The Cowboy’s Least Likely Bride (Family Matters of Cowboy Point #1)

Prologue

The two women had their first in-person meeting on neutral ground. They picked a little coffee spot in Livingston, Montana—a good hour away from Marietta and even farther from Cowboy Point—where neither one of them lived.

They had both agreed that was best, for a variety of reasons.

After all, it wasn’t every day that a woman went of her own volition to spend time with her late husband’s other woman. The woman he’d been married to—however illegally wasn’t really the point—for almost the whole time he’d also been married to her.

Jenny Lisle headed out that February morning, bright and early, easing her old Explorer down the frozen ruts in the dirt road that served as the main thoroughfare on Lisle Hill in Cowboy Point.

The old hill on the west side of the tiny valley rose up from the General Store that had been here since the first miners came up from Marietta to look for a better life—not to mention some money and some land—all the way to the lighthouse on the high ridge at the top that her middle child, Dallas, had taken on and was renovating into a bed-and-breakfast.

A better use for the place than its time-honored position as a local eyesore, Jenny often thought, but never said out loud.

Folks around Cowboy Point got possessive about the past, eyesore or not. She’d learned that when she’d finally married her high school sweetheart and moved up here from Marietta, lo these many years ago now. Cowboy Point natives still considered her a newcomer.

Jenny didn’t mind. It allowed her to get away with things. They could always blame it on her misbegotten youth ten miles down Copper Mountain with all those Marietta people who—everyone agreed—didn’t really understand Cowboy Point.

This despite the fact that Cowboy Point was getting fancier and more accessible by the year, and was more and more a destination for the kind of Montanans who liked dude ranches better than rodeos. Or tourists who only wished they were Montanans, more like.

Jenny liked them all the same. They all spent their money in the quaint old General Store and took pictures out in front of the old sign that dated almost all the way back to the first iteration of the building, when it was little more than a shack with supplies to keep the miners fed.

At the bottom of Lisle Hill—a hill Jenny considered hers despite the fact she’d only married into the family, though it was true that she’d also kept the historic property in Lisle hands despite her former husband’s best attempts to sell it so she figured it evened out—she paused as she looked at the General Store, the diner that was attached to it, and the coffee cart in the parking lot that was now a year-round indulgence.

She wanted a cup of coffee. And she knew that if she went into the diner to get one, her eldest son, the regrettably over-responsible, overly serious, and sometimes downright grim Tennessee—and yes, she accepted that it was probably her fault that he was all of those things—would make it for her.

He’d make it the way she liked it, light and sweet, even though she doubted he had ever polluted his own body with that much sugar or dairy.

Tennessee was a man of many rules. He would make her coffee for her the way she liked it, but then he would want to know what she was doing and where she was going, and that was not a conversation she wished to have. Not yet.

Not until after this meeting of hers today.

The obvious solution was the coffee cart, but she couldn’t bring herself to do it. This was because she had only gone to that cart and looked its owner straight in the face one time. Just once, and she’d known.

Because Helena Patrick, owner and primary barista of the coffee cart that had started out as a summer thing and was now considered a mainstay of the community, bore a striking resemblance to Jenny’s youngest, Cat.

They could be sisters, she’d thought.

And given who her husband had been, Jenny had understood at once that it was very likely that they were.

So when the call came not long after Helena had appeared in Cowboy Point, Jenny hadn’t been surprised.

She’d known who her husband was, though she was ashamed to admit that she’d spent some years pretending she didn’t.

Jenny had been fully aware that charming, golden-boy Patrick Lisle was a cheater back in high school, so who was really to blame for the wreck of their marriage when she’d had that information and stayed with him anyway?

Patrick had told her, repeatedly, that she had always known exactly what she was signing up for and it had always made her cry.

Probably because she’d known that he was right, she thought now.

But she’d been younger in those years, and she had lied to herself a whole lot more back then.

Jenny was older now and she knew two things.

One, that the lies a person told herself always, always came back to haunt her tenfold.

And two, that she couldn’t change a person who didn’t want to be changed.

