Seduction, Cowboy Style

Her eyes were compelling, an odd shade of silvery-gray, their thick, dark lashes accenting the softness into which he fell. Deep in his gut, arousal woke as suddenly as if he’d been yanked from sleep by a loud alarm. His fingers tingled where he’d held her waist as if they would carry the imprint of her forever.

She wasn’t a short woman. In the instant in which momentum had plastered her against him her eyes had been level with his mouth. And her body… She’d felt delicate beneath his hands, fine-boned and fragile. As he ran his gaze down over the rest of her, his mind gave a silent wolf whistle. Long and lean were the first words that came to mind. But not too lean, he thought, measuring with his eyes the soft mounds of her breasts pushing at the lavender knit shirt she wore. She had a jean jacket tied around her slender waist which she’d probably discarded when the cool May morning turned into an uncomfortably warm afternoon.

With the shirt, she wore totally impractical, white, city-girl jeans. It confirmed his initial thought that she wasn’t a local girl. The shirt set off her fair ivory skin so that it held a translucent glow and made her eyes seem incredibly striking. Molten silver encased in those dark lashes. He’d never seen eyes like that. They slanted up slightly at the corners, giving her the look of an exotic cat.

She had a strong-boned face with arching dark eyebrows. Dark hair so brown it looked nearly black was caught back from her high forehead with a hair band from which it curled in wild corkscrews to her shoulderblades. Her nose was straight and slim, her cheekbones high and broad, and her mouth… As his gaze skimmed over the full bottom lip and the curved bow of her upper one, the arousal simmering beneath his skin heated up another degree or two.

Abruptly he realized he was staring. That she was staring right back seemed beside the point. She probably wondered if he was crazy.

“I was looking for someone,” he told her. “I apologize again, ma’am.”

“No harm done. I’m not hurt.” She smiled at him, and the mental wolf whistle died away to a whimper of pure, unadulterated lust. Her mouth was too wide. It should have looked odd, but combined with the rest of her features it only gave her an incredibly sexy, pouty look in repose. When she smiled, her lips parted to reveal perfect teeth and her eyes acquired a distinctly devilish gleam.

“Good.” He wondered what else he should say, but talking wasn’t what he did best. Finally he simply tipped his hat and stepped to one side.

Those unusual eyes clung to his for a moment more, but after a short hesitation she stepped past him and went on around the corner from which he’d just come.

When she disappeared around the corner, Deck had to curb the urge to snatch her back. Slowly he started forward again, continuing on through the tiny store. Who was she? Jackson County barely had a thousand people running around it. Surely he’d have heard about it, if a woman who looked like that had been here for long.

“Ready to go?” His brother appeared, pushing a cart toward the checkout counter. He stopped, eyeing Deck warily. “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing.” He made an effort to focus, pushing a too-wide, too-kissable mouth from his mind. “Did you get cereal?”

Marty indicated the cart, which contained several boxes of the food Deck considered an essential. “Sometimes I feel like your wife,” he said in disgust.

Deck only half registered the comment. He scanned the front of the store, then looked back down the aisles in his line of sight, searching for quirky black curls and long, long legs. But he didn’t see her the entire time he tossed the contents of the cart onto the counter.

Her heart-shaped face was still in his mind as they exited the store, each man carrying two bags of groceries.

“Seventy bucks!” Marty complained. “Seventy dollars and all we get are four lousy little bags of groceries. I didn’t even buy any meat except for hot dogs.”

Deck ignored him.

“Can you believe it?” Marty went on as they walked to Deck’s black Ford pickup parked in an angled space along Main Street in front of the store. “The price of—holy smokes, will you look at that?”

Deck lifted his head from the bags he was stashing in the back of the truck. He looked in the direction Marty was staring…and there she was.

“Now that’s a goddess,” said his brother in a reverent tone.

Deck had to agree, although he didn’t like the way his brother was eyeing her. Then again, how many men would ignore her? Silver Eyes must have come out of the store a little bit ahead of them, because there she was, standing uncertainly along the curb a little way down the street. Although he was too far away to see her face clearly, her body language looked anxious and unsettled as she scanned the long, wide-open street as if she was waiting for someone who hadn’t shown up.

“Quick,” said Marty. “Get in. She might need a ride.”

But before either of them could act on the words, a brand-new pickup turned the corner down by the city bar and slowed to a stop in front of the store. Silver Eyes set the single bag she carried in the bed and climbed into the cab. As she opened the passenger-side door and slid in, the man in the driver’s seat looked up and the late-afternoon sunlight fell full on his face.

Deck heard the startled curse his brother muttered. He was too shocked to say anything at all.

The man driving away with Silver Eyes was Cal McCall.

