Taming a Dark Horse

Her expression went stone-sober as she walked past him and picked up one of the cases she’d left in the doorway.

“I do. I just can’t figure out how to have one without having a man in the house with me. Unfortunately you need one to produce children.” Sighing, she placed the duffel bag upon the bed and began to pull out a stack of blue jeans. “But I keep hoping that someday I’ll meet a man who will change my mind about love.”

Love. Now that was a word he never spoke, didn’t believe in, or want it discussed in his presence. It made him feel very squeamish.

Realizing it was long past time he left the room, Linc turned toward the door only to have her call after him.

“Where are you going?”

Without looking at her, he said, “To call down to the ranch to see if they can round you up a television from the big house. You’re going to need something to keep you busy.”

Her tinkling laugh filled the bedroom. “I don’t need a television. I’ve got you to keep me busy.”

Like hell, Linc thought.

Chapter Three

More than an hour passed before Nevada finished unpacking her things and arranging them just as she wanted in the big bedroom. The dresser and chest were massive, along with the walk-in closet. She could have brought every piece of clothing and toiletries she owned and they wouldn’t have filled half the available space.

Nevada couldn’t believe the house had been built just for the sole purpose of extra housing for ranch workers. It was too beautiful and, in spite of its old age, had been kept in perfect condition. Someone had taken great pains to copy the big ranch house and rich details could be seen in the dark oak casings around the windows and doors, the expensive tiling on the floor, not to mention the nice furnishings.

The first moment she’d walked into the house, she’d felt some sort of strange connection, a feeling that made her wonder if she was experiencing what it felt like to go home. Which had been an odd reaction for Nevada. Since she’d been a very young child, she hadn’t ever felt like she had a home. At least, not like regular folks.

Even though she’d grown up in a house with two parents, it had been far from a normal home. Her mother and father had quarreled incessantly until their arguments had become out-and-out fights that included throwing fists and objects. Nevada had often hidden in the closet praying for the noise to stop and praying, too, that she would someday be able to escape the house that seemed to be filled with nothing but hate.

No. Nevada wasn’t exactly sure what a real home would feel like, but she was certain this old house might hold the answers.

Giving one last look over her shoulder, she left the room. Her medical bag was still in the car and she wanted to get Linc’s bandages changed before it was time for dinner. Something she was to cook, she supposed, since the closest restaurants or delis were at least twenty miles away. Nevada wasn’t exactly brilliant in the kitchen, but if necessary she could put something edible on the table.

Humming to herself, she stepped onto the porch and immediately spotted Linc sitting a few steps away in a wooden rocker. His felt hat was pulled down over his eyes, but the moment he heard her footsteps and the creaking of the screen door closing behind her, he pushed it back on his forehead and cocked an eye at her.

“What are you doing?”

The question seemed comical to her and she laughed softly. “Does it matter?”

He scooted up from his slumped position in the chair. “No. Since you’re going to be here for a while, I can’t start worrying whether you can take care of yourself or not.”

She walked over to him. “What do you mean, take care of myself?”

He shrugged one thick shoulder. “I just meant you surely have enough sense not to do silly things. Like walk out in the woods by yourself.”

Nevada frowned. “Why shouldn’t I walk in the woods?”

He let out a long sigh. “Bears for one thing. Another, you’d turn around once and be lost. The mountains and the basins begin to all look the same. You’d probably be to the Colorado border before you realized you were going north.”

Nevada had to admit she wasn’t necessarily good with directions and as for bears, one of those hairy creatures was the last thing she wanted to meet up with.

Smiling at him, she said, “You’re probably right about that. I have to take a map with me just to find my way around Santa Fe. But that doesn’t mean I can’t get out in the woods. You’ll be along to help me find the way.”

Linc’s mouth fell open. “Bullsh—”

He stopped abruptly before he released the last of the curse word and Nevada only smiled wider.

“What’s the matter now? You don’t like to take walks?” she asked.

Linc rolled his eyes. “I use my legs for a purpose. I walk all over the ranch yard. I don’t walk for a woman’s entertainment.”

