The Rodeo Cowboy’s Baby

by Heidi Rice

  The Rodeo Cowboy’s Baby

  A 79th Copper Mountain Rodeo Romance

  Heidi Rice

  The Rodeo Cowboy’s Baby

  Copyright© 2018 Heidi Rice

  EPUB Edition

  The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  First Publication by Tule Publishing Group 2018

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN: 978-1-949068-65-8

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  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue

  The 79th Copper Mountain Rodeo

  About the Author

  Prologue

  “We need to get you some new meat for your column, honey. So I want you to head down to that hick town in Montana where Charlie’s shacked up and find a cowboy of your own to bang.”

  “New meat?” Evie Donnelly gaped at her editor, Janice Wakowski, as her heart sank to her toes. She’d known this day was coming. Her column Evie8—detailing her own personal roller-coaster ride of how to live and love in the digital age—had been losing circulation by the truckload in the last eighteen months. Ever since her divorce from Dan had become final.

  That was the problem when you’d sold your brand on the basis of finding true love via Tinder. If you then lost your hookup turned husband, after the trauma of three bouts of unsuccessful IVF took their toll on your marriage, you tended to also lose the feel-good, happy-ever-after vibe your readers were looking for.

  But trust Janice to suggest the nuclear option to fix the problem. She wanted Evie to leave Brooklyn, go to Montana and bang a cowboy? Was Janice actually serious?

  Unfortunately, from the gleam in her editor’s eyes, it looked like she might be. Her editor was known as The Brooklyn Pit Bull in the close-knit world of New York publishing for a very simple reason. She was one. The type of pit bull that once she sank her teeth into an idea, you couldn’t wrestle it out of her mouth with dynamite.

  Of course, Janice’s unconventional approach to editing had once been the making of Evie. It had been Janice’s idea for Evie to turn her online dating travails into a career. When Evie had first got off the boat—or rather the budget airline—from Dublin with her lottery-won green card and plans to carve a glittering career in the heady world of New York journalism, she’d snagged a position as an all-round dogsbody at The Brooklyn Voice. But she’d been going precisely nowhere—making cups of bad coffee for everyone—until Janice had overheard her talking about her latest online dating disaster at the water cooler and given Evie her very own column.

  It wasn’t just a big break, it was massive. Not least because Janice had had the kind of faith in Evie her own mother Maureen had comprehensively lacked.

  That had been ten years ago, when Internet dating had still been a risqué novelty act and Evie had been twenty-one. And with her sharp wit and even sharper experiences, Evie had managed to forge a fifty-five-thousand-dollar-a-year career out of the fallout from being the queen of tragic-comic dating disasters… Until she’d hooked up with Dan.

  But after her digital dream marriage had become a real-life nightmare of fertility clinic appointments, silent resentments and festering discontent, her tragi-comic column had become more tragic than comic.

  She did not see how she was going to remedy that in the hick town where her one-time best buddy on the paper, freelance photographer Charlotte Foster, had ended up. She’d barely spoken to Charlie in the last year—her friend’s budding romance with some rancher she’d been photographing naked for a charity calendar coinciding perfectly with the implosion of Evie’s marriage. They’d bonded in New York, while they shared an apartment in Red Hook, because they were both from across the pond, shared the same snarky sense of humor and had both been determined to make their mark. But since life, and her defunct uterus, had kicked Evie in the teeth, and she had discovered a month ago that Dan was expecting a child with his new girlfriend, Evie’s career was pretty much all she had left now. Unlike Charlie—who still had a life.

  “Yeah, new meat, honey, if you still know what that looks like?” Janice said, twirling the plastic cigarette she’d become surgically attached to since giving up smoking. The gleam in her eye became radioactive.

  It was the sort of statement Janice could only get away with because she was a woman. She was past fifty. And she was a local press legend who was fiercely loyal to her staff. And had managed to syndicate The Brooklyn Voice’s content all over the country for thirty years—making Evie and everyone else who wrote for her a decent living in a cut-throat business.

  “I know what new meat looks like, Janice.” Evie fought back, because the only way to fight a pit bull was to show it no fear. “But I’m not ready to get back in the dating pool yet. Even for the sake of the column.” Evie might be totally over Dan—because their relationship had been going downhill long before they’d finally pulled the plug on it. But the discovery of Dan’s impending fatherhood a month ago had been a blow she had not yet recovered from—because it had extinguished her last hope that maybe their undiagnosed infertility hadn’t been her fault. Her confidence was currently at an all-time low—attempting to date a cowboy would be liable to obliterate it completely.

  “Did I say anything about dating?” Janice fluttered her eyelash extensions, doing innocent about as effectively as a pit bull with its jaws clamped around your Sunday roast. “I was kidding about the bang a cowboy thing. I’m just saying you need some new color in the column. Something fresh. Something to get your mojo back. We dropped two more outlets last week with that column about your IVF support group reunion. It’s just not funny, or sunny, or snarky enough, sweetheart. It’s sad.”

