by Lois Greiman
“Why? Because any natural woman would fall for your two-bit charm? Because any natural woman would be entranced by the sight of your eyes, would die for the strength of your arms around her, would be struck speechless at the sound of…” Her words trailed off, and for the life of her, she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten started on this track.
He was staring at her, his sensual lips slightly parted, his brows raised over his mahogany eyes.
She blinked twice and considered hiding behind the roping dummy like a whipped cur. But a Clifton Vandegard didn’t hide. “Maverick’s a…a natural,” she finished lamely, finding her line of thought with some difficulty.
He exhaled a soft breath finally, staring at her as if trying to read something in her expression. “And where did you get your horse knowledge, Hannah? Kentucky?”
“That’s none of your business.”
A muscle jumped in his jaw. His brows lowered. “I think I have a right to know a few things about my employees—such as…oh, I don’t know—why the hell they’re here!” he said, leaning into her face.
She tried to hold his gaze, but finally looked away. “Listen,” she said, glancing at the horses in the pasture. “You want to build a reputation for your stallion. But you’re not going to do it. Not unless you get some of his babies out there winning ribbons.”
“His babies’ll win,” he said. “Belt buckles—for roping!” He took a few strides toward her.
“I can make that horse jump. I can make him fly.”
“I don’t want him to jump. I don’t want him to fly. In fact, I don’t want any of your prissy city ways or your prissy city tack or—”
“Prissy!” She crunched her fists tight and gritted her teeth. “I am not prissy! I’ve worked off my…” She could think of a thousand appropriate things to say, but her mother’s words were still perfectly clear in her mind. A lady does not use profanity.
“Your what?” he asked.
“I’ve worked my…fingers off for you! And—”
His laughter interrupted her. “And you have such pretty little…fingers,” he said. “But the fact remains, I’m not going to let you spoil that horse.”
“Spoil him!” She spat the words.
“An animal like that needs a firm hand, not some soft—”
“I am not soft!”
He grinned as he let his gaze sweep down her body, as if thinking of parts of her anatomy that were just that.
She gritted her teeth. “I can do anything you Barbarian Brothers can do!”
“Yeah?” He raised his brows at her. “The Barbarian Brothers can team rope. Can you do that?”
“A retarded chimpanzee could do that. And probably with more panache.”
He canted his head at her. “More what?”
She snorted at his ignorance.
He growled back at her. “So you’re saying you can rope.”
“Of course I can!”
“Then come on.” He raised the lariat toward her.
She blinked. Her temper settled a notch. “Well, I didn’t say…” She paused and swallowed. She couldn’t lose this job. “I didn’t say right now. I’d need a little time.”
“Oh.” He laughed. “How much time are we talking about, Ms. Nelson?”
She had no idea. “Three weeks?” They were the first words that came to mind.
“So you’re saying you could rope a steer in three weeks?”
He was laughing at her. Maybe a lady didn’t swear, but her mother hadn’t said anything about not knocking a man on his sexy ass.
“Your steer doesn’t look like it’s going to run all that fast,” she said, nodding toward the dummy head.
“Oh, no,” he said, shaking out his loop. “Not that steer. A real steer with legs and ears and horns. You know. The breathing kind?”
“Real steer?”
“Uh-huh. From a real horse. That’s how we do it up here on my broken-down, two-bit ranch.”
She shouldn’t have insulted his ranch. He was so touchy about that.
“You’re not…” He took a few steps closer, eyeing her as if she were a strange new breed. “You’re not scared, are you? You’re not thinking there might be something you can’t do.”
She tightened her jaw. “Three weeks will be fine. And after that time I start Maverick English.”
“Wait a minute,” he said. “What do I get out of this? The privilege of your company?”
“What do you want?” she asked, her tone cautious.
He laughed again. “Now there’s a hell of a question for a lady like you to be asking.” He walked around her, studying her as if judging her for soundness. “Aren’t you afraid I might ask for something revolting? To touch you or…Geez! What if I wanted to kiss you or something.”
The memory of his kiss sent a spurt of warmth up from her belly. “What do you want?” she asked again, holding his gaze and making certain her tone was icy cold.
He stood there in silence for a moment, head tilted sideways as he watched her, and then he said, “I want you to sing to me.”
“What?”
He nodded, as if it were the perfect solution. “Yeah. I want you to sing me a love song. At the rodeo.”
“Wh—”
“Yeah. Let’s see. Three weeks from now…” He narrowed his eyes in thought. “That’ll be about the time of the Buffalo rodeo. And they got a hell of a sound system there.”
“Sound system!”
“Yeah. I can hear it now. Course you’ll need to tell everyone you’re singing it for me.”
“I don’t…” She backed off a step. “I don’t sing really well.”
He nodded. “You’re sure as hell right about that, honey. I heard you in the shower. You couldn’t carry a tune if it were tattooed on your ass.”
She huffed.
“But—” he shrugged “—if losing scares you—”
“I will not lose!”
He grinned. “It’s a deal then?” he asked, sticking out his hand.
She grasped his hand in roiling terror.
He stepped back. “I gotta put up with you for three more weeks then,” he said.
