Danger Deception Devotion The Firsts

by Lorhainne Eckhart

  “You found her. What can I do for you?” Margaret didn’t move, nor did she offer—in any neighborly kind of way—a cup of coffee, a hello, or any sort of welcome.

  “Mister Jerow at the feed store mentioned you do some work with horses,” the man said.

  Margaret watched as he stepped closer still, but the gangly boy beside him took one look at her and hung back. She guessed that was her answer: without grabbing a mirror, she knew she looked rough and untidy. She frowned. The kid appeared scared of his own shadow or, she supposed, her prickly attitude. Scaring kids was not something she wanted to be known for. As it was, Margaret Gordon, former neurosurgeon from Seattle, was already known for destroying kids’ futures. At least that was how she saw herself, anyway.

  “You do work with horses, don’t you?” he said. He had a deep, smoky voice that rattled her insides.

  Margaret stared at him, thinking there was something seriously wrong with her to be so affected by some backwoods cowboy, and then shook her head. “Don’t know why Mister Jerow would have told you that,” she said. Though the truth was, that since Margaret had returned to Post Falls, Idaho, in a haze of shame, she was more comfortable with animals than she was with people, because animals didn’t lie.

  The man looked away, confused, and let out a harsh chuckle. “Sorry to have wasted your time,” he said. Her horse nickered from the rough bark corral her grandfather had built from the trees on the land. “That your horse?” the man asked as he wandered closer to Angel, her five-year-old Egyptian Arabian.

  Margaret couldn’t believe how he walked right up to Angel and stroked her with his large hand. Angel never lets anyone near her except Margaret, and she nickered again as the man touched her forelock and rubbed her neck, turning heavenly blue eyes on Margaret. Her stomach flip-flopped and her cheeks burned. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the awkward teen, who wore baggy jeans and a dark hoodie, with the same dark hair as the man who leaned against her corral. The teen wore a baseball cap over hair long enough to cover his ears, and he shuffled his scuffed sneakers, kicking up the dust. He dropped his gaze to the ground.

  “You don’t talk much, do you?” the man said from where he leaned over by her horse.

  “I already told you I can’t help you,” she snapped, swinging her favorite mug and wishing she could slip back into the house and shut the door. Why wouldn’t they just leave?

  “I don’t think you really answered me,” the man replied.

  She couldn’t believe it—the man was smiling at her. What made it worse was that he had one of those million-dollar smiles, with a set of dimples that had her legs softening to limp noodles.

  “What are you looking for?” She tried to cross her arms but was hampered by the cracked mug she held. She felt like an idiot.

  “My boy’s horse, he can’t get near it. Forget riding it. Told him unless we can find someone to straighten the horse out, I’m getting rid of it. I’m not paying to feed a dangerous animal that’s of no use to me.”

  Margaret watched the boy’s face hardening as his father spoke. A glimmer of hurt flashed in the teen’s eyes. She recognized that tough, pain-in-the-ass, don’t-give-a-crap attitude written all over the kid’s face. It was the same expression she had worn as a twelve-year-old tomboy sent to live with her grandfather, Carl Spick, by a corporate mother busy fast-tracking her career as a top-ten stockbroker in Seattle. Being unwanted and considered a nuisance had produced all kinds of attitude and a profound, deep hurt in Margaret. What was this kid’s story?

  “That true, kid?” she asked the boy.

  The kid jerked his head up and stared at her, wide eyed. He flushed as he glanced at his father. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “What’s your horse’s name?” Margaret asked.

  The boy’s father, still leaning against the corral, answered, “Storm. He’s twelve, a gelding, Percheron–Quarter Horse cross. Old enough to know better.” He was coming toward her, his hands on slim hips molded into a pair of wranglers, and he was digging into each step with a dusty pair of boots. Margaret wanted to shrink back and find someplace to hide—maybe because she noticed he had arms a woman could get lost in. She figured he must have an arrogant attitude, too. The kid wasn’t talking. It took Margaret a moment to realize how quickly he had shut down, instantly becoming a shadow behind his father.

