Rebecca Winters: In a Cowboy's Arms

He’d promised himself to stay away from her, but the trail of her haunting fragrance drove him to follow her out the front door to the truck.

“What are you doing?” She sounded panicked.

Jarod ground his teeth. “Isn’t it obvious? We have unfinished business, Sadie. While we’re alone, now is as good a time as any to talk.” He stretched his arm along the back of the seat, fighting the urge to plunge his hand into her silky hair as he’d done so many times in the past. “To pretend we don’t have a history serves no purpose. What I’m interested to know is how you can dismiss it so easily.”

“I’ve dismissed nothing!” Her voice was shaky. “But sometimes it’s better to leave certain things alone. In our case it’s one stone that shouldn’t be turned.”

“I disagree.”

In a Cowboy’s Arms

Rebecca Winters

www.millsandboon.co.uk

REBECCA WINTERS, whose family of four children has now swelled to include five beautiful grandchildren, lives in Salt Lake City, Utah, in the land of the Rocky Mountains. With canyons and high-alpine meadows full of wildflowers, she never runs out of places to explore. They, plus her favorite vacation spots in Europe, often end up as backgrounds for her romance novels, because writing is her passion, along with her family and church.

Rebecca loves to hear from readers. If you wish to e-mail her, please visit her website, www.cleanromances.com.

To Dr Shane Doyle of the Crow Nation in Montana for his assistance with some aspects of the culture you can’t find in a book.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

EXTRACT

Chapter One

“Zane? I’m glad you called me back!”

Zane Lawson was the brother-in-law of Sadie Corkin’s late mother, Eileen, and uncle of Sadie’s half brother. The recently retired navy SEAL had just gone through a painful divorce, yet Sadie could always count on him.

“You sound upset,” Zane said. “What’s wrong?”

She picked up the Vienna sausage two-year-old Ryan had thrown to the floor and put it in the sink. Her half brother, who had clear blue eyes like his mother, thought he was a big boy and didn’t like sitting in the high chair, but today she hadn’t given him a choice.

“I got a call from the ranch a little while ago. My father died at the hospital in White Lodge earlier this morning.”

Quiet followed for a moment while he digested the news. “His liver?”

“Yes.”

“I thought he had years left.”

“I did, too. But Millie said the way he drank, it was a miracle that diseased organ of his held up this long.” Daniel Corkin’s alcohol addiction had caught up with him at a young age, but the impact of the news was still catching up to Sadie. It had been eight years since she’d last seen him. She felt numb inside.

“With news like this, you shouldn’t be alone. I’ll drive right over.”

“What would I do without you?”

“That goes both ways. Have you made any plans yet?”

She’d already talked to Mac and Millie Henson, the foreman and housekeeper on the Montana ranch who’d virtually raised Sadie after her parents’ bitter divorce.

“We’ve decided to hold the graveside service at the Corkin family plot on Saturday. That’s as far as I’ve gotten.” She had a lot of decisions to make in the next five days. “I’ll have to fly there on Friday.”

“Rest assured I’ll go to Montana with you so I can help take care of Ryan. See you in a couple of minutes.”

“Thank you. Just let yourself in,” she said before hanging up. No two-year-old could have a more devoted uncle than Zane.

Ryan had never got to meet his father, Tim Lawson. Tim had owned the software store where Sadie had been hired after she’d moved to San Francisco to be with her mother, Eileen, eight years ago.

Sometimes her mom dropped by the store to go to lunch with her and that’s how Eileen had met Tim. It must have been fate because the two had fallen in love and married soon after. But Tim had died in a car accident while Sadie’s mother was still expecting their baby. Tragically, Eileen had passed away during the delivery from cardiac arrest brought on by arrhythmia. Age and stress had been a factor.

Sadie suffered from the same condition as her mother. In fact, just before she’d left the ranch, she’d been advised to give up barrel racing and had been put on medication. If she ever married, getting pregnant would be a huge consideration no matter the efficacy of today’s drugs.

Sadie had continued to work in sales for Tim’s store even after new management had taken over. Since Eileen’s death, however, and taking on fulltime duties as a mother to Ryan, she worked for the store from home.

Tim’s younger brother, Zane, had been a tower of strength, and the two of them had bonded in their grief over Tim and Eileen’s deaths.

Zane knew the whole painful history of the Corkin family, starting with Sadie’s great-grandfather Peter Corkin from Farfields, England. Due to depressed times in his own country, he’d traveled to Montana in 1920 to raise Herefords on a ranch he’d named after the town he’d left behind. When he’d discovered that Rufus Bannock, a Scot on the neighboring ranch who ran Angus cattle, had found oil, the Corkins’ own lust for oil kicked into gear, but nothing had turned up so far.

Sadie’s father, Daniel Corkin, had been convinced there was oil to be found somewhere on his eighty-five-acre ranch. His raging obsession and jealousy of the Bannock luck, coupled with his drinking and suspicions about his wife’s infidelity, which were totally unfounded, had driven Eileen away. When she’d filed for divorce, he said he’d give her one, but she would have to leave eight-year-old Sadie with him.

Terrified that if she stayed in the marriage he’d kill her as he’d sworn to do, Eileen had given up custody of their daughter, forcing Millie Henson, the Corkin housekeeper, to raise Sadie along with her own child, Liz.

Zane also knew Mac and Millie Henson were saints as far as Sadie was concerned, and she felt she could never repay their goodness and devotion.

It was their love that had sheltered her and seen her through those unhappy childhood years with an angry, inebriated father who’d lost the ability to love. The Hensons had done everything possible to provide a loving family atmosphere, but Sadie had suffered from acute loneliness.

Once, when she was fifteen, there’d been a mother-daughter event at the school. Never really understanding how her mother could have abandoned her, Sadie had been in too much pain to tell Millie about the school function and had taken off on her horse, Candy, not caring where she was going.

Eventually stopping somewhere on the range, Sadie, thinking she was alone, had slumped forward in the saddle, heaving great, uncontrollable sobs. With only her horse to hear, she’d given way to her grief, wondering if she might die of it....

* * *

“WHAT’S SO TERRIBLE on a day like this?”

Sadie knew that deep voice. Jarod Bannock.

She lifted her head and stared through tear-drenched eyes at the striking, dark-haired eighteen-year-old. She knew two things about Jarod Bannock. One, his mother had been an Apsáalooke Indian. Two, every girl in the county knocked themselves out for his attention. If any of them had succeeded, she didn’t know about it—although he was a neighbor, her family never spoke of him. Her father, whose hatred knew no bounds, held an irrational predjudice against Jarod because of his heritage.

“I miss my mother.”