One Fine Cowboy

by Joanne Kennedy

  “No wonder he’s bad,” she said. “And no wonder Sandi left you. They’re just living up to the labels you go slapping on everything. She’s girlie, and Junior’s vicious. What’s Buttercup? Stupid?”

  His head was spinning, and he was pretty sure it wasn’t from the concussion. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “If you label things, they’re liable to perform right up to your expectations.”

  “I don’t label things.”

  “You labeled me. City girl, all hair and makeup. Well, I just cleaned up your monster killer stallion for you.” She tossed her head, and that crazy hair flared up again. “Label me now.”

  Chapter 9

  Charlie planted her feet solidly on the barn’s worn floorboards, daring Nate to contradict her. Her face felt warm, flushed with excitement from the encounter with the horse.

  Nate stared back, meeting her eyes with his own steely glare, and suddenly she felt an electric current flow between them—a deep, primal connection not unlike what she’d felt with the horse, but with an additional component she didn’t want to identify. She stepped forward, lips parted, then caught herself and looked away. It broke the bond, but the moment remained, throbbing between them like a promise.

  Nate’s gaze dropped from her face and swept up and down her body, assessing every detail like a wealthy buyer at a livestock auction. She felt herself come alive under his scrutiny and wondered if he was noticing her bone structure, the length of her legs, the swell of her breasts.

  She gave herself a mental slap. Cowboy, she told herself. Stupid cowboy.

  But wasn’t that a label too?

  That was different, she told herself. Sometimes you had to label things. You had to remind yourself of the facts when your impulses got the better of you. Sometimes a label was all that stood between you and sure disaster.

  Because any connection between her and this cowboy was sure to end badly. They had nothing in common. Nothing. She was educated and determined to finish her degree. He obviously knew horses, and as a rancher, he was probably well versed in weather and crops and agriculture—but he was hardly dedicated to higher learning. She was sociable, loving parties and get-togethers with her girlfriends. He seemed perfectly content to commune with the horses and the sagebrush—anything that didn’t require words. Sure, there had been something between them for a minute there—a visceral connection, man to woman—but you couldn’t base a relationship on sexual attraction.

  Sometimes it was fun to try, though.

  Nate’s eyes finished their exploration of her finer points and rose to meet hers. She could feel him fishing for the connection, but she closed her heart and glared.

  “So what am I now?” she repeated, hands on hips.

  “Hm,” he said, putting a finger to his lips and squinting, pantomiming deep thought. His eyes widened when he hit the answer. “Pissed off?”

  Charlie laughed in spite of herself. “You got that right.”

  The tension drained out of his face, and she could swear the air cooled a little as he rested his shoulder against the wall. With the gauze taped to his forehead, he looked like a hero returning from a war. “And pretty crazy about the monster killer stallion,” he added. “Am I right?”

  She tilted back against the wall herself, then glanced over at the tall, dark, handsome horse and smiled.

  “Oh, yes,” she said.

  “So.” He leaned forward a little, so she had to look up to meet his eyes. “Do you always like them dangerous?”

  His tone was quiet, caressing, and she felt her pulse quickening. She could tame him too, she thought, just like the horse—but she shook her head and pushed that notion to the back of her mind. Looking down, she concentrated on sweeping a clear space in the dust and straw-specks with the toe of her boot.

  She shrugged. “I guess I do have a thing for the bad boys,” she said. It was true. She always gravitated toward difficult men. That way she could have her fun and walk away unscathed. “That’s probably why I’m still—well, never mind.”

  His lips quirked up on one side. “Single?”

  She stepped back. “I prefer ‘independent.’”

  “That would about cover it,” he said. His voice was low, almost a growl, and she took another step back. She was starting to think he was more dangerous than the stallion.

  No wonder mares were so jumpy.

  “How’s that knee?” he asked.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “Throbbing a little.”

  “You want me to look at it?”

  “No. It’s fine.” She had some other throbbing parts that might need some attention, though. She wiped that thought out of her mind and pasted a polite smile on her face. “So,” she said. “Are you going to show me how to change that bandage?”

