Just a Cowboy

by Rachel Lee

  “What are you running from?” he asked.

  Kelly went hot and cold by turns as shock ripped through her. How had he known? What had she said? How had her most closely guarded secret been so obvious? When she managed to find her voice, she said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I think you do,” he said quietly.

  “You don’t know anything about me!”

  “That’s true. And it’s none of my business, really. But the way you opened the door this afternoon, looking like a frightened gazelle, and rented this crappy place in a town in the middle of nowhere… Sorry. I don’t think you’re on a vacation.”

  “It doesn’t matter what I am.”

  “Maybe not.” He leaned back a bit in his chair as if to give her more space. “I guess I’ve outstayed my welcome.”

  She didn’t want him to go. Didn’t want to rattle around alone in this house, not yet.

  “Wait,” she said tautly.

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  Dear Reader,

  Many of us try to take too much responsibility for the things that happen in life. It is not as if we are fully in control of much, but who among us hasn’t at one time or another castigated ourselves for what we “should have done?”

  We act as best we can in a given situation, with the information we have and understand at the time. In retrospect, we might think we should have done or said something different, but at the time we didn’t know what we learned later.

  Given this kind of thinking, victims too often blame themselves. “I should have” is one of the saddest cries we make. “I should have known.” “I should have done something else.” “I should have guessed.” The guilt is a heavy burden.

  This kind of hindsight can cause terrific problems for us, especially if the consequences were grave. In this story, a man deals with survivor guilt, and a woman deals with guilt over being victimized by the man she once loved. This is the story of how they learn to forgive themselves and find their ultimate healing in love.

  It’s also a bit of a thriller. Enjoy!

  Hugs,

  Rachel

  RACHEL LEE

  Just a Cowboy

  Books by Rachel Lee

  Harlequin Romantic Suspense

  **The Final Mission #1655

  **Just a Cowboy #1663

  Silhouette Romantic Suspense

  An Officer and a Gentleman #370

  Serious Risks #394

  Defying Gravity #430

  *Exile’s End #449

  *Cherokee Thunder #463

  *Miss Emmaline and the Archangel #482

  *Ironheart #494

  *Lost Warriors #535

  *Point of No Return #566

  *A Question of Justice #613

  *Nighthawk #781

  *Cowboy Comes Home #865

  *Involuntary Daddy #955

  Holiday Heroes #1487

  **A Soldier’s Homecoming #1519

  **Protector of One #1555

  **The Unexpected Hero #1567

  **The Man from Nowhere #1595

  **Her Hero in Hiding #1611

  **A Soldier’s Redemption #1635

  **No Ordinary Hero #1643

  Silhouette Shadows

  Imminent Thunder #10

  *Thunder Mountain #37

  Silhouette Books

  *A Conard County Reckoning

  *Conard County

  The Heart’s Command

  “Dream Marine”

  Montana Mavericks

  Cowboy Cop #12

  World’s Most

  Eligible Bachelors

  *The Catch of Conard County

  RACHEL LEE

  was hooked on writing by the age of twelve, and practiced her craft as she moved from place to place all over the United States. This New York Times bestselling author now resides in Florida and has the joy of writing full-time.

  Her bestselling Conard County series (see www.conardcounty.com) has won the hearts of readers worldwide, and it’s no wonder, given her own approach to life and love. As she says, “Life is the biggest romantic adventure of all—and if you’re open and aware, the most marvelous things are just waiting to be discovered.” Readers can email Rachel at RachelLee@ConardCounty.com.

  To Kristin T., a quiet hero.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Prologue

  Kelly Scanlon Devereaux drove home late and alone. It was fast approaching midnight, the downside of having lost her job along with her marriage. She’d had to take a temporary position waiting tables, and it was beginning to look as if she’d never work again as a medical billing clerk. At least not around here.

  That was the cost of divorcing a prominent plastic surgeon: No other doctor wanted to hire her under the circumstances, and so far the hospitals had had no openings.

  At least she had shed Dean Devereaux. Mostly. There was still the divorce to get through in a few months, but in the meantime she had her own place and didn’t have to live in constant terror that she would to make Dean mad.

  Only now that she was free of that threat did she realize just how nervous and tense she had been for most of the last eight years. Now she often wondered why she had put up with it for so long.

  She knew her way around Miami like the back of her hand and chose her route to avoid dangerous neighborhoods. It made her trip longer, but she didn’t care. A little extra time in the car was a small price to pay for freedom.

  The truth was, however, that she wouldn’t feel truly free until the divorce was final. Her hands tightened on the steering wheel as the anxiety hit her again, and she took a couple of deep breaths to steady herself.

  Up until today, Dean had been ugly about the whole thing. He didn’t like losing, and watching him over the last few months since she’d filed for divorce had been an eye-opener. That man actually thought of her as a possession.

