The Cowboy Earns a Bride (Cowboys of Chance Creek Book 8) (14 page)

By the time
Luke walked through his front door that evening he felt like he’d been flattened by a freight train. The icy wind that had whipped through Chance Creek all day had pushed the snow in the pastures into drifts, and his mother had called because it packed so hard in one place that a dozen head of cattle had wandered right up and over a fence. He’d spent all afternoon searching for them, luring them back into their pasture and fixing the fence. Now his muscles ached, he was dog-tired and hungry as anything, too. He’d taken another run out to Amanda’s place and been relieved to find that all was well. Maybe some old geezer had taken a fancy to her because she referenced her
friend
again, and her walkway was clear of snow.

The envelope lying on the floor of his cabin stopped Luke in his tracks. Was it from Mia? His heart rate kicked up a notch as he bent down to retrieve it. It was odd Mia would write a letter rather than text him. She was rarely without her phone. His stomach dropped as he took in the address, written in uneven block letters, as if done by a kid—or a psychopath. What kind of letter was this?

He made short work of opening it. Two words were written on a scrap of paper in the same block handwriting he’d seen on the envelope.

Buety Pagint.

What the hell did that mean?

Luke squinted at the paper. Cocked his head. Beauty pageant? Some squirt of a kid didn’t even know how to spell the words? What kind of a stupid joke was this?

He stumbled toward the couch, sat down heavily and leaned back against the cushions. Beauty pageant. The words meant nothing to him, although…didn’t Mia used to be in those pageants when she was young? He wondered which of her friends would know the answer to that. He couldn’t ask Mia directly, not after their last confrontation. If he did, she’d say he didn’t listen to her, and that wasn’t true—it was just sometimes when she was talking he made the mistake of looking at her and then he lost his concentration.

Beauty pageants. Who knew about beauty pageants?

He let the letter fall from his hand.

Rose Bellingham. He’d bet anything she had the skinny on them. She was close to Mia’s age, too.

He’d call Rose tomorrow and ask a few questions. Better yet, he’d head over to the Cruz ranch to talk with her face-to-face. He let his head fall back against the cushions and shut his eyes, just for a moment. Tonight he needed to head to the Cruz ranch to talk to Mia. Maybe she’d have calmed down by now. She couldn’t stay mad at him forever.

He hoped.

A second later, he was asleep.

Marry him
. The note she’d received was still on Mia’s mind when she returned from work late the following afternoon. Why should she marry him? Luke hadn’t even bothered to stop by and talk last night like she’d suggested when he came to the restaurant yesterday afternoon. Apparently, sorting out their differences wasn’t all that important to him.

She shook her head as she made her way up to her room. Alone in the big house, she was all too aware of the many empty rooms around hers. Ethan and Autumn still made their home in the converted bunkhouse on the property. They hoped to build a family suite on the first floor of the guesthouse, but hadn’t earned enough from running it yet to justify the cost.

She was about to descend to the main floor and make use of the wide screen television there when she saw movement outside and went to the window to see who it was.

It was Luke. But instead of coming to the guesthouse, he was walking toward another cabin on the property—the one where Cab and Rose lived. As partners in the ranch, they’d moved onto the property a few months ago. Mia felt a pang of jealousy that they’d invited Luke for dinner and not her. No one in their right mind would invite both of them when they were fighting, but if the couple was going to choose one of them to cheer up, shouldn’t it be her? She was good friends with Rose.

Luke wasn’t that close with Cab, was he?

She stood on her tiptoes and watched Luke disappear among the trees that separated Cab and Rose’s cabin from the guesthouse. Through the branches, the small house blazed with light and looked cozy as could be in the dark, snowy landscape. That’s how Luke’s cabin would look if she still lived there with him. For the first time her anger diminished enough for her to wonder if she’d been wrong to leave.

No. She wasn’t wrong. He’d said horrible things to her.

