Enchanted by the Rodeo Queen--A Clean Romance

by Melinda Curtis

  Davey passed Jonah coming up the last few feet. “Can I lead?”

  “Only if you give the horses a breather.” Emily waited for Charlie and Adam to reach her, letting them continue on after Davey. “Follow the trail up to Rocky Point and then take the north fork toward the Bucking Bull.”

  “We know,” Davey called back.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask.” Jonah gestured toward Deadly’s chest. “Where did your horse get that scar?”

  The lightness in Emily dimmed. She explained about Kyle’s death. “This poor guy showed up in the ranch yard all bloody and shaking. But once the vet had him sewn up, he kept trying to bolt from his stall, almost as if he wanted to rush back to Kyle’s side.” Em swallowed thickly. Kyle and Deadly shared a special bond, one that hadn’t transferred completely to Emily. “He’s always been a handful. My brother used to say some horses are like fast cars. You have to know how to drive or both you and the horse are going to end up in a wreck.” She patted the gelding’s neck. “But since that day, Deadly’s been skittish when he doesn’t have a clear view of his surroundings. When I take him out alone, I like to stick to open land.”

  “And what about you?” Jonah’s gaze searched her face. “Since the day your brother died, you’ve been...”

  “Moving forward.” Sometimes blindly. Sometimes when she’d have preferred to stay in bed. Only now, as Emily admitted what she thought she’d been doing, did she realize that she’d been moving on a big hamster wheel. “Except... I haven’t really gone anywhere.”

  Jonah nodded. She knew he understood. It was there in the way they didn’t have to say anything or look away as if they’d accidentally invaded each other’s space.

  The moment stretched until it rang in her ears. She almost wished it wouldn’t end.

  This is what I’m looking for.

  Not Jonah specifically, but that feeling of unity and acceptance.

  A bird squawked in a nearby tree.

  Jonah seemed to shake off their bond the way Deadly shook off a persistent fly. “We’ve gone a long way today. Forward progress, I’d say.”

  The sense of connection was broken.

  Emily squared her shoulders, ready to carry on alone again. She breathed in trail dust and the scent of pine. “No use whining, then.”

  “Nope.” Jonah turned Razzy so he could look back down the trail. “We’re barely a quarter mile from the highway and I can’t see a thing. It’s good cover up here. Do you think our bandit was a local? Did he know this route or was it luck?”

  “He had to have known.” Emily guided Deadly up the trail, leaning forward in her saddle as the ground grew steeper. “He hid his gold before then. And he’d need supplies. Egbert is supposed to have the blacksmith’s journal. Have you read it? Did it have any clues?”

  “Oh, I read it. It was bedtime material. Put me right to sleep a couple of nights. A couple of days, too, if I’m honest.” Jonah told his horse to giddyap, giving commands like the tenderfoot he was. “It was more like the smithy’s ledger than a journal, detailing business transactions. And then when Jeb married the schoolmarm, he barely kept any records at all.” Jonah chuckled.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “He probably had other things to occupy his time.”

  “He was happily married.” Em guided Deadly around a patch of eroding ground, coming to her ancestor’s defense. “Don’t forget, if not for Old Jeb, Mike Moody would have gotten away.”

  “How do you figure?”

  She wanted to stop and argue with Jonah, but they were midmountain, so she kept going. “Mike and Jeb fought. That slowed Mike down. Think about it. Mike Moody robbed a lot of stages. No one had come close to catching him before.”

  “Rumor has it he was riding a horse that threw a shoe. That slowed him down, more than the blacksmith. And then the rockslide got him.”

  “Are you writing Old Jeb out of your movie? He was a hero.” A beloved local icon.

  “I’m sure he was comforted in his hero status while he nearly bled to death from a stab wound.”

  Gertie was right to worry about the portrayal of their ancestor. Jonah only paid him lip service. He’d be a forgotten footnote in Hollywood’s version of the story.

  “Why do you want to date Bo?” Jonah’s unexpected question drove concern for her ancestor out of her mind.

