Cowboy Crazy

by Joanne Kennedy

  Not that physical therapy wouldn’t help. Especially since he wouldn’t have to go to Casper for it once the clinic was built.

  “Speech!” somebody at the back of the crowd yelled.

  “Get on with it!” hollered another voice.

  Sarah cleared her throat. “I’ll make this quick,” she said.

  Cheers rose from the crowd. Small-town folks weren’t much for standing in one place, and she was eager to get to the end of her speech too.

  “A lot of you know there was a time in my life when Two Shot wasn’t my favorite place in the world.”

  There was a smattering of laughter.

  “There was a time in my life I couldn’t get out of this town fast enough,” she continued. “And now there’s no place I’d rather be.” She smiled at Lane, who stood in his typical pose, legs apart, arms folded over his chest, totally unaware that he stood head-and-shoulders above every man in the crowd.

  In her eyes, he stood above every man in the world.

  “I wanted to leave Two Shot because I felt like I was stuck. Like the town would never change. It would always be Two Shot Wyoming, Population 245. It would never grow, and neither would I.

  “I was right about being stuck, but the town wasn’t the problem. I was the one who needed to change. And thanks to Lane and to all of you, I did.

  “But Two Shot is changing too,” she said. “We’re getting the Carrigan Clinic built, and soon there’ll be a police station too.” She glanced at Lane. “The Roy Price Memorial Building, named after my stepdad. And there’s one other thing that’s changing.” She scanned the crowd, then focused on Lane as she delivered the last line of her speech.

  “In about six months, the population will be two hundred forty-six.” She put a hand on her belly and waited for the news to sink in.

  The crowd caught on right away, whooping and cheering, but Lane stood as if he was frozen to the ground despite the summer heat.

  “Two hundred forty-six?” he said as the cheers died down.

  “Two hundred forty-six,” she said. “And number two hundred forty-six is going to be a little Carrigan cowboy. Or maybe a cowgirl.”

  He took a step forward, still looking stunned, and then a smile spread across his face and he swept her into his arms. She clasped her hands around his neck and he lifted her into the air. She watched the landscape whirl past as he spun her in a circle, the landscape and then the crowd, a sea of smiling faces. Her family.

  He set her down and Emmy handed her an enormous pair of silver scissors that glinted in the sunlight. With Lane’s arms draped over her shoulders, she snipped the red ribbon and stepped away.

  As the bow unfurled and the ribbon fell, she and Lane stepped through the opening and they each grabbed a waiting shovel. As the blades dug into the hard Wyoming earth, she felt like she was breaking ground on much more than a medical clinic or even a new era for Two Shot.

  She was breaking ground on a whole new life.

  Read on for an excerpt from

  Cowboy Trouble

  Available now from

  Sourcebooks Casablanca

  A chicken will never break your heart.

  Not that you can’t love a chicken. There are some people in this world who can love just about anything.

  But a chicken will never love you back. When you look deep into their beady little eyes, there’s not a lot of warmth there—just an avarice for worms and bugs and, if it’s a rooster, a lot of suppressed anger and sexual frustration. They don’t return your affection in any way.

  Expectations, relationship-wise, are right at rock bottom.

  That’s why Libby Brown decided to start a chicken farm. She wanted some company, and she wanted a farm, but she didn’t want to go getting attached to things like she had in the past.

  She’d been obsessed with farms since she was a kid. It all started with her Fisher Price Farmer Joe Play Set: a plastic barn, some toy animals, and a pair of round-headed baby dolls clutching pitchforks like some simple-minded version of American Gothic.

  A Fisher Price life was the life for her.

  Take Atlanta—just give her that countryside.

  ***

  Libby had her pickup half unloaded when her new neighbor showed up. She didn’t see him coming, so he got a prime view of her posterior as she bent over the tailgate, wrestling with the last of her chrome dinette chairs. The chair was entangled in the electric cord from the toaster, so he got a prime introduction to her vocabulary too.

  “Howdy,” he said.

