Book 6: His Sixth Sweetheart (Ivory Peaks Romance)

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Jane Hammond stood in front of the mirror in her parents’ bathroom and clipped her hair back. She’d slept in rags meant to make her golden locks curl, and boy had it worked. A little too well, and Jane had already complained to her mother about how “poodly” she looked.

Momma couldn’t do anything about it, and she was super involved with helping her best friend’s son get married today.

Jane loved Mike as if he were her brother. They were only a couple of years apart, and because Momma was best friends with his mother, she’d spent a lot of time growing up with him. They shared a lot of the same characteristics, but Jane wore everything she felt and thought on the outside, while Mike had learned to cage it inside him.

She caught herself staring at nothing again, and she jerked back to attention. Her heart beat a little too quickly for a few seconds, and then she tried to tame one more lock of hair by pinning it out of her face too. With most of the curls on the back of her head, Jane decided she could leave the bathroom and not die of embarrassment.

Her heels clunked on the old wood floor in the generational home, and she expected to find her father nursing a cup of coffee and reading something on his device at the kitchen table. He didn’t disappoint, because the lawyer in him did everything exactly the same every single day.

Jane wanted to scream with his routines, because she didn’t like doing the same thing every day. She wouldn’t eat the same food for breakfast; she wouldn’t get ready in exactly the same way; heck, sometimes she even drove different roads to work, just to have some variety in her otherwise completely, utterly, horribly stale life.

“Hey,” Daddy said with plenty of admiration in his voice. “It’s beautiful, Jane.” He set aside his device and smiled at her with all the fatherly love a man could possess.

Jane sighed, her shoulders slumped as she finished the walk to the table.

“Oh, boy,” Daddy said. “Your cousin is getting married in an hour. You better straighten up before then.” He didn’t say it unkindly, but he’d known Jane for all the years of her life—almost three decades now—and she needed a firm hand. A strong voice. Someone to tell her when she was acting like a child or irrationally, when, unfortunately, she did both sometimes.

Since starting at HMC last year, she’d gotten better. Or so she thought.

“What’s eatin’ at you?” Daddy asked when Jane said nothing.

Sometimes Momma had cornbread biscuits on the table for breakfast, but today wasn’t one of those days. Gerty and Mike had chosen an eleven-thirty ceremony time, so they could feed everyone lunch, have an early afternoon dance, and be done by three. 

Mike had gotten them airplane tickets to Spain for a river cruise, and that only made Jane’s jealousy double. She wasn’t exactly jealous. Not really.

“Daddy,” she said carefully. She’d been waiting for Cord Behr to ask her out for months now. That dream had started to dry, wither, and die, but Jane still held onto the very last root with everything she had. If he’d even so much as sprinkle a drop of water on it, her hopes of going out with him would spring back to life.

“I’m sittin’ right here,” he drawled.

“I can’t get my thoughts right.” Jane put her face in her hands, then remembered that she and Molly had spent a significant amount of time that morning doing their makeup. Jane loved Molly more than she could describe, as the woman had been like a second mother to her once she and Hunter had gotten married years ago.

Jane babysat their kids sometimes, and with her mood being attached to literally everything in her life, she sometimes came home from that weeping and wondering and begging God to let her know when she’d be able to start building her own family.

“Remember how you used to tell me how impatient I was?”

Daddy cocked his head. “I was not expecting that.”

Her daddy had often told her she needed to learn to be patient—and Jane had taken that to heart. She’d worked and worked on accepting that not everything happened exactly when she wanted it to. It sure seemed as if the Lord wanted her to keep learning that lesson, but Jane wasn’t sure why.

Had she not been patient enough? 

With her job? With the men she dated? With herself? 

With Cord? whispered through her mind. She would not ask her father about him. Not again. She felt certain Cord would never speak to her again if she pressed the issue on him.

“I feel like I’ve been working so hard to be patient,” Jane said. “I’m trying to find someone to marry, but it just doesn’t seem to be working out.”

Daddy reached over and covered her hand with his. Jane pulled back on her emotions. “I feel like I’m patient at work when I’m waiting on others to do their job so I can do mine. I’m patient with the time it takes to truly change my mind and heart, and while I still think it’s slow, I’m doing it.”

“Yes,” Daddy whispered. “You are, Jane. I’ve seen it.” He gave her another warm smile. “This is just about finding a boyfriend?”

