Joey (Coral Canyon Cowboys #11)

Chapter 1

CHAPTER

ONE

Joelle Young carried a clear plastic tote up the wide steps at Uncle Morris’s house. “Keep going, Ana,” she said to her younger sister, who carried two grocery sacks. One had a loaf of bread and a bag of hot dog buns in it, and the other had two bags of chips.

The girl had just turned eight years old, and she exuded spunk and sass. She loved ponies, coloring, and hula hooping, and Joey loved her with her whole heart.

“In the kitchen,” she said to her sister as she crossed the threshold of the house. The tote she carried had been labeled “office,” and Joey detoured to the left just off the foyer of this great big mansion that Uncle Morris and Aunt Leigh had built for their family.

It sat on the northern highway of Coral Canyon, just inside the city limits, and had taken them almost a year and a half to get to today—moving day.

Everyone in the Young family had been recruited to help move five children and two adults, as well as a pet lizard, a secret pet snake—that Uncle Morris and Aunt Leigh had found out about and steadfastly refused to move from their other house—and a hot tub.

Joey barely weighed a hundred pounds, but she’d tied back her white-blonde hair and was determined to help her aunt and uncle however she could. She usually ended up doing something with the kids to keep them out of the way, and she didn’t mind that.

Today, she went back and forth with OJ and Ana, each of them carrying something light that someone had set in a pile for movers just like them. Many hands make light work, as Grams said, but sometimes it could also put a lot of bodies in a small space, and that didn’t help anybody.

Joey had moved back to Coral Canyon after her first and only year at the Culinary Institute in New York City, and she had been working two jobs and living with her grandparents since. She told herself she was only twenty-two years old, and she didn’t need to have every step of her life mapped out.

She liked working at the bakery and had graduated from being a roller-skating runner of orders to a baker. That meant she had to be awake, dressed, and alert by four a.m. so she could have pastries ready to be bought and picked up when Cake Bites opened at six.

Her boss, a woman named Miriam, was a smart businesswoman.

She had built and opened her bakery right next to a coffee shop.

Aunt Michelle owned Daily Grind, and the two ladies often ran specials for each other’s shops.

Aunt Michelle had stopped her own in-house baking and simply purchased from the bakery next door.

Joey’s new baker position meant she had to quit at Michelle’s coffee shop. She didn’t mind working in the food service industry; she loved to cook, after all.

To fill her evenings, she had gotten a job with Ev’s brother, Shawn.

He owned a catering company called Pork & Beans and had expanded it to a single restaurant in Coral Canyon.

Joey worked on the catering side, which meant she didn’t have to interact with people very often, and she once again got to put her cooking skills to use.

When she wasn’t working in either of those places, she tested recipes in her granny’s kitchen, fed her grandparents, and kept them company while spending afternoons with her tablet, taking them for walks, or lying in bed watching crime documentaries.

She wondered if her life would simply be baking cupcakes in the morning and smoking meat in the afternoon. It wouldn’t be a bad life, she told herself as a commotion broke out in the kitchen.

“I told you now wasn’t a good time to do this egg experiment,” Aunt Leigh said, handing Eric a roll of paper towels. “Clean them up and get out of here.” She sounded stressed, and Joey wanted to help.

She waited while Eric muttered his apology and started cleaning up the broken eggs that had fallen to the floor—their brand new, pristine tile floor.

She met Aunt Leigh’s eyes. “Can I take the kids somewhere where we could help you unpack?” she asked.

Aunt Leigh ran her hands through her hair, pushing her bangs back as she sighed. “Yes. Why don’t you take the girls into the sewing room? Rachelle helped me pack it up, and she’ll be able to help you guys get everything put away.”

Joey nodded and glanced over to Eric, a gangly fifteen-year-old who’d been making messes since he was a little boy.

“Eric’s going to go outside with all of Luke’s kids and Uncle Gabe. They’re working on setting up the shed out there.” Aunt Leigh gave her son a severe glare, and he tossed the ruined paper towels in the trash and stalked out.

“All right,” Joey called. “Rosie, you’re with me. Corinne, Rachelle, Liesl, Grace, Celeste, Melissa, Carter, Pippa, Keri, and Clay. Let’s go unpack the sewing room.”

