Table of Contents
Prologue
Also by Heather Slade
She Danced
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
About the Author
Kiss Me Cowboy
The Promise
Dance with Me
Heather Slade
Cowboys of Crested Butte Book Two
Dance with Me
© 2017 Heather Slade
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
ISBN-10: 1-942200-15-3
ISBN-13: 78-1-942200-15-4
Contents
Also by Heather Slade
She Danced
Prologue
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
About the Author
Also by Heather Slade
Kiss Me Cowboy
Kiss Me Cowboy
The Promise
Also by Heather Slade
COWBOYS OF CRESTED BUTTE
Available Now!
Book One
Fall for Me
Available for Pre-Order Now!
Coming November, 2017
Book Three
Kiss Me Cowboy
BUTLER RANCH
Available Now!
Book One
The Promise
Book Two
The Truce
Coming Soon!
Available for Pre-Order Now!
Coming October, 2017
Book Three
The Secret
She danced
She sang
She took
She gave
She loved
She created
She dissented
She enlivened
She saw
She grew
She sweated
She changed
She learned
She laughed
She shed her skin
She bled on the pages of her days
She walked through walls
She lived with intention.
—Mary Anne Radmacher, Living Eulogy
For the kind of cowboy
who makes a girl’s heart beat
just a little faster.
Prologue
October
Billy stood out on the deck, the baby monitor in his back pocket. She’d probably sleep for at least an hour, maybe even two. He hoped so anyway, for her sake as much as his. She was a much happier baby after her afternoon nap. If she didn’t wake up on her own at the end of two hours, he’d wake her.
Dottie, his mother, told him he should never wake a sleeping baby, but he didn’t listen. By then, he’d miss her so much that watching her sleep wouldn’t be enough. He’d want to feel the warmth that thawed his body when she smiled at him, kicked her feet, and put her head on his chest—like she did at the end of every nap.
Plus, when Willow was awake, he didn’t think about Renie as much.
Today marked eight months since he’d seen her, and next week his baby girl would be celebrating her first birthday. He never dreamed they would be doing it without the woman he swore he couldn’t live without.
It had also been eight months since Renie had seen her horse. He’d been sure having Pooh stabled at his ranch would mean she’d come. Another thing he never dreamed—that Renie would go this long without even asking about her horse. Asking would have meant Renie had to talk to him, something she refused to do.
The woman he thought he knew better than any other person on the planet had turned into someone he no longer recognized. And all because of an innocent baby girl.
October in Monument, Colorado meant that yesterday was a beautiful seventy-degree day, and today the weather report called for snow. The cold front brought ten-degree temperatures with it. He welcomed it. In nothing but his jeans and a short-sleeve shirt, the outside of his body was numb. He wished it would numb him straight through, to dull the ache of missing her. He’d gotten used to it, that constant pain no pill took away.
The only time he experienced joy was with Willow, his beautiful baby girl who had the same blue eyes and flaxen hair as Renie. He’d be willing to bet that Willow looked a lot like Renie had when she was a baby. He didn’t have any photos to look at though, to find out for sure.
Eight months. It didn’t seem possible. Soon, Willow would be walking. She already made her way around the room, holding on to anything that would get her from one place to the next. And Renie wouldn’t be here to see it. Why had she left him? He asked himself that question a thousand times a day.
1
Previous January
“Damn that Liv Fairchild,” he muttered. Billy slammed the barn door shut behind him, and stomped to the house. She wasn’t Liv Fairchild anymore, now she was Liv Rice, but that didn’t change how mad he was at her.
When she came to him and asked whether he wanted to buy her ranch, the answer was obvious. Of course he did. His family’s ranch bordered hers, and they’d wanted to buy this land since he was a boy. His family didn’t begrudge Liv’s—the Pattersons had been leasing grazing rights since they bought the place. And her house, well, it was one of the nicest houses he’d ever seen.
She named a fair price, and he certainly could afford it. It was the side deal she made with him that was the problem. Liv had been boarding horses for years, and she didn’t want to let the families down who counted on her, so she made Billy promise to keep the boarding stables open.
How he’d do that, was beyond him. He traveled as a saddle bronc rider on the rodeo circuit, and sometimes he was away for two or three weeks at a time.
