Roping the Rancher (Harlequin American Romance) (2 page)

There, she’d put it all on the line. She told her mother exactly what she needed. Stacy held her breath, and prayed this once her mother would pull up her mom panties and be the parent.

“Grant and I need time to work out our problems. Then I can go with Ryan for therapy. Surely waiting a month or two won’t make that much difference.”

So much for Andrea stepping up and doing the right thing by putting her children first.

“He shouldn’t have to wait until it’s convenient for us.” Ryan deserved this chance, and apparently she was the only one willing to make it happen.

As a child, whenever she asked her mom to play a game or read a book to her, the response had always been, “In a minute.” Or, “Not now.” Or, “Ask the nanny.” That taught Stacy a valuable lesson. Asking for something led to disappointment. When she learned to quit asking, she avoided that pain.

Harnessing her anger, Stacy mumbled something about how she’d take care of Ryan’s therapy, said goodbye to Andrea and stumbled out of the house. Once inside her car, she dropped her head to the steering wheel and cried.

A minute later Stacy dried her tears and told herself to snap out of it. A pity party never helped. All it did was wreck a girl’s makeup, and leave her with red, puffy eyes. There had to be a solution. All she had to do was find it.

* * *

L
ATER
THAT
AFTERNOON
as Stacy sat in her cozy Hollywood condo, she faced the truth. She could either do the movie or she could give her brother a chance to recover.

There would always be another movie. Maybe not as wonderful a role as the lead in
The Women of Spring Creek Ranch,
but losing the job wouldn’t kill her career. Of course she’d have to solve her cash-flow problem. She’d call her agent and ask him to get her any work he could find to bring in some quick money without requiring a long commitment. Commercials. Voice-over work, whatever, as long as the job paid. Her career would be fine.

Provided Maggie understood. Otherwise Stacy could find herself blacklisted with every director in town. Her hand shook as she picked up her cell phone. “Maggie, I hate to do this, but I’ve got to drop out of the movie. My brother needs physical therapy. It’s a ten-week program, and right now I need to be with him. I can’t be on location for a movie and get him to his therapy sessions.”

“While I’m disappointed we won’t get to work together, I understand. Family has to come first.”

Such a simple concept. How come her mother couldn’t grasp it? “The doctor says his best chance to walk again is a therapeutic horse program.”

“That’s the therapy where patients ride horses, isn’t it?”

“It is.”

“One of the things about a small town is anything happens and everyone knows about it,” Maggie said. “You’re not going to believe this, but Colt Montgomery, a war vet, opened a program like that on his ranch a while ago. It’s a couple miles down the road from where we’ll be filming at Twin Creeks.”

The image of the stereotypical crotchety rancher in the old Westerns popped into Stacy’s mind. The one who preferred his horse’s company to people. Who cared if it was Rooster Cogburn running the program if he helped Ryan?

“The program’s new, and I don’t know anything about it,” Maggie continued, “but if it’s an option for your brother, you might be able to arrange his therapy around our shooting schedule.”

Who would’ve thought she and Stacy would work together after how things had gone between them on the reality show
Finding Mrs. Right?
Stacy bit her lip, trying to control her emotions at Maggie’s unexpected kindness. Her mother wouldn’t help, but here was someone, barely an acquaintance, who was willing to do what she could to alleviate her problem. Tears blurred her vision. “You’d do that?”

“You could pop over to the Rocking M Ranch for a therapy session during your downtime. If your brother’s doctor thinks the program will work, I’m willing to give it a try. The name of Colt’s program is Healing Horses.”

“Maggie, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, especially considering what I said to you and Griffin during the finale.”

Stacy had been one of the bachelorettes on the show competing for the heart of a Colorado cowboy, Griffin McAlister. Because of that opportunity she’d received a deal for her own reality show. However, things had been contingent on her getting a marriage proposal and the free publicity that went along with the engagement ring as the “winner” of
Finding Mrs. Right.
Never one to leave situations to chance and sensing Griffin was as enthusiastic about marital bliss as she was, Stacy approached him with a deal. He’d propose. They’d play the happy couple during the post-show appearances, and then quietly break up. She’d say they parted amicably, and he’d do likewise. They’d fulfill their contracts, get the free publicity to help their careers and come out without a scratch to their images. A win-win situation all around.

