Taming a Dark Horse

by Stella Bagwell

  His nearness caused the nerve endings on Nevada’s skin to stand like metal shavings on a magnet and she drew in a deep, bracing breath before she turned to look at him.

  “I have things going,” she said as she tried to keep her eyes off the strip of bare chest and hard abdomen exposed by the loose tails of his shirt. “How do hot cakes sound? Or would you rather have fried eggs or an omelette?”

  This was not the way he’d expected his nurse to be treating him—as though he was royalty and could pick anything from the kitchen that his heart desired. Was she trying to impress him for some reason? he wondered. There wasn’t any need for her to lift a hand to prepare meals. Marina would be more than glad to send every meal to them. Especially since she had plenty of leftovers, some of which usually made their way to the bunkhouse. Old Cook wasn’t too happy when Marina’s treats appeared in his kitchen. He was protective of his position and didn’t like it threatened by a woman trying to outshine him. But Nevada was a nurse, she didn’t need to stand over a cookstove. Especially for him. And Linc didn’t know whether to be pleased by her attitude or wary of her motives.

  “Hot cakes sounds good. But—uh—I’d appreciate it if you could button these things up for me.”

  He gestured down to his shirt. Nevada put down the fork in her hand and stepped toward him. Before she even reached for the two pieces of fabric hanging against his chest, her heart began to beat fast and faint, her breathing slowed to light little sips of air sucked between her parted lips.

  “I’m sorry. I should have offered to do this for you sooner,” she said in a thick voice.

  Linc felt every part of his body going rigid with anticipation as she moved close and took hold of his shirt. This morning she smelled like honeysuckle and morning dew and he wondered if her dark-pink lips would taste just as sweet and moist.

  Damn it, he wasn’t a man who went around fantasizing about kissing a woman or imagining the shape of her body beneath her clothing, but he seemed to be doing both with Nevada. And he didn’t know how he was going to keep his sanity spending this first day with her, much less two weeks.

  “That’s all right. Maybe I can do it myself pretty soon.” Like tomorrow, Linc thought desperately, then sucked in a fiery breath as her small fingers inadvertently brushed against his belly.

  Hearing the sharp intake, Nevada dropped her hands and jumped back. “What’s wrong? Did I hurt you?” she asked with great concern.

  Linc groaned silently. “No. I just had a—sharp pain in one of my hands. It was nothing,” he lied. He wasn’t about to admit that the touch of her fingers had filled him with more heat than he’d encountered in the burning horse barn.

  “Oh. Maybe I should unwrap it and have a look,” she suggested as she reached once again for his shirt.

  “No, dammit,” he said sharply. “It was just a little pain. Nothing to get all shook up about.” Only he was shook up, Linc thought. He’d been shook up ever since she’d arrived yesterday and the whole idea made him angry at himself and at Victoria for ever sending the woman up here. For two cents he’d call his cousin and tell her to find someone else, that he was going to send Nevada packing. But what would be his excuse? he wondered. That he found her too attractive? That for the first time in his life he’d met a woman he couldn’t push out of his mind?

  “All right. But please tell me if you have any more of them,” she said. “Now if you’ll—suck in a bit, I’ll button your jeans.”

  While she worked to fasten the waistband of his jeans, Linc pulled his eyes away from the shiny crown of her head and looked toward the window. This time she couldn’t prevent her fingers from touching him and it was all he could do to remain motionless as she searched for the tongue of the zipper nestled just above his crotch.

  His heart began to pound like a hammer, forcing hot blood to parts of his body that he wished would remain cold. “If you knew how much I hated this, you’d hurry it up,” he finally barked at her. “And I sure as hell don’t want burned bacon for breakfast.”

  Her lips a tight line, she yanked up the zipper and whirled back to the cookstove. “You think I enjoy dressing you?” she muttered as she whipped the browning bacon on to its other side.

  “I don’t know. Do you?”

