Stevie Lee

by Tara Janzen

  It was Stevie’s turn to choke. “Not income taxes. Property taxes.” Good Lord, she thought, where had this guy been all his life? Dumb question. All she had to do was pick up any outdoor magazine from the last ten years, and she’d be able to pinpoint his whereabouts at any given time. Unfortunately the only picture she’d seen of him hadn’t shown her anything of the man. Typical mountaineering gear included dark glasses, heavy coats, snug hat, and the inevitable ice-encrusted face. Nothing had prepared her for the Nordic god gracing her bar stool.

  “Property taxes,” he repeated slowly, and she could almost see the lightbulb turn on over his head. “Damn. And you bought them.”

  “It was all legal, cut-and-dried business. Anybody could have paid them.” She shrugged again, her slender shoulders lifting and falling with nonchalance.

  The gesture was the final blow to his ego. His last piece of solid financial ground was dust in the wind, and a woman who by all rights should be gazing at him with stars in her eyes was cool as a cucumber.

  Hal started thinking fast, a trait he’d relied on more than once when his back was against the wall, or when his life was on the line. This was a definite back-against-the-wall situation, which required only two main ingredients for a foolproof plan—a debt he could call in, and a debtor who had something he wanted. By her own admission, she owed him—and he could think of a hundred things she had that he wanted, but he’d start with a job. From what he’d seen of the town, she was his best bet, and he’d certainly succeeded taking longer shots.

  “You know, I almost broke my hand decking that jerk.”

  Stevie’s warning instincts lit up like a dance hall on Saturday night. She didn’t know where he was coming from, but she knew the conversation had just taken a sharp turn for the worse. Eyeing him warily, she said, “Thanks again.”

  “Could have gotten real ugly, real fast, if I hadn’t shown up,” He tossed the remark off as if it were barely worth mentioning.

  “I doubt it,” she said “He’s big, but he’s dumb. I was just getting ready to hit him myself.” It was true, but she doubted if it would have done her much good. She watched him drain his glass.

  Hal grinned and almost missed the bar when he lowered his glass. The lady had more cojones than most of his past climbing partners. But she was wrong, and it was his duty to tell her.

  “Not the way I see it. In this case, I think brawn had it all over brains. Besides, what do you need my seventy thousand dollars for? You’ve already got your little piece of paradise.” His arm swung out to encompass the whole bar, and his body came darn close to following. Only his well-honed sense of balance kept him on the stool. He’d had something else to say; he was sure of it, but it momentarily had slipped his mind.

  Stevie hadn’t missed a single slip. He’d made three: Two motor, one verbal. A slow, easy smile lifted a corner of her mouth. She’d seen it happen before—people coming up from sea level getting drunk on half their normal intake of alcohol in the rarified altitude of the Rockies. Halsey Morgan had definitely come up from sea level—and he was definitely going down fast. Nola had been wrong; her little sister Stevie was going to handle this guy just fine . . . as long as he didn’t kiss her.

  Stevie unconsciously dismissed the wayward thought with a flick of her wrist. The kiss had been . . . well, it had been an aberration, that’s all. Just an aberration.

  “What does anybody need money for?” she asked, getting back to the business at hand.

  Considering her question very carefully, he reached up and absently ran a hand through his hair, pushing the shaggy mane into a golden arc. “I don’t know. I get along fine without it . . . or I used to.”

  Stevie watched the beginnings of confusion settle over his face, furrowing his brow and turning his smile into a half-cocked grin.

  She screwed the lid on the bottle for the last time, and put it on the shelf. He’d had only one shot and two glasses of beer, but if he drank any more she’d be carrying him out.

  “You must have had at least sixty grand when you bought your cabin and acreage,” she said, leaning back against the beer cooler and watching him with an amused gaze, a potentially mesmerizing endeavor but one she now felt she could control—until she saw the dreamy softening of his eyes and heard his low, sexy chuckle.

