Have Honeymoon, Need Husband

by Robin Wells

  It was the woman’s confounded eyes, he thought, withering his brow into a scowl as he hoisted himself into the driver’s seat. Something about those big blue eyes made his lips flap like a shirt on a clothesline.

  He risked a quick glance at her and found her eyes locked on him now, studying him quizzically. Luke’s scowl darkened, a silent defense against the effect she was having on him. Unless he wanted to play a round of twenty questions, he’d better turn the conversational tables, and turn them fast.

  He jammed the key into the ignition and started the engine. “Is Josie a nickname or your whole name?”

  “It’s short for Josephine,” she said, pulling the seat belt over her shoulder and fastening it at her waist. Luke couldn’t help but notice how the strap flattened her jacket between her breasts, accentuating her curves in a most distracting manner. “I’m named after my dad. I guess my parents gave up hope of having a boy when they had their fourth girl.”

  Josephine. The old-fashioned, feminine sounding name somehow fit her. “So you’ve got three sisters, huh? Do they all live in Tulsa?”

  “Yes. Along with their husbands and children.” She gazed at him curiously. “Are you an only child?”

  “Yep. Always wished I had brothers or sisters.” He’d volunteered the information without thinking, then immediately regretted it. The whole idea is to keep the conversation focused on her, he reminded himself sternly.

  He jammed his foot on the accelerator, and the truck jerked forward. “So you were the baby.”

  “And always will be, as far as my family’s concerned.”

  A note of resignation in her voice made Luke cast her a curious glance. “You make that sound like a problem.”

  “Being the youngest has a downside,” she said ruefully.

  “Really? What’s that?”

  Josie brushed a strand of hair away from her face and sighed. “Well, with three bossy older sisters and a pair of overprotective parents, I’ve always had someone telling me what to do and what not to do. I never got much of a chance to make many of my own decisions when I was growing up.” Her voice trailed off as she stared out the window. “So I guess it’s no wonder I’m not too great at it now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “According to my family, all the major decisions I’ve ever made have turned out to be mistakes.”

  The conversation was probably getting too personal, but Luke couldn’t resist delving just a little further. “Like what?”

  “Well, my family has a tradition of practicing law. Seems like all the Randalls from the beginning of time were attorneys. My father worked in his grandfather’s law firm, and Granddad worked in his father’s firm—you get the picture. It was expected that I’d join the family firm or at least marry someone who had. So when I decided to major in hotel and restaurant management in college instead of pursuing a law degree, everyone was convinced I was making a terrible mistake. Moving to Chicago instead of staying in Tulsa was viewed as even worse.”

  Luke guided the truck through a thick stand of autumn-tinged woods and glanced at Josie in the dappled light of the overhead branches. “Those sound like personal choices, not mistakes.”

  “I thought so, too, at the time. But when I was out of a job in Chicago and couldn’t land another one to save my life, it began to look like I should have followed my family’s advice. I came back to Tulsa with my tail between my legs like a whipped puppy, with zero confidence in my own judgment. I figured my family must have been right—the logical thing for me to do was to work in the family firm, marry someone from a similar background, have a life like my sisters. After all, I was the only one in my family who was different, and I was the only one who seemed to be making a mess of things.” Josie exhaled a heavy sigh. “Unfortunately, feeling that way made me especially vulnerable to their next piece of advice.”

  Consuela’s earlier remark about Josie’s family pressuring her into marriage suddenly fell into place. “Let me guess. Marrying Robert?”

  Josie nodded grimly, gazing out the window at the open pasture. “They were all so sure he was Mr. Right, so excited when he proposed to me, so full of congratulations and plans that I—well, I guess I just let myself get swept along with the tide.” She heaved a dejected sigh. “Pretty wimpy, huh?”

