by Nicole Helm
“But...”
“And I’m not prone to saying that, so don’t expect me to repeat it.”
“Grady,” she reached out for him, but he stepped away from the bed.
“Oh, fine,” he grumbled. “If you’re going to be that way about it.”
“What wa—”
“I love you,” he blurted as if she’d somehow forced the admission out of him, and she was to blame for all of it. “I love you. Grady Carson loves Laurel Delaney. Are you happy?” He raked his fingers through his hair.
She wanted to laugh. He’d lost his mind, and he loved her. Really. “Grady.”
“And don’t think you’re getting out of this,” he said, pointing at her. “You started it. You’re stuck with me now.”
“Come here,” she said as forcefully as she could manage. “And calm down.”
He looked at her with that same desolate expression he’d used to say he loved her. “You could have died.”
A lump clogged her throat, but she spoke through it. “So could you. You came in guns blazing, all by yourself.”
“Hours,” he said, his voice breaking just there at the end. “You were gone hours before we found you.”
“Grady.”
“What?” he snapped.
She cupped his face with her hands, reveling in the sharp spikes of his beard. “I love you,” she said, looking directly into those beautiful blue eyes, knowing without a doubt that whatever crazy Bent feud nonsense was thrown their way, no matter how many murder investigations went awry, they would make it through together.
He kissed the spot on her collarbone he’d touched earlier. “You’re darn right you do, princess.”
Two weeks later
When Laurel Delaney sauntered into Rightful Claim on a snowy day, dressed in a drab Bent County PD polo and baggy khaki pants, with her badge attached to her hip, Grady Carson wondered how he’d ever thought he could fight the feeling in his gut he got every time she walked into his bar.
A century-old feud hadn’t stood a chance against this wave of possession. Love. She was his. He was hers. Beginning and end of story.
“So, the doctors clear you?” he asked casually.
She slid onto a barstool. “Desk duty,” she said disgustedly, some of the cuts on her face still red and a terrible reminder of that day not so long ago. “I can work in-house and lose my marbles.”
“I’m guessing that’s wise.”
She made a rude noise. “I’m fine.”
“That’s not what you said last night.”
She wrinkled her nose. “You just hit my ribs the wrong way. I don’t plan on getting naked and sweaty with anyone I’m investigating.”
“Good to hear.”
“I did get some good news today,” she said leaning forward on the bar, then wincing.
He winced right along with her. He thought it had been bad enough seeing her bloody and passed out, or in that horrible white hospital bed, but watching her heal and push herself too hard was a new pain he’d never known.
“What’s that?” he asked, sliding her a Coke.
“The muscle woke up yesterday. Lawyered up, but he made a plea bargain. Looks like he’s going to turn on Mr. Head Guy.”
Head Guy. Aaron Zifle. The head of the mining corporations safety department, drowning in safety violations and trying to keep his pretty young wife sparkling in diamonds. Apparently he’d been about to lose his job and so desperate to keep the well-paying position he’d decided the only way to deal with Jason Delaney’s accusation had been to kill.
At least that was Laurel’s theory after her nonstop investigating while she’d still been forced to spend most of her days in bed. Grady was inclined to believe her since he spent most of his days at her bedside, listening to her chatter.
Vanessa had nearly run his bar into the ground, at least in his estimation, but it still stood, and he was back to work, and Laurel was trying to be.
“That is good news. Make his trial airtight, won’t it?”
“Yes. They’ll likely up his bond with that information, too. The chances of him getting out of what he’s done, even with his team of lawyers, is pretty slim.”
“We should celebrate.”
“How?” She rubbed at her rib. “I’m not sure I’m up for any serious celebrating.”
“How about this. After I close up, I pack all my things up and move them to your cabin.”
Her eyebrows furrowed together. “Move. Into my cabin. You?”
“Yes, I believe that’s what I meant.”
“But... We... We’ve barely dated,” she said, her eyebrows furrowing deeper.
“True.”
“My family... A Carson living on Delaney land? The town might have us tarred and feathered.”
“Could be.”
“And the bar.” She gestured around to encompass all of Rightful Claim. “Don’t you have to be here at all hours?”
“Not all hours. I was thinking about giving Vanessa more control, and the apartment—she’s been angling for it for months.”
Laurel blinked at him, beautiful and strong and absolutely everything he wanted to wake up to. Go to bed with. Build a life with.
“This is crazy,” she said, shaking her head.
But she hadn’t said no, and he knew her well enough. “Absolutely insane. So, what do you say?”
Her face broke out into a grin. “How soon can you close up?”
When he leaned across the bar and gave her a nice, hard kiss, a few cheers went up around them. A few mutters. One boo he was pretty sure came from Ty.
