Except for the guides. Six of them, all male. All attractive. Of course. That was the way life worked. She should have expected it.
Just as she should have expected her new riding boots to pinch, her butt to ache, her nose to be sunburned despite lashings of sunscreen and the wide-brimmed hat she had worn all day, and her skin—even where it didn’t show—to feel like it needed a once-over with a Dustbuster to remove the grit.
She hated horseback riding.
Lynn shifted position, winced, and rubbed the knuckles of her clenched fists hard against her thighs. She felt like she was getting charley horses in every muscle below the waist.
“This might help.” The man hunkering down beside her—yes, hunkering was the right word; men in Utah really did hunker down—held out a flattish gold can.
Doc Grandview’s Horse Liniment was scrawled in black letters across the top. Yeah, right, Lynn thought. When even the salve she was offered looked like it could have belonged to Wyatt Earp, Lynn’s skepticism was aroused. Everything about this trip, from the outfitters themselves to the flies that buzzed around the horses’ ears, would have been right at home in the Old West. Lynn’s verdict was, too touristy for words.
“Was I that obvious?” Lynn managed a smile nonetheless, accepting the can and turning it over in her hand. Owen Feldman was part owner, with his younger brother, of Adventure, Inc., the outfit that had arranged and was guiding the trip. Owen was tall, broad-shouldered, and lean-hipped, with close-cropped tobacco brown hair, a craggy, square-jawed face, and baby blues to die for. Maybe a couple of years older than her own age of thirty-five, he was allegedly a born-and-bred Utahn, who knew the Uinta wilderness like few others. According to the brochure he was honest, competent, and utterly reliable—and a real cowboy.
Two days into the trip Lynn had already figured out that she hated cowboys. Especially phony ones. Every time the Feldmans and their crew swung into the saddle, she half expected to hear a hidden orchestra strike up the theme song from Bonanza.
Rory, though, was eating it up. She had already pointed Owen out as a potential playmate for her mom. As for herself, Rory said, she preferred the younger brother, Jess.
The memory made Lynn frown. Where was Rory? And where was Jess?
“Lots of people get saddle sore the first day out,” Owen said, apparently attributing her grim expression to chagrin at being such a wimp. “Just rub this on your … uh, the affected part, and you’ll feel lots better by morning.”
“Thanks, I will.” Lynn slid the shoe-polish-size can into the pocket of her blazing orange windbreaker—new for the trip, the color chosen to prevent some gung-ho hunter from mistaking her for a moose—and stood up. The insides of her knees screamed in protest. The backs of her thighs throbbed. Her butt still ached. Trying not to whimper at the pain, Lynn glanced around the camp. “Have you seen Rory? Or your brother?”
Owen smiled, the tanned skin around his eyes crinkling just the way the tanned skin around a cowboy’s eyes was supposed to crinkle. He stood up too, topping her five foot two by almost a foot. Central casting couldn’t have chosen better, Lynn reflected dryly.
“Rory’s your daughter, right? The little blonde? She and a couple of the other girls wanted to learn how to cast. Jess volunteered to demonstrate before chow.”
“Oh, great.” Lynn couldn’t help the tartness of her tone. While Owen obviously had no problem with his brother taking a gaggle of impressionable young girls off somewhere alone, Lynn did. Jess Feldman was not cut from the same leather as his older brother. Utterly reliable didn’t even begin to apply. “Which way did they go?”
She was trying for a humorous tone, but didn’t quite make it. Owen’s gaze sharpened.
“Come on. I’ll show you,” he said.
“I don’t want to take you away from anything you need to be doing.” Though there was a grain of truth in her reply, the larger reality was that Lynn was simply not comfortable accepting even small favors from anyone. She had been alone for so long, battling her way through the world so that she and Rory could have something better than the nothing with which they had started, that she had grown to like it that way. Never depend on anyone was her motto.
Especially fake cowboys.
“Bob and Ernst are on chow detail. Tim is seeing to the horses. There’s nothing I need to be doing at the moment.” Owen smiled at her. “Come on.”