That was basically every child between the ages of five and twelve in the Young family, and Joey led the way down the hall to the room where Aunt Leigh had put all of her sewing things.

Joey had underestimated how many boxes there would be, and she and all the kids could barely fit in the room with them.

“Okay,” Rosie said, whipping a pocketknife out of her back pocket.

Joey simply blinked and stared at her. She wasn’t even sure if she’d ever held a pocketknife before, but in Rosie’s hand, it looked like a natural extension.

Rosie was all wild cowgirl, while Joey was more of a stay-indoors-and-read type of girl.

Rosie had started riding horses by age four, following her daddy, her cousin Cash, and her brother into the rodeo. She’d just started training to ride the barrels, and Joey actually couldn’t wait to see her do it at next summer’s rodeo.

“Rachelle, you get up here and help,” Joey said. She turned and found the wall to her right completely full of built-in shelves. “What do you think your mama wants to put over here?”

“Her fabrics will go there,” Rachelle said.

Rosie lifted out patterns, set the box down so that smaller hands than hers could take the things out of them, and sliced open another box.

“Okay, everyone,” Joey said. “You’re going to take something out of the box, bring it to me or Rachelle, and we’ll decide where to put it. Okay?”

Several okay’s chorused back to her, and Joey had been part of the Young family long enough to be used to this sort of chaos.

Her family hadn’t moved since Daddy had married Georgia when Joey was only eight years old.

Joey herself had moved to Jackson Hole to go to college and then to New York City to go to the Culinary Institute, and then back.

Always back home.

Where will you move next? she thought as she established one of the shelves for Aunt Leigh’s patterns.

Rosie broke down the boxes as they went through them, which created more room. Joey opened the cupboards built into the other wall to reveal more storage, more shelves, more places to put things.

She thought of Bryce and Codi and Kassie and Reggie about to become parents.

She thought about Belle and Harry and their recent engagement.

Joey wondered if she’d ever meet that just-right man for her.

She had dated a lot in high school and even had a couple of boyfriends in college.

No one in New York City, as the enormity of that place had scared her more than she thought it would.

And no one here in Coral Canyon, though she knew some cowboys who hadn’t left town after they’d graduated from high school. No one seemed interested, and Joey wasn’t really looking for a boyfriend anyway.

She had just turned to tell Grace, Liesl, and Celeste to go put a sewing basket on the lowest shelf by the door, when OJ asked, “What about this, Joey?”

Joey turned and came face-to-face with a cupboard door that had not been open a moment ago, and she rammed it with her face.

She cried out, and her hands flew up to cover her nose.

She tasted blood on the back of her tongue, and tears flooded her eyes.

Pain smarted through her sinuses and down her cheekbones, but Joey was more startled and embarrassed than anything.

She cried when her emotions got the best of her, and so it wasn’t surprising to her that tears streamed down her face.

“I’m sorry,” OJ said, and he really meant it. He was a sweet kid that wouldn’t hurt a spider, but instead carried it outside so it could be free.

“It’s not your fault,” Rosie said as she closed the door. “We just gotta be careful, guys.”

“It’s fine,” Joey said, her voice nasally and pinched. “I just need to go to the bathroom.” She rushed out of the sewing room.

Behind her, she heard Rosie start to lecture Ana for opening the cupboard door when Joey had been standing right there. Her nose stung and her heartbeat flopped in her chest for some reason.

She ducked into the bathroom, but her nose wasn’t bleeding too badly. Thankfully, as she didn’t handle the sight of her own blood very well. To her great relief, the bleeding stopped within a few seconds, but she couldn’t stop sniffling.

“This is so stupid,” she whispered as she tossed the tissue away so she didn’t have to see the blood. She wasn’t even sure why she’d completely lost control of her emotions.

Her uncles kept bustling by the bathroom with bigger boxes and items of furniture as they had to go past her to get to the stairs that led to the second floor where a lot of the children’s bedrooms waited.

Down the hall, she heard crying, which had to be Leigh and Morris’s twins who had just turned two.

Suddenly, everything felt too big, too chaotic, and too fast. Joey rushed out of the bathroom, kept her head low as she ducked around the corner, and then went out the back door.

