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

  “It’s not at all what I expected a Texas ranch house to look like,” Carla said.

  Jo Beth flashed the woman her first unforced smile of the day. “You were expecting the Ponderosa, weren’t you? Something made out of great big rough-hewn logs?”

  Carla Branson chuckled. “’Fraid so.” Her blue eyes twinkled. “How’d you know?”

  “Even as old as it is, that TV show is most people’s only exposure to ranch life. Most Texas ranch houses are just like this one, though, especially in the hill country. Wooden clapboard siding. A gabled roof.” She gestured toward the house as she spoke. “A wide wraparound porch to keep the sun out as much as possible. Down in southwest Texas you’ll find some adobes with red tile roofs. But you have to head a lot farther north, all the way to Wyoming and Montana, or out west to Nevada before you find very many ranch houses made out of logs.”

  “Well, it’s lovely,” Carla Branson said.

  “The foreman’s cabin is the same style,” Jo Beth assured her. “It’s just smaller in scale. It has two bedrooms with a living area in between, and a mini-kitchen with a stovetop and a refrigerator, which I thought might come in useful if your boys want a snack.”

  “My boys always want a snack,” Carla said.

  “Oh, wow, a pool!” they heard one of the boys shout gleefully. A moment later, the rapid pounding of sneakered feet brought both boys streaking back around the corner of the house to their mother. “Mom, they’ve got a pool! They’ve got a pool!” they shrieked, grabbing hold of her hands to drag her the rest of the way.

  Jo Beth quickened her pace to keep up.

  “Just like in the brochure,” she heard their mother say. “Change into your bathing suits, boys, and we’ll take a swim before dinner.”

  For the first time since she started her new venture, Jo Beth really, truly began to believe that it just might prove successful, after all.

  BY FOUR O’CLOCK all the guests with reservations for the first week of operation had arrived. Esperanza and one of her nieces, who’d been hired to help provide waitressing and maid service, provided a delicious welcome buffet supper on the poolside patio. The guests feasted on authentic Mexican especialidads, including shredded pork tamales baked in corn husks, enchiladas made with handmade tortillas and fresh salsa, and cinnamon sopaipillas, deep-fried puff pastry drizzled with honey, for dessert.

  By ten o’clock all the guests were safely tucked away in their rooms. The four Bransons were securely ensconced in the former foreman’s cabin, which had previously been Jo Beth’s living quarters from the time she returned home from college to take on the foreman’s job herself until she began the renovations nearly a year ago to add guest facilities to the ranch.

  A divorced father and his sulky fourteen-year-old son were in the two single dormer rooms on the second floor with the connecting bathroom in between.

  A young married couple celebrating their first wedding anniversary occupied the third upstairs bedroom and the bathroom connected to it.

  Two bright, pretty New York City twenty-some-things, whom—judging by the shameless way they’d flirted with all the cowhands—Jo Beth suspected of harboring some hot cowboy fantasies of their own, were sharing the big front bedroom and bath on the first floor, which had been Jo Beth’s parents’ room.

  And Jo Beth was tucked into a small bedroom at the back of the house in a space that had once been the laundry porch way back before the house had been wired for electricity in the early 1900s. It had served mainly as a storage area since then and had been turned into her private retreat during the renovations. It was a long, fairly narrow room, with enough space for a bed at one end and a sitting area at the other. It had a tiny bathroom in one corner, only big enough for a commode, a sink, and a shower stall. It also had a door that opened to the outside.

  Jo Beth didn’t even wait for all the lights to flicker out before she eased the door open and headed down to the trailer parked behind the barn.

  10

  JUST LIKE THE NIGHT BEFORE, the door to the trailer was unlocked. Unlike the night before, however, Clay wasn’t waiting naked in bed for her. He was in the shower. Steam billowed out of the open bathroom door, filling the air with moist heat and the clean, woodsy fragrance of pine-scented soap.

