The Maverick's Return

by Marie Ferrarella

  Jamie was the first to speak up. “I think we should try to fix it up.” He looked at Dan and Bella. “What do you think?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Bella answered, nodding her head.

  “I’m in,” Dan told Jamie. “After helping you out at your place, I’ve gotten pretty good at fixing things up.”

  “I don’t know about ‘good.’ I’d say that you’re a work in progress at the moment,” Jamie said with a laugh. “But sure, we could all pitch in to get this place looking livable again.”

  “Mom and Dad would have liked that,” Bella told her brothers.

  “Do you think you could have the ranch ready for a Christmastime wedding?” Anne asked quietly.

  Dan whirled toward her. “Christmastime?” he repeated. “Is that when you want it?”

  Her smile was almost shy as she answered, “Yes.”

  “Wait, hold it,” Jamie spoke up, looking at Dan and Anne. “What wedding?”

  “Are you two getting married?” Bella asked, excitement echoing in her voice before Dan could answer their brother’s question.

  “Yes. Yes, we are. And it looks like it’s going to be a Christmas wedding,” Dan said, pulling Annie close to him.

  “Well, congratulations!” Jamie cried. “Let me be the first to kiss the bride-to-be.”

  “That’s my job,” Dan told him, elbowing Jamie out of the way. “You can be the second.” With that, he kissed Annie. Under the circumstances, it was a quick kiss, but it expressed all the love he felt for her. “I just wish that the rest our siblings could be here for the wedding,” he said wistfully.

  “Don’t worry,” Jamie promised with determination. “They might not be here for the wedding, but we’ll find them. I won’t rest until we do.”

  “Neither will I,” Bella added.

  “That would be the very best wedding present of all,” Anne told them, smiling up at Dan.

  “See why I love her?” Dan asked his siblings. Looking at Annie, he said, “Yes, I totally agree, it would,” just before he kissed her again.

  It was the most happiness that the old homestead had seen in a decade—with more to come.

  * * * * *

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  The Cowboy Who Got Away

  by Nancy Robards Thompson

  Chapter One

  “This is a disaster,” the bride-to-be wailed. “I don’t understand how you can be so calm when it’s all your fault, Juliette.”

  Juliette Lowell bit the insides of her cheeks and resisted the urge to help Tabatha Jones, the bridezilla du jour, put her current crisis into perspective. Around the world, people less privileged faced life-and-death crises. The realization that the hand-dyed lavender pumps were two shades lighter than the bridesmaids’ dresses was certainly a disappointment, but it was not a disaster of meltdown proportions as the bride was making it out to be.

  “You have to fix this.” Tabatha’s voice rose three octaves, pushing a tear out onto her cheekbone. It left a trail in her foundation as it meandered down her sullen face. “This is absolutely unacceptable. The wedding is a month away and I need to know how you are going to make this right.”

  Standing in the middle of the Campbell Wedding Barn, the venue for the ceremony, Tabatha’s breath was quick and shallow as she glared at Juliette.

  She seemed dangerously close to hyperventilating.

  “Take a deep breath, Tabatha,” Juliette said. The minute the words left her lips, she knew they were a mistake.

  “Don’t tell me how to breathe,” she said through gritted teeth. “Just fix this.”

  All Juliette could do was shrug. Probably a good choice since every word she uttered seemed to be digging her deeper into trouble.

  When Tabatha had noticed the discrepancy in color, she’d called Juliette, who’d suggested they meet at the wedding venue to view the shoes and dresses in the same light in which they’d be worn during the ceremony.

  “Tabatha, they really don’t look bad,” Juliette said, holding a silk pump next to a dress in a ray of sunshine streaming through one of the barn’s generous skylights. “Besides, the dresses are long and people aren’t going to be looking at your bridesmaids’ feet. They will be looking at their beautiful faces. No one will notice that the color isn’t exactly the same.”

  Tabatha growled. She actually growled. A guttural sound in the back of her throat that started low, then exploded in a noise that sounded like a bark. For a split second, Juliette feared she might lunge at her.

  Tabatha’s mother must have had the same worry because she put an arm around her daughter, but Tabatha brushed her off and pointed at Juliette. “The bridesmaids’ shoes were custom-made in Italy.”

  “I know,” Juliette said. “I told you that due to variations in dye lots and the different material of the shoes and dresses that the color might not be an exact match.”

