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  “Actually,” he corrected her, “I sent him upstairs to look in on Sydney. She should be waking up from her nap around now.”

  She saw that Anderson had come into the kitchen by himself. She looked around, but no one else came in behind him.

  “Where’s Lexie?” she asked.

  “On her way back to the airport,” Anderson answered. “Why?”

  She shrugged vaguely, feeling progressively more uncomfortable. “I just thought she’d be staying for dinner—that is, unless you thought it might be a little awkward to explain to her what I was doing here.”

  “Why would it be awkward?” he asked her, confused. “Where else would my wife be but in our house?”

  Marina looked at him in surprise. “You told her that we got married?”

  It was clear why he didn’t understand why she looked so surprised. “Among other things, yes. Why?” Even as he asked, he couldn’t come up with a reason why Marina wouldn’t want that.

  Marina shrugged again, feeling at a loss. “I just thought you wouldn’t want her to know.”

  That obviously cleared up nothing for him. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but wasn’t that the initial point of our getting married? I mean, that was why you first made the suggestion, right?”

  Why was he making her say this? Making her spell it all out? “Yes, but now that Lexie’s moving here, I figured that you wouldn’t need to keep up pretenses and telling her might just get her angry.”

  “Pretenses,” he repeated as if he wasn’t sure what she was trying to say.

  Did he realize that he was torturing her? Marina wondered. “Well, yes.”

  “But we are married, so that’s not a pretense.”

  “No, but—”

  Anderson was getting a bad feeling about this. “Are you saying that you don’t want to be married?” he asked her point-blank.

  “No, I want to be married,” she told him. She felt as if her thoughts were getting all jumbled up. “But you don’t.”

  “I don’t?” he questioned. What was she talking about?

  “No,” she cried. Why was he making her say this? Didn’t he realize how much it hurt? “I know that the only reason you agreed to marry me was because you needed to prove to the court that you had a stable home environment, with a wife and even a baby, to offer Jake. But now that Lexie’s going to be moving to Montana, everything’s changed.”

  “Everything?” he questioned, repeating the word slowly.

  “Well, yes. You can be together with Lexie if you want to—”

  Anderson stopped her right there. “Oh, Lord, no, why would I want that?”

  Marina was completely dumbfounded. “You don’t want that?” she asked, bewildered.

  He was a man of few words—but more than a few were needed here to fix this. He gave it a try.

  “Marina, all I want is to stay married to you and to be a dad to Jake and Sydney. It doesn’t matter to me where Lexie is, Chicago or here. You’re the one I want, the one I love. I’m not going to force you if you don’t want to be married to me, but—”

  “Not want to be married to you?” Marina repeated as if he had said something she couldn’t begin to comprehend. “Of course I want to be married to you. There’s nothing I want more than to be married to you. I just didn’t want you to feel obligated to continue with this if your heart wasn’t in it—”

  “My heart,” he told her, taking her into his arms, “is exactly where it’s supposed to be.”

  She smiled up into his eyes. “Mine, too.”

  “Good to know, Mrs. Dalton,” he murmured just before he kissed her. “Very good to know.”

  * * * * *

  Keep reading for an excerpt from ALWAYS A COWBOY by Linda Lael Miller.

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  MONTANA MAVERICKS: THE BABY BONANZA

  When tycoon Walker Jones faces off in court against Lindsay Dalton, he finds her a formidable opponent—and an irresistible one! Can she make him see the error of his ways?

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  MAVERICK VS. MAVERICK

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  New York Times bestselling author Shirley Jump

  Coming soon wherever Harlequin books and ebooks are sold.

  Drake Carson is willing to put up with Luce Hale, the supposed “expert” his mother brought to the ranch, as long as she can get the herd of wild horses off his land, but the pretty academic wants to study them instead! Sparks are sure to fly when opposites collide in Mustang Creek...

  Read on for a sneak peek from New York Times bestselling author Linda Lael Miller’s second book in THE CARSONS OF MUSTANG CREEK trilogy, ALWAYS A COWBOY, coming soon from HQN Books.

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  Always a Cowboy

  by Linda Lael Miller

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE WEATHER JUST plain sucked, but that was okay with Drake Carson. In his opinion, rain was better than snow any day of the week, and as for sleet...well, that was wicked, especially in the wide-open spaces, coming at a person in stinging blasts like a barrage of buckshot. Yep, give him a slow, gentle rainfall every time, the kind that generally meant spring was in the works. Anyhow, he could stand to get a little wet.