  Luke’s mind flashed back to his own wedding five years ago, and a wave of empathy surged through him. He, too, had had second thoughts after he’d popped the question, but instead of addressing his concerns, he’d tried to tell himself his feelings were nothing more than typical pre-wedding jitters. He realized now that he should have paid a lot more attention to his cold feet, but at the time he’d been too caught up in shuffling them toward the altar.

  “Actually, it’s pretty understandable,” he found himself responding. “Wedding plans have a way of making you feel like you’re racing downhill on a runaway locomotive, with no way of stopping the train or jumping off.”

  “They sure do,” she agreed emphatically.

  He glanced over at her, and she gave a soft smile. It seemed to Luke that the truck cab had suddenly shrunk, that they were somehow closer than they’d been a moment ago. He turned his eyes back to the road, but not before he’d caught the glimmer of curiosity in her gaze.

  “Sounds like you’ve had some experience along these lines yourself,” she remarked.

  “Afraid I have.”

  “What happened?”

  Luke shrugged. “Cheryl was more interested in getting married than in being married.”

  “Why?”

  “She was on the rebound. She’d had her heart broken, and she wanted to retaliate. I don’t think she even knew what she was up to herself, but her whole motivation was to make her old flame jealous.”

  “Oh, Luke! That must have been awful for you.”

  Luke rubbed his jaw. “Hurt my pride something awful, I’ll say that. Made me feel like the dumbest country bumpkin that ever fell off the turnip truck. But in retrospect, she did me a huge favor by leaving. She wasn’t the type of woman I would have wanted to be saddled with for the long haul.”

  “Had you known her long?”

  “Yes…and no. I went to high school with her. She moved here from Dallas my junior year. She was the town beauty, the girl all the guys fantasized about. Probably because she seemed so unattainable.”

  “Why was that?”

  He was talking too much. The wise course of action would be to just shut up, but Josie’s gaze was riveted on his face, and something about her enthralled expression made him ramble on like a tape recorder with a jammed Play button.

  “Cheryl was a real ice queen. She wouldn’t have anything to do with any of the local boys—said she liked the sophisticated, big-city type. She wouldn’t give me the time of day in high school, and afterward she moved back to Dallas. I hadn’t seen her in seven years. Then out of the blue, she called me up and said she’d been thinking about me, that we should get together. One thing led to another, and—Bam!—two months later we were married.” Luke gave a wry grin. “Of course, two months after that, we were divorced.”

  “What a terrible experience,” Josie murmured.

  “After I got a little distance from the situation, I realized my ego was bruised a whole lot more than my heart. All the same, it’s not an experience I care to repeat.” Luke shook his head. “I served my time as a married man, and I don’t intend to ever wear that ball and chain again.”

  How the heck had the conversation gotten off on this topic, anyway? Luke raked a hand through his hair and frowned in consternation. There he’d gone again, shooting off his big mouth, volunteering information about himself he’d had no intention of sharing with her.

  It was more than her eyes that made him blather like a jaybird, he decided; it was that intent expression on her face. He didn’t know when anyone had seemed so interested in something he’d had to say. She made him feel downright fascinating, and the attention went right to his head.

  The thought
made his scowl deepen, and he yanked the steering wheel harder than he needed to in order to miss a rut in the road. Josie bounced against him, her arm brushing his chest, and the contact sent a disturbing rush of warmth shooting through him.

  He spotted a herd of cows as he topped the hill ahead and exhaled in relief, glad for an excuse to extricate himself from the conversation and the suddenly too-intimate confines of the truck.

  “I need to check a calf with a cut leg in that herd.” He pulled the pickup to a halt, killed the engine and thrust open his door. “I’ll toss out a few bales of hay, take a look at her leg and be right back.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Josie clambered out before Luke could voice an objection. A dozen brown-and-white cows ambled toward them, mooing plaintively. “Looks like they’re glad to see you,” Josie said.

  “It’s not me they’re glad to see. It’s their lunch.” Luke opened the tailgate, climbed in the truck bed and tossed out a bale of hay. The cows clustered around, scooped up huge, messy mouthfuls and chewed, eyeing them dispassionately.

