Page 2 of Charming the Cowboy
Meh.
She’d been toying around with asking for his help with the Halloween festivities this year since she’d gotten a tap on the shoulder from the chamber to get involved and try to draw an even bigger crowd this year.
Spring and Summer were generally the biggest tourist seasons for Wild Rose Point, but Christmas had become a major draw with so many festivities and craft fairs, historic tours, caroling, and a parade. It had made the city start to look for new ways to draw people in all year, and Halloween had big potential. They already had some haunted location tours set up – The Sanderson House was going to be featured, along with the local museum, the lighthouse, and several other places around town. There would be spiced cider at the pumpkin patch, along with a petting zoo in town, some cozy autumn beach walks that included warm drinks, campfires, and ghost stories.
But she really wanted to have a haunted hayride. Really badly.
There was only one cowboy she could think to hit up for the job, and she knew she was getting to it late, but it was just…
Cooper was a whole thing.
The Emperor, even, though she did think the tarot was giving him a little bit too much credit.
The Emperor was the ultimate Big Dick Energy card, and she could do without the giant, obvious symbolism, honestly.
The card was all about masculinity, boundaries, foundations. He was almost severe in how rigid and firm he was.
He was, very pointedly,Cooper.
Who would hate being compared to a tarot card, because he thought it was all a bunch of hogwash.
It was weird that he and Marcus had ended up being best friends.
After Eliana’s dad died, her mom moved her and Marcus to Wild Rose Point and in with their grandmother. Eliana hadbeen nine. Marcus had been thirteen and wild already, and he’d met Cooper at school and somehow the very steady Cooper had found something…charming about her feckless brother. Maybe it was the fecklessness, though she’d never had the sense that Cooper found her charming at all, and she liked to think she was whimsical.
Either way, Cooper and Marcus had formed a lifelong friendship all those years ago, and Eliana had been struck badly by Cupid’s arrow the moment she’d met the serious-looking boy with a cowboy hat on his head.
Cooper had also lost his dad in a ranching accident. Maybe that was part of the connection he and Marcus shared. Fatherless boys in a harsh world.
She set the card on the table and glared at it, before shutting the light off in the fortune-telling room and switching the rest of the lights off before she walked out the front door and locked it behind her. She turned the ‘closed’ sign, which had a subtitle beneath it that said:It’s not advised to steal from witches.
The little warning wasn’t entirely in place of a security system – she had one of those motion-activated cameras near the door.
But she did find that mostly people didn’t want to tempt potential curses.
Not that she’d curse anyone. Curses were just mean, and she should know.
She turned away from the front door and headed down the narrow pathway that led from the alcove her store sat in, and out to the main street. She could hear the crash of the ocean, not far away, but couldn’t see it through the dense, low-hanging clouds that were aspiring to be fog, even when she passed the cross street that had beach access. She paused for a moment outside the bridal shop – Seaside Vows, and looked at some of the beautiful dresses in the window.
She had always known she would never bother with marriage. There was no point. Her mom had been married twice. Obviously, to Eliana and Marcus’s father, and then again to a charming, charismatic man that she’d met when Eliana was in high school. Turned out that he was a grifter. And all he’d done was take what little savings they had and break her mother’s heart.
Then, there was her grandmother’s bad luck with love. She’d been married four times, each to a man who was a bigger liar than the last.
It wasn’t that the Sandersonscouldn’tfall in love. That would be better, honestly. They were more than capable of falling in love. Hard and fast. But love simply didn’t like them. It fell out with them far too quickly and had disastrous consequences.
She turned away from the bridal shop window and kept walking, pausing in front of the Seaglass Saloon, and debating stopping inside. She didn’t know why she felt compelled to do that. She loved the Seaglass Saloon because, much like The Water Witch, it was a family affair and owned by three strong women.
The Hartley family had owned the saloon for years, and it was the source of a lot of local legend. There was a rumor that if you drank a Mooncatcher Lager there at midnight on a full moon, you’d meet your soulmate.
Eliana had actively avoided any such thing. Particularly given that if she met her soulmate, he was likely to kill her. And not in an Edward and Bella way.
She was much less likely to be turned into a vampire and much more likely to be left pregnant, barefoot on the side of the road.
Which had actually happened to her grandmother.
Eliana had never met her biological grandfather. He had been long gone before Eliana’s mother was even born. Hergrandmother had spent the 70s roaming. She had been very much in her Stevie Nicks era at the time, and Eliana held her grandmother’s fashion sense in very high esteem. In fact, she was wearing some of her pieces now. A fringe macramé vest that had tassels that hit the back of her calves as she walked, a pair of corduroy bellbottoms, and a T-shirt, which was her own purchase that said:I’m not like other girls, I’m worse.
She was still hovering by the door to the saloon when it shot open suddenly, and she was nearly barreled over by a massive figure in a black cowboy hat.
