Promises Decide Read online

  PRAISE FOR SARAH MCCARTY

  “McCarty is a sparse, minimalistic writer, with a great ear for dialogue. She’s a passionate observer of history, and manages to deftly and accurately weave her spicy stories through with important facts and issues of the epoch she invokes. She’s also good at capturing that intangible magnetism surrounding dangerous, rugged men . . . I’m hooked.”

  —USA Today

  “If you like your historicals packed with emotion, excitement, and heat, you can never go wrong with a book by Sarah McCarty.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “It’s so great to see that Ms. McCarty is able to truly take these eight men and give them such vastly different stories and vastly different heroines, all of whom allow us to see different aspects of what life was really like for Western frontier women, be it good, horrific, or simply unfortunate.”

  —Romance Books Forum

  “What really sets McCarty’s stories apart from simple erotica is the complexity of her characters and conflicts . . . definitely spicy, but a great love story, too.”

  —RT Book Reviews

  “Readers who enjoy erotic romance but haven’t found an author who can combine it with a historical setting may discover a new auto-buy author . . . I have.”

  —All About Romance

  Titles by Sarah McCarty

  RUNNING WILD

  WILD INSTINCT

  PROMISES REVEAL

  PROMISES DECIDE

  The Shadow Wranglers

  CALEB

  JARED

  JACE

  SLADE

  The Shadow Reapers

  REAPER’S JUSTICE

  REAPER’S VOW

  A JOVE BOOK

  Published by Berkley

  An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014

  Copyright © 2018 by Sarah McCarty

  Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.

  A JOVE BOOK and BERKLEY are registered trademarks and the B colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Ebook ISBN: 9780399585876

  First Edition: September 2018

  Cover photo by Tetra Images/Getty Images

  Dog by Justyna Furmanczyk Gibaszek/Shutterstock

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Version_1

  For my mom. The one person I know who will talk me back into sense whenever I come to her foolishly brandishing the concept of “quit.” She is both my sounding board and my inspiration. Always has been. Love you, Mom.

  Contents

  Praise for Sarah McCarty

  Titles by Sarah McCarty

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  About the Author

  One

  He’d be damned. Someone had been fool enough to buy the Bentley place after all. Jackson pulled up his horse and studied the betraying plume of smoke that rose above the pine trees in the hollow. Bentley had been trying to unload that place for years to no avail. And no wonder. The place was a living testament to Half-Assed Bentley’s reputation for never completing any job that could be left half done. Heck, his reputation had even stretched the good twenty miles to Jackson’s home of Cattle Crossing, Wyoming. It took a lot to stand out in that town of eccentrics, but Bentley had managed it. So much so that anytime a body did less than necessary, they earned the nickname of Bentley.

  The mare tossed her head in protest. She wanted her oats about as much as Jackson wanted his bed. This last bounty had been grueling. Bucktooth Bart had led him a merry chase through some of the roughest country, but in the end he’d caught him and hauled his ass back to Dover’s sheriff for trial. In retrospect, the bounty didn’t seem near fat enough for the amount of effort he’d expended. But it was always that way. Once he got on a trail, it didn’t matter what the payoff was, only that he got to it. Jackson sighed and patted the money pouch in his shirt pocket. He really needed to work on that too-tight focus. He wasn’t as young as he used to be. Crossing the line to twenty-eight last month had made him introspective in regard to a lot of things. Including the fact that the thrill of the chase wasn’t clinging to his smile the way it used to. Instead of feeling victorious after this last bounty, right now he was just damn tired and looking forward to a couple days’ rest and then getting back to working the McKinnleys’ stock. Something he rarely got to do anymore. For reasons that had more to do with that inner restlessness than lack of time.

  Jackson sighed. Truth was, he should be working his own stock on the Lazy M, but the life seemed to have left the place upon his mother’s death. As if it, too, mourned the laughter that once had been the heart of their home. He didn’t blame his father for leaving to chase a new love. Jackson had done his own running. It’d simply been easier to hunt bounties and work the McKinnley ranch than to reshape the Lazy M around the hole left by his parents’ absence. Oh, he paid for someone to care for the house and did what was needed in basic upkeep when he was in town, but he didn’t stay long. Part of him kept expecting Big Jake to come back and pick up where he’d left off, but lately Jackson was beginning to wonder how much longer he could let the Lazy M languish. There was an impatience gnawing in his gut to take it out of mourning, to separate his stock out of the McKinnleys’ and . . . go home. Really home. If Big Jake had found happiness in California, then Jackson had to make a decision: sell the Lazy M or follow the lead of his friends and neighbors, the McKinnleys, and return the Lazy M to prosperity.

  Patting the mare’s neck, he asked, “What do you think, Little Lady? Would you like to help me make the Lazy M shine again?”

