I'm so excited to be featuring again another novel from the publisher that makes the world go round, Harlequin, today it's Delores Fossen's latest in her Last Ride, Texas series, Mornings at Rivers End Ranch.
Enjoy!
ISBN-13: 9781335623980
Publisher: Harlequin
Release Date: 11-29-2022
Length: 384pp
Buy It Here
ADD TO: GOODREADS
Overview:
"Delores Fossen takes you on a wild Texas ride with a hot cowboy."—B.J. Daniels, New York Times bestselling authorThere’s no place like Last Ride for big hearts—and even bigger surprises.
Back when Wyatt Buchanan and Nola Parkman were high school sweethearts, an unplanned pregnancy pulled them apart. Seventeen years later, the haunting decision to place the baby for adoption finds them unlucky in love, yet still drawn to each other like moths to a flame. But with so much heartbreak and history between them, a relationship’s not in the cards. Especially when Nola wants a family and Wyatt makes it clear that his sole focus is River’s End Ranch.
But late-night conversations stir up long-forgotten memories and they find comfort in each other’s arms. For Nola, being with Wyatt gives her hope that they might be able to share the future they once believed would be theirs. Then their now-teenage daughter arrives in Last Ride, seeking answers about her past. Although Wyatt's a confirmed bachelor, seeing Nola with their daughter makes him realize that giving up on his newfound family terrifies him more than being alone. Can the connection he and Nola have just rediscovered offer him a second chance with the woman he’s never forgotten—and help mend his still-healing heart?
Bonus novella! Discovering an empty grave is not something Rosalie Parkman ever expected. Now she'll need the help of Deputy Gabriel Buchanan—without giving in to their heated attraction—to locate the uncle she thought was buried long ago…
Read an excerpt:
CHAPTER ONE
“HEY, DO YOU believe in that whole kill-the-messenger thing?” Wyatt Buchanan heard the woman call out.
Wyatt looked up from the fence repairs he’d been checking and spotted the rider coming across the pasture toward him. Even though he already knew who his visitor was because he recognized the voice, he picked through the thick glare of the late-afternoon sun and saw her. Nola Parkman, a blast from his past, an often pain in his ass and, sadly, the love of his life.
Lost love, that was. And the “life” part was probably an exaggeration.
Probably.
But Nola was at least the love of part of his life, anyway.
Nola was astride Honey Bee, one of his prized palominos that she’d obviously borrowed from his stables and was in no sense of the word gracefully riding the normally graceful mare. In fact, Wyatt was surprised Nola hadn’t ping-ponged right out of that saddle and busted her butt. Or lost that precarious grip on the wicker picnic basket she was balancing in her lap.
“Well?” Nola prompted. She reined in, sort of, fumbling and nearly dropping the basket before Wyatt took it. Nola’s dismount wasn’t pretty either, and it seemed to him that Honey Bee did the equine equivalent of an eye roll. “Are you in the mood for messenger murder, or will you grant me a pardon?” she asked.
“Depends on the message,” he grumbled.
Because Honey Bee looked annoyed enough to give Nola a hard tail flick and maybe even a harder nip, Wyatt tucked the basket under his arm and took hold of Nola’s elbow to move her away from the mare. Once he had her out of flicking and nipping range, he let go of her so he could push up the brim of his Stetson and give Nola the once-over. To see if he could figure out what this visit was really all about.
Her long blond hair was scooped in its usual disordered ponytail, with just as many strands falling out as there were gathered up. No makeup. That was usual, too. And judging from her stained jeans and old Roper boots with burnt specks, she’d been blowing her glass art in her workshop. Again, that was usual. But there was a wariness in her blue eyes.
Hell yeah. Something was wrong.
Of course, her impromptu visit alone had already told Wyatt that. The messenger question and that wariness were only like a PS at the bottom of an email with bad news. She was here to tell him something he didn’t want to hear, and it was dire enough news that she’d brought along food. He was betting the contents of that basket included his favorite ham and Swiss on rye, no mayo, which she’d picked up from the TipTop Diner.
“Don’t you have ranch hands to do this sort of thing since you’re the owner of River’s End?” she asked, tipping her head to the fence he’d been inspecting when she’d arrived. “There was a whole bunch of them by the barns and stables. One of them even saddled the horse for me.”
Wyatt had known with complete certainty that she hadn’t saddled Honey Bee herself because Nola didn’t know squat about tack. If she’d done the saddling, she wouldn’t have made it all the way to the pasture. “I had a new crew doing fence repairs, and I wanted to check their work,” he explained.
