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

Chapter Seven

That kiss kept her up all night.

She tossed and turned and yearned for things she couldn’t name—and things she definitely could—until the hours were less wee and more like morning. When she woke at her usual time she was out of sorts. Her eyes were swollen. She felt cranky and upset and was absolutely certain that she was going to come out of her bedroom to find Harlan waiting for her, so he could deliver an order for her to pack up and get out.

Kendall accepted in that moment, rubbing at her eyes in her bedroom before facing the fallout of the night before, that she didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to leave this place, these people.

But most of all, she really didn’t want to leave Harlan.

It was absurdly hard to make herself stand up and leave that room, then walk through this house she’d come to like so much. She had to force herself to go into the kitchen.

Harlan was waiting for her. Kendall had known he would be waiting for her, and she braced herself—

But he didn’t say anything. He took a long look at her. Then he prepared her a mug of coffee the way she liked it, sweeter and lighter than she ought to take it, but life was short. And usually unpleasant, so why make it more so? That was what she liked to tell herself.

Today she didn’t tell herself anything. She watched as he stirred the concoction just the way she did, the spoon making a metallic clink against the side of the ceramic mug.

When he handed it to her she took it. She cradled it between her hands, took the first glorious sip, and didn’t look at him while she did it.

Maybe she was just girding her loins.

“I’m sorry if I upset you last night,” he said.

Straight out.

Because that was Harlan, she understood then, as her gaze snapped to his. Straight and to the point. He didn’t hide from anything, not even apologizing.

He’d been showing her this all along but somehow, she hadn’t imagined it would extend to an actual apology. Kendall couldn’t remember the last time someone had apologized to her. Much less sincerely.

But she could see the intensity in his gaze. There was no doubt at all that he meant it.

“I’m sorry too,” she said, past the lump in her throat and that strange, fluttering sort of feeling that seemed to swamp her where she stood. “It’s possible I flew off the handle a little more than necessary.”

What struck her most was how hard that was to say to him.

Almost as if she’d gotten used to being in the right by default, because where her family was concerned, that was a given. And it turned out that she didn’t like admitting any sort of fault at all—and wasn’t that a wake-up call?

“I think,” she clarified, because she didn’t want to be the kind of person who couldn’t apologize, having lived with two of them her whole life, “that what I mean is, I did do that. I did go overboard. And I’m sorry.”

“You can take as much time as you want to come around the idea of getting physical with me, Kendall,” he said, and she froze, her coffee mug halfway to her mouth. Because he was looking straight at her, and his dark eyes on her like that made her feel something a whole lot like giddy. “Maybe you’ll never get there, and that will mean we’ll have a different conversation down the line. But I want to be clear that as happy as I am to wait for you to be comfortable, I want you.”

He said that the same way he’d apologized. Straight out. No I think or maybe. Just a statement of fact.

It made her whole body flush, red and hot.

Everywhere.

And he knew it. He could see it. She could tell.

“I’ve wanted you since the moment I laid eyes on you,” he said then, only the touch of more gravel in his voice letting her know this conversation was getting to him, too. That it wasn’t just her. “You living here, sharing the house with me and sharing this life with me, is making it a pretty constant desire on my part. You don’t have to do anything about that. I’m not trying to put pressure on you. But I don’t want there to be any confusion.”

Kendall wanted to tell him that she felt a lot of things right then, but confusion wasn’t one of them. Yet she couldn’t manage to make her mouth work. She couldn’t get any words out.

There was only that heat inside her, burning her alive.

“I’m not trying to make a mess,” Harlan said in that impossibly low voice of his, like smoke and velvet. “But I do, very much, want to get you naked and stay that way a while.”

Her lips moved but still, no words came out. Kendall could only stare back at him, stricken. And, she could admit, elated.

That was the only word for it. She was flooded with delight, and too many images to make sense of.

Harlan watched her for a long moment and she thought she saw the corner of his mouth crook, just the slightest bit. “Okay, then. Clarity achieved.”

He said no more about it. But then, he didn’t have to.

