The Cowboy's Lesson In Love

Learning to love again

Is his hardest assignment

Ever since Clint Washburn’s wife abandoned him, the stoic rancher has built up defenses to keep everyone in Forever, Texas, out—including his young son. Now the boy’s teacher, Wynona Chee, is questioning his parenting! And Clint is experiencing feelings he thought long dead. Still, Wynona has her homework cut out for her if she’s going to teach this cowboy to love again.

USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–winning author MARIE FERRARELLA has written more than two hundred and seventy-five books for Mills & Boon, some under the name Marie Nicole. Her romances are beloved by fans worldwide. Visit her website, www.marieferrarella.com.

Also by Marie Ferrarella

Wish Upon a Matchmaker

Dating for Two

Diamond in the Ruff

Her Red-Carpet Romance

Coming Home for Christmas

Dr. Forget-Me-Not

Twice a Hero, Always Her Man

Meant to Be Mine

A Second Chance for the Single

Dad Christmastime Courtship

Discover more at millsandboon.co.uk

The Cowboy’s Lesson in Love

Marie Ferrarella

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ISBN: 978-1-474-09056-8

THE COWBOY’S LESSON IN LOVE

© 2018 Marie Rydzynski-Ferrarella

Published in Great Britain 2018

by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.

By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.

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www.millsandboon.co.uk

To

Glenda Howard,

With Gratitude

For

Continuing To Make

My Dreams

Come True

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

About the Author

Booklist

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Epilogue

Extract

About the Publisher

Prologue

“Are you nervous?”

Shania Stewart’s softly voiced question to her twenty-six-year-old cousin broke through the otherwise early-morning silence within their small kitchen in their newly rented house located in Forever, Texas.

Wynona Chee didn’t answer her immediately. She was tempted to nonchalantly toss her long, shining black hair over her shoulder and confidently deny the very idea of having even a drop of fear regarding whatever might lay ahead of her today.

Ahead of both of them, really.

But over the course of her young life, Wynona had gone through a great deal with Shania, more than so many women even twice their age. Always close, the cousins had suffered the loss of their parents almost simultaneously. For Wynona, it had been the death of her single mother—she had never known her father—when sickness and heartbreak had claimed her. For Shania, it had come in waves. First, her father had died when a drunk driver had hit his car, then her mother, who had by that time taken in an orphaned Wynona to live with them, had succumbed to pneumonia.

By the time Wynona was ten and Shania was eleven, they did not have a living parent between them. Instead, they faced the grim prospect of being sent off to family care where they would then be absorbed into the foster care system. The latter fact ultimately meant that they would be separated.

The immediate future that faced the two cousins had been beyond bleak at that point.

It was then that they learned the true meaning of the word hope. Their late grandmother’s sister, Great-Aunt Naomi, came swooping into their lives from Houston like an unexpected twister sweeping across the prairie.

A fiercely independent woman, Naomi Blackwell, a dedicated physician who had never married, had been notified about the cousins’ pending fate by the town’s sheriff. She immediately came and took the girls under her wing and returned with them to Houston to live with her in her oversize mansion.

Over the course of the next sixteen years, Naomi not only provided them with a home, she also made sure that they both received an excellent education. This helped guarantee that they could go on to become anything they set their minds to.

It turned out that the girls had set their minds to return to Forever and give back a little of their good fortune to the community. After a short attempt to talk the cousins out of it, Naomi gave them her blessings and sent them off.

When they finally returned to Forever, the house where they had spent their early childhood—Shania’s parents’ house—was gone, destroyed in a fire some eight years ago. Some of the ashes were still there. Consequently, when they arrived back that summer, they moved into a house in town and then set about putting their mission into motion.

Today marked the beginning of their new careers. Shania had been hired to teach physics at Forever’s high school while Wynona was taking over a position that had been vacated at the end of the school year by Ericka Hale, the woman who was retiring as Forever Elementary’s second/third grade teacher.

“A little,” Wynona finally admitted after pausing to take in a deep breath. She could feel her butterflies growing and multiplying in her stomach. “You?”

Shania smiled. As the older of the two, Shania had always felt it was up to her to set the example. But like Wynona, she couldn’t be anything but truthful. It just wasn’t in her nature.

“I’d like to say no,” she told her cousin, “but that would be a lie.” Her smile was slightly rueful. “I feel like everything inside me is vibrating to Flight of the Bumblebee.”

