Million Dollar Cowboy

by Lori Wilde

  “We talk.” Which was more than Ridge and his father did. “And text.”

  “Well there’s that.” Sarcasm pulled his voice down into a yeasty dark brew of contempt. Ah, there it was. Duke’s real feelings.

  Showdown at the Silver Feather Corral, and Ridge wouldn’t have been half surprised to see pearl-handled pistols sticking from Duke’s waistband.

  Neither of them blinked.

  A column of silence marched between them, tension stretching long and flammable. Picking up on the tension, Majestic tossed his head.

  “You look good,” Duke said finally, his tone softening, but his eyes stayed flinty, unrelenting.

  “Wish I could say the same for you.”

  “You always were a little bastard,” Duke said, but there was affection in the word and the tension thawed. Not much, but a little.

  “Where you going?” Ridge nodded at the saddle in his father’s hand. Duke’s forearms bunched and corded from the weight of it. He was still strong as an ox.

  “Chapel. To turn on air conditioning before the rest of them get up there and start squawking about the heat. Casey’s folks are city sissies.”

  “Vivi doesn’t much like the heat either, if memory serves.”

  At the mention of Vivi’s name, his father’s pupils dilated and the pitch of his tone lifted. “She is a rare flower, our Vivi.”

  Our Vivi. Jab. Stab. Take that Oedipus. Daddy’s still in charge.

  Ridge raised his palms. Not a gesture of surrender, more like not-my-circus-not-my-monkeys-don’t-drag-me-into-it. “Hey man, she’s all yours. You claimed her. You’re stuck with her.”

  Duke settled the saddle on Majestic’s back and the stallion gave a kick just to let them know he stayed spicy.

  “Why are you taking Majestic?” Ridge nudged his Stetson back on his head.

  “He doesn’t get ridden enough.”

  “You’re taking that horse around a bunch of people he doesn’t know?” Ridge pressed his mouth flat in a you’re-a-dumbass expression. “Playing with fire.”

  “You haven’t seen the horse in ten years and you’re making judgments? Telling me about my own horse.”

  “I know Majestic. He was my horse.”

  “Until you ran off and left him. He’s aged.” Duke jutted out his chin.

  “Has he?” Ridge hitched his thumbs through his belt loops. They were no longer talking about the stallion.

  “If you came home once in a while you’d know things.” Duke’s bushy eyebrows pulled into a glower.

  “Some things aren’t worth bothering about.”

  “Meaning me?”

  “Take it any way you like, old man.”

  Duke shifted his weight, rocking onto the balls of his feet, sinking his hands on his hips, spreading out, making himself look bigger, fiercer.

  Ridge knew the ploy. Expand your body; expand your territory. Taking control. Taking over. Man-spreading.

  But Duke was already in control here. It was his home. His place. No need to expand. Unless …

  Was his father feeling insecure?

  Ridge smiled big as Dallas. Had his arrival thrown Duke? Hmm. He liked that idea. Liked it a lot.

  Their gazes locked, and Ridge did not have a key. They stared at each other until all he could see was Duke’s chocolate eyes and he supposed that all Duke could see of him where his navy blues.

  Yeah, okay, he’d admit it. He’d gotten his stubborn streak from the old coot.

  Another five seconds of staring each other down and they would have gone to fisticuffs. He could feel it in the air, his own body, in the way Duke sank his feet solidly into the ground. Bracing.

  They’d been here before. Just like this. More than once. He didn’t want to fight an AARP member, but he wasn’t afraid to defend himself if Duke made the first move. The old man had a right hook like a bulldozer, the kind that could knock a son out with one clean snap.

  It would be like old times. Ridge felt his fists bunch, and his body loosened with readiness. If that’s where this was going, so be it.

  Majestic snorted and tossed his head, ready for action. That broke the stare down. Duke was the first to drop his gaze, and he mumbled, “We’re going to use it.”

  Huh? Ridge blinked, confused. “Use what?”

  “At the mine. The Lock Ridge drilling method.”

  Knock him down with a feather duster.

  “Everyone in silver mining will be using it,” Ridge said without a trace of ego. It was a fact. If you mined silver and you weren’t using the Lock Ridge technique, you were squatting behind a giant financial eight ball with spurs on. Only a dumbass would ignore that, and Duke was anything but dumb.