But things hadn’t gone as planned. Instead, Griffin and Maggie fell in love and he proposed to the director instead during the live finale. At the time all Stacy saw was her latest career opportunity flying out the window and she’d been brutal in her anger.

“I owe you an apology, too,” Maggie said. “I couldn’t talk to you at the audition with everyone else around, but I want to tell you that now. I know people say ‘we didn’t plan this, it just happened’ all the time, but that really was the case with me and Griffin. The more we worked together, the more we got to know each other, and we fell in love.”

“I think you were the only one who got to see the real man,” Stacy said. When she was with Griffin on a date she’d sensed he was holding back, that he was treating the show like a job, too. Looking back now she saw that fact even more. He hadn’t been shocked by her business proposition. His only concern had been whether he could trust her to keep quiet about their deal. Once she’d answered that question, he’d agreed. In fact he’d appeared almost relieved, but then he’d pulled the rug out from under her at the finale.

“I’m hoping Healing Horses will work for Ryan because I’d love to work with you. I think this project is going to be amazing.”

As she told Maggie she’d talk to Ryan’s doctor and call her no later than tomorrow with an answer, hope and determination blossomed inside of Stacy.

With a little luck Ryan would get his therapy and she could make the movie. Another win-win situation. Hopefully this one would work out better than the last one.

Chapter Two

Boring. Calm. Uneventful. Ordinary. The words once made Colt Montgomery go stir-crazy, but since coming home from Afghanistan, they sounded pretty damned good. Of course, raising a teenage daughter on his own meant he didn’t use those words in conjunction with his life very often, but he kept hoping.

Everywhere he went in town people and life seemed the same, and yet he wasn’t. Life in Afghanistan consisted of endless monotony and preparation, interrupted with bouts of sheer terror. He spent a good portion of his day wondering if someone he was there to help would turn on him with an AK-47. Then one day he was home.

Going to a war zone changed a man in ways few could understand, but he was one of the lucky ones. He’d come home with all his body parts. Except for some minor scars and an occasional nightmare, he returned unscathed, but then he hadn’t been there for his full tour, either.

Once home, he struggled with what to do with his life. While he loved being a parent, he needed more than raising his daughter and being a rancher. Then he heard from one of his buddies, Dan, who’d lost a leg in Afghanistan. His doctor recommended an equestrian sports therapy program, but there wasn’t one near him. After that email, Colt discovered the purpose he craved in creating Healing Horses.

He’d gone through a seven-week training course to become a registered instructor. Then he started training horses and found local physical therapists willing to donate their time to recommend activities and work with clients when necessary.

When Colt finally was able to open the doors to Healing Horses, Dan was the program’s first patient.

Footsteps tapped across the wooden floor outside his office. He looked up from the stack of bills due on his desk to see his daughter walk in, and his heart ached.

He’d come so close to losing her when he was in Afghanistan, and all because of his selfishness. When her mother ran off with a computer repairman and died a month later in a car accident, he should’ve quit the National Guard Reserves. He’d known getting deployed was a possibility, but he never really thought it would happen. So much for long shots.

When he’d been shipped to Afghanistan, his younger brother came to Colorado to stay with Jess. Reed, a bachelor, made more than a few mistakes, and Jess ran away. What could have happened to her, now that gave Colt real nightmares. Pimps. Drug dealers. General crazies waiting to prey on a naive fourteen-year-old. He thanked God every day that Reed and Avery, now Reed’s wife, found Jess at the Denver airport before she got into any serious trouble.

Jess’s running away had been a hard kick to the head for Colt. This time he got the message. She was the most important thing in his life and it was high time he proved it. So he asked for a hardship discharge, left the National Guard Reserves and returned to Estes Park.

Looking at her now standing in his office, he realized every day she looked more like her mother. Same petite frame, long chestnut hair and warm coffee-colored eyes as her mother. Jess was the constant reminder of how young and in love he’d once been. Sometimes he looked at her and tried to find bits of himself. Today he didn’t have any trouble finding a similarity. Her chin pointed at him in stubborn defiance she inherited from him. He braced himself for whatever hand grenade she was about to throw his way.

“Cody Simmons asked me out to a movie on Saturday. Can I go?”

He closed his eyes for a second to regroup. Times like these he missed having her mother around to tell him whether or not he was being too much of a hard-ass. “As in out for a date, asked you out?”

“The word
date
was never mentioned.”

