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Back Cover Text

For the men of Painted Pony Creek, it’s never too late for a second chance…

Cord Hollister is a true cowboy at heart. As a man who has devoted his life to training horses under the big skies of Montana, he thrives on the stability of ranch life. But when a girl arrives in Painted Pony Creek with a shocking secret, Cord’s orderly life is upended. She’s the spitting image of the first woman who broke his heart—a woman he hasn’t seen in years—and he’ll do whatever he can to help her. He just can’t do it alone…

Shallie Fletcher left heartbreak where it belongs—in the past. And she’s done everything she can to reinvent herself and move on. But when an opportunity arises to partner with a therapeutic riding program for kids, Shallie can’t resist seeking out Cord for lessons. Back in school, he was the crush she couldn’t forget, even though he only had eyes for her best friend. Seeing him now floods her with memories…and fills her with hope. Could the one who got away be the one who stays?

Praise

Praise for #1 New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling author Linda Lael Miller

“Linda Lael Miller creates vibrant characters and stories I defy you to forget.”

—#1 New York Times bestselling author
Debbie Macomber

“Miller’s return to Parable is a charming story of love in its many forms…. [A] sweetly entertaining and alluring tale.”

—RT Book Reviews on Big Sky River

“Miller’s down-home, easy-to-read style keeps the plot moving, and she includes…likable characters, picturesque descriptions and some very sweet pets.”

—Publishers Weekly on Big Sky Country

“A delightful addition to Miller’s Big Sky series. This author has a way with a phrase that is nigh-on poetic… This story [is] especially entertaining.”

—RT Book Reviews on Big Sky Mountain

“Miller’s name is synonymous with the finest in Western romance.”

—RT Book Reviews

“A passionate love too long denied drives the action in this multifaceted, emotionally rich reunion story that overflows with breathtaking sexual chemistry.”

—Library Journal on McKettricks of Texas: Tate

“Miller’s prose is smart, and her tough Eastwoodian cowboy cuts a sharp, unexpectedly funny figure in a classroom full of rambunctious frontier kids.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Man from Stone Creek

Booklist

Also by Linda Lael Miller and HQN

The Carsons of Mustang Creek

A Snow Country Christmas

Forever a Hero

Always a Cowboy

Once a Rancher

The Brides of Bliss County

Christmas in Mustang Creek

The Marriage Season

The Marriage Charm

The Marriage Pact

The Parable series

Big Sky Secrets

Big Sky Wedding

Big Sky Summer

Big Sky River

Big Sky Mountain

Big Sky Country

McKettricks of Texas

An Outlaw’s Christmas

A Lawman’s Christmas

McKettricks of Texas: Austin

McKettricks of Texas: Garrett

McKettricks of Texas: Tate

The Creed Cowboys

The Creed Legacy

Creed’s Honor

A Creed in Stone Creek

Stone Creek

The Bridegroom

The Rustler

A Wanted Man

The Man from Stone Creek

The McKettricks

A McKettrick Christmas

McKettrick’s Heart

McKettrick’s Pride

McKettrick’s Luck

McKettrick’s Choice

Mojo Sheepshanks

Arizona Heat (originally published as Deadly Deceptions)

Arizona Wild (originally published as Deadly Gamble)

The Montana Creeds

A Creed Country Christmas

Montana Creeds: Tyler

Montana Creeds: Dylan

Montana Creeds: Logan

And look for the second book in Linda Lael Miller’s all-new Painted Pony Creek series, Country Proud, coming soon from HQN!

Dedication

To animal lovers everywhere.

Dear Reader

Dear Reader,

Welcome to the town of Painted Pony Creek in the Big Sky State of Montana. Country Strong is the first of three stories based in this town; it will be followed by Country Proud and Country Born.

The heroes of these books, longtime friends, are Cord Hollister, Eli Garrett and J.P. McCall. Central to this first one is Cord, who owns a horse ranch and a horse-training business. You’ll also meet Shallie Fletcher, a woman from his past, who becomes part of his life again.

