Billion Dollar Cowboy
Page 29
“Not if this is the O’Donnell horse ranch and you’re about to take off on the Chisholm Trail reenactment.” She looked up into the dark-haired cowboy’s green sexy eyes. “Who are you?” She planted her high heels on the ground and got out of the car.
“Dewar O’Donnell, and you are?”
Dammit! With a name like Dewar, she’d pictured a sixty-year-old man with a rim of graying hair circling an otherwise bald head, and a face wrinkled up like the earth after a hard summer complete with a day’s growth of gray whiskers. He sure wasn’t supposed to look like Timothy Olyphant with Ben Bass’s eyes. It was going to be one hell of a month because she wasn’t about to get involved with a cowboy. Not even if she had the sudden urge to crawl right up on that horse and see if those eyes were as dreamy up close as they were from ten feet away.
“I’m H. B. Mckay,” she answered.
“Well, shit!” Dewar drawled.
“I know. Life’s a bitch, isn’t it? But I’ll be riding along this whole trip taking notes for the reality show to be filmed this summer,” she said. “Unless you want to tell me that this is a big silly joke and I can go home to Dallas now.”
“Can’t do that, ma’am. I was expecting you to be a man, but we’re ready to move this herd north, so I guess you’d better saddle up. I was just about to call Carl Levy and ask where you were,” Dewar drawled.
“That’s the idea most people have. I guess that empty horse is for me and I don’t get to drive from point to point and stay in a hotel?”
“That’s the plan Carl made,” he answered.
She crossed her arms over her chest. “So we are ready to go right now?”
“Unless you want to change clothes,” he said.
“Hell, no! I’m wearing what I’ve got on, and if I get a single snag in this suit, Daddy will be paying for a brand-new one,” she said.
Dewar frowned. “Daddy?”
“Carl Levy is my father as well as my boss.”
***
Dewar had always had a liking for redheads, but not the kind that wore high-heeled shoes and business suits. And it seemed like here lately he’d dated every redhead in the whole northern part of Texas. Because both of his brothers and his two sisters had beat him to the altar, now everyone in the family thought they had a PhD in matchmaking and had made it their life mission to get him married off.
He’d rebelled at first, but then he admitted that he really wanted to have a wife and family so he’d started looking around on his own. He hadn’t joined one of those online dating services, but he had been dating a lot. Either he was too damn picky or else all the good ones were taken because very few women interested him enough for a second date.
H. B.’s eyes were a soft aqua, somewhere between blue and green like the still deep waters of the ocean. And her lips full, the kind that begged for kisses. He felt a stirring down deep in his heart that he hadn’t felt before, but he didn’t know if it was anger or desire.
It really didn’t matter because the whole damn thing had to be a joke. It was too ridiculous to be real. Raylen had cooked it up and paid some woman to help him pull it off. He pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and quickly punched in the numbers to the office of the Dallas magazine tycoon.
“Carl Levy, please.”
Ten long seconds later, “Tell him this is Dewar O’Donnell and this is definitely an emergency.”
H.B. shook her head and took her saddlebags from her car. “You are wasting your time, cowboy.”
Dewar hooked a leg over the saddle horn and ignored her. “Carl, I’ve got a red-haired woman who says she’s H. B. McKay. You want to verify that?”
He frowned.
“You led me to believe that H. B. was a man, sir. A woman hasn’t got any business on a cattle drive.”
H. B. yelled over the noise of bawling cattle, snorting horses, and grinning men. “Tell him Momma is going to throw a Cajun fit, and if he’s smart he’ll walk in the house with roses in one hand and an apology on his lips.”
“Yes, sir, that was her,” Dewar said.
She held out her hand. “Give me that phone.”
Dewar leaned down and put it in her hand.
“You are going to pay for this, Daddy. I’m pissed off worse than I’ve ever been before in my life. I’m so pissed off that I’m not even going to talk to you about it and you can tell Joel that I know he’s behind this shit and I’ll get even with him when I get home.”
Everything went silent. Even the cows stopped bawling.
“Stop laughing. I’ll show you what I can do, but you are going to be sorry. Believe me, you are going to regret it.”
She handed the phone back to Dewar. “He says to tell you good luck. You ready?”
He put the phone back in his pocket and nodded toward the dapple gray horse. “Soon as you tie down those bags and mount up. Apache is spirited, but he’s tough. You ever ridden?”
“Once or twice,” she answered.
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Cowboy Tough
by Joanne Kennedy
Being a cowboy is all he knows…
Bronc-buster Mack Boyd can ride a wild stallion to a standstill, but he can’t say no when his family prevails on him to come home and help run the ranch. The last person he expects to find there is a high-class Easterner like Cat Crandall.
But no cowboy can rein her in…
When Cat Crandall gives up a lucrative advertising job to follow her artistic dreams, she’s thinking Paris, Tuscany—not the vast and lonely open country of Wyoming. Her success at Boyd Ranch’s artists’ retreat could be her ticket to far more exotic places… but the rough and rugged cowboy she meets there is giving Cat a different kind of inspiration.
“Packs a powerful, emotional punch, and when it comes to capturing the appeal and feel of the West and its people, nobody does it better.”—Booklist
“A truly wonderful cast of characters along with an entertaining story line… a must-read.”—Book Reviews and More By Kathy
For more Joanne Kennedy, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
Jesse
by C.H. Admirand
Loneliness will take a man places…
Jesse Garahan has plenty of Irish charm, but having had his heart demolished twice, he’s sworn off women forever. Until the fateful day he meets Danielle Brockway and her tiny daughter on their way to their new home in Pleasure, Texas.
But there may be places he doesn’t want to go…
Fiercely protective of her little girl, Danielle isn’t about to let Jesse get anywhere close enough to hurt either of them, no matter how much longing she sees in his eyes…
Praise for Dylan:
“Readers will be left panting.”—RT Book Reviews, 4.5 Stars
For more C.H. Admirand, visit:
www.sourcebooks.com
About the Author
Carolyn Brown is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author with more than sixty books published, and credits her eclectic family for her humor and writing ideas. Her books include the cowboy trilogy (Lucky in Love, One Lucky Cowboy, and Getting Lucky), the Honky Tonk series (I Love This Bar; Hell, Yeah; Honky Tonk Christmas; and My Give a Damn’s Busted), and her bestselling Spikes & Spurs series (Love Drunk Cowboy, Red’s Hot Cowboy, Darn Good Cowboy Christmas, One Hot Cowboy Wedding, Mistletoe Cowboy, and Just a Cowboy and His Baby). C
arolyn has launched into women’s fiction as well with The Blue-Ribbon Jalapeño Society Jubilee. She was born in Texas but grew up in southern Oklahoma where she and her husband, Charles, a retired English teacher, make their home. They have three grown children and enough grandchildren to keep them young.