Stone Cold Cowboy (Mustang River #1)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

The day Marlowe Davis’s life changed forever was depressingly average. If her husband hadn’t told her he was having an affair and wanted a divorce, the day wouldn’t have been notable at all.

Before that, it had been boring. Mundane, even. The weather had been cool, but not cold. Cloudy, but not so much that you couldn’t see the sun. She had just finished packing the last of her things for the big cross-country move with her husband to start their new life in Oregon.

Brooklyn to Oregon was a pretty big move, but they needed a big move. It wasn’t like she thought everything was great.

She knew that it wasn’t. But they’d been working on it. The point of the move was working on it.

And while she had known that there was distance growing between them, she hadn’t ever believed that meant…

She and Aiden had always been friends. They’d always had a lovely, companionable relationship.

They’d known each other since high school.

They’d taken a responsible amount of time away from each other during college, and then they found their way back to each other, had a long engagement, and got married.

They knew each other. They were on the same page.

Mostly. And when they weren’t, they talked about it. That was how they were.

Their friends were jealous of them.

They’d been on adventures together. Running a B&B in Maine, working on and living in vacation cottages at a working farm in Vermont.

For the last three years, they’d been in Brooklyn managing a bar with upstairs rooms for rent, and live bands that played five nights a week.

They’d always had a fantasy of living in New York, but then the fantasy had proven to be expensive and chaotic.

Which might have just been the late-night hours the bar demanded.

Marlowe had blamed the bar hours for all that distance.

But apparently, it wasn’t the bar.

She wanted it to be. She wanted to rail at a building that she didn’t love, not the man who had promised to love her, and had gone out and slept with someone else.

Worse even than that, was in a relationship with someone else.

A night of sex after closing up the bar? She might have been able to forgive that. Maybe. After fifteen years of loving him, it was possible.

Not this, though.

Not that an offer for continuing the marriage had been on the table.

He’d confessed everything while she was packing the coffee maker. She’d taped the box up, and he’d looked at her and said: There’s someone else, I’m not going with you.

He’d gotten her packed to move her out of the apartment, out of the marriage, all while thinking she was packing to go into a new life with him.

She’d been devastated, but the devastation almost wasn’t even the worst part. It was wondering how long she’d been living with a stranger.

Wondering how long he’d been planning to do that.

Had taking the job been a lie the whole time?

Had it all been a plan to get Marlowe to agree to end the lease at the apartment, to get her to pack all of her things?

To separate their belongings – easier for unpacking, of course – so that all he’d have to do was find his boxes, and put them in a different truck?

So that he could take his things, already carefully boxed, and move only a few blocks away to his mistress’s house, while he could safely send Marlowe across the country.

She had packed his underwear for him. To take to another woman’s house.

Well, maybe she wouldn’t go.

Maybe she would move into his attic and howl like an appropriately scorned woman. Maybe she would haunt his every step and make him sorry he’d wasted fifteen years of her life.

The issue was that it wasn’t only she and Aiden who were supposed to go. It was Cara. Cara, her sister-in-law, who was a sister to her in every way. She had sold her house and was also packed up and ready to go on this adventure.

She couldn’t do that to Cara. But she’d been sitting in her shock for two days, unable to move, call anyone, or make a decision.

Not about anything.

The moving company had come to pick her things up, and she had gone to a hotel. She was supposed to fly to where her sister-in-law lived in Vermont, in the town she and Aiden had grown up in, and then they were going to make their way to Oregon together, in Cara’s car.

But without Aiden would she even still have a job offer? Because the two of them were supposed to run the new Mustang River resort that was opening on a ranch in the small town of Mustang River, Oregon, and the two of them running it had been a big selling point.

She worried. And worried. And still got on the flight to Vermont.

And when she arrived at her sister-in-law’s doorstep, she burst into tears.

Cara was philosophical. She always was. And she was on Marlowe’s side.

“He’s an asshole,” Cara said, leaning against the counter, a cup of tea in her hand. “I can’t believe he did that to you. I can’t…”

“I know,” Marlowe said.

