The Cowboy’s Mail-Order Bride (The Careys of Cowboy Point Book 1)

Chapter Two

This was a mistake.

Kendall Darlington knew it. She’d suspected it before she’d come down to Marietta today—because who was she kidding, thinking she could escape her family that easily—and she’d known it for sure the minute she’d walked into this old timey saloon that looked like it belonged in a movie. Something involving high noon shoot-outs and men with gravelly drawls who loved their horses more than their women.

A classic country song, basically.

She’d instantly decided to leave and yet here she was anyway. Sitting at a table, a little too close to flirting with this man for comfort.

When she’d decided to do this thing, she’d accepted that she would have to flirt a little bit. Maybe more than a little bit, if necessary. Because if her mother had ever taught her anything, and that was by no means certain, it was the magical properties of just the right amount of flirting.

Men love to feel like men,her mother would say with a mouth full of the South mixed with vodka on ice. The best thing a girl can do is let him.

Kendall tried to shake that off, because she knew too well that no good came of dwelling too much on the quotable things Mayrose Darlington said. Because Mayrose was… a lot of things. Too many things, some might say, and Kendall usually did.

Quotable was perhaps the most lovable of them.

What Mayrose was currently, Kendall needed to remember, was not here. That was the critical bit.

Kendall had packed up and left in the middle of the night, and had known better than to leave behind even a hint of where she might be going. The last time she’d done that had been her attempt to emancipate herself from the curse of the Darlingtons when she’d been all of eighteen, and that had ended badly on a side street in Cranston, Rhode Island. Operatic scenes and recriminations and no escape, after all.

This time she’d slipped away quietly. She’d taken a bus from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, all the way to Livingston, Montana, because Darlingtons were not bus people and she knew they wouldn’t think to look at bus schedules.

Even if they did, why would they look off in the middle of Montana?

She’d spent a couple of nights in Livingston, at the top of what they called Paradise Valley, wandering around the old western cattleman’s city with its neon saloon lights and insistent, demanding wind—the kind of wind that cut through a body so hard it made her want to let it blow her back across the Great Plains to Chicago.

It was the kind of wind that made her think she ought to consider a prayer or two for deliverance. But Kendall wasn’t the praying kind. What she was—what she’d been taught to be all her life—was a very particular kind of practical.

And she liked Livingston for that. There were enough tourists mixed in with the locals in the bars and restaurants to make it worth it, coming out all this way.

If necessary, she could settle down for a minute or two there, she’d thought. She could make things work the way she knew how. She could take a breath while she figured out what to do next and how best to stay as far away from her troublesome kinfolk as possible.

But first there was this Hail Mary pass of hers that she was almost entirely sure would not only fail to work, but would have her hightailing it away from Marietta and the man she’d arranged to meet here as soon as she could.

Maybe a wiser woman than she’d turned out to be would have taken that breath in Livingston and thought better of the whole thing. But Kendall was a Darlington, and Darlingtons were renowned for a certain cunning—and cunning wasn’t the same thing as wise. This morning, she’d taken another bus down to Marietta, bracing herself for one of those decrepit and broke-down rural towns that looked like only the ghosts had bothered settling in for more than a season, and had been dismayed to find the place… charming.

She’d told herself—repeatedly—to ignore the charm. Or to look through it, anyway, because she knew too well that charm could often hide darker, dirtier things beneath it.

Mind you, she didn’t see much that was darker or dirtier as she walked around town in the hour she’d had between checking into her hotel and when she was supposed to meet up with her potential husband-to-be. It was chillier than it looked, but then, there was still snow up in the mountains. Still, the folks she passed on the sidewalks murmured greetings as they crossed her field of vision. Men and women alike.

And they didn’t seem to want anything from her in return.

While she was still a bit disoriented from all that, she’d found her way to the saloon and forced herself to see what she’d signed herself up for.

Potentially signed yourself up for,she’d reminded herself sternly as she’d gone in. It’s not like you signed a contract or made a vow.

