Best of Cowboys Bundle

by Vicki Lewis Thompson, Barbara White Daille, Judy Christenberry, Christine Wenger, Shirley Rogers, Crystal Green, Nina Bruhns, Candance Schuler, Carole Mortimer

  Esperanza Diego nodded complacently and disappeared back into the kitchen without saying a word. None of the cowhands Jo Beth passed on her way to the barn said a word to her, either. Anybody with one good eye and half a brain could tell at a glance that the jefe of the Diamond J was in the mood to kick some butt.

  It was a mood she’d been in for some time now, off and on. Not that anyone blamed her. What with the three best hands on the place lost to the summer rodeo circuit, and turning the main house into fancy la-di-da accommodations for city slickers, and the wedding and all…it was enough to make anyone a mite cranky. Added to which, they all knew she’d spent the morning holed up inside the stuffy little office across from the kitchen, wrestling with columns of numbers that most likely added up to just barely enough. So they all certainly understood, even sympathized with, her obvious desire to stomp the shit out of someone—just so long as that unlucky someone was someone else. As a result of this very natural desire to spare their individual derrieres, the barn was empty of human habitation when she reached it.

  “José!” she hollered, pausing just inside the door to give her eyes a moment to adjust to the shadowed interior. “T-Bone! Damn it, where the hell is everybody?”

  A lone horse nickered in answer.

  “Cowboys.” Jo Beth shook her head. “Bunch of no ’count, lily-livered good-for-nothings. Always running off at the slightest sign of trouble. Irresponsible sons o’…” Her voice trailed off as she neared the occupied stall. “Hey there, Bella,” she crooned, reaching into her breast pocket to fish out one of the peppermint candies she always carried for her pampered favorite. “How’re you doing, sweetheart?”

  The horse nickered again and thrust its head over the stall door, neck stretched out in greeting. Jo Beth offered her hand, palm up. The mare lipped the small red-and-white pinwheel delicately, accepting it as her due, then dropped her head and butted it against Jo Beth’s chest. Jo Beth touched her forehead to the mare’s, and felt her bad mood start to dissolve.

  Bella was her best and dearest friend, a sweet-tempered strawberry roan with a freckled white stripe on her nose and three white stockings. She’d been a champion barrel racer in her prime, and was still a damned fine cutting horse as long as you didn’t work her too hard or too long. She was patient, polite, and undemanding, without an ounce of foolishness or folly in her. A woman couldn’t ask for a steadier or more dependable companion.

  “What say you and me go for a ride?” Jo Beth whispered into the mare’s velvety ear. “Get ourselves a little fresh air and exercise. Stretch our legs. Work some of the kinks out. Hmm?” She lifted a lead shank from the hook between the stalls as she spoke, clipped it onto the mare’s halter, and led her out of the barn and into the scorching Texas sunshine.

  Fifteen minutes later she gathered up the reins and swung into the saddle. Bella took a little dancing sideways step, the powerful muscles of her shoulders and flanks twitching as she sensed her rider’s restlessness and impatience.

  “Tell Esperanza not to wait dinner on me,” Jo Beth said to the lone cowhand who’d decided it was safe to show his face now that she was mounted up.

  She held Bella to a walk as they exited the stable yard, eased her to a slow, rolling canter when they’d cleared the little hillock and the stand of scrub pine and oak trees behind the barn, and then let her have her head when the land flattened out. They raced hell-bent-for-leather for a few exhilarating moments, the hot wind whistling past their ears, Bella’s red mane and tail streaming, her hooves pounding against the hard-packed earth.

  Jo Beth bent low over the mare’s neck, her thick braid whipping out behind her, and the coil of catch rope looped over the saddle horn bouncing against her thigh. She wished they could run forever. But Bella was blowing hot and breathing hard, her thick barrel bellowing in and out between Jo Beth’s legs. Jo Beth reined in, bringing the pulse-pounding, ground-pounding gallop back down to canter, and then to a trot, and, finally, to a walk. Bella shook her head, jingling her bridle as if in protest at the slowdown, but she settled into it, more than content with the leisurely pace.

