Spotlight & Giveaway: Cowboy on the Run by Anne McAllister

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Anne McAllister to HJ!

Hi Anne and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, Cowboy on the Run!

To start off, can you please tell us a little bit about this book?:

Heir to one of the biggest ranches in Montana and a Harvard-educated lawyer to boot, Rance Phillips has understandably – except to him – just been named one of the World’s Most Eligible Bachelors by an upscale lifestyle magazine. That’s bad enough. What’s worse is discovering his dad has a tour bus full of eligible brides-to-be all with their sights set on Rance. So he does what any spooked cowboy would do – he bolts. Doing so brings him back into contact with Ellie Pascoe – now Ellie O’Connor, the widowed mother of four, and once upon a time, the woman Rance left behind. If the bevy of tour bus brides-to-be sends Rance on the run, meeting up with Ellie again does the opposite. He digs in his heels, determined to stick around. Ellie is less than thrilled. She had her heart broken by Rance Phillips once. She isn’t letting it happen again. He didn’t want a wife and he didn’t want children, she is quick to remind him. What she is at pains NOT to point out is that her oldest, 10-year-old Josh, looks a lot like him. Josh wouldn’t be best pleased to learn that, either. He’s 100% Spike O’Connor’s son and he doesn’t need – or want – anyone replacing his dad. Josh is determined to make that perfectly clear when Rance decides to stick around and help out.
 

Please share your favorite lines or quote(s) from this book:

Hard to choose a line or two because they’re all part of scenes. But I think one of my favorites was early in the book where Rance has had it up to his eyeballs with his father’s manipulative shenanigans and the scene ends with the line:

The penalty for patricide in Montana was greater than Rance wanted to pay. But not by much.

And then there’s the time Rance is gearing up to meet Josh’s mother for the first time. He isn’t looking forward to it. Josh’s ma, Rance thought, must be one tough bird. He supposed she couldn’t be all that old – forty probably or maybe fifty. But he had no doubt she’d be boot-faced and cranky…He wondered idly if he could charm her. What good was it, after all, to be one of the world’s most eligible bachelors if he couldn’t sweet-talk one crabby old witch?

What inspired this book?

I think primarily what inspired me was thinking about what has to go into a relationship to make it work, to make it something that people believe in and want to see through. The first time Ellie and Rance met, they were young. Ellie was starry-eyed and Rance was in the midst of rebelling against everything he’d been groomed to do in life. They might have been the right people for each other – but not then. Then things wouldn’t have worked. If they are going to work this time, it’s going to take a lot of effort, a lot of commitment, a lot of maturity. Another thing that inspired this book was a desire to explore what ‘family’ really means, what makes a man a father. There was a strong, unbreakable connection between Josh and his dad, Spike. It is something that Josh and Rance have to come to terms with, to understand, and to value even as they learn to value each other. The relationship between fathers and sons – between Trey and Rance, between Rance and Ellie’s boys, as well as that between Spike and Josh was something I wanted to explore. And, of course, the ‘second time around’ aspect of Rance and Ellie’s own relationship, especially as it involved her children and his father, was the focal point. No relationships exist in isolation. All of them interweave and affect each other. I got to explore all those ideas in Cowboy on the Run.

How did you ‘get to know’ your main characters? Did they ever surprise you?

Rance was one of those guys who, to everyone else, seems to have it all. He’s smart, hard-working, well-educated, the heir to a ranching empire. As a teenager he was the star quarterback on his high school football team (see The Cowboy Steals a Lady to meet Rance as a teenager and then as the “other man” that Poppy’s father, The Judge, wants her to marry.). But we don’t really get to know Rance then except through the eyes of Poppy and of Shane who doesn’t understand at all the pressures Rance is under as Trey Phillips’ son. In fact, no one does. I got to know him a bit by writing about him in Shane’s book, and I sensed there was a lot more to his story. I wanted to know more. In that book he served as a contrast to Shane’s impulsiveness. Rance had a good heart, but I felt he had kept a lot hidden for a lot of years. His meeting with Josh and then with Ellie and her family was a way of waking him up, of making him take another look at decisions he thought he’d already made, then I wanted to make him dig deeper into what he was capable of, not just what he had rebelled against. He didn’t surprise me too much – although when he finally really blew up at his dad, I have to say I was standing on the sidelines, cheering him on.

