The Cowboy's Big Family Tree

by Meg Maxwell

  The seat on the other side of Clementine was open; Clementine had texted Lacey that seven would be a good time to arrive, but the seat remained empty an hour later.

  For the next ten minutes there was excited chatter about the new venture Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen was getting involved with: a food truck. Essie had noticed a couple of different food trucks in town—one Mexican and one featuring soup, and thought Hurley’s could have its own brightly-colored food truck, offering several different kinds of po’boys. The truck would be parked at the far end of Main Street as an option for the lunch and early dinner crowd.

  “Do you think Olivia Mack will say yes to running the food truck?” Logan asked Clementine.

  “I hope so,” Clementine said. Olivia, a lovely young woman who lived in town, had her own catering business and often helped out in the Hurley’s kitchen when they were busy.

  Phoebe ate a spoonful of gumbo. “Olivia is the fortune-teller’s daughter, right? I’ve heard some kids talk about Madam Miranda.”

  “That’s right,” Clementine said. So many times Clementine had thought about sneaking over to Madam Miranda’s fortune-telling parlor for a reading. But she’d resisted, not sure she wanted to know anything about her future in advance.

  In any case, Clementine sure hoped that Olivia would agree to operate Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen’s new food truck. There was something so...magical about Olivia’s cooking. You ate one of her po’boys or cannolis and sighed with contentment. She was that good.

  “I hear congratulations are in order,” someone said from behind her.

  Clementine turned around and there was Lacey Woolen in a pretty green dress. “I’m so glad you’re here, Lacey. And yes, Logan and I will be getting married on New Year’s Eve! It’ll just be a small ceremony for family and close friends. I hope you’ll come.” She saw Lacey take that in, saw that she was touched.

  “I’m very happy for you both,” Lacey said, noncommittal as always, but that was perfectly okay. She glanced down at the open seat beside Clementine. “Is this the seat you said you saved for me?”

  Clementine nodded. She didn’t expect Lacey to stay. But she was very glad she’d come, even if just to say Merry Christmas and congratulations.

  And Lacey did walk away, but not toward the door. Instead, she headed over to the buffet and picked up a plate that Phoebe, now on plate-handing-out duty, gave her. Then she chose a bit of everything and came back and sat next to Clementine.

  “This Creole sauce is amazing,” Lacey said as she ate a spoonful of gumbo with the sauce Clementine had worked so hard to perfect. “Compliments to the chef.”

  Suddenly Clementine’s heart was so full she wasn’t sure she’d have any room for food. She looked around the table—at her birth mother, at her foster daughter, at the man who would soon be her husband, then glanced around the room and spotted her grandmother serving at the buffet, and her sisters coming through the swinging door of the kitchen with two full serving dishes of roast turkey and garlic mashed potatoes.

  As Logan reached for her hand and kissed her knuckles for absolutely no reason at all, earning a sweet giggle from Phoebe next to him, Clementine realized that every one of her Christmas wishes had come true.

  * * *

  On New Year’s Eve, Clementine, escorted by her grandmother, walked down the aisle to her handsome groom. Essie and Clementine’s sisters had cleared out the big dining room of Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen, Clementine’s favorite place on earth, and had transformed it into a beautiful wedding venue. A narrow silver carpet created an aisle, and there were white flowers everywhere. The tables had been pushed to the side and beautifully decorated, and there was a big area meant to be a dance floor.

  Clementine wore her grandmother’s fifty-year-old wedding dress, the very one her sister Annabel had worn to marry West Montgomery in Las Vegas last April. Georgia would have worn the dress to marry her beloved, Detective Nick Slater, but there was no way the dress would have fit over Georgia’s very pregnant belly. Gram hoped to pass the dress on to whomever their wonderful cook Dylan might fall in love with someday, and then Phoebe and then Lucy when they grew up. Clementine adored the idea of the antique wedding dress passing through so many different lives and loves.

  Right before she’d walked down the aisle, she’d asked her daughter to help her put her most treasured gift around her neck. As Clementine had stood before the full-length mirror, Phoebe had tears in her eyes as she fastened the heart pendant. Clementine no longer used the word foster when thinking of Phoebe. There would be a bit of a road ahead of them in terms of adopting Phoebe, but the girl was her daughter in the way it counted most: in her heart.

  Now, Clementine stood at the altar, about to marry the man she loved. The bridal party, Annabel, Georgia and Phoebe, looked beautiful in their deep red velvet dresses. The groomsmen, West, Nick and Dylan, looked very handsome in their tuxedos. Lucy, Annabel’s stepdaughter, was the flower girl, and two little ring bearers named Harry and Henry took their duties very seriously.