She’d expected him to be deeply sad, at the very least, if not old and decrepit. That was the best-case scenario. Kendall had thought it was far more likely that he might turn out to be creepy and weird, or outright scary in a worst-case scenario, and that was why she would have insisted on a public meeting place if he hadn’t suggested it himself. That was also why she’d gotten herself a room at the fancy-pants hotel in town, a renovated Old West charmer called the Graff that reminded her of the hotel she’d walked by up in Livingston. Both harkened back to the dusty, distant, cowboy past, and made her want to do things she didn’t do, like belt out country songs in the street and try a little two-stepping while she was at it.

Kendall figured she could hole up in the Graff if she needed to, and this man would have to make it past the front desk, the concierge, and all the rest of that high class hotel rigmarole before he could get to her. If he turned out to be that kind of guy.

But then she’d seen Harlan.

The minute she’d walked into Grey’s Saloon.

It was less that she’d seen him and more like she’d walked straight into a wall. The wall being him, sitting there in the corner the way he’d been.

Looking… like that.

Her first, wild thought was a fervent wish that he might be the man she was here to meet, because wouldn’t that mean her luck was finally changing for the better?

But Kendall had been forced to become a realist a long time ago, and so she’d quickly assured herself that it was impossible. It couldn’t be the man she’d arranged to meet through a series of anonymized and stiffly formal emails. Why would a man who looked like that be trolling for a wife in weird little papers across the West when he could just… crook a finger? She’d looked around and had assumed that if it was anyone, it was the man behind the bar, which was its own mountain to climb—but the hard look he’d thrown her way told her otherwise. It was a don’t approach me and mind yourself while you’re at it sort of look.

Kendall knew better than to mess with a man like that.

She’d still been uncertain, though she’d started over for the cowboy in the corner because he was the only possible option. And she’d been amazed and a little shocked that her body was reacting the way it was. That her heart was getting silly in her chest. She told herself it was just that she knew how her mother was going to react to this. Mayrose wouldn’t take it well that Kendall had left. She and Breanna, Kendall younger sister, were likely in the middle of staging a whole, drawn-out saga about Kendall’s cruel betrayal of them. Of the family. Of all they stood for, blah blah blah.

There were going to be so many scenes when they caught up with her, the way they inevitably would because they always did, that it almost crushed her then and there. It almost got her wheeling around and running back out to see if she could catch another bus right then and there to take her all the way back to that rundown hotel in Idaho where she’d left them. So she could sneak back in and pretend she hadn’t meant to leave, not really. So she could smooth it all over, the way she always did, and keep everything moving along.

Because she knew she was going to end up doing it anyway.

Kendall had to give herself a talking to as she walked across the old saloon floor, which too many cowboys to count had walked before her. It was obvious with every step. She could almost feel the weight of all that history, all those polished and battered boots, beneath her own feet.

The fact was that the life her family led was an unsustainable and unmitigated disaster. The only reason they managed to convince themselves it wasn’t that bad was because Kendall made it not that bad. She was the peacemaker. She was the voice of reason. She was the one who had to jump in when things got too intense and find a way to talk, wheedle, or charm them back out of it.

And it had been going on so long now that she’d started to think that maybe she needed it, too, the way her sister always told her she did. That maybe she was the one who kept it all going, for some mysterious internal purpose she didn’t know of yet. That was what her mother liked to claim when she was in one of her moods of mystery that mostly consisted of her making dark prophecies she pretended were another kind of family legacy.

Darlingtons were not witches. They never had been. Though they sure seemed to enjoy embodying a term that rhymed with witches.

Kendall knew that her family legacy was far more prosaic. They were nothing if not a whole bunch of hapless frogs sitting in a pot of hot water. And every year the heat got turned up more and more.

And she, by God, was the only one who had the sense to jump out.

If you go back,she’d told herself as she crossed the saloon, you’re going to have to jump right into that boiling water and it’s going to scald you.

But then the cowboy who couldn’t possibly be the man she was supposed to meet stood up from that booth and she felt scalded anyway.

Oldand sad or even scary shouldn’t be packaged like he was. He was… impossible.

