Holly’s boot steps echoed on the pavement, her long, flowy flannel skirt brushing against her legs as she wrapped her arms around herself.
Without Erika here to act as a Greek chorus, Bo’s provocative suggestions nudged her again. And the more Holly thought about them, the more every one of them made sense.
She slowed her pace. Holly Pritchett—straight A student, full-ride scholarship earner, community volunteer. That’s all she’d been a year ago, when she’d met Alan.
But how would the woman she was now handle things going forward?
As she searched for her keys in her coat pocket with the hand that wasn’t holding her box of takeout, a slight kick came from inside her tummy.
She stopped, touching it.
Did her baby have some kind of opinion about Bo’s offer?
Was he or she trying to tell Holly that it would be grand to live a life with all the comforts a child would need? Enough money for college? A mother who wasn’t trying to make it on the shoestring budget of a temp job?
Did he or she want a daddy to lend them a name?
The baby gave Holly another swift, soft kick, and her throat went tight.
Six months. That’s what Bo had said. Six short months and then she would have so much for her baby.
Except for a real father.
Holly dropped her hand from her stomach, beginning to walk again, but a sound from behind halted her.
A man, softly clearing his throat.
Before Holly even turned around, she knew it was Bo. She could feel his presence on her skin, in the middle of her chest. In the crash of her heartbeats.
Slowly, she looked back at him, finding him under the moonlight, his hat shading most of his face except for that strong chin. A sheepskin coat covered a set of shoulders that could easily carry some of her own burdens.
Pride—or maybe it was just a good dose of common sense—brought Holly to reality.
“You just don’t give up, do you?” she asked.
He hitched the strap of his laptop case farther up his shoulder and took a step forward, self-assured, not at all put off by her annoyed tone.
“I’m just seeing that you make it to your car safely,” he said.
“Thank you, but there’s no need.”
She started to walk again, and it seemed that all it took for him to catch up to her was a couple of long steps. It was enough for her to take in the tempting scent of him: shower smells, that sheepskin coat, a hint of warm skin.
Holly’s heart flipped, but, even more worrisome, something just below her belly did, too, right in a place that had gotten her into trouble with Alan.
“I didn’t mean to scare you off,” he said. “It’s only that I’m the type who doesn’t wait around, turning an idea over in his head all night. When I see a situation that needs righting, I do my best to address it.”
“I don’t need any righting, Bo.”
This particular lie felt just as bad as the bull she’d shoveled out to her dad earlier tonight.
My fiancé’s coming into town in a few weeks…
Holly hadn’t realized it, but she had slowed down again. She might even have said that she and Bo were strolling at a courting pace, in no hurry to get away from each other.
But by the time that thought hit her, they were at her pickup, and she readied her keys.
“In spite of turning down your offer, I do wish you luck on your campaign,” she said. “No one who’s been paying attention to Thunder Canyon wants Swinton in charge.”
“At least I have your vote instead of your hand.”
He grinned, and Holly just about leaned back against her car, her legs losing rigidity. Bo Clifton.
Damn, he had a presence. Even the way he just stood there, one hand casually propped low on his hip, his body speaking its own laconic language without the benefit of smooth words, made Holly want to melt.
“I suspect,” she finally said, “that if you’re as good at carrying out some change as you are at talking about it, you’ll be fine without help.”
He raised a hand and tipped back his hat, allowing the moonlight to fall over more of his face—the perpetual smile lines around his eyes and mouth, that slightly amused glint in his gaze.
“Coming from a woman who does a lot of doing herself,” he said, “that means something. People noticed when you came back to town, you know. And you’ve just started volunteering for ROOTS—they think well of that, too. They talked about how you were going to be a big lawyer someday. They’re real proud of you, Holly.”
She kept her tongue. How proud were they going to be when her lies hit her smack dab in the face?
“I don’t know if you recall it,” he said, his voice going lower, as if sensing that soothing was just what she needed right now, “but even back when I was babysitting for you, I could tell you were a force to be reckoned with. You’d never let your older brothers get the better of you. I even had to intercede a time or two when you insisted on roughhousing with them.”
“I remember.” There’d been one time when Hollis, Nick and Dean had thought it might be fun to box their five-year-old little sister up in a “cardboard house” with duct tape and the works. She’d punched a hole in a wall, raging at her brothers, just as Bo had come to her aid, ripping the box apart and giving her brothers a talking-to for crossing a line.
Now, the child worship of him came rushing back. Holly’s hero.
Thunder Canyon’s hero, too, if they ended up electing him.
Bo peered off in the distance, out of the parking lot, toward the mountains. Holly watched him for a moment, holding onto the look of him.
A dreamer and doer. Charmed and charming.
She laughed, her nerves still rolling. Standing here in a parking lot with Bo Clifton, childhood crush and, now, candidate for mayor. The man who’d just proposed to her, a near neighbor who was still a stranger.
He laughed a little, too, as if appreciating the absurdity of all this.