He told Liv’s daughter, Renie, she could keep her horse there for as long as she wanted. She had four years of school to finish before she got her degree and became a large animal vet. He wouldn’t have asked her to move Pooh, the fourteen-year-old mare she’d had since she was ten. But taking care of her horse, along with all the others, wasn’t something he signed up for.
Liv told him to hire somebody. Plenty of ranch hands worked Patterson Ranch, his parents’ place, but he doubted a job this small would entice anyone.
&
nbsp; He was almost years old, and this was the first time he had a place of his own. It wasn’t that he hadn’t wanted to before, he just hadn’t had any good reason. He was on the road so much, and when he was home, his parents’ place was big enough. His room was on the lowest floor of their tri-level house, and he had plenty of privacy, not that he’d ever taken advantage of it.
“You need to move out Billy,” Renie said to him. “You kinda seem like a loser, still living with your parents.”
He knocked her into the water trough when she’d said it. He thought that might teach her, pain in the ass that she was.
“You should hire Blythe,” she said, trying to help him come up with a solution for the stables.
“Blythe who?”
“Blythe Cochran.” Paige and Mark Cochran were her mother’s best friends. She and Blythe had been friends since they were five years old.
“Why would I hire her?”
“Because she’s home. She quit school and doesn’t have anything to do.”
That didn’t sound like the best reason he’d ever heard to hire somebody. The fact that she quit school didn’t fill him with confidence, either. The last thing he needed was to get a phone call while he was out on the road, telling him she was quitting. What the hell would he do then?
“Why’d she quit?”
“She decided she didn’t want to be a nurse. You shouldn’t look down your nose at her Billy. I quit school too.”
“You did? Since when?”
“I quit Dartmouth.”
“You transferred, you didn’t quit.”
“I quit the medical program.”
“You changed your major to vet medicine, because you decided you’d make a crappy people doc. That isn’t quitting, Renie.”
“Since when are you such an expert on college?”
Billy shook his head. He might not know a lot about college, but he did know a lot about her.
Renie switched fields from biomedical to veterinary medicine last year, in her junior year, and had transferred to Colorado State University in Fort Collins, a two-hour drive from the ranch. He told her she could stay at the house as much as she wanted. It was the house she grew up in, and with him away so often, they’d almost never see each other.
“What about when you bring girls home?” she asked.
“What girls?”
That elicited another “loser” comment out of her. He supposed she was right. Plenty of girls would be happy to come home with him, even if only for a night. He wasn’t bragging, it was the nature of being a bronc rider, saddle, or otherwise. Having a one-night stand on the road was one thing—it was different at home.
“You’re a hot guy, Billy.”
“What? God, Renie, you can’t say that to me.”
“What? It’s not like I’m interested.”
“Jeez, what’s wrong with you?”
“I don’t see what the issue is, but let’s get back to the original subject—you should hire Blythe.”
“She know how to take care of horses?”
“No, but…”
Renie was at least five times as infuriating as any woman Billy’d ever met. “Why would I hire somebody who doesn’t have experience with horses?”
“Because she needs the job Billy, and she’ll learn. In fact, I’ll teach her.”
“No.”
Renie grabbed his arm.
Whoa, what the hell? It was as though a bolt of lightning hit him, and the current surged through his veins. It almost knocked him on his ass.
“Please,” she said, in that soft tone she used sometimes when she tried to get her way. It used to make him laugh, and he’d tell her he saw right through her. Today, he had a different reaction. Today, he’d be willing to do anything Renie Fairchild wanted him to.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing.” Billy didn’t know what in God’s name was going on, but he knew he needed to get away from Renie, right now. “Listen, I gotta go into town.”
“Where are you headed? I’m not doing anything. I’ll go with you.”
“No. Not tonight. I’ve…um…got a date.”
“You do? With one of these girls you don’t plan to bring home?”
She was killing him. She didn’t appear as affected by the touch as he had been.
“Whatever, Renie. Mind your own damn business.”
Renie watched Billy stomp away from her. She spent a lot of time watching him walk away. She’d been in love with Billy Patterson her whole life. No one, not a single living person, knew how she felt about him. The only one she ever talked to about him was her horse, which was stabled in the barn Billy now owned.
