Cowboy Come Home Read online

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

  Copyright © 2020 by Carol Pavliska

  Rocky Mountain Cowboy copyright © 2018 by Sara Richardson

  Cover photography by Rob Lang. Cover design by Elizabeth Turner Stokes. Cover copyright © 2020 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  Hachette Book Group supports the right to free expression and the value of copyright. The purpose of copyright is to encourage writers and artists to produce the creative works that enrich our culture.

  The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like permission to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), please contact [email protected]. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  Forever

  Hachette Book Group

  1290 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10104

  read-forever.com

  twitter.com/readforeverpub

  First Edition: March 2020

  Forever is an imprint of Grand Central Publishing. The Forever name and logo are trademarks of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

  The publisher is not responsible for websites (or their content) that are not owned by the publisher.

  The Hachette Speakers Bureau provides a wide range of authors for speaking events. To find out more, go to www.hachettespeakersbureau.com or call (866) 376-6591.

  ISBNs: 978-1-5387-6347-6 (mass market), 978-1-5387-6346-9 (ebook)

  E3-20200106-DA-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Epilogue

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Carly Bloom

  Praise for Big Bad Cowboy

  Rocky Mountain Cowboy by Sara Richardson

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Look for more Sara Richardson books!

  Looking for more hot cowboys? Forever has you covered!

  To Jasper.

  You and this book share a birthday

  (albeit sixteen years apart).

  Yours was the easier delivery.

  Explore book giveaways, sneak peeks, deals, and more.

  Tap here to learn more.

  Acknowledgments

  I think a couple of ghosts helped me write this book. Actually, that might be a stretch. I think a couple of ghosts laughed their asses off while I wrote this book.

  My granddaddy, Jim Weaver, was ranch foreman and manager for the B.B. Dunbar Cattle Company until the day he retired to Uvalde, Texas. You can read stories about him and his horse, Coco, in old copies of The Cattleman magazine. It is said he was one of the finest cowboys in the country, and I think folks are referring to the entire country, not just the country of Texas.

  I’m sorry I never met my uncle Worth (I only know him from a photograph), but my uncle Gene was all the uncle I needed. Like my grandfather, he was a ranch foreman and manager. He taught me to two-step, had a cowdog named Son (short for Son of a Bitch), and never wore his Stetson in the house (or set it on the bed). I never saw him in a short-sleeved shirt, even on our trips to the Texas coast, where he scuffed up the deck of my dad’s boat with his cowboy boots.

  In addition, I enjoyed support from a few of the living, most of whom probably wished they were dead by the time I typed “the end.” I simply can’t thank Madeleine Colavita, my editor, enough. She wrangled a very wild and unruly manuscript, somehow turning it into a book. I’m pretty sure she regularly screams into a pillow. And God bless my agent, Paige Wheeler. I know she gets tired of telling me I’m pretty, but she does it anyway (it’s her job—another day, another dollar/existential crisis).

  Thank you to my copyeditor, Lori Paximadis, master of math, Spanglish, and the space-time continuum. Thank you to Bob Castillo for his patience, and thank you to Estelle Hallick for promoting my books with such boundless enthusiasm (she’s my favorite Disney princess).

  Thank you to authors Amy Bearce, Alison Bliss, Sam Tschida, and Erin Quin for their support. Writing is hard, but these women understand that I like to think it’s harder for me. And thank you to Jessica Snyder, who is very good at pretending I’m fine.

  Thank you to Carolyne, Anne, and Gemma for entertaining my Facebook readers’ group, Carly’s Bloomers. And thank you to the Bloomers for their encouragement and loyalty, especially Natasha, who named Baby Blake! Thank you to my family for believing in me and loving me and never telling me it’s time to get dressed. Special thanks to Camille for helping me tweak a Cinderella moment by saying “Nobody loses a whole ass boot!” But most of all, thank you to my readers. Big Verde was just a place in my weird imagination until you turned that first page and put it on the map.

  Chapter One

  Claire Kowalski gazed across the table at Chad, her latest Sizzle match, and wished she’d swiped left instead of right. It wasn’t his looks, because he was tall and trim with a full head of brown hair and a sexy Prince Charming cleft in his chin. It was literally everything else.

  They’d suffered through enough stilted conversation during the appetizers to last Claire a lifetime.

  You sell respiratory equipment? How exciting!

  She’d worked hard at keeping her eyes from glazing over. He seemed equally unimpressed by her job at Petal Pushers, a nursery and landscaping business owned by her best friend, Maggie. But her rock climbing seemed to have piqued his interest.

  “When you say rock climbing, you mean those walls in fitness centers, right? There are a few of them here in Austin.” He winked at her and grinned.

  She dabbed the corner of her mouth with a linen napkin, trying not to show her irritation with Chad, who really hadn’t done a thing wrong other than be himself.