The kind of man a girl was better off not dreaming about in the first place, because he could never be real.

But there he was.

He was well over six feet and every inch of him looked tough and hardpacked into those western clothes he wore. There wasn’t an inch of visible fat on the man’s rangy frame. It was all muscle. Lean and strong, and beneath that hat he had dirty-blond hair, intense dark eyes, and a face that looked the way she imagined statues of angels might look in all those museums her family refused to visit. Impossibly beautiful, but carved into stone.

She didn’t have the slightest idea why a man like this was resorting to putting ads in a paper for a bride like it was still the Gold Rush and an ad was the only way to get a woman to come out West. In fact, Kendall was pretty sure that if this man went and stood outside the saloon on the sidewalk, he’d have an epic traffic jam of women vying for his attention even though, when she’d walked in, there had barely been a car to be seen.

“Are you going to answer me?” he asked, with a glint in those dark eyes and that drawl that wasn’t Southern, but pure cowboy. And it… did things to her. “Because if you don’t, I’m going to have to get a little imaginative. I guess I can’t really think what would entice someone like you to answer that at all. Much less come all the way here.”

“You know where I came from?” she asked, but not suspiciously. More out of interest in how he could possibly know something like that than any concern that he actually knew it.

“Ma’am,” he said, and there was a grin in his voice, and on his face, if not quite on that hard, stern, fascinating mouth of his, “you’re not from here. And that means that you had to work a bit to get here. I don’t have to know the coordinates of where you came from to know that.”

And now, the more she sat here across the table from all of that hard-edged cowboy goodness, the more Kendall realized the enormity of the mistake she’d made.

This was the trouble with the kind of life she’d led, and it didn’t matter if she’d never chosen it. This is why there were sayings like, lie down with the dogs and you get up with fleas. She was so used to that hot pot existence that she’d just assumed that whoever this man was, she’d know how to play him.

Because everybody had a game, and the first thing she’d learned, growing up with a woman like Mayrose, was that she’d better figure out how to play whatever game was happening that day, and well.

Her whole life might depend on it. And often did.

But she didn’t have to know a single thing about Harlan Carey to understand that he was not the game playing type.

He was deadly serious.

Not only that, he was honest. Kendall knew every kind of con there was. Earnestness could be a put-on, but Harlan’s kind of actual honesty—written all over his face and obvious even down to the way he held himself—was the one thing a con man found hard to ape.

The vision she’d had of him—that his land was probably a farm or even a garden in the backyard, because what could land really mean and so she could pretend in turn, something she figured she could draw out through most of the summer if she really wanted—shimmered in her head, then disappeared.

If this man said he had land, she figured he meant what he said. And if that was true, everything he’d put in his ad might well be true, too.

And what could she legitimately say to him? I answered your ad because I thought that I could shine you on as long as necessary to get a little vacation from my family, who are pack of venal, heartless grifters who have never done a day’s work or spent an honest hour in their lives. Hope that’s cool.

Somehow, she knew exactly how he would react to that. He would tip that hat like they lived in a different century, wish her well, and be on his way. And she didn’t think she could bear that.

Kendall corrected herself immediately. What she couldn’t bear was the loss of the opportunity this presented, that was all. Her mother and her sister might come looking for her. They usually did, though Kendall had gotten smart since her Rhode Island escape attempt and didn’t make such total breaks any longer. Usually she’d call and make it sound like she was doing her own version of the family business on her own. If they got bored they might find her trail, though they were usually too lazy to pay close enough attention to such things. And she always came back in a few days.

It had been longer than a few days now. But one place no member of the Darlington family would think to look for her was in the vicinity of a good, honest man.

Kendall shifted around on the bench seat so she could put her hands on the table. Then she laced her fingers as she held them together, the same way he did.

“I answered your ad because those are the things that I want,” she told him, trying to sound as matter of fact as he had. “And I’ll be honest, I thought it would be highly unlikely that I’d meet you and think you had them to offer. A lot of people talk, but very few people back up that talking with anything that matters.”