  You’re telling me.

  The kick under her ribs made Evie feel pathetic now as well as panicked. That Janice was actually pulling off the sympathetic look with some degree of credibility made Evie realize exactly how low she must have sunk—professionally speaking—in the past year.

  Sheesh, when a pit bull starts feeling sorry for you, it’s totally time to get over yourself.

  “As luck would have it, the hick town has a rodeo.” Janice barreled ahead, obviously taking Evie’s silence as a cue to start gnawing on her brilliant idea again. “It’s a huge deal. Did you see Charlie’s shots in the Montana Bulletin last week of some of the man candy who are competing this year? That rodeo could totally be the focus of your piece—and we could hire her to do the shots. Hot dudes on horses, and bulls. It’s what big-city girls dream about. Small-town guys with enough testosterone to tame a bucking bronco. And you could work in your own unique angle.” Janice grinned, warming to her cause and making her perfectly made-up
face look more like a piranha than a pit bull. “And if you should happen to do some hot dogging behind the hot dog stand, where’s the harm? It’ll get people talking about Evie8 again. But no pressure. Okay, honey? I’m not your pimp, I’m just your editor,” she finished.

  Evie had to give Janice credit for keeping a straight face. Because they both knew, when it came to the paper’s bottom line, Janice would pimp out her own mother.

  Unfortunately though, there was some truth in what Janice was saying.

  Evie’s career had been her lifeline. The one thing that had kept her afloat during the last couple of years. If it was on the verge of going tits-up too, she had to act.

  She’d totally accepted that motherhood was not going to happen for her. Her therapist had told her it was her desire to achieve her goals, the driven part of her personality caused by the fact she had never had a father, that had made her so determined to achieve this goal. And because her biology—which she had no control over—hadn’t played ball she’d become obsessed with achieving the impossible.

  But her career goals—and more importantly her column—were not going under that bus as well, because unlike her biology, her career was something she could control. And if controlling it meant going down to Charlie’s hick town in the middle of Nowheresville, Montana, pretending enthusiasm for her friend’s loved-up new life in the face of her own abject failure in the love shack, and finding the sunny, snarky, sexy side of watching a load of guys bouncing around on bulls for a living, she’d do it.

  But while she might need new meat for her column, she did not need it anywhere near her girly bits—because they were more than happy in mothballs.

  So banging a cowboy was out.

  Chapter One

  Evie’s breath caught in her lungs, as Charlie’s truck barreled over a ridge. The purple and dark blue hues of the mountain in the distance added a dramatic counterpoint to the beauty of the pasturelands in its shadow.

  So Montana is drop-dead stunning. Who knew?

  For a woman who’d spent the first nineteen years of her life working her backside off to leave rural Ireland, it was a startling discovery. County Kildare was undeniably pretty, the lush green fields, thatched cottages and endless hedgerows the fodder of a thousand tourist photographs. But Ireland had never taken Evie’s breath away. She always figured that was because she had never fit into rural life. The endless gossiping and all those small-minded parochial attitudes and prejudices were something she’d found confining and claustrophobic, which was why, when she’d ended up in Dublin and then New York, she’d lapped up the energy and anonymity of city living.

  But how could anyone feel claustrophobic underneath this endless blue sky? Or confined by the drama and majesty of this landscape? Intimidated maybe, dwarfed definitely, but also free. Her lungs expanded as she took in a deep breath of air so pure and fresh it made her light-headed.

  Lifting her iPhone she snapped a photo to stick on her Evie8 Instagram account to go with the ones she’d already taken of Marietta Rodeo’s Main Street Parade that morning and the opening ceremony at the new rodeo grounds.

  Marietta had looked to Evie like something out of a western movie during the parade—complete with decorative storefronts decked out in flags and fairy lights, and enough men moseying about in cowboy hats, boots and chaps to fill a Clint Eastwood convention.

  The opening ceremony at the newly built rodeo grounds, a short walk from the town’s Main Street, had been a surprisingly moving affair. A young local woman had belted out “America the Beautiful” in dulcet tones that had made tingles rush up Evie’s spine. A series of dedication speeches had followed—including one from a hunky local bareback bronc rider called Shane Marvell, which Evie had found both witty and self-deprecating. The unveiling of a statue—a startlingly dramatic creation from another local artist of a bucking bronco in copper, a nod to the town’s copper mining history—had supplied even more fodder for Evie’s Instagram account.

  She and Charlie had wandered back through the downtown area after the ceremony had wrapped up. The weekend rodeo bonanza was now in full swing—with stalls and stands selling everything from huckleberry lemonade to cowboy-boot-shaped chocolates. Charlie had tried to tug her toward a stand where some of the rodeo cowboys and cowgirls were signing autographs and posing for selfies—so she could introduce Evie to them. But with Janice’s words about “finding new meat” for her column echoing in her head, Evie had cried off. After catching a six a.m. flight out of LaGuardia, she needed a little downtime before she braved tonight’s events or met any actual cowboys.

