Cowboy With A Secret

She caught him eyeballing her breasts, but he quickly glanced away when he saw that she noticed. Still, she felt her nipples pucker under the soft robe. And in response to what? A cocky attitude, a penetrating gaze?

Colt McClure wasn’t her type; he was a drifter, no doubt, and there was something hard about him. Something tough. And something dangerous enough to set off wild alarms inside her head.

She’d meant to ask Colt where he’d worked last, and she wanted him to supply references, but her physical response to him was getting way out of line. It embarrassed her and made her feel guilty—she hadn’t even looked at another man since Justin. She’d figured that sex was something she’d never experience again, like wearing suits to work and drawing a regular paycheck.

Fine, but then why was she feeling something breathtakingly akin to lust simmering just below the surface of her skin? Why had her heartbeat gone all aflutter under the chaste folds of her robe?

And the man who was responsible for her turmoil was totally unaware. Colt McClure wolfed down eggs and biscuits as if there were no tomorrow. He had a sensual mouth and big hands, and for an instant she imagined that mouth exploring hers and those hands caressing her breasts.

No!

The man was an unknown quantity with nothing to commend him but the right physique for the job and a willingness to work at the Banner-B. Bethany probably shouldn’t have hired him, but what else was she to do? She’d promised Justin to make the ranch a success, and she couldn’t do it all alone even with Frisco and his family’s help. And maybe she wouldn’t be able to do it at all if cousin Mott succeeded in snatching the place out from under her.

Oh, why had she thought of that? Sudden tears welled in her eyes, and she blinked them away. If Mott succeeded—but she’d already made up her mind that she wouldn’t allow it, no matter how powerful he was, no matter what his political connections.

“Anything wrong, Mrs. Burke?”

Bethany couldn’t let herself seem vulnerable to this man. Or to anyone else for that matter. Vulnerability was too often seen as weakness. But oh, sometimes she felt her loneliness like a vise around her heart, and sometimes she thought she couldn’t stand the pain of it.

She tossed a spatula into the sink with a distracting clatter and made a blind beeline for the hall stairs. She called out over her shoulder, “Any questions about the job, ask Frisco.”

“I thank you kindly for breakfast,” he called after her. “And do you have any sheets for my bed?”

She pretended that she hadn’t heard, but she wished she’d thought of that. Of course he’d need sheets. And maybe some other things, too.

It was the other things that she didn’t dare to contemplate. Felt guilty for even thinking about. But she was sure that they also had something to do with bed.

CHAPTER TWO

BY ONE O’CLOCK IN THE afternoon, the day was rolling along full blaze ahead. Colt swiped at his forehead with one sleeve of the shirt he’d tied around his waist in an attempt to tan away some of the prison pallor. He hadn’t been out in the sun much for the past three years—inmates were allowed only one hour a day exercise in the pen.

He squinted for a moment at the line of dust rolling toward him from the horizon, then threw himself into the task at hand—digging holes. It wasn’t an interesting job, but it gave him time to think.

Thinking was a pastime he’d cultivated in prison because there hadn’t been a whole lot else to do except explore the prison law library for information that would win him a new trial. New information had surfaced, finally. And he’d been sprung, thank God. The trouble was, he hadn’t thought out what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. When you didn’t think you were going to be able to have a real life, you didn’t plan for it. At least, he hadn’t. All his plans went down the drain when the judge handed down that prison sentence.

He moved on to the next spot. Now he could see the dilapidated ranch pickup at the head of all that dust, and he figured it was probably Frisco checking to see if he was working. The old guy didn’t think much of him. Colt had figured that out the first time they set eyes on each other. Or eye, in the case of Frisco, who wore a black patch over his left one.

The pickup jolted over a rise and pulled to a stop just short of where he stood. Colt worked stolidly, knowing he had to prove himself. To his surprise, the person who slid out of the truck wasn’t Frisco but Bethany Burke.

“Greetings, cowboy,” she said. “How’s it going?” She seemed cautious and so solemn. He wondered what it would take to make her bust loose and let go of that cool reserve.

He straightened and leaned on the posthole digger. A runnel of sweat trickled down his back. “It’s going okay,” he said.

