Dreaming of Her Best Friend's Kiss

She made a mistake and married the wrong man.

Once the vows were said, she had to keep them. After all, they were said to God just as much as to her loser, neglectful husband.

And so for fifteen years and four children, Carmen Davis stayed true, kept her word and did her level best to love the man she married.

But she never forgot the man who could make her heart race and whose life was as straight and true as it had promised to be in high school.

Preston Emerson would never love another. He wasn’t the kind of man who could fall for anyone. And it was better to stay single than to be married to one woman while he constantly fought off thinking about another.

After all, the woman he’d fallen in love with had married another.

He could stay away from her, but he couldn’t keep from helping her.

But then one day a single decision changes their lives. The past comes back. Secrets come out and in the virtual storm a love that had been dormant bursts to life.

Chapter 1

Blakely Barclay sat behind the wheel of her pickup, driving in the right lane just barely over the minimum speed limit for the interstate, her hands on the wheel, her mind a million miles away.

Her heart felt sick, her chest ached, and she’d spent the last two hundred miles biting back tears.

Her horses, Candy and Kisses, were in the back of the trailer.

Whimsically, she imagined they were feeling just as dejected as she was.

It wasn’t their fault she was driving home in defeat. They had performed perfectly.

She was the one who hadn’t.

She could almost forgive herself, if she had messed up something difficult. Like jumping through hoops of fire or riding backward standing up, one foot on each horse’s back.

But it hadn’t been that.

She hadn’t checked her foot knot in her trick riding saddle, and one of the easiest tricks in the book—the one where she hung by one foot upside down as her horse galloped around the ring—had turned into a near catastrophe as the knot came loose, her foot slipped out, and she landed facedown in the dirt.

She hadn’t even bothered to change her clothes.

She still had sawdust in her hair.

She didn’t give a flip.

She’d trained for years to make a living doing something she loved, and she hadn’t even gotten into the final ten.

After she’d fallen, she might as well have packed her horses up and started home then, but she’d finished her routine—everything required in the tryout. And she’d performed it all beautifully. If without heart.

Because she knew performing beautifully wasn’t going to be enough after she’d landed in the dirt.

Turning her turn signal on, she pulled over into the exit lane, figuring to stop at the rest stop to check her horses and grab a coffee.

Maybe that would pick her up.

Her eyelids weren’t falling closed, but she was having trouble concentrating. She just wanted to curl up in a ball somewhere and cry for a really long time.

She definitely didn’t want to go home and face her parents and her friends and everyone in the town of Mistletoe who’d known what she was doing and where she was going and had the faith that she would be successful.

She was coming back a failure, and she hated that.

Her phone rang as she pulled into a long parking slot between two big rigs, and she answered it, slouching in her seat, knowing this was probably the one person in the world who could understand how she was truly feeling.

“Hey, Martin.”

“Wow. That bad?”

Her lips quivered, half trying to cry, half trying to smile, that he would know just from her tone that she had screwed up.

“Yeah. My knot was loose, and I fell off Kisses while I was hanging from one foot. I did everything else, but…there’s no way.” She couldn’t keep her tone upbeat. She was barely beating the tears back.

“Bummer. Did you check your knot?”

“No.” She hated even admitting it.

“Why not, Whiplash?” he asked, using the nickname he’d given her years ago when she’d fallen off a horse that had stopped and she hadn’t. He probably knew it would make her smile.

“Why didn’t I? Because I’m stupid.”

“Sorry, Whip. Got to agree with you on that one.”

“Thanks, Staples,” she said, almost able to hear his lips turning up at his own nickname, which he’d gotten honestly—by stapling his finger into a fence post, not realizing what he’d done until he’d gotten two staples in, hence the plural. It had been a beast getting the staples out. It still made her cringe, but it had been ten years and they could laugh about it now. “You’re a great friend.”

She closed her eyes, the smile fading from her mouth, and propped an elbow on her steering wheel, putting her head down on her hand. “I’m fine, by the way. Thanks for asking.”

“I didn’t figure you were in the hospital. Although, after a flub like that, you’d probably drive home with a broken leg just because you were so mad at yourself.”

Yeah. He was so right. Martin knew her better than anyone. Right now, that felt good.

“I’m sorry, I know things aren’t really going any better for you. Are you ready for tomorrow?”

“As ready as I’ll ever be. But this is it for me. If I don’t place well enough to make it to the semifinals, I’ve got to come home. I’m running out of money, and I have a ranch to run.”

“I’ll be home. I can do it.”

“Two people wouldn’t be enough. I’m not gonna dump it all on one.”

“You know I’ll hold things together as well as I can so you can stay out on the circuit.”

“I know. I’ve just been thinking it might be time for me to hang up my dream. I’ve been chasing the rodeo bareback title for years. And I get close…then nothing. Bad draws, bad timing, bad luck, or stupidity on my part. I’ve just been thinking lately that everything seems to be going wrong this year. Even worse than last. And maybe this just isn’t what I’m meant to do.”

“Martin. I can’t believe you’re talking like that. You’ve always said you were going to chase this dream until you caught it. You can’t quit.”

“Hey, you’re driving home. I might as well drive home too.”

“I’m driving home because there is no more chasing my dream. I didn’t make it. There isn’t another rodeo somewhere else for me tomorrow.”

“I know. I just…just am tired of fighting.”

“If you want it, you have to work for it. It’s not going to come easy.” He already knew that, but she couldn’t even imagine Martin not going after the title. He always spent his summers running the rodeo circuit and doing fairly well. He even had a fan following and was a favorite on local TV.

Of course, the bull riders were the big draw, with national recognition, but the bareback guys had their own fan club, albeit smaller.

“I know.” His words were half annoyed, half appreciative, knowing she spoke as someone who always had his best interest at heart.

But she understood his frustration. When a person felt like everything was against him, having someone tell him he just needed to work harder and be persistent didn’t really make him feel better.

She wouldn’t appreciate that right now. But they were in different situations, because there was no next tryout for her. This was the one she had needed to ace.