Please Me, Cowboy (Montana Born Rodeo Book 4) Read online

  “I’m not doing that.” He could feel his hand, couldn’t he? So tightly balled up into a fist it made his whole arm tremble. “You’re not doing that. No one here is a hypocrite.”

  “I get it,” she told him quietly. It felt like the end of everything. And Jonah had no words to describe how that beat at him. Or how hurt couldn’t begin to cover all the ways it tore through him. “Sometimes an ogre is just a guy who doesn’t know any better, and a princess is just a girl who should, and fairy tales are made up stories to make us feel better about how little sense it all makes.”

  “I have no idea what that means.” He didn’t want to know. He had the awful feeling that he already did.

  Her smile then ripped into him. He thought maybe it broke him wide open, right there in the shadow of Marietta’s grand hotel. He was surprised, on some level, that no one else seemed to hear it or see it or feel it, all that shattering right out there in the evening air.

  But maybe that was because he was still standing there, acting as if he was still alive when the truth was, he doubted that too.

  “How could you possibly have stood there and told your brother who I really am?” Gracelyn asked. “When the truth is, I don’t even know?”

  And that time, when she walked away from him, ducking around him and disappearing into the evening, Jonah didn’t follow her.

  Because he didn’t know how to that either.

  *

  She’d known better, of course.

  They’d had a handful of perfect days, she’d let herself pretend—but she’d known it couldn’t last. She’d known.

  You didn’t lose yourself, Gracelyn thought fiercely as she slammed her foot down hard on the gas pedal of the Range Rover she’d liberated from Jonah’s driver. She pointed the luxurious SUV east on the Interstate. You just lost track of it there for a minute.

  Because she’d known from that very first night that whatever happened with Jonah wasn’t something that could survive the week, much less their inevitable return to reality. Hadn’t she told herself exactly that? Right there in his bed?

  So she had no explanation for why, despite all the things she’d told herself—all the things she’d chanted over and over again in her head, trying so hard to ward off any potential pain—she’d obviously convinced herself that when push came to shove, Jonah would choose her over this stupid plot of his.

  Or that he would choose her at all.

  At some point, Gracelyn reflected as she hurtled down I-90, she was going to have to face the fact that she was pretty much always wrong.

  Always.

  As a little girl, she’d been sure her parents would choose her over their assorted addictions. As a teenager, she’d thought her extended family would welcome it when she’d decided to throw the truth around, as she prepared to leave town in a cloud of her own righteous indignation. As an adult, she’d believed she could handle mixing her upward trajectory with a man she’d known full well, and at first sight, was going to pose a serious problem to her.

  Wrong, wrong, wrong. She was always wrong.

  Gracelyn drove too fast, and it didn’t help. She drove as the sun finally dropped out of sight behind her, reflecting fire off of her mirror as it went. She had to grit her teeth to keep from turning back. She drove while her phone sat silent in the drink holder next to her, as Jonah, who hadn’t come after her, failed to so much as shoot her a text. Which was its own message, wasn’t it?

  She drove in and out of what few radio stations existed out this way where there was precious little between the land and sky. She drove until the mountains were a memory and the stars were a tumult in the clear skies overhead. Past Big Timber and Billings and on toward the Dakotas.

  She headed north when she hit Miles City—which looked a whole lot nicer than she remembered it, even if only in her headlights—and the further she got from the city, the further she drove herself straight back into the past.

  There were lights on in the old bar and fewer boarded-up windows on the small collection of houses she passed when she finally got to her hometown. It was coming up on ten o’clock when she took the last turn down the old country road that had never had a name as far back as she could remember. She slowed way down to allow for its still-unpaved state, bumping her way over the same old ruts and remembering all the hundreds of times she’d done this before.

  She remembered coming here as a small child and then later, living here after her grandmother Betty had liberated her from her parents. She remembered driving her granddad’s pick up truck when she was well below the legal driving limit and she remembered taking this same road much too fast when she was finally a legitimate driver in her own right. Back when driving a car had felt as close as she’d ever thought she’d get to flying.