“But you’re not working down at the ranch yard now,” she sweetly pointed out. “And if it’s safe to ask, just what do you do to entertain a woman? Can you sing or play the guitar?”

He scowled. “No and no.”

“Oh,” she said with feigned disappointment. “I thought all cowboys could do those two things.”

“Only on television,” he grumbled.

“Well, I’m sure you have some talents. And I’m bound to discover what they are before I leave here.”

“Don’t bet on that.”

Laughing softly, Nevada stepped off the porch and walked to her car. Once she had the medical bag out of the trunk, she carried it to the porch and motioned for Linc to follow her inside.

“What do you have there?” he asked suspiciously without making a move to do her bidding.

“My medical bag. And there’s not a thing in here that will hurt you. So get to your feet and come along.”

“I don’t need any medicine. I’ve already taken it for today,” he said as he managed to rise to his feet without the help of his arms or hands.

The man must have rock-hard abs, Nevada thought, to raise himself up with no help from his upper limbs. But she didn’t need to be thinking about Linc Ketchum’s abs or the whipcord strength of his body. She was here to nurse, not daydream.

“I’m not going to give you any medicine,” she assured him, then shot him a little smile that was a bit wicked. “I have other things I need to do to you.”

Eying her through narrowed lashes, Linc stopped in his tracks. “Whoa now,” he said firmly. “If you think I’m going to blindly follow your orders, you’re crazy, woman.”

Nevada lifted her gaze to the ceiling of the porch and hummed a bit of a song about suspicious minds.

Linc cursed under his breath. “I’m not suspicious. I just want to know what’s going on. It’s my body after all,” he practically barked.

Compassion filled Nevada’s soft heart and with a smile she walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry, Linc. I was only teasing you a little. It’s a proven fact that patients get well much faster if they laugh. You really need to loosen up and let loose with a few chuckles.”

“I don’t have anything to laugh about,” he grumbled.

Nevada tugged on his arm and urged him toward the door. “Of course you do.You can laugh at me. I won’t mind at all. Besides, I have a nice surprise for you.”

As Linc allowed her to lead him into the house and then the kitchen, he didn’t question her further. He was too busy noticing how it felt to have her arm wrapped around his, her hip and thigh softly brushing against him.

He couldn’t remember the last time he’d touched a woman. Apparently he’d allowed too much time to pass since he’d gone on the prowl for a little female companionship. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be having such a strong reaction to Nevada Ortiz. Sexual starvation could be the only reason he was suddenly noticing the scent of her hair and wondering what she looked like beneath her clothes.

The two of them entered the kitchen and she pointed to the table. “Okay, sit down there while I get everything ready.”

Since he was in such a vulnerable condition, it was obvious he was going to have to trust this woman completely. And if Victoria thought so highly of her, she must be a good nurse, Linc told himself. But she didn’t look or act like any nurse he’d ever known. And he didn’t feel like any normal patient would feel whenever she touched him. But that was something he was going to have to get over. And fast.

With that resolution in his head, he eased down on the long bench and rested his bandaged arms and hands on the table. Like a colorful bird flitting happily from one limb to the next, she moved around the kitchen gathering scissors, towels, tape and a bowl of yellow goop that looked like the sulfur poultices he sometimes used on his horses’ cuts and wounds.

“Before I headed out here today,” she said as she sat down next to him, “I went by Dr. Olstead’s office to pick up my orders for you. He says it’s time for you to see that you still have fingers.”

Linc’s expression was a bit confused. “I’ve seen my fingers since they were burned. I know that they’re still there.”

“Yes. But this is going to last for more than just a few minutes,” she said, then smiled broadly at his perplexed expression. “Just wait and see.”

She picked up a pair of the small scissors that she’d pulled from the medical bag and began to cut through the bandage on his right arm. The white gauze was thickly wrapped and the instrument chewed slowly as Nevada guided it through the material.

While she carefully worked over his arm, Linc studied the shiny crown of her black hair and the dark crescent of long lashes shadowing her cheeks. There wasn’t anything about the woman that wasn’t fresh and young and lovely. Everything about her glowed like a star plucked from a night sky.

