The Cowboy's Downfall, page 1
The Cowboy’s Downfall
The Endeavour Ranch of Grand, Montana
Paula Altenburg
The Cowboy’s Downfall
Copyright© 2025 Paula Altenburg
EPUB Edition
The Tule Publishing, Inc.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
First Publication by Tule Publishing 2025
Cover design by Lee Hyat Designs
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
AI was not used to create any part of this book and no part of this book may be used for generative training.
ISBN: 978-1-966593-84-3
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Epilogue
The Endeavour Ranch of Grand, Montana series
More Books by Paula Altenburg
About the Author
Chapter One
Nix
Nixon McCray had been trampled by bulls. He’d been robbed at knifepoint in the back alley of some honky-tonk off the interstate in Texas. He’d made his first—and last—bungee jump from a bridge over a reservoir in Central California because some rich, sissy college boys had bet him a thousand dollars he didn’t have the guts. He’d spent two years drifting around the American West, carrying only his toothbrush and two changes of clothes, playing the skinny cowboy version of Jack Reacher.
Yet Nix could think of nothing or no one he was more afraid of than his ex-wife. Peg—the reason he’d spent two years adrift—had a knack for making him feel as if he didn’t quite measure up. That it was his fault when the car she wanted didn’t come in the right color. Or that the house she had her heart set on was out of their reach. And that she’d had an affair.
“If you’d been here for me, this would never have happened.”
How she had tracked him to the Endeavour Ranch in Grand, Montana, he’d never know, but somehow, she’d gotten the phone number for the ranch bunkhouse landline. The unlisted number.
He caught himself nodding as she spoke, even though she couldn’t see him. She was somewhere in Switzerland, enjoying his life’s savings with the investment advisor she’d been sleeping with while he—Nix—worked the rodeo circuit.
He—again, Nix—didn’t care about the money. Switzerland was far enough away for him to consider it money well spent. He did care that even now, despite all that she’d done, she had enough power over him to make his heart burn with dread. They’d started dating when they were fourteen. Married at twenty. He’d had no other girlfriends. A few close encounters in parking lots after they’d split didn’t count. He’d been crazy for her, even though his mother and sisters had expressed reservations, and his dad had tried to tell him they were too young for marriage. Peg took it as a personal insult when his mother refused to give up the family ring that rightfully belonged to the McCray firstborn son. She’d been his whole world for closing in on two decades, and when she left him, he’d been lost.
But they’d been legally divorced for two years, and he’d assumed they were done. She didn’t feel the same way, apparently.
No surprise, there.
“That’s why I need you to talk to my parents and convince them it’s a bad idea for them to visit me,” Peggy Jones-McCray finished in her soft, Texas drawl, ending a monologue that he’d only half-heard because he’d learned to tune her out. He’d caught what was important, however.
Talk to her parents? No way in hell.
Lynette Jones was cut from the same cloth as her daughter—all sweet on the surface, but the steely determination of those early Texans who’d traipsed the Oregon Trail lurked underneath.
Victor Jones, meanwhile, was one of those twitchy, middle-aged men who’d been brow-beaten by the women governing his life to the point he couldn’t make his own decisions about what pants to wear anymore. Nix had been following in his father-in-law’s footsteps—letting his wife run his life because she knew best—until Peggy finally found a man more suited to the lifestyle she wanted.
She was waiting for his response. He was keenly aware that Handy, one of his bunkmates, eavesdropped with avid and undisguised interest. A youngster of twenty-some years, Handy sprawled in a chair at the common room’s round wooden table with a wide grin on his face. Everyone else was in the cookhouse, eating breakfast, but he’d answered the phone, and his nosiness overrode hunger.
Nix had never owned a cell phone. He disliked being chipped by the government so his every move could be tracked. Now, he saw the benefits of being able to lock himself in the bathroom so he could carry on a conversation in private. Sweat formed on the back of his neck. This conversation would be all over Grand even before it was finished.
“Your mama isn’t going to heed me,” he said to Peggy. “Besides, they’re in Abilene.” As in Abilene, Texas—a good seventeen-hour drive away. “I’m in—not in Abilene,” he finished lamely, on the off chance she only had his phone number, and not his actual, physical location.
“You’ll figure something out. You always do,” Peggy replied sweetly, with more confidence in him than he deserved. In the background, on her end, he heard a canned, robotic voice spit out an announcement over a loudspeaker in a language he didn’t know. German, perhaps. “Whoops, sorry Nix, that’s our train. I’ve got to run.”
And she hung up. He untangled the landline’s long, curly cord and returned the receiver to its hook on the wall.
“What’re you looking at?” he demanded of Handy, who still wore a grin.
Handy leaned hastily away and threw up his hands. “Nothing.”