He couldn’t believe it.

The next morning, as Deck manhandled a laden wheelbarrow from the barn to the manure pile, he still hadn’t shaken the image of the silver-eyed woman with whom he’d collided in the grocery story. Of all the cussed, lousy luck in the world, why did she have to be McCall’s woman? The man didn’t deserve to have a good dog, let alone a fine-looking woman like that.

He gritted his teeth as he emptied the wheelbarrow and started back toward the barn. Damn that low-life, cowardly bastard! What was he doing back in Kadoka after thirteen years? Nobody thought he’d ever come back.

And if he had any decency in him at all, he wouldn’t.

It wasn’t as if Deck needed a reminder of the night Genie had died. Genie—his twin sister, frozen in the town’s memory at the age of sixteen. The hair shirt of guilt he’d worn ever since ensured that his memory stay razor sharp and crystal clear.

They’d gone to a community dance. Marty had driven separately, since he and Lora Emerson were a serious item and he’d wanted privacy from his kid sister and brother, the “terrible twinnibles” as he’d called them since they were old enough to toddle around after him. Although they both had driver’s licenses, they decided to ride into the auditorium with the brothers’ best friend, Cal McCall, whose family owned the next ranch over. He could still remember waving goodbye to his dad who’d stood on the porch watching as they’d bounced out the lane.

See you. We’ll be back before dawn.

They’d all thought that was hilarious. And so were the raunchy lyrics of the song they’d sung on the way into town until Genie had balled her fists and hit each of them in the shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise.

Just before eleven Cal and Elmer Drucker had gotten into a fight. They’d been fooling around all evening, vying for the attention of the same girl, and when she’d danced two dances in a row with Elmer, Cal had started a little ruckus. The little ruckus turned into a roll-around-on-the-floor wrestling match until a couple of other guys pulled them apart. Elmer had a cut above his eyebrow that needed stitches so his older brother took him on over to wake up the doctor.

See you. Don’t let him stitch your eye shut.

Cal had strutted around like a banty rooster—until his knee had swollen to the size of a cantaloupe and he’d had to admit he wrenched it pretty good. He’d sat in the corner with ice on it for a while and let the girls fuss over him, but eventually he’d crooked a finger at Deck. “This thing hurts. I think I’d better get home and rub some of that horse liniment on it. We’re branding tomorrow and Dad’ll kick my butt if I can’t ride. You ready?”

It would haunt Deck forever to know that if he’d answered that question differently, his sister might be alive today.

But at the time, he’d thought he had a pretty good chance of finding out whether those enormous jugs under Andrea Stinsen’s shirt were real, so when he saw Cal limping his way, he’d been all too ready to agree when Genie volunteered to take him home.

See you. I’ll catch a ride with Marty later.

It was just his luck that less than fifteen minutes later, Marty was beckoning. How the heck was a guy supposed to score when he kept being interrupted? But he hadn’t been that unhappy. It was apparent by then that pretty Andrea had no intention of letting him check out the contents of her bra that night, so after one last sloppy, steamy adolescent kiss Deck had headed home with Marty.

See you. I’ll come by tomorrow.

But they’d only been halfway down the highway when he saw the flashing lights. Marty had skidded to a panicked stop, recognizing the overturned vehicle as Cal’s father’s pickup…the truck Cal had been driving. Deck was out of the truck before it fully stopped. Emergency workers were already there, and until he explained who he was, they wouldn’t let him into the ambulance that was getting ready to pull away. A part of him registered the enormous hulk of a dead steer in the road, another part noted Cal talking and gesturing as he lay on an additional stretcher being loaded into the second ambulance. But he’d been too frantic about Genie to care about anything else.

She was still conscious when he’d climbed into the back of the ambulance. He wouldn’t have known her if it weren’t for the blue chambray shirt she’d been wearing and the silver buckle she’d won barrel racing that decorated her belt. God, the blood. He’d seen a lot of blood in his work on the ranch but he hoped he never saw anything like that again.

Her eyes had been closed and she’d been moaning in pain, but when he took her hand and spoke to her, she’d whispered, “Deck.”

He hadn’t been able to speak for the fear that clutched his throat, so he bent his head and kissed her fingers.

She’d stirred and opened the one eye that wasn’t swollen shut. “Don’t blame Cal.”

Don’t blame Cal.

She’d never spoken again.

Marty had gone on home to tell their parents, while Deck rode to Rapid City in the ambulance with his unconscious twin. Twelve hours later she’d died in the hospital without ever knowing that her family was around her, without ever knowing that the man who’d done this to her was lounging in a hospital bed up in Philip with a few broken bones instead of in a jail cell where Deck wanted to see him.

See you…see you…see you…