The Love of a Cowboy

by Anna Jeffrey

  “What’s Janet up to these days?”

  Luke sipped his whiskey, waiting for its bite to smooth out the kink in his gut that always followed the mention of his ex-wife’s name. History. He and Cal shared some. When Janet had lived at the Double Deuce, the Hearth Room had been her favorite haunt. Countless times, Cal had called the ranch at odd hours asking for somebody, anybody, to come and get her—too drunk to drive down the mountain…drunk and on the peck.

  Janet had met men friends in the Hearth Room, but Luke didn’t ask Cal about them and Cal, being a gentleman, had never volunteered information.

  “The kids tell me she’s answering the phone in some beauty shop,” Luke said.

  “Guess she spent enough time in ’em to know how,” Cal replied.

  Luke felt an involuntary grimace. In the eight years Janet had been his wife, she had spent more on her appearance and wardrobe than most of Callister’s citizens made. His mother told friends she didn’t know how one woman could spend so much money on herself and still look like she belonged at Mustang Ranch instead of the Double Deuce.

  Suddenly, Luke had enough of the Hearth Room and kicking back in his recliner in his cabin with Louis L’Amour seemed like a good thing. He quaffed the last of his drink and set the heavy glass on the black bar top with a thunk. “I’m gonna go,” he said to Cal. He dug out his money clip and paid, then shrugged into his coat. “You tell Sharon hello for me. Aunt Josie, too,”

  He left the bar by the dining room doorway, strolling to catch a parting glimpse of the view he loved through the windows on the far end. The sun’s last rays reflected off a new storm moving in from behind Little Horse Ridge. Wide swaths of purple and dark blue slashed across the sky.

  Unlike the restaurants in Boise, he felt comfortable here. The ski lodge resembled the hundred-year-old house he called home. Sterling Mountain, barely visible in the distance, backed up to the Double Deuce. The majesty of its high, jagged peaks never failed to inspire him. The mountains were a part of him as much as he was a part of them.

  At the dining room’s exit, the waiter, Fred Smith’s boy, David, and the cook, Chuck Gilbert’s fat little wife, Nan, were sitting in a booth, playing cards.

  “You two poison all the customers?” Luke said.

  Nan crossed her arms over a round, apron-covered belly and laughed. “We want to go home when we get rid of our mystery lady.”

  “Mystery lady?”

  “She’s real glamorous-looking. We think she’s a tourist, up from California. Maybe a movie star, but we can’t place her.”

  Luke looked around. He saw only a glass and a champagne bottle on one of the white-clothed tables near the fireplace. “Where’d she go?”

  David nodded toward the double glass doors in the window wall. “Out.” He snickered. “Communing with nature.”

  Luke glanced outside, saw the backs of a pair of shapely legs. His gaze traveled up to a skirt extending only a few inches below the bottom of a thick coat. Lord, she had to be cold. A cascade of black ringlets hung down her back. He almost swallowed his toothpick. He would recognize that hair for the rest of his life. Jesus.

  What the hell was she doing here? Her refusing his invitation to supper smacked him square in the ego. Women liked him. Most didn’t tell him lies to get out of spending an evening with him.

  Settling his hat on, he told the waiter and the cook he’d be back in a minute. He dropped his toothpick into an ashtray and headed for the glass door.

  Chapter 9

  “If you came to go skiing, you’re late. The season’s over.”

  The bottom dropped out of Dahlia’s stomach. She spun around, toward the unmistakable sardonic drawl. Luke McRae’s shoulder leaned against the door jamb, his coat pushed back, his fingers stuffed into jeans pockets. Damn.

  “Just my luck,” she said. “A day late and a dollar short. As they say.”

  With lion-like grace, he pushed off from the door facing and sauntered toward her. A loose, off-white coat with a Hudson Bay stripe hung past his hips. His gray hat brim hid his eyes and emphasized his lean cheeks. A warm rush slithered through her.

  He stopped in front of her and stared down, eyes hooded, his face all sharp planes and shadows in the low light. Her memory leapt to the kiss on the front porch and her heartbeat stepped up. The only time she had seen him since that morning had been at the Rusty Spur Saloon the night he had the blond calf roper hanging on his arm.