“You like being a nurse?” he asked in hopes that a little conversation would take his mind to more normal things.

“Very much,” she answered. “I like helping people.”

“Is your mother a nurse?”

His question must have surprised her because she looked up from her task and frowned.

“Heavens no. Mom would run off screaming if she had to change a bandage or a bedpan.”

“What does she do?”

Nevada’s gaze slipped back to the job of cutting through the bandage and then she shrugged. “She works as a barmaid. In a tavern over in Bloomfield.”

“Oh.”

He didn’t think there had been any note of disgust in his one word, but she must have thought so. She looked up again and this time her lips were set in a grim line.

“Yeah. Oh. Her job is not something I approve of. But she seems to like it. She says the tips are good.” With a heavy sigh, she went back to cutting the last of the gauze away from his arm. “Believe me, Linc, my mother wasn’t always—well, let’s just say in the past years she’s allowed her standards to fall.”

Linc didn’t know why he’d even questioned her about her mother. He’d thought that maybe she’d gotten her personality from the woman. But apparently mother and daughter weren’t on the same wavelength.

“Why is that?”

She kept her gaze focused on her job. “She became—well, I guess you could call it disillusioned with a lot of things. She just gave up on ever having any sort of decent life. You know, a husband, a home, a good job.”

“Your parents are divorced?”

She nodded. “For a long time now. Dad liked women. I couldn’t count all the affairs he had before the two of them finally ended their marriage.”

Linc started to ask her if that was why she hadn’t yet married. But he stopped himself. He didn’t talk about marriage with any woman. Even in a passing way. And he certainly didn’t want this glamour girl to think he had any sort of matrimonial thoughts in his mind.

“That’s too bad,” was all he could say.

“Yes. Very bad,” she said in a resigned voice. “Because of my dad, my mother stopped taking care of herself. She began having affairs just to spite him. And after that everything went downhill.”

She looked up at him and he could see shame and sadness in her brown eyes. “I don’t really know why I told you all that. It’s not something I go around discussing with anyone.”

“I never repeat things told to me in confidence,” he said, just in case she was worrying he would tell others about her family.

Shaking her head, she said, “I wasn’t worried that you would. It’s just not something I talk about.”

Linc understood what she meant. Darla, his own mother, was never discussed by him or his cousins. Years ago, her name was brought up from time to time, but now there didn’t seem any point to it. None of them really knew if the woman was still alive. And apparently she didn’t care enough to let them know.

He noticed Nevada was beginning to peel away the layers of gauze away from his arm and he was relieved by the distraction. He didn’t want to think about mothers or parents or ruined marriages. All of which were very unpleasant subjects to Linc.

“Good lord, that arm looks like the skin of a baby mouse,” Linc exclaimed as she pulled the gauze completely away from his arm and then carefully rested his elbow on a clean towel.

“That’s good. It’s pink. It means it’s alive and getting good blood flow.”

It should be getting plenty of blood flow, Linc thought grimly. Each time the woman got near him he could feel his heart thump into overdrive. A silly reaction and one he’d certainly never experienced before.

He glanced down at his arm and tried not to feel deflated. The new skin was so thin it was practically transparent. All the hair was gone and in places he could see blue blood veins running just below the surface.

“I guess it is healing,” he had to concede.

“It is and very nicely, too. That’s the way we want to keep things going.” With her hand on his upper arm, she carefully twisted his arm back and forth so that she could inspect the top and underneath. “Boy, you really did a number on this one. Is the other arm like this one?” she asked.

“Pretty much.”

She glanced up at him and he could feel the touch of her brown eyes as it slipped all over his face.

“Victoria tells me that you were a hero. She said if it hadn’t been for you several of the horses would have burned to death.”

He grimaced. “Victoria is biased. She thinks of herself as my sister. She’d never say anything bad about me.”

Nevada shot him a faint smile. “Do you think of yourself as her brother?”