“I brought you something to drink.” She looked deceptively delicate as she hauled a large thermos and a mason jar out of the pickup and poured him some iced tea. It was sweetened already, the way he liked it. He thanked her and gulped it down before holding out the jar for more.

Even in this miserable heat, Bethany looked so cool that butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth or on any other place, either. She stood close enough for him to inhale the warm sweet fragrance of her skin, and it reminded him of the scent of wildflowers borne on a prairie breeze. Colt’s eyes were inadvertently drawn to her cleavage, or rather to where her cleavage had formerly shown. Today her shirt—big and blousy like yesterday’s—was buttoned higher.

His eyes roamed elsewhere, taking in the paler skin of her inner arm, the glint of sunlight on blond curls, the way she stood with one hip canted to counter the weight of the big thermos. He felt a rush and a stirring somewhere south of his belt and bolted down the second jar of cold tea in an attempt to quench the fire.

He made himself look somewhere, anywhere, which was why he happened to notice that over on the highway, a small light-colored sedan had slowed to armadillo speed. That in itself seemed unusual, since when people hit a lonely stretch of road in isolated parts like these, they tended to floor the accelerator. The car stopped briefly, then sped up. Bethany kept her eye on it the same way he did before turning back to him.

“Did you talk to Frisco about supper?” she asked.

“Yes, ma’am,” Colt said. Then he remembered. She didn’t like to be called ma’am. And somehow Mrs. Burke didn’t fit her. He’d call her Bethany, but it seemed overly familiar to call her by her first name. Okay, so from now on he’d call her nothing. Though he did think Bethany was a good name for her—soft and feminine, just like her.

“And did he tell you what time to show up?”

“Six o’clock,” Colt said. Because he didn’t include the ma’am, he thought he sounded too abrupt. “Dinner today was delicious,” he added.

“Eddie cooks at noon. He’s good at it.” She watched him carefully for his reaction, but he wasn’t going to give her one. Sure, he knew about the kid. The signs were unmistakable. Eddie had Down’s syndrome, born with an extra chromosome. Mentally challenged, as some put it. That didn’t bother him. Eddie had been polite, friendly and interested.

“Can’t say I’ve ever had a better meat loaf,” Colt said.

Bethany’s face lit up with a smile. Clearly the kid meant a lot to her. “You’ll eat well at the Neilsons’,” she said.

He nodded, bedazzled by the shimmer of her when she smiled like that.

“I’m going to leave this thermos of tea with you,” she said, setting it on the ground. “There’s salt tablets in the barn, and you’d better take them in this weather. You can keep the thermos. You’ll need something to drink when you’re working far away from the home place in such heat.”

“Thanks. I appreciate it,” he said.

Without saying anything else, she marched back to the pickup and got in. When the engine turned over, she backed and wheeled around, leaving him standing at the edge of a spurt of dust.

Colt watched her go, thinking that a high-class babe like her was wasted ’way out here in no man’s land. Bethany Burke should be someplace where there were palm trees waving in the breeze, balmy nights and a passel of admiring men flitting around her in appreciation of her spectacular beauty.

Come to think of it, he could appreciate it well enough, but he didn’t think she’d like it. She’d made it clear that her relationship with him was to be businesslike.

He wondered about her, wondered how long she’d been struggling to make a go of this place. There was something valiant about Bethany Burke’s refusal to do the obvious with the Banner-B. Many an experienced rancher would have packed it in by this time. But she didn’t seem of much of a mind to give up. She wasn’t a quitter. That was one thing the two of them had in common.

The pickup merged with the horizon where it flattened under the weight of the sky, and Colt put his back into his work and dug another posthole. He thought about his new employer, pictured her reclining under a palm tree in one of those tiny string bikinis, a demure come-hither glint in those remarkable blue eyes.

He might have sworn off nighttime dreaming, but there was no reason why he couldn’t indulge in a few daydreams now and then.

COLT HEARD THE RUCKUS as he was storing the posthole digger in the corrugated equipment shed where he thought it belonged, not in the barn where he’d found it. A horse squealed in panic, the heart-wrenching sound echoing back and forth between the barn and the shed. A horse’s terror was one thing Colt couldn’t stand to think about. He knew what it was like to feel that way—no damn good.

