And she somehow made the experience seem enviable.
Most assuredly there would be time enough for Ms. Raben to realize the mistake she had made. Until then, Judson decided that there should be no reason why they couldn’t coexist amicably. Turning off the interstate and onto a less traveled road, he reached into the small cooler on the seat between them.
“Want something to drink?” he asked, pulling out a cold one.
Carrie cringed.
Drinking and driving made her nervous. Though there wasn’t another soul on the road and the likelihood of an accident seemed minimal, her hand tightened on the door handle. It was one thing to be traveling alone with a stranger and quite another to be riding with a drunk.
“No,” she stated coolly.
“You sure?” Judson asked with a peculiar look in his eye. He held the cold can to his forehead for a sec- ond before pulling the tab and taking a long, cool swig.
Carrie’s throat was parched. Inviting beads of mois- ture dripped down the sides of the can. She had to resist the temptation to dab away the rivulets of sweat forming between her breasts.
“Positive.”
A hard glint turned eyes the color of a cloudless sky to gunmetal as he asked, “Even if it’s nonalcoholic?”
Again Carrie cringed, this time not out of fear but embarrassment. Without so much as bothering to check the label, she had simply assumed that drinking and driving was de rigueur for the Western male.
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Just because I’m an Indian—” Judson’s voice was cold enough to drop the temperature in the cab several degrees “—doesn’t mean I’m a drunk.” He tilted his head back and took an especially long pull.
His words came as a total surprise. An Indian with blue eyes? Carrie was as taken aback both by Judson’s declaration of his ancestry as by the vehemence with which it was uttered.
“I didn’t think that—”
“I’ve yet to meet a white who hasn’t jumped to the same conclusion as you—that we’re all good-for- nothing drunks living off government handouts. You don’t need to worry, Ms. Raben.” Her name came out as a hiss. “You’ll fit in just fine around here.”
Carrie drew back as if his words were fists. She had never meant to imply such a thing.
Unmindful of the bewildered look on that pretty face, Judson continued. “There’s a long line of alcoholism in my family history, and I can assure you that I’ve learned something by burying the dead, so you can just let go of that door handle and relax. I have no intention of killing you today.”
Tension wrapped the pair in a tight shroud. Gritty and on edge, Carrie attributed her raw nerves to the long, uncomfortable plane ride from Chicago. She refused to give credence to the possibility that her growing sense of uneasiness was linked to an unlikely chauffeur whose earthy scent of woods and sheer masculinity invaded her senses and left her feeling helpless.
“Hell,” he grumbled. “If you’re afraid of me, how are you ever going to cope with the demands of a school smack-dab in the middle of the wilderness?”
“I am not afraid!” Carrie rejoined a little too quickly, a little too loudly. “And—” Her voice rose a notch. “I certainly didn’t mean to hurt your feelings!”
Issued with such fierce indignation, it was an odd apology indeed. Judson’s eyes snapped from the road to lock upon her. Like an insect squirming beneath a microscope, Carrie was minutely scrutinized.
Judson stared directly into the depths of his passenger’s eyes, the color of which, he decided, was the green of aspen leaves, of undiscovered passion and of a raw vulnerability that reached deep down inside him and squeezed his heart—hard. It just didn’t make sense. The woman was a living, breathing oxymoron. How could such a frightened, little thing exude sexuality like a tea- pot giving off steam?
“Don’t worry. I’m past having my feelings hurt,” he muttered in disgust.
It was a bald-faced lie. It bothered him a whole lot more than he liked to admit that his children’s pretty new schoolteacher had been so eager to assume the worst about him. By now he should be numb to such umbrage, but the dull ache throbbing in his chest as- sured him otherwise. Bitterly, Judson congratulated himself for casting the only vote against hiring this woman whose angelic face presented a deceptive facade for the bigotry that had marked his life. He saw it as his duty to protect the children of Harmony from people like Carrie Raben.
Her assumption that he was a drinker couldn’t have been further from the truth. As a child he had watched alcohol rob his mother of her youth and beauty, slowly destroying her. Through the eyes of an adult, he wit- nessed the desiccation of an entire culture. By publicly taking the pledge that bound him to a life of sobriety, he hoped to provide the kind of positive role model that young Native American men and women so desperately needed. Judson vowed his own children would never grow up in a home like the one in which he was raised—one in which a bottle held greater priority than food on the table or paid utilities.
Defiantly, he reminded himself that just because Car- rie Raben’s singular looks seemed to grow on him with each passing mile, that didn’t make her any better than anyone else who passed judgment on him without both- ering to look past the color of his skin.
Carrie was burning up. The open windows let in fresh air but did little to lower the temperature in the cab. Staring at a sky that met the horizon in an unbroken, infinite line, she was struck by the sheer enormity of the open range that was as intimidating as the virile man sitting a mere arm’s length away. It was apparent that she and her driver were as different as night and day, as explosive as gasoline and matches…
As the old green pickup rolled off the main road and rumbled onto a dirt one, Judson unsnapped the top two buttons of his Western shirt and opened his chest to the air rushing in the open window. Carrie was getting hot- ter by the minute, and not because of the desert heat. Surely the man knew he was giving off sexual vibes that could ignite a prairie fire. Her own fingers itched to untie the silk bow wilting around her neck. An un- expected thought flitted across her mind, an X-rated im- age of Judson Horn pulling off to the side of the road and slowly undressing her—Carrie dropped the thought like a burning match. She hardly knew him and here she was letting her mind take indecent liberties with a man who could scarcely contain his dislike of her!