  And she remembered, in stark detail, that bright blue June afternoon when she’d left in a cloud of dust and had promised herself she would never, ever return. Not as long as she was alive.

  Which meant this worked out perfectly, because she was pretty sure she’d died on the side of Front Street in pretty little Marietta earlier this evening, and this apparition jolting its way home was a ghost.

  The weathered farmhouse at the end of the long lane was exactly as she remembered it, with its different sections slapped together haphazardly over generations to form a lopsided, rambling L. She knew they’d have seen her coming from far off and still, she took her time getting out of the Range Rover. She stood beside it for a moment, breathing in the too familiar scents of a country evening out on the Plains. Growing things and prairie air. Dirt and gas and the dark itself.

  She heard the mournful whisper of the wind through the trees and the rustle of the branches as it moved through them. She heard the dogs making a ruckus out back near the great old barn where she’d played a thousand games of make believe in her time. She heard a TV set blaring from the old living room, where her grandmother Betty liked to sit in the evenings with her feet up and her needlework in her lap.

  And she still could have picked her way across this yard blind. There was a different truck fetched up near the door where the outside light shone. There was a brand new coat of paint peeling off the sides of the farmhouse right beside it. But she knew this place. She knew every last inch of it by heart.

  Gracelyn didn’t know how she’d managed to convince herself she’d forgotten it.

  And there were so many things tilting and rolling inside of her then, like she’d strapped herself to a roller coaster and let it run wild. She couldn’t tell whether she hated this place or she loved it, if she was happy she’d come back tonight or if she wished she’d kept right on pretending it had never existed . . . Hell, she didn’t even know if any of her family still lived here these days, that’s how long it had been.

  But none of that changed the fact that it was home. That it would always be home, no matter that she never planned to live here again. Gracelyn let out a little sigh, and something inside her, some open, hurting thing she’d hardly known was there because it had always been there, started to heal. Just a little.

  The screen door swung open as she reached the steps with a great, long squeak of its hinges that sounded like a familiar song to her ears, and Gracelyn stood there blinking as the light from inside poured over her face.

  She knew the woman who stood there instantly, though she’d only been a seventeen year old smart-mouthed kid the last time they’d stood this close to each other. She wondered if she looked as changed and yet the same. As if the girl she’d known was superimposed over the woman who stood there before her in the farmhouse doorway, a familiar stranger with the same dark Packard eyes, the same body shape they shared with all their female relatives, and even the same damned nose they’d always blamed on their least favorite uncle.

  “Hey Bex,” Gracelyn said to her cousin, once her best friend in the all the world, closer to her than a sister could have been. “Is Grandma Betty around? I was in Montana and I wanted to say hi.”

  That was
stupid, of course. A stupid thing to say. And far more stupid, she realized then, as her cousin stared back at her in obvious astonishment, was the fact that she’d been so busy escaping this place and staying far away from everything it represented to her that she’d never considered what her reception might be when—if—she returned.

  It had never crossed her mind that the family she’d abandoned so ruthlessly might not be all that overjoyed to see her, after all this time had passed. After she’d deliberately and very obviously and literally left them in her dust.

  Maybe Jasper had been right, after all, much as it shamed her to admit it. She was exactly like Jonah, ice and spleen, and an arrogant fool besides—

  “You dumbass,” Bex gritted out at her, and Gracelyn realized with a start that her cousin was choked up. That the glimmering thing Gracelyn could see in those eyes so much like her own was emotion, not fury. Love, not hate. “We’ve been waiting for you and waiting for you. For ten years, Gracelyn.”

  “I think I got a little lost,” Gracelyn heard herself say, in the same kind of messed up voice and too much wet heat behind her eyes.

  “That doesn’t surprise me at all,” Bex replied with a thick little laugh. “You always did have a piss-poor sense of direction.”