“Yes.” She gritted her teeth. “Three more long weeks,” she agreed, but in her mind she breathed a heavy sigh. At least she was here for a while longer.
Dropping her hand, Ty turned quickly away, before she could see his expression, before she could sense his relief. He’d just won himself three more weeks, and if there was a God in heaven—maybe longer.
“GOOD MORNING, NATHAN,” Hannah said, bending over slightly to speak to the booted feet that stuck out from under a tractor.
She’d checked the bottle calves and fed the horses, and then, when she was certain Tyrel was occupied elsewhere, she had hurried over to the machine shed where she’d seen Nathan disappear.
He slid out from under a John Deere tractor and grinned at her. A streak of grease was smeared across his right cheek. “Hey,” he said. “How’re you doing?”
“Good.” She nodded. “How about you?”
“Good.”
“That’s nice.” She cleared her throat. “So you have a band?”
“Yeah. The Restless Cowboys.”
She drew a deep breath and remembered not to wring her hands.
“Were you needing something, Hannah?”
“No.” She said the word too quickly and silently berated herself. Of course she needed something. She needed a lobotomy for making such an idiotic bet. But short of that, she needed help and lots of it.
“Well, then…” Nathan grinned at her, contracting the grease stain on his cheek. “I better get to it,” he said, pulling his creeper back under the tractor.
“Nathan,” she said. Her voice sounded panicked to her own ears.
He pushed himself back out His grin had expanded, though she wouldn’t have thought it possible. “The way I see it, we got us two options,” he said. “We can either teach you to sing, or we can teach you to rope. But I heard your singing�
��” he said, and shook his head.
The air left her lungs in a rush. “You know about the bet?”
“Heard it through the grapevine. So I figure…” He slid back under. She watched him disappear and reappear a second later.
He sat up, and there, clasped in his right hand, was a lariat.
She felt her jaw drop.
“I’m your man,” he said.
Moments later they stood near the roping dummy.
“So which you want to do, headin’ or heelin’?” he asked.
“Huh?”
He grinned, nonplussed. “Ever tossed a rope before?”
“No.”
“Ever handled a rope before?”
“No.”
“Ever seen a rope before?”
“It’s that thing you have in your hand, right?”
“All right. Battle’s half won. Now you gotta rope a steer, right?”
“Right.”
“Well, then—”
“Nathan?”
“Yeah?”
“What’s a steer?”
He paled a little. “Tell me you’re joking and I’ll continue this lesson.”
“And if I don’t?”
“I might cry. ’Cuz it really tears me up inside to see Ty win a bet.”
“Okay, well in that case, I was joking.”
“Good,” he said, making no attempt to make her think he believed her. “Now listen, Hannah, there’s a couple different types of roping. But what me and Ty do is called team roping.”
“Which involves a steer,” she said.
“That’s right” He winced. “A steer. Now some of them steers have horns and some don’t. But all of them got spunk, and none of them much care for the idea of getting trussed up like Penelope Pitstop on the train track. You see, we put them in a chute about here.” Bending down, he picked up a stick and drew an X in the mud. “Then we put a horse and rider on his right side and a horse and rider on his left side.” He drew corresponding marks. “The steer is released. The first cowboy takes off after him and tosses a loop around his head. The second cowboy runs around the steer…” Nate curved a line around the steer’s mark. “…and ropes his heels.”
“His heels?”
“Yeah. His hind legs.”
“You’re kidding,” she said, certain he was.
But he wasn’t. “Nope. So which would you like to do?”
She blinked. “Which is easier?”
“The headin’.”
“Then that’s what I want to do.”
“Good idea. Okay.” Retrieving his rope from the ground, he rose and began twirling his loop. It grew larger with no visible exertion on his part. “Now, one of the first things to understand is, you don’t rope a steer from the front. Unless the steer is brain-dead, he ain’t gonna just stand there and wait for you to come get him. So you’ll be approaching him from behind like this.”
Twirling his loop over his head now, he took a few strides toward the dummy, and then, with practiced ease, he let the loop fly. It soared as easy and sure as a sparrow in flight and fell with fluid grace over the dummy’s wide horns.
“You see?” He turned back toward her. “Nothing to it”
“Right.”
“Okay. You try it,” he said, and handed her the rope.
She took it gingerly.
“It ain’t going to bite you.”
“I know,” she said, trying to figure out what to do with thirty feet of stiff nylon that had a bad attitude and a mind of its own.
“Here.” He stepped up behind her, settled his left hand on her left and his right on her right. “You gotta hold it just so. Then when it feels right just swing it a little.”
He guided her hands, twirling the loop gently beside them.
“Loosen up. Take the rhythm of the rope,” he said, moving slightly closer behind her. “Yeah, that…” He cleared his throat. He was standing close enough for her to feel the muscles flex in his chest, but she was concentrating hard on the task at hand. “That feels good. And it looks good, too. Don’t that look good, Ty?”
Hannah jumped and spun about, dropping the rope. Ty stood not twenty feet away, glaring at her. Nate chuckled, and though Hannah called herself a thousand kinds of fool, she felt herself blush. Turning, Ty strode off toward the barn.
