This morning it was cool, and she was happy to have the considerable weight of a purring cat to keep her cozy. From her porch, she could see the mountains rising up behind the town, keeping watch over the perfect little Old West jewel that was Cold River, straddling the pretty, sparkling river that gave it its name. She could still vividly remember driving into this valley when she’d moved here, aiming her rattly old Mazda around and around the twisting, winding mountain roads, climbing up one side of a dizzying height and then dropping down the other. The views from the hills had astonished her—and still did. The Longhorn Valley had been stunning there beneath the big, blue Colorado sky, the province of farmers and ranchers with real live cowboys wandering the streets of town, and all of it filled with a kind of quiet charm that Harriet found nothing short of delightful.
Soul-restoring, even.
Harriet had grown up in a leafy, historic river town outside of Kansas City, Missouri, thick with families and students and the typical rush of semesters and seasons and the busy nearby city many residents commuted to daily.
Cold River felt like a step back. A deep breath.
For Harriet, who had always felt out of step with the world—and never more so than when she’d been at college in Minnesota—Cold River felt like a blessing.
Though she knew that wasn’t the case for everyone.
And that was why she found herself firing up her trusty old hatchback that afternoon. She headed out from town, driving along Cold River’s pretty main street with its Old West façades, clever little shops, and the Grand Hotel that rose up a few stories and whispered of long-gone copper barons and storied Western outlaws to anyone who passed. She drove over the hill, smiling as the view stole into her the way it always did while she navigated down into fields drenched in summer, gleaming bright beneath the crystal blue skies.
Harriet loved where she’d come from, but she couldn’t deny that there was something about the Rocky Mountains that took her breath away. The soaring peaks and that Colorado sky, so big it made her heart beat faster.
She didn’t spend much time on this side of the hill since her pleasant little life was located in town. The first thing she noticed today was that she didn’t pass a single other car on the county road, not even one of the ubiquitous pickup trucks that were usually everywhere. She was glad that she’d printed out the directions, like the Luddite she was, because she wasn’t sure that there would be any cell phone service way out here. There didn’t appear to be enough people to warrant it.
She drove and drove, listening to Lori McKenna sing into the summer sweetness outside her windows. Eventually, she found her way to some proper Old West fencing and a big, attractive wooden archway with Bar K written in iron at the top.
You do know that a large part of the heritage celebrated by the Heritage Society has to do with my family, right? Jensen had asked her last night.
Harriet had to blow out a shaky sort of breath at the memory of that rumbly voice of his. So … male. She couldn’t get past it.
“At least I’m in the right place,” she said out loud and maybe a little overbrightly as she turned in.
The driveway—or maybe it was just called a road, not a driveway, this far out from civilization—was dirt. She slowed down, because her little Mazda might be trusty in most ways, but she suspected it wasn’t up to a confrontation with this much pure country.
And also because, as she drove, she could see the horses.
Some stood in one place, watching as she bumped along. Others placidly ignored her.
And still others ran along the fences as if challenging her to a race. Or simply for the sheer joy of running.
By the time she came around the last little curve, through the trees, and saw the ranch house waiting, Harriet was as exhilarated as if she was out there running like that, so liquid and beautiful beneath the sky. And had half forgotten what she was doing here in the first place.
She tried to regain her composure as she drew closer to the house, a proper Western affair with rustic dark wood and big windows that looked exactly the way Harriet imagined a ranch house should. It wasn’t the only building in the clearing, but it was the prettiest. The rest were a collection of other structures that she was sure served some or other functional purpose.
Because this wasn’t simply a home. This was a business.
The Kittredge family bred quarter horses. In researching what that meant while she let her hair dry, Harriet had lost the better part of her morning following the history of the quarter horse through the American West. And was somehow unsurprised to discover that the Kittredge family was widely held to have produced some of the finest over the last hundred and fifty odd years.
Like many of the ranching families in this area, their roots ran straight on back to the founding of the town. Just as Jensen had told her.
She learned that Jensen was one of four brothers, with a younger sister, parents, and grandparents, all of whom were something like legends around town. The grandparents still held sway over local decisions, even though they’d retired from actively running the Bar K. The parents were prominent in their own right, involved in all the charities and on all the governing boards. She already knew that the eldest brother, Zack, was the county sheriff and the sister, Amanda, had not only run the Heritage Gala last fall but had opened her own shop in town—where Harriet had bought most of her Christmas gifts last year. That left Jensen and his two other brothers to handle the horses.
All those marvelous horses.
And Harriet could admit, as she parked her car in a yard that was bristling with all the pickup trucks she hadn’t seen on the road, that the thought of Jensen Kittredge handling things made her … silly, really.
When she had somehow bypassed all the silliness she’d seen displayed both in seventh grade before she’d abandoned the public schools and then again in college.
How curious, she thought.
But she wasn’t here for silliness. She was here for her students.
Thinking of those students made her stand a little straighter when she got out of the car, jerking her newly dried cardigan into place. She was aware that it was Sunday and that most people in this area stuck to the same Sunday routine—or so her colleagues at Cold River High had informed her. Chores, church, then a big old family dinner. Wanting to be respectful, she’d worn a dress instead of her usual no-nonsense trousers.
But one thing she’d learned in Colorado was that even in summer, the wind coming down from the mountaintops could very well be cold. That was why she never left home without her sweater.
Harriet told herself that’s what it was. Cold. That was why—when she rounded the back of her car and headed for the ranch house’s front door, only to find Jensen himself standing there, gleaming in the sunlight outside what she thought was a barn—she broke out in goose bumps.
Everywhere.
“You’re a persistent little thing, aren’t you?” he drawled.
Not exactly in a complimentary fashion.
She was definitely cold, she assured herself, and that was all. “Persistence is the difference between surrender and success,” she said. Because she couldn’t stop quoting her mother, especially when she was stressed. Not that she was stressed. Why should she be stressed? “I’ll tell you right now, Mr. Kittredge. I prefer to be successful.”
Last night in the bar, she’d been agitated. Harriet could admit that. It wasn’t the Coyote itself. She was perfectly well aware of its history as the local bordello, and if she’d had her wits about her, she could have given Jensen a small dissertation on the topic of the women who’d resided there and how the way they’d made their living wasn’t necessarily shameful, but in many ways a revolutionary act out on the frontier of a new nation. Instead, she’d been too taken aback by the whole … thing. It had been darker than she’d expected. Much, much louder. There had been a lot of flesh on display and not, she quickly surmised, only because it was summer. There were men she was pretty certain were the real version of the bikers she’d watched on TV—purely for research purposes, of course—and if she wasn’t mistaken, the parents of some of her students.