  He’d fought the court’s decision to give her separate maintenance and had lost. Her attorney had had to hire forensic accountants to find his assets. And she had been mad enough about the way he had treated her, especially over the last year of their marriage when he had started to hit her, that she had wanted to gouge him.

  Cripes, he’d even told her she wasn’t going to live long enough to see a settlement. Ugly, ugly.

  But today, just today, her lawyer had called to tell her that Dean had agreed to the settlement, that he had signed the papers.

  She was still reeling from that. Her attorney assured her that Dean had changed his mind in order to avoid the publicity of a messy trial, in which his own wife would accuse him of physical abuse, and maybe the lawyer was right. It could hardly help the practice of a man who spent his life making beautiful, wealthy women more beautiful to have it known that he was a wife beater.

  So maybe the end was in sight. Her lawyer said Dean couldn’t change his mind now, that the papers his attorney had sent were almost as good as the court’s seal on the settlement.

  But she realized, now that she had won, that she didn’t care much about the money. She cared most about the painful places the whole mess had left, and worse, the realization that she hadn’t been strong enough to stand up to the man all those years. That she had taken it and taken it, and blamed herself for not being good enough.

  That she had been drawn in by cha
rm, flattery and all the oiliness of a snake.

  Ugh. She’d give all that money back if she could just erase the last eight years from her life.

  She pulled into her parking garage at last and into her numbered slot. Like many high-rises in Miami, this one had been built so that the parking garage was beneath the apartments, at ground level, putting the living units well above the reach of a storm surge in hurricane season. She often thought that if they hadn’t had to put the building on stilts, there would have been no garage at all. This address wasn’t exactly A-list.

  But it was good enough, she reminded herself. She sat for a few minutes in her car, enjoying the quiet after work, the sense that soon it would all be over and Dean would be firmly in her past. The sense that she was about to reach a point where she could finally shed the emotional bruises and stop living in fear.

  God, it was going to be a relief. Increasingly, she dreamed of leaving Miami permanently. The more miles she could put between her and Dean, the better. She didn’t want to hear his name ever again, even by accident. Heck, she wouldn’t turn on her TV because she might run across one of the commercials for his practice.

  Nor did she have any ties holding her here. All the friends she thought she had made during her marriage had turned their backs on her. Maybe she made them uncomfortable in some way, because she suspected many of their marriages were like hers. Women who had married wealthy men who had turned out to think of them as possessions.

  “You pay for that money,” she whispered, facing up to her mistake yet again. Even when you honestly believed you loved the guy, you wound up paying for the luxury…sometimes with your body, sometimes with your soul. She’d paid with a little of both.

  At last she sighed and climbed out of her car, thinking of crawling into bed and just forgetting everything for a few hours. All the stress, all the worry, even some of the self-loathing she still felt.

  Oh, she’d been stupid and naive to begin with, but later, as the emotional abuse mounted, her excuses had grown thinner. She didn’t like herself for that.

  She was walking toward the elevator when a voice called out, “Mrs. Devereaux?”

  At once a shudder of distaste ran down her spine. Thinking it was one of the security guards, she turned. “I prefer Ms. Scanlon now.”

  The man stood only a foot away, dressed Miami casual, smiling. “I thought I recognized you. My sister-in-law goes to see your husband. Anyway, you dropped something when you got out of the car.”

  She looked at the hand he held out, trying to see what it was, caught a blur from the corner of her eye, then the world exploded in blackness and stars as her head seemed to split open.

  I’m going to die.

  And then she thought nothing at all.

  Chapter 1

  Coming home from roundup at a local ranch in Conard County, Hank Jackson expected to unload his gear, step into the cool quiet of his house, and maybe have a shot of bourbon to ease the pain he lived with constantly.

  It seemed that no matter how well the docs put smashed bones back together, the bones always remembered the insult. Then they couldn’t make up their minds if they hated activity or inactivity more.

  Regardless, more than a week on the range of riding, camping, roping and herding had left his body feeling a little older than its thirty-four years, and he was looking for a hot bath and a shot, not necessarily in that order.

  Except as he was tugging his saddle out of the back of his pickup, he noticed the house next door. He owned that place, too, a decision made on the spur of the moment because he preferred being busy to having too much time on his hands to think, and that house would keep an entire crew of repairmen busy for quite a while.

  But since he had left nine days ago, things had changed, signaled by curtains in the windows.

  Crap. He froze, saddle still resting on the truck bed, and looked again. He should never have let Ben Patterson persuade him to list the place for rent a few weeks ago. There was still a ton of work that needed to be done, as he’d told Ben. Then he’d allowed himself to be talked into listing it because it would propel him to get the work done faster.

  Hell.

  He’d never expected that anyone would take it in that condition, not even at the ridiculously low rent.

