Cowboy Lessons

This is going to hurt.

It did.

Every bone in his body reverberated when he hit. Like a Saturday-morning cartoon character, he lay there, smooshed into the ground. Puffs of dirt drifted up on a warm breeze. A fly buzzed his face as if shocked to see him there. Through the whitewashed boards of the arena, he could see the face of the grizzled old cowboy who’d put him up on the horse.

He was doubled over. “Criminy,” the old coot said, slapping his knee with laughter. “Did you see that? He looked like one of them rodeo trick riders.”

Someone next to him nodded. Scott wasn’t sure who.

“I reckon he’s okay, though. Seems he’s moving.”

Scott—the human catapult—only groaned. He felt like a gnat who’d hit a front bumper at a hundred miles per hour. Sure, he was able to reach up and straighten his thick-framed black glasses, which had miraculously stuck to his head throughout the whole ordeal, but he’d be surprised if the eyes beneath those glasses weren’t bulging.

A face loomed over him.

He opened his mouth, realized the wind was still knocked out of him, and gave up the idea of trying to greet the person, but, man, was she something.

Reddish-blond hair nearly the same color as the mane of the horse he’d fallen off of hung around her face in spunky little ringlets. As she frowned down at him, he noticed her wide, generous lips. And her eyes…They were the color of his computer monitor, a shade of blue he’d only ever seen created artificially. Those eyes stared down at him with concern and something else he couldn’t quite identify.

“Mr. Beringer,” she said. “If it’s your intention to kill yourself here on the Lazy Y Ranch, you should let us know. It’s easier to fit you with a body bag when you’re alive.”

Ah, a comedian.

He opened his mouth again, realized he still didn’t have his breath back, and closed it.

“Are you hurt?” she asked, the look in her eyes turning to one of concern.

“No,” he managed to say at last. “I’m fine,” he added, because, hey, she was easily the prettiest woman he’d set eyes on in a long, long time, and he’d be damned if he’d act less than a man in front of her. What was it jocks said? Shake it off.

C’mon, Beringer, shake it off.

“Can you move?”

“Not if I don’t have to.”

“Here. Let me help you up.” She held out a hand, and it was either a trick of the light or the pale blue denim shirt she wore that made those eyes of hers look almost green now. Wow. Long legs encased in jeans completed the picture, as well as cowboy boots that had definitely seen better days. He should know because he had a bird’s eye view of those boots. They were right by his left eye.

“You sure I should move?” he asked, because, hey, he watched ER and knew you shouldn’t move an accident victim.

She frowned. “Are you hurt that bad?”

“Only my pride.”

“Can you move your legs and arms?”

“Do you have puppet strings ’cause I think that’s the only way they’ll work.”

She immediately looked concerned again.

“Kidding. Kidding,” he gasped, gasped because he tried to sit up to show her that he was a real man who could shake off a fall from a horse, and that he had faith in her if she thought he looked okay enough to move.

“Here.” She offered her hand again.

He took it this time, everything within him stilling as his own large hand encased her slender fingers. He’d never thought of himself as having particularly large hands before, but he felt downright cavemanish as he clasped hers.

“You okay?” she asked, spoiling the fantasy he’d had of dragging her off by the hair and out behind the barn, which only proved that he must have crowned himself harder than he thought, because he never had caveman thoughts about women he’d only just met.

He managed to sit up, put on his best game face, and say “I’m fine.”

She tugged on his hand again, urging him to stand, which he did, reluctantly, the brand-new jeans and red-and-white-checkered shirt he wore coated in dirt.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.

He kind of liked her concern for his well-being. Frankly, it made him understand why cowboys did such stupid things like strap themselves to bulls and jump off horses mid-gallop. The sympathy factor obviously really worked. “Yeah. I’m fine.”

She studied him a second longer, her wide mouth pressing into a thin line, her blue eyes narrowing just a tad before she said, “Good, then leave.”

He thought he’d misheard her, even shook his head a bit to dispel the arena dust that must have plugged his ear canal. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said leave the ranch, Mr. Beringer.”

The horse had stopped near the opposite end of the arena, Scott noticed, the man who’d mounted him on the beast—the former owner of the ranch—having caught the bronc. Obviously, the person who’d been standing next to him earlier had been her. Terrific. She’d seen his cannonball.

The woman with angry eyes crossed her arms. Scott was aware for the first time that she was tall. She had to be if she was shoulder level to his six-foot-three frame. “Leave,” she repeated. “You low-down, dirty thief.”

Thief? Uh-oh. Obviously she’d heard about the change of ownership of the ranch. “I didn’t steal it.”

“Not technically, but close enough.”

“Buying property by paying the delinquent back taxes is perfectly legal.”

“Legal, yes. Ethical, no. In my mind it’s like fore-closing on a mortgage.”

Well, put that way he could kind of see her point. Kind of.

“You stole my father’s land,” she said, lifting her hand and pushing her index finger into his chest. She looked momentarily startled to find that it wasn’t soft flesh. Hah. Gym. Four days a week.

“And I aim to get it back,” she finished, flexing the finger she’d poked him with as if she’d hurt it.

Her father? “Look, it’s not like I’m going to force him from his house. As I told him earlier, I want him to stay on.”

She snorted, crossing her arms in front of her, that pretty hair of hers flicked over one shoulder angrily. “You couldn’t force him out if you wanted to.”

He almost pointed out to her that he really could, if he wanted to. But the fact of the matter was, he didn’t. He’d acquired their ranch because of the investment value, but as he stared around him, he realized he truly liked the place. The two-story farmhouse looked charming with its wraparound porch. An ancient-looking barn, turned a dusky gray, stood not far from the arena, and multiple cross-fenced pastures stretched out behind it. It was hard to believe they were less than an hour from the heart of California’s Silicon Valley, and San Francisco’s East Bay was right over the hill.

“Another thing,” she added, as if the laundry list she’d pronounced wasn’t enough. “You have no business riding a horse that isn’t yours.”

“But it is mine.”