Tempted by a Cowboy

by Sarah M. Anderson

  She never left Betty’s saddle where Sun could get to it.

  Jo felt awful and she wasn’t sure why. She was not responsible for Phillip Beaumont. Never had been. She could not be the reason he drank or didn’t drink. She couldn’t fix him and it wasn’t her responsibility to save him. Anything he did—everything he did—had to be a choice he made of his own free will.

  However, all of that fine logic was subsumed beneath a gnawing sense of guilt. He’d been in a world of hurt and she couldn’t help but feel as if she hadn’t done enough. After all, she’d had a medical staff monitoring her for a couple of months. She’d moved back in with her parents and grandmother. She’d had Betty.

  The fight to sobriety might have felt lonely, but she hadn’t been alone.

  Not like Phillip was. She didn’t know what his relationship was like with the rest of his family, but she didn’t think she was wrong about his brother waiting for Phillip to drink himself out of the picture.

  She’d loaned him Betty for the night. And then he’d left.

  She shouldn’t care. Her guilt had nothing to do with the way he’d brought her coffee in the morning or kissed her hand after she made him clean saddles. It had nothing to do with how he’d looked at her as if she was the boat he could cling to in a storm.

  But it did.

  Jo focused on her work. What else could she do? If Phillip had given up, Sun would be sold. It hurt her to even think of that—the change would erase all the progress they’d made. But she had an obligation to make sure he was as manageable as possible, no matter who owned him.

  She had a duty to herself, too—her reputation as a world-class trainer, and the reference she’d get from this job. That’s where her focus had to be.

  On the third day of cleaning saddles, Sun wandered over to where she’d left the jumping saddle and gave it a few half-hearted paws before he went to check on his bucket.

  She didn’t have any carrots. But Phillip would have.

  She walked over to the saddle, dusted the hoof prints off of it, and walked away. Sun sniffed the saddle a few minutes later, but didn’t trash it.

  Finally, she thought. He’d gotten bored with this game they were playing. They could move on to the next phase—getting the clean saddle on the horse.

  She didn’t have any illusions that saddling Sun would be something she could accomplish in an afternoon. The process might take weeks—weeks she didn’t know if she had.

  She needed a break. For the first time, she was tired of standing in a paddock. Impatience pulled at her mind.

  She gathered up the saddle and her cleaning supplies and slung them over the paddock fence. She’d leave them there so Sun would see them. Maybe Richard wouldn’t mind if she borrowed one of the horses and went for a long ride. She’d love to give the Appaloosas a go.

  She could call Granny. Just to check in, see how she was doing. Or she could go see a movie. Or something. Anything, really, as long as it didn’t involve Beaumont Farms.

  She unsaddled Betty and left the saddle next to Sun’s. Jo didn’t trust Sun enough yet to leave Betty alone with him, but the two animals had been co-existing better than she’d hoped. The little donkey was doing quite well in the pasture across the drive. That was another encouraging sign that should have put her in a good mood but didn’t.

  She was walking out of the paddock when she heard it—the sound of a car. She looked up to see a long, black limousine driving toward them.

  Phillip. She glanced back at the barn, but Richard hadn’t popped his head out yet.

  Suddenly, Jo was nervous. One of the nice side effects of not getting involved with her clients’ personal lives was that she never had to wonder how to act around them because she always acted the same—reserved. Concerned about the horses and not with their messy lives.

  What if he was drunk, like he’d been the first time? It would mean he’d given up. She’d load up Betty and be gone by tonight. She wouldn’t have to call Granny—she could just go home for a bit and get right with the world again.

  Then she could keep doing what she’d done—traveling from ranch to farm, saving broken horses, building her business and never getting involved. She’d never have to see Phillip Beaumont again.

  But what if...

  The limo pulled up in front of her. Instead of the expensive Italian leather shoes and fine-cut wool trousers that he’d been wearing the first time she’d seen him get out of that limo, a pair of polished ostrich cowboy boots and artfully distressed jeans exited the vehicle.

  Then Phillip stood and smiled at her over the door.

  Oh, God—Phillip.

  Even at this distance she could see his eyes were clear and bright. His jaw was freshly shaven, his hair artfully messy.

  She blinked at him as he leaned forward and thanked his driver. Then he shut the door and the limo drove off, leaving Phillip in the middle of the drive.

  In addition to the jeans, he was wearing the kind of western shirt that hipsters wore—black with faint pinstripes and a whole lot of detailed embroidery on the shoulders and cuffs. He even had a rugged-looking leather-and-silver cuff on his arm.

  Her breath caught as he walked toward her. He shouldn’t—couldn’t—look that good. She watched for his tells—the extra-slow, extra-careful movements, the jumping eyes—but found nothing.

  Phillip Beaumont strode toward her with purpose. God, he looked so good. Better than she remembered. Although, to be fair, he had looked like hell the last time she’d seen him. He certainly didn’t look like hell at the moment. In fact, she couldn’t remember him looking as confident, as capable—as sexy—as he did right now.

  Behind her, Sun snorted. Jo heard his hoofbeats, but they weren’t frantic. Sun was just trotting around. His lack of overreaction might mean he not only recognized Phillip, but was also glad to see him.

