“Oh, that’s just what I need,” Jo Beth countered. “A hip swaggering rhinestone Romeo running around loose on the Diamond J, seducing my female guests. That’d go over real big with the husbands.”
“I’ve never worn a rhinestone in my life,” Clay objected. “And I’ve never trifled with a married woman.”
Jo Beth raised an eyebrow at that.
“That I know of,” Clay amended.
“See there?” Tom said. “He knows how to behave proper.”
“I’m sure he knows how,” Jo Beth agreed. “The question is, would he?”
“Jo Beth!” Roxy said, scandalized. “There’s no call to be hateful.”
“I’m sorry. You’re right.” She looked across the table at Clay. “I apologize. I had no cause to make an assumption like that. No offense,” she said, meaning it sincerely this time.
“None taken,” he replied, equally sincere.
“Well, now, it’s settled then,” Tom said, satisfaction evident in his tone. “Clay’ll move his rig on over to your place in the morning so he can be on hand to help you wrangle the dudes.”
“Jo Beth hasn’t said whether she’s agreeable to that, yet,” Roxy pointed out.
“Jo?” Tom said.
Jo Beth looked across the table at Clay. “Riding herd on a bunch of dudes isn’t the kind of work you’re used to,” she said, giving it one last shot. “It isn’t going to be exciting or stimulating or probably even very interesting. You’ll likely be bored out of your mind before the week is out.”
“No more bored than I’d be hanging around my aunt’s place doing nothing all summer except rest up.” He stood and extended his hand across the table. “I’m willing to give it a try if you are.” He grinned. “Boss?”
Jo Beth had no choice. Not with Tom and Roxy and Clay staring at her, waiting for her answer. Not when it was, as Tom had said, damn it, the perfect solution to both her and Clay’s problems. If he were anyone else, she wouldn’t hesitate for a minute.
That in itself was reason enough to accept his offer because if she turned him down it was a sure bet everyone in the county would start in to speculating as to why, and getting it all wrong in the process. Or not.
She stood, reaching across the table to put her hand in his. “I’ll see you bright and early tomorrow morning.” She gave his hand one hard pump and let it go. “The day starts at 5:00 a.m. on the Diamond J.”
7
“SEÑORITA JO?” Esperanza Diego tapped lightly on the door frame of Jo Beth’s open office door. “You have company, señorita.”
Jo Beth knew who the company was. She’d heard the muted roar of his high-powered pickup as it had pulled into the yard, heard his knock on the front door, heard the low, easy timber of his voice as he conversed in soft sibilant Spanish with her housekeeper, heard his boot heels ring confidently against the polished terra-cotta tiles in the wide front hall as he made his way toward her office across from the kitchen.
She was ready for him. More than ready. She’d been mentally preparing herself for this meeting since the minute she’d opened her eyes that morning. She knew exactly what she was going to say and exactly how she was going to say it. There would be no room for misunderstanding or innuendo, and she would make it absolutely clear that if he were going to work on the Diamond J, there would be no repeat of what had happened in the tack room in Tom Steele’s barn. No matter how indiscreetly she may have behaved with a fellow member of the wedding party, the jefe of the Diamond J did not indulge in sexual antics with the hired help. Period. Full stop. End of story.
She was fairly certain that knowledge would cause Clay to rescind his offer to help. She knew, as surely as she knew her own name, that he’d only made the offer because he thought it would get him into her pants again. And if she was wrong, if he really had made the offer out of the goodness of his heart or as an antidote to boredom or some combination of the two, well, at least she’d have made her position clear and there would be no misunderstandings or ambiguities that might come back to haunt her later.
“Gracias, Esperanza,” she said coolly, without looking up from the spreadsheet on her computer screen. “Ask him to come in, por favor.”
“I’m already in,” he said.