Lynn returned his smile reluctantly and fell into step beside him. They headed through the campsite toward the thick lodgepole forest that climbed the steep slope on the other side of the clearing. Towering pines had shed enough needles over the decades to make the ground soft underfoot. Lynn felt as if she were walking on an inches-thick carpet.
Most of the girls sat together in a semicircle, singing, on burlap sacks thrown on the ground. Pat Greer and Debbie Stapleton, the other mother-chaperons, glanced up from their self-appointed task of leading the impromptu sing-along to watch as Lynn passed by with Owen.
“… and if another bottle should fall, there’ll be eighty-seven bottles of milk on the wall.…”
Milk.
It was all Lynn could do not to gag. The determinedly cheerful and even more determinedly G-rated warble made her want to barf. Pat and Debbie were Tipper Gore clones: They would never permit their young charges to sing about something as age-inappropriate as bottles of beer.
Lynn liked beer. If there had been one available she would have chugalugged it on the spot just to annoy her fellow mothers.
Because they were annoying her with their cheerfulness, their nosiness, their perfect-motherness.
Lynn could feel the weight of their combined gazes stabbing her in the back as she walked past. Stylish suburban matrons comfortably married to successful men, Pat and Debbie seemed to harbor an instinctive distrust of her. As a single working mother who lived on coffee and cigarettes and had a high-profile, demanding job, Lynn supposed they considered her a different species.
And, she supposed with some reluctance, maybe they were right.
“You have any other children?” Owen asked as he stopped to hold a branch aside so that she could enter the woods ahead of him.
“Rory’s it.” Lynn strove to lighten her mood as well as her tone as she stepped past him onto a well-worn trail. It was dark and gloomy under the trees, and ten degrees cooler. Moss covered everything, from the rocks to the tree trunks to the path. The smell was damp, like somebody’s basement. “My one chick.”
“She looks like you. I would have known her for your daughter anywhere.”
Lynn walked smack into a nearly invisible spider web suspended across the path. Shuddering, she wiped the clammy threads from her face and kept going.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Lynn concentrated on responding intelligently to Owen and tried not to think about the spider that went with the web. She hated spiders. In fact, she and Rory did look alike. Both of them had blond hair—though Lynn admittedly gave nature a hand in keeping her chin-length shag bright—fair complexions, and large, innocent-looking blue eyes. Both were less than tall (she despised the word short), their lack of stature compensated for by slim builds. The difference was that for the last several years Lynn had had to work hard to keep her weight down, while for Rory such slenderness was still effortless. “Poor kid,” she said to Owen.
“I wouldn’t say that.” He was behind her. Lynn couldn’t see his expression, but his tone told her that he admired her looks. Lynn made a face. She hoped he wasn’t going to hit on her. Ruggedly handsome or not, he was going to be disappointed if he did. She had no interest in a vacation fling and no fantasies about bedding a faux cowboy.
“Do you have any children?” Lynn asked, for something to say. The path sloped upward, away from the rocky plateau where they would spend the night. Roots and the protruding edges of buried stones made it necessary to watch where she put her feet. Ahead, Lynn could hear the splash of tumbling water. Cracklings and rustlings and chirpings from living things that she preferre
d not to speculate about were nearer at hand.
“Nope.” There was a smile in Owen’s voice. “No wife either. My brother says I’m not a keeper. Once they get to know me, women end up throwing me back.”
Lynn was surprised into glancing around. “Surely you’re not as bad as all that.”
Owen’s eyes twinkled at her. “That’s what I think. But Jess was pretty positive.”
Lynn walked on. There was something about that rueful smile that made her wary. It was too charming, almost practiced. Part of the shtick. He might very well be lying to her. For all she knew, the rat could be married with a dozen kids.
Not that she cared whether Owen Feldman was married or not. But it was irritating to think that he might think she was dumb enough to succumb to a smile, blue eyes, and a cowboy hat. She had her faults, but stupid wasn’t one of them.
