Claimed by a Cowboy

Her mother had sighed, clearly skeptical. “Sure. I’ll be here.”

Reaching for the door to the conference room, Lorelei gave a quick shake of her head, her long dark hair swirling about her shoulders, and banished the memory of her impulsive promise. Now was the time to focus on the more pressing topic of risk management. One of the few women in her department, she was determined to distinguish herself among her colleagues. She straightened her spine and stepped into the office, her footsteps now swallowed by the plush carpet. But a last lingering stab of guilt pierced her. I’ll talk to my supervisor tomorrow about vacation time. Conscience appeased, Lorelei lost herself in the two-hour meeting, all thoughts of Texas and her mother pushed aside.

LORELEI WAS SEATED AT her desk, immersed in notes for a liability audit, when a male voice said, “Knock knock,” from the doorway. She glanced up to see Rick Caulden.

He flashed a knowing smile. “You forget about me again? Reservations? Tuesday night? Any of this ringing a bell?”

“Of course I remember. I’ve been looking forward to our dinner. I just thought you were going to call when you got here.” She enjoyed her periodic dates with the handsome attorney.

Employed by a law firm several blocks away, Rick worked as hard as she did. He was charming but refreshingly unsentimental. They shared the same pragmatic streak and career drive.

“Tried calling,” he said. “Kept going straight to voice mail, so I decided I should come up, find out if your meeting ran long and if I was on my own for dinner.”

“Oh, right—I turned my phone off before the meeting and totally forgot to turn it back on.” A mistake, or a Freudian slip? Had she deliberately left it off because she suspected Wanda would call back? Maybe Lorelei had been trying to avoid the guilt trip of feeling like an ungrateful daughter yet again.

As soon as Lorelei repowered the phone, a message bubble appeared. She frowned. “Wow, that’s a lot of missed calls.”

“At least three of them are me,” Rick said.

And the other six? “Hang on a sec.” She stood, gathering her purse and coat. “I just want to check voice mail before we go.”

“Sure.” He smirked. “I always make our reservations for fifteen minutes later than I tell you. I know how difficult it is to drag you out of the office.”

Under different circumstances, she might have pointed out that she spent an equal amount of time waiting on him or assuring him she didn’t mind canceling because he needed the extra time to prepare a motion or speak with a client. Right now, she was more concerned with her messages than Rick’s unexpected double standard.

Because of the 830 area code on the missed calls, Lorelei assumed her mother was phoning from one of the hotel lines instead of her private number. But it wasn’t Wanda’s voice that greeted her.

“Lorelei? I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Ava Hirsch.”

As if Lorelei had been gone so long she wouldn’t recall her mom’s best friend? Though Ava’s husband was of the vocal opinion that Wanda was “a gallon shy of a keg,” the two women had always been inseparable.

“I’m calling…” Ava stopped, sniffed and tried again. “I’m calling about your mother, dear.”

At the end of the sentence, Ava’s voice broke and the world tilted beneath Lorelei’s feet. She groped blindly for her chair.

“Lorelei? What is it?” Rick’s concern sounded miles away; Ava’s condolences were even more distant, fading beneath the pounding in Lorelei’s ears.

But Lorelei didn’t need to hear the rest of the message to know. She was going home to Fredericksburg, after all.

Chapter Two

Sam Travis was well-versed in the ghosts of Texas lore—he’d shared many a local legend with tourists around the campfire—but he’d never felt haunted until now.

No matter which room he moved to in the bed-and-breakfast, he still saw his landlady, eccentric Wanda Keller, who had been mothering him on and off for the past three years. Maybe I should have left with the others. As of this morning, there had been two other guests staying at the inn. Another proprietor in town had promptly offered them free rooms in light of the tragedy. Wanda had been well-liked in town, even by loners like Sam.