“I’m not falling for that one again.” She’d burned him with technicalities more than once before he learned to choose his words very carefully and scrutinize every one of hers for land mines. “Would you be going with a group of friends?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Then it’s a date, and the answer is no.”

Cody was a good kid. He was an honor student, worked part-time at the Cinemaplex and was a pretty good bronc rider in the junior rodeo circuit, but none of that mattered to Colt. Just thinking about Jess dating shoved his panic into overdrive, especially since he knew what seventeen-year-old boys were like. Basically a bundle of hormones fantasizing about sex every thirty seconds. He hadn’t been much older than Cody when he and Lynn started having sex. By graduation she’d been pregnant and they were planning a quickie wedding.

No way did he want history repeating itself with his daughter.

“Your ‘no dating until I’m sixteen’ rule is so old-fashioned.”

“Then you better go get your bonnet, missy.”

Three more months were all he had before he started greeting boys at the door with a shotgun and giving them his own version of the Spanish Inquisition before he let them out the door with his daughter. He now understood why man invented the chastity belt.

“All my friends have been dating since they were fifteen. What difference will a few months make?”

“What difference will it make to wait?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, shifted her weight onto one foot and glared at him. Such determination and strength, and yet so much hurt behind those beautiful brown eyes. How could a mother walk out on such a wonderful child?

Leaving him, he got. He and Lynn had troubles from the moment the ink dried on their marriage license. She wanted so much that he couldn’t give her. Bright lights, the big city, adventure. Being a military wife and later a rancher’s wife weren’t what she had in mind.

If only he’d known that earlier, but they’d been high-school sweethearts who swore the love they felt would last forever. They were too young and foolish to know what they didn’t know. He wondered now if their relationship would’ve run its course sooner if Lynn hadn’t gotten pregnant.

But then he wouldn’t have Jess, and he wouldn’t trade being her father for anything. She was the only good thing that came out of his marriage.

“You don’t understand what it’s like being the only one who can’t date. I’ll become a social outcast.”

He bit his lip to keep from laughing at her woeful my-life-is-over look and drama queen voice. To a teenage girl everything turned into a Greek tragedy. Life with her was like walking a tightrope. One misstep, either with being too strict or too permissive, could lead to a big fall.

“In a couple of days everyone will forget that your hard-ass dad won’t let you date.”

“If I say no, Cody will probably ask another girl to go with him.”

Good. All the better.

Instead, Colt said, “If he really likes you, he’ll wait until you turn sixteen.”

“Guys have needs—”

“What the hell do you know about that?”

His blood pressure approaching stroke levels, he prayed his daughter wasn’t talking about the kind of needs he knew about all too well. His ate him up so bad sometimes he couldn’t sleep at night. Hell, he couldn’t remember the last time he’d gotten laid. Sure he’d taken the edge off, but that wasn’t the same as being with a woman. Sometimes holding one, losing himself in her warm curves and pretending they cared about each other was the only thing that would ease the ache.

For about five minutes when he’d first returned from Afghanistan, he considered dating. Then he remembered what it was like living in the small town he grew up in where gossiping was a town sport. The last thing he wanted was people talking about his love life and his teenage daughter hearing the stories.

On top of that, a casual relationship, in a lot of ways, sounded worse to him than no relationship at all, but he refused to have any other kind. One disastrous marriage was enough.

“Guys have fragile egos,” Jess said, easing his panic somewhat. “Getting turned down for a date is hard on their self-esteem. He’ll find someone who can go out with him.”

“She’s not my concern.”

“I know. I am.”

“That’s right.”

“Just because you don’t have a life, doesn’t mean I can’t have one.”

Ouch. He’d died and gone to hell, and this conversation was his punishment. “I’ve got a life.”

But her words got him thinking. What did he have other than Jess? A brother and sister-in-law. The ranch he grew up on. His therapy program, Healing Horses. Was that enough? It had to be right now. He couldn’t handle anything else. Definitely not dating and the emotional pitfalls that went along with trying to maintain a romantic relationship. Life with a teenager was exhausting enough.

“A monk has a more exciting life than you do,” his daughter said. “You’ve got work. That’s not the same. What’re you going to do when I go to college in two years? I don’t want you to end up being one of those weird old men who lives alone and talks to himself all day long.”