  She thought about joining him—the open door was surely an invitation—but decided to wait. She’d seen his bathroom the previous evening. The shower stall was barely big enough for him to stand in without banging his elbows on the walls. One of them would get hurt if they tried to engage in any kind of soapy sexual fun in the tiny cubicle. Besides, she’d already washed, dried and rebraided her hair and she didn’t want to get it wet again; the thick, wavy mass took forever to dry.

  From the look of things, she assumed he’d been working out, though why he’d need more exercise after the nonstop sixteen-hour day he’d already put in escaped her. In any case, there was a set of dumbbells on the floor next to the weight bench, and the complicated arrangement of weights and pulleys on the exercise machine was set in a different configuration than it had been the last time she’d seen it. A damp towel had been spread over one of the machine’s crossbars to dry. She pulled it off the bar and held it to her nose. It smelled of hot, hardworking male and something else less pleasant. She sniffed again, more gingerly. The scent of analgesic ointment made her wrinkle her nose and return the towel to its spot.

  She wondered what kind of pain he was in, and if it was bad. Or, rather, how bad it was. She knew rodeo cowboys, like other professional athletes in rough contact sports—and rodeo was one of the roughest—were almost always in some kind of pain, nursing a pulled muscle or a bruised rib or just feeling the general achiness that came from being banged around all the time. The most successful rodeo cowboys, the ones who survived the game the longest and won the most trophy money and big, shiny belt buckles, had an unusually high tolerance for pain. But a high tolerance didn’t mean they didn’t feel it, especially when it was the kind of pain that came from the crisscrossing network of scars that marred Clay’s perfect body.

  They mostly ran up and down his right leg, from his groin to just past his knee, but there were a few low on his abdomen, too. They were new scars, still faintly pink in places, hard to see clearly in the moonlight, no matter how bright. She’d seen enough last night to know, though, that they were an ugly mishmash of precise surgical incisions and jagged wounds inflicted by the hooves and horns of an enraged Brahman bull. He had ignored them, so she’d done him the courtesy of ignoring them, too, but she couldn’t help but wonder at the toll they had taken—and continued to take—on him.

  She heard the shower stop. “Hey, cowboy,” she called out, letting him known he wasn’t alone in the trailer.

  He poked his head out, peering around the edge of the open door. “Hey, yourself.” He grinned at her. “Why didn’t you join me? I left the door open.”

  Jo Beth shook her head. “There isn’t enough room in your shower for what would have happened if I’d joined you.”

  “Is, too,” he said with mock petulance, giving a dead-on impersonation of the Branson brothers. The two boys had been overtired from the long trip to the Diamond J and had gotten overexcited roughhousing in the pool. Their mother had finally had to separate them to stop their bickering and ended up putting them to bed as soon as supper was over.

  Jo Beth smiled at him. “I know what you’re up to,” she said, “but I’m not quite ready to put you to bed yet.”

  His eyes lit up with the sensual interest that was never far from the surface. “You got something else planned?”

  “I might,” she teased.

  “What?”

  “Dry off that gorgeous body and come out here and I’ll show you.”

  He grinned again. “Give me one minute,” he said, and disappeared back into the bathroom.

  He was already more or less dry but he grabbed a towel from the bowl of the sink where he’d dropped it and began the process all over again. It wasn’t as if
he was stalling, exactly, and it wasn’t because he was sensitive about his scars. It was just that some women, when they saw his leg in the bright light tended to turn squeamish on him, or get all fussy and sympathetic, or ask a lot of fool questions he didn’t want to answer.

  Not that he thought Jo Beth would get squeamish. She was a rancher and ranchers, by definition, were not squeamish people, even when they were female. She probably wasn’t going to go all fussy and sentimental on him, either, because Jo Beth was one of the least fussy women he’d ever known. And if she hadn’t asked a lot of fool questions last night, it stood to reason that she wouldn’t now.

  He caught his own gaze in the mirror. “Okay,” he said to his reflection. “So maybe I’m a little sensitive.”