Ellie was someone I think I knew instinctively because as a mother of four myself, I’d been there, done that, and knew the demands on her time and her commitment. I also knew she would do whatever her children needed because she put their welfare above her own. But I knew, too, that having a partner, being one of a couple instead of ‘doing it all alone’ was important. It wasn’t selfish to want that – it was something that would be important to her and also to her children. I think that single parents have it tough. They need support. Ellie was lucky to have her mother-in-law. She was lucky to have her kids. But having Rance back in her life was even more important. I think watching Ellie let go of her compulsion to try to do everything herself, to be everything to everyone was gratifying and it made me smile when she finally allowed herself to feel again that she wasn’t the only one carrying the world.

I loved Josh. He could have had a book himself. At ten he’s on the cusp of moving from childhood to those awkward years when everything he thinks is true might have nuances he never counted on. His dad’s death has made him grow up fast, so fast he doesn’t quite know how to cope. He had such a rock-solid relationship with his dad that allowing another man into their family feels as if it is a betrayal of everything he and Spike shared. Josh is loyal to a fault, yet in the book he finds himself seriously tempted by possibilities suddenly laid out before him. How he comes to terms with his allegiance to his dad and how he deals with Rance and Trey and growing up was such a joy to write.

And I have to admit to a soft spot for Trey. He’s bullish and bossy and single-minded to a fault. But there’s a lot simmering inside Trey that will gradually come to light here and during A Cowboy’s Secret (coming soon!), a story in which he also has a role. I’ve known men like Trey – ones who believe they know best, that they have the truth and everyone else has opinions – and I also knew that some of them, at least, had lots more going on in their lives – which weren’t just black and white — than they ever admitted to. I wanted to explore that with Trey and, I hope, let the people he loved learn that about him and so appreciate him more (even if they wanted to strangle him half the time!). But Trey didn’t make it easy, which is why it is going to take a couple of books!

What was your favorite scene to write?

One of my favorites was the opening scene of the book, which showed Rance in his ordinary world and then introduced the event that caused him to bolt:

