Unbroken Cowboy

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Excerpt

There is a Walmart Exclusive Cover for Unbroken Cowboy. You can find this special cover featuring Dane by himself at Walmart. In all other stores you’ll find the cover with both him and Bea.

 

Beatrix Leighton was a friend to all living things.

She cared for creatures large and small, domestic and wild, both in her job at Gold Valley Veterinary Clinic and in her everyday life.

Whenever she found a wounded critter on the side of the road she always stopped and tried to help it. If ever she found a sickly mouse or a sad, stranded kitten, she nursed it back to health.

She never lost her cool or brought harm to any being.

But she was close, very close, to administering grievous bodily injury to one extremely irritating cowboy who was—no doubt about it—the worst patient she had ever tended to in her life.

Not that Dane had asked her to tend to him, as he was the first to point out, often.

But if she didn’t, what was going to happen to him? Who else could care for him?

She had a special place in her heart for Dane. She always had. From the first moment she’d met him. She’d known him for so many years now it had settled into being part of who she was. She loved him. And it was as much a part of her as her love of nature, animals and pie.

Something so ingrained in her fabric didn’t require her to be conscious of it at all times, or to live with expectation on it. It simply was.

As simple and plain as the fact that Dane saw her as a sister, and yet she loved him still.

Well, most days she loved him. Today he was being an ass.

But the care and keeping of Dane was currently a responsibility she couldn’t turn away from.

She lived in a cabin on the property of Grassroots Winery, happily tucked away in the woods, and currently Dane was the only person occupying the main house.

His sister, Lindy, had moved to Get Out of Dodge—the dude ranch owned by the Dodge family, that sat on the outskirts of Gold Valley—when she and Wyatt Dodge had gotten married, and when Dane had been horrifically injured eight months ago during a championship rodeo competition, it had made the most sense to move him into that house.

And there he had stayed ever since. With Bea on the property basically taking the place of his sister, when the last thing she felt for this man at all was sisterly.

It, along with his grumpiness, was getting old.

The grump she’d been able to cope with. After all, he was incapacitated and stuck indoors. Bea had made sure that she checked in with him now and again just to make sure that he was doing okay, but his unwillingness to follow doctor’s orders and his inability to be even remotely civil was amplifying, and Bea was a hair’s breadth away from clubbing him fiercely with his own crutch.

She supposed she should be grateful that he was on crutches at all. But he was overdoing it. He had just begun transitioning from his wheelchair and doing physical therapy to get walking again just a week ago. But from the moment he had stood up he had refused to get back into his chair and he never admitted when he was tired.

Today he’d been God even knew where the whole day. Then she’d heard he’d been out in the field making sure the grapes weren’t going to die in an upcoming frost and then she’d heard through the workers that he’d fallen down because his leg had given out and the bastard hadn’t even come in then.

He wasn’t doing the prescribed exercises from the physical therapist. He was literally trying to walk it off.

It drove her absolutely insane.

The fact that she didn’t need to be there—the fact that no one had actually asked her to take him on—occasionally did occur to her.

But then, she had not asked her heart to fall resolutely and ridiculously in love with her former sister-in-law’s brother all those years ago, and yet it had.

So here she was. And here he was.

Being a total jerk.

“Bea, I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” she snapped, looking at where he was sprawled out on the couch, appearing as if he had just run a marathon.

A stupid marathon of idiocy through a vineyard on crutches.

As soon he had been able to get even a little bit mobile, he had been on his feet. And he had been trying to get back into what he called fighting shape.

Bea was actually shocked at just how close he was to at least looking like he was back in fighting shape. His muscles weren’t nearly as diminished as she would have expected. His thighs still thick and muscular, his stomach flat, his chest broad and his arms…

If anything could entice a person to write poetry about forearms, it would be Dane Parker’s very loaded-looking guns.

“Take a pain pill,” she said, standing there holding a glass of water out, with a pill flat in her other outstretched palm.

“I don’t need a pain pill,” he growled.

She wanted to punch his sculpted, handsome face. Right in the scar that he’d gotten in his accident. That still hadn’t marred his beauty. No, it made him more roguish if anything. With his blue eyes and blond hair, he could easily trick someone into believing he was angelic.

