Hunk of the Month

by JoAnn Ross

  Jude laughed at that, as she was meant to. But as she compared the two so dissimilar places she wondered if Kate ever felt claustrophobic in her adopted home.

  “Yeah, we wondered about that, too,” Lucky agreed when she mentioned it. He rubbed the square jaw Jude noticed he hadn’t bothered shaving this morning. “Especially since she always seemed to like ranch life. She was, back in high school, one heck of a barrel racer. I fi nally decided that my baby sister choosing to go live in that urban anthill you all call home definitely proves the power of love.”

  Jude thought of the way Kate’s face lit up whenever Jack’s name was spoken, about the way her expression turned absolutely beatific whenever she mentioned Dillon, which she did, constantly.

  “I think you may be right,” she said consideringly.

  “I know I am. And that’s the only reason I didn’t do what Buck advised in the beginning and lasso the girl and drag her back home the day she decided to move in with Peterson.”

  “Kate’s not exactly a girl,” Jude felt obliged to remark. “She’s a wife and mother. And a career woman.”

  “That may be. But she’ll always be my baby sister.”

  Which was, of course, Jude thought, the reason she was sitting here in the pearlescent yellow glow of early morning light, in a pickup racing down the nearly deserted highway that wound through the pine-covered mountains like a shiny black ribbon. Because this hunky cowboy definitely had a soft spot in his heart when it came to his family.

  Having watched an often exhausted Kate struggling to juggle a rising career, a home, new husband, pregnancy and now a child, Jude had always considered herself fortunate that she had no one to be concerned about but herself, no life to worry about but her own. She’d never—not once—envied her assistant. Until now.

  Although it might technically be the middle of summer, Lucky had kept heat blasting out of the dashboard vents. When she stepped out of the truck and was hit with a gust of icy air, Jude sucked in a breath.

  “It feels like winter.” Although she’d thought it was overkill, she was definitely grateful for the flannel shirt and fleece vest Lucky had insisted she put on.

  “If it was winter, we’d have never made it up here,” he said. “The meadows would be waist-deep in snow. But you should be grateful. If it was as warm up here as it is down in the valley, you’d spend the day battin’ mosquitoes.”

  He reached into the back of the truck, took out a black felt hat and plunked it down on her head. “Here. This’ll help keep your body heat from escaping.”

  “So would getting back in the truck and keeping the heater running all day,” she muttered.

  “If you don’t think you’re up to this, I can have Buck drive you back to the ranch,” he offered as he pulled on a pair of brown leather gloves.

  He had, of course, just hit her most vulnerable spot. Her ego. She tossed her head. “Not on your life, cowboy .”

  He grinned as if he’d expected just that answer. “Anyone ever tell you that you’re awfully bullheaded, New York?”

  “Not in those words. But I think you may have just hit on one more thing we have in common.”

  He rubbed his chin again as he considered that. “Guess it just might be. If we were keeping score.”

  “Which we’re not,” Jude said quickly. Too quickly, she realized when he flashed one of those annoying, knowingly masculine grins.

  “Why don’t you speak for yourself, darlin’?” he drawled pleasantly. He tugged on the end of a pale blond strand of hair that had escaped the clip at the nape of her neck, adjusted her hat more to his liking, then, seemingly satisfied, walked away with a smooth gait.

  It was going to be worth it, Jude reminded herself firmly. She could put up with this man’s chauvinism, his teasing, his cocky masculine self-confidence. She could even put up with the cold and the prospect of spending the day sitting on a horse. Because in the end, she was going to go back to Manhattan with a cover article and centerfold that would set the standard for hunkdom into the next millennium.

  And then, she thought with a satisfied inner smile, the publishing world would be her own private oyster. She could take those circulation numbers anywhere in the business, parlay it into a VP spot somewhere. Maybe even work up to publisher.

  And then, finally, perhaps her father would be proud. That fleeting hope was instantly dashed as she remembered he wouldn’t be around to witness her victory. When she felt the sting of tears begin to burn behind her lids, Jude wondered when she’d stop feeling like an orphan.

