The Littlest Cowboy

  #

  Rob McIntyre was having a mental tug of war inside his own mind. He didn’t quite know how he could bid against Kiley Kellogg for her childhood home. That girl seemed to want it way more than he did. But she’d also seemed full of blue mud, as his step-mother Vidalia would say, when she’d been talking about some priceless family heirloom that was going to fund her cause. She was a liar, and a very bad one. And while he couldn’t think of a single reason why she would lie to him, a perfect stranger, about some non-existent piece of priceless jewelry, he was sure she had.

  He didn’t like dishonest women. He’d been badly burned by one, and he’d vowed to live his own life as honestly as possible from then on. He’d given up lies, even little white ones, and it felt good. He was waiting for a woman who was as honest as he was.

  But for some reason, he liked Kiley. She was young, early twenties if he had to guess. And maybe he was drawn to her because she was all alone in the world, or maybe because she’d recently lost her sister. He’d seen the truth of that pain in her big topaz-blue eyes. Maybe it was because of the way she lit up when she started describing her plans for the ranch, or maybe it was because those plans were so unusual and creative and intelligent.

  Or maybe it was just because she was pretty enough to knock the wind out of him every time she smiled.

  He hadn’t slept a wink or stopped thinking about Kiley and the ranch all night long.

  Knowing he’d see her at the auction gave him some kind of a thrill in the pit of his stomach and a case of the jitters at the same time, and he was pretty sure it also influenced him to put on his brown Stetson at just such an angle, and check himself in the bathroom mirror twice before heading out of his room and down the staircase that spilled into the dining room.

  His younger brother Joey was already at a table in the empty dining room, his long legs stretched out from his chair, working on a chest-high stack of flapjacks. “Hey, Rob. Grab a bite before you go? I got more here than I can eat.”

  “You’ve got more there than both of us could eat,” Rob said, veering off course to head to the table. He didn’t sit down, just grabbed a pancake, wrapped it around a sausage and swiped it through the half inch-deep syrup on his kid brother’s plate.

  Joey lived in one of the rooms above the saloon, same as Rob. Their older brother Jason had bought a run-down place just beyond the west end of town, and was living there while fixing it up. Together with their father, Bobby Joe, they ran The Long Branch Saloon and brought tourists and their dollars into Big Falls.

  “You gonna do it?” Joey asked. “Gonna buy that ranch?”

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I’m a little bit torn.” He took a big bite of his hack-job breakfast sandwich and said, “Guess I’ll decide when I get there. Wish me luck, little brother.”

  “I’ll do more than that. I’ll be there for moral support. I’ll be over soon as I finish packing this breakfast away.”

  “For a normal person, I’d say the auction would be over by then, but for you—I give it ten minutes.” Rob shoved the other half of his breakfast-roll-up into his mouth, then headed out to his big red pickup truck.

  He drove into town with only fifteen minutes to spare, sticking to the speed limit over Main Street, though it killed him, then finally speeding up at the far end of the village. He was almost to the firehouse where the auction was being held, when he caught a glimpse of something in his periphery and then heard a big thunk on the passenger side fender.

  He stomped the brakes so damn hard his body lurched forward. The seatbelt would’ve bruised him, if he’d remembered to buckle it. Slamming the shift into park, he dove out of the truck with his heart hammering, dreading to see what he’d hit.

  Kiley Kellogg was just pushing herself up onto her hands and knees on the pavement. Her palms were scraped, and her eyes were tear-filled. “What the—” Then she looked up. “You?”

  “Are you okay?” He reached down to help her up, and wished his heart wasn’t pounding a mile a minute. “I didn’t see you! Are you all right?”

  “I’m okay, I’m just—” She patted herself down, then widened her eyes, and looked around as if on the verge of panic. “No, no, no. Oh, no!” She turned in a slow circle, then started pawing through the grass along the side of the road. “Oh, no, please, not now, not when I’m so close!” she cried.

  “Kiley?”

  She kept searching until he caught hold of her shoulders and made her stop, raising her gently up onto her feet again. “What are you looking for?”

  “The ring!” She wasn’t looking him in the eyes, but still scanning the ground. “My grandmother’s ring. It must have flown out of my hand!” She pulled free of him and started looking again. “Oh my God, there’s a drain! What if it went down there?”

  “Then you’re not gonna find it in time for the auction,” he said. “Not sure how you were gonna sell it in Tucker Lake and get back here with the funds in time either, but—”

  “The jeweler’s meeting me here with a cashier’s check. Oh my God, what am I gonna do?”

