Enchanted by the Rodeo Queen--A Clean Romance

by Melinda Curtis

  Disappointment coursed through her. She hadn’t wanted Bo to be one of those men, the kind who only had to smile to get their way. The handsome kind who cut corners because life gave them so much and they unapologetically took what was offered.

  And yet...

  Some piece of Jonah’s story didn’t fit. “I thought Bo was single.” And if he was, why was Jonah offering to help her garner his attention?

  A moment ago, Jonah’s gaze had been laid bare, his pain visible in the crease between his brows and the firm line of his mouth. At her words, he almost seemed to draw back, as if pulling within himself. “Bo’s not married or engaged.”

  It hadn’t worked out for any of them—not Jonah, not Bo and not the fiancée.

  “Consider the subject closed,” Jonah added, although he didn’t turn away from her.

  Emily was used to Jonah’s sarcasm. It could be annoying, but it was never mean in nature. She wasn’t used to his vulnerability. Here was a man who’d trusted, who’d loved, who’d been hurt.

  He needs a hug.

  Emily shifted, resisting the impulse to do just that. She looked him in the eye, noted his closed-off expression and realized he was waiting for her to respond to his offer. “What exactly are you expecting your assistant to do?”

  “I want you...” He faltered, drew a deep breath and started again. “I have a map of the old stagecoach and Pony Express routes. I want to see if I can find them. I want to walk in Merciless Mike Moody’s shoes—”

  “Boots,” Emily corrected.

  “—and get in his head.” Jonah passed a hand between them, disregarding semantics. “I need someone to guide me to places. I want to know if Mike could see the old roads from his hideout. If I see what he did, I’ll know what tempted him to a life of crime, I’ll know where he’d have ambushed the stage. I’d understand how hard it was to execute his plan.”

  What he wanted sounded easy, a couple of simple trail rides. Straightforward, like Tina running her sweet palomino in figure eights in the arena. But there were tricks to everything and, like the way she’d noticed Button was cutting corners, Emily could tell Jonah wasn’t telling her something.

  Besides the story behind his lost fiancée.

  “I’m going to pass.” She preferred to work with people who were honest. And if she was being honest with herself, there was no way Jonah could help her appeal to Bo. Jonah was too sharp-edged to play matchmaker, especially with someone who’d taken so much away from him. “You can find the roads alone on someone’s borrowed ATV. You don’t need me.” Frankly, most of the time Jonah didn’t appear to need anyone. “The lands across the river are nationally protected, but public. And that’s where I’ve heard the old stage line ran.”

  “No motorized vehicles.” Jonah ran a hand over his red goatee, swept his gaze over her. “I want to see it by horseback, the way Mike Moody would have. I’ve been to the smithy a couple of times, trying to get a feel for that fight Mike had with Old Jeb the last day of his life.”

  Old Jeb. Emily’s ancestor. The man Granny Gertie wanted her to make sure was well represented in Jonah’s script.

  There’s a reason to agree.

  She was lying to herself. There was only one reason to agree: Bo.

  Her eggs sighed again, transgressions with another man’s fiancée forgotten. Like her, they found it hard to believe he’d stolen Jonah’s bride. There had to be more to the story. The two cousins were friendly with each other.

  And yet, knowing what she did, Emily couldn’t agree to the terms. The probability of failure was too high.

  Jonah waited before her with more patience than she’d expected.

  It struck her then. There was another reason to agree: Jonah. He deserved help after what he’d been through. And if she learned more about Bo and his moral fiber... If she learned Bo regretted all that had happened...

  “I sense your hesitation.” Jonah opened the freezer door and selected a pint of fudge chunk. It was the flavor of ice cream she’d been considering when he’d dropped his proposition. “I’m offering you options in a place where you don’t have many. I’m offering you strategy, not a makeover, although a new look wouldn’t hurt.” His smile was apologetic as he handed her the ice cream.

  Emily glanced down at her pink checked button-down shirt and dirty blue jeans.