He ran out of the shed and around it. A red roan galloped around the perimeter of the corral behind the barn, bucking every once in a while for good measure. Whatever else was going on wasn’t any clearer than his vision, which was normally 20/20 but presently obscured by the ominous cloud of dust billowing in the air.

Then he saw Bethany Burke clambering up on the fence, displaying the pert curve of her backside in the process. She dragged a leather halter behind her.

“What the—?” he hollered.

“This horse is meaner than cuss,” she hollered over her shoulder. The halter caught on the fence post, and then her foot slipped and she fell back into the corral.

Colt was over the fence in an instant. The roan, a thousand pounds or so of muscle and sinew, was wild-eyed and galloping straight toward Bethany. She realized the danger and rolled over twice to fling herself away from the onslaught of thundering hooves. Colt planted his two feet firmly in the dust between Bethany and the horse and fixed his gaze on the horse’s eyes. Not surprisingly, the horse fled to the other side of the corral and stood panting, sides quivering.

“Get up,” Colt said tersely into the sudden quiet. He didn’t dare take his eyes off the horse.

Behind him, he heard Bethany climb on the fence, up and over. Colt backed away, still holding the horse with his gaze. Then he vaulted over the fence and jumped down, landing lightly beside her.

Bethany’s face was ashen. She was scared. He couldn’t blame her; she could have been trampled.

“You all right?” he asked sharply.

She nodded and closed her eyes for a long moment. “I’m okay. Thanks.”

“What were you doing?”

“Trying to put a halter on him.”

“Who spooked this horse? Not you, I take it?”

She lifted a shoulder and let it fall, but she wasn’t as nonchalant as she seemed. A slick of perspiration beaded her forehead, and he thought he detected a slight trembling of her upper lip—a very sensual upper lip, it seemed to him.

“You’d have to ask Mott Findley.”

“Who’s he?”

“My neighbor. I took Sidewinder from Mott in trade believing I could help him, but I’m thinking he’s hopeless. Sometimes I’ll be making progress, then something sets him off. If he can’t catch on to what a good horse is supposed to do on a ranch, I’ll have to get rid of him.”

Colt knew what that meant. The roan was well on his way to becoming poodle food. With a marginal operation like the Banner-B, a horse wasn’t worth the feed and vet care it took to maintain him if he couldn’t pull his weight.

He moved closer to the fence, leaned on it. The sinking sun felt good spread across his shoulders. The roan, a gelding about fourteen and a half hands high, had the powerful hind-quarters and deep chest of a good quarter horse, a breed developed for cutting cattle and roping steers. To say this horse was skittish was an understatement—he was downright dangerous. Colt hadn’t seen a horse in such bad shape in years, not since Ryzinski’s. He didn’t have to think about it for more than a moment.

“You mind if I have a try at him?”

Bethany chuckled mirthlessly. “Not if he’s going to kill a perfectly good ranch hand.”

“I know what I’m doing.” Colt turned around and looked at her. She was covered with dust, but she didn’t seem to mind. She’d bundled her hair into a barrette at her nape and tucked her thumbs inside the waistband of her jeans. It drew them tight around her belly. Nice.

“You think you can calm him down, go ahead. Just don’t take any chances.”

“I figure I can help him some,” he told her. She didn’t say anything, so he climbed up on the fence and studied the roan. The horse was blowing air in long huffs and eyeing Colt with trepidation, his ears laid back along his neck. His sleek coat gleamed in the sun.

“What’s his name?”

“Sidewinder. Like the rattlesnake.”

Colt wasn’t sentimental about animals. He wasn’t sentimental about anything anymore. But Sidewinder was an animal caught in a prison, and Colt identified with that. Worse, the animal had no one to help him get out. And a horse only knew to run when threatened. A horse didn’t fight. Block his flight, and you terrified the animal. The horse was beside himself with wanting to be free.

Trouble was, this horse would never be free. He was expected to work. If someone didn’t show him how to work, he’d soon be a dead horse. Nothing free in being dead.

Colt’s shirt was sweaty and stuck to his skin; he stripped it off in one swift motion and flung it over the fence. He alit from the fence, dropping into the corral. Bethany moved closer, but he didn’t look at her. The only power that would hold Sidewinder was the strength of his gaze, and this wasn’t the time to waste it.

