by Caro Carson
Sophia sidestepped Alex and placed her hand in Deezee’s. “You want to marry me right now?”
“Sure, girl. Let’s go crazy.”
* * *
“That was crazy.” Grace looked out the limousine window at the Austin city lights.
Alex held her hand. “Are you okay?”
“I suppose so. I’m not really hurt. Sophie just wants to be happy. I’m just afraid that Deezee isn’t the man who is really going to make her happy.”
“We could be wrong.”
Grace put her head on Alex’s shoulder. “Martina set it up yesterday. I should have known there was a reason Sophie switched to that white gown. I know this isn’t important, but I always assumed I’d be her maid of honor. I guess that’s not going to happen.”
Alex dropped a kiss on her very fancy hair. “Maybe that’s why she wanted those photos with you tonight. She knew she was in her wedding gown.”
“And this is my bridesmaid’s dress?” Grace sat up and turned to face Alex. “If you’re trying to make me feel better, you’re succeeding.”
She wanted to talk to him about everything, but the limousine was moving toward the airport, and her time was short. She took her cellphone out of her silver purse, her prop for this talk. “I have something to show you. It’s Sophia’s boarding pass to get on the plane tonight.”
Alex watched her as she swiped her finger over the screen.
“But here’s mine. It’s cancelled. I’m not going to back to LA tonight.”
Alex looked truly stunned.
“Some woman named Jackson was supposed to spend a week making love to her new man in Texas, so I thought it might as well be me. I told Sophia today I was taking some long overdue vacation days.”
Alex started to laugh as he reached into his inner jacket pocket and pulled out his cell phone. “Let me show you something. This is my boarding pass. I decided if I couldn’t stand to be apart from you, then I ought to stay with you. I was going to be on your flight to LA tonight. I arranged with the other doctors to take my long overdue vacation.”
“Oh, my gosh. What should we do?”
Alex raised one eyebrow at her. “We should take a vacation.”
Grace wanted to cuddle that digital boarding pass on his cellphone to her chest like the treasure it was. It gave her courage. “I’ve been thinking more long-term. When Sophia gets back from her trip, I told her I’d help her interview new assistants. I’m ready to live my own life.”
Alex said nothing.
Grace held on to her courage. “Conventional wisdom says I should take some time to adjust. I should get a job and think only about myself for a while.”
“You’re probably right about that.”
It was a terribly neutral answer, but Alex was watching her closely, intently listening to every word she had to say. He wasn’t neutral at all when it came to her.
There was no time like the present—no time like a private limo ride in a silver gown to proposition a man in a tuxedo.
“But here’s what I really want to do, in my heart. I’m good at being a couple. I like living with someone else. It’s too much, too soon, everyone will say, but I’m afraid I’m going to miss seeing your face. I love being around you. I love having you for a friend. I don’t want to be clingy or dependent, but I want to live with you.” She came to a stop, choked up by emotion and afraid she was babbling.
Alex looked so terribly serious as he picked up her hand. “When it comes to living together, I’m afraid that all I can do is offer you all or nothing.”
“Oh.” Grace could feel her heart pounding hard. She didn’t know quite what he meant.
“I can love you like that, but it would have to be for keeps. I couldn’t handle living together for a few weeks or a few months or a few years, only to have you disappear. It would have to be forever, Grace.”
“I can do forever.” But she looked at him cautiously, unsure of his mood. He was so very grave.
“Good, because that’s the kind of man I am.” Then he reached in the pocket of his jacket once more, and her heart tripped in a seriously happy dance of anticipation. “I bought something today. I was prepared to carry it with me until you were sure of what you wanted, no matter how long that took. I should have known you already had a plan. The best plan. The only plan for us.”
“Oh, Alex. Are we really going to do this?”
He pulled out a diamond ring and smiled at her, the most intimate, perfect smile a man has ever given a woman.
“Yes, Grace. We’re really going to do this. Together. Forever.”
* * * * *
Will Sophie Jackson ever find love? Don’t miss her story, next in Caro Carson’s TEXAS RESCUE miniseries, coming soon from Harlequin Special Edition!
Keep reading for an excerpt from ALWAYS A COWBOY by Linda Lael Miller.
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Drake Carson is willing to put up with Luce Hale, the supposed “expert” his mother brought to the ranch, as long as she can get the herd of wild horses off his land, but the pretty academic wants to study them instead! Sparks are sure to fly when opposites collide in Mustang Creek...