  “No,” he said, but there was a note of humor in his voice. “I’ve got enough trouble without getting you and Peach together.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “She’s—a lot like you.”

  Charlie cocked her head. So the guy already thought he knew her. “Like me how?”

  “Difficult.”

  Maybe he did know her.

  “And she’s in heat,” he added.

  She gave him a sharp look, but he didn’t seem to realize what he’d said.

  “Peach can wait ’til tomorrow,” he continued. “And anyway, I already called Ray. We have to leave something for him to do.”

  She pouted, disappointed. “But you said—you said I could have your gerbil.”

  He laughed. “You’re impossible. And Peach is no gerbil. Besides, it’s dinnertime, don’t you think? How ’bout some turkey and snot? Or maybe something new. I found some macaroni and vomit in the back of the freezer.”

  “Mmmm,” she said. “Vomit. My favorite.” She grinned. “Hey, is there someplace around here I can use a cell phone? I need to call my mom.”

  “Up the hill behind the barn.” He walked her past the stalls and swung open both halves of a Dutch door. “There’s kind of a path.”

  He gestured toward a flat channel where the grass had been pressed down. It wound its crooked way up a gentle slope toward a twisted pine that arched over a weathered park bench. Charlie trekked up the hill, then sat down and dialed home.

  “Honey?” Her mother sounded worried. “Did you make it? I thought you’d call yesterday.”

  “I should have.” Charlie felt a stab of guilt. She’d promised to call as soon as she reached the ranch. “Sorry. I’ve just been so busy.”

  “With the cowboys?”

  “No.” Charlie sighed and rolled her eyes. She felt like a teenager again, defending even the slightest encounter with a boy. “Well, kind of. But not in a friendly way. There’s only one, and he’s a jerk.”

  “Well, good.”

  Charlie laughed. “You’re the only mother I know who hopes her daughter doesn’t find a nice guy and settle down.”

  “No, I hope you do,” her mother said. “I just hope you don’t do it now. Don’t forget The Plan.”

  “No worries,” Charlie said. “The guy’s a jerk, the place is a dump, and I can’t wait to get home.”

  “I thought this was some kind of fancy dude ranch.”

  “So did I. But the brochure exaggerated.” She looked down the hill at the ramshackle barn, with its sagging roof and weather-worn paint. “It exaggerated quite a bit.”

  “Have you learned anything?”

  Charlie thought about her encounter with Junior. “Yeah, I have, actually.”

  “Good. You’ll be bringing back lots of information for your advisor, then?”

  “I think so. I’m working on it.”

  “Good. That’s what matters. Eyes on the prize, Charlie. Remember that.”

  Charlie watched as Nate stepped out of the barn, pushing a wheelbarrow full of straw. He’d taken off his shirt, and Charlie couldn’t help admiring the way the sun glossed the tops of his shoulders and shadowed the muscles of his back.

>   “I know, Mom,” she said. “Eyes on the prize.”

  ***

  Charlie twisted a soapy sponge into a tumbler while she mooned over the view from the window over the sink. Nate had protested when she set the table with plates and silverware, but she was pretty sure he’d liked eating like a real human being for a change. There was a nice, calm vibe over dinner—a feeling of family.

  Not that she knew what family felt like. She’d never really had one—just an absent father and a mother who was always working, always stressed, struggling to raise a daughter alone. Her grandparents had pretty much ignored her since they’d put up a wall of holier-than-thou disapproval between themselves and their wayward daughter. If Charlie had learned one thing from her mother, it was to go it alone. You might love your family, and they might love you back as best they could. But that didn’t mean you could rely on them. It didn’t mean you could trust them to be there when you needed them.

  And men? Men were even worse—users and opportunists, intent on their own pleasure, their own goals. Still, it had been kind of nice, sitting across from the table from a man, eating… well, eating macaroni and vomit.

  Dinner wasn’t always about the food. Sometimes it was about just sitting down with somebody. Feeling connected.

