Cattleman's Courtship

by Lois Faye Dyer

  The scent of roses, blooming in the flower beds edging the porch, lay heavy on the warm evening air.

  “There’s something wonderfully peaceful about watching the sun go down over buttes and open prairie,” Victoria said softly, almost to herself.

  Quinn glanced sideways. She gazed at the horizon, her face in profile. Still, he could read the faint wonder on her features, hear it in her voice.

  “Not the same as watching the sun set over city concrete, is it?”

  “No.” She flashed a quick smile, her gaze meeting his with empathy. “No, it’s definitely not the same. Although, to be fair, I’ve seen some memorable photos that captured sundown, and sunup, on streets in Seattle. There can be a stark kind of beauty in a deserted early-morning street and skyscrapers.”

  “I suppose.”

  Dusk deepened around them. Victoria had switched on a lamp when they passed through the living room and it threw a faint bar of light across the porch floorboards. The light filtered through the screen door but didn’t quite stretch far enough to reach the steps.

  “Do you miss it?” he asked.

  Victoria’s gaze left the shadowy horizon and found his. “What? The city?”

  “The city—and your life there.” He gestured at the darkened landscape. “This is quite a change from urban living.”

  “Yes, it is,” she agreed, falling silent as she considered his words. “I do miss my brothers and my parents. And my work. And double lattes and shopping in downtown Seattle. But oddly enough,” she added slowly, slightly startled by the realization, “I’m not unhappy here. Even though initially I couldn’t imagine not practicing law for six months, I was determined to get well. Then I moved to Colson and after the first few weeks of gearing down, it hasn’t been nearly as bad as I’d imagined.” She chuckled softly. “Not that it’s been easy, but there’s something to be said for actually having the time to watch the sun go down.”

  “What? The sun doesn’t set in Seattle?” he teased.

  “Of course it does. I just didn’t get to see it very often.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I rarely left my office before nine or ten. Even if I’d rated an office with a window, I was so buried in work I doubt that I would have taken time to watch the sun go down.”

  “You worked until ten at night? What time did you start in the morning?”

  “My alarm went off at five. I normally was in my office and working by six-thirty.”

  Quinn’s brows lifted in disbelief.

  “That’s a hell of a long day. What about weekends?”

  “They were pretty much the same, although I ate my cereal and read the paper in bed until seven, then went jogging and picked up a latte at the local coffee bar before work. The nice thing about weekends was that I got to wear jeans to work instead of a suit.”

  “You worked seven days a week?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Probably.” Victoria couldn’t disagree. Her work schedule had been exhausting. “But it was the same for all the attorneys new to the firm. After a few years and a couple of promotions, I might have been able to cut back to six days a week and make it home by seven or eight at night.”

  “And you liked this?” he demanded, baffled. One thing was glaringly apparent—she couldn’t have had time for much of a social life.

  “I got tired of it sometimes, but my goal was to make partner in ten years. That meant I had to work hard.”

  “That’s not working hard,” he said bluntly. “That’s slave labor. What about a life outside your work?”

  “Now you sound like my father. He and my mother have been asking me that ever since I entered law school.”

  “So what’s your answer?”

  Victoria shrugged. “I suppose the only answer is that I didn’t have time for a life away from the office.”

  “What about friends?”

  “My friends were the people I worked with and I saw them at work all day. I never felt the need to spend my rare off time with them.”

  “What about men? And don’t tell me guys didn’t ask you out.”

  “I’d go to lunch with one or two of the single male attorneys at the office from time to time. To tell you the truth, I was too tired to look forward to dating very often.”

  “Yeah, right,” he drawled.

  A companionable silence stretched between them.

  “I guess that means that there isn’t some guy waiting for you back in Seattle.”

  “Sneaky, Quinn. Very sneaky.” She leaned toward him, her gaze pinning his. “If you want to know if I’m involved, you should just ask me.”

  The laughter in her voice irked Quinn.

  “All right. I’m asking,” he muttered.

  “Now was that so hard?”

  “Just answer the question.”

  She chuckled. “No, I’m not involved. In fact, I’ve only been sort-of involved once. In college. It didn’t work out and we parted friends. End of story. Now it’s your turn.” She eyed him expectantly but he didn’t answer. “Come on, Quinn, give. I told you, now you tell me. What about your love life?”

  Chapter Six

  “You already know about my love life. I don’t have one.”

  “None?” Victoria sipped her coffee, watching him over the rim of her cup. “That’s not what Becky told me.”

  His eyes narrowed. “Becky? What did she tell you?”

  “Only that she thought you have a lady friend in the next county—but that it’s not serious.”

  Quinn groaned inwardly. Women. Even Becky gossiped about his sex life.

  “How the hell did she find out about that?” he grumbled, embarrassed.

  “I think Cully told her.”

  “I’m going to kill my brother.”

  “Don’t do that. It’s not his fault. It’s very difficult to tell Becky no if she wants information from a person.”

  “True.”

  Victoria waited, but he offered no further comment. “So was Becky right?”

  “About what?”

  “About the lady in the next county?”