  “There are all kinds of horse people not more than twenty miles from here, around Spokane. They could do wonders, I’m sure,” Margaret said. “What is it you think I can do for you?”

  She didn’t know why she was still talking. She wasn’t qualified to do much of anything but lie out here and lick her wounds. It didn’t help matters that she had also been falling on the wrong side of everything lately, including a three-hundred-year-old Kootenai County code. Living alone on a twenty-acre ranch in the entirely conservative northern Idaho panhandle wasn’t entirely bad if you were a single man, but if you were a single woman, it just wasn’t done. She knew that, and so did everyone else around here. What was wrong with this man? Didn’t he know who she was?

  “I’m not interested in taking my kid’s horse to some yahoo in Washington State,” he said. “Look, can you just take a look at the horse? That’s all I’m asking.”

  The man was in her space now, right in front of her. Holy shit, was he tall. She was five foot nine, so he had to be at least six two, six three. She sidestepped away. Maybe he was one of those guys who got a kick out of tormenting women, because he stepped closer again, matching each step she took, like a slow dance, until she bumped the steps that led into the small house. She would have fallen flat on her backside if he hadn’t reached out and grabbed her. He held her in a way that was familiar and close, stirring feelings in her that couldn’t possibly be real. No, that was definitely not a road she would go down any time soon. She’d been there, done that, another reason she was hiding out here now.

  “Kind of nervous, are you? Or is it me? Do you have a problem with me?” he said.

  She couldn’t look at him. Her face was burning, as she yanked herself away, pushing past him, fighting the urge to rub her arm where his hand had lingered almost possessively. She yanked the brim of her hat down and searched out the kid, who was pressed against the driver’s door, hiding behind the rear-view mirror.

  “I can’t make any promises,” she said, “but I’ll take a look.”

  The man was standing right behind her. “Great. Can you come by today, say, this afternoon?”

  No no no, she thought. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She didn’t want to leave this property today or any time soon. What had she gotten herself into? She couldn’t do it, and she felt the icy fear paralyzing her like a surge of adrenaline until she glimpsed the boy. He searched her out with pleading eyes before jamming both hands in his baggy pants pockets and staring at the ground again. Margaret couldn’t find her voice, so she nodded, swallowing a hard lump.

  Mr. Good-looking stuck out his large, calloused hand. “Great,” he said. “I’m Joe Wilde. My son’s Ryan. We’re five miles up the road. I’ll draw you a map.”

  Joe Wilde. Of course, she thought. He was one of the five Wilde boys she knew from childhood, all of whom had run the school and the county with their shenanigans. She had thought against hope that it might be him, the boy who’d haunted her childhood, teasing her mercilessly and christening her with a horrible nickname that had stuck with her until she moved away to attend medical school. The icy reality set in that unless he had suffered some sort of head injury, it would only be a matter of time before he realized who she really was. Then again, he only knew her as the “orange giant”—and every other crude version of the name that the kids had whispered in the sterile school halls. She doubted very much that he knew what her real name was.

  Joe ripped an envelope in half from inside his truck and drew out a rough map. “Here, it’s easy to find,” he said. His fingers skimmed hers as he handed her the paper, invading her space again, standing right beside her. This ti
me, he touched her shoulder as she struggled to decipher the pencilled lines and accompanying chicken scratch that would’ve made any doctor proud. She stiffened and smelled something pleasant before realizing it was him, not aftershave or cologne. She wondered how in the world soap and water could make a man smell that good. He might as well have been pressed right against her, as his heat was seeping into her as if they were two Eskimos pressed together under a bed of furs.... Stop it! she barked silently to stop her mind from going down that road.

  She sidestepped again and dropped her hand, crumpling the paper. She went to step back but then tripped on his foot, dropping the mug. It shattered across the steps. He grabbed her and lifted her, knocking her hat off, and her mousy brown hair fell loose in disarray past her shoulders.

  He set her down and then bent over to pick up her hat, brushing off the dust as he handed it to her. She snatched it away, stuck it on her head, and raced straight for the front door.

  “So we’ll see you this afternoon around two?” he shouted to her retreating back.

