The Rancher Meets His Match

by Patricia McLinn

  “No, wait.” He stepped into her path, but didn’t touch her. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  The wind caught the material of his shirt, rippling it slightly, as if reaching toward her. Hannah backed up half a step, crossing her arms in front of her.

  “What way did you mean it?”

  Dax considered the silvery thread of water below them as if it might offer help, but faced her when he spoke. “I’m not looking for something permanent, that’s what I’m saying. Nothing serious. I don’t want you thinking otherwise. But maybe we could, uh, go see a movie or something.”

  “But I thought—” She broke it off as she spotted the cliff her words threatened to plunge her over.

  He didn’t ask what she thought. He didn’t raise a questioning brow or alter his expression. He simply waited. His dark eyes bored into hers from under slightly lowered lids, and he waited.

  “I thought you didn’t date.” The words rushed out on one short breath.

  “I don’t. Not usually.”

  “Why?”

  At first she thought he might not answer, or might try to evade the question. But when he spoke, his answer was plain. “If I saw anyone from ’round here, as soon as I stopped asking her out, word would be out I’d dumped her. And there’d be no avoiding each other. That’s why it’s good you won’t be here long. No misunderstandings. See?”

  She thought she did. And she respected his blunt honesty.

  She even agreed with his position. She wasn’t looking for anything permanent, either. Nothing serious. Not yet.

  With the twins in college, maybe the time had come to listen to those around her urging that she pick up the emotional life she’d set aside four years ago along with her marriage to Richard. But she wasn’t one to plunge in. She’d need to ease back into the emotional waters.

  Maybe a little light flirtation to start. A few comfortable, undemanding outings with an uncomplicated man.

  Dax Randall was not that man.

  “I’m not looking for anything serious now, either, and—”

  “That’s fine. That’s great.”

  He closed the gap between them, took her hand in both of his and smiled at her. A smile that carved grooves beside a mouth that suddenly appeared anything but grim and traced lines around a pair of brown eyes that lightened from within.

  The blender in her stomach churned as if it could make butter.

  “No, no. You misunderstand.” She tugged to free her hand, which had started that tingling again. He didn’t release it. “I don’t—”

  “You are looking for something serious.” It was an accusation.

  “No, I’m not. I’m looking for . . . for . . .”

  She didn’t know. Precisely. But she knew he wasn’t what she had in mind. Good heavens, she’d always fallen for men who communicated with ease and wit. Dax’s conversations wouldn’t strain a telegram.

  On the other hand, his bluntness—tinged with a hint of awkwardness—was refreshing. She couldn’t imagine any of the men she or her friends had dated laying it on the line that they were not in the market for a long-term commitment—at least not up front. They waited until the woman started thinking “forever” to reveal they only thought “for now.”

  His honesty suited her. So did his expectations. Her breakup and divorce from Richard had left her feeling for a long time that a relationship was the absolutely last endeavor she wanted to try. She couldn’t pinpoint when that feeling had eased, but she realized now that it had. Only she’d become so out of practice with anything approaching romance that she felt like an awkward adolescent, as tongue-tied and klutzy as any teenager.

  Teenager.

  Like Will Randall.

  Who had most definitely not approved of his father’s apparent interest in her. If looks could freeze, she’d have been a Popsicle.

  “I want something easy. No stepping on anybody’s toes.”

  “I told you—”

  “You’re not involved with anybody,” she filled in. “But you are—your son. And I don’t think he would like us going out.”

  “Will.” He released her hand.

  “I also don’t think you’d like to make him unhappy. And I know I don’t need that kind of trouble. So, let’s leave it at that, Dax. Maybe I’ll see you again before I leave. Good night.”

  She didn’t run. She didn’t think she acted oddly when she returned to the camp fire. And she didn’t wilt under the questioning gazes from Cambria and Irene.

  Unfortunately, she did dream. Brown eyes. Gravelly voice. Harsh face. Muscular thighs. And tingling that wouldn’t quit.