He’d chosen to spot-check this area because this particular pasture wasn’t in use for the next three weeks, when some new horses would be moved here. If someone wanted to go the lazy route, then this would have been the place to do a half-assed job. Thankfully, the job had been full-assed, so he wouldn’t have to chew anyone out. Or fire someone.
“Either you’re two weeks early or this is about something else,” Wyatt commented, still studying her, still waiting.
No need for him to clarify the two-weeks comment. They both knew, down to the hour, the anniversary that they anticelebrated each year. In thirteen days and nine hours, it would be the birthday of the child they’d made together. Their daughter, who’d been born nearly seventeen years ago, when Nola and he had been sixteen.
A daughter in DNA only.
That was something Wyatt had had to repeat to himself like a mantra over the years. It was the easiest way to put a pause on the whole eating-away-at-him deal. Yeah, they’d made the kid, and Nola had pushed all six pounds and eleven ounces of her out into the world after a long, grueling labor. But within minutes, they’d had to give her to someone who stood a hundred percent chance of doing a better job with her than they could have.
Which wasn’t exactly a high standard.
They’d both been high school juniors back then, and he’d still been eight days away from his seventeenth birthday. Nola had been a month away from hers. And Wyatt had had less than five hundred dollars to his name. The only job he could have gotten was something at minimum wage. Despite her highborn Parkman surname, Nola had been in the same proverbial boat. So, they’d made the only choice they could and that was to give her up.
It was because of that hundred percent belief that someone else could do a better job than them that Nola and he had made a pact. They had agreed they would never look for the girl or her adoptive parents. No ancestry DNA tests to see if she popped up as a match. No peeks at adoption connection sites where there were posts of children looking for bio-parents and vice versa.
Added to that, the only time Nola and he had allowed themselves to talk about the DNA-only was on the birthday. One day a year of rubbing their noses in the penance that was silently simmering and jabbing there the other 364 days of the year.
Sometimes, they hadn’t been able to do that penance face-to-face, like when Nola had been in Italy training to make her glass, but they’d still managed some long phone or email conversations. No matter the format, though, the mood had always been miserable.
“I’ll be back in two weeks for that,” Nola murmured, scooping up the basket and heading to the lone tree in this particular part of the pasture.
A sprawling oak he’d named Nine Months Later.
Because it’d likely been where he had gotten Nola pregnant all those years ago. Of course, it could have also happened at one of the other comfort-lacking places where they’d had a go at each other. Teen hormones were a greedy, insatiable son of a bitch. And sometimes a “gift” that just kept on giving. But Nola and he had paid a billion times over for their lack of self-control and a discount condom that obviously hadn’t been worth squat. Because of that, Wyatt had never had much faith in condoms, or any other form of birth control, for that matter. He’d also decided he had never wanted to risk getting another girl or woman pregnant. Never. So, he’d had a vasectomy when he’d turned twenty-one.
While Honey Bee cropped some grass and moseyed over to Moonlight, the gelding that Wyatt had ridden out to the pasture, Nola took a thin blanket from the basket, spread it out under the shade of the tree. A shade that still didn’t block off much of the heat. It was August when the sweltering Texas heat could be a son of a bitch, too.
He’d been right about her choice of sandwiches, but she’d also brought along at least a half dozen little bags of her favorite cheddar-cheese-and-onion potato chips. And beer. A six-pack. Since Nola didn’t drink beer, that meant she’d felt he might need to be on his way to getting drunk to deal with whatever news she’d come to deliver.
“Just tell me why you’re here,” he insisted, popping the top on one of the beers.
She didn’t even hesitate. “Today is August first, the drawing of the Last Ride Society.” Of all the things he’d steeled himself up to hear her say, that wasn’t anywhere on his steel-required radar.
The Last Ride Society had been formed decades ago by the town’s founder, Hezzie Parkman. Hezzie apparently had a thing about her silver-spoon descendants preserving the area’s history by having a quarterly drawing so that one lucky/unlucky Parkman would then in turn draw the name of a local tombstone to research. Research that required the drawer to dig into the person’s history and write a report for all the town to read—
“Hell,” Wyatt said when it hit him. “You drew my brother’s name.”
Nola nodded, sighed, ripped open a bag of chips and funneled some straight from the bag into her mouth. “It was Griff’s name all right. I wasn’t actually at the drawing, but my mom was, and she accepted the honor for me.”
Yeah, her mom, Evangeline, would have done that all right. The civic-minded Evangeline, who counseled troubled teens, arranged food drives, donated most of her income to the needy and probably walked on water every now and then, wouldn’t have considered that Nola might want to shirk duty and tradition. Even if that duty and tradition meant poking around in Griff’s life.