It was the fact of this attraction, that he didn’t hide from it or disguise it. The fact that he wanted her and wasn’t afraid to say it. The more interesting fact that she wanted him just the same, in a way she had never wanted anyone. So much that it scared her, a little.

Because she didn’t know how it was possible to want anyone like that and not have it used against her. Eventually. Because as she knew all too well, anything and everything could be weaponized, and especially emotions.

Harlan went about his usual work that day, leaving Kendall to settle into the office. She did, but it was hard to concentrate, when she usually loved the cool embrace of numbers and bills and questions that had only one answer. She was too busy thinking that for all intents and purposes, that had been their first fight. And in her experience, even if a person said that things were fine or smoothed things over, a fight never really ended. It was never really resolved. It kept coming around, taking on new forms, and resurrecting itself at the slightest provocation.

But as day after day passed, it began to occur to her that Harlan… really was a man who meant what he said. That every now and again he liked to be spontaneous and he enjoyed the fallout from that when he did it. He’d admitted that.

Other than those occasions, he was a what you see is what you get kind of a man. The salt of the earth, man of his word, honest and downright good man she’d always believed was a fairy tale.

Kendall did not doubt that he wanted her the way he said he did.

But he didn’t push that. He didn’t grab her or even look at her in a way that made her uncomfortable. It was more like his confession had lit a match, and now that flickering flame ran through everything.

That spark. That heat.

One night she stopped in the door to the living room on her way to bed. Harlan was sitting in the chair he liked best, his feet up and a book on his lap with that long dusk outside and the mountains peering in. He looked beautiful, she thought. Just… beautiful.

Like the kind of man she’d never believed could truly exist.

That hot… but he liked to read? That implacably gorgeous… but not full of himself?

He was a unicorn, she thought, and since when did a Darlington happen across magic like this?

That she would ruin this was certain. She was genetically predisposed to destroy anything she touched.

Still, she was speaking before she could think better of it. “You never asked if I want you too.”

He looked up and fixed her with the sort of look that was patient, hot, and entirely too knowing for her peace of mind.

“I don’t need you to tell me, Kendall. I know that you do.” His dark eyes gleamed. “I can see it all over you.”

That night, she lay in her bed, wide awake. She tossed and turned, awash in a feeling of sheer disbelief—though it was edged out, as the hours ticked by, with irritation instead. Mostly at herself, but she aimed some at him, too.

If Harlan was trying to get under her skin, it was working.

But it was full-on summer now, so Montana was getting to her too. The mountains were covered in wildflowers, carpeting everything in bright colors beneath the endlessly blue sky. The evenings were light until late and it was like everyone had the same kind of summer fever. Because after the winter’s cold and dark, for months and months, if the weather was nice, Montanans were going to take advantage of it.

Cowboy Point was nothing short of vibrant come July, to better take advantage of as many light-filled, graceful summer hours as possible.

There was a weekly Farm and Craft Market. Produce and food stands appeared at the foot of every dirt road. The Art Collective, a community of artistic types that lived a ways out in hills, had a pop-up gallery in one of the fields along the main road in fine weather. There were alpaca ranchers turned fiber enthusiasts, artisan dyers, and yarn stockists out of one of the buildings on the main street. Mountain Mama Pizza had live music out on their patio, and the General Store set up picnic tables out front while their connected diner ran summer plate specials, all from locally sourced ingredients.

In the long evenings, when it seemed as if the sun couldn’t quite make up its mind whether or not to sink behind the mountains, the community gathered in all of these places and over at the Copper Mine, the bar across the creek. They too put out picnic tables in the field next to it and strung up lights that reached nearly all the way to the church and its Thursday pancake suppers. Most nights the bar also had locals come in with food trucks to help celebrate the joy of these summer nights.

“I’m not much for nightlife,” Harlan told her in the beginning of the real summer in July. “But I’ve also lived here since birth. I have community whether I want it or not. I don’t want you to feel isolated.”