  * * * *

  “You okay this morning, Hannah? Did you sleep all right? I hope the cabin’s okay.”

  “Huh? Oh, yes, everything’s fine.” She forced herself to smile across the round table at Irene. Most of the bed-and-breakfast guests had already left for the day when she’d dragged herself into the Westons’ kitchen in the futile hope that coffee would clear her haze. “It’s a lovely cabin.”

  “You look tired.” Cambria sounded more like a scientist observing a bug than a solicitous hostess.

  “Maybe it’s the time change.”

  Cambria shook her head. “Shouldn’t bother you coming this way. I suspect it’s the company you kept last night.”

  Images of dreams, hot and restless, streaked across Hannah’s mind. She shifted in her chair and felt the burn in her cheeks.

  “Cambria,” Irene scolded. She reached across the table and patted Hannah’s hand. “Now, don’t you listen to a thing she says. She’s just teasing you about talking to Dax at the cookout.”

  “Well, I started teasing,” Cambria said with a laugh that didn’t hide the sharp interest in her eyes, “but I swear if I hadn’t seen him leave with Will before anybody else, I might wonder exactly why you’re so heavy-eyed this morning.”

  From her years in advertising, Hannah knew a few things about damage control. She’d found it worked best to meet a situation head-on.

  “Cambria, I’m surprised at such subterfuge from you. You’re usually more straightforward.”

  Irene murmured something that could have been “like a sledgehammer.” Cambria made a face at her stepmother, who smiled back serenely, but Hannah ignored the byplay and kept on.

  “If you want to know what happened with Dax Randall last night during our walk, I’ll tell you. We talked— briefly—about where we’d lived our lives. And about the weather—even more briefly. And he asked me out.”

  “He did?”

  “Well, I’ll be.”

  After a lifetime of being called “wholesome,” Hannah didn’t harbor particular sensitivity about her appeal to the opposite sex, yet she felt a flash of thankfulness that their utter disbelief was so clearly aimed at Dax asking someone out, and not at his asking her out.

  “I’m glad, Hannah,” Cambria said. “We’re all so used to Dax being solitary, maybe we’d given up on him, but he’s a fine man, and you two—”

  “I said no.”

  Cambria and Irene exchanged a long look, and Irene murmured, “Well, I’ll be,” again before starting to hum under her breath as she had last night.

  “He also said,” Hannah continued with the authority she used to restore calm when a production meeting threatened to fall apart or the twins squabbled, “that he wasn’t interested in anything serious. And, while I admire his honesty and I agree with him on that point, I’m also not interested in a vacation romance. In fact, this isn’t even a vacation. I came here to work.” She took a last swallow of coffee and stood. “And I’ll get started if you can tell me where Boone is.”

  “He’s working on our house. That’s why I’m here, to drive you up.” Cambria also stood, though a little awkwardly from her advancing pregnancy.

  “Will you be back for lunch?” Irene asked.

  “No, we’ll have lunch up at the house, then I’ll drop Hannah off on our way to Sheridan for my doctor’s appointment.”

  “Fin
e.” Irene wore an abstracted, dreamy smile. “I have some things I want Hannah to see this afternoon.”

  * * * *

  “What a waste,” came a whispered female voice from somewhere behind him.

  “Yes, indeed,” agreed another from the depths of Jessa Tarrant’s sundries store in Bardville. “That Dax Randall’s one hunk of man to be going to waste.”

  Dax dug in his pocket for money to pay for his purchases while cursing under his breath that nature hadn’t fixed it so force of will could prevent heat from rising up his neck and no doubt staining his skin an even deeper color than the sun had managed.

  It made it no better that the whisperers hadn’t meant him to hear or that both whisperers were grandmothers. It made it a sight worse that the comments had also been heard by Rita Campbell, behind the cash register, and Sheriff Tom Milano, who appeared to be doing nothing more than hanging around Rita.

  Some might say Milano was entitled, since he would retire as sheriff in less than two months, and, after more than a decade of being a widower, would marry Rita the weekend after that. Dax thought sourly that a grown man could find better things to do than moon around after a woman.

