In Need of a Cowboy

by Linda Lael Miller, Heather Graham

Genres: Romance Anthologies & Collections; Contemporary Romance; Western Romance

Synopsis

A fascinating portrait of the progressive female trailblazer and US Secretary for Labor who navigated the foreboding rise of Nazism in her battle to make America a safer place for refugees.

ASK ME AGAIN
by Linda Lael Miller
Sudden fatherhood turns an Arizona rancher’s life upside down. But when a burned-out and beautiful social worker moves in across the road, the lonely cowboy finds the missing piece of his family puzzle in a city girl who’s not afraid to take a chance . . .

THE COWBOY
by Heather Graham
He thinks she’s a fancy filly. She thinks he’s a jerky jock. When they wind up on the same team, the barrel-racing FBI agent and the no-nonsense detective have to rethink their first impressions . . . to track down a criminal mastermind who’s abducted two women.

Release date: January 21, 2025

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

The kid sat sullenly on the edge of the crumbling water trough in front of the barn, arms folded, face flushed, eyes averted. A battered army surplus backpack slumped at his feet.

Blindsided by the sudden discovery that he was the father of a twelve-year-old son, Jack O’Ballivan stood stock-still, as inescapably stuck as if he’d planted the soles of his boots in quicksand, and shifted his gaze back to the boy’s mother, Loreen Baker.

Loreen, blonde and thin, stood well within Jack’s personal space, and it was all he could do not to put out his hands and shove her into the manure pile behind her.

“You can’t deny it, Jack,” she said smugly. “The kid looks just like you.”

That much was obvious. When Jack looked at the boy, it was like looking at a much younger version of himself—same dark hair, same blue eyes, same stubborn jawline.

For once in her miserable, screwed-up life, Loreen was telling the truth.

Jack lowered his voice. “‘The kid’?” he challenged, in a raspy growl. “Is that what you call him? Or does he have a name?”

Loreen took a step back, and her cheap sandals made a squishing sound as they sank into the muck. She made a face.

“It’s Gideon,” she said, less confident than before. “His name is Gideon.”

Jack leaned in a little. “And you waited twelve years to tell me about him?”

Loreen looked away, hugged herself nervously. “I had my reasons.”

“Like what?”

“Like I was married a couple of months after we broke up, and my husband thought Gideon was his.”

Jack thrust out a furious breath. “I see,” he said, and now it was a real effort to hold his temper in check. He had a child—a child, and he’d missed more than a decade of knowing him. Loving him. And protecting him—something the boy had badly needed, from the looks of things.

“And now—?” he seethed.

“And now it’s your turn to raise the kid. I’ve done my time.”

Jack glanced in the boy’s direction again, praying he hadn’t overheard Loreen’s words, then glared into her upturned face again.

“Are you on drugs, Loreen?” he asked bluntly. Her teeth were bad, and that wasn’t a good sign. Neither was the grayish pallor of her skin.

She’d changed a lot since they were together, back in college; she’d been beautiful then, and lively, if a little wild at times.

For a while there, Jack had believed he loved her.

Until he’d caught her beating his dog with a stick because it had thrown up on her new shoes. He’d wrenched the stick from her hands, flung it away, and yelled at her to get her things together and get out of his apartment and his life.

Whatever he’d felt for her had died instantly, killed by the knowledge that she could be so vicious and so cruel as to deliberately hurt a helpless animal.

Loreen had cried and begged and said she was sorry, then dropped to her knees and tried to embrace the dog, Hobbs, who had sidestepped her to hide behind Jack, still whimpering from the pain and the sudden, fierce betrayal of a human being he’d trusted.

Now, remembering that scene, Jack felt a stabbing chill. Had she beaten Gideon, too, in fits of anger?

“No,” she replied stiffly, in belated answer to his question. “I’m not on drugs.”

He shoved a hand through his hair. Reassessed this woman as calmly as he could, under present circumstances.