  It wasn’t something he liked to admit, even to himself. Especially to himself. He wrapped the towel around his waist, knotting it low on his left hip, and swaggered out of the tiny bathroom just to prove he wasn’t all that sensitive about it.

  Jo Beth was sitting on the end of the padded weight bench, bare-legged, wearing one of his black western snap-front shirts and a sly, sexy smile on her face. His chaps were draped across her lap. He recognized them by the distinctive row of silver conchas running down each leg.

  He eyed her warily, suspicious of that smile. “What are you planning to do with those?”

  “Nothing.” She stroked a hand over the smooth, worn leather. “Yet.”

  “Yet?” He leaned against the kitchen counter and crossed his arms over his wide, bare chest. The pose was casual and lazily arrogant and, Jo Beth realized, it took most of his weight off of his right leg. It abruptly occurred to her that his regular stance, hipshot, casual, with his left foot flat on the ground and his right knee slightly bent, did the same thing.

  It could, of course, be the way he had always stood, or it could be an unconscious accommodation to the pain he constantly battled.

  She ran her gaze down the long length of his body, from the smoothly rounded muscles in his bare shoulders and hair-dusted chest, to the bugling biceps of his crossed arms, down the sculpted surface of his washboard abs, past his towel-draped hips, down his long, lean hard-muscled legs. His right knee was bent, the toes of his right foot just barely touching the floor. She lifted her gaze back to his face. He was grinning at her, as usual, with that wild, wicked, come-and-get-me-baby look in his eyes, clearly enjoying her slow survey of his nearly naked body. But there was something else there, too, something dark lurking just behind the reckless bravado and sensual invitation in his gaze.

  She glanced at the prescription bottles sitting on the kitchen counter. There were three of them, lined up in a row, each with a tiny tablet laid neatly out in front of it. “You haven’t taken your pain meds yet, have you?”

  His face went utterly blank for a moment. That was so not what he’d expected her to say. He recovered quickly, lifting one shoulder in a careless shrug. “Not yet,” he said dismissively, both irritated by and uneasy with her question.

  “Take them,” she said.

  Rebellion flared in his eyes.

  “I’m a rancher,” she said quickly, before he could give voice to all that masculine indignation and make some idiotic statement he couldn’t back down from. “I’ve been around cowboys all my life. I’ve seen them get stomped on and gored and mangled. I’ve seen broken bones and cracked skulls and mashed fingers. I’ve even had a few myself. I know pain when I see it. And you’re in pain. So don’t be a macho idiot,” she snapped, knowing instinctively that cooing feminine sympathy would only get his back up and make him feel he had to prove how stoic he could be. “Take the damn pills, Clay.”

  He stood stock-still for a second longer, holding her gaze, his mutinous and unruly, hers imperturbable and dispassionate. And then he gave a resigned sigh. “You’re a mean, unfeeling bitch,” he said conversationally and turned to pick up the pills.

  “And you like that about me.”

  “Yeah. I guess I do.” He tossed all three pills into his mouth at once, turned on the water in the kitchen sink and leaned down to drink directly from the faucet. “So—” he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand as he straightened “—now what?”

  “Now we wait for those pills to take effect and then—” she stroked the chaps that were still lying across her lap “—I show you what I want you to do with these.”

  “What you want me to do with them?” He resumed his casual pose against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest in a way that best displayed his impressive physique. “Why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like what you have in mind?”

  “Oh, I think you will,” she said. “It’s another one of my fantasies. And you’ve liked all of my fantasies so far, haven’t you?”

  He nodded. “So far.”

  “You’ll like this one, too. I promise.” She stroked the chaps again, with just her fingertips this time, the way she had stroked his skin the night before. “Trust me.”

  “Said the spider to the fly.” He flashed her his wicked cowboy grin, the one deliberately designed to make women weak at the knees. “Maybe you should bring those into the bedroom so we can get started on whatever you’ve got in mind.”

