Authors: Katherine Garbera - Her Summer Cowboy
Tags: #Romance, #Western
Her Summer Cowboy
a montana born fair novella
Katherine Garbera
Her Summer Cowboy
Copyright © 2014 Katherine Garbera
Kindle Edition
The Tule Publishing Group, LLC
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental
ISBN: 978-1-940296-70-8
Dear Reader,
Happy Summer!!! I hope you are having a great one. My best memories of summer stem from the times I spent at the county fair listening to country music concerts, eating all kinds of foods that weren’t “good” for me and riding rides that thrilled me. I incorporated all of those elements into HER SUMMER COWBOY.
Emma Jean is me and you but if we had a really famous family. She’s got the same dreams and desires as anyone else except that most people thought she’d be good at singing and songwriting because her father and grandfather were. She is good but she lacks confidence in herself because she is afraid to share her own emotions.
Hudson Scott is one of the Scott brothers that you may have met before in A COWBOY FOR CHRISTMAS or THE RELUCTANT BRIDE. He’s a rough and tough cowboy/bouncer who is going home to Marietta after a decade away. He and Emma Jean aren’t looking for anything but a summer fling as they are both on separate paths and expect that once the fair is over they will go there own way.
I hope you enjoy HER SUMMER COWBOY as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Happy reading,
Katherine
Nashville, Tennessee
I
t was hot
and humid on the edge of the large clearing where the summer tour buses were assembled. There was a stale breeze that tepidly tried to stir but really in this heat not much was moving. Hudson Scott sank deeper into the lawn chair he was sitting in under the shade of a big oak tree. From his position he could watch the bus area and the pathway that led up to it.
He wouldn’t have thought an aging country music legend would have so many determined fans but he must have turned away at least fifteen people already today.
“Excuse me? Where is Alan Jennings’ tour bus?” a woman asked. She wore a mini-skirt and had a pretty sunburn across the bridge of her nose. She didn’t look like the other women who’d stopped by to try to gain access to Alan. She was about thirty years too young.
But the heart wants what it wants, he thought. Hudson took in the little auburn-haired beauty that asked the question. Her voice was soft, sweet and full of the melodies of the South. She wore a pair of big, black sunglasses that hid most of her face. She had a cute button nose and a mouth that was full and pink.
She had complemented her mini-skirt with a peasant-style short-sleeved blouse and a pair of wedge heels that still only brought her up to his shoulder. She carried a big insulated cooler bag in one hand and a guitar in the other.
“Who wants to know?” he asked.
“Just tell me where he is?” she said.
“I’m his bodyguard.”
“You’re his bodyguard?” she asked, skepticism dripping from her.
“Yeah. So unless you tell me who you are, I’m afraid this is as far as you go,” he said.
“You don’t look like a bodyguard,” she said.
Hudson was a rambler, a bouncer and a cowboy. He’d been travelling around the country since he’d left home at 18, and after an argument with his father that had taken place just after his mother died a couple of years later, he only came home for holidays and weddings. At thirty-one he knew it was probably time to patch things up and when he’d returned to Marietta, Montana earlier this summer for a family wedding, he’d realized that he didn’t quite hate everything about it as much as he’d thought he had back at 18.
In fact, he missed his brothers and wanted to get to know the women they were settling down with. And he had two nephews he barely knew. That wasn’t right. His momma, if she were still alive, would never have let him stay gone so long.
But he was stubborn just like his daddy and being Hudson, he was determined he could outlast the old man. Except when he’d been home in June he’d realized that Jeb Scott really was getting old and maybe it was time to stop running. So he’d taken this job as a bodyguard and horse wrangler for Alan Jennings Farewell Summer Tour. They were hitting county fairs from Tennessee to Montana for the next two months.
“What do I look like?” he asked.
“Trouble,” she said. “Like one of the guys my gramps would drink with back in the day. Except, he’s an old man and not a partier anymore.”
“Would Gramps, the reformed partier, approve of you acting like a groupie to a man who could probably your grandfather?”
She looked at him like he was speaking Chinese.
“I’m not a groupie. I’m his granddaughter.”
“So you are claiming to be Alan’s granddaughter?” he asked. He’d grown up on country music and knew all about Alan Jennings, his talented daughter Maryann who’d gone on to marry Keith Wells. It had been a marriage made in country music heaven that had ended in tragedy.
