Billion Dollar Cowboy (27 page)

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Authors: Carolyn Brown

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Colton squeezed her hand three times and they stood up together.

Maudie sniffed into a handkerchief.

“Yes!” Roxie whispered.

“I love you.” Janet pulled a gorgeous nosegay of daisies, roses, and orchids from her oversized purse and handed it to Laura.

“Colton, stand right here,” Roger said. “And Miss Laura, you stand here. You two face each other and look at each other, not at me.”

In ten minutes she would never be Miss Laura Baker again. Panic clenched her heart into a pretzel.

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today in the presence of God and these witnesses,” Roger began. “Traditional vows?” he whispered.

Colton nodded.

All the fears, doubts, and worries left Laura when Colton said his vows without stuttering one time and finished with his own words, “All this I vow because I love you and because you own my heart.”

Maudie wept loudly into a handkerchief behind her.

Roxie sighed.

Rusty cleared his throat.

“Now repeat after me,” Roger said to Laura.

She drew strength from looking deeply into Colton’s eyes and blocking everything else out as she repeated her vows, ending with, “All this I promise to do because I love you too, Colton, and my heart is yours for all eternity.”

“By the authority invested in me by the state of Texas and by God, I pronounce you man and wife,” Roger said. “Now, Colton, you may kiss your bride.”

The kiss sealed the vows and Laura knew complete and honest peace in that moment when her husband’s lips touched hers.

Roger laid a hand on Laura’s shoulder and one on Colton’s. “Let me be the very first to introduce to you all in this room, Mr. and Mrs. Colton Nelson. There is a reception out at the ranch with a light lunch, fellowship, and wedding cake for anyone who’d like to follow the new couple out there.”

Colton looked at Laura.

She shrugged. “I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

Colton looked at the family pew and Andy winked.

“Andy?” he whispered.

“I might have known.” She nodded.

Colton tucked Laura’s arm in his and a standing ovation and loud clapping led her out to his truck. He caged her with an arm on each side of her against the truck and kissed her hard, passionately, and with so much heat that she was panting when he stepped back.

Andy was behind Colton when she opened her eyes. “Congratulations! And Laura, I did the reception. Not Colton or even Maudie and Roxie knew about it. Hired a caterer and called Janet. So don’t ever be mad at Colton. You both need the memories.”

“I’m so happy right now I could never be mad at anyone,” she said. “Let’s go home.”

Colton left a cloud of dust behind the truck the whole way home and skidded to a stop so fast that it scared Donald and Daisy, who’d been sleeping on the front porch. The cat climbed the mimosa tree and Donald flew toward the pond.

“What is the big hurry?” she asked.

“I want to get something done before everyone gets here,” he said.

“You ready for this?” Andy asked the minute they were out of the truck.

Colton grabbed Laura’s hand and followed Andy into the house.

“Bring it on,” Colton said as soon as they were in the office.

Andy pulled a single sheet of paper from the briefcase. “This paper nullifies everything you just signed, Laura. It says that from the moment you became Mrs. Colton Nelson that the ranch is yours as well as his.”

“But,” she stammered.

“You needed to show me how much you trusted me.” Colton signed his name to the bottom of the document. “This is showing you that I trust you.”

Tears flowed down her cheeks. “I love you.”

He wiped them away with the back of his hand. “Don’t cry, darlin’. What’s mine is yours and remember what you said about the heart. Well, if you were ever to leave me, I’d die and wouldn’t have any need for all this anyway. Now let’s go share our wedding day with all our family and friends.”

Dear Readers,

A few months ago, four new cowboys showed up in my virtual world and asked, hats in hand, that I tell their stories. I guess word is getting around that I’m a sucker for sexy cowboys with an interesting love story. Colton Nelson wanted to be first and invited me down to Ambrose, Texas, to take a look at the town of less than a hundred people and his ranch, the Circle 6, which was ten times bigger than the whole town. I was hooked from the first line of their story about how they’d even met each other.

Ambrose is at the end of the road, quite literally, since you can’t cross the Red River into Oklahoma at that point. The school closed years ago and the kids are bussed six miles over to Bells, Texas. The old school building is now used as a community center. They lost their post office a while back and the mail comes by rural mail delivery. But there is still a church and the folks are a friendly lot who take care of their own.

I fell in love with the small towns in that area as well as the cowboys and their stories. Lucas is from Savoy, not far from Bells. Greg has lived on a ranch in Ravenna his whole life, and Mason lives just outside of Whitewright with his twin daughters.

So begins a brand-new venture in a brand-new area of Texas. Trust me, the cowboys are sexy and the ladies that capture their hearts are very sassy. Here’s hoping that you settle in real well with these folks and enjoy reading all about the cowboys from north Texas.

Many thanks to my fabulous editor, Deb Werksman, and all the staff at Sourcebooks who turn my manuscripts into gorgeous books. I’d like to thank Sourcebooks once again for continuing to publish my books. Also thank you to my agent Erin Niumata and the folks at Folio Literary Management. And Husband, the man who is always ready at the drop of a hat to go with me anywhere I want to go for research. He even drives and takes tons of pictures for me so my hands can be free to take notes. It takes a special person to be the spouse of an author and he has my utmost love and appreciation.

And a very, very big thank you to all you readers! Y’all are truly the wind beneath my wings!

