Cowboy Comes Back / The Cowboy's Convenient Bride: Cowboy Comes Back / The Cowboy's Convenient Bride

“And I’m good. I think we have a shot at this.”

Kade couldn’t handle another yo-yo experience. The old yes, they want you … no, they don’t. He’d had his hopes dashed a few too many times of late.

“Tell you what, Sheri. You do what you think is best here. If you want to pursue this, great, but I’m telling you not to waste your time if you think this is a waste of time.”

“Sweetheart, if I thought you were a waste of time I would have stopped being your agent when I stopped dating you. I’ll keep you posted.”

“Don’t.” Kade spoke before thinking. But it was the truth. “Just tell me if I make the short list, all right?”

“You got it. Bye, love.”

Kade flipped the phone shut and stuck it in his pocket.

“AND THEN KADE told Jason he could do as he damned well pleased where Libby was concerned. I was right on the other side of the aisle weighing nails. I heard him.”

“Well, don’t announce it to the world, you fool. That could affect the odds.”

The men’s voices were loud enough to be heard at the door when Libby opened it, but they fell silent as soon as she stepped inside the almost empty bar and waited a moment for her eyes to adjust. She found it amazing that anyone was in a bar at 7:00 a.m., but Nevada was a twenty-four-hour state and some people had developed unusual circadian cycles. The only reason she was there at such a ridiculous hour was that she’d picked up a package at the Wesley post office as a favor to the owner and was delivering it on her way to do her Saturday-morning shopping.

Libby set her jaw and went up to the bar. It was dumb to let the dealings of two morons upset her, since nothing happened in Otto without a flurry of betting amongst the local ne’er-do-wells. Marriage, divorce, weight loss. Everything that happened had a few bucks riding on it. Libby was not the betting kind and generally ignored such activity. But she’d never been the subject of it before.

“So, what are the odds?” she asked Julie, the bartender, setting down the box she carried.

“For which bet?” Julie idly pushed the lank brown hair that had escaped her up-do away from her face.

“Which bet?” Libby did her best not to look outraged. She normally didn’t become outraged unless she was dealing with bureaucracy or fuel prices. “How many are there?”

Julie shrugged her thin shoulders, making her tank top slide off to one side, before reciting in a monotone, “Rekindled romance, eight to one. One night of passion, even money.”

Libby’s eyes widened still more.

“And I’m betting against one-night stand, so if you do have one—” Julie made a please-cooperate face as she pulled her top back into place “—don’t tell anyone. Okay?”

Libby slapped her palm on the bar, then headed for the door. She had had enough.

Kade would do as he damned well pleased where she was concerned? She’d see about that.

Libby felt remarkably calm as she got into her truck and drove to Kade’s ranch. They were about to get a few things straight, she and Kade. It was time to meet face-to-face. Get it over with, rather than dying a thousand deaths wondering when she was going to bump into him. Libby wasn’t one to avoid confrontation, but she’d been avoiding this one, which made her feel weak. Time to change that.

Kade’s truck was parked under a scraggly tree at the edge of the yard, but Libby somehow knew the house was empty before her knuckles touched the rough wood of the kitchen door. No one answered, so she peered through the curtainless window in the door. The kitchen was empty—the fridge was gone, the counters were bare and the table and chairs were nowhere in sight.

“Lib—”

She almost had a heart attack when Kade spoke from behind her. She whirled around, angry at her reaction and ready to take it out on him, fair or not. But she hadn’t counted on the impact of seeing him standing there, tall and lean. The same, yet different. And still as sexy as hell, if one went by appearances alone.

He had a bad case of bed head, his wheat-colored hair sticking out in several directions, and a thick growth of stubble on his chin and jaw—which seemed even more chiseled than before. Standing barefoot on the gravel, he rubbed one hand self-consciously over his head as he apparently waited for her to say something.

When she didn’t speak, mainly because she was fighting back memories triggered by his disheveled appearance, he asked, “What are you doing here?”

She looked him up and down, collecting herself, taking refuge in anger once again. Much safer there. “Where’d you come from?”

He pointed at his horse trailer. “I don’t sleep in the house.” He was more muscular than he’d been ten years ago, and there was a new scar on the side of his face, curving close to his left eyebrow. Probably the result of that bronc stomping him just before he’d won his second world title. Libby had read about it in the papers and had been bitter enough at the time to have rooted for the horse.

“Daddy?”

Libby’s eyes jerked toward the trailer in time to see a girl with a mop of tousled blond hair poke her head out the door.

“It’s just a friend, Maddie. I’ll be back in a minute.”

But the girl had already jumped to the ground and was heading toward them, the silvery shapes on her pink pajamas glinting in the early sun.

This is the child. Kade’s child. The reason Libby had discovered that he’d been sleeping with someone else while she’d been hundreds of miles away, working on her degree. The girl came closer and hugged Kade’s waist, staring at Libby as she leaned against her father.

Reality sucked. It really did. Libby liked it better when the kid was just some faceless entity, not a flesh-and-blood little girl with Kade’s hazel eyes.

“This is Madison,” Kade said, and it was easy to see that he did not want Libby to do anything to upset his daughter. As if she would—it wasn’t the kid’s fault that Kade couldn’t keep his fly zipped. Libby forced the corners of her mouth up when all she really wanted to do was escape. “Hi, Madison.”

“Hi,” the girl said, obviously as curious as Libby was uncomfortable. “You can call me Maddie. All Dad’s friends do.”

Libby didn’t know how to deal with this. None of her combative strategies applied here, and this was obviously not the time to do battle.

“I’ve got to go,” she said, brushing past Kade and his daughter, not caring what either of them thought. She needed to regroup.

Libby couldn’t remember the last time she’d turned tail and run. Even when Kade had come to her to confess that he’d gotten a woman pregnant and had to do the right thing, she’d held her ground—mainly out of shock, but she’d held it. Kade had been the one to leave.

She was startled when Kade caught up with her as she reached the bumper of her truck.

“Why’d you come, Lib?”

She glanced over his shoulder to see his daughter mounting the steps to the trailer, shooting one last curious glance their way before disappearing inside.

I came because I wanted to get this reunion over with and move on. I wanted to prove to myself that I’ve been losing sleep over nothing.

But the words wouldn’t come. So she hedged.

“They’re taking bets about us at the bar.”

“Of course they are. You must have known that would happen.”

“Listen, Kade. I live a quiet life now. I don’t like to be stared at or gossiped about.” She managed to hold his gaze as she spoke.

“Since when? You’ve never cared what anyone thought.”

So much for hedging. “I cared what you thought, for all the good it did me.”

“I wanted to get married,” he said in a voice so low it was almost a growl. “You were the one who demanded more time. You were the one who said we should make sure before we took the big step.”

“I didn’t think you’d be sleeping with other women, or raising families with them.”