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

Chapter Three

Kendall slept badly and woke up groggy and disoriented.

Sunlight poured in through the old windows, illuminating old wood built-ins, bright gilt-edges, and daguerreotypes set on the walls. She bolted upright in the old brass bed with the cloud-soft mattress that had kept her awake because it was too lush, too nice, too fancy—and those things came with a price. Her heart was racing as she looked around, wondering what disaster Mayrose had gotten them into this time.

Because the nicer the hotel room, the more dangerous the game her mother was playing and the more likely it was that Kendall was going to have to find them a way out of it—

She was out of the bed and halfway across the room, all done up in old West splendor, before she remembered.

As far as she knew, Mayrose and Breanna were still back in Idaho.

Or maybe they’d moved on, but they weren’t here. They didn’t do small towns, filled with charm and nosy neighbors who kept track of things that slipped through the cracks in bigger places. There was no way they could be in Marietta unless they’d tracked her here, and she knew that was unlikely.

Not this soon. Not when she hadn’t left behind a single clue. She hadn’t even asked them what the long-term plan was lately, a question that usually led to extensive theatrics.

Still, it took a long, hot shower to scrub the panic away.

By the time she dressed and made it down to the lobby, however, Kendall was back on form. And that was a good thing, because Harlan Carey was already there, waiting in the lobby.

Though this time, she had the opportunity to observe him before he saw her.

It was immediately clear that she hadn’t been imagining the force of this man yesterday. He had a kind of commanding presence that was obvious even now, when he was standing over near the doors, engaged in what looked like a pleasant enough conversation with a man much shorter than himself wearing a toothy grin and an officious-looking woman holding a clipboard.

Kendall’s initial reaction was to think, wow, he doesn’t like either one of them.

But the moment she thought that, she made herself stop, then re-examine that conclusion. Why did she think she could read a man she’d only met the day before and knew so little about? That was the kind of thinking that could get a person in trouble.

And Kendall had enough trouble as it was.

As she drew closer, she decided that she didn’t really think that it was necessarily because her powers of discernment were so great, though she had certainly had the opportunity to work on them over the years. It was Harlan himself.

He just looked as unpretentious and forthright as he’d seemed to her yesterday.

He was dressed the same way as he’d been in Grey’s Saloon, in boots and jeans, a nice shirt, and that hat. She realized as she approached that the man he was talking to wasn’t necessarily short. Not really.

It was just that Harlan himself was so tall.

“Tod,” he was saying, sounding like his patience was being tried but was holding steady all the same, “I told you I’d let you know when and if I was ready to sell even one parcel of the land that’s been in my family since before yours even knew Montana existed. And I will. But it’s not going to be in this lifetime or the next.”

It was possible, Kendall thought then, that when he’d told her he was honest to a fault, he’d meant it.

Because he really did seem easy to read, but she didn’t think that was because there wasn’t a whole lot to read there. He was obviously a man of depths. But he… had nothing to hide.

That was a heady thought.

She almost tripped over her own feet, thinking such a thing. That wasn’t the sort of person she usually encountered. Kendall probably would have said, if asked, that such a person didn’t exist. Couldn’t exist.

Harlan shifted his gaze, saw her, and that was headier still.

There was just something about the man. About the way he looked at her. The way he looked at everything with that same intensity.

It made something deep inside of her curl up on itself, as if trying to luxuriate in it. In him.

Kendall wasn’t sure this boded well. It was pretty much the opposite of what she’d expected answering that ad would be like, in fact. When she’d imagined it, she’d entertained a whole fantasy that she might be able to do what her family normally did—but more nicely—and spin it out for a while. Give herself a place to lie low and all that.

But she realized, with a start, that it would never have happened that way. If he’d been the kind of man she’d expected, she would have been halfway to Idaho by now. Because she wasn’t her family. She never had been and she wasn’t now. She cleaned up after them, she didn’t play along.

Maybe that was why she’d had so much trouble sleeping.

When he excused himself from his conversation—barely breaking eye contact with her as he stepped around the two people he’d been talking to and made his way directly toward her—she tried desperately to tell herself that since she’d stayed here, she really ought to start thinking strategically.