But Grady Carson didn’t care much, because Laurel Delaney was his. Like it was always meant to be.
* * * * *
SPECIAL EXCERPT FROM
When wealthy cattleman Callen Laramie is called back home to Coldwater, Texas, for a Christmas wedding, he has no idea just how much his
attendance will matter to his family...and to the woman who’s never been far from his thoughts—or his heart.
Read on for a sneak preview of
Lone Star Christmas
by USA TODAY bestselling author
Delores Fossen.
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Lone Star Christmas
by Delores Fossen
CHAPTER ONE
DEAD STUFFED THINGS just didn’t scream Christmas wedding invitation for Callen Laramie. Even when the dead stuffed thin
g—an armadillo named Billy—was draped with gold tinsel, a bridal veil and was holding a bouquet of what appeared to be tiny poinsettias in his little armadillo hands.
Then again, when the bride-to-be, Rosy Muldoon, was a taxidermist, Callen supposed a photo like that hit the more normal range of possibilities for invitation choices.
Well, normal-ish anyway.
No one had ever accused Rosy of being conventional, and even though he hadn’t seen her in close to fourteen years, Billy’s bridal picture was proof that her nonnormalcy hadn’t changed during that time.
Dragging in a long breath that Callen figured he might need, he opened the invitation. What was printed inside wasn’t completely unexpected, not really, but he was glad he’d taken that breath. Like most invitations, it meant he’d have to do something, and doing something like this often meant trudging through the past.
Y’all are invited to the wedding of Buck McCall and Rosy Muldoon. Christmas Eve at Noon in the Lightning Bug Inn on Main Street, Coldwater, Texas. Reception to follow.
So, Buck had finally popped the question, and Rosy had accepted. Again, no surprise. Not on the surface, anyway, since Buck had started “courting” Rosy several years after both of them had lost their spouses about a decade and a half ago.
But Callen still got a bad feeling about this.
The bad feeling went up a notch when he saw that the printed RSVP at the bottom had been lined through and the words handwritten there. “Please come. Buck needs to see you. Rosy.”
Yes, this would require him to do something.
She’d underlined the please and the needs, and it was just as effective as a heavyweight’s punch to Callen’s gut. One that knocked him into a time machine and took him back eighteen years. To that time when he’d first laid eyes on Buck and then on Rosy shortly thereafter.
Oh man.
Callen had just turned fourteen, and the raw anger and bad memories had been eating holes in him. Sometimes, they still did. Buck had helped with that. Heck, maybe Rosy had, too, but the four mostly good years he’d spent with Buck couldn’t erase the fourteen awful ones that came before them.
He dropped the invitation back on his desk and steeled himself up when he heard the woodpecker taps of high heels coming toward his office. Several taps later, his assistant, Havana Mayfield, stuck her head in the open doorway.
Today, her hair was pumpkin orange with streaks of golden brown, the color of a roasted turkey. Probably to coordinate with Thanksgiving, since it’d been just the day before.
Callen wasn’t sure what coordination goal Havana had been going for with the lime-green pants and top or the lipstick-red stilettos, but as he had done with Rosy and just about everyone else from his past, he’d long since given up trying to figure out his assistant’s life choices. Havana was an efficient workaholic, like him, which meant he overlooked her wardrobe, her biting sarcasm and the occasional judgmental observations about him—even if they weren’t any of her business.
“Your two o’clock is here,” Havana said, setting some contracts and more mail in his inbox. Then she promptly took the stack from his outbox. “George Niedermeyer,” she added, and bobbled her eyebrows. “He brought his mother with him. She wants to tell you about her granddaughter, the lawyer.”
Great.
Callen silently groaned. George was in his sixties and was looking for a good deal on some Angus. Which Callen could and would give him. George’s mother, Myrtle, was nearing ninety, and despite her advanced age, she was someone Callen would classify as a woman with too much time on her hands. Myrtle would try to do some matchmaking with her lawyer granddaughter, gossip about things that Callen didn’t want to hear and prolong what should be a half-hour meeting into an hour or more.
“Myrtle said you’re better looking than a litter of fat spotted pups,” Havana added, clearly enjoying this. “That’s what you get for being a hotshot cattle broker with a pretty face.” She poked her tongue against her cheek. “Women just can’t resist you and want to spend time with you. The older ones want to fix you up with their offspring.”
“You’ve had no trouble resisting,” he pointed out—though he’d never made a play for her. And wouldn’t. Havana and anyone else who worked for him was genderless as far as Callen was concerned.
“Because I know the depths of your cold, cold heart. Plus, you pay me too much to screw this up for sex with a hotshot cattle broker with a pretty face.”
