Cole wasn’t convinced anything was going to save them—and wasn’t sure he wanted it to. As much as he loved the ranch that had been in his family for a little over a hundred years—and had been his life for virtually all of his own thirty years—he knew the pain of fighting a losing battle, of watching his father die a little more each day as their financial ground eroded beneath them. It seemed to him that his dad’s new plan, running cattle for his old friend—and now millionaire several times over—Tom McKay, wasn’t much better than any of the others he’d come up with over the past dozen years.
“One Saturday night,” Sam pressed him. “One little dance. It’s not like you have better things to do. It’s not like I’m askin’ you to marry the girl!”
Cole’s jaw went tight. Good thing, too, he thought grimly. He rolled his shoulders and tried to ease the feeling of carrying not just the ranch, but the entire Absaroka mountain range on his back.
“You might have fun,” his grandmother remarked, her tone mild. She smiled at him over the cup of coffee she cradled in her hand. “Been a long time since you’ve had some fun, Cole.”
It wouldn’t be fun to go a fancy ‘ball’ at the old Graff Hotel which in his youth had been a rundown flea bag joint and had recently been ‘restored to its former glory’ by local-rancher’s-son-made-good. Troy Sheenan, the older brother of one of Cole’s classmates, Dillon Sheenan, had parlayed his smarts into millions of bucks in the California technology market and had decided to spend a lot of it locally, restoring the Graff. Cole had always liked Troy, and he admired his decision even though he wasn’t sure he understood it. And maybe it was just envy that had him squirming at the thought of turning up at the Graff as if he belonged there with all the rich folks.
But he couldn’t see any way out of it. Not if his grandmother was sticking her oar in. Emily McCullough rarely voiced a comment when he and his father locked horns. She watched worriedly, but she didn’t speak up unless she was worrying about Sam’s dodgy heart. He’d had a heart attack in his mid-thirties, right after Sadie’s mother had upped and left.
“Congenital defect,” the doc in Bozeman had said. “But we can do something about it.”
Or they could have if Sam had agreed. He hadn’t.
“No time,” he’d said succinctly, checking himself out of the cardiac unit as soon as he could pull on his boots and slap his hat on his head.
“You’ll have all the time in the world if they bury you,” Cole had argued often since, and his older brother Clint had shaken his head and muttered, “Damn fool.”
But no one told Sam anything, least of all his sons or his mother. Only Sadie could occasionally worm her way through a chink in the Sam McCullough armor.
Now she tossed her dark hair and said stoutly, “I’d go, but I don’t suppose Tom McKay’s daughter would want to dance with me.”
A faint smile flickered across Sam’s hard face. “Don’t reckon,” he said drily. Then he turned his gaze back to Cole. “It’s a real live cowboy she’s hankerin’ to meet.”
Cole had heard a lot about Tom McKay’s daughter in the last week or so. The opposite of his sister who had never been sick in her life despite growing up teething on spurs, Lacey McKay had been frail and sickly for much of her life. Her father’s rough-and-tumble Montana childhood had been the stuff of fantasies. A liver transplant two years ago had given her a new lease on life. And a promise from her father had brought her to Marietta to see the stuff of her fantasies in person. That apparently included meeting ‘a real live cowboy.’
“I ain’t pushin’ you to marry the girl,” Sam pointed out. Again.
No chance of that. Cole couldn’t count the number of times he had heard his father hold forth long and hard about the foolishness of thinking ‘hot-house city girls’ could survive the wilds of rural Montana. He could recite Sam’s diatribes by heart, had grown up on them. The words ground together like stones in the pit of his stomach.
“What do you say, Cole?” his grandmother asked quietly. “I won’t even put much starch in your shirt.” She gave him a gentle coaxing smile.
She knew he’d do anything for her, so she rarely ever asked. She had been the shelter of his youth, the one he had always been able to count on, who had kept him steady and strong when so often he had wanted to go right off the rails. If she hadn’t protected him from every bit of his foolishness, it was only because she hadn’t been there at the time.
She worried about his dad. Sam was her only son. He was hard and stubborn and could argue a fence post into the ground. But she loved him. So did Cole—when he didn’t want to hit the old man over the head with a shovel.
