The crazy woman erased the distance between them and sniffed his shirt. Twice. She wrinkled her nose before breaking into a smirk. “Relax. You don’t smell. I’d be more offended if you doused yourself in Axe body spray. Now that shit is really rank.” Her fingers traced the row of buttons that stopped between his pectorals. “Nothin’ wrong with honest sweat, Fletch. I actually prefer a man who’s not afraid to let me see his dirtier side.”
Fletch’s flip “I’m all about getting down and dirty with you” masked his relief that Tanna wasn’t turned off by his less than flowery scent.
She laughed. “You never give up, do you?”
“Nope. And consider that your warning.” He grinned. “So, you giving me a second chance on that coffee date? Say . . . on Sunday?”
“How do I know you won’t stand me up?”
Fletch placed his hand over hers, which still rested on his chest. “Since my Sunday rates are triple my normal weekly rates, it’s gotta be a real emergency for a client to call me.”
“Smart. So if it looks like you won’t make it can you at least text me?”
Dammit. He so didn’t want to admit this.
Her eyes turned suspicious. “What?”
“Does it make me a techno-loser if I admit I don’t text?”
Tanna cocked her head. “You’re a doctor. I doubt you’re a technophobe and don’t know how to text, and with all those confusing pharmaceutical names, it’s unlikely that you misspell words.”
“Not intentionally.” Fletch held up his hands. “See these huge mitts? Even the tips of my fingers cover about three letters at a time so I’m a fumbling fool. It takes me three times as long to send a text as it does to dial a number. So if I can’t call, I don’t bother.”
Her eyes were on his fingers and the hungry look on her face suggested she was thinking about how well he used his fingers, not how badly. “Tanna?”
She refocused. “Fine. Where should we meet? Someplace in Rawlins?”
Tricky woman. She didn’t consider it a real date if they met up instead of him picking her up.
Wrong. But he’d let her think that if it meant she’d show up.
“Sounds good. There’s Dot’s Diner across from the Super-Valu. Around eight?”
“That’ll work.”
“I’m looking forward to it.” Fletch pressed his lips to the back of her hand before letting her go. “Drive safe.”
Sunday night, Fletch showed up early at the restaurant for their date. He thought he’d prepared himself to act cool and friendlike. But the instant he caught sight of the sexy Texas cowgirl, he knew this “friendship” experiment was doomed to fail from the start.
So yeah, maybe he had a predatory look in his eye and a wolfish twist to his mouth when every delicious inch of Tanna sauntered toward him.
She stopped at the end of the table, propped her hand on her hip and loomed over him—as much as the petite woman could loom—and warned, “I’m fixin’ to walk right back out the door if you keep staring at me like that.”
He couldn’t stop the tiny grin or from asking, “Staring at you . . . like what?”
“Like I’m on the damn menu.”
“I wish.”
“Sweet Lord, are you tryin’ to test me today?”
“Yep. I’ve already made it clear I’d like a second helping of you. And you are testing my willpower, sugar twang, because you always look so tasty.”
She whapped him on the shoulder. “I swear, August Fletcher—”
“I love the thick and sweet way my name rolls off your tongue,” he half growled. “Say it again.”
Tanna purred, “Dr. Pervert,” before she dropped into the chair opposite his and smirked at him.
“I guess I deserved that. Still . . . I’m glad you came.”
“Since I didn’t hear from you beforehand I assume you’ve not dealt with emergency calls today?”
“Just one. Early on. So I’m all yours.” Stop with the come-ons, Fletch. “I wasn’t sure if you wanted coffee or tea so I ordered both.”
“Tea is fine. But pass me the sugar.”
He slid the packets closer. “I didn’t get a chance Friday night to ask how it’s goin’, working up at the Split Rock.”
Tanna stirred three packs of sugar into her iced tea. “Busy. I had no idea the retail store had that much traffic. I sort of expected I’d be sitting around bored. But that hasn’t happened so far.”
