A Good Old-Fashioned Cowboy Read online

  “Nope,” Pru said. “Love is dead.”

  “Love,” Charity repeated, her eyes getting large, “is dead.”

  “Not if I say it’s not,” he said.

  They looked at each other, then back at him.

  “You want to fix this?” Charity asked.

  “That’s what I’ve been saying!”

  They exchanged another glance.

  “You broke a house rule,” Pru said.

  He frowned. “I don’t live in the house.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kit said. “We’ll tell you where she is but you have to pay the penalty.”

  “Fine. What’s the penalty?”

  “You have to draw a slip,” Kit said.

  He heard rustling behind them, and then Charity produced a large glass jar.

  “Wait, are those the finding-a-husband tips?”

  “This is a new modern era,” Pru said. “What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.”

  “You really want me to draw one of these?”

  “Yes,” Kit said, smiling in a way that made him think she would lose no sleep at all over eviscerating him with her gleaming white teeth.

  “Fine.” He drew a slip. “Happy now? Where is she?”

  “The candy store, dumbass,” Pru said.

  And they slammed the door, leaving him there on the porch. He looked down at the slip and he laughed.

  A good grovel never goes amiss.

  Well, fine.

  He was out of pride anyway. So that was just what he would do.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  EVERYTHING WAS READY. Everything was beautiful. The candy was gleaming like jewels in its bins, along with her fudge and other hand-created concoctions.

  And she felt dead inside.

  Great. Sullivan Brooks had managed to ruin candy for her.

  No. She wouldn’t let that be the situation. He didn’t get to do that. This place was her true north.

  She touched the compass necklace that hung around her neck. This was home, and in her heart she felt like she’d been led back to where she was supposed to be. She really did. And she wasn’t going to let Sullivan Brooks and his inability to deal with his emotional baggage decide that for her. She wasn’t going to let him make her feel different.

  As if her bitter thoughts had conjured him, she looked and he was there. He was outside the door, all sexy in a black T-shirt and black cowboy hat.

  How she wished that she could be immune to him. That she could look at him and feel nothing. But she didn’t. Her heart nearly burst with love and she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She couldn’t even really be mad.

  But fundamentally, there was a difference between being left at the altar by a man you didn’t even like that much, and being pushed away by a man you knew felt too much. She knew he was afraid. But he was here. He was here.

  She ran to the door and opened it, breathless as she caught his scent, all hard work, maple, and man.

  “What are you doing here?”

  A smile tipped the corners of his lips, and then he dropped down to his knees in front of her, right there on the step of her candy store.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I was wrong, Hope. And I was afraid. I thought that if I pushed you away first, that if I didn’t try to be anything better, then I would be safe. That I couldn’t be devastated again. Because, you know, having my mother walk away, having my father disappear down into a bottle instead of stepping up to be the man he should’ve been...you don’t walk away from that without scars. You just don’t.”

  The rawness, the honesty in his pain broke through all of Hope’s defenses. This was Brooks. And it was all she’d ever wanted from him.

  Not the boy with ten-foot walls around his heart pushing people away before they could push him away, but a man. A man who felt deep, real pain.

  “I thought that maybe I could just...” He sighed. “I don’t know. I thought I could just build a wall up around myself and that I wouldn’t love you. That I wouldn’t miss you. I made everything I felt for you turn to anger and resentment, but you were right. It wasn’t you who broke us. If you’d stayed, it would’ve been me. Maybe not that year, but some year. Because I wouldn’t have been able to break down all those walls for you. But time and distance and twelve years without you, twelve years without hope, showed me what I need to do. What kind of man I need to be. Pride be damned, I love you, woman. More than anything. And I have since I was seventeen years old, but I was too much of a coward to say it. Too much of a coward to do a damn thing about it. But I’m here now. I’m asking, I’m begging you, to forgive me. To let me try and be better. I don’t know if the best I can be is good enough for you, but I will spend every day of my life trying to make it good enough. More than good enough. Because you’re everything, Hope. You’re so bright that it blinds me. And your love is so precious to me that the idea of trying to be worthy of it...”

  Hope crouched down in front of him, taking his hand in hers. “You never had to try to earn it, Brooks. It was just there. And you...you disrupted me. My life. My plans. You’re the reason my compass points back here. I know you are. Otherwise the girls and I could’ve gone to any town. It could be a candy store anywhere. But it’s not home if it’s not with you.”

  She tumbled forward into his arms, and they both fell back onto the sidewalk. She laughed.

  “Now we’re both on the ground. Who’s going to pick us up?”

  “We’ll pick each other up. Forever. Always.” But they didn’t move. They only stared at each other. “I have a confession to make,” he said.

  And then he produced a slip of paper.

  “What?”

  “I was told that I had broken a house rule and I had to take a slip. They wouldn’t tell me where you were otherwise.”

  “They’re the best. But is that the only reason you came here? Because the slip said you had to grovel?”

