Cassidy Harte and the Comeback Kid

“True enough. Can’t say as I blame you.”

Still, the disappointment in the feisty rancher’s eyes gnawed at Cassie’s insides. Guilt poked at her. Leaving right now in the middle of the ranch’s busiest season would create a bundle of problems. Jean would have to find someone else fast to fill her position, which meant she would have to take time from the ranch’s guests for hiring and training someone new.

She wavered. Maybe she could stick it out a little longer, just for Jean’s sake.

Then she thought about working for Zack, having to see him regularly. Ten years ago she had been nothing short of devastated when he jilted her. She had worked hard during the intervening years to get to this place where she had confidence again, where she could see all the good things about herself instead of constantly dwelling on what it was she had lacked that had driven the man she loved into the arms of her brother’s wife.

Seeing him all the time, working for him, was bound to undermine that confidence. She couldn’t do it. Not even for Jean.

“I’m sorry,” she said again.

Jean shrugged and managed a weathered smile. “We’ll just have to make the best of a bad situation. That’s all we can do. Now, it’s been a heck of a day. Why don’t you go back to your cabin and I’ll finish up here?”

“No. I’m almost done. You get some rest.”

Jean touched her shoulder again. “Good night, then,” she said, then hobbled from the kitchen.

After her boss left, Cassie quickly finished her prep work for breakfast, then turned the lights off and walked out of the kitchen toward her own cabin next to the creek.

She considered her little place the very best perk of working for the ranch. It was small, only three rooms—tiny bedroom, bathroom and a combined kitchen and living room—but all three rooms belonged to her.

For another few days, anyway.

The cabin was more than just a place to sleep. It represented independence, a chance to stand on her own without her two older brothers hovering in the wings to watch over her, as they had been doing for most of her life.

She was twenty-eight years old and this was the first time she had ever lived away from home. How pathetic was that? She had never known the giddy excitement of moving into a college dorm and meeting her roommates for the first time or the rush of being carried across the threshold of a new house by a loving husband or repainting a guest bedroom for a nursery.

She didn’t like the bitter direction her thoughts had taken. Still, she couldn’t help thinking that if it hadn’t been for Zack Slater, her life might have turned out vastly different.

She had just graduated high school when he blew into her life. She had been young and naive and passionately in love with the gorgeous ranch hand with the stunning gold-flecked eyes and the shadows in his smile.

To her amazement he had seemed as smitten as she. The fierce joy in his face whenever he saw her had been heady stuff for a girl who had never even had a serious boyfriend before.

Right from the beginning they had talked of marriage. He had wanted her to finish college before they married, but she couldn’t stand the idea of being away from him for four long years. She had worked for weeks to persuade him that she could still attend college after they were married, that he could work while she went to school since she had a scholarship. After she graduated, she would work to put him through.

Finally she had worn down his resistance. She flushed now, remembering. Maybe if she hadn’t been in such a rush, had given him time to adjust to the idea of settling down, he wouldn’t have felt the need to bolt.

But he did, taking her dreams—and her brother’s wife—with him, and leaving Matt a single father of a tiny baby.

What else could she have done but stay and try to repair the damage she had brought down on her family? If she had the choice to do all over again, she honestly didn’t think she would change anything she had done after he left.

She sighed and let herself into the cabin, comforted by the familiar furnishings—the plump couch, the rocker of her mother’s, the braided rug in front of the little fireplace. She had made the cabin warm and cozy and she loved it here.

Functioning more on autopilot than through any conscious decision, she walked into the small bathroom and turned on the water in the old-fashioned clawfoot tub, as hot as she could stand. When the tub was filled almost to overflowing, she took off her clothes and slipped into the water, desperate to escape the unbelievable shock of seeing the only man she had ever loved, after all these years.

Taking a bath was a huge mistake.

She realized that almost as soon as she slid down into the peach-scented bubbles. Now that she didn’t have her work in the kitchen to keep her busy, she couldn’t seem to fix her mind on anything but Zack and the memories of that summer ten years ago, memories that rolled across her mind like tumbleweed in a hard wind.

