The Courting Cowboy

by Tara Janzen

  The Courting Cowboy

  Tara Janzen

  For Anita—a cowboy, of course!

  First published by Bantam/Loveswept, 1993

  Copyright Glenna McReynolds, 1993

  EBook Copyright Tara Janzen, 2012

  EBook Published by Tara Janzen, 2012

  Cover Design by Hot Damn Designs, 2012

  EBook Design by A Thirsty Mind, 2012

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Dear Reader ,

  Welcome to the Tara Janzen line of classic romances! New York Times Bestselling author, Tara Janzen, is the creator of the lightning-fast paced and super sexy CRAZY HOT and CRAZY COOL Steele Street series of romantic suspense novels. But before she fell in love with the hot cars, bad boys, big guns, and wild women of Steele Street, she wrote steamy romances for the Loveswept line under the name Glenna McReynolds. All thirteen of these much-loved classic romances are now available as eBooks.

  Writing as both Glenna McReynolds and Tara Janzen, this national bestselling author has won numerous awards for her work, including a RITA from Romance Writers of America, and nine 4 ½ TOP PICKS from Romantic Times magazine. Two of her books are on the Romantic Times ALL-TIME FAVORITES list – RIVER OF EDEN, and SHAMELESS. LOOSE AND EASY, a Steele Street novel, is one of Amazon’s TOP TEN ROMANCES for 2008.

  She is also the author of an epic medieval fantasy trilogy, THE CHALICE AND THE BLADE, DREAM STONE, and PRINCE OF TIME.

  For more information about Tara Janzen, her writing and her books please visit her on her website www.tarajanzen.com; on Facebook http://on.fb.me/tcBKCq; and Twitter @tara_janzen http://twitter.com/#!/tara_janzen.

  Titles by Tara Janzen

  Classic Romances

  Scout’s Honor

  Thieves In The Night

  Stevie Lee

  Dateline: Kydd and Rios

  Blue Dalton

  Outlaw Carson

  Moonlight and Shadows

  A Piece of Heaven

  Shameless

  The Courting Cowboy

  Avenging Angel

  The Dragon and the Dove

  Dragon’s Eden

  Medieval Fantasy Trilogy

  “A stunning epic of romantic fantasy.” Affaire de Coeur, five-star review

  The Chalice and the Blade

  Dream Stone

  Prince of Time

  River of Eden – “One of THE most breathtaking and phenomenal adventure tales to come along in years! Glenna McReynolds has created an instant adventure classic.” Romantic Times – 2002 BEST ROMANTIC SUSPENSE AWARD WINNER

  Steele Street Series

  – “Hang on to your seat for the ride of your life…thrilling…sexy. Tara Janzen has outdone herself.” Fresh Fiction

  Crazy Hot

  Crazy Cool

  Crazy Wild

  Crazy Kisses

  Crazy Love

  Crazy Sweet

  On the Loose

  Cutting Loose

  Loose and Easy

  Breaking Loose

  Loose Ends

  SEAL of My Dreams Anthology

  All proceeds from the sale of SEAL Of My Dreams are pledged to Veterans Research Corporation, a non-profit foundation supporting veterans medical research.

  Panama Jack, by Tara Janzen

  One

  From where Ty Garrett stood on his back porch he could see everything he loved in the world and just about everything he hated. He hated drought, and there was plenty of drought to go around in northeastern Colorado. He hated to think he’d never be able to get ahead of himself financially, but one look at the ramshackle ranch buildings and the dust blowing with the cold autumn wind was enough to make him wonder if he would ever catch up with a decent living, let alone get ahead of one.

  His gaze shifted, following the sheer cliffs rising out of the plains to the north, part of the boundary to his land. The chalk walls of the escarpment gleamed amber with the last reflected rays of the sunset, while a dark prairie sky pulled across the heavens from the east. Winter was getting ready to come on good, when there’d be snow piling up in the coulees, the land turning white to the horizon, long nights spent in front of the stove, and short days spent working hard to survive. He had no complaints about winter, but he hated to think he might spend the rest of his life without a woman to share the seasons with year after year, especially the nights. He’d been alone that way for a long time.

