Claimed by a Cowboy

There’s No Place Like Texas

Sam Travis doesn’t like to be tied down. He’s used to picking up work all around the Hill Country, including odd jobs for Wanda Keller, an older woman who treats him as a son. When Wanda suddenly dies, her estranged daughter shows up…and Lorelei Keller turns out to be more than he bargained for.

Polished—some might say uptight—Lorelei left Fredericksburg in the dust years ago. Coming home for her mom’s funeral sends her into a tailspin of regrets. But that’s nothing compared to the shock of learning that Sam has inherited her mother’s B and B. Did the sexy cowboy manipulate his way into her mother’s heart? Lorelei is determined to clean up this mess, and then get the heck out of Texas. For good this time.

Because there’s nothing to keep her there now…except maybe Sam?

“I’m about to pour a glass of milk and cut into the German chocolate cake. You want a piece?”

Finding herself temporarily mute, Lorelei shook her head. At her silence, Sam turned around. Their eyes locked, and she was glad she stood in the shadows. Maybe he couldn’t see the blush heating her cheeks. Although she’d been infuriated by the hateful way he’d spoken to her earlier, the anger didn’t stop her instinctive female appreciation of his broad shoulders and bare chest. Knowing he’d defined those arms and abs working hard under the Texas sun somehow made them even more appealing than muscles honed through an expensive gym membership. It was a damn shame the man ever wore a shirt. Her gaze slid involuntarily down his body toward the denim waistband of his jeans.

The corner of his mouth kicked up. “You stare any harder, you’re going to bore holes in me.”

The warmth in her face ignited to full-on flames. She opened her mouth to snap that she hadn’t been staring, but the lie stuck in her throat. She settled for, “Don’t be conceited. Haven’t you displayed enough character flaws for one day?”

Dear Reader,

Texas is a huge state, made up of many regions that are each special in its own way. In my new Hill Country Heroes miniseries, I get to share some of my favorite aspects of the Texas Hill Country—from outdoor recreation to generations of history and folklore to the award-winning vineyards. (The Frederick-Fest event mentioned in all three books is fictional, but it’s based on the many real festivals that take place throughout the year in Fredericksburg.)

My first Hill Country Hero is cowboy Sam Travis, who was raised on a ranch by his bachelor uncle and has never truly felt like he fit in anywhere. The closest thing Sam has to family these days is his sometimes landlady at a Fredericksburg bed-and-breakfast. When she dies unexpectedly (and leaves Sam the B and B) it’s difficult to say who’s more shocked, Sam or the woman’s estranged daughter, Lorelei Keller. Knowing how much Mrs. Keller had missed her daughter and had wanted her to come home, Sam talks Lorelei into staying for an annual festival, as a way of honoring her mother’s last wishes. When Lorelei agrees, two people who’ve always felt like outsiders might finally find the place where they fit—with each other.

If you get a chance, I highly recommend you visit the Texas Hill Country. In the meantime, I hope the stories make you feel like you’re there!

Best wishes,

Tanya Michaels

Claimed by the Cowboy

Tanya Michaels

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Three-time RITA® Award nominee Tanya Michaels writes about what she knows—community, family and lasting love! Her books, praised for their poignancy and humor, have received honors such as the Booksellers’ Best Bet Award, the Maggie Award of Excellence and multiple readers’ choice awards. She was also a 2010 RT Book Reviews nominee for Career Achievement in Category Romance. Tanya is an active member of Romance Writers of America and a frequent public speaker, presenting workshops to educate and encourage aspiring writers. She lives outside Atlanta with her very supportive husband, two highly imaginative children and a household of quirky pets, including a cat who thinks she’s a dog and a bichon frise who thinks she’s the center of the universe. You can visit her at www.TanyaMichaels.net.

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This book is dedicated to Jane Mims (what would I do without you?) who graciously chauffeured me around the hill country in spite of the world’s most diabolically uncooperative GPS.

