Read The Cowboy Takes a Bride for Free Online

lost Dutch.
    And damn if the awful cycle hadn’t started all over again.
    Now, he hung on by a thread. Dangling. The only thing keeping him sewed together was that stallion and the certainty that together, they could take the top spot in the Fort Worth Triple Crown Futurity. At this point, his only goal was to honor Dutch’s memory.
    Now there was a fly in the ointment.
    Mariah Callahan.
    Joe paced the kitchen floor, hands clasped behind his back, the thought of Mariah suddenly making him restless, impatient. He didn’t want her here. He hoped Ila was right. That she would win their bet. He wanted Mariah gone because the woman stirred something in him, something more than irritation and inconvenience, something he didn’t want to think about too hard in case he found he liked it. He didn’t want to like her. Didn’t want to have any feelings for her beyond indifference. Because feelings just led to pain.
    On his sixth pass in front of the window, Joe caught sight of something from his peripheral vision. Something that stalled him in midstep.
    The two top boards on the back side of the corral fence had been knocked down. No Miracle in sight.
    The ornery stallion had broken out again, and Joe knew exactly where he was headed.
    M emories pummeled Mariah as she climbed up the precarious wooden porch riddled with termite holes. She, Dutch, and Cassie had lived in similar hovels just like this, one after another, quick as the turn of a radio dial. The location changed, but the houses were all the same—dinky, desperate, and dilapidated.
    A horseshoe hung over the front door. The ends pointed upward so all the luck wouldn’t run out.
    “Didn’t help, did it, Dutch?” she mumbled past the lump clogging her throat.
    The only thing that had changed from her childhood was that her father owned the property instead of renting it.
    She knew without even entering it that the horse barn would be stocked with the finest equestrian equipment that money could buy. Dutch had been the kind of man who’d buy a new blanket for his horse before buying new shoes for his child. She recalled the vicious fights he and Cassie had over money. Dutch arguing that he had to spend money to make money. Whereas Cassie would point out he cared more about his damn horses than he did his family. Dutch would counter that the horses were what put food on the table.
    That had been his delusion. His self-defense. That his constant chasing of a dream would eventually end in success. Clearly it had not.
    Mariah sighed, braced herself for what she would find inside, and opened the door.
    Her ballet slippers made a shuffling sound against the worn hardwood. Newspapers, horse magazines, and old clothing littered the floor—faded jeans, stained Western shirts, scuffed boots, athletic socks, battered cowboy hats, red bandanas.
    A brand new cutting saddle sat on the stained, floral-print, 1970s-era sofa like a crown on the head of a rag doll. It surprised Mariah that she could identify a cutting saddle. More memories flashed through her.
    “Look here, Flaxey,” she recalled Dutch saying to her one day when he’d taken her with him to pick out a saddle. He took her little hand in his and ran it over the saddle’s seat. “A good cutting saddle allows you to ‘sit the stop.’ Do you know what that means?”
    She’d shaken her head. She didn’t understand, but it seemed to matter to her daddy, so she listened real hard.
    “It means the seat should lie close to the horse’s back. You want as close as you can get. The pocket should be in the middle of the seat. See here.” He pointed to another saddle. “This one sits too far back. It’ll force the rider against the cantle and put him up on the swells.”
    Mariah hadn’t known what he’d been talking about, but she made note of the lesson and now, twenty years later, it came rushing back. All this time she thought she’d forgotten her father’s early lessons on horse care, but they weren’t gone.