  Here in Wyoming, this close to the mountains, the month of May might bring sunshine and pastures blanketed with wildflowers—or a freak blizzard, wild enough to bury cattle and people alike.

  Raising his coat collar around his ears, he nudged his horse into motion with his heels. Starburst obeyed, although he seemed hesitant about it, unusually jumpy, in fact, and when that happened, Drake paid attention. Horses were prey animals and, as such, their instincts and senses were fine-tuned to their surroundings in ways a human being couldn’t equal.

  Something was going on, that was for sure.

  For nearly a year now, they’d been coming up short, Drake and his crew,
when they tallied the livestock. Some losses were inevitable, of course, but too many calves, along with the occasional steer or heifer, had gone missing over the past twelve months.

  Sometimes, they found a carcass. Other times, not.

  Like all ranchers, Drake took every decrease in the herd seriously, and he wanted reasons.

  The Carson spread was big, and while Drake couldn’t keep an eye on the whole place at once, he sure as hell tried.

  “Stay with me,” he told his dogs, Harold and Violet, a pair of German shepherds from the same litter and two of the best friends he’d ever had.

  Then, tightening the reins slightly, in case Starburst took a notion to bolt instead of skittering and sidestepping like he was doing now, Drake looked around, squinting against the downpour. Whatever he’d expected to see—a grizzly or a wildcat or even a band of modern-day rustlers—he hadn’t expected to lay eyes on a lone female. She was just up ahead, crouched behind a small tree and clearly drenched, despite the dark rain slicker covering her slender form.

  She was peering through a pair of binoculars, having taken no apparent notice of Drake, his dogs or his horse. Even with the rain pounding down, they should have been hard to miss, being only fifty yards away.

  Whoever the lady turned out to be, he wasn’t giving her points for alertness.

  He studied her as he approached, but there was nothing familiar about her. Drake would have recognized a local woman. Mustang Creek was a small community, and strangers stood out.

  Anyway, the whole ranch was posted against trespassers, mainly to keep tourists on the far side of the fences. A lot of visiting sightseers had seen a few too many G-rated animal movies and thought they could cozy up to a bear, a bison or a wolf and snap a selfie to post on social media.

  Some greenhorns were simply naive or heedless, but others were entitled know-it-alls, disregarding the warnings of park rangers, professional wilderness guides and concerned locals. It galled Drake, the risks people took, camping and hiking in areas that were off-limits, walking right up to the wildlife, as if the place were a petting zoo. The lucky ones got away alive, but they were often missing the family pet or a few body parts when it was over.

  Drake had been on more than one search-and-rescue mission, organized by the Bliss County Sheriff’s Department, and he’d seen things that kept him awake nights, if he thought about them too much.

  He shook off the gruesome images and concentrated on the problem at hand—the woman in the rain slicker. Wondered which category—naive, thoughtless or arrogant—she fell into.

  She didn’t appear to be in any danger at the moment but, then again, she seemed oblivious to everything around her, with the exception of whatever it was she was looking at through those binoculars of hers.

  Presently, it dawned on Drake that whatever else she might be, she wasn’t the reason his big Appaloosa gelding was so worked up.

  The woman seemed fixated on the wide meadow, actually a shallow valley, just beyond the copse of cottonwood. Starburst pranced and tossed his head, and Drake tightened the reins slightly, gave a gruff command.

  The horse calmed down a little.

  Once Drake cleared the stand of cottonwoods, he stood in the stirrups, adjusted his hat and followed the woman’s gaze. Briefly, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing, after days, weeks and months of searching, with only a rare and always distant sighting.

  But there they were, big as life; the stallion, his band of wild mustangs—and half a dozen mares lured from his own pastures.

  Forgetting the rain-slicked trespasser for a few moments, his breath trapped in his throat, Drake stared, taking a quick count in his head, temporarily immobilized by the sheer grandeur of the sight.

  The stallion was magnificence on the hoof, lean but with every muscle as clearly defined as if he’d been sculpted by a master. His coat was a ghostly gray, darkened by the rain, and his mane and tail were blacker than black.

  The animal, well aware that he had an audience and plainly unconcerned, lifted his head slowly from the creek where he’d been drinking and made no move to run. With no more than a hundred yards between them, he regarded Drake for what seemed like a long while, as though sizing him up.

  The rest of the band, mares included, went still, heads high, ears pricked forward, hindquarters tensed as they awaited some signal from the stallion.

  Drake couldn’t help admiring that four-footed devil, even as he silently cursed the critter, consigning him to seven kinds of hell. The instant he pressed his boot heels to Starburst’s quivering sides, a motion so subtle that Drake himself was barely aware of it, the stallion went into action.