And his death.
Even if it meant Wyatt would have to relive things he’d barely survived.
“Evangeline asked me to tell you if you needed someone to talk to about this, about Griff,” she clarified, “that her door is always open.”
Wyatt scowled. Not because it was lip service. It wasn’t. Evangeline would go out of her way to help him deal with this, even though she had to secretly be holding a grudge against him.
Had to be.
After all, he’d knocked up her teenage daughter and had created the juiciest kind of gossip that still sparked every now and then even after seventeen years. Added to that, he wasn’t to the manor born. In fact, in those days, Griff, their brothers, Jonas and Dax, and he had been the poor pitiful kids, orphaned after their parents had drowned on a fishing trip when their boat had capsized.
Long before the time Wyatt had done the knocking up, he and his siblings had been living on River’s End Ranch, which was then run-down in every way possible, while being raised, in a very general sense of the word, by a mean-as-a-snake cousin. The cousin, Maude Muldoon, had taken them in only because of the monthly social security checks paid out since they were orphans. The state had allowed that because they’d apparently thought Maude having a uterus and some shared DNA were ample qualifications for raising four grieving boys.
Now Wyatt owned Maude’s ranch, which he’d bought by paying off the back taxes after she’d died, and over the past decade, he’d built it into something that took him way, way out of the poor-pitiful-kid income bracket. He didn’t have more money than God, but he likely had more funds than plenty of the Parkmans did.
And he had the ranch.
It was the lottery of pipe dreams for him because it was big, profitable and incredibly beautiful. There were lots of pretty ranches in and around Last Ride, but he’d always thought River’s End had gotten the long end of the stick in that particular department. The narrow Rocky River with its clear blue water coiled and cut through the pastures like a Wish You Were Here picture on a postcard.
Well, he was here. And it was his. That was one wish he could tick off his bucket list.
“I just want to know your ground rules for the report I’ll be writing about Griff,” Nola went on, funneling in more chips and washing them down with an orange soda. She might be thirty-three now, but she had the taste buds of a twelve-year-old.
“Well, sure as heck don’t mention that he made a habit of doing the nasty with your sister Lily,” he said right off the top of his head. “Learning about that would give your grandparents a stroke.” The couple was well into their late eighties and the very definition of old money, old school.
Nola made a sound of agreement. “Best to leave out Lily’s and Griff’s underage drinking, too. And that time Griff gave her so many hickeys that she went through a tube of concealer a day for an entire week just to cover them up.”
True. There were just some things family members didn’t need to know. In fact, he was betting that was something Evangeline and her snooty parents wouldn’t want to have anywhere in their memory banks. Evangeline was already dealing with the fact that none of her daughters had chosen a life of service, what with Lily raising horses, Nola with her glass workshop and Lorelei owning and running the shop that sold Nola’s glass creations. At least with Nola there was the artist factor, but with Lily’s knack for breeding quarter horses, Wyatt considered her an artist as well.
“What are Lily’s ground rules?” he asked.
Nola shook her head. “Haven’t had a chance to ask her yet. She’s tied up with some business stuff. But I’ll check first chance.” She paused and nudged him with her elbow in what he recognized as a gesture of comfort. Attempted comfort, anyway. “What about you? How much is it going to eat away at you to have the town talking about Griff again?”
The eating away would be huge, along with bringing back the mother lode of bad memories. But that wasn’t what he told Nola. No need to make her feel worse about this than she already did. Added to that, the timing sucked with their annual pity party only two weeks away. “You could maybe do the research fast,” he suggested. “Just like ripping off a bandage. Then people can move on and talk about something else.”
She made a sound of agreement. “News of this will stir up the Sherlock’s Snoops,” Nola pointed out.
It sure would, but then, it didn’t take much to stir up that lot. They were basically a group of nosy people who had way too much time on their hands and fancied themselves to be Sherlock Holmes. And when Griff’s life had ended one pretty spring evening when he’d been just nineteen, the Sherlock’s Snoops had refused to accept that it was anything but foul play.
Wyatt didn’t want to believe there’d been foul play or suicide, but each time he had to deal with memories of his brother, he slid into a dark hole. A hole that seemed to get darker and deeper each time he went there, so he’d pulled back and stopped taking their calls or reading their emails. He’d also tried, as much as possible, not to think about it. “When I come back for our noncelebration in two weeks, I can let you know how the research on Griff is going,” Nola continued, then paused. “If that’s what you want.”
