Choose Me, Cowboy Read online

  So, the place didn’t look like home yet. In time, they would fill it up with their own memories and make it feel like home. But right now, the house felt lonely. Probably because of what had happened tonight, he felt the emptiness here more keenly.

  Bone tired, with muscles aching from every fence he’d repaired and every new post hole he’d dug, he needed another drink. He pulled a beer from the fridge and cracked it open. Leaning against the green-tiled counter with one hip, he sipped it, trying to push away the memory of seeing Kate and the idiot band boy calling her out in front of the whole bar.

  Katie-Kat Canaday. My sexy red-haired lady.

  His chest gave a squeeze and he took a quick gulp of beer. Seeing her again tonight after all these years—even from across the room—had caught him off guard. More accurately, the sight of her rocked him. Momentarily stole the strength from his legs as he stood, talking bulls with Greenwall. He’d literally had to shove a hand against the wall and turn his back on her to keep his balance.

  Of course, he’d remembered Kate was from Marietta when he’d moved here at the beginning of August. But he’d hardly expected she’d still live here. She’d always talked about wanting to live in a big city somewhere. New York or maybe San Francisco. They’d talked about doing that together, in fact. Once. He’d expected her to do just that. But here she was, still living in Marietta, Montana, about as far from a big city as a place could get. And, like an idiot, like an abandoned dog who couldn’t let go, so was he.

  The six years since their break-up in Missoula had done nothing to diminish the primal ache that always flashed over him like heat lightning at the sight of her. That shouldn’t have surprised him. She’d appeared in his dreams with some regularity since that awful day and he’d wake hard and aching with want. That ache was in him now, even thinking about her.

  Her hair was still that red color women were always trying to get out of a bottle, but never could. And she wore her hair long now, not short like when he’d known her. Perversely, all he could think as he’d watched her, was how that silky hair would feel, brushing against the skin of his bare chest.

  He let out a humorless sound that echoed around the half-empty room. That said just about everything there was to say about how well he’d gotten over her.

  She hated him for good reason. He owed it to her to stay far away. But he hadn’t expected her to be tangled up with an idiot like the lead singer from that band. Maybe she’d changed since their time together. Maybe that tattooed freak was her type now.

  Six years and the whole world had turned inside out. For damned sure, his world had. His life had spun like an off-balance top for a while after the divorce. But here, he sensed, things were different. Now that he’d settled in Paradise Valley—a place that took his breath away and had already settled into his bones like he belonged there—he’d decided that he’d found where he wanted to be.

  A sharp knock at the door made him jump.

  Izzy, he thought automatically, scanning the coffee table for whatever she’d forgotten. But he could see nothing. He went to the door and pulled it open. “What did you forget?” he was asking before he saw not Izzy, but a man in a black cap and 80’s style Members Only jacket standing at his doorstep.

  “Can I help you?” he asked.

  “Finn Scott?”

  “Yeah?” A bad feeling crawled up the back of his neck and he had the impulse to slam the door in the stranger’s face. “What do you want?”

  “Just this.” The man pulled an envelope out of a breast pocket and shoved the thing into Finn’s hands. “You’ve been served.”

  He stared down at the envelope uncomprehendingly at first as the man took his leave and headed down the walkway. His insides gave a twist and he scowled after him, realizing he must have been lurking outside, waiting for him to come home so he could slap these papers in his hand.

  He wanted to shout after him, tell him specifically where he could stick them. Because he already knew what they were. Though he wouldn’t have admitted this to anyone—that would have meant he thought of her at all—he’d been half-waiting for her to pull something since day one. He closed the door, with no gentleness, ripped open the envelope and scanned the court papers. “Motion To Modify Court Ordered Custody of Minor Children...”—Damn her!—“Plaintiff, Melissa Jamison.”

  Jamison. Not Scott. So, sometime in the past four years, she’d managed to drag another sucker into her path of destruction. He actually felt sorry for him. For a moment.