It was the tour bus that did it.
One minute Rance Phillips was entirely focused on the dark red Simmental calf he’d roped and thrown to the ground for branding amid the sound and fury of bawling mother cows, bleating calves and the cussing and whooping of half a dozen cowboys.
And the next moment everything stopped.
The low mechanical drone in the background, which had seemed like no more than the result of a shift in the wind bringing the sound of truck engines on the highway a half mile distant, suddenly grew very loud indeed.
“Will you look at that,” J.D. Holt, his foreman said.
Instead of branding the calf, Shane Nichols, who was wielding the iron, stood straight up and did just that.
His brother, Mace, who was supposed to be vaccinating, straightened too. He took off his hat and said, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
And Cash Callahan, who was turning baby bulls into steers, looked up, dropped the knife, and whistled. “Whooo-eeeee.”
“What the hell –?” Rance demanded. He tightened his hold on the calf. “This isn’t a Sunday school picnic, you know. Pay attention!”
They were paying attention. Just not to him. Disgusted, Rance finally looked up to see for himself what was going on.
A tour bus – a neon pink tour bus – was pulling to a stop just beyond the confines of the corral. Before he could say a word, the door to the bus opened and a horde of women spilled out.
“Ho-leee,” Shane breathed.
“Maybe I haven’t seen everything,” Mace mumbled.
“Look at those mammas!” J.D. grinned as the women – all of them young, most of them pretty, and not one of them dressed appropriately for a branding – advanced toward the corral. They seemed oblivious to the cattle, but they were evidently looking for something — or someone. Their eyes darted from this cowboy to that one.
Then one of them pointed straight at Rance. “There he is!”
Oh, no. He didn’t believe it. Refused to believe it!
But no sooner had they spotted him than they made a beeline in his direction.
Rance said a very rude word under his breath. He let go of the calf and, as it bolted, looked around for a bolt-hole of his own. There were none. The women descended en masse.
“Oooh! Rance! My name’s Jolie, Rance.”
“Ah, Rance. You’re even handsomer than your pictures!”
“Rance, baby! You probably don’t remember, but my mother and yours – “
The babble of female voices was deafening. They were getting closer, swarming over the corral fence.
Rance straightened up and took one more desperate glance around, saw the astonished and bemused faces of his friends and knew there was no hope for it. He had to stand his ground.
So he did, but he was furious. For the last four months — ever since that damned article in the magazine, Global Style, had named John Ransome Phillips, IV “one of the world’s most eligible bachelors” — Rance’s life hadn’t been the same.
He had been used to women batting their lashes at him. As he’d grown to adulthood, he’d become accustomed to occasionally turning heads and hearing muffled female giggles when he looked their way.
But he’d never in his life get accustomed to this! Everywhere he went now, women ogled him. They turned up in his law office, they followed him down the street. If he went into the grocery store, they trailed him down the aisles. If he ran into town for baling wire, women stampeded into the hardware store. They brushed up against him and wiggled their hips in front of him. They tucked their phone numbers into his pocket and patted his butt!
The ones enterprising enough to have discovered his cell phone number . called him at 3:00 in the morning to chat. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his work was suffering, too. His receptionist-cum-secretary, Jodi, couldn’t get any work done either, because she was always making appointments for single women who desperately needed legal advice from John Ransome Phillips, IV about cases that didn’t exist.
Last month he finally caved in and stopped letting her answer the phone. Now there was a blasted phone tree intercepting calls – not that it slowed them down much. He bought an answering machine that screened out all unknown numbers from the landline. Recently he’d stopped going to the grocery store, the hardware store, anywhere off the ranch at all, except to court or to his office.
It still hadn’t been enough.
Lately they’d begun turning up at the ranch. Last Monday evening he’d answered the door, expecting his accountant, and found instead a blonde in a mini-skirt whose car “just happened to break down” in his driveway — no matter that his “driveway” was a private five-mile gravel road from the nearest county highway.
On Tuesday after a harrowing day in court, during which most of the onlookers had been females more concerned with ogling him than with following the case, he’d found another hopeful female already there sipping a margarita on his front porch while she chatted with his father!
“You’re encouraging them!” he’d accused John Ransome Phillips, III.
“Me?” His father had flattened a hand against his chest and stared at Rance in wide-eyed innocence. “I never –!” The old bastard could’ve won an Oscar.
On Wednesday morning Rance discovered a brunette in the barn. She’d been there all night, lying in wait.
“Proving I’m devoted,” she told him as he hustled her to her car. “The article said you wanted your wife to be ‘devoted.’” she quoted the magazine as he shoved her in and slammed the door.
It had also said he liked apple pie. So many pies had turned up in the mail over the past four months that the post office was getting a little testy about the smell of rotting apples in their delivery vans. Rance told them they didn’t need to bother delivering the pies, but the postmaster had cited some obscure regulation, assuring Rance that the pies had to keep coming.
Of course, half a dozen enterprising women hadn’t bothered with the postal service or any other delivery service. They’d shown up with their pies in person.
Rance felt hunted. Stalked. “I need a restraining order,” he told his father.
The older man blinked. “Against half the human race?” Then, at Rance’s stony look, his father suggested cheerfully . “You could get married. That would put a stop to it.”
Of course his father would say that. The earlier protestations of innocence were protestations, and nothing more. It was no secret that John Ransome Phillips, III, was eager for his only son to marry. For the last two years, Trey Phillips, as he was known to friend and foe alike, had been telling the world at large and his son in particular, that he wasn’t getting any younger and he wanted to be assured of the succession before he was gone.
“Like you’re some damn king,” Rance fumed.
“Something like that,” Trey agreed amiably.
They hadn’t discussed the topic again. Trey had continued to watch Rance speculatively, and Rance had taken refuge where he could — on the range. It was the one place he could count on not being followed.
Until now.

What was the most difficult scene to write?

