Page 1 of Accidentally Matched

Chapter One

––––––––

COLTER

––––––––

Rolling hills, verdantpasture, cows, bulls, shit, a hundred angry mustangs to the east, and right before us an angry heifer with a thorn in her hoof, then there in the middle of it all, a pink fucking eyesore in heels coming straight toward us.

Tierney Vaughn.

Looking as out of place as a ballerina in a pigsty. In fact, she has no business even being within a mile of the several thousand acres of the ranch I run with my best friends and business partners, Nolan Spears and Jace Hamilton.

Collectively, Nolan, Jace, and I come from families with old money, billions and billions of dollars of old money that we inherited as soon as we graduated from university. We might still oversee our family businesses remotely, but this ranch, The Lone River Ranch, which has been jointly owned by our families for generations, is where we want to be. Nothing compares to the cold, crisp air, the green open spaces, just the hum and bustle of nature.

So the only reason we know heiress and hardcore city girl, Tierney at all is through her father, who has a passion for Arabians, and we happen to be the biggest sellers of the noble breed of horse.

We’ve seen her a couple of times when we’ve had meetings in Desmond Vaughn’s palatial home and the occasional barbecue her mother would invite us to, but we ignore her. We have zero business to do with her.

But here she is, coming toward us, teetering on her heels.

“What the hell is she doing here?” I ask, adjusting my Stetson, narrowing my eyes against the glinting sun behind her.

“Don’t know, but she’s going to get herself killed in those heels falling into shit face-first,” Nolan says.

“Who is she waving at?” Jace asks, and we all three turn around to look at our ranch hands amid attempts to subdue a diva of a cow so we could remove the thorn stuck in her hoof.

We’ve never met a more high-maintenance, drama queen of a cow than Alice before. As pretty as she is, the heifer sure did put on a show, mooing in sheer agony, swaying about the place, and upsetting the bulls, which is never a good thing. I’d put up a lot of money that the thorn in her hoof is as tiny as a thumbtack, but she’s carrying on as if she’s dying.

Is the high society heiress trying to get the attention of one of our ranch hands?

All our men have stopped what they’re doing, their gazes transfixed on the girl waving both her hands in the air, while looking as if she were traipsing an obstacle course and saying something we can’t hear.

The cockiest ranch hand, Wade, whistles as she gets closer, and all we can see are her tanned bare legs. Brody removes his hat and straightens his hair. Jack tucks his thumbs into the loops of his jeans and strikes a fucking pose. Chad and Gunner remove their shirts and puff out their chests. Eli, the youngest hand we have, looks at her as if she’s Aphrodite.

There’s a scrap of very rocky, unforgiving land we have on the southern boundary. No one goes there. Perfect to hide a few six-foot graves.

“Hello, woo hoo, hello, Mr. James, Mr. Spears, Mr. Hamilton. Hellooo.” She finally reaches us, puts her hands on her hips, and takes a few breaths.

“Whew. That was quite the walk. Good thing I found Marcia coming out of your office on her way to lunch. If she didn’t set me in the right direction west and told me to walk in a straight line across the pasture, I would have ended up in Timbuktu.” Without taking a breath, she continues. “May I?” she asks, going to Eli and taking the water bottle from his hand.

She takes a dainty sip and then hands it back to him. The young prick does nothing but stare at the place where her luscious pink mouth touched.

Nolan beats both me and Jace to it. He grabs the bottle from Eli and empties the contents into his mouth, his lips exactly where hers had been, before he hands the bottle back to the lad, who looks as if he lost his fucking puppy.

“Oh, hello,” she says to the rest of our men, waving at them.

That land can definitely hold six graves. No. Fuck. I scratch those thoughts right out of my head. What the hell is wrong with me? Was I seriously considering burying our ranch hands for looking at her? I don’t give a flying fuck which poor bastard falls for her. And neither do Nolan and Jace.

And no, we’renothaving a meeting to discuss our response to her either. We didn’t the last time.

But Jesus fucking Christ, what is she wearing? Never mind. Not my fucking business.

“What do you want, Vaughn? We’re in the middle of something, and last time I checked, we do business with your father, not you,” I say, a little too abrasively. But I want her off our fucking land, and I 100% know Nolan and Jace want the same thing. Growing up closer than brothers mean we’re always in sync with each other.

From the little we know about her, she runs some sort of dating matchmaking love site thing with her friends and their dogs. It’s all too fucking frivolous for us, and besides, we don’t date.

“I want you, Colter. I want you, Nolan, and I want you, Jace,” she says, tapping her finger against our chests.

---