Wes Stryker's Wrangled Wife

He leaned in, slow and easy. “Are you planning to do without that for the rest of your life, too?”

The deep timbre of his voice reminded her of a guitar string stretched tight and slowly strummed. She had no doubt the man could sweet-talk with the best of them. She should know. She’d been sweet-talked by pros. She’d also been lied to and cheated on and tossed aside, and not only by her ex-husband.

In the background, coins jangled into the jukebox. Within seconds the first strains of “Blue Christmas” started all over again.

She could feel Wes Stryker’s eyes on her. She knew she could have said something blunt and sassy to put him in his place, but for some reason she didn’t. It was his eyes. The rest of him exuded smugness, but those blue eyes of his were tinged with sadness. The man had troubles, and she didn’t see any reason to add to them. She picked up the bottle in front of her and took a hardy swallow.

“Well?” he prodded.

“Sex,” she said, reaching for her coat and sliding off the stool, “is highly overrated.”

She held up her hand, anticipating his protest. “Trust me on this, Wes. Or simply agree that we disagree. Oh, and merry Christmas.” Without another word she walked to the door, gave it a yank and strode out into the cold.

The room remained quiet until the last bell hanging on the hook on the back of the door had stopped jingling. And then it seemed that every spectator had something to say.

“Oooo-eee,” Butch Brunner exclaimed. “That woman’s definitely an eyeful.”

“She is that,” Forest agreed. “But she’ll give you an earful without even trying.”

“Why,” one of the other men said, “she practically singed the hair in the ears of every man in the diner the first time she set foot in the place.”

“I don’t think she’s the kind of woman the Carson brothers had in mind when they decided to advertise for women to come to Jasper Gulch a few years back.”

“No sirree, Bob.”

Wes listened, but he didn’t add to the conversation flowing through the saloon. An eyeful? An earful? He’d bet his last trophy she’d be a handful in bed.

The woman had certainly packed a wallop in the short amount of time she’d spent in the Crazy Horse. He’d known people who talked for hours but said less than Jayne Kincaid had said with two words, a wry twist of her lips and a slight thrust of her chin. She’d been married, divorced and hurt. And she thought she wasn’t looking for a man. Wes happened to believe that everyone was looking for a partner, the other half of a whole, someone to share this messy journey humans called life. And sex wasn’t overrated, no matter what she’d said. It was one of life’s most pleasurable, not to mention its most powerful, driving forces. It was like a tidal wave or a hurricane or the rotation of the earth around the sun. A man could ignore it, but he couldn’t pretend it didn’t exist.

And neither could Jayne Kincaid.

Jayne Kincaid. He let her name roll around in his mind, along with the image of her sky blue eyes and that cockamamy way she wore her short, dark hair. Butch was right. She had a helluva body. Yet she did nothing to draw attention to it or detract from it. She wasn’t a flirty little rodeo bunny or a city-wise coquette or an ice queen, for that matter. This was a warm-blooded woman who knew the ropes and wouldn’t hesitate to hang a man on them. Dang. Women like that were few and far between.

Merry Christmas, she’d said. Wes still wasn’t sure about the merry part, but it had turned out to be an interesting Christmas Eve, that was for sure. He rose to his feet slowly. Taking his time buttoning his sheepskin jacket, he wondered how long he should wait before he paid her a little visit.

“Ya leaving, Wes?” Forest called gloomily from the back of the room.

“Yeah. I think I’ll call it a night.” Wes said goodbye to the men who were still huddled inside the Crazy Horse Saloon. Whether any of them noticed or not, he was feeling a sight more amicable leaving the bar than he’d been going in. Even the sting of the wind and the blinding snow didn’t dampen his mood. He simply punched on the lights, turned up the heat and switched on the windshield wipers in his shiny silver truck. He was halfway home when he noticed that he was whistling to a Christmas song about a rusty Chevrolet. It had been a long time since he’d felt like whistling about anything.

His first glimpse of the dilapidated fence posts lining his driveway drew the whistle from his lips. The rundown old house had little appeal in the light of day. At night, it was downright depressing. He should have remembered to turn a light on before he left. Not that he was accustomed to being greeted by lighted windows. It was just that this was the first Christmas Eve he’d spent on the ranch since he’d buried his father a few years back. And it was the first Christmas Eve to come and go since Dusty and Kate had died.

Wes pulled his fancy pickup truck into the barn and got out. The bucking bronco emblem on the doors had been Dusty’s idea. It seemed that Carlin “Dusty” Malone had always had some grand scheme up his sleeve, most of which had gotten the two of them into trouble.

Wes closed the heavy barn door, latched it and headed for the house. He was chilled by the time he shut the back door behind him, but although his knee ached a little, he didn’t experience that knife-in-the-gut feeling thoughts of Dusty usually evoked. Tonight the memory of Dusty’s crooked smile made Wes smile a little himself.

He hung his hat and coat on a hook by the door, ran a hand through his hair and wandered to the bedroom where he’d spent most of his youth planning his escape from Jasper Gulch. His leaving hadn’t bothered his father. By that time, Sam Stryker’s only love was for the bottle he curled up with every night, and maybe the fleeting memory of the woman he’d buried when Wes had been five.

Wes barely remembered his mother, but he’d always thought she would have liked Dusty Malone. He and Dusty had started on the rodeo circuit the same year. Dusty had ridden bulls, while bucking broncos had been Wes’s specialty. Nothing had come between them, not winning, or losing, not barroom brawls, not even falling for the same girl. When that girl had married Dusty, Wes had been the best man. Although Dusty had insisted that he would always be the best man, Wes had always known that Dusty would have done the same for him if the tables had been turned and Kate had married him, instead. Friends like that didn’t come along every day. Kate used to say that all the time. She also used to say she’d married one of the only two men on the planet who put the toilet seat down. Obviously, putting the toilet seat down was a big deal with women. It had certainly been an issue with Jayne Kincaid.

