Cowboy's Heart (Copper Canyon, Texas)

by Patti Ann Colt

  Cowboy’s Heart

  by

  Patti Ann Colt

  Excerpt

  Lights flashed on the windows and she got up to see who was coming to the house at this time of night.

  The truck pulled down the lane and when it came under the yard light, she sucked in a breath.

  Jess.

  She shoved her feet into her flip flops, rushed to the back door and out to the driveway, not taking time for a robe.

  Jess got out of his truck, his mouth opened in surprise.

  Their argument washed over her. She wanted to yell and scream at him, she wanted to hit him, she wanted….ohhhh.

  She launched herself at him and took his lips. She didn’t know how it was possible to be so damn mad, yet want him so bad.

  He did what he always did — softened his lips, smoothed a hand down her spine, calming her, gentling her, seducing her. Then he pressed into her with hungry tastes, pulled her against his solid length and tightened his hold.

  God, she was home.

  Breath mingled, sensation after sensation blasted through her. She stroked his back, the warmth of his body defying the shirt and spreading tingles into her hands. “Why didn’t you call me?”

  “I did. Why did you leave in the first place?” He lifted her nightgown and stroked the bare skin underneath…

  Published By KLG Press

  Cowboy’s Heart

  Kindle Edition

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Cowboy’s Heart

  COPYRIGHT © 2012 by Patti Ann Colt

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or KLG Press except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Cover Art by Patti Ann Colt

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Amazon.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Questions, comments or media inquiries should be directed to:

  KLG Press

  704 Canyon Creek Trail

  Fort Worth, TX 76112

  admin@knowlinkgrow.com

  Publishing History

  KLG Press

  First Edition, April 2012

  Dedication

  To my daughter-in-law, Rebecca Razo Colt

  Because it’s wonderful to have gained another daughter who is also a friend

  Acknowledgements

  Copper Canyon, Texas is a real place.

  The places, people and events I’ve depicted are not.

  That doesn’t make the sentiment and values any less real, inviting or true.

  Thank you, Texas! Twelve years ago, this small town Idaho girl moved to Dallas-Fort Worth and you made me welcome. Your men are gentlemen. Your women are sweethearts. Your values are strong. Your pride is admirable.

  You are the home of my woman’s heart.

  ∞∞∞∞∞∞

  CHAPTER ONE

  Jess O’Hare twirled his whiskey glass in the condensation on the table in front of him. He sat in the corner booth of The Low Down Saloon and Restaurant in Copper Canyon, Texas. It was Thursday night. He was expected at his parents for dinner shortly and yet he didn’t move.

  He watched Sully Johnson, his cousin and owner of this fine establishment, wiping glasses and checking bottles behind a long, glossy oak bar. The bar was said to have been bought at a Hollywood auction off an old western movie set. He knew that couldn’t be true, but Sully’s blarney made it seem possible. He closed his eyes. The aroma of cooking beef made his stomach growl and yet he sat.

  “You still moping?” Sully’s drawled close to his ear.

  Jess opened his eyes and swiped at him like a pesky fly, then spread his arms to the back of the booth. “I’m not moping.”

  “Right.” Sully lifted the glass and wiped the table.

  He thought maybe he’d get lucky and Sully would leave it alone, but it was a hope not in keeping with years of family nosiness.

  “You should just go after her.” Sully slid into the opposite seat.

  He groaned. “Don’t start.”

  “Well, you’ve been acting like a lovesick cow ever since Amy Rose left two weeks ago. Whole family’s tired of tippy-toeing around you. Amy Rose is probably tired of waiting for your sorry ass.”

  “You’ve talked to her?” He snapped his mouth shut.

  Sully snorted. “See, you’re so hung up, a pair of scissors couldn’t cut you free. What’d you two break up for anyway?”

  Jess stiffened. “Don’t think that’s anybody’s business.”

  “Figured it was about time somebody made it their business.” Sully screwed up his mouth, ready to launch into the topic like a minister delivering a sermon.

  Jess downed the rest of his drink and shoved his empty glass across the table. Sully caught it, as only a good bartender could. The action derailed the lecture. For a half-second.

  “She’s been your girl for three years, Jess. You’ve been stuck on her since high school. From the looks of things, she’s stuck on you, too.

  “I just love all this sweet advice from a guy who frequently spouts off that he isn’t getting married.” He swallowed, fighting the sarcastic tongue that hinted at the frustration boiling over in his gut.

  She’d left! Left! Yes, their last argument had been devastating. They’d both been angry and said things they didn’t mean. But didn’t that crazy girl know that he loved her?

  Sully interrupted Jess’s usual-of-late spiral into the morass of hurt and pissed. “My life isn’t the discussion topic here, cow chaser. Besides, your mama is gonna kill you when she finds out you missed Thursday night dinner because you were sitting here and then she’ll call her sister —my mama —and I’ll never hear the end of it. Git.”