  “There it is again.”

  The deep voice dragged her from her unhappy thoughts. “There what is?” she snapped.

  “That little line you get right between your eyes when you frown.” Lucky skimmed a fingertip down the crease in question. “And two little ones right here.” He touched first one side of her mouth, then the other. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you that’s a good way to get wrinkles?”

  She batted at the gloved hand that was still on her face. “Since my mother died before my sixth birthday, I don’t recall much of anything she might have said.”

  He took his hand away without argument. “I didn’t know, Jude. I’m sorry.”

  “So was L”

  His expression seemed to sober as he gave her another one of those long, judicial perusals. A strange, new kind of silence stretched between them. Then, just when Jude was certain Lucky was on the verge of saying something important, he simply put a friendly arm around her shoulder.

  “Let me introduce you to Lightning,” he said.

  “Lightning?”

  “The mare I picked out for you. I think you’re going to like her.”

  She looked at the narrow dirt trail that seemed to climb straight up the side of the mountain. “That name doesn’t exactly give me a great deal of confidence. Especially since I have to admit, this looks a bit more difficult than riding in Central Park.”

  “That’s why I picked her for you. She really is a sweetheart. And as gentle as an old dog, despite her name, which we only gave her because her white blaze looks kinda like a lightning bolt. Believe me, New York, when you’re sitting in that nice wide western saddle with the tall roping horn to hang on to, you’ll feel as safe as if you’re riding in your daddy’s minivan.”

  “My father never owned a minivan.”

  The strange, unsettling mood vanished, like patches of alpine snow melted by a bright hot sun. His grin returned. “Now why doesn’t that surprise me?”

  9

  BY THE END of her first full day on the Double Ought, Jude was definitely wishing that horses came with instrument panels, so she could monitor the odometer to see how far she’d ridden. She’d never realized exactly how wide and open the western rangeland was until Lucky O’Neill had apparently decided to drag her all over every damn inch of it.

  Determined to pass whatever macho tests he’d apparently decided were necessary to pay her back for the way she’d disrupted his life, she managed, somehow, to stick by him like the strips of bright yellow flypaper she’d seen in the barn.

  She had to admit that the Wyoming high country scenery was spectacular. But as she dragged her aching body out of Kate’s cotton-candy-striped pink sheets on the second day of the roundup, the suspicious New Yorker in her continued to suspect that the man was trying to run her off by making life as miserable as possible.

  After a quick shower, she dressed in Lucky’s mother’s working clothes; although Kate had sent her clothes as instructed, the casual outfits that had been so right for the city were obviously unsuitable for such difficult physical work.

  Not wanting Lucky to gain the upper hand by leaving without her, she rushed downstairs to the kitchen and chugged down some of the black sludge Buck called coffee, even as she considered it’d probably be more efficient just to inject the caffeine straight into her veins. After forcing down the breakfast she’d discovered yesterday that she did, indeed, need, she climbed into the truck for the ride back up to
the pastures. It would be another long grueling day watching a bunch of men in cowboy hats round up some bulls who were equally determined to range free.

  On the first day, Jude had been a white knuckle rider.

  “You know,” Lucky had drawled as he’d observed her literally hanging on to the high western saddle horn, “you don’t have to choke that poor horn to death. Why don’t you loosen up and let it breathe a mite?”

  That was easy for him to say, she’d thought as the docile mare had picked her way around granite boulders, deftly climbing up the steep mountainside. But this morning, her nervousness eased enough to allow her to enjoy the spectacular sight of the colorful mix of riders and what Zach told her were Angus, black baldie and red Herefords spread out over the meadows and canyons. The scene was made complete with the mountains and expansive blue sky as a backdrop.

  Jude quickly discovered that despite what Zach had told her about a cow’s lack of intelligence, every so often a bull would figure out why all these men on horseback had gathered in his pasture and would take off for the north forty before the crew could get him into the trailer.