  “Is that all you’re going to give them to eat?”

  He glanced at the cows. As far as he could tell, they were the very picture of bovine bliss. His eyebrows quirked upward. “What else do you think they want?”

  “I thought you fed them cow chips.”

  “Cow chips?” Luke stared at her. “What the dickens are you talking about?”

  “Well, Butch told me he’d once won the cow chip throwing contest at a heritage festival, and I was hoping to see some. I wondered what they looked like.”

  Luke’s jaw fell slack with disbelief. “You’re wondering what a cow chip looks like?”

  Josie nodded.

  A smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. He rubbed his jaw to try to hide it. “What do you think they look like?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. Potato chips or corn chips or—”

  Luke couldn’t keep the laughter from erupting from his throat. “I don’t quite know how to tell you this, Josie, but a cow chip deals with the other end of the cow than you’re imagining.” He glanced down at the ground and widened his grin. “And if you don’t watch out, you’re about to step on one.”

  Josie’s gaze flashed to her feet. She stared for a moment, then looked up at Luke, her eyes were wide and horrified. “That’s a cow chip?”

  Luke nodded, his face creased in an ear-splitting grin.

  “People throw that?”

  Luke let out a chortle. “When they get old and dry, they’re as hard as a piece of wood. In fact, in the western part of the state where trees are scarce, the early settlers used them as firewood.”

  Josie’s face crinkled in distaste. “I wouldn’t want to toast my marshmallows over that.”

  Luke threw back his head and roared. To his surprise Josie joined him, laughing until tears pooled at the corners of her eyes.

  Good gravy, she was lovely, Luke thought, watching her. And her laughter was one of the nicest sounds he’d ever heard—rich, real, earthy, contagious. He laughed with her until long moments later, when she drew a ragged breath, wiped her eyes and grinned up at him.

  “You must think I’m the greenest greenhorn you’ve ever seen, huh?”

  But that was not what Luke was thinking at all. He was far too busy drinking in the sight and sound and smell of her, far too preoccupied fighting the urge to pull her in his arms and kiss her silly.

  He gave himself a mental shake, but he couldn’t wipe the smile off his face. And he couldn’t resist teasing her further. He jammed a thumb in the pocket of his jeans and grinned. “Well, that depends.”

  “Depends on what?”

  “On whether or not you thought I was going to serve those cow chips with sheep dip.”

  She leaned against him and laughed until her knees buckled. His arm somehow made its way around her. shoulders, and when they stopped laughing and looked at each other, they were standing close enough that he could smell her perfume, feel the heat of her body, see the dark blue facets radiating out from the pupils of her eyes.

  Attraction crackled between them, electrifying the air. Luke gazed at her, dazzled by a riot of optic impressions. The sunshine streamed through her hair, streaking it with red and gold highlights, reflecting the blazing color of the autumn leaves behind her. A faint dusting of freckles danced across her nose. Her cheeks were pink and wind kissed, her lips soft and upturned and tempting.

  The combined effect made Luke feel like his senses were on overload, about to short-circuit. When her eyes met his, a jolt of emotional energy surged between them, and it seemed like the most natural thing in the world for his head to lower toward her waiting lips.

  The moment he did, he felt like he’d stepped on a downed power line, like the world had exploded under his feet. Nothing mattered, nothing existed except the sweet, urgent heat of her mouth on his. Her lips yielded and parted, and he pulled her against him, winding an arm around her back, tangling a hand in her hair, losing himself in the exquisite sensation of her mouth moving with his.

  Desire, hot and intense, pulsed through him. Her arms clutched his back as if she were holding on to him for dear life, and then—

  Something wet nudged his backside. Jumping as if he’d been gigged by a cattle prod, he jerked around to find the half-grown heifer he’d come to check out nosing the back pocket of his jeans.

