Cowboys Do It Best

That was twenty minutes ago. Ricky was still out there with him.

She frowned as she stepped out on the porch. She wasn’t sure she liked the idea of Ricky hanging around Chase McGuire for the next couple of months. The man was apt to stir up Ricky’s fascination with the rodeo.

Outside, the air was dusky with storm, the sky, a crisp, exhilarating gray as the day slid into evening. Wind bristled though the leaves on the oaks and made a nuisance of itself by grabbing her hair and throwing it in her face.

She turned toward the barn, and her shirttail flapped in the wind. The flannel rubbed across her bare nipples; and she shivered. She thought about how Chase McGuire had looked at her breasts. Openly. With obvious pleasure.

Somehow she had to figure out a way to get into a bra tomorrow.

None of the horses was out in the paddocks, and all the stalls on this side of the barn were shut to the outside. The southern doorway to the barn glowed a welcoming yellow from the lights Chase must have turned on to fight the premature gloom of the storm-shrouded day.

She paused when she reached the doorway. Neither Chase nor Ricky was in sight, but Dancer’s stall door was open. Kelpie lay in front of it, panting happily. Summer headed that way.

“So you got bucked off the first time, huh?” her son’s excited voice was saying.

“Sure did. And after all my bragging.” A long, mournful sigh, accompanied by the sound of something rubbing rhythmically against wood. “That’s when I learned why cowboys are supposed to be strong, silent types. We mostly get ourselves in trouble when we open our mouths. When we aren’t bragging, we’re putting our foot in it.”

Ricky giggled. “Do you put your foot in it?”

“All the time.”

Summer stopped in front of the stall next to Kelpie. The dog, exhausted from the day’s excitement, settled for standing up and butting her head against Summer’s leg. Dancer, a placid old mare Summer used for her beginning riders, munched lazily on her feed in one corner of the stall. On the other side of the stall, Summer’s hired hand drew a rasp rhythmically back and forth across a rough, splintery place in one of the wooden supports to the stall while her son watched. She noticed that his gorgeous black Stetson had been replaced by a beat-up, cream-colored distant cousin—a working cowboy’s hat, in fact.

Chase looked up, saw her and smiled the one-dimple smile that fit his face as well as his worn jeans fit his hips. “Looks like you’ve got a cribber,” he said.

A “cribber” was a horse that chewed on whatever wood was around, often swallowing air along with the wood and making itself miserable. “Dancer’s not the one with the taste for wood,” she said. Her voice came out wrong. She cleared her throat. “It’s that blasted gelding of the Bateses, the one who threw me. I moved him to the end stall. It’s a little bigger, more room for his toy.” She referred to the big ball that rolled around at the horse’s feet. Cribbers usually chewed out of boredom, and the ball gave the horse something to do.

“Chase wanted to get the wood smoothed down,” Ricky broke in, “so’s Dancer wouldn’t hurt herself on it. We already got all the horses in.”

We? “I see,” she said. “Well, I’m sure that was a good idea, but, Ricky, you aren’t to be following Mr. McGuire around, bothering him with a bunch of questions.”

“I wasn’t bothering him,” Ricky said indignantly. “Was I, Chase?”

“Not a bit.” Chase ran the rasp over the wood one last time, then smoothed his fingers over it, testing. “He helped me bring the horses in and then showed me where the tools were so I could get this taken care of.”

Summer shifted her feet uncomfortably. The man had found work that needed doing without being told. He was being patient and good-natured with Ricky—and she wished he’d been rude and obnoxious instead. She wished—oh, she didn’t know what she wished. She wanted to grab her son and tell him to stay away from Chase McGuire. “Ricky, you know I don’t let you handle all of the horses.”

He drew his narrow shoulders up straight, offended. “I just got Honey-Do an’ Dancer and Mr. Pig and Scooter. Just the ones you always let me get.”

Now she’d treated him like a “little kid” in front of his new hero. Summer sighed. “Well, it’s time to give me some help now,” she said. “Come on up to the house and feed Kelpie, Hannah and Amos.” Kelpie yipped when she heard her name, and pushed against Summer’s legs again.

“But, Mom, Chase said that he was going to—”

“Ricky,” she said once, in her warning voice.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said, but his lip stuck out.

“Go ahead and wash up after you feed them,” she said. “We’re having fried chicken for supper.”

That brightened his face again. He looked at Chase. “You don’t want to miss Mom’s fried chicken, so you prob’ly better get washed up pretty quick, too.” Then he took off at his usual dead run with Kelpie running and yipping at his heels.

“Sorry if I kept him from his other chores.”

She pulled her eyes away from the barn door her son had disappeared through. Chase stood just where he had before, about four feet away. Not close at all. Maybe her heart gave a little skip when she saw him with his eyes crinkled up at the corners from the smile that never seemed to leave his face. It didn’t worry her. The humming in her blood was really rather...pleasant. It was only a natural, physical reaction. “I doubt you had much choice,” she said dryly. “I can tell that Ricky’s going to be about as hard to detach from you as a burr from a dog’s tail. I hope your patience doesn’t wear out.”

