The Charmer in Chaps

by Julia London

  PRAISE FOR THE NOVELS OF JULIA LONDON

  “A passionate, arresting story that you wish would never end.”

  —Robyn Carr, New York Times bestselling author

  “Julia London writes vibrant, emotional stories and sexy, richly drawn characters.”

  —Madeline Hunter, New York Times bestselling author

  “London’s characters come alive on every page and will steal your heart.”

  —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

  “London expertly sidesteps outdated stereotypes at every turn.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A novelist at the top of her game.”

  —Booklist

  “London’s writing bubbles with high emotion as she describes sexual enthusiasm, personal grief, and familial warmth. Her blend of playful humor and sincerity imbues her heroines with incredible appeal.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Kudos to London—she tackles family issues and weaves them into a special romance that travels a bumpy road to happily ever after.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019

  Copyright © 2019 by Dinah Dinwiddie

  Excerpt from The Devil in the Saddle by Julia London copyright © 2019 by Dinah Dinwiddie

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK, BERKLEY, and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780451492364

  First Edition: May 2019

  Cover art by Peter Adams/Getty Images

  Cover design by Judith Lagerman

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

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  Contents

  Praise for the novels of Julia London

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Devil in the Saddle

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  WINTER

  Everyone knows how intense a high school crush can be. When every waking moment is consumed with the awareness of the crush, when a smile, or a brush of the fingers from the crushee could carry the crusher for a day. Maybe even a week if you reexamined it ad nauseam with your best friend and roommate, Stacy, while your foster parents yelled at each other in the living room.

  That’s how Ella Kendall had felt about Luca Prince in high school. He’d transferred into Edna Colley High School in the middle of their junior year, coming from wherever insanely rich kids came from. He was tall and muscular, had dark hair streaked with gold, and had hazel eyes that changed from blue to green to brown. He was so handsome and so exotically perfect that Ella’s hormones had stacked up like discarded tires and had burned for the next eighteen months. It was a fire that could not be doused.

  Not that Luca Prince ever noticed.

  Everyone in the town of Three Rivers knew about the Prince family and the famed Three Rivers Ranch for which the town was named. They’d filmed Hollywood movies there. They’d hosted a summit between the president of the United States and the president of Mexico about some trade thing. The ranch was massive in size and supposedly, if you wanted to see it all in one day, you needed a plane.

  Ella and Stacy had never seen the ranch except in pictures, because they sure didn’t run in the popular kids’ circle. But they’d heard about the fabled fortress. It was tucked away behind a big fancy gate, nestled on the bank of the river at the foot of the hills. Mariah Frame, nee Baker, their only friend in high school, had seen the ranch, and she’d said it was a like a castle. A Spanish castle. “It’s so big,” she’d said. “And it has so many horses.” Apparently it also had a pool, tennis courts, cars, and Ella could no longer remember what all. But she used to imagine that it was just like the castles in all the princess movies she’d watched as a kid.

  Ella, Stacy, and Mariah had called him Prince Luca. He was so dreamy, with those mesmerizing eyes and wavy hair that brushed his shoulders. He and his twin sister, Princess Hallie, had ruled Colley High. They were the homecoming queen and king, a stratosphere of popularity so high above Ella that she must have looked like a speck to them.

  Once, Luca had asked Ella for her notes from algebra, and Ella had gotten so tongue-tied that she’d just shoved them at him. And, of course, she’d completely lost her mind on the night of the senior dance when he’d grabbed her hand—without asking, now that she thought about it, but that was a minor detail—and pulled her onto the dance floor. And then, just like in the movies, after a bit of swaying around, he’d kissed her.

  Out of the blue, with no warning, Prince Luca had kissed her, right in the middle of the dance floor, beneath the piñatas. Ella had been kissed many times since, but she remembered everything about that one. His hand had cupped her face; his other had rested on the small of her back. His lips had lingered on hers for what seemed like forever, soft and tender, like he’d landed there and liked it. He had not kissed her in the urgent, demanding way that Clint Adams had kissed her their sophomore year. Prince Luca’s kiss was a proper knee-melting, heart-exploding kiss.

  And then, just as suddenly, he’d lifted his head, touched her cheek, and walked off. He’d left her bobbing there like a tethered float in the Macy’s Day Parade, unable to understand what had just happened. It wasn’t until Frank Cash bumped into her that Ella had woken from that dream, still standing in the middle of the dance floor.

  Naturally, she and Stacy had dissected every moment of that phenomenal event over the weekend th
at followed, and Ella was prepared for Monday. She knew what she would say. Stacy had coached her at flirting, because she and Mariah understood Ella was the worst when it came to flirting.

