Cook County Cowboys

by Crystal-Rain Love

  “You look great, Kenz. I’m glad the bleached hair thing was a passing fad.”

  Kenzie self-consciously raised a hand to her loose hair, wrapping a light brown strand of the tousled mess around her finger, and tried not to get too over-excited at the compliment.

  Chance bent down and made kissing noises at the barking dog, calming Daisy down so he could scratch her between the ears. “I hope this dog has a better use than guarding the property,” he said, straightening back up. “She let me all over it this morning once I gave her a piece of beef jerky.”

  The reminder of what had brought her out to the barn to come face-to-face with the man who’d ripped her heart out of her chest and smashed it to bits snapped Kenzie out of her shocked state.

  Flinging the hair she’d wrapped around her finger over her shoulder, she snatched the bat out of Chance’s hand and cocked a hip, planting a fist on it. “Care to explain what the hell you’re doing on my property in the first place?”

  He sighed, took a step back and braced himself as if he knew he was in for a tongue lashing. “I got back into town yesterday, and saw my brother. He mentioned you were having trouble with the ranch.” A wry grin touched his mouth. “He wasn’t making much sense after that, but I woke up early this morning, couldn’t get back to sleep…and I thought I’d see if his drunk-blabbing was truth or fiction.”

  Heat crept into Kenzie’s cheeks as she crossed her arms. “Did you come to ridicule, or to laugh at me?”

  What looked like genuine confusion shone in Chance’s eyes. “Why would I do either of those things?”

  “Because you always thought I was just a spoiled brat.” She leaned the bat against the wall and stepped over to Suede, letting the dark gelding nuzzle her hands. “I’m sure you find it hilarious that I’ve let the ranch get in this condition.”

  “I’ve never thought you were spoiled, Kenzie. A little pampered, but if I was a wealthy man with a daughter, I imagine I’d pamper her too. I can’t fault you for that.” He shoved his hands into his pockets and blew a breath out between his lips. “And what’s become of this ranch isn’t funny at all, it’s downright sad. From what I could see on foot this morning, you have a lot of weak spots in your fencing, some much-needed maintenance on structures, and what I’ve seen of the herd doesn’t look too hot. What the hell happened?”

  “My daddy died,” she snapped, wiping her hands on her jeans as she pulled away from Suede and headed for the bag of oats. “Thanks for stopping by to tell me how poorly I’m running the ranch, but I already know, and have made the decision to sell.” Her voice cracked and she cleared her throat to cover it up. “I’m sure you can find your way back to the main road.”

  “I’m sorry you lost your father.” Chance’s hand wrapped around her upper arm as she passed him.

  She had no choice but to stand before him, looking into his hard face. “Then maybe you should have been here for his funeral.”

  His eyes closed for a moment before reopening, the blue softer than before. “I didn’t find out until yesterday.”

  “Would it have made a difference?” She angled her head to the side, waiting for an answer she already knew. She’d chased him away with her desperate ploy for his affection, and he’d never set foot in Cook County again, not until now when his own mother needed to be buried.

  “I really am sorry. Mark was a good man.” He let go of her arm and glanced around the barn. “I understand that he’s not around to help you, but what I don’t get is why the bunkhouse is empty. What happened to the men who worked this ranch? They could have kept it up better than this.”

  “They left,” Kenzie said with more than an ounce of anger. “Daddy decided he should get married again the year after you left, and his money-hungry wife didn’t understand why he paid his men so much better than his friends paid their men, despite the fact Daddy’s ranch was a lot bigger and therefore more profitable.”

  Chance’s eyebrow shot up. “Mark Calhoun let a woman tell him what he could and couldn’t pay his own men?”

  “Not just any woman. His wife,” Kenzie reminded him around the ball of disgust creeping into her throat. “She complained and complained so he told the men he was having financial difficulties and cut their pay. They weren’t really happy, but they’d known him for a long time and took his word for it. They stayed on.”

