Winning The Cowboy's Heart

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

CHAPTER ONE (#u3d7b7885-4653-57cf-8b88-a23f35832bb2)

“THANK YOU FOR coming out tonight, Carbondale!” Heath Loveland shouted into the mic at Silver Spurs, the town honky-tonk. A drumroll behind him, followed by a cymbal crash, punctuated his closing set’s final remark. His bass player, Clint, hammered a quick, throbbing beat.

Heath loosened his sweaty grip on his Fender and peered into the throng of country-western-dressed locals, searching out his MIA fiancée. No surprise she hadn’t shown. In fact, it would have been a surprise if she had, seeing as she disapproved of his gigging. “We hope you had a good time tonight.”

Raucous hoots and hollers rose to the exposed-beam rafters in answer. Stamping feet vibrated the dusty wooden floor. Water streamed down condensation-covered windows while overhead fans stirred humid air reeking of beer, body odor and peanuts. Beneath Heath’s Wranglers and black muscle shirt, sweat slicked his body.

A wide smile creased his face as he absorbed the room’s electric energy. Playing for hyped crowds was like a hit of pure sunshine; it lit him up with the force of a solar blast. Hardworking folks watched his band, Outlaw Cowboys, to forget about life for a while, and he gave them that amnesia: a hat-raising, boot-stomping, tail-swishing night out.

“We love you!” a pair of cowgirls in Daisy Dukes screamed from the front row.

He tipped his black cowboy hat, earning him another earsplitting screech, and ignored Clint’s eye roll. Not a night went by that Clint didn’t gripe about renaming their band the Heath Loveland Fan Club. Heck. Wasn’t like Heath could do anything about it. They followed him from show to show. What’s more, he’d never get involved with groupies, even if he wasn’t already spoken for...though he supposed their attention figured into Kelsey’s demand he quit gigging and “grow up,” as she put it...

...and set a date for their wedding.

A heaviness clamped around his chest. He slid a finger along his damp T-shirt collar, stretching it from his steaming neck. She’d be fit to be tied if he told her about this morning’s call from Nashville. And she’d never agree...

“Marry me, Heath!” an unfamiliar female voice hollered.

With a wink, he strummed a quick open-string scale, then cranked a tuning peg to sharpen his G, sending his hovering female fans into a tizzy of squeals and shrieks. “How about a little Johnny Cash to finish us out?”

“Yeah!” roared a pack of men near the bar. They raised their overflowing mugs.

Heath strummed the opening notes of “Folsom Prison Blues” and caught his bandmates’ surprised expressions from the corner of his eye as they scrambled to catch up. Usually they closed with one of the band’s originals. Yet this cover popped in his head and shot straight to his fingertips before he’d given it conscious thought.

He played close to the bridge for added twang as he growled out the opening verse. The gravelly words were dredged from a dark well inside him. Low and deep. He was stuck, trapped, he crooned, listening to the train going by without him. His chest ached. His eyes stung. Like every tune he performed, he experienced the song’s pain, loss, regret, becoming the music, the notes pouring from him like an open wound.

He grabbed his Fender’s headstock and bent it back, strumming low on the E string so the notes arced as they flew. When he hit the bridge, his foot stomped on his Boss compressor to give it lots of swells. Behind him, Remmy, his drummer, pounded a driving beat while Clint thrummed the deep bow-wow-wow bass line that vibrated your body, your organs, your cells even.

His gaze swept the stomping crowd as he sang and stopped dead on a pair of luminous brown eyes. It wasn’t so much the shape that caught his attention, though they were enormous in her freckled face or the thick fringe of lashes surrounding them—it was their ferocious expression. A fierce hunger and an aching vulnerability directed not so much at him but at his music...which was him...the person few really saw.

Jewel Cade.

His new stepsister.

His fingers stumbled and missed the eight fret when he changed chords. Heat swamped his face. He tore his attention from Jewel and muted the strings with the side of his hand for the next seven bars before risking another glance.

Her magnetic eyes lifted from his guitar and clicked with his and in that moment, a strange sense of connection, a recognition, jolted through him. Despite the dim light, he spied her rapt expression. It softened her lean face, parted her full lips. She wasn’t just listening to music, she was breathing it in, was sustained by it, just like him.

Music was his life support. Once taken off it, would he survive?

He ripped into his guitar solo, hammering the B7 chord, adding extra flourishes as he kicked up the tempo.