Her hair was straggly, overprocessed, and in need of washing. Her clothes, worn short-shorts, and a low-cut top that revealed a grungy bra, made her look like a hooker. Hell, for all he knew, she’d traveled that route.

“I don’t believe you,” he said flatly.

“What if I am, then?” she snapped. “All the more reason I shouldn’t have to raise your son.”

“Will you keep your voice down?” Jack retorted. “The boy can hear you!”

Loreen shook her head. “No big deal if he does,” she said, and the shrug in her tone only increased Jack’s sense of outrage. “He knows how I feel. He’s a brat and I’m sick of being around him. He always wants something, needs something. It’s a total drag.”

Jack closed his eyes for a long moment, shook his head.

When he opened them again, Loreen was grinning at him.

Grinning.

“You’re rich now,” she said. “Just write me a nice check, and I’ll be out of your life—and Gideon’s—for good.”

Jack didn’t bother to ask himself how she knew he had money; he made a point of living simply and keeping a low financial profile. At thirty-two, his fast-track days were behind him; he was all about living simply now, and he felt good about that.

“As if I’d trust you, Loreen.”

For all the attitude she was dishing out, she looked hurt.

He didn’t care.

For the moment, all his concern was for the son he hadn’t known he’d had.

“You’re going to have to sign custody of our son over to me, Loreen,” he said, speaking as reasonably as he could. “Permanent custody. You’re clearly not fit to care for him, and proving that to the authorities would be no trouble at all. A little digging and I’ll have all I need.” He paused, looked over at Gideon. The boy’s head was down now, but he was petting Jack’s German shepherd, Trey, with one faltering hand.

Jack’s throat thickened, and the backs of his eyes scalded.

“Abandoning a child won’t win you any favors with the law, either,” he added, turning back to Loreen, and his voice was a hoarse croak that time.

Loreen’s narrow, bony face tightened in fresh irritation. “Fine,” she said sharply. “Then I’ll just take Gideon and hit the road again. I thought it would be better to leave him with you than dump him on the foster system, but I guess I was wrong!”

When she whirled to walk away, Jack caught a firm but not bruising hold on her right elbow.

She shook him loose.

Just then, the child let out a roar of angry sorrow, and when Jack turned in his direction, he saw that Gideon had wrapped both arms around Trey’s furry neck and buried his face in the dog’s gleaming hide.

Jack was done arguing with Loreen. He strode over to the boy and crouched before him.

“Gideon?” he ventured, his voice gruff with emotion.

He could hardly believe he’d gotten out of bed that morning thinking he had an ordinary day of hard work ahead of him—rounding up stray cattle, checking fence lines, overseeing the renovation of the house and the completion of the new barn. Instead, he’d learned that he had a son, and now his heart had been torn wide open with a crowbar.

He knew little or nothing about the boy, but he already loved him fiercely. It was as if a switch had been flipped the moment he realized Gideon was bone of his bone, flesh of his flesh.

“I hate her,” Gideon cried, while Trey stood patiently by, offering what comfort he could, a lick to the boy’s cheek, a paw raised to brush the side of his knee. “I hate her!”

Tentatively—after all, he’d been an absent father, and the fact that he’d had no clue that Gideon existed would make little difference to the child—Jack rested a hand on the kid’s trembling shoulder.

Gideon was small for his age, and downright skinny.

Just as Jack had been, when he was twelve.

At sixteen, the growth hormones had kicked in.

Now he was still lean, but he stood six feet tall and he was muscular from years of working out, followed by months of manual labor on the rundown cattle ranch he was determined to restore.

He had plans for this place. Plans that had nothing to do with getting richer.

“That’s okay,” Jack said, at something of a loss. He wasn’t Loreen Baker’s greatest fan, but he didn’t hate her, and he didn’t think Gideon did, either.

“You didn’t want me,” Gideon accused, lifting his head from Trey’s neck to glare at him. “Why didn’t you want me?”

The question sundered Jack O’Ballivan’s very soul. “I didn’t know about you, son,” he replied hoarsely. “If I had, I would have been part of your life from day one.”