  “Women chase after Bo like hungry bloodhounds on the scent of a fox.” Jonah tipped the brim of her cowboy hat up. “You have to be different. You have to act like he isn’t the most handsome man in the room.”

  “Is that how it was with your fiancée?” Had that woman treated Bo like he was no different than any other man?

  Jonah turned his back on Emily and started walking. “You have to earn that information.”

  She followed him. “I could just ask Bo.” If she could actually form words when the hunky Texan was near. That had always been a problem in the past, hence her invisibility.

  Jonah shook his head. “Asking about Aria won’t get you a coveted date.”

  “I’m not looking for a date. I’m looking for something long-term.”

  Jonah chose that moment to face her. He stood in front of an entire shelf of chocolate. Big bags in exotic flavors left over from Easter. It was amazing she registered the chocolate behind him when his eyes were upon her. They were so blue and full of regret that she held her breath.

  “I’m moving into your bunkhouse today.” Gone was the sarcasm, the snark, the attitude that implied Jonah was smarter than everyone in the room. She didn’t recognize this man. “Tomorrow afternoon. You bring the horses. I’ll provide the map.” He turned, grabbing a yellow bag of chocolate with a large, happy Easter bunny on the front. He handed it to her. “For your nephews.”

  He’d selected two items to please her, but the contents of his basket held nothing as decadent—vegetables, tofu patties, yogurt, peanut butter, white bread.

  “Are you vegetarian?”

  “No.”

  She didn’t believe him. He was so thin. Although he could be recovering from some illness. There wasn’t anything in his basket that a doctor wouldn’t approve of, except maybe white bread. Was that why he’d lost his fiancée to Bo? Because he’d had cancer or a brain tumor or some other health scare?

  She was suddenly Team Jonah, at least where the other woman was concerned.

  While she’d been wondering about Jonah’s health, he’d gone to the checkout counter. “Bring me my horse, Aunty Em, and leave the questions to me.” Jonah paid for his groceries and moved to the door, juggling his bags and two boxes of small kitchen appliances. “Enjoy that ice cream.”

  Emily added the ice cream and chocolate to her grocery order, knowing when she got around to eating her pint, she wasn’t going to enjoy it, not the way she usually did.

  Because she was going to think of Jonah with every spoonful.

  * * *

  EXTERIOR. SECOND CHANCE BLACKSMITH SHOP. Mike and Jeb face off over the forge. Mike’s guns are holstered.

  MIKE: I’m taking your horse.

  JEB: No.

  Mike shakes a small bag of gold.

  MIKE: You can buy a better horse.

  “BLECH. NO BLOOD. No guts. So much for trying to write the ending first.” Jonah rubbed his forehead and stared at the peeling rose wallpaper in the bunkhouse. He’d moved to the Bucking Bull Ranch after talking to Emily in town. His steamer and rice cooker sat on the counter in the kitchenette. The one-room shack had a minimalist Western atmosphere, if he overlooked the feature wall. “Who puts wallpaper in a bunkhouse?”

  He’d been trying to write for hours but had very little to show for it. Moving out here was supposed to help him with that. He was closer to real cowboys this way—or in the case of the Clarks, real cowgirls. The sounds of livestock, the smell of leather... It should’ve all been inspiring. And it might’ve been if Emily ha
d agreed to be his assistant.

  Don’t blame someone else for your failures.

  That was Grandpa Harlan’s voice, gruff and disapproving.

  Jonah turned from the wallpaper and stared at a small watercolor he’d hung on the refrigerator with a magnet. It was a portrait Aria had done of him right before he’d proposed. She’d captured his face in cynical lines, everything from the slant of his eyes to the lowered eyebrows.

  “There’s a man who doesn’t trust the world,” Jonah had told Aria when she’d shown it to him, thinking she’d captured the side of himself that he didn’t like. He wondered if that was the way she saw him.

  “You’re not looking deep enough,” she’d told him, staring at his portrait with love in her eyes.

  He’d proposed then. The words coming clumsily out of his mouth because they hadn’t been rehearsed. If he’d delved deeper into his reason for popping the question, he’d have known it was too soon and for the wrong reasons. He’d have realized where their romance was headed.