  Then she went silent for a minute and looked at him. “Wait a minute, why are you here? Are you here for the auction?”

  “I uh...was interested in the ranch too,” he admitted. Even though he had a pretty strong hunch she already knew that.

  “You didn’t tell me that last night.”

  “Seeing how bad you wanted it, I was reconsidering.”
She lowered her head. “That was sweet of you, but now it’s over. Without that ring, I can’t afford it. Unless…I mean, would you...could you…maybe…loan me the money?”

  “Loan you the money,” he repeated.

  She shifted her gaze, lower and to the left. “You did hit me with your truck. I mean, look at me. You made me lose my grandmother’s ring.”

  “I did, huh?”

  She pulled out her phone. “Call the jeweler in Tucker Lake. Go ahead, it’s Skilman’s. He’ll tell you what he offered for it based on the pictures I sent him, providing the stones were real, which he was going to verify when he got here.”

  Rob had no doubt the jeweler would do just that. But he wasn’t just handing her five hundred thousand dollars based on photos she’d sent to a jeweler. She could’ve got photos of a priceless ring off the internet, for crying out loud. He wasn’t an idiot.

  And in that very moment, it became clear to him why she’d told him about the ring in the first place. To set him up.

  And yet, he couldn’t quite bring himself to call her on her bullshit and walk away. There was so much hope, so much need in her eyes. And there was also a pretty significant chance he was jumping to the wrong conclusions based on his history, painting her with the old Paula brush. Probably not, but it was possible.

  “How old are you, Kiley?” He blurted the question without thinking first, and knew it was rude as hell. But once it was out, it was out.

  She blinked. “I thought cowboys were polite.”

  “I’m only an aspiring cowboy.” He stood there, watching her and waiting.

  She gnawed her lower lip, didn’t meet his eyes. “Twenty-three. What does that have to do with anything?”

  It had a lot to do with everything, he thought. She was young. She was trying to con him, and she was terrible at it. But she was also beautiful, and heartbroken, apparently all alone in the world and desperate to reclaim her childhood home. Something about that just grabbed hold of his heart and twisted.

  He was pretty sure he was about to do something really stupid. But everything in him was telling him it was the right move. He probably should have taken time to mull on it some, but there wasn’t really any time to take.

  “I’m not gonna loan you the money,” he said.

  “But—”

  “But I am gonna help you.”

  Her frown got even deeper. “Help me how?”

  She sounded like she was accusing him of being up to no good. He thought it over for a long minute, waiting for the voice of
reason to kick in and outshout his impulsive decision, but he found himself counting those freckles across her nose instead of counting the ways this could go terribly wrong.

  “The auction’s gonna start any minute, Rob McIntyre, so if you have some magic way to save me without giving me the money you just cost me, then spit it out.”

  He figured he’d probably kick himself later. “You said you have enough for half, right?”

  “If it doesn’t go for more than I think it will.”

  He nodded. “Okay then. We buy it together. We go in as partners.” He watched her face.

  She seemed to be casting around inside her brain for some kind of counter offer. Then someone stepped into the open firehouse doorway and called, “Auction begins in ten minutes!”

  Kiley sent a desperate look skyward, chewing her bottom lip and getting teary eyed.

  “My operation wouldn’t interfere with yours at all,” he said.

  “I don’t even know what your operation is.”

  “Horses. Quarter horses. I want to breed them, raise them, train them. There’s plenty of acreage for both. I’ll use the bigger barn for stables. You want the little one anyway. We could do this.” Then he shrugged. “But I get to live in the house. For now, at least.”

  “But…we don’t even know each other.”

  “It’s that or nothing,” he said.

  “But…my grandmother’s ring!”

  “Yeah, too bad about that,” he said. “Tell you what—if you find it, you can buy me out.”

  “But…but that’s not fair.”

  “Seems fair to me.” People were filing into the firehouse, taking up their seats. “Look, I’m just gonna go on inside now, get a good spot up near the front. I can buy the whole place myself. I don’t need a partner. If you’re not interested, I’ll just—”

  “All right, all right!” she said quickly. “Okay. I’m in.”

  “And I get to live in the house?”

  “Yes, yes, yes.” She extended a hand his way. “Deal.”

  He shook her hand, then said, “I’ve got to get the truck out of the road.”

  “I need to find a restroom to clean up,” she said, looking at her scraped palms. “Meet you inside.”