Now he wiped his mouth on his napkin, set it beside his plate, then pushed his chair back from the table and stood up so that he could meet his father’s gaze eye to eye. It was gratifying that, for the last decade, he’d had an inch and a half on his father and it was Sam who had to look up.
Now their gazes locked, Sam’s blue eyes as hard as the ice on the Yellowstone River. Cole knew what they were saying: It’s for the ranch. It’s your duty. A man does his duty. Always.
He let his breath out slowly. “Fine. I’ll go.”
“Right. There’s a dinner beforehand.” Sam was breathing easy now. “Be a good time for you to talk to him about how many cattle we can run. I’ve been thinking Angus from that spread down in Utah. Or there’s a place in Idaho—the Bar Nine Hollow—that would be a good place to pick up some.” Confrontation over, foreclosure forgotten, business at hand, Sam moved right on.
But Cole hadn’t forgotten. He carried his plate to the sink. Sam was still giving orders when Cole walked out of the room.
He didn’t want to be here.
He sat there in his truck staring at the Graff and, in the pit of his stomach, Cole felt the knot tightening. It had been tightening all day.
He told himself that agreeing to be some young woman’s ‘real live cowboy’ for an evening didn’t matter because in the larger scheme of things, there was nothing to it. Doing so served a larger purpose: it would make her happy, allow his dad and her father to do the business they wanted to do, which, in turn, would keep the ranch afloat and, please God, keep his father from having yet another heart attack. All good things.
So. It was expedient. The right thing to do. And Cole was accustomed to doing the right thing. Except...
Except he didn’t want to go to the ball with a woman he didn’t even know. If he had to go to a ball—and it wasn’t his idea of a great night out—at least he wanted the woman he went with to be Nell.
And how useful was that?
He wasn’t supposed to be thinking of Nell! She was off limits. He’d put her off limits a month ago when he’d known he had to be sensible, to put her best interests first, to stop living in dream land and do what needed to be done.
It had taken him a week to do it. But finally he’d put pen to paper and had written her a letter. In it he had explained that things were never going to be the way they had hoped they would be, he could see that now. He’d told her that her coming back to Montana for them to make a go of it together was a pipe dream.
He’d been blunt because he knew she would argue with him if he weren’t. “It won’t work. I should never have thought it would,” he’d written, pressing down hard with the pen, as if he could press the words into her heart. “You won’t be happy here.”
Then he had ended on a positive note. He’d told her she had a great life to look forward to and advised her to go out and enjoy all that life had to offer—and he had enclosed the divorce papers for her to sign.
And now, at the first inkling of a memory snaking its way into his head, his bloody defenses crumbled, and his mind hauled her back, front and center—and here she was.
His gloved hands tightened on the steering wheel as he remembered lying in bed in Reno talking to Nell about the Graff this past winter. “We could make a weekend of it,” he’d said, dreaming impossible dreams.
Yeah? Who wa
s going to feed the cattle? Who was going to chop the wood? Who was going to make sure his old man didn’t over-strain his unrepaired heart? Stop Gran from climbing ladders to fetch things out of the attic? Keep Sadie from driving everyone nuts with her next crazy idea for keeping the ranch afloat?
It had been insane to get married in the first place. He couldn’t imagine why they’d done it. Well, yes, he could. Their spur of the moment meet-up in Reno had turned into the best time of his life, they had clicked on every level, and when Nell had wrapped her arms around him and looked up into his eyes and said, “Imagine if every day were like this one, if we were together forever,” he’d imagined it.
He had said, “You mean, get married?”
And the most beautiful smile in the world had lit her face and she’d said, “Oh, Cole, yes!”
Yes. As if he’d proposed and she had accepted.
Actually, to be honest, he supposed he had. The question had not been as academic as it should have been. The hope had been there in his voice. He knew that. He had heard it then as well. And Nell had heard it, too. She’d clutched at it the way she’d clutched his arms and kissed him.
“I love you,” she’d said. “Oh, I do love you. We’ll be so happy.”