  Later, he’d plotted it out, written it up, complete with sparkling dialogue, painful, tense moments and a tearful romantic ending. For Bo. Later still, he’d put the project away, certain his father and agent would laugh at it. Getting movies made in Hollywood required a certain amount of clout. Jonah had none, which made writing in a different genre difficult.

  He may have nailed Bo and Aria’s script, but he was floundering with Mike Moody and more was at stake with the Western. Every word, every action he detailed on the page could let Shane and Second Chance down. He got to his feet, needing to get out of the small cabin, wanting to talk to Bo but assuming he’d be rebuffed. Did it matter whose baby it was if it wasn’t his or Bo’s? Bo’s force field seemed to indicate that it did.

  The sky above the ranch was an endless black dotted with bright stars. Crickets chirped. In the barn, a horse whinnied. There was no traffic noise. No sirens. Not even creaking timbers from the Lodgepole Inn.

  It was after 9:00 p.m. The farmhouse across the ranch yard was dark. The Clarks were in bed. Moving here might have been a mistake. The writing wasn’t coming any easier just because he was in these authentic, wide-open Idaho spaces.

  The mistake was telling Emily about my failed engagement.

  Like Jonah, Emily wasn’t the most trusting type. And he’d given her a reason to look beneath Bo’s pretty veneer. That weakened Jonah’s bargaining power.

  Jonah blew out a breath and breathed in...woodsmoke.

  That was odd. No smoke came from the farmhouse chimney.

  Curious, and in need of a distraction from the dreadful script, Jonah walked around to the back of the house, telling himself he wasn’t snooping. The backyard wasn’t fenced.

  Emily sat at a circular firepit while eating her fudge chunk ice cream. For once, she was outside without her cowboy hat. The firelight made her hair seem a richer brown.

  “Evenin’, neighbor.” Jonah’s spirits immediately lightened. His running shoes crunched over gravel as he entered the circle around the pit. He claimed a webbed folding chair next to her.

  “Jonah, I don’t want to sound rude but—” she put a spoonful of ice cream in her mouth, pausing until she’d swallowed “—I live in a house full of people and this is the only time I can be alone.”

  “Hmm.” That wasn’t the type of statement he could let slide. “Aren’t you alone when you ride out to check on the cattle?”

  She dug her spoon into the carton and said nothing.

  “Or when you drive into town to get groceries or pick up the boys?”

  Emily indelicately shoved a spoonful of ice cream into her mouth and stared at the fire.

  “I came here to see if you’d been considering my offer.” An outright lie, but he needed inspiration, and one of her snappy lines could be used as inspiration for a new scene.

  “Your job offer?”

  Jonah nodded. “About helping you attract Bo’s attention.”

  She scraped her spoon around the inside of the carton, seemingly not sold on his proposition. Or perhaps his confession had turned her off Bo.

  Jonah had been in enough pitch meetings in Hollywood to recognize that she needed a teaser. “Here’s some free insight. Bo’s parents were Texas-Philly snowbirds. Migrating whenever a business Uncle Darrell ran needed his presence for more than a few days at a time. His branch of the Monroe family is in oil and yacht building. Contrast that to me. I was born and raised in Hollywood. My dad runs Monroe Studios and my mom is my sister Ashley’s momager.”

  Growing up, Jonah had been the overlooked older child. Not an actor. Not an athlete. And later, not even healthy.

  Emily stared into the depths of the empty container and shifted her feet as if getting ready to leave, which was odd. Most people liked to know they had less than six degrees of separation between them and actress Ashley Monroe.

  Jonah turned the conversation back to his cousin. “Bo likes women with a bit of polish.” That was because of his cousin’s Philly roots. “Independent women who might occasionally find themselves in a bind.” Bo had a serious rescue complex. He’d take on the cause of any damsel in distress. “And women with contradictory layers.” They had to be intriguing.

  Emily was intriguing, although she didn’t seem to know it.

  She tossed her ice cream carton in the fire and then set her spoon on her chair’s plastic armrest. “Did you just describe your former fiancée?”