  And then she opened up her arms the same way she’d opened up that door, and Gracelyn walked right back into them.

  At last.

  Chapter Seven

  ‡

  Jonah meant to leave.

  First, he waited for Gracelyn to come back Thursday night, but she didn’t—a fact it took him until almost three a.m. to accept. He woke up Friday morning and went for a run in the Graff’s fitness center. It was like every other fitness center in every other hotel he ever traveled to, and no matter how high he jacked up the treadmill, he couldn’t seem to outrun the heavy thing that pressed down hard on him, like stone.

  He meant to leave, and so he took a series of calls, each quicker than the last. He suspected that might have had something to do with his viciously dark mood that he did very little to hide. And when his calls were done, he packed.

  But Gracelyn hadn’t taken her things when she’d left last night, and he stood in the doorway to her room imagining that if he stood there long enough, she might appear from the attached bathroom and everything would reset and go back to what it had been—

  Which, of course, didn’t happen.

  And he had no real explanation for how he found himself outside on Marietta’s Main Street. He should have been in a car headed for his plane back to Dallas. The afternoon tipped over into early evening and still he walked. And around him, the whole town—and what had to be the better part of the Paradise Valley region—poured out into the streets to enjoy the mild September weather and the rodeo fever.

  Jonah told himself this was a research opportunity, nothing more. A chance to figure out what his brother could possibly be thinking. He wove his way around excited children and sloping, surly-eyed teens. He avoided the parents treating the sidewalk like date night and the boisterous crowd spilling out of Grey’s Saloon. He looked in the windows of a bakery, a book store, an upscale chocolate shop with a very long line. He avoided his own reflection as if he was some kind of vampire. He eyed the imported cowboys askance, and he narrowly escaped the determined pursuit of more than one cute little cowgirl with a bit of a buzz on.

  It was Friday night. Summer was over, but this was its last hurrah. The rodeo was in town and that obviously meant something here. And Jonah was made of stone.

  He was on his second loop around the town, and he was definitely leaving this time, just as soon as he got back to his hotel down at the far end of Front Street. Then he looked up to see two older, white-haired ladies sitting on a wrought-iron bench outside a tattoo parlor that looked like it belonged in the middle of funky Austin, Texas, not set down here in Marietta.

  The little old ladies looked so much like they belonged in an animated movie that Jonah almost looked around to make sure the street signs hadn’t burst into interpretive dance while he wasn’t looking. The two women smiled at him, in a placid sort of unison that made him straighten at once, his eyes narrowing as he took them in. The one on the left wore her snowy hair up in a bun and was draped in scarves, the one on the right had short white hair and a lot of bold jewelry instead, and they both wore knee-length skirts and very brightly-colored cowboy boots.

  “That is not our Jasper Flint, Martha, as much as he might look it,” said the one on the left, making no particular effort to modify her volume. Almost as if she wanted Jonah to hear her. “You can tell by the hair. Or the lack of it.”

  “That and the ferocious scowl,” the one who was clearly Martha replied tartly. Then sniffed. “Don’t nudge me, Harriet. He obviously wants to look mean, or he wouldn’t be walking around like that right out here on a public street on rodeo weekend, making all the women and children cower before him in fear.”

  She was the one who smiled the brightest when Jonah stopped in front of them.

  “Evening ladies,” he said, sounding more like Jasper than he had in more years than he could count. He ignored it—and the hitch inside him that went with it. “I couldn’t help but overhear.”

  “That’s undoubtedly because we were speaking to you, dear,” Harriet murmured, her smile never dimming. “Hardly any point in saying it, otherwise.”

  “And I also couldn’t help but notice that neither one of you is cowering.” He eyed the shop behind them through its wide open front door. Rock music spun out from inside, mixed with that buzzing sound that he knew was the tattoo gun. “From me or, apparently, the prospect of getting a little ink.”