In a fairy tale world, no doubt they would have. But not here. Not in the world Cole lived in day after grinding day, the one that Nell had only seen briefly and mostly from afar.
“You wouldn’t have been happy here,” he said gruffly now, as if she could hear him from a thousand miles away.
But she would have liked the Graff tonight, lit up like some fairy tale castle. He opened the truck door and the wind caught it, nearly yanking it out of his hand. Snow stung his face as he banged the door shut and trudged through the icy parking lot toward the hotel.
This was his reality—the old truck, the stinging snow, the cutting wind—not the fairy tale castle, not the dreams.
“Remember that,” he told himself.
Since Cole had made the decision last month, he had done his best to not let himself think about her at all. But tonight, despite the sting of the snow and the bite of the wind, he couldn’t banish her from his mind.
In truth, she’d been there all day. Knowing where he’d be this evening—and its fairy tale potential—had obviously done a number on his head, opening cracks in his resistance, so that she’d been with him like a burr under his saddle since he’d been out feeding cattle this morning.
There was nothing remotely romantic or appealing about feeding cattle in a harsh Montana winter. Ordinarily it didn’t bring Nell to mind at all, but somehow this morning he’d imagined her making up a story about it, then telling it to him as he pitched the hay off the back of the wagon.
Later, in the afternoon, when he had spent an hour getting an ornery bull out of a thicket, he knew she would have found story possibilities then, too. She’d have seen the ice and snow and the bull snot and, instead of seeing nothing but hard work, sore muscles and drudgery, she would have found something poetical about it.
Her eyes would have sparkled and she’d have lowered her camera, saying, “Could you wrestle him out again? I didn’t get a good angle the first time?”
She would probably even give the damned bull a name! Because that was what Nell did. She found the human interest—even in ornery bulls and ornerier cowboys. She told stories.
After dragging the bull out and chivvying him back up the draw, Cole had come into the kitchen, blowing on his hands and stamping his feet to try to get the circulation back in them, he had found his grandmother making a cherry pie. “Last quart,” she’d said, a smear of flour on her nose from when she’d rolled out the dough. “To celebrate your dad’s deal with Tom McKay.” She had beamed. “Thanks to you, Cole.”
“It wasn’t me,” he had protested.
“Of course it was you.” His grandmother opened the oven door and set the pie in, then shut it again. “You agreed to go. And Tom’s delighted that his daughter is going to meet you.”
“Meet,” Cole said firmly. “That’s it. I’m not interested in anything else.”
Emily straightened, then smiled and shook her head. “If she’s as nice as her father is, you might want to reconsider.”
“No.” He’d made that mistake once, even if no one else knew it. And he wasn’t sharing the news now that it was over. “You going to save me some of that pie?”
“I’ll make your father leave you some.”
“Thanks.” All he could think was that Nell had loved his grandmother’s cherry pie, too. The day he met her, when she had brought him home concussed from the Wilsall Rodeo and had sat there all night watching him to make sure he didn’t die—she had eaten the last of the cherry pie his grandmother had left him before she’d flown out to Boston to meet her first great-granddaughter.
“This is amazing,” Nell had said. “Do you think your grandmother would teach me to make a cherry pie?”
“Sure,” Cole had said at the time, smiling dazedly at her. Concussions had a lot to answer for. If he’d been thinking straight none of this ever would have happened.
Now he reached the massive dark double doors with insets of beveled leaded glass that led into the Graff. They’d been refinished, the dark wood gleaming, the bevels turning the light into rainbows. Troy had done more than give the old girl a facelift, Cole thought, preparing to haul open one of the great heavy doors. But as he did so, they opened automatically with a barely audible swish. Cole stopped, his eyes widening. Then, shaking his head in amazement at what Troy had accomplished, he strode in through a glassed-in airlock designed to keep the Montana winter outside while allowing a view of a lobby within. It would have done the Copper Kings proud.
Marietta’s mining past had never reached the glory days its founders had hoped for. It had never, not even in its heyday, had the wealth that Butte once had. Marietta’s own entrepreneurs had done their best, but by the time Cole was born, the place had pretty much become a ghost town. It was hard to imagine it decked out in early 20th century finery.