Fletch wrapped his hands around his cup of coffee. “Did you bartend much?”
“Twice. Harlow kind of took over the bartending gig this week.”
“You okay with that?”
“It’s only the first week so we’ll see how it goes from here. The bar is really sedate.” She winked. “I like bars that are hoppin’.”
“We oughta head to Buckeye Joe’s again one of these nights. Just you and me.”
“You and me get into trouble in bars, Fletch.”
He grinned at her. “All the more reason for us to go.”
“I’ll take it into consideration, since my usual choices of drinking buddies are currently knocked up. Or nursing.”
She stirred her tea again. Almost like she was nervous.
“What was your week like?” she asked.
“Same old, same old. Horses, cows and bulls. I did help deliver a baby llama. Cute little bugger, but the mama ain’t interested in it, so the owners will have to bottle-feed.”
“Did you do anything fun?”
He shook his head. “I worked around Laramie Monday and Tuesday. I spent Wednesday and Thursday in Rock Springs. Friday I had nonemergency visits around here I’d postponed. Yesterday I got a couple of calls but the problems had resolved themselves by the time I got there.”
“Does that happen a lot?”
“Yeah. But I can’t really know if the call was made outta panic or if there’s a valid concern for an animal without physically checking it out in most cases. They know they’ll be billed for my services regardless if there’s something wrong or not. I knew when I started my practice if I didn’t take a hard-line stance on billing for my time for all calls, it’d look like my time wasn’t worth nothin’.”
“Didn’t want to be known as the nice guy?” she asked.
Fletch flashed his teeth. “There’s a difference between bein’ accessible, bein’ nice and a bein’ a chump. But I must not be too nice because I can’t keep a veterinary assistant to save my hide.”
A smirk played around the corners of Tanna’s mouth. “This might shock you. I went to trade school for a year to become a veterinarian assistant.”
Fletch leaned forward. “Seriously? Come to work for me. I can double what they’re paying you at the Split Rock. Hell, I’ll triple it.”
“I didn’t graduate.”
“I don’t care. I can teach you how to do everything the way I like it.”
Tanna laughed. “Nice try. But I already learned a lot of the ways you like it in just one night. Which is why you keep doggin’ me.”
“Partially true. But I’m talking about business here, Tanna, not pleasure.”
“What makes you think we could work together?”
“First of all, because you’re a born ranch girl. You’ve been around large animals so you’ve got some idea what to expect. You don’t have as many misperceptions about what I do as some dewy-eyed new vet assistant school graduate.”
“I’ll bet you’ve had problems with that. Animal-loving girls who wanna snag a hot veterinarian for a husband.”
Fletch thought back to his last assistant, Ashley. She’d dressed nicely, if a bit provocatively, for her interview. She seemed to grasp that his practice wasn’t puppies and kitties. He’d hired her on a two-week trial period. She’d shown up the first day in a miniskirt and four-inch heels, with a low-cut shirt that highlighte
d her D cups. She’d lasted four days. And she seemed really surprised he hadn’t offered a marriage proposal.
Before he could toss off a sexy remark, she said, “Besides, I’m only in Wyoming temporarily. You need an assistant who’s sticking around for the long haul.”
“Why’d you go to school in the first place? Weren’t you already on the circuit?”
She wiped the condensation from her glass with a napkin. “I raced on weekends. I hadn’t gotten into my groove yet and my dad wanted me to have some sort of skill, so I chose a two-year degree. After I finished a year, I rewarded myself by attending a private barrel racing camp. That’s when everything changed.”
“How so?”
“The woman who ran the camp hadn’t personally won any world championships, but several of her students had. She was this wonderful, grizzled old cowgirl who knew horses and barrel racing. She lived it. The first time she watched me run barrels, she told me why I wasn’t increasing my time. One little trick of hers and I shaved seconds off my time.”
His eyebrows rose. “Full seconds?”