The scar made it much clearer that he was more of a fallen angel.

“I’m going to put it in a piece of cheese and trick you into eating it,” she said.

“I’m not a schnauzer,” he said.

“Then stop acting like one.” She didn’t know if he was particularly acting like a schnauzer. Actually, in her experience schnauzers were much better patients. In her experience, basically everything was a better patient.

“Bea…”

“Dane,” she said, perilously close to stamping her foot. “Lindy asked me to check in on you.”

“Lindy needs to realize that just because she’s my older sister doesn’t mean that I’m not a grown-ass man.”

“A grown-ass man who got trampled near to pieces because he insists on earning money by engaging in…a measuring contest for private parts.”

Her cheeks heated intensely and she tried to keep her expression steady.

“For private parts?” he repeated.

“You heard me,” she repeated, the glass of water and the pill still held determinedly out in front of her.

“I did hear you,” he said. “I just didn’t realize that you were in the third grade.” He shook his head. “Private parts.”

“Stop it,” she said.

“I don’t want to take a damn pain pill,” he responded.

“Then drink some damn water.” She slammed the glass down on the coffee table in front of him and stood there expectantly.

“I want a beer.”

“Yeah, great,” she said. “Drink a beer, don’t hydrate.”

“I’m fine,” he said again. But he did sit up and lean forward, picking up the glass of water.

“You need to be careful with yourself,” she said. “If you overdo it then it’s entirely possible you’ll set back some of your progress. You don’t want to cause any internal bleeding or anything like that.”

“I have been stuck in here, sitting on my ass, going on eight months. I’m over it.”

Bea sighed and took a seat in the chair across the room from him. She really did feel for him. She did. A man like Dane was… Almost impossible to contain. It was one of the things she admired so much about him. She always had.

She remembered vividly the first time she had met him. He’d looked so mature and compelling to her. A man.

He had been twenty, and when she looked back on pictures of him then, it surprised her how young he looked, since to her eleven-year-old self he had seemed extremely mature. He had such confidence and swagger, he was already riding professionally in the rodeo, and the stories he had told had been… Amazing.

Her parents had hated him on sight. They’d hated everything about the woman that their oldest son, Damien had chosen to marry, including her family. Trailer trash, that was what her mother had labeled them. Social climbing gold digger had been her father’s take.

Lindy had tried. She’d done her best to fit in and please her future in-laws, but Dane… He was every inch who he was. And nothing more.

And Lindy had made it abundantly clear that her brother was part of her life. They didn’t have a great relationship with their mother, and Lindy had stood firm with Damien on the inclusion of Dane at holidays and birthdays.

For Bea it had been…

He had been an instant obsession.

Bea had always felt like an outsider in her family. And there was something about the way Dane inhabited his skin that had made her want to get closer to him, and made her envy him all at the same time. Over the years that had…morphed. Into an extremely sincere and fatal-feeling crush.

A crush that was so abundantly and clearly futile it was painful. It had been easy to pretend that maybe there had been hope. Especially when Lindy and Damien had divorced.

Maybe it was a strange way to look at it, but she had been partly convinced that one reason Dane had so resolutely seen her as a younger sister was because he was her brother’s brother-in-law. They were sort of family by marriage, and she had imagined that it kept her in a strange protected bubble.

With the divorce, she had been worried that it might mean she would never see him anymore, but given the nature of Lindy and Damien’s divorce…

Her brother was a cheating louse. And in the years since, she had done what she could to have a relationship with him. Particularly since he and his new wife had a baby, and that baby was Bea’s niece.

But Lindy had been in her life since she’d been a little girl, and she felt just as much like a sister to her as Damien felt like a brother. She hadn’t been able to shake that connection just because they weren’t legally sisters anymore.

And that meant that she did still see Dane. Almost as much as she had before. When he passed back through town, he would always join them for dinner, often making a point of saying hi.

But these past months… She’d seen him more than she ever had. And his disinterest in her could not have been made more apparent.

She had spent a goodly amount of time physically caring for him. And he was…unmoved.