  “No. It just happened to be the exact thing I needed right when I needed it. I feel like all the slips have kind of been that way.”

  “I don’t think I needed to prance around in high heels and have you smell my neck.”

  “Maybe not, but I didn’t mind it.”

  “Well,” she said, “of course you didn’t. That doesn’t make it magic.”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I think there might be a little magic. A little farmhouse magic. And a lot of magic between the two of us.”

  She smiled. “I love you, Brooks. I always have.”

  “I love you too,” he said. “And every time I sat in that bar and told Garrett Roy that I hated you, that was what I meant.”

  “Did you really do that?”

  “Oh yeah. I was bitter as hell. But you know what, it was just me trying to pretend I wasn’t ruined for all other women because of you.”

  “Were you?”

  “You know I was. I love you. Whatever you need, I’m going to be there for you.”

  “Good. Because what I need is help getting all our stores open. Otherwise we’re going to lose them, and I might have to go find other work.”

  “Well, that’s not going to happen.”

  “Grant Mathewson is helping Pru clear all the junk out of the corner store of hers. It’s a lot bigger than mine. But still, we need some help. Some muscle.”

  “You have my muscle. And all the free maple syrup you could ever want.”

  She cocked her head to the side. “Does that make you my sugar daddy?”

  “I guess it does.”

  “What do you know? I had to come back home to get one of those too. And it was you all along.”

  “That’s the truth. It was you all along.”

  “I love you a lot, you know. But I can’t move in with you.”

&nbs
p; His brows shot up. “Why not?”

  “Not until we’re done getting the stores set up, not until we’re done with our time at the farmhouse.”

  He smiled. “The way you and your friends care about each other is part of you. It’s part of what shows me that when you love, you love forever. If I’d been less of an idiot back then, I might have seen that. Anyway, we can sneak around for a while.”

  “I’m more than okay with that. It’s fun, bringing a little bit of the past into the present.”

  He smiled. “That should carry us into the future just fine.”

  She touched the compass necklace, and she gave thanks.

  Thanks for the old pact that had brought them all back home, for the farmhouse that had sprinkled on that extra magic dust, and for Brooks.

  And most of all, for love.

  Love that didn’t grow weaker with time, or shaky with trials, but love that strengthened.

  Between her and this town, between her and her friends, and between her and her man.

  Here in her shop, he wasn’t a boy from the wrong side of the tracks and she wasn’t a poor little rich girl. Right now, they were just Hope and Brooks.

  Like always. Like forever.

  * * *

  How to Win Him

  Caitlin Crews

  To the other three points on my Jasper Creek compass, thank you for being you.

  Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Kit’s Story

  KIT HALL HAD never had the slightest intention of returning to Jasper Creek, Oregon, for anything more than a quick holiday visit.

  In fact, she’d always been actively opposed to the very idea. She’d assumed that the life she would be leading at age thirty would be so objectively brilliant that the topic of the pact she’d made with her three best friends a million years ago would never come up.

  Or, if it did, that it would apply to her friends but not to her. Never to her.

  She’d dedicated most of her life to making sure of it.

  And on paper, she’d succeeded. Even her father thought so. And Lawrence Hall—who’d spoken truth to power (his take) as the editor of the local paper since before Kit’s birth yet preferred to be known for his true passion (his words), The Jasper Creek Chapbook, which featured seasonal volumes of poetry, vignettes, and worthy essays (all written by him, of course)—was the self-appointed arbiter of all things intellectual in this corner of rural Oregon.

  Kit had departed this little town, which sat in a largely overlooked state that no one who wasn’t from here ever pronounced correctly, like a comet. She had started getting ready for greatness there and then.

  She’d insisted on being called by her legal name, Katherine, before her plane had touched down on her way to Princeton. Because Princeton was serious and Kit intended to be serious right along with it. And after she’d gotten herself an Ivy League education, she’d taken it a step further. She’d followed up her summers of interning at Carriage & Sons, publisher of possibly the most nose-bleedingly literary masterpieces ever committed to paper, by becoming an editor of said masterpieces.

  If anyone had told her, back when she’d first walked through the doors of the iconic Manhattan building where Carriage & Sons had been housed since the nineteenth century, that she would end up out of publishing, back in Oregon, and spending the summer in a farmhouse with her three best friends, Kit wouldn’t even have laughed. It would have been too absurd to laugh at.

  But there was no denying that was exactly where Kit was.

  Out on the front porch steps of this sweet old farmhouse, looking out over the deep green hills that could only mean she was home. With the three people who knew her best.

  For better or worse.

  She clutched the compass necklace they’d all worn since childhood like it was a talisman.

  Because it was a talisman.

  “I go by Katherine now,” she had told her friends in Chicago the last weekend in May, on the morning of the canceled wedding that had started all of this.

  Because they’d apparently needed constant reminders.