She concentrated on the scenery. The great plains were slowly giving way to more mountainous terrain. Boulders cropped up like great gray pigeons huddled against the earth. Scraggly spruce began yielding to out- bursts of pine and quaking aspen.
“Aren’t those bright red flowers dotting the hillside Indian Paint Brush? Isn’t there a legend behind them?” she asked, venturing into what she assumed was safe territory.
Mindful of his mother’s undying belief in the old legends as well as her penchant for those fragile blos- soms, Judson felt the question touch a sensitive chord deep inside him. He was angered that that which held deep spiritual significance for him was nothing more than frivolous small talk to this outlander.
“It’s symbolic of the red man’s blood shed by the whites when you stole our land,” he snapped. “You can read all about it in one of the books you bought to brush up on Wyoming folklore. Most outsiders are sure they can find all they’ll need to know about the natives in the library.”
Stung by the cold fury of his words, Carrie eyed him critically. How dare he make her feel like some kind of cultural squatter!
“If I’m going to teach here, I’d like to be as knowl- edgeable as possible,” she replied woodenly in defense of herself.
Judson raked his fingers through his dark hair and sighed in exasperation. A man of few words who en- joyed his solitude, he found superficial chitchat a waste of energy. Certain that a litter of kittens would prove less curious than this contrary female, he decided it was time to put a stop to her endless questions.
“Are you going to ask me the name of every plant and animal in the Wind River Mountain Ran
ge?”
“Maybe,” she said, gracing him with an acerbic smile.
Grudgingly Judson acknowledged how a smile could transform the uptight schoolteacher beside him into a lovely woman. Carrie Raben was something all but- toned up, he decided, and wondered just what kind of a man it would take to get those buttons undone. Aroused at the thought, he grimly reminded himself of the cost of such yearnings.
Nonetheless the young woman’s interest in the native flora and fauna evoked in him something that at last put the two of them on peaceable terms: his love of this untamed land.
The further away from the city they traveled, the less Judson resembled a cornered mountain lion. As he pointed out coyotes and deer and red-tailed hawks, Car- rie was impressed both by the depth of his knowledge and his uncanny eye. Where she could discern only landscape, he unerringly uncovered camouflaged wild- life. Clearly this man was on a spiritual plane with his fellow creatures. Knowledge tempered by respect and reverence was evident in the way his eyes held this vast wilderness that he called home, and Carrie found herself wondering if any woman would ever be able to compete with such a rival.
In a cloud of dust they passed a weathered, old gold mine claiming “The Carissa” as its name. Rounding the top of the next hill, Carrie was astonished to find herself in the midst of an actual ghost town. Little more than an outcropping of historic buildings, Atlantic City was still functioning—in a desolate, halfhearted sort of way.
“Almost there,” Judson said, pulling up in front of the local mercantile. “Time to stop for lunch.”
Climbing out of the pickup, Carrie thought to herself that there could not be enough liquid refreshment in the old establishment to put out the fire inside her. She fol- lowed Judson through the swinging doors and into the past. A 1912 calendar hung on the wall along with a collection of mining relics. The smell of whiskey min- gled with dust, and Carrie almost expected an old-time saloon girl to step out from behind the antique bar and offer her a shot of whiskey.
Judson ordered a hamburger platter, and Carrie did the same. Looking over the rim of the old preserving jar in which her soft drink was served, she studied him closely. In the vehicle she had been nervous and re- served. In the dimly lit mercantile she felt more at ease in scrutinizing her driver. His face was lined with the telltale signs of a life of hard work beneath the sun, and it seemed to Carrie that the harsh exposure to the ele- ments had given him an aura of determination and dig- nity. The lines around his eyes belied the sun-squinted curiosity of looking so far to see so little in these wide open spaces. Slightly off center, his nose had been bro- ken a time or two, and a ridge of scar tissue ran along his left jawbone. Clearly there was as much hard living as hard work written on Judson Horn’s handsome face. This was definitely a man who knew his own mind.
He was slightly older than she had first thought. Per- haps it was his lean body that had initially duped her into thinking him to be less than ten years older than she. Or maybe those incredibly tight-fitting jeans had deceived her. Was it merely the unusual combination of blue eyes set against such dark skin that made the man so phenomenally attractive? Or the sense that no woman would ever be able to tame him?
When her eyes fell upon that all-knowing smile of his, Carrie quickly diverted her gaze to a whimsicallooking creature hanging upon the wall. It was a rabbit with a set of horns growing from its head.
Judson’s eyes twinkled with devilment, and a wicked thought played with the corners of his mouth. A harm- less little practical joke would illustrate far more elo- quently than he himself could the need to send the new teacher back where she belonged.
“It’s a jackalope,” he offered in explanation.
