A Good Old-Fashioned Cowboy Read online

“Just...messages from the universe,” Kit said, her tone gently mocking.

  “Are you telling me you don’t believe in fate?”

  Kit looked wounded. “You know I do. Fate, destiny, and true love.”

  “We’re surrendering to fate,” Charity said.

  “But we still need rules, because we’re not surrendering to anarchy. No unauthorized cooking of seafood,” Pru declared.

  “I have all that salmon,” Hope said, now feeling unfairly targeted.

  “You must gain permission to fill the house with the smell of fish. It is good and right that you do so.”

  “But it’s...”

  “We are helping you. We care,” Kit said seriously. “You don’t want all that salmon, do you?”

  “I hate salmon,” Hope said.

  “Then no one needs to eat it!” Kit declared.

  “If we were in high school we would have just filled James’s car with it and called it a day,” Pru said.

  Hope couldn’t help it. She laughed. “We would have,” she said. “Oh, we would have. We’d have filled it up with fish and taped it shut!”

  “We were badasses,” Charity said wistfully.

  “Small-town badasses,” Kit said. “But sure.”

  Hope sighed. What had happened to that girl? She’d gotten lost. In Chicago. In James’s family. In James. In wanting nicer clothes and a better house and a shinier car so she could keep up with her shiny friends.

  But really, what had she gotten out of the last nine years?

  A nine-year relationship that had been worse than boring by the end, with a man who fit like an old pair of jeans: faded, worn, and too tight.

  And she wanted...something more.

  Her Brooks dreams were emblematic, not of wanting the man who’d once broken her heart, but of wanting something new. She was sure.

  Something simmered in her belly and the image of a cowboy filtered through her mind. She knew exactly who he was, even if she tried to keep herself from thinking his name again.

  She was awash in regret, just like that.

  She had always been...cautious when it came to physical relationships.

  She hadn’t even lost her virginity until college. It was one of her regrets. That she hadn’t given it up to Sullivan Brooks when she’d had the chance.

  Maybe that was why he haunted her sweaty, erotic dreams.

  He represented unfinished business.

  “We have to make an effort to talk to people,” Hope said. “In town.”

  “Male people?” Pru asked, lifting an eyebrow.

  “Not necessarily. But...could be. Maybe.”

  “But we’re here for friendship,” Charity said, touching the compass around her neck. They all reflexively did the same. “So regardless of the magic universe, we can’t let men steal friendship.”

  “All right,” Hope said. “Friends first. This house is a sacred space. No men here. No hookups here. No ditching for dudes.”

  “And,” Pru continued, “you will all attend the weekly meeting for the Main Street Renovation Coalition in our living room. Failure to do so...”

  “Will result in a penalty,” Kit said. “And, calling an excess of meetings, in addition to the weekly meeting, will also be met with a penalty.”

  “Great. No cell phones. Being social. Meetings. And...” Hope looked around the room, then down at her phone which was still lighting up. And suddenly everything felt simple. Suddenly it really did feel like going back in time. “You guys, I think this is actually going to be pretty great.”

  “Me too,” said Kit.

  “I knew it would be,” said Charity.

  “Don’t be smug,” said Pru. “But, you’re right. It’s going to be great.”

  Charity grinned. “I guess we aren’t too old to play store after all.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE NEXT DAY, they assembled in the basement of the Main Street Shops, a large space that was open and continuous beneath the four buildings that they were occupying for their stores.

  The town of Jasper Creek had been revitalized in recent years, certainly coming a long way from the blocks of empty shops that had sat vacant for years when the girls were in school, but the end of Main Street, where their grouping of shops sat, was still in disrepair.

  It was a priority for the town to change that. But economies in small towns were tricky, dependent on tourism, good weather, and a lack of wildfires. Smoke from fires could handily halve business during the typical high season, or so Charity had told them during the last meeting, as though she were reciting from a brochure.

  Charity had done most of the legwork when it came to securing the leases, liaising with the city council, and presenting their plans for the stores. Charity planned on reopening the yarn store that had shuttered after the elderly owner’s health had declined, and still had all of the stock in place, arranged as if the Closed sign had been turned yesterday instead of several years earlier.

  Pru was reviving the old feed store on the corner that had shuttered sometime around their high school graduation. It was full of old boxes of dusty junk including a large wooden Victrola and the bumper of what Pru estimated to be a 1930s-era Ford truck.

  The Victrola had gone back to the farmhouse, and they’d put it in the living room, along with the small collection of 1940s records they’d found.

  The candy store and the bookstore—to be manned by Hope and Kit—were blessedly empty. They were small spaces that had to be offered up for a pittance since no one was chomping at the bit to take them on.

  Except for them.

  And they were...maybe a little bit nuts.

  But it felt good. It all felt good.

  Pru stood proudly behind an old navy-blue-and-gold safe. “I have the combination,” she said. “Now I just have to figure out how to get it open.”

  “I believe in you,” Charity said, crunching a chip from a small bag she’d just fished from her purse.

