The Cowboy Way

If she’d been getting laid regular, it wouldn’t be so bad. But it had been over six months since that weekend in Dallas with Jim, the cattle broker, and she’d gone without for four months before that. It’d been so long, she’d almost forgotten what it was she was missing. And then Clay Madison had swaggered onto the scene with that lazy, loose-hipped, loose-kneed cowboy saunter of his and had reminded her of exactly what she was doing without. She’d have avoided him if she could have, but he was best man to her maid of honor, so ignoring him wasn’t an option.

Unfortunately, having sex with him wasn’t, either.

Jo Beth had two ironclad rules when it came to sex. She didn’t do it close to home. And she didn’t do cowboys. Ever.

And, hell, it wasn’t as if Clay had ever looked twice at her, anyway. She wasn’t the kind of woman a man like him looked at, or even took any particular notice of. She had a decent body—a bit on the skinny side, true, but decent, nonetheless—and she had a nice enough face. Nothing that would stop traffic, but it didn’t stop clocks, either. She freely admitted she didn’t have enough feminine graces to be what anyone would call beautiful, but she had a certain lean and rangy wholesomeness going for her, an outdoorsy girl-next-door kind of thing that wasn’t completely unappealing.

Except to men like Clay Madison.

Men like Clay Madison didn’t want the wholesome girl-next-door. They wanted flash and sparkle in their women. They wanted curvy bodies, big hair, fluttering eyelashes, and glossy wet-lipped smiles. They wanted adoring, tractable, bosomy, bubble-brained buckle bunnies who gave head at the drop of a trophy belt buckle and didn’t make a fuss when the party was over. And they got them. By the truckload. In every town and every city where the rodeo played, the buckle bunnies lined up, waiting for some cowboy to give them a tumble. And if that cowboy happened to be a handsome-assin, four-time Pro Rodeo bull-riding champion with shoulders a yard wide, a tight little butt, and a wicked gleam in his soulful brown eyes, well, that cowboy inevitably got first pick. And it was for certain he would never pick a woman like her.

Not that she’d pick him, either. Not for anything real or permanent. But she sure as hell wouldn’t mind having him in her bed. Just once. Just one time to see if he was as good as he looked.

“And, damn, I bet he’s fine,” she murmured, her eyes drifting closed to better imagine just how it would be.

She pictured herself running her hands over his broad bare shoulders while he kissed her senseless, pictured herself rubbing her bare breasts against his equally bare chest while his hands roamed over her back, pictured herself digging her nails into his firm cowboy butt as he pumped into her. Her mental picture show tightened her nipples inside her plain white cotton bra and had her squirming in the saddle.

Bella tossed her head and looked around to see what was going on.

“Sorry, sweetheart.” Jo Beth reached out and patted the mare’s neck to reassure her that all was well. Cutting horses and barrel racers took their signals from the movement of the rider in the saddle; a press of the leg just a certain way meant one thing, a shift of weight meant something else. “I didn’t mean to confuse you, baby girl.”

Dealing with her own confusion was more than enough for the moment.

It wasn’t as if she even liked cowboys. Well, okay, she liked them all right, as employees, as colleagues, as friends, but definitely not romantically. She’d learned her lesson there the hard way. And, yet, here she was fantasizing about one. Which just proved it was way past time she scheduled herself a trip to Dallas for an overdue visit with her favorite cattle broker. Or, maybe, since time was so short and her need was so desperate, she ought to just call up that good ol’ boy banker in the next county. He was always real glad to hear from her. Tomorrow, after the wedding, she decided, she’d give Todd a call and see if he’d like to meet her at the Holiday Inn out on Highway 81. A nice sweaty bout of recreational sex was just what she needed to clear her head and settle her nerves so she could concentrate on something besides the physical needs that hadn’t been satisfied in far too long. After all, it wouldn’t do to be all wound up when the city slickers finally arrived. It might create a bad impression if she bit a paying customer’s head off just because that customer was breathing the same air she was.

She shifted in the saddle, arching her back in a long stretch, rolling her head from side to side in an effort to loosen muscles that were tight with tension. In the process, she inadvertently tightened her thighs against the mare’s sides. Bella took a quick little sideways jump in response. The move might have unseated a less experienced rider but Jo Beth only swayed in the saddle, keeping her seat without any trouble. “Sorry, Bella,” she said again, reaching out to settle the mare with a stroke of her hand.