Something shifted in the child’s freckled, tear-streaked face.

Suspicion? Hope? Jack couldn’t tell.

Behind him, Loreen shouted, “Fine, then! No money, no kid! Come on, Gideon—we’re getting out of here! Let’s go!”

“Do you want to go with your mom?” Jack asked, very quietly. It seemed important to let the boy know he had some choice in the matter, even though Jack had no intention of letting him leave. “Because if you don’t, you can stay right here, with me.”

“Seriously? I can stay with you. And—and this dog?”

“His name is Trey,” Jack said, with a slight grin. His emotions were scraped raw. “And, yes, we’d both like that a lot. If you stayed, I mean.”

“I’m not an easy kid,” Gideon warned solemnly. “I can be a lot of trouble.”

Jack swallowed his grin and tried to look serious. “Is that right? Well, I wasn’t an easy kid, either, so I guess you took after me.”

Gideon’s little face brightened a little. “Is this your ranch, or do you just work here?”

“It’s mine.”

“It’s not in very good shape,” the boy remarked, taking in the ancient ranch house and outbuildings before looking over at the nearly finished barn.

“Gideon!” Loreen screeched. “Get. In. The. Car! Now!”

Gideon’s gaze slipped past Jack’s face and found Loreen, though he didn’t move, or answer her demand. Then he looked at Jack again. “I think you need help getting this place fixed up,” he said solemnly. He paused to bite his lower lip. “I guess I’d better stick around and give you a hand.”

Another lump formed in Jack’s throat, and he had to swallow hard—and painfully—before he could make a reply. “That would be good,” he said. “Really good. I could use another ranch hand, and I think you’d do just fine.”

Loreen was coming in their direction; Jack sensed that, stood, and turned around, standing between Gideon and his mother.

When she opened her mouth and sucked in a breath to yell again, Jack cut her off.

“Get yourself a room in town for the night,” he said evenly. “I’ll arrange to meet with my lawyer tomorrow, so we can get the documents ready.”

Briefly, very briefly, her expression lightened. Then she narrowed her eyes and said, “What about the check?”

“Trying to sell a child is illegal, Loreen,” Jack replied. “Do you want to go to jail?”

“She’s been in jail lots of times,” Gideon put in. He was standing beside Jack by then.

“Shut up!” Loreen hissed, bending to glower into her son’s face.

“And she’s already got a motel room,” the boy went on. Evidently, he felt safe speaking up, with his newfound father standing beside him. “It’s dirty, and it smells like mildew.”

“I told you to shut up,” Loreen shouted.

The kid wasn’t backing down. He lifted his eyes to meet Jack’s. “Her boyfriend, Brent, is there right now. He told her to make sure she got some money out of you and not to bring me back with her if she didn’t want more trouble than she knew what to do with.”

Loreen closed her eyes and rocked back on her heels. Swore copiously.

Just about then, three of the ranch hands rode in on mud-splattered horses, and they didn’t even pretend not to notice the standoff in front of the barn.

With a flash of corny humor, Jack thought, This ranch ain’t big enough for the both of us, Miss Loreen.

“Everything all right over there, Boss?” called Tom Winter Moon, the foreman and Jack’s good friend.

“It’s fine,” Jack replied good-naturedly, raising his voice enough to be heard from a distance of a few hundred yards. “The lady was just leaving.”

Loreen looked as though steam might shoot out of her ears, like in a cartoon. “I can’t go back to that motel without money!” she cried, actually stomping one foot in frustration. “Brent will kick me out!”

Unhurriedly, Jack took his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans, extracted five twenty-dollar bills from it, and held them out to her.

Loreen snatched the money immediately, though she made it plain she wasn’t satisfied. She gave her son a scathing once-over and told him, “Don’t get too comfortable, buddy boy. If I don’t walk out of that lawyer’s office tomorrow with a check in my hand, you and I will be out of here before you can say Jack’s-my-daddy.”