  “Don’t let it rattle you, boy,” the sheriff said, though at thirty-six Dax Randall hadn’t thought of himself as a boy for nearly two decades. “There’s scientists say nature abhors a vacuum and sets to filling it up. I couldn’t rightly say about that, but it’s sure that women abhor an unattached male, and set to getting him attached.”

  Didn’t he just know it.

  Dax couldn’t think of an unattached female in the county who wouldn’t have taken him up on his invitation last night—every one of them hoping it would lead to more. And that wasn’t vanity, it was experience. A good number of them had been as subtle as a thunderclap in angling for that very thing.

  But not Hannah Chalmers.

  She’d turned him down flat.

  She’d looked at him seriously while she’d told him no, but most other times a smile had flirted with her mouth. Sometimes, a quick, nervous kind of smile. But then, a real smile, like the one when she’d looked down at the creek. A smile that dropped a shallow dimple on the left side of her mouth and crinkled up her hazel eyes. She had a way of tipping her head a bit to the side, too, that made a man feel she was truly interested in whatever fool thing he might find to say.

  “Pay him no heed, Dax,” instructed Rita, with heightened color disappearing under the fringe of her graying hair.

  As Dax stuffed his change into a pocket of his jeans, he caught the long, smiling look Rita sent the sheriff, which he returned in full. A smile like that would suit Hannah Chalmers’s sweet mouth. Hoisting the box of supplies to his shoulder, Dax blocked the view and muttered a farewell.

  “Dax! Dax Randall, wait.”

  Jessa’s voice calling from the back of the store stopped him. He let the street door swing closed and turned back. Jessa had been the only unattached female around Bardville less interested in getting attached than he was, so they’d gotten along fine from the time she opened her store a few years back. But now she was attached herself—attached with a vengeance from what he’d seen of her and Cully Grainger.

  “Hey, Jessa.”

  “It was great to see you last night, and Will. I’ve missed him. He hasn’t been around here to the shop with the other kids lately. And it seems like I hardly ever see you. Sorry we didn’t get a chance to talk.”

  If her sentence ended with the slight lift of a question, as if inviting him to confide in her about his attentions to Hannah, he chose to ignore it.

  “Yeah. Nice evening. But—”

  “And nice to meet Hannah, too, wasn’t it?”

  That was too direct to ignore completely.

  “Yeah.” It had been nice to meet her, to shake hands with a woman with a good grip. Firm, but not like she wanted to arm wrestle. Her hands were soft but not so delicate he feared crushing them. And she was forever using those hands to try to bring order to her hair. He could have told her that was a lost cause in a Wyoming breeze. “Yeah. I gotta go—”

  “That book you ordered for Will finally came in. I can’t believe it’s taken so long.” The hole in his memory must have been apparent, because she added, “Remember? The one you ordered at the start of summer. The one about the early space program.”

  She held out a hardcover book and he took it in his free hand, the other still balancing the box on his shoulder.

  The Right Stuff by Tom Wolfe. He and Will had rented the movie back in the winter. Will had been so taken with it, he’d gone right to the battered encyclopedia that had been out-of-date when Dax had used it for homework. Frustrated there, he’d gone to the library and taken out an armload of books, including this one. He’d checked it out from the library so often that Dax had figured Will should have his own copy.

  But then Will had stopped reading those books.

  “Something wrong, Dax?” Jessa asked.

  “No.”

  Something was wrong. Something was wrong with Will.

  His son had lost his enthusiasm. Not just for learning about the space program, but for everything. He had turned into a stranger. Listless, moping. The boy who had once been as happy amid a crowd of friends as he was with the two of them on the Circle CR, now seemed sullen and restless when he was alone with Dax, yet he avoided the company of kids he’d known all his life.

  “That was the book you ordered, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, that’s it. Thanks. Put it on my account, will you?” he added as he headed out. “Gotta get to Westons’. See you, Jessa.”