Contents

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 One

The fifth floor of the insurance company was impressively quiet. Nothing so crass as noise leaked from the opulent and distinguished conference rooms at the end of the long corridor—which made junior actuary Lorelei Keller want to cringe at the staccato echo of her navy pumps against the marble tile. She preferred to stand out in meetings because she possessed a lightning-quick mind, not because everyone could hear her coming from a mile away.

As if her footfalls weren’t making her self-conscious enough, the cell phone in her jacket pocket suddenly buzzed. Even with the ringer turned off, the vibration seemed loud in the empty hall. She fished the phone out to check the display screen and scowled. Though no name showed, the 830 area code meant Fredericksburg, Texas. More specifically, her mother. Again.

Exhaling an impatient breath, Lorelei turned the phone off completely and repocketed it. Wanda Keller was her only immediate family and Lorelei loved the woman. But mother and daughter were painfully dissimilar. Graduating from an Ivy League university had been easier for Lorelei than getting through to her mom. Not that I’m deliberately avoiding her. She fully intended to call Wanda back later, after business hours. Headed into a meeting with one of the company’s top executives was not the time to rehash their argument about Lorelei’s refusal to visit at the end of the month.

“You loved Frederick-Fest as a child,” Wanda had burbled just two days ago, sounding as enthusiastic as a child herself. She claimed the timing of the weeklong March event would be extra festive this year, since its dates fell over St. Patrick’s Day—never mind that their ancestry was German, not Irish—and the spring equinox.

“But I’m not a kid anymore,” Lorelei had pointed out as gently as possible. “I have adult responsibilities, like a job I worked hard to get.”

“They have to give you vacation time, don’t they?” Wanda had persisted.

Lorelei had bit her tongue to keep from saying anything cruel. Like, I’m not about to use up vacation to come help sell crystals and hand out bookmarks on the protocol for “What to Do if You Encounter a Hill Country Ghost.” “I’ve got a really busy month ahead of me, Mom.”

Wanda’s voice, which had been by turns cheerfully cajoling and stubbornly challenging, fell to a barely audible level. “You haven’t been home in over a year.”

Home. How could Lorelei explain that Texas hadn’t felt like home since her father had died twenty years ago? Her freshman year of college, Lorelei had joked with her roommate about “Philadelphia freedom” because moving to Pennsylvania truly had liberated her. She’d been free of living in a house that was a shrine to her dad, free of her mother’s increasingly bizarre beliefs. Lorelei had soothed her frazzled nerves with the orderly logic of numbers and let her first snowy Pennsylvania winter numb a decade of tangled emotions.

“You know I had to cancel at Christmas because I had the flu,” Lorelei had defended herself. “I’ll come down for a visit this year. I promise.”

“When?”

“I don’t know, Mom. Soon.” Soonish, anyway. “But not this month, okay? I’ll look at my calendar, talk to my boss and get back to you.”

Her mother had sighed, clearly skeptical. “Sure. I’ll be here.”

Reaching for the door to the conference room, Lorelei gave a quick shake of her head, her long dark hair swirling about her shoulders, and banished the memory of her impulsive promise. Now was the time to focus on the more pressing topic of risk management. One of the few women in her department, she was determined to distinguish herself among her colleagues. She straightened her spine and stepped into the office, her footsteps now swallowed by the plush carpet. But a last lingering stab of guilt pierced her. I’ll talk to my supervisor tomorrow about vacation time. Conscience appeased, Lorelei lost herself in the two-hour meeting, all thoughts of Texas and her mother pushed aside.

LORELEI WAS SEATED AT her desk, immersed in notes for a liability audit, when a male voice said, “Knock knock,” from the doorway. She glanced up to see Rick Caulden.

He flashed a knowing smile. “You forget about me again? Reservations? Tuesday night? Any of this ringing a bell?”

“Of course I remember. I’ve been looking forward to our dinner. I just thought you were going to call when you got here.” She enjoyed her periodic dates with the handsome attorney.

Employed by a law firm several blocks away, Rick worked as hard as she did. He was charming but refreshingly unsentimental. They shared the same pragmatic streak and career drive.