It didn’t seem as though much had changed at the ranch since Billy bought it. In fact, her mom left most of the furniture in the house when she sold it. She and her new husband, Ben, hadn’t needed it at his place in Crested Butte.
With Billy home infrequently, most of the house looked exactly the same as it always had. The master bedroom was the one room Renie was sure was different. She hadn’t set foot in it though. It was almost as though the bedroom was the only place in the house Billy lived. It seemed wrong to invade his space.
When her mom decided to sell, she asked Renie first if she wanted to keep it, live there herself, but Renie told her to sell it to Billy. With four years of school still ahead of her, she didn’t have time to take on the ranch.
She thought a lot about whether she’d regret her decision later, after she graduated and started a practice. Even then, she knew she wouldn’t be able to live the rest of her life next door to the Patterson family. The heartache of seeing Billy come to visit his parents with the wife he would he eventually marry, and the children they would eventually have, was more than she’d be able to handle. You didn’t love someone the way she loved Billy and ever truly move on from it.
Something didn’t feel right between them tonight. It seemed as though Billy was mad at her.
She’d planned to stay here for the weekend, ride Pooh, and study. Maybe she was making too much of it, but if he really did have a date, she didn’t want to be here.
Can I still stay this weekend? She texted him.
He answered within seconds. Of course.
Thanks. See you tomorrow.
William Prescott Patterson, Jr. was eleven years older than Irene Louise Fairchild. Her first memory of him was when she was ten, right after her grandfather died, and she got Pooh. Renie and her mom were out riding in the meadow. It was wide open, and a great place to let the horses run. Billy waved them over.
“Who’s this, Renie?” he rubbed the horse’s nose.
“This is Pooh,” she said proudly. “She’s mine.”
“Great name,” he answered as he slowly walked around her, running his hand over the horse’s body. “She’s solid. You pick her out yourself?”
“Mom helped.” Obviously Billy didn’t think Pooh was a boy’s name, like her mom did.
“‘Some people talk to animals. Not many listen though. That’s the problem.’ You hear that before, Renie? Remember that. Talk to her, but listen too. Will you do that?”
He must be a very good bronc rider if he knew how to listen to horses, she thought at the time. From that day on, Renie spent as much time listening to Pooh as she did talking to her.
She must’ve read the same page over at least twenty times when she put the book down and turned off the light. Billy either wasn’t coming home tonight, or he planned to get back late enough that she’d already be asleep.
Whatever happened between them tonight, made him stay away. Where had he gone, and who was he with? She had to stop thinking about it too much or she wouldn’t get any sleep at all.
Telling Renie to stay at the house had to have been the stupidest thing he’d ever done. On the other hand, he loved having her there. Hell, he couldn’t make up his damn mind what he thought about it.
When she touched him today, he wanted to pull her into his arms and kiss her. Since then it was
the only thing he thought about. But, it was more than that. His mind drifted to the other things he wanted to do to Renie Fairchild. He tried to shake it out of his head. Thinking about kissing her was bad enough. More than that, it was…incestuous—or something.
It might have been a fluke. He’d see her tomorrow, and it would be as though nothing happened today. If it were that simple, he’d be inside his house, not sitting outside in his truck.
He told her he had a date. It was a lie, but at that moment, he had to leave, and the last thing he wanted was to take her with him.
He went to the brewery first, then next door to the movie theater, and then he went to the bowling alley. All in all, he’d killed about four hours. He drove around for another hour, wasting gas until he decided he was being ridiculous.
Once he got home, he put off going inside. He’d been sitting outside in his truck for twenty minutes, and it was damn cold. It was January after all, and Monument, sitting at seven-thousand feet elevation, was colder on average than the surrounding towns and cities.
“Ah, to hell with it.” He got out of the truck and went in the back door of the house. One light remained on, in the kitchen. Renie told him she and her mother left that light on whenever someone would be getting home late. He decided it worked for him, too. He liked it. It made him feel as though somebody waited for him. He left it on even when he was at the house alone.
Renie was gone the next morning when he got out of bed. It wasn’t unusual for her. She was always running off somewhere, meeting up with that friend of hers.
Dance with Me (Cowboys of Crested Butte Book 2) Page 1