Hell, she decided, maybe she wouldn’t wait until after the wedding to call ol’ Todd. He was always real accommodating, always ready to meet her whenever and wherever she wanted him to, always up, as it were, for an afternoon quickie or an all-night marathon. Maybe she’d better call him this afternoon, as soon as she got back to the ranch, and set something up for tonight. Get the kinks out before the wedding.

Except, damn it, she couldn’t.

Tonight was Cassie’s bachelorette party. As maid of honor, Jo Beth was duty bound to show up for it, despite the fact that she was looking forward to it with only marginally less dread than she was to the wedding itself. The difference in her level of enthusiasm being that the wedding would be a public ordeal with everybody in the county in attendance, ready to snicker should she make a fool of herself traipsing down the aisle in a flowing silk dress with rosebuds in her hair.

The bachelorette party, thank God, would at least be a private affair. Silly as all get-out, of course, but blessedly private because the bride had decided she wanted to have an old-fashioned slumber party instead of the more traditional girls’ night out on the eve of her wedding. The invitations had specified baby-doll nighties as the preferred wearing apparel for the festivities—“Not in this lifetime,” Jo Beth muttered morosely—and they were going to listen to golden oldies, make popcorn balls and ice cream sundaes, and give each other manicures and pedicures so they’d all have matching nail polish for the wedding. As a special surprise for the bride, bridesmaid LaWanda Brewster, who’d recently become an entrepreneur in the at-home sex-toy business, was going to treat them to a demonstration of her most popular products.

Jo Beth shuddered at the mere thought of it, and wondered what it was about weddings that turned otherwise reasonable women into starry-eyed lunatics. Or, hell, maybe it was just her. Maybe she was the lunatic and all the rest of them were behaving perfectly normally under the circumstances. All the other bridesmaids—all five of them—had been tickled pink to be part of the wedding. They’d seemed to genuinely enjoy the shopping trip to Dallas to pick out just the right bridesmaids’ dresses, and the endless discussions about the appropriate flowers and which wedding-cake recipe was best and whether the groom’s cake should be devil’s food or red velvet. They’d been sincerely and utterly delighted with the color-coordinated bridal showers, cooing like doves over the pastel sherbet punch, the platters of tiny crustless sandwiches, and the silly bouquet made out of a paper plate festooned with bows from the shower gifts.

It wasn’t that Jo Beth wasn’t honored to have been asked to be the maid of honor—after all, she and Cassie had been best friends since kindergarten—but, really, if she had to sit around with a bunch of otherwise rational women and gush over one more precious pot holder with the bride’s chosen rooster motif on it, she was going to run screaming from the room.

“Thank God it will all be over tomorrow,” she said to Bella as she reined her in and swung out of the saddle.

Her boot heels sent little puffs of dust into the air as they hit the ground, the jinglebobs on her spurs ringing merrily with the movement. She pushed the brim of her hat back with the tip of her index finger and swept her gaze over the empty landscape. A sigh of satisfaction escaped her lips. She’d ridden out into the middle of nowhere—or as close to it as she could get and still be on Diamond J land. In this remote corner of the ranch there was nothing but the hot Texas wind and the land, a few gnarled oak trees that’d managed to stand up to both, and the old wooden windmill, its blades creaking rhythmically above the water tank beneath it.

The tank was made of smooth, weathered concrete and was a foot and a half deep and nearly ten feet across. The water in it was cool and clean. Later in the summer, when the cattle were moved in to graze the pasture, the area around the tank would be thick with mud and the water would be churned up and murky, but right now—at least until the new pool behind the main house was filled—the water tank was the closest thing to a swimming hole on the Diamond J.

And Jo Beth was determined to take full advantage of it.

She looped Bella’s reins around one of the crosshatch wooden braces at the base of the windmill, and reached for the metal button on the waistband of her jeans.