Read on for a sneak peek from New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller’s second book in THE CARSONS OF MUSTANG CREEK trilogy, ALWAYS A COWBOY, coming soon from HQN Books.
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Always a Cowboy
by Linda Lael Miller
CHAPTER ONE
THE WEATHER JUST plain sucked, but that was okay with Drake Carson. In his opinion, rain was better than snow any day of the week, and as for sleet...well, that was wicked, especially in the wide-open spaces, coming at a person in stinging blasts like a barrage of buckshot. Yep, give him a slow, gentle rainfall every time, the kind that generally meant spring was in the works. Anyhow, he could stand to get a little wet.
Here in Wyoming, this close to the mountains, the month of May might bring sunshine and
pastures blanketed with wildflowers—or a freak blizzard, wild enough to bury cattle and people alike.
Raising his coat collar around his ears, he nudged his horse into motion with his heels. Starburst obeyed, although he seemed hesitant about it, unusually jumpy, in fact, and when that happened, Drake paid attention. Horses were prey animals and, as such, their instincts and senses were fine-tuned to their surroundings in ways a human being couldn’t equal.
Something was going on, that was for sure.
For nearly a year now, they’d been coming up short, Drake and his crew, when they tallied the livestock. Some losses were inevitable, of course, but too many calves, along with the occasional steer or heifer, had gone missing over the past twelve months.
Sometimes, they found a carcass. Other times, not.
Like all ranchers, Drake took every decrease in the herd seriously, and he wanted reasons.
The Carson spread was big, and while Drake couldn’t keep an eye on the whole place at once, he sure as hell tried.
“Stay with me,” he told his dogs, Harold and Violet, a pair of German shepherds from the same litter and two of the best friends he’d ever had.
Then, tightening the reins slightly, in case Starburst took a notion to bolt instead of skittering and sidestepping like he was doing now, Drake looked around, squinting against the downpour. Whatever he’d expected to see—a grizzly or a wildcat or even a band of modern-day rustlers—he hadn’t expected to lay eyes on a lone female. She was just up ahead, crouched behind a small tree and clearly drenched, despite the dark rain slicker covering her slender form.
She was peering through a pair of binoculars, having taken no apparent notice of Drake, his dogs or his horse. Even with the rain pounding down, they should have been hard to miss, being only fifty yards away.
Whoever the lady turned out to be, he wasn’t giving her points for alertness.
He studied her as he approached, but there was nothing familiar about her. Drake would have recognized a local woman. Mustang Creek was a small community, and strangers stood out.
Anyway, the whole ranch was posted against trespassers, mainly to keep tourists on the far side of the fences. A lot of visiting sightseers had seen a few too many G-rated animal movies and thought they could cozy up to a bear, a bison or a wolf and snap a selfie to post on social media.
Some greenhorns were simply naive or heedless, but others were entitled know-it-alls, disregarding the warnings of park rangers, professional wilderness guides and concerned locals. It galled Drake, the risks people took, camping and hiking in areas that were off-limits, walking right up to the wildlife, as if the place were a petting zoo. The lucky ones got away alive, but they were often missing the family pet or a few body parts when it was over.
Drake had been on more than one search-and-rescue mission, organized by the Bliss County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d seen things that kept him awake nights, if he thought about them too much.
He shook off the gruesome images and concentrated on the problem at hand—the woman in the rain slicker. Wondered which category—naive, thoughtless or arrogant—she fell into.
She didn’t appear to be in any danger at the moment but, then again, she seemed oblivious to everything around her, with the exception of whatever it was she was looking at through those binoculars of hers.
Presently, it dawned on Drake that whatever else she might be, she wasn’t the reason his big Appaloosa gelding was so worked up.
The woman seemed fixated on the wide meadow, actually a shallow valley, just beyond the copse of cottonwood. Starburst pranced and tossed his head, and Drake tightened the reins slightly, gave a gruff command.
The horse calmed down a little.
Once Drake cleared the stand of cottonwoods, he stood in the stirrups, adjusted his hat and followed the woman’s gaze. Briefly, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, after days, weeks and months of searching, with only a rare and always distant sighting.
But there they were, big as life; the stallion, his band of wild mustangs—and half a dozen mares lured from his own pastures.
Forgetting the rain-slicked trespasser for a few moments, his breath trapped in his throat, Drake stared, taking a quick count in his head, temporarily immobilized by the sheer grandeur of the sight.
The stallion was magnificence on the hoof, lean but with every muscle as clearly defined as if he’d been sculpted by a master. His coat was a ghostly gray, darkened by the rain, and his mane and tail were blacker than black.
