Cowboy With A Secret

She gestured with a thumb. “You’ll—you’ll find an apartment over the barn. I would have cleaned it out if I’d known you were coming.” She didn’t have the local accent, which had a tendency to twang like out-of-tune banjo strings.

“No matter if it’s clean or not. It’ll do. I’ll start in the morning.” He nodded his head curtly and began to lead his horse away.

“You didn’t tell me your name.”

He stopped and turned slowly. His shadow fell across her face. “McClure,” he said. “Clayton McClure. They call me Colt.”

“Well, Mr. McClure, we’ll meet in my kitchen tomorrow morning at seven o’clock sharp. Breakfast. We’ll talk about your duties then.”

“You got it,” he said.

He knew she watched him all the way to the barn, but he didn’t care. As soon as he popped the top off the beer, he took the stairs two at a time and poked around the tiny apartment. If you could put that name to a room-and-a-half with a tiny bath attached. Everything was furred with a thick layer of dust, but that was Texas. Basic furniture, nothing fancy. It would do.

Colt wasn’t daunted by the lack of suds the soap coaxed out of the trickle of alkaline water that passed for a shower in his quarters. Afterward he unfurled an old musty blanket from his bedroll and spread out naked on the bare mattress provided. The air was stuffy; not much of a window. His skin was slicked with sweat before he was half asleep.

He didn’t dream. He’d trained himself not to. It was better that way, especially when your dreams had a way of slipping out from under you and catapulting you into a shaky shadowy world where nightmares woke you screaming.

BETHANY BURKE STARED wide-eyed as Colt disappeared into the barn. When she’d first seen him trying to outrun the cloud of dust he’d stirred up as he galloped toward her, she’d thought he was one of those mirages conjured up out of the heat on a hot summer’s day. She’d almost forgotten about replying to that peculiar ad.

But, she admitted to herself, if she’d ordered a cowboy to her own specifications, he couldn’t have been better. He was lean and lithe, without an extra ounce of fat. His narrow hips sat a horse like he was born to it. Those wide shoulders meant muscular upper arms, good for roping and branding. And he had hungry eyes.

That last thought took her by surprise. Hungry for what? Or was the expression under those drooping eyelids a raw insolence unconcealed by his thin veneer of politeness? Those eyes weren’t only hungry, they were hard as flint. A shiver ran down her spine in spite of the fact that it was ninety-five degrees in the shade.

“Who was that I saw go into the barn?”

Bethany whirled to see Frisco, her bandy-legged foreman, stumping toward her from the equipment shed. Jesse James, the border-collie mix, bounded along beside him.

“A guy I just hired to work on the ranch,” Bethany said offhandedly.

“What guy?”

“His name’s Colt McClure. I answered an ad.”

“What ad?”

Bethany scuffed the ground with the toe of one boot. “It was a kind of mail-order thing.”

“What,” Frisco said suspiciously, “are you talking about?”

“I ordered him. Through an advertisement. He showed up. That’s about all there is to tell.” She turned toward the house, but Frisco caught her arm.

His expression was incredulous. “You ordered this honcho through one of them catalogs you’re always getting in the mail?” Frisco always teased her about her penchant for mail-order catalogs. Seed catalogs, clothing catalogs, knickknacks, lingerie, and health-care catalogs—all found their way into the big Banner-B Ranch mailbox.

Bethany bit her bottom lip. “The ad was in the Cattle Rancher’s Journal. It was a quarter page, with a wide border. I couldn’t help seeing it.”

Frisco released her arm and shot her a baleful glance out of his one eye. “Looking for trouble if you ask me.”

“I didn’t ask you, Frisco. We need someone around here, and we need him desperately.” This ongoing conversation between them reminded her of a snake eating its tail, circling ’round and ’round.

“I try my best,” Frisco said, lapsing into his defensive mode. “I know I’m getting a little worn, but I ain’t about to assume room temperature yet.”

Bethany slid an arm around his stooped shoulders, wishing that every successive episode of this debate didn’t have to scrape away at Frisco’s self-esteem, although she knew that’s exactly the way it was. “I want you to take it easy because Doc Hogan said you should. I couldn’t stand it if anything happened to you.”

Frisco jutted his jaw out. “So you invite a perfect stranger to live in the barn. A stranger who needs a shave real bad. Hair’s overlong, too. He looks no ’count.”

“We’ve had hands who weren’t razor-friendly before, Frisco.” She tried not to think about Colt McClure’s eyes and how they’d sliced right through her like a well-aimed bullet.

