THE STARDUST COWBOY

by Anne McAllister

  He pulled on a pair of socks and shoved his feet into his boots. There. He might have wished for a suit of armor, but this was better than what he'd been wearing.

  "Come in," he said. He made his voice sound steady by sheer force of will.

  The door opened a crack. "Are you sure?" There was a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

  He snatched the knob and jerked it open. "I'm sure," he said. "Now, what're you doin' down here? What do you want?"

  "I want to know if Chris had a will."

  He didn't know what he'd expected her to say, but it definitely wasn't that. His brows drew down. "What the hell are you asking a thing like that for?"

  "Because I want to know." Solemn blue eyes bored into his. "Did he?"

  It was an accusation. He didn't need it spelled out. "You must've kept real busy in town this afternoon, listenin' to all the gossip."

  "No one gossiped," Dori said flatly. "I told you I met Jake's teacher, Maggie Tanner. She just indicated some surprise when I said Jake had inherited Chris's half of the ranch. She understood there wasn't a will. Was there?"

  Riley looked away. He jammed his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He rocked back on the heels of his boots. Then he rocked forward and came down on his toes, hard. "No, there wasn't." He said the words with as much force as she'd spoken hers, daring her to make something of it.

  "Then Jake doesn't own half the ranch."

  "Yes, he does."

  "But if Chris didn't leave it to him, it's yours."

  "It's Jake's," Riley insisted.

  "Not if—"

  "Did Chris send you money for Riley?"

  "Yes. But that's not—"

  "It was money from Chris's share of the ranch. Whatever profits Chris made, they went to Jake."

  "But—"

  "Don't you think if Chris had made a will, he'd have left the ranch to Jake?" he demanded.

  The blue eyes blinked, looking suddenly confused. "I don't … I don't know. The point is, he didn't."

  "The point is, he would have. And I knew it. Once I knew about Jake, I knew Chris's half belonged to him."

  "But legally—"

  "Legally it's Jake's. Chris's name is on his birth certificate. Chris is his father. Jake is Chris's heir."

  "How do you know Chris is on his birth certificate?"

  "Because I checked." She stared at him.

  "When they sent me Chris's effects and I found out about Jake in the first place, I knew Chris would want him to have it. My lawyer didn't believe in my giving up what he figured was mine by rights. So I had to prove to him that Jake was Chris's son."

  "You didn't have to," she argued.

  "Yes," Riley said flatly. "I did."

  "Why?" Her voice almost trembled now. She shook her head as if she didn't understand. He didn't blame her.

  But he wasn't sure he wanted her to understand, either. He shrugged. "Because it belongs to him," he said simply. "It's Jake's."

  They stared at each other, she, searching his face, asking him questions he didn't want to answer; he, trying to stay steady, to get through this, to shut her up and hope she would go away.

  "You were going to buy it from him. Pay him money for something that you could have had without spending a dime." She said the words in an almost dreamy tone, as if she was trying to figure them out as she spoke.

  "Then it would have been mine," Riley agreed. "The right way."

  "That's what you wanted." She swallowed. Her words were soft. She didn't look at him now, but instead stared out the doorway into the growing darkness.

  "Yeah." He shifted from foot to foot. "It's what I'd planned."

  She didn't reply for a moment. Then she gave an almost harsh, broken laugh. "Boy, we really must have made your day when we showed up and moved in."

  Riley's mouth twisted. "It was a shock," he admitted.

  "Why didn't you say? Why didn't you just tell us to go away?"

  "I couldn't." That was the simple truth. He shrugged. "You weren't going to kill Jake's dreams."

  She gave him a wry look. "So I killed yours instead."

  "No." He hesitated. "Mine were already dead."

  In the instant after he said the words, he regretted it. He didn't talk about his dreams ever, not to anybody.

  Dori opened her mouth as if to ask him a question, then apparently saw the look on his face and thought better of it. "I'm sorry."

  "Not your fault."