  Jo Beth sighed and tried to be content, too, but she was still restless. Still edgy. Still agitated and dissatisfied and riled up. And it wasn’t all because of the three hands who’d quit on her to follow the summer rodeo circuit, leaving her shorthanded when she needed them most, or the half dozen city slickers who were due to invade the Diamond J in less than a week, or her best friend’s wedding at which she had agreed to be—God help her—the maid of honor. It wasn’t even the bookkeeping.

  It was that damned Clay Madison!

  If she’d been getting laid regular, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it had been over six months since that weekend in Dallas with Jim, the cattle broker, and she’d gone without for four months before that. It’d been so long, she’d almost forgotten what it was she was missing. And then Clay Madison had swaggered onto the scene with that lazy, loose-hipped, loose-kneed cowboy saunter of his and had reminded her of exactly what she was doing without. She’d have avoided him if she could have, but he was best man to her maid of honor, so ignoring him wasn’t an option.

  Unfortunately, having sex with him wasn’t, either.

  Jo Beth had two ironclad rules when it came to sex. She didn’t do it close to home. And she didn’t do cowboys. Ever.

  And, hell, it wasn’t as if Clay had ever looked twice at her, anyway. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man like him looked at, or even took any particular notice of. She had a decent body—a bit on the skinny side, true, but decent, nonetheless—and she had a nice enough face. Nothing that would stop traffic, but it didn’t stop clocks, either. She freely admitted she didn’t have enough feminine graces to be what anyone would call beautiful, but she had a certain lean and rangy wholesomeness going for her, an outdoorsy girl-next-door kind of thing that wasn’t completely unappealing.

  Except to men like Clay Madison.

  Men like Clay Madison didn’t want the wholesome girl-next-door. They wanted flash and sparkle in their women. They wanted curvy bodies, big hair, fluttering eyelashes, and glossy wet-lipped smiles. They wanted adoring, tractable, bosomy, bubble-brained buckle bunnies who gave head at the drop of a trophy belt buckle and didn’t make a fuss when the party was over. And they got them. By the truckload. In every town and every city where the rodeo played, the buckle bunnies lined up, waiting for some cowboy to give them a tumble. And if that cowboy happened to be a handsome-as-sin, four-time Pro Rodeo bull-riding champion with shoulders a yard wide, a tight little butt, and a wicked gleam in his soulful brown eyes, well, that cowboy inevitably got first pick. And it was for certain he would never pick a woman like her.

  Not that she’d pick him, either. Not for anything real or permanent. But she sure as hell wouldn’t mind having him in her bed. Just once. Just one time to see if he was as good as he looked.

  “And, damn, I bet he’s fine,” she murmured, her eyes drifting closed to better imagine just how it would be.

  She pictured herself running her hands over his broad bare shoulders while he kissed her senseless, pictured herself rubbing her bare breasts against his equally bare chest while his hands roamed over her back, pictured herself digging her nails into his firm cowboy butt as he pumped into her. Her mental picture show tightened her nipples inside her plain white cotton bra and had her squirming in the saddle.

  Bella tossed her head and looked around to see what was going on.

  “Sorry, sweetheart.” Jo Beth reached out and patted the mare’s neck to reassure her that all was well. Cutting horses and barrel racers took their signals from the movement of the rider in the saddle; a press of the leg just a certain way meant one thing, a shift of weight meant something else. “I didn’t mean to confuse you, baby girl.”

  Dealing with her own confusion was more than enough for the moment.

  It wasn’t as if she even liked cowboys. Well, okay, she liked them all right, as employees, as colleagues, as friends, but definitely n
ot romantically. She’d learned her lesson there the hard way. And, yet, here she was fantasizing about one. Which just proved it was way past time she scheduled herself a trip to Dallas for an overdue visit with her favorite cattle broker. Or, maybe, since time was so short and her need was so desperate, she ought to just call up that good ol’ boy banker in the next county. He was always real glad to hear from her. Tomorrow, after the wedding, she decided, she’d give Todd a call and see if he’d like to meet her at the Holiday Inn out on Highway 81. A nice sweaty bout of recreational sex was just what she needed to clear her head and settle her nerves so she could concentrate on something besides the physical needs that hadn’t been satisfied in far too long. After all, it wouldn’t do to be all wound up when the city slickers finally arrived. It might create a bad impression if she bit a paying customer’s head off just because that customer was breathing the same air she was.

