Love Me Some Cowboy

by Lisa Mondello

  As she'd noted the day before, some of the outbuildings were three-sided, with metal roofs and concrete slabs and each seemed used for a different purpose. In one, a not unpleasant grassy scent permeated the air, tickling her nose and reminding her of the feed store in town. There were bags and boxes of various sorts, and all kinds of supplies. Another building housed a shop, with a workbench, a vice, and assorted hand tools, along with boxes of nails and coils of barbed wire. A section of it looked like a garage, with the tools and equipment needed to keep the ranch vehicles running. Another building housed a tractor, and parked in front was a red pickup truck, older and more battered than the one Will drove on the road. In all likelihood it never left the ranch. Also outside, scattered about, were other types of implements that Cassie guessed could be fitted on the tractor and dragged. And not far from them was a fuel tank set on stilts.

  The last building was easy to identify from the corral abutting it. The wooden structure looked far older than the other outbuildings, more weathered, but very sturdy. It was fully enclosed.

  Two horses were free in a nearby pasture. The pair stopped nibbling blades of grass long enough to inspect her before, one by one, they lowered their heads once more. Cassie gazed at them. She'd always loved horses, but from afar. She'd touched one once, smoothed her fingers along its hairy cheek, but she'd never ridden one.

  Will suddenly emerged from the stable, leading a large brown horse into the corral. By his look of surprise, he was just as taken aback to see her there as she was to see him. Both he and horse paused before crossing over to where she stood.

  Once they stopped, he was the first to speak. "Are you in that much of a hurry to get outta here?"

  Stung by her error in thinking him away, and also by his uncanny ability to read her thoughts, Cassie answered tightly, "You could say that, yes."

  "You didn't look all that unhappy a little while ago when I saw you with Granddad and the kids."

  Cassie retreated, both physically and mentally—taking a step away from the corral and hiding behind her previous shield. "I have a job to do."

  "Don't you ever get tired of sayin' that? Don't you ever relax?"

  "Do you?" she retorted before she could stop herself.

  For once he didn't have a quick comeback. He was just as driven in his need to make the ranch prosper as she was in her need to settle this contract. Which made her think better of her aggressive stance. She did, after all, need his help.

  As a peace offering, she motioned to the horse. "What's his name?" she asked.

  "Jimmy."

  Her head snapped up. Jimmy? Like her boss? "Is that really his name or are you being—"

  "His name's Jimmy. Been that way since he was born eight years ago." He motioned toward the horses in the pasture. "That chestnut sorrel out there, she's his mom. Her name's Polly. And the other one, the dun. He's Jake. Polly is Mom's horse and Jake is Grandad's. They both have a few years on 'em."

  "And Jimmy is yours."

  "That's right."

  She moved uneasily, unable to think of anything else to say. Mostly, she was aware of him. At this moment, both Will and the horse seemed larger than life to her. They could have been supernatural beings from one of Bonnie's "other realms." Handsome and valiant and vital.

  The horse stamped a hoof and tossed his head, breaking Cassie's line of thought, which made her want to kiss the diamond-shaped blaze on his hairy forehead. He was a large horse, but he wasn't larger than life. And neither was Will.

  She flicked a hand toward the house. "I should be getting back. I didn't mean to disturb you. I was just…looking around."

  She started to turn away, but Will stopped her with an offer.

  "You know, if you want, we can do our talkin' now. There's no use you havin' to wait any more."

  She looked at him. He'd hooked his arm under the horse's neck and was casually rubbing the animal's cheek, keeping him pacified.

  "You aren't too busy?" she asked.

  Will laughed. "I'll be busy on this place all my life. You want to wait that long?"

  "Well…sure. Okay," she said, thinking she was agreeing to his prior offer.

  The twinkle in his blue eyes told her he'd taken it another way.

  "You better be careful," he warned. "I might hold you to that one day." Then, leaning forward, he released the gate latch. "Hang on a minute...I'll be right back. I'm just gonna turn Jimmy out with the others."