All my best,

Carolyn Brown

Read on for a sneak peek at

Cowboy Seeks Bride

coming August 2013 from Sourcebooks Casablanca

If it was an April Fools’ joke, it damn sure wasn’t funny.

If it wasn’t a joke, it was a disaster.

Those five big horses complete with cowboys didn’t look like a joke. Cattle bawling and milling around looked pretty damned real, too. And that little covered wagon, with a bald-headed man the size of a refrigerator sitting on the buckboard holding the reins for two horses in his hands, didn’t have a single funny thing about it, either.

Haley’s mouth went dry when she realized that the big dapple gray horse was for her and that absolutely nothing in front of her was a practical joke. It was all as real as the smell of the horses and what they’d dropped on the ground.

She slung open the door of her little red sports car. The cowboys were all slack jawed, as if they’d never seen a woman before. Well, they’d best tie a rope around their chins and draw them back up because she was going to be their sidekick for the next thirty days. They could like it or hate it. It didn’t really matter to her. All she wanted to do was get the month over with and go home to civilization.

“You lose your way?” The cowboy on a big black horse looked down at her. His tone was icy and his deep green eyes even colder.

“Not if this is the O’Donnell horse ranch and you’re about to take off on the Chisholm Trail reenactment.” She looked up into the dark-haired cowboy’s green sexy eyes. “Who are you?” She planted her high heels on the ground and got out of the car.

“Dewar O’Donnell, and you are?”

Dammit! With a name like Dewar, she’d pictured a sixty-year-old man with a rim of graying hair circling an otherwise bald head, and a face wrinkled up like the earth after a hard summer complete with a day’s growth of gray whiskers. He sure wasn’t supposed to look like Timothy Olyphant with Ben Bass’s eyes. It was going to be one hell of a month because she wasn’t about to get involved with a cowboy. Not even if she had the sudden urge to crawl right up on that horse and see if those eyes were as dreamy up close as they were from ten feet away.

“I’m H. B. Mckay,” she answered.

“Well, shit!” Dewar drawled.

“I know. Life’s a bitch, isn’t it? But I’ll be riding along this whole trip taking notes for the reality show to be filmed this summer,” she said. “Unless you want to tell me that this is a big silly joke and I can go home to Dallas now.”

“Can’t do that, ma’am. I was expecting you to be a man, but we’re ready to move this herd north, so I guess you’d better saddle up. I was just about to call Carl Levy and ask where you were,” Dewar drawled.

“That’s the idea most people have. I guess that empty horse is for me and I don’t get to drive from point to point and stay in a hotel?”

“That’s the plan Carl made,” he answered.

She crossed her arms over her chest. “So we are ready to go right now?”

“Unless you want to change clothes,” he said.

“Hell, no! I’m wearing what I’ve got on, and if I get a single snag in this suit, Daddy will be paying for a brand-new one,” she said.

Dewar frowned. “Daddy?”

“Carl Levy is my father as well as my boss.”

***

Dewar had always had a liking for redheads, but not the kind that wore high-heeled shoes and business suits. And it seemed like here lately he’d dated every redhead in the whole northern part of Texas. Because both of his brothers and his two sisters had beat him to the altar, now everyone in the family thought they had a PhD in matchmaking and had made it their life mission to get him married off.

He’d rebelled at first, but then he admitted that he really wanted to have a wife and family so he’d started looking around on his own. He hadn’t joined one of those online dating services, but he had been dating a lot. Either he was too damn picky or else all the good ones were taken because very few women interested him enough for a second date.

H. B.’s eyes were a soft aqua, somewhere between blue and green like the still deep waters of the ocean. And her lips full, the kind that begged for kisses. He felt a stirring down deep in his heart that he hadn’t felt before, but he didn’t know if it was anger or desire.

It really didn’t matter because the whole damn thing had to be a joke. It was too ridiculous to be real. Raylen had cooked it up and paid some woman to help him pull it off. He pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and quickly punched in the numbers to the office of the Dallas magazine tycoon.

“Carl Levy, please.”

Ten long seconds later, “Tell him this is Dewar O’Donnell and this is definitely an emergency.”

H.B. shook her head and took her saddlebags from her car. “You are wasting your time, cowboy.”

Dewar hooked a leg over the saddle horn and ignored her. “Carl, I’ve got a red-haired woman who says she’s H. B. McKay. You want to verify that?”

He frowned.

“You led me to believe that H. B. was a man, sir. A woman hasn’t got any business on a cattle drive.”

H. B. yelled over the noise of bawling cattle, snorting horses, and grinning men. “Tell him Momma is going to throw a Cajun fit, and if he’s smart he’ll walk in the house with roses in one hand and an apology on his lips.”

“Yes, sir, that was her,” Dewar said.

She held out her hand. “Give me that phone.”

Dewar leaned down and put it in her hand.

“You are going to pay for this, Daddy. I’m pissed off worse than I’ve ever been before in my life. I’m so pissed off that I’m not even going to talk to you about it and you can tell Joel that I know he’s behind this shit and I’ll get even with him when I get home.”

Everything went silent. Even the cows stopped bawling.

“Stop laughing. I’ll show you what I can do, but you are going to be sorry. Believe me, you are going to regret it.”

She handed the phone back to Dewar. “He says to tell you good luck. You ready?”

He put the phone back in his pocket and nodded toward the dapple gray horse. “Soon as you tie down those bags and mount up. Apache is spirited, but he’s tough. You ever ridden?”

“Once or twice,” she answered.