“Really?” Wynona asked, surprised to hear that her cousin was anything but confident. She’d always projected that sort of an image. “But you’ve always been the calm one.”

“Most of the time,” Shania admitted. “But I’m not feeling very calm right now, although I guess I did manage to fool you,” she told Wynona with a self-deprecating laugh. “Now I guess all I have to do is fool everyone else.”

“That’s easy enough,” Wynona assured her cousin. “All you have to do is channel Great-Aunt Naomi.” A fond smile curved her lips. “That woman could make a rock tremble in fear.”

Shania laughed. “She could, couldn’t she?” A wave of nostalgia came over her as she looked at her younger cousin. “Do you find yourself wishing we were back in Houston with her right now?”

“No,” Wynona said honestly. She saw that her answer surprised her cousin. “Staying with Aunt Naomi would have meant taking the easy way. I think we both know that we’re right where we’re supposed to be just as I know that Aunt Naomi is proud of us for choosing to do this.”

Shania smiled in response, nodding her head. “I think you’re right.” The young woman looked at her watch, then raised her eyes to meet Wynona’s. She took in a deep breath. “Well, Wyn, it’s almost seven. If we don’t want to be late our first day of school, we really should get going.”

Wynona nodded in agreement as she felt her butterflies go into high gear. “Okay, Shania. Let’s do this.”

Chapter One

Clint Washburn wiped the back of his wrist against his forehead while crouching down and holding the stallion’s hoof still with his other hand. Seven thirty in the morning and it was already getting hot.

This was fall, he thought. It shouldn’t be this hot, certainly not this early in the day. These days it felt as if things were making even less sense than usual.

A movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention. Clint frowned when he saw the skinny little figure entering the corral. After closing the gate, he was walking toward him.

Ryan.

The boy wasn’t supposed to be here. He was supposed to be on his way to school by now.

Clint stopped working on the stallion’s hoof. The tiny rock or whatever had worked its way under the horseshoe, causing the animal to limp, was just going to have to wait until he sent his son on his way.

He squinted. The sun was directly behind the boy, making Ryan’s fine features as well as his expression momentarily difficult to see. Clint’s frown deepened.

“Shouldn’t you be on your way to school by now, boy?” Clint asked.

There was no warmth in his voice, only impatience.

Rather than answer immediately, the small boy looked at his father with wide eyes, his fine, light brown hair falling into his piercing blue eyes. He turned a slight shade of red before answering.

“I...I thought I’d stay home and help you with the horses today.”

“You thought wrong,” Clint replied flatly. “I don’t need your help with the horses. That’s what I’ve got Jake and your uncle Roy for,” he reminded the boy crisply, referring to the ranch hand and his brother. “What you need to do is go to school.” Shading his eyes, Clint scanned the area directly behind his son. “Lucia is probably looking for you right now. Don’t give her any extra work,” he instructed his son briskly, then ordered, “Go.”

The answer, although not unexpected, was not the one his son was hoping for.

Summoning his courage, Ryan tried to change his father’s mind. “But—”

“Now.”

A stricken look came over Ryan’s thin face. His shoulders were slumped as he turned on his heel and made his way back into the house.

“Kind of hard on the boy, aren’t you, boss?” Jake Weatherbee asked. He’d waited until Ryan had left the corral and was out of earshot before he raised the question. “He just wanted to help.”

“He just wanted to skip school, like any kid his age,” Clint replied gruffly.

“So let him once in a while,” Roy Washburn, Clint’s younger brother, told him, adding his voice to the argument. “Nothing wrong with that. If you let your son work with you, he’ll get to see just what it means to be a rancher. It’s what Dad did.”

Clint’s expression hardened. This was not advice he welcomed. “Dad didn’t do anything. He was too drunk half the time to work the ranch. That’s why we did. The boy has to learn discipline before he learns anything else, not to mention what they can teach him at school.” Clint’s eyes swept over the two men standing before him. “I want that kid to be able to pick his future, not be stuck with it the way you and I were,” he told Roy.

Clint brushed his hands off on the back of his jeans. “Now, if you two bachelors are through debating whether or not I’m raising my son properly, maybe you can get back to doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”

“Didn’t mean no disrespect, boss,” Jake told him. “I was just remembering what it felt like being the boy’s age.”

Clint’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe you should try remembering what it’s like being your age and working for a living.” He turned to look at his brother. “Same goes for you.”