  Her mouth fell open as she jerked her head around at him. “Keep asking me questions like that and you can cook your own breakfast the best way you can,” she said tightly.

  For long, tense moments he stared at her. What the hell was he doing, he wondered. He’d been trying his best to get along with the woman. He didn’t really want to insult her. And he sure as heck hadn’t meant to ask her such a provocative question. But something strange seemed to happen to him whenever she touched him. His normal personality flew out the window and left behind a rutting buck without any manners.

  Raking a bandaged hand over his rumpled hair, he said regretfully, “Aw hell, Nevada. Go ahead and say it. I’m a terrible patient.”

  Ducking her head, she turned back to the frying meat and lifted the browned strips onto a plate lined with paper towel. “Forget it. I understand.”

  Not liking the idea that he’d hurt her feelings, he moved forward and placed his hands on her shoulders. The bandages on his hands prevented him from feeling the heat of her body, the softness of her skin, but he could imagine the sensation and it was enough to cause his stomach to clench with desire.

  “Do you?” he asked softly.

  Slowly she turned and lifted her face to his. There was a challenging tilt to her chin, but there were also shadows in her dark eyes, expressions that he couldn’t understand but desperately wanted to.

  “I think so. You don’t like me near you. You don’t like me touching you.”

  Linc tried not to flinch. He had not expected anything so blunt to come out of her mouth. And he’d especially not expected her to read him so closely.

  “Look, Nevada, it isn’t that I don’t like you—”

  “Liking me has nothing to do with it,” she interrupted. “You don’t like how I make you feel. And you’re afraid that I’m feeling the same way toward you.”

  Linc swallowed as his throat tightened and his heart continued to chug like a laboring freight train. “Since you seem to know so much about me, just how do I feel?”

  As Nevada’s gaze roamed his sober face, she realized she shouldn’t have gotten into this conversation. It was going to lead them to things that neither of them needed to hear or feel. But there was no way she could avoid his question now without looking like more of a fool than she already did.

  “I think you find me attractive,” she said frankly.

  Slowly, his dark brows inched upward and she shivered with surprise as his bandaged hands slid up the sides of her neck and gently cupped her face.

  “And how do you find me, Nevada Ortiz?”

  The question was spoken so softly she could barely hear it. But she did hear and she couldn’t ignore it any more than she could dismiss the sudden pounding of her heart.

  “You’re a very masculine, good-looking man, Linc. I’m sure you’ve had plenty of women tell you that.”

  She watched his nostrils flare and for a moment she believed she’d angered him all over again, but then his face softened and his bandaged thumbs began to move back and forth across her cheeks. In the back of her mind, Nevada realized she wanted to feel the touch of his skin upon hers instead of the coarse gauze wrapped around his fingers. She wanted to know what it was like to be in his arms and have his hard lips kissing hers.

  “Do you feed the egos of all your male patients like this?”

  The corners of her mouth lifted ever so slightly. “I’ve never had any male patients like you.”

  A faint grimace twisted his lips. “What does that mean? That you’re still trying to flatter me?”

  “I never intended to flatter you. I’m only trying to answer your questions.”

  “Really.”

  His one word was full of disbelief and while Nevada’s
mind was screaming at her to step away from him and put a stop to his touch and the senseless conversation between them, she found that her legs refused to obey her commands.

  “That’s right,” she said as she nervously licked her lips. “I’ve attended to plenty of male patients over the years. But they were all housed in a hospital room or medical clinic. They were all bedridden or incapacitated in some way. They weren’t strong and virile like you.”

  The more she spoke, the more pink color seeped into her cheeks, and as Linc’s gaze roamed her face he realized her blush surprised him. She’d already admitted she’d had plenty of boyfriends. Surely it didn’t make her feel self-conscious to talk about the intimate things that went on between a man and a woman.

  “That’s the way you see me?”

  Desire was growing thick in her throat, followed by a choking lump of fear. Just having this man touch her face was making little earthquakes go off inside her. What would happen if he actually put some effort into it, she wondered wildly.