  Amy Lambert had been making eyes at him again in church on Sunday, but Ty was sure another man’s wife was the quickest road to ruin. She was sweet-looking, though, all blond hair and blue eyes, with pink blushes that got a man wondering what in the world she was thinking about.

  Grinning wryly, he lowered his gaze and scuffed his boot across the boards of the porch. He knew what she was thinking about all right, but he wouldn’t be messing himself up with Amy Lambert. A man had to draw lines he never crossed, no matter how long the nights.

  He sighed and looked back to the house, through the window framing the kitchen and the young boy huddled over the schoolbooks lying open on the table.

  Ty loved living on the grassland, roping calves, riding colts, and working the ranch. But there was nothing on God’s green earth that made him feel love like the boy in the kitchen, Corey Allen Garrett. He’d made some mistakes in his life, and some had said keeping his son had been the biggest. Adoption, they said, was the only sensible solution for unwed teenagers. But Ty had never had regrets, not in twelve years.

  “Dad!” Corey hollered without looking up from his books. “Come here, Dad. I’m stuck.”

  Ty groaned. When he’d left, Corey had been working on his science homework. The new teacher, Miss Willoughby, was a stickler for homework. So far he and Corey were barely keeping up, and Parents’ Night was Thursday. He didn’t want Corey to get behind when he had to go in and face the teacher himself. Especially when he would already have one strike against him by being late because of a construction job he’d picked up on the side.

  “Dad!” Corey yelled again.

  Ty pushed off the porch rail, grinning at his own cowardice. One little old widow lady from back east couldn’t be too hard to handle, despite what he’d heard about her strange ways and fancy degrees. He just wished that once every blue moon or so a good-looking, not so old, eligible marrying kind of woman would show up within a fifty-mile radius of Talbot, Colorado.

  * * *

  Victoria Miranda Elizabeth Willoughby cleared her throat unsuccessfully twice before reaching for the water glass on her desk. She thought things were going rather well for her first Parents’ Night. Her dearly departed husband, Charles Edward Willoughby IV, certainly hadn’t educated her to end up teaching the children of farmers and ranchers in the vast emptiness of the American West. Still, she hadn’t lived with a peer of the British realm without learning how to stiffen her backbone and call upon her reserves. Chin up, Victoria, had been the rallying cry of her youth, and marrying her mentor had changed little except their sleeping arrangements.

  “As I was saying,” she continued after taking a sip of water. “My goal is to have the seventh- and eighth-graders firmly grounded in the scientific method before we break for the Christmas holidays. The requirements for the high school students will, of course, be—”

  The classroom door squeaked open, interrupting her and drawing everyone’s attention. Victoria frowned. She
usually gave demerits for tardiness, but demerits hardly seemed appropriate for Parents’ Night. Then again, the man coming in late hardly seemed old enough to be the parent of one of her teenage students.

  He closed the door behind him and gave her a short nod, touching the brim of a gray sweat-stained cowboy hat.

  “Ma’am,” he said, and a slow, easy smile broke across his face.

  Victoria’s heart fluttered.

  She quickly cleared her throat again and returned the greeting with a prim glance. She didn’t know what else to do. It was quite beyond her how women coped with the average western American male, especially the ones called cowboys. They were so unlike the men she’d always known, so unlike her husband and her father.

  She finished her sentence and moved on to her philosophy of teaching. But out of the corner of her eye she noticed the man wasn’t moving away from the door. She took a calming breath and returned her attention to him.

  “There are a few empty desks toward the back,” she said, asserting her authority.

  His smile broadened, creasing his sun-browned cheeks and revealing strong white teeth. Her heart fluttered again.

