A Good Old-Fashioned Cowboy Read online

  New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates lives in rural Oregon with her three children and her husband, whose chiseled jaw and arresting features continue to make her swoon. She feels the epic trek she takes several times a day from her office to her coffee maker is a true example of her pioneer spirit.

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author Caitlin Crews loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative-writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilize the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

  Jackie Ashenden writes dark, emotional stories with alpha heroes who’ve just gotten the world to their liking only to have it blown apart by their kick-ass heroines. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, the inimitable Dr. Jax, two kids and two rats. When she’s not torturing alpha males and their gutsy heroines, she can be found drinking chocolate martinis, reading anything she can lay her hands on, wasting time on social media or being forced to go mountain biking with her husband. To keep up-to-date with Jackie’s new releases and other news, sign up to her newsletter at jackieashenden.com.

  Nicole Helm grew up with her nose in a book and the dream of one day becoming a writer. Luckily, after a few failed career choices, she gets to follow that dream—writing down-to-earth contemporary romance and romantic suspense. From farmers to cowboys, Midwest to the West, Nicole writes stories about people finding themselves and finding love in the process. She lives in Missouri with her husband and two sons and dreams of someday owning a barn.

  Also by Maisey Yates

  Secrets from a Happy Marriage

  The Bad Boy of Redemption Ranch

  The Hero of Hope Springs

  The Last Christmas Cowboy

  Also by Caitlin Crews

  Christmas in the King’s Bed

  His Scandalous Christmas Princess

  Chosen for His Desert Throne

  Also by Jackie Ashenden

  Promoted to His Princess

  The Most Powerful of Kings

  The Italian’s Final Redemption

  Also by Nicole Helm

  Badlands Beware

  Close Range Christmas

  Hunting a Killer

  A Good Old-Fashioned Cowboy

  Maisey Yates

  Caitlin Crews

  Jackie Ashenden

  Nicole Helm

  Table of Contents

  How to Find Him by Maisey Yates

  How to Win Him by Caitlin Crews

  How to Hold Him by Jackie Ashenden

  How to Love Him by Nicole Helm

  Excerpt from Confessions from the Quilting Circle by Maisey Yates

  How to Find Him

  Maisey Yates

  This book is dedicated, yet again, to my dearest friends. Jackie, Nicole and Caitlin. My day would be boring without your texts. I’d get a lot more done. But it would be boring.

  Contents

  PROLOGUE

  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

  PROLOGUE

  “Old friends are the bricks and mortar of your life.”

  —Nora Roberts

  ON A SLOWLY cooling summer night, the crickets chirping their low hum of incessant noise, stars spread out like a wave of celestial glow, four girls sat around a small campfire and planned their future.

  “After Princeton, I’ll probably stay on the East Coast,” Kit said. Though college was a far-off proposition, it was what her father wanted for her, and so it seemed a foregone conclusion that was what she would do.

  “I’m not sure what I’ll do after med school, but I’ll want to work at a hospital bigger than this area. Dad always says the important work is done in underserved communities.” Charity didn’t know what that meant quite yet, but that was what was expected of her. What else was there to do?

  “I don’t know what I’ll do, but I want to live in a city. A real city with fancy stores and important people.” Hope smiled dreamily. She didn’t need a concrete plan yet. She just knew she wanted more.

  Pru frowned at all of them. “But if you do all that, we won’t be together.” Her marshmallows were burning and no one noticed. “I’m staying right here, with my own piece of the ranch.” There was no doubt for her that the Riley ranch, where they were prepared to camp tonight just a ways from the main house, would be her future. Always.

  “Maybe we’ll figure out a way to be together,” Kit said. “When you’re important, you can do whatever you want. We’ll visit.”

  “Yes,” Charity agreed. “We’ll just have to go on vacations together.” She fiddled with the compass necklace that hung from her neck. Pru’s mom had taken the four of them to the mall just this afternoon. They’d saved up their chore and birthday money so they could go buy matching necklaces. No BFF broken hearts. Something grown-up. Special.

  They had searched the store, high and low, for something they could all agree on. Something the store had four of. When they’d been about to leave, Kit had gone over to the cashier and asked her if she had anything that fit the bill.

  They’d walked out with four delicate necklaces with tiny compasses at the end and promised to wear them. Always.

  “We can always take summers off,” Hope said. “Go somewhere fun and exciting together.”

  “I can’t just take summers off from the ranch,” Pru said, pouting.

  “Sure you could. You could take turns with your brothers. Maybe not a whole summer, but we’ll find time to be together,” Hope said firmly.

  “I don’t understand why anyone would want to leave Jasper Creek.”

  “Maybe you will,” Kit said philosophically. “And maybe we’ll change our minds and want to stay.” She knew she wouldn’t, but she had more faith in Pru eventually wanting to leave. There was so much out there. Why would anyone want to stay?