  The interruption struck him like a pitcher of cold water. He pulled away from Josie, jammed his hand in the pocket the calf was nuzzling and extracted a peppermint. The calf’s velvety muzzle claimed it from the flat of his hand.

  Luke reached back in the pocket, pulled out a handful of peppermints and thrust them at Josie. “Here. In lieu of cow chips, why don’t you give her some of these while I check that cut on her leg.”

  Luke crouched beside the calf, glad for a duty to perform, aroused and upset and thoroughly disgusted with himself.

  Dammit, he didn’t need this kind of distraction. He had a ranch to run and a lodge to manage. He didn’t have time to be conducting tours or drumming up wild-goose chases or getting as steamed up as a shaving mirror in the middle of the day. Especially over a woman who’d just confirmed all his suspicions that she was the rankest rank amateur who’d ever set foot on the Lazy O.

  Cow chips, indeed! He looked up from the calf’s leg to find Josie watching him, her blue eyes wearing a slightly dazed expression, her lips pink and kiss swollen, her cheeks brighter than the weather alone explained.

  He swallowed hard, fighting back the urge to pick up right where they’d just left off. He needed to explain his actions, but he’d be damned if he knew what the explanation was.

  He slowly straightened, taking care to keep the calf between them, then stared down at his boots and cleared his throat. “Look, I didn’t mean to get out of line just now,” he mumbled. “I don’t exactly know what happened. I guess I was laughing too hard and just got overly ex…ex—” Oh, criminy, O’Dell—say anything except excited! “Exuberant.”

  Overly exuberant. Oh, that was a good one. Flyin’ catfish—where the heck had he come up with that?

  Josie’s cheeks flamed. Luke swallowed painfully and averted his eyes. “Anyway, I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.” He motioned brusquely toward the truck. “We’d better get going. We’ve got a lot of ground to cover.”

  He stalked toward the pickup, wishing some of that ground would just open up and swallow him now.

  Chapter Five

  Josie braced her hand on the dashboard as the pickup bumped its way back toward the lodge late in the afternoon. The setting sun lit the clouds like a brushfire, blazing the sky with color brilliant enough to rival the surrounding autumn foliage, but Josie was too focused on the man beside her to pay much attention to the passing scenery.

  Luke was staring straight ahead, his face such a study of concentration that he might have been navigating a course of land mines.

  Ever since they’d left the cow pasture, he’d been ri
gid and stiff and withdrawn. Not that he’d been rude; on the contrary, Josie reflected, he’d been the epitome of politeness. He’d courteously answered all her questions about the ranch. He’d dutifully shown her the crop of winter wheat, the herd of longhorn cattle, the quarter horse breeding stables. In response to her questions, he’d perfunctorily explained that he held an animal husbandry degree from Oklahoma State University, that ranching was a business as well as a way of life, that technology played a key role in his operation.

  Under any other circumstances, she would have been impressed with the size of the Lazy O, with the scope of the operation, with Luke’s scientific approach to managing it.

  But she’d been far too impressed by the heart-stopping way he’d kissed her in that cow pasture to register much of an impression about anything else.

  Eyeing his rigid profile now, it was hard to believe he’d behaved with such spontaneity and passion. She might even be inclined to think she’d imagined the whole thing, except for the fact that nothing in her experience equipped her to imagine anything like that toe-curling kiss. She’d never felt anything like it, never knew such sensations actually existed. The memory made her mouth dry, and her pulse fluttered in her throat.

  For the life of her, she didn’t know how it had started. One minute they’d been boisterously laughing, and the next his gaze had fastened on hers. Then his eyes had gone all smoky and dark, and his face had tilted and lowered, and his mouth had gotten that intent, hungry set as it moved closer and closer to hers, almost in slow motion, until their lips had finally met;

  Josie swallowed hard and gazed out the window, getting that funny, melting sensation in her stomach all over again at just the thought of it.