The Cowboy's Runaway Bride. Nancy Robards Thompson

The Cowboys scored and the place erupted in a cacophony of shouts and cheers.

      “On another note, Rachel over at Bistro Saint-Germain said Lucy says she’s finally going to open that party barn she’s been talking about.”

      Lucy was his baby sister. Since she’d moved back home from California last year, she’d been threatening to turn the old barn down on the lower forty of their family’s farm into an events venue.

      Since she seemed to approach life in fits and starts, going gung ho until she lost interest on the project du jour, this idea had become known as the party barn.

      “Yeah?” Ethan said, taking another bite. He’d stopped expending too much energy on his little sister’s whims. It was hard to take her seriously after the fourth or fifth time that she’d jumped into something with both feet, only to move on to the next big thing.

      “Sounds like she’s serious about this,” Zane said. “Maybe the twelfth time’s a charm. I told her to invite me to the grand opening party.”

      Ethan harrumphed. “Don’t hold your breath.”

      He wasn’t worried that the party barn might actually become a reality. In all fairness, Lucy wanted to make the place a venue for weddings and other swanky events. She’d latched on to the idea after Juliette’s wedding planning business had grown legs and had become a runaway success. Juliette had offhandedly mentioned that the closest wedding venue to Celebration was the Regency Cypress Plantation and Botanical Gardens, which was on the northern edge of Celebration. Lucy swore their grandparents’ old barn was an untapped gold mine. Ethan didn’t get it. The dilapidated pile of kindling needed to be burned down, not cobbled back together.

      It wasn’t that he didn’t support Lucy. She and their brother, Jude, had inherited some money and equal interest in the family’s 900-acre ranch. Since Jude was living the high life on the Professional Bull Riders’ circuit, he and Lucy had left Ethan with the task of reviving Triple C’s once floundering horse-breeding business. Ethan had worked hard to turn it around and breathe new life into it. Since the breeding arm of Triple C was all his doing, the siblings had mutually decided to divvy up the land, each claiming a specific 300-acre area. Ethan got the land with the stables and the home where they’d grown up. Lucy had chosen the plot with their grandparents’ old house and the barn. Jude’s was untouched acreage.

      Lucy could do whatever she wanted with her piece of land. She was perfectly within her rights to turn it into an events venue. Hell, she could turn it into a zoo if she wanted. It was her call. However, over the past three years she’d had the attention span of a fruit fly. She’d already blown through every cent of the money she’d inherited after their parents died and she’d maxed out her credit cards and was left with the debt.

      Ethan had helped her out financially until she could find a job with a steady paycheck that allowed her to start paying off her cards. As far as Ethan knew, she was still paying. Now that she was supporting herself, he wasn’t going to enable another whim. When she’d asked Ethan to cosign for a loan so she could have some party barn start-up money, he’d declined.

      If he was completely honest, his refusal wasn’t just tough love. Ethan had often worried that his siblings might have the same alcoholic gene that had almost gotten the best of him. It ran in their family. In fact, it had cost their father his life. Their dad had been sauced the night of the car crash that had killed him. For a while it had been touch and go for their mother, who had landed in the ICU.

      She’d lived, but she’d come out of the accident a paraplegic because of damage to one of the lower thoracic nerves. She passed away about a year later.

      The disease hadn’t hooked its claws into Jude, who seemed to have his act together—even if he never did come home. Ethan still worried about Lucy. She was only twenty-five. She had done some things in the past—like getting caught drunk skinny-dipping in the pond out back of old man Jenkins’s hunting lodge—that made him question whether or not she was immune to alcohol’s hereditary choke hold.

      For some ridiculous reason completely out of left field, Ethan found himself wondering if Chelsea Allen, the woman who’d already proven herself capable of breaking into houses, had ever been skinny-dipping.

      As he chased away the inappropriate image with a sip of his beer, for a split second he craved a shot of something a hell of a lot stronger than nonalcoholic beer.

      After Ethan’s own hard-traversed path to sobriety, he worried that being in a party environment—even if it would be mostly wedding receptions—wouldn’t be good for Lucy.

      Sure, she was a grown woman, but she would always be his little sister. She and Jude were all the family he had left. His stance against the party barn stemmed from simply wanting to protect her. Jude may have been the prodigal brother, but Ethan was the protector. As any good big brother would, he wanted to hold back the tide and keep it from drowning her.

      Even if the jury was still out on whether or not she was susceptible to the alcoholic gene, her previous, half-baked business ventures indicated she might not possess entrepreneurial instincts, either.

      Obviously, she’d been talking about the party barn enough that word was starting to get around town. She hadn’t mentioned any more about it to him. But really, was that so hard to believe? Sometimes he felt like he was the last to know anything. Such as how he’d had no idea that Juliette had such a beautiful friend. Whether or not that friend was hiding something or hiding from something, Ethan couldn’t deny that she’d been front and center in his brain all night. He hadn’t had this kind of reaction to a pretty woman in a very long time.

      He’d definitely stop by Juliette’s tomorrow and see what Chelsea Allen was up to.