Tempt Me, Cowboy (Copper Mountain Rodeo)

  TEMPT ME, COWBOY

  (Copper Mountain Rodeo #1)

  Megan Crane

  Coming Soon

  In The Copper Mountain Rodeo Series

  Marry Me, Cowboy

  Lilian Darcy

  Promise Me, Cowboy

  C.J. Carmichael

  Take Me, Cowboy

  Jane Porter

  © Copyright 2013 The Tule Publishing Group, LLC

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to my fellow Montana Born authors: CJ, Lilian, and Jane. Loved our trip--may it be the first of many!--and LOVED working with you!

  Table of Contents

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  Excerpt: Marry Me, Cowboy

  Excerpt: Promise Me, Cowboy

  About The Author

  1.

  She was exactly the kind of trouble he didn’t need.

  Jasper Flint could see the woman from halfway down the block, like a shot of bright color against the weathered old brick of his newest acquisition. She hadn’t been there when he’d left the railway depot earlier that morning for a run around the outskirts of Marietta, Montana, his brand new home. There’d been nothing but the crisp blue dawn, the hint of the coming winter already there in the chill of the late September morning while Copper Mountain stood high above the town, a sleepy blue and purple giant slouching in the distance.

  And the quiet. The blessed quiet and more of the same on the wind. A far cry from the noisy, frantic, nonstop life he’d left behind in Dallas.

  An hour and a leisurely five miles later, Jasper was more than ready to face a long day of renovations, the current highlight of the best decision he’d ever made: his early retirement at thirty-five. He was ready to lose himself in the simple joy of making instead of taking, the sheer, hard won happiness in transforming something old into something new. He wasn’t ready for whatever trouble this woman had brought with her, the storm of it swirling around her despite the early morning sunlight and the clear fall day, practically casting the whole street in her shadow.

  It was there in the way she stood waiting for him, impatient hands on her sweet hips and her chin tilted up—belligerent and scrappy, like she wanted to exchange a few punches right there in the street. It made him smile. He wouldn’t mind getting his hands on her, blonde and cute and with legs that could inspire a man to wax a little poetic even in the blandly conservative clothes she wore, and preferably before she opened her mouth and ruined the perfectly decent fantasy he already had going on.

  But he knew her type. Prissy and disapproving, spring-loaded way too tight and, unless he misread that downturned mouth of hers and the glare she aimed at him like she already knew him, constitutionally unhappy.

  Not—it went without saying—the sort of woman he usually found hanging around, waiting for him to show up. Not enough cleavage, for one thing. And definitely not enough teased hair. He liked his women cheap and obvious and all but flashing neon signs above their heads to shout out their availability.

  This woman looked like trouble. Expensive trouble and a whole lot of work. He was in the market for neither.

  Jasper slowed to a stroll as he drew near, eyeing her not-nearly-tight-enough pants and definitely-not-slinky-enough top, that thick blonde hair twisted back from her face in a way that shouted sensible, with something uncomfortably close to regret. He wondered what it would be like to have a woman like this—her figure concealed by her outfit instead of starkly presented to him like a Vegas buffet—throw herself at him the way the bimbos did so easily. But that was the paradox, of course. The good girls had steered well clear of him even before he’d had money, like he had darkness grafted onto his very bones and they could scent it in the wind.

  He’d learned to live with cheap and calculating. He’d even have said he liked it, the predictability and the ease of that kind of woman, the uncomplicated nature of such mercenary transactions, until now.

  “Sorry,” he said when he was close, letting his Texas roots have their way with his drawl, and surprised to discover he meant it. “You’re not really my type.”

  She blinked, her lips parting slightly, which drew his attention to what might have been the most carnal mouth in the whole of the West. It hit him like a hammer, pounding an impossible lust through his body to pool in his sex.

  What the hell?

  “I—what?”

  It was like she could read his mind, and it made her stammer.

  “I like easy and sleazy.” He grinned slightly, imagining that mouth of hers engaged in practices that would fall under both headings. “I’m afraid I’m true to my redneck roots.” He flipped the bottom of his ratty green Stars t-shirt up to wipe at his face, and when he lowered it, was more delighted than he should have been to find her staring at his abdomen with a look on her face that suggested he’d smacked her over the head with a hammer of his own. His grin widened. “I don’t really go for the disapproving schoolmarm thing. But I sure do appreciate the thought.”

  She blinked again. Then understanding flooded over her surprisingly readable face and Jasper watched in fascination as she went pale, then a deep red. A blush? When was the last time he’d seen a woman blush? His ex-wife had been incapable of it—and, for that matter, just about everything else it turned out a marriage required.

  Jasper banished thoughts of that blessedly short-lived disaster, and concentrated on the woman in front of him instead. He couldn’t seem to keep himself from imagining what that blush might look like in far more interesting places. And were those freckles across her delicate cheeks, complicating the creamy sweep of her skin?

  He didn’t understand why he found that so intriguing. Or why it made him want in a way he hadn’t felt in so long, it took him a moment or two to recognize what that particular feeling, sharp and intense and roaring in him so loudly, even was.

