Her Steeple Ridge Cowboys

Chapter 1-2

“So this is the house.” Missy indicated the white, two-story building that had first captured his attention as he’d looked at properties online. He’d never lived in a house that didn’t share a wall or a floor or a ceiling with another person, and this country house had charmed him from the moment he laid eyes on it.

“Jamie said a cleaning crew would be here today, so you can probably move in tomorrow.”

“Oh, I’m not going to live in the house,” he said, some of his earlier frustration and embarrassment at being corralled by a dog ebbing away. He opened the back door of his truck and lifted his windbreaker from the seat. After shrugging into it, he relaxed.

Without exhaust fumes, honking cars, and the pressures of running his multi-billion-dollar technology firm, relaxing had become infinitely easier. Which was why he’d bought Steeple Ridge Farm in the first place.

Somewhere to start over, he thought as Missy gaped at him.

Somewhere to start over“You’re not going to live in the house?”

“I bought a place in town.” He didn’t need to explain himself, not to her.

“You did?” She blinked, her long lashes distracting him. “Why would you buy a place in town when there’s a house here?”

Or maybe he did need to explain himself. Maybe everyone in town would ask the same question. “I wanted to live in town,” he said. “I knew there was a house here, but I figured I might not want to live on a farm.”

She stared at him like he’d just sprouted horns. “Why’d you buy the farm then?”

“I wanted it.” He gazed steadily back at her, almost daring her to ask him another question. Something intimate flowed between them, and he found he couldn’t look away from the smattering of freckles across her cheekbones, the intensity in her seafoam eyes, the beauty in the lines of her face.

She half coughed, half scoffed and stepped back, breaking the moment between them. He exhaled, not quite sure when he’d started holding his breath.

“Anyway.” She indicated the barn on his right. “That’s the back barn. There are twenty matted box stalls there, two tack rooms, and some storage areas.”

He said, “Mm hm,” like he knew what a matted box stall was. He didn’t, but he’d brought his laptop, and as soon as he could get on the Internet, he’d figure it out. That was what Tucker Jenkins always did—he figured things out. That’s why he’d founded a company while he was still in college that had grown into the second-largest developer of digital apps. It’s why his software—a program he’d written and developed from his apartment in New York City—sold almost a billion dollars annually to video game companies, phone conglomerates, and online retailers.

Not your company anymore, Tucker, he told himself. After ten years, a failed marriage, and more stress than any thirty-two-year-old should have to endure, he’d sold everything he’d thought he ever wanted—and bought a farm in rural Vermont.

He was only five or six hours away from the city—he could go back and get his fix of the fast life any time he wanted. His company also had a branch in Montreal, and that was only two hours north of Island Park, his new home in the middle of nowhere. He’d been to Montreal many times and found the town quaint, and charming, and slow.

Slow was what he really wanted. He craved slow. Wanted to wake up when he woke up, maybe ride a horse, get lunch at a diner that served breakfast all day, and drive on roads that frequently got blocked by two trucks that had been going in opposite directions when their drivers stopped to chat.

Of course, Tucker had never ridden a horse before, or driven a truck until last week, or even eaten breakfast in the past five years.

But all that was about to change. He took a deep breath of air scented like grass and sunshine and . . . he glanced at Missy. Flowers. She smelled like flowers and soap. He caught himself gazing at her mere moments before she slid him a look out of the corner of her eye.

“Did you want to see the horses?” she asked, a glint in her light-green eyes. That sparkle said she knew exactly who he was—someone who’d never seen a horse in real life, if he didn’t count the police horses he’d glimpsed in Times Square. And he didn’t count those.

“Definitely,” he said with too much confidence. “You said we have thirty-three right now?”

“We’ll start with one,” she said. “He’s mine. He’s a quarter horse mixed with an Appaloosa, and his name is Diamond King.”

“Diamond King,” Tucker said, finally able to focus on the conversation, the farm, the woman. He needed to leave his past in the past. Needed to find a way to be happy again. As he followed Missy through the barn and out into the open land, he wondered if simply owning a horse farm would be enough.

She stopped and leaned up against a white board fence and called to the beautiful creature grazing a hundred yards away. The horse lifted its head and came plodding toward her. The closer it got, the more Tucker wanted to retreat. After all, the dog now snoozing at Missy’s feet had caged him in a corner of the yard in seconds—what would this horse do?

Missy turned and laughed at him. “Come on, City Boy. He won’t bite.”

Tucker realized he had backed up a few steps, and embarrassment raced through him. “City Boy?” he asked as he rejoined her. He towered a foot taller than her and probably could’ve snapped her in half with his bare hands. Yet she possessed a quiet strength that interested him—called to him a way nothing had for years.

She nudged him in the chest with her shoulder as she fondled the horse’s mane. “Don’t worry, Tucker. We’ll get you countried right up. Won’t we, boy?”

At her playful tone, a spring of desire for Missy began to bubble in Tucker’s chest. He reached out to touch the horse. When the animal didn’t rear up and snap at him, he relaxed all the way, maybe for the first time since he’d graduated from high school.

It felt nice. Real nice.