  Kit was clutching two very large coffees she’d gotten from Keira’s Coffee Cart, squinting against the light. Hope had a hot chocolate and a bag of Swedish Fish and was Not At Home to looks of judgment.

  Pru wrinkled her nose and started working the gold wheel. It took her fifteen minutes to get it open.

  “Put them in,” Pru said, firmly conducting the rules now that they were set because it was just who she was as a person.

  Pru stuck hers in first, followed by Kit, then by Charity. Hope stared down at the phone.

  The phone that had become a source of extreme anxiety over the last month.

  Constant messages about the wedding, then the misdirected text from her fiancé just hours before the actual wedding telling the wrong woman he was going to meet up with her rather than get married. And then afterward the steady stream of condolences, which she was sure were actually judgments carefully wrapped in sweetness. The messages from her parents which were pure judgment.

  She’d been glued to it. Unable to look away even as it stole pieces of her sanity. And letting go of it felt hard.

  She blinked, feeling rocked by the realization that she was literally clinging to her past.

  “In it goes,” she said, quickly stuffing it inside.

  Pru shut the door with a loud click. “And it’s done.”

  It was Kit who held up the jar containing strips of paper, each one with a tip for landing a husband.

  They had not been cut out of the actual magazine. Kit had looked at everyone in extreme horror, proclaiming the periodical to be a piece of literary history, and had demanded that Pru write them down on a piece of paper, which she had.

  They had then gone into a jar which had been decorated with hearts by Charity.

  She shook it. “Hope, you must choose one.”

  Hope blanched. “Have I made it very clear that I find this
to be silly?”

  “You have,” Charity said, nodding gravely. “But there’s nothing to be done. This is for your happiness. Your future.”

  Hope made a scathing face. “I look forward to all of you failing and breaking rules, and getting one of your own.”

  “Anyway,” Kit said. “The odds of you actually running into an eligible bachelor on the Main Street of Jasper Creek are very low.”

  “Very, very low,” Charity agreed.

  “Maybe I can find myself an octogenarian to hit on.” She reached into the jar and snagged a piece of paper. “Oh Lord...”

  “What?” her friends chorused.

  “You have to read it,” Kit said.

  “‘Pretend to trip. A gallant man will lift you up off the ground and offer assistance.’”

  “Well, that’s the best thing I’ve ever heard,” Kit said.

  “Good thing I’m not going to find a man worth tripping over.”

  “Okay,” Pru said. “Enough jawing. We have stores to open.”

  “Yeah, well,” Charity said, looking sulky. “It’s going to take ages. My store might already be an existing thing, but it’s a nana shop, and you know yarn is much more hipster these days.”

  “In Jasper Creek?” Kit questioned.

  “Farm-to-table restaurants have cropped up all over,” Charity pointed out.

  “Because the farms are right over there,” Pru said, gesturing. “Anyway, this was your idea. And my feed store is currently stacked full of junk, which I was not adequately prepared for.”

  “I have a lot of unsalable itchy wool,” Charity said. “Wool can be treacherous.”

  “And you would know that how? You don’t knit, Charity,” Hope pointed out.

  Charity looked suddenly wistful. “I used to love going into that store. It was quiet.” Her dreamy expression suddenly went tight. “Somehow there was always less pressure there.”

  It was the closest Charity had come to really talking about...much of anything. She’d been gung ho about the endeavor but hadn’t said anything about her break from medicine apart from vague comments about stress.

  Charity was the mom friend. The one who had snacks and Band-Aids in her purse and who always seemed to have it together.

  Hope couldn’t help but wonder if that was actually true right now.

  “Well, this feed store is the closest I’ll get to ranching since my dad portioned the ranch out to my brothers and not me.” Pru’s voice went hard.

  Kit patted Pru’s arm. “It wasn’t right. You would have done a great job with it. But you’ll do an amazing job with this.”

  “Of course I will! Agriculture is my thing.”

  “I’m going to spend my days surrounded by romance novels,” Kit said. “I can’t imagine anything better. It’s what I always wanted. I could just never... You know how my dad is. Romance isn’t exactly considered literature in his eyes.”

  “Is anything?” Hope asked. “Or does it all fall short of his dangerously imperious gaze?”

  “He would call your verbal prose purple and embarrassing, Hope.”

  Hope shrugged and took a handful of Skittles out of her purse. “I could live with that.” She sighed. “Oh, I missed sugar. And the candy store was always my favorite. So many samples... I can’t wait.”

  “Well then,” Pru said. “We better get moving. The centennial is in August and we need to be open for it or...well, it’s all a loss.”

  “It won’t be a loss!” Charity said, raising her hands in triumph.

  “Conquer that yarn,” Kit said.

  “I’m a doctor,” she said. “I can handle anything.”

  They all went up their individual staircases, into their stores, and Hope found herself surrounded by silence.

  Silence and...bins. Because she had wanted to put together a candy shop comprised almost entirely of bins, rather than shelves.

  This was...hers.