“Tried calling,” he said. “Kept going straight to voice mail, so I decided I should come up, find out if your meeting ran long and if I was on my own for dinner.”

“Oh, right—I turned my phone off before the meeting and totally forgot to turn it back on.” A mistake, or a Freudian slip? Had she deliberately left it off because she suspected Wanda would call back? Maybe Lorelei had been trying to avoid the guilt trip of feeling like an ungrateful daughter yet again.

As soon as Lorelei repowered the phone, a message bubble appeared. She frowned. “Wow, that’s a lot of missed calls.”

“At least three of them are me,” Rick said.

And the other six? “Hang on a sec.” She stood, gathering her purse and coat. “I just want to check voice mail before we go.”

“Sure.” He smirked. “I always make our reservations for fifteen minutes later than I tell you. I know how difficult it is to drag you out of the office.”

Under different circumstances, she might have pointed out that she spent an equal amount of time waiting on him or assuring him she didn’t mind canceling because he needed the extra time to prepare a motion or speak with a client. Right now, she was more concerned with her messages than Rick’s unexpected double standard.

Because of the 830 area code on the missed calls, Lorelei assumed her mother was phoning from one of the hotel lines instead of her private number. But it wasn’t Wanda’s voice that greeted her.

“Lorelei? I don’t know if you remember me, but this is Ava Hirsch.”

As if Lorelei had been gone so long she wouldn’t recall her mom’s best friend? Though Ava’s husband was of the vocal opinion that Wanda was “a gallon shy of a keg,” the two women had always been inseparable.

“I’m calling…” Ava stopped, sniffed and tried again. “I’m calling about your mother, dear.”

At the end of the sentence, Ava’s voice broke and the world tilted beneath Lorelei’s feet. She groped blindly for her chair.

“Lorelei? What is it?” Rick’s concern sounded miles away; Ava’s condolences were even more distant, fading beneath the pounding in Lorelei’s ears.

But Lorelei didn’t need to hear the rest of the message to know. She was going home to Fredericksburg, after all.

Chapter Two

Sam Travis was well-versed in the ghosts of Texas lore—he’d shared many a local legend with tourists around the campfire—but he’d never felt haunted until now.

No matter which room he moved to in the bed-and-breakfast, he still saw his landlady, eccentric Wanda Keller, who had been mothering him on and off for the past three years. Maybe I should have left with the others. As of this morning, there had been two other guests staying at the inn. Another proprietor in town had promptly offered them free rooms in light of the tragedy. Wanda had been well-liked in town, even by loners like Sam.

Sam worked multiple seasonal jobs that kept him in motion, but he always circled back to Wanda’s, helping her with minor repairs and enjoying her cooking for a week or so before leaving again. It had taken him over a year of just being able to show up, his usual room always vacant, before he’d realized that she held it perpetually open for him. When he’d insisted she shouldn’t do that, she’d called him dummkopf and responded that it was her inn and she’d do whatever she liked. This B and B, now painfully devoid of her presence, was the closest thing he’d had to a home since the dusty bunkhouse where his uncle had raised him.

But not close enough that he wanted to own the place. He recalled the shock on Ava Hirsch’s tear-streaked face that afternoon—it had mirrored his own.

“What do you mean, she left it to me?” Too flabbergasted to keep his voice down, Sam had earned angry glares from all the nearby nurses.

Behind her wire-rimmed glasses Ava’s eyes had been the size of poker chips. “You didn’t know? I never would have said anything. I thought…”

Sitting alone in the dimly lit kitchen hours later, Sam raised his half-finished beer in an affectionate toast. “Still meddling from the great beyond, Wanda?” She’d always nagged him to settle down. If Ava were right about the change to her friend’s will—something Sam still didn’t quite believe—then maybe it was Wanda’s gentle way of coercing him into putting down roots.

He shook his head at the asinine idea of him as a hotel manager. Granted, this was a very small hotel, but that made it worse. Guests expected a personal touch, that extra dose of folksy hospitality. On the trail, in his element, Sam did just fine with tourists as long as they followed his rules about the horses. Most clients who wanted to rough it had a certain expectation of what their guide would be like. His occasionally gruff demeanor fit the part. He didn’t have Wanda’s gracious nature. The first time some the-customer-is-always-right twit complained about sheet thread count or something equally ridiculous… Well, being raised by a cantankerous bachelor uncle was not the same as attending charm school.