Wes’s right boot hit the floor about the same time thoughts of Jayne Kincaid jump-started his heart. He took the letter out of his pocket and placed it on the stand next to his bed. He knew he had a decision to make regarding Dusty’s two kids, but it wasn’t the kids he was thinking about as he turned back the covers. He was thinking about Jayne, and he wished to high heaven he wasn’t crawling into bed alone.

Wes opened his eyes slowly. He wasn’t sure what had awakened him. It wasn’t quite daybreak, but it was close, the color of the sky on the other side of his wavy windowpanes somewhere between black and gray. He felt a smile pulling at his face, not because it was Christmas—he didn’t have a tree or even a stocking, after all—but because he had a woman on his mind. That’s what had awakened him. He’d been dreaming, and while the remnants of the dream weren’t clear in his mind, they were evident on his body.

He wondered if Jayne was awake yet. And he wondered what she would say if he called on her so early in the day. While he was at it, he wondered how she would react if he told her he was going to petition for guardianship of Kate and Dusty’s two kids and raise them the best way he knew how. Would she say he was nuts? Maybe he was. But other than their father’s eighty-two-year-old great aunt, Annabell, who lived in a two-bedroom house southeast of Sioux Falls, two hundred and twenty miles away, and Kate’s long-lost sister who could be dead for all anybody knew, Wes was all those two kids had.

He made quick use of the facilities, layered on his clothes and hiked out to the kitchen. Shivering, he made a mental note of all the things he had to do to get the place ready for Logan and Olivia’s arrival. He could have lived in the barn, but a five-year-old girl and her ten-year-old brother needed heat and windows with glass instead of plywood. They needed good food in their stomachs. Most of all they needed to know he wanted them.

Picking up the old black telephone from the place it had sat for as long as he could remember, he dialed the number Annabell had listed in her letter. Her answering machine clicked on after the fourth ring. Wes smiled, remembering some of the messages she’d left on that thing. Most folks her age didn’t even bother with the contraptions, but Annabell Malone wasn’t like most folks her age. She welcomed challenges, and wasn’t afraid to try new things. For an eighty-two-year-old woman she was very young at heart.

Figuring they were all probably in church, Wes followed the instructions Annabell recited in her feeble-sounding voice and left a message. He took a minute to start the coffee, then donned his sheepskin jacket and his favorite cowboy hat. At the last minute, he went in search of the cellular phone. Tucking it into his pocket just in case Annabell returned his call any time soon, he headed outside to feed and water the horses.

Maybe he’d hook the trailer up to his truck and haul Stomper and the sleigh into-town in a little while. He was in the process of imagining Jayne’s reaction to such an old-fashioned activity when he lowered his right foot to the first step.

Whoosh.

He was airborne. His arms flailed, his feet flew out from under him. He landed on the icy ground five steps below, in less time than it had taken High Kicker to buck him off that time down in Santa Fe. He was gasping for breath and in too much pain to be dead, so the fall couldn’t have killed him. He couldn’t tell if he’d damaged the ribs that had started to heal, and his knee was aching pretty badly again, but it was the searing pain in his left shoulder that kept him very still. Damn. He’d dislocated it again.

Clutching his shoulder with both hands, he picked up one boot, gritted his teeth and tried to roll onto his side. His foot slid on the ice, his bad knee crashing onto the hard surface so fast he saw stars. He tried rolling the other way, but he almost passed out from the pain slicing through his shoulder. He tried several other maneuvers. The results were the same.

He should have known his father wouldn’t have had the downspout fixed, thereby routing the rainwater to a less hazardous spot. From the look of the place and the back taxes that had to be paid, it was obvious that his father hadn’t taken care of much of anything these past several years. It looked as if it was up to him to make the place operational again. First, he had to figure out a way to get up.

Think, Stryker, think.

He considered whistling for Stomper, but Wes had closed the stall door himself yesterday, and although Stomper could finagle an apple or a carrot out of anybody’s pocket, he wouldn’t be able to unlatch the stall. It was fifteen miles to town, two miles to his nearest neighbor. It was also Christmas morning, and not too many people would be out and about, and if they were, they wouldn’t be driving past this old place on Old Stump Road.

Wes was breathing easier and thinking clearly. A lot of good it did him. Between the ice and the pain, he was stuck on his back, staring at a sky as dull as the old steel sink in his kitchen, cold seeping into his coat and jeans as he tried to decide how to keep from freezing to death. His fingers were already starting to tingle. He slid them into his pockets, paused. What the—

He took a careful breath and he almost smiled.

Lo and behold, the cellular phone.

Chapter Two

“Look, Alex! A huck! And a doctor’s kit. Can you tell Aunt Jayne thank you?”

“Tanks, Aun‘ie Jayne. Aun’ie Jayne!”

“Jayne?”

“Sis, are you all right?”

“What?” Jayne came out of her musings with a start, only to find Louetta, Burke and Alex staring at her from the living room floor where wrapping paper and ribbons were strewn everywhere.

“Alex said thanks,” Burke said, watching her closely.

“Oh, you’re very welcome, Alex.”

Alex went back to his new truck, but Burke and Louetta continued looking at her strangely. Normally, it wouldn’t have bothered Jayne. People looked at her strangely all the time, but Burke and Louetta looked concerned, and that made Jayne uneasy.