“Yes, sir,” Roy answered with just a slight hint of mocking in his voice. He turned his attention back to the recently purchased stallion he was preparing to break.

Clint’s frown appeared to have been chiseled into his features. He was more dissatisfied with his own behavior than with the behavior of either his brother or his ranch hand. He knew that ultimately, the men meant well even if he hadn’t asked for or welcomed their opinions.

Clint blew out a breath. Maybe he’d gone a little too far. “Look, I didn’t mean to go off like that,” he told Jake and Roy. “I’ve got a lot on my mind right now and this thing with the boy isn’t helping any.”

Given a reprieve, Roy decided to take the opportunity to reach his brother. “Don’t you think you’re making more of this than you should, Clint? At least Ryan was offering to help. He wasn’t just running off—”

“Yet,” Clint interjected seriously. “But if I don’t force him to do what he’s supposed to, it’s only going to get worse. I’ve got to nip this sort of behavior in the bud,” he insisted. A distant look came into his eyes. It still haunted him. Seven years and the wound still hadn’t healed. “I missed what was right in front of me once. I’m not going to let that happen again,” he stated firmly.

Roy paused to look at his brother. Though Clint had shut down again, Roy could see the glimmer of pain in his eyes. He knew that he wasn’t referring to his son when he talked about missing what was right in front of him. Clint was talking about Susan, Ryan’s mother. He was talking about the bomb she had detonated in the center of his life.

He had come home late one evening to find a crying baby and a note pinned to the sheet in his crib. Susan was nowhere to be seen and he had no idea how long she had been gone. When it finally dawned on him that she wasn’t home, he was absolutely devastated. The woman he adored and had been married to for almost two years had left without warning.

The short, terse note she’d left in her wake stated that she realized that she wasn’t cut out to be a rancher’s wife and even less to be a mother. She went on to tell him that he needed to cut his losses and forget about her.

According to her note, they had never been a proper “fit.”

That had probably hurt most of all, the antiseptic words Susan had used to describe what to him had been the most wonderful part of his life.

What he had thought of as his salvation had turned into his personal hell.

From that moment on Clint had sealed himself off from everyone and everything.

He hired someone to care for his house and his son—in that order. He didn’t feel that he was up to doing either for a long, long time. To keep from falling into an apathetic abyss, Clint forced himself to run the ranch and to look after the horses that he bought and sold as well as the cattle on the ranch. It gave him a purpose. Otherwise, he felt he had no reason to go on.

Time went on and he made peace with his lot, but he still didn’t come around, still didn’t reach out to the son who seemed to need so desperately to be acknowledged by him.

While no one could have accused Lucia of being an outspoken woman, his housekeeper did do her best to try to make Clint open up to the boy, but none of her efforts were successful.

Clint made sure that the boy was clothed and that he always had enough to eat, but that was where it ended. There was no actual bonding between them. If Clint did manage to make it home for a meal—which he missed with a fair amount of regularity—there was no animated conversation to be had at the table. If it weren’t for Roy, who lived in the ranch house with them, there would have been very little conversation at all.

On a few occasions Ryan would try to have a conversation with his father, asking him questions or talking about something that had happened in school. Clint’s responses usually came in the form of a grunt, or a monosyllabic answer that really said nothing at all.

It was clear that Clint didn’t know how to talk to his son, or to people in general, for that matter. The wounds that Susan had left in his heart had cut unimaginably deep and refused to heal. Communication with Roy was generally about the ranch, while his communication with Lucia in regards to Ryan was usually kept to a basic minimum.

In essence, to the adults who dealt with him it was evident that Clint Washburn was in a prison of his own making. The fact that the prison had no visible walls made no difference.

No matter where he went, the prison he was in went with him.

This particular morning, when Ryan walked back into the kitchen after his father had rejected his offer to help with the horses, Lucia all but pounced on him.

“Where did you run off to?” she asked. The housekeeper, Lucia Ortiz, had made a clean sweep through the house already, looking for the boy who had been placed in her care from the time he was one year old. “If we don’t leave for school right now, we’re going to be late. Let’s go.”

Small, thin shoulders rose and fell as the boy followed Lucia out of the house to where her twelve-year-old car was waiting.

“I thought I’d help Dad with the horses,” Ryan said in a small voice.

Lucia gave the boy a long look. “Did he ask for your help?” she asked, getting in behind the steering wheel.