  “Well that was a helluva piece of luck in Vegas, at the outdoor trade show back in . . . well, a few years back. I didn’t find a sponsor, but I ended up with plenty of money anyway. Do you play poker?” His eyes refocused for a moment. At the negative shake of her head, he let out a heavy sigh and drifted back toward oblivion. “Too bad, ’cause I don’t have the money now. It’s gone, alluvit.” Damn, he was tired, he realized.

  Against every polite and grateful bone in her body, Stevie’s easy smile blossomed into a full-blown grin. Nola had been right, she silently conceded, Halsey Morgan was broke. But before that, he’d been lucky, she thought with more than a fair share of skepticism. She’d never heard of anybody winning that kind of money at poker.

  “Well, that’s too bad, Hal. Why don’t we head home?”

  “What about him?” He pointed toward the hall, and his arm kept going, sliding all the way across the bar until his face dropped flat against the polished oak. A swath of flaxen hair fell over his forehead.

  Stevie stared at the silky veil covering his face, silently fighting the temptation to reach over and brush it back behind his ears. It would be so easy. He wouldn’t even know.

  “Don’t you worry about old Kong,” she said quickly. “I’ll call my brother. He’ll come and pick him up.”

  “That’s shnice.” He felt a little woozy too. Maybe he could hit her up for a sandwich or something . . . something. There had been something he wanted from her. He rolled his head sideways, his eyes drifting up the full length of her legs and over the curve of her hips to the great curve of her breasts. No, he slowly decided, he didn’t think he could get that, not all of it, not yet.

  “That’s what the sheriff is for, to do nice things.” Stevie pushed herself off the cooler and stepped into the hall. If she smiled any wider, her face was going to bust.

  A moment on the phone took care of Kong Kingman. Gene had his own key, so they didn’t have to wait. Stevie strolled back around the end of the bar and kindly helped Hal to his feet.

  “What did you shay you needed my money for?” he asked, draping his arm over her shoulders and getting it all tangled up in a silky expanse of honey-colored hair.

  “To get out of this dumpy little piece of paradise . . . and maybe go on safari,” she added thoughtfully, rearranging his arm and flicking off the lights before opening the door. “Or maybe I’ll follow in the footsteps of the great Halsey Morgan and island-hop the South Pacific. What do you think?” Teasing gray eyes looked up at him from under thick, dark lashes.

  Hal thought it sounded like a damned good idea, a real bang-up damned good idea—especially if she invited him to go along. Hell, he’d practically invented safari, and, geez, what he didn’t know about the South Pacific—well, hell, he knew it all. And when they got tired of sun-washed beaches and swaying palm trees, maybe she’d like to go to Alaska, or . . . what was the name of that little country where they had all the big mountains? The one where he’d almost frozen to death the time he’d . . .

  Three

  She’d drunk him under the table.

  Hal let out with a heavy moan and rolled over in the bed, right into something big and solid and alive.

  “Damn,” he said softly. Somehow he’d gotten lucky the night before, and he didn’t remember a minute of it. Chalking his fortune, or misfortune, up to fate, he tried to slip back into unconsciousness. Maybe with a little more sleep the memories would come back. He and the silky-haired, long-legged goddess must have made magic.

  A low, rumbling, and distinctly nonfeminine groan forced his eyes open to a narrow slit. Then something wet and distinctly nonhuman slicked up the back of his neck and behind his ear. Hal squeezed his eyes
shut and pulled the pillow over his head. He wasn’t ready for this—whatever it was.

  His bedmate had other ideas, though. More groans, grunts, and an inordinate amount of shuffling around gave him no choice but to drag the pillow off his head and check things out.

  Too close for comfort, the biggest, softest eyes in the world, one blue and one brown, gazed at him from the other pillow with a fondness Hal knew he didn’t deserve. The tongue slid out again and left a wet trail up his cheek.

  “What’s your name, huh?” Despite the bongo beat in his head, a weak smile touched the corner of his mouth. He reached out to scratch his new friend behind the ear. The husky groaned again in pleasure, tail thumping. Hal ran his fingers through the thick soft fur, following a red collar down to a blue tag. It said “Tiva” on one side and “Stevie Lee Brown. Trail’s End Bar, Grand Lake, Colorado” on the other. The pounding behind his temples picked up in rhythm, and Hal swore softly, rolling over and burying his head back into the pillow. The lady had shown him no mercy last night—and obviously little else.

