Cowboy With A Secret

Bethany heard a whimper coming from inside the wicker basket.

To her utter amazement, a small pink fist flailed in the air. The whimper swelled to a cry, and when Bethany bent over to look, she saw a tiny baby wrapped in a print blanket.

It was crying, its face screwed up and its legs kicking emphatically under the blanket. Bethany dissolved into total bewilderment, half thinking this must be some practical joke, yet knowing in her heart that it couldn’t be.

Bethany reached down and unpinned an envelope from the baby’s blanket. The outside of the envelope was blank, so she opened it and unfolded the note inside.

COLT, it said in printed block letters. PLEASE TAKE CARE OF ALYSSA FOR ME. I’LL BE BACK.

It seemed that her new ranch hand, Colt McClure, had some explaining to do.

Cowboy with a Secret

Pamela Browning

www.millsandboon.co.uk

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Pamela Browning spent a lot of years living and rearing a family in a charming South Carolina town that was nothing like Yewville. No one in this book bears any resemblance whatever to persons living, dead or comatose, except for Muffin the cat, who will never reveal her real name. Never. If she wants her catnip mouse refilled on a regular basis.

Pamela enjoys hearing from her readers and invites you to visit her website at www.pamelabrowning.com.

This book is dedicated to the memory

of my brother-in-law, Bob Grier,

who loved to demonstrate in rip-roaring fashion

the wonders of the Grier Ranch.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

EPILOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

COLT MCCLURE PEGGED THE gal at the Banner-B Ranch for a babe as soon as he spotted her. But it was the promise of the ice-cold beer he’d insulated and stowed in his saddlebag that made him urge his horse into a hellzapoppin’ gallop down the long curving driveway.

The hot Texas wind flung a handful of grit into the five days’ growth of beard bristling from his face, but Colt didn’t care. He didn’t care about anything now except finding a place to work and a place to live. Oh, yeah—and that beer.

Instantly alert at the hammer of hoofbeats on parched earth, the gal lifted one hand to shade narrowed eyes against the orange sun sinking its way toward the horizon. The other hand rested on a neatly rounded hipbone.

He reined his horse to a stop at the edge of a patch of dry dusty grass in front of the two-story house. As he swung down from his mount, he realized that the woman’s eyes were a cool aquamarine, the shade of the sea where there was no bottom. Or at least what he thought the sea would look like—he’d never seen the ocean. And he never wanted to after having a gander at those eyes. He could drown in them if he’d let himself.

The air shimmered with heat in the space between them. “Bethany Burke?” he said.

Long golden hair fell in loose curls around her face and tumbled over her shoulders. The way she nodded her head in confirmation and the resulting ripple of that incredible hair jolted Colt with the kind of emotion he hadn’t felt in a long, long time.

Or maybe it wasn’t emotion. Maybe he’d been too long away from women. Well, he planned to work on that, and from the look of things, Gompers, Texas, could be the place to do it.

“I’m the mail-order cowboy,” he said into the silence.

Her skin was nut-brown from spending long hours in the sun. Her eyes startled him again with their beauty. She had a soft-looking mouth, the lips full and berry-red without the aid of makeup. It formed itself into a perfect O.

“You wrote. You said you needed a ranch hand.” His voice was gruff and rusty with disuse. He hadn’t done much talking in prison.

“I did. I do. I didn’t expect you to just—arrive,” she said.

“I rode over from town. Managed to cadge a ride down from Oklahoma for both me and Buckaroo with some folks who had extra room in their horse trailer.”

She was a little thing, although well-worn boots added a couple more inches to her five-two or so, and she was clearly all woman under that plaid shirt. A man’s shirt, too big for her, but it had been washed so many times that the well-worn cotton clung tightly to her fully rounded breasts.

No bra. He reckoned he knew such things. She’d left the top buttons unfastened to reveal a deep cleavage, shadowy and pretty near fascinating.

She toyed nervously with the front of her shirt, then realized he was watching. Her hand fell away. A roughly callused hand, but daintily made.

“Where do I bunk?” he said. He saw no point in wasting words. The ranch was a shambles; fences sagging, bunkhouse falling apart, who knew what else. There was work for him here.