  But Monday came and went, and there had been nothing from Luca.

  He hadn’t even looked her way. It was like he didn’t even see her.

  Then had come graduation, and they’d all gone their separate ways. Ella and Stacy had aged out of foster care, and she’d hied herself up to Dallas and college, later transferring to San Antonio on a scholarship to a small college. She’d worked a lot in the last twelve years, had struggled to finish her accounting degree, but she’d done it. She’d had a couple of serious boyfriends. There was Jake, who ended things with her when she wouldn’t move in with him. Jake never did understand how she needed her own place after being moved from one foster home to the next since the time she was six.

  The other was Mateo. About a year ago, Mateo told Ella that he felt like she was using him for sex and nothing more. “You don’t really let me see you,” he’d said.

  Ella was a little stunned by that and swore it wasn’t true. But later, she’d asked Stacy if it might be true.

  “Oh yeah,” Stacy had said. “You’ve got a wall up, El. I mean, everyone does, really, but yours is like, super high. Like border wall high.”

  “Okay, all right,” Ella had said, not liking the idea of surrounding herself with a border wall.

  Mateo was still her friend and, in fact, had gotten her the hostessing job at the Magnolia Bar and Grill when she’d moved out to the farm.

  That had been it on the steady boyfriend front. She didn’t have a lot of time for dating between her two jobs and trying to strike out on her own with a new bookkeeping and accounting business. And truthfully, no guy had ever made her heart flutter or her palms sweat quite like Prince Luca had. No guy had loomed as large in her thoughts—the legend of Prince Luca had lived on long after graduation, and he was still her ultimate fantasy. She hadn’t seen him in twelve years, but she’d seen pictures of him online and had heard about him from time to time. Always with a beautiful woman, usually blond. Always at some swank location. Always gorgeous.

  A prince.

  So what were the odds that he would be standing before her now? How impossible was it that he would come riding to her rescue?

  There was no mistake—Luca Prince was standing before her, here and now, and Ella felt like a ridiculous, dopey teenager all over again. A little thrilled, a little scared, a lot baffled. And totally afraid that if she opened her mouth, she might humiliate herself.

  So she just stared at him, and he stared back at her. Which seemed like an odd thing for either of them to be doing on an old county road with nothing but buzzards around. Luca had come riding up on a horse across the open range wearing a white T-shirt, jeans so tight she wondered how he sat on that horse, and chaps. Chaps. He had a few days’ worth of beard on his face, a hat stained with sweat around the crown. He looked like he’d come off a movie set. He’d ridden right up to her, did that acrobatic move off the horse, stuck his landing right in front of her, and said, “Well, hello there,” like he’d been missing her all these years.

  Here’s the other thing about high school crushes. When you see your crush after twelve years, you’re supposed to look amazing. He’s supposed to realize he was an idiot back then. But Ella was dressed like a Dumpster diver. Not totally her fault, because she’d been caught up in a little problem prior to this meeting. Ella was a person who prided herself on having pulled herself up by the bootstraps and making her own way in this world. If she ran across a difficulty, she handled it, no complaints. She needed no one, expected nothing, and was, according to Stacy, self-sufficient to a fault.

  Still, there were a few things Ella couldn’t deal with. Like snakes, thank you to Folsom Elementary and her second-grade field trip to the snake farm and the nightmares that had followed. Or liars. She definitely couldn’t deal with liars. To paraphrase Mr. Darcy, once her good opinion was lost, it was lost forever. And she definitely couldn’t deal with Mama Tia’s taco stand on North Alamo Street in San Antonio. That place had almost killed her.

  Last, but not least, she could not deal with cars. Cars, those stupid, lumbering, rusty, necessary beasts and their long slate of problems. She didn’t care how vehicles worked. She didn’t care how many horses they took the place of or how many miles she could get from a tank of gas. All she wanted was to get in her old SUV, stick a key in the ignition, crank it up, and go. Was that asking too much? Apparently so. The car gods were exacting their revenge on her for her less-than-stellar maintenance plan, because on top of the many, many home repairs she’d not counted on when she’d recently moved back to Three Rivers, she’d also had plenty of car trouble.

  This morning, the faucet in the kitchen sink came off and sprayed water all over her. Ella had managed to turn the water off. She’d YouTube’d a video, “Repairing a Kitchen Faucet,” and was on her way to the hardware store to get what she needed to fix that damn faucet when the check engine light came on and her car just stopped running. While it was running.