  The woman had been so smitten by the thought of buying her bridesmaids bespoke shoes that she obviously hadn’t heard a word that Juliette had said.

  Or she had selective memory.

  Juliette held up the shoe again, turning it every which way in the light. “It’s close—”

  “It’s not close enough,” Tabatha hissed. “All I care about is how you’re going to fix this in time for the wedding. Fix it.”

  Tabatha thrust the lavender shoe at Juliette and walk
ed out of the barn.

  “Oh, Tabatha. Honey...” Her mother cast an apologetic glance at Juliette and trotted along after her daughter.

  Good grief.

  As Juliette stood there trying to digest what had just happened, another realization hit her hard. All her life she’d been a people pleaser. In the past, she would’ve chased after the client, falling all over herself trying to make the bride-to-be happy, promising her miracles she would’ve worked magic to deliver, but today, she just didn’t have it in her.

  She wanted Tabatha to have the wedding of her dreams, but the woman was out of control. She’d crossed the line. Juliette had told her about the possibility of color variations, but Tabatha had ignored her.

  “I warned you,” Juliette muttered under her breath as she slid the dress back into the garment bag and draped it over her arm. Before she placed the pumps back in their box, she held one up again and tried to look at the color with an objective eye. They were pretty. Well, as pretty as purple silk pumps could be.

  Even so, her job was to make sure the bride was happy. She’d call her friend Nora at Sassy Feet Shoe Repair and see if she could help.

  Juliette sighed. “It’s a purple shoe. I don’t know what more you want, Tabatha. The way you’re acting, you’d think they sent you something chartreuse.”

  “Does Tabatha have something against chartreuse shoes?”

  The familiar deep, masculine voice wound its way around her spine and settled at the very base of her solar plexus, making her breath catch and her heart do an all-too-familiar two-step. She knew it was Jude Campbell before she turned around and saw him standing in the wedding barn’s doorway.

  Her initial split-second reaction was It’s you. You’re back. She wanted to hug him and lose herself in the sanctuary of his strong arms, in the familiar feel and smell of him. But in the next blink, the intoxicating madness fell into the chasm that had been created by everything that had happened when they broke up and the ensuing years that they’d been apart since then.

  “Actually, Tabatha dislikes lavender shoes. Or these lavender shoes, at least.”

  “Was that Tabatha I saw kicking up gravel as she peeled out of the parking lot?”

  “Oh, she peeled out, did she? Nice. I hope she waited for her mother to get in the car and close the door before she sped off.”

  Jude nodded and flashed that effortless, brilliant smile that reached all the way to his brown eyes, making them crinkle at the corners. He looked exactly the same, from the top of his curly honey-brown hair to the broad, muscled shoulders all the way down to the toes of his weathered cowboy boots. Juliette’s mouth went dry and all the reasons she should keep her walls firmly in place threatened to fly out the window, but she knew better.

  She prided herself on only making new mistakes.

  Jude Campbell, with his hypnotizing smile and those arms and broad shoulders, would not be a new mistake.

  “Why are you here, Jude?”

  He shifted his weight from one foot to another. “What’s the matter, Juju? Aren’t you glad to see me?”

  “You’re not allowed to call me that anymore.”

  Hearing him call her by the nickname he’d had for her all those years ago made something warm and forbidden blossom in her stomach.

  Damn him. How was it that after all these years, after everything he’d done, he still had this effect on her? How could she still feel something for him after what he’d done to her? To them.

  “You seemed like you were happy to see me when I was home for Ethan and Chelsea’s wedding. What happened?”

  Reality happened. Real life happened. Three months ago, he’d waltzed back into town for one night—for his brother’s wedding to Juliette’s best friend. He’d been the best man to her maid of honor. There had been a built-in safety in that short visit. Because of the wedding, almost every minute of her time had been consumed by helping Chelsea, or otherwise claimed by the schedule of events. There hadn’t been enough time to let down her guard. But if she was honest with herself, in that short twenty-four hours the ice cap that had formed over her heart had started thawing.

  He’d left so soon after the wedding there’d been no need to think about the feelings he’d stirred up in her. It wasn’t denial; it was self-preservation. It had been ten years since he’d been back to Celebration. For all she knew, it would be another ten before he passed through again.

  “You were home?” she said, emphasizing the operative word. “You breezed through so fast, I wasn’t even sure if it was really you. Are you home longer this time, Jude?”