  The toss of her head could have meant anything. He chuckled. “As long as you get your ration of oats, you don’t care, do you?”

  She dismissed the comment with a dip of her head. Once the thought entered his head, though, it wouldn’t leave.

  The McKinnleys were earning quite the reputation for having not only well-trained horses but also a knack for turning wild into workable. No small feat with some of the horseflesh that came through. The army had them on retainer, which provided a good job for Jackson when he wasn’t bounty hunting. And, truth be told, there was nothing Jackson liked better than working horses. But he could be doing it for himself. There was enough demand for everyone to make a good living. And before his mother’s death, he�
��d planned on doing just that.

  He pushed a narrow branch out of his face as he urged Lady on and corrected himself. Making love to a woman ranked right up there as a favorite pastime, but right now neither training horses nor loving women was of paramount importance, because he who brought the gossip of Bentley’s fiasco having a new owner was going to be in high demand in Cattle Crossing. Heck, Jackson might just get a free pie at Millie’s restaurant for that tidbit. A man didn’t pass up the opportunity for free pie. Especially one of Millie’s.

  The mare tossed her head again when he turned her off the trail. He patted her shoulder. Dust flew up to dance in the late-summer sunbeams.

  “I know, Little Lady, but there’s no way we can pass up the opportunity to get a gander at the fool who swallowed Bentley’s line of bull.”

  Laying the reins against Lady’s neck and pressing in with his right knee, he directed her down into the hollow. The mare snorted, shook her head, and balked, keeping her nose pointed in the direction of home.

  “Don’t be temperamental, honey. You know there’s an extra scoop of oats in it for you.”

  As if she understood the crooning reprimand, the little mare pranced, adding a jig to her get-along. It was the spirit in that jig that had caught his attention when she’d been dropped off at Clint McKinnley’s as part of a broken-down remuda. There had been nothing particularly eye-catching about the little bay. She’d looked no better than any of the rest of the poorly cared for horses delivered to Clint as payment on a gambling debt owed by a local cowboy. That was, until the wrangler had tried to use his bigger gelding to shoulder Little Lady into the corral. Then that pretty little head had come up and her tail had swished one disdainful sweep before, neat as a pin, she’d tattooed the bigger horse’s nose with her hooves, driving him back. And then with another toss, she’d pranced right into the corral like a princess. A tattered bit of royalty, for sure, but a princess nonetheless. Jackson had made up his mind to claim her then and there.

  The only thing standing between him and his goal had been Clint’s cantankerous nature. Clint was as tough a son of a bitch as his cousin Cougar. Jackson had nothing but respect for both. They were deadly fighters and honest men, and over the years they’d formed a deep friendship, but that friendship was spiced with some good-natured rivalry. Part of that rivalry was seeing who could finagle the best deal out of the other.

  Clint hadn’t wanted to sell the spunky mare. He’d planned on breeding her to his blood stallion, but Jackson wasn’t one for giving up on what he wanted. That being the case, when Clint had rejected his initial request, in the form of “Not a prayer in hell,” Jackson had waited Clint out, refusing payment for favors, until the debt had gotten high enough between them to weigh in Jackson’s favor and Clint had gotten tired of hearing the inevitable “So, about that mare . . .”

  Jackson’s tactics might have been a bit underhanded, knowing Clint’s bone-deep sense of honor, but Little Lady had been worth the twinge of his conscience. The mare had heart. The kind that wouldn’t quit. The kind that could drag a man out of hell. Jackson patted her neck again, smiling. Now, if he could only find a woman as sweet as Lady with that same spit-in-the-devil’s-eye jig in her step, he’d snatch her right up and to hell with his bachelor status. Fortunately, such a creature didn’t exist. He smiled as he cut through the woods. Being a bachelor had some mighty fine side benefits, like the widow in Cheyenne who enjoyed the sense of danger she claimed clung to him.

  The wind blew up from the home site, bringing the stench of smoke with it. Too much smoke. The kind that came from burning green wood. Which didn’t surprise him. Anyone who looked at the Bentley place and saw promise had to be a tenderfoot. Oh, it was a pretty enough spot, but the ground was too rocky for farming, too wooded for grazing, and the house didn’t have a right angle in it. While all of that was bad, it wasn’t the worst of it. What made the Bentley place an unsellable disaster was that it sat square in a wash that took the runoff from the mountains. One big storm in the highlands and the unsuspecting new buyers could wake up one night to find a flood knocking at their door.

  Jackson sighed, wondering just how dumb the new owners had to be. One look at the well should have clued them in to the trouble they were buying. It was too shallow to be good water, and making it deeper in the rocky soil was going to take more muscle than most wanted to put into the job. It was certainly more than Bentley had wanted to put into it. The so-called well was only twenty feet deep and was fed more by runoff than from a clean, underground supply. Jackson shook his head and pushed another branch out of his way, shaking it again when his long blond hair got in his line of vision. The best thing that could happen to the new owners was for the well to be dry, because otherwise, they were likely to take seriously sick from any water pulled from it.