  She shifted in the saddle, arching her back in a long stretch, rolling her head from side to side in an effort to loosen muscles that were tight with tension. In the process, she inadvertently tightened her thighs against the mare’s sides. Bella took a quick little sideways jump in response. The move might have unseated a less experienced rider but Jo Beth only swayed in the saddle, keeping her seat without any trouble. “Sorry, Bella,” she said again, reaching out to settle the mare with a stroke of her hand.

  Hell, she decided, maybe she wouldn’t wait until after the wedding to call ol’ Todd. He was always real accommodating, always ready to meet her whenever and wherever she wanted him to, always up, as it were, for an afternoon quickie or an all-night marathon. Maybe she’d better call him this afternoon, as soon as she got back to the ranch, and set something up for tonight. Get the kinks out before the wedding.

  Except, damn it, she couldn’t.

  Tonight was Cassie’s bachelorette party. As maid of honor, Jo Beth was duty bound to show up for it, despite the fact that she was looking forward to it with only marginally less dread than she was to the wedding itself. The difference in her level of enthusiasm being that the wedding would be a public ordeal with everybody in the county in attendance, ready to snicker should she make a fool of herself traipsing down the aisle in a flowing silk dress with rosebuds in her hair.

  The bachelorette party, thank God, would at least be a private affair. Silly as all get-out, of course, but blessedly private because the bride had decided she wanted to have an old-fashioned slumber party instead of the more traditional girls’ night out on the eve of her wedding. The invitations had specified baby-doll nighties as the preferred wearing apparel for the festivities—“Not in this lifetime,” Jo Beth muttered morosely—and they were going to listen to golden oldies, make popcorn balls and ice cream sundaes, and give each other manicures and pedicures so they’d all have matching nail polish for the wedding. As a special surprise for the bride, bridesmaid LaWanda Brewster, who’d recently become an entrepreneur in the at-home sex-toy business, was going to treat them to a demonstration of her most popular products.

  Jo Beth shuddered at the mere thought of it, and wondered what it was about weddings that turned otherwise reasonable women into starry-eyed lunatics. Or, hell, maybe it was just her. Maybe she was the lunatic and all the rest of them were behaving perfectly normally under the circumstances. All the other bridesmaids—all five of them—had been tickled pink to be part of the wedding. They’d seemed to genuinely enjoy the shopping trip to Dallas to pick out just the right bridesmaids’ dresses, and the endless discussions about the appropriate flowers and which wedding-cake recipe was best and whether the groom’s cake should be devil’s food or red velvet. They’d been sincerely and utterly delighted with the color-coordinated bridal showers, cooing like doves over the pastel sherbet punch, the platters of tiny crustless sandwiches, and the silly bouquet made out of a paper plate festooned with bows from the shower gifts.

  It wasn’t that Jo Beth wasn’t honored to have been asked to be the maid of honor—after all, she and Cassie had been best friends since kindergarten—but, really, if she had to sit around with a bunch of otherwise rational women and gush over one more precious pot holder with the bride’s chosen rooster motif on it, she was going to run screaming from the room.

  “Thank God it will all be over tomorrow,” she said to Bella as she reined her in and swung out of the saddle.

  Her boot heels sent little puffs of dust into the air as they hit the ground, the jinglebobs on her spurs ringing merrily with the movement. She pushed the brim of her hat back with the tip of her index finger and swept her gaze over the empty landscape. A sigh of satisfaction escaped her lips. She’d ridden out into the middle of nowhere—or as close to it as she could get and still be on Diamond J land. In this remote corner of the ranch there was nothing but the hot Texas wind and the land, a few gnarled oak trees that’d managed to stand up to both, and the old wooden windmill, its blades creaking rhythmically above the water tank beneath it.

  The tank was made of smooth, weathered concrete and was a foot and a half deep and nearly ten feet across. The water in it was cool and clean. Later in the summer, when the cattle were moved in to graze the pasture, the area around the tank would be thick with mud and the water would be churned up and murky, but right now—at least until the new pool behind the main house was filled—the water tank was the closest thing to a swimming hole on the Diamond J.