She had been good at that, at one point. Maybe even yesterday morning, before she’d laid eyes on this man. Though it was hard to remember that—or anything—when Harlan Carey was filling up her entire field of vision.

“Ready?” he asked when he came to a stop before her.

And Kendall felt… flustered. She nodded, because that seemed safer than trying to speak at the moment.

“I realize you don’t know me,” Harlan continued in that low voice, still with that dark, intense gaze of his trained on her. “Any safeguards you need to put into place so that you feel all right about driving out to the ranch with me are great.”

The truly amazing thing, Kendall thought then, was that she hadn’t considered safeguards at all. And she should have. If he had been anyone else, she knew she would have.

So now she made a point of typing the address he gave her into her phone, finding it on the map, and then pretending to send it to someone. She tried to imagine what it would be like if there was anyone in her life she could call on in a time of need, or expect to step in and help her in some way…

But there was only Harlan, standing there like he could wait forever if that was what it took her to feel comfortable.

Something inside her shivered. Kendall decided she was done with her little game of pretend. She tucked her phone in her pocket, smiled, and then let him walk her out of the hotel doors toward the street.

Outside, the day was as bright as yesterday had been, but far warmer. That same vintage truck waited outside the old hotel, gleaming bright red in all the May sunshine.

Kendall couldn’t get over the hushed, almost reverent sensation that seemed to hum inside her as he walked her around to the passenger side, opened her door, and made sure she was settled inside before he circled back around to climb behind the wheel.

She didn’t want to tell him that no one had ever treated her in a chivalrous manner before. That felt like a deeper conversation, and not one she expected she was going to need to have with this man she might marry, but had no intention of staying with long enough to get intimate with.

Something that made her heart seem to hitch in her chest as she thought it, but she refused to pander to it. Because that was the deal, like it or not. That was life.

It was that or let him get to know her, the oldest Darlington daughter and all that entailed, and that was a hard no.

Harlan started up the truck. He looked over at her with that little crook in the corner of his mouth.

Kendall thought, very distinctly, this man might be the end of me.

But whatever that meant, it didn’t send her scrambling to let herself out of the truck, so maybe that wasn’t the worst thing in the world.

“Did you explore the town?” he asked, very politely. So politely she almost wondered if he could read her—when that should not have been possible. Her own mother and sister claimed she was the most pokerfaced of them all. It was why Kendall always had to run cleanup—she alone could maintain a neutral expression. She alone could keep her thoughts off her face.

“I walked around,” she told him, not sure how she managed to sound so calm and very nearly pleasant. “But only a little.”

Harlan nodded. Then he took her on the tour of Marietta she’d quickly realized yesterday that she didn’t want to give herself.

Because it had been bad enough at a cursory glance when she’d only just arrived. Marietta looked like a postcard, or the sort of storybook she’d found in libraries as a kid and had paged through longingly, wondering if it could be possible some people really got to live like that.

On cheerful streets, bright and happy, while all around spring was beginning to bloom and happy flowers would soon be everywhere.

That was alien enough to a girl used to smokey bars and casinos and the like. But so was the way Harlan talked about this place as he drove her around. The clear and genuine affection she could hear in his tone as he pointed out landmarks and made sure she saw the prettiest views of the town laid out at the foot of Copper Mountain… made her whole body want to shiver, down deep, and keep shivering.

Maybe it did, but she was too busy hanging on Harlan’s every word to tell.

He told her about the renovation of the hotel where she was staying. How the Graff had been a wreck until local hero Troy Sheenan decided it was about time a phoenix rose from those ashes. He told her about the Grey family, who’d been running that saloon since they’d erected the first version of it some 125 years ago—the first building that had ever stood in what eventually became Marietta. He drove her down what had to be the prettiest lane Kendall had ever seen, pointing out the Bramble House Inn and the rest of those happy, Victorian homes that it was hard to believe any real people got to live in.

But the more Harlan showed her, the more Kendall began to feel like she was visiting a movie set. She was sure she’d seen at least a few Christmas movies set on what could easily have been Marietta’s streets, from the graceful inn to an adorable chocolate shop.

