Slow Hands Cowboy (Mustang River #3)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Perfection was essential when planning your enemy’s wedding. Walker Grayson was certain of that.

One thing about Walker was that if he was certain of something, then he saw it through.

The kind of life he and his siblings’d had growing up didn’t leave room for uncertainty or moral quandary. He’d been willing to shoplift, grift, whatever he had to do back when he’d been a kid to make sure he and his brother and sister could eat – and he would always be proud that he’d done it.

Always be confident in those choices, because they were choices that had helped them survive.

Now, though, he was doing more than just surviving. He owned this place – along with his siblings – and they’d made something of themselves in a way that meant the whole town of Mustang River had to take notice.

And take notice they had.

Enough that the Painted Ridge Resort was playing host to the town’s wedding of the season. The wedding of Alan March, local doctor and former high school golden boy, to Addison Carey, daughter of the former mayor, current mayoral candidate, and ever-present pain in his ass.

But that was fine. His whole life he’d had to smile, make nice while people judged him, looked down their noses at him and he just smiled back. Unruffled. Unbothered. Because what he’d never do is let one of those people know they got to him. Not ever.

He surveyed the scene before him with a small measure of pride and a heaping helping of hostility and irritation, which he kept off of his face, thank you very much.

Pink flowers. Pink flowers in vases, fashioned into an arch, draped in a garland over a table.

Pink flowers everywhere.

And two white peacocks roaming the yard looking content if pointless in his opinion.

People seemed to be obsessed with them regardless of how pointless he found them.

Or maybe it wasn’t people in the general sense. But a certain sort of bride. The kind who needed an entire yard decked out in a manner that was befitting a princess.

Perhaps, because it was.

The princess of Mustang River, who was marrying her Prince Charming.

His gut burned with irritation. Rage, even, and who could blame him? For the last few months, his entire life had been dominated by Addison Carey, and he hadn’t wanted to have a thing to do with her since high school.

He had wanted her, and to this day, she was the only woman that he had ever wanted that he’d had to yearn for.

He wasn’t an asshole. No meant no. He didn’t chase down women that didn’t want his attention. It wasn’t that.

There was a spark between them; there always had been, she had taken that spark and turned it into something pointed and sharp. Had fastened it into a knife’s blade that she flicked beneath his skin and expertly separated it from his bones.

He didn’t like that.

He was a man with a healthy amount of pride, especially now, and the way that she’d acted back then had been like torture.

Everyone had seen her as this beautiful, shimmering light, but he knew exactly what she was. She was mean as a snake.

And now she was running for mayor, which he found particularly hilarious, and he wondered if it would affect her campaign at all if he exposed the fact that she had asked him to prom in eleventh grade and then ghosted him.

Yeah, that had happened. It was embarrassing.

Because in so many ways, Walker had always been cynical.

But with Addison, he hadn’t been, even back then. He had been an unruly boy who had been… Well, he felt like he was in love. It hadn’t even felt like lust.

Which was a testament to how powerful a seventeen-year-old boy’s hormones were. Truly.

And that was the only way he could’ve been suckered into a date that he should’ve known at that point was a trick.

Not that it mattered. Except it did. What hurt now was his pride.

What hurt now was the fact that she had taken the last little bit of belief that he had that maybe the world had something good in it and squished it underneath her designer shoe that had no business being in the halls of Mustang River High School.

And that was a fact.

It had been his own personal hell that she had been able to turn him into her errand boy for her wedding.

He was part owner of this ranch. He knew for a fact he owned more land than the Carey family.

That he was probably richer than her, not just in a familial sense with this shared property, but personally.

His earnings from the rodeo, endorsements, championship pots, were above seven figures, and other than the cash he’d spent building his house, he proudly let them sit in his bank account while he lived off the interest and this land he had inherited from his father.

Well. Not his father, but that was a whole different story.

He was ruminating on Addison right now; he didn’t have time to ruminate on the Grayson family drama.

“I just want to catch a glimpse of bridezilla.”

Walker turned and saw Laney, the chef at the Painted Ridge Dining Room, who had sidled up next to him. She was small, blonde, with tattoos extending from her wrists up to her shoulders.

Pretty.

Given that Walker was a shameless flirt, he would normally have flirted with her, but they were working together, and he had found that he needed her as an ally. Laney had become a friend, united in irritation with Addison.

“Oh, just you wait,” he said. “She breathes fire.”

“Does she?”

“No. Sadly, she is all things pristine and delicate and beautiful.”

He didn’t like the way the last word tasted in his mouth. He’d like to wash it down with a shot of whiskey, but that was going to have to wait until after the bridal shower, which he was overseeing himself because he couldn’t chance anything going wrong.

This was the issue. The Carey family was richer than God.

Addison herself might not be much more than a small-town nepo baby, but her dad owned a sizable amount of timberland and had been the mayor, so he had both influence and wealth.

