by Carly Bloom
“Um…weird?”
“Yeah,” Carmen said, shrugging her shoulders. “I’m kinky that way.”
“I have some goose jerky.”
“I’m down for it,” Carmen said. “Bring it.”
Sally hurried off.
Jessica shifted in her seat. “Listen, Carmen, Casey and I are talking. This is kind of bad timing.”
“So I did a thing,” Carmen said, ignoring Jessica entirely.
Jessica rolled her eyes. “Tell me there’s no restraining order. Was it one of those twins?”
Carmen laughed. “This has nothing to do with them.”
“Oh. Well, then maybe it can wait—”
“I bought the Village Château restaurant. Well, part of it. The chef, Frederick, is in on it too. He wanted to buy it but didn’t have the resources. I’m the majority owner. We’re going to call it Le Château Bleu and we plan to fuse French and German—”
The words Carmen was stringing together finally formed themselves into sentences in Jessica’s mind. “Are you serious? You bought the restaurant at the Château?”
Sally came back and set a plate down in front of Carmen. It looked like dehydrated dog poop, but it was set on a fancy doily. “You’ve got to hold it in your mouth for a few seconds to soften it up.”
“Looks delish,” Carmen said.
“My son, Bubba, made it.”
“Carmen!” Jessica said. “Did you hear me? Did you really buy the Village Château?”
“Not technically. Closing date is a few weeks away. But it’s happening.”
Jessica’s brain was on overdrive. She knew where this was heading, and it was too good to be true. She glanced at Casey across the table, and he was grinning and wiggling and appeared to be about ready to pop out of his skin.
Carmen picked up a piece of jerky and eyed it curiously. “We’d like a manager on the premises as soon as possible, of course. Current owners are cool with it. It’s going to be a big transition. Lots to do. Because I have huge plans and we’re going to have a lavish and extreme grand opening. I’m talking celebrity guest list. Big Verde won’t know what hit it.”
“A manager? You need a manager?”
“Yep. Do you know anybody who might be interested?” Carmen’s eyes twinkled, but she managed to keep a straight face as she stuffed the jerky in her mouth.
“Careful now,” Casey said. “That’s going to expand.”
Carmen, cheek bulging, gave him a thumbs-up and mouthed I’ll miss you to Jessica. At least Jessica thought that’s what she said.
Beneath the table, a big boot rubbed against Jessica’s ankle. Casey raised his eyebrows. “Well? What do you say, Jess?”
She gazed at Casey, noting the slight wrinkles around his eyes. They hadn’t been there when she’d left twelve years ago. She took his hand and traced some light scars, wondering what had caused them. She’d missed parts of his life. Major parts. But the expression on his face, so hopeful and anxious, belonged to the boy she used to know.
Casey squeezed her hand. “We have our whole lives ahead of us, Jess.”
He’d said the same thing on the night they’d promised to be together forever. It was true then, and it was true now.
“Oh, Casey,” she said, choking back tears in disbelief. “I think I’m finally coming home.”
Casey leaned over the table to kiss her, and when their lips met, applause broke out in the Corner Café.
Home was where her cowboy was, and he was in the best little town in Texas.
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Please see the next page for an excerpt from Carly Bloom’s Cowboy Come Home, available in March 2020.
Chapter One
Claire Kowalski gazed across the table at Chad, her latest Sizzle match, and wished she’d swiped left instead of right. It wasn’t his looks, because he was tall and trim with a full head of brown hair and a sexy Prince Charming cleft in his chin. It was literally everything else.
They’d suffered through enough stilted conversation during the appetizers to last Claire a lifetime.
You sell respiratory equipment? How exciting!
She’d worked hard at keeping her eyes from glazing over. He seemed equally unimpressed by her job at Petal Pushers, a nursery and landscaping business owned by her best friend, Maggie. But her rock climbing seemed to have piqued his interest.
“When you say rock climbing, you mean those walls in fitness centers, right? There are a few of them here in Austin.” He winked at her and grinned.