  And Jo Beth was determined to take full advantage of it.

  She looped Bella’s reins around one of the crosshatch wooden braces at the base of the windmill, and reached for the metal button on the waistband of her jeans.

  WITHOUT LOOKING AWAY from the scene unfolding below him, Clay Madison looped his reins around the saddle horn in front of him, reached into the saddlebag suspended from the rigging behind him, and extracted a pair of high-powered binoculars. Someone was nosing around the water tank in the gully below. It was probably perfectly innocent, just someone intent on getting a drink for themselves or their horse, but it never hurt to make sure. Water was a precious commodity out on the Texas prairie, and a smart rancher took care to safeguard it. Not that Clay was a rancher, but he was the guest of a man who was, and that made it his duty to see what the lone rider messing around down there by the water tank was up to.

  Nudging up the brim of his black Resistol cowboy hat with the flick of a finger, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and placed the smooth plastic eyepiece directly against his brow bone. It took a second or two to manipulate the focus wheel, and then, suddenly, with no warning at all, a naked female bottom filled his entire field of vision.

  He stared at it for a second or two, then lowered the binoculars, blinked carefully and deliberately, as if to clear an obstruction in his eyes, and repositioned the binoculars. Yep, even at fifty yards there was no mistaking what he was looking at. It was definitely a woman’s ass. Creamy white and softly rounded, two perfectly formed globes of luscious female flesh peeked out at him from beneath the hem of a faded blue shirt. As he set there, stock-still atop his borrowed pinto, his gaze fastened unwaveringly on the enticing curves exposed beneath the blue shirt, he was suddenly struck with the overwhelming need to have one burning question answered.

  Who’s luscious ass was it?

  It was nobody he knew or had met in the last interminable week, that was for sure. He’d never forget an ass like that. Even if he’d only seen it fully clothed before—and, regrettably, the only asses he’d seen for a couple of months had been fully clothed—he’d have recognized it. It wasn’t the kind a man forgot. There was a nice, sweet double handful there, slim enough to entice the eye, round enough to give a man something to grab on to when the action got hot and heavy.

  But who the hell was it?

  He readjusted the focus of the binoculars to take in more of the scene below, telling himself—promising himself—he’d watch just long enough to satisfy his curiosity about who it was, then he’d turn the pinto around and go back the way he’d come. It was the proper thing, the gent
lemanly thing to do. And no matter what certain matrimonially disappointed females might say to the contrary, his dearly departed mama had raised him to be a gentleman. As soon as he knew who it was, he’d go.

  Stubbornly, though, almost as if she knew he was there, she kept her back to him as she finished undressing. She shrugged out of the blue shirt, letting it slide down her back, covering up her ass for a moment before she caught the shirt by the collar with one hand and reached up to loop it over the saddle horn on top of the pair of jeans already hanging there. Given her size in relation to the horse she was using as a clothes rack, she was an inch or two above average height, but she was slightly, almost delicately, built. The waist above that luscious ass was as narrow as a boy’s, her arms and legs were sapling slender, and he could clearly see the bumps of her spine, running down the valley of her back like a strand of pearls barely showing beneath her pale creamy skin. The look of fragility was directly countered, however, by the strength inherent in the smooth flex and coil of the well-toned muscles that covered her narrow frame. She was, he decided judiciously, what was commonly called lean and wiry. She looked the way he had always imagined a ballerina would look if you saw her naked. Not his type at all—he preferred exotic dancers to ballerinas—except for that fantastic little caboose.

  It gave him hope that what she had in the breast department might be equally fantastic, and had him unconsciously sucking in his breath when she reached up behind her and released the hooks on her plain white bra.

  She leaned forward a bit as it loosened, crossing her arms over her torso, lifting her hands to brush the shoulder straps down. As she straightened, reaching out with one hand to stuff the scrap of white fabric into one of the saddlebags strapped to her horse’s saddle, she flicked a long brown braid over her shoulder. It was nearly as thick as a man’s wrist and came halfway down her back. The sight tickled a memory in Clay’s mind. He’d seen a woman with hair like that. Recently, he thought. He was almost sure of it.