dana formed a circle around Jackson and Laila, as if waiting for something big to happen.
He said, “Don’t be angry with your Mom, Laila. I told her what happened, and when she heard me out, she asked me to come over. I’m glad the whole family is here, too, because I have something real important to say, and it starts with a heartfelt apology about everything I’ve done in the past.”
The Halloween special effect noises kept on, a whistling wind that added to the tension. Besides that, Laila heard someone mutter in the background.
“Here he goes, making another scene.”
Jackson heard it, and he obviously knew what the peanut gallery was referring to.
“This isn’t my brother Corey’s wedding,” he said in a level voice. “I haven’t had any champagne tonight, and I’m not going to be making any speeches about how marriage stinks and how the entire state of matrimony is a big mistake. That’s not why I’m here.”
Someone else coughed, as if they doubted Jackson. Maybe they had been at the wedding and they couldn’t imagine that there was any difference in him between then and now. But he had grown up, becoming a man Laila could not only desire, but love. That was why yesterday had hurt so much, because of the suspicion that she had been wrong.
Yet, now, he waited before her, braving her family and friends, not knowing how she would react to him, standing tall with all those apology roses in hand.
A burn crept up her throat, her eyes stinging as Jackson stepped forward, handing her the flowers. Every petal seemed to tell her how much she was worth to him. If she couldn’t read it in the bouquet, she sure could do it from the look in his eyes.
He was making a big gesture but, truly, all she had needed was him.
Jackson’s pulse was racing a mile a minute as he stood there holding those roses. He felt every eye in the room on him, especially those of Laila’s family.
Do her wrong again, they seemed to be saying, and there’ll be a high cost.
But he was here to do right.
This time when he proposed, it was for real—not some joke at a beauty pageant.
“Laila, it wasn’t so long ago that I didn’t deserve to tread in the footsteps you made. But somewhere along the line, you brought a light to my head. And to my heart. You showed me decency, patience…even sweetness.” He could barely breathe. “I can’t see a future without you, and I ask with humility, hope and—Lord believe it—seriousness for you to spend the rest of your days with me.”
The Halloween noises over the stereo abruptly stopped as a kind soul turned off the sound track. That left the high volume of Jackson’s heartbeat in his ears as Laila broke into tears.
The flowers seemed to wilt in his arms.
Crying?
&
nbsp; Was that how a woman said yes?
But then, just as he was at his lowest, she rushed to him, and he dropped the roses so he could pull her against him full force.
“I do,” she whispered into his ear. “I will. We will. My boss just told me what you said to defend me at the town hall. I wanted so badly to believe in you, though, even before he—”
“It’s okay, Laila. Just so you say yes tonight.”
The entire room broke into cheers and applause, but they were only wisps of noise while Jackson cupped Laila’s head with one hand, her back with the other, holding on for dear life.
Then she raised her tear-stained face to him, and he realized that he still had so much to tell her, so much to straighten out.
But when she kissed him, he knew that everything would work. No doubts in his head, heart, soul.
They escaped out the door, but not before she grabbed their coats from the entry. She pulled him out front, where dusk was just lying down for the night and the lights from the ranch house windows breathed softly, like warm relief.
When she put on her coat, her flowing white dress whisked out from her hem. The last of the sunlight caught the diamond snowflake glitters in her long hair.
A queen, he thought. His queen for the rest of his life.
Then he remembered.
“Dammit,” he said, stopping their progress. “I clean forgot.”
As she faced him, he reached into his jeans pocket, coming out with a diamond ring that matched her sparkle. He had bought it today, mulling over the jewelry counter in Bozeman with care and consideration. With the hope that she wouldn’t turn him down.
When she saw it, she sucked in a breath.
“I bought it,” he said, “after giving a lot of thought to how I was going to go about winning you back. And I’ve been doing a lot of that during our relationship, haven’t I? Always trying to woo, to win.”
“That’s because I demand effort,” she said, nestling close to him, stroking his cheek with her fingertips. “Maybe too much at times.”
“You were doing what I needed you to do, Laila. And, yesterday, when you came to me, all teared up…”
“No more apologies.”
But he wanted there to be no trace of doubt, and he framed her face with his hands, looking down into those soul-deep blue eyes.
“I take a while to learn. And, for most of my life, I’ve been real comfortable not learning, just staying in a rut, marching to the same love-’em-and-leave-’em tune. I thought that I truly believed that a one-woman existence wasn’t for me. I’d seen what love did to my mom after Dad’s death, and I knew what it felt like to lose him, too. I never wanted to feel that way again.”
“I know, Jackson.”
He peered down at her. “You had me figured out long before I even did?”
“There was a lot to untangle, but I saw through you pretty early on, just as you did with me.”
They were the only two people who could do that for each other, Jackson thought. Maybe that talent was a big part of love, and since he had never found it before, he’d had no idea when it had hit him so swiftly and thoroughly.
She laughed through her tears, and he dried them with the pad of his thumb, not liking to see her cry, wanting to do anything he could to stop it from this day forward.
“It was such a stupid fight,” she said. “Wasn’t it?”
“I was the cause of it. It was bound to come, anyway, with all we weren’t saying to each other. I’m just glad we’re on the same page now.”
“The page that says we’ve also figured out our future plans?”
She was asking if he wanted to go back to Texas, abandoning Thunder Canyon.
But this town had caught his fancy, too, and he knew that staying here was important to Laila.
“Thunder Canyon is my home now,” he said, “just as much as you are.”
He took her hand in his, looking at her as if she were the diamond-studded heavens all wrapped into one woman.
Slipping the ring over her finger, he said, “My wife-to-be.”
She looked at the ring for the longest time, and he realized that she was crying again.
But when they connected gazes, he saw that they were good tears, and that made him happier than he ever thought he could be.
“My husband,” she said, and he liked the sound of that.
Liked it way more than a former scoundrel like Jackson Traub would have ever thought.
Lost and found in each other, they kissed under the setting sun, the two least likely people to ever find love finally discovering it with each other.
Special thanks and acknowledgment to Crystal Green for her contribution to the Montana Mavericks: The Texans Are Coming! continuity.
ISBN: 978-1-4592-1424-8
THE HARD-TO-GET COWBOY
Copyright © 2011 by Harlequin Books S.A.
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*Kane’s Crossing
§The Suds Club
‡The Foleys and the McCords
~~Montana Mavericks: Thunder Canyon Cowboys
§Billionaire Cowboys, Inc.
‡‡Montana Mavericks: The Texans Are Coming!
**Montana Mavericks: The Kingsleys
†The Fortunes of Texas: Reunion
††Most Likely To… ~Montana Mavericks: Striking It Rich
~~Montana Mavericks: Striking It Rich
The Hard-to-Get Cowboy Page 17
