by Liz Isaacson
Her Last Secret Sweetheart
Last Chance Ranch Romance Book 5
Liz Isaacson
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Sneak Peek! Her Last Christmas Cowboy Chapter One
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About Liz
Chapter 1
Cache Bryant sat on the front steps of his cabin, his acoustic guitar across his lap as he watched the sun rise in front of him. The golden rays filled his soul with light and peace, and he loved this time of the morning.
Before dawn, he didn’t have to worry about his tasks for today. He didn’t worry about the bills he had to pay, or the cows he had to train, or the woman he wanted to impress.
Cache enjoyed the moment while he could, because he had a lot to do today. Scarlett, the owner of Last Chance Ranch, had been hounding him about getting the cow cuddling up and running. She simply had no idea how much work it took to make a bovine lay down and be petted. It wasn’t natural for cows, though Cache had found that they liked it.
But cows were stubborn, and the training had taken longer than he’d anticipated. Than anyone had anticipated.
As they were wont to do, his thoughts wandered first to his family’s dairy farm in Nevada. They’d lost it a couple of years ago, and Cache had come further west to Last Chance Ranch while his brother and father had gone east to Shiloh Ridge in Colorado.
Maybe he just needed to go visit them. Get a change of scenery for a few days. He wasn’t sure, but the funk he’d fallen into recently seemed to be plaguing him for longer than usual.
He liked his job here at Last Chance Ranch. He did. He loved the people, though he was feeling particularly lonely now that Sawyer was married and Dave had started dating Sissy. Cache felt like so much of his life had passed him by, while he watched the sun rise and dreamed of milking cows.
But it was his life, and he actually enjoyed it—most of the time.
He sighed as he got to his feet. After taking his guitar inside and propping it in the corner against the coat closet, he grabbed his work gloves from the end table near the couch and headed out.
“Mornin’,” Dave said as he moved down his front steps too, and Cache smiled at him.
“Yep, it’s morning again,” Cache said. They started down the road together, though Dave sometimes drove his truck over to the stables where he worked. Cache had worked jobs all over the ranch, but he’d traded out his time on the south side of the ranch with the bigger animals to administer meds to the horses for the large care vet. And when he wasn’t doing that, he worked in the Canine Club or with his dairy cows.
Last Chance Ranch wasn’t really set up to be a dairy operation, and his cows’ milk had dried up a while ago. They grazed, and lowed at the chickens that got out of their coops, and hopefully, Cache could start getting people into the pasture for the cuddling.
“How are the cows doing?” Dave asked, and it seemed that was all anyone asked Cache.
“Great,” he said. “How’s the new dog?”
A smile spread across Dave’s face. “Awesome. I might get another one.”
“They’re all over anyway,” Cache said, smiling. A couple of cars turned onto the road behind them, and Cache moved to the side. “Goat yoga this morning.”
“I don’t understand it,” Dave said.
“Yeah.” Cache said nothing about the cuddling. Until they were ready to launch the program, Scarlett had sworn him to secrecy. She wouldn’t even tell Karla, the ranch’s marketing director, and surely she’d need time to put together something for the announcement of the program.
Cache wasn’t sure. What he knew was limited, only what he could glean from a couple of articles online about a farm in New England. Connecticut, if he remembered right. If there were other farms or ranches picking up on the idea, he hadn’t heard of them.
“Band practice Friday?” Dave asked.
“Yeah,” Cache said, wishing he had a date on Friday night. He could ask someone, he knew. Plenty of women came to the ranch each day, from volunteers to regular employees like the new veterinarian technician Scarlett had hired a few months ago.
“Got any new songs?” Dave asked, and Cache finally started to feel more like himself.
“Yeah,” he said. “And Sawyer’s said he’ll have one too. Apparently, being awake in the middle of the night with a baby has helped his creativity.”
Dave chuckled with Cache. “Yeah, I bet.”
“Cute baby they brought home,” Cache said.
“Totally,” Dave said, keeping his gaze down the road as they passed in front of the homestead.
“I’ll see you later,” Cache said, detouring to the right while Dave kept going. The administration building was down that way, and Dave had taken to stopping by that building in the morning since he’d started seeing Sissy more often.
Cache hadn’t asked him specifically about her, but Dave had been in an increasingly good mood the past month or so, and Sissy had been the only thing in his life that had changed. Cache could put two and two together.
He cleaned out the watering troughs for the llamas and refilled them, enjoying the crisp start to the day. He took a deep breath and got to work measuring the medicines Blade needed that day.
Everything about a living, breathing, working ranch enthralled him, and always had. He loved the circle of life, even when sometimes he lost a horse or a cow or a dog.