  “I’m not going to dinner. Don’t want to deal with the same conversation. Have you heard from Amy Rose?” He sing-songed the question in his mother’s high pitch.

  “Can’t blame Aunt Ladonna. She took Amy Rose into the family from the first. This break up hurt more than just you.”

  Jess ground his teeth together and then slapped the table. “You think I did that on purpose?” He didn’t need to hear this. Hurting his mama and daddy, his brother and the rest of the family who loved Amy Rose too hadn’t been his intention. Breaking up hadn’t been his intention at all!

  Sully rose. “Nope. Not on purpose. But might work better if you hunted her down, got on your sorry knees and begged. Give your mama a hug for me.” He sauntered off, stopping at the juke box.

  Jess let his head roll onto the back of the red upholstered seat. He knew he’d been worse than a fool that night with Amy Rose. He’d been dead tired and dirty, hot and sticky, and just plain grumpy. She’d already been over-emotional for the last couple of weeks and impatient.

  Then the taboo subject of her law degree came up. She was ready to take the bar exam for a career she didn’t want, only to make her father happy, and Jess thought it was time to draw a line and say no.

  He was a simple rancher, never pretended to be otherwise and thought Amy Rose was okay with that. But she wouldn’t make a choice. She wouldn’t look at
him and say “I want to be with you.” She just kept going off on all these tangents to please her father. It scared him to death.

  He needed her to make a decision.

  His road or her father’s?

  She couldn’t do both to his way of thinking. If she got sucked into the law firm, she’d be at the office all the time, and eventually would give in to her father’s hatred of all things rural and Jess in particular. This wasn’t a new argument. They’d had a version of this same damned “discussion” since Amy Rose had started law school. She was his bright shining light. He needed her and yet instead of understanding her perspective, he’d felt like he was losing her and he’d opened his mouth and made it happen. Shit.

  The juke box started playing Darius Rucker’s “Come Back Song” and Jess groaned.

  Sully gave him an evil grin from behind the bar.

  He grabbed his cowboy hat and strode through the saloon doors, flipping Sully off as he left. He stood on the porch for several long moments, at war with himself. Home or his parents?

  He stared at his new, hardly-driven red truck in the parking lot. He bought it about a year ago in an attempt to impress upon Amy Rose and her family that he could clean up and look decent. She hadn’t really noticed, telling him volumes about who she was. And the new truck didn’t drive near as well his ten-year-old work truck. Even coupling the shiny vehicle with his new jeans and a new cowboy hat didn’t change the dirt under his nails. Why the hell he put the duds on after coming in off the dry and dusty range, he didn’t know. Maybe some fleeting idea of driving to Dallas and dragging Miss Amy Rose back home where she belonged. He heard boot steps on the plank and turned to see who it was, then wished he hadn’t.

  “O’Hare.”

  Amy Rose’s father stopped at his side. He didn’t offer his hand and neither did Jess.

  The man’s blue striped suit cost more than his brother’s custom made bronc riding gear. “Pretty far away from work aren’t you?”

  “Client and friend in Flower Mound.”

  That explained it. Business. Flower Mound, Texas was just up the road a piece.

  Even though Copper Canyon was surrounded by many such upper middle class, moneyed towns, Edgar Adams never came to this area without a damn good reason anymore. His family roots had been established here a long time before suburbia and money had shined up the area, before many well-to-do owners had taken over dozens of the ranches. No, Mr. Adams had shaken Copper Canyon off his shoes when it was a simple rural area. He’d gone on to build a successful law practice. He’d eventually bought a home in an area of Dallas renowned for famous people. The man resented Amy Rose living here, hated her attachment to the family’s homestead, hated visiting. Jess’s middle class family was just icing on the hate cake.

  Edgar glanced at his watch. “Glad you took my earlier advice and sent her home. She needs to prepare for her future, not hang around here.”

  Jess clenched his teeth. “I take it she made it safely to your house?” It galled him to have to ask, but she wasn’t answering her phone and damned if he’d worry about that any more.

  “Yes, she did.”

  Jess nodded at the man and started down the steps.

  “She’s doing what needs to be done, son.”

  Jess turned, temper simmering. “I’m not your son, sir. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t refer to me that way.”

  Mr. Adams lifted his hands, a small smirk on his face. “No offense intended. Just appreciate having my daughter and heir to my law firm back.”

  Jess ground his teeth even more to keep from punching the smirk from Edgar’s face. During the argument with Amy Rose, he had said some petty, awful things he regretted. Mouthing off to her father wouldn’t change that.

  He tipped his hat. “Good night, sir.” He walked to the red truck, wishing mightily that he hadn’t succumbed to being something he wasn’t just to impress Edgar Grayson Adams. He drove away, mulling over and discarding several ways to try to see Amy Rose without her mother slamming the door in his face. Or worse still, telling security not to let him through the gates.

  Not wanting to add to the mess of the situation, he drove to Thursday night dinner at his parents as expected and hugged his mama.