And so this husband of hers who made it clear he wanted her, but never pushed that boundary, took her out almost every night. He made sure she couldn’t help but meet the people who were the fabric that made up Cowboy Point. The families that had been here forever. The newcomers who’d maybe only been here a generation or two, instead of three or four. The folks who were truly brand new, who might or might not stick it out through winter.

Locals took bets on that, she discovered. There was a book on it in the General Store.

But the people Kendall found she liked to pay the most attention to were Harlan’s brothers. Her brothers too, now, she supposed, though it felt funny to think about the Careys as family. Her family, no less. Particularly when to them, family wasn’t a dirty word.

“It’s like watching a television show,” she told Harlan one night, sitting next to him on a picnic bench out behind the Copper Mine. The creek looked inviting, this side of a nice and hot July day. It tended to cool down at night, this high up, but she liked that, too. She’d spent too many summers in much hotter places and had never enjoyed the feeling of incinerating the moment she stepped outside. She was a little suspicious of those who did. “Your brothers are like local gods.”

“Everyone’s a local god in a place this small,” Harlan replied. “We all end up in the community tabloids sooner or later. It’s just that the tabloids here are the stories everyone tells each other. My brothers star in a lot of those stories because they’re single.”

“But they’re all a different kind of single.” Kendall leaned closer to Harlan, so she could speak directly into his ear. She nodded toward Wilder, because it was always fun to look around at all the women who were making eyes at him—or trying not to seem as if they were making eyes at him. “I’m trying to guess which of the ladies staring at him have actually been with him and which ones just consider him aspirational.”

“I don’t want to know,” Harlan muttered, but Kendall could tell that he did.

“No spoilers,” she cautioned him. “I want to see how it plays out.”

She moved her attention over to Boone, who never made as much of a scene as the others. Possibly because he was often in the company of his best friend, a local girl who was married to someone else who was never with her. But what Kendall noticed was that even when his best friend wasn’t around, Boone didn’t seem to see another woman. No matter how many of them mooned around in his direction.

“Boone and Sierra have been best friends since they were kids,” Harlan told her when she mentioned this. “She used to run around with him all over the ranch.”

That was hard to imagine, Kendall thought, then thought better of saying. Because every time she saw Sierra, the woman looked… weighed down. Maybe even sad, especially when Boone wasn’t making her laugh.

Another thing she kept to herself was the fact that in her experience, men and women being best friends wasn’t really a thing. Usually, one of them was nursing deeper feelings—or an attraction they could only deal with by spending all that time together and pretending not to feel what they felt.

And the thing about that kind of dynamic was that it always blew up. Eventually.

Kendall knew better than to say all of that, even to Harlan. Because, in her experience, men did not read these undercurrents the way women did.

The antidote to all of that being Knox, who acted as if he had a spotlight attached to him at all times. As if he was forever on the stage—and in the center of that stage. Something he was clearly more than okay with.

“Really,” Kendall said into Harlan’s ear, “they’re all ridiculously entertaining.”

Another man might have questioned her interest in his brothers, but not Harlan. Because Harlan looked at her with that dark gaze of his and Kendall just… melted. No matter how cool the summer night was at this elevation.

Harlan, she knew, was not concerned about who Kendall was looking at.

“Wait until you meet Ryder,” he told her, toying with his beer bottle on the table in front of him like that might distract them both from the fact that she was sitting so close to him that her leg was flush against his. “He’s actually an entertainer by trade. If you can call the rodeo entertaining.”

Kendall pretended her pulse wasn’t rocketing around inside her. “You don’t like the rodeo? What kind of cowboy are you?”

“The kind who works for a living,” Harlan replied with a drawl. “No applause necessary.”

Some nights they danced to the music at Mountain Mama, out on that patio. Harlan took her in his arms and whirled her around and around until she wasn’t sure she was dizzy from the way they moved or just giddy, inside and out, because of him.

And then, every night, they would drive home with so many stars in the sky above them, that she felt like a mess either way. As if there was no hope for her but to surrender, completely.

Every summer night she thought she was that much closer to letting go for good.

And every summer morning, she woke up and thought that this life she’d stumbled into was as close to a charmed life as she’d ever had or ever would.