  She didn’t turn around as she stumbled up the two steps. “Yeah, uh-huh,” she managed to mutter as she opened the door and slammed it behind her.

  * * * *

  Joe stood outside the old log house with single-paned windows, the Spick house, watching the closed door Margaret Gordon had slammed in his face as if he were a leper and she couldn’t get away from him fast enough. Just what the hell was the matter with the woman, anyhow?

  She had always acted as though she had a stick shoved up her ass. All through school, she’d gone out of her way to avoid him, though she had mile-long legs that he had often pictured wrapped around him. Her long, thick, dark hair framed the most gorgeous smoky brown eyes and a cute round face. To top it off, she had a light smattering of freckles on her nose and cheeks that she never tried to hide with a pound of makeup. Her skin was flawless, and those lips—he dreamed of taking them for a test drive.

  It was obvious the woman thought he was lower than a dung beetle. To tell the truth, he was embarrassed that his son had watched that woman try to emasculate him. Just what the hell was she doing, living out here all by herself, anyway? Last he heard, she’d hopped the first bus to Seattle for medical school. He’d seen her a few times over the years, and she had always had the same snobbish, stuck-up attitude, walking around as if she was better than everyone, looking right through him as if she didn’t see him.

  He’d seen her in town a few months back. She was tall and gorgeous, with a set of breasts he dreamed of running his hands over, feeling the weight of them. He had pictured what they’d look like, full and creamy with dark red nipples. Well, at the time, he’d nearly gone over and asked her out, but his common sense had kicked in, and he remembered that she had fought over money with her mother when her grandfather hadn’t even been cold in the ground. Carl Spick would’ve rolled over in his grave if he’d seen the way his granddaughter and daughter acted, like two selfish moneygrubbers. Joe didn’t need a woman like that in his life. Even now, he could barely make ends meet. With the economy in the toilet, he’d all but given up on ranching. He’d sold off the last of his cattle the year before Carl died and had started taking out trees here and there in the back, milling the lumber himself.

  Here he was again, all because Stan Jerow had told him Margaret was still here. He had insisted that Margaret was who Joe needed for Ryan’s horse, that she could work magic with any animal. Her grandfather had said Margaret had a special connection to them, a certain touch. Whatever was going on with his horse, Ryan’s horse, Margaret would figure it out. When he’d driven in and seen her in that ratty old hat and wool coat, he’d felt poleaxed. He would never have believed a woman could make anything that frumpy look sexy. The way she had walked, all sexy in those faded blue jeans, along with the fact that she didn’t need to curl and primp just to step outside, had all his good sense taking a hike, which was the one and only reason he had worked her until she agreed to come and see Storm. Whatever he was thinking with, it sure in the hell hadn’t been his brain. As he bent over and picked up the broken mug, he reminded himself that he had until that afternoon to pull his head out of his ass, have her look at the horse and then send her on her way.

  Chapter Two

  She’d changed three times, not that her small closet held many clothes. She didn’t even have many outfits, since she had basically lived in scrubs during her residency. Since her encounter with Joe, she had shampooed and used the good conditioner on her hair in the small shower bath, and she’d spent the entire morning arguing with herself and racing around the small two-bedroom house. She’d also found the pieces of her pink and gold mug placed in a neat pile off to the side of the top step—and in a thoughtful way so she wouldn’t cut herself.

  It wasn’t as if Joe Wilde had asked her out on a date, and this certainly wasn’t a beauty pageant. She was going to see a dusty and dirty horse, and she’d be traipsing through horse shit. It wasn’t lost on her that Joe Wilde hadn’t changed one bit. He was still the same arrogant ass she’d gone to school with, always planning and scheming. He’d manipulated her into going over to see the damn horse, and in front of his kid, for God’s sake! He was lower than a skunk. Deep down, she had silently, miserably suffered through her entire adolescence with a major crush on Joe and she was furious that he still had that effect on her.