  Sighing, he shifted his weight onto the hip that hurt marginally less and tried to decide if he could ignore his new tenant until tomorrow. Or was he honor-bound to get the heck over there right now and tell him all about the things that weren’t working right and a few things that might not be safe?

  Ben might not have remembered all the details. And what if there was a family in there?

  Cussing under his breath, he left his saddle and headed next door, leaving his own grassy yard behind for the weedy patch of dirt that belonged to the other house. Yet another thing he’d been planning to take care of this week or next.

  Climbing the two steps to the small, covered porch elicited another cuss word that only he could hear. The doorbell didn’t work, so he rapped sharply on the front door, a solid oak door in dire need of painting. Oh, hell, why kid himself? It needed a blow-torch first, and looking at it he was quite certain some of the underlying layers of paint were lead-based. He’d better not find any kids living here, because, if he did, Ben would get more than a few choice words.

  His first knock went unanswered. He rapped again, more loudly, saw one of the new curtains twitch, and finally the front door opened a crack.

  He found himself looking into one blue eye through that crack.

  “Yes?” said a quiet, tense voice.

  “Hank Jackson,” he said. “I’m your landlord.”

  “Oh.” Then, “Oh! The agent mentioned you.”

  And the door didn’t open even a hair wider. “Lady, I don’t know if Ben bothered to tell you, but there are some things about this house that aren’t safe.”

  “I know that.”

  “But do you know them all? Just tell me you don’t have any kids.”

  “No. No kids.”

  This wasn’t getting them very far. Part of him just wanted to turn around, walk away, find that hot bath and that shot of bourbon. But in good conscience he couldn’t do that without at least making an attempt.

  “I need to show you the things that are wrong. I need to tell you the work I’m going to be doing in the next week or so. Ben did tell you I’d be working on the place?”

  “It can wait. I’ll only be here a short while.”

  “Some of it can’t wait.” Damn, she was bringing out his stubborn streak. “Look, I don’t bite, but I may have to break your rental agreement if we don’t come to some kind of terms about the things I need to do here.”

  The door opened a little wider and he was astonished to see the kind of blond, blue-eyed beauty that should be in the movies. And she looked nervous. Why the heck should she look nervous? Nobody in Conard County looked nervous about someone knocking on the door.

  He almost sighed. Instead, he fought for some courtesy. “It’s important,” he said. “I didn’t expect the place to get rented in its current condition, and I’m not sure Ben gave you all the warnings.”

  At last she nodded, opened the door all the way, and let him step in. He smothered a wince as his hip reminded him that not all was well south of the border, especially after a week in the saddle.

  “The place is good enough for me,” she said tentatively. “I’ll only be here a short time.”

  “Yeah, but I’d like you to leave on your feet, not on a stretcher.”

  At that he was relieved to see the faintest of smiles lift the corners of her perfect mouth. Beauty came in all varieties, but this woman had the kind that usually implied heaps of plastic surgery. Exactly the kind that didn’t appeal a whole lot to him. Usually.

  “The place isn’t exactly a death trap,” he said, forcing himself to pay attention to business and not to another area south of the border that was choosing a bad time to sit up and take notice. “But there’s s
ome rotten flooring I need to warn you about, and a couple of iffy electrical circuits. And the stove doesn’t work right, but I have a replacement coming soon.”

  “Okay.”

  He held out his hand. “Hank Jackson.”

  “Kelly Scanlon.” Her handshake was firm. Okay, so she hadn’t come by that perfect figure by unnatural means. She must work out.

  “Nice to meet you,” he managed to say as if he meant it, although he was thinking of at least a half-dozen ways he’d like to give Ben a hard time.

  “If the house is so bad, why are you renting it?” she asked.

  “It wasn’t my intention. Ben’s been after me to list it with him. I thought I made it clear he wasn’t to rent it until I’d finished the most important work.”

  Her smile widened a shade. “I guess he doesn’t listen well?”

  “Apparently not. Either that, or he’s even more desperate than I thought. Even with the semiconductor plant that moved in a couple of years ago, I think beggars around here make more than real estate agents. Did he even show you the fuse box?”

  “No.”

  “Hell.” He sighed, then limped past her through the small living room to the kitchen. Like many kitchens of its era, it had more room than convenience. Space enough for a big table, but few cabinets, an old freestanding sink, and just an itty-bitty patch of counter. The stove stood all by itself near one wall, the refrigerator a few feet away.

  “Someday,” he remarked, “this is going to be a nice kitchen. But right now…” He shook his head. “Most of it looks like an afterthought.”

  “I don’t need much.”

  “Maybe not,” he allowed. “One person can get by.” He walked over to the mudroom door and stepped out into the unheated, glassed-in area. “Here’s the fuse box.”

  He opened the metal casing. “There are three circuits here that I removed the fuses from. Resist any temptation to put a fuse in them until I get an electrician out here. If you get desperate to use these circuits, I have extension cords I can lend you so you can plug into safe sockets.”