  But he sat awhile in his parked truck, staring at the dust-caked top of the windshield where the fan of the wipers never reached.

  He knew his son, and he knew what he had to do.

  Even if Hannah Chalmers had it right, and Will didn’t much like the idea of his father going out with her, that didn’t matter. It was for Will’s own good.

  As for Hannah not wanting to go out with him . . . well, he hadn’t run a ranch all these years by giving up easy. He’d change her mind.

  * * * *

  Hannah entered the open barn door on a whim. Returning to the Westons’ with Boone and Cambria, she’d felt restless and decided to take a walk, while they went in to visit with Irene before going to Sheridan. At the other end of the barn’s length from where she’d entered, the double doors opened wide into a corral, with sunlight and a cool breeze streaming in. A horse stood in the wide aisle, a length of rope hooked to its bridle at one end and a post at the other. A man held the horse’s left rear hoof in his angled lap as he bent over his work.

  Dax Randall.

  She knew it immediately. Perhaps from his voice—gravelly, low, calming—as it crooned nonsense words to the animal.

  All she could see of him was the back. That was plenty. His movements pulled the faded dark plaid shirt tight across his back. He wore chaps, with the straps buckling at the back of his powerful thighs and spotlighting his buttocks. The smooth-worn denim cupped his muscled rear end.

  Hannah swallowed hard.

  The animal became aware of her presence first, turning its head to look past Dax to where she stood. If it hadn’t been a horse staring at her, Hannah might have taken the look to be the jealousy of one female not wanting to share the attentions of a male with another.

  “Hold still, you bag of bones.” Dax’s tone never changed.

  The horse shifted restively.

  “Hold, there,” Dax murmured. Still without changing tone, he added, “Who’s here?”

  “It’s Hannah. Hannah Chalmers.”

  His hands seemed to still, but not for long.

  “I’m sorry if I’m interrupting. I’ll go—”

  “No.” The strength of the word had both the horse and Hannah staring at him, but only the horse could see his face. “Better stay. Leaving might spook ’er.”

  The animal seemed awfully calm to Hannah, but what did she know about horses?


  “May I talk?”

  “Low,” he instructed.

  “You’re changing his shoes—I can see that—but why?”

  “It’s a her. I’m getting Jezebel ready for bringing the cattle down.”

  “Jezebel? That’s her name?”

  “Yeah. What’s so funny?”

  Hannah stifled her chuckle. She doubted he’d understand if she said she’d guessed the horse’s gender based on a jealous look. “Bring the cattle down from where?”

  “From up top. Up the mountain.” He jerked his head to the west, toward the Big Horns. “There you go, Jezebel.”

  He released the horse’s hoof and watched as she shifted her rear end away, tamping her foot lightly, looking for all the world like a human testing the fit of a shoe. Then, still crouching, Dax pivoted to face Hannah and sat back on his heels in a way that made her thighs ache just to watch.

  His hat was tipped back, revealing his dark eyes pinned on her. They were a powerful weapon.

  A smudge angled across his jaw, like a thumb swipe. She had the urge to wipe it clean with her fingertips. Or her tongue.

  “Up the mountain? Why are the cattle there?”

  She hoped desperation didn’t seep into her voice. That tingle had returned between her shoulder blades, and she couldn’t deny its cause any longer. Dax Randall was one powerfully attractive man.

  That was the problem. She wasn’t ready for a powerfully attractive man. She’d been off the slopes so long she’d be a fool to try skiing a double black diamond trail her first run back down the mountain. She needed to find herself a bunny hill.

  “Better grazing in summer. Come cooler weather, we bring ’em down closer. So we can feed in the worst weather. Hannah, is something wrong?”

  His abrupt change of subject threw her for a second. “Wrong? No. Why?”

  “You’re twitching your shoulders like something’s biting you.”

  She almost laughed. She could just imagine Dax’s face if she told him that what was biting her was the sight of him.

  “Mosquitoes,” she muttered obscurely. “So why’re you shoeing the Westons’ horses?”