  “I didn’t fit in a desk when I was supposed to,” he said. “I don’t think there’s much hope for it now.”

  The other parents chuckled, and her gaze inadvertently slid down the rugged length of his body, across a broad chest, narrow hips, and long legs. Her cheeks flushed. “Well, yes, hmm, I see the problem. There’s a chair in my library corner. You’re welcome to use it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.” He gave her another smile, and she experienced another distressful reaction in her chest.

  “You’re—you’re welcome,” she stammered, wondering what in the world was coming over her.

  She continued on with her speech, calming herself with the carefully rehearsed words. A minute later, though, her gaze strayed to the man making his way to the back of her classroom. He was particularly unlike the men she’d grown up with, she thought with exasperation as she watched him step over a desk to shake someone’s hand and draw more attention to himself. When he leaned even farther over to greet another man, her eyes widened despite herself. He was straddling the desk in a position that did shocking things to his otherwise properly fitting jeans. Her breath stopped for a moment, until he finished his social business and moved on toward the chair in the back. Really, she wondered, still aghast, what did a woman do with a man like that?

  The cowboy found the chair and sat down, taking off his hat and giving her his attention. She momentarily repaid him in kind, just to make sure he stayed put. Her quick glance took in the rich brown color of his hair and the liveliness of his light gray eyes.

  He was attractive, she supposed, in a fresh, outdoorsy way. His features were well made and even, a genetic blessing that had nothing to do with a person’s character—she’d learned that from an unfortunate personal experience—but the cowboy was handsome nonetheless. She liked the way the dark slashes of his eyebrows contrasted with the pale color of his eyes. It was intriguing, safely so, not like the business with his legs and his muscles and his jeans. He radiated energy and life, a distinct difference from Charles, who had been quite infirm his last few years.

  She went back to her speech, wishing the parents would show more enthusiasm and interest. So far they were about as animated as her seventh-period class, the highlight of the evening apparently having been the latecomer. She checked him again after a few minutes, for no special reason, and was surprised to find him yawning.

  So much for her radiant-energy-of-youth theory, she thought with another twinge of exasperation. She raised her voice a degree, relying on a time-proven lecture strategy to rekindle everyone’s interest.

  Ty stifled another yawn, thinking Corey had been right. Miss Willoughby did look like an owl, a baby owl with its feathers all stuck out. “Like one of those burrowing owlets we found in the south pasture last spring,” he’d said. “Remember how cute they were, drying out after the rain?”

  It was her glasses, Ty decided. They were so perfectly round, and she blinked in slow motion as if she were very tired. Every time her glasses slid down her too-small nose, it took her longer and longer to push them backup. She would give the classroom full of parents a slow, inquiring look over the tortoiseshell rims, expecting questions that she seldom got, then with a near-imperceptible sigh push her glasses up and continue with her speech.

  The wet-feathers part was a bit more of an exaggeration, but Ty understood where his son had gotten the impression. Her hair was naturally curly to an untameable degree, her one hundred and one misplaced bobby pins notwithstanding. The color was mostly brown, but there were a few auburn strands woven through the brownness. He couldn’t say the same for her outfit. Her sweater was plain dark brown and reached past her hips, covering half of her plain brown skirt, but he thought he detected some nice feminine curves under all the brownness. Past her skirt, her stockinged legs were pale, and she wore a pair of sturdy plain brown shoes.

  She did look like an owl, a slightly lost, somewhat overwhelmed baby owl. The resemblance was remarkable, except he’d never seen legs as pretty as hers on any bird. Her knees were fine-boned, and without having to lean too far over in his chair, he could see her ankles.

  Tilting his head to one side, he leaned the extra inch necessary. Her ankles were also nice, very nice. He’d always thought women’s ankles were sexy, and Miss Willoughby definitely had some of the best he’d seen. Not that great ankles alone meant anything, or that he meant anything by admiring them. She really didn’t look to be his type. Lacey Kidder, his seventy-year-old neighbor, didn’t think he was putting enough effort into finding out just exactly what kind of woman was his type. And if he didn’t, she said, by golly, she was going to start. It was time he was married, she said. Past time, actually.