Apparently he hadn’t been the only one wondering what his life would be like when Jess went off to college. Part of him dreaded her leaving, while a piece of him looked forward to the freedom he’d have. For as long as he could remember responsibilities ruled his life. From the time he and Reed were strong enough to lift a saddle his father had worked his sons harder than any ranch hand. As the big brother, he’d watched out for Reed. Colt had stepped in to defuse things once their mother, the family peacemaker and punching bag, died. Then at eighteen he’d found himself in the military responsible for a wife with a baby on the way.

An empty nest and the chance to figure out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life sounded pretty good right now.

“Your life shouldn’t stop because you’ve got me to raise.”

“It hasn’t.” He picked up the top bill and scanned the paper, hoping his daughter would take the hint that he was done discussing her dating and his.

“Why don’t you trust me?” Jess accused. “I thought you’d forgiven me for running away.”

Jess’s quiet words and the clear pain in her expressive brown eyes hit Colt hard like a kick from an angry mule. He replaced the bill on the stack. “I have. I know if you’re ever that upset again, you’ll come to me, and we’ll work things out. I don’t want you to ever be afraid to tell me anything.”

Unlike how he and Reed had been with their father, who they tried every trick to avoid. The old man was as likely to greet a simple good morning from his sons with a slap upside the head as a smile, and there was never a way to predict which they’d get or change the outcome. “I trust you. It’s the boys that scare the hell out of me.”

“We’d just being going to a movie.”

He’d told himself he wouldn’t be the hard liner his father had been. He wouldn’t drive his daughter away. The last thing he wanted her thinking was that he didn’t trust her. He sighed. Time to cowboy up and prove the fact. “I’ll compromise. Make it a double date, and you can go.”

His daughter charged around his desk, flung her arms around him and squeezed him tight. “I won’t let you down,” she whispered in his ear and kissed him on the cheek. Then with one last grin, she headed for the door as Nannette McAlister, his assistant at Healing Horses, strolled in. “You’ll never guess what happened. Dad said I could go out on a double date this Friday.”

“You finally wore him down, huh?” Nannette was the kind of mother every child should have. She loved and encouraged her three children, and their friends were always welcome in the McAlister home. All she wanted was for them to be happy. His brother had found that out firsthand.

Since Reed married Avery, Nannette’s youngest and only daughter, he and Jess had been enveloped in the family fold, as well.

“I’m putting my full trust in my daughter,” Colt said to Nannette to emphasize his point with Jess. “She promised she won’t let me down.”

Jess shook her head. “I’m leaving before he changes his mind.”

“Smart girl.”

“I take after my father,” Jess said before she dashed off.

“How’s the morning going?” Nannette asked once she’d settled at her desk, and started booting up her computer.

“Better now that Jess is gone. This dating stuff is going to kill me.”

The older woman smiled knowingly. “I feel your pain. Raising Avery gave me more gray hairs than her brothers combined. I know it doesn’t seem like it sometimes, but you will survive having a teenage daughter.”

“Thank goodness you keep reminding me of that.”

When Nannette heard about him turning the Rocking M into a horse-therapy ranch, she’d immediately volunteered to help with bookkeeping. Then when they started classes, she’d assumed scheduling duties, as well. Taking the money he’d gotten from the grant Healing Horses received three months ago to hire Nannette McAlister had been the smartest thing he’d ever done.

When her computer finished booting up, she punched some keys and said, “We received another client application.” The hum of the printer filled the office. Nannette grabbed the paper, scanned the application and froze. “This can’t be the same Stacy Michaels.”

“I need a little context, Nannette. So far you aren’t making a lot of sense.”

She walked across the room and handed him the paper. “Stacy Michaels was one of the finalists when Griffin was on that ridiculous dating show.”

Colt had wondered what kind of woman went on a show like that and fought with a pack of women to win the “love” of a man they’d just met.

A woman whose moral compass didn’t point due north, that’s who.

From the little bit he saw of the show, he remembered flighty, beautiful women with long legs and short form-fitting skirts that almost showed the good china. Great to look at, but no substance. Women who’d looked down their more-often-than-not surgically altered noses at just about everyone.

After glancing at the application, he said, “It doesn’t matter if it’s the same woman or not because she wants to sign her brother up for the spring therapeutic sports riding session. It’s already started and it’s full.” He picked up his phone and punched in the number listed on the application. The sultry feminine voice that answered could get a rise out of a man two months after he was dead and buried. His pulse rate shot up like a rodeo bull out of the shoot as he asked to speak to Stacy Michaels.

“This is Stacy.”