In the corner of the yard to her right, Uncle Gabe, Uncle Morris, and several of the older teen boys still wrestled with garden tools, a lawn mower, a wheelbarrow, several rakes and shovels, and other larger equipment waiting outside the shed for its proper placement.

Joey ducked to the left, away from them. Her chest hitched with every step, and she held a new tissue to her nose to check if it was bleeding. It wasn’t. Aunt Leigh and Uncle Morris had built a large house, and it seemed to take forever to gain the corner and duck around it.

The side yard over here wasn’t very big, maybe only fifteen feet between the house and the fence beside it, and shade covered everything here.

Joey pressed her back into the house and slid down until she reached the ground, her knees folded to her chest. She put her head against them and cried, hoping that this tsunami of emotions and this deluge of tears would subside, and she could get back and continue being helpful.

Several trees had been left on the property, giving Aunt Leigh and Uncle Morris a maturely landscaped yard. As Joey quieted, she listened to the wind rustle through the tall trees. The leaves had already started to fall, and in fact, most were gone as Halloween lingered only ten days away now.

She sniffled, but thankfully she wasn’t outright sobbing anymore. She’d just checked to make sure her nose wasn’t bleeding again when someone came around the front corner of the house, saying in a clipped voice, “I can’t help that, Delaney. It’s not my job to find you an assistant.”

Adam Harmon. Glorious, gorgeous Adam Harmon.

The blond god of a man took two steps and then turned as he paced back the way he’d come. Clearly, he hadn’t seen Joey. Her breathing turned shallow, because she didn’t want him to find her there, pressed against the side of the house, bleeding and crying.

You’re not bleeding, a voice whispered in her head. But she may as well have been, and Joey simply felt stitched together wrong right now.

Adam, however, had been cut from one of God’s choicest cloths. He had hair the color of the warmest sandy beach Joey could imagine, and those broad shoulders…. Joey dreamt about them at night.

He wore a suit coat as well as he did a polo, and Joey hadn’t realized he’d be there to help Uncle Morris move. In fact, Joey thought Adam had left Coral Canyon at the beginning of the month to start a new job with a new country music star in Nashville.

Her heartbeat thundered like a herd of stampeding mustangs as she heard his voice fill her ears. She couldn’t even tell what he said, but he certainly didn’t seem happy. She wondered who Delaney was.

Probably his girlfriend, she thought. Adam had to be a decade older than her, and she had no right to be crushing on the man at all. He’d helped her several months ago when a rude customer at Cake Bites had launched into her, that was all.

She’d fallen and skinned her knees, and oh, Joey couldn’t handle the sight of her own blood, and she’d nearly fainted in Adam’s car. He’d doctored her up and taken care of her, and she couldn’t help but wish he’d come around the corner of the house to do the same thing again today.

He’d sit down on the ground beside her, put his arm around her, pull her close, and say, Tell me why you’re crying, Roo. And she would, and he wouldn’t judge her, and he wouldn’t make her try to spell out why she felt the way she did.

He turned around again and started along the length of the house, and Joey held very, very still.

“I did not violate any contracts,” he said.

“I did not sign a contract, and as Mister Young has said, you’re free to hire someone else.

I followed everything to the letter of the law, and I never signed an employment contract.

In fact, I told you eight days prior to the agreed-upon signing day that I would not be signing and that you would need to find someone else. ”

Joey’s nose started to itch, and it felt like it might leak a trickle of blood at any moment. She lifted her hand as slowly as she could to press the tissue there.

Adam’s eyes zoomed to her. He froze, suddenly silent and unmoving, his phone stuck in his ear and his mouth partway open still. Then he barked, “I have to go. If you need to contact me again, please call my lawyer.” He lowered the phone and stabbed at the button. Then he marched toward her.

So maybe Delaney wasn’t his girlfriend.

She almost flinched away from the angry storm of emotions preceding him. Then he softened right before her eyes—the muscles in his face, the set of his shoulders, the way he swung his arms, the anger in his step—it all melted away until he sighed as he sank onto the ground next to her.

“Are you okay?” he asked in a voice one-hundred-and-eighty-degrees different than the one he just used with Delaney on the phone.

To her horror, Joey sniffled, and that only triggered a new floodgate of emotions to open. She managed to shake her head as tears flowed down her face once more.