  As though she was glad to see him. “You’re back.”

  “I am.” He stopped less than two feet from her—more than far enough away to be considered a respectable distance but close enough that Jo could reach out and touch him if she wanted to.

  Oh, how she wanted to. The man standing before her was a hybrid of the slick, handsome playboy in commercials and the cowboy who’d worked by her side for over a week.

  A man should not look this good, she decided. It wasn’t fair to everyone else. It wasn’t fair to her.

  She forced herself to breathe regularly. No gasping allowed. “What have you been up to?”

  “Did you watch Denver This Morning this morning?”

  She gave him a look. “No.”

  “Or Good Morning America yesterday?”

  “No.”

  “No,” he said with the kind of grin that did a variety of very interesting things to her. “I didn’t figure you had.”

  She couldn’t help herself. She leaned forward and took a deep breath, just as Granny had done once to her. Coffee, subtly blended with bay rum spice. Not a hint of alcohol on him.

  “I’ve had a lot of coffee in the last five and a half days.” He smelled warm and clean and tempting. Oh so tempting. “It’s a good place to start, I’ve heard.”

  “As good as any,” she agreed. Why was breathing so hard right now? She shouldn’t care that he’d been sober for five days. She shouldn’t care that he’d come back to the farm looking better than any man had a right to look.

  “I hired a sober coach,” he went on. “Big guy named Fred. He’ll help me stay on the straight and narrow. I’m meeting with him tomorrow morning and he’ll be accompanying me to all my required club appearances.”

  “You did...what?” She couldn’t have heard him right.

  “Sober coach. To help me stay sober. So I can save my farm.” He lowered his head to look at her. “I wanted to thank you.”

  She blinked at
him. Why was he telling her this? “For what?”

  Before he could answer, Betty wandered over and leaned into his leg, demanding to be petted. “Hey, girl,” he said in a bemused tone as he rubbed her head. “Been keeping an eye on Jo for me?”

  He’d been thinking of her. “She missed you,” Jo managed to say.

  Phillip notched an eyebrow at her. Yeah, she wasn’t fooling him any. How could she hope to fool herself?

  You gave up men when you gave up drinking, she reminded herself as he pulled a device out of his back pocket. You don’t get to have this. Him.

  Phillip tapped on the screen a few times. “Here,” he said, handing it to her.

  The sun chose that moment to break through the clouds. The glare off the screen made it impossible to watch what he’d called up, but she heard a perky voice say, “...with us this morning is the handsome face of the Beaumont Brewery, Phillip Beaumont himself.”

  “I can’t see,” she told him.

  “You need to get out of the sun.”

  She glanced back at her trailer. Suddenly, the distance of a couple hundred feet felt way too close and also too far away at the same time. “We could go to my trailer.”

  The moment she said it, she knew she’d meant something other than to just watch a video.

  She turned her head back to Phillip. Her mind was swimming. Fifteen minutes ago, she’d written him off as a drunk who wasn’t interested in saving himself. But now?

  Their eyes met and a spark of something so intense it almost wasn’t recognizable passed between them. She recognized it anyway. Sheer, unadulterated lust coursed through her, suddenly as vital as the blood that pounded through her heart.

  This was the moment.

  She could invite Phillip back to her trailer and pin him against the wall and kiss him as a reward for having had nothing but coffee for almost a week and no one would ever know.

  Except she would.

  And so would he.

  “We could,” Phillip said, his voice dropping down to something that would have been a whisper if the tone hadn’t been so deep. “If that’s what you want.”

  She wanted. She wanted the Phillip who wasn’t afraid to grab a hay bale or clean a saddle, the Phillip who knew how to harness and drive a team. The Phillip who made her blush.

  She wanted to kiss him.

  Unable to come up with any words at all, she simply turned and walked to her trailer.

  She opened the door and stepped up. But she didn’t make a move toward the bed. She stopped at the top of the steps and turned.

  Phillip stopped, too—one foot on the lowest step. He wasn’t inside, but he wasn’t out either.

  “Here,” he said, leaning forward to tap the screen a few more times. “Watch.”

  The video restarted. “Welcome back to Good Morning, America,” a perky woman who looked vaguely familiar beamed into the camera. “With us this morning is the handsome face of the Beaumont Brewery, Phillip Beaumont himself.”

  The camera panned to Phillip sitting on a couch. His leg was crossed and his hands rested on his shin. He seemed quite comfortable on camera. He looked so good in his fancy western shirt—different than the one he was wearing now—and boots that were probably eel. He grinned at the perky woman—the same grin he’d given Jo the first time they’d met.

  “The Beaumont Brewery is home to the world-famous Beaumont Percherons,” the woman went on. “But there could be some changes underway and Phillip is here today with the details. Phillip?”

  Phillip turned his attention to the camera. There he was, the sophisticated man-about-town. “Thanks, Julie. The Percherons have been a part of the Beaumont Brewery since 1868.”

  The screen cut away to a black-and-white commercial with the Percherons leading a wagon of beer. Phillip’s voice over explained the history of the Brewery’s Percheron team from the Colorado Territory to the present as decades of commercials played.