  “Saw that write-up on you in the Wall Street Journal.” Duke cinched the saddle on Majestic.

  Ridge raised an eyebrow, waiting for a tart rejoinder.

  “You didn’t mention a word about me,” Duke said.

  “I did not. Why should I? I made it on my own. Besides, Bridgette Alzate taught me that if you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.”

  Duke snorted again.

  Anger heat pushed its way up Ridge’s neck. Do not rise to the bait. He’s an alligator waiting to attack. Anything you say can and will be used against you. “Got something to say?”

  “Gave you my DNA. You’re welcome.”

  “If I could give it back, I would.”

  Duke laughed a fat, wet sound like mud sucking around bogged work boots. “I imagine you’d like to shove it down my throat.”

  “The thought has occurred to me.”

  “Congratulations.” Duke bobbed his head up and down once, as if he were reluctant and rusty at praise. “You took my DNA and ran with it. You achieved what you set out to do.”

  Ridge cocked his head, closed one eye against the glare of the sun coming through the open stable door, and gauged his father. Tried to puzzle out his angle.

  “How’s Vivi?” he asked, poking the bear.

  Duke tightened his lip. “All in a fluff over this weddin’.”

  “Archer told me you built a wedding chapel on the east forty.”

  “Vivi’s idea. Renting the chapel out for weddings brings in more money than hunting leases. Who knew?”

  “You’ve stopped the leases?”

  Duke rolled his eyes. “Vivi’s liberal claptrap. Don’t kill Bambi, wah, wah.”

  “And you went along with it?”

  “Some things ain’t worth getting in a snit over.”

  Ridge couldn’t help grinning. Duke was bending over backward to please his trophy wife. “Hey, keeping her happy must be working for you. You’ve managed to hang on to her the longest of all your wives.”

  “It ain’t all gumdrops and roses, but this one’s gotta stick. I’m too old to start over.”

  “What? No tick-tock of her biological clock? She’s thirty-two. There’s gotta be a countdown. Ready to become a daddy again?”

  “Hush it.” Duke’s eyebrows bunched together above his hawkish nose. “Last thing I need is another squall bag.”

  “You should try for a girl,” Ridge teased, enjoying watching his father squirm. “I always did want a little sister.”

  “You’re enjoying this.”

  “Immensely.”

  “Gloatin’ bastard.”

  “Yep.”

  “I need to get up to the chapel.”

  “Turning on that air conditioning and all.”

  Another long stretch of silence, but this one was less tense than before. Something had shifted.

  Duke grunted. “Good to have you home.”

  This was as close to saying I’m sorry for stealing your girl as Duke was ever going to get. Good enough.

  Hey, shocker of shockers, coming home didn’t feel as bad as he’d feared. But he didn’t trust this feeling or his father.

  Not by a long shot.

  Chapter 4

  “You’re late,” Mom hollered above the beehive hum of female voices gathered in
the mansion’s enormous kitchen.

  “You said to be here at seven,” Kaia hollered back, looking for a place to set the doggie crate. There wasn’t a spare scrap of real estate unoccupied by gifts or brunch fixings or purses.

  Her mother pointed at the clock. Seven-ten.

  Kaia offered up an apologetic smile. “I almost died, remember.”

  Mom sank her hands on her hips. “That was two years ago. You need a new excuse.”

  “But you’re really, really happy I didn’t die.”

  Mom came across the immense kitchen to wrap her in a hard hug while Kaia was still holding on to the package. “I’m really, really happy you didn’t die.” She rested her chin on Kaia’s shoulder. “Did you bring the hash brown casserole?”

  Kaia cringed. Oh crapple. “I left it on the counter. I’m sorry. You want I should go back for it?”

  “We’ve got more food than we can eat,” Casey, the bride-to-be said. She was standing at the island folding breakfast sausages into triangles of crescent roll dough for pigs in a blanket, and looking gorgeous in a short blue cotton dress with Van Gogh sunflowers on it.

  “I really don’t mind,” Kaia offered.

  “No worries. Do not go back for it. The minister will be here at eight for the rehearsal and it will take us that long to get everyone up to the chapel.” Casey piled a freshly wrapped sausage on a platter.