  “We’re not going into the bedroom. At least—” her smile was as wickedly seductive as his “—not yet, we aren’t.”

  She was deliberately building up the anticipation, of course, and hoping to make him sweat a little while he wondered and worried about just what she had in mind, but she was also buying time for the pain pills to take full effect. She wanted him fully, completely focused on her when the time came, not distracted by pain. At least, that’s what she told herself.

  “You were terrific with the dudes today,” she said.

  “The dudes? You want to talk about the dudes? Now?”

  “I just thought you should know. They were all very impressed with you. Especially that little brunette from New York and her busty friend.”

  “The brunette’s name is Arianna,” he supplied. “The blonde is Stacie.”

  “Oh, you remember their names, do you?”

  “Of course I remember their names,” he said. “The two of them cornered me on the porch after supper and asked if I was interested in a three-way. Pret’ near scared the piss outta me.”

  “Oh, dear.” Jo Beth tsk-tsked with mock disappointment. “I may have to change my plans, unless…Does the idea of a three-way really scare you?”

  “With those two man-eaters, it does. They’re a couple of baby sharks. With really big teeth.” He gave an exaggerated little shiver. “You have to promise to protect me from them.”

  “I promise to snatch them bald-headed if they get too close to you,” she said, just a little more seriously than she should have if she’d really been teasing.

  The spurt of jealousy—if that’s what it was—disconcerted her enough to have her quickly changing the subject.

  “If you want to know the truth, I was pretty impressed with you today, too,” she said. “And I’m not talking about the way you fill out your jeans, although—” she smiled appreciatively “—you do that very nicely.”

  He tilted his head in acknowledgment. “I aim to please.”

  “And you do,” she said. “On many levels. One of them being the way you handled the dudes. No, let me finish,” she said, when he would have interrupted. “I believe in giving credit where credit is due, and in admitting when I’m wrong. I pooh-poohed the idea and tried to make a joke out of it when Tom and Roxy suggested that you could be an asset on a dude ranch. But if you hadn’t been there when the Bransons arrived, I’d have been stiff and unnatural, which would have made them uncomfortable, and everything would have started off on the wrong foot.”

  “You’d have pulled it together.”

  “Maybe. Eventually. But you being there meant I didn’t have to. You’re good with people. Real good.”

  He waggled his eyebrow. “I’m better in bed,” he said, trying to turn the conversation to a subject tha
t was more familiar and comfortable for him. He was used to being lauded for his physical prowess and his sexual expertise. He could respond to that kind of flattery with a knowing grin or a wiseass remark. Being commended for his social graces left him tongue-tied and embarrassed.

  Jo Beth sighed. “I’m trying to show my appreciation here, and give you a compliment,” she said. “The proper response is ‘thank you.’”

  “Thank you.” He waited for two long beats. “Can we go to the bedroom now? You could show me your appreciation in there.”

  Jo Beth shook her head. “I’m going to have to make you suffer for that remark.” She stood up, shook out the chaps, and held them out in front of her. A slyly considering look gleamed in her brown eyes. “I really like the way you look in these.” She approached him with a slow, hip-rolling, hip-thrusting gait as she spoke, and held the chaps up to his waist, as if judging for fit. “They emphasize your tight little cowboy butt and showcase your package real nice,” she said, and let them go.

  He clutched at them automatically to keep them from falling to the floor.

  “Put them on for me,” she said.

  “What?”

  She slipped her fingers under the knot on the towel at his waist and pulled it off. “Put the chaps on.”

  “You mean, like this?” Clay was scandalized. “With nothing underneath?”

  “Nothing but you,” she purred.

  “But that’s…That’s indecent.”

  “Why is it indecent?”

  “Because it’d be like parading around in…in crotchless panties, that’s why.”

  “And only women do that, right?”

  “Yes.” He immediately saw the trap he’d fallen into. “I mean…that is…Okay, yes,” he said, deciding to stick by his guns. “Only women do that. It’s biological.”