  “So what happened?” Chance glanced past her to where Hershey stood, whinnying for food, and gestured with his head toward the oats.

  “She started spending money like it was going out of style,” Kenzie explained as they worked together to feed and water the horses. “The men didn’t appreciate seeing her drive up in a brand new Lexus not long after my father cut their pay on the claim of financial difficulties.”

  Chance shook his head in disgust. “How long did they stay?”

  “Surprisingly, they stayed on a good number of years, but morale was never the same.” She sighed as she finished pouring Tulip’s feed. “Then financial difficulties did happen. That woman was determined to spend every last dime my daddy had to his name, and she nearly did.”

  “The ranch hands got another pay cut?”

  “Pay cuts, plural.” She returned the bucket she was using to its place by the feed. “He left me the ranch in his will, but that skank got everything else. She even took the Mustang my daddy got me for my sixteenth birthday because he hadn’t thought to include it in the will. In his head, he’d bought the car for me. It was mine.” She looked up to see Chance shaking his head, jaw clenched tight, eyes smoldering.

  “I can’t believe it. I can’t believe Mark Calhoun would marry a woman like that.”

  “Why not? She had what every man cares about.” She held her hands out several inches in front of her own chest then sighed. “I guess he’d grown tired of being alone.”

  “He had you,” Chance pointed out, returning his bucket to rest with the one she’d used. “As for his physical needs, he could have gotten a whore. Sounds like he pretty much did, only he paid too much.”

  Kenzie laughed at the insinuation against her stepmother, but quickly sobered. “I thought I was his shining star,” she admitted. “Apparently I wasn’t as highly favored as I thought.”

  “He loved you, Kenzie. Anybody could see that. Hell, he…” Chance chuckled as he leaned back against the barn wall and folded his arms. “He cornered me in this very barn when you were about sixteen. Told me I was a decent guy, but if I ever so much as laid a finger on you he would castrate me with his own pocket knife.”

  Kenzie gasped. “He didn’t!”

  “Oh, he did.” Chance grinned down at her and let out another chuckle. “He said, ‘Keep it in your pants or learn how to walk without it, son. I won’t tell you again,’ and strolled right out of here as if he hadn’t just threatened me.”

  Kenzie covered her mouth with her hand, too mortified to say anything. All the times she’d brushed up against Chance right behind her father’s back and he’d had that threat hanging over him… “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  He shrugged. “You were young. I figured it might have embarrassed you, and it wasn’t anything he needed to tell me anyway. I would never have touched a kid, regardless.”

  No, he wouldn’t have, but she’d certainly tried every trick in the book to get him to…until the day he’d offered to let her take what she’d wanted.

  The image of him sitting in the kitchen chair, his large erection pointing at her, flashed before her and her stomach clenched in response. She’d hated him so much after that. He’d humiliated her, taken her love for him and flung it in her face. Yet, she still hadn’t found another man who could make her feel what he’d once made her feel. Hell, she’d been proposed to a few weeks ago, by a man who had the financial means to get her out of debt, but she couldn’t do it. Will didn’t make her heart soar like Chance always had.

  “Thanks for helping me feed the horses,” she murmured and stepped toward the door. “I know it’s disappointing seeing the
ranch like this after the way it once was, but I’ve done the best I can under the circumstances. Men don’t stay when you can’t pay them well, and I can only do so much by myself. I was never really taught about the ranching business, other than how to apply my accounting degree toward the bookkeeping. All I can do is make sure the animals are fed…and sell it.”

  “You don’t want to sell this ranch.” Chance straightened from the wall and stepped forward. “This is your heritage.”

  “Maybe if I’d been a boy.” She shook her head, sniffed, desperate not to let the burning in her eyes lead to tears. “If Daddy had wanted me to keep this land, he would have taught me how to take care of it.”

  “He wouldn’t have wanted his pretty little girl cleaning shit out of stalls or pairing off cattle to screw,” Chance stated in his usual indelicate way. “He probably thought you’d have a husband by the time he died, someone who’d do the dirty work for you.”