  “I use walls for training, but I climb real rocks. Big ones. I’m the president of the Texas Hill Country Rock Climbers Association.”

  Chad raised his eyebrows. “So, like, you climb up sheer rock walls and stuff? I thought you had to be pretty strong to do that.”

  His eyes di
pped down to Claire’s ample cleavage. She shouldn’t have forgone the “Sunday safety pin” she often used with the pretty blue wrap dress.

  She didn’t have the typical lean, athletic build of a rock climber. She was tall and curvy, and with what her mother referred to as a “shock” of red hair, she was easy to spot on a cliff. But looks aside, climbing required strength and agility, as did loading saplings and shrubs onto flatbed trucks, or holding down a calf who’d managed to get a strip of baling wire wrapped around its leg, which she’d done on her family’s ranch earlier today.

  Claire placed her napkin back in her lap, noticing the small angry puncture the baling wire had made in her palm. Her hands were the only things that might offer a hint as to her toughness. They were definitely not as soft and flawless as her carefully moisturized face, but her nails were freshly painted.

  She picked up her fork, took a bite of dry salmon, and downed it with a substantial sip of merlot. “I’m no expert, but I’ve done some class five climbs.”

  She waited for him to ask what qualified as a class 5 climb. That’s how this worked. It’s your turn.

  “I’m a runner,” he said.

  They were back to Chad’s favorite subject: himself. That’s pretty much all he’d talked about for the past twenty minutes.

  “I see a lot of trail runners when I’m climbing,” Claire said. “Do you run on trails?”

  “I run at the gym,” he said. “And I do CrossFit, of course.”

  “Of course.” She squinted over her wineglass, which had miraculously worked its way back to her lips and concluded (a) he was everything she’d chalked him up to be, (b) his healthy glow came from a tanning bed, and (c) she might have to fake a text from her dying grandmother.

  “This is Kobe beef, you know,” Chad said, pointing to his plate. “You should have gotten the steak.”

  “That’s not Kobe,” Claire said. Kobe was extremely rare, and most places that claimed to sell it were outright lying. They got away with it because there were an awful lot of people willing to be duped if it made them feel special.

  Including her.

  Two years ago, she’d fallen for a sexy, wandering cowboy named Ford Jarvis. He’d made her feel so stupidly special that she’d thought he might actually settle down. Ha! Zebras didn’t change their stripes. Especially if they were dumbass cowboys, and even if they’d taken you home to meet their mother.

  Ford had told her he’d never settle down. Not in a town. Not on a ranch. And not with a woman.

  Put that on a bumper sticker, cowboy.

  She’d been duped, and then she’d been dumped.

  Now Ford was back in town. More specifically, he was back on her ranch.

  Temporarily, of course.

  Claire only had to survive the next six weeks. How hard could that be?

  She desperately needed a distraction. Unfortunately, the only thing distracting about Chad was a bit of arugula stuck in his teeth.

  Chad took a sip of wine. Would it free the arugula? He swallowed and smiled. Nope! That piece of lettuce was holding on like a grasshopper on a windshield wiper.

  “Well, a guy from the gym told me they serve Kobe here. And I’m pretty familiar with what constitutes a fine cut of beef.” Chad picked up his knife and poked at his steak. “Look at this beautiful marbling.”

  “Marbling is just fat, and it’s usually the result of corn feeding, which is not very good for the animal or the person consuming it. Have you ever been to a feed lot? Have you ever smelled one?”

  “You act like you grew up on a ranch.”

  Claire sat up straight, pride swelling in her chest. “That’s because I did. My family owns Rancho Cañada Verde.”

  The ranch had been in the Kowalski family for five generations, and at twelve thousand acres, it was no small family farm. In recent years, it had become a household name among the growing organic, grass-fed market, and Claire’s expertise—she had a degree in fashion merchandising—had played a big part in it. It didn’t matter whether you were pushing pencil skirts or skirt steaks, it was all about branding and positioning. She was good at marketing. Because of her, the ranch’s brand was even gracing grocery store shelves on the labels of salad dressings, salsas, and marinades.

  “Never heard of your ranch,” Chad said. “Where is it?”

  “It’s in Big Verde, which is about an hour southwest of here.”

  Big Verde was barely a pinprick on the map, but thanks to the beautiful Rio Verde and its various springs and swimming holes, it attracted a fair number of tourists.

  “I think we rented a cabin there once,” Chad said.

  “Really? Do you know who owned it?”

  Chad shook his head, as if he could barely remember the cabin, much less the owner.

  “There’s an adorable little Airstream trailer on Rancho Cañada Verde that we used to rent to tourists,” Claire said. “But I live in it now.”