  Now it was Jonah’s turn to go silent.

  “You’re not doing a very good job of selling Bo as the man for me.” Emily slouched in her chair, burying her hands in her jacket pockets. “I’ll forget for a moment he was involved in a messy love triangle if you’ll answer me this. Does your description fit me? Do I have a bit of polish? Am I independent but perhaps not completely self-sufficient? Do I have contradictory layers?”

  Yes. Yes to everything.

  Emily’s laughter lacked humor. “I’ll take your silence as a no. No on all counts.” Sober again, she asked, “Are you trying to fix me up with Bo so you can win your fiancée back?”

  “No!” The word burst forth at a volume that had her studying him.

  “Then why try and fix me up with Bo?”

  He couldn’t tell her the truth—that the matchmaking was just a carrot to draw her into his sphere. Guilt prickled along his skin. He was no better than the legions of females who’d pretended to like him in an effort to further their acting careers. Although he supposed there was a possibility that Bo might fall for Emily and get over Aria for good, so the deal between them could be mutually beneficial. “If I explain about my engagement, will you take me on a trail ride?”

  A log on the fire collapsed in on itself.

  “Curiosity was the cat’s downfall.” Emily slanted a glance at him. “But in this case, if you tell me about your engagement, I’ll give you one trail ride.”

  “Sure.” Jonah was certain he could turn one ride into another. “Long story short...” Because the full story was messy. “Bo and I are close. We met Aria at a fund-raiser in Houston a year ago. I was on location for a movie. We both dated her.” It had become a competition to see who would win her heart first. Not Jonah’s proudest moment, to be sure. But relying on hindsight could be harsh and judgmental. “After a few months, she accepted my proposal and shortly thereafter admitted she also had feelings for Bo.”

  She’d stood in front of Jonah and handed his ring back. “I can’t marry you if I love Bo.”

  Bo had stood nearby, stone-faced.

  “And all I could think in those first few seconds was there’s something wrong here.” He’d taken a breath and realized something important. “My heart wasn’t broken.” He’d taken another breath and realized Bo’s had been. “It all happened so fast.”

  “Like a traffic accident,” Emily noted.

  The tofu patty Jonah ha
d had for dinner churned at the memory of a once-innocent rivalry gone wrong.

  “She loved two men at the same time.” Jonah hardly recognized his voice. It was flat and emotionless, the way Bo’s had been earlier in the store. “And now she’s pregnant with someone else’s baby.”

  “She’s...” Emily laid a hand on Jonah’s shoulder, bridging the distance between them. Just one brief touch before she retreated. “How do you feel about that? Are you okay?”

  He blinked. Not even his mother had asked him how he was doing after his engagement fell apart. “Shocked at the speed of her rebound, obviously. Although given the whirlwind courtship I had with her, I shouldn’t be.”

  But Bo was. Bo seemed devastated.

  Emily blew out a breath. “So you’re saying Bo’s not a homewrecker.”

  “Not in the slightest,” Jonah was quick to say, turning the subject to safer waters. “And afterward... It took a few months but we’re back to doing things together—like coming here—but our relationship isn’t the same.” It felt more like an obligation than a fondness for one another’s company.

  Emily stirred the fire with a poker. “You do realize you’re in a broken bromance with your cousin?”

  “Technically, I don’t think family relationships can be bromances.” But her slant on the situation was clever, he’d give her that.

  Emily made a dismissive noise. “You have bigger problems than writing the story of Mike Moody’s life. I’m not sure I want to get tied up in all this.”

  Jonah bristled.

  But Emily wasn’t done. “I’m not going to mend Bo’s broken heart.”

  “We’ll never know if we don’t try. Are you in or out?” He crossed his arms over his chest. “I sense out.”

  “I didn’t say...” Her head wobbled, along with her resolve. “I shouldn’t be...”

  Ah, the longing for a husband of her own.

  Jonah leaned into the space between them. “Bo’s a good man. If you’re interested, I can get you a shot. He can’t resist lending a hand to a woman in her time of need.”