A Cowboy's Pride

Then the mother charged, fueled by maternal fury, surging at Boomer. The cattle dog expertly dodged her deadly hooves and scuttled clear.

Cole held up his hand, halting the collie’s retreat. They weren’t out of the woods yet. Best keep pressuring.

One eye on Boomer, the heifer sniffed her calf. Her tongue darted out and her rough lick tipped the newborn’s head.

“Atta girl,” Cole muttered, his chest loosening as he dragged in his first full breath in hours.

“Nicely done, son,” Boyd said and the rare praise from his stoic father caught Cole with unexpected warmth. Living life on the edge of personal and financial disaster had a way of threatening a man’s pride. He took his victories where he could. They’d saved the calf whose mother now lavished it with a thorough bathing.

Could they save the ranch, too?

“Looks like our work’s done.” Pa wheeled his horse around and nudged it into a walk down the rutted lane to their stable.

“I’ll keep checking on them.” Cole brought Cash up alongside his father’s mustang. Boomer kept pace.

Only the twittering of waking birds, and the clip of hooves striking hard ground, broke the silence. Overhead, the iridescent sky glowed. Light now striped the fallow fields awaiting this year’s planting, and their shadows rode ahead.

“I’ll stop down to First National at nine,” Cole said once they’d reached the stable and untacked the horses. The sweet smell of grain rose as he poured cornmeal into Cash’s feed bucket, a treat for the exhausted horse.

“No need to waste your time, son.” Cool water misted the air as Boyd filled the water troughs. Several horses hung their heads outside their stall doors, nosy about the early activity, nickering to the new arrivals.

“It’s not a waste.” Cole doled out halved apples to his siblings’ mounts. “If I can convince them to hold off a couple months, and we have a good season, we could turn things around.”

“I figured out another way without including the bank.” Boyd pulled the stable door shut behind them once they finished.

“Good to hear.” Cole glanced at his frowning father from the corner of his eye. Why didn’t Pa seem pleased?

“Not sure you’ll think so.” They ambled closer to the two-story homestead built by their ancestor, Colonel Archibald Loveland, an army veteran. He’d deserted from the Colorado War, married a Cheyenne interpreter and settled here over a hundred and thirty years ago, breathing life into the first of many Loveland scandals.

Must be in their blood.

“Why would I object?” Cole noticed a few green shoots alongside the fieldstone walkway to their front porch. With any luck, they might get three hay crops...

Boyd paused on the porch’s stairs. “Was approached by an outfit to do a story about our feud with the Cades. They’ll pay enough to cover our mortgage through the season if I give them access to the property.”

Cole leaned against the pine banister, absorbing his father’s news. Like the rest of the home, it’d been culled from the distant forests and hauled over great distances. Their ranch was a bastion against a landscape of forbidding mountains, its warm hearth and hand-hewn timber beams communicating self-reliance, simplicity and lack of pretentions. His heart swelled at the thought of what his ancestors had wrought.

They’d fight to their last breaths to safeguard their family’s legacy. But a story dredging up old scandals? It’d upset the tenuous peace between them and the Cades and jeopardize his father’s wedding. His hard-won happiness.

“What kind of outfit? Something local?” Cole’s hands tightened around the banister as he recalled the frenzied media who’d hounded his family after his mother’s death.

“Cable show.” For some reason, his pa seemed to have trouble meeting Cole’s eye.

“National TV?” Cole squinted into the strengthening sunshine and glimpsed an approaching black car bumping down their drive. “We don’t want them sniffing around the place, dragging out old skeletons.”

“Better than being thrown off our land before the wedding,” Pa countered.

Cole shoved his balled hands into his pockets, unable to counter the argument. “They’ll drag up stuff about Ma.”

The vehicle neared, its engine’s smooth purr sounding expensive, foreign. Out-of-towners. Someone lost?

“Got assurances to the contrary.” Boyd stepped off the porch and, to Cole’s astonishment, waved two hands overhead as if he expected whoever was driving.

“Who’s this?” Cole strode to his father’s side and peered at dark-tinted windows as the town car slid to a smooth stop.

“The show’s producer and host.”

“This is a done deal!” Cole exclaimed. “Why’d you keep it from me? Does anyone else know?”

The door opened and a fetching pair of slim, shapely legs in black heels emerged.

“Nope. You’re the first.”

A tall blonde ducked gracefully from the car. Something about her struck him as if he knew her, though he wasn’t sure with the sun backlighting her, casting her features in shadow.

“I don’t understand.”

A suited man joined the lady, and they stepped gingerly across the pebbled drive. She held her head high and stared directly at him.

“The show’s called Scandalous History,” Pa said, then hustled to greet his company.

Scandalous History... Now where had Cole heard of it?

Then it hit him, a sucker punch straight to the gut, leaving him off balance.

“Hello, Cole.”

His body stiffened at the familiar, silky-smooth voice. A flash of memory—listening to her speak as they’d watched campfires, stargazed, fly-fished—pulled a lump into his throat. He’d once thought her words sounded like lyrics, her laughter a song. He’d also thought she walked on water until she’d skated right out of his life.

He peered into the beautiful face he’d seen in his dreams, the one he envisioned while riding the range, gorgeous as ever with her perfectly symmetrical features and large blue eyes in a heart-shaped face. Only she looked different somehow. More sophisticated. Elegant. As if someone had slapped a coat of varnish over her natural beauty, making it harder to see who she really was...if he’d ever really known at all.

Old hurt stalked through him, residual anger on its heels. When she’d left, she’d nearly done him in. Was she back to finish the job? Not a chance.

His jaw clamped shut, and he spoke through gritted teeth, minding his manners for Pa’s sake until he got rid of her and the threat she posed to him and his family.

“Welcome home, Katie-Lynn.”

CHAPTER TWO (#uf565d4ba-a430-5d93-8122-1534b2b84435)

KATIE-LYNN.

Besides her family, no one had used her real name since she’d changed it to match her makeover. Katie-Lynn was another person, a ghost from her past.

In LA she was a star.

Remember that girl.

“Katie-Lynn, you’re as pretty as ever.” Boyd beamed at her as he pulled a can of coffee from a wooden cabinet. He hadn’t changed much. Sun streaming through the kitchen’s windows glowed on his thick white hair and highlighted unbowed shoulders in a flannel shirt. The extra lines on his craggy face added to his distinguished appearance.