  But she’d feel a lot more connected if they were eating something they could actually look at without making distressing connections between the food and various unpleasant bodily functions. Maybe she could cook something.

  She opened the pantry cupboard. It was neater than the rest of the house, with snacks and cereals lined up on paper-covered shelves. There were five different kinds of sugary cereal, several jars of peanut butter, a box of animal crackers, and two containers of Nestlé’s Kwik. The guy ate like a kid.

  Hopefully there was something nutritious in the freezer. She opened the top compartment in the ancient fridge and sorted through an assortment of packages wrapped in white butcher paper. If some animal had died to feed Nate, there was no point in wasting the sacrifice. Charlie herself would never eat meat—not ever—but she tried not to be prejudiced against carnivores. They just didn’t know how animals were treated at the factory farms and slaughterhouses that provided their meat. They were uninformed.

  Unenlightened.

  She peeled back the paper on one packet and stared down at an angry red hunk of frozen flesh. It was obviously some part of a cow. She winced and pulled the paper back over it, reading the description slashed in magic marker across the front.

  Brisket.

  What the hell was a brisket, and what did you do with it? It looked like the kind of thing you saw centered on a platter, browned and surrounded by potatoes and carrots, but she had no idea how to get to that result. She shoved it back in the freezer and pulled out a slightly smaller bundle.

  Another slab of meat. This one was rounder, kind of a bread-loaf shape. She pictured a cow she’d seen once at a PETA protest. Someone had spray-painted lines on it so it looked like the diagrams you see in cookbooks—a walking meat-cutting guide. It had been an effective image, the living, walking beast, with its soft brown eyes, crisscrossed with harsh black lines. The guy leading it had worn an executioner’s costume, with a black hood, and carried an axe decorated with fake blood.

  She shuddered and flipped the corner of the paper over. Boneless Shoulder Roast, she read.

  Boneless shoulder? She’d heard they were breeding genetically altered cows these days, but how did the poor thing walk?

  She sighed and pulled out another package.

  Ground beef. She never thought she’d be so glad to see an animal chopped up beyond recognition. This she could deal with. She could make spaghetti—with meatballs for Nate and whatever other students might show up.

  Because they were bound to show up. Nate seemed confident no one would opt to stay at Latigo Ranch, but he hadn’t seen the brochure. Wherever Sandi had taken those pictures, it had been gorgeous—rustic, yet comfortable, with rough-hewn log furniture and open-beam ceilings.

  She glanced around the kitchen, taking in the worn linoleum floor, the scarred countertops, and the chrome dinette set. Then she looked at the wallpaper and felt a rush of happy, homey familiarity. The place definitely worked for her—but the other students were in for a very rude surprise.

  ***

  Nate’s head was pounding by the time he’d finished the after-dinner chores. He practically staggered to the sofa, then fell onto the cushions, letting his head loll on a pillow. Sleep. He needed sleep.

  Blessed, blessed sleep.

  “You can’t sleep,” said a voice behind him.

  Nightmares already?

  He turned to see Charlie standing in the doorway to the kitchen. There were times he might call the woman a nightmare, but this wasn’t one of them. Her hair was smoothed down, the spikes calmed to sleek layers, and her face was freshly scrubbed. Without the red lipstick and dark eyeliner, her face looked softer, more approachable.

  More kissable.

  He chased that thought away. It was totally inappropriate—but he couldn’t help moving his eyes down that body, lured by the pale skin of her bare legs. She was wearing only an oversized white T-shirt that barely covered those mysterious panties, and Nate was sure he could see faint round shadows where the fabric peaked over her breasts.

  Damn right he couldn’t sleep. Not after seeing that. He licked his lips, then pulled his gaze back up to her face, flushing guiltily.

  “You have a concussion,” she said. She seemed totally unaware of the fact that he’d just stripped that T-shirt off her in his mind, savoring the curves and valleys of the body underneath. Her skin would be smooth, he thought—smooth, warm and yielding.

  Totally unlike her personality.