  "A whole lot of everything else is my fault."

  "No. It … it hasn't been bad. Jake's … Jake's fun." He smiled a little. "A good kid. A good hand. I've … enjoyed him." He rocked back and forth on his boot heels again, watching his toes, slanting a quick glance her way.

  "Then it's just me you don't like?"

  His head jerked up. "What?"

  "You don't look at me. You rarely talk to me—except to tell me not to wash your clothes or bake cookies or do what I can to help. You walk out of rooms that I come in. You won't sit down in the evening and watch a program with Jake because I'm there, too. You don't like me." She folded her arms across her chest and stared at him, as if daring him to dispute her interpretation of the facts.

  "I like you! And I do, too, look at you!" His face was warm now from doing that very thing. Every time he looked at her, his face seemed to get hot. "And I talk to you. I've just been talkin' to you, haven't I? And it isn't necessary for you to do things for me all the time—"

  "Like wash your shirts."

  It wasn't the shirts that bothered him. He rubbed a hand against the back of his neck. "I don't want to take advantage," he muttered.

  "I think the 'taking advantage' bit has been all mine," Dori said dryly. "I think Jake and I don't belong here. I think I should sign the contract on his behalf and take a pittance, if you won't just take the ranch back for nothing, and then I think Jake and I should get out of your way."

  "No! I don't—I don't want him—you—to go!" He took a deep breath and tried to put his thoughts in order, to say them to her so they'd make sense. "That's what I wanted in the beginning—to buy the ranch, to have it all for myself, once and for all, fair and square. It would have been tight financially, but I would have managed. I intended to manage—because that's what Chris would have wanted—and because it's the right thing to do, and I wanted to do it, too.

  "But when you … when you came … with Jake—" The words got a little harder now. It wasn't quite so easy to explain how his feelings had changed since they'd been here. All he could say was, "It's better this way."

  She looked doubtful.

  "It is." He looked at her, straight at her. "I want you to stay."

  "You want Jake to stay."

  "Both of you," he said. He didn't know if he meant that or not. Dori caused him no end of confusion. He wanted her there. He wanted her gone. But he knew for a fact that if she went, so would Jake.

  Apparently his lack of conviction showed. She looked equally unconvinced.

  "Where would you go?" he challenged her after a moment.

  She gave a bitter smile. "Not home, that's for sure."

  "Would you really take Jake away? He's happy here."

  "I know that. I just … feel 'beholden.'" Her expression told him how little she liked the feeling.

  "You're not. It's not necessary."

  Her blue eyes flashed. "If you say that one more time, I'll leave right now! It is necessary for me to do my part. I'll tell you what," she said, "we'll stay—for now—if you let me contribute—if you don't refuse my cookies and my washing and folding clothes. If you let me work around here and supplement the income by working, too."

  She would stay if he let her wash his shorts? Riley closed his eyes. And what the hell was this nonsense about working? "What do you mean working?"

  "I know how to do bookkeeping. You've got a computer. If I get the right software I can maybe get some work keeping books and inventories for a few of the businesses in town. If you'll 'let me.'" Her chin challenged him again, and s
he gave the last two words a definite twist.

  He stared at her. A good twenty seconds must have passed. Then, "You know computers?" he asked.

  She nodded.

  "You do … book work?" He sounded like a drowning man who'd just seen a life preserver bob into view.

  "I learned from Milly, my sister. She got her degree in accounting at Montana State. She did the books for the store for years. But she taught me when she thought she was moving to Denver."

  Riley didn't care where she'd learned. He only cared that she knew how.

  "You'll stay if I let you do book work?" He almost laughed.

  And something sparkled in Dori's eyes. It was almost as if she were laughing inside, too. "And the laundry."

  He gave her a look of long-suffering despair. She looked back with perfect equanimity. Finally he muttered, "You drive a hard bargain."

  She smiled then. It lit her whole face. "I do, don't I?" Then she held out her hand to him.