“Not all of it.” Jane exhaled heavily again and looked past her father and out the window. She could see the roofs on a couple of cowboy cabins—Cord’s included. He lived alone now, and he’d been working the farm for over fifteen years. 

“But yes,” she said. “All of it. Having someone to share my thoughts with, the things I don’t understand, the things I love, the things that bother me…I want that.” She met her father’s eye again, and he nodded slowly.

He’d aged well, probably because of the amount of exercise he did. The man loved to run, and he’d even done the Boston Marathon in his mid-forties, before he’d married Momma and started having more kids.

Silver lined his temples now and salted his beard and mustache. Mama kept his hair trimmed, and the shortest of it didn’t seem to hold as much darkness as it once had. He was a powerful presence in any room he entered, and especially so in his midnight-black suit, the dark blue tie already knotted precisely around his neck.

Jane wore a deep blue dress that matched his tie, and since she was ready an hour before the wedding started, she was probably more like her father than she wanted to admit. 

The Hammonds were never late, she knew that. In fact, if she showed up fifteen minutes early to a family brunch, she’d be the last one there. It had driven her to the brink of madness in her mid-twenties, but now she simply expected to get jazzed for showing up before the agreed-upon time but after everyone else.

“I know you do, sweetheart,” Daddy said. “You’ll get it.”

She managed a smile in return. “You look like the cat who ate the canary.”

“I’m just thinking of who’s coming to this wedding,” he said. “Mike has a lot of friends. Friends from Wyoming. Friends in the military. Friends from HMC.”

“I work at HMC too,” Jane said in a deadpan. “Trust me, there’s no boyfriend material there.”

Daddy laughed, and that lightened Jane’s heart. “I’m just saying,” he said amidst the last of his chuckles. “Say yes to everyone who asks you to dance at the wedding. That’s all.”

“No one is going to ask,” Jane said. Before Daddy could protest, the front door opened, and both of her younger brothers entered the generational house.

Deacon, the youngest of Daddy’s younger boys, entered. “Morning,” he said. “Look who I found lurking on the porch.”

Tucker came inside rolling his eyes. Jane jumped to her feet to go say hello to her brother. The brother she hadn’t seen in seven months. “You’re here.” She realized as she said the words how very much she sounded like Mama.

Tucker laughed as he wrapped his strong arms around Jane. “You sure do look pretty,” he said, far more rodeo cowboy twang in his voice than necessary. Still, that was the circle Tucker ran in, and she couldn’t expect him to turn it all off when he came home.

“Hey-oh,” Hunter said as he came inside. Jane could see so many memories with him in it. He’d been fifteen when she was born, and he’d been the very best big brother in the entire world. He’d held her and read books to her. He’d helped her with her spelling words while he worked on a crossword puzzle.

He’d started two charitable foundations and run the multi-billion dollar company for seventeen years.

Jane felt like a complete failure next to Hunter. He grinned with the force of gravity and opened his big wingspan as if gathering all of his chicks to keep them safe from the stormy weather ahead.

“My brothers and my sister.” He could command a room too, but he did it in a much quieter way than Daddy did.

They all moved into Hunter, because he was the sun, and they all revolved around him. Jane wanted a man like him in her life. Someone who was so good, and so giving, and so smart. Sure, she had a type—and that was blonde-haired, blue-eyed cowboys—but she could stand to dance with a dark-haired man if she had to.

Maybe at the wedding, she thought, and that single thought, no matter how farfetched, buoyed her up enough to bring a smile to her face.

* * *

An hour later, Jane walked down the aisle with her arm tucked through Tucker’s. She carried a small bouquet of seven flowers in blue and white. Her gown flowed around her feet with every step.

Gerty and Mike had a hobby farm and dozens of acres of land about ten miles south of the Hammond Family Farm, and they were getting married there today. She’d come to help string streamers and strings of lights through the rafters of this old barn.

Someone had swept the floor clean, and every available surface glinted with soft lights, pretty white flowers, and accents of blue in the punch bowl, the centerpiece vases, and the bow ties all the men wore.

After she’d handed her few flowers to Mike to create one big bouquet, she couldn’t help glancing over to the men’s side of the altar, where her brothers stood. Keith Whettstein waited over there too, as he was a good friend of Mike’s and had been working on the farm since he moved to Colorado with his father.