  In the front row sat Lacey Woolen wearing a blue dress. Essie Hurley was right next to her, and tears came to Clementine’s eyes at the beautiful sight.

  “How did I get so lucky?” she whispered to her groom.

  “I’m the lucky one,” Logan said. “You changed my life.”

  “I think the whole bunch of us changed our lives,” Clementine said. “The twins changed yours, Phoebe changed mine, then yours, then ours.”

  “Yours, mine and ours. We’re now just one big happy family,” Logan said.

  “One big happy family,” Clementine repeated.

  The reverend at the podium welcomed the guests and talked about love and commitment and family and the symbolism of embarking on a new year as a married couple. And finally, he asked Logan the words Clementine had longed to hear.

  “Do you, Logan Grainger, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to love, honor and cherish as long as you both shall live?”

  Logan took her hands in his and looked into her eyes, his blue eyes both intense and soft on her at the same time. “I do. With all my heart, I do.”

  Clementine ordered herself not to cry. The reverend repeated the same question to her.

  “I do,” she said, looking at her handsome groom. “With all my heart, I do.”

  “Then by the power vested in me by the state of Texas, I now pronounce you husband and wife. Feel free to kiss your bride, Logan.”

  Logan stepped closer and took her face in his hands, kissing her so intensely and passionately and sweetly that her knees almost buckled.

  Then he stepped back just a bit and faced their guests, their loved ones, and said, “I now pronounce us family.”

  “Yay! We’re all a family!” Harry exclaimed, rushing up to Logan and Clementine. His twin followed and both boys threw their arms around them.

  With happy tears in her own eyes, Phoebe ran over to them, squeezing Clementine in a hug, then Logan, then each twin.

  The guests rose to their feet, clapping and cheering, and Essie Hurley let out a wolf whistle that had everyone laughing.

  Holding hands in a line, the five of them, Clementine, Logan, Phoebe, Harry and Henry walked back up the aisle together, one big happy family.

  * * * * *

  What happens when a fortune-teller’s daughter and pragmatic PI team up to find a missing person?

  Find out in THE COOK’S SECRET INGREDIENT,

  the next book in the del
icious

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  Keep reading for an excerpt from A CHILD UNDER HIS TREE by Allison Leigh.

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  A Child Under His Tree

  by Allison Leigh

  Prologue

  Six years ago

  “You’re pregnant?”

  Startled, Kelly hid her hand down by her side, but it was too late. Her mother had already seen the distinctive plastic stick and snatched it out of her hand.

  This is what Kelly got for not waiting until she was back at work on Monday to take the test. But she’d been too anxious. Too worried to wait through the weekend, to wait another two days when she already knew.

  After a glance at the stick, where a huge blue plus sign broadcast the results, her mother pitched the test into the faded pink trash can that had been in Kelly’s room since she’d been ten. “Well? What do you have to say for yourself?”

  She wished she’d waited until Monday, that’s what she had to say.

  She wisely kept the sarcastic thought to herself. Kelly was twenty-three. Old enough to deal with the consequences of her actions, but not old enough to deal with her mother’s reaction.

  Evidently unsatisfied with Kelly’s silence, her mom grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her slightly. “Well? At the very least, tell me it’s the Buchanan boy’s baby.”

  Kelly looked away from her mother’s face. “Why? Caleb and I broke up two years ago.” She was only buying time, though. Because she knew why.

  Her mother made a disgusted sound and let her go. “Because you’ll be set for life, obviously!” She propped her hands on her skinny hips. “He’ll marry you. Even when it doesn’t work out, you’ll be taken care of. Those people take care of their own. Always have. Always will.”

  Those people.

  Kelly felt nauseated. More from her mother’s words than from the baby inside her that hadn’t even existed five weeks ago. By those people, her mother meant anyone connected to the wealthy Clay family. The family who possessed everything that Georgette and Kelly Rasmussen did not.

  Money. Plentiful land. Education. Class.

  Georgette envied everything they possessed, even as she seemed to hate them for it.

  “I don’t want to marry Caleb.”

  Her mother made another disgusted sound. “Since when?”

  Since he dumped me more than two years ago? Again, Kelly kept that answer to herself. She was over Caleb Buchanan. Had been for a long while now. Sleeping with him thirty-four days ago had been her way of proving it. Convoluted thinking, perhaps, but it was true, nevertheless. Which only seemed to confirm that the Rasmussen nut didn’t fall far from the tree.

  “You’ll marry that boy,” her mother said into the silence. She pointed her finger at Kelly’s face. “You’re not going to get stuck raising a baby on your own the way I was. You’ll marry him. He’ll provide for you both.” Her eyes narrowed, and she smiled tightly. “They’ll provide for all of us.”

