Married To The Cowboy (Love In Collin's Ranch 3) Read online

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  Married to the Cowboy

  Western Romance

  By: Veronica Wilson

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  This books's Riddle:

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  Married to the Cowboy

  Prologue

  "I swear to God, Paul, you take one step closer I'm gonna cut her throat from ear to ear!"

  Sometimes, the things you love the most come back to haunt you. In my case, they come back to kill something I loved even more.

  "Jenna... Jenna, you don't want to do this."

  "You’re making me do this!"

  There was a time in my life where I would've done anything for Jenna McClean. I would've robbed a bank, I would've run over a stray dog, I would've killed another man with my bare hands if she wanted me to. And there were a couple of times where I did things to make her happy that I've regretted my entire life. Not killing or robbing, just hurting people so she could show off to her friends how she had me wrapped around her little finger.

  But that was a lifetime ago.

  In the here and now, I wish she'd never been a part of my life. Because in the here and now, she's got a twelve-inch, razor-sharp hunting knife pressed to the throat of the love of my life, and I'm pretty sure that if Jenna doesn't get what she wants, she's going to take her away from me.

  Chapter 1

  I'll be the first to admit that I didn't want to spend my life being a rancher. Don't get me wrong—it ain't such a bad way to live, and it's how my family has lived for generations. But I think that was also what made me want to rebel against it, because it was expected of me. When I was a kid, I didn't understand why the family still ran the ranch. I mean, our family had made millions off of gold and copper claims in Arizona over the years, so that we could've lived any way we wanted to. We could've been living in a twenty million dollar mansion out in Scottsdale, spending our days getting loaded by the pool and traveling the world whenever the urge struck us. But, instead, we woke up before dawn every day to feed the steers and milk the heifers. It didn't make a damn bit of sense to me.

  "Every man has gotta have a purpose, Paul," my old man told me one chilly February pre-dawn morning while he burned down his second Winston of the day. "It's what your grandpa taught me and what his daddy taught him. And it's what I've tried to teach you and your brothers."

  Of course, the old man wasn't much for ranching, either. The fact was, my dad was a bit of an adrenaline junky, and ranch life doesn't exactly provide that kind of rush. So along with running the ranch, he was a Phoenix police officer, and when traffic stops and domestic disturbances weren't enough to keep his blood up, he ran for sheriff of the town the ranch is parked in, Apache Junction, and won by a landslide thanks to the family's reputation. Not that being the sheriff of a town that was mostly made up of retirement castles and trailer parks was much more of a gas than ranching, but the old man just so happened to become sheriff when the Hell's Angels and other various forms of white trash decided to start setting up meth labs by the dozen in our quiet little Arizona town. That gave him plenty of action, so much so that it eventually got him killed and sent me down the same road.

  But back in high school, I was a spoiled little shit. I didn't give two shits about hard work. All the ranch was was a giant weight around my shoulders. It was someplace I went to sleep and eat—anything else I had to do there was just preventing me from partying, getting laid, and playing football.

  Back then that was my main focus in life, football. I lived and breathed it. It was the one thing I wanted more than anything else in the world, and I was convinced that one day my skill and drive would take me all the way to the NFL. Now I think back on how I was back then and have a good laugh at myself, because basically every high school football player has the same pipe dream. And inevitably that dream is crushed beneath the massive heel of reality. That big old foot squashes you like a bug when you get injured so bad that there ain't a chance in hell you'll ever play again; or when you realize that virtually every high school player in the country has the exact same dream as you, and every single one of them is better than you'll ever be, and then your ego gets crushed along with your dreams and you become a beer drunk who wistfully laments the "good old days" any time he has one too many Natural Lights on a Friday night.

  Me, I consider myself one of the lucky ones. I had plenty of talent, plenty of drive and ambition, enough to get picked up by Arizona State University as a second string QB after graduation. But, in the long run, my body wasn't built for the game, and in my first ever start I got hit so hard that it cracked two vertebrae and busted a rib that then plunged into one of my lungs like a dagger. My one college appearance and it sent me to intensive care for a week and a half. I would make a full recovery and even be offered a place on the team after, but I walked away instead. The one thing my six-month-long recovery taught me was that I wasn't meant for the gridiron, and if I kept at it all that would happen to me was more pain and suffering. Besides, by that point, the old man had been killed breaking down some tweaker's door, and I wanted my own brand of revenge.

  But back in high school, all of that was a thousand miles away and I was a god. My team and classmates worshipped the very ground I walked on and I knew it. And I took full advantage of it. I ditched classes knowing that not a single one of my teachers would bust me or fail me. I treated my classmates like utter shit and made more than a few of them absolutely miserable with my bullying. I didn't care, though. Me acting like an asshole 24/7 made my teammates bray like donkeys and bolstered my teenage ego. But, despite being the king of my own little desert fiefdom, the one thing I wanted avoided me like the plague.