After getting all the medicines to all the right equines, he headed back toward the homestead, where the twelve dairy cows he’d been training were housed in a huge field across the dirt lane from the cabins that bordered the backyard of the homestead. The rest of the bovines were kept in a different field between the homestead and the Goat Grounds.
He couldn’t help glancing to the row of cabins there. Gramps lived in the end one, and Cache loved the old man as if he were his own grandfather. Adele and Carson lived in the one in the middle, and Karla Jenkins lived in the third.
Karla Jenkins.
The woman Cache had been trying to impress for a while now. He’d invited her to the Halloween carnival eight months ago so she could see his band. She’d come, and she’d clapped and laughed along with everyone else.
But she hadn’t gushed over him the way the girls did to Dave. Cache could sing too, but his first love was the guitar. His second was these insufferable cows, and he jumped over the fence to join them in the pasture.
He whistled at them as if they were dogs, and several turned toward him. “Cookie. Daisy. Come on, girls.”
Some of the cows he’d named and could tell them one from another. Only about eight or nine of them, the ones he’d been working with tirelessly to get them to lay down on command.
His cows lumbered toward him, all but two who stayed stubbornly out in the field a ways, already lying down. He didn’t whistle again, as he’d been working fo
r months to get Jenny and Flower to lie down and stay there.
He went to them instead, starting to talk to them the closer he got. “What’s going on with you two?” he asked. “Are you sick?”
His other cuddlers came with him, their footsteps heavy in the grass. He avoided a spot of cow manure, asking, “Flower, what are you doing?” He reached the cow and ran his hand down her side. She didn’t seem to be bloated.
“What—?” It was then that he saw the sandy blonde hair of a woman curled into the cow’s chest.
Karla Jenkins herself tilted her head back and looked up at him. A smile sprang to her face, and she looked like a bright ray of heaven. “Morning.”
“Good morning,” he said, glad it was a natural reaction and he didn’t have to think to do it. Karla Jenkins, out in his cow pasture, cuddling his cows. He had no idea what to make of it.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, staring openly at her. She’d been in his dreams for months, and yet she’d never really indicated that she was interested in him at all.
“Scarlett told me you were training your cows for a cuddling thing,” she said. “I thought I’d try it. Is this how it’s done?”
Cache wanted to blurt that her cuddling into Flower’s side was one of the sexiest things he’d ever seen. Instead, he just nodded. “They’ve only had me to practice with,” he said.
“I’m happy to volunteer as a test subject,” she said.
“You could get kicked.”
She smiled at him again. “Oh, I don’t think so. This cow is nothing but a sweetheart.” She patted Flower’s ribcage.
Cache chuckled, some of the awkwardness between him and Karla leaking away. It didn’t seem fair, though, that she had to be here, looking so soft and lovely and cuddling with his cow.
Maybe he could just ask her to dinner. He’d never really come out and asked. Maybe he was absolutely terrible at flirting and needed to be more forthright.
“Cache,” she said, and he blinked himself back into focusing on her.
“Yeah?”
She stood up and brushed dirt and grass from her clothes. She wore a pair of khaki shorts and a cute T-shirt with lemons on it. “I didn’t mean to step on your toes.”
“You didn’t,” he said. “I was just surprised. Scarlett didn’t want anyone to know about the cow cuddling.”
Karla ran her fingers through her hair, driving Cache toward the brink of madness.
“You wouldn’t want to…I don’t know. Go to dinner with me. Would you?” Cache swallowed, and he swore Flower sighed as if to say, Oh, buddy, bad idea.
Karla blinked, shock traveling across her face in slow waves. “Dinner?”
“Yeah, dinner,” Cache said boldly, refusing to look away. No more games. No more dancing around this woman at the meals she cooked for the whole ranch.
The longer she stood there and stared at him, framed by his lounging cows, the stupider Cache felt. Was she going to say anything? He’d even take a no at this point. At least then he’d know.
Still, she said nothing.
Chapter 2
Karla Jenkins tried to find the right words and put them in the right order. Cache Bryant had just asked her out. Right out loud. She’d noticed that they’d been flirting on and off for a few months now, and he was brilliant with a guitar in his hands.
And with these cows, as she’d never seen a cow just lie right down and let a human curl into it. But two of his had done exactly that, and she couldn’t wait to report back to Scarlett.
“It’s fine,” Cache said. “Never mind.” He turned and started walking away, everything in Karla desperate to call him back. But she just watched as he moved over to a different cow and started talking to it too, in the same human-like way he had Flower.
“Flower,” she whispered, stroking her hand down the cow’s hide again. “How do I tell him?” She wanted to go out with him, and she was flattered he’d asked. But she had so many things she didn’t want to talk about. Mistakes from her past. And didn’t people talk about their past when they started dating?