  He stared at it. He hadn't touched Dori Malone yet. He wasn't sure he wanted to. It seemed even a little more intimate than her involvement with his underwear. But he also didn't see that he had a choice. If he didn't, she'd start thinking he didn't like her again. Cripes. He took her hand in his.

  He hadn't held a girl's hand since Tricia's.

  Oh, for God's sake, why did he have to start thinking about that?

  Dori figured right off that she had to begin as she meant to go on.

  If she just sort of easily stepped up the pace of her contribution to the ranch, Riley would think that was all there was—and whenever she tried to take it to the next level, they'd fight about it again.

  So she took down all the curtains, washed all the windows, bought several gallons of paint, drove down to Casper and bought wood to replace the splintered railings around the porch, and started sewing, painting, sawing and hammering with a vengeance.

  It wouldn't have been her choice to have four or five projects going at once. But she could do what she had to.

  And one look at Riley's face when he saw the extent of her determination made her glad she had.

  "What the hell are you doing?" he demanded when he came into the kitchen that first night to find evening light pouring through all the bare windows.

  "Cleaning house," she said. "Making curtains. Painting rooms. Fixing the porch rail. Doing my part," she finished firmly, meeting his gaze straight-on, daring him to tell her it wasn't necessary.

  He opened his mouth, then closed it again. He sighed. He scowled.

  She smiled. Brightly. "After you've cleaned up for supper, bring me your laundry."

  "I don't—"

  "Or I'll go down to the bunkhouse and get it."

  She would, too. She'd had enough of his stubbornness. She could be just as stubborn. She was, after all, John Malone's daughter.

  After supper he brought up his laundry. He put it in the washing machine himself, though. Not giving her a chance to do it. But then he got distracted when Jake asked him about something to do with one of the horses. He never did come back to put it in the dryer or to fold it.

  Dori moved to the dryer. And when it was done, she smoothed and folded it herself.

  She hadn't given it much thought before. She'd washed enough laundry in her life to do it automatically. But since Riley had made such a big deal out of it, she found herself very aware of the soft cotton of the shirts and T-shirts that stretched across his broad back and the soft jeans that were almost white where he balanced bales of hay against his thighs and along the inseam where his legs rubbed on his saddle.

  Mostly, though, she found herself lingering over his briefs.

  There was nothing very special about them. They were white. They were cotton. They had been totally unmemorable.

  Until she'd seen him in them the other evening.

  She couldn't get the memory out of her mind.

  Her fingers played with the elastic of the waistband. They traced the opening of the fly. They seemed to somehow, of their own volition, make a fist right there and—

  Dori let out a whoosh of a breath. Stop that! Just stop it!

  It was bad enough that she watched him all the time, that she seemed aware of his every movement, while he seemed oblivious to hers. Now she was developing a fetish about his underwear, too!

  Maybe she ought to let him wash his own clothes.

  No. She couldn't. Not after she'd made such a fuss about it.

  She shoved the thought from her mind, finished folding the laundry, while deliberately focusing her mind on the painting she was going to begin on tomorrow in Jake's bedroom. A much safer topic.

  Except she started thinking that it had once been Riley's bedroom, too.

  Every morning when she went in there to make sure Jake had straightened his bed and left things in fairly reasonable order, she found herself staring at the pictures on the wall. At first she'd looked at the photos of the young Chris.

  It had been interesting to see him as a boy. There was a free-spiritedness about him even then—a kind of devil-may-care attitude that came through even in print. Everyone else in the photo might be serious, but Chris was always larking about. The pictures confirmed everything she'd ever known about the man who was the father of her son.

  She found herself going back, though, not to look again at Chris, but to look at Riley.

  There was never anything devil-may-care about Riley Stratton. Not from the earliest school pictures, to the one of him and his father and a very big fish, to one of Riley sporting a big gold rodeo buckle, to a posed portrait of him with his arm around a pretty little blonde.