  Regrouping took a second. “What are you doing here?”

  “I’d say this is more my territory than yours.” His gaze made a lazy hundred eighty degree sweep of the deck. “Where’s your third arm? Saturday night? I’d expect a couple of party girls like you two to be whooping it up at the Rusty Spur.”

  “We aren’t party girls. Piggy went out. With someone we met at the Forest Service. Pete Hand. Maybe you know him.”

  “I do. Good man.”

  “She needs that. She’s known her share who weren’t.”

  His stare penetrated all the way to her spine. “And how about you? What do you need?”

  She had opened the door for that one. “Nothing.”

  “You’re lying to me, darlin’. For about the fourth time.”

  His voice had gone soft and low, a mixture of accusation and seduction. Damn him. She jerked back toward the lake view. “It’s odd how you keep popping up.”

  He leaned forward, too, bracing his forearms beside hers on the rail. He had a pocket knife and a wooden match stem in his hands. “I didn’t pop up. I’m guessing I got here first.” His long fingers worked at whittling a sharp point on the match stem. He gave her a sidelong glance, his dark auburn brows arched. “Lost my toothpick,” he said, as if she had asked.

  “Don’t you have a date waiting? Or something?”

  He smiled his smirky smile. “If I did, would you care?”

  Care. She had done her best not to after seeing him with his girlfriend. She made a little gasp, speechless again.

  “Truth is I tried to get a date with a pretty brunette. Wanted to bring her up here for supper and show her what a good place this is, but she turned me down. Told me a lie to boot. Told me she wasn’t usually hungry at night.” He turned his head and faced her. “You must’ve got hungry after all.”

  Did he expect an explanation? Why did every conversation with him feel like a contest? A smart-ass retort refused to gel, so she settled for something trite. “It’s a woman’s privilege to change her mind.”

  “Yep. Guess it is.” He closed his knife, straightened and slid it into his left pocket. “You ski?”

  She tore her gaze away from his pocket—and his fly—and looked out over the landscape. “What does that have to do with anything? There isn’t much skiing in Texas, but I did it a few times when I was in college. Ruidoso, Aspen once. You must have skied all your life.”

  He leaned on the deck rail beside her again, his arm touching hers, the whittled match stem lodged in the corner of his mouth. “Nope. Never had the time. All I come up here for is to eat. College, huh? SMU?”

  “How’d you know that?”

  “I read it on your shirt, that day at the Forest Service. What’s it stand for?”

  Dummy. How could anybody not know what SMU stood for? But then again, how could an ignorant cowboy who had probably never been out of the Frozen North know anything about a prestigious Texas university? “Southern Methodist University.”

  “Ahh. A graduate. Lemme guess. Art. School teaching, maybe.”

  Her ego smarted. “Business. Cox Business School, to be precises. I’m an MBA.”

  “Ahhh, an advanced graduate. I knew you weren’t a butcher in Podunk, Texas.”

  Jerk! She wanted to yank that match stem from his mouth and stab him with it. “I’ll have you know, Loretta is a bigger town than Callister. And I used to live in Dallas.”

  “Bigger butcher shop, huh?”

  “I didn’t work in a butcher shop. I’m a . . .” She stopped. She was no longer anything
. “I was a marketing specialist. With an advertising firm.”

  He tucked back his chin. “Were you, now? That sounds like a hefty paycheck. Gave that up to work on a survey crew, huh? What happened? A shark bite you?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Isn’t that what they call it? Swimming with the sharks? Guess one of ’em spooked you. So you cut and ran to the beach.” He undulated a hand through the air in a swimming motion. “Or in your case, the high country.”

  The truth of that statement cut deep. Except for Piggy, who didn’t count, no one ever chided her this way. Emotion knotted in her throat. She pulled her cloak of pride tighter and lifted her nose. “For your information—”

  Uh-oh. Luke straightened, shoring up for the tongue-lashing that was bound to come. Before she could launch it, snow began to float down.