  As he read on, he found the kicker buried in the middle of a paragraph, three pages in. “Plaintiff intends to move to Hong Kong with her husband and seeks permission to take the children out of the country in the within custody modification.”

  He braced a hand on the wall behind him with a foul curse. Hong Kong?

  From around the corner, five-year-old Cutter, one-half of the dynamic-duo that owned him, body and soul, came stumbling toward him, rubbing his eyes. Without a word, Finn set the papers down, scooped the boy into his arms and hugged him fiercely to him. “Hey, Snip,” he murmured. The boy’s white-blond hair smelled of shampoo and sleep and Cutter’s own sweet fragrance. “What are you doing up?”

  “Daddy,” Cutter said tearily against his neck. “I had a bad dream.”

  He sifted his fingers through the boy’s sweaty hair. “You’re okay now. I’m here.” He started back with Cutter toward the boy’s room.

  “There was a monster in my room,” Cutter murmured.

  He nodded. “We’ll just see about that. No monsters allowed. That’s the rule, right?”

  Cutter nodded fiercely and sniffled. He settled the child into his bed beside the one where Caylee slept, then knelt down beside him. “Here we go.” He checked under the bed, behind the curtains and crawled to the small closet and opened it. “All clear.” Then he reached for the jar of glitter Cutter’s twin kept on the nightstand between them for occasions such as this. He unscrewed the top and tossed a pinch of glitter into the air, thankful none of the hard-bitten cowboys he spent his days with could see him now. He’d never hear the end of that. “No self-respecting monster would dare come in here now.”

  The glitter had been Caylee’s idea and seemed to satisfy Cutter’s feeling that magic was afoot and dragons had been slayed. He found himself wishing that glitter would work just as easily on those papers in the living room.

  He kissed the boy, who was a miniature version of him, and rubbed his back until his small chest rose and fell with deep regular breaths. When he was sure that neither of them would stir, he went back to the living room and punched in a number on his cell. The hour was late and his old college roommate, now an attorney, Mark Erlewine, in Missoula, answered the phone, sounding groggy.

  “This better be good, buddy,” Mark growled on the other end. “I have court in the morning.”

  “She did it, Mark,” he said without preamble. “She served me with papers tonight. She’s trying to get them back.”

  A deep sigh on the other end. “Read me the caption and the first two pages of the complaint.”

  He did and when he’d finished, Erlewine asked, “When’s the court date again?”

  “At the end of the month. In Missoula.”

  “The judge? His name should be listed on the stamp.”

  He scanned down the document. “Corillo.”

  On the other end of the line, his attorney made a strangled sound and fell silent, thinking.

  “When you get quiet, I know I’m in trouble,” Finn said. “I am in trouble, aren’t I?”

  “Corillo is ultraconservative. Big on family stability. And he favors mothers. I’m sorry to hear she’s filed a motion to reconsider, but I can’t say I’m actually surprised. This kind of thing happens all the time. Situations change. People change their minds. And if, by trouble, you mean are you at risk of losing full custody? Well, yes. She’s their mother. If she’d signed over all rights to them when she gave you full custody three and a half years ago, this
would be a different story. We can argue abandonment, but it’s a risk. A big one, considering your situation.”

  “My situation?”

  “Look, I know what kind of father you are, but your life, from the outside, has a tangle of loose ends. You need to show stability. Roots, even.”

  “I just signed the final papers on a small ranch I was lucky enough to inherit here in Marietta. I’m only doing the rodeo thing temporarily to earn enough money to get that going.”

  “The ranch is good. But one card trumps the rest. If you were married...stable, things might look different to a judge like Corillo.”

  “Married? He can’t discriminate against me for being single. Can he?”

  “No. Not technically. But that doesn’t mean he can’t rule against you. We could file for dismissal at this hearing and might get it. But we might not. My best advice? Find a wife, Finn. And find one fast. Get yourself looking settled. If you don’t, your crazy ex may just get what she wants.”