I’m not sure which was the hardest to write – sometimes it’s the most pedestrian scenes that are hard because they get you from one place to another and you need them, but they don’t – on the surface – seem to do much. But one of the scenes that was pivotal was when Rance met Josh’s mother face to face when he brought the boy home after his accident.

it was Ellie. No doubt about it.
Ellie Pascoe in the flesh.
At least she’d been Ellie Pascoe when Rance had met her in his English class at Montana State all those years ago.
She’d been the only thing he’d noticed. Her sparkling green eyes, smattering of freckles, and long thick braid of honey-colored hair had made Ellie Pascoe the only attraction strong enough to distract him from thoughts of his recently shattered rodeo career.
Of course she was older now. There was obvious maturity in her body, in her face. But in essence she was the same. Nothing had much changed, Rance decided. Except her name.
Now, obviously, she was Ellie O’Connor. His jaw tightened at the thought.
Of course she’d talked to him about marriage that year. She’d been in love with him. It hadn’t been a secret. And in his way Rance had loved her.
But to him marriage meant perpetuating “the dynasty.” It meant giving in to all those things his father wanted him to do — go to law school, find a wife, have a family.
“I’m not gettin’ married,” he’d told Ellie more than once. He didn’t see why it mattered. They had a good thing without talking about the M word, didn’t they?
Apparently not good enough for Ellie.
She must have wanted the ring and the Mrs. in front of her name worse than he’d thought, because when he’d come back to school the next autumn, eager to tell her about his summer working for a horse breeder in Ireland, Ellie wasn’t there.
At first he thought she’d just moved out of the dorms and into an apartment in town. But he hadn’t been able to find her. Then classes had begun, and still she wasn’t there. That was when he’d realized she might not have saved enough money to return to school. He knew she’d been working two jobs.
Though he had no money beyond what he’d saved from the pittance the breeder had paid him that summer — and he certainly would never have asked his father for money — he would have helped her to stay in school however he could.
When he finally ran into her friend, Leah, he demanded, “What’s with Ellie? When’s she coming back?”
He remembered Leah had looked at him for what seemed an eternity. Then she’d shaken her head. “Ellie’s not coming back.”
“I know money was tight. I can help if she — ”
“It’s not money.” Leah had hesitated for a split second, then said flatly. “Ellie got married.”
The news was almost as unexpected as the sudden end of his rodeo career. Rance knew he must have stood staring at Leah, jaw hanging open, for at least a minute. Then, feeling like a fool for displaying his feelings so openly, he’d snapped his mouth shut, muttered something about ”if that was the way she wanted it,” and stalked away.
He hadn’t asked who Ellie had married. He hadn’t wanted to know. Later he heard she’d wed a guy she’d grown up with. But at the time it was enough to realize how little she’d cared about him!
Obviously, she’d wanted marriage more than she’d wanted love — his love anyway! Well, fine, she could have it.
If she didn’t care about him, he wouldn’t care about her. He had vowed that he wouldn’t even think about her.
Now he looked at this older version of Ellie again. She was looking at him as if she’d seen a ghost. Her face was a white as the boy’s in his truck.
And that was when he realized that the boy he’d given the ride to, the boy whose horse had been spooked – was Ellie’s son!

Would you say this book showcases your writing style or is it a departure for you?

This book is definitely in my wheelhouse in terms of style and scope. One of my former editors, Patricia Smith, used to say that every author has a “vein of gold” that they mine for their ‘best books’ or the ones that touch them most. Cowboy on the Run is in that vein for me because it’s about all kinds of relationships – the romantic forever relationship between Ellie and Rance, the one between a mother and her children, the one between fathers and sons, those among all family members. Exploring those relationships – the stresses and the strengths of them – is what I enjoy most in writing. And doing them within the context of a novel like Cowboy on the Run is definitely where I work most easily.

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

I want them to have a sense that good strong committed relationships are possible, that families come in all shapes and sizes, and that in every family there is always room for one more. I want them to feel good at the end of the book, and of course I want them to want to know more about what drives Trey Phillips!

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

There are two more books in this current sub-series, Cowboy, Come Home, of my Code of the West books coming soon. The next one, A Cowboy’s Secret, is the story of J.D. Holt, who is the foreman on Trey Phillips’ ranch, and Rance’s long-suffering law partner, Lydia Cochrane. It’s an ‘opposites attract’ in spades story! Then I have a Christmas book called, A Cowboy’s Gift, about Gus Holt, J.D.’s younger brother, a footloose rodeo cowboy who discovers that ‘going down the road’ is no longer the life he wants.