  “Ohmigosh! It’s snowing,” she said. “I didn’t know it was going to snow. I won’t be able to get home. I wouldn’t have come up here if—”A snowflake landed on the tip of her nose. Her fingertips flew to touch it. “Oh!” Her eyes rounded, then she laughed. “I don’t remember the last time I saw it snow. But it shouldn’t be doing this in May.”

  She was a confusing woman. He had poked at her on purpose, venting his anger. Ten seconds earlier she had been ready to give him a cussin’, now here she was laughing like a kid over a few snowflakes. Why the hell he found that sexy he didn’t know, but there it was. “Well, darlin’ when you’re half way to the North Pole at seven thousand feet, it snows in May.”

  She held her palms open to catch the large flakes. Her eyes sparkled. God Almighty, she was a pretty thing. He had thought so that day she and her mouthy friend went to Boise with him but tonight, standing here with white snowflakes on her shiny, black hair, her full lips wet and red, the taste of them lingering in his memory, she took his breath. All he could think about was kissing her again. Well, truth be told, he was thinking about a lot more than that.

  “Are we really half-way to the North Pole?”

  “Forty-fifth parallel. The marker’s up the road a piece.”

  A few black corkscrew curls feathered against her cheek. He reached out and pushed them back, then touched her ear lobe and earring. She didn’t jerk her head back or bat his hand away, so he changed his tone to serious. “Why wouldn’t you come eat with me tonight?”

  “You know why.”

  Releasing a long sigh, he dropped his hands. He wasn’t sorry he had kissed her on the porch that day, but he wished he could take back the crude invitation to a hotel. “What, you thought I’d jump you? Like on the front porch?”

  “Not necessarily.”

  “Scared you’d jump me?”

  She rolled her eyes and turned back to the lake view. “Women jumping. I’ve heard that happens to you often.”

  “When it comes to McRaes, you could hear anything in Callister, most of it not true.”

  “Whatever. I assure you I have never jumped a man in my entire life.”

  “Maybe not, but you have to admit, you did kiss me back pretty good that day.”

  “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  He couldn’t see clearly in the fading light, but he was sure she was blushing. He chuckled silently. “Nothing wrong with it. I’ve been thinking about it ever since.”

  “If you had told me at the beginning you were on your way to see your son, I would have known you were stressed out and—”

  “Stressed out? Not that’s not a phrase I use. Or associate with myself.

  “Upset, then.”

  He removed his match stem from his mouth. “You would’ve gone that day, hotel and all, if you’d known I was a little bothered about my boy?” He flicked the match stem into space, then crossed his arms and braced his butt against the deck rail so he could see her full-faced. Damned if he was gonna talk to her side view. “I should’ve been smarter. Should’ve mentioned him first.”

  She didn’t look up. “That’s not what I meant and you know it. I’m just saying I might have been more sensitive if I’d known you were . . . little bothered.”

  “Sensitive. Now there’s a college word.”

  She did look up then, firing him a look that would fell a buffalo. “Do you have something against people who go to college? What I was trying to tell you is I’m sympathetic, as I imagine most people are.”

  You bet. He had more sympathy than he knew what to do with. Everybody felt sorry on the surface. Pity from her cut deeper than a skinning knife. “I don’t need or want anybody’s sympathy. I got past crying in my beer a long time ago.”

  “There’s no reason to be such a stoic, you know. It’s normal for someone to feel compassion for a father of a challenged child.”

  Challenged child. Dumb-ass term. He could feel his lips sneaking into a sneer. “That’s another one of those college words. Some of that politically correct crap. Doesn’t help Jimmy much, but I guess it makes the do-gooders feel easier. You don’t have to dance around words with me. I can handle plain talk.”

  “I don’t dance around. But even if I do, it’s because you say obnoxious things that make me lose my train of thought. I think you do that to hide your feelings. I think you can’t handle plain talk at all.”

  Damn her for that smart mouth. And damn himself for not being able to leave her alone. How had she wormed under his skin?

