Today, HJ is pleased to share with you Megan Crane’s new release: The Cowboy’s Long Lost Christmas Bride
Some loves are impossible to forget.
Dallas Lisle spent years turning a lighthouse an ancestor built for a skeptical wife into an inn. He’s made peace with lost causes, but not with his wife, Ruthie Mathis. She’s his first and only love, and she left him. Not that he blames her. He knows exactly what kind of man he was when they were together. So when Ruthie walks back through his door, Dallas braces for the reckoning he deserves.
Except Ruthie… doesn’t remember him. She’s chasing a mystery – her lost memories and photographs found in her late grandmother’s house, leading her to Cowboy Point, the lighthouse inn, and Dallas. She doesn’t know they were married. She doesn’t know why she left.
Dallas knows all too well. And telling her the truth risks losing her all over again. Not telling Ruthie could mean they have a second chance, but for years, Dallas wished he were a different kind of man for her. Now he has the chance to prove he can be. Even if it means letting the love of his life go. Again.
Enjoy an exclusive excerpt from The Cowboy’s Long Lost Christmas Bride
Prologue
The first night in December had teeth, this high above Paradise Valley, Montana, in the remote mountain community of Cowboy Point.
Jenny Lisle liked it that way. She liked a winter night to feel like winter, and no matter what the calendar said, winter in the Gallatin Mountains pretty much started the moment summer ended. That being when August couldn’t fight off those cold mornings any longer. By the time December rolled around, she liked to sit in her little house halfway up Lisle Hill, let the fire crackle, and make sure that she was wearing something cozy while the winds blew in and the snow came down.
It was particularly delightful when shared with a friend.
And Jenny found that she still couldn’t believe what a friend she had in Peyton Patrick, the woman who ought to have been her mortal enemy. The woman her husband had built a whole second family with before disappearing without a trace.
Most of the women Jenny knew would never have given Peyton the time of day.
But then, most of those women had the good fortune to never have found themselves married to Patrick Lisle.
And, sure, it’s possible that Jenny and Peyton had both leaned into it more than was wise because it had felt pretty great to defy him and get together at all. Much less be friends. They both knew that he would never have allowed it. He would have actively pitted them against each other, in fact, in the same way he’d kept them in the dark about each other for so long.
They both knew exactly who Patrick Lisle had been. Or still was, if he was out there somewhere—though Jenny found she cared less and less about what might have happened to him as the years passed.
What mattered was that, in addition to giving her three children half siblings that they’d welcomed as if there was never any reason for any bad blood between them, the Patricks’ relocation to Cowboy Point had also given her Peyton.
First an ally, which had been gift enough. But now she was well and truly a friend.
Maybe a best friend, Jenny liked to think, and she hadn’t had one of those in a long while. That was what happened when a seemingly decent life went so obviously off the rails in the form of a husband just… abandoning not only his family but the long history of his people in a place like Cowboy Point. Folks kept a safe distance from that runaway train or they found ways to help it hurtle along faster, and Jenny couldn’t say she was mad about it. She understood. A lot of people thought infidelity was contagious.
She also appreciated every person around here who made it clear that they couldn’t be relied on. Information she hoarded and remembered, when situations reversed themselves as situations often did. Not that she’d act as they had, but she remembered.
Jenny bet they did, too.
Maybe it wasn’t such a mystery where some of her children’s martyrish tendencies came from, now she considered it.
The end result of all that turmoil, happily, was that she got to spend evenings like this with a good friend who was not only a surprise addition to her life this last little while—she’d gone through the same thing Jenny had. Literally.
Tonight they both got to hunker down in the sweet old house that had been in their mutual husband’s family for generations. They got to delight in the crisp weather outside, the snow falling gently enough to suggest that it was only going to be an inch or two to start December off. They got to watch their shows together, read their books, and let the fact that the man who’d betrayed them both was out there somewhere while they had fully taken over what ought to have been his warm them as surely as the fire did.
Jenny found that thought kept her nice and toasty all winter long.
Because they often enjoyed their wine of an evening, they didn’t bother worrying about getting Peyton back home as the night wore on. She often stayed over—so often that Jenny had started to think of the room that had once been Tennessee’s as Peyton’s, now. Sometimes they spent time together in the little cabin on the hill leading out of Cowboy Point and farther into the mountains. It was a cozy little space, one of the cabins that sat below the Stark family’s Cowboy Point Lodge that was finally completely renovated and revived and had started taking guests in its main building over the summer. But Peyton shared that cabin with her daughter, Helena, and her son Raleigh had his Airstream parked outside.
It’s like the fraternity and sorority I never joined, Peyton had said with a rueful laugh once.
That had been enough for them to obliquely agree that they might as well do most of their hangouts in Jenny’s overly-large-for-one-person house. Because there were often things to discuss that their children didn’t need to hear. No matter how grown-up they were these days.
Tonight, for example, they were engaging in their favorite pastime. Analyzing their children’s romantic lives—which the kids had a tendency to view as “interfering.”