  After moving away, she’d been too busy with medical school to allow Joe to invade her every waking thought, and the crush had faded—sort of. When she returned after her grandfather died, she had seen him at the funeral. After all these years, she still recognized him. Even the devil himself would have had the decency to offer condolences, but not Joe. She had expected more from him, but he was still the same selfish jerk he’d been in school, leaving without saying one word. Even in town a few months back, she had pretended not to see him and hurried the other way, fearing the snake was just waiting to make a joke of her again. When he had driven up this morning with his kid and his devilish charm, she’d frozen.

  Now, as she gazed in the mirror, about to apply a hint of makeup, reality hit her like a blast of frigid air. The man had a kid with him, his kid, so of course there had to be a wife. How pitiful. Drooling over a married man—how low had she sunk? To him, this was a game, and he was winding her around his finger. Why, she could just imagine the laugh he was having at her expense now. Joe Wilde: just the name said it all, just an average Joe, a redneck nobody from a small town in the backwoods USA. Hell, she was better than that. She had gone to medical school and worked herself to the bone, spending years surviving on catnaps and bad coffee, just to end up right back here.

  She tossed her makeup back in the drawer and yanked a brush through the curls she’d spent the last hour styling into her hair. Short of washing it again, she didn’t have a hope of getting rid of them, and she didn’t have time to redo anything. She glanced at her small bedside clock and the rumpled unmade double bed covered with half the clothes in her closet. It was one forty-five, time to go. Margaret stomped her feet into her comfortable square-toed boots, the old ones that were cracked and faded, and caught a glimpse in the hallway mirror of the pristine crispness of her freshly ironed white shirt and brand-new jeans. She didn’t have time to change again, and the last thing she wanted was for Joe Wilde to think she’d dressed up and primped for him. The excuse that she had done it for the horse sure wouldn’t fly, so she grabbed an old brown sweater and shrugged it on, slung her cloth purse over her shoulder, and set the wide-brimmed hat she always wore on her head before hurrying out the door.

  Angel nickered, and Margaret called to her: “I’m sorry! I won’t be long, and then I’ll take you out.” She rubbed the white star just above Angel’s eyes and then peeked over the corral into the red plastic water tub, half full. She took off at a jog around the square house, which her grandfather had built for his bride from the trees on the property. After her residency, when she’d passed the boards, she had bought herself a used blac
k Lexus that now sat in the backyard. She had kept it even after returning to Post Falls, a town where all the residents drove pickups—another one of those damn codes she was breaking.

  The five-mile drive to Joe’s farm down the backcountry gravel road added a few more nicks to the midnight black of her sports car. The entire way, her foot trembled on the gas pedal as she argued with herself to turn around, go home and lock the door. She swore and told herself to suck it up and get the meeting over with. Don’t agree to anything he asks, she warned herself.

  She slowed and pressed the brake as she rounded a bend in a cloud of dust, stomping the clutch and throwing the gear into neutral when she saw the house number staked at the side of the tree-lined road. Tiny branches and early spring leaves hid a portion of the rotted sign, which seemed to have been painted in red by a two-year-old. The narrow driveway flanked by heavy brush resembled a mud bog similar to those from monster truck shows. She would need a four by four to get through, but where could she leave her car on this narrow gravel road, and how far up was the house? In this part of the country, people had large spreads and mile-long driveways, houses always hidden way out back.

  She pressed her head back against the headrest. If she turned around and went home, Joe would just show up again and catch her off guard, and she didn’t want that. No, she needed to get rid of him once and for all, set him straight. She didn’t work with horses. She couldn’t and wouldn’t help him, and she planned to say just that, telling him to leave her the hell alone. Margaret stomped the clutch and backed up, the wheels scraping the gravel. She gave herself a quick pep talk, because she would need to get enough speed to sail through the mud. She was determined not to think of the worst-case scenario: If she took it slow and easy, she’d sink faster than a rock in water and would be spinning her wheels to the end of time. The thought of being stuck anywhere in Joe Wilde’s clutches was enough of an incentive for her to rev the engine a couple of times, her foot hitting the accelerator as if she were at the starting line of the Kootenai County stock-car races, with testosterone pulsing all around her.