Last Chance Cowboy (Mustang River #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Since moving to Mustang River, Oregon, and beginning her new life at the Painted Ridge Ranch and Resort, Cara had learned that if you wanted to bait a horse, you needed sugar cubes or alfalfa.

If you wanted to try to bait a man, however, she’d learned that strawberry rolls were much more effective.

Bait being the operative word, because tame definitely wasn’t it.

Zane Barton was as wild as the landscape around Painted Ridge Ranch, and twice as deadly. There was no taming to be had. Not that she wanted to tame him, she just…

She was fascinated by him. That was the word that she’d arrived at a couple of weeks ago. Crush felt silly, frothy and young. She didn’t feel young, and he wasn’t frothy or silly, so that was out.

It spoke to unrequited feelings that a person didn’t necessarily need to act on, though, and in that sense, she supposed it was close.

But it was still too juvenile for her to bear. So, fascination it was.

She had a fascination with Zane.

He had nothing of the sort with her, but he did seem to like her baked goods. So, there was that.

The fascination with her baked goods was also why she was being sent to his house – a place she had never been before – to try and sweeten him up.

When Cody had asked her to do this, she had laughed.

Because one did not sweeten up Zane Barton, that would imply that there was some sweetness there to be increased.

She might be fascinated with him, but she was also realistic about him.

She wasn’t entirely sure what Cody was to her. He was her landlord, owned the land that her bakery was on. So, not really her boss, even though he did take a percentage of the bakery’s sales. It was more of a collaboration. He was also in a relationship with her former sister-in-law.

Before all of this, Marlowe had been married to Cara’s brother for five years, and they’d been together much longer than that. Cara barely knew life without Marlowe. Cara was about nine when Marlowe and Aiden had started dating. Marlowe was a sister to Cara in every way that mattered.

Which was why, when her brother had revealed that he was cheating on Marlowe, and wouldn’t be going with her to the Painted Ridge Resort to start their new job as planned, Cara had insisted they still go.

It was why Cara had never questioned where her loyalty lay.

And that made Cody feel a little bit like family, even if there was no neat way to describe that on paper. He would feel like a brother-in-law, because Marlowe felt like a sister.

While her own brother…

Well, he had come out here and tried to win Marlowe back.

He had tried, also, to fix his relationship with Cara.

It hadn’t worked.

Because Cara had found that a lot of her old resentment had come rushing to the surface. Resentment that had nothing to do with Marlowe, and everything to do with the last few years.

With the way that Aiden hadn’t been able to handle their mother’s deteriorating health, hadn’t helped Cara with caregiving.

Every time she’d asked for more support, he’d had excuses.

He’d sent money instead of himself because he was too busy.

He was building a life — a life for a family — he was trying to get to a place in his life where he was stable enough to have children, and he had to be loyal to Marlowe and the future that they wanted to build.

But Cara wasn’t stupid. She knew that none of that had ever been about Marlowe, and after it had come out that Aiden had cheated on Marlowe, Cara’s suspicions had been laid out in front of everyone.

The reluctance to get involved had been about Aiden’s avoidance.

How nice for him. But both children couldn’t be avoidant. Not when their mother needed to be taken care of.

Somehow, he had been confident that it could all be left up to Cara, and everything would be taken care of.

He’d been right. She would have never left their mother without care. Not ever.

But it hadn’t been fair.

That chapter of her life had dominated her late teens and early twenties. Now here she was, twenty-four, pretty damned estranged from the only immediate family she had left, living across the country, owning a brand-new business, and… thriving?

Was this thriving?

She felt so much like herself, just in a new place.

But somehow she seemed like she was thriving enough to be the one who had been chosen to try and convince Zane to allow Cody to expand trail riding on the ranch to include a trail that went through his property.

She found it interesting that he’d been a firm no with Cody.

She knew next to nothing about Zane — except she knew he’d met Cody in the rodeo circuit and had moved to Mustang River because of him. Cody was the only person that Zane was even remotely close to.

Even so, he’d told Cody in no uncertain terms that his property was not open to guests.

It was Walker, Cody’s younger brother, who had suggested Cara try to charm him.

Zane had put a lot of work into the bakery.