A long shadow moved in the doorway. It was early September, still warm, and they’d left the door open to air out the bunkhouse. One of the Endeavour Ranch’s three owners filled its frame, much like a gunslinger about to enter a saloon.
While Nix’s ex-wife might tie his insides in knots, he viewed Ryan O’Connell with wary respect. Back in the old days, Ryan would be the loner who rode into town, shot the place up, then took over as sheriff and imposed law and order, all while obeying no rules but his own. Kind of the same way he ran the Endeavour. Nix wondered how much he’d overheard.
“Aren’t you supposed to be down at the fat pen, cutting steers?” Ryan said to Handy. He spoke in a hard, quiet voice that made grown men quake in their boots.
Handy was no exception. “Yessir.” He grabbed his hat off his knee, scrambled from his chair, and hit the ground running.
Ryan waited until he was out of earshot before addressing Nix, who was busy trying to think of how best to respond to questions about the phone call from his ex-wife, because while none of your business might be right, it wasn’t the wisest option. He liked his job.
Ryan didn’t believe in wasting words. “The Endeavour Ranch plans to offer a bull riding clinic for the kids at Custer County Grand High and we want you to run it,” he said. “Our boys are going to take part.”
The ranch ran a group home for misfit, teenaged boys who’d had more than one brush with the law. There’d been pushback from local parents after Ryan’s wife Elizabeth, a social worker, enrolled two of the boys in public school. The boys weren’t unredeemable—according to Elizabeth—but they weren’t role models for their peers, either.
Nix pieced the details together. “You want to sit boys with no impulse control on a few tons of dynamite? And you want me to light the fuses for them?” he said. “Do I understand you correctly?”
Ryan’s lips twitched. Could have been from humor. More likely a prelude to murder. “You understand me just fine. We might take it a step further. If we get enough interest, we can set the kids up in teams and turn this into a junior, PBR-style competition. It would be a great event for the Endeavour to add to the rodeo in February.”
Lordy. Nix should have known those years as a bull riding instructor would come back to bite him one day. The same way he should’ve known Peggy was sleeping around.
He could see no way out, but he gave it a shot. “I’ve never trained kids.”
“We aren’t going to put them on our top performers,” Ryan said. “Levi’s got a few young bulls that aren’t fit for the pro circuit.”
Which wasn’t quite true. Levi Harrington was the genetics expert who ran the ranch’s breeding program, and he and Ryan didn’t see eye to eye on what turned a bull into a crowd p
“Sign-ups are next Friday,” Ryan continued. “You’ll meet Remi at the school. The two of you can collect names and hand out permission slips for parents to sign.”
“Remi?” The tight band around Nix’s chest ratcheted a notch tighter. “Not questioning your judgment, but I don’t see him as a bull rider.”
Remi Forrest was one of the two boys the ranch had unloaded on the public school system. He was quiet and sullen, a petty thief with a fascination for break-and-enters, who’d someday, no doubt, graduate to bigger things. Jewelry stores. Museum heists, maybe. Dress Remi in black and he’d blend into the shadows where he normally skulked. He wasn’t a boy who liked being the center of attention, and bull riders were showmen at heart.
“That’s precisely why this will be good for him,” Ryan said, once Nix aired his reservations. “He’s no coward. He can sit an indifferent bull if he puts his mind to it.” Puts his mind to it was the part that concerned Nix the most. That boy was harder to read than a bull with a 96 percent buck-off rate. “I’ll sweeten the deal,” Ryan added. “You take this on, and I’ll lend you one of my cars for that trip to Abilene.”
Ryan loved luxury cars—the faster, the better. He had five or six in his garage, and he didn’t mind lending them out to people he trusted, so this was kind of a big deal.
“The Spider?” Nix asked, pushing his luck. The Spider was a Ferrari 488, custom-painted a British racing-car green, guaranteed to attract the highway patrol’s extra-special attention. He’d love to take it out to the racetrack and open it up.
“Anything but the AMG.”
That was the car Ryan normally drove. He loved it almost as much as he loved his wife—and it was no secret how much value he placed on Elizabeth O’Connell.
“I’m not driving it to Abilene, though,” Nix said, remembering why he might need a car. No way was he doing his ex-wife any favors. Those days were done.
“Sure, you’re not,” Ryan said. “Let me know when you want the keys.”
*
Shauna
“Are you serious? She was kicked out of another school already? This was her first week!”
It had to be some sort of record.
Heads turned in the reception area outside of Shauna Walsh’s open office door. She was a real estate lawyer, and new to the Grand Cooper and Nash law firm, so her office, reserved for interns, wasn’t private. She took her mother off her cell’s speakerphone while skirting her desk to close the door.
“I didn’t send either of you to the best private schools for them to crush your spirits,” Natalie McKillop Morris replied, her words gently defensive. “Remember when you set the chemistry lab on fire?”
