The Cowboy's Sweet Redemption
by Kacy Cross

Copyright © 2022 by Kacy Cross. All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce, distribute, or transmit in any form or by any means. For information regarding subsidiary rights, please contact the Publisher.

Chapter One

When Delilah’s money ran out, she didn’t panic. She pulled on her big girl panties and started applying for jobs, because surely “art history doctoral candidate” would sound impressive on a resume. It had to—it wasn’t like she had a slew of other things to stick on there.

Besides, the loan paperwork she’d submitted through the university couldn’t possibly take that long to process. Two weeks, tops. She could do anything for fourteen days while she waited on the people who held her dissertation in their hands to get some ducks in a row.

Four days after she’d noted the dwindling balance in her bank account, the panic finally kicked in at 12:57 p.m. That was the time on the clock behind the pointy hat of the shift manager at Dairy Queen who stared at her resume as if it had grown a face.

If someone had a mind to paint this scene, the artist would call it The Death of Hope and use dark oil-based colors on his canvas.

“What does MA stand for?” he asked while chomping extra hard on his gum, brow furrowed as he visibly tried to reason it out in his head.

“Master of Arts,” she supplied helpfully and gave him her best I’m totally qualified to hit buttons on a cash register smile. “It just feels redundant to say Master of Arts in Arts and Culture. Most people abbreviate.”

“Uh-huh.” His gaze shifted back and forth as he read through the rest of the words on the page, his mouth helping him along by sounding out the syllables. “How many degrees do you have?”

“Only two. At the moment.” She tapped the paper where she’d listed out her stellar research skills. “I’m working on my doctorate in Art History, which will make it three when I’m finished. But I still have a way to go. I’m doing my dissertation on the artwork of Fernando De Leon Da Rosa, who painted important works depicting the battle for Texas independence…”

She’d lost her audience. She could always tell when she’d rambled on too long. No one wanted to hear about her theories on the correlation between the art styles and political events that had unfolded during the battle of San Jacinto and The Alamo. She barely wanted to hear them herself after four years of nose to the grindstone.

But she was so close to being done she could taste it. Just a few more months and her dissertation would be complete. Finally, all her hard work would pay off.

“So.” She cleared her throat. “That’s a long way of saying I need to stay in the area. The museum in Kilgore stores all the archives for artwork from that period.”

The Dairy Queen manager nodded. “Uh-huh. Why don’t you get a job there, then?”

“Oh, I would love to,” she said with a laugh. “But it’s a very small operation. One curator only.”

That’s when she realized she might have done herself a favor and at least pretended like working at Dairy Queen was her first and only choice. But probably that ship had sailed. She bit her lip as the manager shook his head.

“You’re way too fancy for us, lady.” He slid the resume back across the shiny Formica countertop. “Besides, I need someone who can make change. No degree required for that.”

“Please,” Delilah implored him as this opportunity started sliding away faster than she could catch it. “Can you just check with your regional supervisor or something for a second opinion? I’ll do anything.”

Except clean toilets, though she’d stopped saying that at the fourteenth place she’d tried, because no one was hiring for that anyway. And honestly, she might even be willing to touch nasty toilets pending whether or not the job would allow her to stop avoiding her landlord, who’d been coming around asking about the overdue rent.

So far, she’d been able to sneak out of her apartment via the patio entrance by climbing over the balcony on the side opposite from the parking lot and crawling to her car behind the bushes. The artist could label that painting Brown Twigs in Young Woman’s Hair. Eventually, the landlord would just slap a past due notice on her door that she couldn’t pay, and then she’d be homeless.

The manager shook his head again. “Sorry. We have a lot of high school kids around here who are pretty reliable, so I’m sure I’ll find someone.”

Beaten out by teenagers. Desperate times called for desperate measures.

“Maybe you could call me?” she asked hopefully. “If you don’t find anyone soon?”

“I’ll keep you in mind.” His semi-blank expression didn’t bode well for the eventuality of that happening. “Thanks for coming in. Would you like to order anything?”

Since they didn’t seem to have an “all items on this menu are free” menu, she shook her head. “I don’t think my bank account could take the hit.”

The manager eyed her curiously, his posture relaxing for the first time since she’d handed him her resume, as if he’d just realized people with art degrees needed to eat, too. “You could try the Dairy Queen up in Mineola. I think I heard they were having a hard time finding people.”

“Thanks, I might try that.” She wouldn’t. Mineola was too far away from the museum where she spent most of her time, and the gas alone would kill her budget, not to mention the commute time. Plus, there was probably a reason they were having a hard time.

“Have a milkshake,” he suggested. “On me.”

She must have sounded as dejected to him as she did to herself. Since she hadn’t eaten yet today, she accepted it gratefully. Chocolate, even in shake form, could never be a bad answer to your problems.