  “Ridge is here,” Kaia blurted.

  Those three words brought the entire room silent.

  “What?” Casey said.

  “His plane just touched down.”

  “Bury the lead, will you?” Kaia’s youngest sister, Aria said. At five-seven, Aria was the tallest of the four Alzate sisters. She’d just graduated from Texas Tech and was back home for the summer.

  Someone, Kaia wasn’t sure whom, but she suspected it was Ridge’s stepmother, Vivi, said, “Baa baa black sheep has finally returned.”

  “How does he look?” Tara, Kaia’s next-to-the-oldest sister asked. “Still handsome as ever?” Tara was a nurse who worked at Cupid General Hospital in obstetrics.

  “Where can I put this?” Kaia asked, wishing she hadn’t brought up Ridge’s name, and shot Casey a get-me-out-of-this look.

  Before Casey could answer, a toothy toddler in blue jean shorts and cowboy boots tackled her around the knees. Kaia grunted at the exuberant impact and ruffled the kid’s hair.

  “KiKi!” squealed the toddler, who happened to be Casey’s three-year-old nephew, Atticus, and the ring bearer at the wedding. He had a thing for Kaia, probably because she usually had an animal or two with her for him to play with.

  “Kitty kitty?” he asked, cocking his little head to one side.

  “No kitty,” she told him. “Not today.”

  “I’ll take that,” said Lynne, Casey’s older sister and Atticus’s mother, and took the unwieldy wedding gift off her hands, leaving Kaia free to swing Atticus onto her hip, lift his shirt and blow a raspberry against his round little belly.

  Atticus shrieked with joy and planted a wet kiss on the end of her nose.

  Mom leaned over to pinch Atticus’s cheek. “When are one of you girls going to cooperate and give me one of these?”

  Simultaneously, all three of Kaia’s sisters, Ember, Tara, and Aria, rolled their eyes.

  “Hey,” Kaia said. “Don’t look at me. Ember and Tara are first in line.”

  “Go ahead.” Tara groaned. “Throw us under the bus just because we were born before you.”

  “I might be the oldest,” Ember said. She was the only sister who’d taken after Mom’s Irish side of the family, and her flame-red hair matched her name. “But clearly you’re more maternal. Go for it, Kaia.”

  “I would love to have one of these someday.” Kaia tickled Atticus making him giggle like the Pillsbury Doughboy. “But first things first. Gotta finish up vet school, and oh yeah, find a husband.”

  “You don’t need a husband to get one of those,” Aria said. “All you need is a visit to a sperm—”

  “The Song of the Soul Mate,” Granny Blue Alzate interrupted, her voice wrapped with the earthy tones of her Comanche ancestry.

  Granny Blue sat at the kitchen table chopping up mise en place for the omelet buffet. She was petite, eighty-three, and sharp as a hawk. Her dark eyes, deep-set into a wrinkled face, missed nothing and she did not put up with bullshit. But it was just as easy to earn her smile as her rebuke.

  “Need a hand, Granny?” Kaia asked, passing Atticus to Lynne, who’d come back into the room. She bopped over to the kitchen sink, washed her hands, plunked down beside her grandmother, and started julienning red bell peppers.

  “I have a question, Mrs. Alzate,” Casey said.

  “Please, you’re part of the family now.” She slid pieces of diced ham from a cutting board into a small bowl. “Call me Granny Blue.”

  “Granny Blue.” Casey smiled an I’ve-got-the-world-on-a-string smile. “What is this Song of the Soul Mate stuff?”

  Granny Blue shot Kaia a glance that said, how do you explain the inexplicable?

  Kaia shrugged. She had no idea. She’d never experienced it. Didn’t know if she believed in the legend.

  “It’s something that happens to the women in our family when they fall in love,” Granny Blue explained.

  Casey took the chair across the table from Granny Blue, leaned in. “Tell me more.”

  “Anyone want a Bloody Mary?” Aria interrupted from where she was standing beside the Vitamix.

  “Me! Me!” Tara and Ember waved wildly. Kaia raised a hand as high as her shoulder.

  “Not now.” Mom frowned. “Those are for brunch. We don’t want you girls half-in-the-bag for the rehearsal.”

  “Why not?” Aria said. “Being half-in-the-bag is what makes it fun.”