  Nostrils flared, eyes rolling, the cocky son of a bitch snorted, then threw back his head and whinnied, the sound piercing the moisture-thickened air.

  The band whirled toward the hillside and scattered.

  The stallion stood watching as Drake, rope in hand and ready to throw, drove Starburst from a dead stop to a full run.

  Before Starburst reached the creek, though, the big gray spun on his hind legs and damn near took wing as he raced across the clearing and up the slope.

  Drake and his gelding splashed through the narrow stream, and up the opposite bank, the dogs loping alongside.

  But hard as he rode, the whole experience felt like a slow-motion sequence from one of his brother Slater’s documentaries. He and Starburst might as well have been standing still for all the progress they made closing the gap.

  The stallion paused at the top of the ridge, he and his band sketched against the stormy sky. Time seemed to stop, just for an instant, before the spell was broken and the whole bunch of them vanished as swiftly as if they’d melted into the clouds.

  Drake knew he’d lost this round.

  He reined Starburst to a halt, grabbed his hat by the brim and slapped it hard against his left thigh before jamming it back on his head. Then, still breathing hard, his jaw clamped down so hard that his ears ached from the strain, he recoiled his rope and fastened it to his saddle.

  Harold and Violet were at the foot of the ridge by then, panting visibly and looking back at Drake in confusion.

  He summoned them back with a shrill whistle, and they trotted toward him, tongues lolling, sides heaving.

  Only when he’d ridden across the creek again did Drake remember the woman. Coupled with the fact that he’d just been outwitted by that damn stallion—again—her presence stuck in his hide like a burr.

  She stood watching him as he rode toward her, her face a pale oval within the hood of her slicker.

  With bitter amusement, he noticed that her feet were set a little apart, as in a fighter’s stance, and her elbows jutted out at her sides. Her hands, no doubt bunched into fists, were pressing hard into her hips.

  As he drew nearer, he noted the spark of fury in her eyes and the tight line of her mouth.

  Under other circumstances, he might have thrown back his head and laughed out loud at her sheer audacity, but at the moment his pride was giving him too much grief for that.

  He hadn’t managed to get this close to the stallion—or his prize mares—for longer than he cared to remember. While he hated letting them get away so easily, he knew the dogs would be run ragged if he gave chase, and might even end up getting their heads kicked in. They’d been bred for herding cattle, not wild horses.

  They were disappointed just the same and whimpered in baleful protest at being called off, which only made Drake feel like more of a loser than he already did.

  Harold and Violet, named for two of his favorite elementary school teachers, ambled over to him, tails wagging. They were drenched to the skin and getting wetter by the minute, but they were quick to forgive, unlike their human counterparts, himself included.

  Just then, Drake’s chestnut quarter horse, a two-year-old mare with impeccable bl
oodlines, caught his eye, appearing on the crest of the ridge. Hope stirred briefly, and he drew in his breath to whistle for her, but before he could make a sound, the stallion came back, crowding the mare, nipping at her flanks and butting her with his head.

  And then she was gone again.

  Damn it all to hell.

  “Thanks for nothing, mister!”

  It was the intruder, the trespasser. The woman stormed toward Drake through the rain-bent grass, waving the binoculars like a maestro raising a baton at the symphony. He’d forgotten about her until that moment, and the reminder did nothing for his mood.

  He was overreacting, he knew that, but he couldn’t seem to change course.

  She was a sight, he’d say that, plowing through the grass the way she was, all fuss and fury and wet through and through.

  Drake waited a few moments before he spoke, just watching her advance on him like a one-woman army.

  Miraculously, he felt his equanimity returning. In fact, he was mildly curious about her, now that the rush of adrenaline from his lame-ass confrontation with the stallion was starting to subside.

  Drake waited with what was, for him, uncommon patience. He hoped the approaching tornado, pint-size but definitely category five, wouldn’t step in a gopher hole and break a leg, or get bitten by a snake before she completed the charge.

  Born and raised on this land, where there were perils aplenty, Drake understood the importance of practical caution. Out here, experience wasn’t just the best teacher, it was often a harsh one, too.

  As the lady got closer, he made out her face, still framed by the hood of her coat, and a pair of amber eyes that flashed as she demanded, “Do you have any idea how long it took me to get that close to those horses? Days!” She paused to suck in a furious breath. “And what happens when I finally catch up to them? You come along and scare them off!”

  Drake resettled his hat, tugging hard at the brim, and waited.

  The woman all but stamped her feet. “Days!” she repeated wildly.