The trouble with that was, Kendall knew better than to believe in anything that felt charmed. That was a good way to make certain that the other shoe—because there was always another shoe and well did she know it—would drop right on her head.

But the July days seemed endlessly blue, bright and golden and sweet. One morning, Kendall drove down to the main house in the hardy old hatchback of indeterminate age that Harlan had told her was hers to use as she pleased. Like his truck, it ran better than some finer, newer cars she’d been in over the past five years.

The car was one more way he made her feel taken care of, but thinking too much about that was dangerous. It made her want to turn the car around and go find him, out there in the rolling hills of the ranch. And maybe do something about all the stars in a mess inside her that he’d put there himself.

But she didn’t. She was running down to the General Store and she’d taken up the habit of dropping in to see if Belinda needed anything. It didn’t take a lot to show someone consideration, she’d discovered. It didn’t take turning herself inside out and scraping herself raw against another person’s indifference. That was what her family demanded of her.

In this family, there might be a lot of teasing. The brothers like to jostle each other, with words as well as an unexpected shoulder, whenever possible. They were all particularly careful around Zeke, but she got the impression that was a new development. And it was obvious that underlying all of it was affection. What seemed like a genuine delight in each other’s company.

And love.

That word she’d spent so much of her adult life trying to avoid. Because talking about love was depressing when you were a Darlington. Talking about love as a Darlington was like chatting intently about desert vacations when you were a fish.

Kendall liked coming to the main house on her own. There was a no-knock policy, so she let herself in. And without Harlan she could linger in the front hall, looking at the pictures of him from when he was small.

She had never felt anything quite like the sensations that moved through her when she stood there, looking at his past and wondering if that might really be her future, too—but she shook it off. She reminded herself that this was still temporary even when it felt like it wasn’t.

Especially when it felt like it wasn’t.

She headed toward the back of the house and could see Belinda out through the glass windows, moving around in her garden. But Zeke was in the kitchen and she stopped, surprised to find him standing there over what looked like a whole tabletop of… spurs. Gleaming ones. Embossed ones. Spurs featuring different metals and finishes.

“That’s a lot of spurs,” she said, perhaps obviously.

Zeke cracked a smile in her direction in a way that made her heart hurt, because Harlan was so much like him. “Some might say too many spurs,” he drawled, with a glance out the windows toward his wife.

Kendall drew closer to the table and reached out a finger toward one of the shiny pairs, though she didn’t touch the glossy surface. “These are so… pretty? I guess I’ve never thought of spurs as pretty before.”

The back door opened and Belinda came in with a basketful of vegetable and greens. “You want some of those things?” she asked as she took in Kendall’s interest in the spurs. “Please. We have too many.”

“I’m not as spry as I used to be,” Zeke said, with what had to be the world’s best example of understatement, but who was Kendall to call him on it? “I can’t be out there, mending fences day and night. And you know what they say about idle hands.”

“He makes his own spurs. And bits.” Belinda set her basket down on the counter with a thump. “And what are we supposed to do with a house full of spurs and bits, I ask you?”

Kendall blinked, and didn’t think. “Bespoke cowboy accessories? You should sell them.”

It took her a moment to realize that both Belinda and Zeke were frowning at her. She straightened from the table, sure that she’d overstepped.

“You mean one of those online things,” Zeke said, and though that was a statement, Kendall heard it as more of a question.

Or she chose to answer it, anyway. “Sure, I bet you could sell them online. But you could also sell them at the Farm and Craft Market. I keep inventing reasons to go down there every week. There are so many cute little booths with unusual, unique things. I was talking to the organizer last week and she said that they get more and more tourists coming up from Marietta all the time, just to see the market and wander around Cowboy Point. What’s a better souvenir than something handmade by a real cowboy?”

Zeke was already shaking his head. “Never have been much of a salesman. I can sell a man a bale of hay, but let’s be honest. The hay sells itself.”

“I wish I had all that time to sit around in a booth hoping tourists from Marietta happen by,” Belinda said with a sniff.