She gestured with a thumb. “You’ll—you’ll find an apartment over the barn. I would have cleaned it out if I’d known you were coming.” She didn’t have the local accent, which had a tendency to twang like out-of-tune banjo strings.

“No matter if it’s clean or not. It’ll do. I’ll start in the morning.” He nodded his head curtly and began to lead his horse away.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

He stopped and turned slowly. His shadow fell across her face. “McClure,” he said. “Clayton McClure. They call me Colt.”

“Well, Mr. McClure, we’ll meet in my kitchen tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp. Breakfast. We’ll talk about your duties then.”

“You got it,” he said.

He knew she watched him all the way to the barn, but he didn’t care. As soon as he popped the top off the beer, he took the stairs two at a time and poked around the tiny apartment. If you could put that name to a room-and-a-half with a tiny bath attached. Everything was furred with a thick layer of dust, but that was Texas. Basic furniture, nothing fancy. It would do.

Colt wasn’t daunted by the lack of suds the soap coaxed out of the trickle of alkaline water that passed for a shower in his quarters. Afterward he unfurled an old musty blanket from his bedroll and spread out naked on the bare mattress provided. The air was stuffy; not much of a window. His skin was slicked with sweat before he was half asleep.

He didn’t dream. He’d trained himself not to. It was better that way, especially when your dreams had a way of slipping out from under you and catapulting you into a shaky shadowy world where nightmares woke you screaming.

BETHANY BURKE STARED wide-eyed as Colt disappeared into the barn. When she’d first seen him trying to outrun the cloud of dust he’d stirred up as he galloped toward her, she’d thought he was one of those mirages conjured up out of the heat on a hot summer’s day. She’d almost forgotten about replying to that peculiar ad.

But, she admitted to herself, if she’d ordered a cowboy to her own specifications, he couldn’t have been better. He was lean and lithe, without an extra ounce of fat. His narrow hips sat a horse like he was born to it. Those wide shoulders meant muscular upper arms, good for roping and branding. And he had hungry eyes.

That last thought took her by surprise. Hungry for what? Or was the expression under those drooping eyelids a raw insolence unconcealed by his thin veneer of politeness? Those eyes weren’t only hungry, they were hard as flint. A shiver ran down her spine in spite of the fact that it was ninety-five degrees in the shade.

“Who was that I saw go into the barn?”

Bethany whirled to see Frisco, her bandy-legged foreman, stumping toward her from the equipment shed. Jesse James, the border-collie mix, bounded along beside him.

“A guy I just hired to work on the ranch,” Bethany said offhandedly.

“What guy?”

“His name’s Colt McClure. I answered an ad.”

“What ad?”

Bethany scuffed the ground with the toe of one boot. “It was a kind of mail-order thing.”

“What,” Frisco said suspiciously, “are you talking about?”

“I ordered him. Through an advertisement. He showed up. That’s about all there is to tell.” She turned toward the house, but Frisco caught her arm.

His expression was incredulous. “You ordered this honcho through one of them catalogs you’re always getting in the mail?” Frisco always teased her about her penchant for mail-order catalogs. Seed catalogs, clothing catalogs, knickknacks, lingerie, and health-care catalogs—all found their way into the big Banner-B Ranch mailbox.

Bethany bit her bottom lip. “The ad was in the Cattle Rancher’s Journal. It was a quarter page, with a wide border. I couldn’t help seeing it.”

Frisco released her arm and shot her a baleful glance out of his one eye. “Looking for trouble if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you, Frisco. We need someone around here, and we need him desperately.” This ongoing conversation between them reminded her of a snake eating its tail, circling ’round and ’round.

“I try my best,” Frisco said, lapsing into his defensive mode. “I know I’m getting a little worn, but I ain’t about to assume room temperature yet.”

Bethany slid an arm around his stooped shoulders, wishing that every successive episode of this debate didn’t have to scrape away at Frisco’s self-esteem, although she knew that’s exactly the way it was. “I want you to take it easy because Doc Hogan said you should. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”

Frisco jutted his jaw out. “So you invite a perfect stranger to live in the barn. A stranger who needs a shave real bad. Hair’s overlong, too. He looks no ’count.”