And you’ll meet Eli, the local sheriff, and J.P., a military veteran, and you’ll learn more about them in Country Proud and Country Born, and see how they find love, too.

In this book, this series, you’ll experience everything that’s important to me and, as I know from past contact with my readers, to you, too: a strong sense of community, a love of country and small-town life and, above all, the importance of human connections—especially family and friendship. The possibility of redemption. The importance, too, of a sense of humor, which can help us through hard times and make good times even better. The same goes for the role of music and how it enhances our lives.

And I can’t imagine what my own life would be without dogs, cats, horses, birds… I’m an “animal person” all the way, and I’m fortunate that almost everyone I know is, too. (I’d love to hear your animal stories, dear reader. Write me at the website or address below. Send pictures if you’d like.)

Ultimately, it all comes down to love, doesn’t it?

I’m grateful to have these beliefs in common with my editors, Paula Eykelhof and Michele Bidelspach, and my agent, Irene Goodman. I’d also like to extend my appreciation to a number of people at Harlequin Books, a division of HarperCollins: Dianne Moggy, Margaret Marbury, Loriana Sacilotto and Susan Swinwood.

My family—daughter, Wendy, and niece, Jenny, and their respective (and respectful!) partners are vital to my personal and professional lives. So, of course, is the rest of my family. And my longtime friend and fellow animal lover, Debbie Macomber.

Much gratitude to my many loyal readers!

Linda Lael Miller

PROLOGUE

Eighteen years before…

SPARKS ROSE FROM the crackling bonfire in lazy, twisting spirals, the tiny stars of some miniature universe, soaring high above the loud party on the stony banks of Painted Pony Creek, blazing brilliant red-orange trails against the night sky for a few glorious moments, then, inevitably, fading to ash. Drifting slowly earthward, so briefly bright, then gone.

Shallie Fletcher, seventeen and prone to finding cosmic meaning in just about everything, sighed. Sparks continued to flare, then vanish, only to be replaced by more.

Not that she’d ever shone, let alone soared.

That was for other girls, girls like her best friend, Reba Shannon.

An ache formed in Shallie’s throat as she watched her best friend wrap her dazzling self around Eli Garrett, there at the faint, flickering edge of the firelight, but the ache didn’t stem from jealousy.

Oh, no. What Shallie felt, that hot summer night, was remorse.

And guilt. Mostly because of what Reba was busy doing. But Eli was certainly doing his part…

He was making a damn fool of himself, which was his own fault, since he’d had too much beer, like a lot of the other guys and not a few of the girls. High school was over. Graduation was a full week in the past, but the parties, it seemed, might go on all summer. Or until the whole class ended up in jail for underage drinking, whichever came first.

Shallie, raised in foster care by her aunt and uncle, both of whom swilled cheap vodka from midmorning until they passed out sometime after the eleven o’clock news, quietly avoided alcohol. Tonight, knowing what she knew—what everybody knew, except for Eli and his two closest friends, John Patrick McCall, known as J.P., and Cord Hollister—she’d considered diving headfirst into a bottle and curling up at the bottom, like the storied worm in a jug of rotgut tequila.

If she’d been drunk, after all, she could have forgotten for a little while that she’d stood by and watched, saying nothing, not for just a day or a week, but for months, while Reba, beautiful, narcissistic Reba, played her game. While she convinced each of them that she was in love with him, and him alone.

Shallie hadn’t been the only one who could have, should have, spoken up. But that didn’t really matter now, did it?

She’d known Eli, J.P. and Cord since kindergarten. A tomboy, Shallie had been part of their circle from day one, when they’d decided, for whatever reason, to befriend the scruffy foster kid from the run-down motel south of town.

In the early years, she’d gone everywhere with those three—fishing and swimming in this very creek, horseback riding, and even to Saturday afternoon matinees at the Silver Buckle Theater, before it closed for good.

