Cowboy Tough

by Joanne Kennedy

  Copyright © 2013 by Joanne Kennedy

  Cover and internal design © 2013 by Sourcebooks, Inc.

  Cover design by Randee Ladden

  Cover photo by Rob Lang

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks, Inc.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  FAX: (630) 961-2168

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  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  To my husband, Ken McCauley,

  who taught me to believe in love.

  Chapter 1

  Cat Crandall knew artists were supposed to suffer, but this was ridiculous.

  Sure, Picasso lived in an unheated tenement and burned bundles of his own drawings for warmth. Modigliani died of tuberculosis in a sordid Parisian garret. And Van Gogh’s painting of his room at Arles is famous for its grim, depressing atmosphere. But asking a group of vacationing watercolor painters to spend two weeks living in the Boyd Ranch Bunkhouse was going too far.

  Windblown and dilapidated, its siding weathered to a soulless shade of gray, the building looked like a stack of kindling someone had dumped on the open prairie when they realized it wasn’t worth burning. The front door was stuck shut, which was probably a good thing. Cat hated to even imagine what the interior looked like.

  But she was going to have to face it sooner or later. Her students arrived tomorrow, and she didn’t believe in running from trouble. Especially when she was in the middle of God’s great open spaces, with nowhere to run to.

  Putting her shoulder to the battered wooden door, she gave it a shove. It popped open so suddenly she staggered inside, grabbing the back of a chair for balance.

  “Ouch.” She turned her palm up and eyed the splinter jutting from her skin. Biting her lower lip, she pinched it out with her thumb and forefinger, wincing at the sharp pain. She winced again as she surveyed her surroundings.

  She’d expected quaint and rustic; what she’d gotten was old and dirty. The plank floor was scuffed and studded with nail heads, and smudged windows revealed a desolate swath of yellowing prairie. The chair she’d grabbed, like its mismatched companion and a crooked table, looked like a thrift shop refugee from a war zone.

  The place had advertised an “Authentic Wild West Experience,” and she supposed that wasn’t a lie; probably the old-time cowboys hadn’t lived much better than this.

  But when she’d signed on with Art Treks, she’d been hoping for the Tuscany experience, or maybe the Loire Valley experience. But while they’d hired her to “facilitate creative plein air watercolor workshops in exotic locations around the world,” they’d failed to define “exotic.” Or “the world.”

  For the next fourteen days, her world would be Wyoming. And this, evidently, was exotic.

  “We call this one the Heifer House,” said a deep voice from behind her.

  She whirled to see the Wild West himself standing in the doorway, feet planted, arms loose in a gunfighter stance.

  Well, that was exotic: a cowboy, decked out in full high plains regalia. Instead of six-guns, he was armed with a bottle of Windex and a dirty rag.

  He nodded toward another wooden structure, visible through the smeared window. It tilted tipsily windward on the far side of a concave dirt crater.

  “That’s the Bull Barn, for the men.” His mouth was twisted into a sardonic smile, and she couldn’t help smiling back. His outfit was ridiculous.

  The jeans were all right. The striped shirt was loud, but not outrageous. It was the oversized cherry red glad rag knotted round his neck and the chaps bracketing his legs that made him look like an extra from Paint Your Wagon.

  Shoving the rag in his back pocket, he lifted a thumb and forefinger to tug down the brim of his hat.

  “Ma’am.” He punctuated the greeting with a sharp nod.

  Did he have to call her that? It made her feel about a zillion years old.

  “I’m not a ma’am.”

  “Oh. Sorry, ma’am.”

  Was he trying to annoy her, or was he really that dumb? Cat looked him up and down and decided she didn’t care as long as he wore those chaps. They might make him look like a cartoon cowboy from the funny papers, but they hugged his slim hips and emphasized his muscular thighs. The leather tie at the front reminded her of a bow on a very nice, very masculine birthday present, and it put his assets front and center, making it obvious that under the cowboy costume was a very real man—maybe even a real cowboy, if such a thing still existed. He was tanned and muscular, with a swoon-worthy smile and dark eyes that invited her to reach over and untie that bow.

  Adjusting the tilt of her broad-brimmed sun hat, she looked away. She wasn’t here to gawk at men; she was here to keep her clients comfortable while they learned to paint landscapes in watercolor. And that meant she needed to do something about the less-than-stellar accommodations.

  If it was just her, she wouldn’t care. Squalor was an artistic rite of passage, after all. But while Picasso and Van Gogh would have welcomed the suffering, she couldn’t let her students stay in this bare-bones bunkhouse. Neither could her fifteen-year-old niece Dora, who was arriving the next day. The kid had enough issues right now without adding splinters and pneumonia to the list. It might be August, but the website had warned that nights in Wyoming could be nippy.