“We’ve had hands who weren’t razor-friendly before, Frisco.” She tried not to think about Colt McClure’s eyes and how they’d sliced right through her like a well-aimed bullet.

“One of them hands you’re talking about took a hankering after somebody else’s horse, another ran up an overlarge tab at Pug’s Tavern before he lit off for parts unknown, and the last one wrecked the pickup. That’s what happens when you hire people you don’t know.”

“No need to have a conniption fit over this, Frisco. Besides, no one we know wants to work here. Mott Findley has seen to that.” Mott was her late husband’s cousin, and he wanted nothing more than to see the Banner-B go belly-up.

Frisco worked his forehead into a knot, a sure sign that he was engaged in deep thought, and rammed his hands down in his pockets. “We’ll see how this guy works out,” he said grudgingly.

Bethany bent and scratched Jesse behind one ear. The dog immediately stopped thumping his tail in the dust and relieved himself on the sunflower seedlings she’d recently set out on the side of the house. He always did this when he was happy, according to Frisco.

It was exasperating, this habit of Jesse’s. “You know, Jesse,” she said, “you’re a mighty expensive flea motel. For two cents I’d trade you in on a good mouser.”

“Jesse eats cats for fun,” Frisco warned. “He ran off all them barn cats we used to have.”

“Maybe I’ll get me a nice inside cat, one of those flat-faced white Persians to sit on the windowsill and lord it over all of us. Including that ungrateful mutt.”

Frisco looked pained. “You really want to tick Jesse off, you go right ahead and do that. No telling what Jesse might do, you tick him off.”

Bethany sighed. They’d acquired the dog to help with cutting cattle, but from the beginning he’d refused to have anything to do with such foolishness. The fact was, Jesse was untrainable. Unfortunately he and Frisco had bonded.

“I’d better go find that posthole digger. I plan to let our new hand build fence tomorrow,” she said.

Frisco’s one good eye regarded her with deep affection. “Don’t get to counting on this mail-order guy,” he said.

Bethany remained unruffled as she headed toward the shed. It had taken Frisco a few years to learn to take orders from a woman. And besides, she was the one who had promised Justin that she’d make the Banner-B a success.

She’d do it. No matter what.

THE NEXT MORNING BETHANY hurried downstairs in her bathrobe to plug in the coffeemaker at precisely six-fifteen. She never set her alarm clock because this was the time she always woke up, rain or shine, weekday or weekend. But today was different. Today she would interview Colt McClure.

She sneaked an early cupful from the coffeepot and nursed the fragrant steaming mug in her two hands as she paused to fill her ears with the first warbles and trills of birdsong outside her window. Morning bathed the home place in delicate silver-gray light, unfurling a misty curtain to blur the relentless brown everything.

As usual, she turned on the radio for the early farm-and-ranch report, “brought to you by Rubye’s Beauty Box, we curl up and dye for you.” Down by the chicken coop, a raucous rooster greeted the slow-rising rim of the sun with a jubilant fanfare. Later the heat would be blistering, sucking precious moisture from the grass, the trees, the vegetables in the garden.

When Bethany had first arrived on the Banner-B, she’d hated west Texas with its endless wind and dust and heat and glare, not to mention its indigestible food. Later, after a rough period of adjustment and more Texas Pete hot sauce than she cared to think about, Bethany had come to appreciate the wide-open spaces and the friendly people.

Anyway, she thought with a sigh, she was here to stay. At least she’d learned to tolerate the food well enough. Some people bragged about abs of steel. Bethany was proud of her stomach of iron, forged by repeated blasting in hot-pepper sauce.

Listening to the ranch report with one ear, she mentally began to arrange the day’s schedule around breaking in a new hand. First she’d make sure this McClure guy knew how to dig those postholes, and while he was working at it, she’d drive into town and sweet-talk old Fred Kraegel into letting her charge more barbed wire to her account. Later she’d tackle Sidewinder, the most ornery horse in the world.

But before she got started on any of this, she’d best get decent, which meant throwing on a pair of jeans and one of Justin’s old shirts, same as she did every day. There was no need to put on airs while she interviewed a new employee. By her best recollection, the last time she’d worn a dress was to her husband’s funeral five years before.