She’d eaten supper with their families, in their clean, orderly houses. In her early teens, J.P.’s older sisters, Clare and Josie, had given her clothes, brushed and braided her hair and, when the time came, taught her a million things she would’ve had to learn by trial and error otherwise.

How to make the most of her features with a minimum of makeup, for instance, and which colors looked best on her. They’d insisted that being smart was a good thing, more important than being pretty or popular, though both of those things were fine, in and of themselves. A girl just had to remember that being pretty didn’t mean jack-shit if you were ornery or a liar or a cheat. Popularity, the very popular McCall sisters agreed, was fun all right, but it didn’t have much substance in the long run.

It was great to be class president or prom queen or a cheerleader, but some people got stuck, Clare and Ellie maintained, and accomplished little or nothing after graduation.

Who wanted to peak in high school?

Watching them, Shallie wondered about her own future with her friends. With Reba. And with Eli, J.P. and Cord. Especially Cord…

Was it better to say something right now?

Or do nothing?

CHAPTER ONE

Evening of Thursday, June 6

THE NIGHT REBA SHANNON’S ghost materialized in the cramped storeroom behind Sully’s Bar and Grill, where Cord Hollister and his best friends, J.P. McCall and Eli Garrett, sat playing their usual every-other-Thursday game of five-card stud, the famous big sky was fixing to bust wide open and dump a shitload of rain.

Cord, never the anxious type, had been curiously uneasy all day. Woken up that morning with the small hairs on his nape and forearms rising and an odd twitch in the pit of his stomach.

The storm had been brewing even then, but it wasn’t the impending gully washer that was getting under his hide. He was used to violent storms, having lived in God’s country from the age of three; hell, he relished them, always had. Could stand at a window for hours, watching lightning slash jagged rips from sky to ground, dance along the rods on the barn roof, roll itself into a fiery ball and tumble from one end of the horizon to the other—and back again.

The wilder the show, the better Cord liked it.

Which was a damn good thing, since on the Montana plains extreme weather was common enough—blazing hot summers, apocalyptic blizzards in winter, flash floods and the deep, sticky mud residents called gumbo in the spring, when the rains came and the snow began to melt high in the Rockies.

Some springs were mild; creeks and rivers, freshly thawed, stayed politely within their banks.

Flowers dotted the meadows, and the grass grew green and rich and plentiful on the range.

But if the winter had been hard, the snowmelt descended from the high country in dark, churning torrents, taking out roads, drowning fields and ranges.

Life was tough everywhere, Cord knew, but it took a special kind of stick-with-it to farm or run a ranch in Montana, even with decent equipment and enough capital to make it from one season to the next. Smaller outfits went under on a regular basis, all too often taking the hard work, hope and sacrifice of several generations down with them, but a surprising number held on, somehow.

Folks out here had plenty of backbone, and they kept their complaints to themselves.

The old-timers were particularly durable; the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse could ride in, wreaking their predicted havoc, and these veterans of peace and war, hardship and plenty, would swear up and down it was nothing compared to that drought or wildfire or recession way back when.

As far as these descendants of pioneers were concerned, the West in general—and Montana in particular—was no place for the timid or the easily discouraged.

And, being neither, Cord pretty much agreed.

So, no, it hadn’t been the weather that made him jittery.

As the clouds gathered, darkening from pale gray to an ominous shade of ebony over the course of the day, a prelightning charge pulsed in the air, almost audible.

And then, between one heartbeat and the next, she was there.

The specter blew in through the rear door of Sully’s place, the creak of its rusty hinges muted by a blast of thunder and, as if to ratchet up the drama a notch or two, a bolt of lightning struck just the other side of the vacant lot behind the bar, briefly illuminating the figure from behind.

Although her arrival was relatively mundane—no shimmering ectoplasm, rattling chains or harrowing moans—the effect was still creepy, in a Wes Craven kind of way.

Cord, who was holding his first decent hand of the evening, one jack short of a royal flush, instantly dropped his cards.