  Jenna McClean.

  Actually, that's not a very accurate statement. Jenna didn't avoid me, not by any means. What she did do was play with me. She toyed with my emotions, twisting and turning them around her little finger like she was playing with a piece of Silly Putty. Basically, whatever that girl wanted, I would do it without a second thought; and if you saw her back then, you'd completely understand why. Jenna was a teenage boy's wet dream. She was a homegrown Playboy centerfold—sweeping blonde hair, crystal blue eyes, a full, curvy body that radiated sex and desire from every pour. When she walked down the hall, every male head—teachers included—would turn and watch her walk by.

  We'd known one another since kindergarten, and both our families have the Gold Canyon of Arizona running through its veins. The Collins—my family—and McClean families came to Arizona in 1870. Both families bought up hundreds of acres of desert. One family thrived, while the other became dirt farmers and tent pole preachers. You can probably guess which is whi
ch.

  Not that McClean's did all that bad for themselves. Jenna's great-granddaddy had a silver tongue and the will of God pumping through his veins. His ministry traveled throughout the west coast and, of course, down south. He was big with the snake handlers and the folk who spoke in tongues. His travels were enough to keep the homestead running, more or less, but they got out of prospecting and moved into cattle ranching.

  The rivalry between the two families kicked into high gear when my granddad emptied the last of his mines and decided to go into the cattle business himself, which is how the Collins ranch came into being. Because of its creation, and because my granddad used his influence to swipe more than his fair share of the McCleans’ business away from them, tensions between the McCleans and Collinses got ugly—real ugly. My old man used to tell us stories of his uncle Frank and the McClean twins, Jasper and Derek. Frank was a bit of an asshole, the type of guy who bragged himself up as much as he could. He mostly rode his daddy's coat tails but made it out that every smart business move the ranch ever made was his idea.

  Anyway, back in the day, Apache Junction and Gold Canyon were quite literally one-horse towns. One country store, one feed store, one Woolworth's (which pissed off the country store owner to no end when it came to town), one saloon. It was pretty much impossible to not know your neighbors and an even greater impossibility to avoid your enemies, and even the people you didn't quite care for. Now, Uncle Frank, he didn't hate the McClean twins. True enough, he wasn't exactly fond of them, but from the way the old man told it Frank didn't have it in him to hate anyone. But he did like rubbing people's noses in shit (I most likely inherited this unholy trait from him), especially the McClean twins.

  One cold November night in 1948, the three of them were drinking pretty heavy all night long. Frank was talking the family ranch up pretty big all night, especially bragging up the fact that they'd grabbed a couple of heavy hitters from Texas and Kansas City. Between the two of them, they were bringing in ten thousand steers. Losing those two clients took a significant chunk out of the McCleans’ asses, which meant the McClean granddaddy was going have to hit the open road again preaching hellfire and brimstone. At around 2 am, the McClean twins drank up enough courage that they didn’t want to put up with eating anymore of Uncle Frank's shit. They pulled him outside, beat the piss out of him, and then chained him to the bumper of their Ford and went for a ride. You can probably guess what happened after that.

  Needless to say, the McClean twins were arrested, tried, and then put in front of a firing squad. After that the Collinses avoided the McCleans, and the McCleans avoided the Collinses, and each did the best they could to stay on their tracts of land. And if by some chance members of the family crossed paths, they made sure to walk the other way.

  Personally, I think this was the reason I wanted Jenna so much. Forget her face, her body, the way she moved; she was forbidden fruit, and it made me want her all the more because I knew being with her would piss off my old man to no end.

  Chapter 2

  And maybe that was also the reason why Jenna loved to toy with me—because she knew that, no matter how much I wanted her, my family would never approve of her and her family would never approve of me. Not that it mattered to her one way or another. Jenna was a daddy's girl who did whatever her father told her to do. Her teenage rebellious streak drew her to me, but she would never let us become serious out of fear she'd disappoint her old man—and possibly disgrace the family—by bedding down with a Collins (which she did on more than a few occasions). But without a doubt she knew how to play me.

  After the first time we made love, she knew she could do whatever she wanted with me. It was like she was a voodoo priestess and I was her zombie slave. If someone at school offended her some way, she'd set me on them like a rabid dog. I remember this one kid named Chris Carter during our senior year. He was kind of an odd guy, liked to draw and read, kept to himself for the most part. I never paid much attention to him until he pissed Jenna off somehow. One afternoon after practice we'd driven up to Tortilla Flats. We were making out hot and heavy and I thought she was going to give it up to me again. It had been three months since we'd made loved for the first time, and believe it or not, despite my utter devotion to her, we only had sex once in the entire six years of our "relationship". Yeah, I was a complete fool for her.