  Dori wondered what had happened to the blonde.

  Was she part of those dreams he said had died?

  She didn't think it was something she ought to ask.

  Jake could ask Riley a million questions, and he'd take the time to answer all of them. Dori could ask him if he wanted another cup of coffee or seconds on pork chops, and that was that.

  She got Jake's bedroom painted. She got the curtains made. She would have liked to paint the bedroom she was sleeping in, but since it was Riley's really, she didn't think she should without asking him.

  So one night later that week at dinner she said, "Do you mind if I paint your bedroom?"

  "You want to paint the bunkhouse now?" He looked up at her, startled.

  "Not the bunkhouse. Your bedroom. The one I'm sleeping in."

  "Oh." He looked momentarily confused, then shrugged.

  "It's your bedroom now. And you seem to get a charge out of painting, so do what you want."

  There was encouragement for you, Dori thought.

  "And then I'll be down to paint the bunkhouse," she informed him. "No big deal. I'll use the paint I have left over."

  He gave her a baleful look, but didn't protest, though she knew he would have liked to.

  "I thought I'd paint it pink."

  Riley choked. "The hell you—"

  Dori laughed. "Gotcha."

  She had him, all right.

  Everywhere he turned, there she was. Fixing the porch rail. Painting the bedrooms. Making curtains. Doing his laundry.

  Every time he put on his shorts now, he thought about her fingers having been there before him.

  He was going nuts.

  It was like high school all over again. Like all those months that Tricia had teased him and tempted him and let him go home aching.

  But she'd done it on purpose.

  Dori Malone wasn't. She teased him, yeah. But not the way Tricia had—not with soft kisses and playful nibbles, not with the brush of her breasts against his arm or the exploration of roving hands.

  Dori's idea of teasing was telling him she was going to paint his bunkhouse pink or asking if maybe he'd like to take her along when he moved the cattle up to the summer pasture. She knew she could get a rise out of him. It was entirely verbal.

  She never touched him at all.

  He only wished.

  It wasn't her,
he told himself. Not her specifically, that is. It was him.

  He was a healthy normal male with all the right instincts—instincts he'd kept reined in for years and years. Instincts he might have managed to keep well reined in forever if Jake's very pretty mother hadn't appeared.

  But she had. And she enticed him merely by being there—by cooking and baking and painting and sewing, by smelling good and doing laundry and smiling at him over dinner at the end of every day.

  She and Jake together reminded him of everything he'd once dreamed of. She, in particular, made him think about all the things he was missing. And wanted.

  Still wanted.

  Bad.

  Dori had what she wanted.

  She was contributing. The rooms all had new curtains. Both bedrooms and the alcove were painted—blue, not pink. She had scrubbed and polished and waxed the floors. Her mother would have been proud—if she didn't drop dead from shock first.

  Dori had never been a committed housekeeper. All those womanly tasks that she was excelling at now were not the things she would have chosen to do.

  She would have chosen to saddle up and ride out with Riley and Jake.

  But she knew even a hint of that would have been pushing too hard.

  And it wasn't as if she could have contributed much if she had saddled up. Despite her dreams and her childhood fantasies, she knew darn well she'd have been more of a liability on horseback than she would have been a help.

  So she was stuck in the house. For the moment, at least.

  She did take over the computer, though. For all the times Riley occasionally disappeared into the alcove under the pretense of "working," mostly what she glimpsed him doing in there was reading the instruction manuals and scowling at the screen. That was when she discovered that he wore glasses.

  They made him look almost as sexy as he did in just his briefs—a thought that she didn't dare pursue. She spent enough time daydreaming about Riley Stratton in various forms of dress and undress.

  She needed now to think of him as her partner—Jake's partner. And nothing else.

  So she'd hoped he would invite her into the alcove with him. She'd hoped he would say, "Come help me with this." When they'd struck their "bargain," he had, after all, seemed interested in her doing the book work.