LITMIR.BIZ

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she wasn’t sure just how much she’d downed before climbing out the window. Sophie also suspected the tequila was the reason she hadn’t noticed the mud until it was too late to save her shoes.

      And it had almost certainly influenced her decision to come up with this date plan.

      Chief McKinnon huffed, scrubbed his hand over his face and then winced when he encountered that cut on his head. “Look, Miss Granger, I’m sorry for what happened to you, but instead of looking for a date, you should just go back to the church and be with your family.”

      “God, no!” She couldn’t say that fast enough. “That’s the last place I need to be without a plan. One of my brothers is there. My cousin, too. My best friend. And my mother.” Especially her mother. “They’d go after Brantley and beat him up. Then, you’d have to arrest just about everyone in the vicinity who’s related to me.”

      He nodded. Stood. Handed her a fresh Kleenex. “I’ll go to the church and calm them down.”

      “You’d stand a better chance getting this mud off tulle. Once they learn what’s happened, there’ll be little chance to calm them down. No, the best way to handle this is my date idea.”

      He cocked his head to the side, studied her as if he were indeed about to call the mental hospital to come and get her.

      “Don’t you see?” she asked, but didn’t wait for him to answer. “If you and I leave now, I can say I ran off with you. We wouldn’t really run off, of course. We could just go somewhere for a couple of hours, but I could tell my family I had second thoughts about marrying Brantley and that I couldn’t help myself, that I had to have one last fling.”

      “That’s the tequila talking,” he insisted.

      Possibly.

      Probably, she amended.

      Sophie didn’t usually have to make critical decisions and plans while under the influence, and once she sobered up and got out of the dress so she could breathe, she might be able to come up with something better. For now though, this was all she had.

      “If your family thinks you’re with me, it’ll make you look bad,” the chief added. Clearly, he was grasping at straws here.

      “I don’t think I can look any worse, do you?”

      He didn’t argue, not with that anyway. “Basically, you want me to lie for you?”

      She nodded. “But it’s for the sake of keeping peace and preventing an assault. I hate Brantley for what he did. Hate him with every fiber of my being.”

      That shock was finally wearing off. Some of the tequila, too.

      Fast.

      Hell in a handbasket.

      How had it come to this?

      The hurt shoved away the anger so fast that Sophie didn’t even know it was coming. She caught on to the desk to steady herself. That didn’t help, either, and since her knees were too wobbly to stand, she just sat on the edge of the desk. Of course, she knocked things over, but she couldn’t help it.

      She was no longer an engaged woman. No longer about to become Brantley’s wife. In fact, she wasn’t sure who she was and prayed that was a temporary effect of the hurt and the lack of oxygen. Because at this exact moment, she felt something she’d never felt before.

      Broken.

      “I would ask if you’re okay,” Chief McKinnon said, “but I already know the answer. You’re not. And that’s why you’re not thinking straight. If you just go to your family with the truth—”

      “But I don’t want them in jail,” she added, just as the eighteenth round of tears came.

      He glanced up at the ceiling as if seeking divine guidance. “Why me? Isn’t there someone else in town who’d have an easier time lying about this?”

      It was hard to give someone a flat look while you were crying, but Sophie thought she’d managed it. “There are no other eligible straight men in town.”

      He was it, period. All the others were married, too young, too old, or else they worked at her family’s ranch. Dating someone who technically worked for her was a huge no-no in her brother’s eyes. Hers, as well. And there wasn’t a single breathing soul in Wrangler’s Creek who would believe she’d ditched Brantley for some wild-oats sowing with the pig farmer that everyone called Skunk. Or Ned the pharmacist, who had a germ phobia and wouldn’t touch anyone unless he was wearing latex gloves.

      Sophie kept trying despite the sobs. “Plus, folks don’t know you that well since you’ve only lived here a couple of months—”

      “Nine months,” he corrected. He gave her four more Kleenexes, and she needed every one of them.

      “In Wrangler’s Creek time, that’s only a couple of minutes. Skunk, the pig farmer, has lived here since before I was born, and people still call him the new guy.”

      At least the chief didn’t just shoot down her idea. He bunched up his forehead as if giving it some thought. Thought that ended in a head shaking. “No one has ever seen us together before now. No way would they believe you’d run off with a man you didn’t know.”

      “So we could embellish the lie and say we’ve been secretly meeting.”

      “Now you want embellishment?”

      “It’s for a good cause,” she pressed.

      But then Sophie had to consider something that she was certain she would have considered earlier if she’d been thinking straight. “Uh, are you seeing anyone, engaged, gay?”

      “None of the above. That doesn’t mean I want to buy into a lie that would snowball.”

      He still clearly wasn’t on board with this so Sophie just went for broke. “I don’t want my family to see me looking this pathetic. This muddy,” she added, glancing down at her feet. “While I’m crying. Do you have any idea how hard it is to be the only sister in a family of alpha cowboys?”

      “Not really.” He finally gave in and just handed her the entire box of Kleenex.

      Even though he looked so ready for this conversation to be over, Sophie continued. “Well, it’s hard. I’ve had to fight and scrape for every ounce of power and responsibility I have, and if they see me like this, I’ll lose that. They’ll walk on eggshells. They’ll treat me like a hurt woman.”

      “Uh, aren’t you a hurt woman?”

      “Yes, but I don’t want them to know that.”

      More ceiling glancing, more huffing. “Follow this through. If we pretend we’re dating, the pretense will continue because there’ll have to be a fake breakup. Your family will definitely look at you as a hurt woman then. And what kind of example would that set for me? I’ve got two nephews, and I don’t want them to think I’m the kind of guy who’d carry on with an engaged woman.”

      He was making sense, but Sophie still wasn’t giving up on this plan just yet. This was one of the things she had to do often at Granger Western. She had to tweak sales proposals, marketing plans and personnel assignments. This was just another situation in need of a tweaking.

      But what? How?

      Sophie was asking herself those very questions when she heard something she didn’t want to hear. Voices that she recognized.

      Oh, God. They’d found her.

      “Is my sister here?” someone barked. Garrett, her oldest brother.

      Garrett sounded both concerned and pissed. Not a good combination. He was the one most likely to kick Brantley’s butt, but he would also berate her forever about getting involved with the man he’d always said was all wrong for her. Of course, any man who wasn’t a cowboy would have been wrong for her in Garrett’s eyes.

      “Is

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