A sudden bright shimmer of light ahead drew Lynn’s attention. Through a frame of swaying branches, sunlight bounced off the surface of silvery water. As she walked toward the light her view broadened to take in a wide stream, a slash of sunny sky, and the brown and green wall of the forest climbing the mountain just beyond the opposite bank. A well-fed muskrat sat up on a smooth-surfaced gray rock rising from the middle of the current, whiskers quivering as it stared at something the humans could not see. As Lynn watched, it dove beneath the surface with scarcely a ripple, its sleek brown body disappearing from view.
Enchanted by the display, Lynn stepped from beneath the overhanging foliage into a scene of breath-stealing beauty. A wide creek, its water a deep green, flowed over smooth stones toward a rocky staircase some fifty yards away. There it tumbled for nearly twelve feet into a noisy, misty froth of white before continuing its quiet journey down the mountain.
Perched on boulders overlooking the waterfall were two slender, jeans-clad teenage girls. A third, blond and petite and laughing, was thigh-deep in the center of the stream just above the waterfall, legs braced apart, blue T-shirted back resting securely against the white T-shirted chest of a tawny-maned, bronzed-skinned pretty boy.
Rory and Jess Feldman. Lynn’s eyes narrowed. Despite all appearances to the contrary—she was a hair taller than Lynn now, and her childish wiriness had recently been augmented by budding curves—Rory was still a child at fourteen. A boy-crazy child.
Jess Feldman, on the other hand, was no boy. He had to be at least thirty. And, unbelievably, the no-good so-and-so had his arms around her daughter.
3
FOR A MOMENT Lynn did nothing, just watched in silence as her fingers curled into fists at her sides.
Jess Feldman’s big, tanned hands covered Rory’s smaller ones. He guided her in slowly arcing overhead and then snapping a thin bamboo fishing pole. The neon-green line looped and sang as it spun out. With a splash the sinker struck the water about twenty feet from the pair and promptly sank.
The girls on the rock applauded. Laughing, Rory turned in Jess’s arms to say something to him, saw her mother on the bank, and froze. Following her arrested gaze, Jess glanced around, discovered Lynn and his brother, and waved.
Nonchalantly. Friendly-casual. Like there was nothing in the scene to upset the mother of the innocent child in his embrace.
“Jess is good with kids,” Owen said comfortably in her ear.
Lynn registered that remark with disbelief, never taking her eyes off the pair in the water. “Good with kids” was not how she would have described Jess Feldman’s demeanor.
“Rory—and the other girls—are not kids. They’re teenagers. Young women,” Lynn said sharply, and beckoned to her daughter.
Rory scowled. Lynn steeled herself for an embarrassing scene if she insisted Rory come out of the water. She wondered, as she so often did these days, just when this hell-bent on self-destruction nymphette had replaced her sweet child.
The change had happened overnight, it seemed. When Lynn thought about it she sometimes conjured up visions from the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Maybe an alien had taken up residence in Rory’s body while the child lay sleeping.
The idea was almost comforting. At least it would absolve Lynn of any blame.
The noisy clang of metal on metal reverberated in the distance: the dinner triangle. Lynn had seen one of the men unpack it earlier.
“Chow!” Owen cupped his mouth to bellow at his brother, who grinned, gave him a thumbs-up, said something to Rory, and deftly reeled in his line. Shouldering the pole, Jess held Rory’s arm above the elbow as the pair clambered from the water. Lynn moved toward them. Owen followed.
“Thanks, Jess,” Rory said with an adoring glance upward when they reached the bank. The other girls—Rory’s best friend, Jenny Patoski, and her second-best friend, Melody James—slid down from their perch to crowd around the two. Jenny was taller than Rory, with curly black shoulder-length hair, big chocolate eyes, and fine features. She was a pretty girl, prettier than Melody, whose light-brown hair was as long and straight as Rory’s but who was unfortunately afflicted with a largish nose and smallish eyes. But even Jenny was not, Lynn thought loyally, as pretty as Rory—especially when Rory was beaming, as she was now.
“You’re welcome.” Jess gave Rory a heartbreaker’s practiced smile, then turned his attention to the other girls as they vied for his notice. He held up a hand for silence. “I’ll catch you ladies later. Right now, let’s go eat.”
Identical bedazzled expressions crossed three young faces as the girls watched him lay aside his fishing pole and reach for a flannel shirt draped over a nearby rock.