“Where’s the fire?” Clint muttered close to Heath’s ear, jamming beside him, but Heath only played harder.

He shredded the notes, alternating octaves, grabbing the horn of the guitar and pulling the top into his stomach to bend them. Sweat rolled down the sides of his face and his muscle shirt clung to his torso. His fingers slid along the neck from one fret to the next. He toggled while he plucked up one note, then stroked down another, fast and tight, picking like a madman. One, two...eight phrases later, and he peered up from his guitar in Jewel’s direction. Was she impressed?

And why did he care about his new stepsister’s opinion?

Disappointment washed over him. She was gone. He kept strumming, continued singing, but his earlier excitement faded. A few minutes later, he ended the song with a rowdy flourish to roof-raising applause. Heath and the rest of the band broke down their equipment, loaded it in Remmy’s van and then sauntered back into Silver Spurs for some tall cool ones.

Clint signaled the bartender and ordered beer. “Who are you looking for?”

Heath quit craning his neck. “No one,” he lied. He sought out Jewel’s fire-engine red hair for no good reason except the connection sparking between them. Had he just imagined it?

Not that he’d pursue her, even if he weren’t already engaged. She wasn’t even his type. He liked gals who wore makeup and nail polish, who fixed their hair pretty and smelled like flowers. Soft and sweet. Jewel, on the other hand, was scrawny and hard-edged, a prickly tomboy cowgirl who preferred horses to people and was as approachable as a cactus. Not to mention they were now family, and he was engaged to a woman he was supposed to love forever.

“Last call!” shouted the bartender to the mostly cleared honky-tonk. He slid them three cans of Bud.

“Has Kelsey made any of our shows?” Remmy asked.

“She’s busy with work.” Heath gulped his beer and scanned the room again.

Kelsey, a tireless volunteer and fund-raiser at the local animal shelter and food shelf, also helped at her father’s ranching supply company, Hometown Ranching. When he and Kelsey married, she expected him to leave his family ranch, Loveland Hills, and join the business. He tugged at his limp collar again. Nothing against their enterprise, but working the open range left him free to sing to the cattle, compose songs by the campfire and gig in the local honky-tonks. He’d have to give it all up...

Once he agreed to a wedding date and said, “I do.”

Their families expected him and Kelsey to marry, seeing as they were high school sweethearts and got engaged after graduation ten years ago. Kelsey was sweet and generous, his first love. So what was stopping him from setting a wedding date with her? It’d make everyone happy...

“Can we get your autograph?” A trio of gals shimmied close, wriggling in their boots and fringed skirts as they stared Heath up and down like he was the last steak at a family reunion.

He shot them a giggle-inducing smile and signed the backs of their phone covers with an offered Sharpie. They flicked their hair and batted eyelashes long enough to scare a daddy longlegs.

“Call me, sexy.” One of them shoved a paper in his pocket before traipsing out the door, Silver Spurs’s last customers.

Heath read a cell number on the note followed by a <3 Jaimey and crumpled it up.

“Did you make up your mind about Nashville?” Clint snagged the paper, drained his brew and chucked the can in the recycle bin behind the bar.

“Hey!” groused Kevin, Silver Spurs’s owner. “Make yourselves useful and put up some chairs.”

“You got it.” Heath quit drinking, despite his dry, hoarse throat, and headed for tables grouped around a pool table.

“Do you ever say no?” Clint caught the dishrag Kevin hurled at him and wiped surfaces as Heath cleared.

“He’s a people pleaser.” One of the waitresses, June, held out her tray for the empties Heath collected. “My therapist says I’m one, too. Means you always make everyone else happy except yourself. That’s why I owe five hundred bucks to Pampered Chef.”

Clint slapped the dishrag on another table and swished it across the wet-ringed surface. “Are those pans solid gold?”

June laughed and her earrings, peeking from beneath a short pouf of strawberry blond hair, danced. “My friends threw parties all month. I had to order from each or I’d offend them.” She shifted her weight and sighed. “See? Can’t say no, just like Heath. Though that’s why we all love our heartbreaker.” Her nails lightly scraped his cheek as she patted it. “Just remember: ‘to please is a disease.’” She sashayed away.

“I’ve said no before.” Heath diligently stacked Kevin’s chairs, despite needing to get home for some shut-eye. In four hours, he’d be vaccinating calves alongside his brothers. He rubbed his gritty eyes, then hoisted another chair.