New York Times and USA Today bestselling author KATHLEEN EAGLE published her first Mills & Boon, an RWA Golden Heart winner, in 1984. Since then she has published more than forty books, including historical and contemporary, series and single title novels, earning her nearly every award in the industry including Romance Writers of America’s RITA®. Kathleen lives in Minnesota with her husband, who is Lakota Sioux and forever a cowboy.
The Prodigal Cowboy
Kathleen Eagle
ISBN: 978-1-408-97866-5
THE PRODIGAL COWBOY
© 2012 Kathleen Eagle
Published in Great Britain 2020
by Mills & Boon, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street, London, SE1 9GF
All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. This edition is published by arrangement with Harlequin Books S.A.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, locations and incidents are purely fictional and bear no relationship to any real life individuals, living or dead, or to any actual places, business establishments, locations, events or incidents. Any resemblance is entirely coincidental.
By payment of the required fees, you are granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right and licence to download and install this e-book on your personal computer, tablet computer, smart phone or other electronic reading device only (each a “Licensed Device”) and to access, display and read the text of this e-book on-screen on your Licensed Device. Except to the extent any of these acts shall be permitted pursuant to any mandatory provision of applicable law but no further, no part of this e-book or its text or images may be reproduced, transmitted, distributed, translated, converted or adapted for use on another file format, communicated to the public, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
® and ™ are trademarks owned and used by the trademark owner and/or its licensee. Trademarks marked with ® are registered with the United Kingdom Patent Office and/or the Office for Harmonisation in the Internal Market and in other countries.
This ebook contains the following accessibility features which, if supported by your device, can be accessed via your ereader/accessibility settings:
Change of font size and line height
Change of background and font colours
Change of font
Change justification
Text to speech
For All My Relatives
Contents
“Looks like he ain’t coming.”
Bella Primeaux glanced up from the news report on her smartphone display. The cowboy claiming the next bar stool was half-shot and full-ugly. She didn’t know him, wasn’t interested in knowing him, and there was no point in sparing him more than a glance. She pressed her elbows against the bar and swiveled two inches to the right, turning a cold left shoulder.
“What’s that you’re drinkin’?”
Bella glanced right. Another one was moving in. She was book-ended by Crude and Rude. Experience told her that if they got no satisfaction, their type would go away.
“What does that look like to you, Loop?” the one on the right asked the one on the left. “Seven and seven?”
Loop? Bella swallowed the urge to laugh. She’d interviewed a rodeo cowboy named Rope who’d given a shout out to his brother Cash and his friend Spur. But Loop?
“Looks like tea.” Loop was perceptive.
“Is that some of that Long Island iced tea? You wanna try some, Loop?” Rude signaled the bartender. “Bring us three more of these.”
“Lemme try hers first,” Loop said as he reached for Bella’s glass from the left.
She slipped her phone into the woolen sack that hung over her shoulder on a braided cord. He could have her drink. She was leaving anyway.
“Is it whiskey and tea?” Loop sniffed, slurped and slammed the glass on the bar. “It’s just tea.”
“And