Charming the Cowboy (Wild Rose Point #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

“There is no honor among seagulls!” Eliana Sanderson held the remains of her mangled pumpkin and glared menacingly at the top of the lamppost, where Edgar sat fatly, smugly, and rudely, looking down at her and her decimated decorations.

She glared at Edgar. Edgar didn’t care.

He was a menace around town any time there were decorations, and fall was his warm-up for the Christmas season, where he rained terror down upon everyone and ate their tinsel.

It was a miracle he wasn’t dead.

Legends never died. And neither did horrid seagulls.

It was the last day of September, but she’d felt honor-bound to get the decorations up at The Water Witch as soon as possible.

She was, after all, a witchy little shop full of witchy little things.

And while she felt tarot, crystals, and candles were good all year round, she was also very aware that October was her busiest month.

She had the only metaphysical shop in Wild Rose Point, Oregon, a charming, coastal town in the northern part of the state that boasted incredible views, food, and very awful, annoying birds. That wasn’t in the pamphlet, of course.

The shop location had been in her family for over forty years.

Her grandmother had done palm reading and fortune telling, her mother had tried to get away from that a little bit and had transitioned it into a home goods and gifts shop that also sold tarot, and if you asked really nicely and paid her fifty dollars… she’d give a reading.

Eliana had taken over five years ago, and had rehabbed it into a more modern space, with tarot and oracle cards galore, crystals, books, and candles that were only poured locally on the new or full moon.

She had all of her items organized by color. White crystals, decks and books all in one section of shelf, purple on the next, then pink, and so on. It was beautiful, and cozy, and a constant delight in her life.

Eliana, her mom and grandma lived together in a rambling Victorian down the street and her mom and grandma were very focused on their art right now (her grandma was doing pottery, her mom was in a painting era) her brother, Marcus, was in and out of town as he plotted various schemes and business ideas and in general was a cad – like his great-great-grandfather Angus before him.

She found him to be a cad affectionately, of course.

Even though Angus was the reason they were all cursed. But what could you do? Old-timey fuckboys were going to fuckboy, and her brother was bound and determined to do the same.

Why not? Honestly. Since the Sandersons were doomed to never find love, they might as well find a good time. Though Eliana couldn’t say she’d found that either.

Curses were for the birds. Seagulls, even.

She chuckled to herself as she picked up her mangled pumpkin and walked back into the shop to finish up her closing duties.

She set the pumpkin on the counter, then picked her water pot up and refreshed her snake plant, which had a cardboard cutout of Edward from Twilight with Bella clinging to his back, hiding in the leaves.

It made her smile every time she saw it. And was maybe evidence she was more of a romantic than she liked to believe.

She did like Twilight.

She liked the idea of two people being meant to be in a way that defied…everything. Since she was cursed to never, ever find the love of her life and all, it was nice to think there might be stronger magic than that at work in the world.

She peered into the fortune-telling room and looked at the tarot deck sitting on the table, a piece of selenite placed on top to keep them clear.

She mainly kept the room in honor of her grandmother, who’d used that room every day for years. It had floral wallpaper and a table with one chair on either side. There was even a crystal ball, which Eliana never used. She wasn’t psychic. Nor did she claim to be.

Intuitive? Maybe.

Imbued with a deep knowing? Possibly.

Though never about her own life.

Her intuition pulled her into the room now. She took the selenite off the top of the deck and shuffled the cards before taking one off the top and flipping it over.

The Emperor.

She set the deck back on the table and grimaced.

There was one person in particular that card made her think of and she really didn’t need to be thinking of him.

Mainly because her crush on Cooper Langdon had felt played out by her junior year of high school, and the fact he still made her feel like she had butterflies in her stomach every time she saw him was just…

Meh.

She’d been toying around with asking for his help with the Halloween festivities this year since she’d gotten a tap on the shoulder from the chamber to get involved and try to draw an even bigger crowd this year.