  Howdy? She turned to face him and stifled a snort.

  Halloween was three months away, but this guy was ready with his cowboy costume. Surely no one actually wore chaps in real life, even in Wyoming. His boots looked like the real thing, though; they were worn and dirty as if they’d kicked around God-knows-what in the old corral, and his gray felt Stetson was all dented, like a horse had stepped on it. A square, stubbled chin gave his face a masculine cast, but there was something soft about his mouth that added a hint of vulnerability.

  She hopped down from the tailgate. From her perch on the truck, he’d looked like the Marlboro Man on a rough day, but now that they were on the same level, she could see he was kind of cute—like a young Clint Eastwood with a little touch of Elvis.

  “Howdy,” he said again. He actually tipped his hat and she almost laughed for the first time in a month.

  “I’m Luke Rawlins, from down the road,” he continued. The man obviously had no idea how absurd he looked, decked out like a slightly used version of Hopalong Cassidy. “Thought maybe you’d need some help moving in. And I brought you a casserole—Chicken Artichoke Supreme. It’s my specialty.” He held out a massive ceramic dish with the pride of a caveman returning from the hunt. “Or maybe you could use a hand getting that chair broke to ride.”

  Great. She had the bastard son of John Wayne and Martha Stewart for a neighbor. And he thought he was funny.

  Worse yet, he thought she was funny.

  “Thanks.” She took the casserole. “I’m Libby Brown. Are you from that farm with the big barn?”

  “Farm? I’m not from any farm.” Narrowing his eyes, he slouched against the truck and folded his arms. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You calling my ranch a farm, that’s what.” A blade of wheatgrass bobbed from one corner of his mouth as he looked her up and down with masculine arrogance. “There’s no such thing as a farm in Wyoming,” he said.

  “Well, what do you call this, then?” Libby gestured toward the sun-baked outbuildings that tilted drunkenly around her own personal patch of prairie.

  “A ranch.”

  “That’s not what I call it. I call it ‘Lackaduck Farm.’” She pointed to the faded letters arched over the barn’s wide double doors. “That’s what the people before me called it too. It’s even painted on the barn.”

  “Yeah, well, they weren’t from around here either. They were New Yorkers and got smacked on the bottom and sent home by Mother Nature. Thought they’d retire out here on some cheap real estate and be gentleman farmers. They didn’t realize there’s a reason the real estate’s cheap. It’s tough living.” He looked her in the eye, no doubt judging her unfit for a life only real men could endure. “You think you’re up to it?”

  “As a matter of fact, I am.” Libby hoped she sounded a lot more confident than she felt. “This is what I’ve always wanted, and I’m going to make it work.”

  She didn’t mention the fact that she had to make it work. She didn’t have anything else. No career—not even much of a job. And no boyfriend. Not even a dog.

  The dog died in September, right before the boyfriend ran off. Lucky couldn’t help it, but Bill Cooperman could have stuck around if he’d only tried. He just had a wandering eye, and it finally wandered off for good with a hotshot editor from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The hotshot editor was also Libby’s boss, so she basically lost everything
in the space of about six weeks. All she had left was a broken heart, a cherry red pickup, and the contents of her desk in a battered cardboard box.

  Since her professional and romantic aspirations were a bust, she’d sold her one-bedroom condo in downtown Atlanta and literally bought the farm. She was now the proud owner of thirty-five acres of sagebrush and a quaint clapboard farmhouse in Lackaduck, Wyoming. At the moment, tumbleweeds were her primary crop and grasshoppers her only livestock, but the place was as far from Atlanta as she could get, and she figured a fresh coat of paint and a flock of free-range chickens would make it her dream home—one utterly unlike the one she’d left behind. So far, Wyoming was like another planet, and that was fine with her.

  “I’m definitely going to make this work,” she repeated, as much to herself as to her new neighbor.

  The cowboy reached over the truck’s battered tailgate for the dinette chair, which freed itself from the toaster cord the minute he touched it.

  “Guess you’ll be glad to get some help then.”