  “It’s seven thirty in the morning.” She sounded scandalized. Her eyes were a blue to rival the Montana sky, and they widened in what had to be horror, which he felt like a heat wave throughout his body, reminding him how dark and perverse he was compared to an undoubtedly pure, small town sweetheart like this one. “On a Monday.”

  “It wouldn’t matter if it was the sweet spot of a Saturday night,” he told her, enjoying himself immensely despite his own twisted soul. It wasn’t like he could do anything about it, could he? “It still wouldn’t work out, unless you’re hiding a honky tonk or two beneath that Head of the PTA outfit of yours.”

  “I most certainly am not.” But her hands moved to the ruffled part of her blouse, then her quiet little belt buckle, as if she’d forgotten what she was wearing and had to remind herself by touch. Or make sure it was still there.

  Or maybe she was as baffled by these garments, neither of which he’d ever seen on a woman under sixty-five years of age, as he was.

  “I’m afraid we’re just not meant to be, darlin’,” he drawled, more Texas in his voice than usual and a fire he couldn’t quite control beneath it.

  That rattled her for a moment, he could see it in that intense blue of her eyes, but then she squared her shoulders and tilted that c
hin of hers back up anyway. Scrappy, he thought again, and with a purely male jolt of approval that boded ill for the both of them, he just knew it.

  “What on earth would make you think someone would show up and proposition you at this hour?” she demanded. “What kind of degenerate are you?”

  Jasper realized then that she had no idea who he was. He found that notion wildly liberating. And, strangely, arousing. He couldn’t remember the last time someone hadn’t known who he was and acted accordingly. He’d forgotten what it was like—the honest responses that had nothing to do with his net worth, the total lack of artifice or calculation, that look on her face that suggested he was nothing but a man, and a rather unappetizing one at that.

  He thought he loved this place already, and he’d been here all of two days.

  “The kind of degenerate you appear to be hanging around on the street waiting for,” he replied easily, not at all surprised that he was enjoying himself now. His brows arched up. “At seven-thirty. On a Monday.”

  This was much worse than Chelsea had imagined.

  I heard it from Carol Bingley myself, Mama had said on Saturday, standing in the doorway to the kitchen, her entire small frame radiating tension and fury, which usually made everyone in a six mile radius duck for cover and/or hide.

  Everyone except Chelsea, that was, because it was Chelsea’s duty to take care of her. Margot was down in Salt Lake City tending to her ever-expanding family, Nicky had stayed in North Carolina after college and married a woman who had no intention of leaving the area, and Daddy had died almost fifteen years ago now, which left Mama to Chelsea.

  Whether she liked it or not. Mostly, of course, she liked it fine. Mostly.

  Sometimes I think Carol Bingley makes things up just to feel important, Chelsea had replied in a light tone, pretending to be deeply involved in the preparation of her sandwich, not that she could imagine eating anything with Mama glaring at her like that, so accusingly, like Chelsea had betrayed her in some way. It has to feel like a pretty small life, spending all day in a pharmacy when you’re not even a pharmacist, snooping on people every time they drop off a prescription or pick up an extra tube of toothpaste—

  The depot has been sold. Mama had intoned it like a death knell, and it rang through the kitchen like one, then inside of Chelsea, because she knew what it meant. That she’d failed. That she’d let Mama down. That she was as useless as Mama had always told her she was, though she tried very hard not to let that get to her. The new owner—some Texan roughneck—is moving in this weekend. Congratulations, Chelsea. That Wright girl—she meant Chelsea’s best friend Jenny, of whom Mama had never approved, and it pained Chelsea deeply that it was because of where Jenny had lived growing up—is bettering herself by marrying a Monmouth while the Crawford family legacy is lost forever. What do you have to say to that?

  Don’t worry, Mama, she’d said. Rashly, perhaps, and it wasn’t like her mother listened anyway. Not to her. I’ll fix it. I promise.

  Even if she didn’t want to fix it. Even if she secretly thought that Mama was the broken thing, and worried that she was, too, by association.

  Even if she wasn’t entirely sure that marrying a Monmouth was the best thing for her best friend, not that she’d shared that unsolicited opinion with Jenny or anyone else, which meant she wasn’t so sure being a Crawford meant much, either.

  She shivered now, though the fall morning wasn’t particularly cold, and focused her energy on the strange man before her.

  He didn’t look like a roughneck—not that Chelsea had the slightest idea what a roughneck was supposed to look like, only that Mama thought such people were far, far beneath her. Even further beneath her than everybody else, that was.

  This man was long and lean, and built out of the kind of smooth muscles that spoke of long hours of hard, manual labor instead of weight machines in the gym. He was wearing a t-shirt with too many holes and a pair of track pants, and wasn’t even breathing heavily, though the t-shirt showed that he’d worked out hard. He had too-long dark hair with hints of gold that spoke of the Texas sun she’d heard in his voice, and that looked as if he’d scraped it back from his face with his fingers. He hadn’t shaved. Possibly not in days, though that rasp of stubble wasn’t yet a beard. It made him look… disconcertingly untamed, and this was Montana, home of untamed things of all kinds.