  Though there was plenty of room when he led the horse past her, Cassie instinctively backed away. As she did, she realized she'd do well to remember to keep just such a distance during their coming exchange. When it was only the two of them.

  CHAPTER SIX

  "YOU MIND IF I see to a few things while we talk?" Will asked.

  "Not at all," Cassie replied.

  "Come on in, then," he invited, and showed her into the stable by a side door.

  Scents of feed and hay and leather were heavy in the air as Cassie's eyes adjusted to the interior. Scattered rays of light, visible through cracks in the walls, gave some brightness to the room, as did an open window across the way. The difference from outside, though, was still palpable.

  The stable was divided into two areas and separated by a flat-board fence. The narrower section, where they stood, had a hard rock floor with years—possibly generations—of old tack and equipment strewed about or hanging from nails, alongside more up-to-date versions. The other side was a shelter for the corralled horses. It had a soft dirt floor covered with hay, and a wide doorway—closed now—where the horses could enter and leave the stable as they pleased.

  Will dusted off the top an upturned wooden barrel and offered it to her as a seat. "Best I can do in here."

  Cassie settled onto it. "It's fine," she murmured and Will nodded.

  She watched as he moved behind the fence to where, through the wide spaces between the boards, she saw an almost identical upturned wooden barrel. It held an array of grooming implements: a metal comb, a brush, a bottle half full of some kind of liquid—liniment?—along with several other articles she couldn't identify.

  "So what is it you want to know exactly?" he asked as he collected most of the gear before returning.

  For a second, Cassie couldn't remember! Then she reclaimed her thoughts, "Tell me about your grandfather and his brother. Why are they so at odds?"

  "They're twins," he answered as he put the items away, "but they're complete opposites. They don't look like each other and they don't think like each other. As a result, they rub each other the wrong way. Granddad's always loved the ranch, while Uncle Ray... Well, I guess he must have some sort of feeling for the place, but his main interest is in Love and his businesses there."

  "But surely there's more to it than that. They're both so angry."

  Will crossed his arms and leaned casually against a support post. "The one thing they do have in common is that they're both as stubborn as they come. They could teach mules how to dig in and not budge."

  Cassie smiled faintly.

  "Granddad's big beef with Uncle Ray is that he isn't loyal enough to the family name or the family heritage. He still resents that Uncle Ray isn't here workin' the ranch with us. Uncle Ray made his decision a long time ago, and Granddad still holds it against him."

  "But if that's so, why wouldn't your uncle be happy to sell the strip of land?"

  "Probably because Granddad wants him to."

  "You mean he truly is only refusing to be opposite?"

  Will shrugged.

  "It feels more than that," Cassie said, frowning.

  "Could be Uncle Ray's still mad at Granddad for winnin' the girl."

  "What girl?" Cassie demanded.

  "Uncle Ray was interested in my grandma before my granddad got around to proposin'. But then Granddad was interested in her first. Which makes things kinda confused."

  "But that's years and years and years ago!"

  "Yep. Then Uncle Ray got married a few years after Granddad did a
nd didn't ask Granddad to be his best man. Then when my daddy was born, Uncle Ray didn't come out to see him until he was three months old. So to get back at him, when Ray, Jr. was born, Granddad waited six months to go see him. On and on, one thing after another. It's just the way it is between those two."

  Cassie's spirit was ebbing. All she was learning was how impossible her goal would be to achieve. "So what you're telling me is that I'm wasting my time. That I should just go back to Houston and forget about the sale."

  Will shook his head. "No. My daddy and Ray, Jr. were good friends growin' up. They liked to fish and hunt together, and because of that Granddad and Uncle Ray buried some of their differences for a while. The boys brought 'em together and that lasted for a time even after they grew up. Then things happened and pretty soon they were back to the way they used to be."

  "So? I don't understand what you're saying."

  "I'm sayin' that Uncle Ray thinks the world of Ray, Jr., even if it doesn't always look like it. And that if anyone can get through to him, Ray, Jr. can."

  Cassie shifted position, then gave an instinctive cry as the barrel beneath her began to topple over.