The horse rolled his eyes, shook his proud head and took off at a trot, but that was what Colt expected. He strode to the center of the enclosure and kept his body turned fully toward Sidewinder, maintaining eye contact. What has someone done to you? he said silently. He’d never known if horses knew what people were thinking, and he wasn’t sure it mattered if they did. He didn’t need any special ESP with Sidewinder because his body language would do the job. It had never failed yet.

Sidewinder took off at a gallop, and Colt let him run off some steam, facing him all the while, finally allowing himself to break eye contact. Soon he noticed that Sidewinder kept the ear on Colt’s side still, and Colt knew that the horse was trying to understand the situation. In Sidewinder’s world, Colt was a new person presenting a new scent and a new attitude; Sidewinder was intelligent and wanted to know what was going on.

The horse made several more revolutions of the corral. He was amazingly beautiful as he ran, a magnificent horse. Bethany looked on doubtfully from the other side of the fence. Colt couldn’t blame her for being skeptical.

It took a while, but Colt finally recognized the signs. Sidewinder licked his lips and pretended to chew. The horse was ready to calm down.

“Maybe you’d better come out of there,” Bethany said behind him. “He’s looking agitated.”

She’d misread the signs. Lots of people did. Bethany clearly thought that Sidewinder was gathering himself for an attack. Well, her thinking was not unusual.

“He’s fine, just fine,” he said. To his satisfaction, Sidewinder dropped his head and kept trotting. This was a signal.

Colt now broke eye contact and changed his body position. Sidewinder stopped running. The roan stood, his flanks heaving, watching. Colt didn’t move.

“Colt—” Bethany said urgently.

Colt shook his head slightly and she knew enough to keep quiet. The horse took a tentative step forward, then another. He stopped again. Colt waited.

Then Sidewinder, the horse that had almost trampled Bethany Burke less than a half hour ago, walked slowly to him and stood submissively at his side.

Colt spoke to him then. “Good boy,” he said as he reached out and stroked Sidewinder’s nose. The horse remained alert, but allowing himself to be stroked was an admission of trust. Colt kept stroking, moving his hand downward to rub the horse’s neck. This horse was no problem horse. He just hadn’t been handled right.

“Never have I seen anything like that. It’s incredible,” Bethany said from her perch on the fence. She sounded awestruck.

“Tomorrow we’ll try a saddle,” Colt said. He patted Sidewinder’s neck and made a slow turn. The horse followed him when he headed for the gate.

Bethany met him on the other side and waited while he closed and latched it. “Lordy, Colt, what is it you do?” she said.

Colt was feeling pretty good about what he’d accomplished. “Secret,” he said. He didn’t let on how psyched he was.

“Will you really try a saddle tomorrow?”

He peeled his shirt off the top rail of the fence. It had dried stiff, and he didn’t want to put it on so he crumpled it into a ball.

“And maybe more.” Until those final moments, he hadn’t realized how exhilarating it was to be doing what he did best. He’d been aware of Bethany Burke. He’d wanted to impress her. But that wasn’t the main thing.

Bethany studied him, and he wondered if she was assessing more than his resolve. Her gaze dropped to his bare chest, a movement that looked involuntary. Or was he reading too much into this? Maybe he’d better stick to reading horses.

“Well, cowboy, that was some show. I’d like you to tell me how you do it. I mean it.”

“I can show you much better than I can tell you,” he said. “Meet me here tomorrow afternoon at the same time.”

“Is it okay if Frisco watches?”

“How about just you?” So far Frisco had been all hiss and vinegar, and the idea of the old guy’s spectating held no appeal. Colt was determined to cement his place here before setting himself up for criticism. A job was a job, and he intended to keep this one. It was far enough away from Oklahoma, for one thing, and there was plenty to do and no competition. The Banner-B suited him.

“All right, then, just me.” Bethany smiled at him.

Smiles from beautiful women had been few and far between in the last few years, and it was all Colt could do not to turn his considerable charm on her.

Bad idea. He’d save it for the horse.

“I’ll be out planting posts tomorrow early,” he said. He deliberately tacked a gruff edge to his words.

“Fine.”

With a curt nod, he left her. Next, supper with the Neilsons. Maybe he could soften up the old coot by being friendly with the kid. Eddie liked him, he could tell.