It was just too bad that she’d learned both of those critical things the hard way.

Still, it had felt like a fresh knife sunk deep into her sternum to discover who that voice on the other end of the line belonged to.

“My name is Peyton Patrick,” the decidedly female voice had said, and Jenny had known who she was, who she had to be, immediately.

In some ways, she’d been waiting for this call since high school.

It was the way the other woman said her name. Even the hint of the South in her voice couldn’t wash away the nerves. Or the hint of something more like a sadness that Jenny knew too well, because she felt it too.

“How can I help you?” Jenny had asked, maybe because she was trying to buy time. Or convince the other woman not to do the thing she had clearly called to do.

“I don’t know that you can help me,” the other woman had said, with a rueful laugh that had seemed to resonate deep inside Jenny whether she liked it or not.

“I don’t know how to say this nicely, I’m afraid, and I’m sorry for that.

But I’m pretty sure that we were both married to the same man. At the same time.”

Jenny didn’t remember much about that initial conversation.

She’d been too shocked, and then furious with herself for the shock.

Because again, she’d known Patrick. It had just never occurred to her that instead of having a woman in every port of call, he’d instead dragged a single, specific woman around with him out there, called her his wife, and had made a family with her.

All the while coming home to Cowboy Point and his first family, where he’d either charmed them all silly or had pretended Jenny was the one responsible for those odd shadows and dark spaces in their marriage.

Maybe it was a good thing that she’d been too shocked to react much to Peyton that first time. It meant she had time to have her emotions later. In private. That was the only place she let herself really let go and cry these days.

But they’d agreed to speak again. And the second time, she had been slightly more prepared.

“Helena,” she’d said when the other woman called at the appointed time. She hadn’t even bothered to say hello. “Is Helena your daughter?”

Peyton had let out a breath. “She surely is. And she’s as hardheaded as they come. Once she found out about Cowboy Point, and the whole Lisle family there, well. Nothing could have kept her away.”

The coffee cart hadn’t been around that long, Jenny had thought. That meant Helena had been observing her half-family for a while.

Patrick had called himself Lyle Patrick for his second family. He hadn’t even had the creativity to pick different names. He was Patrick Lisle at home in Cowboy Point, and had clearly made it so he could answer to the name in either direction.

Jenny really did have to admire the efficiency of it all.

When it didn’t make her feel sick, that was.

“Helena has been talking so much about Cowboy Point that she’s convinced her brothers to come check the place out,” Peyton had told her.

“And I felt I needed to reach out to you, because I don’t think it’s necessarily fair for us all to descend upon you without you having any idea that it’s happening.

Or even that we existed in the first place. ”

“I knew,” Jenny admitted. She’d been sitting in her house then, curled up on the couch, in the historic Victorian that some or other Lisle ancestor had built in the wake of the gold rush era in Paradise Valley that had never come to much in the copper mines in Cowboy Point.

She now lived in the old house alone, save for all of her ghosts and regrets.

Maybe that made it easier to tell truths to a stranger on the phone who she suspected she had more in common with than she’d like.

“The first time I saw Helena, I knew a call like yours would be coming at some point or another. She looks just like my daughter, Cat.”

Jenny and Peyton had a lot to talk about, it turned out. They both had two sons and a daughter each, all named after places. All names chosen at the behest of Patrick or Lyle or whoever he’d been.

“I don’t know whether to laugh or cry that he created two families exactly the same,” Jenny had said, somewhat helplessly.

“I find I do a lot of both,” Peyton had replied in the same tone.

They had talked quite a bit over the past year, until an evening spent on the phone with Peyton, who was living over in Dillon then, was something Jenny looked forward to most nights.

Now it was a new year. It had come in cold and snowy, just the way people around here liked it.

Peyton herself was currently in Bozeman, because she liked a short-term rental, she said.

Something she’d picked up in her years with Lyle.

More important than all of that, though, was that the Patrick brothers were due in town any day now.

Jenny and Peyton had decided it was best to meet up, in person at last, in advance of that arrival.