  She’d optimistically moved out of her parents’ ranch house in the hope that she’d need privacy for herself and the Prince Charming she’d find on Sizzle. But so far, the only person to experience the new Egyptian cotton sheets and their ridiculously high thread count in the trailer’s newly renovated loft bed was her.

  “You live on your parents’ property? In a trailer?”

  “The ranch is twelve thousand acres.”

  Chad stared blankly.

  “It’s a fifteen-minute drive from my trailer to my parents’ house,” she said. “It’s hardly a camper in the backyard.”

  Claire didn’t go into how the refurbished trailer, which she’d named Miss Daisy, had appeared in a magazine spread featuring unique Texas getaways. And although it wasn’t anywhere near her parents’ house, it was pretty dang close to the foreman’s cabin.

  Claire’s eyes were on Chad, but every cell in her body vibrated like a tiny traitorous compass pointing toward Ford. She could literally feel the man’s pull.

  He was probably already done unpacking his measly belongings—Ford bragged that everything he owned fit in the back of his pickup with room to spare—and not thinking about her at all.

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a small-town country girl,” Chad said. His eyes dipped down to her chest again, as if small-town girls were also expected to have small boobs.

  Claire gently tugged at her neckline and gave Chad the steely gaze she’d learned from her father. Big Verde men might not have fancy gym memberships, but they knew not to stare at a woman’s chest.

  Chad cleared his throat. “Do you have cows and stuff on your ranch?” he asked, shoveling another bite of steak into his mouth.

  Cows and stuff were what turned a chunk of land into a ranch. “Yes. And I typically don’t eat anything with four legs unless I knew it by name. Or at least its tag number.”

  “That’s kind of…morbid, isn’t it?” Chad shuddered a little.

  Maybe a little, and it was probably why she tended not to eat beef. “I consider myself a pescatarian, for the most part.”

  “Pescatarian? Your profile says you’re Baptist,” Chad said. “I’m pretty sure they eat meat.”

  Claire lifted her wineglass. “It’s drinking they don’t do.”

  She checked the time. How had it only been six minutes since the last time she’d looked? She set her phone down only to see Chad pick his up. He was probably looking at more Sizzle profiles.

  Yep. His thumb swiped right.

  Claire cleared her throat, and Chad hastily set his phone down. “Sorry,” he said. “A message from my grandmother.”

  Claire raised an eyebrow. She’d offer a few more discussion prompts for Chad before politely declining dessert, coffee, and—if she was reading him right—fellatio. Then she’d chalk him up as another Sizzle “fizzle” and be on her way.

  Chad cracked his knuckles. Maybe he would be the one to end the date early. “I was thinking we could go back to my place after dessert.”

  Claire folded her arms across her chest and placed her napkin
on the table. “This has been fun, Chad, but I really need to be getting back—”

  “What for? What could possibly be happening in Little Big Town that you need to get back to?”

  Somebody really wanted his blowjob.

  Claire could have explained that Big Verde was in for some weather tonight—thunderstorms coming from the east—but instead, she dug in her purse and pulled out two twenty-dollar bills. She dropped them on the table and then slammed back the last of her wine. “Dang,” she said. “That’s a decent merlot.”

  * * *

  Thunder rumbled through the Texas Hill Country as Ford Jarvis leaned back in his kitchen chair, balancing on two legs. It had been raining on and off all day and, according to Gerome Kowalski, had been doing so for the better part of a week, making the ranch soggy as hell.

  Beau Montgomery, head herdsman, was taking credit for it. He’d killed two rattlesnakes in one day and hung them on the fence.

  You’ve got to put them belly-up if you want it to rain.

  Cowboys were a superstitious lot when it came to the weather. Heck, they were a superstitious lot period. And although Ford liked to poke fun, he was no exception. When he’d seen two heifers in the creek-side pasture running with their tails up this afternoon, his first thought had been, Here comes a flood.

  And the first thing he’d done when he’d moved into the cabin was turn the horseshoe over the door right-side up, because everybody knew an upside-down horseshoe was bad luck.

  He glanced out the window and thought about those heifers. The ground was saturated, the creeks were full, and if the sky opened up, they might, indeed, see some flash flooding. He checked the weather radar on his phone.

  He let out a low whistle that earned him a glare from Oscar. While some guys had friendly dogs to ride in the back of their pickups, Ford had a mean, bony cat.

  “Damn,” he said. “Things are about to get worse.”

  Oscar pulled his tiny ears back tightly against his head.

  The scraggly cat had shown up on a stormy night much like this one while Ford was living on a ranch outside of Sonora. He hadn’t wanted to take the nasty creature with him when he’d left for Wichita Falls, but he’d been afraid the other ranch hands would let the poor thing starve. Same story when he’d moved to El Paso, and from El Paso to Big Verde.