And once again, Kendall didn’t even consider what she was doing. She was talking before she knew she might open her mouth, almost like she was comfortable here. Almost like she believed in this charmed life and her place in it. “I can do it.”

Once again, her in-laws stared at her.

And as they kept staring at her, she felt a deep compulsion to prove herself. She told herself it was healthy. Who wouldn’t want to impress her mother- and father-in-law? It was a perfectly reasonable urge and had nothing to do with what she’d seen on a social media post regarding attachment issues.

“I’m actually pretty good at selling things,” she told them, which was true. She did not intend to elaborate on the sort of things she sold. Given that most of the time, what she was selling was a particular narrative to explain terrible behavior away. Then again, wasn’t all sales about storytelling? “I can be pretty persuasive, though I have to say, I don’t think these will require I do much besides display them.”

“It’s your funeral,” Belinda said, because Belinda was always the worst-case scenario person. Which was funny, because she was also the first person to laugh, or leap into the middle of an argument, or hell, start one. She was all about following her feelings, all the time.

Kendall found that admirable. And also intimidating.

But that was how she found herself driving down to the store with a selection of spurs and bits in a box beside her. She stopped in front of the General Store, but she took the box across the street instead so she could walk that little way down the road to the Mountain Mama barn.

And also so she could enjoy the fact that people waved at her, now. Like she really was one of them.

That made her feel ridiculously happy, so she was grinning as she went into the pizza place. It was doing a brisk business already though it wasn’t yet noon. Kendall waited by the counter, still reveling in the fact that she already felt like a part of things. That she got to imagine that she could be a part of all this. She could identify most of the families seated at the tables inside the building and spilling out onto the patio. She knew the Bennett sisters, who owned and ran the place. She’d had several conversations with all three of them, all together and alone.

But she waited until she saw Flannery, the middle Bennett sister, come barreling out of the kitchen with her red hair in thick braids wrapped around her head, wearing an apron covered in flour. She smiled wide when she saw Kendall, but kept going, carrying the two pizzas she had in her hands out towards the waiting tables. When she came back, she was wiping her hands on her apron.

“Did you call in an order?” she asked.

“Actually, I’m hoping you have a second to talk about the Farm and Craft market,” Kendall said. Flannery brightened and nodded, so Kendall explained Zeke’s hobby. She set the box on the wide counter and opened it so Flannery could look at the spurs and the bits nestled inside. “What do you think? Is it worth setting up a booth?”

“Is it worth more local, bespoke art?” Flannery laughed. “Of course it is. This is exactly the kind of thing people are looking for. Come on down next Saturday and we’ll get you all set up.”

“That’s it?” Kendall laughed. “I thought there’d be… I don’t know, a whole process to go through.”

“I aspire to a process,” Flannery replied with a laugh. “If I had my way, there would be so many people jostling for a booth that it would take an application process, a panel of judges, and a waiting list, but we’re not there yet.” She ran a finger down along the curve of one of the spurs. “I think this kind of thing is a step in that direction, though. Tell Zeke he’s going to be the star of the market.”

Kendall practically skipped back to the car, already thinking about ways that she could dress up a booth. She would have to ask the artist himself about a logo, and who knew? Maybe there should be a clever name to go along with it. Something that indicated Zeke’s essential cowboyness, yet allowed the weekend warriors to dream about their own home on the ranges someday.

Inside the General Store, she behaved the way she always did when faced with the Lisle family. She acted as if no one had told her that there was the feud. She chatted with Cat, the younger Lisle sister who was usually behind the counter with her mother. She gave a wide berth to Cat’s older brothers, who always looked at her as if she’d been sent in to spy on the place by Harlan.

As if it would be worth spying on a country store in the first place, and especially when all she needed were a few ingredients.

“I was talking to Flannery about a new booth at the Saturday market,” she told Cat, because what she’d learned was that small-town people chatted. And the weirdest part was, Kendall liked the chatter. She wasn’t playing along, she actually liked someone to say a pleasant hello to her when she entered a place. She very much liked it when the small talk was happy, funny, and made the process of buying anything and everything, that much more pleasant. There was a lot of that at the Farm and Craft market.