“Yep. She took a serious interest in my riding style and made me unlearn everything and start from scratch. It worked. I learned so much from her—first off that the horse does matter. Shitty horse, shitty time. When my folks picked me up, she took them aside and gave them the hard sell about letting me compete full-time because I had the talent. Offering to train me exclusively.”
“You jumped at the chance?”
“Yes, and I haven’t looked back. She tracked down my first competition-grade horse.”
When Tanna pursed her lips around the straw and sucked, Fletch’s cock stirred. What she could do with that mouth . . .
Focus, man.
“I immediately started winning. I moved up in the standings and people—meaning sponsors—began to notice. By the time I was twenty-two I was ranked top ten in the world and by twenty-nine I’d won back-to-back world championships.” A fleeting smile crossed her lips. “I was so thrilled she was in the audience in Vegas when I won. She and I went out and got rip-roarin’ drunk. It was a blast and a little bittersweet to think back on now, because the next year she died from a brain aneurysm.”
“So it’s not like you can go to her, return to basics, and get your riding mojo back.” He spun his cup around and decided head-on was the best approach with the fiery cowgirl. “I read about what happened to you last year.”
“Where?”
“Online.”
Tanna’s eyes became guarded. “You could’ve just asked me.”
“I figured I needed to suss out some details before I’d know what to ask.”
“So what do you want to know?”
Fletch picked up her hand. “Everything.”
“That’s a pretty broad subject.”
“You’re a pretty broad.”
She laughed softly. “You don’t ever react the way I expect you to.”
“I hate to be predictable.” He grinned. “Start talking, barrel racer.”
“How far back do you want me to go?”
“To when everything fell apart.”
“That’s easy to pinpoint. When my mother died.” Tanna took a long drink of iced tea. But she didn’t let go of his hand. “Now I see how spoiled I was. Of course, I took it all for granted then. I never bothered to move out on my own. Why should I? When I went home between events, I had a mini-suite to myself with a big bed, a big screen TV and a bathroom. I had home-cooked meals, someone to do my laundry, a place to train my horse. I had someone to talk to who thought I hung the moon and stars.”
He threaded his fingers through hers. Tanna’s hands weren’t pampered; hers bore the marks of hard work, like his did. But her fingers looked delicate in his big paws.
“I’ve always been a mama’s girl. My mother, like so many Texas mothers, had dreams of her daughter bein’ a beauty queen. She entered me in my first and only pageant when I was eight.” The corners of her lips turned up. “I got last place. Mama claimed it was because I hadn’t grown into my looks. But I knew even then that big-haired blondes with blue eyes would be crowned the winner. I’m too ethnic-looking for some things and not ethnic-looking enough for others.”
“Astute observation.”
She shrugged. “My mother was half-Mexican; my father a white Texas good old boy. Anyway, I’d only agreed to the pageant because I’d struck a deal with my mom. I’d compete in the pageant if she let me sign up to learn to barrel race at the fairgrounds.” She snickered. “I’m sure she thought I’d win the beauty contest and I’d forget all about barrel racing. But I won and was hooked. On the back of the horse and in the arena, it didn’t matter if I was dark skinned or light skinned—it was about skill.” Her gaze locked on to his. “I don’t need to explain ethnic issues to you.”
“No, you don’t. My mother was Native. My dad is white. I never spent time on the rez. There weren’t any Indian kids at our school. Eli and I suspected we would’ve been thrown together even if we hadn’t been related.”
“Wait. You and Eli are . . . ?”
“Cousins. His mom and my mom were second or third cousins. Although, I didn’t meet Eli until he moved in with his aunt and we started goin’ to the same school.” That was a situation she’d have to ask Eli about. “Has your family always been in Texas?”
“I’m . . . third generation? My grandfather and his brother ran away from their family in their late teens and crossed the Mexican border into Texas. They became U.S. citizens and worked any and every job they could until they earned enough to buy a small ranch. My grandfather was quite the vaquero. He caught the eye of my grandmother Bernadette, a white girl. They married against her father’s wishes and she gave birth to my mother, Bonita. Bernadette died when my mother was eleven. My mom took over running the household.”