She turned away from the window, wishing more than anything for someone’s company. When her phone rang a few minutes later, she grabbed it and held it to her ear.

“Hello?”

“Have you lost your mind?”

She stifled a groan. Her mother.

“It isn’t bad enough you’re pregnant with a married man’s baby? Now you’ve thrown over Luke, too? Are you going to sleep with the entire town?”

“Only the male half.” Shoot, had she actually said that out loud? Yes, she had. And her mother was not amused.

“You get over there and beg him to take you back. He was willing to make an honest woman of you, something that Scranton man certainly wasn’t. You won’t get another chance like this, believe me. You’re used goods, Mia Start. No man’s going to want you now.”

Mia clicked the phone off, the first time she’d ever hung up on her mother. Used goods. What was this, the nineteenth century?

She paced the living room in the Cruz guesthouse, too agitated to watch television now. It all came down to gossip, didn’t it? Her mother didn’t want to be shunned at her church. Luke didn’t want to be talked about by his friends. Now she was supposed to be too embarrassed to show her face.

And she was too embarrassed to speak up about the incident with Warner. Too embarrassed to speak up and maybe stop it from happening to someone else. She sat down on the couch as painful memories from the past swirled through her mind. She remembered the way the other girls at the pageant had looked at her, the way they’d repeated the rumors that she’d tried to trade sexual favors in order to win. The way everyone had retreated from her when she walked into a room—as if she carried a fatal disease that they might catch.

She stood up and strode to the kitchen. Maybe cooking her dinner would dispel both the memories and the pain. She wasn’t ready to speak up about Warner and expose herself to that kind of treatment all over again.

She just couldn’t. Not now.

“Thanks for dinner,”
Luke said as he pushed back from the table. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans. What more could a man ask from a meal? Except to have it served by his fiancée, not his friend.

“No problem.” Rose smiled at him. She and Cab had welcomed him into their house and invited him to dinner as soon as he showed up at their door. Normally he considered Cab more Rob’s friend than his own, but the sheriff was a good host and had enough stories to tell to make any social occasion an interesting one.

“How’s Mia doing?” Cab asked, finishing his own meal.

Luke shrugged. “That’s what I came to talk about. Is there something I should know about her past? About the time when she was doing those pageants?”

Rose looked surprised. “Pageants? That was a long time ago. She stopped doing them when she was about fifteen, right?”

“I don’t know. Can’t say I was paying attention back then.” He grinned, relaxed by the good meal and good company. “Would have been pretty creepy if I had been, seeing as how I was about twenty-five.” Luke went on to describe the weird note he received and didn’t miss the look that passed between Cab and Rose. “What?”

Rose shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “Well, I wasn’t friends with Mia either, back then—there are a couple of years between us—but I knew her, and those pageants were icky if you ask me.”

“What do you mean?”

Rose took a moment to answer. “I guess a lot of the girls wanted to be there, but there were others who competed because their mothers wanted them to, you know? And I think Mia was one of them.”

Luke didn’t know Enid Start all that well. She was short, like Mia, and decidedly middle-aged. In her conservative clothes and understated makeup, she kind of faded into the background, so it hadn’t occurred to him that she would be the motivation behind Mia doing pageants.

“Mia didn’t want to do them?”

“I’m not sure I’m explaining this right,” Rose said, offering him a basket of biscuits. “Little kids don’t sign themselves up for pageants, right? Someone has to do that for them. Mia started really young. And I get why a parent would do it, you know? You get to dress your kid up and show them off, but by the time they’re preteens, it’s a little dicey. You have to ask yourself why a mother would want her daughter to stand in front of a crowd in a fancy dress—and then a bikini—to be judged on how her body looks.”

“Lots of girls do beauty pageants. It doesn’t hurt them.” Luke had grown up seeing articles in the local newspaper about them. He knew plenty of girls who had participated.