  ∞∞∞∞∞

  Amy Rose Adams leaned back against the bathroom wall and cursed the all-day-long morning sickness that pretty much kept any food from her stomach for the last two weeks. Not for the first time, she wished Jess was there to hold her and tell her in that humorous way he had that everything would be okay. But she’d been anxious and worried after figuring out she was pregnant. She’d gone to Jess, ready to tell him and discuss their future. She’d screwed up, though, approaching the whole discussion in the wrong way, and it had blown into the mother of all arguments.

  In a fit of temper and over-emotional worry, she’d walked away from Jess and her future. Stupid didn’t begin to cover it. Because someday, very soon, she was going to have to crawl back and tell him about the baby. Her eyes flooded with tears and she tried to sniff them away.

  She heard a noise in her room and froze.

  “Amy Rose, are you okay?”

  “Yes, Mother. Out in a minute.” She put a hand over her stomach, and rose from the floor, hoping the sudden action wouldn’t force her to upchuck again. She hated vomiting. Hated it.

  “All right, dear. But hurry along, will you?”

  Amy Rose grabbed a tissue and blew her nose. She eased to the mirror to see how close to normal she looked and balked at the pale face and messy hair. She reached for the brush and with a few strokes, righted her hair, then pinched her cheeks.

  Her parents didn’t know about the baby yet. She refused to tell them until Jess knew. Once that news was sprung, it only followed that it was time to tell her father she wanted no part of his law firm. She feared that would cause a fallout that could end the relationship she had with him and her mother.

  She needed to sort things out in her own head, get her ground stable. Her whole world was topsy turvy since the pregnancy test had screamed “BABY” and she was struggling. She wasn’t even a wife yet and now she was going to be a mother.

  Jess was pretty straight forward in his beliefs. If you said something you didn’t mean, you said sorry. If you loved someone, you told them so. She’d always subscribed to that philosophy, too. But days after their argument, she’d realized she’d told him time and time again that she loved him too much to ever walk away. Yet that was exactly what she’d done while in a tailspin about the baby.

  “Stupid, Amy Rose. Men don’t come any better than him. Even if my parents don’t agree.”

  She opened the door, expecting her mother to still be in her room, but finding her gone. Since she’d gotten home, her thrilled mother had been culling her list of friends and inviting their eligible sons to dinner, filling the social agenda. Amy Rose had no energy for those social occasions and even less interest. All she wanted to do was sleep. Tonight she got a reprieve. Son #5 had decided a night at Ranger Ballpark was better than an obligatory dinner with a blind date and her parents. Fortunate. Her stomach wasn’t going to let her smell the usual Thursday night halibut dinner without rebelling again.

  She carefully moved to the bed and wished she were in her own room in Copper Canyon. She loved the country cowboy look of the old homestead that had been her grandmother’s and the wide-open space of the ranch. She belonged there, had made it her home, belonged with her cowboy. Coming to the family home in Dallas had been a mistake made in the temper of an argument. Less than an hour’s drive separated the two homes, but atmosphere was eons apart. She hated the sleek white designer look of this house and the closed, fenced in, security enforced neighborhood with a former President living down the street. She always had.

  But at the time, she was stinging from hard words and had needed to get away before she blubbered like a baby in front of Jess. She didn’t want him to ride to the rescue and try to make things right for her. Didn’t he understand that she
needed to be the one to make things right in her own world? She needed one person to respect her choices. She’d believed it was him, hoped it was him. But the argument had left hurt and doubts.

  Now she didn’t feel well enough to go anywhere. She lay back on the bed as gently as possible and closed her eyes, then rubbed her tummy. “Oh, baby, what am I going to do?” She was almost asleep when a knock sounded on the door.

  Her mother opened the door. “Honey, Mattie has dinner ready.”

  Amy Rose cracked an eyelid. “I’m not hungry, Mother. Eat without me.”

  Doreen Adams bustled into the room, all efficient concern. Amy Rose turned on her side, pulling the bedspread over her exhausted body.

  “You’ve been so tired all the time lately, dear. You should go see the doctor and have some tests done. You might be anemic. I suffered from that a lot when I was your age.”

  “Hmmm, maybe.” I’m just pregnant, Mother. Go away.

  Her mother sniffed, her nose tilting in that way that said she was about to say something Amy Rose would not like. “Still mooning over that cowboy? Honestly, Amy Rose, I thought by now you’d be over it.”

  Yep. Crap. Besides the soul-ripping argument and a baby weighing on her mind, two weeks to get over three years together?

  “We were together a long time, Mother. I’m not ready for anyone else.” Or calling it quits.

  “Well, your father will miss you at the dinner table.”

  “Is he home?”

  “Not yet. But when he found out our guests cancelled, he invited Miles to dinner.

  Oh, God.

  Miles Justin was a partner in the Adams-Henry law firm. And she’d dated him for a while before Jess stole her heart. God, just shoot me.