Once upon a time before she married, before she moved from Wichita to Gompers, Texas, to start a new life as Justin Burke’s wife and helpmate, Bethany had worked in an office. In a tall building. With air-conditioning. And she’d dressed stylishly in suits complete with pantyhose and heels for her nine-to-five job in an insurance office. She’d been Bethany Carroll then, had belonged to a young singles’ club, jaunted around town in a red convertible and had never owned a jar of moisturizer in her life.

Now she rode a horse and worked cattle, gunned a dented pickup truck through the dry arroyos and gullies of the Banner-B, and her only concession to skin care was giant jars of moisturizer that she ordered periodically from one of those catalogs Frisco was always grousing about. Her main hobby consisted of daydreaming about growing the hardscrabble ranch left to Justin by his daddy into a spread whose name could actually be uttered in the same breath with the word prosperous.

That time, however, still seemed mighty far in the future. So far, in fact, that maybe by the time she could afford decent clothes and makeup again, she wouldn’t have the face or the figure to show off anymore.

But I’m only thirty years old! Out of sheer desperation, she reminded herself of this often. Most of the time she felt much older; the responsibility of the ranch weighed heavily on her shoulders. With no family of her own, distanced from her friends in Wichita by a life that they couldn’t begin to understand, she often felt so alone.

These thoughts were abruptly ended by the unmistakable clomp of cowboy boots on the wide wooden boards of the back porch. A wild glance at the clock confirmed that it was only six-thirty, too early for Frisco and certainly too early for Colt McClure. And Mott Findley usually didn’t swagger onto her porch at this ungodly hour.

She edged a cautious eye around the bravely starched curtain hanging at the window. It wasn’t even properly light outside.

“Ma’am?” Colt McClure peered back at her, and her coffee sloshed over the rim of her mug before she dumped it in the sink with a clatter. She was suddenly mindful that she wore nothing under her old chenille bathrobe but bare skin. Backing away from the window, she clutched the two sides of fabric together. “I told you seven o’clock,” she said sharply.

He cleared his throat. “No offense, ma’am, but I’m here to work. I don’t mind gettin’ an early start.”

“Well,” she said. Her robe had never seemed so skimpy, and she wondered if it revealed anything she didn’t want him to see. A sneaky peek at her reflection in the black plastic door of the microwave oven reassured her. Faded yellow chenille was not exactly titillating stuff.

She flicked off the radio. “Come in,” she said. She kept her back to the door, hitched the belt of her robe even tighter and busied herself pouring him a mug of coffee until he was inside. Well, actually it oozed more than poured—she brewed her coffee strong.

When she turned around, Colt McClure, all six feet and more of him, stood to one side of the kitchen table crushing the brim of his worn black Stetson brushpopper in his enormous hands. He smelled of soap and leather and clean blue denim, and he’d slicked his dark hair back behind his ears. Today he looked much less fierce; he’d shaved the beard stubble to reveal a square, lean jaw. His eyes gleamed above the planes and hollows of his face, and she searched them for a hint of the insolence she’d noticed yesterday. If it was there, he’d concealed it.

He wasn’t drop-dead handsome; far from it. The scar bisecting one cheek took care of that. But he gave off a rugged strength, and he was certainly an imposing figure, with shoulders way out to El Paso, stomach flat as the west Texas plains, and long, long legs. His jeans were well-worn and so soft that they clung all the way down. His thighs—but she had no business thinking about his thighs. Or any of the rest of him.

“Sit down, please,” she said briskly, attempting a brief and impersonal smile. “Sugar? Cream?”

“Black,” he said. He lowered himself onto one of the kitchen chairs, the woven cane seat creaking under his weight. Even sitting, he blocked a good deal of light from the door.

She slid the coffee in front of him and clapped a spoon down on the table beside it. He kept his eyelids lowered, which she found respectful until she realized that he was staring at her bare feet. Her toes curled unwittingly, and she felt a slow heat work its way up from her chest to her neck to her cheeks.

She turned away in embarrassment, so fast that the bottom part of her robe flipped open. In exasperation, she yanked it closed. She’d give anything to be able to stuff the fabric between her knees and clamp it in place with her kneecaps, but she couldn’t. She didn’t want to appear undignified.