Linc had never had such a question put to him and for a moment it took him aback. All these years he’d thought of himself as the cousin, the one standing just on the outside. And it wasn’t because Ross or Seth or Victoria had tried to make him feel that way. In reality it had been quite the opposite. Tucker’s children had treated him as though he’d been one of Tucker’s offspring, too. But there was no escaping facts. He wasn’t one of them. And yet he loved them just as much or more than if they had truly been his siblings.

“Yeah. I guess I do,” he murmured.

“I’m glad. Because she thinks you’re just about the next best thing to pajamas.”

Glancing away from her, he said, “I didn’t do anything special. Anyone would have gone in after those horses. I just happened to be the first one at the barn.”

That wasn’t the way Nevada had heard it. Victoria had told her that several of the ranch hands had been at the barn and they’d tried to hold Linc and keep him from running back into the burning building. They had not been able to stop him, and by the time Linc had emerged from the flames, the entire group had begun to think he was dead.

“Well, I’m sure your horses are happy about it. But I’ll bet they miss you.”

“Dr. Olstead won’t let me go near them. Bacteria, he reasons,” Linc muttered. “Hell, they’re cleaner than I am. The stalled ones get a bath every day.”

Nevada smiled with understanding. “Dr. Olstead is right. You don’t want to risk getting any sort of infection. It’s not that he thinks the horses are unclean, but there’s other things around a barn that might harbor bacteria. Like flies and things like that.”

“Yeah. I understand. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

“No. You don’t have to like it,” she agreed.

Reaching for the scissors, she began to cut away the bandages on his hands. This task took longer, but Linc didn’t mind. In spite of all his protests it was more than nice to have this lovely woman touching him so gently, touching him as though she really cared about his health and well being.

Don’t start thinking along those lines, Linc. Just because a woman acts sweet and gentle on the outside doesn’t mean she’s all goodness on the inside.

His hands had been burned even worse than his arms and Nevada clicked her tongue with misgivings as she unwrapped each finger. “God, this must have been painful. Does any of it still hurt you?” she asked. “If it does, just let me know. I have painkillers in my bag.”

“No. None of it hurts. In fact, it mostly doesn’t have any feeling at all,” he told her. “If I touched your arm, I doubt I’d feel it.” At least not in his fingertips, Linc thought. But the rest of his body darn sure would.

She nodded soberly. “The nerve endings in your skin were burned.”

“Will it always be that way?”

Her brows pulled together as she gave her head a little shake. “I’m not sure about that, Linc. I think that problem will get better in time, but I can’t make you any promises. I’m just an RN not a doctor.”

She proceeded to clean his hand and arm and then slather it with the yellow goo. Once she had every spot of his limb covered with the stuff, she began to wind clean gauze around his arm.

“I guess there’ll be plenty of scars once the skin heals,” he mused aloud. “What about the hair on my forearms? Will it ever come back?”

She looked up at him and gently smiled. “I’m not totally certain about that either. I’d say probably. At least part of it. But who cares whether you have hair on your forearms? You can always wear long sleeves. They look more masculine to me, anyway.”

He drew in a deep breath and pushed it out. “You have an answer for everything, don’t you?”

She shot him an annoyed look, then laughed softly. “Look, Linc, I’m going to be honest with you. A few scars or a lack of hair is nothing to what you could have had. It’s a miracle you’re alive. So you’d better be thankful.”

He glowered at her. “You think I need your preaching to tell me that?”

“You haven’t heard preaching from me—yet,” she warned.

“Hmmph,” he snorted. “For someone so little you’re sure full of sass.”

“That’s to make up for my size,” she reasoned pleasantly.

As far as Linc was concerned, he didn’t see a thing wrong with her size. Everything was put together perfectly. Too perfectly for his peace of mind.

“Can I wiggle my fingers?” he asked as he forced himself to focus on anything but her.

She raised up from ministering to his arm. “Sure. Wiggle all you want.”

Linc attempted to flex his bare fingers, which still looked like sticks of watermelon to him. “All the time I was in the hospital, I kept thinking how good it would feel to bend my fingers. But it—well,” he grimaced as he tried to close them into his fist. “It doesn’t feel all that good. They’re stiff.”