She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a linen napkin, trying not to show her irritation with Chad, who really hadn’t done a thing wrong other than be himself.
“I use walls for training, but I climb real rocks. Big ones. I’m the president of the Texas Hill Country Rock Climbers Association.”
Chad raised his eyebrows. “So, like, you climb up sheer rock walls and stuff? I thought you had to be pretty strong to do that.”
His eyes dipped down to Claire’s ample cleavage. She shouldn’t have forgone the “Sunday safety pin” she often used with the pretty blue wrap dress.
She didn’t have the typical lean athletic build of a rock climber. She was tall and curvy, and with what her mother referred to as a “shock” of red hair, she was easy to spot on a cliff. But looks aside, climbing required strength and agility, as did loading saplings and shrubs onto flatbed trucks, or holding down a calf who’d managed to get a strip of baling wire wrapped around its leg, which she’d done on her family’s ranch earlier today.
Claire placed her napkin back in her lap, noticing the small angry puncture the baling wire had made in her palm. Her hands were the only things that might offer a hint as to her toughness. They were definitely not as soft and flawless as her carefully moisturized face, but her nails were freshly painted.
She picked up her fork, took a bite of dry salmon, and downed it with a substantial sip of merlot. “I’m no expert, but I’ve done some class five climbs.”
She waited for him to ask what qualified as a class 5 climb. That’s how this worked. It’s your turn.
“I’m a runner,” he said.
They were back to Chad’s favorite subject: himself. That’s pretty much all he’d talked about for the past twenty minutes.
“I see a lot of trail runners when I’m climbing,” Claire said. “Do you run on trails?”
“I run at the gym,” he said. “And I do CrossFit, of course.”
“Of course.” She squinted over her wineglass, which had miraculously worked its way back to her lips and concluded (a) he was everything she’d chalked him up to be, (b) his healthy glow came from a tanning bed, and (c) she might have to fake a text from her dying grandmother.
“This is Kobe beef, you know,” Chad said, pointing to his plate. “You should have gotten the steak.”
“That’s not Kobe,” Claire said. Kobe was extremely rare, and most places that claimed to sell it were outright lying. They got away with it because there were an awful lot of people willing to be duped if it made them feel special.
Including her.
Two years ago, she’d fallen for a sexy, wandering cowboy named Ford Jarvis. He’d made her feel so stupidly special that she’d thought he might actually settle down. Ha! Zebras didn’t change their stripes. Especially if they were dumbass cowboys, and even if they’d taken you home to meet their mother.
Ford had told her he’d never settle down. Not in a town. Not on a ranch. And not with a woman.
Put that on a bumper sticker, cowboy.
She’d been duped, and then she’d been dumped.
Now Ford was back in town. More specifically, he was back on her ranch.
Temporarily, of course.
Claire only had to survive the next six weeks. How hard could that be?
She desperately needed a distraction. Unfortunately, the only thin
g distracting about Chad was a bit of arugula stuck in his teeth.
Chad took a sip of wine. Would it free the arugula? He swallowed and smiled. Nope! That piece of lettuce was holding on like a grasshopper on a windshield wiper.
“Well, a guy from the gym told me they serve Kobe here. And I’m pretty familiar with what constitutes a fine cut of beef.” Chad picked up his knife and poked at his steak. “Look at this beautiful marbling.”
“Marbling is just fat, and it’s usually the result of corn feeding, which is not very good for the animal or the person consuming it. Have you ever been to a feed lot? Have you ever smelled one?”
“You act like you grew up on a ranch.”
Claire sat up straight, pride swelling in her chest. “That’s because I did. My family owns Rancho Cañada Verde.”