  This small-town rodeo was much more full-on already than she’d been expecting. And it was obviously a big deal for the community. She wanted to do it justice in her column. And she couldn’t do that if she was feeling fragile and out of sorts.

  Luckily the drive back to The Double T had given her the much-needed breather she had been looking for and then some.

  The truck swung onto a rutted farm track and a white clapboard house, a couple of big red barns and a collection of cattle pens nestled among a grove of pine trees that clung to the banks of a river came into view. The water sparkled in the dazzle of September sunshine as it snaked its way past the back of the house and along the valley floor. The truck trundled into the yard and Charlie braked in front of the white house, which up close looked welcoming as well as picturesque with its peeling paint and worn porch swing.

  “What a cool place,” Evie murmured to Charlie. “No wonder you love living here.” It still wouldn’t be for her, she didn’t do rural, or small town, but she could absolutely see why Charlie would love it, with her photographer’s eye for beauty. “The eye candy options must be endless—landscape-wise.”

  “The landscape’s only part of it,” Charlie said, slanting her a smile that lit up her eyes with innuendo. “The man candy options are pretty awesome, too.”

  “Logan’s certainly very cute,” Evie said. She’d been introduced to Charlie’s rancher dude in town during the parade.

  Logan had been gruffly polite, ruggedly handsome and distant, probably because he had a tin star pinned to his flannel shirt and he had been busy corralling a crowd of several thousand people.

  But he’d reserved one slow megawatt smile for Charlie as she and Evie had headed off toward the rodeo grounds for the opening ceremony—which had made Evie’s heart clutch painfully in her chest. Had Dan ever looked at her like that? She couldn’t remember.

  “Although I never would have paired you with a lawman,” Evie added, stifling her thoughts about Dan.

  Stop being a misery, you’re here to soak up the atmosphere and reinvigorate your column, not turn into even more of a killjoy.

  “He’s only a reserve deputy,” Charlie said, still with that naughty smile on her face as she walked round the back of the pickup to lift out Evie’s suitcase. “And his handcuffs come in very useful when our sex life needs a lift.”

  Which, from the pheromones Evie had felt pinging off the two of them, was probably never.

  “I’ll bet.” Evie laughed, but it sounded a little strained. They entered the house, which smelled of old wood and lemon polish. A glimpse at the living room revealed a couple of old couches facing a large old-fashioned fireplace with a wood-burning stove and a flat-screen TV on top of the mantel. The view of the river and the mountain beyond from the back porch reminded Evie of Charlie’s charity calendar, which had been hanging in The Brooklyn Voice’s office since January.

  “I definitely remember that view from your calendar,” she shouted as she followed Charlie down the hall. “But I’m sure there was a naked hottie draped in the stars and stripes out there last time I looked,” she finished, keeping her tone light and teasing.

  She and Charlie had never had a super-deep relationship. They’d shared beers and margaritas and girl talk and swapped stories about how nuts New Yorkers were during the year when they’d roomed together before Evie had hooked up with Dan. But that was about as far as it
went.

  “That would be Lyle, Logan’s brother and my sister Em’s main squeeze nowadays. They live together in town.”

  Evie walked into the kitchen behind Charlie. The classic fridge, glass-fronted cabinets, an ancient stove and a butcher block table covered in a checked oilcloth looked homely and lived in, like the rest of the house. The window above the sink looked out onto the riverbank, where an ancient tire hung by a threaded rope from a tree limb, almost as if the swing was waiting for a new generation of children to come and play.

  Evie rubbed the pang in her chest as Charlie began setting out mugs for tea.

  How had Deputy Logan Tate managed to domesticate her friend? He must have some serious wonder junk in his pants—because Charlie had always been the girl least likely to settle down.

  “Your twin is living in Marietta now, too?” she said, surprised to hear that Emily had relocated here. She’d only met Emily a couple of times, when she’d come over from the London gallery she ran to visit Charlie in Brooklyn. From what she could remember, Em had been a little uptight and a lot overprotective. But she couldn’t imagine her settling in a small Montana town any more than she could imagine Charlie being here.

  “I’d like to take credit for converting her, but the truth is she fell hard for Logan’s sweet-talking brother Lyle,” Charlie said as if it was no big deal.

  “And gave up her career in London?” Evie couldn’t hide her shock.

  Charlie turned. “She’s running the art exhibitions in town, does some work in Livingston and Bozeman. I think she realized she wasn’t that happy in London—especially after she’d met Lyle.”

  “Well, I suppose he does have a very nice ass,” Evie said, still trying to get her head around the news. This place was starting to sound a bit like The Stepford Wives.

  “Couple that with his cute personality and it’s a win-win.” Charlie laughed, obviously amused by Evie’s confusion. “You’ll meet them both tonight at the picnic in town—most of the calendar guys will be there, celebrating hitting fifty thousand in sales. We thought we’d head to Grey’s Saloon afterward. Lyle’s going to be playing a couple of sets—because as well as being a sweet talker he’s also a sweet singer and guitar player.”