  He released the branch. It swished back in place behind him, rustling as it collided with another. Reaching into his vest pocket, he pulled out a leather tie. Lady twitched as the knotted reins dropped to her neck. With a quick gather he tied his hair back. He really should cut it. The comment that had started him growing it all those years ago had long since stopped stinging, but amusement could be as inspiring as resentment, he’d found. And he did get a chuckle from the surprise on the faces of the men he laid out who’d thought he was more pretty boy than threat.

  The high-pitched sound of panicked children’s voices rode piggyback on the wind and smoke. He grabbed up the reins. What the hell? The fool who’d bought the land had children? Shit. That was going to complicate his get-a- gander-and-run plan. Jackson had a lot of things riding double on his conscience, but leaving kids as sitting ducks for disaster wasn’t one of them. With a curse, he urged Lady forward.

  As soon as he cleared the trees, Jackson saw the source of the commotion. Two boys and a very young girl were milling around the rough stone wall above the well. As he watched, the little girl clambered up the side, the clunk of something metal in her hand against the hard rock carrying in the late-afternoon quiet as she leaned over the edge. A heartbeat later, the boys were in the same position, peering into the well. No doubt they’d lost a toy down there. Jackson shook his head. They ought to know better than to lean over like that. No telling how stable that wall was. No matter what the prized possession, it wasn’t worth a broken neck. Even if they escaped broken bones, there were other dangers. Snakes loved a dry well, and for sure any well dug by Half-Assed Bentley wouldn’t hold water in the recent drought.

  Jackson nudged Lady into a lope. As he did, the boys grabbed the girl by the ankles and, to his utter horror, lowered her over the edge.

  “Son of a bitch!” Were they crazy?

  There was a cry.

  “She’s slipping!”

  Jackson’s heart leapt into his throat as the girl’s skirt flew over her head, exposing her skinny legs. The boys made desperate grabs for the back of her faded blue dress. Jackson prayed the material held. Something that little shouldn’t tumble that far. Lady charged across the clearing. Jackson leapt from the saddle as soon as he got close, scooping all three of the precariously perched children away from the edge of the well. The tinkle of broken glass followed his roll. He let the boys tumble to the ground, their squeals of surprise ringing in his ears. The little girl he clutched to his chest, protecting her from the brunt of the fall. He braced himself for the little girl’s wail, but instead, unbelievably, she giggled.

  Damn.

  He stood, brushing off the seat of his pants with his free hand, keeping a tight hold of the girl with the other. “What the hell were you doing?” he barked.

  All three children blinked at him, then the middle child, a boy of about seven or eight, glared at him through a shock of bright red hair. Pushing up onto his elbows, he stuck out his lip. “I’m going to get the soap!”

  It took Jackson a minute to figure out what the kid meant. And when he did, it took all he had to bite back a smile. “Yo
u’ll be wanting to get a bit bigger before you go threatening to wash my mouth out with soap.”

  The kid’s belligerence didn’t budge as he got to his feet. The little girl dangling in Jackson’s grip whispered too loudly for a secret, “Mimi will do it.”

  The dark-haired boy stepped closer, tension and frustration humming off him. “Hush up, Melinda Sue,” he ordered in a surprisingly deep voice.

  “Mimi?” Jackson asked, setting Melinda Sue down. She immediately went to stand by her brothers.

  Melinda Sue nodded, her long blond hair a tangle about her face. The smudge of dirt on her cheek only made her eyes seem bluer. He frowned and glanced at her brother. His eyes were green, and the older quiet one’s, brown. They were a mismatched bunch, for sure.

  “She can make anyone do anything,” Melinda Sue declared righteously.

  Interesting. “Where is Mimi?” For that matter, where were their parents?

  All three children looked to the well.

  Shit.

  “Mimi is in the well?”

  In unison the children nodded. The lower lip of the blond urchin trembled.

  “What is she doing in the well?”

  “She wanted to see where the water was.”

  The water was a good thirty feet farther down and likely somewhere else entirely, but Jackson didn’t say that. He studied the area surrounding the well, his mind working on how best to get the child out.

  “And she fell in?”

  The older boy nodded. His skin and hair were darker than his much fairer siblings. Jackson guessed his age around ten. “What’s your name, son?”

  “Tony.”

  Jackson held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Tony.”

  Tony ignored his proffered hand, countering with, “What’s yours?”

  “Jackson Montgomery.”

  Tony cocked his head to the side. “Is that name supposed to mean something to me?”