Gideon moved a little closer to Jack, pressing into his side.

Trey gave a little yelp and positioned himself like a furry wall between Jack and Gideon and Loreen, who seemed to have forgotten that she’d wanted to dump her son and be footloose and fancy free, as the old saying went.

Jack bent far enough to ruffle the dog’s ears. Trey was in protection mode, but he was scared, too. He wasn’t used to the kind of energy Loreen was putting out; Diamond Creek Ranch was a safe place, a refuge.

“Go,” Jack said, holding Loreen’s frenzied gaze. “If you don’t, I’ll call the police. I’m pretty sure they’ll take a genuine interest in you, Loreen. That Brent yahoo you mentioned, too, most likely.”

Loreen paused, looking as though she was about to launch herself at Jack, claws out, and rake him bloody.

She opened her mouth, closed it again, and then turned and stomped off toward the driveway, where her rattletrap rust-bucket of a car was parked.

Jack held his breath, hoping the damned thing would start, and exhaled heavily when the motor sputtered to life and then roared as Loreen revved the engine. After shifting gears—a loud, grinding sound resulted—she made a snappy three-point turn and sped for the gate.

The rig fishtailed on the dirt road, flinging up dust in all directions, and tore away.

Jack squeezed Gideon’s shoulder. “You okay, son?” he asked.

The boy looked up at him. Smiled sadly. “I think she was expecting you to follow her orders.”

Jack smiled down at his son, ruffled his shaggy hair. “Hope she isn’t holding her breath,” he said.

Harper Quinn opened the front door of the cottage she’d inherited from a distant relative—it was a fixer-upper by any definition—and felt a strange, sweet frisson of—something as she took in the man standing well back from the welcome mat, hands in the hip pockets of his battered blue jeans. His long-sleeved chambray shirt was open to reveal a worn T-shirt beneath, and the stubble on his chin matched his dark, longish hair.

He was accompanied by a young boy, ten to twelve years old, similarly clad, and a German shepherd with a graying muzzle and gentle eyes.

Ollie, Harper’s teacup Yorkie, scrabbled at the heels of her sneakers, wanting to slip past and greet the visitors.

His yapping was making her low-grade headache worse, and the shepherd was big enough to swallow Ollie whole, so she stooped to gather him up. He squirmed and wriggled in protest, but at least the barking stopped.

“This is Trey,” the boy said, patting his dog’s head.

Benignly, Trey plunked himself down on the weathered boards of the porch, tongue lolling, and in that moment, Harper would have sworn the critter was smiling.

Harper smiled, too, looking at the boy. “This is Ollie,” she replied, taking one of his tiny paws between her thumb and index finger and waggling it briefly.

The man laughed, and the sound was rich and masculine. “Now that the dogs have been introduced,” he said, still keeping his distance, “I’m Jack O’Ballivan, and this is my son, Gideon.”

“Harper Quinn,” Harper said, a bit puzzled. She was a city girl, unused to neighborly visits. In the Seattle high-rise where she’d lived until a few weeks before, she had only a nodding acquaintance with one or two of the other tenants.

“My dad owns all that land across the road,” Gideon said, his expression solemn and his tone vaguely hesitant, as if he wasn’t quite sure of his own words. “You can’t see much from here, except maybe the barn roof, because of the trees. It’s called Diamond Creek Ranch, and it’s almost a thousand acres.”

“Gideon,” Jack said, in a tone of gentle reproof. “We’re here to welcome Ms. Quinn and offer help, not to brag about the size of our property.” He rested a hand on the boy’s head and ruffled his hair, and Harper’s discouraged heart warmed at the sight; in her former life as a social worker, she’d seen so many children neglected and abused that she’d almost forgotten how it looked when a parent showed such easy affection for their child.

Gideon smiled, but his mouth wobbled with the effort.

His father seemed to sense the boy’s reticence, and pulled him to his side, held him there for a moment or so. His intensely blue eyes were fixed on Harper’s face, and the lopsided grin on his attractive face held a modicum of sadness.