There was a part of her that felt relieved when he headed out of town and into the hills.

As if, were she to stay too long in all that postcard splendor, it would force her to reveal herself. And then he would know who she really was, and she didn’t want that.

Not yet, anyway.

Not yet,she thought, more fiercely than she should have.

“My family’s ranch has been around almost as long as Marietta has,” he told her as he drove into the countryside. Fields behind wooden fences that shouted the West to her. Perfect, weathered barns. Horses running in the distance, cows grazing. “I guess because my great-grandfather was a miner, he wasn’t worried about the land folks down here in the valley called inhospitable. Because anything is better than a mining shaft.”

“I don’t have to have spent even one second in a mining shaft to believe that,” Kendall agreed.

The old pickup truck ran beautifully as they drove up out of the fields and on to a narrow road that got notably steeper and more treacherous with every mile as it zigged and zagged its way up the side of the mountain that she’d seen from almost every vantage point while down in Marietta proper. It also seemed a lot less springlike, and quickly. There was snow clinging to the mountainside and patches of ice on the road before them whenever they lost the direct sunshine.

But the view as they climbed was spectacular. Mountains sprawled where they liked, and Paradise Valley more than lived up to its name.

And the farther she got from pretty Marietta there at the base of the mountain, the more Kendall could appreciate what a jewel it was—and the better she could breathe. Perfection scared her. She didn’t mind admitting it. It was impossible not to wonder what lurked beneath it—or if everyone who belonged in such prettiness could see what lurked in her.

She shoved that off and concentrated on the drive.

“I don’t think I’d like to come up this road by foot,” Kendall said in a particularly slippery stretch. The road ahead looked perilous, particularly as there was only a faint gesture toward a guardrail on the steep side of the road. “Or by horse. Or however people got up mountains back in the day.”

“This is Dry Creek Road.” Harlan sounded amused. Or maybe it was just that he enjoyed showing his life off. Kendall could imagine that might be fun, if you had one like this. “But no one calls it that. Around here, it’s known as Desolation Drive. You don’t want to break down here. And you don’t want to speed, or hit bad weather, or get disoriented when the snow is coming in sideways. It’s not a good place to get stuck.”

He looked over at her and she must have had an apprehensive expression on her face—so not her usual neutrality, again, and why was that a thing that was only happening with him?—because he laughed. “Don’t worry, Cowboy Point more than makes up for it.”

Kendall turned so she could look at him as he drove, looking as relaxed behind the wheel as he had talking to people in the Graff’s lobby. Or even sitting across from her yesterday. She had to order herself to force her gaze away from the way he draped one hand over the wheel, because if she thought too much about his hand she would have to think about how it had felt over hers—

That was not the sort of thing she should indulge. Not here in the confines of this vintage truck, making its way up a terrifying road toward a place she had an address to—but no real sense of where it was.

Better not to think about any of that.

“Is your town really called Cowboy Point?” she asked instead, maybe a bit more brightly than called for. “That wasn’t on the map you showed me.”

“It isn’t a town,” Harlan replied in that same, steady way, his eyes on the road and the tight turns. “It’s more properly an unincorporated community and census designated place.” That made his eyes crinkle in the corners. “But it’s been called Cowboy Point since the beginning. Out here in the West, we like to name a place so that there’s no doubt that—at least once upon a time—it’s exactly what it says it is.”

She started to respond to him, then paused. “You say that like I’m not from the West myself.”

“You have too much of a Southern drawl in your voice to be from the West.” Harlan’s dark eyes gleamed when she frowned at him. “It’s not big and twangy, like Alabama or Texas. Not thick like Mississippi. My money’s on Tennessee.”

Kendall felt a little bit breathless at that. “As a matter of fact, I spent large parts of my childhood in various suburbs of Nashville.” And she didn’t like that breathlessness. She didn’t like all these odd sensations whirling around inside of her. She cleared her throat. “Tell me more about Cowboy Point.”

