Page 1 of Oops I Fell For The Cowboy Next Door

CHAPTER ONE

PIPER

The cabin is smaller than the photos.

Not in a bad way. In a way that makes my chest loosen for the first time in six months. Two bedrooms, a stone fireplace, a kitchen with butcher block counters that have seen better decades. The porch sags on the left side where one of the steps has cracked clean through, and the whole place smells like pine and dust and something faintly sweet, like the last tenant burned a candle and never opened a window.

It's perfect.

I drop my last box on the kitchen counter and press both palms flat against the wood. Cold seeps through my fingers. Outside the window, the Bitterroot Mountains are doing that thing mountains do at four in the afternoon when the light goes amber and the whole world looks like it was painted by someone who actually gave a damn.

Denver never looked like this. Denver looked like traffic and fluorescent lighting and Cole's apartment where I kept my toothbrush in a holder shaped like a cactus because he thought it was funny, and I thought it was fine, and fine turned out to be the most dangerous word in the English language.

Two years of fine.

Two years of rearranging myself to fit into a life that wasn't mine. Shrinking my voice, my opinions, my goddamn wardrobe. Cole never told me to change. He just stopped noticing me until the version of Piper that showed up every day was someone I didn't recognize in the mirror.

So I quit my office job, kept the remote contract, packed my car with everything that mattered, signed a year lease on a cabin in a town where nobody knows my name, and drove north until the mountains swallowed the highway.

Grizzly Ridge. Population eight hundred and something. One diner. One general store. Zero ex-boyfriends.

Heaven.

My phone buzzes on the counter.

Mom:

Did you make it? Are you alive? Send proof of life.

Me:

Alive. Cabin is cute. Mountains are stupid beautiful. Stop worrying.

Mom:

I'll stop worrying when you're 50. Maybe. Love you.

Me:

Love you too.

I slide the phone into my back pocket and lean against the counter, surveying my kingdom. Boxes stacked along the far wall. My laptop bag on the couch. A suitcase open on the bedroom floor with three flannels and a pair of boots I bought the week I decided to move here. My grandmother's silver ring on my right thumb, catching the light.

This is mine. All of it. The creaky floors and the drafty windows and the porch step that'll probably eat my ankle if I'm not careful. Mine.

The word feels foreign. Good foreign. Like tasting something for the first time and realizing you've been hungry your whole life.

I pull open the back door to check the yard situation and stop cold.

There's a cow in my yard.

Not metaphorically. An actual cow. Brown and white, big as a small car, standing about twenty feet from my back steps with her head down, chewing grass like she pays rent here.

"Excuse me," I say out loud, because apparently I talk to livestock now. "This is private property."

The cow doesn't even look up.

Behind her, three more have wandered through what I now realize is a gap in the fence line along the eastern edge of my lot. The wire is sagging between two posts, and the posts themselves are leaning like drunks holding each other up after last call.