Ignoring the tug at his conscience, Judson quickly reminded himself that this delicate woman was simply not the right person for this job. It was a damned shame that Ted Cadenas had been forced into early retirement by a heart attack. With school starting in less than a week, the board members had jumped on the only ap- plication they had received like a trout upon the first mayfly of the season. They’d summarily dismissed Judson’s concern that a city-bred girl would be unable to handle the elements and the isolation of the job.
“They’re thick around here—and mean,” he contin- ued, warming to his subject. “If you see any around the schoolyard, just get out your shotgun and blast ’em. They’ve been known to gore children if they happen to come between a mama and her bunnylopes.”
If Judson noticed her skepticism, he didn’t show it. He was too busy cursing himself for falling headlong into eyes the color of a mountain meadow. Hotly he told himself that his desire to see Ms. Raben on an airplane heading in the opposite direction had less to do with the pooling of desire in his loins than the certainty that, with typical Anglo obstinacy, she would force her urban prejudices onto his children.
“They can carry tularemia—a nasty, contagious disease that you nor your schoolchildren would care to contract. First you bloat up and then—”
Not wanting to hear all the gruesome details, Carrie cut him off. “Surely blasting the little creatures is a little harsh?” she questioned, envisioning herself point- ing a shotgun out a window and blowing a chunk out of the hillside.
“Oh, well, if you’re squeamish…” Judson rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I guess I could show you how to trap the little buggers if you’d like. That way you won’t ruin the fur, and if you skin ’em, you can collect a bounty for the pelts.”
The expression on Carrie’s face indicated that option was not exactly palatable, either.
“You really…think it’s…necessary to kill them?” she asked.
“I sure do,” he said, leaning forward and taking one of her hands into his.
A jolt surged through Carrie at his touch. The man’s hands were rugged and callused and big. And when they enveloped hers, a sweet pain unlike any she had ever known before rushed through her. She could liken it only to grabbing hold of a live electrical wire and being unable to let go. Carrie couldn’t help but wonder if a woman would feel the need to struggle beneath such rough hands…
Pushing himself away from the table, Judson picked up the bill and ambled over to the cash register. As she cast a lingering look around the ancient mercantile, Car- rie heard Judson tell the cashier to throw in a length of rope for trapping jackalopes.
His sudden kindness left her feeling beholden, and she felt a rush of gratitude for his concern.
Opening the door into the bright sunshine, Judson Horn warned gruffly, “Remember, I warned you. Har- mony ain’t near so fancy.”
Chapter Two
Carrie’s first impression of her new home was that it was a picture-perfect postcard. Nestled into the fringe of an aspen grove, the school overlooked a meadow speckled with purple lupine and enough wild sunflowers to give the impression that the entire countryside was dotted with butter. Threading its way though the meadow like a silver ribbon was the magnificent Popo Agie River.
A world unto itself, the tiny school district of Har- mony, Wyoming, combined the old and the new. It con- sisted of a little white schoolhouse, complete with a bell in the steeple, which looked like it was taken straight out of a historical novel. A dirt field beside the buildings served as a playground providing two slides, swings, a merry-go-round and a wobbly basketball hoop nailed onto a pole. Beside the playground, a trailer house was set on a concrete foundation, and there, glistening be- neath the sun in front of the two buildings, sat a shiny, new black-and-red Chevy pickup.
Eager to inspect it all for herself, Carrie flung the door open and hopped out of the dilapidated Ford pickup before it even rolled to a stop. She hurried up the weathered steps of the schoolhouse to impatiently jiggle the doorknob. It seemed to her that Judson Horn was taking his own sweet time getting out of the pickup.
Joining her at last on the narrow stoop, he drawled, “You’re sure in a big hurry to be disappointed.”
Carrie’s resentment flared at the gloomy prediction. “I’ll be the judge
of how I feel, thank you.”
Tapping her foot upon the smoothly worn wood, she added in a rush, “Now would you please be so kind as to open this door and let me in?”
His long, drawn-out sigh made it clear that he pre- ferred to keep her locked out indefinitely. Carrie watched in shameless fascination while he fished the depths of his jeans’ front pocket for the key. The blood throbbing inside her veins began to simmer, heightening the warm flush on her cheeks. This man was so utterly, so totally, sensual that she had little doubt he was aware of the effect he had upon her, on all women for that matter. The only difference being that Carrie was de- termined to resist him. She had no intention of becom- ing another in what was likely a long, long line of con- quests. Besides, only a couple of months ago she had sworn off all men—especially good-looking ones with attitudes as big as their ten-gallon hats.
“Here you go,” Judson said, handing over a silver ring linking four tarnished keys and a tacky plastic tab faintly marked with the school district’s emblem.
Fervently Carrie hoped that they were keys that would lock out the heartache of the past as well as open the doors to the future. Not unlike a child on Christmas morning, she slipped the key into the lock and opened the schoolhouse door.
Had Judson Horn, the indomitable curmudgeon, not been there beside her she would have rushed to the front of the room and spun around in her excitement. Instead Carrie stood silently beside him in the doorway and wrapped her arms around herself.
The Cowboy Who Broke the Mold Page 2