Because one thing she knew was that people always liked to tell their stories, if she could get them talking. Always. And the only way she could handle what was happening, what she was doing, was by pretending this was any other normal day. That she was doing the sort of thing she always did. That she was just… gathering the necessary background.

It didn’t mean she would stay. It didn’t mean she wouldn’t.

She was just doing the thing she’d been trained her whole life to do.

“It started off just a few families,” he was saying. “Now there’s a fair few more. We’re considered part of the greater Marietta area, but most of that applies to things like the hospital, the high school. For all intents and purposes, ten miles up a road like this, we’re on our own.” He lifted a brow her way. “But this is Montana. We like it that way.”

Then he returned his attention to the road, and that was a good thing. Because the last bit of the road was even steeper and more winding than before, as they stopped zigzagging up the side of the mountain and actually rounded it.

And once they did, Kendall found herself holding her breath.

Because on the back of Copper Mountain, entirely hidden from the valley down below, was another valley. It was much smaller than Paradise Valley. She could see the whole sweep of it as they drove to the top edge, then began to descend into it through an avenue of Rocky Mountain evergreens that stood like quiet, watchful guardians over a little town that wasn’t quite a town.

Either way, there was a collection of buildings clustered in the center of the narrow valley, and houses tucked away along the valley’s sides. There was only the one road, no stop signs or stoplights, with dirt roads snaking off here and there. There was an elementary school. A tidy little library. They sat across from each other with a kind of square in the middle, that Kendall imagined must be green in summer. There was a feed store. A general store, according to the sign out front, with what seemed to be a diner attached.

There was a creek running on a diagonal through all this, and despite the name of the road they’d been on, it looked swollen and cold this time of year. There was a bar on the other side.

Across the road, they passed an old, renovated sort of barn that advertised pizza and ice cream. She wondered if they used the big, wide patio in high summer. There were a selection of smaller buildings, old houses dressed up to be businesses and the like, though she couldn’t tell what they were.

Kendall had felt as if she was holding her breath the whole time she was in Marietta. It was so perfect that she’d had the bone deep sense that she would break something there, like a bull in a china shop, if she wasn’t careful. But Cowboy Point was different.

She felt herself breathe, and deep. And more, she could almost imagine herself in a place like this, where the air was full of sun and pine and everything looked a little hardier and less manicured than Marietta had. A little tougher, maybe. A little more solitary.

Home, a voice in her pronounced, but she pretended she didn’t hear it.

Because that was madness. She’d never had a home. Kendall didn’t know what that word meant, not really.

Harlan lifted a few fingers in a lazy wave to the handful of other vehicles they passed, but he kept going until they were climbing up the other side of the small valley, toward the big, old Lodge that sprawled there, facing Copper Mountain.

“This is Cowboy Point Lodge,” Harlan told her, slowing to let her marvel at the graceful old building as they passed. “It was called the Jewel of the Rockies, once upon a time, long, long ago. The family that owns it is trying to clean it up again and bring more folks into town, but that, like everything around here, comes with some controversy.”

“Doesn’t everything,” Kendall murmured.

But she was captivated, completely, by the view.

Because right after they passed the Lodge, for a moment, it seemed as if they were perched on the edge of the world.

Behind them, Copper Mountain rose, and the whole of Cowboy Point was tucked up there at the foot of Copper Mountain’s snowcapped peak. But laid out before them, she could look out over what seemed like undulating waves toward the horizon, though none of it was water. It was all mountains.

They marched on, one range and then another like some kind of tectonic dance, and she felt sheer exhilaration move through her as if she was dancing too. Because it was one thing to talk about the Rockies. To talk about mountains at all. It was something else again to truly understand how, if you were lucky, looking at them could make your soul feel fresh and new.

Like this was a baptism of sorts, driving into them like this.

She wanted to throw out her arms. She wanted to see if they could fly.

Kendall was a little surprised they weren’t already, because that was how it felt inside of her. Like they were soaring in this little red truck, straight off into the blue.

There was just something about being this far off in a mountain range she knew most people never got to see that made her feel… clean.

A part of her wanted to stay where they were forever, right here where they could see forever on all sides, and just breathe.