“Well, good luck, Bo,” she said, holding up her hands, her keys jangling from her fingers.
“You have to admit that I’m not shy about problem solving.”
“No, you’re not.” Holly blew out a breath. “I can’t begin to point out all the issues your problem solving would have brought up, though.”
“Nothing we couldn’t manage.”
“Oh, Bo. For starters, after a six-month marriage to you, my child still wouldn’t have a father.”
“I said I’d provide for him or her for the rest of your lives.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No, it’s not.” He’d sobered at that, but she could still tell he thought his offer had been a damned good one.
“Besides, if Alan ever did come back to Montana, he’d know what was what.”
“Not necessarily. What if you and I had started seeing each other while you were at college, right after Alan left you? And what if we’d kept it a secret because you didn’t want anyone to think that you were the type who goes from one man to another? It’d be just like you to worry about appearances like that. Maybe your friends didn’t even know about us….”
“I told Alan I was pregnant, so how would that explain the baby being yours?”
“Maybe you got a false reading on a home pregnancy test and you were mistaken about the news when you told him. You didn’t get pregnant until after he left town, and your baby will just be born early.”
Good heavens, this man could spin a tale—and woo her with the very thought of this fictional romance at the same time.
Seduced by Bo…
Holly got ahold of herself. They wouldn’t need a story like this, because, first, Alan had made up his mind to leave her and her child, and Holly knew his ambition for what it was—all-consuming. He wouldn’t be back.
Second, she wasn’t going to say yes to this hare-brained scheme.
She presented another reason his plan would never work. “Then there’s the whole problem of Swinton.
You’re much older than I am. He’d jump all over that, saying you’re a cradle robber.”
Bo rolled his eyes. “I doubt many others would point it out. What are we—about fifteen years apart? Big deal.”
“Thirteen,” she said, too quickly. She’d added up the difference a long time ago, during the babysitting, journal-writing days when she would scribble down who she wanted to marry someday. But she’d eventually recorded names like Leonardo DiCaprio on those pages, too, so it wasn’t as if she’d held herself to the promises of her youth or anything.
Just when she thought Bo might ask her how she could be so precise about their age difference, she said, “But here’s the biggest believability issue—no one is going to buy into a marriage between you—the mayoral candidate—and me—the pregnant recent college graduate. They’d think you haunted the Bozeman campus or trolled the bars around the area, and that’s just going to justify everything Arthur Swinton says.”
He laughed at her honesty.
“I’m not saying I wouldn’t have been flattered, though,” she added, trying to soften the blow.
“You didn’t offend, Holly. It’s just that, with everything you say, you prove my point all the more.”
“What point?”
“That you were made for what I proposed.”
Talk about single-minded. “Bo, I was going to be a lawyer. I can expose the weaknesses in any case or scenario.”
“Like the story you told your dad about that fiancé who’s coming to town?” And…boom. They were done.
Holly turned to her pickup, unlocking it. She opened the door, ready to pull herself in.
“Uh-uh,” Bo said, coming to her side, placing one hand on the small of her back and one on her hip, helping her into her seat, whether or not she wanted it. “I don’t care how independent you are.”
Once she was behind the wheel, his touch lingered on her, and even through her coat, sweater and skirt, she could feel the outline of his hands—hot, as if the burn would never go away.
The oxygen seemed to dissipate in her lungs, leaving her breathless as he slowly removed himself, backing away. His gaze searched hers, as if he was finding something there that even she wasn’t fully aware of.
Or maybe she was.
A father for her baby—even a temporary one…
He grinned, just as if he’d read her mind. She shut the pickup door, the metal rattling.
As she started the truck, he tipped his hat to her in a farewell gesture, still wearing that maddening smile.
It wasn’t too far of a drive to the fringes of Thunder Canyon, where the Pritchett spread waited. But as Holly pulled into the graveled drive in front of the ranch house—a log cabin from the 1940s—she wished she’d had a few hundred miles more before she arrived.
She could see the window of the parlor—where she’d had her discussion with her dad before leaving the house to meet with Erika—burning with light. It devoured the beige curtains.
Stilling her nerves, Holly got out of the pickup and went into the cabin, hanging up her coat on a rack nailed to the barn wood wall and kicking some work boots out of the way of the dirt-crusted doormat.
Nice. She was always getting after her brothers when they cut through this entrance rather than the mudroom. They still worked the spread with her father, even though they lived in their own cabins nearby and only spent time in the house when visiting with Dad.
After she removed her own relatively pristine boots and carried them through the foyer, her mood got even darker as she waded through tools and wood from a nightstand someone had decided to repair and abandoned, then a bunch of fishing gear propped against the stairs.
Men.
She was trying to move aside a pole when she heard her dad’s soft bark from the parlor. “Hol?”
Frowning, she backed away from the stairs. “Here, Dad.”