During Christmas the previous month he’d been downright cantankerous when she’d attempted to get him to join a dinner that Lindy had thrown right there at the winery for family and friends.

And if he felt…anything special for her at all he would have been there.

She knew, because she would basically walk across broken glass for him. Crawl across it maybe even. Do the Electric Slide across broken glass.

Really, she would do a lot of things across broken glass for him.

He wouldn’t even take a pain pill for her.

“Have you thought about taking that job at Get Out of Dodge that Wyatt offered you?”

He flicked a glance at her, those blue eyes sending an all-too-familiar shiver through her body.

“It isn’t my goal to work on another man’s land.”

“He’s your brother-in-law,” Bea pointed out. “And may I say a trade up from the last one.”

Dane snorted. “No argument from me. I like Wyatt, he’s a decent guy. I mean, once I got over the fact that I knew way too much about him and his past exploits to be entirely comfortable with him sleeping with my sister, I could acknowledge he was a good guy.”

“He’s not just sleeping with your sister,” Bea said, not quite sure how she managed to keep her face from catching on fire. “He’s married to her.”

She’d rather never talk about anyone sleeping with anyone around Dane.

“Yeah, so was your brother. He still cheated.”

“Wyatt won’t cheat,” Bea said.

“You think you’re a good judge of that kind of thing?”

She thought about it for a moment. The fact of the matter was, Bea had absolutely no experience with men. But she had a fair amount of experience watching people. She was the kind of person that blended easily into the background. The person at the party who would be in the corner on her hands and knees making friends with the dog instead of chatting with people. And that meant she had a lot of time to form opinions.

All growing up she had moved—reluctantly—in fairly rarefied circles. At least by the standards of Logan County. Her family was wealthy and consequently she had spent a decent amount of time around powerful men. And then there was her mother. Who had never been faithful, not through all the years of her marriage. Bea had quite a few opinions about cheaters, in actual fact.

“Damien is spoiled,” Bea said. “He blames all of his problems on other people, and he doesn’t know how to be told no. He also gets tunnel vision and thinks he’s the most important person in the world. He can’t even remember there’s another person when he’s in one of those moments. Wyatt… He’s different. Totally different. And he waited a long time to get married. I think because he was waiting till he could be the best kind of husband. So yeah, I think I know.”

“Well, your vote of confidence means a lot.”

“Why do I get the feeling you’re being sarcastic?”

“Because I am.” Dane shook his head. “Your problem is that you’ve never met a stray you didn’t like. You’re too giving.”

That made her want to choke him. He acted like she was a child, and she was not a child.

Bea clucked her tongue. “You’re right about that. I haven’t ever met a stray I didn’t like. There are no bad animals, Dane. Animals want to be fed, safe and warm. Animals are only interested in having basic needs met. And if you do that, they love you. Humans on the other hand are innately selfish and some of them are bad.”

“Some animals are bad.”

“They aren’t,” she insisted.

“What about sharks?”

“If you don’t go into the water looking like a fish you’ll never have a problem with sharks.”

Dane shook his head. “I’m not debating the finer points of animals and their morality with you.”

“No, but you are doing a great job of changing the subject. Are you going to take the job with Wyatt?”

“I don’t have anything else to do.”

“I imagine you can keep on doing work here.” Lindy hadn’t asked Bea to broach the topic about the job, but Bea knew it was weighing on her. And Bea wanted to help. Lindy wanted Dane to take the job at Get Out of Dodge in part because she didn’t want Dane to further isolate himself over at the winery, and in other part because she was afraid that without supervision he was going to work himself too hard, whereas Wyatt could tailor the tasks he meted out to his brother-in-law as needed.

Dane did not look at all cheered by the prospect of working on his brother-in-law’s ranch.

She supposed a man like him… She could understand that.

Bea just wanted to live. She loved her little cabin in the woods, loved the sanctuary that she had carved out for herself and her animals. She had learned, when she was a little girl, to keep her head down, to avoid the notice of her parents so that she wouldn’t draw any negative attention to herself.