Even though he wouldn’t be staying, he was touched by the gesture. If she had bequeathed him the inn, her intentions were good. Wanda may have been trying to give him a home—which was more than his actual mother had ever done—but she seemed to have overlooked that what he’d loved most about the inn was gone. He’d once got jalapeño juice in his eye, and it had burned like hellfire. His dry, unblinking eyes stung far worse now.

“Place won’t be the same without her,” Sam declared aloud.

A plaintive, otherworldly yowl of agreement came from the floor. Sam nearly jumped until he realized that the reclusive white cat had finally made an appearance—his first all night, although he’d halfheartedly eaten the small plate of food Sam pushed under the bed.

“You miss her, too, don’t you?” Sam reached down to scratch Oberon’s head, which the cat tolerated for a millisecond before scooting back, his ears flat and his yellow gaze suspicious. The feline had worshipped and adored Wanda Keller, but regarded all other human beings with contempt.

Sam might have made a sarcastic comment, such as telling the cat to have fun opening its own damn can of tuna tomorrow, except he couldn’t forget the pet’s distress earlier. It had been Oberon who had found Sam in the kitchen and let him know something was wrong, meowing anxiously, tail twitching, constantly glancing back over his shoulder, as if he wanted Sam to follow. Although Wanda normally rose at sunrise to roll out dough for breakfast, Sam had assumed she was sleeping in because of the bad headache she’d mentioned last night. He’d tried to help out by brewing coffee for everyone and putting boxes of cereal around the bowl of fresh fruit on the dining room table.

Sam had followed the cat to her room, but there was nothing to be done. She’d gone in her sleep; the doctors diagnosed a ruptured brain aneurysm. When the paramedics had tried to take the body, Oberon had launched himself at them in hissing attack. Attempts to get hold of the cat had proven futile, and the feline disappeared under Wanda’s bed, where he’d begun a low, spine-tingling wail. When Sam had returned from the hospital, Oberon had still been there, his cry hoarser than it had been hours before but just as heartfelt. Sam believed the cat was ornery enough to have tried stalking the ambulance, if Wanda had ever installed a cat door. She worried about him ending up in traffic and getting hit by a tourist watching for street signs.

Now, Oberon sat back on his haunches and studied Sam as if assessing him. The uneven triangle of black fur around the cat’s left eye added to his sinister expression. When his slim body tensed to pounce, Sam wondered if he was about to get lacerated for letting them take Wanda away. Instead, the animal shot into Sam’s denim-covered lap and circled twice before curling into a warm ball. Sam was shocked, but assumed this was a temporary truce. They were each saying goodbye to the only family they’d had.

We weren’t her only family. Wanda might have been “like a mom” to him, but she was a real mother to someone else. If there was one thing Wanda had talked about more than her legends, herbs and woo-woo philosophies, it was Lorelei. Sam’s jaw tightened. He’d heard dozens of stories about Lorelei, who’d pretended at five that her bicycle was a horse named Spokes and, at ten, had been the first in her class to memorize all the state capitals. Wanda always bragged that Lorelei was as “smart as a whip,” which would explain the extra cords and whatnot draped over the young woman’s gown in graduation pictures.

Most of the family photos Wanda liked to show off were from back when her husband was alive and Lorelei had been a chubby-cheeked little girl. The most recent portrait he’d seen was from several years ago: a flinty-eyed, unsmiling college grad who looked just a bit too smug beneath her mortarboard. Wanda had always made excuses for why her pride-and-joy didn’t visit. Sam was less inclined to do so.

“Things were hard for her after her dad died,” Wanda had said once, looking faraway and sad.

Not wanting to upset his friend, Sam had held his tongue. But he had trouble sympathizing. As a child, he, too, had lost a father. What he’d needed most was comfort from his mother. Instead…

Sam didn’t realize he’d been absently petting the cat until he stopped and Oberon butted his head into Sam’s arm, protesting.

