Julie Benson - Roping the Rancher

But things hadn’t gone as planned. Instead, Griffin and Maggie fell in love and he proposed to the director instead during the live finale. At the time all Stacy saw was her latest career opportunity flying out the window and she’d been brutal in her anger.

“I owe you an apology, too,” Maggie said. “I couldn’t talk to you at the audition with everyone else around, but I want to tell you that now. I know people say ‘we didn’t plan this, it just happened’ all the time, but that really was the case with me and Griffin. The more we worked together, the more we got to know each other, and we fell in love.”

“I think you were the only one who got to see the real man,” Stacy said. When she was with Griffin on a date she’d sensed he was holding back, that he was treating the show like a job, too. Looking back now she saw that fact even more. He hadn’t been shocked by her business proposition. His only concern had been whether he could trust her to keep quiet about their deal. Once she’d answered that question, he’d agreed. In fact he’d appeared almost relieved, but then he’d pulled the rug out from under her at the finale.

“I’m hoping Healing Horses will work for Ryan because I’d love to work with you. I think this project is going to be amazing.”

As she told Maggie she’d talk to Ryan’s doctor and call her no later than tomorrow with an answer, hope and determination blossomed inside of Stacy.

With a little luck Ryan would get his therapy and she could make the movie. Another win-win situation. Hopefully this one would work out better than the last one.

Chapter Two

Boring. Calm. Uneventful. Ordinary. The words once made Colt Montgomery go stir-crazy, but since coming home from Afghanistan, they sounded pretty damned good. Of course, raising a teenage daughter on his own meant he didn’t use those words in conjunction with his life very often, but he kept hoping.

Everywhere he went in town people and life seemed the same, and yet he wasn’t. Life in Afghanistan consisted of endless monotony and preparation, interrupted with bouts of sheer terror. He spent a good portion of his day wondering if someone he was there to help would turn on him with an AK-47. Then one day he was home.

Going to a war zone changed a man in ways few could understand, but he was one of the lucky ones. He’d come home with all his body parts. Except for some minor scars and an occasional nightmare, he returned unscathed, but then he hadn’t been there for his full tour, either.

Once home, he struggled with what to do with his life. While he loved being a parent, he needed more than raising his daughter and being a rancher. Then he heard from one of his buddies, Dan, who’d lost a leg in Afghanistan. His doctor recommended an equestrian sports therapy program, but there wasn’t one near him. After that email, Colt discovered the purpose he craved in creating Healing Horses.

He’d gone through a seven-week training course to become a registered instructor. Then he started training horses and found local physical therapists willing to donate their time to recommend activities and work with clients when necessary.

When Colt finally was able to open the doors to Healing Horses, Dan was the program’s first patient.

Footsteps tapped across the wooden floor outside his office. He looked up from the stack of bills due on his desk to see his daughter walk in, and his heart ached.

He’d come so close to losing her when he was in Afghanistan, and all because of his selfishness. When her mother ran off with a computer repairman and died a month later in a car accident, he should’ve quit the National Guard Reserves. He’d known getting deployed was a possibility, but he never really thought it would happen. So much for long shots.

When he’d been shipped to Afghanistan, his younger brother came to Colorado to stay with Jess. Reed, a bachelor, made more than a few mistakes, and Jess ran away. What could have happened to her, now that gave Colt real nightmares. Pimps. Drug dealers. General crazies waiting to prey on a naive fourteen-year-old. He thanked God every day that Reed and Avery, now Reed’s wife, found Jess at the Denver airport before she got into any serious trouble.

Jess’s running away had been a hard kick to the head for Colt. This time he got the message. She was the most important thing in his life and it was high time he proved it. So he asked for a hardship discharge, left the National Guard Reserves and returned to Estes Park.

Looking at her now standing in his office, he realized every day she looked more like her mother. Same petite frame, long chestnut hair and warm coffee-colored eyes as her mother. Jess was the constant reminder of how young and in love he’d once been. Sometimes he looked at her and tried to find bits of himself. Today he didn’t have any trouble finding a similarity. Her chin pointed at him in stubborn defiance she inherited from him. He braced himself for whatever hand grenade she was about to throw his way.

“Cody Simmons asked me out to a movie on Saturday. Can I go?”

He closed his eyes for a second to regroup. Times like these he missed having her mother around to tell him whether or not he was being too much of a hard-ass. “As in out for a date, asked you out?”

“The word date was never mentioned.”

“I’m not falling for that one again.” She’d burned him with technicalities more than once before he learned to choose his words very carefully and scrutinize every one of hers for land mines. “Would you be going with a group of friends?”

“Not exactly, but—”

“Then it’s a date, and the answer is no.”

Cody was a good kid. He was an honor student, worked part-time at the Cinemaplex and was a pretty good bronc rider in the junior rodeo circuit, but none of that mattered to Colt. Just thinking about Jess dating shoved his panic into overdrive, especially since he knew what seventeen-year-old boys were like. Basically a bundle of hormones fantasizing about sex every thirty seconds. He hadn’t been much older than Cody when he and Lynn started having sex. By graduation she’d been pregnant and they were planning a quickie wedding.

No way did he want history repeating itself with his daughter.

“Your ‘no dating until I’m sixteen’ rule is so old-fashioned.”

“Then you better go get your bonnet, missy.”

Three more months were all he had before he started greeting boys at the door with a shotgun and giving them his own version of the Spanish Inquisition before he let them out the door with his daughter. He now understood why man invented the chastity belt.

“All my friends have been dating since they were fifteen. What difference will a few months make?”

“What difference will it make to wait?”

She crossed her arms over her chest, shifted her weight onto one foot and glared at him. Such determination and strength, and yet so much hurt behind those beautiful brown eyes. How could a mother walk out on such a wonderful child?

Leaving him, he got. He and Lynn had troubles from the moment the ink dried on their marriage license. She wanted so much that he couldn’t give her. Bright lights, the big city, adventure. Being a military wife and later a rancher’s wife weren’t what she had in mind.

If only he’d known that earlier, but they’d been high-school sweethearts who swore the love they felt would last forever. They were too young and foolish to know what they didn’t know. He wondered now if their relationship would’ve run its course sooner if Lynn hadn’t gotten pregnant.

But then he wouldn’t have Jess, and he wouldn’t trade being her father for anything. She was the only good thing that came out of his marriage.

“You don’t understand what it’s like being the only one who can’t date. I’ll become a social outcast.”