“That will soon change,” she promised. “I’m going to bandage each finger lightly so you can move them around and maybe use them just a little. But I mean very little.”

He looked at her with surprise. “You mean I don’t have to go around with my hands plastered against boards?”

She gave him a happy smile. “Nope. Now, isn’t that good news? And aren’t you sorry about all this whining and griping?”

The expression that stole over his face was mostly sheepish, but the upward curve of the corner of his lips told her he was definitely pleased.

“Maybe I have been a little cranky,” he admitted.

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Is that normally your nature?”

He frowned. “Why do you ask that?”

Nevada made a palms up gesture. “Because I don’t know you, Linc Ketchum. I don’t know if you’re usually grouchy or cheerful or sweet or mean or what.”

“You’re not here to analyze my personality,” he reasoned. “And you don’t need to know any of those things just to doctor my hands.”

Nevada was going to be doing more than doctoring his hands, she wanted to point out, but she didn’t say that to him. She could see that it was disturbing to this man to have her here in the house. So far she’d tried to keep everything as light and playful as she could. And she hoped she could keep their time together on that same track. It wouldn’t do for both of them to get serious.

“Well, I guess I’ll learn for myself,” she said as she picked up a roll of gauze and started one end of it around his thumb. “Do you think you can tell me what you like to eat? Or is that a secret, too?”

“You don’t need to worry yourself about that either,” he told her. “Marina will be bringing up supper from the big house each evening.”

This was news to Nevada. Victoria really hadn’t had time yesterday to discuss some of the details about her stay here or her duties to Linc. She’d expected to be preparing some sort of meals for him and herself.

“That’s nice. But I hope she’ll allow me to do breakfast and lunch.”

He studied her through drooped lids and for the first time in Nevada’s life she felt her whole body react to a man in a purely sexual way. Heat filled her cheeks and she felt as though her whole body was soon going to be glowing like a firefly.

“What does a nurse know about cooking?”

Nevada drew in a bracing breath and told herself not to look at him. She couldn’t look at him if she expected to get her senses back under control.

“Probably about as much as a cowboy does,” she muttered.

He caught her off guard by releasing a low chuckle. “You might be surprised at what I know how to do in the kitchen.”

Nevada couldn’t keep her gaze from latching on to him and the minute it did her stomach did a nervous jump. Was he talking about cooking, she wondered, or something altogether different?

“Really. Then maybe you could teach me a few things,” she ventured.

The amusement on his face disappeared like a cloud slipping past the sun and his gaze traveled from her face to her bosom and back again. “I’m sure you’ve already learned everything there is to know.”

Chapter Four

Something about Linc’s words struck Nevada hard and deep. And for the next few minutes she didn’t say anything as she finished bandaging his fingers then went to work on his left arm to repeat the same process.

She really didn’t know why his remark had bothered her so. Maybe it was the note of disgust she’d picked up in his voice or maybe it was the lewd way he’d looked at her. Either way, it didn’t matter, she told herself. Linc Ketchum wouldn’t be the first person to think she was a promiscuous young woman. Some of her so-called friends had also accused her of sleeping with a long list of boyfriends. But in reality nothing could be further from the truth. Nevada was a virgin. And so far she hadn’t met one man who would make her want to change that fact.

Even so, she wasn’t going to explain any of this to Linc Ketchum. Her sexual habits were none of his business. Pure and simple.

Later that evening, after she’d finished dressing Linc’s burns, Nevada went outside to explore the rugged landscape of the yard. She was at the back of the house enjoying the sight of the far-distant San Juans when she heard the sound of an approaching vehicle.

Carefully picking her way through the rocks and clumps of blooming sage, she skirted the end of the building to see Marina climbing out of an old red pickup truck.

“Marina! Hello!” she called to the housekeeper.

The large Mexican lady with a heavy braid pinned to the back of her head, turned in the direction of Nevada’s voice and smiled broadly when she spotted her.