The trouble was, he’d never been an asshole before. He’d never been cruel. Not the man she knew, and this was undeniably cruel. He’d set her up – whether he’d known from the moment they’d accepted this job that he wasn’t going or not.

She could feel something shatter deep within her, it wasn’t her heart, not in the way that people meant it.

It was trust. Because even his sister was shocked, everyone would be shocked.

They were this very solid couple. They always had been.

If it wasn’t them, if they weren’t the ones that were going to go the distance, then who was going to?

What could she trust? What could she count on? Ever again.

“Right.” Cara pushed off the counter and clapped her hands. “We’re still going.”

Marlowe didn’t have anywhere else to go, but it wasn’t that simple either. “I mean, this doesn’t change anything for you. But it does for me. Cody Grayson hired us on the basis that there would be two of us running the resort. I don’t know if I can do it by myself.”

“I’m going to help you.”

“You’re going to be running the bakery. That’s going to be so much work. Early mornings and… I can’t ask you to take on double duty.”

“My older brother — and his bullshit — are my responsibility. The way he let you down is my responsibility. Marlowe, you’ve been my sister for so much of my life. I’m on your side. He doesn’t have a side here. He lied. He cheated. That’s it.”

The words made Marlowe grind the back of her teeth together. “I know. Very aware. I just…”

“Do you want to call him?”

She couldn’t figure out for a moment if her sister-in-law meant Aiden or her boss. Cody.

The idea of speaking to Cody on the phone again made her feel… Weird. Like there were little sparks dancing beneath her skin.

He was such a taciturn man. They had done two phone interviews prior to him offering her and Aiden the job. One she and Aiden had done together, and one she had done by herself because Aiden was busy at the bar.

Cody wasn’t a friendly man, nor was he chatty.

His voice was low and rough and had a growl at the back of it.

The reality was, he could narrate dirty audiobooks and make a killing.

It was just that the words he was saying…

were not half as sexy as the voice itself.

He was clipped, and to the point. There was no excessive chatter.

Still, she felt a strange sense of avoidance about speaking to him again, and not just because she thought she would lose her job.

“It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission,” Cara said, confirming she meant Cody.

Nerves sparked in her stomach, and she set her cup of tea down, unable to keep sipping at it.

“It’s also a terrible idea to show up in a place you don’t know anyone expecting a job that you’re now taking under false pretenses.”

“You know me,” Cara said. “You have me. Anyway, you already sent your things across the country in a giant moving truck, and I’ve got all my stuff ready to go in my car. We’re doing this.”

If Marlowe wanted to be charitable, she could look at the last couple years of Cara and Aiden’s lives and see why Aiden was maybe having a crisis.

They’d lost both of their parents, and while Marlowe had lost both of her parents a long time ago – her father to alcohol, and then death and her mother to her whims that had taken her far away – she knew that when you had a functional family the loss was different.

But Cara had carried the brunt of her mother’s declining health, not Aiden.

Their dad had died when they were young, and Cara had been taking care of their mother until just recently, when she had finally passed from dementia.

She knew that Cara wanted to leave that part of her life behind, desperately.

Cara was counting on her. Cara, who was such an important person in her life, and who she loved so much.

Cara, who was more family to her than anyone in her own family.

She had a house waiting for her, she had to be out of this house – the childhood home that she’d inherited when her mom died – because it was already sold.

She couldn’t abandon Cara.

Aiden might be able to abandon Cara — and Marlowe, for that matter —but Marlowe wasn’t like that.

Loving Cara, wanting to do the right thing for Cara, that drove her now. Gave her something to anchor down into.

They were doing this. She told herself that while she settled into the little attic room she’d stayed in with Aiden so many times over the years. She picked at a little bow on the precious bedspread – everything Cara owned, everything she did, was cute and feminine – and sighed heavily.

Then she heard Cara, in the room right below her, voice muffled. She was shouting, though, and Marlowe didn’t have to work hard to figure out who Cara was talking to.

She heard Cara shout words like coward and liar. All true.

Of course, Marlowe didn’t hear the response. She wasn’t even supposed to be hearing Cara’s side of the conversation, she knew.