  The boys were ahead of them now, chattering but so far away Emily couldn’t hear what was being said. The same would be true of her nephews and her conversation with Jonah. Whatever they discussed would be private. “I’m thirty. It’s time I set down roots of my own somewhere.”

  “Yes, but why Bo?”

  She glanced at Jonah over her shoulder, prepared to fire a quip back at him, starting with “It’s none of your business.”

  Jonah wasn’t grinning. His expression was the same as it had been the other day in the general store, the expression of a man who’d been jilted and who knew what unrequited love was.

  Emily focused on the trail ahead and spoke plainly. “Bo’s a cowboy.”

  “He’s not a cowboy,” Jonah scoffed. “He’s a Texan. There’s a difference.”

  “Potato-Potahtoe. He wears boots. He knows how to ride.” Bo would help her raise her little cowpokes. “Besides, there aren’t many single men in town my age.” This could be her last chance to stay in her hometown.

  Jonah stopped talking, which was always unnerving because he wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met before. He had little to no filter and seemed to consider no topic off-limits.

  Except when it came to details about his fiancée.

  His silence meant he was thinking about something.

  Me?

  She whistled softly. Deadly swiveled his ears back and forth, no doubt wondering what signal she was sending.

  After a few more minutes without talking, Jonah cleared his throat. “First off, you need to compliment Bo on something no one else would, like his way with animals.”

  “How would I know that? I haven’t seen him with any animals.”

  “He has a dog,” Jonah said in a tone that implied Emily hadn’t done her homework. “You should clean up and visit the camp he’s working on. He’s handy with a hammer.”

  “You do remember my second condition,” Em said, because his advice was sounding hokey. “About clothing?”

  “Trust me. A little style goes a long way.”

  Although Emily was starting to like Jonah, she didn’t trust him.

  Ahead, the boys followed the north fork in the trail. Emily and Jonah reached Rocky Point not long after.

  “Hang on.” Jonah brought Razzy next to her. “This view is spectacular. Would Mr. Merciless have stopped here to see how close the posse was?” He rose up in his stirrups. “I can see the entire valley, but not the town proper. Could he have watched for an approaching stage from here? Galloped down the mountainside and—”

  “Broken his neck?” Emily snorted. She gestured back the way they’d come. “You saw how steep that was. And the stages had schedules. He could wait much closer to the road.”

  “The stage road was across the river in the valley. I want to go there tomorrow. Maybe there was a narrow ravine they passed through. A place he could set a trap.”

  “If you want to go on horseback you’ll need to live up to your end of the bargain first.” Emily couldn’t see the boys. She urged her horse after them.

  “I gave you gems about Bo,” Jonah grumbled.

  Gems? Not hardly. He wanted her to talk to Bo about dogs and power tools. Anyone could do that.

  Emily left Jonah to eat her dirt.

  * * *

  EXTERIOR. MIKE’S HIDEOUT. Mike is cooking beans over a small campfire on a sad hill.

  A ROUGH PATCH of land on a sad hill.

  That was what Merciless Mike Moody’s hideout was.


  Of course, back then Mr. Merciless didn’t have the Clark family cemetery on the doorstep of his small man cave. Still, it was an isolated, lonely place, requiring a hard man to stay.

  Jonah slid off Razzy’s back, landing on shaky ground. Or, at least, his legs felt like the ground shook. “Hold still, fella, until I get my bearings.” He clung to the saddle horn.

  Razzy swung his head around, nudged Jonah in the hip hard, and blew a raspberry as if he was one of the Clark boys and found Jonah’s sore muscles hilarious.

  “Hey. Not funny.” Jonah turned sideways, still clinging to the saddle.

  The horse whinnied and shook his head.

  “And that’s why I call him Razzy. He’s a comedian.” Emily hopped down and checked to make sure her nephews had their mounts secured to the low wrought iron cemetery fence. Her honey-brown hair fell in a loose braid over one shoulder, but she was otherwise none the worse for wear after that long ride. “I had high hopes for you, Tenderfoot. Walk it off.”