“One of them hands you’re talking about took a hankering after somebody else’s horse, another ran up an overlarge tab at Pug’s Tavern before he lit off for parts unknown, and the last one wrecked the pickup. That’s what happens when you hire people you don’t know.”

“No need to have a conniption fit over this, Frisco. Besides, no one we know wants to work here. Mott Findley has seen to that.” Mott was her late husband’s cousin, and he wanted nothing more than to see the Banner-B go belly-up.

Frisco worked his forehead into a knot, a sure sign that he was engaged in deep thought, and rammed his hands down in his pockets. “We’ll see how this guy works out,” he said grudgingly.

Bethany bent and scratched Jesse behind one ear. The dog immediately stopped thumping his tail in the dust and relieved himself on the sunflower seedlings she’d recently set out on the side of the house. He always did this when he was happy, according to Frisco.

It was exasperating, this habit of Jesse’s. “You know, Jesse,” she said, “you’re a mighty expensive flea motel. For two cents I’d trade you in on a good mouser.”

“Jesse eats cats for fun,” Frisco warned. “He ran off all them barn cats we used to have.”

“Maybe I’ll get me a nice inside cat, one of those flat-faced white Persians to sit on the windowsill and lord it over all of us. Including that ungrateful mutt.”

Frisco looked pained. “You really want to tick Jesse off, you go right ahead and do that. No telling what Jesse might do, you tick him off.”

Bethany sighed. They’d acquired the dog to help with cutting cattle, but from the beginning he’d refused to have anything to do with such foolishness. The fact was, Jesse was untrainable. Unfortunately he and Frisco had bonded.

“I’d better go find that posthole digger. I plan to let our new hand build fence tomorrow,” she said.

Frisco’s one good eye regarded her with deep affection. “Don’t get to counting on this mail-order guy,” he said.

Bethany remained unruffled as she headed toward the shed. It had taken Frisco a few years to learn to take orders from a woman. And besides, she was the one who had promised Justin that she’d make the Banner-B a success.

She’d do it. No matter what.

THE NEXT MORNING BETHANY hurried downstairs in her bathrobe to plug in the coffeemaker at precisely six-fifteen. She never set her alarm clock because this was the time she always woke up, rain or shine, weekday or weekend. But today was different. Today she would interview Colt McClure.

She sneaked an early cupful from the coffeepot and nursed the fragrant steaming mug in her two hands as she paused to fill her ears with the first warbles and trills of birdsong outside her window. Morning bathed the home place in delicate silver-gray light, unfurling a misty curtain to blur the relentless brown everything.

As usual, she turned on the radio for the early farm-and-ranch report, “brought to you by Rubye’s Beauty Box, we curl up and dye for you.” Down by the chicken coop, a raucous rooster greeted the slow-rising rim of the sun with a jubilant fanfare. Later the heat would be blistering, sucking precious moisture from the grass, the trees, the vegetables in the garden.

When Bethany had first arrived on the Banner-B, she’d hated west Texas with its endless wind and dust and heat and glare, not to mention its indigestible food. Later, after a rough period of adjustment and more Texas Pete hot sauce than she cared to think about, Bethany had come to appreciate the wide-open spaces and the friendly people.

Anyway, she thought with a sigh, she was here to stay. At least she’d learned to tolerate the food well enough. Some people bragged about abs of steel. Bethany was proud of her stomach of iron, forged by repeated blasting in hot-pepper sauce.

Listening to the ranch report with one ear, she mentally began to arrange the day’s schedule around breaking in a new hand. First she’d make sure this McClure guy knew how to dig those postholes, and while he was working at it, she’d drive into town and sweet-talk old Fred Kraegel into letting her charge more barbed wire to her account. Later she’d tackle Sidewinder, the most ornery horse in the world.

But before she got started on any of this, she’d best get decent, which meant throwing on a pair of jeans and one of Justin’s old shirts, same as she did every day. There was no need to put on airs while she interviewed a new employee. By her best recollection, the last time she’d worn a dress was to her husband’s funeral five years before.

Once upon a time before she married, before she moved from Wichita to Gompers, Texas, to start a new life as Justin Burke’s wife and helpmate, Bethany had worked in an office. In a tall building. With air-conditioning. And she’d dressed stylishly in suits complete with pantyhose and heels for her nine-to-five job in an insurance office. She’d been Bethany Carroll then, had belonged to a young singles’ club, jaunted around town in a red convertible and had never owned a jar of moisturizer in her life.