“Enough of this,” Sam told the cat. “You want me to pet you, you have to come with me into the den. No more sitting in the dark, crying into our beer. Metaphorically speaking. Let’s see what’s on the tube.”

He gently set the cat on the floor, and, sure enough, Oberon followed him down the hallway. They passed by a framed picture of Lorelei as a teenager and Sam shook his head. If the woman was so damn smart, why hadn’t she known how lucky she was to have Wanda?

LORELEI WAS A LITTLE surprised that the man behind the counter handed over keys to the rental car. After her sleepless night and turbulent flight into San Antonio this morning, she had deep bags beneath her bloodshot eyes. She probably looked strung out and wouldn’t have blamed the guy if he’d insisted on some kind of drug test before letting her drive a car off the lot. Then again, he was already a little scared of her from when she’d growled, “Trust me, I understand the optional insurance policy, you can stop overexplaining!” So maybe his thrusting the keys at her was less about customer service and more about getting rid of her.

“Your luggage is already in the trunk,” he informed her. “You have a nice day.”

Not a chance in hell. “Thank you,” she said tightly. She’d been speaking through clenched lips all day; now she gripped the keys so hard they dug into her palm.

It was as if she were trying to hold herself together through sheer physical force because if she didn’t, Lorelei might fly apart. She stalked across the lot toward her assigned car, barely giving herself a moment to buckle in and adjust the seat and mirrors before heading for the exit. If she paused to consult a map, paused to find a radio station, paused for one second to think…

Although it had been a while since her last trip here—I’m sorry, Mom. I will always be sorry—she knew the I-10 route by heart. There were no surprise detours this Wednesday afternoon. The city gave way to unmanicured vistas, tree-studded hills and pastures that looked furry due to bunches of some tawny untamed grass.

About fifteen minutes from Fredericksburg, she stopped at a filling station to use their restroom even though it wasn’t really necessary. Maybe she was just stalling because she couldn’t face what awaited her.

It was surprisingly warm outside—she’d dressed that morning for March in Philly, not March in Texas. On her drive, she’d already seen a few patches of bluebonnets in bloom. Wanda had loved plants of all kinds. Lorelei had a stray memory of a picnic with her parents, long ago, in a field of wildflowers. Her mother had told her a Native American legend about how flowers had become fragrant. Wanda had grown plants both decorative and functional in window boxes and pots all through their house and yard. She and her husband had turned to medicinal herbs and holistic treatments when he was diagnosed with liver cancer, rather than to oncologists.

With a hard swallow, Lorelei climbed back into the rental car, annoyed with herself for postponing the inevitable. She could stop every mile between here and the bed-and-breakfast and it wouldn’t change anything. I’ve lost them both.

When she’d called Ava last night with her flight details, Ava had volunteered her husband, Clinton, to come pick up Lorelei in San Antonio. “If you insist on driving yourself, at least call us when you get close. We’ll meet you at the B and B.”

Lorelei had thanked the woman sincerely for the offer but had said she’d call them later because she might want a nap before seeing anyone. It had been a half truth. There was no way she’d be able to sleep, but she needed to be alone in her mother’s inn. Being there would solidify the loss and Lorelei wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep from detonating. The last thing she wanted was a witness.

Though she had to slow down temporarily for a stretch of road where signs warned Loose Livestock, she didn’t encounter traffic. Judging from the wry sign on a dilapidated diner—Over a Dozen Served!—she was officially on the road less traveled. All too soon, she was turning onto the street where the Haunted Hill Country Bed-and-Breakfast sat.

Lorelei parked the car in front of the stone-faced two-story building, bracing herself for not hearing her mother’s voice when she walked inside. Would she still smell the uniquely familiar blend of lemon, lavender and nutmeg from the incenses and oils Wanda had favored? Those aromatherapy scents had permeated the entire inn. Except during Christmas seasons when the bed-and-breakfast was filled with fresh pine and baking gingerbread.