Britt Whettstein stood on Jane’s side, but she kept smiling at her boyfriend only three rows back. Jane worked not to roll her eyes, because Britt was the nicest person ever. She wasn’t super smart, but she worked hard and she tried hard, and given her limitations, she functioned in society very, very well.

Hunter stood almost on top of Mike, barely leaving room for even a breath of space between them. She wasn’t sure if it was to keep Mike in place, but it seemed to be working if it was.

The rest of the wedding party arrived, and Jane didn’t see Cord. Mission, Matt, and Vince had all made it down the aisle and taken their places as best men. Gerty’s younger siblings had arrived, and thanks to Amy, plenty of white rose petals now littered the aisle.

The music kept droning on and on. Gerty didn’t appear in the doorway of the barn, and Jane started to fidget. She glanced over to Molly, who wore wide eyes filled with concern on her face.

Mama sat with Daddy in the front row, and even she straightened and twisted to look behind her, as if the problem with Gerty’s arrival would be standing in the doorway. 

Just when Jane was about to snap, the music changed. It pitched up in volume and speed, as the wedding march piped into the barn.

Gerty appeared first, a glowing smile on her face. She was radiant in every single way, and Jane swore she saw a halo of white light around her entire person. 

Her daddy was a big, burly man, quick to laugh and tell jokes, and absolutely terrifying if he thought he was being lied to. Not that Jane had done a lot of lying in her life. A few little white lies here and there, but nothing serious.

She sensed a presence behind her, and sure enough, the warmth from someone’s body melted into hers. She held very still, because someone had just put their hand on her waist and leaned in to whisper something in her ear.

“You look ravishing,” he said. Jane would know that voice anywhere, and shivers scattered through her whole body at the nearness of Cord Behr. The fact that he was up there in front of everyone, on the wrong side of the altar, whispering in her ear felt scandalous all on its own.

She glanced over to Daddy, but he’d stood up and was facing the back of the barn, where Gerty still stood with her daddy.

Oh, this Cord Behr was as smart as he was good-looking. 

His hand started to slip away, and Jane wanted him to stay more than she cared to admit. “You and me are dancin’ today,” he said. “With you in that dress, if we don’t, it’ll be a real shame.”

She twisted enough to look at him to see if he was joking or not. He could tease a lot, and he was Colorado’s biggest flirt. He wore a smile to go with his sandy hair and those gorgeous eyes. Jane had lost herself in them many times, and she blinked so she wouldn’t do so again.

He gestured between the two of them. “Me and you. Dancing. Later.”

She nodded, and he turned and ducked around the back of the altar to take his place between Travis and Mission. That put him in a spot where she could admire him from afar, which was what she’d been doing for the past fifteen years.

Gerty reached the altar, and her father leaned down and pressed his lips to her cheek before handing her over to Mike. The two of them looked at each other, and it was like they’d turned into small children experiencing the magic of Christmas for the very first time.

If that was what it felt like to get married, Jane wanted it even more. Mike and Gerty had been friends in their teens. They’d even dated a little bit. 

All in God’s timing, she thought, which was a phrase she used often with her life coach. Gerty and Mike hadn’t been ready to be standing here in front of the altar fourteen years ago. They were now.

The ceremony started, and Jane watched Cord. His words tumbled around in her head, ringing and making her excited in one breath and absolutely terrified in the next.

You and me are dancin’ today. With you in that dress, if we don’t, it’ll be a real shame.

Could she really dance with him here, in front of everyone? She wanted to, and she couldn’t wait until the music started again and men and women filled the dance floor.

Cord caught her staring, and the corners of his mouth twitched upward. Jane smiled at him too, wondering if he’d talked to Daddy about the two of them dating. Daddy had not been happy with it when she was younger, but a common theme around the house these days was that Jane wasn’t a little girl anymore. Or even a teenager.

She was a grown woman, with a college degree, a good-paying job, and a place to live, eat, and sleep. So what if it was Hunter’s sprawling mansion that she and Deacon could barely keep up with?

Right now, it was all she had, and Jane considered leaving Coral Canyon…for good. Businesses everywhere needed accountants, and Jane wouldn’t have any trouble getting another job.

Then she looked at Cord. She couldn’t leave town—or him—without knowing if they had something good or not. 

Me and you. Dancing. Later.

She gave him a weak smile, but he caught it, doubled it, and grinned back at her appropriately.

Jane’s impatience kicked in then, because she really just wanted to dance.