  Jonah took a step away from Razzy, pleased he didn’t falter or receive another horsey nudge. “Ha. Like you wouldn’t have unsteady legs after taking a spin class.”

  “Spin class? Is that where they ride bicycles that go nowhere?” Emily scoffed, giving him attitude from beneath her hat brim. “City folk.”

  Jonah opened his mouth to fire back a retort when his gaze snagged on Emily’s face. A sly smile. A crinkle of big brown eyes against the glare of the sun. His mouth went dry and he forgot what he’d been about to say.

  I need to write about her.

  About the love she has for her home and her yearning for a romantic love of her own, a desire so great she’d make a deal with the devil to find a husband. She was settling for Bo because he was convenient. Jonah bet that normally she was picky about her men. He bet few could live up to her high expectations.

  Emily caught him staring.

  Jonah glanced away, wrapping his horse’s reins around the cemetery fence rail as he’d seen her do. Emily wasn’t going to be a character in a script any more than his sister was going to land a role in Mike Moody’s tale. He was here to soak up the inspiring atmosphere, to look for traces of the rockslide that had killed the infamous bandit. But it was hard to put together the story pieces when the bigger boulders had been cleared away a month ago to allow better access to Mike Moody’s loot.

  Laughing, the Clark boys swarmed the area like ants on patrol, just the way the Monroe kids used to do when Grandpa Harlan took them on his biannual family trips. It was amusing, but it wasn’t the kind of atmosphere he’d been hoping to find.

  Taking a protein bar from his pocket, Jonah scanned the area as he ate, finding nothing but unsettling memories of an angry bull as large as a tank and the sickening, repeated crunch of metal as the animal rammed them.

  Like him, the Clark boys remembered that day. Unlike him, they chattered enthusiastically, reliving it as a grand adventure.

  “I haven’t been up here since we came to your rescue,” Jonah told them, recalling the wild time in Shane’s SUV.

  “And then Mom and Zeke caught our new Buttercup!” Adam played hopscotch on the flat grave markers, as if catching feral bulls was an everyday occurrence.

  “And we found Mike Moody’s gold.” Davey followed his little brother at a slower pace.

  There was nothing strategic about the location of the cave, other than it was a natural shelter on a ridge separating two valleys. The trees blocked the view in either direction. How had Mike found this place? And why had he hidden his gold here?

  “What are you doing, Charlie?” Emily asked as the boy disappeared into the bandit’s cave, a fissure in the rock that had been blocked by boulders for decades before Grandpa Harlan and the others found it.

  “I’m just making sure we didn’t miss any gold, Aunty Em.” Charlie poked around the cave.

  “Are you going to do that every time we come here?” Emily stayed close to her mischievous nephew.

  “Yep,” Charlie said.

  “Who’s this?” Adam pointed to the granite square beneath his feet.

  “Shove off and I’ll read it,” Davey said. When his little brother moved, he knelt and brushed the dirt off the flat marker. “Jeb-ah... Jeb-ah... Jebediah Clark!”

  The pair oohed and then proceeded to read the name on every marker. Clarks, the lot of them.

  Jonah wandered over to read Jeb’s headstone. “Old Jeb lived up to his name. Old.” He’d been nearly ninety when he died.

  The boys chortled.

  “Surely, that’s worth mentioning in your movie’s epilogue.” Emily leaned against the cave’s entrance, looking like she was ready for a bold, local cowboy to walk over and kiss her.

  Jonah took a step her way before stopping himself. He was wrong for her on both counts.

  Not a cowboy. Not setting down roots here.

  Adam knelt by a marker nearest the cave and brushed the dirt off. He turned to his older brother. “Who’s this?”

  “Let... Let-ty. Who’s Letty?” Davey wiped away more debris covering the stone. “She doesn’t have a last name.”

  “Is there a date?” Jonah wound his way through the markers to join the boys.

  Davey read off the years framing her life.

  “Letty was a young woman. She died a year before Mike Moody did.” Jonah removed his sunglasses and bent, running his fingers over the professionally engraved letters. “She died when only Mike knew about this place.”

  “So he must have known her,” Emily said with a certainty Jonah didn’t like. “But who was she?”