  “Stop this, Linc. I can’t be your nurse if you’re, well, personal like this. It won’t work.”

  “No. It won’t work,” he murmured lazily. “But I tried to tell you that yesterday. You should have gotten into your car and driven away when I told you to.”

  His gaze zeroed in on her lips and Nevada felt every bone in her body turning to liquid fire. “So what are you going to do about it?” she muttered inanely.

  “What do you think I’m going to do about it?” he asked with a growl.

  “Find another nurse to take my place?”

  “It’s too late for that,” he murmured. “And too late for this, too.”

  Nevada could see his head bending toward hers yet she couldn’t believe that he was going to kiss her until she actually felt the touch of his lips.

  The contact was like the strike of a match in a pitch-dark room. The space around them seemed to light up and tiny flames sizzled upon her lips as Linc’s mouth dominated hers with a bold search that left her breathless and shaking uncontrollably.

  Halfway through the kiss, his hands left her face and gathered at the back of her waist. She stumbled slightly as he tugged her forward and into the circle of his arms. The front of her body landed against his and she was instantly consumed with heat and the wild urge to slip her arms around his neck, to hold on and never let go.

  She felt the room receding and her senses being sucked into a velvety-soft place when the shrill sound of the telephone jolted the two of them apart.

  They stared at each other in shocked silence before Linc finally turned away and clumsily snatched the ringing receiver from the wall near the cabinets.

  Nevada sucked in a deep breath and turned back to the skillet on the cookstove. Thank God she’d turned the burner off beneath the sausage or it would have burned to a crisp by now.

  As she put a flame beneath the skillet, she realized her hands were trembling and she couldn’t seem to suck in enough air to satisfy her lungs. What had the man done to her? She’d been kissed before. Or so she’d thought. Apparently, none of her past suitors had known what they were doing or the chemistry between them had been bad. And that was all it had been between her and Linc, she firmly told herself. Chemistry. Pure and simple. He was a raw male animal and his rough edges excited her sexually. That’s all there was to it.

  “That was Marina,” he said as he hung up the telephone. “She wanted to know if she needed to send breakfast to us.”

  Nevada wondered how he could sound so normal, so unaffected when her whole body was still vibrating from the kiss they’d shared. But then maybe he hadn’t felt any of the things she’d felt, Nevada decided. Maybe the kiss had been just an impulse that he now regretted.

  “What did you tell her?” she asked while hating the fact that her own voice was strained.

  “Not to bother. That you were cooking up something. I just didn’t know what it was yet.”

  For the next few moments as Nevada broke eggs into another skillet, the innuendo of his remark didn’t sink in. When it finally registered that Linc hadn’t been referring to breakfast, she turned around to shoot a few choice words at him. But the room was empty.

  Nevada was relieved. She didn’t need to get into another war of words with the man. And she certainly didn’t need to kiss him again. But she very much wanted to. And even worse than that, he probably knew she did.

  Chapter Seven

  Linc’s cousin Ross arrived shortly after they’d finished eating breakfast. The two men sat together on the front porch and drank coffee while Nevada cleaned the kitchen and tried to assure herself that everything was going to be all right.

  Throughout the meal, Linc had never mentioned the kiss and neither did she. Maybe it was better that way, she told herself. Maybe if they both behaved as though it had never happened, then they could forget it and move on.

  She had to move on to the job at hand, Nevada thought. Because Linc was not a man who’d be interested in any sort of relationship with her. From all that she could see, he didn’t even much like women. She didn’t need to ruin her life by pining over a man who didn’t give a flip about her.

  Out on the porch, Linc listened to Ross as he talked about his trip to the livestock auction at Farmington yesterday. Normally he was always interested to hear how cattle and horses were selling on the market, but today Ross wasn’t holding his attention.

