Unbroken Cowboy Read online

  In Gold Valley, Oregon, forbidden love just might be the sweetest...

  Dane Parker traded in his trailer-park roots for glory as a bull rider. But when a serious injury sidelines him for months, it’s the first time he can’t just pull himself up by his bootstraps. The last thing he wants to deal with is sweet family friend Bea treating him like one of her wounded animals—or the unexpected attraction that suddenly flares between them.

  Beatrix Leighton has loved Dane for years, while he’s always seen her as another sister. When she enlists his help to start her animal sanctuary, she thinks it will give him purpose. Instead, it brings all the desire she feels for him to the boiling point. Bea’s father taught her early on that love means loss. But could her forbidden crush turn into a love that will last a lifetime?

  Praise for New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates

  “Yates’ new Gold Valley series begins with a sassy, romantic and sexy story about two characters whose chemistry is off the charts.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Smooth-Talking Cowboy (Top Pick)

  “The banter between the Dodge siblings is loads of fun, and adding Dallas (Bennett’s surprise son) to the mix raises that humor up a notch or two.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Untamed Cowboy (Top Pick)

  “Fans of Robyn Carr and RaeAnne Thayne will enjoy [Yates’s] small-town romance.”

  —Booklist on Part Time Cowboy

  “Passionate, energetic and jam-packed with personality.”

  —USATODAY.com’s Happy Ever After blog on Part Time Cowboy

  “[A] story with emotional depth, intense heartache and love that is hard fought for and eventually won.... This is a book readers will be telling their friends about.”

  —RT Book Reviews on Brokedown Cowboy

  “Yates’s thrilling seventh Copper Ridge contemporary proves that friendship can evolve into scintillating romance.... This is a surefire winner not to be missed.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Slow Burn Cowboy (starred review)

  “This fast-paced, sensual novel will leave readers believing in the healing power of love.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Down Home Cowboy

  Welcome to Gold Valley, Oregon, where the cowboys are tough to tame, until they meet the women who can lasso their hearts.

  Cowboy Christmas Blues (ebook novella)

  Smooth-Talking Cowboy

  Mail Order Cowboy (ebook novella)

  Untamed Cowboy

  Hard Riding Cowboy (ebook novella)

  Good Time Cowboy

  Snowed in with the Cowboy (ebook novella)

  A Tall, Dark Cowboy Christmas

  Unbroken Cowboy

  In Copper Ridge, Oregon, lasting love with a cowboy is only a happily-ever-after away. Don’t miss any of Maisey Yates’s Copper Ridge tales, available now!

  From HQN Books

  Shoulda Been a Cowboy (prequel novella)

  Part Time Cowboy

  Brokedown Cowboy

  Bad News Cowboy

  A Copper Ridge Christmas (ebook novella)

  The Cowboy Way

  Hometown Heartbreaker (ebook novella)

  One Night Charmer

  Tough Luck Hero

  Last Chance Rebel

  Slow Burn Cowboy

  Down Home Cowboy

  Wild Ride Cowboy

  Christmastime Cowboy

  Look for more Gold Valley books coming soon!

  For more books by Maisey Yates, visit www.maiseyyates.com.

  Maisey Yates

  Unbroken Cowboy

  For Nicole. You didn’t shout, “Full Yates!” at me even once while I wrote this. A true testament to our friendship. Especially given this book contains a raccoon.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  EPILOGUE

  EXCERPT FROM COWBOY TO THE CORE BY MAISEY YATES

  CHAPTER ONE

  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, which 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 be certain 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 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.

  Toda
y he’d been God 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 as 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 who 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?”