Spring and Summer were generally the biggest tourist seasons for Wild Rose Point, but Christmas had become a major draw with so many festivities and craft fairs, historic tours, caroling, and a parade.

It had made the city start to look for new ways to draw people in all year, and Halloween had big potential.

They already had some haunted location tours set up – The Sanderson House was going to be featured, along with the local museum, the lighthouse, and several other places around town.

There would be spiced cider at the pumpkin patch, along with a petting zoo in town, some cozy autumn beach walks that included warm drinks, campfires, and ghost stories.

But she really wanted to have a haunted hayride. Really badly.

There was only one cowboy she could think to hit up for the job, and she knew she was getting to it late, but it was just…

Cooper was a whole thing.

The Emperor, even, though she did think the tarot was giving him a little bit too much credit.

The Emperor was the ultimate Big Dick Energy card, and she could do without the giant, obvious symbolism, honestly.

The card was all about masculinity, boundaries, foundations. He was almost severe in how rigid and firm he was.

He was, very pointedly, Cooper.

Who would hate being compared to a tarot card, because he thought it was all a bunch of hogwash.

It was weird that he and Marcus had ended up being best friends.

After Eliana’s dad died, her mom moved her and Marcus to Wild Rose Point and in with their grandmother.

Eliana had been nine. Marcus had been thirteen and wild already, and he’d met Cooper at school and somehow the very steady Cooper had found something…

charming about her feckless brother. Maybe it was the fecklessness, though she’d never had the sense that Cooper found her charming at all, and she liked to think she was whimsical.

Either way, Cooper and Marcus had formed a lifelong friendship all those years ago, and Eliana had been struck badly by Cupid’s arrow the moment she’d met the serious-looking boy with a cowboy hat on his head.

Cooper had also lost his dad in a ranching accident. Maybe that was part of the connection he and Marcus shared. Fatherless boys in a harsh world.

She set the card on the table and glared at it, before shutting the light off in the fortune-telling room and switching the rest of the lights off before she walked out the front door and locked it behind her.

She turned the ‘closed’ sign, which had a subtitle beneath it that said: It’s not advised to steal from witches.

The little warning wasn’t entirely in place of a security system – she had one of those motion-activated cameras near the door.

But she did find that mostly people didn’t want to tempt potential curses.

Not that she’d curse anyone. Curses were just mean, and she should know.

She turned away from the front door and headed down the narrow pathway that led from the alcove her store sat in, and out to the main street.

She could hear the crash of the ocean, not far away, but couldn’t see it through the dense, low-hanging clouds that were aspiring to be fog, even when she passed the cross street that had beach access.

She paused for a moment outside the bridal shop – Seaside Vows, and looked at some of the beautiful dresses in the window.

She had always known she would never bother with marriage.

There was no point. Her mom had been married twice.

Obviously, to Eliana and Marcus’s father, and then again to a charming, charismatic man that she’d met when Eliana was in high school.

Turned out that he was a grifter. And all he’d done was take what little savings they had and break her mother’s heart.

Then, there was her grandmother’s bad luck with love. She’d been married four times, each to a man who was a bigger liar than the last.

It wasn’t that the Sandersons couldn’t fall in love. That would be better, honestly. They were more than capable of falling in love. Hard and fast. But love simply didn’t like them. It fell out with them far too quickly and had disastrous consequences.

She turned away from the bridal shop window and kept walking, pausing in front of the Seaglass Saloon, and debating stopping inside.

She didn’t know why she felt compelled to do that.

She loved the Seaglass Saloon because, much like The Water Witch, it was a family affair and owned by three strong women.

The Hartley family had owned the saloon for years, and it was the source of a lot of local legend. There was a rumor that if you drank a Mooncatcher Lager there at midnight on a full moon, you’d meet your soulmate.

Eliana had actively avoided any such thing. Particularly given that if she met her soulmate, he was likely to kill her. And not in an Edward and Bella way.

She was much less likely to be turned into a vampire and much more likely to be left pregnant, barefoot on the side of the road.

Which had actually happened to her grandmother.