  “Please don’t do this to me,” she’d begged, and had spread her arms across the hood and lay her cheek against the metal. “I am living on fumes right now.”

  When the car didn’t answer, she’d kicked it. When the car still didn’t answer, she’d shouted, “Dammit!” and gave the hood a whack with both fists. And then she’d looked around for her phone to call someone and discovered that of course she’d left it on the kitchen counter.

  So her fists hurt and her car still didn’t work, and she didn’t have her phone. She’d climbed onto the hood and slumped against the windshield and pulled her hat over her face. “Okay, well, this is a good lesson on why you should always have a plan B,” she’d said aloud. “You have to figure something out, because if you don’t, you’ll be late to work, and besides, there is a strong possibility you could be eaten by a coyote out here, because I know what I heard last night.”

  Ella had been talking to herself a lot since moving to the country, but sometimes, extreme situations warranted a full discussion.

  Anyway, she’d sat up and stared down the road. It was what, a mile at most to the highway? She figured she could walk to Timmons Tire and Body Shop and get a tow. Or she could walk back to her house—a little more than a mile—and call someone to come get her. “But then your car is sitting here in the road,” she’d pointed out to herself. “Okay, Timmons it is.” She’d slid off the hood, stomped around to the passenger side of her car; opened the door with a vengeful yank; grabbed her tote bag, which she slung violently over her shoulder; kicked the door shut; and stepped around to the road.

  That’s when she saw a horse and rider cantering across the field toward her. She’d been living out here only a couple of weeks, but she rarely saw anyone, and a slight panic suddenly surged in her—there was no one to hear her if she screamed.

  “Don’t be paranoid,” she’d chastised herself. Just because a man was riding toward her didn’t mean he intended to chop her into pieces and scatter the bits for the buzzards. A rider wasn’t exactly uncommon around here either. Cows needed punching, and some places couldn’t be reached by vehicle. She’d seen Three Rivers ranch hands on horses and all-terrain vehicles a couple of times out her back window.

  As the person drew closer, she could see the cowboy hat, the white T-shirt, the chaps. She’d experienced a vague niggle in the back of her head that he looked strangely familiar. She’d lifted the brim of her sun hat to have a clearer look as the rider trotted right on up as if he knew her.

  And then her belly did a somersault. The rider did know her, and she knew him. Holy hell, she hadn’t seen him in a dozen years, but she’d known exactly who he was.

  He lifted his hat off his head, dragged his fingers through his hair—still dark brown, still sun-streaked, still gorgeous—reseated the hat, t
hen stuck his thumbs into the string that tied his chaps around his waist and flashed a dazzling smile, his teeth all snowy white against his tanned face. “Well hello there.”

  That was the moment the world stopped spinning and the sun shone brighter.

  Ella wanted to speak up, but she was so stunned she couldn’t stop gaping at Prince Luca. Her thoughts were doing a mad dash back to high school, slipping and colliding into each other as they went.

  “Did I startle you?” he asked in a voice that was sexier and deeper than in high school.

  Ella blinked. Yes! “No,” she lied, in spite of all the obvious signs of being startled, such as eyes wide and staring and her heart fluttering so badly she could only sip in tiny gulps of air.

  His gaze drifted down her body to the snow boots she was wearing. His smile deepened and his hazel eyes crinkled in the corners with amusement. “Expecting a norther?”

  Ella glanced down. Oh no. Oh God. It was worse than she thought. Did she really have to rush out to the hardware store so quickly that she couldn’t have at least put on a dry shirt or wiped mud off her thigh or dashed on a little mascara? And was it really easier to shove her feet into snow boots than to find some flip-flops? Because news flash, it never snowed here.

  This, she decided, was the height of unfairness, for the universe to dump her out on this road like she’d been living in a cave just as her high school crush rolled up. “They were handy,” she said vaguely. Aaand, here she was again, displaying her inability to be charming or erudite or even the slightest bit flirty.

  Luca didn’t seem to think that was a strange answer. He shrugged, and his gaze moved to her car. “Having trouble?”

  “Umm . . . a little.” God help her, but Luca the man was even sexier than the boy. He’d filled out in the last decade to the point that his T-shirt hardly fit across his chest and arms now. He was muscular, but not in a gym-rat kind of way. In a it’s-natural-to-be-so-damn-strong kind of way.

  “Do you need a ride?” he asked.

  What she needed was a do-over. She would like for him to go back across the pasture, then come back when she was wearing the cute red dress she’d bought at the vintage shop in town and her hair was not a half-wet, half-frizzy hot mess and probably sporting a few cobwebs from her time under the sink.