He seemed to lean closer, though she didn’t feel encroached upon. Quite the opposite. She leaned in too, closing that space between them over that wide wooden table. Like they were both hanging on to each other’s every word.

She had to remind herself that she was acting. That this was an act.

Though even as she tried to do that, she had to face the fact that it was slightly more complicated than that. Because there was a part of her that wanted to be a woman like the one he was looking for. There was a part of her that wanted nothing else, and so badly that she could still remember exactly where she’d been standing when she’d read his ad. In that rented kitchen in Tacoma. Three or four locations back.

She remembered thinking, two out of three ain’t bad.

The whole way here, she’d assured herself that she could back out at any point. She’d expected that point would come quickly. She’d almost just stayed in her hotel room, because Marietta seemed like a sweet little spot to escape from life for a while, so why complicate things with some cowboy?

It felt like being on a roller coaster to discover that now, all she wanted to do was convince him that she was the right choice.

“You didn’t ask for experience of any kind,” she said. She kept her gaze on his, intent and steady. “And that’s a good thing, because I don’t have any. What I do have is me. I pick up things pretty quickly. I’ve always been a fast learner. I’m not afraid of hard work, though it would be nice to put that hard work toward building something. I’ve spent most of my life moving from place to place, wishing I could settle and put down some roots. That’s not the kind of thing you can ask a man for on a first date.” She thought that sounded a little too serious, so she made herself smile. “Or even the tenth.”

Harlan said nothing. He watched her, a fallen angel set into stone, and that roller-coaster ride slipped and dropped, twisted and whirled.

“I’m not opposed to the idea of building up next generations,” she continued, keeping her voice as without inflection as she could manage.

She’d laughed about that part, sitting on the bus. A wink and a smile would do the trick there, she’d decided. Men could spend a whole lot of time and energy on a maybe someday. Looking at him, however, she had the very distinct impression that this wasn’t a man who spent much time flirting. She wasn’t sure, in all her life, that she’d ever met a man who made it clear—just by sitting there—that he was about doing the thing or not. No flirting with maybes. No in betweens.

It was different, that was all. That had to be why her throat was dry.

Kendall hurried on. “In a theoretical sense, I mean. I’m not signing up for a buffet if I haven’t even tasted the food.” She thought she saw the faintest bit of crinkling in the corners of his eyes, then. And she found she felt emboldened by that. “I think that people have more expectations about marriage than they say they do. What are yours?”

“I’m already married,” he told her at once, as if that didn’t require thought. “To the land. To these mountains. Paradise Valley and Montana. I’m a simple man, Kendall. I can’t promise you I’ll show you far-flung places or buy you pretty things. And not because you don’t deserve those pretty things or I can’t afford it. But because I come down into town maybe once a week. Usually less, and I’m only here to stock up on supplies. My idea of a good night is getting the paperwork done and going to bed early. If you need tokens to prove affection, I’m going to let you down.”

Mayrose would have howled with derisive laughter at that, then left. Breanna would have demanded that he buy her a drink or three for her trouble, then would have tried to see what she could get out of him anyway, because he’d been fool enough to say he could afford it.

Kendall, never one to swim against a rising tide, would have excused herself if they were here and hung back until it was time for damage control.

The thing was, she was a Darlington woman. Darlington women liked their loot. Their little treasures. Trinkets and baubles and any kind of shiny thing. Like magpies on the make.

Until now, Kendall had always assumed that she must too, that it was in her blood. That the only reason she didn’t go after her own was that she was too busy managing her mother and sister and their various trails of destruction.

Here in Marietta, Montana, a town she’d never heard of in all her life, she could finally test that theory.

And so she stayed right where she was. Without asking for a drink to ease her troubles.

“What I can promise you is that I will honor you,” Harlan continued and it did something to her, to hear him say something like that with that intense gaze of his steady on hers. “I will listen to you. I will do my best to do right by you, to the best of my ability. I might not sing you a sweet song or take you dancing on the weekends, but if you marry me, I will do my best to see to it that we get as close to happy as we can, stay there, and maybe even make some joy out of it while we’re at it.”