He’d done some of the construction on the building before she’d arrived, he’d mounted her shelves.

He ate there every morning. And maybe if it was framed as something that might increase the flow of guests overall, keep the bakery and the business solvent…

Though Cara had asked why, as someone who worked on the ranch, he wouldn’t purely be motivated by the business doing better because they had increased the offerings.

Walker had looked at her and flatly stated that she would have better luck because she was pretty.

Walker was charming, so she’d giggled and agreed.

But ever since then, all through baking the special batch of strawberry rolls she was going to take to Zane’s house, packing it in a little basket with a pink cloth, and getting dressed in a floral sundress to go up to his place, she had been questioning everything.

Mostly because even if that were true, even if she were remarkably attractive – and she didn’t think she was – Zane had never indicated that he was the sort of man who cared about that. The kind of man who valued it or made decisions based on it.

Walker probably would. And maybe that was the issue. Walker was thinking that to him, the messenger would matter. Send a pretty girl in a short skirt, and he would say yes and probably seduce her.

Zane?

Likely not.

Though the idea of seduction made her cheeks feel a little bit warm. Was that seduction in general? Could she transfer it to someone like Walker?

That would be easy. He was really handsome. He was also, per every report she’d heard on him, easy. The kind of man a woman could have an experience with and then move on and still be friendly with him.

And yet. Something about the word easy didn’t create that same delicious tension inside her.

Someday, she was going to psychoanalyze this.

The fact that this entire ranch was complete with gorgeous cowboys, and the one that intrigued her the most, the one that made her heartbeat just a little bit faster, was the least friendly, least accessible, least appropriate one for her to be interested in.

Interested was a strong word.

She wasn’t interested.

It was just that you couldn’t help who you were attracted to.

Maybe she could, but her issues were conspiring against her.

All she knew in life was impossible, disconnection, and a distance from people she wished she could be closer to. And maybe part of her wanted to keep it that way.

Maybe part of her wanted to always be thwarted. Maybe part of her wanted to keep relationships off limits and out of reach because it just seemed safer.

At this point, her entire life had been a front-row seat to heartbreak and loss.

There were very valid reasons that she wasn’t amped to jump into anything like that. Of course, she also felt like she was being left behind, that she was tragically inexperienced for a woman of twenty-four, and that if she looked at Zane for too long, she was going to spontaneously combust.

Those things were related.

“No combusting,” she said to herself as she got out of her little car and grabbed her basket full of rolls.

She looked like Little Pink Riding Hood, well, without the hood. But she felt a little bit like she was heading toward the Big Bad in Wolf’s cabin.

It was a cabin. Small and rough-hewn, set back in the trees.

There was a wide front porch that had a rocking chair on it.

There were no planter boxes, no landscaping at all.

All the plants around the cabin grew wild.

Ferns and manzanita, and behind it, towering pine trees that created shade over the whole place.

It was a beautiful, peaceful spot, and if the trail were anywhere near his house, she could understand his resistance.

She took a step toward the house, and then, there was a rustling in the bushes just to the left of the house.

She stopped, clutching her basket and holding it to her chest.

Was it a bear? A deer? A squirrel, maybe, since they did make an awful racket for their size. She could fight a squirrel.

Everything else was a firm no.

But, she wanted to know what it was so she could decide whether to run, stand her ground, or dash back down the hill.

A figure came around the side of the foliage, neither bear, deer, nor squirrel.

Just the Big Bad Wolf himself.

Zane.

He held a black cowboy hat in his hand and wore a pair of blue jeans that rested precariously low on his hips.

He was not wearing a shirt.

His dark hair was wet and pushed off his forehead. His body was…

She swallowed hard.

His chest was broad and muscular, covered in dark hair, his abdomen ridged and glorious.

She hadn’t seen him shirtless before, and she really hadn’t known how beautiful he was.

He was the type of guy who was clearly built, even fully clothed, so she’d suspected, certainly, but she hadn’t really known.

Now she did.

Her mouth was so dry she couldn’t swallow.

“What are you doing here?”

He stood there, looking at her, and he could not have had a less welcoming expression on his face. He was angry that she was there. That much was obvious.