The animal, well aware that he had an audience and plainly unconcerned, lifted his head slowly from the creek where he’d been drinking and made no move to run. With no more than a hundred yards between them, he regarded Drake for what seemed like a long while, as though sizing him up.
The rest of the band, mares included, went still, heads high, ears pricked forward, hindquarters tensed as they awaited some signal from the stallion.
Drake couldn’t help admiring that four-footed devil, even as he silently cursed the critter, consigning him to seven kinds of hell. The instant he pressed his boot heels to Starburst’s quivering sides, a motion so subtle that Drake himself was barely aware of it, the stallion went into action.
Nostrils flared, eyes rolling, the cocky son of a bitch snorted, then threw back his head and whinnied, the sound piercing the moisture-thickened air.
The band whirled toward the hillside and scattered.
The stallion stood watching as Drake, rope in hand and ready to throw, drove Starburst from a dead stop to a full run.
Before Starburst reached the creek, though, the big gray spun on his hind legs and damn near took wing as he raced across the clearing and up the slope.
Drake and his gelding splashed through the narrow stream, and up the opposite bank, the dogs loping alongside.
But hard as he rode, the whole experience felt like a slow-motion sequence from one of his brother Slater’s documentaries. He and Starburst might as well have been standing still for all the progress they made closing the gap.
The stallion paused at the top of the ridge, he and his band sketched against the stormy sky. Time seemed to stop, just for an instant, before the spell was broken and the whole bunch of them vanished as swiftly as if they’d melted into the clouds.
Drake knew he’d lost this round.
He reined Starburst to a halt, grabbed his hat by the brim and slapped it hard against his left thigh before jamming it back on his head. Then, still breathing hard, his jaw clamped down so hard that his ears ached from the strain, he recoiled his rope and fastened it to his saddle.
Harold and Violet were at the foot of the ridge by then, panting visibly and looking back at Drake in confusion.
He summoned them back with a shrill whistle, and they trotted toward him, tongues lolling, sides heaving.
Only when he’d ridden across the creek again did Drake remember the woman. Coupled with the fact that he’d just been outwitted by that damn stallion—again—her presence stuck in his hide like a burr.
She stood watching him as he rode toward her, her face a pale oval within the hood of her slicker.
With bitter amusement, he noticed that her feet were set a little apart, as in a fighter’s stance, and her elbows jutted out at her sides. Her hands, no doubt bunched into fists, were pressing hard into her hips.
As he drew nearer, he noted the spark of fury in her eyes and the tight line of her mouth.
Under other circumstances, he might have thrown back his head and laughed out loud at her sheer audacity, but at the moment his pride was giving him too much grief for that.
He hadn’t managed to get this close to the stallion—or his prize mares—for longer than he cared to remember. While he hated letting them get away so easily, he knew the dogs would be run ragged if he gave chase, and might even end up getting
their heads kicked in. They’d been bred for herding cattle, not wild horses.
They were disappointed just the same and whimpered in baleful protest at being called off, which only made Drake feel like more of a loser than he already did.
Harold and Violet, named for two of his favorite elementary school teachers, ambled over to him, tails wagging. They were drenched to the skin and getting wetter by the minute, but they were quick to forgive, unlike their human counterparts, himself included.
Just then, Drake’s chestnut quarter horse, a two-year-old mare with impeccable bloodlines, caught his eye, appearing on the crest of the ridge. Hope stirred briefly, and he drew in his breath to whistle for her, but before he could make a sound, the stallion came back, crowding the mare, nipping at her flanks and butting her with his head.
And then she was gone again.
Damn it all to hell.
“Thanks for nothing, mister!”
It was the intruder, the trespasser. The woman stormed toward Drake through the rain-bent grass, waving the binoculars like a maestro raising a baton at the symphony. He’d forgotten about her until that moment, and the reminder did nothing for his mood.
He was overreacting, he knew that, but he couldn’t seem to change course.
She was a sight, he’d say that, plowing through the grass the way she was, all fuss and fury and wet through and through.
Drake waited a few moments before he spoke, just watching her advance on him like a one-woman army.
Miraculously, he felt his equanimity returning. In fact, he was mildly curious about her, now that the rush of adrenaline from his lame-ass confrontation with the stallion was starting to subside.
Drake waited with what was, for him, uncommon patience. He hoped the approaching tornado, pint-size but definitely category five, wouldn’t step in a gopher hole and break a leg, or get bitten by a snake before she completed the charge.