  Well, okay, they were leasing, and if they didn’t get the businesses running by the deadline they wouldn’t be able to afford them. But it was still more hers than anything she’d had for the last...nine years.

  A rebellion and a revolution.

  Candy, her own business.

  Not to please her parents, not to please James. Not to please his parents.

  Just her.

  The silence suddenly felt like a symphony. Because it was her silence.

  Just like this place was hers.

  Suddenly she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye. A tan cowboy hat. A white T-shirt. Blue jeans.

  Brooks.

  And this wasn’t a dream.

  She turned and then pitched forward suddenly, going ankles over shoulders down onto the ground and creating a massive crash.

  She lay there on her back on the wooden floor, staring at the ceiling. It was a nice ceiling. Old stamped plaster. This was not how she thought she might examine the ceiling. But thankfully, her pride seemed to be wounded more than anything else. Luckily, she was in the building and no one had—

  She heard the sound of the door open and froze.

  She hadn’t locked the front door after she’d come in.

  “Hey, sorry to barge in but I saw someone fall. Everything okay?”

  Oh Lord.

  His voice. It was still so good. Like gravel and honey and he was just so damn hot. And why was this happening to her? Why was any of this happening to her?

  He was the first naked man she’d ever seen and right now those fantasies—which had been building on each other for months now—were clear and present and oh my...

  Also the fact he’d seen her naked...

  Agh.

  “I’m fine,” she shouted from on the ground. She was behind the bins. Maybe he wouldn’t come over. Maybe, he wouldn’t know it was her. Maybe.

  “I don’t normally barge in where I’m not invited but I saw you fall and...”

  Suddenly, it wasn’t the ceiling she was staring at. It was his face. His beautiful face that had only improved with age. The strong, firm line of his jaw had been etched in her memory long ago, and she was slightly distressed to discover that she had not embellished any of it. His dark brows were locked together, a deep groove between them. Concern was evident in his blue eyes which then, turned to...something else: a strange, slow smile that did not seem all that...friendly.

  “Hope. Hope Marshall.”

  “Yes. It is me. And this is just about right for life right now.”

  She sat up. He reached down that large, masculine hand which occupied a very particular place in her dreams.

  She swallowed hard, and took hold of it.

  It was so rough. Years of hard work, she suspected. It was tempting to imagine what it might feel like to have Brooks’s hands on her skin. She knew what it was like to be touched by a man who hadn’t done a day’s work away from a desk in his life.

  But she’d been touched all over by Brooks’s hands.

  And then she realized two things.

  That she was staring.

  And that the man-catching tip had worked.

  She found herself being hauled to her feet, and once she was back on solid ground she winced. Apparently, she had done a little bit of damage to her poor body.

  “I didn’t know you were back in town,” he said.

  “Yeah. It was...not planned.”

  Silence ricocheted off the redbrick walls around them.

  He crossed his arms over his broad chest and rocked back on his heels. “I heard about your wedding.”

  So much for putting that in the safe with her phone. She cleared her throat. “Oh, in that you heard there wasn’t one?”

  “Yeah,” he said, a muscle in his jaw ticking.

  “Is it...?”

  “All over town? Yes. Your mom calle
d Lettie Beamish, who then called my mother, who told my grandmother, who told everybody at church on Sunday.”

  “Good. Good.”

  “They’re all praying for you.”

  “I would expect nothing less.”

  “But, I didn’t hear that you were coming back to town.”

  “So the Jasper Creek grapevine had a breakdown in the system? Shocking. Yeah. I... I’m leasing this place. The whole street. With Charity, Pru and Kit.”

  That shocked him. “Really?”

  “The city council was desperate. They said anyone who could renovate it by the town centennial could lease them for basically nothing. And we have this dream and... Anyway.”

  He looked around the ramshackle shop, full of upturned bins. “And this is going to be...?”

  “It’s a candy shop,” she said. “You know, there used to be one in town. When we were kids. It had all kinds of old-fashioned candy and homemade fudge. I got the recipe before I left to go to school. I make it all the time. It’s that thing that I give away as gifts and... Everyone loves it. But it doesn’t exist anymore and I’ve always thought that it should.”

  “I thought you had big dreams,” he said, his voice going hard. “Dreams that were way bigger than here.”

  She swallowed. She deserved that. Because when she’d broken up with him it had been all about how what she wanted was bigger than Jasper Creek and bigger than him.

  “Yeah, well that didn’t work out, did it?”

  “Did you have a job over there?”

  “I kind of fell into interior design, which wasn’t really my plan.” It was funny that she didn’t feel like taking on the responsibility of the decor for the stores, but interior design wasn’t her passion or anything. It just was. And it had been for places that were nothing like this. “But I did hospitality and worked in a hotel for a while and then one of the people who came and stayed there ran this business, and she got me involved. I don’t know. I enjoyed it, but it wasn’t my passion. Still, I was pretty successful at it, and I think everyone thought I was nuts walking away. Or rather, driving away. With a cooler full of salmon.”

  “It might’ve been the salmon that made people think you’re nuts.”

  “Sure,” she said.