Teasers and Excerpts 

For Second Chance with a Cowboy – Lassiter Ranch Book 4

By Jennie Marts

Under the skirt, she’d put on a pair of black thong panties, not exactly planning to seduce him somewhere on the ranch this morning, but hey, if a hayloft proved available…there was a strong possibility she might haul him into it.

 *** 

  Something that had felt a lot like love had come over her when she came up the stairs and heard him telling her nephew what happens when you give a mouse a cookie. The sweet giggles of the five-year-old made her heart want to burst.

She’d stood in the hall outside of Max’s room wondering if she really was in love with Chevy Lassiter again. Or if she’d ever stopped loving him in the first place.

Then he’d come out and asked her if she knew what would happen if you gave a cowboy an aerospace engineer, and she stopped thinking altogether as he carried her into her bedroom and shut the door. 

 *** 

Vanilla was her normal relationship lane. She didn’t do hot crazy sex. In fact, she hadn’t had any sex in months, let alone the insane kind. And especially not with men she barely knew.

Although Chevy wasn’t someone she barely knew. He’d been the love of her life. The one she still dreamed of in the quiet moments when she let herself remember his smile. 

 *** 

Excerpt 1
The water did look amazing, and he’d been dying for a swim all afternoon. 

He shucked off his boots and jeans then let out a whoop as he raced past her, wearing only his black boxer briefs, and splashed into the water. 

He ducked his head under then came up, shaking the water out of his hair. The temperature was perfect, warm but not hot, and cooler the deeper it went. He lifted his hand and beckoned her toward him. “Come on in. The water’s fine.”

“No way. I don’t have a swimsuit.”

He offered her one of his best flirty grins. “Never stopped you before.”

She shifted from one foot to the other, chewing on her bottom lip.

“I know you’re mentally weighing the pros and cons,” he told her. It was what she’d always done.

She planted a hand on her hip. “You don’t know me that well.”

“Yeah, right. Go ahead. Lay them on me.”

She let out a little indignant huff before starting the list. “The biggest pro is that the water looks incredible, and I’m hot and could practically die from wanting to go for a swim.”

“Avoiding dying seems like a pretty big pro. What kind of con could possibly challenge that?”

“Wellll, the biggest one is that getting in the water means I’d have to take my clothes off.”

“Nope. That definitely goes in the pro column for me.” He waggled his eyebrows playfully at her. “Oh, come on. You’ve got nothing I haven’t seen before.”

“Oh yes, I have. I have much more now than you’ve seen before. I’m no longer a seventeen-year-old girl with flawless skin and no dimples or cellulite. My body has changed. I am much…” She paused as if struggling to come up with the best descriptive word. “Much curvier now.”

“I happen to like your new curves. In fact, the curvier the better I like to say.”

“Oh yeah? When do you like to say that?”

“Just now. And also, any time there’s a possibility of a gorgeous, curvy woman, stripping naked in front of me.” He offered her another one of his trademark grins—the one that most women couldn’t resist.

But most women weren’t Eleanor Gibbs.

She was different.

“Tell you what,” he said. “How about if I turn my back, and I won’t look while you strip down and wade in.”

She twisted her mouth from side-to-side with indecision. “You promise you won’t look?”

He held up two fingers. “Scout’s honor.”

She arched an eyebrow. “Now I know you’re lyin’. You were never a Boy Scout.”

He laughed. “Okay. I promise I won’t look…after your shirt and shorts come off.”

She huffed again.

“Come on, darlin’,” he drawled. “You gotta give me a little something here.”

“No, I don’t.” She tried to keep the annoyed expression on her face but couldn’t hold it as she broke into a laugh.

He splashed a small spray of water in her direction then held up three fingers. “All right, you had your chance to do this the easy way. Now, Miss Eleanor Gibbs, you’ve got exactly three seconds to peel those clothes off, or I’m coming out of this lake to do it for you.” 

Leni narrowed her eyes at him. “You wouldn’t dare.”

Oh, he would dare. In fact, he couldn’t wait to dare. Chevy took a step toward her as he called out, “Three!”

She let out a shriek as she retreated up the shore, splashing water as she walked backward.

His grin widened as he took another menacing step toward her. “Two!”

“Okay, you win. Stop counting.” She laughed as she shimmied out of her shorts and tossed them further back onto the bank, then pulled her shirt over her head and pitched it toward the shorts, leaving her in only a black lacy bra and a pair of black bikini panties. She made a circular motion with her hand. “Now, turn around.”

He stared, the sight of her half-naked body making his mouth go dry. 

The last time he’d seen her like this, she was seventeen, and he was a horn-dog teenage boy. Now, she was a full-fledged woman, round and lush, and as his gaze roamed over those curves she’d described, he felt like that love-sick out-of-control teenager again.

“Why are you staring at me?” she asked, self-consciously putting her hands up to cover herself.

“I can’t help it,” he said, all teasing aside. “You’re just so gorgeous.”

A grin tugged at the corners of her lips. “Stop it.”

“It’s true.”

“You’re just trying to get me to take my bra off in front of you.”

He shook his head, trying to keep the sincerity in his voice. “No, it’s true. You’re beautiful.” He couldn’t help the grin that creased his face. “Although, if you do want to take your bra off in front of me…”

Excerpt 2
Chevy’s brow furrowed as he looked at something out the window behind her. “Did you know you have a cow in your backyard?”