  Somehow Will caught her before she hit the rocky ground and pulled her upright.

  "I'm...all right. I didn't expect— I didn't mean—" The words caught in her throat.

  Will stood so close that she could hear the rapid thumping of his heart, or maybe it was her heart. She didn't know. Her hand had found his chest, resting against it. To hold him away? To hold herself away? That golden hair, those sky-blue eyes, the rugged lines of his face...

  He smiled slowly. "Didn't expect to get started so fast. You don't let any grass grow under your feet, do you?"

  Cassie had no idea what he was going on about. Or why, every time she got near him, her mind would hit some sort of erase button, leaving her to founder. "I don't—"

  He dipped his head, his lips touching hers in a soft butterfly kiss that was soon followed by another and another. Finally, drawing away, he smiled again, a slow pull of his lips that if only she'd let herself admit it, she had started to wait for. Then he righted the barrel, saw her back to her seat and stepped away, for all the world as if the past few moments hadn't happened.

  "Ray, Jr. is the person you want to talk to," he said, turning to search for something among the boxes on a shelf.

  If her heart wasn't beating so fast and her lips weren't tingling from those kisses, Cassie might have thought the whole thing a dream. She took a couple of steadying breaths, striving to seem just as unaffected about what had happened as he was. It had been a spur of the moment thing; it meant nothing. Nothing at all.

  She cleared her throat. "I had the impression that all the strings were in your uncle's hands."

  Will must have found what he wanted, because as he turned back to face her, he slipped whatever-it-was into his jeans pocket. "Just because Ray, Jr. takes the path of least resistance most of the time, that doesn't mean he's not his own man. He's got a lot goin' for him. He's just up against a hard rock. One he's been up against all of his life. So he knows ways to get around it."

  "This morning he didn't seem very interested in helping me."

  "You saw him?"

  "Yes. At the store. After I saw your uncle."

  "Did you ask him to help?"

  "No, but—"

  "I'll be headin' into town tomorrow mornin'. If you want, why don't you come along and we'll both talk to him."

  "I can talk to him on my own," she protested.

  "That's true. You can. But it might carry more weight if I'm with you. Ray, Jr.'s a little more into family connections than his daddy is."

  How could Cassie refuse? "All right," she said, "I'll come with you."

  "Good. You ready to head back?" He retrieved his hat from a nail just inside the door, set it on his head and waited for her reply.

  "Yes," she said. "I'm ready." And strove hard not to so much as glance at him as she accompanied him to the house.

  ~~~~

  WELL, I SHOULDN'T have done that! Will thought as he stared unseeingly at the computer screen. He could hear the children playing outside and the other adults in the backyard under the shade tree as they waited for the right moment to open the hand-crank ice-cream maker his mother used for her special blue-ribbon recipe. Cassie had fled to her room immediately, but he'd had a harder time breaking free. Only his excuse about the press of paperwork, which his mother knew well to be true, had kept him from getting roped into the social occasion outdoors.

  Except...a half hour had passed since he'd sat down in the small space in the second kitchen pantry he shared with rows of vegetables and fruits his mother had judiciously preserved in glass quart and pint bottles, and he'd yet to complete a single entry. He couldn't put his mind to it. His gaze kept traveling to the horseshoe nails he'd searched for like an idiot, stuffed into his pocket and then set out on the bookshelf above the monitor upon entering his "office". By quirk of fate, because he hadn't counted them, there were three nails. One for each of the kisses he'd given Cassie. She had barely reacted; her lips parted slightly, her body unmoving. But an earthquake had taken place inside him, shaking him to his foundation. Enough to make him quickly run for cover.

  This wasn't something he needed right now! He had enough to think about and to do. Tonight he'd planned to work on the tractor, make sure it was ready for the hayride his mother wanted him to provide for the guests tomorrow afternoon. And he'd needed to catch up in here.

  When his granddad had worked cattle full-time, the old man had known each and every cow in their herd by sight. Known their history, their lineage, how heavy a cow's calves usually were, if she had breech births, if she'd started to go barren. He'd kept it all in his head. Will had a lot of that same information in his head, too, but keying those records onto a computer spreadsheet made it easier for him to keep run of everything and brought the ranch into modern times. He could compare one method against another and see which yielded better results.

  Yet here he sat, the tractor ignored and the computer just stared at.

  All because he'd kissed a girl.