“At age eleven?”
Tanna nodded. “She didn’t have much of a childhood, taking care of my grandfather and my uncle Manuel—who never married. They bought more land and started running cattle. Which is where my dad came in. They hired him as a ranch hand. That’s where he and mama met. He ended up taking over everything after my grandfather died. I never met my grandfather. My mama always said he worked himself to death.
“I always assumed my dad liked ranch life. So it shocked me and my brother, Garrett, when he sold off all the horses and cattle within two months of Mama’s death. We even had a good friend of his intervene, trying to get him to see how irrational he was acting in grief. But Dad told him to butt out. Then he just looked me and Garrett right in the eye and said he hated everything about living on a ranch. He had for quite some time, but my mother refused to consider selling or moving. Now that she was gone”—those beautiful brown eyes welled with tears—“he had no intention of keeping it.”
“So in addition to dealing with your mother’s death . . . you found out your father wasn’t the man you thought he was?”
Tanna pulled her hand from his and grabbed a paper napkin to blot her tears. “That’s a nice way of putting it. He told me and Garrett that we were spoiled brats and that it was coming to an end. I understand where he was coming from where I was concerned. I was a thirty-four-year-old woman who hadn’t left home. But the land succession should’ve gone to a blood relative descendant. Dad said since my mother had left everything to him, to do as he saw fit, we had no say in any decision he made. It was such an ugly situation.”
“Aw, darlin’, this is breaking my heart.”
“It broke mine too. And my spirit, which is how I ended up on a long losing streak on the circuit. Six months after we’d buried my mother, my father had rid himself of the ranch, married Mama’s best friend, Rosalie, and bought beachfront rental property in Florida.”
What a selfish asshole. “Did you and your brother get anything?”
“He gave us each one hundred K.” Tanna’s e
yes were burning with rage when she looked at him. “Not that I’m ungrateful or greedy, but that money was an insult. He sold the ranch for ten million dollars. Ten. Million. Dollars. And he couldn’t part with less than that amount for his only children?”
Fletch whistled.
“So in some ways, I lost both my parents that year. He never even called me after I got injured. It’s like that part of his life ended with my mom.”
Silence stretched between them.
When Fletch couldn’t stand it any longer, he stopped her restless fingers from ripping the napkin to shreds. He brought her hand to his mouth and placed a kiss in the center of her palm. “I’m so sorry for what you’ve gone through.”
“Thanks. As tired as I am of talking about it, that’s not the whole story. During that time I tried to maintain my standings but kept falling further and further down. I didn’t qualify for CRA World Finals. My sponsors understood. The breeders who owned the horse understood but they took Jezebel back to their stables. Which I found a relief. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone that I didn’t have a place to go, so I hid out in my horse trailer. That was a wake-up call. I realized just how spoiled I’d been.”
“I’ll bet your mother loved having you home to spoil.”
She smiled wistfully. “Maybe. By the time the new year started, I was rarin’ to go. But because I didn’t have a good showing the previous year, my sponsors cut my funds in half. So I had to curb the number of events and only entered ones with a decent purse and points. After months of limited winning, I decided to enter every event I could. I didn’t tell Jezebel’s owners and I stopped answering their calls.”
“Not smart.”
“Yeah, but I wasn’t pushing Jezebel too hard. I took extra precautions with her and had her checked out by a vet at least every two weeks. I sent those health reports on to the owners like I always did.” She took a breath. “Labor Day weekend I was scheduled to compete in Dallas at an outdoor venue. I’d drawn last, which I usually prefer. It sprinkled a little off and on. Nothin’ to be alarmed about. The other competitors said the dirt was fine. My turn rolled around and we shot out at a good clip. Made the first barrel and she didn’t feel slippery. On the second barrel . . . she spun out. We both went down. Hard. Jezebel landed on top of me, knocking the wind out of me. So it seemed like minutes that she was crushing me when in all actuality it was only seconds.
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