She found him sitting on a threadbare settee in front of a crackling fire in the stone hearth. He and his gruff, gray wire-haired miner appearance fit right in among the faded, old-Western velvet upholstery and mahogany furniture her mom had favored. He hadn’t changed a thing since she’d died seven years ago of a heart attack—not even the black-and-white photos of places like Tombstone that she’d taken during their quirky ghost town-itinerary honeymoon. Nor the colorful afghan she’d knitted just for him.
The blanket was spread over his legs, but Holly knew he was under it more to be in contact with what his wife had touched rather than to ward off any chill.
Heck, it was almost as if both of her parents were in the room, looking at her with crestfallen expressions.
As Holly’s heart sank, too, Bo’s voice came to her.
It seems that you need a husband as much as I need a wife…
The coward in her thought how much better this conversation with her dad would go if she had only said okay to Bo.
But that would’ve been ridiculous.
It would’ve been…
A most welcome solution?
Her dad said, “How was dinner?”
She held up the take-out box. “Good. I met Erika and brought back some ribs for us from the Shack.” She resisted the urge to shift around, just as she used to the few times she’d gotten into trouble during her entire life.
“You left before you told me the exact date your fiancé’s coming into town, Hol. I’d like to have a nice talk with him when he does get here.”
Dad, don’t even bother to prepare a speech.
That’s what she should’ve said.
“He only told me it would be in a few weeks,” she said, making sure her tone was nonchalant.
Deeper and deeper.
“He didn’t even give you a date?” he asked.
“Please stop this, Dad. I feel like you think there wasn’t any love involved with this baby—that what I have with the father is a tawdry thing.”
Pressing her lips together, Holly made herself go quiet. Why had she blurted that out?
Because she, herself, doubted that Alan had ever felt any love?
Hank Pritchett glanced at Holly with some surprise. She never talked back.
“That’s not what I intended to say,” he said. “I only feel the urge to ask why your intended doesn’t seem to care enough right now to be here.”
At least it sounded as if her father been doing some thinking and accepting while she’d been gone. Apparently, he’d even transferred his anger from her to this fictional fiancé. In a way, that made Holly feel even worse, as if she’d gotten away with something.
Her father added, “I don’t like any man who goes off on a business trip instead of being with his pregnant girlfriend.”
Well, then, he would’ve just loved Alan.
“I understand,” she said, coming to sit next to him on the settee. “But, Dad, this baby is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. I’m happy. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted for me?”
His blue eyes strayed to her stomach, and all Holly wanted was to have her dad take part in that happiness. The baby was a miracle, even if Alan hadn’t been.
Her dad’s gaze turned wistful, and he smiled as he looked at his future grandchild, although she suspected he was fighting the gesture.
“I call him or her Hopper,” she said.
“You don’t know what it is yet?”
“I know my baby’s not an ‘it,’ that’s for sure.” She grinned. “We decided to wait on the ‘he’ or ‘she’ part until the birth.” Well, she’d decided that. “The baby likes to move around inside me on occasion, like he or she is hopping around.”
He clutched the afghan, as if sharing this moment with her mother. Holly’s chest seemed to cave in. What she would give to have Mom here, too….
“When’s Hopper coming?” he asked quietly.
She warmed at his use of the nickname, even if he’d sounded like he thought it was rather silly. “Two months.”
“You hid him or her for a while.”
“Yeah, I did.”<
br />
But she wouldn’t tell him why—about how she’d dreaded that look he’d leveled on her earlier, the frustration and disappointment of knowing she’d let him down.
Yet there was a way he could keep on believing that she was the golden girl he’d sent off to college….
She contained a buzz as she pictured Bo in the moonlight, trying to get her to accept his wacky proposal.
“So tell me about this fiancé,” her father said.
Holly gulped. If she’d thought to avoid these questions, she’d thought wrong.
Deeper and even deeper…
She called upon the budding lawyer in her. Diversionary tactics.
First, she put the rib box near her dad, hoping the aroma would be enough to make his stomach grumble, but when he didn’t bite, she gave in.
“He’s in…business,” she said.
Oh, so lame. She would have to do better than that.
Her dad wasn’t nearly satisfied, either. “What kind of business?”
Desperate, she said the first thing on her mind. “Ranching.”
Her father waited expectantly and, God help her, she could only think of Bo.
“He owns two spreads,” she said, “but he’s got other interests besides.”
“Other interests?”
Deeper…
She stood from the settee, intending to go up to her room so she could this off for even one night longer. “If you don’t mind, Dad, I’m really tired.”
But he wasn’t stopping. “This fiancé’s sounding real shady to me. What’s his name?”
All right, she was in a corner, anyway.
This was it—she would have to utter a fake name she’d already made up for just this sort of situation. She would have to commit herself and then suffer the consequences when this phantom fiancé never materialized.
Or she would have to get the truth over with right now.
It seemed like a thousand years went by as her dad sat on the edge of the settee like a predator ready to pounce on whatever came out of her mouth.
When the Cowboy Said ''I Do'' Page 3