A Cowboy for All Seasons Read online

  Discover the power of family in this uplifting quartet by New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates, USA TODAY bestselling author Caitlin Crews, Nicole Helm and Jackie Ashenden.

  June Gable left each of her four granddaughters a handwritten bequest—to spend a season at her beloved farmhouse in Jasper Creek, Oregon, before they sell it. These cousins were once as close as sisters, but time and family betrayals have pushed them apart.

  In spring, polished city girl Keira must find her country roots—and reconnect with an old flame. In the summer, tough tomboy JJ needs to tap into her softer side while helping a single dad and his daughters. Cheerful dreamer Lila has to help coordinate the town craft fair in autumn, under the stern eye of the handsome cowboy she loved as a girl. And as winter falls, headstrong, independent Bella must learn to ask for help from the one man she believes she can never have.

  The four cousins will have to confront secrets from the past, deal with old wounds they’d rather hide, and tangle with their hardheaded cowboys before they can find love, healing and the true meaning of family...

  New York Times bestselling author Maisey Yates lives in rural Oregon with her three children and her husband, whose chiseled jaw and arresting features continue to make her swoon. She feels the epic trek she takes several times a day from her office to her coffee maker is a true example of her pioneer spirit.

  USA TODAY bestselling and RITA® Award–nominated author Caitlin Crews loves writing romance. She teaches her favorite romance novels in creative-writing classes at places like UCLA Extension’s prestigious Writers’ Program, where she finally gets to utilize the MA and PhD in English literature she received from the University of York in England. She currently lives in the Pacific Northwest with her very own hero and too many pets. Visit her at caitlincrews.com.

  Nicole Helm grew up with her nose in a book and the dream of one day becoming a writer. Luckily, after a few failed career choices, she gets to follow that dream—writing down-to-earth contemporary romance and romantic suspense. From farmers to cowboys, Midwest to the West, Nicole writes stories about people finding themselves and finding love in the process. She lives in Missouri with her husband and two sons and dreams of someday owning a barn.

  Jackie Ashenden writes dark, emotional stories with alpha heroes who’ve just gotten the world to their liking only to have it blown apart by their kick-ass heroines. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand, with her husband, the inimitable Dr. Jax, two kids and two rats. When she’s not torturing alpha males and their gutsy heroines, she can be found drinking chocolate martinis, reading anything she can lay her hands on, wasting time on social media or being forced to go mountain biking with her husband. To keep up-to-date with Jackie’s new releases and other news, sign up to her newsletter at jackieashenden.com.

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  A Cowboy for All Seasons

  Maisey Yates

  Caitlin Crews

  Nicole Helm

  Jackie Ashenden

  Table of Contents

  Spring by Caitlin Crews

  Summer by Nicole Helm

  Fall by Maisey Yates

  Winter by Jackie Ashenden

  Excerpt from Secrets from a Happy Marriage by Maisey Yates

  Excerpt from Seduced by a Steele by Brenda Jackson

  Caitlin Crews

  To Nicole, Maisey and Jackie

  for making this so magical.

  To Flo for believing in the magic.

  And for Grandma Junes everywhere, who loved

  so hard and so true it stays long after they go.

  I love you, Gram and Nana. Still and always.

  Contents

  SPRING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  SPRING

  Dearest Keira,

  It’s a very strange thing to get old, to know that eventually the world will go on without you. To see clearly your successes, and your mistakes, and still not know what you could have done about either.

  You, my poised girl, so full of elegance and surety in yourself, have filled my life with happiness since the day you were born. Summers with you always reminded me how much the world had to offer my four wonderful, vibrant, different girls.

  I’ve missed you, and though I know you won’t admit it to yourself, you’ve missed your heart, as well. It’s all good and well to see what the world has to offer, but sometimes only home can bring you true change.

  I have many things to ask of you this spring, and I doubt you’ll be surprised I’ve asked you to spend this particular season at home, tending to the land and the cattle. I know you’ll appreciate watching the season bloom around you, and find a way to do that yourself.

  First, you’ll need to face your past and make peace with your choices—past ones, and the ones that await you in the future.

  Let my spirit guide you in all that you do and let this house take care of you as it has always cared for me.

  Love always,

  Grandma June

  CHAPTER ONE

  KEIRA LONG WAS finally ready to face her ghosts.

  That was what she told herself as she climbed out of the car she’d driven down from Seattle, packed full of all her worldly possessions—which told a sad, small tale about her past five years—and faced the house that had stood for over a hundred years and been the only safe space in her life for what felt like much longer than that.

  Grandma June’s farmhouse. Keira’s favorite place on earth.

  And for the first time in her life, without Grandma June, whom they’d lost just over three weeks ago.