“No, you’re right. It’s probably fine for most girls, but I don’t think it’s good for all of them. For some it’s too much pressure. I mean, what kind of a message does it send?

“The kind of message that gets women killed,” Cab put in darkly.

Rose shot him a look. “That’s going too far. Beauty pageants don’t lead to murder—but they can lead to bad body images.”

“When you train a woman to need approval or to determine her self-worth that way, you train her to be vulnerable.” Cab was adamant.

“I’m not disputing that,” Rose said. “But back to your question, Luke. Mia’s mom put far more emphasis on those pageants than she did school. She made it pretty clear: Mia’s job was to look good enough for a man to want to support her.”

“Well, it worked,” Luke joked. “She looks great and I do want to support her. Nothing but the best for my Mia.”

Rose shook her head. “You’re missing the point. It’s Enid who thinks she should trade looks for security. Not Mia.”

“I don’t want to trade anything,” Luke said. “I just want to marry her.”

“Then maybe you better start by figuring out why Mia quit those pageants—because she did, all of a sudden. There were some rumors, too—nasty ones.” Rose stabbed a piece of chicken so hard her fork scraped across the plate.

“What kind of rumors?”

“I hate to even repeat them, since they’ve finally died down over the years.” Rose took in his expression and sighed. “There were rumors Mia offered to trade favors for the crown of one of the more important pageants.”

Luke pushed back from the table. “No way. Not Mia.”

“No. Of course not. But something happened, and whoever sent you that message wants you to know what it was. If I were you, I’d look into it.”

A wave of defeat overtook Luke. Of course he’d look into it, but when would he have time? And what had happened to Mia when she was fifteen?

His fists clenched under the table. He was damn sure going to find out.

‡
Chapter Ten

“A
re you sure
you still want to help me plan my wedding?” Rose asked the next day when Mia joined her at Linda’s Diner for a breakfast meeting. Mia had opted to hold the meeting away from both Rose’s cabin and the Cruz guesthouse, needing a change of scenery after spending the previous night wondering what Luke’s visit had entailed.

“Of course.” But the truth was, she wanted to grill Rose about what Luke had said the night before far more than she wanted to talk about invitations.

“Listen.” Rose cupped her mug of coffee with both hands, huddling over it as if hoping it would warm her entire body. “Luke stopped by last night. He ended up staying for dinner. I hope you don’t mind.”

“I don’t mind. He’s your friend.”

“Sort of,” Rose said. “Anyway, he asked about you.”

“Oh?” She tried to be nonchalant. Probably failed.

“About your pageant days.”

Mia stilled. “Why did he want to know about that?”

“I don’t know.” Rose took a sip of her strong, black coffee. “I might have spoken out of turn.”

Mia’s unease deepened. Why did the pageants keep coming up suddenly? She’d put all of that behind her years ago. “What did you say?”

“I told him your mom pushed you to do them. That maybe you would have preferred to do something else.”

Mia wrinkled her nose. “Damn straight. I wanted to get a job so I could save up for a car. Plus…” She trailed off, not eager to talk about the rest of it.

“Plus what?”

“There was an… incident. A judge who got a little handsy. You know.”

Rose pushed her cup away. “I might have mentioned that, too,” she said in a small voice.

Mia’s heart sunk.

“I’m sorry,” Rose rushed on. “It just came out. I didn’t think until later that maybe you hoped he didn’t know.”

“Well, he knows now,” Mia said. She felt like a noose was tightening around her neck. She wanted to get away from the past, but it kept creeping up on her and drawing her in again.

“What happened?”

Mia considered refusing to talk about it, but decided to open up instead. She could use a friend’s opinion about what to do, and Rose had proved herself a true friend these last few days.

“I was fifteen and competing in my first big pageant. I was so nervous. I wanted to win so badly. It was the one place my mom and I really connected, you know? I knew she’d be proud of me if I won, and besides—who doesn’t want to be crowned queen?”