Callen didn’t even waste a glare on that. The pretty face was questionable, but he was indeed a hotshot cattle broker. That wasn’t ego. He had the bank account, the inventory and the willing buyers to prove it.
Head ’em up, move ’em out.
Callen had built Laramie Cattle on that motto. That and plenty of ninety-hour workweeks. And since his business wasn’t broke, it didn’t require fixing. Even if it would mean having to listen to Myrtle for the next hour.
“What the heck is that?” Havana asked, tipping her head to his desk.
Callen followed her gaze to the invitation. “Billy, the Armadillo. Years ago, he was roadkill.”
Every part of Havana’s face went aghast. “Ewww.”
He agreed, even though he would have gone for something more manly sounding, like maybe a grunt. “The bride’s a taxidermist,” he added. Along with being Buck’s housekeeper and cook.
Still in the aghast mode, Havana shifted the files to her left arm so she could pick up the invitation and open it. He pushed away another greasy smear of those old memories while she read it.
“Buck McCall,” Havana muttered when she’d finished.
She didn’t ask who he was. No need. Havana had sent Buck Christmas gifts during the six years that she’d worked for Callen. Considering those were the only personal gifts he’d ever asked her to buy and send to anyone, she knew who Buck was. Or rather she knew that he was important to Callen.
Of course, that “important” label needed to be judged on a curve because Callen hadn’t actually visited Buck or gone back to Coldwater since he’d hightailed it out of there on his eighteenth birthday. Now he was here in Dallas, nearly three hundred miles away, and sometimes it still didn’t feel nearly far enough. There were times when the moon would have been too close.
Havana just kept on staring at him, maybe waiting for him to bare his soul or something. He wouldn’t. No reason for it, either. Because she was smart and efficient, she had almost certainly done internet searches on Buck. There were plenty of articles about him being a foster father.
Correction: the hotshot of foster fathers.
It wouldn’t have taken much for Havana to piece together that Buck had fostered not only Callen but his three brothers, as well. Hell, for that matter Havana could have pieced together the rest, too. The bad stuff that’d happened before Callen and his brothers had gotten to Buck’s. Too much for him to stay, though his brothers had had no trouble putting down those proverbial roots in Coldwater.
“Christmas Eve, huh?” Havana questioned. “You’ve already got plans to go to that ski lodge in Aspen with a couple of your clients. Heck, you scheduled a business meeting for Christmas morning, one that you insisted I attend. Say, is Bah Humbug your middle name?”
“The meeting will finish in plenty of time for you to get in some skiing and spend your Christmas bonus,” he grumbled. Then he rethought that. “Do you ski?”
She lifted her shoulder. “No, but there are worse things than sitting around a lodge during the holidays while the interest on my bonus accumulates in my investment account.”
Yes, there were worse things. And Callen had some firsthand experience with that.
“Are you actually thinking about going back to Coldwater for this wedding?” Havana pressed.
“No.” But he was sure thinking about the wedding itself and that note Rosy had added to the invitation.
Please.
That wasn’t a good word to have repeating in his head.
Havana shrugged and dropped the invitation back on his desk. “Want me to send them a wedding gift? Maybe they’ve registered on the Taxidermists-R-Us site.” Her tongue went in her cheek again.
Callen wasted another glare on her and shook his head. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll send them something.”
She staggered back, pressed her folder-filled hand to her chest. “I think the earth just tilted on its axis. Or maybe that was hell freezing over.” Havana paused, looked at him. “Is something wrong?” she came out and asked, her tone no longer drenched with sarcasm.
Callen dismissed it by motioning toward the door. “Tell the Niedermeyers that I need a few minutes. I have to do something first.”
As expected, that caused Havana to raise an eyebrow again, and before she left, Callen didn’t bother to tell her that her concern wasn’t warranted. He could clear this up with a phone call and get back to work.
But who should he call?
Buck was out because if there was actually something wrong, then his former foster father would be at the center of it. That Please come. Buck needs to see you clued him into that.
He scrolled through his contacts, one by one. He no longer had close friends in Coldwater, but every now and then he ran into someone in his business circles who passed along some of that gossip he didn’t want to hear. So the most obvious contacts were his brothers.
Kace, the oldest, was the town’s sheriff. Callen dismissed talking to him because the last time they’d spoken—four or five years ago—Kace had tried to lecture Callen about cutting himself off from the family. Damn right, he’d cut himself off, and since he would continue to do that and hated lectures from big brothers, he went to the next one.
Judd. Another big brother who was only a year older than Callen. Judd had been a cop in Austin. Or maybe San Antonio. He was a deputy now in Coldwater, but not once had he ever bitched about Callen leaving the “fold.” He kept Judd as a possibility for the call he needed to make and continued down the very short list to consider the rest of his choices.