The first time she had talked to him—really talked to him—was branded into her memory. He had worked at the Diamond Harte for several months before that late spring evening, but she had been so busy finishing her senior year of high school that she had barely noticed him, except as the cute, slightly dangerous-looking ranch hand with the sunstreaked hair and that rare but devastating smile.

Matt liked him, she knew that. Her oldest brother had raved about what a way Zack had with horses and how he worked the rest of the ranch hands into the ground. And she remembered being grateful that her brother had someone else he could trust to run things, while he had so many other worries on his mind.

Melanie had been in the advanced stage of a pregnancy she obviously hadn’t wanted. Never the most even-tempered of women, her sister-in-law had suddenly become prone to vicious mood swings. Deliriously happy one moment, livid the next, icy cold a few moments later. Her brother definitely had his hands full, and she was grateful to Zack for shouldering some of that burden.

Then, in late May, the week after her high school graduation when the mountain snows finally began to melt, Matt had asked Zack to take a few of the other ranch hands and drive part of the herd to higher ground to graze. Because it was an overnight trip, they would need someone to cook for them, and Cassie had volunteered, eager for the adventure of a cattle drive, even though it would be a short one.

When she closed her eyes, she could see every moment of that fateful trip in vivid detail….

She loved it up here.

With a pleasant ache in her muscles from a hard day of riding, Cassie closed her eyes and savored the cool evening air that smelled sweet and pure, heavy with the rich, intoxicating perfume of sagebrush and pine.

The twilight brushed everything with pale-rose paint, and the setting sun glittered on the gently rippling surface of the creek. Hands wrapped around her knees, she sat on the bank and listened to the water’s song and the chirp and trill of the mountain’s inhabitants settling down for the evening.

She would miss this so much in the fall when she moved to Utah for college. The campus in Logan was beautiful, perched on a hill overlooking the Cache Valley, but it didn’t even come close to the raw splendor of the high country.

This was home.

So many of her most pleasant memories of her parents were built on the firm foundation of these mountains. Every summer and fall on the way to and from their grazing allotment they used to camp right here where the creek bowed. Her mom would cook something delicious in a Dutch oven and after supper her dad would gather her and Matt and Jesse around the campfire and read to them out of his favorite Westerns.

She smiled softly. Her memories had begun to fade in the six years since her parents had died in a wintry roll-over accident, but she could still hear Frank Harte’s booming voice ring through the night and see his broad, callused hands turn the pages in the flickering firelight.

She missed them both so much sometimes. Matt did his best. Both her brothers did. She knew that and loved them fiercely for working so hard to give her a good, safe home for the past six years.

Matt had only been twenty-two, Jesse seventeen, when their parents died, and she knew a lot of men would have figured a grieving twelve-year-old girl would have been better off with relatives or in the foster care system. Their aunt Suzie over in Pinedale had offered to take her in, but Matt had been determined they would all stick together.

It must have been so hard for him. She thought of how rotten she’d been sometimes, how often she’d snapped at him when he told her to do her homework or make her bed.

You’re not my mother and you can’t make me.

She owed him big-time for putting up with her. Someday she would have to find a way to repay him.

She sighed, resting her chin on her knees. She was reluctant to leave this peaceful spot, even though she knew she should probably go check on the stew and see if the ranch hands had eaten their boots yet.

When she walked away from camp a half hour earlier, Jake and Sam Lawson had been snoring in their tent in a little before-dinner nap after beating the brush all day. But they were probably awake now and wondering where she’d wandered off to.

She smiled at the thought of the two bachelor brothers, who were in their early sixties and had worked for the ranch her entire life. They treated her like a favorite spoiled niece, and she loved them both fiercely.

And then there was Slater.

A whole flock of magpies seemed to flutter around in her stomach whenever she thought of the lean, hard cowboy leading the cattle drive. This was the longest she had ever spent in his company, and she had to admit she had spent most of the day watching him out of the corner of her eyes.