J.P. turned in his chair, following Cord’s gaze, and abruptly froze.

Eli, focused on his cards, took a while to shift mental gears and notice that Cord and J.P. were staring at something behind him.

Frowning, he swiveled, registered the slender haunt standing just inside the cardroom, rain lashing through the opening and pooling on the uneven floor around her feet.

“Holy shit,” he whispered.

“Reba?” J.P. murmured, very quietly, like a man talking in his sleep.

J.P.’s retired service dog, Trooper, didn’t move or make a sound.

The shadow-woman closed the door with visible effort and moved toward them, dumping a shabby backpack on the nearby floor. She stopped just inside the wavering circle of light that fell over the round table where they sat, motionless, stricken to silence. They didn’t even think to stand in the presence of a lady, normally a reflex as automatic as breathing.

Not that any of them drew a breath.

Finally, Trooper bestirred himself, stood at attention, emitting a low, uncertain sound, more whine than growl.

“At ease,” J.P. told the animal, although he didn’t look away from the thin, bedraggled girl hovering at the edge of the light.

Cord, finally over the initial shock, and plenty embarrassed by his reaction, shoved a hand through his hair and pulled himself together.

Mostly.

The girl wasn’t, couldn’t be, Reba, but the resemblance was downright uncanny. She had Reba’s coloring—caramel-brown hair and those remarkable amber eyes, her high, elegant cheekbones, too—but she was impossibly young and a few inches shorter than her look-alike.

That she was related to Reba, and closely, was a sure bet, but she was no ghost back from the grave.

Of course she wasn’t.

She’d given Cord one hell of a turn, though, and shaken J.P. and Eli up, too.

Had Reba had a sister? As Cord recalled, she hadn’t said much about her family; in fact, she’d given the impression that she didn’t have any kin at all.

Like this girl, Reba had just appeared one day, seemingly out of nowhere. Claiming to be eighteen, she’d landed a job cleaning rooms at the Painted Pony Motel, and started building herself a social life—which had consisted of hanging out with high school seniors and turning up at dances, football games and keggers when she wasn’t working.

She’d almost certainly been closer to twenty; Cord had no doubt she’d lied about her age. As far as he knew, nobody had found Reba’s preference for running with a younger crowd odd. She’d had a way of deflecting questions, delicate or otherwise, laughing them off.

Now, here stood this young girl, literally the mirror image of the Reba they’d all known eighteen years ago.

They say everybody has a double.

Cord hadn’t believed that—until now.

The resemblance could be coincidental, he reasoned, but that seemed a lot more unlikely than a biological connection. She had to be Reba’s sister, niece, cousin…

Or daughter.

Was this girl, somewhere in her teens, Reba’s child?

That possibility jarred Cord, colliding with a few other possibilities rolling around in his head at the moment.

Thinking he ought to say something, he opened his mouth, but his brain, busy with calculations, refused to cooperate. He couldn’t form a single rational word.

Finally remembering his manners, Cord got to his feet and, awkwardly, J.P. and Eli stood up, too.

Eli was the first to recover the power of speech.

“Who are you?” he asked the visitor. That was Eli, direct to the point of bluntness. In his line of work, as the local sheriff, that was a plus, though it often hampered him when it came to ordinary communication.

“Tonight,” she said with a little shiver, which she tried to hide, “my name is Zelda.”

Cord was still thrown by the mere fact of this woman-child, but he recovered enough to ask, “What is it the rest of the time? Your name, I mean.”

She made a face and jutted out her chin, at once obstinate and defensive, her bare, skinny arms wrapped tightly around her middle, as though she thought she might splinter into pieces if she didn’t keep a firm grip.

“Whatever I decide it will be,” she replied crisply, but her bravado was clearly slipping now.

Cord took his denim jacket from the back of his chair and draped it around her shoulders without comment, while J.P. silently offered her a place to sit, drawing back a chair, indicating it with a gesture of one hand.

