Enchanted by the Rodeo Queen--A Clean Romance

by Melinda Curtis

  MAYOR: The Merciless gang struck again. Took the stage on the south road. I’ve sent for the sheriff. He’ll be searching the home of every able-bodied man in the territory.

  The mayor pats Mike’s arm.

  MAYOR: Not your home, Mike.

  INTERIOR. THE SMITHY. Letty and Jeb are in the midst of an argument, whispering as Mike dozes on Jeb’s cot in the corner.

  LETTY: What do you want me to do? Our crop was ruined by that spring snowstorm. We’re behind on payments. We’re going to lose everything.

  JEB: I said I’d marry you, Letty. I didn’t say I’d steal for you. After all those robberies—the ones you say Mike did—they’re going to hang him, blind or not. I’m going to turn him in the next time the sheriff comes to town.

  LETTY: You do and I’ll swear on a stack of Bibles you’re one of the gang. No one will believe a blind man could pull off all those robberies.

  JEB (looking speculatively at Mike): All those murders...

  LETTY (milking Jeb’s fondness for her): No more talk of blood and mayhem. Kiss me, Jeb. Kiss me like today’s our wedding day.

  EXTERIOR. THE STAGE ROAD NORTH OF TOWN IN THE DEEPENING DUSK. Jeb is riding his horse, scanning the dim woods as he looks for Letty, hoping to stop her from doing something stupid with her brother’s gang. Mike steps out in front of him, wearing the flour sack over his head and pointing a six-shooter at Jeb.

  MIKE: Throw down your coin, friend, and I’ll let you pass.

  JEB (whispering): Mister...Merciless?

  MIKE (chest puffed out with pride): One and the same. Throw it down, friend.

  Jeb looks into the trees as he reaches for his newly purchased pistol.

  LETTY (in a deep voice): Don’t reach for that gun, friend.

  JEB (a determined set to his chin): You’ll be moving to another territory and leaving Miss Letty behind.

  Mike seems taken aback. The “man” in the woods stands. Jeb’s attention is on the shooter, the man he assumes is the real threat since he knows Mike is practically blind.

  JEB: You’ll be moving on...

  Jeb draws his pistol and fires at the figure in the woods. A scream pierces the air.

  MIKE (uncertain): Letty?

  JEB (pale, leaps off his horse and runs to her side): Letty? Holy heavens! Letty?

  Jeb reaches the fallen figure dressed in a man’s suit. He pulls off the flour sack and cradles Letty in his arms as blood soaks her abdomen.

  MIKE (kneeling next to them): Letty?

  JEB (rocking Letty, crying): I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  The sound of an approaching wagon. Jeb raises his head, processing his options. He gently transfers Letty into her brother’s arms, face strained with regret.

  JEB: I’ll tell them we struggled. I’ll tell them I fought you. But you have to take her to safety.

  MIKE (blinking eyes that can barely see): Where?

  Jeb runs to his horse, brings her back to Mike.

  JEB: There’s a cave near Lookout Ridge. My horse knows the way. Take Letty there. I’ll bring supplies later. Just keep her alive.

  The sounds of the wagon grow louder, as does the sound of Letty’s labored breathing.

  JEB (stumbling to the road, staring at the blood on his hands): Go!

  He waves down the wagon, prepared to feed them a story to save his darling Letty.

  EXTERIOR. LOOKOUT RIDGE. Jeb digging a grave while Mike sits nearby, crying.

  EXTERIOR. THE STAGE ROAD NORTH OF TOWN. Mike ties up Jeb’s horse in the woods, pulls a flour sack over his head and steps out in front of the approaching stage to a chorus of shouts and screams. He shoots indiscriminately. The guard falls off as the driver pulls the stage to a halt.

  MIKE: You remember to tell the sheriff that man’s name. Wouldn’t want it left off my wanted poster. Now throw down your cash box and move along.

  The driver does as instructed, taking off almost before the cash box lands in the dirt. Mike waits until the stage is gone and then scrambles to the place he heard the box drop, shoots off the lock and grabs the sack of gold. The sound of a posse’s thundering hooves fills the air. Mike stumbles into the woods and climbs on Jeb’s horse. They race off, but instead of his mountain hideout, the horse runs back to the smithy, losing a shoe in the race.

