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Blame It on the Cowboy
by Delores Fossen
LIARS AND CLOWNS. Logan had seen both tonight. The liar was a woman who he thought loved him. Helene. And the clown, well... Logan wasn’t sure he could process that image just yet.
Maybe after lots of booze though.
He hadn’t been drunk since his twenty-first birthday, nearly thirteen years ago. But he was about to remedy that now. He motioned for the bartender to set him up another pair of Glenlivet shots.
His phone buzzed again, indicating another call had just gone to voice mail. One of his siblings no doubt wanting to make sure he was all right. He wasn’t. But talking to them about it wouldn’t help, and Logan didn’t want anyone he knew to see or hear him like this.
It was possible there’d be some slurring involved. Puking, too.
He’d never been sure what to call Helene. His longtime girlfriend? Girlfriend seemed too high school. So, he’d toyed with thinking of her as his future fiancée. Or in social situations—she was his business associate who often ran his marketing campaigns. But tonight Logan wasn’t calling her any of those things. As far as he was concerned, he never wanted to think of her, her name or what to call her again.
Too bad that image of her was stuck in his head, but that was where he was hoping generous amounts of single-malt scotch would help.
Even though Riley, Claire, Lucky and Cassie wouldn’t breathe a word about this, it would still get around town. Logan wasn’t sure how, but gossip seemed to defy the time-space continuum in Spring Hill. People would soon know, if they didn’t already, and those same people wouldn’t look at him the same again. It would hurt business.
Hell. It hurt him.
That was why he was here in this hotel bar in San Antonio. It was only thirty miles from Spring Hill, but tonight he hoped it’d be far enough away that no one he knew would see him get drunk. Then he could stagger to his room and then puke in peace. Not that he was looking forward to the puking part, but it would give him something else to think about other than her.
It was his first time in this hotel, though he stayed in San Antonio often on business. Logan hadn’t wanted to risk running into anyone he knew, and he certainly wouldn’t at this trendy “boutique” place. Not with a name like the Purple Cactus and its vegan restaurant.
If the staff found out he was a cattle broker, he might be booted out. Or forced to eat tofu. That was the reason Logan had used cash when he checked in. No sense risking someone recognizing his name from his credit card.
The clerk had seemed to doubt him when Logan had told him that his ID and credit cards had been stolen and that was why he couldn’t produce anything with his name on it. Of course, when Logan had slipped the guy an extra hundred-dollar bill, it had caused that doubt to disappear.
“Drinking your troubles away?” a woman asked.
“Trying.”
Though he wasn’t drunk enough that he couldn’t see what was waiting for him at the end of this. A hangover, a missed 8:00 a.m. meeting, his family worried about him—the puking—and it wouldn’t fix anything other than to give him a couple hours of mind-numbing solace.
At the moment, though, mind-numbing solace, even if it was temporary, seemed like a good trade-off.
“Me, too,” she said. “Drinking my troubles away.”
Judging from the sultry tone in her voice, Logan first thought she might be a prostitute, but then he got a look at her.
Nope. Not a pro.
Or if she was, she’d done nothing to market herself as such. No low-cut dress to show her cleavage. She had on a T-shirt with cartoon turtles on the front, a baggy white skirt and flip-flops. It looked as if she’d grabbed the first items of clothing she could find off a very cluttered floor of her very cluttered apartment.
