Real Vintage Maverick. Marie Ferrarella

badly to see her that it physically hurt. But he didn’t see her. She wasn’t there, as he knew she wouldn’t be.

      She hadn’t been there for eight years.

      Hadn’t been anywhere for eight years because she’d been dead for eight years. Another statistic to the ravages of the insatiable cancer monster.

      His heart had been dead just as long.

      At times, Cody was surprised that it was still beating, still keeping the shell that surrounded it alive and moving.

      A man with nothing to live for shouldn’t be required to live, Cody thought darkly.

      He tossed off the covers and got out of bed despite the darkness that still enveloped the room. He knew it was useless to try to go back to sleep. Sleep was gone for the remainder of the night. If he was lucky, a glimmer of it might return by that evening.

      Most likely not.

      Slipping on the discarded jeans he picked up from the floor, Cody padded across the bare floor to the window and looked out.

      There was nothing to see, just a vastness that spread out before him.

      His ranch.

      Their ranch.

      “Why did you leave me?” he demanded in angry frustration, not for the first time. “Why did you have to go?”

      He wasn’t being reasonable, but he didn’t much feel like being reasonable. It wasn’t fair that he had been left behind, to face each day without Renee after she had filled so much of his life before then. He couldn’t remember a time when he hadn’t known her, hadn’t been aware of her. The very first memory he had was of her.

      Eight years and he still wasn’t used to it. Hadn’t made his peace with it. Eight years and a part of him still expected to see her walk through the door, or see her standing over the stove, lamenting that she’d burned dinner—again.

      He’d never minded those burnt offerings—that was what he’d teasingly called them, her burnt offerings—and he would have been willing to eat nothing else for the rest of his life if only he could see her one more time. Hold her one more time …

      He supposed, in a way, that was what the dreams were about. Seeing her one more time. Because they were so very vivid that, just for a moment, Renee was alive again. Alive and the cornerstone of his world.

      He wished he could sleep forever, but that wasn’t going to happen.

      Cody dragged his hand through his hair and sighed. He might as well get dressed and get started with his day, even if it was still the middle of the night. The ranch wasn’t going to run itself.

      “I miss you, Renee.”

      His whisper echoed about the empty bedroom just as it did about his empty soul.

       Chapter One

      It happened too quickly for him to even think about it.

      One minute, in a moment of exasperated desperation—because he hadn’t yet bought a gift for Caroline’s birthday—Cody found himself walking into the refurbished antique store that had, up until a few months ago, been called The Tattered Saddle.

      The next minute, he was hurrying across the room and managed—just in time—to catch the young woman who was tumbling off a ladder.

      Before he knew it, his arms were filled with the soft curves of the same young woman.

      She smelled of lavender and vanilla, nudging forth a sliver of a memory he couldn’t quite catch hold of.

      That was the way Cody remembered it when he later looked back on the way his life had taken a dramatic turn toward the better that fateful morning.

      When he’d initially walked by the store’s show window, Cody had automatically looked in. The shop appeared to be in a state of semi-chaos, but it still looked a great deal more promising than when that crazy old coot Jasper Fowler ran it.

      Cody vaguely recalled hearing that the man hadn’t really been interested in making any sort of a go of the shop. The whole place had actually just been a front for a money-laundering enterprise. At any rate, the antique shop had been shut down and boarded up in January, relegated to collecting even more dust than it had displayed when its doors had been open to the public.

      What had caught his eye was the notice Under new ownership in the window and the store’s name—The Tattered Saddle—had been crossed out. But at the moment, there was no new name to take its place. He had wondered if that was an oversight or a ploy to draw curious customers into the shop.

      Well, if it was under new ownership, maybe that meant that there was new old merchandise to choose from. And that, in turn, might enable him to find something for his sister here. As he recalled, Caroline was into old things. Things that other people thought of as junk and wanted to discard, his sister saw potential and promise in.

      At least it was worth a shot, Cody told himself. He had tried the doorknob and found that it gave under his hand. Turning it, he had walked in.

      Glancing around, his eyes were instantly drawn to the tall, willowy figure on the other side of the room. She was wearing a long, denim-colored skirt and her shirt was more or less the same color. The young woman was precariously perched on the top step of a ladder that appeared to be none too steady.

      What actually caught his attention was not that she looked like an accident waiting to happen as she stretched her taut frame out, trying to reach something that was on a higher shelf, but that with her long, straight brown hair hanging loose about her back and shoulders, for just an instant, she reminded him of Renee.

      A feeling of déjà vu seized him and for a moment, his breath caught in his throat.

      Balancing herself on tiptoes, Catherine Clifton, the former Tattered Saddle’s determined new owner, automatically turned around when she heard the little bell over the front door ring. She hadn’t anticipated any customers coming in until the store’s grand reopening. That wasn’t for a couple more days at the very least. Most likely a couple of weeks. And only if she could come up with a new name for the place.

      “We’re not open for business yet,” Catherine called out.

      The next thing out of her mouth was an involuntary shriek because she’d lost her footing on the ladder and both she and the ladder were heading for a collision with the wooden floor.

      The ladder landed with a clatter.

      Catherine, fortunately, did not.

      She was saved from what could have been a very bruising fate by the very person she’d just politely banished from the premises.

      Landing in the cowboy’s strong, capable arms knocked the air out of her and, along with it, anything else she might have said at that moment.

      Which was just as well because she would have hated coming across like some blithering idiot. But right now, not a single coherent thought completed itself in her head. It was filled with just scattered words and a myriad of sensations.

      Hot sensations.

      Everything had faded into the background and Catherine was instantly and acutely aware of the man whose arms she’d landed in. The broad-shouldered, green-eyed, sandy-haired cowboy held her as if she weighed no more than a small child. The muscles on his bare arms didn’t even appear to be straining.

      A tingling sensation danced through Catherine’s entire body, which was stubbornly heating up despite all of her attempts to bank the sensation—and her reaction to the man—down.

      Her valiant efforts to the contrary, for just a moment, it felt as if time had stood still, freezing this moment as it simultaneously bathed her in a heretofore never experienced, all but debilitating, feeling of desire. For two cents proper, using the excuse that this rugged-looking cowboy had saved her, she would have kissed him. With feeling.