  Not surprising, her husky seemed like-minded. The dog hopped off the bed and walked over to the door, where she whined and scratched until he finally dragged himself to his feet. With his eyes barely open, Hal shuffled across the cabin, bitching and moaning all the way. He really needed a cup of coffee. He really needed something to eat.

  Damn! His groceries! As if on cue, he stumbled into a box on the kitchen floor, stubbing his toe and giving himself a new pain to worry over.

  Okay, he thought, leaning back on the table and holding his aching head in his hand, so the lady wasn’t all bad. She’d gotten him home, gotten his groceries home, and set him up with a warm girl named Tiva to keep him from freezing.

  Another moment of standing there made him realize something else. She’d also stoked up his old wood stove. Was there no end to the lady’s good deeds? A particularly painful sequence of throbs convinced him otherwise. She wouldn’t get any gold-plated references from him. But as long as she had the stove going, he might as well start some coffee brewing. Maybe a gallon or two would clear the fuzziness from his brain.

  Still holding his head, he moved to the sink, turned on the tap, and immediately felt like an idiot. Of course, nothing came out. When he’d left for his tropical sojourn, he’d closed the cabin up tight, which included draining the pipes and having the power turned off. Sometimes he wished he wasn’t so thorough.

  A sharp bark from the husky startled him into a painful jerk. Right, he thought wearily, let the dog out. He took two more steps forward, opened the door, and was blasted in the face with pure Rocky Mountain sunshine, a hundred volts of it. His eyes snapped closed so fast and with such force that for a second, Hal was afraid he might not ever get them open. No such luck.

  Squinting through a tiny slit, he forced himself outside, one arm raised in front of his face. Yessiree, the Rockies were beauties all right. Young and majestic, they jutted into a cornflower-blue sky scudded with clouds, one hundred and eighty degrees of Continental Divide stretching across the horizon. A rolling, wildflower meadow sloped down from his cabin to a forest of lodgepole pines. Facing to the south, it was almost bare of snow. Even through his pain, he appreciated the pastoral scene, and for the first time was glad he’d come home.

  The realization carried him off the front porch and into knee-high grass and sage. It helped him lower his arm and take a good look around. His gaze tracked the edge of the meadow, down one side and up the other, to a two-story, A-frame sitting at the top. He knew right away it was Stevie Lee Brown’s—and suddenly his thoughts weren’t quite so bucolic.

  Considering all the trouble she’d gotten him into the previous night, he figured she still owed him. A cup of coffee and a hot shower were a good place for her to start, but it was only a start. By the time he’d organized a clean set of clothes and his toothbrush, he’d tacked a couple more requests onto his list, favors he’d meant to ask, the very vital innards of his plan for getting out of his financial mess, and closer to sweet Stevie Lee. The lady hadn’t seen the last of him, not by a long shot.

  * * *

  Stevie nursed her third cup of coffee—Mud, her father called it—and continued pushing the numbers this way and that on the profit and loss statement: Kip “TNT” Brown hadn’t done her any favors when he’d left her the bar in their divorce settlement. The equity she still owed him was a major part of her debt problem. She needed a helluva summer, or she and the Trail’s End would really come to the end of their trails. A look at the numbers told her it would take something more along the lines of a miracle for her to scrape together the third installment of Hal Morgan’s taxes.

  Perversely, the thought brought a small, private smile to her face. Toying with her cup, she let her gaze drift out the window to the pine-forested ridge behind her cabin. Halsey Morgan was alive. Or at least he had been when she’d finally gotten him into bed.

  The memory of his kiss and of his entreaties for her to join him in his antique four-poster brought a soft blush to her cheeks. The man sure had a sweet streak in him when he wanted something. In languages she’d never even heard before, let alone understood, he’d whispered his sensual promises in her ear.