Jo Beth looked up to see him standing in the doorway beside and just a bit behind her housekeeper. He towered head and shoulders above the diminutive woman, looking dark and dangerous and fatally seductive in snug, faded jeans that hugged his lean hips and a snap-front western shirt that made his shoulders and chest look impossibly broad. His stacked-heel cowboy boots were burnished black leather, hand-stitched and custom-made, adding unnecessary inches to his height. A silver trophy buckle—one of hundreds, she was sure—decorated his hand-tooled leather belt and showcased his lean midsection. The silver conchas running down the sides of his chaps emphasized the length of his lean horseman’s legs and subtly accentuated the bulge beneath his fly. He was every inch the cocky, confident rodeo heartthrob, from the dark, silky hair tickling the tops of his ears, to the black cowboy hat he carried, deceptively gentlemanlike, in one hand, to the blunted rowels of the diamond and heart spurs on his boots.
Jo Beth ignored the fluttering sensation in her chest and told herself she wasn’t the least bit impressed.
“He is already in,” Esperanza parroted, turning her head to smile up at him approvingly.
“So I see,” Jo Beth muttered, wondering if he deliberately went out of his way to charm every woman he came in contact with, or if it came so naturally to him he didn’t even know he was doing it.
Like Jo Beth, the housekeeper wasn’t normally an easy woman to charm but, somehow, someway, he had accomplished that task in the time it took to walk from the front door of the ranch house to the office. Esperanza was all but simpering.
“Gracias, Esperanza,” Jo Beth said again, tacitly sending the housekeeper on her way.
“Sí, señorita.” Esperanza bobbed her head and stepped back. She bumped into Clay.
He turned sideways, pressing his back up against the doorjamb to let her get by, and made a flourishing gesture with the hat in his hand that ceded the right of way to her. She flashed another twinkling smile at him. He returned it instantly and in full measure, giving the housekeeper a look that said, at just that moment, his entire attention was centered squarely and completely on her. That ability to focus so intently on a single person was a big part of his charm, Jo Beth realized, and whether it was learned or innate made no difference in how it affected people.
“You’re late,” she said pointedly, when he turned that laserlike attention back to her. She stiffened her spine against its softening effect.
“Late?” A ghost of a grin turned up the corners of his mouth. “You mean you were serious about starting at five o’clock?”
Jo Beth didn’t return his smile. “I’m always serious when it comes to the Diamond J. You’d do well to remember that.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He touched two fingers to his forehead in a mocking salute. “I’ll make a note of it.”
Jo Beth stifled a sigh. He wasn’t going to make this easy but, then, she really hadn’t expected him to. His type never did things the easy way if they could help it. “Come in and close the door, please,” she said in her most clipped, most authoritative voice. “If you’re actually going to go through with this charade, there are a few things I need to make crystal clear to you first. Privately.”
He closed he door. “Sounds serious.” He sauntered across the small room, hitched a hip onto the edge of her desk and, placing his forearm on his thigh, leaned in as if ready to listen intently. “Shoot,” he said.
Jo Beth tensed, fighting the cowardly urge to get to her feet and put some space between them. “You’re crowding me,” she said instead. Her voice was cool and rock steady. She was very proud of herself for the way it sounded; it was so completely at odds with the warm, squishy, entirely idiotic way her insides were reacting to his nearness. “And I don’t like to be cr
owded.” She leveled an icy gaze at him for emphasis. “So back off, cowboy.”
Clay straightened away from her without rising from the edge of the desk. “Whatever you say, boss.”
“I don’t like to be called boss, either,” she snapped.
“Is there anything you do like?”
So much for there being no room for innuendo, she thought. The man was a master at it. Sexual insinuations came as easily to him as breathing. Or, hell, maybe she was hearing sensual implications that weren’t there. She didn’t think so, though. He looked way too self-satisfied and full of himself for her to be imagining it.
She stifled another sigh. “Look,” she began patiently, determined to stick to the script she had devised in her head. “If you’re going to be working here we have to get a few things straight.”
“Such as?”
“Such as how there will not be a repeat of what happened at the wedding reception yesterday.”
The expression in his dark eyes warmed another lascivious degree or two. “In the tack room, you mean?”