Ryan scrambled into the passenger seat, then settled in. He buckled up before answering because he knew that was the proper thing to do.

“No,” he murmured.

“Then why did you offer?” Lucia asked, talking to him the way she would to an adult rather than a child. The boy was going through so much; she didn’t want to add to that by making him feel that he was being looked down upon. “You know your father has his own way of doing things. Besides, he has Jake and Roy helping him.”

Ryan seemed to sink farther into his seat. His voice grew smaller. “That’s what he said.”

Lucia started up the car. It was getting late and if they didn’t leave now, they really were going to be late. Glancing at the boy’s expression, she could feel her heart going out to him. There were times that observing the awkwardness between father and son when they interacted was almost too painful.

“See,” Lucia said, doing her best to sound cheerful. “You need to wait until he asks.”

Ryan pressed his lips together, staring straight ahead. And then he raised his eyes to his ally. “What did I do, Lucia?”

“Do?” she questioned, not really sure what the boy was asking her.

Ryan nodded. “What did I do to make my father hate me?”

She was tempted to pull over and take the boy into her arms, but she knew that he wouldn’t welcome that. He wanted to be treated like an adult, so she did her best to oblige. “Oh, hijo, he doesn’t hate you.”

“Well, he doesn’t like me,” Ryan insisted, hopelessness echoing in his voice.

“It’s not that,” Lucia insisted. “Your father just doesn’t know how to talk to a little boy.” Or to anyone else, she added silently.

“You do,” Ryan said with feeling. “Can’t you teach him?”

Lucia let her true feelings out for a moment. “Oh, hijo, if I only could. But your father is not the kind of man who would allow himself to be taught by anyone. He doesn’t like to admit that he’s wrong. He is a very, very sad man.”

The expression on Ryan’s face was equally sad. “Because my mother left. I know.”

Lucia looked at the eight-year-old sharply, caught off guard by his response. “Who told you that?” she asked.

“Nobody,” he answered truthfully. “I heard Jake and Uncle Roy talking about my mother, about how everything would have been different if she had stayed with my dad.” The look on Ryan’s face was all earnestness as he asked, “Did she go because of me? Is that why Dad doesn’t like me?”

Not for the first time, Lucia had a strong desire to box her employer’s ears. “Oh no, Ryan, no. She didn’t leave because of you. Your mother left because she didn’t want to live on the ranch. She wanted something more exciting in her life.”

“More exciting than horses?” Ryan questioned, mystified that anyone could feel that way. He loved the horses as well as the cattle. Uncle Roy had taught him how to ride when he was barely old enough to walk. The horse had actually been a pony at the time, but it still counted as far as Ryan was concerned. He had loved being on a horse ever since that day.

Lucia looked at him sympathetically. “I’m afraid so.”

Ryan just couldn’t understand. “But what could be more exciting?” he asked, puzzled.

“That was what your mother wanted to find out.” Lucia flashed a smile in the boy’s direction. “She didn’t realize that she was leaving behind the most exciting part of her life.”

Ryan’s eyebrows disappeared beneath the hair hanging over his forehead. “Dad?” he questioned.

Lucia bit back a laugh. The boy was absolutely and sweetly unassuming. “No, you.”

Ryan frowned at the answer. He stared at the tips of his boots, waving his feet back and forth slightly. “I’m not exciting.”

“Oh, but you are,” Lucia assured him. “And you’re only going to get more exciting the more you learn. For that,” she pointed out, “I’m afraid that you’re going to have to go to school. Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”

Ryan sighed and then nodded. “I guess so.”

The housekeeper caught the hitch in his voice. “Ryan, you’re not having any trouble at school, are you?” she asked, peering at his face.

Ryan shook his head. “No.”

“None of the kids are picking on you, are they?” Lucia asked. “You can tell me if they are.”

“No,” he answered, then added quietly, “None of the kids even know I’m there.”

Lucia tried something else. “How about your teacher? Do you like her?”

“Yes, I guess so.” He shrugged again, then modified his answer. “She’s okay.”

Because she was trying to get the boy to open up to her, Lucia tried to encourage him to keep talking. “Why don’t you tell me about her?”

Looking slightly bewildered, Ryan asked, “What do you want to know?”

Lucia thought for a moment. “Well, to begin with, what’s your teacher’s name?”

For the first time that morning, possibly that week, Lucia heard the small boy giggle. It was a charming sound, like a boy who adores his teacher.