COUNTRY MUSIC WAS PLAYING on the radio, something whiny and sad that made Bethany feel mopey just listening to it. She rattled around in the kitchen, cobbling a meal together from leftovers because she didn’t feel like cooking. To make things even worse, she was nursing a bruised shoulder, an unpleasant souvenir of her dust-up with Sidewinder.

While her food warmed in the microwave, she wondered what was going on around the Neilsons’ supper table. Frisco was probably whittling invisible notches in that chip on his shoulder, and Dita would be making cheerful table conversation. Eddie—well, Eddie was Eddie.

What would Colt McClure add to the mix? He wasn’t exactly Mr. Personality. And anyway, why did she care?

Well, she did care. She desperately wanted the new hand to work out. Not to prove Frisco wrong, but to make life easier at the Banner-B for all of them. After she’d left the corral that afternoon, she’d ridden out to the new fence line and checked on the work Colt had done. He’d dug more fencepost holes than she’d imagined one man could do in a single day. And what he’d accomplished with Sidewinder was nothing less than phenomenal.

Bethany was glad that the old system of breaking a horse’s willpower and creating subservience through fear had fallen into disrepute. She hated pain and cruelty of any kind. These days, the trend in horse training was to use more humane methods than trainers had employed in the past.

She and her own horse, Dancer, worked as a team, and next to Frisco, Bethany considered Dancer her best friend on the ranch. Consequently when Sidewinder first arrived in trade from Mott Findley for some extra bales of hay that she’d grown last year, when the horse had turned out for some reason to be skittish and afraid, she’d thought that teaching him was a mere matter of showing him love and thereby developing trust. So far, all her high-minded theory had achieved for her was a near-death experience courtesy of a terrified horse that was worth less than spit.

But Colt McClure knew something she didn’t, something that would save Sidewinder. He had a rare gift. And Bethany was eager to learn his secret.

She’d been so preoccupied with all she’d had to do today that she’d clean forgotten that Colt needed sheets for his bed. After supper, she loaded the dishwasher and then rummaged in the linen closet until she found what she was looking for. Colt would probably still be eating with Frisco and his family, so she’d drop the sheets off and afterward take a long walk the way she often did late in the evening.

That rascal Jesse roused himself from his spot alongside her old slat-bottomed porch rocker and followed her as she headed toward the barn, her arms full of neatly folded sheets and an extra pillow.

“Dumb dog,” she said to him, nice as pie even though she didn’t feel it. “Trying to ruin my sunflowers. Seems like after all I’ve done for you, you could show respect for the things I love. How am I ever going to get flowers started around the house? What am I going to do with you, Jesse James?”

Jesse, outlaw that he was, wagged his tail enthusiastically and lifted his leg on the truck tire.

Bethany, thoroughly put out, kept walking. “Like I said, Jesse, you’re a dumb dog. But maybe not so dumb. You’ve got Frisco on your side at least.” When he saw that Bethany was going nowhere more interesting than the barn, Jesse wandered away toward the bunkhouse, which was so decrepit and rundown that it wasn’t in use anymore.

The barn was big and more ramshackle than Bethany would have liked, but repairing either it or the bunkhouse was out of the question as long as she continued to have serious cash flow problems. Still, the barn was comforting in its familiarity. As she wrinkled her nose against the dust motes swimming in the last rays of the dying sun, Colt’s horse stuck his head over the door to his stall and pricked his ears. He was a beautiful black quarter horse, sleek and well-kept.

Her own horse, Dancer, nickered and blew in recognition at the sight of her, but her arms were full and Bethany couldn’t get to the carrot she’d stashed in her back pocket. “I’ll be back soon,” she promised. Dancer snorted and bumped her nose against the gate to her stall.

All was quiet overhead in Colt’s apartment. Her footsteps echoed hollowly on the wooden steps as she made her way upstairs. The door hung wide-open, which didn’t surprise her much. Anybody would want to get a cross-draft going in such airless quarters.

“Colt?” she called.

No answer. Inside the tiny room, an oscillating fan positioned on a table blew air across the top of a chipped enamel pan heaped with ice cubes. A primitive air conditioner? It made sense, but not when Colt wasn’t there. And where’d he get that much ice? The apartment refrigerator was the small square kind college kids used in their dorms, and it made minuscule ice cubes.