The few times he’d caught her watching him, he had given her that half smile of his, and she felt like a bottle rocket had exploded inside her.

He made her so nervous she couldn’t think straight. What was it about him? She’d been around cowboys all her life and most of them were simple and straight-forward—interested in horses, whisky and women, not necessarily in that order.

Zack seemed different. Despite the way he joked with the older cowhands, there was a sadness in his eyes, a deep, remote loneliness that probably made every woman he met want to cuddle him close and kiss all his pain away.

She rolled her eyes at the fanciful thought. If a woman wanted to kiss Zack Slater, it wasn’t to make him feel better. He was totally, completely, gorgeously male, and a woman would have to have rocks for brains not to notice.

Well, she couldn’t sit here all night mooning over Zack Slater. Not when she had work to do.

Just as she started to rise, the thick brush ten yards upstream on the other side of the creek begin to rustle with more than just the breeze. A few seconds later, a small mule deer—no more than a yearling doe, probably—walked out of the growth and picked her way delicately to the water’s edge. After a careful look around, she bent her neck to drink and Cassie watched, smiling a little at the ladylike way the doe sipped the water.

The deer so entranced her that she almost missed another flicker of movement, again on the opposite side of the creek, at the halfway point between her and the deer. She narrowed her eyes, trying to figure out what other kind of animal had come to the water, then inhaled sharply. She caught just a glimpse of a tawny hide and a long swaying tail as something slunk through the brush.

A mountain lion!

And he had his sights on the pretty little doe.

Even though she knew it was all part of the rhythm of life—hunter and hunted, another link on the food chain and all that—she couldn’t bear to watch the inevitable.

She squeezed her eyes shut for a moment, then changed her mind and jumped to her feet, waving her arms and hollering for all she was worth. As she’d hoped, the doe lifted her head from the water with one panicked look, then bounded back into the trees with a crash of branches.

“Ha, you big bully,” she said to the cougar. “Find your dinner somewhere else.”

The big cat turned toward her and she could swear there was malice in those yellow eyes. With a loud, deep growl that made the hairs on the back of her neck stand at attention, the animal turned, his long tail swaying hypnotically.

Uh, maybe drawing attention to herself with a cougar on the prowl wasn’t exactly the best idea she’d ever had.

“Nice kitty,” she murmured in a placating tone. “Sit. Stay.”

The big cat paced the bank on the other side, staying roughly parallel to her. For the first time Cassie began to feel a real flicker of fear, suddenly not at all sure the eight-foot-wide creek would be enough of a barrier between them if the cat decided she made a better snack.

Moving slowly, she scooped up a softball-sized rock, just in case, and began backing toward camp and the men.

She had only made it a few yards when the cat tensed his muscles as if to spring back into the brush. Before she could breathe a sigh of relief, he turned at the last minute and spanned the creek in one powerful leap. With a strangled shriek, she threw the rock but it only glanced off the cougar’s back before landing in the water with a huge splash.

Cassie didn’t wait around to see if her missile found a target. She whirled and took off for camp, heart racing and adrenaline pumping through her in thick, hot waves. The cat was gaining on her. She knew it and braced, expecting jagged teeth to rip into her flesh at any second. This was it, then. She was going to die here in these mountains she loved, all because of her stupid soft heart.

And then, when she thought she could almost smell the predator’s breath, fetid and wild, and feel it stir the hair at the back of her neck, a gunshot boomed through the twilight.

For an instant time seemed to freeze and she became aware of the total silence on the mountainside as the echo died away. A few moments earlier the evening had buzzed with activity but now nothing moved except the soft wind rustling the new leaves of the aspens.

She stopped, gratitude and relief rushing through her, then shifted her gaze to see which of the ranch hands had come to her rescue. She wasn’t at all surprised to see Slater just lowering a rifle.