But tonight he saw clearly that once upon a time the aspirations had been there—or Troy had done a heck of a job paying homage to a past that had never been.
He hadn’t spared any expense, that was certain. The high-ceilinged lobby wore its handsome mahogany furnishings, its thick plush rugs and polished marble floors with the ease of entitlement. In junior high Cole and Dillon and their buddies had skate-boarded across those floors. Now they gleamed. The whole place had the look of old money well spent.
When he’d heard what Troy had planned for the Graff, Cole had had his doubts. “Kind of trying to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, isn’t it?” he’d said last summer.
Troy had shrugged, then given him a flicker of that sly Sheenan smile. “Guess we’ll have to wait and see.”
Obviously Troy had seen potential there that Cole had never recognized. The Graff wore its new looks well. The prisms on the chandelier high above the lobby sparkled, tinkling softly as Cole and other late stragglers stamped their feet to knock off new snow, then headed toward the cloak room.
“Whoa, look at you!” Sadie’s friend, Nicole, goggled at him when Cole handed her his jacket. Her gaze slid appreciatively over his charcoal suit, black shirt and dark red tie. “You clean up good!” Her low appreciative whistle and wide grin made heads turn. Strangers—city folk from the look of them—men in tuxes and women in long dresses—looked around to study him.
Cole felt his neck heat. He had an urge to run his fingers inside the suddenly tight collar of his shirt. Em insisted she hadn’t starched his collar, but Cole wasn’t sure he believed it.
“Want me to take your hat, too?” Nicole offered.
“Nope. Thanks.” He’d feel naked without his hat.
“Hat doesn’t make the man, Cole,” she chided.
Maybe not. But he reckoned the hat was part of what Lacey McKay would want to see. Now he tipped it in Nicole’s direction just the way his grandfather used
to do. Then he squared his shoulders and headed toward the sound of the music.
Cole had never minded dancing. He’d shuffled and waltzed his way around his fair share of post-rodeo dances. His grandmother had taught him and his brother how when they were barely as high as her waist.
“A gal likes a spin on the dance floor,” she’d told them. “You learn now, you’ll thank your old gran.”
But this didn’t look like any dance floor Cole had ever trod. The thousands of tiny pink lights scattered across the ceiling looked like some Valentine version of the Milky Way. A fleet of large round tables with starched pink tablecloths sailed along the edges of the dance floor. Each table had a scattering of candles, a hearts-and-flowers centerpiece, and was set with fine white china, silver, wine glasses and goblets, all of which reflected the sparkling lights above. It looked more romantic than his brother’s Beacon Hill wedding reception had. Beautiful people were everywhere—and Cole recognized damn few of them.
“Was I right or was I right?” Troy Sheenan appeared at his side, waved a hand to encompass the room, then slanted him a quick proud grin.
Cole took a deep breath and shook his head, still not quite able to believe the transformation. “You were right. It’s amazing.”
“Must be,” Troy agreed drily, “to get you here.”
“Doin’ my dad a favor. I’m meeting McKays. You’ve met Tom?”
Troy nodded. “Good man. Hope he comes back to town. Oh, hell. Jane’s waving. Gotta run. Have a good time.”
Jane Weiss was the mover and shaker behind tonight’s ball. The head of the Marietta Chamber of Commerce, the reason for the Great Wedding Giveaway 100th Anniversary that tonight’s ball was celebrating, Jane had come to town last fall and had pretty much taken Marietta by storm.
She and Troy had even dated for a while. They were still friends. So it could happen, Cole told himself. Maybe someday he could just be friends with Nell. But the sudden knot in his stomach didn’t encourage that line of thinking. He’d never just wanted to be friends with Eleanor Corbett, not from the moment he’d laid eyes on her. There was something about Nell that had caught his attention at once. With her heavy thick straight honey-colored hair, her flawlessly smooth olive complexion, and her dark slightly slanted eyes, deep brown with gold flecks, she had been radiant that afternoon—and every day thereafter. She was both exotic and undeniably beautiful. Her smile was as warm as it was friendly. And she always seemed to go golden in the sun.
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