But Harlan drove deeper into the mountains. Kendall tried to come back into her own skin. He wound his way up the craggy side of a different hill, and as he started down the other side of it, she began to see fences.

“This is the beginning of High Mountain Ranch,” he told her. “We have thousands of acres, stretching almost all the way to Big Sky.”

Normally she was more circumspect, but she laughed at that. “And you really had to resort to personal ad?”

Harlan laughed too, and she definitely did not focus too much on how that felt, to laugh with him. “It’s not that I don’t think I could find someone. It’s what I told you yesterday. There’s a ranch to consider and all things being equal, I’d rather that the business not get tangled up in romantic notions.”

“You don’t believe in romantic notions?” Kendall did not add that it seemed strange to hear that from him, given that he apparently believed in a kind of chivalry she would have said was dead and buried. Who opened doors for a woman these days?

“I believe in them fine,” Harlan said, though she thought he sounded different. More measured, maybe. And he kept his gaze on the road. “My parents were high school sweethearts. If my mother hadn’t died when I was eight, I reckon they’d be together to this day. Instead, my dad found Belinda, and I got to watch a whole different way to be married and be romantic while you’re at it.”

“So she’s not a wicked stepmother?”

Harlan laughed again. “She’s wicked all right. But not to me. Belinda is…” He shook his head. “A whirlwind. It’s impossible not to love her.”

Kendall couldn’t tell what that note was in his voice then, but it sounded to her like it was possible he might have tried really hard not to love his new stepmother, all the same.

“I don’t have anything against romance,” Harlan said, as if it was important he make that clear to her. She could feel the touch of that intense stare of his on the side of her face. “But I don’t have time for it. I’ve watched the effort it takes. The care and feeding that it requires, like anything that grows. And the mourning it requires when it dies.” She couldn’t help but look at him then, at the steady, intent way he was studying her. “When I tell you I’m a practical man, I mean that. In my experience, that’s not the kind of attitude that lends itself to any kind of productive dating life.”

Kendall ignored the way her pulse beat inside her and tried to imagine that, as he drove her through rolling fields tucked away in these hills, miles upon miles away from anything. She tried to imagine Harlan presenting himself for a regular date. Dinner and a drink, small talk, maybe a little dancing, maybe a walk beneath the stars.

But the images wouldn’t come together. Not with a man this direct. This intense.

She felt a kind of shiver move through her again, but it wasn’t fear.

It was something else entirely.

Oh no,she thought.

He turned off the road and they were on a dirt lane then, moving slowly up a rolling sort of hillside. She saw outbuildings. Structures she knew had something to do with ranching activities, though she couldn’t have said how. And then, in the trees, she began to see the hint of a cabin tucked away here, there. They were spread out quite a ways from each other. One was set up so that it had a view. The next was half-hidden in a grove.

“All of my brothers have cabins on the property,” Harlan told her.

“All four of them,” she said, remembering.

His mouth crooked. “It seems like more than four, if I’m honest.”

The dirt road led them past a proper ranch house within walking distance of more barns, and more outbuildings whose purpose Kendall could only attempt to imagine. “That’s the main house. My dad and Belinda live there now.”

But he kept on driving, back behind a series of barns and continuing along the lane until they were out of sight of the house. Only then did he pull off, driving up the side of yet another hill before coming to a stop in a clearing.

They both sat there a moment, staring out at the house in front of them.

“I would not call that a cabin,” Kendall said. As judiciously as she could.

Harlan leaned forward over the steering wheel, as if looking at the place for the first time. “It was a cabin. I just kept adding on to it.”

It was an odd little house that should have looked haphazard, but didn’t. Like Harlan himself, it had the sense of a ramble—but she suspected that every part of the place served some practical purpose, whether she could tell what it was or not. From the breezeway with a pitched roof that led straight to his own barn to the towering windows everywhere that must let in the mountains and what light there was, it was beautiful.

Like a kind of Rocky Mountain castle, but not flashy. It seemed almost as if it was a part of the trees around it, the mountains on all sides.

“Come on,” he said, shooting her a look. “I’ll give you a tour.”