  “Do you, Kit?” Pru, who Kit thought should have been an ally, given how much she hated her full name, had smirked at her.

  Kit had already been uncomfortable in her bridesmaid’s gown, in a horrific shade of lilac that made her look jaundiced. She obviously preferred her adopted Manhattan uniform of all black, all the time, with perhaps a gray T-shirt to mix it up when she was feeling spicy.

  “Since college, actually,” Kit had replied, not exactly under her breath.

  Charity’s placid doctor’s smile from within the embrace of her own lilac horror had not been remotely supportive. “I love how when people at the rehearsal dinner asked Kit where she went to college, what she said was, ‘I went to school in New Jersey.’ Then waited. Everyone else on earth names the college they went to when asked. Except Ivy League people. Why is that?”

  “You know why,” teased Hope, their bride-to-be. The bride-to-be-that-wasn’t—though at the time they’d been in the last moments of not knowing that. Of not knowing that what should have been a happy occasion would instead see them all shacked up together in Jasper Creek, having tossed their old lives aside. “They don’t want you to be embarrassed that they are so finely educated.”

  “Katherine is actually my name,” Kit had continued to murmur to the receptive audience of her lilac monstrosity. “It’s literally on my driver’s license.”

  “Let me guess.” Pru had rolled her eyes, grinning. “Everyone in the city calls you Katherine on command.”

  “They do. Because people in New York know that it’s my actual name.”

  “You’ve been Kit since we met in the cradle.” Charity had waved a hand. “Everybody in New York City can call you whatever they want. You’ll always be Kit to us.”

  In a way, that had been foreshadowing. And Kit had run with it.

  Katherine Hall, a senior editor at the haughtiest of all the publishing houses in Manhattan, certainly couldn’t quit her job and break her apartment lease on a whim, move back to the Pacific Northwest, and decide to open what would certainly be considered the trashiest of all the trashy bookstores.

  Kit, on the other hand, had started sneaking her grandmother’s romance novels when she was twelve. One of the finest days of her life had been discovering that her mother had long been doing the same. Theirs had always been a quiet rebellion, conducted under Kit’s father’s nose—which he would’ve lifted in disdain had he known that the literary halls of his home were thus polluted by popular fiction of any type.

  But especially, especially, romance novels.

  Everyone she knew either was or would be appalled to discover that Kit had, long ago, dreamed of opening a cute little bookshop that sold the books she actually liked. And that she was now, thanks to her friends, launching herself straight on into that dream. Kit couldn’t really believe it herself.

  She heard the farmhouse’s screen door open behind her, followed by footsteps across the porch, and then Charity settled in next to her on the top step.

  Kit lifted her coffee mug in tribute. Charity grinned sleepily and did the same, though her mug was filled with tea.

  For a moment, Kit stopped thinking about her New York dreams and the fact she’d given up on them. For a moment, she sank into the easy, casual intimacy she’d missed.

  Charity didn’t have to say anything. They’d been involved in the same long, comfortable conversation for most of their lives. All four of them had. It was tempting to say that they were like sisters, but Kit knew peopl
e with sisters. They never seemed to get along the way she and her friends always had, whether they chose to use her legal name or not. It didn’t matter how long it had been since they’d talked, or had seen each other. They all slotted right back into place again, the way they always did.

  That was why all four of them still wore their compass necklaces.

  And why, if she was honest with herself, they’d all felt they could admit they weren’t happy in their lives and had come back here—no matter how much they might have preferred to pretend it was all an act of solidarity with Hope.

  So even though Kit could have said a thousand things, what she did was sit there, pressing her bare toes against the rickety top step of the porch until it squeaked. She and Charity watched the sun climb up over the rolling hills of a green Oregon summer, fresh and bright and bursting with flowers and birdsong.

  “Who drank the last of the coffee but didn’t start a new pot?” came a grumpy voice from behind them. Hope.

  Kit didn’t bother craning her head around. “Was it so fancy in Chicago that you forgot how to make coffee?”

  “All I know is that you appear to have coffee, and I do not. No fanciness involved.”

  “You snooze, you lose,” Charity singsonged.

  There was the sound of even louder footsteps behind them, heralding Pru’s arrival. They called her Pru-ricane for a reason.

  “Pru, there’s no coffee. Yet both Charity and Kit have some,” tattled Hope.

  “I have tea,” Charity clarified.

  “A clear and egregious violation of the house rules,” Pru judged.

  Kit turned around, then stood to face her other two best friends through the screen. They’d added to the original house rules they’d made when they first arrived here, but she would have remembered if there was a coffee amendment. “You don’t get to randomly decide that something is a house rule just because you’re cranky in the morning.”

  “I think you’ll find that house rules are house rules, Katherine,” Pru said loftily. “You agreed when we made our new pact. No cell phones, weekly meetings in the living room, being social, no unauthorized seafood and especially no salmon—”