What did surprise her was the yowl behind her. To her shock, the cat wasn’t dead, just royally teed-off. Apparently he decided he’d had enough of interfering humans. With a last angry screech exactly like one of the barn cats tangling with the wrong cow dog, the mountain lion skulked back into the trees.

She whirled back to Zack. “You missed him!”

“I shot into the air.”

“Why?” she asked, incredulous.

He shrugged those broad shoulders. Despite the fierce need to pump every ounce of air to her oxygen-starved cells now that the danger had passed, her heart skipped a beat at how big and strong and wonderful he looked leaning there against a rock. “I saw you scare away his prey. You can’t blame the guy for going after the consolation prize.”

She stared at him. “You were going to let him take a chunk out of me just because I didn’t want to watch him kill a poor, helpless deer in front of me?”

“Naw.” He grinned and she began to feel a little shaky. “I probably would have gotten around to shooting him once he caught up to you.”

“Well, that’s comforting.”

He only laughed at her snappish tone. “You okay?”

“Swell. Thanks so much for your help.” The panic of the moment, coupled with the fact that she hadn’t had time to eat anything since breakfast, combined to make her feel a little light-headed.

Zack walked closer to her, then frowned. “You’re shaking.”

“I think I need to sit down.”

To her complete chagrin, she swayed and would have fallen over if he hadn’t suddenly moved as fast as the cougar had—and with exactly the same lithe grace—and reached for her.

He guided her to the soft meadow grass. “Here we go. Just sit here for a minute until you feel more like yourself.”

She hissed in fast breaths between her teeth, thinking again of that terrible moment when she thought her number was up. Remembering it wasn’t helping calm her down, any more than having Zack Slater crouching so close.

She knew she was trying to distract herself from her scare but she couldn’t help noticing his hard mouth, just inches from hers. A little wildly, she wondered what it would be like to have those lips on hers, how he would go about kissing a woman.

“Deep and slow.” His voice broke through her thoughts, and she stared at him, suddenly terrified he’d read her mind.

“Wha-what?”

“You’re going to hyperventilate if you keep breathing so fast. Slow down a little.”

Wrenching her mind away from any thoughts of the man’s kisses, she focused once more on the cougar. “Do you think he’ll be back? We should watch the calves.”

“I think between the two of us, we’ve probably scared him clear to Cody by now.”

They sat there for a moment longer until she felt she had enough control of herself to return to camp.

To her amazement Zack had stuck close to her all evening, as if afraid she might have some delayed reaction to almost becoming cat bait. He was sweetly protective, even insisting on going with her to bury the remains of their food from any wandering bears.

Later they sat around the campfire long after the Lawson brothers had gone to bed, talking softly while each glittering star came out and the wind mourned through the tops of the pines and the fire hissed and sputtered.

She told him of her parents and her grief and how tough it had been after their deaths. He shared snippets of his own childhood, of moving from town to town with a saddle bum for a father and of being on his own since he was fifteen.

And then, when the campfire burned down to embers, he walked her to her tent, pushed her hair away from her face with a work-hardened hand and softly kissed her.

It had been worlds better than anything she could have imagined. Sweet and tender and passionate all at once. Just one kiss and he had completely stolen her heart.

That had been the beginning. They were inseparable after that and had tumbled hard and fast into love. It had been the most incredible three months of her life, filled with laughter and heady excitement and slow, sexy kisses when her brothers weren’t looking.

Until it ended so horribly….

Cassie came back to the present to several depressing realizations. The water in the tub was now lukewarm, bordering on cool, and any bubbles had long since fizzled away.

And, much worse, silent tears were coursing down her cheeks as she relived the past.

Oh, cripes. Hadn’t she cried enough tears over Zack Slater? It was a waste of good salt. The man wasn’t worth it ten years ago, and he certainly wasn’t worth it now.

She climbed from the tub, wrapping herself in a thick towel, then splashed her face with cold water to cool her aching, puffy eyes. She hadn’t indulged in a good, old-fashioned pity party for a long time, and she figured she must have been long overdue. But enough was enough. Now that it was all out of her system, she could move on.

