A Cowboy to Remember

The bad boy of country music may have finally met his match…

Colton Raines is tired of being the bad boy of country music. He’s ready to find what his sister has with her husband, but doesn’t believe it can happen until he meets a sexy woman dancing alone in a bar. Her free spirit and calm center bring him a peace and a fire that he’s never experienced before. But she’s not interested in being another notch in his belt, despite his protests to the contrary.

Sierra Austin has always wanted a place to belong and a home, after a lifetime of being dragged everywhere. The last thing she needs is a man who has wandering feet and a home base far from the small town where she’s established a strong business. But when her emotions become engaged, will she learn that home is where the heart is or where she is planted?

Colton Raines had officially grown up and he wondered where he could lodge a formal complaint.
He studied the cowboys and girls dancing in the small-town bar and drank his beer, pondering his future and his past, and wondering how he’d gotten so damned melancholy when he used to be the life of the party. Of course, he also would never have been caught dead in a small town. He was Nashville, bright lights, big city all the way, but he was liking the small pace of this Granite Junction, his sister’s newly adopted home, thanks to her new husband. Who would have thought he would have changed too?
It’d been kind of an evolution, he supposed, and it was probably about time since he was over thirty, as his parents loved to remind him. Traveling with his band over the past several months, he’d retreated more and more to his hotel room after shows and didn’t party like he used to, skipping bars and afterparties, avoiding groupies and sure things like they were bear traps eager to snap shut and lock him inside.
He’d gotten bored with the whole thing. Hated being the bad boy of country music.
Maybe it came from spending the past few months with his sister, Piper, and her husband, Ty Evans, who was opening for him during this tour. He joked that he didn’t need to hang out with the man who was defiling his baby sister, but the truth was, he was fucking jealous. Seeing their relationship, their loving, playing out in front of him? Yeah, he just might be thinking he wanted some of that. Someone who might be interested in him for something other than his money, his music, or his connections. He certainly wasn’t going to find that on the road, or even in Nashville at his usual haunts.
He tilted back the bottle of beer and let the cool liquid trickle down his throat, soothing the raw vocal cords from doing a couple of sets as a favor to the owner of the bar in Granite Junction. Yeah, finding someone real wasn’t happening anytime soon. Anyone who got close to Colton Raines saw a meal ticket or their name in lights. Even in this podunk town, people knew who he was, and the girls had been on him like flies on shit, even when he was just trying to lie low and have a few weeks’ vacation. A working vacation, anyway. He had a recording date coming up in Nashville, and he needed to compose new material. But inspiration had been hard to come by.
He shoved away from the scarred wood table, the loud scrape of the chair on the floor interrupting his sister and Ty’s make-out session. They broke apart, only slightly guiltily, and stared.
Colton snorted in disgust. “I’m going to take a leak.”
“Nice language. And you wonder why women don’t want you,” his sister stated, a little primly, from her perch on Ty’s lap.
“It’s not that they don’t want me. They do. Well, they want everything else, not me.” Damn, now he sounded like a whiny baby. Poor me, everyone wants me. Boo-hoo.
Fuck, he even made himself sick. Time to regroup.
Ty gave him a sympathetic look, having witnessed it all while on the road with him for the past few months. “I get it, man. You want to head back to the ranch?”
“Nah, I’ve got this.” His sister snuggled closer to her husband and Colt snorted. “Aren’t you supposed to be spending time with the bride-to-be or something? I thought you had bridesmaid duties for Emma.”
She shrugged. “We finished everything and now the girls are all dancing. I’d rather spend my time right here. But if you continue to be a giant baby, I might change my mind.”
He scowled, though she wasn’t wrong. He’d been in a foul temper all evening after he and Ty had sung a few sets for the Saturday evening crowd here at The Rock. He didn’t mind the singing. He just hated the women who crowded around him, running their hands all over him. He’d retreated to this back table to hide. Pathetic.
He tipped the bottle to drink the remaining beer. “Be right back.”
He weaved his way through the crowd, evading the clutches of sharp-nailed cowgirls, until he came to an abrupt stop near the dance floor. A woman danced with pure abandon, her eyes closed, with Emma and a couple of other women he didn’t know from the bachelorette party. Her painted-on jeans showed the most perfectly rounded ass he’d seen in a long time, the plunging neckline of her V-neck blouse showing just the right amount of cleavage. She was part of the group, yet alone, swaying to the music and singing the words—loudly and not exactly correctly—but she didn’t seem to care. She seemed so free, so loose, so completely comfortable with herself and unconcerned with the world around her.
She opened her eyes and met his stare, a half-smile playing about her lips and a faint challenge in her gaze. Something about her drew him in and he had to meet her, a woman who didn’t have the same calculating gleam in her eye when she looked at him but saw the man standing there and appreciated him.