WITHOUT LOOKING AWAY from the scene unfolding below him, Clay Madison looped his reins around the saddle horn in front of him, reached into the saddlebag suspended from the rigging behind him, and extracted a pair of high-powered binoculars. Someone was nosing around the water tank in the gully below. It was probably perfectly innocent, just someone intent on getting a drink for themselves or their horse, but it never hurt to make sure. Water was a precious commodity out on the Texas prairie, and a smart rancher took care to safeguard it. Not that Clay was a rancher, but he was the guest of a man who was, and that made it his duty to see what the lone rider messing around down there by the water tank was up to.

Nudging up the brim of his black Resistol cowboy hat with the flick of a finger, he raised the binoculars to his eyes and placed the smooth plastic eyepiece directly against his brow bone. It took a second or two to manipulate the focus wheel, and then, suddenly, with no warning at all, a naked female bottom filled his entire field of vision.

He stared at it for a second or two, then lowered the binoculars, blinked carefully and deliberately, as if to clear an obstruction in his eyes, and repositioned the binoculars. Yep, even at fifty yards there was no mistaking what he was looking at. It was definitely a woman’s ass. Creamy white and softly rounded, two perfectly formed globes of luscious female flesh peeked out at him from beneath the hem of a faded blue shirt. As he set there, stock-still atop his borrowed pinto, his gaze fastened unwaveringly on the enticing curves exposed beneath the blue shirt, he was suddenly struck with the overwhelming need to have one burning question answered.

Who’s luscious ass was it?

It was nobody he knew or had met in the last interminable week, that was for sure. He’d never forget an ass like that. Even if he’d only seen it fully clothed before—and, regrettably, the only asses he’d seen for a couple of months had been fully clothed—he’d have recognized it. It wasn’t the kind a man forgot. There was a nice, sweet double handful there, slim enough to entice the eye, round enough to give a man something to grab on to when the action got hot and heavy.

But who the hell was it?

He readjusted the focus of the binoculars to take in more of the scene below, telling himself—promising himself—he’d watch just long enough to satisfy his curiosity about who it was, then he’d turn the pinto around and go back the way he’d come. It was the proper thing, the gentlemanly thing to do. And no matter what certain matrimonially disappointed females might say to the contrary, his dearly departed mama had raised him to be a gentleman. As soon as he knew who it was, he’d go.

Stubbornly, though, almost as if she knew he was there, she kept her back to him as she finished undressing. She shrugged out of the blue shirt, letting it slide down her back, covering up her ass for a moment before she caught the shirt by the collar with one hand and reached up to loop it over the saddle horn on top of the pair of jeans already hanging there. Given her size in relation to the horse she was using as a clothes rack, she was an inch or two above average height, but she was slightly, almost delicately, built. The waist above that luscious ass was as narrow as a boy’s, her arms and legs were sapling slender, and he could clearly see the bumps of her spine, running down the valley of her back like a strand of pearls barely showing beneath her pale creamy skin. The look of fragility was directly countered, however, by the strength inherent in the smooth flex and coil of the well-toned muscles that covered her narrow frame. She was, he decided judiciously, what was commonly called lean and wiry. She looked the way he had always imagined a ballerina would look if you saw her naked. Not his type at all—he preferred exotic dancers to ballerinas—except for that fantastic little caboose.

It gave him hope that what she had in the breast department might be equally fantastic, and had him unconsciously sucking in his breath when she reached up behind her and released the hooks on her plain white bra.

She leaned forward a bit as it loosened, crossing her arms over her torso, lifting her hands to brush the shoulder straps down. As she straightened, reaching out with one hand to stuff the scrap of white fabric into one of the saddlebags strapped to her horse’s saddle, she flicked a long brown braid over her shoulder. It was nearly as thick as a man’s wrist and came halfway down her back. The sight tickled a memory in Clay’s mind. He’d seen a woman with hair like that. Recently, he thought. He was almost sure of it.

But who?

And where?

And then she turned toward him and it seemed as if his gaze met hers through the precision-ground lenses of the binoculars.

“Jesus,” he said, and dropped the binoculars as if they’d suddenly gotten too hot to hold.

It wasn’t so much that he thought he’d been discovered. Situated as he was, in a stand of tall cottonwoods and scrub oak just below the crest of a hill, with the hot Texas sun at his back and shining full in her face, it would be almost impossible for her to have seen him. Still, he sucked in his breath and froze for a moment, just in case she had, and wondered what in hell the prissy, dried-up stick of a rancher from the Diamond J was doing shucking her clothes to go skinny-dipping in a watering tank in the middle of the day.