  “Not another mystery.” Adam fell back on his bottom.

  Jonah’s gut rebelled against Emily’s implication. “He didn’t have to know her. He could’ve found this spot after Letty died here.”

  “But then why only one name on the stone?” Emily shook her head as she studied Jonah. “You don’t care about who she was, just like you don’t care about Old Jeb.”

  “No.” Jonah shook a finger at the heavens. “I don’t want her to be part of Mike Moody’s past.” Or to have given him any children. “Merciless men don’t bury anyone. That’s why they’re merciless. And if they cared enough to bury someone, they’d have added her last name to the stone.”

  “I know who she is. Letty was his horse.” Charlie hopped over the low fence to weigh in. “Don’t look at me like that, Davey.” He gave his older brother a small shove. “When Buff dies, I’m gonna bury him on the ranch.”

  “I bet Granny Gertie knows who Letty is,” Davey said solemnly. “She knows everything about Mike Moody.”

  The old woman knew everything because her husband, along with Grandpa Harlan, and his brother Hobart had researched the myth and found the gold, only to consider it unlucky and put it back where they’d found it.

  Jonah didn’t believe in luck. But he was stuck on the first act of his script and the very last thing he needed was this Letty person to have been important to Mr. Merciless. To have been sweet and kind, a woman the bandit cared for, a woman who wouldn’t approve of the man’s ruthlessness.

  “Let’s head back.” Jonah had plot points to figure out. “Maybe Gertie will know something about Letty.”

  Something that wouldn’t undermine his impression of cold-blooded Mike Moody.

  CHAPTER SIX

  “WHAT DO YOU THINK?” Tina had several different outfits spread across Emily’s bed—all black. The teen was at the ranch when Emily, Jonah and the boys returned from their ride. “I need to pick some outfits for the rodeo queen competition or go shopping. The event is in a week and it takes me forever to find something that fits.”

  Emily studied the clothes Tina had brought. Granny Gertie was baking. The smell of oatmeal cookies filled the air. It should have comforted Emily, but these clothes...

  “What you’ve got here is nice, Tina.” Black jeans.
Long-sleeved black shirts with pearly snaps. Safe. Predictable. Slimming, at least in theory, because they were black. Nothing Tina brought stood out like Jonah with his sharp blue eyes and city clothes. Not that Emily should be giving Jonah more than a passing thought. He was vinegar. She was oil. She went to her closet and dug around for some color. “A lot of girls wear outfits like that. But we want to stand out.”

  “No. We don’t,” Tina blurted. “I try very hard to blend in. It’s my mission in life.”

  Emily gave the teen a critical once-over. “That outfit you’re wearing doesn’t blend in.”

  Tina had on a bright red T-shirt with braided blue handkerchiefs sewn on the sleeves with silver threads. Her jeans were gray. Her shoes yellow with white polka dots.

  “I wore this because...” Tina hesitated and then pressed on. “I wore this because I...” Her round cheeks pinkened before words spilled out of her nonstop. “I wanted to show off to you because I made this. I mean, not the whole T-shirt. I sewed the trim on the sleeves. I like to take ordinary things and make them different. Which is dorky, I know. But maybe I’m a little bit of a dork.” Her fingers twisted in the hem of her T-shirt. “Nobody cool sews. And if they did, they wouldn’t wear what they made, at least not to school. That would be the crowning achievement of dorkdom.”

  Smiling wanly, Emily fingered the woven strips of material attached to Tina’s sleeves. “I take it you didn’t wear this to school today?”

  “No. Gah.” Tina tossed her thick brown hair over her shoulder. “Madison would eat me alive.”

  Emily wanted to tell Madison a thing or two. “Do you love sewing?”

  Tina nodded, squirming as if she’d never admitted a love of her hobby to anyone before.

  “Then you should sew your own blouses and jackets to compete in.” The embroidery, the beading, the sequins. It would take her hours. “Not that there’s time for that now. But if you compete later, it earns you respect with the judges. Now, the clothes you choose should be a bright color that complements Button’s gold coat.”