She’d intended for the new hand to take her seriously, which was perhaps a futile hope at this point. Nevertheless, she tried.

“I believe your ad said that you’ve worked on a ranch before,” she ventured primly as she assembled eggs, flour, milk and bacon on the counter beside the stove.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said in that grating voice of his, rusty as an old door hinge.

If she wanted more information, obviously she’d have to dig.

“What kind of work?”

“Everything.”

“Could you be more specific?”

“Ropin’, brandin’, workin’ cattle. Fences, barn repair, cleanin’ out ditches. Balin’ hay, trainin’ horses—”

“Are you good at it?” She slapped cold bacon into the warming skillet.

“At which, ma’am?”

“Breaking horses.”

“I think so.”

“What’s your philosophy about it?” she shot back. She began to cut out biscuits with the top of a jelly glass the way Dita, Frisco’s wife, had showed her years ago when Bethany had arrived at the ranch with no more idea of how to bake biscuits than how to rope or brand or ride fences.

He watched her punching out floury circles of dough, narrowing his eyes as if he suspected a trick question. Which it wasn’t. “Philosophy, ma’am?”

“Please don’t call me ma’am. You can call me Mrs. Burke. Or Bethany, if you prefer.”

He didn’t say anything.

“I asked your philosophy about breaking horses,” she reminded him.

He paused before answering. “I don’t like to think of it as breakin’. I like to think of it as buildin’. I think if you’ve got a horse to train, it’s like bringin’ up a kid. Your future relationship with the horse depends on how well you do it.”

She was surprised at this easy, unexpected flow of words and risked a quick look at him out of the corners of her eyes. “You’ve trained a lot of horses?”

“A fair number. Even some tough ones.”

She turned around and studied him. His deep-set gray eyes were thoughtful and clear, with silvery motes swimming in their depths.

“And how do you go about training a horse that doesn’t cooperate?” She was thinking of Sidewinder, the two-year-old quarter horse who had, of late, appointed himself the bane of her existence. Or so it seemed.

Colt’s eyes, those marvelous eyes, met hers with a crinkle of amusement. There was nothing hard about them now. “You have to train an uncooperative horse like porcupines make love. Very gently, ma’am—Mrs. Burke.”

She whipped back around, not wanting him to see that she was charmed as well as embarrassed. She shoved the biscuits into the oven and slammed the oven door. The noise it made reverberated into an awkward silence. Well, perhaps it was only awkward for her. She didn’t dare look at him.

“Mr. McClure, how many eggs can you eat, and how do you like them cooked?” she blurted.

“You better call me Colt. And I can eat five eggs. Or six. Sunny-side up.”

“I don’t usually cook for the help. From now on, you’ll eat with the ranch foreman at his house.” She was setting boundaries now; she discouraged familiarity with the hands.

“That’s fine.”

She drew a deep stabilizing breath. “Maybe I’d better explain things. Frisco’s my foreman, and he’s been here since my late husband was a boy. Dita’s his wife, a hard worker. She does the work of a man around here. Eddie’s their nineteen-year-old son, and he cooks, handles odd jobs and works in the garden.” She didn’t tell him the rest about Eddie; Colt would figure that out for himself.

“This Dita—you mean to say she’s a regular hand?”

“That’s what I mean to say, all right. She’s in her forties and as strong as an ox. She’s also solid and dependable, which is more than you can say for some.”

“I see,” Colt said, although she knew he was puzzling over a forty-something-year-old woman being employed as a hand. Well, Dita was a blessing, and you had to take help wherever you could get it. Also, Dita and Frisco and Eddie were her family. They weren’t related by blood, but they were all she had now that Justin was gone; her own parents had died when she was a teenager.

“You have any objection to hard work, cowboy?” she asked Colt.

“That’s what I’m looking for,” he said evenly.

“I’d say you’ve found it at the Banner-B.”

“Looks like it, all right. Speakin’ of which, what do you want me to do today?”

“Dig postholes,” she said. “You’ll find the posthole digger in an empty stall in the barn, and my foreman will show you where to start.”