Mulberry Moon (Mystic Creek, Band 3) - Softcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Catherine Anderson is the author of more than thirty New York Times bestselling and award-winning historical and contemporary romances, including New Leaf, Silver Thaw, Walking on Air, and Cheyenne Amber, among others. She lives in the pristine woodlands of Central Oregon.

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***This excerpt is from an advance uncorrected copy proof***

Copyright © 2016 Catherine Anderson

CHAPTER ONE

With the taste of tacos lingering in his mouth, Ben Sterling opened the door to leave Taco Joe’s on West Main and hollered good-bye to Joe Paisley, the owner. A rush of icy, pine-scented air surrounded Ben as he donned his tan Stetson and stepped onto the sidewalk. It smelled like home and reminded him how glad he was to be back in Mystic Creek, not just for a visit, but living on his ranch again.

Liquidating his business as a rodeo stock broker hadn’t been an easy decision. He’d made damned good money. But it kept him on the road most of the time, often in flat, arid country where only a few bushy trees dotted the landscape. He’d quickly grown tired of the constant traveling, but he’d stuck it out to build a nice nest egg. Now he had finally quit, returned to his roots, and was trying to build a real life.

Because it had been sunny when he left home, he’d forgotten a jacket, so all he could do was hunch his shoulders against the frigid temperature. His new Dodge Ram waited along the curb only paces away. Against the backdrop of late nineteenth-century storefronts that characterized Mystic Creek, it looked futuristic in the grayish light that always bathed the town as the sun started its slide into oblivion.

The smooth soles of his riding boots lost traction, warning him that the concrete was icy. In mid-September, Mystic Creek sometimes had weather fluctuations, warm one minute and freezing the next. Stupid not to bring a coat, he thought. This is high-elevation Oregon. He guessed he’d been gone too long. Climatic habits ingrained in him during boyhood had lost their hold on him.

Walking to his vehicle, he saw his dog, Finnegan, watching him through the back cab window. Eight months old, the blue merle Australian shepherd had the mottle of black, gray, and white fur common to blues, but his markings were distinct, his narrow nose and forehead sporting a tapering white blaze. He bounced from side to side on the bench seat, acting as if he’d been alone for hours.

A smile touched Ben’s mouth. A bachelor and now thirty years old, he enjoyed having a dog. When Ben first returned to live on his ranch, the big, rambling house had felt empty when he stayed there alone. He’d grown up in a large family. He preferred noise buzzing around him. Finn had provided the perfect antidote, snuggling with Ben in the recliner while he watched TV or read novels, always eager to play, barking joyously, and offering a warm presence beside him in bed at night. Hello, when a man couldn’t find Miss Right, no matter how hard he searched, sometimes he had to settle for companionship from a four-legged friend. There were worse fates than being loved by a dog.

Not that Ben didn’t keep company with women. He just couldn’t find that one special lady he wanted to be with for a lifetime. Dating at thirty was a crapshoot with lots of promising beginnings followed by disappointing endings. He couldn’t find anyone who truly loved animals, for one thing, and his life revolved around all kinds of them. He’d met a few gals that had a cat, bird, or goldfish, but they didn’t want a dog in the house. Or they were afraid of horses. A number of them had even visited his ranch in high heels and gotten pissed if they stepped in manure. He couldn’t build a future with someone like that. He needed a down-to-earth person who didn’t run in terror from his free-range chickens or pick dog hair off her fancy clothes.

As he circled the truck to the driver’s door, delicious aromas drifted across the street from the Straw Hat, which served Mexican cuisine, and the Cauldron, another eatery in Mystic Creek, which specialized in home-style fare. Ben enjoyed eating at the Cauldron, and apparently so did many others. Through the front windows, he could see that the place was packed. The menu offered a wide variety of homemade choices, and the prices were also easy on the wallet.

There was only one fly in the ointment for Ben where the Cauldron was concerned, the café’s owner, Sissy Sue Bentley. She was a petite woman with cropped dark hair, blue eyes that dominated her heart-shaped face, and a figure that was perfection on a small scale. She’d caught his attention over a year ago, and he’d started patronizing her establishment, hoping to get better acquainted. Despite his efforts to be friendly, she’d treated him as if he had a contagious disease. After a couple of weeks, he’d started to feel like a stalker and chalked it up to bad chemistry. Now he avoided the place.

Sissy wasn’t the only pretty female in the area, after all. On weekend nights, he sometimes frequented the nightspots in nearby Crystal Falls, hoping to meet someone he could relate to. So far, he’d run across several gals who were stunning, and a few intriguing enough to date for a couple of months. In the end, though, even if the sex was great, there was always something to put the kibosh on the relationship. It was just his luck that the only local woman he found attractive had taken an instant dislike to him.

As Ben pulled open the truck door, Finn leaped forward and slathered his face with doggy kisses. Ben laughed and gave the pup an enthusiastic scratch behind both ears. “I missed you, too.” He gently pushed the shepherd off the driver’s seat and started to climb inside the vehicle.

A familiar sound stopped him dead in his tracks. Berk, berk, berk. He swung around and did a double take. A white hen was strutting eastward along the street. Ben had seen some strange sights in Mystic Creek. One time a skunk had joined the participants of a Fourth of July parade and cleared the sidewalks of people with one threatening lift of its tail. More recently, a black bear had moseyed onto East Main and pushed its way through the swinging doors of the Jake ’n’ Bake and devoured everything in the pastry section while Jake hid in the cooler until law officers arrived.

Now it was a chicken invading the downtown area. Where had it come from?

Just then, two more hens fell in behind the white leghorn, all three of the fowl covering ground at a pace suggesting they were late to an appointment. Finnegan barked. He was used to seeing chickens at home, but never within the city limits.

What the hell? Ben looked in the direction from which the chickens were coming and saw more feathery pedestrians appearing from behind the last building on the opposite side of the street. It housed Marilyn Fears’s One-Stop Market, a small mom-and-pop shop. Had Marilyn decided to raise chickens? It was a popular hobby, and so far as Ben knew, the town had no ordinances against it.

Marilyn had space behind her building for a coop and run. A small distributary of Mystic Creek flowed behind the shops on that side of West Main, so the land back there hadn’t been developed. Diverting the stream’s natural course wasn’t an option. In this town, nobody messed with Mystic Creek. The waterway was thought to be magical by many people, and even a narrow brook originating from it was revered.

As Ben watched, the flow of hens didn’t abate. How many chicks had Marilyn ordered? As Ben stood there, dumbfounded, even more chickens appeared. Beckoning Finn out of the truck in case he needed the dog’s help with bird herding, he gingerly headed toward the store. If Marilyn’s chickens were loose, she’d need help collecting them. The ones he’d seen were pullets, not yet full-grown, and at an age when hens were sometimes warier of humans than they might be later. He didn’t want that nice older lady to fall on the ice and...