  She lifted her hand and absently ran it through the loose tendrils of hair tickling her cheek, unconsciously recalling the softness of his mouth against her skin, the rough timbre of his voice—and her blush deepened. Maybe she had understood his words better than she’d let on. Why else would she have threatened to drop him in the snow if he didn’t stop talking?

  Foolishness, her common sense warned, pure foolishness. She had enough problems without allowing a mere physical attraction to mess up her life. He might look like a Nordic god, but he was trouble with a capital T, and worse, he was a traveling man. She had decided a long time ago that the next time somebody wandered off into the world, it was going to be Stevie Lee Brown, not some man with her heart in the palm of his hand.

  “Well, that settles that,” she whispered to herself quite convincingly and forced her attention back to her books.

  Tired of looking at net losses, she searched through her papers for her balance sheet full of liabilities. She picked the form out of the sloppy pile, and a red pen rolled off and leaked on her blue-and-white checkered tablecloth. Typical, she thought. She was floating in red ink.

  Last week, she’d offered Jake, the hottest bartender in town, double his wage at The Emporium, and he’d turned her down. Maybe a stock option was in order. Sure, she thought, that was what Jake wanted—stock in a broken-down bar. She took another sip of coffee and rearranged the numbers on her balance sheet, reversing the debits and credits just for kicks.

  If she didn’t have a bartender, a darn good bartender, by the next weekend, she might as well close her doors. She and her brother Doug would never be able to pump enough business through the Trail, not without killing themselves. And death, she was sure, was not on the top of Doug’s priority list for the summer.

  Young and in love, she knew he planned on having his nights free and two days off a week. Her mother had offered to help out, but sweet as the offer was, Stevie doubted if her scatterbrained mom could take the pressure. No, what she needed was someone to charm the crowds away from Jake Stone at The Emporium. She needed a good-looking, fast-talking—

  A knock on the door interrupted her thoughts.

  “Come in,” she hollered, reaching across the table and flipping off the lock. The door opened but no one came in, and Stevie glanced up.

  If she’d had a cat, it could have dragged him in.

  “Good morning.” She deliberately added a bright sparkle to her voice, and watched him carefully, gauging his hangover by the depth of his wince. There was a slight crinkle to the eyes, his mouth was holding firm—he wasn’t in too bad of shape, she decided.

  “Nice try, Stevie. What did you do? Mickey Finn me?” Sarcasm, pure and simple, and thicker than molasses, rolled off his lips and right off her back. She wasn�
�t going to let him get around her defenses again.

  “If I had, you wouldn’t know it yet.” One sable brow arched above her clear gray eyes. “You should have told me you couldn’t hold your liquor. I do keep a full stock of soft drinks.”

  Two very bloodshot, indigo-blue eyes narrowed at her from beneath a Dodgers cap. The white-blond hair sticking out on either side of his hat reminded her of fairy wings, but she doubted if he wanted to hear about it. She also doubted if he wanted to know that he’d forgotten to zip his pants.

  “Funny how I never had that problem before.” His voice, rough and gravelly the night before, was positively jagged this morning.

  “The altitude does crazy things to a person sometimes,” she said, leaning back in her chair and rocking it on two legs. “Makes them dizzy, lowers their tolerance for alcohol, maybe freezes them to death in their sleep”—she not so subtly hinted at all the work she’d done last night—“I’m glad to see you didn’t have that problem.”

  “Guess your luck finally ran out.” Try as he might, he was having a hard time holding onto his anger.

  “It’s not the first time,” she confessed with an unperturbed smile. “Probably won’t be the last.”

  Well, he thought, she sure hadn’t lost any of her chutzpah, and she was even prettier than he’d remembered. The upturned collar on her white sweater framed a face he’d seen more than once in his dreams. It was strange that delicate never crossed his mind, he thought as he looked at the clean, gently curved angles of her brow and cheeks, the bare hint of freckles across the bridge of her nose, or the full softness of her lips. Kissing came to mind, lots of it. With very little effort, he remembered the taste of her on his tongue, the feel of her in his hands and under his mouth.

  “How are you feeling this morning?” he asked, keeping his thoughts to himself, and, hopefully, the leering gleam out of his eyes.