The Cowboy Earns a Bride (Cowboys of Chance Creek Book 8) Read online

  Beauty pageants. Who knew about beauty pageants?

  He let the letter fall from his hand.

  Rose Bellingham. He’d bet anything she had the skinny on them. She was close to Mia’s age, too.

  He’d call Rose tomorrow and ask a few questions. Better yet, he’d head over to the Cruz ranch to talk with her face-to-face. He let his head fall back against the cushions and shut his eyes, just for a moment. Tonight he needed to head to the Cruz ranch to talk to Mia. Maybe she’d have calmed down by now. She couldn’t stay mad at him forever.

  He hoped.

  A second later, he was asleep.

  Marry him. The note she’d received was still on Mia’s mind when she returned from work late the following afternoon. Why should she marry him? Luke hadn’t even bothered to stop by and talk last night like she’d suggested when he came to the restaurant yesterday afternoon. Apparently, sorting out their differences wasn’t all that important to him.

  She shook her head as she made her way up to her room. Alone in the big house, she was all too aware of the many empty rooms around hers. Ethan and Autumn still made their home in the converted bunkhouse on the property. They hoped to build a family suite on the first floor of the guesthouse, but hadn’t earned enough from running it yet to justify the cost.

  She was about to descend to the main floor and make use of the wide screen television there when she saw movement outside and went to the window to see who it was.

  It was Luke. But instead of coming to the guesthouse, he was walking toward another cabin on the property—the one where Cab and Rose lived. As partners in the ranch, they’d moved onto the property a few months ago. Mia felt a pang of jealousy that they’d invited Luke for dinner and not her. No one in their right mind would invite both of them when they were fighting, but if the couple was going to choose one of them to cheer up, shouldn’t it be her? She was good friends with Rose.

  Luke wasn’t that close with Cab, was he?

  She stood on her tiptoes and watched Luke disappear among the trees that separated Cab and Rose’s cabin from the guesthouse. Through the branches, the small house blazed with light and looked cozy as could be in the dark, snowy landscape. That’s how Luke’s cabin would look if she still lived there with him. For the first time her anger diminished enough for her to wonder if she’d been wrong to leave.

  No. She wasn’t wrong. He’d said horrible things to her.

  She turned away from the window, wishing more than anything for someone’s company. When her phone rang a few minutes later, she grabbed it and held it to her ear.

  “Hello?”

  “Have you lost your mind?”

  She stifled a groan. Her mother.

  “It isn’t bad enough you’re pregnant with a married man’s baby? Now you’ve thrown over Luke, too? Are you going to sleep with the entire town?”

  “Only the male half.” Shoot, had she actually said that out loud? Yes, she had. And her mother was not amused.

  “You get over there and beg him to take you back. He was willing to make an honest woman of you, something that Scranton man certainly wasn’t. You won’t get another chance like this, believe me. You’re used goods, Mia Start. No man’s going to want you now.”

  Mia clicked the phone off, the first time she’d ever hung up on her mother. Used goods. What was this, the nineteenth century?

  She paced the living room in the Cruz guesthouse, too agitated to watch television now. It all came down to gossip, didn’t it? Her mother didn’t want to be shunned at her church. Luke didn’t want to be talked about by his friends. Now she was supposed to be too embarrassed to show her face.

  And she was too embarrassed to speak up about the incident with Warner. Too embarrassed to speak up and maybe stop it from happening to someone else. She sat down on the couch as painful memories from the past swirled through her mind. She remembered the way the other girls at the pageant had looked at her, the way they’d repeated the rumors that she’d tried to trade sexual favors in order to win. The way everyone had retreated from her when she walked into a room—as if she carried a fatal disease that they might catch.

  She stood up and strode to the kitchen. Maybe cooking her dinner would dispel both the memories and the pain. She wasn’t ready to speak up about Warner and expose herself to that kind of treatment all over again.

  She just couldn’t. Not now.

