is changing too,” she said. “We’re getting the Carrigan Clinic built, and soon there’ll be a police station too.” She glanced at Lane. “The Roy Price Memorial Building, named after my stepdad. And there’s one other thing that’s changing.” She scanned the crowd, then focused on Lane as she delivered the last line of her speech.
“In about six months, the population will be two hundred forty-six.” She put a hand on her belly and waited for the news to sink in.
The crowd caught on right away, whooping and cheering, but Lane stood as if he was frozen to the ground despite the summer heat.
“Two hundred forty-six?” he said as the cheers died down.
“Two hundred forty-six,” she said. “And number two hundred forty-six is going to be a little Carrigan cowboy. Or maybe a cowgirl.”
He took a step forward, still looking stunned, and then a smile spread across his face and he swept her into his arms. She clasped her hands around his neck and he lifted her into the air. She watched the landscape whirl past as he spun her in a circle, the landscape and then the crowd, a sea of smiling faces. Her family.
He set her down and Emmy handed her an enormous pair of silver scissors that glinted in the sunlight. With Lane’s arms draped over her shoulders, she snipped the red ribbon and stepped away.
As the bow unfurled and the ribbon fell, she and Lane stepped through the opening and they each grabbed a waiting shovel. As the blades dug into the hard Wyoming earth, she felt like she was breaking ground on much more than a medical clinic or even a new era for Two Shot.
She was breaking ground on a whole new life.
Read on for an excerpt from
Cowboy Trouble
Available now from
Sourcebooks Casablanca
A chicken will never break your heart.
Not that you can’t love a chicken. There are some people in this world who can love just about anything.
But a chicken will never love you back. When you look deep into their beady little eyes, there’s not a lot of warmth there—just an avarice for worms and bugs and, if it’s a rooster, a lot of suppressed anger and sexual frustration. They don’t return your affection in any way.
Expectations, relationship-wise, are right at rock bottom.
That’s why Libby Brown decided to start a chicken farm. She wanted some company, and she wanted a farm, but she didn’t want to go getting attached to things like she had in the past.
She’d been obsessed with farms since she was a kid. It all started with her Fisher Price Farmer Joe Play Set: a plastic barn, some toy animals, and a pair of round-headed baby dolls clutching pitchforks like some simple-minded version of American Gothic.
A Fisher Price life was the life for her.
Take Atlanta—just give her that countryside.
***
Libby had her pickup half unloaded when her new neighbor showed up. She didn’t see him coming, so he got a prime view of her posterior as she bent over the tailgate, wrestling with the last of her chrome dinette chairs. The chair was entangled in the electric cord from the toaster, so he got a prime introduction to her vocabulary too.
“Howdy,” he said.
Howdy? She turned to face him and stifled a snort.
Halloween was three months away, but this guy was ready with his cowboy costume. Surely no one actually wore chaps in real life, even in Wyoming. His boots looked like the real thing, though; they were worn and dirty as if they’d kicked around God-knows-what in the old corral, and his gray felt Stetson was all dented, like a horse had stepped on it. A square, stubbled chin gave his face a masculine cast, but there was something soft about his mouth that added a hint of vulnerability.
She hopped down from the tailgate. From her perch on the truck, he’d looked like the Marlboro Man on a rough day, but now that they were on the same level, she could see he was kind of cute—like a young Clint Eastwood with a little touch of Elvis.
“Howdy,” he said again. He actually tipped his hat and she almost laughed for the first time in a month.
“I’m Luke Rawlins, from down the road,” he continued. The man obviously had no idea how absurd he looked, decked out like a slightly used version of Hopalong Cassidy. “Thought maybe you’d need some help moving in. And I brought you a casserole—Chicken Artichoke Supreme. It’s my specialty.” He held out a massive ceramic dish with the