Kendall was looking forward to it. She wanted to see if she was as good at it as she thought she was.

Cat, who was the kind of beautiful, offhanded and effortless, that would send Kendall’s mother and sister into a fury, sighed. “I keep telling my brothers that we should open a little booth at the market. But they don’t see the point of having two stores open at the same time, and they outvote me.”

She showed what she thought of family politics with a roll of her eyes, and Kendall laughed. And on her way outside, she stopped by the coffee truck that was parked outside the General Store now that it was summer, just as Harlan had promised. Inside, the lovely if mysterious Helena was pulling shots and foaming milk, and grinned when she saw Kendall. “A mocha again?”

Kendall liked that, too. She liked that it was known, what drink she’d prefer. That she was enough of a presence in this place that her drink order mattered.

“Yes,” she said, smiling at Helena. “Thank you. And feel free to use a heavy hand on the chocolate.”

Cowboy Point was beginning to feel like its own starry sky at her. A great big mess of people and places, and all of it beautiful. All of it meaningful in a way she never could have imagined before.

“Everyone here is so invested,” she said that night, sitting out beneath the summer sky with Harlan. And it was a joy, she found, to sit with this man and ask him how his day had gone. To tell him about hers. It was such a simple, unexpected, pervasive joy. “They care about every piece of what they do. In the pizza place, every ingredient is as locally sourced as possible and they put those pizzas together with deliberate care, so that they’re works of edible art. I know you don’t like the General Store, but they could mark up their prices because they know that they have a captive audience since folks don’t want to drive all the way down to Marietta for every little thing. But they don’t.”

Harlan shook his head. “I never thought I’d see the day when the Lisles are praised under my roof.”

“We’re outside.” She laughed at the way he looked at her. “I’ve never lived in a place like this before. It’s exciting to be around people who actually love to do what they do.” Kendall leaned forward, cupping her chin in her hand. “You and your brothers love this land. It matters to you. I think that’s what I’m trying to say. This is the place where things matter. I feel like somewhere along the way, people have lost that. It’s a shame.”

He didn’t speak for a moment and the longer that went on, the more she began to notice the way he was looking at her. That crook in the corner of his mouth. The fact that they had taken to sitting next to each other instead of across the table from each other. She didn’t know when that had happened, when they had started inching closer and closer.

But when he reached out, she didn’t pull away.

Instead, she sat so still that she could barely tell she was breathing. And Harlan took a piece of her dark hair that must have fallen down from her ponytail and carefully, tenderly, tucked it behind her ear.

Then smiled as goose bumps shimmered down her neck.

“We’re all we’ve got,” he said and it took a minute to remember what conversation they had been having. “If we don’t care about this place or what we do, who will? It seems like every year there are more people who want to be here and fewer people acting like they were cursed because they were born here. It’s a nice shift.”

She was still trying to fight off the shivers. “Harlan…”

His haze grew more intense. More heated. “You want to be careful how you say my name,” he told her, his voice quiet. “I don’t want to misread the situation.”

That was the trouble. He wasn’t misreading anything. Kendall wanted to take that hand, bring it back, and maybe nestle her cheek into it while she was at it. She wanted to kiss him again, heedlessly. Recklessly.

But something in her balked when she thought about what would come after.

Because somewhere inside of her, she’d drawn that line. She couldn’t continue to tell herself that it was temporary if she slept with him. She knew herself better than that. It was already hard as it was to keep herself from all the things she wanted.

Besides,a more cynical voice inside her chimed in, the more intimacy you give him, the more ways he can disappoint you.

Though she couldn’t think of a single thing about him that could possibly be disappointing.

“That’s what I thought,” he said.

And then, the way he always did, he settled back into the evening as if nothing was tight or hot or needy there between them. As if he didn’t feel that same spark that burned higher and higher in her by the day.

As if he was perfectly fine, leaving that fire to rage unchecked like that.

While she was quietly going out of her mind.