  Fat chance of that, she thought with a sickening thud in her stomach. The only man she’d imagined in that role stood before her now, and he’d made a fool of her. He’d taught her a very valuable lesson the night he left. You couldn’t make a man love you just because you loved him, and sexual attraction was way different than love. Even if Chance still found her attractive, he’d proven he didn’t care for her on a deeper level…not like a husband should love a wife. The knowledge of that made her feel even more stupid for sending Will away, but deep inside she’d held on to the hope Chance would come back groveling for her. Well, he was here now, only he wasn’t groveling.

  “Yeah, well, I don’t have a husband and I’m not snagging one for the wrong reasons so I have to sell.”

  “What are you asking?”

  She frowned as she noted the curiosity in his eyes. It was a little too intense. “Why?”

  “I’ve been saving up to start a ranch of my own.” He shrugged. “I always loved this place. It’d be a good place to put down roots and start a family.”

  Start a family. Get a wife and have children…on her land. Create little versions of him with some woman on the same land she’d grown up following him around on, loving him…imagining him carrying her over the threshold. Did the man have no conscience?

  Kenzie balled her hands into fists, enraged by his insensitivity, as if he could forget the way she’d felt about him. “Fuck you, Chance Masters.”

  His eyes grew wide. “What?”

  “You can’t have my land.” She turned on her heel and made for the house.

  “Ah ha! I knew you didn’t really have it in you to let go of this place.” He followed her out of the barn. “It’ll take work, but it can get back to what it once was.”

  Kenzie rolled her eyes, amazed by his gall. Was he really that dense to think she was mad at him because she didn’t want to sell the land? Did he really not know he’d just shoved the knife he’d stabbed into her heart ten years ago even farther?

  She spun around and faced him, forcing him to come to an abrupt stop. Dirt plumed up from the ground and she waved it away. “What part of ‘I don’t have the money to hire ranch hands or the knowledge to manage this place the way it should be managed’ do you not understand?”

  He held his arms out to his sides. “I know how to do everything that needs doing, Kenz. In case you can’t figure it out, I’m offering my services to you.”

  How sweet. He showed more concern for her land than for her. Kenzie shook her head and let out a growl before turning and clomping up the porch. “I can’t afford you either.”

  “I haven’t even stated my fee,” he yelled. “I come pretty cheap.”

  Kenzie stopped, turned, saw the grin spread across his face. The image of him in the kitchen chair flashed through her mind once more followed by a slash of red. “You son of a…” She stormed down the steps and across the short distance to shove him hard in the chest. “I didn’t sit on your dick ten years ago and I’m not going to do it now!” She ignored the fake slack-jawed look of surprise on his arrogant face and twisted around, determined to make it all the way into the house this time.

  “Hey!”

  His voice came out a deep boom of thunder, sharp enough to crack like a whip. She froze. Never had she heard a man sound so angry.

  “Get your ass back down here.”

  You don’t tell me what to do, she thought, but swallowed down the words. To her utter shock, her feet started moving toward him, her heart hammering under the brutal look in his eyes.

  “That’s not what I was going to say.” He said the words slow, as if he’d lose control if he didn’t say each word carefully.

  She stood close enough to slap his face, but didn’t dare. His body vibrated with anger, and his fierce eyes held her in place. Still, she wasn’t going to be toyed with again. “I’m not going to suck—”

  He clamped one hand over her mouth; the other held the back of her head so she couldn’t jerk away. “I’m going to do you a favor and stop you from making another insult you’ll regret la—Ouch! You little—”

  He shook his hand in effort to ease the pain of the bite she’d delivered while she spit on the ground, letting him know even the taste of him turned her stomach...or at least she pretended it did.

  “I wasn’t going to say that either! How could you think I’d come back here after all this time and…” He closed his eyes, shook his head, and then looked up to the sky before nodding. “You’re right. I’m an ass and I tried to come over here and act like I could help you without giving you a real apology for what happened the last time we saw each other.”