  ***

  Kate swiped the chalk-clogged eraser over the board at the back of her classroom at Marietta Elementary. At the end of a very long Monday full of kindergarteners, an awkward conversation with Judy Elsworth, the principal, regarding a phone call she’d gotten from the Bellmers about Saturday night, and a handful of parent-teacher conferences, she longed for nothing more than a glass of wine, a plate of homemade pasta and a foot massage, not necessarily in that order. But since her term of forced solitude was upon her, the foot massage was, unfortunately, not in the cards. Wine and pasta, alone, would have to suffice.

  With a sigh, she glanced at her watch as she gathered up her things. Nearly five-thirty. Her last scheduled parent/teacher conference had cancelled at the last minute and rescheduled for tomorrow. Which meant another long day. But she actually didn’t mind conference time. She looked forward to getting to know the families of the children in her class, even if the class was only hers temporarily. She already knew many of them. In a town the size of Marietta, practically everyone knew everyone, for better or for worse.

  Glancing out the window, she noticed thunderheads gathering in the sky. Something was coming. Weather tended to move fast over the mountains, coming and going with a speed that matched the dramatic Montana landscape. She’d better get a move on, she thought, before getting caught in a thundershower.

  On the near-empty playground, she noticed two of her favorites, Caylee and Cutter, five-year-old twins from Janice Brinker’s kindergarten class, climbing the taller of two geodesic dome jungle gyms on the now-empty playground. She guessed that Janice had a parent-teacher conference scheduled for today, too. The twins were the exception to the everyone-knew-everyone rule. As they were new to town, no one knew much about them at all, except that they’d just moved to Marietta before the start of school in mid-August.

  On a nearby bench, head bent to her cell phone, was the young woman Kate had often seen picking up the pair at school. She was not their mother, Kate had been told, but a babysitter.

  As Kate watched, Cutter—with typical five-year-old audacity—stood straight up on the climbing structure and twirled his arms like a bird. Kate gasped and pressed a helpless palm to the window. “Look up. Look up!” she begged the woman through the thick glass.

  And just as the woman did look up, Caylee’s high-pitched squeal accompanied her brother’s pinwheel off the monkey bars toward the rubber mats below.

  With a gasp, Kate dropped everything in her arms and ran. Slamming through the push-bar doorway at the end of the hall, she raced outside feeling like everything was happening in slow motion. The slow whoosh of blood in her ears, the sound of her shoes against the asphalt as she ran toward the playground and the boy lying at the base of the jungle gym.

  The babysitter was holding the crying boy by the time she reached the monkey bars and Kate reached up to pull Caylee down safely. But the little girl hung back under the bars, staring wide-eyed at her brother. For his part, Cutter had relinquished every bit of his five-year-old bluster and was wailing loudly.

  “I-It’s all my fault,” a distraught babysitter told Kate as she dropped down beside them. “I took my eyes off him for a moment and—”

  “Is his head okay?”

  Izzy had a hand clapped over her mouth. “I think so. It’s his arm. He landed badly. It might be broken.”

  There was no question in Kate’s mind that was indeed the case. His wrist was already turning black and blue and beginning to swell.

  From behind her came the sound of someone running and she looked up as a man dropped to his knees beside the boy. He scooped the boy away from the young woman and into his own arms and sat on the rubber mat, his back half-turned to Kate. “Hey, Snip, it’s okay, now. I’m here. Oh, man. That looks like it hurts.” He half-turned to the young woman. “I pay you to watch them, Izzy,” he said sharply. “What the hell happened?”

  The sound of his voice made her breath hitch. Kate watched the man sooth a hand over the boy’s forehead and kiss him there and she felt her world tilt sideways.

  Oh, no. It couldn’t be.

  No, really, it couldn’t. But he turned to look at Izzy and all doubt vanished.

  Finn Scott. Her Finn Scott. Scratch that. There weren’t enough possessive pronouns in the world to make him hers.

  “It’s my fault,” Izzy was saying. “The twins were playing tag and I looked away for a moment and Cutter was—I’m so sorry.”

  Twins? He and what’s-her-face had had twins?

  “It was a accident, Daddy,” Caylee said. “Cutter was being a bird.”