“I am. Actually I’m a little bit disappointed you don’t recognize me. Being Gramps’ bodyguard and all,” she said. “Surely, he told you I’d be stopping by to stock his tour bus before he left. I do it every summer.”
“You’re a smartass, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Not normally, no,” she said. “Who are you? Really?”
He tipped his cowboy hat back on his head and looked over at her with a steady stare that had been known to make even the rowdiest of drunk rednecks back down. “I’m the bodyguard.”
She bit her bottom lip and then nodded. “Okay, you convinced me with your scary stare. Can I know which tour bus is his now?”
He nodded. “That one over there.”
“Thank you. Why does he need a bodyguard?” she asked. “Is there any danger to him?”
“No, ma’am. I’m here to wrangle the horse for his show and provide some security for him. I guess his record label just wanted to make sure no one got crazy.”
“Why would they? In the last few years attendance hasn’t been that great. I mean his core fans are getting older just like he is.”
Hudson realized that she didn’t know that Alan was retiring. Everyone was pretty sure his retirement tour was going to bring out the fans and like Alan’s agent said, maybe a few crazies. So Hudson was here to make sure nothing happened to the old man or anyone else touring with him.
“He’s retiring,” Hudson said.
“What?” She almost dropped her bag as she stared at him. And he was glad that he wasn’t going to be on the receiving end of that temper.
“That’s what I was told. And why I was hired. It’s nice to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand.
She brushed past him without responding, but he wasn’t bothered. He just stood there and watched her walk away. Her hips swaying with each step she took, the bag in her arm swinging wildly.
Summer just got a little more interesting.
*
“What do you
mean you’re retiring?”
Emma Jean Wells couldn’t believe her grandfather the Grand Ole Opry hall-of-famer and country music legend Alan Jennings was serious. Gramps lived for playing live and touring. He’d told her that more than once when she’d tried to get him to come and live with her. “And more importantly, why did I have to hear the news from a man who claims to be your bodyguard?”
“Emma, don’t get your dander up,” he said. “I wanted to tell you in person. And since you were headed up here to spend a few days with me there was no need to go into it on the phone.
“But why? And don’t say the road is getting to you,” she warned as she moved around his tour bus putting away the food she’d made for him. Every summer since she was sixteen her grandfather had taken his show on the road to county fairs all across the country. When she’d been younger she’d come with him a time or two but people always wanted her to perform the duet he used to do with her mom—his daughter. She didn’t like the spotlight, having seen first-hand that not everyone could handle it.
She might be like this old rascal—who was definitely up to something—and love the stage. Or she might be like her father and not be able to live without it and slowly drink herself to death. So instead she chose a quiet life teaching school in Capshaw County, Georgia in the tiny town of Winsome right across the border on Florida’s panhandle.
It was where her people were from. There no one asked her about her parents’ tragic love story or tried to get her to sing. They just let her be. She’d traveled all the way from Winsome and would be spending the next week at her family’s Nashville mansion before heading back home to do nothing all summer.
“Well, clichéd or not, pumpkin, the road is getting to me. I’m not as young as I used to be.”
Her grandfather looked like he was in his fifties instead of late seventies. He still had a thick mane of silvery blond hair that was more silver than blond these days. His eyes were clear blue like a lake in the Tennessee mountains and nothing got by him. He was fit and trim, a testament to his sobriety and his determination to undo the damage he’d done to himself by living hard at the beginning of his career in the late 60s and 70s.
He didn’t look like someone who was going to retire. He liked the road and travelling. It was in his blood. He liked being away from that big old Nashville mansion where his only roommates were the ghosts of the past. So retiring? She didn’t think so.
“And you’re not dead yet, you old goat. So what’s going on?” she asked.
“No respect,” he said. “After all I’ve done for you.”
“Gramps,” she said, putting the last of the homemade carrot juice bottles she’d made for him away and coming over to sit next to him on the padded bench. “I love you. You know that. But I can tell when something is up. Just tell me what’s going on.”
“The truth is,” he said, strumming his fingers over the old Gibson acoustic guitar that he’d been playing since he was sixteen. “I want you on the road with me. And we both know that if I’m retiring and this is my farewell tour, you can’t say no.”
She looked at him. Was he serious? He’d retire just to get her to come on tour with him. She didn’t want to seem like the bad guy here. She loved her Gramps and would like to spend the summer with him, but he wanted her up on that stage with him and that’s where she drew the line. Singing songs that reminded her of her youth and her parents.