He wouldn’t have guessed she had it in her. From what he knew of Miz Jo Beth Jensen—which was, admittedly, not much—she was a serious-minded, no-non-sense, nose-to-the-grindstone kind of woman who seemed to have a perpetual mad-on against men in general and cowboys in particular. What with them both being key members of Cassie and Rooster’s wedding party and having similar duties to perform, they’d been thrown together pretty regularly over the last week and he’d read the No Trespassing signs clearly, right from the start.

At their very first meeting, when Rooster had introduced his best man to his bride’s maid of honor, Clay had politely dipped his head, touching the brim of his hat with two fingers in the accepted cowboy greeting, and flashed his never-fail “howdy there, darlin’” smile in an effort to start things off on a friendly footing. She’d dipped her head in return and answered his smile with one that could freeze the balls off a prize bull at fifty paces. Don’t even think about it might as well have been written across her nearly nonexistent chest in bright red letters. He’d done her the courtesy of acceding to her unspoken wishes and hadn’t given her another thought that didn’t have to do with the wedding preparations.

But that was before he’d seen her standing buck naked in the bright Texas sunlight and realized the dried-up stick of a rancher had one hell of a sweet little body hidden under her dusty jeans and snap-front western shirts. Completely forgetting his vow to leave as soon as he knew who it was, he swung out of the saddle, retrieved the binoculars, and raised them to his eyes.

BRACING A HAND ON THE EDGE of the tank, Jo Beth stepped over the rim and eased into the water. Even warmed as it was by the relentless Texas sun, it still felt deliciously cool against her sun-flushed skin, slick and silky against her thighs and belly, wonderfully refreshing as it lapped against her breasts. She sank down a bit, letting the water slide up over her shoulders and neck to the base of her chin, and tilted her head back so that everything but her face was immersed. And then she sat up and leaned back against the rim of the tank, her eyes closed, her face turned up to the sky, and ordered herself to relax.

It should have been easy. The air was hot and dry and blessedly quiet, the silence broken only by the creaking of the old windmill and the breeze that rustled the leaves of the ancient oak trees that dotted the pasture. The water in the tank was swimming-pool warm. She was completely and utterly alone for the first time in days, her only companion the old horse that stood with her head down and one foreleg bent, drowsing in the shade of the windmill.

And, damn it, she was still wound up tighter than an overworked watch spring, and no relief in sight, except what she could give herself. She sat up and smacked the water with the flat of her hand, irritated and annoyed and just plain frustrated that she’d had to resort to her own devices so often lately. Self-love was convenient but she’d never found it all that satisfying. Still, when it was all you had…

She leaned back against the edge of the tank again, closed her eyes, and pressed her hands against her water-slicked breasts, giving in to the fantasy that had been making her crazy for the past week.

CLAY VERY NEARLY DROPPED the binoculars again. She couldn’t be doing what it looked like she was doing. Could she? No, prissy, dried-up sticks didn’t do that, especially not out in broad daylight in front of God and everybody. Except that she didn’t look prissy and dried-up at the moment. She looked luscious and juicy and wanton, lying there in the shallow water with her head thrown back against the rim of the tank and her small, work-worn hands caressing her own breasts. They weren’t very large breasts by anybody’s reckoning—certainly not exotic-dancer material—but they weren’t nonexistent, either. Small, high and rounded, made buoyant by the water, they were startlingly white under the bright Texas sun, glistening with droplets of water that looked like diamonds on her skin. Her nipples were a pale pinkish-brown, small but beautifully erect, the lighter colored areola drawn up tight and puckered around them. She brushed her fingers across them…back and forth…around and around…slowly, oh-so-slowly…until they were as prominent and deeply pink as the most succulent summer raspberries.

Clay’s entire body hardened in response. His jaw clenched. His fingers tightened on the hard plastic casing of the binoculars. His cock swelled in his jeans.

JO BETH PINCHED HER NIPPLES gently, tugging them into hard little points, squirming as she imagined other hands on her aching flesh.