She put on her robe and decided on a glass of milk before bed. Just as she was opening the refrigerator and reaching for the carton, she heard a knock at the front door.

Rats. It was probably Jean coming to check on her one more time. The last thing she wanted was to have company, with the mood she was in tonight. She thought about ignoring it, but the knocks only grew louder and more insistent. Gritting her teeth, she looked out the small window at the cabin next to her, thinking of the man who now stayed there.

The man who now owned the whole blasted place.

What if he decided to venture outside to investigate the commotion? She didn’t need another encounter with him today. Swearing under her breath, she went to the door and swung it open, then her breath seemed to tangle in her lungs.

Well, she didn’t have to worry about Zack coming out to see who was banging on her door, since he was the one standing there, fist raised to knock one more time.

Chapter 3

As he’d expected, she didn’t look exactly thrilled to see him. Her eyes turned wintry, her mouth went as tight as a shriveled-up prune, and her spine stiffened, vertebrae by vertebrae.

Even so, she looked so beautiful he had to shove his hands into his pockets to keep from reaching for her.

She must have only just climbed out of the bath. Her still-damp hair, a few shades darker than normal, clung to her head, and she had wrapped herself in a silky robe of the palest yellow. The delectable smell of peaches wafted to him on the cool, early-summer breeze, and his mouth watered.

Framed in the light from inside her cabin, she looked warm and soft and welcoming, just as he had imagined her a thousand times over the years.

Her voice, though, was as cold as her eyes. “What do you want?”

Just to see you. To hear your voice again. He shifted his weight, alarmed at the need instantly pulsing through him just at the sight of her. He would have to do a much better job of controlling himself if he wanted this plan to work.

“I just spoke with Jean.” Despite his best intentions, his voice came out a little ragged. “She said you tendered your resignation.”

He didn’t think it was possible, but that prune-mouth tightened even more. “What else did you expect?”

“I expected you to show a little more backbone.”

She stared at him for several seconds. In the porch light her eyes looked huge, those dark lashes wide with disbelief, and then she laughed harshly. “Oh that’s a good one, coming from you. Really good. Thanks. I needed a good joke tonight.”

Okay. He deserved that. He had no right to lecture her about staying power when he had been the one who walked away just days before their wedding. Still, that was a different situation altogether.

He plodded gamely forward. “So you’re just going to walk out and turn your back on Mrs. Martineau when she needs you?”

Her gaze shifted to some spot over his shoulder. “Jean has nothing to do with this. You’re the new owner. That means I’m turning my back on you.”

“We need to talk about this.”

“No, we don’t.” She started to close the door, but his instincts kicked in and he managed to think fast enough to shove a boot in the space. Still, she pushed the door hard enough to make him wince.

“We don’t have anything to say to each other,” she snapped.

“I think we do. Come on, Cass. Let me in.”

After a long pause where she continued to shove the door painfully against his foot, she finally shrugged and stepped back. He followed before she had a chance to change her mind.

Inside, he saw the cabin’s floor plan matched his. Here, though, it was obvious Cassie had decorated it to suit her personality. It was warm and comforting, with richly textured rugs and pillows and Native American artwork covering the walls.

Cassie was a nurturer. She always had been, even as a girl just barely out of high school. She used to talk about her brothers raising her, but he had spent enough time with the family to know she took as much care of them as they did her. The Hartes looked out for each other.

The cabin reflected that nesting instinct of hers.

He smiled a little at an assortment of whimsical, ugly, carved trolls filling an entire shelf above her mother’s rocking chair. She’d been collecting them since she was a girl and he recognized several new ones since he had last seen her collection.

He narrowed his gaze, looking closer. Where were the little kissing trolls he’d given her as a gift during their first month together? He couldn’t see the piece here with the rest of the figurines.

He almost asked her what she’d done with it—why she hadn’t set it out, too—but then clamped his teeth against the question. He had no right to ask her. Even if she burned it and flushed the ashes down the toilet, nobody would have blamed her.