  Pru held on to them changing their minds. After all, Jasper Creek had everything anyone could ever want. Why would anyone want to leave? “If you guys leave and don’t like it, you have to promise to come back home.”

  “I promise,” Hope said, though she couldn’t imagine wanting to be in boring old Jasper Creek. She knew Kit agreed, but they kept it between themselves because Pru was so fiercely defensive of home.

  “Sure. We’ll all promise,” Kit agreed with an easy shrug.

  “We should come home and open our stores,” Charity said, fingering the compass, the gold seeming to come alive in the firelight. Just this afternoon, they’d pretended to run stores on Main Street, a game that even as they approached the ripe old age of thirteen they hadn’t left behind.

  “Yeah, when we’re old—like, really old. Like when we’re thirty, if we’re all unhappy, anyone that doesn’t live here has to come home.”

  “And open the stores. You can’t forget that part,” Charity said. She liked the idea of a place that was all hers. Every time they played make-believe store owners, she felt in charge of her own life. Like she could do whatever she wanted.

  “It’s a pact,” Pru said firmly.

  Kit nodded thoughtfully. “A
pact needs words. Symbols. A talisman.” Like in all the books she read. She looked down at her necklace, then wrapped her hand around the compass. “Okay, everyone hold on to their compass and repeat after me.” Kit considered. “Best friends we are, and always will be. If life doesn’t give us what we want, home is where we’ll return.”

  “It doesn’t rhyme,” Pru said with a frown.

  Kit rolled her eyes. “It doesn’t have to rhyme, it just has to mean something. We need to look at the fire, hold our necklaces, and say it all together.”

  Pru grumbled a little bit, but after a few practice tries, they said the words and looked deep into the fire. Immediately, there was the lone howl of a coyote, and then a few answering calls as the wind gave a little gust sending the flames just a little higher.

  “Woah,” Hope breathed.

  “It’s a coincidence,” Pru insisted, though she looked around nervously.

  “It’s a sign,” Kit said firmly. “We made a pact. The universe heard us and responded.”

  “You need to lay off the poetry books, Kit,” Pru said disdainfully, but her heart jittered all the same. Like they really had made a pact with the universe.

  But the feeling faded with sticky marshmallow roasting and plenty of chocolate. They ate, they chattered, determined to stay up all night lying there on the grass looking up at the stars.

  Charity had gone to a science camp last summer and learned the constellations, informing them the arrow-looking one was Aquila. They’d searched it out every night they were together ever since.

  “It’ll always bring us back,” Charity said softly. “Whether we’re thirty or not. Pacts with the universe or not. We’ll always come back.”

  She reached across to find Kit’s hand, then Kit gripped Hope’s, and Hope Pru’s, until they were a connected chain, looking up at the stars, thinking about what their futures might hold.

  And knowing, no matter what, the thing that would always bring them back together was each other.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hope’s Story

  “I HOPE YOU like salmon.” Hope Marshall shut the front door of the quaint farmhouse behind her and shouted across the porch at her friends. They were sitting around a campfire, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows in a scene reminiscent of their childhoods.

  Except Hope couldn’t remember feeling stressed, exhausted, and like a royally flattened pigeon during her childhood.

  “I do not, Hope,” Kit, formally known as Katherine, said from her position by the fire. “And I think you know that.”

  One of Hope’s dearest friends in all the world, Kit believed in bracing honesty, fierce loyalty, and scarves that could also pass as blankets.

  Her friend was currently swathed in one of those very scarves, her dark hair a blunt frame for a pale face that resembled an antique doll, with large eyes and a perfectly drawn mouth. She somehow managed to effect a posture of lounging in the old yellow canvas-and-aluminum lawn chair she occupied.

  Hope made her way down the wooden steps and paused for a moment, looking back at the big white farmhouse they’d rented for the summer.

  It had the right kind of front porch for drinking lemonade, with wild, erratic flowers growing up to touch the top of the staircase railing.

  It had been owned by June Gable, a sweet older woman that Hope could scarcely remember from town picnics and church services. June had passed a while ago and the ownership of the home had fallen to her granddaughters, who now rented it out to guests.

  Two of them, Keira and Bella, lived on ranches near this property spread, with their respective husbands, and had told them they would be on hand for anything they needed.

  The house and its contents—antique furniture, old board games, bakeware, and stacks of books and magazines—were all there for them to use.

  Hope had already made use of the kitchen by throwing some fudge together. Anything to get her mind off her incessantly buzzing phone.

  Her parents. They were so upset. So, so upset and sending messages every few minutes to that effect. The weight of their disappointment was beginning to grind Hope into fine powder.

  So she ignored her phone.

  For now.

