Page 5 of Breaking the Cowboy's Rules

He stared in the tarnished and warped mirror behind the bar. The tables of bridesmaids were drinking, laughing, and eyeing him and his cousins as if they were really hungry. Hell, maybe they thought they were the entertainment for the night. Bodhi, already edgy, felt his irritation notch up a level.

An audacious idea rolled out of the scrum of his brain.

He turned around and sprawled against the bar, arms wide and encompassing his two brooding cousins.

“Let’s play a game.”

*

Samara Nicoletta ReeseSteel Wentworth had been driving west for three days when she saw the sign for Copper Mountain Rodeo. The graphic of the cowboy on a bucking bronc—hand held high, defying gravity and who knew what other laws of physics, a Stetson perched at an impossibly jaunty angle, leather fringe on his chaps dancing, buckle gleaming—was as fascinating as it was alien.

Cowboys were just in movies, right?

But maybe they did exist in real life in…where was she? Montana yet or still?

Not that it mattered.

Say yes.

Don’t block.

Stay in the moment.

The rules of improv—who knew there were rules?—ping-ponged around her exhausted and traumatized brain. Improv had been the latest podcast she’d audibly digested as she’d driven mindlessly. No destination. No plan. Just the need to go. To escape. To not think. To not be her for a while. Or forever.

Staying in the moment was the one thing she’d tried to glom on to after the various mindfulness, breaking habits, yoga for health, Freakonomics, the Daily, and even Malcolm Gladwell’s podcasts hadn’t found the soil of her barren brain fertile enough. Impulsively she and her Audi A8 L exited the highway and soon rolled down an out-of-a-western-movie set main street with brick buildings.

“Say yes and…” she mantra-ed. Would this one stick?

Marietta.

Montana.

Miles and miles away from Manhattan, her family, her career, her life and who she’d mindlessly become.

Three weeks to break a habit.

She remembered that much from the ‘forming habits of a meaningful life’ podcast.

Meaningful. Hers had had meaning all right. Just not perhaps what she intended. Or had she ever intended anything? Had she just happily attached the blinders and stepped into the Wentworth world like her brothers and cousins, no questions asked, no moral heart-to-hearts?

And ripping the blinders off had made the rest of the world screamingly and blindingly bright. Disorienting.

Driving with very little sleep hadn’t helped. She needed three weeks to become someone else. She was on day three.

Maybe this was where she could gain some perspective. Finally process. Hadn’t that been in the ‘recovering from trauma’ podcast? Samara made her living thinking, calculating, anticipating, and acting decisively. But self-reflection had never once entered her daily rituals or habits.

She wasn’t sure if she had three weeks. She could have forever. For the first time, she didn’t have a plan. Or limits.

She’d broken and then ditched her work phone out the window somewhere in Pennsylvania—not ecologically mindful. She’d turned off her locator and had blocked all numbers on her personal phone. She’d deleted her news app and all social media. Before leaving the city, she’d paid her hair stylist triple to come in early to color her pale, brownish-auburn hair a fiery deep red with a few strategic gold highlights. It looked eye-poppingly fantastic, especially with her creamy complexion. She’d tripled her normal tip for the stylist to keep her mouth shut—no insta posts, no chats to reporters.

Samara drove through the town slow, and no one in the few trucks, Jeeps or SUVs seemed to mind or honk. Most of the shops had western-themed decorations in the windows. She saw a coffee shop, a scattering of non-chain restaurants, more than a handful of cute boutiques, a courthouse, and a massive park that dominated the end of town.

She fought a shiver.

The mountain that seemed to guard one end of the town must presumably be Copper Mountain, but the entire town was ringed with mountains. She turned and saw a sprawling park, and beyond it, the glimmer of blue water. She turned down another street, curious, and her gaze lit on an old historic hotel. The town looked like a movie set, and the courthouse and hotel were the crown jewels.

I could stay here.

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