“He’s always been the jealous type. Okay, let’s try that again,” Nate said, handing her the rope. “Swing it by your side a little.”
She did so, but she was distracted now and the loop kept slipping away, while the remainder of the rope had a tendency to snake off in sloppy folds down her left leg.
“That’s good. That’s not bad,” Nate lied. “Now bring it up above your head.”
She did. It hit her left ear and settled over her shoulders at a stubborn angle.
“Okay, well…” Nate said, rocking back on one heel and sheepishly scratching his nose. “I think you might want to cancel any late-night plans you got going for about the next, uh…three weeks or so.”
LATE NIGHT PLANS! Hannah flopped into bed like a beached fish, then wished she hadn’t because the ripple effect of the mattress made her arms bounce, and her arms shouldn’t be bouncing. Her arms shouldn’t be moving at all. She wasn’t even sure they should still be attached to her body.
Turning her head, she groaned into the coverlet.
“Hey, Hannah.” The door creaked open behind her. “You looked pretty good out there,” Ty said. The door closed.
Hannah squeezed her eyes shut and wished for death. Either his or hers—she couldn’t decide which, but in a moment the door opened again and he was still breathing.
“Tomorrow, though,” Ty said, “you might want to try roping the dummy instead of your shoulders.”
BY 6:30 THE NEXT MORNING Hannah’s skin was lobster red from the beating of the hot shower. By seven she could almost move her arms. By nine she had fed the horses, cleaned the stalls and dragged the roping dummy inside the barn.
She wasn’t about to give up, but she’d be hanged by her thumbs until she was dead before she would entertain Tyrel Fox with her roping antics again.
By ten o’clock she thought she might die. By noon, she hoped she would.
It took every ounce of her energy to keep from falling face first into her potatoes again.
“Tired?” Ty asked, watching her over his coffee cup.
“No!” She straightened with a start.
He grinned like a devil, like a satyr, like a lover. “Good. ‘Cuz I need you to go to town for me. We got some calves with scours. You’ll have to pick up some Baytril from Doc Haberman.”
“No problem.”
He snorted, then rose to his feet. “That’s nice to hear ‘cuz I’m all burned out, and I’m going to need you to take a couple of shifts during the night.”
“All right.”
“All right,” he said, and pivoting on his heel, left the house.
Nate chuckled and helped himself to another helping of scalloped potatoes. “Geez, I love seeing, him like this.”
Hannah knew she shouldn’t ask, but she couldn’t help herself. “Like what?”
Nate turned to her and grinned. “All tied up in knots,” he said, and dug into his third serving.
SHE WAS THE ONE all tied up in knots, Hannah thought. Literally. Several days had passed, but still the muscles in her shoulders were knotted like a bowline. Her back ached as if someone had been flogging her with a frayed rope. And her arms…Well, her arms weren’t even worth thinking about.
And she stunk!
Ben-Gay. If someone had told her four months ago that Allissa Clifton Vandegard would someday be roping a plastic steer and smearing her body with Ben-Gay, she would have laughed in his face. But now she was too sore to laugh. And Ben-Gay had been the only relief she could find in the drugstore in Valley Green.
Groaning out loud, she slipped out of bed.
According to the clock beside her bed it was one o’clock in the morning—time for her to c
heck the cattle.
Five minutes later she was dressed and heading out the door.
From his bedroom window, Tyrel watched her make her way across the yard toward the pastures.
She was a big girl, he reminded himself—all grown-up. Hell, she was meaner than any animal out there, and could damn well take care of herself.
Still…He paced again. What if something happened to her? Striding back to the window, he stared out into the night. Half-frozen raindrops were pinging against the windowpane. He should have gone out himself.
The hell he should have! He was paying her and paying her well! She could damn well do her part.
Staring through the darkness, he watched her climb through the fence, watched her bend so that her fanny and her endless legs were all he could see.
He was out the door in thirty-two seconds. But there he stopped. What was he going to tell her? That he was worried about her? That he couldn’t sleep knowing she was out there alone? Hell, why didn’t he just tell her he was in love with her, couldn’t breathe when she was near him, couldn’t think when she was in the same…universe?
A bull bellowed, and the sound gave Ty an idea. Stepping back inside, he unhooked a cane from the wall and stashed it beneath his arm. If Hannah saw him slinking around after her, and he hoped she wouldn’t, he’d say he’d thought Houdini had gotten out again, and he’d come armed to chase him back in.
In a few moments, Ty could see Hannah, barely illuminated by the barnyard light as she moved between the clusters of cattle ahead of him. He stood on the lee side of a huge, round bale, sheltered both from the rain and her view.
Geez, he was an idiot, he thought. Hooking the cane on his arm, he shoved his bare hands into the pockets of his jacket and gave her time to finish her tour of the pasture.
This kind of cold was worse than the dead of winter. He pulled up his collar and called himself ten kinds of a fool. He could be fast asleep in his nice warm bed about now. Shaking his head at his own lunacy, he turned toward the house.
Then her shriek brought him up cold.