  Besides the quality of the video, very little changed across the years. The horses were all nearly identical, the wagon the same—years of Beaumont Percherons anchoring the company to the public consciousness.

  The camera refocused on Phillip and the woman. “Those are some classic commercials,” the woman announced.

  “They are,” Phillip agreed. “But now the Beaumont Brewery is trying to decide whether to branch out from the Percherons or stick with tradition. So we’ve set up a poll for people to vote—should Beaumont Brewery keep the Percherons or not?”

  “Fascinating,” the woman said as she nodded eagerly. “How can people vote?”

  “Visit the Facebook page we’ve set up for the poll,” Phillip said as the web address popped up at the bottom of the screen. “We encourage people to leave a comment telling us what the Percherons mean to them.”

  Phillip and the woman engaged in a little more light banter before the segment ended.

  Jo blinked at the screen. “You did that?”

  “I’d show you the one from Denver This Morning, but it was basically the same thing,” he said. Then he set his other foot on the step.

  “We?” Because that interview had been a lot of we—we set up the poll, we made a Facebook page.

  “My brother Matthew helped me,” he corrected. “But they didn’t know that Chadwick hadn’t exactly signed off on this particular line of publicity.” He smiled the wicked smile of a man who does whatever he wants and gets away with it. “We’ve already had over sixty thousand votes to keep the Percherons and four thousand comments in less than forty-eight hours. I dare Chadwick to ignore that—and I doubt the new Brewery owners will be able to ignore it, either.”

  “You,” she whispered, staring at the screen as if it held all the answers.

  He wasn’t going to give up on Sun or the Percherons. Or himself. He wasn’t going down without a damned good fight.

  He lifted her hat off her head and set it in the seat next to the door. He wasn’t touching her, not really, but licking flames danced over her skin, setting her on fire. “I did a lot of thinking that night,” he said, low and close. So close she could kiss him. “About who I was and what I wanted. Who I wanted to be.”

  “I know you didn’t sleep,” she admitted. “Neither did I.”

  “I decided I needed to make some changes, so I called my cleaning service the next morning,” he went on, brushing his fingertips over her cheek and pushing her hair back. “I had them get rid of all the alcohol in my apartment in the city. I also told Richard to get everything out of the house and give it to the hands. I talked to Matthew and hired a sober coach.”

  “You did all that?” Amazing, yes—but why? Because no matter how impressive of a step it was, she couldn’t be the reason. “Did you do this for me?”

  He climbed the second step. The door swung shut behind him, closing them off from the rest of the world. They were the same height now, close enough she could feel the heat from his chest radiating through his shirt. He brought his other hand up, cupping her face. “If you were any other woman in the world, I’d say yes.” He searched her eyes. “But...”

  “But?” It was the most important but she’d ever said.

  “But,” he went on, a small, soft grin taking hold of his lips, “I didn’t. Not really.”

  “Who did you do it for?”

  “I did it for Sun and Marge and Homer and Snowflake and all the horses. I even did it for Richard, the old goat, because he’s a good farm manager and he’s too damn old to be unemployed.”

  “Yeah?” She couldn’t help herself. She dropped the device on top of her hat and slid her arms around his waist. He was solid and warm and quite possibly the best thing she’d ever held.

  “I did it for me,” he told her.

  It should have sounded like a selfish announcement from one of the most selfish men
in the world, but it didn’t. His voice was low and steady and he looked at her with such heated fervor that she knew the touch of his lips would scorch her and there’d be no turning back.

  “Because I couldn’t live with myself if I let it go.”

  “Oh,” was all she could say. It seemed inadequate. So she surrendered to the pull he had on her and kissed him. She couldn’t fight her attraction to him any longer and she was tired of trying.

  It was a simple touch of her lips to his, but he sighed into her with such contentment that it demolished her reserves. Skin on skin. Desire burned through her. Her nipples went tight—so tight it almost hurt. Only his touch could ease the pain.

  She was kissing Phillip Beaumont, really kissing him. She tilted her head for better access. He responded by opening his mouth for her. When she swept her tongue in to touch his, he groaned, “Jo.” Then he kissed her back.

  Any sense she had left evaporated. She ran her fingers up his back, feeling each muscle before she laced her fingers through his hair. Everything about her felt...odd. Different. Warm and hot and shivery all at the same time.

  She wanted to see the body that was doing things to her—pooling heat low in her belly that demanded attention right now. The weight between her legs got so heavy so fast that she was suddenly having trouble standing.

  And thinking? Yeah, that wasn’t happening either. All she could think was how long it’d been. Years. Over a decade she’d denied that she needed this—to feel a man’s arms around hers, to feel desirable.

  She grabbed the front of his shirt. Snaps, not buttons. Done. The shirt gave and Phillip’s chest was laid bare for her.

  She had to look—had to—so she broke the kiss and let her fingertips trace the outline of his chest.

  Carved of stone, that’s what his muscles were. Smooth and hard but warm—almost hot to the touch. Or maybe that was just her. “Wow,” she breathed as she traced his six-pack.

  “Mmm,” he said, pushing the hair away from the left side of her neck—the smooth side—and...and...