  INTERIOR. SMITHY. Jeb closes the doors to hide the fact that Mike is there.

  MIKE: Stupid horse. Stupid lame horse. Jeb! You’ve got to hide me.

  JEB: No. Your past is catching up to you.

  Letty’s music box is on a shelf. Jeb opens it up, filling the smithy with a bittersweet song—“You Are My Sunshine.” The shouts of the posse reach them. Mike moves closer to Jeb and tosses the bag of gold to the blacksmith’s feet.

  MIKE: My sister would want you to save me. You know she’d want you to save me.

  JEB (face contorted in grief and indecision): If you can make it to the cave, I’ll bring you supplies tomorrow. But only if you leave town. Promise me.

  MIKE (incredulous): I promise but the posse is here in town. They’ll shoot me before I get across the road.

  JEB: I’ll slow them down. Go. Out the back.

  Mike stumbles out to the old nag and climbs into the saddle. Jeb hides the bag of gold and picks up a hunting knife. He opens the door to the smithy that faces Main Street.

  JEB: For you, my love. May this make up for all our wrongs.

  He stabs himself in the side, being careful to miss anything vital.

  JEB (stumbling forward): Help! Help!

  The posse descends upon the smithy, guns drawn.

  SHERIFF: Who was it? Who stabbed you?

  JEB (sinking to the ground): Mike. Merciless Mike Moody.

  EXTERIOR. MOUNTAINS. A rumbling rockslide kills Mike.

  EXTERIOR. LOOKOUT RIDGE. Weeks have passed, Jeb places a headstone on Letty’s grave.

  Later still, Jeb and the schoolmarm climb atop the buckboard amid well-wishers congratulating them on their nuptials.

  INTERIOR. MIKE’S HIDEOUT. Jeb painstakingly digs a hole in the rock wall inside the cave and hides the box of gold, keeping only one coin for himself. He sets off dynamite to cover the cave entrance with rock, sealing it from ever being found.

  INTERIOR. THE BUCKING BULL RANCH’S FARMHOUSE. Jeb on his deathbed. His adult son is at his side. On a dresser, the music box plays.

  JEB: That’s why I buried your mother up there. It’s where I want to be buried, too.

  He presses a gold coin into his son’s hand. His son stares at it in amazement.

  JEB (drawing his last breath): In case you think I’m an old fool making up stories.

  SON: Dad, is there more where this came from? Do you know where Mike Moody buried it? Dad?

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  “BEST FIRST DRAFT EVER.” Jonah drank the last of his water and shouldered his backpack.

  Yes, he’d taken some liberties with the timeline and Mike’s blindness, but when a story worked, it worked.

  With lighter steps than he’d had in days, Jonah headed back down the fire road, whistling as he took long strides. He rounded a bend and came face-to-face with a bull, the feral kind with long pointy horns and a distrust of people.

  Especially Hollywood scriptwriters wearing red shirts.

  The bull pawed the ground and snorted.

  “Hey!” Jonah held up a hand. “Back away.”

  The bull snorted again.

  Jonah side-stepped, heading for a tree with a thick trunk. Its branches were too high to climb, but it would provide some form of shelter. “Hey!” he shouted again when the bull took a step in his direction. “Get out of here!”

  The bull seemed to reconsider his charge. He turned around and trotted down the fire road in the direction Jonah wanted to go. No way was he following on the heels of that beast.

&nb
sp; Franny had taken the Monroe men on a trail through the woods once. If he could find it, he could follow it down to the Bucking Bull’s pastures.

  * * *

  EMILY PUT AWAY Razzy late in the afternoon.

  The ranch was quiet without the boys or Franny around. They’d gone into Ketchum for dentist appointments. There was no Adam hopping about begging for sweets. No Jonah jabbering about Mike Moody.

  Which was odd—Jonah not being around. If he wasn’t writing, Jonah came to greet her at the barn when she returned. It’d been six hours since he talked about hiking up to Merciless Mike’s hideout. He should’ve been back by now.

