Blame It On The Cowboy

Not exactly a pleasant reminder.

Reese stood to excuse herself so she could go lie down on the air mattress. Jimena wouldn’t even question it, thank God, but before Reese could say anything, she heard the movement in the still-open doorway.

“All the stuff is gone,” Reese said, figuring this was just another neighbor responding to her “free stuff” sign that she had taped on the side of the apartment complex’s mailboxes.

But it wasn’t a neighbor.

It was Dr. Gutzman.

Since Reese had never seen the stocky gray-haired man outside his office and never dressed in anything but a white coat, it took her a moment to realize who he was. Another moment for her to think the worst.

“Did you come to tell me there’ll be no radiation, after all?” Reese managed to ask.

He opened his mouth, closed it. Then nodded. “You won’t be having radiation,” he confirmed.

As much as Reese was dreading the treatments—and she was indeed dreading them—they’d been the tiny sliver of hope. Her 2 percent chance of survival. Of course, she hadn’t truly embraced that sliver, but now Dr. Gutzman had just taken it away.

“I’d rather not die in a hospital,” Reese volunteered.

Jimena stood and took hold of her hand. Reese could feel the bits of sticky Cheetos on her friend’s fingers.

The doctor nodded, came in and eased the door shut. He glanced around the nearly empty room and frowned. Perhaps because of the junk-food stash.

“You’re not going to die in a hospital,” he said. “At least, not in the next week or so from an inoperable brain tumor.”

Reese was still on the page of thinking the worst. “Does that mean I’m going to die even sooner?”

He huffed, glanced around as if this were the last place he wanted to be. “There was a glitch with the new electronic records system. Your images got mixed up with another patient. When I realized the mistake, I had a look at yours, and other than an enlarged left sinus cavity, you’re fine.”

Reese couldn’t speak. She just stared at him, waiting for the other shoe to drop. The doctor didn’t look like a prankster, but maybe this was his idea of a really bad joke.

“Did you hear me?” he asked.

She had. Every word. And Reese was desperately trying to process something that just wasn’t processing in her mind.

“So, there’s really nothing wrong with her?” Jimena asked.

“Nothing. She’s as healthy as a horse.”

Reese hadn’t been around too many horses to know if they were especially healthy or not, but she would take the doc’s news as gospel.

Right after she threw up, that is.

God, she was going to live.

* * *

LOGAN SLAMMED DOWN the phone. Jason Murdock, his friend and the rancher Logan had been buying stock from for years, had just given Logan a much-too-sweet deal on some Angus.

Hell.

Much more of this and Logan was going to beat the crap out of somebody. Especially the next person who was overly nice to him or gave him a sweet deal on anything.

For the past three months since the mess with Helene, nearly everybody who called or came into the office was walking on sonofabitching eggshells around him, and it not only pissed him off, it was disrespectful.

He’d run McCord Cattle Brokers since he was nineteen, since his folks had been killed in a car crash, and he’d run it well. In those early years people had questioned his ability to handle a company this size.

Silently questioned it, anyway.

But Logan had built the image and reputation he needed to make sure those questions were never spoken aloud. He’d done that through ball-busting business practices where nobody but nobody walked on eggshells. Yet, here they were all still doing just that. After three months.

Not just his family, either.

He’d halfway expected it from Riley, Claire, Lucky and Cassie because they’d been at the scene of what Lucky was calling the great proposal fuckup. Logan expected it, too, from his assistant, Greg Larkin, since he was the sort who remembered birthdays and such shit.

But everybody in Spring Hill who’d had a reason to come to Logan’s office door had looked at him with those sad puppy-dog eyes. He could only imagine how bad it was when those puppy-eyed people weren’t right in front of him. All the behind-the-hand whispers were no doubt mumbles about poor, pitiful Logan and what Helene had done to him.

Logan tried to make a note on the business contract he was reading and cursed when his pen didn’t work. He yanked open his desk drawer with enough force to rip it from its runners, and got another reminder he didn’t want.

That blasted gold watch.

Why he still had it, Logan didn’t know, but every time he saw it he remembered his night with Julia. Or whatever the hell her name was. She should have been nothing but a distant memory now and soon would be once he found her and returned the blasted watch. Until then, he moved it to his bottom drawer next to the bottle of Glenlivet he kept there.

Of course, if it hadn’t been for the Glenlivet, he probably wouldn’t have slept with Julia and wouldn’t have had the watch in the first place.

Logan moved it to the bottom drawer on the other side.

Damn it all to hell!

The engagement ring was still there, too. The bottom drawers of his desk were metaphorical land mines, and this time he made a note. Two of them.

Get rid of the ring.

Find Julia and have someone return the watch.

Logan didn’t want the ring around because he was over Helene. And as for the watch—he didn’t want it around in case there was something to the blackmail/extortion theory he’d had about her. Even though it had been three months since their encounter, that didn’t mean she wasn’t out there plotting some way to do something he wasn’t going to like. That’s why he’d hired a private investigator to find her, but so far the PI had come up empty.

“Don’t,” Logan barked when Lucky appeared in the doorway of his office.

He hadn’t heard his brother coming up the hall, but since Lucky was wearing his good jeans and a jacket, it probably meant he was there for a meeting. Lucky certainly wouldn’t have dressed up just to check on him.

“Don’t interrupt you, or don’t draw my next breath?” Lucky asked. He bracketed his hands on the office door, cocked his head to the side.

“Both if you’re here to talk about anything that doesn’t involve a cow, bull or a horse.”

“How about bullshit?”

Logan looked up from the contract to see if Lucky was serious. He appeared to be. Just in case, Logan decided to clarify. “Bullshit that’s not specifically related to anything that involves my ex?”