Delilah slid into one of the booths, because what else did she have to do? No reason she couldn’t hang out in the air conditioning while she contemplated her life choices that had dumped her in a Podunk town in East Texas where the job market had proven to be nonexistent.

She wasn’t too proud to earn an honest living, at least until she got her doctorate, at which point the world of academia would open to her and she’d have her choice of positions at lofty universities around the world. That had been the plan, anyway…for almost ten years.

So close to her goal. She needed a miracle.

“I need to hire someone immediately,” a voice behind her said. “Yesterday would have been better.”

Not just any voice, it sounded gravelly, as if he didn’t spend a lot of time talking and his throat was out of practice. It was shivery in a good way. Sexy even. She could listen to his voice a whole lot more, especially if he intended to fill in a couple of blanks about his hiring troubles before Delilah turned around and told him he’d found the answer to his problems.

The botched interview with the Dairy Queen manager sat heavy in her chest. She couldn’t afford to screw up a second opportunity, whatever it was. Despite every fiber of her being screaming at her to jump over the hard, red plastic seat divide with enthusiasm, she made herself sit tight.

“You can’t just lock them up in the barn or something?” The other voice was also male, but wholly uninteresting. Especially since he seemed to have veered off subject.

Though for curiosity’s sake, she did want to know whose imprisonment they were blithely discussing.

“Nah, the whole point is to use them. The ranch doesn’t have a lot going for it in the first place. I need to squeeze everything I can out of what I’ve got.”

A pause while they both did Dairy Queen things, likely eating a hamburger or sipping a shake, but she didn’t want to clue them in that she was eavesdropping. Though they were taking so long to spell out the information she needed, she almost turned around anyway to tell them to hurry up.

“Maybe you should put out an ad in Dallas or something,” Uninteresting Guy suggested.

“I tried that. Even offered room and board. Nothing. Not one single call.”

Okay, now Sexy Voice was just talking crazy. He needed immediate help and would give her—er, the candidate—a place to live? How could no one else be interested?

She slouched down in her seat and sat on her hands. There was assuredly a really good answer to that. The job required special skills or came with terrible working conditions. Sexy Voice might be an eighty-year-old lecher. Or he was paying peanuts.

Uninteresting Guy harumphed. “Maybe dog trainers all work for places and don’t freelance.”

Dog trainers? Delilah blinked as her pulse scattered. Had she heard Uninteresting Guy say dog trainers? Surely not. There was no way Sexy Voice needed a dog trainer, because her life didn’t work like that.

“I called a couple of training facilities,” Sexy Voice said wryly and sipped his drink for eight maddening seconds. “Some of them do come to your house to train your dogs, but what they wanted to charge for four at once is highway robbery.”

Definitely dogs. Her not-so-much specialty. But it totally could be, as far as Sexy Voice was concerned. Fate to the rescue.

Delilah spun in her seat and met the gaze of the man at the next table, fully intending to introduce herself. Stuck her hand out and everything. But all the stuff in her brain resembling English drained out instantly as she soaked in the intense experience of Sexy Voice, in the flesh.

He was not eighty.

He had a lived-in face that was too rugged to be handsome but too compelling to be called anything else. Blue eyes that borrowed the sky for color and a mouth designed to spout poetry outside a lady’s window. Among other things.

The real kicker was the scar curving around his left eye, an open half parenthesis, as if whatever had left its mark on him had begun an aside explanation of the reasoning behind marring such perfection and then…stopped. Keeping its secrets forever to itself.

The painting would be called Angel Falls From Heaven, with a trail of bright light following his image as it dropped from a roil of clouds overshadowing the dark lands, a study in contrasts, but none of it would detract from the magnetism of the subject.

She swallowed, a tad overwhelmed by the sheer presence radiating from him.

He wasn’t checking her out at all. Nor did he seem overly thrilled with the interruption, his brows furrowed as he contemplated her.

“I’m Delilah,” she finally croaked and resisted the urge to beat her chest with a fist to clear whatever it was in there sitting on her lungs. “Kersey. I’ll train your dogs.”

“You will?” he rasped with a heavy dose of sarcasm, as if she had not in fact just offered up herself as the solution to his woes. “How do you know I have dogs?”

“I’ve been sitting right here,” she told him with a slight head tilt toward her booth. “And I heard you. Is it a secret? Are you part of the dog mafia?”

His beautiful lips didn’t so much as quirk, but Uninteresting Guy laughed, bless him. Even though she’d forgotten about him until that second, she flashed him a grateful smile.

“I’m not sure I even want to know what the dog mafia is,” Sexy Voice muttered and then jerked his chin toward the table. “Join us so I don’t have to shout.”

Didn’t have to ask her twice. She scrambled from the booth and slid into his, on Uninteresting Guy’s side, because duh. This seat had the better view.