  She sat down in a chair next to Kit and looked around at the three of them, all lit up in the glow of the fire.

  The whole air was that deep twilight color that settled on everything it touched and painted it blue. There was no competition from streetlights, not here. She’d gotten used to her bright, noisy corner of Chicago.

  But the distant memories of the life she’d had before seemed a lot less distant here. Especially surrounded by the women she’d grown up sharing it with.

  “Handily,” Hope said, “there is also beef, and a limited number of vegetarian options.”

  She bent down and fished a marshmallow out of the bag sitting on the ground, then took one of the stretched-out wire hangers from where it was propped against a rock and speared the sugary treat.

  “No one wants secondhand squash,” Pru said in her extremely straightforward manner. “Also, I question the kind of friends you had in Chicago that so many of them chose salmon when there was steak.”

  “James’s family,” she muttered.

  “I could eat the salmon...” Charity, a bright, brilliant doctor who was also—in the grand tradition of those working in the medical profession—a champion martyr, made the offer with a gravely sacrificial tone.

  “What was I thinking?” Hope asked, shoving her marshmallow into a glowing pocket in the fire. She hadn’t roasted a marshmallow since...well, since she and the girls had gone camping after high school graduation, but apparently roasting marshmallows was like riding a bike. “It was like... I couldn’t get away with his heirloom family ring without being hunted down by the cops so I thought... I know, I’ll take the food.”

  Wedding food that she had packed in dry ice for her drive from Chicago to Jasper Creek, Oregon, her heartbreak and humiliation echoing in her like a drumbeat as she left that life behind.

  As she headed toward home.

  Humiliation had blossomed into rebellion as she’d driven. She’d given James Field Warner IV nine years of her life. And he’d given her a cooler full of salmon.

  She refused to give him credit for anything else. The positive move that had resulted from this had nothing at all to do with him. It was Charity, Pru, and Kit.

  Like always.

  Even though they’d gone their separate ways after high school, they always found their way back to each other.

  There was a constellation at the Riley Ranch—Pru’s family ranch where they’d spent all their summer days—clearly visible on warm nights.

  It’ll always bring us back.

  Charity had said that, like a prayer. Hope hadn’t believed her, not then. Not when her dreams had been so much bigger than an Oregon sky and a small town.

  But here she was.

  They’d made a promise under that sky. And again, after her wedding-that-wasn’t, they’d sat under the stars, surrounded by the most beautiful white gossamer canopy that they had rented for the whole night, along with the venue, and had passed around the bottles of champagne meant for a toast that would never happen.

  * * *

  HOPE GRABBED HOLD of her compass necklace—the necklace her now-not-going-to-be-her-mother-in-law had disparaged while they were dressing for the wedding.

  “That’s very down-market.”

  “It’s symbolic.”

  Now that James had called off the wedding and she was sitting in an empty venue, with only her friends, she had to wonder what it was symbolic of.

  She’d been worried it had been symbolic of her own...she wouldn’t have called them doubts until just now. But as the wedding had drawn closer she’d started dreaming. First, of home, of pine trees swaying overhead as she lay in the back of a pickup tru
ck.

  Of clear, diamond-dust skies with no streetlights.

  And then—much more concerning—of strong, masculine arms that did not belong to her fiancé.

  Nope.

  The man who was making her wake up sweaty, hot, bothered, and very aroused was not the man she was supposed to marry, but the man she’d left behind.

  Brooks.

  And as loudly as the sound of Jasper Creek whispered through the trees, whispered to her soul, in the weeks leading up to the wedding-that-wasn’t, Brooks’s name had been even louder.

  Brooks, she rationalized, lying there with her friends, was not the real issue. It was what he represented. A time when there had been endless possibilities.

  A time when getting to third base in the bed of a pickup truck had been the height of excitement and what had come next hadn’t mattered at all.

  “I’m thirty and I was supposed to be married. Instead I’m dumped. In front of...everyone. Every friend I ever made in this town.”

  Brooks.

  “We made a deal,” Charity said, softly. “We made a deal that if we were thirty and miserable we’d go back home and open the shops, remember?”

  “There’s no way the shops are still for sale,” Pru said.

  “They are. I drive down to Jasper Creek sometimes. From Seattle,” Charity said, the words like she was admitting to an illicit tryst. “And I always see the buildings. The old yarn shop...and last time I was there, there was a sign offering penny rent to the person who can rehab the businesses by the centennial in August.”

  “That would be an insane amount of work,” Pru said, ever the pragmatist. “No one could do it.” But there was also a keen edge to her voice, because if anyone liked taking on the impossible and then making it look easy, it was Pru. Even if she’d never admit it.

  “I guess no more work than rebuilding my life,” Hope said, an echo of home still reverberating in her chest.

  An echo of Brooks.

  “You have a career,” Kit said.