  “I see a woman in Hadley every now and then,” he confirmed reluctantly. “But not very often. It’s been a few months.”

  “I see.” The terse words stabbed Victoria, surprising her. A few months. That was long before she met him and shouldn’t affect her one way or the other. But it did. She sipped her coffee and frowned, mulling over her reaction. “And you told me you don’t do relationships, so I assume that you’ve never been married.”

  “No. Hell, no.”

  His vehement denial left no room for doubt. Curious, Victoria badly wanted to know if Becky and Lonna’s belief that he’d been engaged once were true. Short of bluntly asking him outright, however, which she was reluctant to do, she wasn’t sure how to find out.

  “So you’ve never even been close to marriage,” she ventured.

  Quinn looked away from her, his profile hard as granite. At last, he broke the small silence.

  “I was engaged in college.”

  Victoria glanced at him. The light from the living room softly illuminated the left half of his face, the right side shadowed by the night. His tension was palpable. Even in the dim light, she saw a muscle flex in his jaw.

  “What happened?”

  “She decided that marriage to me would be hell.”

  Shocked, Victoria was speechless.

  “But… How could she say such a thing?”

  “Because it’s true.” Quinn’s gaze left the dark landscape and met hers. “We were good in bed together,” he said bluntly. “But when we weren’t in bed I didn’t talk to her enough, didn’t pay enough attention to her. She loved parties and people, but the people she spent time with and the parties she kept dragging me to bored me stiff. To make a long story short, she broke off the engagement. Two weeks later, she married somebody else.”

  “And it broke your heart,” Victoria said softl
y.

  “No. It didn’t break my heart. That’s the point.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Victoria, I don’t have a heart to break. Connie and I were good in bed together, but I just wasn’t interested in spending every hour of the day with her after sex.”

  “But that doesn’t mean you don’t have a heart,” Victoria protested. “It’s not unusual for a man and woman to have a physical connection without an emotional connection. Women’s magazines run articles about that subject all the time.”

  “Maybe, but a physical connection is all I’ve ever had. Connie needed more from me than I knew how to give, she wanted me to be in love with her.” His brooding gaze met Victoria’s. “Whatever the hell that means.”

  And she hurt you. His fiancée may not have broken Quinn’s heart, but it seemed clear that Connie’s swift marriage to another man indicated betrayal. When added to the childhood abandonment by his mother and Eileen’s battling in court over his father’s will, Quinn had more than enough reason to distrust women. With the sole exception of Becky’s staunch championship and loyal friendship, Victoria wondered if any female had ever been faithful and good to Quinn. Victoria ached for the guilt and pain she saw in his eyes. “You were both very young, Quinn.”

  “I was old enough to know that marriage isn’t for me. I learned that lesson from my father and mother before I was ten years old,” he said grimly. “When Connie left, I promised myself that I wouldn’t forget again. Bowdrie men don’t make good husbands, Victoria, we don’t know how.”

  “Did you father actually tell you that?”

  “He didn’t have to. I was old enough to remember my mother crying for hours before she disappeared. Later, when he took Cully and I to live with him at the ranch, I watched him and Eileen fight on a daily basis. It isn’t something I’m likely to forget.”

  “But just because your father and stepmother had a bad marriage doesn’t mean that you’re doomed to suffer the same fate, Quinn.”

  “That’s a chance I’m not willing to take. I don’t want to live with a woman who grows to hate me because I can’t love her enough, nor do I plan to father any children and force them to grow up in that hell. Kids deserve a father who can make their mother happy and give them a good life, who’ll teach them about family. I can’t do that.”

  “I think you’re wrong, Quinn. You were wonderful with little Bobby at the pharmacy, you knew just what to say to him. I think you’d be a very good father. As for having no heart, no one who’s watched you with Becky would ever agree with that statement. You’re tender and gentle and obviously care very much for her.”

  Her words warmed Quinn’s heart, touching him deeply and easing the coldness inside.

  “And as for your father,” Victoria continued, leaning forward to clasp his forearm. “It seems to me that his actions are a testament that he was an honorable man. Despite the difficulties for himself, he did what he could for you and Cully. He made a home for you, gave you his name and in the end, left you a substantial inheritance. Those aren’t the actions of a man who doesn’t love, Quinn.”

  “Maybe.” Quinn’s hand closed over hers and she immediately turned her palm up to his. He threaded his fingers through hers and stared at their hands, her slim fingers pale against his darker, stronger ones. He wondered if she could possibly be right. “He was a hard man, more comfortable with men than with women or children. He had his own code of honor—all his neighbors will tell you that if he gave his word, he kept it. I respected him, but I can’t say I ever really knew him.”

  “That was his loss,” Victoria murmured, struck anew by the lack of warmth and affection in Quinn’s life.

  Something about her quiet conviction eased the tight band that squeezed Quinn’s chest. The tightness always accompanied any mention of his father and was one of the reasons Quinn rarely talked about him.