She sank gratefully onto the wooden seat and surveyed the scarred tabletop, strewn with poker chips and cards dropped and forgotten when she made her grand entrance.

“How old are you?” Eli demanded.

“Twenty-two,” the girl said, after the briefest hesitation.

“Bullshit,” J.P. muttered, watching her, studying her, as they all were.

By then, the dog had lost interest, no doubt concluding that the new arrival represented no threat to his master and could therefore be safely ignored. He was curled up alongside J.P.’s chair again, as he’d been all evening.

“Okay,” she admitted, with an exaggerated sigh of long-suffering tolerance, “I’m seventeen. Which is why I had to come in through the back door, since this joint is evidently a saloon or whatever.”

“All right—Zelda,” Eli persisted, “back to the point of this conversation. Who are you, and what are you doing here?”

She studied her overlong fingernails, which were painted a troubling shade of greenish purple, dusted with glitter and noticeably chipped. Then she raised her Reba-eyes, wide and brown-gold, swept a haughty glance from Eli to J.P. to Cord, and finally swung it back to Eli.

“That was two questions,” she pointed out mildly. “But I suppose, since you’re the county sheriff, you have to grill every stranger you see.”

So, she’d done her research. When in doubt, google.

“That wasn’t an answer,” Eli said.

“Zelda” raised her shoulders briefly, then lowered them again. Gave another little sigh, as though put upon. Lord, but teenagers could be a pain in the ass.

“You’ll have plenty of time to quiz me later,” she said, sitting up straight and tossing her head so that long tendrils of wet, tangled hair tumbled back over her left shoulder. “For now, I’m calling the shots.”

The gesture was familiar, another echo of Reba, and so was the big talk.

“Unless,” she went on, assuming a thoughtful expression, “you plan to run me in on a vagrancy charge or something.”

“I could do that,” Eli warned, but he was wearing down, Cord could see that. Hell, they all were.

It was surreal, as if they’d slipped out of the world they knew into some parallel dimension, where the rules were very different. Here, in this new place, it seemed that Reba wasn’t dead and gone, long before her time. Her presence was palpable.

And she wanted something.

Cord hadn’t gone to Reba’s funeral; none of them had. Wouldn’t have known she’d died if Brynne Bailey hadn’t come back to Painted Pony Creek to take over her parents’ failing restaurant and mentioned it one morning, when the three of them stopped by for breakfast.

Breast cancer, Brynne had said. About two years ago. It had been a shockingly quick decline. All very sad. She hadn’t attended the services, either, since she’d been out of the country at the time on a research trip for her job with an art gallery back east, but she’d seen a notice on social media and sent flowers.

She hadn’t said anything about Reba having kids.

Shaken again, Cord refocused his attention on Zelda.

She was wearing a skimpy tank top and stylishly ragged skinny jeans. He registered that much. And there was a tattoo on the rain-beaded skin at the base of her throat. A musical note. A double one with two stems.

J.P. got out his cell phone, peered at the screen. He needed glasses but was too vain to wear them in public, so he squinted a lot.

“Calling the cops?” the kid asked in a tone breezy with impudence. She darted a glance in Eli’s direction. “That seems unnecessary since the head honcho is right here.”

“Listen,” J.P. interjected, ignoring her remark, “can we get down to the proverbial brass tacks here?” He slipped his phone back in his shirt pocket and glared down at the girl, marking off each point on a finger as he made it. “You’re seventeen years old. You just turned up in the back room of a seedy beer hall in small-town Montana, during the middle of the goddamned storm of the century. None of us ever saw you before and given the size of this place, that means you aren’t a local. It follows that you’re a runaway, and maybe in some kind of trouble, too. Somebody, somewhere, is worried sick about you.”

Some of the zip went out of the girl. “Nobody’s worried about me,” she said, with a note of sadness none of them missed. Again, she examined their faces, each in turn. “Cord Hollister, J.P. McCall and Eli Garrett. That’s you guys, right?”

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