Addison was trying to follow the same path, but in his mind, she was just trying to step in her father’s footprints.

And fine. She was welcome to do that. But she didn’t have any qualifications of her own. As far as he was concerned, she was kind of an empty-headed witch.

Her brain seemed to be filled with nothing.

She owned a little shop in town that sold home goods, but she was rarely there.

It was fully staffed, and Addison essentially functioned as the buyer and the manager.

He hated that he knew that about her. He hated that he knew anything about her.

He had quit Addison Carey for good a long time ago, and having to do this wedding had forced him to pick up an old habit.

Thankfully, he had only seen her in person a couple of times. Because she was still –

His thoughts were interrupted when a parade of women walked around the side of the hotel, on a path that let out to the lawn.

They were all dressed immaculately.

But Addison would’ve been easy to spot even if she hadn’t been the only one wearing white.

Her long honey-colored hair was styled in perfect waves, her lips were a bright glossy pink, and she was laughing in that particular way she did that drew people to her like a magnet.

This was the thing. She wasn’t openly a bitch.

She had been covertly awful to him in ways that he had loathed and loved, because it was attention, and again, teenage boys were dumb. So part of him had craved that attention even though it had been bad attention.

But other people didn’t know it.

Other people knew her to be a ray of sunshine. A real debutante.

“I see,” Laney said.

“This is going to be a lot.”

“I hope all the food is perfect, or she’s going to go into the kitchen and spit in everybody else’s.”

Laney snorted. “Yeah, don’t worry, it’s amazing. She’s just lucky that I’m too professional to spit in her food.”

“No kidding.”

The truth was, she had been flawlessly polite during their dealings. She had just been all over the place. She had changed things for this bridal party and the wedding about nine hundred times.

Conservative estimate.

The decorations, the date, the location on the ranch, the menu — she had changed the menu so many times.

The cake, the flowers, the activities, absolutely everything, and he had been acting as wedding coordinator for a runaway train, but the runaway train had a hundred thousand dollars on it, and for the sake of their business, this wedding needed to both scream that it had cost six figures and entice other people with that sort of money to the venue.

He understood the assignment.

And one thing he could say about the years of bad treatment from Addison was that it had been what taught him to move through life with an impenetrable smile on his face.

If you showed people that you weren’t bothered, they wouldn’t bother with you.

By senior year, the power dynamic between them had flipped.

And he could still remember at graduation, when she had brushed past him very intentionally, and he had taken her hand to help her up to the stage. Their eyes met. She looked shocked, and he’d watched color flood her cheeks.

Then he’d smiled. Slowly.

“Congratulations.”

He could still remember how much it had cost him to say that word. But it had been worth it for her response.

He’d be damned — then and now — if she knew that he hated her. He would be damned if she knew that she’d hurt him in ways that had changed him forever.

The field inside his soul was sown with neglect, abandonment, and insecurity. So it had been extremely easy for a few seeds planted by an object of fascination in high school to mean more than they should have.

If he had a healthy field instead of a bunch of fucked-up crops, it wouldn’t have mattered.

But he’d been a mess going into all that, so what she had done had only made it worse.

The woman who appeared to be the maid of honor began to direct everyone to seats, and the hotel staff began to bring out an array of beautifully wrapped gifts that had obviously been inside in some sort of staging area.

The wedding was next week. The big bridal shower was today, and the bridal party was staying over the weekend for a bachelorette party. Which would involve a lot of wine and likely laughter at the expense of others. He could only assume.

Maybe he could offer to be the stripper.

That actually almost made him laugh.

If he thought he’d shocked her at graduation, showing up in full cowboy gear and offering to do a strip tease would probably send her into an early grave.

Appealing.

Very appealing.

“My staff is set to serve nibbles in five minutes, before the presents are opened, and then afterward there will be the cake.”

They hadn’t done the cake in-house; they had hired a local cake bakery and decorator. While Cara, their local baker, could do all of that, she didn’t like to do people’s big event cakes.

If it were cupcakes or smaller things, they could badger her into it, but she wasn’t one for a whole lot of fussy icing.

He didn’t need to stay for the whole thing, but he did feel like he needed to supervise it getting rolling.

He was the coordinator, whether he liked it or not.

This was all still an evolving role.

He worked in public relations and marketing for the ranch.

After he’d finished with the rodeo, he’d actually gone and gotten a degree.

Just because he wanted to. Because he was tired of people acting like he was an idiot. Because it felt good to be able to brandish a piece of paper at them to prove that he wasn’t what they assumed.

At least, he thought that it would feel good. He still liked to pretend that it did. That it did something to banish that feeling of inadequacy down in his soul.

It should. And he was very good at pretending.

Very good at smiling.

“All right,” he said, turning away from the proceedings. “Let’s make sure everything goes off without a hitch.”