Taming Clint Westmoreland - Brenda Jackson [0]
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BRENDA JACKSON
TAMING CLINT WESTMORELAND
Contents
Acknowledgments
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
Epilogue
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
To Gerald Jackson, Sr., the love of my life.
To all my readers who have made the Westmorelands a
very special family in their hearts. This book is for you!
To my Heavenly Father. How Great Thou Are.
Better a meal of vegetables where there is love
than a fattened calf with hatred.
—Proverbs 15:17
One
C lint Westmoreland glanced around the airport and silently cursed. It was the middle of the day, he had a ton of work to do back at his ranch and here he stood waiting to meet a wife he hadn’t known he’d had until a few days ago.
His chest tightened as he inwardly fumed, recalling the contents of the letter he’d received from the Texas State Bureau of Investigations. He’d learned from the letter that when he’d gotten married while working on an undercover sting operation five years ago as a Texas Ranger, the marriage had never been nullified by the agency. That meant that he and Alyssa Barkley, the woman who had been his female partner, were still legally married.
The thought of being married, legally or otherwise, sent a chill down his spine, and the sooner he and Alyssa could meet and get the marriage annulled the better. She had received a similar letter and a few days ago they had spoken on the phone. She, too, was upset about the bureau’s monumental screwup and had agreed to fly to Austin to get the matter resolved immediately.
He glanced at his watch thinking time was being wasted. It was the first of February and he had a shipment of wild horses due any day and needed to get things ready at the ranch for their arrival.
When he had announced at his cousin Ian’s wedding last June that he would be leaving the Rangers after ten years, his cousin Durango and his brother-in-law, McKinnon Quinn, had invited him to join their Montana-based, million-dollar horse-breeding business. They wanted him to expand their company into Texas. Clint would run the Texas operations and become a partner in the business. His main focus would be taming and training wild horses.
He had accepted their offer and hadn’t regretted a day of doing so. So to his way of thinking, at this moment he had more important things he should be concentrating on. Like making sure his horse-taming business stayed successful.
He glanced at his watch again and then looked around wondering if he would recognize Alyssa when he saw her. It had been five years and the only thing he could recall about her was that she’d been young, right out of college with a degree in criminal justice. The two of them had been together less than a week. That was all the time it had taken to play the part of a young married couple who desperately wanted to adopt a baby—illegally.
She had played the part of a despairing, wannabe mother pretty convincingly. So much in fact that a sting operation everyone had assumed would take a couple of weeks to pull off had ended after the first week. Afterward, he had been sent on another assignment. From what he’d heard, she had turned in her resignation after deciding being a Texas Ranger wasn’t what she wanted to devote her life to doing after all.
He had no idea what she’d done since then, as their phone conversation had been brief and he hadn’t been inclined to even ask. He wanted the issue of their being married dealt with so they could both get on with their lives. She should be about twenty-seven now, he thought. On the phone, she’d said she was still single. Actually, he’d been surprised that she hadn’t gotten married or something.
The sound of high heels clicking on the ceramic tile floor made him glance at the woman strolling in his direction. He blinked. If the woman was Alyssa, she had certainly gone through one hell of a transformation. Although she’d been far from a plain