Not My 1st Rodeo by Donna Alward Page B

thinking about looking for a teaching position a little closer for next year. I mean, I don’t want to assume anything, but…well, I’d be closer to my mom and dad. And as far as you and me…”
    She touched a finger to his nose. “I’m done with sabotaging the best thing to happen to me by letting doubts creep in. I love you. You love me. And today that’s enough. It doesn’t get any better than that.”
    But oh, she was wrong, Brett thought. His heart was full as he gazed into her eyes and caught a fleeting glimpse of forever.
    â€œIt gets better all right,” he promised. “You just wait and see.”

Look for these titles by Donna Alward
    Now Available:
    Almost a Family
    Sold To The Highest Bidder
    Breathe
    First Responders
    Off the Clock
    In the Line of Duty
    Into the Fire
    Beneath the Badge
    Print Collections
    First Responders, Volume 1
    First Responders, Volume 2

Something About a Cowboy
    Sarah M. Anderson

Dedication
    To Donna Alward and Jenna Bayley-Burke, for roping me into this! It’s been a blast, ladies!

Chapter One
    It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
    Mack Tucker stood just inside the hotel bar, scanning the sparse crowd in front of him. Even though this was one of the fancier hotels in the area, complete with an indoor water park, the place was not crowded. But then Tuesday nights in the middle of January in Billings, Montana, weren’t exactly peak tourist season.
    He wasn’t supposed to be here, not alone. Not looking for a blind date with a woman he’d met on a website named NotMy1stRodeo.com, of all ridiculous things.
    If he was in a hotel looking for a woman, it should’ve been his wife, Sue. God rest her soul. He was married. Or at least he had been, back before the cancer had taken her.
    But Sue had been gone for six years, and Mack’s three boys kept insisting it was time for him to get out there again, as his youngest, Tommy, kept saying.
    It’d been Tommy who, unbeknownst to Mack, had put up a profile on NotMy1stRodeo.com. Tommy, who’d been screening likes and flirts and messages and God only knew what else people did on online dating sites.
    And it’d been Tommy who’d given Mack’s email and home phone number to a woman.
    The woman Mack was supposed to be meeting tonight.
    He could still bail. It didn’t matter that he’d driven almost three hours in the dead of winter to get to this fancy hotel. It didn’t matter that the woman, by the name of Karen Thompson, had the kind of voice that had made him sit up and pay attention when she’d called. It had absolutely no bearing on the situation that, at least in her online pictures, she was beautiful—delicate and refined but with a mischievous glint in her eyes.
    He was not now, nor had he ever been, the kind of man who met a woman he didn’t know and do anything with her, much less have sex with her. He was forty-six and far too old for this kind of shit.
    Then he saw her. Well, he didn’t know if it was her her, but he saw a woman sitting at the bar in a dress that wasn’t all there. He only caught glimpses of red fabric low on her hips and high around her neck. The rest was bare skin, smooth and creamy and begging to be touched. Her mass of dark brown hair was twisted up and off her neck with a red rose pinned behind her ear, making her look elegant and sophisticated and absolutely not the kind of woman who would be interested in a working rancher who got cow shit on his boots every single day.
    Maybe he’d get lucky—lucky enough—and that wouldn’t be his date. That’d she’d be a happily married woman waiting on her happily married husband and Mack could go on with his life, none the worse for his small temptation into sin. Absentmindedly, he spun his wedding ring on his right hand.
    His phone chimed—Tommy’s chime. “You can do it! Have fun, Dad!” the message read.
    He sighed