High Country Baby

“You work at Bent Tree?” she asked him.

The cowboy gave a slight nod of his head. Now that she was getting a better look at him, he did look familiar. She remembered a cowboy who had tipped his hat to her the first day she had arrived at her uncle’s ranch. He’d been wearing a sweat-soaked chambray shirt, a black cowboy hat and boots caked with mud and manure. But just because she could place him at Bent Tree didn’t mean that he was following her on her uncle’s orders. Uncle Hank hadn’t mentioned one word of this to her before she had headed out.

“I’m lowerin’ my arms, lady. You got that?” the cowboy asked. For a man staring down the barrel of a gun, he seemed to have the mistaken impression that he was in charge of this encounter.

The man’s collar-length dark hair was unruly from the night; his face had been unshaven for several days. She wasn’t overly impressed with his height or the jailhouse tattoos on his exposed skin, but he was surprisingly fit from the look of his defined chest and shredded abs. His eyes were squinty and bloodshot, and he was obviously hungover. If he had been her employee, she would have fired him on the spot.

“And if you don’t plan on shootin’ me, you’d best holster that weapon,” the cowboy told her.

“I haven’t decided not to shoot you.” The man’s arrogance wasn’t unexpected—he was a cowboy.

Clint watched her through sore, narrowed eyes while he buttoned up his shirt. Getting caught with his pants down by Hank’s niece had sobered him up quick enough. And he didn’t like having that gun pointed at him.

“Lady—do you even know how to shoot that gun?” Clint unzipped his jeans a little so he could tuck his shirt in.

“I’m a crack shot.” she answered him. “Now, get your hands back where I can see them!”

Clint heard the slightest squeak in Taylor’s voice when she issued the command. She didn’t want him to know it, but she was rattled. And a rattled woman with a gun aimed at his chest didn’t sound like a good time.

“Look...” Clint tucked in his shirt. “You need to get on the horn to your uncle. Convince him that you don’t need me and you’ll be seein’ the hind end of my horse before you can say Gucci.”

Clint finished tucking in his shirt, zipped up his pants, buckled his belt buckle, and then pointed to the campsite.

“Now—I’m going over there...if you shoot me, you’d better do a good job. If you just graze me, you’re gonna regret it...”

“What’s your name?” she asked tersely. Clearly she had lost control over this situation. A phone call to her uncle was the next logical step.

“Clint.” The cowboy settled his hat on his head and adjusted the brim. “Clint McAllister.”

There was a bite in his tone and rigidness in his body she didn’t like at all. He was an ill-mannered man, too jagged around the edges for her taste.

“Just stay put until I talk to my uncle,” Taylor ordered when Clint started to walk over to where his horse was tethered, his saddle hoisted onto his narrow hip.

“Take it easy.” He shook his head in frustration.

This was a rotten beginning to an already lousy day.

“You take it easy.” Taylor snapped, but she holstered her weapon.

“Uncle Hank!” The connection was bad on her end. “It’s Taylor...can you hear me?”

“I can hear you...”

“I can barely hear you...but, listen... I’ve got some guy named Clint following me and he says he’s under orders from you...is that true, or should I shoot him?”

“I’d rather you not shoot him, Taylor.” Hank told her. “He’d be a hard one to replace.”

Taylor glanced quickly at Clint’s back—he wasn’t looking at her, but she knew he was listening to every word.

“Uncle Hank—I told you that I needed to make this trip on my own.”

She had taken a leave of absence from her job so she could ride the Continental Divide. Her plan was to ride a section of the divide alone; she’d never imagined it any other way.

“Negative,” Hank said in a brusque tone that she had heard many times in her life. Her uncle was a big man, physically as well as in the world of ranching, and he wasn’t fond of explaining his decisions.

Clint turned around and they locked eyes for the briefest moment before they both broke the connection.

Taylor lowered her voice. “Uncle Hank—I don’t want this. This wasn’t part of my plan.”

“Plans change.” Hank told her in a no-nonsense manner. “Take Clint with you or make a U-turn and come on back to the ranch.”

Taylor moved farther away from her cowboy bodyguard. “Did Dad call you? Is that it? Because if he did, let me assure you...”

“Your dad didn’t call me—my brother hasn’t bothered to call me in years, so I don’t expect him to start now.”

Hank was her father’s older brother. When their father, her grandfather, died, a disagreement about the validity of the will sparked a family feud that had lasted for most of her adult life.

“Uncle Hank.” She sounded like a child beseeching a parent. “Please. This is really important to me.”

“You are really important to me, Taylor. I was wrong to go along with your cockamamie idea in the first place. I’ve come to my senses now, and I’m not changing my mind. So, what’s it gonna be?”

“I have to do this,” she said quietly. “I can’t turn back now.”

“Come again?”

More loudly, she repeated. “I can’t turn back now.”

Not after she had come this far—farther than anyone in her life, including her, thought that she would go.

“It’s better this way,” her uncle reassured her.

It was pointless to disagree, so she didn’t bother to put her energy into a lost cause.

“And Taylor?”

“Yes?” She didn’t try to hide the disappointment.

“Clint knows the divide like the back of his hand—and I trust him.”

Clint didn’t have to hear the conversation to know that it wasn’t swinging in Taylor’s favor. Her body language—hunched, tense shoulders and lowered head—said it all. Which meant that he was still on the hook to babysit a woman who looked as if she’d be more comfortable getting pampered in a ritzy spa than riding the divide on horseback. She didn’t make sense to him, and he wasn’t keen on things that didn’t make sense.

“Everything squared away?” Clint asked as he swung his saddle onto the back of his sturdily built buckskin quarter horse.

“Looks like we’re stuck with each other.” Taylor swatted a fly away from her face. “I don’t know what possessed my uncle to change his mind at the eleventh hour—I don’t need a babysitter.”

Clint reached beneath his horse’s belly to grab the girth. “I ain’t no babysitter.”

Taylor cringed at the way in which Clint colorfully put a sentence together. She was an English major in college. Syntax was always her first love and double negatives made her nuts. Even though he’d managed to butcher the English language with a four-word sentence, she couldn’t deny one thing: the cowboy didn’t want to be here anymore than she wanted him. They were both in the same rotten boat. And by the looks of him, there was a chance he could be persuaded...