Just a Cowboy

“Someday,” he remarked, “this is going to be a nice kitchen. But right now…” He shook his head. “Most of it looks like an afterthought.”

“I don’t need much.”

“Maybe not,” he allowed. “One person can get by.” He walked over to the mudroom door and stepped out into the unheated, glassed-in area. “Here’s the fuse box.”

He opened the metal casing. “There are three circuits here that I removed the fuses from. Resist any temptation to put a fuse in them until I get an electrician out here. If you get desperate to use these circuits, I have extension cords I can lend you so you can plug into safe sockets.”

“Okay, I can do that.”

He glanced over and found her standing right at his shoulder. And damn, she smelled good, too. Faintly like roses and honey. Or maybe after a week of smelling horses and cattle, anything else would smell like ambrosia.

He tore his gaze from her—for some reason his eyes kept wanting to stare—and pointed to the floor to the right side of the back door. “Over there the joists are rotting underneath. You can go out the door safely, but I’d advise against stepping over there. I can’t guarantee it will hold you.”

“Okay.” She sounded agreeable enough.

He looked at her again. “Did Ben tell you this?”

She bit her lip, then gave a tiny shake of her head.

He sighed. “Oh, I am going to have some words with him. All right, the windows out here are slated to be replaced. I have the new ones in my garage, but I haven’t gotten to it yet. You’ll notice the windows in the rest of the house are all new, but I still need to do some caulking and leveling, okay? So you’ll have me outside from time to time banging around.”

“Okay.”

That seemed to be her only word. He led the way back through the kitchen to the rear of the house, where there were two bedrooms. One was completely empty, the other held an old bedstead. He just hadn’t gotten around to removing it, or some of the other furniture the last owners had left behind. Not much, but a minimum for someone who had none.

But when he looked at the bedstead and mattress, he winced, and this time it wasn’t from physical pain. “Are you going to sleep on that?” he asked.

“It’s there.”

“Ah, crap, lady, that thing is…”

“A bed,” she said firmly. “I can get a mattress pad to cover the worst of it. At least it’s not the floor.”

This time when he looked at her he saw past the initial impression of too beautiful to something that showed more depth and determination. Eyes that appeared older than her appearance would indicate. There was a story there, he thought. He wasn’t sure he wanted to know it, either. She’d made it clear she was a transient, and he knew the kinds of stories that came with eyes like that.

“The stuff that’s here,” he said by way of explanation, “was left by the previous owners. I just haven’t gotten around to getting rid of it. If you want it out of here…”

She interrupted. “No, really. I can use the stuff that’s here. I don’t need or want to replace it.”

“Your choice,” he said after a moment. “Watch it in the empty bedroom, though. More rotten floors. I got rid of the termites, but I just haven’t had time yet to replace all the wood.”

“Not a problem.”

He scanned the rooms again, and never had the place looked shabbier. It was an old house to begin with, and the last owners hadn’t invested much, if anything, in keeping it up. They’d been getting on in years, and probably hadn’t even noticed most of the deterioration. The walls everywhere were hideous, covered in dying wallpaper, water spots and paint that had probably been sagging on the walls since the Second World War. The floors…well, where they weren’t bare, worn wood, they were covered by old, cheap linoleum that had been tacked down in places where it had ripped.

“I was so sure nobody would rent this place in this condition.”

She surprised him with a quiet laugh. “Amazing things happen.”

He looked at her again and felt himself smiling in response. “That they do.”

“Sorry I can’t offer you coffee or anything, but I just rented the place this morning and I haven’t been out to get supplies, or even any dishes or a coffeemaker. I figured I could do that tomorrow.”

“This morning? Just this morning?” That gave him pause. “You have a car, right?”

She shook her head.

“Well, hell,” he said. “That’s not gonna work. You can’t carry much on foot—the store’s on the other side of town. What do you need?”

She shrugged a shoulder. “That depends on how comfortable I want to be.”

“Short term, right?”

“Two months at most.”

He nodded. “Okay. I’ve got some stuff at my place you can use. Coffeemaker, pots and pans, some spare dishes and things. No reason you should buy that stuff for just a couple of months.”

Her mouth opened a little in surprise. “Are you sure you can spare it?”

“Hell, yeah. That house belonged to my parents. When I moved back here, I came with a lot of stuff from my place in Denver. I wanted my own things, and I just moved a lot of theirs to the side.” Feeling a little awkward, he admitted, “I just wasn’t ready to get rid of it, you know?”

She nodded. “But now? Are you comfortable with somebody else using it?”

“Sure. I’m not lending you the heirloom china, though.”

She laughed again, and this time it was an easier sound. That was good. If he was going to have to deal with a tenant as closely as he’d need to deal with this one, what with all the work this place needed quickly, it was far better to deal with one who wasn’t uptight about everything.

And the rest of it? Well that was just being neighborly.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll get you some minimum stuff to get through the night, and we can discuss what else you need in the morning.”

“But,” she said, “Ben said you were out working at one of the ranches. You must be tired.”

“I am. But if I stop moving, I’ll freeze up. So let’s just get you a coffeepot, some dishes. Like I said, just enough for tonight. We can deal with anything else in the morning.”

Then he turned and limped his way to the front door, aware of her light step following him.

Kelly followed him, noticing the limp, but even more noticing his lean, rangy build, a build that, encased in jeans and a plaid Western shirt, suggested a lot of hard muscle beneath. His face had a chiseled appearance, a few lines that seemed awfully deep for a guy who didn’t look like he was much older than she was, and the sun had bronzed him. His hair was dark and a little wavy, and just a bit too long.

He was the kind of guy a lot of women in her previous life would have noticed, partly because he had a great build, but partly because he was so different from what they were accustomed to. A rednecked cowboy, evidently, and a far cry from the guys she had known who got their muscles in gyms and their tans on the beach or in salons.

She had to admit that she liked it. Life with her soon-to-be-ex husband had revolved around his practice and the hours he spent with a personal trainer. Not to mention the careful artifice of sun-streaked hair from a bottle.

Once that had seemed normal to her, but now she loathed the plasticity of it. Which was really kind of a funny thought, since Dean had been a plastic surgeon. She swallowed a giggle, surprised that she even wanted to laugh.

“So,” said Hank Jackson, the limping cowboy who had just barged into her life, “how the heck did you get curtains up so fast?”

“It was the first thing I did this morning,” she answered truthfully. “I walked into town and bought them. The rods were still good.”