  “Thanks for dinner,” Luke said as he pushed back from the table. Fried chicken, mashed potatoes, gravy, and green beans. What more could a man ask from a meal? Except to have it served by his fiancée, not his friend.

  “No problem.” Rose smiled at him. She and Cab had welcomed him into their house and invited him to dinner as soon as he showed up at their door. Normally he considered Cab more Rob’s friend than his own, but the sheriff was a good host and had enough stories to tell to make any social occasion an interesting one.

  “How’s Mia doing?” Cab asked, finishing his own meal.

  Luke shrugged. “That’s what I came to talk about. Is there something I should know about her past? About the time when she was doing those pageants?”

  Rose looked surprised. “Pageants? That was a long time ago. She stopped doing them when she was about fifteen, right?”

  “I don’t know. Can’t say I was paying attention back then.” He grinned, relaxed by the good meal and good company. “Would have been pretty creepy if I had been, seeing as how I was about twenty-five.” Luke went on to describe the weird note he received and didn’t miss the look that passed between Cab and Rose. “What?”

  Rose shrugged and looked uncomfortable. “Well, I wasn’t friends with Mia either, back then—there are a couple of years between us—but I knew her, and those pageants were icky if you ask me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Rose took a moment to answer. “I guess a lot of the girls wanted to be there, but there were others who competed because their mothers wanted them to, you know? And I think Mia was one of them.”

  Luke didn’t know Enid Start all that well. She was short, like Mia, and decidedly middle-aged. In her conservative clothes and understated makeup, she kind of faded into the background, so it hadn’t occurred to him that she would be the motivation behind Mia doing pageants.

  “Mia didn’t want to do them?”

  “I’m not sure I’m explaining this right,” Rose said, offering him a basket of biscuits. “Little kids don’t sign themselves up for pageants, right? Someone has to do that for them. Mia started really young. And I get why a parent would do it, you know? You get to dress your kid up and show them off, but by the time they’re preteens, it’s a little dicey. You have to ask yourself why a mother would want her daughter to stand in front of a crowd in a fancy dress—and then a bikini—to be judged on how her body looks.”

  “Lots of girls do beauty pageants. It doesn’t hurt them.” Luke had grown up seeing articles in the local newspaper about them. He knew plenty of girls who had participated.

  “No, you’re right. It’s probably fine for most girls, but I don’t think it’s good for all of them. For some it’s too much pressure. I mean, what kind of a message does it send?

  “The kind of message that gets women killed,” Cab put in darkly.

  Rose shot him a look. “That’s going too far. Beauty pageants don’t lead to murder—but they can lead to bad body images.”

  “When you train a woman to need approval or to determine her self-worth that way, you train her to be vulnerable.” Cab was adamant.

  “I’m not disputing that,” Rose said. “But back to your question, Luke. Mia’s mom put far more emphasis on those pageants than she did school. She made it pretty clear: Mia’s job was to look good enough for a man to want to support her.”

  “Well, it worked,” Luke joked. “She looks great and I do want to support her. Nothing but the best for my Mia.”

  Rose shook her head. “You’re missing the point. It’s Enid who thinks she should trade looks for securi
ty. Not Mia.”

  “I don’t want to trade anything,” Luke said. “I just want to marry her.”

  “Then maybe you better start by figuring out why Mia quit those pageants—because she did, all of a sudden. There were some rumors, too—nasty ones.” Rose stabbed a piece of chicken so hard her fork scraped across the plate.

  “What kind of rumors?”

  “I hate to even repeat them, since they’ve finally died down over the years.” Rose took in his expression and sighed. “There were rumors Mia offered to trade favors for the crown of one of the more important pageants.”

  Luke pushed back from the table. “No way. Not Mia.”

  “No. Of course not. But something happened, and whoever sent you that message wants you to know what it was. If I were you, I’d look into it.”

  A wave of defeat overtook Luke. Of course he’d look into it, but when would he have time? And what had happened to Mia when she was fifteen?