The ranch had been in the Kowalski family for four generations, and at twelve thousand acres, it was no small family farm. In recent years, it had become a household name among the growing organic, grass-fed market, and Claire’s expertise—she had a degree in fashion merchandising—had played a big part in it. It didn’t matter whether you were pushing pencil skirts or skirt steaks, it was all about branding and positioning. She was good at marketing. Because of her, the ranch’s brand was even gracing grocery store shelves on the labels of salad dressings, salsas, and marinades.
“Never heard of your ranch,” Chad said. “Where is it?”
“It’s in Big Verde, which is about an hour southwest of here.”
Big Verde was barely a pinprick on the map, but thanks to the beautiful Rio Verde and its various springs and swimming holes, it attracted a fair number of tourists.
“I think we rented a cabin there once,” Chad said.
“Really? Do you know who owned it?”
Chad shook his head, as if he could barely remember the cabin, much less the owner.
“There’s an adorable little airstream trailer on Rancho Cañada Verde that we used to rent to tourists,” Claire said. “But I live in it now.”
She’d optimistically moved out of her parents’ ranch house in the hope that she’d need privacy for herself and the Prince Charming she’d find on Sizzle. But so far, the only person to experience the new Egyptian cotton sheets and their ridiculously high thread count in the trailer’s newly renovated loft bed was her.
“You live on your parents’ property? In a trailer?”
“The ranch is twelve thousand acres.”
Chad stared blankly.
“It’s a fifteen-minute drive from my trailer to my parents’ house,” she said.
“Oh. That’s bigger than I thought.”
Claire didn’t go into how the refurbished trailer, which she’d named Miss Daisy, had appeared in a magazine spread featuring unique Texas getaways. “It’s hardly a camper in the backyard,” she said. “It’s nowhere near my parents’ house.”
It was, however, pretty dang close to the foreman’s cabin.
Claire’s eyes were on Chad, but every cell in her body vibrated like a tiny traitorous compass pointing toward Ford. She could literally feel the man’s pull.
He was probably already done unpacking his measly belongings—Ford bragged that everything he owned fit in the back of his pickup with room to spare—and not thinking about her at all.
“I wouldn’t have pegged you as a small-town country girl,” Chad said. His eyes dipped down to her chest again, as if small-town girls were also expected to have small boobs.
Claire gently tugged at her neckline and gave Chad the steely gaze she’d learned from her father. Big Verde men might not have fancy gym memberships, but they knew not to stare at a woman’s chest.
Chad cleared his throat. “Do you have cows and stuff on your ranch?” he asked, shoveling another bite of steak into his mouth.
Cows and stuff were what turned a chunk of land into a ranch. “Yes. And I typically don’t eat anything with four legs unless I knew it by name. Or at least its tag number.”
“That’s kind of…morbid, isn’t it?” Chad shuddered a little.
Maybe a little, and it was probably why she tended not to eat beef. “I consider myself a pescatarian, for the most part.”
“Pescatarian? Your profile says you’re Baptist,” Chad said. “I’m pretty sure they eat meat.”
Claire lifted her wineglass. “It’s drinking they don’t do.”
She checked the time. How had it only been six minutes since the last time she’d looked? She set her phone down only to see Chad pick his up. He was probably looking at more Sizzle profiles.
Yep. His thumb swiped right.
Claire cleared her throat, and Chad hastily set his phone down. “Sorry,” he said. “A message from my grandmother.”
Claire raised an eyebrow. She’d offer a few more discussion prompts for Chad before politely declining dessert, coffee, and if she was reading him right, fellatio. Then she’d chalk him up as another Sizzle “fizzle” and be on her way.
Chad cracked his knuckles. Maybe he would be the one to end the date early. “I was thinking we could go back to my place after dessert.”
Claire folded her arms across her chest and placed her napkin on the table. “This has been fun, Chad, but I really need to be getting back—”
“What for? What could possibly be happening in Little Big Town that you need to get back to?”
Somebody really wanted his blow job.
Claire could have explained that Big Verde was in for some weather tonight—thunderstorms coming from the east—but instead, she dug in her purse and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills. She dropped them on the table and then slammed back the last of her wine. “Dang,” she said. “That’s a decent merlot.”