  Damn it, he’d been a big, stupid fool to kiss Nevada. Hell, he didn’t even know why he had. Except that he’d wanted to kiss her and had ever since she’d stepped out of her car and faced him with her hands on her shapely little hips. Now it was going to be hell to keep his distance from her. But it was something he was going to have to do. Being indisposed with burns was a minor problem compared to the pains Nevada could cause him.

  “Linc, are you sure you’re feeling all right?”

  He looked over to see Ross studying him with a narrow eye.

  “Sure. I’m fine. Or I would be if I could take these damn bandages off and get to work,” he answered.

  Ross’s gaze leveled on Linc’s bandaged arms and hands. “Yeah. I guess that would be hell going around like that,” he said, then grinned mischievously, “but it might not be all bad to have Bella doing everything for me. Like giving me a bath, helping me dress—”

  He broke off suddenly and Linc stared purposely out at the mountain range in the far distance.

  “Oh. So that’s what’s bothering you,” Ross said with sudden decisiveness. “You don’t like having Miss Ortiz getting that personal.”

  He turned a glare on his cousin. “Would you?”

  Ross chuckled. “Is that supposed to be a trick question? Two years ago I would have loved it. Now, well, I’m a one-woman man. You will be, too, Linc. One of these days before you get too old to make love to a woman.”

  Linc rose from his chair and walked over to one of the posts supporting the roof over the porch. Propping his shoulder against it, he gazed across the mountain top to the big ranch house where his father had once lived with his mother.

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, Ross. That sort of thing doesn’t interest me at all. Never has and never will. You know that.”

  “No. I don’t know anything of the kind. What I do see is a man who’s missing a hell of a lot of living. And I’ve never understood why.”

  Glancing over his shoulder at Ross, he said, “Is that what you come up here for? To give me some sort of mental therapy? If it was, then you can just get the hell back down the mountain. I don’t need it.”

  “Why no. It sounds like you’re in a wonderful frame of mind,” Ross said with sarcasm, then shook his head in a helpless fashion. “I thought Nevada would have already brought you out of this funk you’re in, but I can see she hasn’t made any headway. Poor woman, she’ll probably be ripping those bandages off you way ahead of time if you keep this up.”

  Linc started to bark back at him, then shut his mouth as he realized he’d
be adding fodder to Ross’s assessment of him. Jerking the brim of his hat down on his forehead, he asked, “Did you get that supplement for the horses yesterday? I don’t want any of the gestating mares to go without.”

  “Yeah. I got it. Twenty sacks. It was all the feed store had.”

  “Has Skinny been sitting up nights with Miss Lori?”

  “Yeah. He’s wearing himself out, too.”

  Skinny was the oldest wrangler on the T Bar K and, except for Marina, had worked for the ranch longer than anyone. Linc realized the man was heading toward his upper seventies and needed his rest. But there wasn’t anyone, other than himself, that he would trust with the young mare.

  “You think I don’t know that?” Linc retorted the question. “But what the hell am I supposed to do about it? There’s an eighty-percent chance she’ll foal in the dark. Other than a vet, there’s no one besides Skinny that I would want around in case something goes wrong. She’s young and this is her first foal. He’ll know what to watch for.”

  Sighing heavily, Ross rose to his feet and walked over to where Linc continued to slump against the porch post.

  “Look, Linc, I realize you miss the horses—”

  “Do you?” Linc interrupted roughly, then murmured in an easier voice, “I doubt you understand how much. They’re my life.”

  Ross didn’t say anything for a few moments and then he gently placed his hand on Linc’s shoulder.

  “Maybe this is a good time to think about that.”

  Surprised that his cousin would make such a remark, Linc looked around, but by then Ross was already stepping down from the porch and walking to his truck.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he called over his shoulder.

  As Ross turned the vehicle around to head back down the mountain, Linc lifted his hand in a farewell gesture, while desperately wishing he was going down to the ranch yard with his cousin. By this time of morning the place would be quiet. But just after daybreak, the barns and corrals were always buzzing with cowboys spreading feed, catching horses from the remuda and saddling up for the day’s work.