  His fists clenched under the table. He was damn sure going to find out.

  ‡

  Chapter Ten

  “Are you sure you still want to help me plan my wedding?” Rose asked the next day when Mia joined her at Linda’s Diner for a breakfast meeting. Mia had opted to hold the meeting away from both Rose’s cabin and the Cruz guesthouse, needing a change of scenery after spending the previous night wondering what Luke’s visit had entailed.

  “Of course.” But the truth was, she wanted to grill Rose about what Luke had said the night before far more than she wanted to talk about invitations.

  “Listen.” Rose cupped her mug of coffee with both hands, huddling over it as if hoping it would warm her entire body. “Luke stopped by last night. He ended up staying for dinner. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind. He’s your friend.”

  “Sort of,” Rose said. “Anyway, he asked about you.”

  “Oh?” She tried to be nonchalant. Probably failed.

  “About your pageant days.”

  Mia stilled. “Why did he want to know about that?”

  “I don’t know.” Rose took a sip of her strong, black coffee. “I might have spoken out of turn.”

  Mia’s unease deepened. Why did the pageants keep coming up suddenly? She’d put all of that behind her years ago. “What did you say?”

  “I told him your mom pushed you to do them. That maybe you would have preferred to do something else.”

  Mia wrinkled her nose. “Damn straight. I wanted to get a job so I could save up for a car. Plus…” She trailed off, not eager to talk about the rest of it.

  “Plus what?”

  “There was an… incident. A judge who got a little handsy. You know.”

  Rose pushed her cup away. “I might have mentioned that, too,” she said in a small voice.

  Mia’s heart sunk.

  “I’m sorry,” Rose rushed on. “It just came out. I didn’t think until later that maybe you hoped he didn’t know.”

  “Well, he knows now,” Mia said. She felt like a noose was tightening around her neck. She wanted to get away from the past, but it kept creeping up on her and drawing her in again.

  “What happened?”

  Mia considered refusing to talk about it, but decided to open up instead. She could use a friend’s opinion about what to do, and Rose had proved herself a true friend these last few days.

  “I was fifteen and competing in my first big pageant. I was so nervous. I wanted to win so badly. It was the one place my mom and I really connected, you know? I knew she’d be proud of me if I won, and besides—who doesn’t want to be crowned queen?”

  She took a sip of her orange juice. “Fred Warner was one of the judges. I met him in one of the practice sessions, where they tell you how the pageant will go—where to stand, and so on. He seemed ancient to me, but was probably only middle-aged. He was kind. Asked me if it was my first big pageant. Gave me some tips. He told jokes, too, and made me relax. I thought he was like any other adult I might meet—like one of my parents’ friends, or someone from church.” She swallowed hard. “But during the second practice session, he took me aside. He led me to a storeroom in the convention center where the pageant was being held. I’d seen one of the other girls come out of that room with him, so I believed him when he said he was just giving some of the better contestants some special tips.” She lowered her gaze. “You can imagine what happened next.”

  “Oh, Mia.”

  Mia pushed on. “It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. He got me in a tight clinch. His hands were everywhere—I hadn’t experienced that before; Mom kept me on a pretty tight leash up until that point. The worst was that I couldn’t get away—that he was stronger than me. I thought—I thought he’d…” She choked back a sob. “Finally, I bit him—hard. He was surprised and loosened his grip for a second. I got out of there. I ran to the washroom and cried and cried. One of the other girls found me and I made her go get my mom. I was so hysterical she had to take me home.”

  Rose didn’t say a word, just waited for the rest of it. Mia was grateful for that. If she stopped now, she didn’t think she could go on. “She didn’t believe me. She thought I was exaggerating, or… I don’t know. She didn’t want to believe—I realize that now. She didn’t want to think she’d put me in danger. She made me go back the following day.”

  “No!” Rose’s shocked exclamation made heads turn their way.

