A Montana Cowboy

A Montana Cowboy
Rebecca Winters

A Cowboy’s LegacyTen years ago, Trace Rafferty left Montana to serve his country. Now the wounded Navy flyer is coming back to sell the only home he’s ever known. But someone else is living on his hundred-year-old family ranch—a woman Trace hasn’t seen since she was a teenager. How can he turn attractive, widowed–and pregnant–Cassie Bannock out of her home?Cassie knows her housekeeping days on the Rafferty spread are numbered. Yet she can’t believe Trace would turn his back on his heritage. In or out of uniform, the former F-16 pilot is still the handsomest man she’s ever seen. Without a true home, in addition to a real and looming threat to her and her unborn baby, can Cassie protect her legacy and help a homecoming cowboy claim his?

“You’re so good to me.”

Their mouths were achingly close. He brushed his lips against hers out of need. “It’s because you’re so easy to please I want to do everything for you.”

“Trace …” This time she took the initiative and pressed her lips against his. That was all it took to deprive him of his last shred of self-control. Maybe he was dreaming, but her mouth seemed to welcome his, urging him to kiss her and hold nothing back.

He pulled her against him, loving the shape of her, the fragrance of her hair, the softness of her skin. She’d aroused his passion on so many levels, he didn’t know how he was going to stop, but he had to. He could feel her baby. Much as he wanted to make love to her, he couldn’t. This wasn’t the time, or the place. Cassie needed to be able to trust him.

Let go of her now, Rafferty.

A Montana Cowboy

Rebecca Winters

www.millsandboon.co.uk (http://www.millsandboon.co.uk)

REBECCA WINTERS, whose family of four children has now swelled to include five beautiful grandchildren, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the land of the Rocky Mountains. With canyons and high alpine meadows full of wildflowers, she never runs out of places to explore. They, plus her favorite vacation spots in Europe, often end up as backgrounds for her romance novels, because writing is her passion, along with her family and church.

Rebecca loves to hear from readers. If you wish to e-mail her, please visit her website, cleanromances.com (http://cleanromances.com).

To my editor Kathleen, who allows me

to write the books of my heart. What joy!

Contents

Cover (#uadd7e739-985d-5a1f-aa29-42a161865905)

Introduction (#u98b492c0-7185-5432-8884-2a374a0af807)

Title Page (#u0ed79fec-b3ae-5654-b90f-541370ab7085)

About the Author (#u900af426-52c8-513e-8076-b0ac6272adda)

Dedication (#u773cca2b-3c99-5e20-8a48-342f210b5313)

Chapter One (#u8650e093-bdab-5f7d-ba1e-62dd8ef63391)

Chapter Two (#u8611d447-941e-5a90-a5fe-f7d64cfba237)

Chapter Three (#u1f198935-83cd-56b3-be18-b8176ac89d56)

Chapter Four (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Ten (#litres_trial_promo)

Extract (#litres_trial_promo)

Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter One (#ulink_f9587b00-c071-5042-9a00-cc0f1496fd9e)

Captain Trace Rafferty of the Thirty-First Fighter Wing out of Aviano Air Base was coming home for good, much sooner than he’d expected.

Since leaving Italy, where his squadron had flown F-16s critical to operations in NATO’s southern region, he’d been in Colorado Springs, Colorado, for the past few days talking with the higher-ups. Having been forced to retire as a jet pilot from the Air Force at twenty-eight due to an eye injury, he’d decided to accept a flight instructor position at the Air Force Academy.

Trace had been asked to stay on with the Thirty-First as a flight navigator, but after being a pilot, he couldn’t do it. The Academy was giving him time to get his affairs in order before he went to work for them. He would use this time to tell his father about his future plans...plans his father wasn’t going to be happy about.

Sam Rafferty, known as Doc, was a cowboy and rancher besides being the head veterinarian in White Lodge, Montana. A year ago he’d married Ellen Neerings, a pretty brunette widow from the same town, and they lived in a condo. His arthritic hips had made it impossible for him to live and take care of things on the ranch any longer.

Ellen’s husband had died several years earlier. With the sale of their small family home, she’d been able to pay off mounting debts because of her husband’s long illness, but she’d been left with little to live on.

Both she and Trace’s father had sacrificed too much for their families. His dad should have the money from the sale of the ranch to buy him and Ellen a new house of their own in White Lodge with every convenience. She had two married children and needed more space for them and her grandchildren when they came to visit from other parts of the state.

Since Trace wasn’t going to live in Montana, selling the ranch was the only sensible solution to make his father’s life more comfortable, but he knew it was a subject that would bring his dad pain. The ranch, located in the south central part of the state bordering Wyoming, had been in the Rafferty family for close to a hundred years. Trace hated the fact that his father had done so much for him all his life, virtually supporting him and his mother, even after she’d remarried. It was Trace’s turn to give back.

His parents had divorced when he was eight years old. His mother had settled in Billings, only forty minutes away, taking him with her. She didn’t like the ranch’s isolation and preferred the amenities of living in town.

His dad had moved heaven and earth to be with his son as much as possible during those years. After living with such a kind, laid-back father, it had been hard for Trace to adjust to being around the rigid-type man his mother married soon after the divorce. When Trace turned eighteen, he joined the air force. His mom now lived in Oregon with her husband.

Trace hadn’t come back to the United States very often and traveled home to visit his parents on his infrequent leaves. Over the past year the ranch had stood empty. While no one lived there, his dad had hired a former ranch hand named Logan Dorney from the neighboring Bannock ranch to be the foreman on the place until Trace claimed it for his inheritance. But Trace learned the other man had been accidentally killed by a stray bullet from a hunter in February.

Except for Logan’s widow, Cassie Dorney, formerly Cassie Bannock, who came in to do the housekeeping once in a while, the ranch no longer had a foreman. Trace would take over that job until the place was sold. Again, all this had to be discussed with his father who knew nothing yet about Trace’s plans.

When the fasten-seat-belt sign flashed on, he’d been deep in thought. It surprised him that the flight from Denver to Montana had been so short. He looked out the window. As the plane made its descent to the Billings airport, he decided summer was the best time to see the patches of wheat and corn fields. Below him lay a different mosaic from the farms dotting the Italian countryside he’d so recently left.

Soon the Yellowstone River came into view under a June sun. The airport itself sat on top of Rimrock, a unique five-hundred-foot-tall sandstone feature rising from the valley floor. It all looked familiar, but Trace felt little sense of homecoming.

After the jet landed and he’d picked up his bags, he grabbed a taxi and asked the driver to take him to the Marlow Ford dealership where he’d arranged to have his new Ford Explorer waiting for him. He inspected the vehicle and liked its Kodiak-brown color.

Trace took off for White Lodge, anxious to spend a little quality time with his father. It had been six months since they’d last seen each other. But when he dropped by the vet clinic, the new vet, Clive Masters, who’d replaced Liz Henson since her marriage to Connor Bannock, said Trace’s dad was out on an emergency.

The world he’d once known kept going through changes. You couldn’t go back and find everything the same. He understood that, but the thought added to his depression.

“Doc Rafferty has been expecting you. He said if you came while he was gone, he wants you to drive out to the ranch and get settled. When he’s through, he’ll meet you there.”