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: An ebook copy of Cowboy on the Run & 3 Tule ebooks

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Excerpt from Cowboy on the Run:

It was the tour bus that did it.
One minute Rance Phillips was entirely focused on the dark red Simmental calf he’d roped and thrown to the ground for branding amid the sound and fury of bawling mother cows, bleating calves and the cussing and whooping of half a dozen cowboys.
And the next moment everything stopped.
The low mechanical drone in the background, which had seemed like no more than the result of a shift in the wind bringing the sound of truck engines on the highway a half mile distant, suddenly grew very loud indeed.
“Will you look at that,” J.D. Holt, his foreman, said.
Instead of branding the calf, Shane Nichols, who was wielding the iron, stood straight up and did just that.
His brother, Mace, who was supposed to be vaccinating, straightened too. He took off his hat and said, “Now I’ve seen everything.”
And Cash Callahan, who was turning baby bulls into steers, looked up, dropped the knife, and whistled. “Whooo-eeeee.”
“What the hell—?” Rance demanded. He tightened his hold on the calf. “This isn’t a Sunday school picnic, you know. Pay attention!”
They were paying attention. Just not to him. Disgusted, Rance finally looked up to see for himself what was going on.
A tour bus—a neon pink tour bus—was pulling to a stop just beyond the confines of the corral. Before he could say a word, the door to the bus opened and a horde of women spilled out.
“Ho-leee,” Shane breathed.
“Maybe I haven’t seen everything,” Mace mumbled.
“Wow.” A master of understatement, J.D. just shook his head and grinned as the women—all of them young, most of them pretty, and not one of them dressed appropriately for a branding—advanced toward the corral. They seemed oblivious to the cattle, but they were evidently looking for something—or someone. Their eyes darted from this cowboy to that one.
Then one of them pointed straight at Rance. “There he is!”
Oh, no! He didn’t believe it. Refused to believe it.
But no sooner had they spotted him than they made a beeline in his direction.
Rance muttered under his breath. He let go of the calf and, as it bolted, looked around for a bolt-hole of his own. There were none. The women descended en masse.
“Oooh! Rance! My name’s Jolie, Rance.”
“Ah, Rance. You’re even handsomer than your pictures.”
“Rance, baby! You probably don’t remember, but my mother and yours—”
The babble of female voices was deafening. They were getting closer, swarming over the corral fence.
Rance straightened up and took one more desperate glance around, saw the astonished and bemused faces of his friends and knew there was no hope for it. He had to stand his ground.
So he did, but he was furious. For the last four months—ever since that damned article in the magazine, Global Style, had named John Ransome Phillips, IV “one of the world’s most eligible bachelors”—Rance’s life hadn’t been the same.
He had been used to women batting their lashes at him. As he’d grown to adulthood, he’d become accustomed to occasionally turning heads and hearing muffled female giggles when he looked their way.
But he’d never in his life get accustomed to this. Everywhere he went now, women ogled him. They turned up in his law office, they followed him down the street. If he went into the grocery store, they trailed him down the aisles. If he ran into town for baling wire, women stampeded into the hardware store. They brushed up against him and wiggled their hips in front of him. They tucked their phone numbers into his pocket and patted his butt!
The ones enterprising enough to have discovered his cell phone number called him at three in the morning to chat. And if that wasn’t bad enough, his work was suffering, too. His receptionist-cum-secretary, Jodi, couldn’t get any work done either, because she was always making appointments for single women who desperately needed legal advice from John Ransome Phillips, IV, about cases that didn’t exist.
Last month he finally caved in and stopped letting her answer the phone. Now there was a blasted phone tree intercepting calls—not that it slowed them down much. He bought an answering machine that screened out all unknown numbers from the landline. Recently he’d stopped going to the grocery store, the hardware store, anywhere off the ranch at all, except to court or to his office.
It still hadn’t been enough.
Lately they’d begun turning up at the ranch. Last Monday evening he’d answered the door, expecting his accountant, and found instead a blonde whose car “just happened to break down” in his driveway—no matter that his “driveway” was a private five-mile gravel road from the nearest county highway.