That would make for one miserable visit since it’d be a double punch to the gut. DNA-only, Wyatt reminded himself. He didn’t have a mantra that worked for Griff, though.
“I’ll want to know,” he assured her. He didn’t. That was a big-assed lie, but it wasn’t right to put all of this on her shoulders, especially since Nola didn’t want this any more than he did.
“Monkey balls,” Nola muttered. Her version of profanity, something she’d started shortly after Lily’s daughter, Nola’s niece, had started repeating everything she’d heard her beloved aunt say.
Nola went quiet, staring out at the pasture while she sipped more of her orange soda. Wyatt could hear the carbonated bubbles pinging against the inside of the metal can, could smell the fruity scent mix with the grass and sandwich he’d yet to eat. Picnic smells for a nonpicnic mood.
“Why couldn’t I have been matched up with the tombstone of somebody with no connection to us?” Nola complained. “Or somebody fun like that woman who used to live behind the motorcycle repair shop?”
“The one who raised pygmy goats and dressed them up,” he remarked. She’d gained some fame with her pygmy pair reenacting Star Trek’s Spock and Captain Kirk. A San Antonio newspaper had run a story on it.
“Exactly! Her or Ella Lou Devers, who claimed she’d had Al Capone’s love child. I heard they found all kinds of interesting porn in her house after she passed.”
Wyatt looked at her. “If you want to research porn, all you have to do is turn on your computer.”
Nola shook her head. “Not the same. The cheap thrill comes from running across it unexpectedly when it’s supposed to be secret. Speaking of the unexpected and secrets, look what I found the other day.” She pulled out an envelope from her back pocket and handed it to him.
He opened it, looked in and had a holy hell moment when he spotted the pictures that’d been taken a lifetime ago with an instant camera. Specifically, nearly naked pictures of Nola and him.
“Why the heck would you keep these?” he snarled, but since he wasn’t blind and was a guy, he knew why. Because this was about that cheap-thrill stuff she’d just mentioned. This was about seeing Nola pose for him while wearing only panties and a smile.
Since she would have been only sixteen at the time, it felt a little pervy to look at them, but then he flipped to one of his sixteen-year-old self. He’d been trying to show off muscles he hadn’t had yet on that rangy body.
He continued to flip through and found one of them French-kissing while Nola was also trying to push the button on the camera. They were off-center and too close to the lens, but he didn’t get a pervy feeling this time. It was a punch-to-the-gut reminder that he’d kissed her like that often. Had put his hands on every inch of her body.
But that had ended after she’d gotten pregnant.
And, sticking to the promise she’d made to her grandparents, Nola hadn’t kissed or touched him since. At the time, it had seemed like the right decision. Still probably was. Being together like that would no doubt make them think of their hearts being ripped apart because of the DNA-only they’d had to give up.
“It was interesting to see us like that,” Nola went on. “And I had to take a really long, cold shower after I looked at them awhile.” She laughed. “After I kept thinking about them.”
He’d be taking some cold showers, too. And would be thinking about them as well.
“I figure I shouldn’t keep these,” she went on, and he noted her breathing was a little heavier now. Or maybe that was his. “After all, someday someone might be researching me for the Last Ride Society, and I wouldn’t want this included. Would you?”
It sounded like such an innocent, no-brainer question, but hell, here he was, looking at the nearly naked pictures now, knowing that he should stop so he wouldn’t have the images of her small perfect breasts in his head.
Too late.
The images were there.
“Would you?” she repeated. This time it sounded dirty, and when he looked at her, he spotted the tiny crumb of potato chip on her bottom lip. It was just perched there, practically begging Wyatt to remove it.
With his tongue.
In that instant, Wyatt knew he was going to make a mistake. One that he was one hundred percent sure he’d regret.
That didn’t stop him.
Praise:
"Clear off space on your keeper shelf, Fossen has arrived."—Lori Wilde, New York Times bestselling author"Delores Fossen takes you on a wild Texas ride with a hot cowboy."—B.J. Daniels, New York Times bestselling author
"Overall, this romance is a little sweet and a little salty-and a lot sexy!"—RT Book Reviews on Texas-Sized Trouble
"Fossen certainly knows how to write a hot cowboy, and when she turns her focus to Dylan Granger...crank up the air-conditioning!"—RT Book Reviews on Lone Star Blues
"An amazing, breathtaking and vastly entertaining family saga, filled with twists and unexpected turns, cowboy fiction at its best."—Books and Spoons on The Last Rodeo
"This is much more than a romance."—RT Book Reviews on Branded as Trouble
No comments:
Post a Comment