  “You hated when I was dating him when we were teenagers! Now you’re all for me marrying him?” Kelly wanted to throw herself on the twin bed that also hadn’t changed since she was ten and pull the pillows over her head.

  “I knew you’d mess it up. Same as I did when I was that age.” Again the disgusted sound from her mother, accompanied by a hand swiping dismissively through the air. “And you did. He went off and found someone else.”

  Someone better. That’s what her mom had said at the time.

  Kelly pushed away the hurtful memory and put the width of the twin bed between them. “Exactly.” She didn’t throw herself on the bed. She wasn’t a teenager anymore. She was an adult. With a baby inside her. “He found someone else. A brilliant premed student just like him.” She left out the part that Caleb had also broken up with that woman. “Why on earth would you think this baby is his, anyway?”

  “He was home here in Weaver for Christmas. If not his, then whose? God knows you’re not much of a catch. Only boy who ever came sniffing around for you was that Buchanan kid.”

  “Ever think that’s because I didn’t want boys coming around here to meet you?” She couldn’t believe the words came out, even if they were true.

  “All right, then,” Georgette challenged. “Whose baby is it?”

  Kelly’s eyes stung. She wasn’t a liar by nature.

  But she lied. She lied because she wasn’t going to get foisted on Caleb Buchanan just because he and his people took care of their own. She wasn’t going to end up a wife out of his sense of responsibility. Not when she’d been raised by a mother who’d only acted out of responsibility instead of love.

  Caleb might have wanted her once, but he’d cast her aside.

  Until one night thirty-four days ago when he’d wanted her enough to get naked in the front seat of her pickup truck, just like they’d done back when they were in high school. Back before he’d left her and gone off to college. Back before he’d chosen another woman.

  “It was just a guy, Mama. Nobody you know at all.”

  The determined brightness in her mother’s eyes dimmed, and she got the same disappointed, dissatisfied, discontented look she’d had all of Kelly’s life. She sank down on the foot of the twin bed as if she couldn’t stand the weight of her own body. “The only chance you had of making something of yourself—snagging a fancy, educated surgeon like that Buchanan—and you take up with some guy just passing through town?”

  Her mother was editorializing. Adding details that Kelly had not. Embellishing the story with her own experiences. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. “Caleb has years to go before he’ll be a surgeon! And I don’t need to make someone like him marry me in order to make something of myself, Mama. I’ve got a good job working with Doc Cobb!”

  “Sure, answering his phones and putting out the trash. You think that old coot is gonna want his receptionist parading around with a pregnant belly and no ring on her finger? Times may have changed since you were born, but people in this town still expect mamas to be with the daddies. All you’re gonna earn is a lot of gossip and speculation. You ought to h
ave been smarter than to ruin your life the same way I did!”

  Kelly stared at her mother and vowed right then and there that she’d make sure her child never heard such hateful words. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”

  Georgette just snorted, not seeming to notice Kelly pulling out her ancient suitcase from the closet until it lay open on the bed. “What fool thing are you doing now?”

  “Packing.” Kelly kept moving, pulling open her top drawer and dumping the contents into the suitcase, quickly followed by the second drawer, and the third and last. She had to push down hard on the suitcase when she closed it to get the lock latched, but she managed.

  Georgette was watching her with an annoyed look. “Gonna go chase after the guy, I suppose. Fat lot of good that’ll do.”

  Kelly didn’t have a second suitcase. But she had an oversize beach bag that managed to hold several pairs of shoes and her favorite pair of boots. “Why? Is that what you did?” She propped the bulging canvas bag against the faded pink suitcase and went back to the closet again. “Fruitlessly chase after my father?” She snatched two handfuls of hanging clothes from the single wooden bar in her closet. “Is that why you’ve always hated me?”

  Her mother answered with a huff. “I’ve always said you had a crazy imagination.”

  “Yes.” Kelly draped the clothes over her arm. She was leaving behind stuff, but she was beyond caring. “It’s my imagination that I can count on one hand the times you’ve ever shown a lick of caring for me.”

  Georgette’s frown deepened. She’d never welcomed other people’s opinions, and Kelly’s was no different. “Kept a roof over your ungrateful head, didn’t I?”

  “Yes, you did, Mama.” She awkwardly looped the beach bag strap over her shoulder and wrapped her fingers around the suitcase handle, dragging it off the mattress. It bumped hard against her knee. “You did your duty, that’s for sure.” Tears glazed her eyes. “But I’m not going to raise my baby like that.” She shuffled toward the door with her heavy load precariously balanced.