Betting on the Cowboy

Besides, Ro wasn’t exactly a shopaholic. She wouldn’t have spent the money if she hadn’t thought it was important. Bree forced the worry from her mind, and instead strolled the perimeter of the airy room, drinking in the romance of every charming detail.

“This may be my favorite of all the cottages. That’s not a compliment,” she hastened to add. “Just a fact. Just a personal preference. The colors...the creek. I don’t know, something just appeals to me.”

“I thought it might,” Rowena said. She lowered herself onto the rocker and leaned her head back against the quilt with a sigh, as if she didn’t get to sit down very often these days. “I used the colors from your old room. Remember?”

Bree scanned the area with new eyes. She hadn’t noticed it before, but now... Her childhood bedroom had once been painted this exact shade of powder blue, and her canopy bed had been trimmed in bluebell-daffodil patterned linens that she had loved with an innocent, absolute passion. She’d felt like a fairy princess in that room.

“I’d forgotten,” she said softly. “I can’t believe it, but I’d actually forgotten.”

Once the floodgates were open, she felt the memory rush through her. She suddenly saw Rowena and their mother, arguing quietly at the Mill End store in downtown Gunnison. Ro had tucked a bolt of flower-sprigged fabric under her arm with the grim tenacity of a quarterback protecting a football.

Ro couldn’t have been more than nine years old at the time, because Bree had been eight when she got her dream room. But the determination on Rowena’s face was intense and unshakable, far beyond her years.

“You helped me pick out that print,” Bree said suddenly. “You talked Mom into buying it for me, even though it was much too expensive. And I know you couldn’t have liked it, really. It wasn’t your style at all.”

Rowena had shut her eyes, but she was smiling, as if her mind’s eye had summoned the pictures, too. “You should have seen the look on your face. Clearly, you were going to curl up and die if you didn’t get it. Whether or not I liked it was irrelevant.”

Bree remembered that. Somehow, her future had seemed to depend on the sweet, feminine flowers in that bolt of fabric. She had believed with all her heart that if her room looked like that she would always be happy. If her room looked any other way, if her bed was draped in any other material, she would be forever unrealized.

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