  Keira had promised herself she wouldn’t cry, so she looked at the old farmhouse instead. It stood stout and settled against the moody March afternoon, no matter its weathered paint and signs of age and care. Keira chose to take that as a sign. She’d left Seattle before dawn and driven all the way down the interstate, then over the familiar rolling hills on autopilot, skirting her hometown of Jasper Creek, Oregon, and taking the country roads she knew so well.

  A wave of sadness washed over her, but she concentrated fiercely on the dogwood tree that stood in front of the house. In a matter of weeks the buds she saw fighting for purchase on its branches would burst into color—a glorious pink that made Keira feel light and happy every time she saw it. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t in bloom yet. It would be.

  Keira breathed past the sadness and tried to let it go. That was what the funeral had been for. Grief and ghosts and trying to hold on to the past when it was already gone.

  She’d flown down three weeks ago to stand in the pretty little church in town and say her goodbyes to her grandmother. She’d stood in a pew with two of her three cousins, JJ and Lila, and wished that they were all still as close as they’d been when they were kids. She could have used the sort of easy intimacy they’d all taken for granted back then: leaning on each other’s shoulders, crowding together in a closet in Grandma’s house, giggling through a game of sardines. That kind of closeness had seemed far away to her then, wearing stiff black clothes that fit wrong and that she knew she would hate forever and never wear again.

  Still, it had been good that they were there, if sad that no one had seen their youngest cousin, Bella, in far too long. Keira was the only child of problematic parents so she’d always viewed her cousins as her sisters. They knew things about her no one else did, or ever would. And at the funeral, no matter how they’d all grown apart, JJ and Lila had been the only members of her family she’d wanted to see...as well as providing an excellent buffer.

  There were ghosts Keira hadn’t particularly wanted to face. Worse, there were her parents. Keira had spent the last five years trying her best to get over them as she forged her way through her very own adult life. Wasn’t that the project of any woman in her twenties? It was certainly Keira’s.

  And it was a project that a season spent in Grandma June’s beloved old farmhouse could only accelerate.

  Keira had parked her car where she always had, hating that she was the only one here now. All she could hear was the sound of the wind blustering about over the hills and around the eaves of the house. The air was still cold, holding on to winter and the snowcapped mountains in the distance, but there was a softness in it that Keira chose to think was hope.

  She breathed in deep, then let it out slow, imagining that cou
ld clean her—clear her—from the inside out.

  She was ready to be new. She was ready to take on her grandmother’s challenge and spend her season here. Each of her cousins—assuming anyone could find Bella—would do the same.

  Keira liked the symmetry of it. Four cousins. Four seasons. Four chances to...

  Well. Keira didn’t really know what her cousins might get out of their time here. She only knew that for her, it was time to come home. She couldn’t go to any of the houses she’d grown up in because they’d changed hands so quickly, in line with her parents’ roller-coaster fortunes. And she certainly wouldn’t use the word home to describe life with her parents. She’d spent as much time as she could with Grandma growing up, had left for college at eighteen and had never slept under her parents’ roof—assuming they even had a roof this week—again.

  Maybe it was better to say that Keira was ready to make her own home, at last. And this farmhouse was the closest thing she’d ever had.

  Keira tucked her hands in her jean pockets, glad she’d worn a warmer outer layer to ward off the chill as she started across the cold, muddy ground toward the front porch. She knew this walk, from the crunch of gravel beneath her feet, to the creak of the gate in the picket fence that surrounded the house. She knew the uneven plank on the porch that caught at her bare feet every summer. She loved the enduring charm of every inch of the place—a little bit ramshackle and a little bit worn, but always welcoming.

  She found the key where it was always hidden under the mat. Grandma June had liked keys that looked like keys, and the one that opened the door looked like a proper antique. There was scrollwork and a compass, and Keira liked the weight of it in her palm.

  She fit the key in the lock, jiggling it to get the door open.

  Do not cry, she ordered herself as she opened the door to step inside.

  Because she was forced to confront the fact that no matter how perfect and welcoming the house looked to her, no matter how familiar it smelled as she stood in the hall, her grandmother wasn’t going to be here.

  There was no scent of anything baking in the kitchen, the way there had been every time she’d come to visit. There wasn’t the light Grandma June had brought to the place, even when she wasn’t in the same room. The windows were shut up tight, when Keira knew Grandma June would have opened them all up on a moody spring day like today.

  Keira squeezed her eyes shut against a new prick of tears, and could almost feel her grandmother again. As if she was standing there, just around the corner out of sight, waiting for Keira to come in and say hello.

  So she did.

  “Hi, Grandma June,” Keira said out loud, into the deep stillness. “I’m here.”

