The Love of a Cowboy Read online

  Praise for Anna Jeffrey’s debut novel

  THE LOVE OF A COWBOY

  “This book is on fire! Intense, romantic and fiercely tender…an authentic and powerful love story” — Joan Johnston, New York Times bestselling author of The Price

  “Anna Jeffrey delivers a big, bold, and passionate story of second chances and starting over. Curl up and enjoy!” — New York Times bestselling author, Susan Wiggs

  “A truly remarkable debut from a writer who is bound for superstardom.” — USA Today bestselling author, Katherine Sutcliffe

  ****

  Published by Anna Jeffrey on Kindle

  The Love of a Cowboy Copyright © Jeffery McClanahan, 2003

  All rights reserved

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

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  Cover design by Kimberly Killion – www.HotDamnDesigns.com

  THE LOVE OF A COWBOY

  by

  ANNA JEFFREY

  PROLOGUE

  Dallas, Texas

  Monday, December 22

  If Dahlia Montgomery Jarrett ignored the fact that it was her husband she was burying three days before Christmas, it was as good a day as any for a funeral. Sky overcast but no rain, temperature not too hot for her black Ellen Tracy suit. Typical for December in North Texas.

  As the obligatory graveside ritual ground to an end, she made a silent prayer of thanks. She had shaken enough hands, said “thank you for coming,” enough times, been the dutiful spouse.

  Through it all, she hadn’t shed a tear, and was proud of herself.

  Because she hadn’t screamed either.

  The service had been short and un-crowded. Kenneth Jarrett’s family was small. He’d had few friends. Some of her friends from work had come, but most only sent flowers. Poinsettias. A touch of the bizarre. Fitting, Dahlia thought.

  She moved toward a waiting black limousine, flanked by her father and her lifelong friend, Pegine Murphy. If someone asked her to define her feelings, she could not. How could she find words a mere five days after learning her husband, the man who had vowed to forsake all but her, had died in a violent car collision at four o’clock in the morning with another woman in the passenger seat of his car.

  Wednesday morning’s surreal events had flashed through her mind in snatches a hundred times—the pre-dawn call from the Denton County sheriff’s office, sobbing and driving against morning traffic to Denton where she had never been, nearly colliding with a van loaded with Santas who flipped her off in unison when she ran a stop sign.

  The morgue scene followed—Kenneth playing on closed-circuit TV like a bad movie. Her knees barely held her through it.

  After she had confirmed Kenneth’s identification, a young deputy scanning a form on a clipboard asked her if she knew her husband’s passenger.

  “Passenger?” Dahlia had asked stupidly.

  “Yes, ma’am. Female, approximately thirty, blond hair, blue eyes, weight one-twenty-seven.”

  Sinking deeper into shock, Dahlia shook her head. On Tuesday morning, he had left their North Dallas home for a two-day meeting in Austin. South. No, she didn’t know a female rode with him. No, she didn’t know why he had been driving a narrow, rural road on the opposite side of Texas from where he should have been.

  Female passenger…river bottom…no ID…Would she attempt an identification?

  In her mind, Dahlia had refused, but her head nodded assent.

  Then came the blow that nearly felled her. The woman who had departed life with Kenneth was her co-worker, Bonnie Gibson. For four years, Dahlia had considered her a friend. They lunched together several times a week, prowled the shopping malls. Three evenings a week, they worked out at a gym, commiserated during breaks at the juice bar about married life and men. And sex. They had shared the most intimate of secrets. She knew the bedroom deficiencies of the deceased woman’s husband almost as well as she knew Kenneth’s.

  Staring at Bonnie’s lifeless face, at a visceral level, Dahlia had resisted the truth. It slunk in anyway.

  Grief, confusion, humiliation, anger—all bunched into a tight knot and lodged behind her breastbone. She hyperventilated, had to be guided to a chair by the deputy. She had left the morgue groping for mooring.

  She hadn’t cried since that day, holding herself together with brittle control.

  Thus far, the sheriff’s department investigation had been typical, she assumed. A 10-50F she heard them say. An accident with fatalities. It appeared Kenneth’s Corvette crashed head-on into a bridge abutment, then plunged into the North Fork of the Trinity River below. Both victims pulled from the murky water had been pronounced dead at the scene.

  High speed the cops said. DUI they suspected. Toxicology results were pending.

  Dahlia hadn’t let herself think of the probable outcome or its consequences.

  Since breaking the news the morning of the accident to her husband’s family, her only contact with them had been to make funeral arrangements. With her consent, his parents selected the funeral home, the chapel and a gravesite in the Jarrett family plot in an old Dallas cemetery.

  When the awkward question of her own burial arose, she assured them she didn’t expect a spot to be reserved for her beside her husband. His mother’s relief came as an audible sigh.

  No surprise there. Just as Kenneth’s WASPy parents hadn’t wanted a Catholic, half-Filipino daughter-in-law, they wouldn’t want her corpse tainting the family plot someday in the future.

  She didn’t care, Dahlia told herself. She had her own supporters—her dad and Piggy. They arrived a few hours after she had called them, having driven from the small West Texas town of Loretta where she and Piggy grew up.