They could never understand why she was happier outside than inside the high polished marble halls of their home in the winery. Could never understand why she didn’t like the parties that they threw, or why she didn’t get along with the acceptable children of the families they preferred to spend time with.

But she didn’t.

Her solution was to be sunny, cheerful and generally out-of-the-way. If she was going to be unacceptable, she found it was best to be unacceptable in an unobtrusive way.

As an adult, she had a few friends, and she had her family—both by blood and marriage, though the marriage was dissolved now—and she loved them very much. They saw her behavior as somewhat haphazard and often in need of commentary. She smiled and then did what she wanted anyway.

No one ever seemed to notice.

Dane wasn’t like that. He was a man who had forged his own way. His own destiny. He didn’t like easy, and he didn’t like unobtrusive. She admired that about him, even if it made her want to beat him over the head with one of the heavy, hardbound books that was stacked on the coffee table.

“Just think about it, Dane,” she said. “Lindy is worried about you. And I understand that it irritates you that she’s…” She tried to choose her words carefully. She was getting frustrated and she was forgetting that Dane was like any other wounded animal.

She just had to figure out how to handle him with the kind of care that he needed. And she had an idea.

“Do this for her,” she said. “She’s worried about you. And if you… If you do this, she’s likely to ease up. Eventually, you’ll be back on your feet and…”

The look he gave her was skeptical at best. “Right. Suddenly, you’re very concerned for Lindy’s well-being.”

“I am. We are…family, kind of,” Bea said, almost choking on the words, because if Lindy was family, then Dane was family, and she had just never felt familial to him. “And I care.”

The fact of the matter was, whether or not she felt sisterly toward him didn’t change the fact that he felt brotherly toward her. And right about now she wasn’t above using that to her advantage. There had to be some advantage in it. Because there wasn’t in any other corner of that painful reality.

“And I appreciate that,” he said, his tone so gentle and placating it got her hackles up yet again.

He talked to her like she was a kid. The little sister she didn’t want to be to him.

But if she was gaining ground, she couldn’t really afford to be tetchy about it right now.

“Great. Then appreciate it by doing something for your sister. She’s been letting you stay here…”

“I don’t really like to rehash all the charity my sister has given me. I have my own money. I can take care of myself.”

“No one doubts that. But this house is empty, and there’s no reason for you not to be in it.”

“You could be in it,” he said.

“I don’t want to be in it,” Bea said.

“I’ve never understood why you had such an aversion to this place.”

“Probably for the same reason you have an aversion to working on another man’s land. There are just some things that don’t suit us, right?”

“I expect so.”

“So will you do this? Will you help Lindy feel more at ease?”

“Sure. If it will get her off my back, then I’ll do it.”

He didn’t say it, but she had a feeling that the unspoken words were: if it will get you off my back, then I’ll do it.

Bea was nothing if not relentless, and she was not above using it to her advantage when the occasion called for it. She had been described as a dog with a bone on more than one occasion.

She really didn’t find that as offensive as some people might. Dogs were loyal. Much more so than most humans.

“Thank you,” she said, leaning forward, and without thinking, pressing her hand over the top of his and squeezing.

Their eyes locked, that startling blue punching a hole in her chest and leaving her breathless. Suddenly, that rough, masculine hand beneath hers felt like it was burning through her skin.

She jerked her hand away and rubbed it on her jeans, trying to make the feeling go away. She had made a mistake touching him. She was always making mistakes with him.

That initial startle in her chest was beginning to settle, and she looked at him clearly for the first time since. And saw that he was oblivious to the whole thing.

Because of course.

That simple touch had lit her on fire from the inside out, and he had felt nothing at all.

But hey, she had convinced him to take the job.

Maybe she wasn’t like a little sister to him after all.

Maybe she was more like a faithful retriever.

That was even worse. Or at the very least it was the depressing same.

But she was helping him. And she supposed caring about anything else was silly.

Dane was getting better and that was what mattered.

Her feelings were a dead end. Dane didn’t want her, and even if he did…it wasn’t like she wanted to get married or anything like that. Not when she’d seen just how miserable marriage made people. Her feelings were pointless, and they were just going to have to stay buried. Like always.

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