  “We don’t cower any longer,” Martha assured him. “We gave it up in our twenties. Possibly our thirties, now that I consider it. It all blends together, after a while.”

  “There are a few things that stand out, of course,” observed Harriet, shifting her bright boots beneath her. “Ink, for example. I always wanted a tattoo. But Mother told me they were the work of the devil and the Merchant Marines, which, it must be said, she did seem to feel were more or less the same thing.”

  “It’s so pleasant to welcome in the time of one’s life when one can do as she pleases,” Martha said, as if in agreement.

  “I don’t know either one of you,” Jonah said, though he felt as if he did, which he would likely find bizarre the moment he walked away, “but I feel confident that you both did exactly as you pleased, no matter what time of your life it was.”

  Harriet smiled at him. “Didn’t you?” She settled back against the bench and nodded at her friend, though her gaze never left Jonah. “Tell me, Martha, didn’t we read an article not too long back about the Flint brothers?”

  “We did indeed.” Martha gifted Jonah with a benevolent smile. “It talked all about their unshakable bond. They claimed it was that identical twin connection, far more powerful than mere brotherhood. You know how close twins can be, Harriet. Why, Bitsy and Gert Framingham practically had telepathy back in college!”

  “If not, sadly, any wit to go along with it,” Harriet replied dryly. Her calm gaze seemed to pin Jonah to the ground where he stood. “But do you know what the wonderful thing is about unshakeable bonds?”

  Jonah shook his head, unable, suddenly, to speak past the constriction in his throat. It hadn’t been there a moment before, surely.

  “They can take quite a bit of shaking, it turns out, before they start to crack,” Martha said, very distinctly. “No matter how it might appear.”

  Jonah had no idea what he might have said to that, but a man around his own age, who looked vaguely familiar to him, appeared in the shop’s open door. He rolled his eyes at the women.

  “Enough,” he said. “Leave the man alone.” He shook his head as he looked at Jonah. “Ignore the Grans, please. They want you to think they’re your magical fairy godmothers or something. When, in fact, they just live in a small town and listen to every single bit of gossip they can. That�
�s how they know your business. They have zero shame.”

  “Hush, Griffin,” Martha chided him, though she didn’t sound at all chastened. “Or I won’t let you give me my first tattoo.”

  “It’s not her first,” Harriet confided to him, or maybe to the whole street, her eyes sparkling. “She just doesn’t want to shock you with the delicate placement of the one she already has. You grandchildren can be so excitable.”

  Griffin had a hand over his face and was groaning into it as Jonah walked away. And he was almost all the way to FlintWorks before he realized that, while the Grans might not have been magical the way they’d seemed back there for a moment, they’d still managed to make him smile.

  A minor miracle, he was sure.

  And maybe that was why, when he found himself at the microbrewery’s door, he didn’t keep walking. He didn’t go on to the Graff, grab his stuff, and get the hell out of this place, the way he knew he should.

  Instead, he manned up and went inside to find his brother.

  And found him—after asking three different blue t-shirted bartenders, who gave him three different, if cheerful, answers—out behind the building, tossing garbage bags into the dumpster.

  Jonah let the heavy door slam shut behind him and stood there for a minute. Copper Mountain hung there in the distance, looking brooding and mysterious in the gathering dark, and he knew his brother knew he was there. That if he’d been anyone else, Jasper would have turned around and faced him already.

  “I swear to God,” Jasper said after a moment or two inched by, brushing his hands on his cargo pants as he finally turned from the dumpster. “If this is round two of your bullshit, I’ll throw you in there with the garbage.”

  “Tempting,” Jonah said. He eyed his brother across the little stretch of concrete. “But you couldn’t throw me anywhere with a phalanx of major league pitchers standing behind you offering pointers, and anyway, that’s not why I’m here.”

  He hadn’t thought this through, he knew. They can take quite a bit of shaking before they start to crack, the old woman had told him. He went with it.