“You won’t be sorry,” she promised him. “Now about the room and board—”

“I haven’t hired you yet.” His gravelly timbre skated along her skin, tempered not at all by his mulish expression. “Aren’t you even a little curious about the job?”

Oh, well, sure, to a degree. But honestly, she hadn’t thought that far ahead. “If it’s training dogs, what more do I need to know? They all start out at a baseline and end up trained.”

At that, his mouth did quirk. “What if I’m asking you to train them to balance a ball on their nose while wearing a tutu? And then jump over an elephant on command?”

It was such a specific scenario, she stared at him for a moment, trying to read him, which was no chore. And didn’t work. The man’s face resembled an iron vault, much like the rest of his body, which she’d have to be blind not to notice.

What was with the sudden urge to see if she could melt him, just a little?

“Are you asking me to train dogs to do that?” she asked, suddenly fascinated with the idea he might own a circus. “Because I can, if you are.”

Probably. The key here was to communicate confidence, not uncertainty.

“Really?” His gaze unhitched from its piercing fixation on her face and did a slow perusal of the rest of her in a way that made her feel thoroughly examined and shivery at the same time. “How many dogs have you trained to jump over an elephant?”

“Oh, none.” She laughed that off and prayed he wouldn’t ask her how many dogs she’d trained to do anything, the answer to which was none. Now might be the opportune time to switch gears before he sniffed out her lack of experience. “So let’s be clear. What are you asking for this dog trainer to do?”

He spread his hands, and yes, he used them often to do things the men she knew did not, judging by the rough calluses and general capableness that radiated from him. “I have four dogs. They’re a menace. I need them civilized and working on my cattle ranch. It’s that simple.”

“My specialty,” she lied with an affirming nod. “My dad is Doc Kersey. All those dog trainers at the facilities you called? Learned how to do what they do from him. He’s a legend in the field. Google it. I’ll wait.”

Sexy Voice’s eyes did a thing she couldn’t interpret, but his friend laughed. “Zero doesn’t have a phone. He hates them.”

She slid Uninteresting Guy a glance, who wasn’t all that bad to look at, especially in his battered cowboy hat some women would swoon over. He just wasn’t the other guy, which she had a feeling wasn’t an unknown between them. And he was okay with it. Pure speculation, but she’d spent a decade studying paintings of people and interpreting their moods, feelings, experiences, and she’d like to think she had some skill.

Uninteresting Guy wore everything on his sleeve. The other guy, no. That only amplified his utter appeal, a thing she never would have said she’d find attractive, but here they were.

And he didn’t own a cell phone. Fascinating. But the first part of Uninteresting Guy’s sentence intrigued her more. She jerked her head toward the other side of the table. “Did you just call him Zero?”

“That’s what everyone calls him,” Uninteresting Guy announced. “Zero Renshaw. Don’t worry, you’ll get why soon enough. I’m Tag, by the way. Tag Ryland.”

The man with the unlikely name of Zero rolled his beautiful, opaque eyes. “It’s not a mystery. It’s a gift from basic training.”

Everything about him came together in a snap. “You’re in the military.”

Of course that’s why he had that hard, watchful look about him, not to mention the way he lived in his skin with such comfort. He knew himself and his body inside and out, and it was a huge turn-on.

“Was,” he supplied instantly. “Not anymore. Now I own a ranch and four horrible dogs. If you can train them, you’re hired.”

“I accept,” she said blithely and stuck out her hand to shake his.

But he didn’t reach out to seal the deal. Instead, he swept her with one of those enigmatic glances that made her want to spend hours unpacking it. And him.

“I said if,” he stressed. “Since I’m not hiring your father, I’m more interested in what you can do.”

She lowered her hand to the Formica tabletop.

Okay, so obviously he wasn’t born yesterday. But she needed this job almost as much as she needed to breathe. There was no way she’d let it slip from her fingers at this point, and she could fake it for two weeks, no problem. “I’ve been learning from my dad since I could walk. Training dogs isn’t difficult. The key is to give them a job to do, which sounds like what you want. Dogs who do stuff around your ranch.”

“It is what I want.” Those eyes bored through her, and she wouldn’t be at all shocked if he could read things in her mind, things she never meant for him to know. “Come to the Flying Pig tomorrow and show me.”

“Show you?” She almost choked on it. “Like an audition?”

“Exactly like. Ask around for directions. Everyone knows where the Flying Pig is. You want the job; I’m giving you a chance to earn it.”

Sweat broke out along her neck. He knew. Somehow, he knew she’d never trained a dog in her life. All the things she’d learned had never been put to use, not while her father hovered over her, telling her how she was doing it incorrectly and what a disappointment she was since she wasn’t doing it his way.

That’s why she’d started burying herself in art.

That’s why she had an inexplicable urge to prove her father wrong with Sexy Voice’s dogs.

She lifted her chin. “Is there any reason I can’t start right now?”

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