  He swung the chair over his shoulder and headed for the house.

  Libby sighed. She had her pride, but she wasn’t about to turn her bad back on an able-bodied man who was willing to tote furniture for her. Beggars can’t be choosers, and Luke Rawlins wasn’t really such a bad choice, anyway. She wasn’t in the market for his brand of talent, but it sure was fun to watch him move furniture. Those chaps, with their swaying leather fringe, must have been designed by the early cowboys to highlight a man’s best assets.

  ***

  Luke set the chair in the kitchen, then traipsed back out and scanned the contents of the truck bed. He’d been worried when they sold the Lackaduck place, but the new neighbor seemed all right. More than all right. When he’d first seen her, tussling with her furniture in the back of the pickup, he’d thought love might have finally come to Lackaduck. Then he’d realized all he could see was her backside and decided it was probably just lust.

  Besides, her sofa was definitely a deal breaker.

  It was enormous. And hideous. Once they wrestled the dang thing inside, it dominated the homestead’s tiny front room like some evil crouching monster. Carved cherubs on each corner lofted a complicated scrollwork banner in their pudgy fists. They were probably supposed to be cute, but Luke thought they looked like evil leering babies, preparing to strangle unsuspecting sofa sitters with their long wooden ribbon. He made a silent vow to stay as far away from that piece of furniture as he could.

  “Careful,” Libby said as they swung it into place. “It’s an antique.”

  “Antique?” He did his best not to sound judgmental.

  She tipped her lightly freckled nose in the air and flashed him a hard look. “French Victorian Baroque Provincial,” she said. “That’s what the dealer said.”

  French, he could believe. And Victorian, and all that. But mostly, the thing was plain ugly. It seemed like a city girl should have better taste—especially one who was obviously educated. There were at least fourteen boxes of books in the bed of the truck. It took him a good twenty minutes to haul them all into the house and stack them in the front hall.

  “You a schoolmarm, or what?” He set down the last box and parked his Stetson on the newel post.

  “I’m a journalist. I have to read a lot.” She picked up his hat and tipped it onto her head for a half second, then whipped it off and plopped it back on the banister.

  “A journalist? Well, good luck finding a job around here,” Luke said. “We’ve only got one newspaper, and it’s barely surviving, because there isn’t any news at all.” He picked up the hat and set it back on her head, adjusting it to a rakish angle. “Don’t take that off,” he said. “It suits you.”

  “No thanks.” She took it off and shook her springy brown curls back into free-form disarray, and he had to agree the wild, untamed look suited her way better than the hat.

  “So I guess my new job will be a challenge,” she said.

  Acknowledgments

  So many people to thank, so little space! I could fill an entire book with gratitude for all the people who helped me bring Lane and Sarah’s story to life.

  I’m forever grateful to the Frontier Days Committee for allowing me to experience the rodeo up close, and to Ian St. Clair of the Wyoming Tribune Eagle for showing me around and doing his best to keep me out of trouble. Not an easy task, but he managed it.

  I could (and probably should) fill pages with the names of the thousands of volunteers who help transform our town into the center of the rodeo universe on the last week in every July. Their dedication and spirit of community keep the cowboy way alive.

  My editor Deb Werksman has, as always, guided this story to be the best it can be. And I am truly grateful for the support of my wonderful agent, Elaine English. Few writers find the right agent on their first try. I was lucky.

  Writers need other writers, and my writing friends and critique partners have helped me through a challenging year. Thanks to Jeana Byrne, Amanda Cabot, Tina Forkner, Mary Gillgannon, Liz Roadifer, Mike Shay, and Marjie Smith.

  Special thank to Cie Patterson and her daughter, the real Samantha, who will always be my friends no matter what. Also thanks to Colette Auclair for the rants and to Laura Macomber for letting me share her wonderful Wyoming family. And to my farther-flung family, Scott McCauley and Aminda O’Hare, and all the Fleurys big and small.