  Now, back at the funeral home, they transferred from the somber black Cadillac to Piggy’s fire-engine-red Blazer. Kenneth’s friends would be meeting the family at his parents’ home for a short reception.

  “I dread this.” Dahlia said, settling into the Blazer’s back seat. “I don’t know how I can face them.”

  Her dad reached back between the bucket seats and squeezed her hand. “Not much longer, sweetheart.”

  Piggy’s fierce gaze reflected in the rear view mirror. Her anger had been snapping and crackling for days. “More to the point, how can they face you? Just be glad this little soiree is taking place at their house instead of yours. At least we can bail out when you’ve had enough of the Jarrett charm.”

  They remained silent as Piggy drove. Dahlia stared out, seeing but not registering, stumbling through a labyrinth of memories and warring emotions. Her husband had been a man of many facets—ambitious, not lazy, sophisticated and suave, handsome enough to have stepped o
ff the pages of GQ.

  And he had been unfaithful, calculating and mendacious. Countless times she had dismissed how manipulative he was, of others as well as her, or closed her eyes to his selfishness. Just a few months ago, she had been close to leaving him. He’d had an affair with another woman, though not the one who died with him. Back then, even as Dahlia knew a lie rolled off his tongue as readily as the truth, instead of kicking him out or packing her bags, she had let herself believe him when he said it wouldn’t happen again.

  And why had she done that? Because to her, belonging to some one and some thing as time-honored as marriage had been more important than a few glitches in probity. But as diabolic as she knew he could be, nothing had prepared her for both his and a friend’s betrayal in one stroke.

  They entered the upscale subdivision where Kenneth’s parents lived. Large brick homes glided past, their lawns turned to winter’s beige and festooned with Christmas decorations. All of it looked so normal.

  Everyone arrived at the Jarrett home at the same time. As Dahlia entered the two-story foyer, she saw nothing had changed from when Kenneth had brought her here ten nights ago for dinner with his parents and several other guests.

  Thick ropes of green garland and red poinsettias beribboned in gold still draped the stairway banister. A tall, lavishly decorated Christmas tree, unlit, still filled a corner of the living room. Beside this very tree, Kenneth had given her an early gift, a diamond tennis bracelet that had brought a gasp from his mother. The presentation, Dahlia now realized, had been nothing more than a performance to make himself appear as a loving husband in the presence of his parents and their friends.

  In the formal dining room to the right of the foyer, she could see the Ethan Allen cherrywood table extended to its full length and food from a caterer, laid out. The subdued guests formed a line and filed past. Piggy went ahead of her, picking up a plate and silverware and surveying the array of fancy food. “Well, this ain’t exactly the family dinner in the church basement, is it.” She added some raw vegetables to her plate. “Hmm. I don’t see any rice. Did they forget you were coming?”

  “Shh. Don’t start.” Dahlia glanced around to see who had heard. Rice was a private joke. It went back five years to the rehearsal dinner before her wedding. Kenneth’s mother had asked her if she preferred rice to potatoes, the first of many thinly veiled racial slurs.

  I didn’t know if you could buy make-up in your color, dear…Did your mother read and write English?..If you and Kenneth have children, I suppose they’ll be dark…

  Dahlia, her father and Piggy ate standing near the fireplace, apart from the group. Piggy assessed the small crowd. “Just goes to show you I’m not the only one who thought he was a jerk. Only a handful of people even care that he’s gone and I question their sincerity.”

  Dahlia’s dad spoke up. “Pegine, remember where you are. Show some respect.”

  “I can’t help it, Elton. The whole thing makes me so mad—”

  Dahlia laid a hand on her forearm, stopping her. “Don’t, Piggy. I know it wasn’t perfect, but I shared my life with him.”

  “You were too generous, girlfriend. You’d have been better off with a large dog.”

  “I wanted it to work out. I wanted us to be a family.”

  Piggy sighed and shook her head. “Let’s face it, Dal. You’re too nice a person. No match for a scheming sonofabitch.”

  Another hard truth Dahlia couldn’t deny or excuse away.

  One by one, Kenneth's friends, for the second and third times, offered their condolences and left.

  “Hypocrites,” Piggy hissed. “Those bastards knew he screwed around behind your back. And you’ll never make me believe his hoity-toity mom and dad didn’t know it either. They helped him lie to you, you know.”

  Piggy ripped into Kenneth and his mother so often, Dahlia frequently tuned her out. Today, of all days, she was too weary to listen. She had been thriving on adrenaline since Wednesday and as for emotions, she was numb. “I know all that, Piggy. Please don’t say any more. It’s over.”

  “If you believe that, let me tell you about a bridge in Brooklyn. Personally, I think the fun’s just beginning. I’d bet my CPA certificate the IRS was hot on his heels. As underhanded as he was?..Why, you might be dead broke, girlfriend, and don’t even know it.”

  “I do know it. I’ve been worried about it.”