Sam worked multiple seasonal jobs that kept him in motion, but he always circled back to Wanda’s, helping her with minor repairs and enjoying her cooking for a week or so before leaving again. It had taken him over a year of just being able to show up, his usual room always vacant, before he’d realized that she held it perpetually open for him. When he’d insisted she shouldn’t do that, she’d called him dummkopf and responded that it was her inn and she’d do whatever she liked. This B and B, now painfully devoid of her presence, was the closest thing he’d had to a home since the dusty bunkhouse where his uncle had raised him.

But not close enough that he wanted to own the place. He recalled the shock on Ava Hirsch’s tear-streaked face that afternoon—it had mirrored his own.

“What do you mean, she left it to me?” Too flabbergasted to keep his voice down, Sam had earned angry glares from all the nearby nurses.

Behind her wire-rimmed glasses Ava’s eyes had been the size of poker chips. “You didn’t know? I never would have said anything. I thought…”

Sitting alone in the dimly lit kitchen hours later, Sam raised his half-finished beer in an affectionate toast. “Still meddling from the great beyond, Wanda?” She’d always nagged him to settle down. If Ava were right about the change to her friend’s will—something Sam still didn’t quite believe—then maybe it was Wanda’s gentle way of coercing him into putting down roots.

He shook his head at the asinine idea of him as a hotel manager. Granted, this was a very small hotel, but that made it worse. Guests expected a personal touch, that extra dose of folksy hospitality. On the trail, in his element, Sam did just fine with tourists as long as they followed his rules about the horses. Most clients who wanted to rough it had a certain expectation of what their guide would be like. His occasionally gruff demeanor fit the part. He didn’t have Wanda’s gracious nature. The first time some the-customer-is-always-right twit complained about sheet thread count or something equally ridiculous… Well, being raised by a cantankerous bachelor uncle was not the same as attending charm school.

Even though he wouldn’t be staying, he was touched by the gesture. If she had bequeathed him the inn, her intentions were good. Wanda may have been trying to give him a home—which was more than his actual mother had ever done—but she seemed to have overlooked that what he’d loved most about the inn was gone. He’d once got jalapeño juice in his eye, and it had burned like hellfire. His dry, unblinking eyes stung far worse now.

“Place won’t be the same without her,” Sam declared aloud.

A plaintive, otherworldly yowl of agreement came from the floor. Sam nearly jumped until he realized that the reclusive white cat had finally made an appearance—his first all night, although he’d halfheartedly eaten the small plate of food Sam pushed under the bed.

“You miss her, too, don’t you?” Sam reached down to scratch Oberon’s head, which the cat tolerated for a millisecond before scooting back, his ears flat and his yellow gaze suspicious. The feline had worshipped and adored Wanda Keller, but regarded all other human beings with contempt.

Sam might have made a sarcastic comment, such as telling the cat to have fun opening its own damn can of tuna tomorrow, except he couldn’t forget the pet’s distress earlier. It had been Oberon who had found Sam in the kitchen and let him know something was wrong, meowing anxiously, tail twitching, constantly glancing back over his shoulder, as if he wanted Sam to follow. Although Wanda normally rose at sunrise to roll out dough for breakfast, Sam had assumed she was sleeping in because of the bad headache she’d mentioned last night. He’d tried to help out by brewing coffee for everyone and putting boxes of cereal around the bowl of fresh fruit on the dining room table.

Sam had followed the cat to her room, but there was nothing to be done. She’d gone in her sleep; the doctors diagnosed a ruptured brain aneurysm. When the paramedics had tried to take the body, Oberon had launched himself at them in hissing attack. Attempts to get hold of the cat had proven futile, and the feline disappeared under Wanda’s bed, where he’d begun a low, spine-tingling wail. When Sam had returned from the hospital, Oberon had still been there, his cry hoarser than it had been hours before but just as heartfelt. Sam believed the cat was ornery enough to have tried stalking the ambulance, if Wanda had ever installed a cat door. She worried about him ending up in traffic and getting hit by a tourist watching for street signs.