“Yes, in the tack room.” She pushed to her feet, unable to sit still another minute with him perched on the edge of her desk, looming over her, all but surrounding her with his heat and raw animal vitality. “I want to be absolutely clear on this. It will not happen again.”
“Why not? Didn’t you like it?” His smile made it clear that he knew she had.
“That’s not the point.”
“What is the point, then?”
“The point is, I am the jefe of the Diamond J and as such I don’t indulge in intimate relationships with the hired help.”
“Well, you know, strictly speaking, I’m not the hired help.” He fingered the brim of his hat as he spoke and tilted his head, looking up at her from under his thick fringe of lashes, suddenly the very picture of harmless aw-shucks innocence. “I’m just somebody who’s being real neighborly-like and lending a—” his glance flickered downward for a scant, fleeting second “—hand.”
Jo Beth had to restrain the urge to shield the crotch of her jeans with her palms. So much for innocence! “This isn’t going to work,” she said.
“Oh, I think it will.” He rose from his perch on the edge of the desk and set his hat, brim side up, on top of her computer monitor. “You just have to adjust your perspective a little bit, is all.”
“My perspective?” She stood her ground as he moved toward her, despite the insistent clamoring of every single nerve ending she possessed telling her to turn tail and run. Jo Beth Jensen had never run in her life and she wasn’t about to start now. “What’s wrong with my perspective?”
“First off, we don’t have an intimate relationship. We don’t have any kind of relationship at all, when you come right down to it.”
“No, we don’t,” she agreed. “We don’t have a relationship. That’s exactly what I wanted to make clear.” She took a small unconscious step back as he continued to advance with that slow hip-rolling cowboy gait of his that oozed sex with every step. “I’m glad you realize that, and that you’re willing to acknowledge it. I wasn’t sure you would.”
“Oh, I realize it. I realized it from the minute you told me what we do have.”
“I told you what we have? When?”
“In the tack room.”
“I told you…?” She shook her head, unable to think clearly with him standing so close. And, come to think of it, how had he gotten so close? And how had she ended up with her back pressed flat against the metal file cabinet?
This wasn’t how she’d meant this interview to go at all. She’d been determined to stand her ground, to show him who was boss, to show him how unaffected she was by his seductive charm and, yet, here she was, cornered in her own office, as breathless and wet as some brainless hot-to-trot buckle bunny.
She slapped her hand against his chest to hold him off. “What did I tell you we have?” she demanded, striving to maintain some semblance of control.
He put his hand over hers, pressing it flat to his chest. “Don’t you remember?”
She could feel the slow, steady beat of his heart beneath the hard curve of his pectoral muscle. It set her palm to tingling and sent heat racing up her arm to sear her brain, making it hard to connect one coherent thought to another. She shook her head again, trying to clear the sensual haze that fogged it.
“You explained that what was between us was sex,” he reminded her. “Plain and simple, down and dirty sex, you said. And then you slid your hand down my body—” he matched the words to action, dragging her hand, unresisting, down the front of his body as he spoke “—and showed me exactly what you meant by that.”
She could feel his erection under her palm, huge and hard and tempting, pushing against the button-fly front of his jeans, throbbing under her fingers. He released her hand. She didn’t move it. She barely even breathed.
“It was good sex,” he said, his voice low and dark and wickedly seductive. “It was hot, wild, mind-blowing, toe-curling sex. I want more. How ’bout you, Jo Beth?” He nudged his hips forward, pressing his erection more deeply into the curve of her hand. “Do you want more, too?”
There was only one honest answer to that but she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it. She couldn’t bring herself to move her hand, either. That was answer enough.
“We could have more.” He bracketed her hips in his palms and pulled her firmly to him, so they were pressed tightly together, pelvis to pelvis.
Her hand was trapped between their bodies, her palm filled with his hard, hot penis, her knuckles pressed against her own pubic mound. All the soft, sensitive tissue between her thighs began to tingle.