* * *
Thunder rumbled through the Texas Hill Country as Ford Jarvis leaned back in his kitchen chair, balancing on two legs. It had been raining on and off all day and, according to Gerome Kowalski, had been doing so for the better part of a week, making the ranch soggy as hell.
Beau Montgomery, head herdsman, was taking credit for it. He’d killed two rattlesnakes in one day and hung them on the fence.
You’ve got to put them belly-up if you want it to rain.
Cowboys were a suspicious lot when it came to the weather. Heck, they were a suspicious lot period. And although Ford liked to poke fun, he was no exception. When he’d seen two heifers in the creek-side pasture running with their tails up this afternoon, his first thought had been, Here comes a flood.
And the first thing he’d done when he’d moved into the cabin was turn the horseshoe over the door right-side up, because everybody knew an upside-down horseshoe was bad luck.
He glanced out the window and thought about those heifers. The ground was saturated, the creeks were full, and if the sky opened up, they might, indeed, see some flash flooding. He checked the weather radar on his phone.
He let out a low whistle that earned him a glare from Oscar. While some guys had friendly dogs to ride in the back of their pickups, Ford had a mean, bony cat.
“Damn,” he said. “Things are about to get worse.”
Oscar pulled his tiny ears back tightly against his head.
The scraggly cat had shown up on a stormy night much like this one while Ford was living on a ranch outside of Sonora. He hadn’t wanted to take the nasty creature with him when he’d left for Wichita Falls, but he’d been afraid the other ranch hands would let the poor thing starve. Same story for when he’d moved to El Paso, and from El Paso to Big Verde.
Four ranches in two years; five if you considered he’d hit Big Verde twice. He didn’t have many belongings, so packing up and heading out was easy. It was just him, his trusty adopted wild Mustang, Coco, who he’d broken himself, and Oscar.
Of all the ranches he’d worked, Rancho Cañada Verde was the finest. It wasn’t the biggest or the fanciest, but it was the gem of the Texas Hill Country, and Gerome Kowalski was a rancher any cowboy would be proud to work for. Nevertheless, Ford had been very firm with Ge
rome about this stint as ranch foreman being temporary. He’d committed to a roundup in west Texas in six weeks.
He didn’t like staying in one place for too long.
There was something about the newness and excitement of going from ranch to ranch that agreed with him. And he liked leaving folks behind while he could still tolerate them, before they’d had much of a chance to wear on his nerves. He especially enjoyed knowing that the ones who did wear on his nerves would soon be nothing more than an image in his rearview mirror.
Six weeks. Surely, he could last that long. All he had to do was keep his mind, eyes, and hands off Claire Kowalski, aka the rancher’s daughter.
How hard could it be?
He swallowed. Twelve thousand acres wasn’t that big. And he and Claire had a history together that involved their clothes falling off any time they were within ten feet of each other.
She’d been nowhere to be seen when he’d visited Gerome’s office at the ranch house earlier. Beau—the rattlesnake slayer and resident busybody—told him that Claire had moved out of the ranch house and into a silly little Airstream trailer practically within spitting distance of the foreman’s cabin. Well, maybe not spitting distance. Ford couldn’t see Claire or her little tin can from here.
He swore he could feel her though.
That tug. Whenever he thought about Claire—and he’d thought about her plenty over the past two years—it was as if someone was yanking on an invisible band attached to his midsection. The first time it had happened, he’d thought he was having a damn heart attack.
He was used to it now. The feeling kind of went along with the other chronic aches and pains of cowpunching.
Had he fallen in love with Claire?
Maybe.
Was the condition permanent?
Most definitely not.
Jarvis men didn’t fall in love and stay that way.
The Jarvis Curse.
Some of the men in his family took it seriously. As in, they literally believed in a curse. His family’s colorful history included a story about Ford’s great-grandfather messing with the wrong bruja.