  His gaze searched hers but he found no pity there. Instead, her blue eyes held understanding, warmth and compassion. For the first time in his life, he’d met a woman that he could laugh with, play with, and share the beauty of a sunset with in companionable silence. An intelligent woman with a wry sense of humor lived within that sinfully sexy package that first attracted him.

  Victoria Denning had slipped beneath his defenses and found a place within him he hadn’t known existed. If he didn’t know it was impossible, he might think that she’d found his heart.

  But of course, he reminded himself grimly, he didn’t have a heart. At least, not one he’d admit to.

  Quinn pushed away his thoughts and refused to give a name to the surge of emotion that swept him. He lifted their clasped hands and brushed his lips across the backs of her fingers.

  “I’d better be going. Four in the morning comes too early.”

  Quinn left and Victoria climbed the stairs to bed. She turned out the lights and slipped between the sheets but sleep wouldn’t come. Troubled, she lay awake in the moonlit room, pondering her conversation with Quinn. The dark shadows of night had encouraged intimacy and confessions and she’d felt an elemental shift in her relationship with Quinn. Something had changed between them.

  Or perhaps she’d simply been forced to admit the truth.

  She could no longer pretend that seeing Quinn was only a way to pass the time while she was in Colson. Nor could she convince herself any longer that she wanted only to repay his gallantry by proving to him that he wasn’t the man Eileen Bowdrie claimed.

  Something had happened to her the night they met. He’d held out his hand to her on that dance floor and her life hadn’t been the same since. The practical side of her brain told her that love at first sight was illogical, but instinct as old as Eve and Adam told her that her fate had been sealed the first time he’d smiled at her and took her hand.

  She twisted, punched her pillow in a futile effort to get comfortable and rolled onto her side to stare out the window at the dark night.

  Quinn’s insistence that he was heartless and incapable of loving was a huge barrier. His belief obviously went bone-deep and that part of him scared her. She thought she’d caught glimpses of the real Quinn over the past several weeks, especially tonight, when he’d opened up and told her things she suspected he rarely spoke about. It was difficult, if not impossible, to glimpse that deeper side of his character and believe that Quinn wasn’t capable of an enduring, powerful love.

  Still, if she were wrong, she wasn’t sure she could accept that all he might ever feel for her was the explosive chemistry between them while she struggled with a much deeper emotional connection.

  The man she thought she could safely tease and tempt because he was determined not to seduce her, was suddenly very dangerous.

  She had the uneasy feeling that Quinn Bowdrie might be the one man who could break her heart.

  What was I thinking? She nearly groaned aloud. Lonna tried to warn me, but I wouldn’t listen.

  She had no idea how to handle her feelings for him. And that scared her. Because Quinn threatened her emotions in ways no man ever had before.

  And in a few months, they would be separated by three states and hundreds of miles when she returned to Seattle. Quinn would remain in Montana. Did she really want to complicate her life with a man too far away and too memorable to forget?

  And what about Quinn? He’d never denied that he was physically attracted to her, but after the past weeks, Victoria had come to hope that his emotions ran deeper than mere lust. And if he did care for her, how much damage would be done to his already battered, carefully guarded heart if she walked away from him?

  Victoria was torn. How could she avoid hurting Quinn and still protect her own vulnerable heart.

  It’s too late. The realization stunned her. I’ll never forget Quinn. Not even if I return to Seattle tomorrow and never see him again, I’ll never forget him.

  The following morning, Dr. Anders pronounced Becky well enough to hobble around her house with her cane. Immensely grateful to Victoria, but aware
that she’d kept the younger woman away from her life for two weeks, Becky insisted that Victoria return to her apartment and her own commitments.

  Carrying her suitcase, Quinn waited while she hugged Becky goodbye, then followed Victoria down the sidewalk to her car where it took him only seconds to stow the bag in the back seat. He glanced over the car roof at Becky, beaming at them from the porch.

  “Becky’s watching us.”

  Victoria’s gaze flicked to the porch and back.

  Quinn fought the urge to take her in his arms. “Drive carefully.”

  His voice was gravelly, his eyes dark with emotion.

  “I will.” Victoria went up on her toes and kissed his cheek. “Thank you, Quinn.”

  “What for?” he asked gruffly.

  “For the best two weeks I can ever remember.”

  He didn’t answer, but he tucked her hair behind her ear, his fingers lingering against her cheek. A muscle twitched along his jawline, his features set in hard lines. Then he stepped back, pulling open the driver’s door.

  Victoria had no choice. She slid beneath the wheel, he closed the door and stepped back. She turned the key, the engine purred to life, and she shifted into gear and slowly accelerated, waving goodbye to Becky as she pulled away from the house.

  All the way down the driveway, she paid scant attention to the road. Instead, she watched Quinn’s unmoving figure until she turned onto the gravel main road and the rearview mirror reflected only the empty road behind her.

  “Damn,” she muttered. “Damn, damn, damn. Why couldn’t he have said something? Anything. Like, when I’ll see him again.”

  As she drove into Colson, Victoria grew even more frustrated. The slower rhythm of the small Western town and the people she’d come to know had changed her view of life.

  Do I really want to go back to twelve-hour workdays, seven days a week, with no time for friends?