  “Father Dubanowski will be there.” With a stern finger, Mom waggled for Aria to put the pitcher down.

  “He’s Episcopalian—he drinks.”

  “About this soul mate thing …” Casey leaned forward, propped her elbows on the table, and sank her chin into her upturned palms, getting closer to Granny Blue.

  “If we’re going to talk about that silly old myth, we definitely need alcohol. How about mimosas, Mom? Champagne versus vodka?” Aria made teeter-totter, weighing-it-out motions with her hand.

  “No hooch.” Mom shook her head.

  “Bummer.” Aria sank her butt against the kitchen counter, folded her arms over her chest. Looked defeated.

  “Cheer up,” Ember said, bumping Aria with her hip. “In a couple of hours you can have all the Bloody Marys and Mimosas you want.”

  “Within reason,” Mom added.

  “Are you guys purposely trying to stop Granny Blue from telling me about the legend?” Casey asked.

  “Pay no attention to them. They’re skeptics,” Granny Blue said. “Scared of what they do not understand.”

  Kaia finished up the bell peppers, reached for the porcini mushrooms, and started chopping. She was on the fence about the family legend. She didn’t believe it, but she wanted to.

  “Well,” Casey said. “I want to understand. Tell me.”

  Granny Blue stacked her palms on the table in front of her. “It is simple. When the women from my bloodline kiss their soul mate, they hear a soft, but distinct humming at the base of their brains.”

  “That’s just tinnitus,” Vivi said. “Ringing in the ears. I hear it after I listen to loud music on my headphones.”

  Granny Blue stared at Vivi until she sheepishly glanced away. “It is not ringing in the ears.”

  “That’s wacky. I mean, c’mon,” Aria said. “How could kissing someone make your head hum?”

  “Wish fulfillment?” Lynne asked, bouncing Atticus on her knee, playing giddy-up horsey. “Power of suggestion?”

  “I do not know the answer to the mystery,” Granny Blue said. “I only know that it is so.”

  “Too bad the rest of us don’t have such a clear-cut signal,” Vivi muttered, and everyon
e turned to look at her. “What? I’m not allowed to question my choices?”

  No one was touching that with a ten-foot pole. The entire town had questioned Vivi’s choice when she threw Ridge over for his father.

  “Mom,” Ember said. “Do you hear humming when you kiss Daddy?”

  “I’m not from your granny’s bloodline,” Mom said, trying to look neutral. Kaia already knew Mom thought Granny Blue’s head humming tale was bunk, but she respected her mother-in-law too much to say so.

  “Is it a Native American thing?” Casey asked.

  Granny shrugged, a casual gesture that said she didn’t care if anyone believed her or not. “It is a family thing.”

  “But only for the women?” Casey asked.

  “Only for the women.”

  “That hardly seems fair.”

  “Fair has nothing to do with life,” Granny Blue said sagely. “It just is.”

  “So there’s no way to know for sure if I’m Archer’s soul mate.” Casey pouched out her bottom lip in disappointment. “No song for us.”

  “My granddaughters are lucky to have an undeniable way to know if they’ve found their true loves.” Granny Blue leaned over and placed a wrinkled hand on the left side of Casey’s chest. “But anyone can know for certain if they just get quiet, be still, and listen to their hearts.”

  Casey locked gazes with Granny Blue. “Archer is my soul mate.”

  “And so you know.” Granny Blue smiled. Straightened. “You are smarter than all four of my granddaughters put together.”

  Tears formed in Casey’s eyes. “I know.”

  “Did Casey just dis the shit out of us?” Aria asked.

  “Language!” Mom scolded.

  “Sorry.” Aria did not look the least bit contrite.

  “I didn’t mean I was smarter than you,” Casey apologized. “I meant I knew for sure that Archer is the one I’m meant to be with.”

  “That’s good.” Ember crunched a carrot. “Seeing as how you’re about to marry him and all.”

  “Just like I knew about Armand,” Mom murmured, and a dreamy smile came over her face.

  “Ooh,” Lynne said. “I’ve got a question. What if you were already happily married, and then you kissed someone else and heard the humming? What then?”

  Casey whipped her head around to stare at her sister. “Why would you kiss someone else if you were happily married?”