  Such behavior was always met by cursing and other outward signs of masculine frustration, but Jude couldn’t help noticing that the tougher things got, the calmer Lucky became.

  “The trick is to move slowly,” he explained over a lunch of melt-in-the-mouth tender barbecue beef sandwiches after spending nearly two hours getting some particularly reluctant bull into the pen. “If you chase him too hard, he’ll take off, and given enough time, cattle will outrun you, and pretty soon you’re out there making an ass of yourself and killing your horse. Each of these guys weighs about a ton, which means he can go damn near anywhere he wants. The trick is to get him to want to go where we want him to.”

  As the hours passed, Jude and Lightning began to relate to each other, allowing her to gain more and more confidence. Enough so that she enjoyed the afternoon lope across the lush green pasture so much that when it came time to quit for the day, she didn’t really want to get off the horse.

  It was dark by the time they reached the ranch. The adrenaline of the day had begun to wear off, and she felt a renewed ache in muscles she hadn’t even known she had two days ago. It was all Jude could do to keep her eyes open as she ate two bowls of the leftover chili Buck heated up.

  Lucky stopped her after supper. “I thought you could use this.” He was holding out a brown bottle.

  “What is it?”

  “Liniment. It’ll help get the kinks out.”

  “What kinks?”

  From the back and forth movement of his jaw, she suspected Lucky was grinding his teeth. “The ones from spending the day in the saddle when you’re not used to it. But if you’re going to start acting like some damn mule again—”

  “No.” She grabbed the bottle, willing to accept whatever scant comfort he was offering. “Thank you. I am a little stiff.”

  “That’s not surprising. Want some help rubbing it on?”

  The fact that his seductive grin failed to stir a single feminine chord proved exactly how exhausted she was. “No, thank you. I can manage.”

  That stated, she forced her saddle-sore body upstairs. She managed to brush her teeth, strip off her clothes and rub on the oil that made her smell like something that belonged stabled in the barn, before falling into the narrow bed.

  The only good thing about such a deep, almost drugged sleep, she considered when her alarm shattered the quiet dark the following morning, was that her exhaustion had kept her from dreaming of Lucky.

  Unfortunately, her rebellious mind refused to surrender thoughts of him during the third day of the roundup. As she sat astride the placid, ill-named Lightning, watching Lucky go one on one with a pair of recalcitrant bulls, Jude found herself daydreaming of him in the most outrageous scenarios.

  She pictured him stripping off her clothes in the flowered meadows, imagined sitting face-to-face on his lap, making love with him as his mare galloped through the forest. Never mind that such a scenario was probably physically impossible; after all, a more prudent woman would consider this entire outdoor western adventure to be impossible.

  He’d definitely not been exaggerating when he’d warned her that the Double Ought wasn’t a dude ranch. But, refusing to run up the red flag of surrender, she dung stubbornly to her determination even as she occasionally longed to be pampered.

  Late in the afternoon, she caught a glimmer of something on the horizon that looked vaguely familiar. Moments later, she caught a whiff of smoke and realized she wasn’t alone when Lightning’s eyes widened and rolled back.

  Jude rode over to where Lucky and Zach were just finishing herding another bull into the pen. “Is that what I think it is?”

  Lucky followed her gaze to where the high green meadow light refracted the haze of faraway forest fires. “A lightning bolt must have struck a tree,” he murmured. “Or, sometimes well get a fire from a cinder spark from a passing train, but not usually this high up.”

  “A fire?” A deep-seated fear sent a chill skimming up her spine, through her veins, causing an involuntary tremor.

  “It’s wildfire season,” he told her with a casualness that she couldn’t share. “We’ve been lucky the past two years and haven’t had more than a few hundred acres burned. Which, in the long run, actually helps the grasslands.”

  Fire. It was the one thing—the only thing—that Jude was terrified of. Even now she could remember that horrific night, the sirens, the acrid smoke burning her lungs, her father carrying her out of the house, then rushing back in for her mother....

