The Cowboy Takes a Bride Read Online Free Page B

Was she going to have to club Joe over the head to get him to notice her as a woman? She flipped on the radio, and Garth Brooks was singing “Unanswered Prayers.”
    She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel in time to the music. She and Joe were kindred spirits, cut from the same cloth. When would he finally realize that they were meant to be?
    All her life Ila lived in the brilliant glow of her beautiful younger half sister. Death canonized Becca. No matter what Ila did, she could never measure up. She’d forever be that klutzy, skinny, tomboy cop, uncomfortable in her own skin.
    She’d been accepted into the police academy at eighteen, but no one had noticed because that was the same day Becca had been crowned homecoming queen. Then during the same week that she’d become the youngest female ever hired by the sheriff’s department, Becca had won the Professional Rodeo Cowboys Association barrel-racing championship. And the month Ila got shot in the line of duty, Becca had been killed.
    Upstaged by her baby sister one last time.
    It was petty to hold on to her disappointments, Ila knew that. She didn’t like feeling this way. She wanted to be magnanimous and loving and forgiving. Instead, she felt as if she was always drawing the short straw. It had taken every bit of strength she had to smile happily at Joe and Becca’s wedding. To stand there as the maid of honor while her sister married the man she loved.
    Memories of Joe tumbled through her head. Sitting next to him in Miss Coltrane’s first grade class, playing hooky together in fifth grade to go fishing at Solider Springs Park, the time she’d kissed him under the bleachers at the Fourth of July rodeo when they were sixteen.
    Shame shot through her at the old memories that the years seemed to sharpen instead of fade. She’d thrown her arms around him and plastered her lips against his and . . .
    He hadn’t kissed her back.
    Joe had waited patiently for her to finish, and then he’d given her a funny look that knotted her up inside. “You’re my best friend, Il,” he said. “Let’s not mess it up with that mushy stuff.”
    “Of course,” she’d blathered. “You’re right.” She shrugged like the kiss hadn’t meant a damn thing to her.
    But she’d never stopped loving him. Not even when five years later he started dating Becca. It stung, but she forgave him. She forgave Joe everything.
    She’d been shattered by Becca’s death too. Her entire family crippled by the blow. But as she and Joe comforted each other, she secretly started thinking, What if?
    This morning, she’d woken up with a strange premonition that something wasn’t right. Joe didn’t drink often—he cared too much about his horses to let anything get in the way of that—but when he celebrated or mourned, well, Katy bar the door. And he was mourning Dutch something fierce.
    He buried his grief after Becca’s passing by partnering up with Dutch and throwing himself into training Dutch’s prize-winning stallion, Some Kind of Miracle.
    Ila had been Joe’s friend, his crying shoulder. She’d hung around, and just when she was beginning to hope that maybe, just maybe, she had a shot with Joe, here comes Dutch’s daughter strutting into the picture.
    Ila hadn’t missed the way Joe looked at Mariah Callahan. With hot eyes and lusty intent. The way she wished he’d look at her. What was the big deal about Mariah? She was blond. Whoop-de-do. And yes, she was all cute and cuddly small while at the same time managing to look chic and stylish. Even so, she wasn’t nearly as pretty as Becca had been, but the minute Ila spotted the interloper, she’d thought, Uh-oh , and her stomach had gone queasy.
    Face it, Joe has a type and it isn’t you. Stop pining for a guy who doesn’t want you.
    That would be the smart thing to do, but Ila’s heart wanted what it wanted.
    Joe.
    And she knew she couldn’t win his love if there was a Becca look-alike within spitting