Kendall felt the strangest wash of sensation go through her, then. It was so deep and so wide that for a moment, she thought she might be sick. It took her a long, horrified moment to realize that she wasn’t being struck down by a sudden flu. That the burning sensation at the back of her eyes was tears.

She was actually about to cry, as if this man had spouted off love poetry.

Something deep inside of her turned inside out, and she was glad she was holding her hands tight together because she could feel a tremor in her fingers. Darlingtons don’t show weakness, she thought, almost desperately.

But she had the strangest thought that what she really wanted was to reach out to him.

This was all silly, she told herself then, and harshly. Fantasy stuff. She knew better than to believe in fairy tales.

“This isn’t how people do things,” she said quietly. “Not anymore.”

Harlan shrugged. “More folks got together this way than the way they do these days. They knew they didn’t have time back then. My great-great-grandfather came out this way, claimed his land, and wrote a letter to his cousin back in Vermont to send him out a wife. He didn’t even meet her. She was the youngest girl in a local family and family legend is, she was more adventurous than the rest. She thought it sounded like more fun to go on out into the untamed wilderness and marry a man she’d never met than stay home and wrestle a harsh life out of snowy Vermont with the rest of the family.”

“I think I would have liked her.” Kendall studied him. “Was she happy?”

“Life isn’t supposed to be happy.” Harlan said that quietly, but no less intently. “It’s life. We have to take into account the good as well as the bad. Understand that things get complicated, plans don’t work out, things don’t end the way they should. Some winters are so bad they take years to recover from. Sometimes there’s heartbreak everywhere you look. That doesn’t mean that a life is bad, just that, sometimes, it’s hard.”

“You’re not really selling it,” she said, and her voice had gone soft, something she only understood when she heard it.

She had the dizzying thought that this man made her… not recognize herself.

He reached across the table then to place one of his hands over hers, still laced there between them.

And it was like a blinding, white-hot light, but she wasn’t blind. All she could see was his hand over hers. More than that, she could feel it. His palm was callused and warm and told her more things about this man.

They made him seem more honest, more real.

Slowly, almost agonizingly, she dragged her gaze up to his.

And the thing about Harlan Carey was, she could feel him everywhere.

It was as if that white-hot lightning bolt blazed out from the point of contact and lit her up, everywhere.

By rights, she should have been ash.

“I’m not a salesman,” he told her, like he knew. “What you can depend on is for me to tell it to you straight, like it or not. Whatever it is.” The corner of his mouth curled, just slightly. “Some think that’s harsh, but I happen to think it’s a virtue.”

Kendall didn’t know what was happening to her then, except that she melted. She simply… pooled into nothing. She felt too hot. She felt flushed and embarrassed, and that was so unlike her that she once again wondered if she was falling ill.

But even if she was, all she could seem to focus on was every beat of her heart that seemed to shudder everywhere inside. That echoing pulse that throbbed in the strangest places from behind her knees to her wrists to an insistent beat between her legs.

She, who had never been rendered wordless in her life, could not think of a single thing to say.

“Are you staying in town tonight?” he asked, in a mild voice at odds with the intent way that dark gaze moved over her.

And his hand was still on hers, telling her how things could be between them. If she agreed. If she really did this. If, something in her suggested, you give up this idea you could ever control a man like him.

Kendall realized she was just staring at him when his mouth crooked. “If you are, I suggest you come on up to the ranch tomorrow and get a feel for the place. Decide one way or the other on this after you’ve slept on it.”

“And then what?” she asked, and it felt like a victory. To get the words out. To say anything at all when there was all of that heat and flush in her throat, the same as everywhere else.

When she still felt half bright light, half ash.

“And then, Kendall Darlington,” Harlan drawled in that way she could feel like smoke curling around her bones, his hand still holding hers with just enough pressure to make her shiver all way down her spine, and a gleam in his dark gaze that she could feel like a lick, “assuming we both feel that it’s right, we get married.”