A few days later, after yet another restless night of dreams that were far too realistic and that made her much too sad to wake up from, she drove down from Cowboy Point into Marietta. She’d collected shopping lists from the whole family once they heard she was headed down the hill, and she wondered what it said about her that she truly liked the fact that they felt comfortable asking her. That they trusted her enough to do it.

Maybe that wasn’t a big deal to some people, handing off a grocery list.

But to Kendall it felt like being accepted into the family.

Maybe, she thought as she navigated the winding road down Copper Mountain, what she really needed to think about was why the bar was always so low. Well, not why. She knew why. What she didn’t know was why she was always so surprised every time her own alien upbringing was pointed out to her.

Because well-adjusted people not only didn’t go and marry strangers, they certainly didn’t think that a shopping list was anything more than that. A list. Of items to pick up from a grocery store. A thing that many people in bigger cities outsourced to complete strangers who operated delivery services.

She shook her head over that for most of those ten miles down Desolation Drive that she wasn’t sure she’d ever really get used to. It was so steep. So relentlessly treacherous, even this close to August without a trace of snow or ice to be seen.

When she got to the bottom and drove into Marietta proper, she hunted down each and every item on every list in her hand. Because there was no point allowing her childhood trauma to make her a perfectionist in the strangest arenas unless she committed to it wholeheartedly, was there? She packed it all into bags and arranged them in her car, even taking the time to write each household’s name on the bags that were theirs. Boone. Wilder. Knox. Main House.

But the best were the bags that said ours.

Hers and Harlan’s. Like they really were a team. A unit.

Her last stop was the little pharmacy in town to pick up something for Belinda. She parked on the street, finding Marietta prettier and more welcoming each time she came. Almost as if she was the one who was changing—becoming more and more like the sort of person who deserved that fairy-tale postcard life.

Though she knew better than to let herself get carried away. That was a road that couldn’t possibly lead anywhere safe.

Inside, she waited in line and studied last year’s Woman of the Year award that was displayed proudly behind the counter. She picked up Belinda’s order, smiling to herself at the strident conversation the woman behind the counter—presumably said woman of yesteryear—was having with another townsperson, barely looking up at Kendall while she did it.

Not that Kendall minded. She found that she, too, wanted to know what the mayor was up to. In fact, she was filled with glee as she imagined asking people what they thought about the mayor of Marietta and her apparently filthy-rich husband up at the market this weekend.

What could be more delightfully small town than that?

Admit it, she told herself happily as she walked back outside. This is beginning to feel like home.

It was a beautiful day, clear and gorgeous. And sweet, bustling Marietta was a fine town. A wonderful place to visit. Kendall just couldn’t help thinking that she liked Cowboy Point more. The tall pines. The kick of that high mountain air. The ranch that rolled on forever.

Harlan, she thought, or maybe something in her sang his name, these days.

Filled with all of that summer sweetness, she looked ahead to her car.

And stopped dead.

Right there in the middle of the sidewalk.

She felt, very distinctly, everything inside of her shatter, like she’d been glass all along and someone had just slammed a steel-toed boot straight through her gut.

It was so sunny. That was what seemed so wrong, suddenly. The sky was so blue and everything around her was pretty. Marietta was sparkling like a postcard, but Kendall could see the rot in it now.

She should have known better than to imagine it would ever go away.

Because it never did. That rot followed her around and here it was again, leaning up against her car. One of them had her head tipped back to take in the sun, the other was staring straight ahead at Kendall with a vindictive look on her face.

As always.

“Come on now, Kendall,” Mayrose said in that sugar-wouldn’t-melt voice of hers that felt like a kick in the stomach. And was meant to, she was well aware. “You didn’t really think you could hide from us forever, did you?”

Next to her, Breanna stopped her sunbathing and focused on Kendall too, sweeping her hair back from her face and securing it on the top of her head with her sunglasses.

“Once a Darlington, always a Darlington, big sister,” she said, with a drawl like honey and pure poison in her gaze. “When are you going to accept who you really are?”

And the way she laughed at that made everything inside Kendall run cold.

Because this was the other shoe she’d been afraid would fall on her all this time.

And here it was, landing on her head on a Marietta street and squashing her flat.