As he pulled it on with deliberate slowness, muscles rippling, they practically drooled.
It was all Lynn could do not to let loose with a sarcastic wolf whistle.
Not that she didn’t know where the girls were coming from. On the contrary, she understood only too well. At fourteen she might have been dazzled by Jess Feldman herself. He was sexy, she had to admit, but too deliberately so, though the girls were a little young to make a fine distinction like that. He sported a shoulder-length tangle of gold-shot brown hair (she wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his blond streaks were as artificially enhanced as hers were), broad shoulders, a leanly muscled torso, and enough tanned hide to reupholster a couch. Add the appeal of narrow hips and long legs in tight, wet-to-the-thigh jeans, the same to-die-for baby blues he shared with his brother, and a crooked, roguish smile, and he was the physical embodiment of a young girl’s fantasy man. It took an adult woman to discern the phoniness behind the package. Everything from his shoulder-length locks to his tight jeans seemed calculated to give females a thrill.
Lynn wondered if the brothers’ last-cowboy shtick helped bring in the tourists. She guessed that it probably did.
The women tourists, anyway.
Though Jess appeared oblivious to the teenagers’ rapt attention as he buttoned his shirt, there was no way he could be unaware of the havoc he was wreaking on their vulnerable libidos: Their hearts (or whatever) were in their eyes. Lynn didn’t doubt that he was tantalizing them deliberately.
He probably got off on giving them a thrill. He was that kind of megalomaniac, Lynn was sure. She’d met the type before, too often. He probably considered himself a stud and proved it as often as possible. The thought made her eyes narrow.
Not with her little girl, he wouldn’t!
“Where’s your jacket?” she asked Rory, tight-lipped. The blue T-shirt with its snarling-bulldog emblem clung too closely to Rory’s budding breasts. Some combination of the cooling air and her wet jeans had chilled Rory to the point where her nipples had hardened and were nudging at the thin knit, plainly visible.
At least, Lynn hoped the reaction was caused by the cold.
The child wasn’t wearing a bra.
“I left my jacket back at the camp. It’s warm. I don’t need one, anyway,” Lynn eyed her child. Rory returned the look with interest.
“Along with your bra?” Lynn asked the question pseudo-sweetly, in a voice too soft for the others to
overhear.
“Get a life, Mother.” Both Rory’s voice and demeanor bristled with dislike. “And get off my back.”
“Listen here, young lady—” Lynn heard her own voice rising and bit her lip, cutting herself off. Engaging in a shouting match with Rory would result only in her own embarrassment, she knew from experience. The debacle would end with Rory bursting into noisy tears and Lynn feeling as if someone had punched her in the stomach.
There had to be another way to deal with her daughter. But Lynn was at a loss as to what it could be.
There was another clang of metal. Rory’s gaze shifted from her mother to Jess and instantly grew adoring. Lynn gritted her teeth.
“If we don’t get back we’re going to miss out,” Owen said to his brother. Jess grinned.
“Bob’ll save enough for us. We’re the bosses, after all. Now, these ladies … sad to say, they’re a different story.”
They were moving toward camp now, with Owen ushering them along. The girls chorused a protest at the prospect of missing a meal, while Owen gallantly soothed the waters his brother’s teasing had stirred up.
Lynn tuned the ensuing conversation out. Having fallen into step just in front of Owen, who brought up the rear of their little procession, she silently contemplated the pros and cons of giving Rory a lecture on the dangers of predatory older men as soon as she could get her alone. Worthless, was her verdict as she eyed her daughter’s squared shoulders and swinging backside. Rory was already well aware of her mother’s feelings. Lynn could tell that from the very way the child walked.
And she was defiantly determined to do as she pleased. Lynn could tell that too.
She sighed. When Rory was a baby Lynn had thought that motherhood was bound to get easier as the child grew older. Little had she known!
By the time they reached camp the paean to milk bottles was, thankfully, over. Those who had remained behind were washing up and then standing in line for chow, tin plates in hand. With a cheery word to her friends, Rory scampered off to change her wet jeans.
Heartbreaker Page 2