“Obviously,” Jack O’Ballivan said quietly, “you were on your way out, so we won’t keep you. We’re throwing a shindig next weekend—a big bonfire, a barbecue, some games and even a dance, to celebrate finishing the new barn. If you’d like to join us, that would be great—half of Copper Ridge will be there, so you’ll have a chance to meet a lot of the locals.” With that, he tilted his head back and took in the sorry state of the cottage, with its sagging shutters and peeling paint. “And I can recommend a few contractors, if you’re planning to renovate.”

Harper was planning to renovate; it had been years since anyone had lived there, and the neglect showed. After the surprise notification that she’d been left a house and several acres of land in northern Arizona, she’d applied for and gotten a counseling job with the Copper Ridge school system.

“Ummm,” she said, biting her lower lip. She wasn’t sure she was up for a party, even if it would allow her to meet the attendees, some of whom were bound to be teachers, or parents of the children she would be working with in a month or so, when school started. “Okay. Thank you.”

“Is that okay, you’ll come to the party, or okay, go ahead and send over a contractor or two?”

Harper felt her cheeks flush. Her feet felt rooted to the floor. Jack O’Ballivan wasn’t classically handsome; he was rugged and strong, and though he was lean and muscular, he seemed to take up a lot of space.

Maybe he knew he had that effect on some people, and had taken care to maintain a small distance so as not to overwhelm the newcomer to the neighborhood.

She recovered quickly and replied, “Both. The party sounds like a lot of fun, and as you can see, this place needs a ton of work. I’ve been here a week now, and I’ve done a lot of cleaning and painting, things like that, but the roof is in poor shape and the fireplace chimney”—she gestured toward the side of the cottage—“is crumbling. In fact, half of it is lying in the yard. So I do need to hire someone as soon as possible.”

Bringing the place up to speed was going to take a chunk of her savings, but of course, she didn’t share that.

Gideon and Trey were already walking away, toward the broken front gate. The picket fence zigged and zagged and stuck out in every direction but straight up.

Mr. O’Ballivan lingered, one foot on the ground, one on the porch step. He gave her a thumbs-up and smiled again.

“I have most of the construction workers in the area occupied, working over at my place, but I can spare a few guys.”

Straining in Harper’s arms, Ollie started wiggling and yapping again, most likely wanting to follow the boy and the other dog. Maybe Harper’s best friend Devon had been right, and she should adopt a second dog to keep her Yorkie company.

Devon ran an animal rescue organization back in Seattle, where Harper had lived and worked until she’d made the decision to leave the city and make a whole new start in a state she’d never even visited before.

With the deed to her cottage in hand, she’d scanned the internet for job opportunities in the area.

She’d been interviewed for the position in Copper Ridge via Zoom and, much to her relief, had been hired almost immediately.

Then, after breaking the lease on her condo in Seattle and sending the few things she’d decided to keep on ahead to be stored in the cottage, she’d loaded Ollie and a couple of suitcases into her compact car and headed for Arizona.

It had seemed a practical plan at the time—the property, unsaleable as it stood, was worth fixing up, in her opinion, though it would be a lot of work. Ultimately, if things didn’t work out there and she wanted to move on, it would probably be easy enough to sell the place.

All around, the restoration would make for a good long-term investment and, since it was only ten to fifteen minutes from the school buildings in town, the commute would be easy.

On top of that, the surrounding countryside was spectacular.

More difficult in winter, though. Elliott Parker, president of the school board, had warned her that the Arizona high country was considerably different, weather-wise, from the desert farther south.

Heavy snowfalls, even blizzards, were not uncommon in this part of the state.

Returning from her woolgathering with a jolt, Harper set Ollie down inside the house and shut the door behind her so he couldn’t escape. He’d never lived in the country before, and she’d had to chase him through the underbrush twice since they’d arrived. Since his brain was roughly the size of a lima bean, he couldn’t kno. . .