“That was an accident. Someone mislabeled the chemicals we used.”
Whether the mislabeling was accidental or deliberate remained up for debate. Either way, Shauna and her lab partner had been innocent. They’d never even been considered suspects. To this day, she was secretly insulted by that.
Her seventeen-year-old sister, on the other hand, wasn’t known as Taryn the Terror for nothing. She sported rebellion like a neon tattoo. This was the third private school to expel her. When was their mother going to admit that the problem was Taryn?
Right now, as it turned out.
“Private school’s not right for her,” Natalie said. She sounded tired. Taryn had that effect on most people. She tired Shauna out, too. “I’m sending her to Grand to stay with you. Let’s see what a year in a rural public school does for her. Besides, she listens to you way better than she does me.”
Wait. What? Blood pulsed in Shauna’s ears, applying an alarming amount of pressure to the top of her head, because Taryn didn’t listen to her. She listened to no one. “You can’t send her here.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Taryn was their mother’s daughter, too, after all. Through and through.
“I can and I will. If you won’t take her in, then I’ll speak to your grandfather. He has plenty of room. Taryn would be good company for him,” Natalie said.
Shauna pressed a palm to her forehead. The spoiled youngest child of late-in-life parents, Natalie had gotten pregnant with her eldest at seventeen. Shauna’s father, a year younger than Natalie, had been working on one of the local ranches that summer, and he’d been in no position to take on a baby. He’d high-tailed it for home as soon as he’d been given the news. His parents had paid child support on his behalf, asking only for visitation rights in return, and as a result, Shauna was much closer to them. They lived in Oklahoma. Her father and his young family lived somewhere in New Mexico. From what Shauna understood, his wife and sons knew nothing about her. The spineless coward.
Exactly the type of man Natalie enjoyed. Taryn’s father was ten years her junior, and between the two of them, they had enough trust fund money to do nothing but play. Meaning Shauna had grown up with children.
And she was so tired of them all.
“We can try it until Christmas,” Shauna said, knowing she had no other choice, because while she might not want to live with Taryn, at the end of the day, she had to live with herself. She’d come to Grand, Montana, to get to know her mother’s family better. Her grandfather, Angus McKillop, was in his early nineties and showing signs of dementia. Saddling him with a rebellious teenaged granddaughter would never work out.
Well. It might work well for Taryn, who had zero interest in supervision—either giving or receiving. Plants withered and died when she walked past.
Satisfaction strode through the phone signal along with her mother’s next words. “Excellent. If Taryn leaves here on Saturday, she should be in Grand by next Tuesday.”
“How is she traveling—by Pony Express?”
Natalie laughed, happy again now that she’d got what she wanted. “She’s driving. We bought her a car.”
“She got expelled from school and you bought her a car?” I can’t even.
“She’ll need one to survive in rural Montana.”
The better question might be, what would rural Montana need to survive Taryn?
“This is wonderful,” her mother prattled on, ignoring Shauna’s silence. “Gunther and I can come to Grand for Thanksgiving. You and Taryn can visit LA for Christmas. It will be fun to catch up with family. Have you visited the Endeavour Ranch yet? I’m dying to see it.”
Shauna’s cousin, Dan McKillop, was one of the Endeavour’s three owners. He was also the county sheriff. Having Taryn in town was about to do wonders for his career. Shauna’s, too. God, give me strength.
When her mother finally stopped talking, and Shauna had disconnected the call, she folded her arms on her desk and rested her head on them. She couldn’t decide what would be the best cure for her headache, although she leaned toward day drinking. Lou’s Pub was close by, and it opened at noon.
A light, one-knuckled knock bounced against her closed office door.
“Come in,” she said, without looking up.
A man cleared his throat, which got her out of her chair in a hurry. She’d expected Lillit, the motherly front desk receptionist, not Lillit’s husband George, the Cooper in Grand Cooper and Nash. He carried a stack of file folders.
“Lillit asked me to give these to you. She needs your signature on them. Is this a bad time?”
“Sorry.” She smoothed her linen skirt, trying to get her head back on track. George Cooper was a nice man, but he was also her boss. “Unexpected phone call from my mother.”
“I see,” George said kindly, sounding as if she’d just explained everything, which she probably had, because of course he’d know Natalie McKillop—or know of her, at least. Grand was a small place.
He sounded so kind and understanding, in fact, that she found herself oversharing. “She’s asked if my younger sister can live with me for the school year.”
He laid the folders on her desk and tidied the small pile so that it lined up with the edge. “I assume your younger sister will be living with you and going to school here because she’s unwanted everywhere else.” His mild gaze met hers. “Being unwanted… That’s a hard thing for a child, even one who’s a teenager.”
