Rugged Cowboy - Elana Johnson Page 0,4

under this intense sun.

She didn’t care. Or maybe she did.

Jess wasn’t entirely sure what was running through her body. Attraction? Could that be true?

“Dad?”

“Let’s go,” Dallas said. “You’ll have to lead us to the stables though.” He looked at Jess. “We don’t know where they are.”

A boy that stood to his shoulder came to his side, as well as a little girl. Jess hadn’t even seen them in her haste to get out to the stables.

These were brand new cowgirl boots that she’d bought specifically for the wedding, and they had no traction on the bottom. A wet floor had taken her down, and humiliation started to rise from the soles of her feet.

She left the West Wing, already too hot so that when she took in a lung full of the September air, she almost passed out from heat exhaustion.

“What’s your name?” Dallas asked, and Jess realized all of her good sense had fled the moment she’d slipped on the floor. Maybe she’d hit her head too hard. As if on cue, the back of her skull sent a dull ache toward the front.

“Oh, uh, Jessica,” she said. “Morales.”

“These are my kids,” he said. “Thomas and Remmy.”

“Daddy, I can’t keep up,” the little girl said, and Dallas slowed down.

Jess did not. She really had to get Marshmallow Crème and Texas Tyrant saddled and decorated for the wedding. Nate and Ginger weren’t doing anything very traditionally, including the casual lunch they’d had before the wedding, and they were riding horses down the aisle instead of having Ginger’s father walk her toward a waiting Nate.

Jess had done horseback weddings before, and she knew how to braid manes and tails, weave in flowers, and balance crowns on the horse’s heads to make them a beautiful addition to the ceremony.

She’d gone to town to get the flowers, and she’d missed most of the lunch. Thankfully, the flowers waited for her in a cooler in the stables, and she just needed to get there.

She’d bathed Marshmallow and Tyrant that morning, and they still waited in the wash bay.

“Hey,” she said to them, always better able to relate to horses than people. Her disastrous relationship with Spencer proved that. And the brief relationship she’d tried with a man named Preston before that. And the boyfriend she’d had before that? They’d only dated for a week before everything fell apart.

Jess frowned at the track her mind took. She’d never dwelt much on the barren wasteland that was her love life. She didn’t like acknowledging and facing her failures, and the fact was, she’d failed with every man she’d ever tried to get close to.

“I think there’s something broken inside me,” she whispered to the cream-colored horse. Marshmallow Crème had beautiful, long lashes and a supremely calm demeanor. Jess had loved her from birth, and she’d raised her the past three years for just this moment when she would carry Ginger down the aisle toward her happily-ever-after.

“All right,” Dallas said, stepping to her side. “Tell us what to do.”

Annoyance sang through Jess, but she had barked at him to help her. “If you’ll grab that cooler, I’ll start braiding.” She looked at him, which bordered on dangerous. He was extremely good-looking, and though Jess had just bowed out of a relationship with Spencer a couple of weeks ago, she wondered if she could ask Dallas to dinner.

He has two kids, she reminded herself as she turned Marshmallow around. Not that she didn’t want children. But she barely knew how to take care of herself, and she’d never had a relationship for longer than two months. So the thought of getting to know Dallas and two children was so far outside of her realm of reality.

She tethered Marshmallow and moved back to her tail.

“What are you going to do?” Remmy asked, and Jess smiled down at the little girl.

“I’m going to braid her tail,” she said, starting to part the hair. “And we’re going to weave in ribbons and flowers. She’s going to carry the bride for the wedding.”

It was all so romantic, and Jess longed for a horseback wedding of her own. She’d have to figure out how to have a boyfriend for longer than a couple of months, though.

So it was probably hopeless to even think about something like riding a horse toward her anxious groom.

She focused on her work and asked Remmy for the flowers when she needed them. Dallas fed them to his daughter, and she didn’t go more than a few feet from