On Tuesday after a harrowing day in court, during which most of the onlookers had been females more concerned with ogling him than with following the case, he’d found another hopeful female already there sipping a margarita on his front porch while she chatted with his father.
“You’re encouraging them!” he’d accused John Ransome Phillips, III.
“Me?” His father had flattened a hand against his chest and stared at Rance in wide-eyed innocence. “I never—!” The old bastard could’ve won an Oscar.
On Wednesday morning Rance discovered a brunette in the barn. She’d been there all night lying in wait for him.
“Proving I’m devoted,” she told him as he hustled her to her car. “The article said you wanted your wife to be ‘devoted.’” She quoted the magazine as he shoved her in and slammed the door.
It had also said he liked apple pie. So many pies had turned up in the mail over the past four months that the post office was getting a little testy about the smell of rotting apples in their delivery vans. Rance told them they didn’t need to bother delivering the pies, but the postmaster had cited some obscure regulation, assuring Rance that the pies had to keep coming.
Of course, half a dozen enterprising women hadn’t bothered with the postal service or any other delivery service. They’d shown up with their pies in person.
Rance felt hunted. Stalked. “I need a restraining order,” he told his father.
The older man blinked. “Against half the human race?” Then, at Rance’s stony look, his father suggested cheerfully, “You could get married. That would put a stop to it.”
Of course his father would say that. The earlier protestations of innocence were protestations and nothing more. It was no secret that John Ransome Phillips, III, was eager for his only son to marry. For the last two years, Trey Phillips, as he was known to friend and foe alike, had been telling the world at large, and his son in particular, that he wasn’t getting any younger and he wanted to be assured of the succession before he was gone.
“Like you’re some damn king,” Rance fumed.
“Something like that,” Trey agreed amiably.
They hadn’t discussed the topic again. Trey had continued to watch Rance speculatively, and Rance had taken refuge where he could—on the range. It was the one place he could count on not being followed.
Until now.
Rance reached over and grabbed the branding iron from Shane, then pointed the white-hot end of it at the approaching women. Their eager smiles faded. They looked around nervously, at him, at each other, then back toward the bus.
They slowed momentarily, but then, with foolhardy resolution, they came on.
Rance dug in. He brandished the iron. He narrowed his eyes. “Go away. Go on. Outa here. Now. Git!”
The women halted. They cocked their heads. They wetted their lips. They mustered tremulous, come-hither smiles.
“Don’t pay any attention to them, sweetheart,” the foremost one crooned, jerking her head at the women behind her. “They don’t have what you want.”
“You don’t want a pushy broad like her,” the blonde behind her said, smiling, encouraging him to agree with her. “Do you, Rance, darlin’?”
“I only came on the bus because it seemed less intrusive,” another one protested. “An organized event to let you take your pick,” she said, sounding as if she was quoting from some brochure.
And damn it, she probably was. Rance goggled at the thought. His mind reeled. Somebody had organized a tour to bring women to meet him? Who the hell—!
And then a movement in the doorway of the bus answered his question before he even had a chance to ask it. Trey stood there, one arm braced again the window, smiling at him.
It was the last straw.
Damn Trey and his conniving, manipulating, underhanded ways.
Rance leveled the branding iron at the women and headed straight at them. The women began backing up.
“Hey now, Rance,” he heard behind him. “Don’t be so hasty,” J.D. protested.
Rance ignored him. He could find his own women on his own time. His father had no business providing a harem of them right out in the middle of the branding.
“Now, son,” Trey began. He jumped down out of the bus and began to push his way through the gaggle of retreating women.
“Don’t start,” Rance warned. “I don’t want to hear it.”
“It was a joke,” Trey said, spreading his hands.
“I’m not laughing.”
“Of course you’re not—because you recognize the truth in it. You know it’s time you settled down,” his father pointed out, heedless of the fury in Rance’s tone. “You’re thirty-three years old and you’re still playing the field. If you’d get serious about finding a wife yourself, none of this would be happening.”
He was serious. Rance could see it in his father’s face. In the determined thrust of his jaw. In the steely glint that shone in his version of the Phillips blue eyes.
He was serious, totally misguided, and about a century out of date. But Rance knew his father. The old man wasn’t going to let up.
The penalty for patricide in Montana was greater than Rance wanted to pay. But not by much.