Patrick Lisle being the lowlife that he was, he had spaced out each set of three children with both women so that they matched. Deliberately, Jenny often thought, because he had always been detail-oriented in his cruelties. That meant Jenny’s Tennessee was more or less the same age as Peyton’s Finn. Jenny’s Dallas and Peyton’s Raleigh came next, on either end of the same year. And then, as matching cherries on top, Jenny’s Cat and Peyton’s Helena were only a few months apart.
Helena had been the one to find the truth about the father she knew as Lyle Patrick. Then she’d found Cowboy Point and had come here to scope the place out. When she’d decided that the Lisle side of the family seemed…more like them than like her awful dad, she’d gotten the rest of her family to join her here to maybe build some bridges.
Jenny couldn’t remember now how she’d thought that would go, though she did recall that she’d been sure that it would be a temporary thing, back then. Instead, it seemed the Patricks were settling in—with the possible exception of Raleigh, who was the first to tell anyone who asked, and many who didn’t, that he wasn’t made to settle down anywhere. Finn had gone ahead and married one of the Bennett girls and Helena was talking about starting a second coffee truck since the first one, parked year-round outside the Lisles’ historic General Store, was such a success.
But it had been a good thing for everyone involved. Right from the start, they’d universally decided to put old family dynamics and potential hurt feelings that were Patrick’s fault, not anyone else’s, aside. And maybe that helped everything else ease a bit. Tennessee had finally seen Matilda Stark as more than the younger sister of a man he considered a friend, something Jenny would have said he’d never allow. The kids met weekly down in the pizza place that was in so many ways a hub of Cowboy Point—and was where Finn had first set eyes on Kitty Bennett—because they were all dedicated to making sure they made themselves a family.
It felt like roots. Good ones, this time. Not twisted around on whatever Patrick had done.
That Tennessee and Finn had managed to find themselves the kind of love that both Jenny and Peyton had believed Patrick offered them, once upon a time, except the real version this time, made everything that much sweeter.
It was what they wanted most of all for their kids, who didn’t deserve to carry the weight of that man. They figured they could do that. They should do that.
Jenny was happy to say that her daughter had found it a few years back with Wilder Carey, and the two of them, if possible, seemed even happier now than they had at first. No matter how appalled her sons had been that Cat was with someone their age. Jenny had not seen age as a barrier. She hadn’t even cared about the infamous feud between the Lisles and the Careys that dated back to the very first member from each of those founding Cowboy Point families getting heated in a poker game.
Jenny kind of thought that if good old Ebenezer Lisle was anything like his descendant, he probably had cheated in that game the way the Careys had always claimed.
Anyway, all she wanted was her children happy. Truly happy.
That left her with one remaining child to sort out now, and unsurprisingly, he was probably the hardest yet. Her marvelously stubborn and deeply wounded Dallas.
It was a well-known saying that a person could only be as happy as their unhappiest child. And Jenny had always known that Dallas was that child.
Even as a boy, there’d been something about him. He had those dreamy eyes, the same blue as his siblings’ but with that faraway look in them. It hadn’t really surprised her that he was the one who left as soon as he could, joining the Army and going directly into Ranger School—meaning, getting the hell out of Cowboy Point. And Montana.
Getting himself as far away from his family as possible.
She hadn’t taken it personally. Or not too personally—she was a mother after all, so she always felt it when her babies were far.
But Jenny had known that the person he really wanted to get away from was his father. Or the ghost of his father, maybe. Tennessee and Dallas had seen maybe a little too much of Patrick growing up and she knew, to her shame, that they hadn’t seen enough of her when they’d needed her most. There was nothing that Jenny could do about that now. She couldn’t change the past, much as she wished she could.
What she could do was try to make up for it.
Especially since, these days, Dallas liked to tell everyone who asked—meaning, mostly his mother—that he was allergic to emotion.
Good thing Jenny knew the real source of that particular allergy.
She’d sent the reason for Dallas’s years-long symptoms an anonymous postcard back in the summer. Just to formally announce the opening of Dallas’s little passion project that he’d poured himself into over the past few years. Or had used to hide from the world once he moved back to Cowboy Point.
Though Jenny had learned that this was an opinion her son did not like very much when she shared it. Not that Dallas liked much of anything, as far as she could tell—which he would say was because he’d gone numb in the Army.
Maybe he had. But that wasn’t why he’d stayed that way.
Tonight, as Jenny and Peyton sat on her couch laying bare all of their children’s deepest issues because that was how they expressed their love for them, she was beginning to think that she’d made a mistake with that postcard.
Maybe not everybody in the world sat around thinking about the past as much as Jenny and Peyton did. Maybe the woman she’d sent that postcard to, who’d married her son while he was an Army Ranger and had likely seen sides of him Jenny hadn’t, had no desire whatsoever to come find him again.
“That was a heavy sigh,” Peyton observed from her place on the couch, piled beneath a set of blankets.
“I was hoping…” Jenny shook her head. Peyton knew what she was hoping. “I just can’t imagine who’s going to dig inside my poor Dallas and find out where he keeps that broken heart if it’s not the one who broke it in the first place.”
