One Less Lonely Cowboy. Kathleen Eagle

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       www.millsandboon.co.uk

      For David and Shawna

      May you live happily ever after

       Chapter One

      Iris reminded her mother of a hatchling popping out of its shell. She’d slept through much of western North Dakota, missed crossing the state line, and now she was about to get her first look at her new stomping grounds. Her new airspace. Plenty of air, plenty of space—two more points Lily Reardon could add to the plus side of the next pointless discussion about the move they had to make. It didn’t matter that Iris only bothered with one minus—leaving her friends—against Lily’s multitude of pluses, or that the discussion was no longer a discussion but a fait accompli. It would come up again, mainly because Iris was waking up in more ways than one.

      She blinked, head bobbing atop a long, slightly wobbly neck as she emerged from the white folds of her old Minky blanket, still the hatchling for another second, maybe two. Blink, blink. No judgment in the big blue eyes that searched first for assurance that Mommy was nearby. Last year’s Iris. Lily’s little girl.

      Then the curtain came down in those eyes.

      “Where are we?”

      It wasn’t the question that was hard to take; it was the tone. It was like the landscape surrounding the second-hand Chevy that was one missed payment away from getting repossessed: beautifully straightforward and unforgiving. The answer wasn’t important.

      “We’re almost there.”

      Iris drew a deep breath as she took a look at either side of the two-lane road. Winter had receded from the brown grasslands, but spring wasn’t ready to put up any green shoots. Nights were still too cold, and the sky was still untrustworthy. The beauty would come. They only had to wait a little longer, drive a little farther. But Iris could only know what she was seeing here and now. Montana was Lily’s birthplace. It had narrowly missed being Iris’s.

      “I hope there’s a ‘there’ there,” Iris said. “I don’t see any here.”

      Lily chuckled. Whether trying her patience or plumbing her trove of trivia, her daughter loved testing her. Being both mother and teacher, Lily lived in double jeopardy.

      Lily took the bait. “You know where that comes from, don’t you? ‘There’s no there there’?”

      “Gertrude Stein.”

      Lily smiled at the road ahead. Point for knowing the answer, extra point for not saying duh. They passed a turn marked by the sign that told Lily they were getting close. Iris had stopped noticing signs the day before, two or three hundred miles back. She’d been asleep when Lily had turned off the road at a truck stop near Dickinson, North Dakota, when she’d started nodding off herself.

      “She was talking about California,” Iris said. “Can you imagine?”

      “Oakland.”

      “Whatever.”

      Point docked on Lily’s mental scoreboard. But this wasn’t the time for a tally.

      “Cali-freakin’-fornia,” Iris said, as though she knew the place firsthand. “If there’s no ‘there’ there, I quit.”

      “Quit what?”

      “The journey. Life’s a journey, right? Literally and figuratively both. And this—” Iris made a sweeping gesture toward the brown fields and foothills beyond the windshield. “—is just a layover. Who goes to a place like …” She sucked in the deep breath her dramatic sigh required. “Back to my original question. Where are we?”

      “As far west as your thirteen-year journey has taken you so far. We just passed Lowdown, Montana.”

      “Who goes to Lowdown, Montana, Mom? Who? Oh, God, we do.” Iris slid back down, tucking her chin into her blanket. “We two, we unhappy two, and we don’t even stop in Lowdown. We drive right through on our way to Bottom Feeder Farm.”

      “The СКАЧАТЬ