  He’d have to tell Lacey he’d figured out one thing: The right woman couldn’t go wrong if she had ankles like Miss Willoughby. He leaned a little farther to the left—and fell off his chair.

  He barely caught himself, and he made a lot of noise doing it, planting his boot hard on the floor and scraping the chair. When it was all over, he looked up and found Miss Willoughby staring at him.

  “Are you quite comfortable now?” she asked with a civilized amount of condemnation in her voice, the dark, delicate wings of her eyebrows rising above her tortoiseshell rims.

  She could have ignored the incident, but she’d chosen confrontation instead. Coming from the diminutive Miss Willoughby, he liked the choice. When she continued to give him one of those looks, he started to laugh. He’d have to add “spirited” to Lacey’s list.

  “Quite comfortable, now. Thank you, ma’am.”

  She blushed, and he realized she was a lot easier to embarrass than he was. Her tough exterior went about as deep as prairie topsoil. Surprisingly, he found himself liking that too.

  “I believe,” Miss Willoughby continued, her cheeks a faint shade of pink, “that an academic trinity of parent, child, and teacher creates the optimum learning environment. A great deal of my own education was attained in this manner, literally in the field at my father’s knee. I was also quite fortunate to have continued my studies under the guidance of his esteemed colleague, Charles Willoughby . . . Charles Edward Willoughby the Fourth.”

  She repeated the name after a short pause, as if she expected the people in the room to recognize it, but Ty figured she was shooting in the dark. For the most part, the folks around Talbot didn’t keep up with the goings-on of the Royal Geographic Society and the Explorers Club, groups she mentioned at every opportunity. He was beginning to understand why people thought she was snooty, and why the school board thought she was such a catch. He was having a harder time figuring out why Corey liked her so much. His son had never worked harder for a teacher. He and Ty did science assignments even on the rare night when she didn’t assign anything. Ty thought his son was a little young to be an ankle man, and as far as he could tell,
she was drier than toast. But she wasn’t as old as he’d expected.

  And she did have something about her, a kind of innocent, painstaking seriousness that made a person feel as though she were telling them the God’s truth with every word she spoke. It was interesting, and maybe a little disconcerting.

  “Mr. Willoughby and I,” she was continuing, “eventually married, and together founded the Willoughby Institute of Natural History Research and Education.”

  In fact, she wasn’t nearly as old as he’d expected, and she had a nice voice, very soothing and feminine. Given the lack of female companionship in their lives, her voice might be one of the main reasons Corey liked her. She didn’t speak like anyone else they knew. She had an accent. It wasn’t French, or southern, or British, or anything else Ty could put his finger on, but it was cultured.

  Hiding another yawn, he checked his watch and stretched his legs out into the aisle. He had already decided to skip the rest of Parents’ Night. He’d heard Ann Riverson’s English speech three years running, and Glen Frazer, the principal, always wound up the evening by wheedling favors.

  Ty was favored out. He stretched his legs again and ran his hand over his eyes. He was so damn tired. He should be asleep in bed, not sitting in a schoolroom, listening to Miss Willoughby’s sweet, uppity voice tell him all about the merits of earth science, natural history, and her dead husband’s institute.

  Victoria frowned at the cowboy nodding drowsily in the corner of her classroom. Surely he wasn’t going to fall asleep in her library corner, not in the middle of her presentation. He’d been fighting the inclination for the last quarter hour. Couldn’t he hold on for another few minutes?

  She did a quick visual check of the other people in the room. There weren’t any signs of rapt fascination, but no one else was falling asleep. She looked back at the exhausted rabble-rouser, ready to reproach him with a steely glare, but she was too late.