Chapter 1
Trish
Trish Meadows was stuckin the mud.
Literally. She’d known better than to take her compact front-wheel drive vehicle to Wyoming, but it had seemed impractical to spring for a rental when she already had a perfectly good little car to drive. Once she arrived at the romance writers’ retreat where she was headed, she had to hand over her keys for the week anyway.
Those were the rules for the exclusive retreat. Ones she agreed to with her application. Never mind that said application had been submitted by her best friend Mindy without her prior knowledge. The contents—questions and answers alike—were a mystery to Trish. No amount of pleading revealed anything her friend hadn’t deemed essential.
“You overthink everything,” Mindy answered in response to Trish’s pleas. “I’m not letting you overthink this. Just go and have a great time. Write all the words!” Only five writers had been selected for the week-long stay. It was to be held at the Holbrook Ranch in Starlight, Wyoming, and included a personal appointment with a literary agent. “You’re one of the lucky five.Theluckiest, actually.”
Trish wished her welcome email had included a note about the state of the driveway. She’d made it 732 of the 732.5 miles from Omaha without incident. And now, all she had to show for her money-saving logic was muddy windows and no cell service.
Shoving open her car door, Trish exhaled and surveyed the situation. Her rear tire was half-submerged in murky brown water. She was stranded on an island of mud, dry land too far away for any easy hop.
“I can figure this out,” she mumbled. No way would she let this little incident dampen the week ahead. That’s just what Henry would expect. Well, Trish was here to prove Henry wrong.
A little mud couldn’t hurt. Trish wriggled out of her flip-flops and snaked the loops through a couple of fingers. Her skinny jeans were plastered on a little too tight for rolling up. The deepest part of the hole she’d steered into seemed to swallow only her rear tire. If she could just stretch far enough forward . . .I’ll hardly get the tops of my feet wet.
Though she’d never tried yoga, Trish imagined her exit from the car qualified for some such animal-themed pose. Muscles she didn’t know she had stretched in agony, and she teetered unsteadily trying to get her balance. But when the wobbling stopped, she stood victorious, jeans un-splattered, and on dry land.
Slipping her flip-flops back on, Trish prepared to trek the last half mile to the ranch, which had to be up ahead, around the wooded bend in the road. But two steps away, Trish froze. The Dinosaur. She couldn’t leave her precious laptop in the car for some stranger to come along and steal. They’d been together since her freshman year of college.
“Well, crap.”
Tossing her shoes aside to keep them safe on dry land, she wished she’d left the car door open. This would be much easier if she had.
Bending only her upper torso forward, Trish tried to see if she could reach the handle, but a sharp rock dug into her foot. She fought the pain, ignoring the rock as her fingers grazed the handle. Another two inches and she could grasp it.
But of course, her foot slipped. The rock kicked loose from its slimy hold and Trish fell forward. She caught herself on the side of her car. But without anything to grip, her body slid along the door until she plopped into the mud. The jeans she’d been so proud to keep dry were now entirely slathered in muck.
Attempts to push herself back up to her feet only served to sink her palms deeper into the sludge. “Are you kidding me?”
The only positive side to this mess was that the road to the Holbrook Ranch was a private drive. No one had come along to witness such an embarrassing dilemma. With any luck, the other writers had already arrived. Hopefully none of those handsome cowboys advertised on the retreat website would encounter her disaster either.
Anchoring one palm on the top of her front tire, Trish pushed herself up to standing. Her poor car would sport dirty hand prints all week unless the ranch had a personal car wash.
Trish looked longingly at the laptop case in her passenger seat. She hated to leave The Dinosaur behind, but she’d risk theft over death by muddy suffocation any day. Her laptop was her most precious possession. She couldn’t risk destroying it if she slipped again and toppled back into the puddle.
“I’ll come back for you,” she promised through her car window.
There was little point in wearing flip-flops with her feet coated in mud, so Trish didn’t bother to put them back on. The private drive was mostly dirt, but her soles managed to find what few rocks were sprinkled in. She couldn’t quite tell if the weeds along the edge were soft or prickly and decided not to chance it with a scrape already stinging the bottom of one foot.
Around the bend, an expansive log home with a deep covered porch came into view. Most of the home was a single story, but there appeared to be an upper level set in the middle. Hanging plants with pink flowers dotted the length of the porch.
Trish swallowed. This house looked much too fancy to welcome a mud-covered writer in its driveway. Shewonderedif there was a hose somewhere behind the three-car garage. She’d rather show up dripping wet and clean than crusted over with drying mud.
She wished Mindy were here. Sure, she’d get a tremendous laugh over the whole mud thing, but her best friend was completely fearless. She’d march up to the front door and knock without hesitation. Trish was only pretending to be fearless in hopes it’d prove to Henry that she was a serious writer. One who could someday make a living following her dream.
They’d been dating for nearly six months, until Henry skipped out on Trish’s celebration two weeks ago. He hadn’t deemed a party centered around finishing a book worth sacrificing a round of golf with his coworkers. Maybe it was Mindy’s gift of an exclusive writers’ retreat in romantic Wyoming that gave Trish the courage to break things off with a man she once felt she had a stable future with.
If everything went as planned this week, Trish could prove to Henry that writing a book was a great accomplishment. Thanks to Mindy, Trish had an opportunity here to meet with a prestigious literary agent about that very book. If she could make Henry a little jealous with a few innocent pictures taken with some handsome cowboys in the process, well, all the better.
“Here goes nothing,” Trish mumbled.
* * *
Wade