  “You can nap for maybe an hour,” she continued, stern as a drill sergeant with a new recruit. “But you need to wake up every once in a while. Maybe you could set an alarm.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said, looking away. He could feel himself shifting, stirring with arousal, and he squeezed his eyes shut, calling up Aunt Martha from the depths of his subconscious. “It’s nothing serious.”

  She plopped down on the sofa beside him and peered into his eyes. He turned away. He knew what she was looking for, and he knew she’d find it. He’d looked in the mirror earlier, and his pupils were still dilated. But he was fine. In fact, judging from the way his body was responding to the sight of Charlie in her skimpy nightclothes, he was perfectly healthy.

  She reached up and took his head between her hands, turning his face toward hers. Her eyes met his with an intensity that set his pulse to pounding, and he could swear his temperature spiked a good three degrees. Maybe she was only looking for concussion symptoms, but it felt like she was looking deep inside him, searching his mind—maybe even his soul. He swallowed hard, wondering if she could see his thoughts: The faint outline of Aunt Martha, fading behind an ever-changing series of images. Images of Charlie, naked as she stood there in the doorway. Naked on the sofa. In his bed. In his arms. On his lap.

  He needed to put something on his lap, that was for sure. Charlie didn’t need to look in his eyes. All she needed to do was look down and she’d know exactly what he was thinking.

  “Your pupils are still huge,” she said.

  She hadn’t caught his thoughts then. Or noticed the growing bulge pressing at the fly of his jeans. He breathed a sigh of relief and let his eyes meet hers.

  The same connection he’d felt in the barn zinged back into being, stretching between them, pulling them together. Charlie’s eyes widened in surprise. She looked away, but then her eyes flicked back to his, as if she couldn’t help herself, and now he felt like he was looking into her soul, into her heart, past the brittle façade she presented to the world to a softer version of Charlie hidden behind it. The flickering lights around the edge of his vision intensified, giving her a shimmering halo, and he closed his eyes and gave in to the inexplicable force that was drawing them together.

>   When their lips touched, the pull intensified. It was instantaneous, thrumming like a lariat stretched taut in the moment where the roped calf balks and the horse backs, pulling the rope tight—but when he went to haul her in, deepening the kiss, she slipped the noose and pulled away.

  Chapter 10

  He couldn’t say how long the kiss had lasted. Had it been seconds? Minutes? Maybe hours? It wasn’t duration that mattered; it was the intensity of it, the feeling he’d given in to a fixed, unalterable destiny that had been waiting for him all his life. The feeling was almost overwhelming—overwhelmingly good—but when he opened his eyes, the look on Charlie’s face said otherwise. Her expression was easy to read:

  Sheer, stark terror.

  “Oh shit,” she said.

  It wasn’t quite the response he’d hoped for, but it was pure Charlie. He couldn’t help smiling.

  “I love it when you talk dirty,” he said.

  “No, really.” She jerked to her feet, pacing the room and swishing her hands together as if dusting flour from her palms. “That didn’t happen, okay? Didn’t happen.” She turned to face him, narrowing her eyes, and soft, sweet Charlie was gone, replaced by the Charlie she wanted the world to see.

  “It’s just been too long, I guess. Or something,” she said. “I just—I don’t know what I was thinking.”

  Well, good. If she didn’t know what she was thinking herself, maybe she hadn’t figured out what was going through his mind either.

  “But you can’t sleep,” she said. She was all business again, as if nothing had happened. “You can take a nap, but I’m waking you up in an hour.” She grabbed the remote and powered up the television. “You can use the bed if you want to.”

  “I’m fine right here.” No way could he sleep in the bedroom. Not after seeing her sprawled on his bed the night before. His dreams were randy enough without being fueled by that vision, and by the scent of her that no doubt lingered on the pillows.

  He pulled off his boots and dropped them to the floor, then set a throw pillow in Charlie’s lap and lay his head on it, bending his knees and pulling his stocking feet onto the sofa. He felt her stiffen and glanced up to see her staring down at him, her expression changing from confusion to anger to tenderness and back again. She settled on pissed off, which seemed to be her default expression.