  “People who only see forest fires on the evening news get skewed ideas of them,” Lucky was saying, oblivious to the fears curling through her.

  Jude tried to close the door on those painful memories, struggled to listen to his explanation, hoping to find some scant assurance that she need not worry. That the distant fire would never come their way.

  “Grass has shallow roots and in this part of the country, we just don’t get enough steady rain or snow to percolate the ground, so what little moisture we get just passes through the soil, leaching the nutrients too deep for the roots to reach.

  “But the trees have longer taproots, so they soak up all the nutrients. Two hundred years ago, the Indians knew enough to oxidize this land. Every twenty years or so, they’d burn the fields, which was why, when the white man first showed up, he was amazed at all the rolling hills of grass as high as a horse’s knees. Modern so-called conservation methods of putting out too many fires are the reason we have all these trees and brush.”

  He pointed to a spot on the high meadow where the grass seemed a deeper, more emerald green. “See that?”

  “It looks as if you’ve fertilized it,” Jude said, her interest in the topic helping to sidetrack her fear.

  “Mother Nature did. When she burned it last year.”

  “Did you have to reseed?”

  “Nah. The land reseeds itself. That’s one of the tricks Mother Nature has up her sleeves. And the fires can’t destroy whatever seeds are already in the soil.”

  She could see his point. Still, Jude thought, as she glanced nervously in the direction of the distant haze, she’d just as soon no “oxidizing” took place while she was on the Double Ought.

  Try as she might, Jude couldn’t dismiss the everpresent threat of wildfire. It billowed in her mind like smoke while she rode the range with the men. And even though she enjoyed the magnificent scenery, a deep-seated fear disrupted her normally laserlike concentration as she tried to learn more about the actual day-to-day operation of the Double Ought.

  “There’s something I don’t understand,” she said on the evening of her fifth day in Wyoming, her fourth spent up in the pastures. She’d tracked Lucky down in the barn where the aroma of horse and hay and the tang of testosterone-laced male sweat hovered in the air like heat lightning. Lightning she was doing her best to ignore.

  “Ask away.”

&nb
sp; She watched him pouring the grain into the horse troughs, noticed the way he had a small word, a gentle touch, a rub behind the ear for each cow pony in turn. That the animals loved him was more than obvious by their eager whinnies, the way they’d curl their lips back in almost a smile whenever he’d approach their stalls. That Lucky loved them back was equally apparent.

  “I was reading something in Buck’s Western Horseman magazine—it was just lying on the table,” she said, defensively as he shot her an amused look. “Anyway, there was an article stating that more and more modern ranchers are using helicopters to sight out the livestock. And pickups and four-wheel drive bikes to gather them up. But you’re still using horses.”

  “A lot of guys have gone to that kind of operation,” he agreed. “But personally, I don’t subscribe to it because like so many other supposedly quick fixes, it’s not perfect. You miss too much while you’re sitting in a pickup, like a sick calf in the brush, or a cow hiding in a canyon.

  “We also use draft horses hitched up to sleds to feed the cattle during the winter, which cuts down on labor costs because one man can feed the stock, whereas if you use a tractor or truck you need an extra man to drive it. There’s also the fact that using horses is good for the environment because it cuts down on fossil fuel.”

  “Plus the fact that you like horses,” she suggested.

  “Called that one right. Actually, I flat-out love the animals. Buck’s always said that there’s nothing better for the inside of a man than the outside of a horse.”

  His gaze shifted out the barn door to the fields of hay illuminated by the full moon overhead. “And on a purely aesthetic basis, it’s impossible not to enjoy the scent of the grass or the sight of a red-tailed hawk or bald eagle circling in the sky overhead. Part of the trouble with the modern world is that people are hurrying too fast through life. They don’t take time to enjoy the scenery along the way.”

  For not the first time since she’d arrived in Wyoming, Jude compared Lucky’s life with her own hectic life-style in New York and decided that they couldn’t be more different. It was, she reminded herself, a fact she’d be wise to keep in mind.