“It’s the Christmas season,” Peyton pointed out. “It’s supposed to be magical. That means anything can happen.”
Jenny hoped that was true this year. For Dallas in particular.
And later on, when she paused the movie so she could go back into the kitchen to get herself a cup of water because a wise woman stayed hydrated when the wine was flowing, Jenny stopped still and stared out the window.
It was a dark night and the snow was swirling, though it wasn’t collecting much on the ground. The lighthouse’s powerful beam swept over everything in its usual rhythm, the intervals making the dark seem darker in between, and sweeter when the light danced through.
But what caught her attention was a pair of headlights making their way very, very slowly up Lisle Hill.
It was a late hour to be out, and especially in what looked like, from where she was standing, a vehicle without proper snow tires or chains. She couldn’t think of anybody she knew who’d be driving up the side of a mountain in December without being properly outfitted.
Though she supposed she was going to have to get used to that, because times were changing. Dallas had finally opened up his bed-and-breakfast, his passion project finally complete. A lighthouse had been standing on the top of Lisle Hill as a silly little folly that one of the original Lisles had built to impress his bride from back East who missed the sea. It had stood there, nonfunctional and empty, for as long as Jenny could remember.
But Dallas had decided that he could restore it to its former glory and better yet, turn it into something more than a relic of a long-dead man’s foolishness. Dallas had been working on it for years now, whenever he wasn’t doing his shifts in the family-run General Store, which was another holdover from Cowboy Point’s gold rush past. Jenny wasn’t the only one who’d assumed that he would never finish. That he would rattle around up there on the top of the hill until he was part of the legend of the lighthouse in his own right.
Instead, he’d finally opened the place as of Thanksgiving, though as far as Jenny knew, no one had actually stayed there yet.
Maybe this was the very first guest. That was exciting enough, but as Jenny peered out at the car, watching it slip too much as it navigated the unpaved dirt road beside her house, she saw something else. Something that was possibly even more exciting—
But she had to be sure she wasn’t seeing things.
She walked back out into the living room, and waved at Peyton to come look out the window too.
“It looks like Dallas is getting his first guest,” she said, but nodded toward the car.
Peyton, always quick on the uptake, held up her phone, zoomed in, and took a picture of the car as it finally, painfully passed.
Then she showed it to Jenny.
And neither one of them said anything. Not for that first moment as they looked at the Georgia license tag.
“Could be a rental,” Jenny said, because that was the reasonable thing to say.
“Not sure why a rental at this time of year would look that beat up, with nothing even remotely resembling a four-wheel drive or a set of chains,” Peyton replied.
They watched the taillights blink through the trees as the vehicle kept climbing up the hill. Peyton pressed her shoulder to Jenny’s, and Jenny pressed back, and they stayed like that until they couldn’t see the vehicle any longer.
“Still,” Jenny said then, since neither one of them had moved from the window, “we should reserve judgment.”
“We can reserve it.” Peyton’s voice was calm. Bland. So much of both that it ended up careful. “But that doesn’t delete it.”
“No,” Jenny agreed in the exact same voice. “It doesn’t.”
Because both of them knew exactly where Jenny had sent that brochure in the summer. To an address not far from Columbus and Fort Benning, the last known address of the wife Dallas had loved and lost.
And maybe it was just any old car with Georgia plates making its way up the hill to a lighthouse in Cowboy Point in this dark December. Cowboy Point was becoming more and more of a draw for tourists in the summers, but it was not exactly one of Montana’s hot spots at this time of year. Still, it was possible that this was just a coincidence. Or a rental car.
But Jenny had that little feeling deep inside of her. Like a spark, blooming into life.
And when she and Peyton sat down on the couch again, it seemed to her that her friend could feel it too.
So they said nothing more about it, because they would have to wait now and see what happened. How it all turned out.
Whether more drastic measures might have to be taken, if the car was random after all.
Jenny turned their movie back on. They both settled in beneath their cozy throws. But even though the movie was supposed to be a tearjerker, neither one of them stopped smiling for the rest of the night.
Excerpt. ©Megan Crane. Posted by arrangement with the publisher. All rights reserved.
Giveaway: An ebook copy of THE COWBOY’S LONG LOST CHRISTMAS BRIDE + one additional Tule ebook of the winner’s choice
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Meet the Author:
USA Today bestselling, multi-award-nominated, and critically-acclaimed author Megan Crane has written more than 150 books, and shows no sign of slowing down. She publishes romance as Megan Crane and M.M. Crane with an exciting backlist of women’s fiction, rom-coms, chick lit, and young adult novels. She’s also won a large and loyal fanbase as Caitlin Crews with Harlequin Presents, Harlequin Dare, Harlequin Historical, and contemporary cowboy books. And for paranormal fun, Megan partners with Nicole Helm to publish as Hazel Beck for her witchy rom-com novels.
Megan has a Masters and Ph.D. in English Literature, has taught creative writing classes in places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, and is always available to give workshops (or her opinion). She lives in the Pacific Northwest with her comic book artist husband, though, at any given time, she is likely to either be huddled in a coffee shop somewhere or off traveling the world. Preferably both.
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