  Emily knocked on the door to the bunkhouse, but there was no answer. A niggle of concern chilled the back of her neck.

  She went inside the farmhouse and checked in with her grandmother.

  Gertie was knitting in a chair by the front window where she could see all the ranch comings and goings, if there had been any. She closed the music box when Emily came in. “I made cookies.”

  “Have you seen Jonah?” Was he napping or showering after his hike?

  “Haven’t seen him since he left after lunch.”

  The second niggle of apprehension ran down Emily’s spine. She tried calling him on her cell phone. He answered, but all she heard was a garbled “I’m...” And then the line went dead. Two additional tries resulted in calls not going through.

  The last person to go up the mountain and not return as planned had been Kyle. A sense of urgency had Emily racing for the door. “I think he’s up on the mountain somewhere. I’m going out to find him.”

  “Take water and a med kit.” Granny Gertie was nothing if not sensible. “And be safe.”

  Assuring her she would be careful, Emily returned to the barn, saddling Razzy and Deadly. “He’s probably sitting up at the cemetery trying to intuit why Letty was a killer,” she told Razzy. “This’ll probably be a short ride.”

  “Hey.” Bo entered the barn. “Have you seen Jonah? I need to tell him something.”

  “No. I think...” Em choked up. “I think he’s missing.” She never should’ve let him go off alone.

  “Did you check his room?” Gertie called from the front porch. “I could’ve missed him return while I was making cookies.”

  “He didn’t answer before,” Em said.

  “He could’ve had his headphones on while he was writing.” Bo led the way back to the bunkhouse.

  If that had been the case, he’d have come out after the dropped call. Regardless, Emily knocked again, louder this time. When no one answered, they went inside.

  Jonah kept the interior as neat as he kept his appearance. There was no pile of dirty clothes in a corner. No scattering of toiletries in the small bathroom. Everything was stowed in his travel bag. His laptop sat closed on the kitchen table, plugged into a power strip. He had one of those slim printers there, too. And beside it were two stacks of papers. His script, she assumed.

  Emily glanced at the first page.

  The City Slicker and the Rodeo Queen.

  “What the...” She scanned the page, and then the next one. “He wrote about me. About us.” Mostly about her. Emily had to put a hand on the counter to hold herself up. “This is...personal.”

  Bo picked up the other script.

  Em was too upset to check what Jonah’s cousin held. The City Slicker and the Rodeo Queen wasn’t a script about Merciless Mike Moody and his sister Letty. It was a script about Emily and her quest to find a cowboy husband, aided by a clever matchmaker from Los Angeles.

  “All this time...” All this time she’d thought he was writing a Western. And instead, he’d been writing about her. She flipped to the end, having the foolish notion that maybe he’d have written them together on the last page. But no. His pages ended with Emily putting on a dress and hot pink cowboy boots and bringing Bo lemonade. “Unbelievable.” She dropped the manuscript on the table. “I feel so...exposed.”

  He held my hand. He kissed me.

  It was one thing to hear Jonah talk about writing things that happened in his life and another to be the topic of his work.

  Without my permission!

  She’d thought he cherished her. If she didn’t move... If she didn’t do something, she was going to be sick.

  “Do you know what this is?” Bo’s voice was cold and hard. He held up the other script.

  “No. And I don’t care.” She stomped out of the bunkhouse, intending to put the horses back in their stalls and let the man rot on the mountain.

  “It’s a script,” Bo said, still using that cold, hard voice as he followed her. “A story about Jonah, Aria and me. A flippin’ romance. And he keeps insisting he doesn’t want to write those anymore.”

  Technically, Bo’s story had been a tragedy. Emily stopped, turned, wished this wasn’t happening. “He wrote one about me and you, too.”

  Bo swore, pacing in a tight circle. “He always does this. He takes what happens around him and writes it into a script. Our childhood antics were immortalized in that sitcom he worked on. We were far enough removed from the events that it seemed amusing. But this...” His mouth set in a grim line.

  “Was he in there?” Gertie called, sitting in a rocker on the front porch.

  “No,” Emily snapped. She wished he had been. She couldn’t wait to lay into him.