  Kenzie was surprised by the sincerity in his voice, more so by the chagrined expression on his face. Still, she’d thought he was sweet and kind before; he’d taught her he could be nasty too. “I don’t care about an apology.”

  “Well, too bad, because you’re going to get one.” He took a deep breath and licked his lips. “I have regretted that day for the past ten years. If I could change the way I left here I would. You didn’t deserve the way I treated you. I didn’t think it through, I just…” He licked his lips again. “I panicked.”

  “Panicked?” Kenzie laughed, a bitter little sound. “As I recall, I was the inexperienced one.”

  “And I wanted to keep it that way.” His eyes burned through her. “You were always a beautiful girl, Kenz, then you started hanging around that damn Stacy tramp, getting ideas. You have no idea how hard it was for me to see you laying out in skimpy little swimsuits, how many cold showers I had to take. Every time you had the chance, you were rubbing up against me, making it harder and harder to be respectful toward you. That day I broke enough and got a taste of you…I knew I was about to cross a line I couldn’t uncross later and you were too young to see the danger. You thought you loved me, Kenzie, but the truth was…I was just the first guy you thought was cute, and I was too damn old for you.”

  Kenzie opened her mouth to refute his assumption he’d only been a crush, but he cut her off.

  “I had to do something to make you so angry, so embarrassed…” He took off his Stetson and raked a hand through his thick, wavy hair before replacing it. “If you didn’t kick me out right then I would have taken what you’d been foolishly shoving in my face. You would have eventually realized that I was just some worthless cowboy who worked for your dad when not riding bulls, and you wouldn’t have just hated me, you would have hated yourself. I couldn’t let you do that, Kenzie. I just couldn’t.” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, slowly opening them on the exhale. “I knew you’d be mad, and embarrassed. I’d planned on it, but I didn’t realize just how much you really believed you loved me. I never meant to crush your heart like that, and I am truly, deeply sorry.”

  She let out a shaky breath, floored by his admission. He still didn’t get it, couldn’t believe she’d genuinely loved him. She’d been so angry, thought he’d treated her the way he had because he was a cruel bastard. But all along he’d been trying to protect her.

  “I accept your apo
logy.” She swiped her eyes with the back of her hand before tears could form. “You know…back then I thought it was simple. I loved you, and because you thought I was pretty you should have loved me. I mistook your kindness for a return of my feelings. Now that I’m older, I realize the age difference was a huge deal, and I…I know I put you in a horrible position.” She squared her shoulders and forced herself to meet his gaze evenly. “I guess I picked the right cowboy. Some other man in your position would have taken advantage.”

  “I feared that every time I headed out for the circuit,” he confessed. “Especially with you hanging around Stacy Cove. That girl was loose as hell and determined to rub off on you.”

  “I only wanted you,” Kenzie reminded him, seeing no point not to. It wasn’t a big secret. “I guess I should be glad one of us was smart.”

  He made a rough growling noise in his throat. “I wouldn’t say smart. If I’d been smart, I would have handled things a lot better.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “Your dad was good to me and gave me work when I needed it. He knew there was something going on between us and he gave me the chance to be a good man about it rather than shoot me in the balls like he could have. I owe it to him to help you get this ranch back where it needs to be.”

  “Chance, I appreciate it, but it’s no use. I can’t sell the ranch to you.” Not if he was going to bring some woman onto it and start a family. He could say her feelings for him were make-believe, but she knew better. “Thanks, though, for the apology. I do feel better knowing why you did what you did.”

  She sighed and turned toward the house, done with the conversation.

  “I believe I said I would work for you.”

  She couldn’t stop the laugh from tumbling up her throat. “And I told you I couldn’t afford you.”

  “I haven’t stated my fee yet.”

  “Oh for goodness sakes.” She turned on the porch. “Whatever it is, I’m sure I can’t pay.”