“I like Rick,” he said, and walked toward her slow and easy. “He’s a bright kid, and he really did help me find where things were. He said the tools were his grandpa’s.”

Summer felt the little hitch in her breath as he drew closer. He couldn’t have heard it, though, which was good. It was best Chase didn’t know what effect he had on her.

She turned just a bit suddenly to lead the way out of the stall. “My father left me his tools along with his stable,” she said, speaking quickly to distract herself from what she was feeling. “Which was a good thing, since the place wasn’t in such great shape when I...he’d been ill,” she added, not wanting Chase to think that Sam Erickson would ever have intentionally neglected his property. “He couldn’t keep things up very well that last year.”

And she’d been gone. Summer’s mouth tightened with the familiar ache of reproach. While her father was dying, alone and too proud to tell her about his illness, she’d been following her cowboy husband around the rodeo circuit. She walked a little faster down the aisle between the stalls. “I’ve got to get back to the house and turn the chicken over. If you’d just shut off the lights when you—”

“Summer.” She didn’t jump when his hand landed on her shoulder, stopping her. Maybe she’d felt it, had felt him behind her and known he was going to touch her. Maybe...

Gently, he turned her to face him. “No need to gallop off so quick. I’m not going to do a thing you don’t want me to do.”

Oh, Lord. That’s what she was afraid of.

His fingers were callused. She felt them, rough and warm, on her throat, testing the place where her pulse bounded like a doe fleeing the hunter. He knew, damn him, and his smiling eyes told her he knew. “After all, you’re the boss, aren’t you? You’re in charge. Everything’s got to happen the way you want it to. Right?”

The rafters over their heads creaked in the rising wind. The barn smelled like a barn—like horses and hay—and so did the man in front of her, the man whose fingers rested lightly on the pulse in her throat. All around them horses shuffled their feet, stamped, chewed placidly on whatever remained of their feed, while Summer’s muscles softened like wax from the heat of a torch. From just one touch.

And that treacherous smile of his. And the idea, the sneaky, twisty worm of an idea he’d planted, that she could want, and could have what she wanted.

No. No, she knew where that led. With an effort she pulled back. “It’s starting to rain,” she said inanely, and turned and walked away. And if she felt him watching her leave—if she knew he was studying the sway of her hips and the shape of her bottom as she moved—she tried very hard not to enjoy the knowledge so damned much.

The air was cool with moonlight and rich with the smell of earth after rain. Chase welcomed the chill as much as the fresh scent. He lay crossways in his too-small bed in the little room off the kennel and looked at the patterns the moonlight made on the ceiling.

He was so hard he hurt. But for the moment, just for the moment, he didn’t mind, because it was a good kind of a hurt, an alive kind, the sort he hadn’t felt in over a year, not since he woke up in the hospital and realized his days of following the circuit were over. Since then he’d been with a few friendly ladies, but he hadn’t really wanted.

It was good to want again.

The wind had pretty much departed with the rain, so the shapes the shadow branches made on Chase’s ceiling shifted only slightly in the remnants of a breeze. Chase shifted, too, uncomfortable, but not really minding the ache that was keeping him awake.

Chase’s temporary quarters were about what he’d expected. The floor was cement, with a rag rug next to the bed. The single window had been painted shut with the same blue paint that was flaking off the chest of drawers, and the closet was the result of someone’s less-than-expert carpentry.

But the room was one huge step up from the couch where he’d spent the last two nights. It had a door that he could. close when he wanted—or leave open like he had it now. And it was as ruthlessly clean as the tiny bathroom next to it. He supposed the hard-headed woman he worked for must have come in here and scrubbed everything with one hand while he was moving the horses after lunch. She was just not too bright about some things, but Chase was already certain that sort of stubborn, prideful behavior was typical of Summer Callaway.

The storm that had threatened had made an appearance briefly. While he and his pretty boss lady and her son had sat at her kitchen table and eaten fried chicken with ovenfried potatoes, mustard greens drenched in hot sauce and biscuits with butter and honey, the rain had come. It had been one of those quick, noisy cloudbursts, lots of wind and a fast, hard drenching that finished up so abruptly you could just imagine someone upstairs turning off the tap. But while it had lasted...

Eating in the kitchen with a widow woman and her sixyear-old son might have made Chase feel itchy. It hadn’t. He’d felt comfortable. Maybe, he thought now as he watched the moon shadows, the combination of hot food and him on the inside of four snug walls, with a lot of wind and rain on the outside, was what had made him feel so relaxed and contented. Hard to say. Contentment wasn’t a feeling he’d had much experience with.

Chase shifted again in the dark, his skin hot with the same fever that had his groin aching. He shoved the covers off. Chilly night air flowed over his naked body, air freshly washed by the recent rain.

The contentment hadn’t lasted. Chase didn’t know what had called up the old memory. Maybe the rain. Maybe it had been the feeling, insidious and terrible, that had snuck in under his guard—that feeling of safety and permanence. Of family. By the time they’d finished eating—and getting in each other’s way trying to get the dishes done, since the fool woman wouldn’t admit that having only one arm to use hampered her in the slightest—he’d been starting to feel itchy. But it had still been raining, and Ricky had looked awfully hopeful when he’d asked Chase to play checkers.