  He cocked a brow. “Would you be happy if I said yes?”

  Juliette didn’t answer. She busied herself wrapping the purple shoe in the tissue paper it came in and putting it back into its box.

  “I am home longer this time than last.”

  Damn if her gaze didn’t find its way back to him. His eyes seemed to hold a mixture of bemusement and disappointment.

  He wasn’t that tall—just under six feet, which was still big for a bull rider. But he had those broad shoulders and that lean, muscled body to compensate for it. He also had those lethal, dark brown eyes and that lopsided smile that had always disarmed her.

  Even after everything that had happened, her former eighteen-year-old self whispered that she wouldn’t mind a bit if he kissed her hello, but the twenty-eight-year-old she was now, the one who knew better, overruled that foolishness with a simple blink of her eyes.

  This was the effect Jude Campbell had on every healthy, red-blooded woman he encountered.

  And that’s what she needed to remember.

  “I’d heard through the grapevine that you weren’t coming back for the ten-year reunion,” she said.

  “My plans have changed. Is it too late to change my RSVP?”

  Juliette shrugged. “You’ll have to call Marilyn Harding. She’s chairing the reunion committee.”

  Juliette silently cursed Tabatha again. If not for the ridiculously demanding woman, she wouldn’t have been at the Campbell Wedding Barn at the precise moment Jude had chosen to make his entrance. Juliette was a wedding planner, but Jude’s sister, Lucy, owned and operated the venue. She had inherited the property after her parents had died several years ago and had turned the old ramshackle barn into one of the South’s premier wedding barns.

  Since Juliette sent so much business Lucy’s way, she’d given Juliette a key to the place so that she could come and go as she needed. No sense in both of them being at the mercy of the gaggle of bridezillas who contracted Juliette to create the wedding of their dreams.

  Lately, it seemed like every single bride she worked with turned into a bridezilla.

  Juliette took a deep breath as she pondered the possibility that if every one of her brides seemed like a bridezilla, maybe they weren’t the problem; maybe she was the one who’d gone off the rails. Or something like that. Maybe she was mixing her metaphors. She was so burned-out lately, it was a wonder she could even think. It didn’t help that Jude was standing right there in front of her.

  “I thought the homecoming queen would’ve been in the middle of organizing the ten-year reunion,” he said.

  Juliette frowned and hitched up the garment bag onto her arm. “So, you think the homecoming queen should plan the party, and the homecoming king should just be able to show up? And until today you weren’t even sure if you could make it. Can you please explain the logic in that?”

  Jude was silent for a moment and it took everything in Juliette’s power not to fill the stillness, until finally, he spoke.

  “Was there ever any logic when it came to you and me, Juju?”

  Juliette’s stomach clenched.

  “If you are here to see Lucy, she’s not in right now. You might want to give her a call on her cell phone. There’s not an event tonight, so
she and Zane were taking the day off.”

  “I’ve already talked to my sister. I stopped by because I saw your car out there.”

  She tried to ignore the satisfaction his confession brought her and almost asked him how he knew it was her car, but stopped short. He’d seen it when he was home for the wedding. Jude had taken a break from the professional bull riding circuit to come home for the wedding of his older brother, Ethan, to Chelsea Ashford Alden. Of course, that’s when he’d seen it. The wedding had been the first time that she’d seen Jude in the nearly ten years since the two of them had broken up before she’d gone to college and he’d gone off to try out his skills on the PBR circuit.

  He was fresh off a world championship win. A hometown hero. Of course he’d want to come home and bask in the glory.

  “How long are you home?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Two or three weeks? A month? Depends.”

  All kinds of questions filled her head. It was the beginning of October. The PBR circuit usually ran through the end of the month. She wanted to ask him about work, but a sixth sense warned her that might be shaky territory. Really, it was none of her business. If he was still in the running for this year’s championship, he wouldn’t be hanging around Celebration right now. It stood to reason that she was better off not asking.

  “Where are you staying?” she asked instead.

  “At the cabin on the lower forty of my folks’ property—my property,” he corrected.

  Jude and his siblings had inherited the ninety acres that had been in the Campbell family for three generations. They’d subdivided the property into three equitable shares. Ethan and Lucy each had working businesses on their respective properties.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve been out there,” Juliette said. “Are you comfortable there? Does the place even have electricity?”

  “I have no idea. I’ll be fine,” he said. “If it’s too bad, I can always crash at Lucy’s.”