“What?” She whipped her head around, all thoughts of her rhododendron and chicken Pad Thai forgotten, to see a reddish-brown cow chewing its cud while standing in her sister’s flowerbed. 

“Is it yours?”

“Lorna hasn’t even let Max get a dog yet. You think she’d have a pet cow?”

Chevy held up his hands. “Hey, this could be some newfangled hipster thing your sister is doing to save the environment by not using a lawn mower.”

She playfully punched him in the shoulder. “That’s not our cow. And I think my sister would take offense at being called a newfangled hipster.”

“She has a jar of that kombucha crap in her fridge, sells fancy seven-dollar coffee drinks, and has avocado toast on the menu in a coffee shop in the middle of the mountains.”

“Touche.” Leni let out a groan as the cow pulled up one of her sister’s gorgeous geraniums. “Not the geraniums,” she called out as she knocked on the window. “Lorna just planted those this summer. Why can’t it be eating the dandelions?”

“I love that your concern is more about which flowers it’s eating than over why you have a cow that doesn’t belong to you standing in your yard.”

“What should we do?”

“Figure out who it belongs to and take it back.”

“I solve complex problems in my job that can involve aerodynamic fluid flow or propulsion and combustion, but nothing in my skill set has prepared me to solve either of those options.”

He chuckled. “Then it’s a good thing your boyfriend is a cowboy who runs a cattle ranch. I consider myself fairly proficient in all things heifer related.”

She offered him a side-eye. “Are you including me in that proficiency?”

He let loose a belly laugh as he lifted her off the counter and set her on her feet. “I wouldn’t dare.”

“Not if you wanted to live to see tomorrow.”

“Why don’t we start by seeing if she’s carrying a brand. That might tell us what ranch she’s from.”

“How do you know it’s a she?”

He raised an eyebrow. “Remember that heifer proficiency we were just talking about? You stick to rockets—let me manage the bovine.”

Gladly. Besides, she was still thinking about how easily he’d thrown out the word boyfriend a few seconds ago.

Her phone buzzed as she followed him through the door. She pulled it from the front pocket of her shorts and saw her sister’s name as she tapped the screen. “Sorry Sis, I can’t talk right now. There’s a strange cow in our backyard.”

Lorna gasped. But apparently not for the reason Leni thought she would. Not because she’d told her a cow was in her yard. “I just saw on Nextdoor this morning that someone was missing a cow. Is it reddish brown with a white spot in the middle of its forehead that’s shaped like the state of South Dakota?”

Leni blinked, not able to keep up with all the craziness in her sister’s comments. “South Dakota? You know I’m terrible at geography. And I’m not close enough to the cow to see what state appears to be on his forehead.”

“South Dakota is the one that’s like a rectangle except the bottom right corner is broken so it looks like some of the Dakota is spilling out.”

“Thank you for that social studies lesson. What do you mean you saw it on Nextdoor?”

“You know, it’s like the app for people to stay in touch with what’s happening in their neighborhoods.”

“I know what Nextdoor is. But I thought people usually posted about their missing dogs or lost cats or to get a recommendation for a good plumber.”

“Well, apparently in Woodland Hills, people also use it to post about their missing heifers.”

Leni laughed as she put her sister on speaker. “It’s Lorna. She said someone posted on Nextdoor that they were missing a cow.”

He reached for his phone. “Oh nice. I’ll pull up the app.”

“Don’t bother,” Lorna told him. “I already did. It looks like the cow belongs to Berniece Buckley. If it’s the one with South Dakota on its forehead.”

Leni shook her head. “Is there more than one missing cow on the app?” she asked her sister as Chevy mouthed ‘South Dakota?” at her.

“Hmm,” Lorna said, sounding distracted as if she were scrolling through her phone. “Not today.”

“Phew. Well, that’s sure a stroke of luck,” Leni said, not even trying to disguise the sarcasm in her voice. She pointed to the white spot on the cow’s forehead. “Does that look like South Dakota to you?”

He squinted at the spot. “Yeah. I can see that.”

“Yay.” Lorna’s cheer came through the speaker.” This says her name is Babydoll, and she loves carrots, dandelions, and molasses.”

And apparently geraniums.

Leni turned to Chevy. “So can you watch her while I go whip up a batch of carrot pancakes covered in molasses?”

Chevy ignored her as he got closer and crooned to the cow. “Hey Babydoll. You ready to go home?”

The cow took a few steps toward him then nuzzled her head into his shoulder.

“I’ve got some carrots in the fridge you can use. Do you think you can you catch her?” Lorna asked. She was really invested in this cow thing. 

“We don’t have to. She’s currently cuddling into Chevy’s shoulder. He just said her name, and she’s practically crawling into his lap. I swear that man’s charm knows no bounds.”

“Aww. That’s so sweet. Take a picture,” her sister instructed through her laughter.

Leni lifted her phone and snapped a picture of the cow cuddling up to the cowboy. Then she flipped the phone screen and got a couple of selfies of the same shot but with her in the foreground. 

She made a mental note to make sure she got another selfie of just the two of them. She didn’t really want the only current pic she had of her and Chevy to have a heifer in it.  

Lorna laughed harder when Leni sent her the picture of Chevy and one of the selfies with her making a goofy face. “Max, look at this picture of Aunt Leni with a cow in our backyard.”

Max’s excited voice came through the phone speaker. “There’s a cow in our backyard? Can we keep it?”