Karla hadn’t been in the game for a while, but she thought she still knew the rules. And Cache would want to know about her, and she’d have to tell him things if she wanted to keep him in her life.
The two sides of herself went to war, and she honestly had no idea which one would win. The man—the ridiculously handsome cowboy—in question glanced over to her, and Karla still stood there, unsure about what to do.
She wasn’t sure if her heart could take another battering. “Maybe he’ll be gentle with your heart,” she whispered to herself. Yeah, and maybe he could train these cows to fly. She didn’t think so, but she needed to explain.
She stepped around the legs of the cow and headed toward him. “Cache,” she said just as he snuggled into the side of a cow.
“Come join me,” he said. “I want them to be able to tolerate two people.”
“Cache,” she repeated, and he gestured for her to come over.
She did, stepping between the hooves and sitting on the ground next to Cache. Their eyes met, and he was so, so handsome. Her breath caught in her throat, and she found herself diving all the way into his blue, blue eyes.
“Good girl, Cookie,” he said, patting the cow.
“Do you have names for all of them?” she asked.
“Just a few,” he said. “The several I’ve been working with on the cuddling.”
“How do you pick them?”
“Well, all the cows are girls,” he said. “So I just call them whatever. Daisy or Flower. Bluebell. Floral varieties are popular, obviously.” He put that delightful smile on his face, and Karla’s heart started bobbing somewhere in the back of her throat.
They sat in silence for a minute, and Karla decided maybe she could be honest with him. “Cache, I want to go out with you.”
He turned his head and looked at her. “Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I just….” She gazed at the horizon. “This might sound stupid, but I don’t want to be the talk of the ranch if we start seeing each other.”
“Is that what would happen?” Cache asked, his phone buzzing.
“Possibly, and I—I’m a pretty private person.”
“It’s okay,” Cache said, getting to his feet. “I have to get over to Piggy Paradise. I’ll see you later, okay?” He didn’t wait for Karla to say anything before he dashed off.
She stayed against the cow’s side and gazed up into the cloudless California sky. She wanted to pray for help, but she didn’t quite know how. She’d tried that before anyway, and nothing much had come from it.
She’d still lost her job. Her husband. Her baby.
The pain that always came when she allowed this particular box to open sliced through her. She’d gotten a new job. A better job. She loved Last Chance Ranch, and it had come with the cabin that had allowed her to truly get a new start on her life.
She didn’t want the husband anymore, and that really was a problem. Jackson had been terrible for her from the beginning, and she’d been a fool to think a baby could fix their broken marriage.
In the end, she’d lost both, and most of her life felt like a waste. She’d managed to put together a few pieces, but it had come at a high price. A vow that she didn’t need a man in her life, something she’d kept since the divorce had been finalized five years ago.
Could she break that vow now? For a cheerful cowboy with the best eyes she’d ever seen?
She sighed as she got up too. “Thanks for the cuddle, Cookie.”
Later that day, Karla sat at her desk in her office, which was really the second bedroom in the cabin on the edge of the homestead’s backyard. She hadn’t made lunch for the ranch workers that day. She’d hardly gotten any work done either.
All she’d been able to do was sit at the desk and stare as she thought about Cache Bryant and his dinner invitation.
He’d taken it off the table and never really put it back on before running
off to do his job. She had his phone number. She could call him. But she had no idea what to say.
“Focus,” she muttered to herself, and she looked down at her computer. She was supposed to be putting up next month’s goat yoga schedule, and she couldn’t seem to get it done.
After that, she needed to confirm with Forever Friends about the Fourth of July picnic and adoption event, taking place in a couple of months. That event should be highly publicized around the ranch and through the Forever Friends organization, and Karla had a meeting the following day that would take her down to the offices in LA.
Anxiety hit her at having to return to the city. All those memories. All those people. But she pushed aside the panic and picked up her phone to text Vicky, the only friend she had left from her previous life.
Still on for lunch tomorrow?
Yes! Vic’s text came back almost immediately. Karla smiled at her device as they confirmed their location and time. Then Karla would drive back to the ranch, back to this small cabin, back to this simpler, easier life.
Karla loved this life, but she’d started to feel like it was hollow. She was a shell, with nothing of substance inside.
And her thoughts went back to Cache again. Wondering if he could provide some sort of fulfillment for her, Karla once again stalled in her work. Could she really find out? She’d heard all of the love stories here on the ranch—and if he didn’t think they’d be the source of all gossip if they even so much as glanced at each other with a playful glint in their eyes, he was sorely mistaken—and she didn’t want to feel like she couldn’t be here if she and Cache started something and broke up.