“I’d be at your service, just like in the tack room,” he said. “Only it wouldn’t be a quickie. I’d make it last for hours.”
“Hours?” she echoed faintly, thinking of all the fantasies she’d had over the last week, fantasies of what she could do to him…what he could do to her…what they could do to each other. The throbbing between her thighs intensified.
“Hours,” he promised. “Think about it, Jo Beth. You and me together.” He bent his head and nuzzled the hollow of her throat, his lips barely touching her, his breath hot and moist against her skin. “Completely naked.” His mouth grazed the side of her neck and trailed upward. “In a bed.” He flicked the lobe of her ear with his tongue. “I’m good in a bed.” He breathed the words into her ear. “Real good.”
Coming from any other man the hotly whispered words would have sounded like sheer macho braggadocio. From him, they were merely a statement of fact—and she could testify to the truth of that statement from her own experience.
He was good.
Damned good.
He was, unfortunately, the best she’d ever had.
“I can give you what you want.” He shifted her hips from side to side between his hands as he spoke, so that their bodies rubbed together, so that she felt the pressure of her own hand between her legs. “As often as you want it. Any way you want it.”
She closed her eyes and sucked in her breath, wondering if she was going to come right then and there, just from the sound of his voice in her ear and feel of him in her hand and the exquisite intermittent, maddening pressure against her pubic bone.
“Anything you want,” he whispered hypnotically, like the legendary incubus of Greek myth, promising untold sexual delights to susceptible women. He rotated his hips, just slightly, just enough to make her gasp and catch her breath. “Anything you can imagine.”
“Anything?” she murmured, transfixed, her imagination running riot, her blood pounding, her body pulsating with anticipation and rampant intemperate need.
“Anything.” His lips grazed hers, barely touching. “And everything,” he said, the words a hot promise against her mouth.
And then he let her go and stepped back.
“Or we could do it your way,” he said, “and keep it strictly business.”
Jo Beth blinked up at him, dazed, confused
, wildly aroused, her lashes fluttering like those of a dreamer caught in a deep, drugged sleep.
“Think about it,” he said, “and let me know.” He plucked his hat from the top of her computer. “I’ll be outside getting my rig situated.”
IT TOOK JO BETH nearly sixty seconds to tamp down the urge to chase after Clay so she could throttle him with her bare hands. And then another sixty to come to the inescapable conclusion that she didn’t really want to throttle him—when she finally got her hands on him it would be to do something far different!—and didn’t need to think about whether to accept his offer or not. Well, she did need to think about it, she should think about it, but damn it, she didn’t want to think about it!
She wanted him. She wanted her fantasy cowboy and the hours of hot, wild, mind-blowing, toe-curling sex he had offered her. And, at that exact moment, with her body still throbbing and her blood running hot and her nerves screaming with sheer sexual frustration, she couldn’t think of one single reason why she shouldn’t have what she wanted. Not one.
As long as she went about it discreetly, so there was no chance of anyone ever knowing, what was the harm? As he had pointed out, he wasn’t actually an employee. She wasn’t paying him a salary. So, in reality, she wasn’t violating her rule against getting involved with the hired help. And her other rules, the ones about not getting involved with cowboys and not indulging her sexual appetites close to home, well, she’d already violated both of those by having sex with him yesterday. At this point it was just a matter of degree and, hell, in for a penny, in for a pound, as her mother used to say.
Her mind made up, she plucked her hat off the rack by the door, settled it securely on her head, and calmly, deliberately, headed outside to the yard to lay down the terms of their continued…association.
Clay was standing by the hood of his gleaming black pickup, hipshot, at ease, talking to T-Bone McGuire and two teenaged boys she recognized from the Second Chance Ranch.
The boys, brothers by the look of them, were sandy-haired and gangly, wearing faded jeans and shirts so new she could see the creases from where they’d been folded around the cardboard inserts they’d been packaged with. They were obviously starstruck, dazzled by the real live four-time Pro Rodeo bull-riding champion in their midst and, just as obviously, trying not to show it.
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