  Mia lowered her voice. “She said I had to carry through with what I’d started. She said I had an obligation.”

  “That’s insane.”

  “No.” Mia shook her head tiredly. “That’s denial. It makes us do stupid things. I’ve forgiven my mom for it. She didn’t know what to do, so she pretended nothing happened at all. And I went back. I was shaking in my boots, but I did it. Mom walked with me to the dressing room where everyone was preparing for the pageant. When I went in you could have heard a pin drop. Then the other girls started whispering.”

  Her hands were shaking as she lifted the juice to her lips again.

  “Mom got me out of there, fast—I’ll give her that much. We drove home and I never entered another pageant again. We never spoke about it again, either.”

  Rose was blinking back tears, but Mia found her own eyes strangely dry. She felt calm, too. Saying it out loud wasn’t as hard as she’d thought it would be.

  “I’m so sorry, Mia. I know it was bad, but I’m so glad it wasn’t worse.”

  “That’s the thing,” Mia said and her voice broke. “It was worse for someone else.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Warner raped one of the other girls. And he’s still on the circuit. I don’t know what to do.”

  Rose’s eyes went wide. “You have to tell someone.”

  Pain clogged Mia’s throat. There it was again—the need to haul herself before a crowd and expose her shame and humiliation. “I’m not sure I can.”

  “I know you can,” Rose said. “Mia, you are one of the bravest women I know. You can do this.”

  “Maybe.”

  “If you need someone by your side, you know I’ll be there, right?”

  “Yeah, I know that.” Rose had already stood by her when others hadn’t. “I’ll think about it, okay?”

  “Okay.” Rose gave her hand a squeeze. “Now how about those invitations you told me about?”

  “Take a look at this.” Mia pulled out her phone gratefully and showed Rose the website for a local printing company. “Here are a ton of stationary samples. If you go through and favorite some of them I’ll take a trip to the store and get real samples you can hold in your hand. I’ll drop them by later tonight.”

  “Wow—that’s great service.”

  “That’s the whole point of me being your wedding planner. I do the hard work. You get to relax and enjoy yourself.” She felt calmer now that they were on safer ground.

  “You’re going to be a genius at this.” Rose settled down to choosing her stationary.

  Mia let out a long breath. Sh
e could figure out what to do about Inez and Fred Warner another time. Right now it was her job to concentrate on Rose, and she turned to the task willingly.

  “Is this seat taken?” Cab dropped onto the bench seat next to Rose without waiting for an answer.

  “Are you going to help me pick out stationary?” Rose asked.

  “Just here for some coffee, although I wouldn’t mind a couple shots of Jack Daniel’s while I’m at it.”

  “Jack Daniel’s?” Rose checked her watch. “It’s barely eleven-thirty in the morning. Why would you want to get wasted?”

  “Because I’ve been getting honked at, whistled at and laughed at everywhere I go today. And to top it off, Marge Ransom patted my ass.”

  “Marge Ransom?” Rose cocked her head. “Isn’t she about eighty years old?”

  “Maybe she thought it was your head,” Mia said.

  Cab glared at her. “She read the sign.”

  “What sign?”

  “The one some jackass taped to the back of my cruiser.”

  “Uh-oh,” Rose said. “What did it say?”

  “Honk if you think I’m sexy. And it was duct-taped to my car. You try getting that off.”

  “Honk if you think… Oh my God, was it Jamie?”

  “Had to be. I’m telling you, he doesn’t take my godlike physique seriously.”

  “Well, I take it seriously.” Rose pecked him on the cheek. “I take it very, very seriously.”

  “You take it any way you can get it,” Cab growled, kissing her back, then seemed to remember they had company. “Sorry, Mia.”

  “That’s okay. At least someone’s getting along.”

  Cab focused on her. “Still on the outs with Luke? He cares for you a lot, you know.”

  “So everyone tells me,” Mia said, gathering her things. “Too bad he doesn’t act like it when I’m around.”