  ~~~~

  CASSIE GROANED WHEN a rooster's crow awakened her the next morning. She pulled the pillow over her head, but the rooster wouldn't stop and the sound, though muffled, got through.

  She'd had a horrible night. Waking up for long periods and sleeping only in snatches. As a fanciful, young teen, she would have swooned at the thought of Will Taylor kissing her. As an older teen, she was sure she would have fainted dead away. Yet the reality of it actually having happened was even more disturbing—when, obviously, it had meant nothing to him. He'd gone on to talk about Ray and Ray, Jr., and how—

  She sat up with a jerk and looked at her watch. It was well past seven o'clock! He'd told her to be ready to leave at seven forty-five. She threw off the bedcovers, slipped into her robe, and, after peeking to see that the hall was clear, hurried into the bathroom.

  Just as she was about to close the door, Will stepped out of his bedroom. He was fully dressed, thank heaven. He'd probably been working for the past couple of hours and had only come upstairs to get something.

  Her first instinct was to finish shutting the door without saying a word. But he was looking at her and starting to smile.

  "Mornin'," he said quietly.

  Cassie hadn't looked in a mirror yet. Her hair was probably standing straight up and the makeup she'd been too unnerved to remove last night probably made her look like a raccoon or worse. She ran a smoothing hand over her hair and peeped out at him through the door crack.

  "Good morning," she murmured.

  "Late start?" he asked.

  She lifted her chin. "I'll be ready on time."

  "Good, 'cause Ray, Jr. likes to eat breakfast at Reva's at eight. That's where I thought we'd corner him."

  And Reva's would be filled with other Love regulars, too, which made Cassie wince to herself. She'd been far more prepared to meet townspeople
yesterday than she expected she would be today, unless her upcoming shower could work miracles.

  His gaze moved over the little he could see of her. "Are you always such a bright and cheery person this early?" he teased.

  "On my good days," she retorted and shut herself safely inside the narrow room.

  She could hear Will's chuckle through the door.

  ~~~~

  THE WARRENS, IT seemed, were early risers. The family was in the kitchen at the table when Cassie entered the room. A huge stack of hotcakes, a tub of butter, a bottle of syrup, crispy strips of bacon—the visitors were about to dig in.

  "Cassie, good morning," Sylvia greeted her, smiling warmly, and the salutation was taken up by the Warrens. "Is there anything I can get you before you leave? Some coffee? Some orange juice?"

  "You're leaving?" Cindy Warren questioned, surprised.

  "Only for an hour or two," Will said, entering the room behind her. He snatched a strip of bacon. "She's comin' into town with me."

  "Ah-ha!" David exulted. "What'd I tell you?"

  Cindy dug her elbow into his ribs. "Shhh," she said.

  The children giggled as they reached for the syrup at the same time and began a tug of war to see who'd win. Both parents' attention turned to stop the tussle before something broke or was spilled.

  "I'll come to the door with you," Sylvia said and followed Will and Cassie onto the front porch.

  "Phew," the older woman said, fanning herself. "I've forgotten how energetic kids that age can be." She grinned at Will. "It's been a long time since you were that little."

  Robbie spoke up from his seat at the jigsaw puzzle. "'Bout time we start growin' our own again. Can't wait forever." He thumped a puzzle piece into place with a balled up fist, and then lifted a bushy eyebrow at Will, mischief in his grin.

  "You're gonna live forever, ol' man," Will bantered back. "You're too ornery for the devil to want you anytime soon."

  "It's wings I'm after, son. An' I can feel 'em sproutin' already!" He wiggled his shoulders.

  The gray cat leaped onto her favorite rocking chair and, bracing her front paws on the arm nearest Cassie, looked up at her, expecting to be petted.