  Inconsolable, the boy buried his face against his father’s broad chest. Behind him, thunder rumbled across the prairie and a streak of lightning jagged across the sky. The heat from that jagged flash seemed to explode in her chest as he looked up, noticing her for the first time.

  The instinct to run rolled through her like the thunder that rumbled across the sky and she scooted back away from him, hoping that he’d forgotten her as she’d tried to forget him. But she wasn’t that lucky.

  Recognition, mixed with confusion, burned in his dark gaze. “Kate?”

  He turned fully then, looking at her starkly with those brown-green-gold eyes. Eyes that had once had the power to melt her into a puddle of want and need. Those eyes brought to mind long, athletic Saturday mornings, sharing a thoroughly rumpled bed and slow, deep kisses.

  Doomed. I am doomed.

  A numb buzzing started up in her ears that had nothing at all to do with the nearby thunder.

  She couldn’t think straight. Finn was sitting two feet away from her, holding his son and she couldn’t imagine what she should be doing with her hands.

  And then she remembered Saturday night. No doppelganger. No ghost. It was him. Right here in Marietta. The hell?

  “That’s Miss Candy,” Caylee said, using the name most of the five-year-olds used for her. “She’s not our teacher. She’s the other one.”

  “That’s me,” she admitted in a small voice. “The other one.”

  Her words elicited the proper response, a wince from Caylee’s father.

  “Scott’s a pretty common last name around here,” she managed. “I never—I didn’t connect them with you.”

  He rubbed a hand across his mouth and said, “You’re Miss Candy?”

  Izzy, who’d been wallowing in self-reproach, now flicked a curious look at them over the steeple of her fingers, apparently relieved no one was looking at her anymore.

  “I am,” Kate said, getting to her feet, “but I suppose if you’d ever come to school with your kids, you would have known that.” She instantly regretted the sharp bite of those words, but there was no taking them back now. Belatedly, she remembered what little she knew about him and the words ‘single-dad’ came to mind. Which meant.... A whole jumble of chaos kicked off in her brain.

  Finn used to get a look on his face just before he nodded to the gate-puller, when he was all tucked and tied onto the back of some bred-to-be-vicious
bucking-bull, his hand clamped down hard by the leather strap, his hat pushed down low over his eyes. He wore a look that said, ‘I’m ready,’ or ‘I’m all in.’ or ‘Don’t mess with me.’ He looked at her that way now as he got to his feet with his little boy in his arms.

  She was a terrible person.

  “I’ve got to get him to an ER,” Finn said. “Can you point me towards one?”

  “Is my arm b-broke, Daddy?” Cutter whimpered.

  “We’ll see,” he answered, kissing the boy’s forehead again. “I hope not, Snip.”

  “The Marietta Regional Hospital is just down at the other end of town,” Kate told him. “Across from the fairgrounds on Railroad Ave.”

  He turned around in a circle with the boy in his arms. “Railroad Ave....?”

  “If you turn right out of the—it’s just down this way a bit and then...oh, never mind. I’ll take you.” Seriously, she thought a little wildly, she should have her head examined for blurting that out without a thought to the consequences. “Or,” she amended, “maybe it’s better if Izzy takes you?”

  Izzy sniffed and brushed her wet cheeks with the base of her palms. “Or I could take Caylee home with me until you’re finished at the ER,” she offered. “I promise, Mr. Scott, she’ll be fine. If Miss Candy drives you, that is.”

  “Canaday,” Kate corrected, shifting uneasily and looking at the sky. Rain was starting to fall. Small droplets splattered on the playground nearby.

  “Oh. I’m sorry,” Izzy said. “I’ve only heard about you as Miss Candy.”

  She shook her head. “They all call me that. And it’s probably better if Caylee doesn’t have to sit in the ER waiting. She must be hungry.”

  “You sure?” he asked Kate.

  Not at all. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll just get my keys and purse from my classroom. I know an Orthopedic doc at the hospital. Ben Tyler. I’ll give him a call on the way.”