Now, Oberon sat back on his haunches and studied Sam as if assessing him. The uneven triangle of black fur around the cat’s left eye added to his sinister expression. When his slim body tensed to pounce, Sam wondered if he was about to get lacerated for letting them take Wanda away. Instead, the animal shot into Sam’s denim-covered lap and circled twice before curling into a warm ball. Sam was shocked, but assumed this was a temporary truce. They were each saying goodbye to the only family they’d had.

We weren’t her only family. Wanda might have been “like a mom” to him, but she was a real mother to someone else. If there was one thing Wanda had talked about more than her legends, herbs and woo-woo philosophies, it was Lorelei. Sam’s jaw tightened. He’d heard dozens of stories about Lorelei, who’d pretended at five that her bicycle was a horse named Spokes and, at ten, had been the first in her class to memorize all the state capitals. Wanda always bragged that Lorelei was as “smart as a whip,” which would explain the extra cords and whatnot draped over the young woman’s gown in graduation pictures.

Most of the family photos Wanda liked to show off were from back when her husband was alive and Lorelei had been a chubby-cheeked little girl. The most recent portrait he’d seen was from several years ago: a flinty-eyed, unsmiling college grad who looked just a bit too smug beneath her mortarboard. Wanda had always made excuses for why her pride-and-joy didn’t visit. Sam was less inclined to do so.

“Things were hard for her after her dad died,” Wanda had said once, looking faraway and sad.

Not wanting to upset his friend, Sam had held his tongue. But he had trouble sympathizing. As a child, he, too, had lost a father. What he’d needed most was comfort from his mother. Instead…

Sam didn’t realize he’d been absently petting the cat until he stopped and Oberon butted his head into Sam’s arm, protesting.

“Enough of this,” Sam told the cat. “You want me to pet you, you have to come with me into the den. No more sitting in the dark, crying into our beer. Metaphorically speaking. Let’s see what’s on the tube.”

He gently set the cat on the floor, and, sure enough, Oberon followed him down the hallway. They passed by a framed picture of Lorelei as a teenager and Sam shook his head. If the woman was so damn smart, why hadn’t she known how lucky she was to have Wanda?

LORELEI WAS A LITTLE surprised that the man behind the counter handed over keys to the rental car. After her sleepless night and turbulent flight into San Antonio this morning, she had deep bags beneath her bloodshot eyes. She probably looked strung out and wouldn’t have blamed the guy if he’d insisted on some kind of drug test before letting her drive a car off the lot. Then again, he was already a little scared of her from when she’d growled, “Trust me, I understand the optional insurance policy, you can stop overexplaining!” So maybe his thrusting the keys at her was less about customer service and more about getting rid of her.

“Your luggage is already in the trunk,” he informed her. “You have a nice day.”

Not a chance in hell. “Thank you,” she said tightly. She’d been speaking through clenched lips all day; now she gripped the keys so hard they dug into her palm.

It was as if she were trying to hold herself together through sheer physical force because if she didn’t, Lorelei might fly apart. She stalked across the lot toward her assigned car, barely giving herself a moment to buckle in and adjust the seat and mirrors before heading for the exit. If she paused to consult a map, paused to find a radio station, paused for one second to think…

Although it had been a while since her last trip here—I’m sorry, Mom. I will always be sorry—she knew the I-10 route by heart. There were no surprise detours this Wednesday afternoon. The city gave way to unmanicured vistas, tree-studded hills and pastures that looked furry due to bunches of some tawny untamed grass.

About fifteen minutes from Fredericksburg, she stopped at a filling station to use their restroom even though it wasn’t really necessary. Maybe she was just stalling because she couldn’t face what awaited her.

It was surprisingly warm outside—she’d dressed that morning for March in Philly, not March in Texas. On her drive, she’d already seen a few patches of bluebonnets in bloom. Wanda had loved plants of all kinds. Lorelei had a stray memory of a picnic with her parents, long ago, in a field of wildflowers. Her mother had told her a Native American legend about how flowers had become fragrant. Wanda had grown plants both decorative and functional in window boxes and pots all through their house and yard. She and her husband had turned to medicinal herbs and holistic treatments when he was diagnosed with liver cancer, rather than to oncologists.