  Agitation that had simmered for two weeks boiled over. He stood up and jammed his fists against his waist. “Then how’s this for plain? A few years ago, they called him mentally retarded. That was a bitter pill, but I swallowed it because that’s what he is and that’s as clear as you can say it.” He huffed a laugh. “Challenged. That’s a goddamn cruelty joke. It doesn’t come close to the way it is.”

  Her eyes went wide. She didn’t move. He had shocked her. Good. He intended to. Then he realized he was looming over her. He took a step back and stuffed his hands into his coat pockets. Christ, what was it about her that got his back up? He never got aggressive or shot off his mouth to a woman, especially one he wanted to bed.

  Though Dahlia was stunned by his words, the almost imperceptible sag of his wide shoulders didn’t escape her. “That’s awfully cynical. I know political correctness has a phony ring, but it’s just words.”

  “No. It’s more than that. It’s propaganda. And those school people are experts at it, trying to cloud people’s thinking so they can’t see or don’t have to deal with the truth of things. Giving people false hopes.”

  He turned and stared off toward the mountains, but she had the feeling he wasn’t seeing them. “Well, here’s the truth about my son. No matter what they call it, no matter how big a check I write ’em, it won’t make any difference.” A pair of gloves came out of his pocket. He used them to scrape off snow that had accumulated on the deck rail. She gave them an envious glance. Her fingers felt like popsicles.

  “The day won’t come when he takes the reins at the Double Deuce like McRae men have always done. He doesn’t know he’s got a heritage that’s over a hundred and fifty years old. Can’t dress himself, can’t comb his hair unless somebody shows him how every time. Can’t eat a meal or even . . .” He paused and stared at her, his eyes a bleeding wound. “He can’t even take a piss without help.”

  As straight as a javelin, his pain went to her core. She had suspected his cantankerous streak shielded a tender heart, but she hadn’t dreamed it was also a broken one.

  He stuffed his gloves back into his pocket. “He’ll never live on his own. Never have a woman. And if he tries, those politically correct assholes? They’ll stop calling him challenged and call him perverted….Hell, he may not even get to be twenty years old.”

  “Re—Really? What’s wrong with him?”

  “Heart. Takes a long paragraph to explain it. And you know what I’ve thought about every day of my life since he was born? . . . It was preventable. If I could’ve just . . .” His jaw hardened. He clenched a fist and shook it.

  Just what? She had
seen women hysterical over any and everything, but she had never been close to so much raw emotion in a man. Kenneth hadn’t even been capable of such depth of feeling. The gossip she had heard about Janet McRae’s drinking hurtled into her thoughts. Like a gust of chilling wind, understanding swept through her and she saw his torment: the proud father at the birth of a son and heir, the devastating discovery his offspring had been born less than whole, the despair at learning why. Without a doubt, this was a side of him rarely revealed. Had she unwittingly done something to unleash this festered rage? Or was it simply long overdue?

  “Just what?” she asked. She had to know what he thought he could have done that would have prevented his son’s tragedy.

  “Jimmy’s mama didn’t want any more kids.” He braced his hands on the deck rail and spoke to the empty space in front of them. “Hell, she didn’t want the two we already had. But she was a regular fertility goddess. Just look at her and she’d get knocked up. That third time, she went clear off the deep end. Wanted to have an abortion. Looking back, maybe it would’ve been just as well if I hadn’t stopped her.”

  Compared to this moment, Dahlia’s interaction with all other people, even with her husband, seemed superficial. Mentally, she reached out to touch his forearm. “If—if abortion was what she wanted, how did you keep her from it?”

  “Money. An MBA oughtta know money’s the number one motivator in all the world. In school, they teach you all that shit about fear and hunger and so forth, but it’s really money. I bought her off. Me and my dad. Mom wonders to this day how we came out of the fall sale that year with no cash. Janet agreed to give birth as long as she didn’t have to take care of another kid. Then she went on a world-class shopping trip. I made a deal with a devil, but I figured it out too late.

  Dahlia could hear her own breathing. Her thoughts crashed into each other and Piggy’s words came back to her. Jimmy might not even be Luke’s kid. “I don’t understand. If things were that bad between you, how—how did she, uh . . . get pregnant?”