Her Valentine Cowboy: A Clean and Uplifting Romance


 
 
 
 Roque’s smile was long gone. Now he looked as if she’d slapped him.
 “You don’t believe me,” he said. “You think I won’t follow through. You think I don’t have it in me to do what I say.”
 “What else can I think, Roque? I’m thankful for everything you’ve done here, but you’ve generated so much new business that I can’t do all the work by myself anymore. I had a hard enough time doing it to begin with.”
 “I’ll still come,” he said.
 “What for?” she asked.
 Roque held his hands out. “For you!”
 She sighed. “Let’s just be realistic. This is the end of our arrangement. It was always month to month, subject to being ended at any time by either party. That’s in our contract.”
 “You’re not just a contract to me, Susana!”
 
 
 Dear Reader,
 There’s more to being a cowboy than putting on boots and a Stetson, and more to being a Texan than where you lay your head at night. As John Steinbeck once said, Texas is a state of mind. It’s big and diverse, with ten distinct ecoregions, at least five different accents, and a cuisine that includes kolaches and barbecue, Tex-Mex and gumbo, chili and chicken-fried steak. Its cultural heritage draws on too many influences to count. It’s a place that calls out strong emotion and deep loyalty—whether you’re a multigenerational native Texan like Susana or a newcomer like Roque, who got here as quick as he could.
 Texas has scope. There’s room here to dream big, to find friendship, community, meaningful work and love. So pull up a chair and enjoy Susana and Roque’s story.
 Happy reading!
 Kit
 PS: The chicken noodle soup and chili supper is a real thing, hosted every February by the friendly folks of the Vsetin Czech Moravian Brethren Church, and if you’re handy to the Hallettsville area, I encourage you to check it out. (See what I did there?)
 
 
 
 Her Valentine Cowboy
 Kit Hawthorne
 
 
 
 Kit Hawthorne makes her home in south-central Texas on her husband’s ancestral farm, where seven generations of his family have lived, worked and loved. When not writing, she can be found reading, drawing, sewing, quilting, reupholstering furniture, playing Irish penny whistle, refinishing old wood, cooking huge amounts of food for the pressure canner, or wrangling various dogs, cats, goats and people.
 Books by Kit Hawthorne
 Truly Texas
 Snowbound with the RancherHill Country PromiseThe Texan’s Secret SonComing Home to TexasHill Country Secret
 Visit the Author Profile page at Harlequin.com for more titles.
 
 
 To all the horse people in my life. You know who you are. Your knowledge, devotion and capacity for hard work inspire me.
 
 
 Acknowledgments
 Many thanks to everyone who answered my questions about horses, tractors, dozers and the rest—my sister Teri James Gillaspie; my daughter Grace; my husband, Greg; fellow authors Nellie Krauss and Janalyn Knight; and local horsewoman and leatherworker Janine Hunt. Thanks also to the members of the Vsetin Czech Moravian Brethren Church, especially pastor’s wife Vernell Labaj, who cheerfully and tirelessly answered my many questions about Czexan culture and cuisine and never made me feel like a pest. As always, thanks to my critique partners: Mary Johnson, Cheryl Crouch, David Martin, Janalyn Knight, Willa Blair, Nellie Krauss and Ani Jacob. Special thanks to my reader Monika in New England, who encouraged me to follow up on the taco-kolache place mentioned in some of my earlier books. Thanks also to my editor, Johanna Raisanen, who always makes my books better.
 
 
 Contents
 CHAPTER ONE
 CHAPTER TWO
 CHAPTER THREE
 CHAPTER FOUR
 CHAPTER FIVE
 CHAPTER SIX
 CHAPTER SEVEN
 CHAPTER EIGHT
 CHAPTER NINE
 CHAPTER TEN
 CHAPTER ELEVEN
 CHAPTER TWELVE
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN
 CHAPTER FOURTEEN
 CHAPTER FIFTEEN
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
 CHAPTER NINETEEN
 CHAPTER TWENTY
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
 EPILOGUE
 EXCERPT FROM A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS BY AMIE DENMAN
 
 
 CHAPTER ONE
 ROQUE FIDALGO LAY flat on his back on the full-size mattress that made up the sleeping quarters of his live-in horse trailer. The mattress was shoehorned in over the trailer’s gooseneck hitch, which put the ceiling about a foot and a half away from his face. Tiny curtainless windows ran down the narrow strips of wall on two sides, but there was nothing to see through the dirty glass except the rusted corrugated metal of the old barn that the trailer was parked inside.
 Sometimes in the mornings, if Roque didn’t hop right out of bed the minute his alarm went off and start filling Cisco’s feed bucket with grain, Cisco would saunter over into the barn and eyeball him through one of the windows. If that didn’t work, he’d lean his thousand pounds or so of horseflesh against the side of the trailer and rock it back and forth until Roque finally rolled out of bed.
 But Cisco hadn’t done that this morning. Maybe he was standing hock-deep in snow out in his sorry excuse for a pasture, too downhearted to even care. Or staring across the road at the huddled buildings of the frozen Texas town, wondering how his life had come to this and what was the point of it all.
 Roque eased his body out of his sleeping area, down the ladder and onto the nine square feet of floor space, trying not to bump into the little drop-down table where he kept his electric kettle and French press, but bumping into it anyway. A minifridge and microwave were stacked in the corner between the table and the door. That was the kitchen. There wasn’t any stove. As far as food went, if it couldn’t be nuked, reconstituted, eaten straight from the package or bought ready-made, Roque didn’t eat it.
 He could hear the whine of the faucet he’d left streaming into the rust-stained bathroom sink on the other side of the pleated folding door. At least his pipes hadn’t frozen.
 Lately Roque had been making a lot of these at