  And the way he looked at her, with that little crook to his mouth and that gleam in his hazel eyes she wasn’t sure she wanted to identify, made her heart turn achy little somersaults in her chest.

  Or maybe that was a panic attack. It wouldn’t be her first.

  “I’m Chelsea Collier,” she said stiffly, not sure what was happening to her.

  He was tall in a way that made her feel tiny and delicate, despite the fact she was wearing her dizzyingly high three inch heels—the ones with the platform bottoms she’d picked up in Bozeman with Jenny while trying on her Maid of Honor’s dress for Jenny’s wedding the following week—and hadn’t been the slightest bit delicate in her whole life. It occurred to her that she hadn’t had to introduce herself to someone new in quite a long while, and that made her feel oddly vulnerable, too.

  “Chelsea Crawford Collier,” she amended.

  He laughed. It was a gruff, male sound, that worked over her skin and down beneath it, winding around and around the center of her and pulling taut.

  “That’s a whole lot of Cs for one woman,” he said, that laughter still rich in his voice, making her feel shivery for no good reason at all. “What were your parents thinking? What was wrong with every other letter in the alphabet?”

  Chelsea summoned her best frown, the one she’d perfected in her years containing boisterous history students at the high school. What was one disreputable-looking man next to packs of unruly teenagers?

  “You’re new here, so perhaps you don’t know that the Crawford family was one of Marietta’s First Families,” she said reprovingly, aware that she sounded uncomfortably like her mother. That snooty intonation, even the way she was looking at him, as if the name Crawford was branded into the side of Copper Mountain standing in the distance. Was this what she had to look forward to? Slowly becoming Mama? But she couldn’t seem to stop herself, and the sad truth was that she knew the answer to that already. “Barton Dudley Crawford, my ancestor and one of Montana’s great visionaries, brought the railway here in 18—”

  “This railway?” he nodded toward the old railway line that ran behind the depot building, and unlike her history students, didn’t look even slightly cowed when she scowled at him for interrupting her. “My railway?”

  She didn’t like his possessiveness, which was another sign she was becoming Mama much faster than she was comfortable with, so she opted to ignore it.

  “The very same,” she replied primly. “The Marietta Railway Depot is a symbol of our town’s rich copper rush past, and stands as a monument to Barton Crawford as well as the many contributions of the Crawford family to this town and to this region since.”

  A little speech that she was fairly certain she’d heard Mama deliver to the postman only last week, as she was wont to do. You are turning into her even as you speak, that dire voice inside of her warned. It’s already happening.

  “Is this what people do for fun around here? Accost newcomers on the sidewalk to give them unsolicited history lessons?” He laughed again, and again, the sound of it did things to her she didn’t understand. Or like. “This is definitely not Dallas.”

  “I’m trying to tell you that you need to make the depot into a museum,” she snapped, and even though her little-used temper was flaring, she still caught the way the man before her stilled. He was dangerous, she realized in a sudden flash of insight. Far more dangerous than that easy smile of his let on. “That’s what it’s supposed to be. What’s it’s meant to be. I’ve spent the last year fundraising. The rodeo will be here in two weeks and we’re going to have the final push—”

  “I’ll stop you right there,
” he said, interrupting again, and she didn’t know why that look in his eyes was so unnerving. Like he could see straight through her, to all those shadowy places where she was never Crawford enough, not for Mama.

  You’re a Collier all the way through, Mama had sniffed whenever Chelsea did something she didn’t like—which was more often these days, now that Chelsea’s relationship with Tod Styles was over and she was “without prospects.” Mama preferred prospects. Collier straight down to the bone, and nary a speck of Crawford blood to be seen.

  Margot and Nicky, of course, were 100% percent Crawford while they stayed away, though that percentage seemed to dip considerably whenever they visited. Which was probably why they did it so seldom.

  There were times, Chelsea reflected, when she found all of this—even Mama’s high opinion of herself—funny. Endearing. But today didn’t seem to be one of those times.

  “I’m Jasper Flint,” he said, and then paused, almost as if he expected a reaction to that—but then laughed when Chelsea only continued to scowl at him. “Of course,” he said, shaking his head. “You must be the only woman I’ve met in the past ten years who doesn’t have the slightest idea who I am.”

  “Why would I know who you are?” Chelsea demanded, but even as she did, she realized she should have paid more attention to Mama’s very long, very acerbic diatribe about him this weekend. Saturday and Sunday, and so what if Chelsea was trying to grade papers? The trouble was, the only way Chelsea knew how to manage her mother was to very actively not pay attention to the specifics of the things she said, but to let it all wash over her like the weather. It was a survival tactic she’d perfected a long, long time ago.

  But she had the sinking feeling that Carol Bingley knew exactly who this man was. Which meant her mother did, too, and had no doubt shared it all with her while she was only pretending to listen. Which meant she should probably have looked into that before showing up on his doorstep this morning on her way to school, all fired up to do… something.