  Chapter 1

  Two years, four months later…

  Dahlia Montgomery’s patience drew its next-to-last breath on a cold sunlit morning in a god-forsaken place named Callister, Idaho, population 635. There in the reception room of a U.S. Forest Service complex, she and her best friend, Piggy Murphy, waited for their summer employer, Piggy’s cousin Jerry. Apparently he had stood them up for the second time in twenty-four hours.

  Another snafu. A plague that had become a too-familiar part of Dahlia’s once well-planned existence. This latest one, though tiny in comparison to the calamities that had befallen her in the past two and a half years, just might be that infamous straw that collapsed her. Why hadn’t she resisted longer and harder when Piggy and Dad nagged her into this hare-brained scheme?

  Piggy zipped her coat all the way to her chin. “Wonder why they don’t turn up the heat.”

  Dahlia pointed to a sign on the wall: THIS FACILITY IS HEATED BY SOLAR ENERGY.

  “Hunh. Could have fooled me. Feels like they’re burning candles.”

  Yeah, Dahlia thought and cast a skeptical eye at the golden shafts of sunshine pouring through giant skylights. She pulled her jacket—her lightweight jacket—tighter about her and hunched forward. “Jerry should’ve told us it’s still winter up here. We didn’t even bring warm coats.”

  “Whatever.” Piggy stuffed her hands into her coat pockets, scooted down in her chair and rested her neck on the back. Her eyelids fluttered shut.

  “It’s ten o’clock,” Dahlia snapped, tired of hiding her annoyance. They had arrived at eight. She had read two magazines on forestry from front to back and all the brochures on the gray steel side tables circling the room. Two dozen people uniformed in khaki and green had come through the front entrance and disappeared up a long hall. A dozen more civilians. No Jerry Murphy. “If the furnace worked, we could go back to the house.”

  “Lean back and take a nap,” Piggy muttered. “He’ll show.”

  “Surveyor helpers. That’s a joke. Grunts is more like it. I should have stayed in Loretta and helped Dad.”

  “Shh. I’m sleeping.”

  Dahlia scanned their surroundings. Until now, she hadn’t known there were so many shades of gray. The tint of everything—walls, floor, furniture—matched her mood.

  Across the room, in front of a wall of windows, trapezoids of sunlight hop-scotched over the salt-and-pepper carpet. She pushed up from her chair and moved to bask in the warmth of one of the sunny patches, her reflection showing in the window glass. Long kinky hair fanned out from her head like a tom turkey’s tail in full ruff. She loved her rebellious hair-do. Her coal-black hair was naturally straight as a string and she put great effort into keeping it tightly curled. But un-shampooed and un-moussed, it looked like the frizz that ate New York. And that she didn’t love. She turned her jacket pockets inside out, looking for a barrette, a rubber band, something. “I don’t suppose you’d have a hair clip,” she said to Piggy.

  Piggy’s eyes opened to half-mast. She pulled a yellow claw-clip out of her pocket. “Sha-zam.”

  As Dahlia gathered the sides of her hair into a knot at her crown, she viewed the world outside. Little mounds of thawing snow glistened in brilliant morning sunshine. Water trickled everywhere. Across the street, a brick bank building’s digital marquee pegged the temperature at thirty-three degrees.

  They had inched into town in a snowstorm yesterday, roads slick, visibility three feet, but today, under clear, blue skies, she could see the entire metropolis of Callister. The main street was a highway. Boise to the south, who knew what to the north. Three
blocks of buildings, some brick, some log, huddled on either side of the two-lane road. Though sunlight glinted off their metal roofs, the structures themselves looked even older and dustier than the ones she had left behind in Loretta, Texas.

  A pair of un-collared dogs trotted past, busy marking tires. No leash law in this town, she mused. No different from Loretta.

  Something that was different was a distant hum of an engine and the screek and scrape of metal against metal. Though muted at present by the Forest Service building’s thick windows, the monotonous noise had gone non-stop all night. And how did Dahlia know that? Because if she had closed her eyes in sleep at all, it had been for no more than a few minutes. “What is that?” she asked an obese receptionist at a gray desk.

  “That sound?” The receptionist—her name plate said Gretchen and she had on a mammoth ski sweater that filled Dahlia with envy—plunked a hammy elbow on an open drawer. “That’s the sawmill. Jobs. Money. They’re working three shifts now.”

  “Sawmill? Is this a mill town?” Another fact Jerry had neglected to tell them.

  “I dunno. The sawmill’s the biggest thing we got. When it ain’t running, things get real grim around here. Most of our folks work over there. Either that or log.”

  “Log? You mean, as in, cut down trees?” Dahlia knew little about logging. No sawmills existed in West Texas, and except for mesquites, few trees.

  Gretchen grunted and slammed the filing cabinet drawer. “That’s generally what happens when they log. You a tree-hugger?”

  “Well, no—”

  “Good. We got enough of them already.” She turned her back and lumbered up the hallway, her steps scuffing against the tight-napped carpet. On her feet were untied, all-weather boots the size of shoe boxes. Soon she returned, waddling toward them, carrying a steaming mug in each hand. She stopped and shoved a mug at Piggy. “We don’t usually serve coffee around here, but you two look like you could use it. We had some doughnuts earlier, but they’re all gone.”