Reclaiming the Cowboy. Kathleen O'Brien

not,” Mitch repeated. “A hundred times, when I was trying to make her tell me what was going on, it would have been easier for her to invent any old story, just to shut me up. But she didn’t. She didn’t want to tell me the truth, but she was too good to tell me a lie.”

      “Okay.” Dallas nodded slowly, though he clearly wasn’t convinced. “But there’s one other thing you ought to know. If you look her up, you’ll see. She’s rich.”

      “I don’t give a damn about that.”

      “I know. I just want you to be prepared. When I say rich, I don’t mean comfortable. I mean really rich. Dripping, Rockefeller rich.”

      Mitch hesitated, looking down at his brother’s somber face. “I see. What you’re trying to say is that she’s out-of-my-league rich.”

      “More or less, yeah.” Dallas didn’t mince words. “I’m saying she’s trouble, and she’s out-of-our-league rich. Look, she left you. You had a grand adventure, but it’s over. She’s gone back to her real life. You need to let it go, Mitch. You need to let her go.”

      * * *

      MAYBE JACOB AND the rest of them were right, Annabelle thought as she knelt, here at this fork in the bricked path of Greenwood’s butterfly garden, oddly paralyzed and unsure where to plant the final daffodils. Maybe she was crazy. Divorced from reality, dysfunctional, paranoid—just as her mother had been.

      Because the way she felt, now that she was back home at Greenwood...

      She felt like her own ghost.

      So maybe they were right. Maybe it was loony to feel that her invented alter ego, Bonnie O’Mara, was more real than Annabelle Irving could ever be.

      Maybe it was bonkers to insist on living in the Greenwood gardener’s cottage and refuse to spend a single night in the elegant, twenty-two-room Italianate mansion where she was born and raised.

      Maybe it was daft to dream of taking the Irving fortune, every hellish dollar of it, and burning it in a bonfire down by the creek.

      But the truth was...being back here, being the heiress to all this had paradoxically stolen any hope of being happy. It had reduced her once again to an object, a thing, a possession, instead of a woman.

      All her life, Annabelle had understood she wasn’t a person. She was an idea. An arrangement of colors on canvas. A mythical, imaginary creature who came to life only in the minds of the people who romanticized her pictures. When the lights were off, when the museums were closed, she was supposed to sink back into the ornate frame, frozen in place, until another art lover came to imagine her into existence all over again.

      “The irises will be coming out any day now.”

      Annabelle looked up as Fitz, the elderly gardener who had tended Greenwood since Annabelle was a little girl, came limping toward her, his wheelbarrow rumbling before him. She forced herself to smile. Fitz had been the one person she could honestly call a friend. Drawn together by their mutual love of growing things, he’d come to be like a father to her through the years.

      And yet, in the end, even he had betrayed her.

      “Yes, the irises will be gorgeous. And I’m so glad you put in day lilies.” Shading her eyes with the knife blade she held in one palm, she peered up at him. Only about five-three, with a face turned to tree bark by the California sun, he looked even browner with the light behind him, casting him in shadow. “They’re a wonderful addition.”

      He reached into his wheelbarrow and lifted out a straw hat. “Here,” he said. “You don’t want to end up a grizzled old piece of shoe leather like me.”

      “Don’t I?” She took the hat, but she didn’t put it on. She raised her face toward the sun. No one cared anymore—no one would punish her for getting dirty fingernails or letting the sun freckle her pale skin. And yet it still felt like the most luxurious act of defiance, to be out here at noon, with her hands in the earth and the heat on her face.

      “No. You don’t.” Fitz plucked the hat from her hands and stuffed it on her head. “I bet you didn’t even use sunscreen. You know, BonnyBelle, you don’t always have to do the opposite of what your grandmother would have wanted you to do. Sometimes she was right.”

      She looked down at her grimy fingernails, realizing the truth of his words. She could have put on sunscreen first, and she could have enjoyed her gardening without courting skin cancer. As it was, she’d be red as a watermelon by nightfall.

      “You’re right, Fitz—I’m acting silly, and—” But she couldn’t complete her sentence. One of the maids was scurrying down the brick path toward them, her hand held up, waving urgently.

      “Ms. Annabelle,” she said as she reached them. “I’m sorry. There’s a man, and he won’t go away. I told him you weren’t at home, and so did Mr. Agron, but the man says he isn’t leaving till he talks to you. He’s been here half an hour, and Mr. Agron said we should call the police, but—”

      Annabelle’s heart hitched. Could it be Jacob?

      The maid stopped to catch her breath and maybe to find the right words. “I don’t know if we should. He’s not doing anything, and he’s obviously not a reporter. He’s kind of like...a cowboy or something.”

      Annabelle dropped her trowel and, without thinking it through, rose from her knees. She wiped her earthy palms on her jeans, then raised a hand to her hair, which was flyaway and tangled and probably littered with leaf debris and vermiculite.

      “A cowboy?”

      “Well, sort of. I don’t know exactly. He doesn’t have a horse or a hat or anything, but—” She shook her head. “Anyhow, he says you know him. He says if we’ll just tell you his name—”

      “What is his name?” Annabelle’s voice came out tight, threaded with tension. She already knew the answer, of course. She knew because the maid was flushed with a pretty confusion, a heightened female awareness caused by a gorgeous young cowboy.

      “Mitch,” the maid said, her lips curving into a small, puckering smile as she formed the word. “Mitch Garwood.”

      * * *

      MITCH HAD DECIDED he’d give her an hour. He’d wait out here, on one of the benches around the front fountain, till the sun disappeared behind the mansion’s fancy white colonnades.

      If Bonnie hadn’t come out by then, he swore to himself, he’d go back to Silverdell and to hell with her.

      But as the minutes dragged on, and it seemed likely he’d have to make good on the threat, he wondered whether he could really do it. Could he just hop on his motorcycle and head east, flipping the bird to Greenwood—and Bonnie—in his rearview mirror?

      Because...if he did, what then?

      He tried to imagine going the rest of his life without an explanation, without hearing from her lips what the whole crazy running thing had been for. He hadn’t been able to unearth anything that made sense, though he’d combed the internet and studied every single photo of the Annabelle Oils till he could probably paint one himself.

      The prim, lace-draped Annabelle Irving was Bonnie, all right. But not his Bonnie. The Annabelle Oils girl was straight out of a fairy tale, with floating clouds of red curls so pale they were almost gold and huge blue eyes that looked haunting and strange, as if you’d never be able to see what she saw, not if you stared at the same spot forever.

      His Bonnie wasn’t one bit strange. His Bonnie’s eyes were smart, clear and friendly. She didn’t wear lace, and she was too sexy to be allowed in a fairy tale. She was a normal, red-blooded woman. She hummed off tune and didn’t care who heard her. She ditched her shoes the minute she got inside, and sometimes her fuzzy socks didn’t match. She cooked a steak so tender it melted between your teeth. She bit her fingernails and looked killer in blue jeans.

      So