Rance supposed he was a little old to be running away from home.
But he didn’t know what else you’d call it. And he didn’t know what else to do.
He needed space. He needed time. He needed room to breathe. And he wasn’t going to get any of those things as long as he stayed on the family ranch and battled his way through a passel of women every day of the week.
So he finished the branding, endured the grins and guffaws of his buddies, and gritted his teeth through one more evening of Trey Phillips’s heavy-handed hints—and when the old man had retired to his bedroom with a western and a glass of whiskey, Rance left a phone message for his secretary, threw some clothes into a duffel bag, and jumped in his truck and took off without looking back.
He had no goal or destination in mind. Didn’t need one. Didn’t want one.
He’d had too damn many goals and destinations of late.
“Phillipses have goals,” Trey said so often that Rance reckoned it ought to be carved on a family crest. Rance had grown up with a hundred goals all laid out before him. As a youngster, he’d been goaled to death.
At eighteen, when he’d seen his life mapped out for him by his father, he’d had enough. He didn’t want to grow up, grow old and die without ever making a decision of his own. So he’d turned his back on his old man’s goals, rejected his early acceptance at Princeton and had gone off to ride broncs on the rodeo circuit.
“To live,” he’d told his father defiantly.
“Not on my money,” Trey had replied at once.
“Not on your money,” Rance agreed. He didn’t want to be beholden. He’d been determined to make it on his own—or starve to death trying.
He might have if Shane Nichols, with whom he’d gone down the road, hadn’t been a better rider than he had. Shane had made enough money rodeoing to buy gas and groceries on days when Rance had nothing but lint in the pockets of his Wranglers. Without Shane, he might have had to pack it in, crawl home and eat humble pie.
But Shane had kept him going, had patched him up, jollied him along, taught him everything he knew. And Shane wasn’t the only one. Roughstock riders were a small, close-knit group—maybe not a family, but close. Once it was clear to them that Rance was in it for real, not just thumbing his nose at his rich daddy, other guys had taken him under their wing, offering him advice, beer, sandwiches, rides. Sometimes Rance thought that the three years he had spent going down the road from rodeo to rodeo had been the happiest time of his life.
He’d known, of course, that it wouldn’t last forever. Men didn’t get old still riding broncs. In fact most barely made it to middle age before they had to find another way to make a living.
Rance knew he would, too. But he hadn’t realized it would happen as quickly, as irrevocably as it had.
One minute he was looking forward to hopping in the truck with Shane after the Pendleton rodeo, and the next he was on his way to the operating room with a shattered right arm. Three months, a plate, several pins, and four doctors’ opinions later, he was hanging up his spurs and applying to Montana State for school.
“You give your arm a rest and you’ll come back,” Shane, ever the optimist, had assured him. But Rance had seen the worry and urgency written on Shane’s normally cheerful face. And the Phillips realism he’d been born with told him he’d seen the end of that dream. Rodeoing had given him a little breathing space. It was wrong to hope for more from it.
He had gone to school. He’d known he wanted the education by this point, even though it hadn’t been easy adjusting to the academic routine. In fact only two things made it palatable at all—the sweet little rancher’s daughter he met in his freshman English class and the fact that his father was furious that he still insisted on not going to Princeton.
The rancher’s daughter hadn’t returned for her sophomore year. But the satisfaction of his father’s displeasure lasted for the next four. And when Rance finally did graduate, he took further pleasure in choosing Harvard Law. He was quite sure Princeton was everything his father claimed it was. He’d also been sure it wasn’t for him.
Harvard hadn’t been his cup of tea, either. But he was determined, by that point, to show the old man that he could make something of himself on his own.
He had resolution. He had his own goals. He accomplished them.
In the past four years he had developed a thriving law practice with an office in Billings as well as in his hometown. Three high-profile cases, all of which he’d won, brought him state accolades and a share of media attention. It got him a share of his father’s, too. Trey had been so impressed that he’d invited Rance to dinner and managed to say he guessed maybe the kid was worth something after all.
“Don’t fall all over yourself gushing,” Rance had replied, never even looking up from the steak he was cutting.
“Wouldn’t think of it,” Trey said heartily. “Seein’s how you’re an educated feller now, even if you did go to that Massa-chew-sitts school, I wondered if you might want to take a look at the land deal Schyler’s offering me.”
Schyler was the man whose ranch covered the section adjacent to the Phillips spread. “Schyler’s offering to sell?” Rance had asked, his attention caught. From there it had been a small step for Rance to get back into the ranching operation.
He knew that had been his father’s intention all along. But to make sure Trey didn’t get everything his own way, Rance had insisted on driving back and forth from Billings where his apartment and his main office were. He’d worn a rut in the highway, he did it so often.
Actually he would have preferred staying at the ranch, but that would have meant coming back under the old man’s thumb—and there was no way he was doing that. Or there would have been no way, if last year his father hadn’t had a heart attack.
It was minor, Trey assured him. “No big deal,” he’d said over and over.
But Rance had been there when his father went ashen, when sweat literally popped out on his brow. He’d seen the pain in his father’s eyes and the grip it had on his body. It might not have scared Trey, but it frightened Rance enough that he moved back home and commuted the other way for a change.
Since he’d come back to the ranch, he’d taken over most of the day-to-day running of the cattle operation. He couldn’t believe how much he’d missed it. Rodeo had been a way to stay around horses when he’d left the ranch. But to be honest ranching had always interested him a lot more than rodeo ever had. It still interested him far more than the law did.
He still had his run-ins with the old man—as stubborn a cuss as ever was born, even after his heart attack. But for the most part Rance had dug in, settled down, enjoyed every moment.
Until that damn article had come out.
Its five pages of full-color photos set Rance’s teeth on edge. Its text extolled more virtues than even his deceased doting mother would ever have believed he had.
And if all that wasn’t bad enough, it ended by proclaiming, “We’d call John Ransome Phillips, IV, a golden boy—able to turn his hand successfully to whatever needs to be done—except he’s no boy, ladies. Rest assured, the woman who tries to put a brand on the very eligible John Ransome Phillips, IV, will learn that he’s one-hundred-percent Montana man.”
Yeah, well, they’d got that right at least, Rance thought as he gripped the steering wheel now and drove into the darkness.
More important, he was a determinedly unmarried Montana man.
And at the moment, thanks to them, he was a Montana man on the run.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