  I’m grateful to my parents, Don and Betty Smyth, for their patience, love, and support while I floundered around figuring out what I’m supposed to do with my life. And to my sister Carolyn, for showing me people like us could write real stories. Remember Tivvy the Dog? I was so impressed. I still am.

  But the biggest, most heartfelt thank-you of all goes to Scrape McCauley. You are the reason I write about love and the heart of everything I do.

  About the Author

  Joanne Kennedy is the author of four Western contemporary romances: Tall, Dark and Cowboy, Cowboy Fever, One Fine Cowboy (nominated for A RITA award for best single title contemporary), and Cowboy Trouble. A transplanted Easterner, she ran away from home to the West at the advanced age of thirty-two and was delighted to discover that cowboys are real, and chaps are leather pants with no seat.

  At various times, she dabbled in horse training, chicken farming, organic gardening, and bridezilla wrangling at a department store wedding registry. Themes that have remained constant throughout her life are Jack Russell terriers, a tendency to confuse fiction with real life, and a stubborn belief in romance that led to multiple dysfunctional relationships before she finally got it right.

  Now older and hopefully wiser, she lives in Cheyenne, Wyoming, with two dogs and a retired fighter pilot. The dogs are relatively well-behaved.

  Joanne loves to hear from readers and can be reached through her website, www.joannekennedybooks.com.

  Tall, Dark and Cowboy

  by Joanne Kennedy

  She’s looking for an old friend…

  In the wake of a nasty divorce, Lacey Bradford heads for Wyoming where she’s sure her old friend will take her in. But her high school pal Chase Caldwell is no longer the gangly boy who would follow her anywhere. For one thing, he’s now incredibly buff and handsome, but that’s not all that’s changed…

  What she finds is one hot cowboy…

  Chase has been through tough times and is less than thrilled to see the girl who once broke his heart. But try as he might to resist her, while Lacey’s putting her life back together, he’s finding new ways to be part of it.

  Praise for Cowboy Fever:

  “HOT, HOT, HOT…with more twists and turns than a buckin’ bull at a world class rodeo, lots of sizzlin’ sex, and characters so real you’ll swear they live down the road!” —Carolyn Brown, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Red’s Hot Cowboy

  www.sourcebooks.com

  One Hot

  Cowboy Wedding

  by Carolyn Brown

  A marriage made in Vegas…

/>   Hunky cowboy Ace Riley wasn’t planning on settling down, but his family had other plans for him…The only way to save his hide, and his playboy lifestyle, is to discreetly marry his best friend, Jasmine King.

  Can’t possibly last…

  Feisty city-girl Jasmine was just helping out her friend—that is, until their first kiss stirs up a whole mess of trouble, and suddenly discretion is thrown to wind.

  One hot cowboy, one riled up woman… And they’ll be married for a year, like it or not!

  Praise for Carolyn Brown’s Spikes & Spurs series:

  “An old-fashioned love story told well…A delight.”

  —RT Book Reviews, 4 Stars

  “Tender and passionate love scenes…endearing and quirky characters…an absolutely adorable story.”

  —The Romance Studio

  “Plenty of twists, turns, and hot cowboys, and a story line that’s got to be continued.” —Long and Short Reviews

  For more Carolyn Brown, visit:

  www.sourcebooks.com

  Darn Good

  Cowboy Christmas

  by Carolyn Brown

  He’s One Hot Cowboy…

  Raylen O’Donnell is one smokin’ cowboy. He could have any woman he wants, but he’s never been able to forget a certain dark-haired girl who disappeared from his life. So when she suddenly returns to the ranch next door, Raylen’s not fixing to let her get away again…

  And She’s Out For a Sizzlin’ Christmas

  Raised in a traveling carnival, Lizelle Hanson thought all she wanted was a house that didn’t have wheels and a sexy cowboy for her very own. But settling down’s going to take some getting used to, and catching Raylen, the hotter-than-hell cowboy next door, might just take a little holiday magic…

  “An earthy, sensual story… an array of quirky characters make this a fun holiday read.”