  The nerve! The gall! The shame of it all.

  “You look like he was in there.” Gertie stopped rocking. “You look like you found him in a compromising position with another woman.”

  “He’s not here!” Emily shouted. “He’s out somewhere. If I’m lucky, he’ll have been eaten by a bear or...” She’d been about to say trampled by a wild bull, but that was too cruel a wish, even to wish upon someone as shallow and uncaring as Jonah.

  “I recognize that look on your face.” Granny got to her feet, using her cane for leverage. “You’re considering something foolish.”

  Emily stopped at the barn door, torn between rescuing Jonah, only so that she could give him what for, or letting him try to save himself.

  “We Clarks always do the honorable thing,” Gertie reminded her.

  For once, mired as she was in anger and hurt, Emily didn’t want to be a Clark. She wanted to be selfish and spiteful. She wanted to rail and belittle. That wasn’t the Clark way. It wasn’t the way of a rodeo queen, either. But that didn’t change the fact that there was a growing pit of bitterness seething in her belly.

  “I...” She couldn’t tell Gertie she’d fallen in love with a manipulative con man. It was too painful to admit.

  “He doesn’t deserve a rescue,” Bo said in a voice that matched Emily’s. “But we’re going to do it because we’re better than he is.”

  Em nodded, heading to the tack room. “We’re going to need another horse.”

  * * *

  JONAH WAS LOST.

  One tree was looking like another.

  And it wasn’t like he could open an Uber app and request a ride back to the ranch.

  He’d just keep going downhill until he hit the highway and then he’d figure out where he was.

  “Jonah!”

  He’d finished his water an hour ago. He was parched and probably imagining things.

  “Jonah!”

  He stopped thrashing through the underbrush and listened.

  “Jonah!” Emily was visible, riding Deadly on the slope above him. And behind her was Bo, riding Franny’s horse, Danger.

  “Over here!” Jonah waved his arms. He thrashed his way onto the narrow track she was using, stopping in a clearing wide enough for all three horses. “I ran into your future Buttercup and let him have the right of way on the fire road. I thought I knew the way back but—”

  “You thought you were lost and about to die in the woods.” There was no relief on Emily’s expression or
in her words, only pain and anger. “I can see it on your face.”

  “That would be the big yellow streak he tries to keep hidden.” Bo was just as angry as Emily.

  “I’m sorry you had to take time out of your day to find me. My cell is one big dropped call.” Jonah was certain they’d been worried when he hadn’t returned to the ranch on time. He stared up at Emily, at brown eyes ringed with red rather than worry, at the firm set of her mouth. And then he studied his cousin’s face, the slash of lips, the bunching of biceps. He smiled, trying to defuse the tension. “I appreciate you coming to my rescue. Although I’d have made it to the highway. Eventually.”

  Neither one of them took his words and made a joke out of it.

  Jonah’s smile fell. “Has something happened? Is everyone okay at the ranch or...?” He glanced at Bo, looking for bad news about the Monroe family.

  Bo stared at Jonah as if he could see right through him, as if there was nothing inside Jonah he wanted to see.

  “Get on.” Emily handed Razzy’s reins to Jonah.

  Everyone was all right, then. “Did I leave the teakettle on?” Had he burned down the bunkhouse?

  My laptop.

  He refused to panic. He’d written the draft of the script on his phone and his other work wouldn’t see the light of day. He waited to hear what had happened. And then waited a bit more. The birds in the trees had more to say than Bo and Emily.

  “Where am I?” Jonah gave Razzy a friendly pat on the neck by way of greeting. “Besides in trouble with you two.”

  Neither one of them denied it. But neither one of them explained, either.

  Jonah slid his arms through the backpack straps and then climbed into Razzy’s saddle. Now that he was safe, the triumphant feeling he’d found on Lookout Ridge returned. “The good news—besides being found before nightfall—is that I’ve solved the plot of the Mike Moody story.”

  The three horses stood close in the clearing, but Bo had his force field fully charged and in place while Emily looked ready to launch a nuclear initiative at Jonah. He had to be patient and wait for them to unleash.