And now there was no avoiding the reason she was here, looking at his house in the first place. She’d let herself forget it—or she’d kept pushing it away—because the drive had been so pretty. So mesmerizing.

But reality was reality. She knew that better than most. He was giving her a tour because she might actually come and live here.

With him.

In this place that was far, far away from everything she’d ever known, and not just geographically.

It was a little overwhelming, Kendall admitted as she opened her door, then paused as he came around to do it for her. But there was no denying the fact that it was a perfect hiding spot. That there was no possible way her family could find her here. She wasn’t sure how they would even begin to look for her here.

That alone would have disposed her to like the place.

But there was also the Harlan of it all.

He showed her around, making a point of indicating that there were separate bedrooms, in case she thought that he was going to insist on husbandly rights immediately. Something she did not find herself as opposed to as perhaps she should have.

But she shoved the notion of husbandly rights aside, because a house told a lot of tales about the person who lived in it. And the story of this household was of the same man she’d already met. Measured. Honest.

Everything in the house’s structure was masculine, but neat. And not in a way that suggested he’d rushed around last night, cleaning it up. She got the sense that Harlan was not a man who liked clutter. The things he had looked cared for. Comfortable.

Useful, not fanciful.

Like him.

Like me,she thought.

They stopped in the main room that had a big fireplace tucked into a stone chimney that divided the living room and the kitchen. Kendall tried to think of the last time she’d spent any real amount of time in a house. It was usually hotels. Apartments. Rented places that were easily left behind.

This was a house with a deep foundation. With roots. She could feel it.

And then there was that gleaming thing in his dark gaze. Kendall could feel the echo of it deep inside of her.

This could be home,a voice inside her whispered, the way it had in Cowboy Point proper. At last.

And that was dangerous. So dangerous. She knew it. She could feel it, crackling along her skin and under it, like electricity.

“I’m surprised you have time to take me on a tour like this,” she said, holding his gaze, because she could be steady too. “I thought the whole point of this was that you don’t have that kind of time.”

“I’m not an animal, Kendall,” he said, and she was beginning to understand that tone of his. That it was him being funny. Or something like sardonic, but without any dark edge.

She was beginning to understand, further, that she liked it.

Given precious little encouragement, she might like him, too.

“Good to know,” she replied.

He didn’t smile with his mouth but she saw it all over him, just the same. “I might want a wife in an unconventional way. But I don’t want that wife to be uncomfortable. I don’t want it to seem like I don’t care about how we’ll get on. Because I do.” She saw something on his face then. Some kind of resolve. “From my perspective, I think that this could work. So it’s really down to you.”

Kendall thought about what that might mean. All the things that it might mean. Because there was the house. And what she imagined the work would be like. There was also that bit about the next generation, about husbandly duties, that she’d assumed she’d try to avoid.

Before she’d met him, that was.

Though she stopped herself. Because she wasn’t going to be here that long, surely.

And for the first time since she’d gotten rid of her panic attack this morning, she felt a kind of desolation move through her and settle in, hard. She couldn’t let herself think about her inevitable departure. Or ask herself why, exactly, it should hit her that way.

Instead, she looked at Harlan Carey, who made her feel things when she had long since come to believe that she was incapable of feeling anything.

That seemed like enough.

And in this beautiful house, hidden so far away from the world, who knew? Maybe she would have time for all kinds of things before her past caught up with her.

But she didn’t tell him all that. What she did instead was smile at him.

Because this wasn’t meant to be a measured decision. It was meant to be impulsive. It was meant to be based on practicality alone.

And practically speaking, she could live here quite happily. He seemed decent enough. And Lord knew, she’d seen enough of the opposite kind to last a lifetime.

There wasn’t going to be time to get to know him. That was the point.

This was the way people had been doing things like this since the dawn of time, she knew.

Maybe it was better. Safer, really. If all you had practical considerations, anything else could be gravy if it came along.

And if it didn’t work out that way, she could leave.

She told herself that was why it was so easy to smile at him the way she did, and let it widen when he smiled back.

“Well?” she asked. “Are you going to propose or am I?”