World’s most eligible bachelor?

Gotta be a joke. Sure, he’s heir to a Montana ranching empire, but Rance Phillips has no intention of perpetuating the dynasty just because a lifestyle magazine and his meddling father are pushing brides-to-be down his throat. But when his path unexpectedly crosses Ellie O’Connor’s, he pulls up short.

Once his college sweetheart, strong-willed, stubborn Ellie is now a widowed mother of four. Four? Rance should be running for the hills. Instead he lingers, then settles in, determined to help save her family’s ranch for Josh, her eldest son.

Ellie doesn’t want help. She doesn’t want Rance! Well, actually she does. But he won’t stay. Not forever.

So he needs to leave now. Before she falls for him again. Before her willpower crumbles. But mostly before Rance notices that Josh looks far too much like him!

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Meet the Author:

Years ago someone told Anne McAllister that the recipe for happiness was a good man, a big old house, a bunch of kids and dogs, and a job you loved that allows you to read. And write. She totally agrees.

Now, one good man, one big old house (since traded for a slightly smaller house. Look, no attic!) a bunch of kids (and even more grandkids) and dogs (and one bionic cat) and seventy books, she’s still reading. And writing. And happier than ever.

Over thirty plus years Anne has written long and short contemporary romances, single titles and series, novellas and a time-travel for Harlequin Mills & Boon and for Tule Publishing. She’s had two RITA winning books and nine more RITA finalists as well as awards from Romantic Times and Midwest Fiction Writers. One of the joys of writing is that sometimes, when she can’t go back in person, she can go back in her mind and her heart and her books.
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