  She instantly felt foolish, and flushed.

  But it was as if a weight had lifted. As if the house had been waiting for a proper greeting, and now Keira’s grief could subside a little.

  She set about unpacking her car and moving herself in to her favorite bedroom upstairs, the way she would have any of the summers she’d stayed here. Her parents had always dropped her off as soon as they could reasonably get away with it. One year it had been April, which hardly made it a summer vacation, but neither Keira nor Grandma June had been all that interested in twelve-year-old Keira accompanying her parents to their latest couldn’t-fail, get-rich-quick scheme in Vegas.

  Michael and Katy Long had accomplished nothing on that trip, of course. Because all of their schemes ended in pain, tears and humiliation. Like the year Dad had claimed they were going to go on a big adventure, which involved moving from their trailer into a tent in one of the campgrounds on the outskirts of Jasper Creek. Adventure was one way of putting it. Terrifying and scarring were the words that leaped to Keira’s mind.

  Keira had hated every second of the out-of-control roller-coaster ride that was her entire childhood. She’d learned early on that the kids around her in their happy, stable houses, where things made sense, couldn’t understand what she went through. And she was never, ever to tattle. To anyone.

  Keira had always been perfectly happy not to talk about her parents, to keep her head down and to dream about turning eighteen and finally being free.

  She’d always preferred it here in this farmhouse, where she knew there was a bed for her and food in the fridge. She might have to do chores, but the reward was feeling like she belonged. Like she was safe. Like the house would be here in the morning no matter what.

  When she was done emptying her car and arranging her things the way she liked them, she found herself walking down the hall, with its creaky floorboards, to Grandma’s room. She sat there on the end of her bed the way she had in those later summers when she was older, too conscious of the kind of future she had before her if she wasn’t careful, and so in love she couldn’t see straight.

  She ran her hand over the quilt her grandmother had made by hand, then looked out the windows to where the trees were starting to look as if they might snap out of their winter slumber and make a run at spring. Keira felt much the same.

  The end of this bed was where she’d sat and poured her heart out to the only person who she’d known would, if not always understand her, support her. No matter what. The only cousin she’d confided in back then had been JJ, as they were so close in age, but she hadn’t even told JJ all the details—afraid that that would be exactly the sort of tattling her father had always warned her against. She’d saved her darkest truths for Grandma June. Sitting here again felt like completing a very long circle.

  Grandma June was how Keira had gotten up the nerve to apply for college. Then to actually go, when her parents had only laughed at the notion. They’d pressured Keira to stay in Jasper Creek, marry the man who happened to be a member of the prominent West family, who hated her father, and settle down right out of high school despite her scholarship—because it would benefit them. Because her parents were always thinking about themselves. And as for the rest of the small town of Jasper Creek, the undercurrent to every conversation back then had always seemed to be that the daughter of known liar Michael Long certainly couldn’t expect to do better than marrying a West, could she?

  Grandma June had shrugged her shoulders and told Keira that she wasn’t aware love was a Black Friday sale, available only one day and gone forever the next.

  If it’s love, Grandma said, it will find its way.

  And four years later Grandma June had sat next to her and gathered her in a hug when Keira had broken her own heart into pieces because she knew it was the right thing to do—no matter how much it hurt.

  “You’d be proud of me,” Keira said out loud now, and it was already easier than the first time. It felt perfectly normal to talk to quiet rooms filled with her grandmother’s things. “I saw him at the funeral. And you were right all along. I built it up in my head and I felt some stuff, but it was fine.”

  Grandma had always told Keira that there was no need to avoid her past. That pasts had a way of catching up to a person the harder they tried to run. And that Remy West, who had been Keira’s first love—her first everything, from kiss to marriage proposal to heartbreak—was no reason to avoid coming home to Jasper Creek.

  And maybe Keira had been using him as an excuse, at first. She’d graduated from college and turned Remy down in the same weekend, and she knew that no one in this town was ever likely to understand that decision.

  But she’d done it. And the past five years hadn’t been easy, but they’d been rewarding. She’d carved out a life in Seattle. She had her own savings now. A retirement plan. She had no debt. She had quit her job so she could live in her grandmother’s farmhouse for a whole spring without risking anything.

  For a girl who’d been raised by a con-man father and a mother whose entire life was about indulging his every whim and scheme, it was nothing short of a miracle.

  Keira pressed her palm against the faded quilt, and let the emotion roll over her. It was still so hard to believe she was never going to hear her grandmother’s voice again. The particular way Grandma June said her name. The magic of her chortle when she was trying not to laugh. The cards she sent on every birthday, without fail, that had Keira smiling the moment she saw the distinctive handwriting on the envelope.