  But instead of stripping down and letting me have my way with her, she pushed me off and started talking shit about Chris. She talked about how weird she thought he was, about how she thought he'd be the type of kid who would come to school and start shooting it up for no reason other than he was a complete psycho. She went on and on, and as she kept talking, I kept nodding and agreeing with her, hoping that she'd finally shut up and start taking off her clothes. But, nope, she just kept talking and I kept agreeing. Soon enough, I was so worked up by Jenna that I was almost ready to drive straight over to Chris's house, march straight there, and then beat the living hell out of him. I didn't do that, of course. But the next day at school, I started making that poor kid's life a living hell.

  Every day for six months, I visited some cruelty or other on Chris Carter. Thinking back on it now, some of the things that I did to that poor guy make me shudder. I mean, he didn't do nothing to nobody, and I still can't understand the reason why Jenna had a bone to pick with him. I guess it just made her feel better about herself to see me torture the poor kid. But all the things I did to him, he didn't deserve a single damn one of them and I wish I could take it all back. I'm one of the lucky few bullies who eventually get to make amends for his past misdeeds.

  Back when I had given up on college and was just starting in with the Phoenix Police Department, I ended up pulling Chris over doing ninety miles an hour in a Porsche 211. He was quick to make his mark after high school, creating a piece of software that would eventually be bought by one of the big software companies for millions. When I pulled him over and asked for his license and proof of insurance, he handed it over to me shaking like a leaf. When I read the name, I completely understood why he was so scared. I'm sure he was having flashbacks of the beatings I'd dished out. Instead of ticketing Chris for excessive speed, I asked him to have a cup of coffee with me and apologized for all the things I'd done. By that time Jenna's spell over me was completely broken, and I realized what a shitheel I'd been to the guy—to everyone I knew back then, really.

  The thing that drove the final wedge between me and Jenna happened when I had almost fully recovered from my football injuries. I was so full of rage and anger at the time that I hardly knew what to do with myself. I felt weak, powerless, and absolutely rudderless. This was, of course, when Jenna started nosing around again. It had been a few years since I'd last seen her. Despite the time and distance, she was never far from my mind. I heard things about her from high school friends; stories about her partying hard, going to community college off and on, and a long series of lovers. In my blindness, I kept thinking that all the guys she was sleeping with were nothing but pale replacements for me, and she was just biding her time until I came back into her life.

  But then I got hurt, and day after day in the hospital I hoped that she would come and see me. It was the same when I was back on the ranch, still recovering. But I never saw hide nor hair of her. Then the old man bought it, and I was suddenly in more pain than I thought humanly possible. Three days after his funeral was when she popped up on my doorstep, her eyes shining, her entire being seeming to radiate this strange glow. She was almost exactly as I remembered her. Sure, she was a little older, a little rougher around the edges, but she was still the same Jenna in my eyes. She practically fell into my arms when I answered the door, smothering me with kisses without saying a single word as she pushed me inside and began pulling my clothes off, not caring if anyone was in the house (thank God there wasn't. My brother Henry was somewhere drinking his pain away out in the desert, and my oldest brother Sam was back down in Tucson strongarming Mexicans with the Border Patrol) just nee
ding me more than anything else in the world.

  We made love for hours, her body like a ceaseless wind-up toy wanting more and more of me. In those short few hours, all the years between us seemed to fade to nothing, as if we hadn't spent a single moment apart. After I was finally spent and passed out from exhaustion, I woke up a couple of hours later and discovered Jenna rifling through my wallet. She'd also stuffed her purse full of my mother's jewelry, keepsakes that my father had held onto to remember her by. Catching her doing these things, taking these treasures, simultaneously broke my heart and hardened me beyond repair. I finally saw this woman, this broken girl, for what she was: a user. She had always been one and always would be, and she was only capable of loving one person and one person only: herself.

  I exploded in a rage, shouting at her and dragging her out of my house and tossing her into the dust and grime of the driveway, telling her I never wanted to see her again. It was at that very moment, as I slammed the door behind me, that I decided not only that I was done with Jenna, but also with love or any semblance of a normal life. I became oddly peaceful and content, filled with purpose. At that moment, I decided my only true path in life was vengeance and justice, and I knew that, in order to follow this path, I couldn't have any attachments; I needed to be alone so that no one could ever hurt me again.