  Setting her fists on her hips, she tilted her chin up so she could meet the cowboy’s eyes. “This is not what I expected.” She was tempted to poke a finger in his chest, but now that they were
eye to eye—or eye to shirt pocket—she realized he was bigger than she was. A lot bigger. “The website said ‘rustic,’ not ‘sordid.’ Are you in charge here?”

  He grimaced. “If I was, d’you think I’d be wearing this monkey suit?”

  She gave the monkey suit another once-over. “I don’t know. They look like cowboy clothes to me, and you’re a cowboy, right?”

  “Not today.” He lifted one hand in a mock salute. “Today I’m the window washer, Walmart greeter, and general step’n’fetch-it.”

  He rolled his shoulders as if he wanted to squirm out of his shirt, then reached up and tugged at the oversized red bandanna around his neck. Tearing it from his neck, he shoved it in his pocket along with the window-washing rag.

  Maybe he wasn’t a real cowboy after all. Those guys were famous for being comfortable in their own skin, and he looked like he wanted to rip off his fancy clothes and run for the hills.

  The notion of him shedding his clothes almost made her smile in spite of herself.

  “Guess I’m part of the rusticity.” He’d dropped the aw-shucks drawl, but his voice was still low, with a baritone timbre that seemed to vibrate at the base of her spine. “I’m trying to clean up the sordid stuff, though.” He stepped forward and offered a rough, calloused hand. “Mack Boyd. I’ll be your wrangler.”

  Cat tried not to react as his big hand swallowed her small one, but she couldn’t help sneaking a quick look up and down. If she could get him out of the monkey suit, he might be a decent model for a portrait. She wondered how he felt about posing naked.

  If he was willing, she might overlook the accommodations.

  Maybe she should borrow that Windex and wipe the rampaging fantasies out of her mind. It wouldn’t do for fifteen-year-old Dora to see her aunt going all googly-eyed over strange men with bows on their assets. And judging from the way his square jaw softened as he took in her sparkly one-shouldered tunic, he might be having the same kind of thoughts.

  Then he squinted at her hat and his lips tightened in obvious disapproval.

  She touched the brim self-consciously. Okay, it wasn’t a cowboy hat. But it kept the sun off her face, and it was a hell of a lot prettier than the dirty old thing he was wearing. Especially since she’d stuck a few roadside flowers in the blue silk scarf wrapped around the crown. He might look like a Louis L’Amour hero, but she looked like a Renoir painting.

  “I’d better get back to work,” he said. “Feel free to explore, and let me know if you need anything.” He turned and shot one of the grubby panes with Windex, giving her a chance to appreciate the fine slice of Wyoming scenery framed by the fringe on his chaps.

  Throwing her hat on a chair, she tossed her head to get her hair out of her eyes and her mind out of the gutter. She was supposed to be checking out the bunkhouse, not the wrangler. Raking her fingers through her hair, she strode down a short hall to her left, glancing right and left to check out the rooms.

  The website trumpeted “private rooms” with a shared “luxury bath,” but by that standard, a box stall in a barn would be designated a first-class suite. The bedrooms were more like cubicles than rooms, with walls that ended a foot below the ceiling. Inside each one, a neatly made bed was accompanied by a worn wooden kitchen chair and a rickety dresser. A few tin lanterns and antique rodeo posters were scattered around in a failed effort to transform the thrift shop furnishings into Western chic.

  Returning to the front room, she peered out the newly cleaned window at the rough dirt crater between the two bunkhouses. It looked like a mortar hole in no-man’s-land.

  “What’s that?”

  “The fire pit.” He stood back from the window, then reached out to remove a final streak of cleaner. The move reminded her of an artist putting the final touches on a painting. “I’ll have benches around it by the time your guests get here.”

  She sighed. “I suppose we gather ’round at night and sing cowboy songs?”

  He grinned. “Don’t knock it till you’ve tried it.”

  “I don’t know any cowboy songs.”

  That wasn’t quite true. Her dad had loved Westerns, and the eerie, threatening whistle from “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” sounded in her head every time she looked at this guy. He might be wearing the biggest white hat she’d ever seen, but he was definitely not Roy Rogers.

  “I’ll teach ’em to you.” His smile revealed strong teeth nearly as white as the hat. Momentarily dazzled, she looked away and muttered something about freshening up.

  Backing into the bathroom, she closed the door and sat heavily on the side of the claw-footed tub with her feet splayed and her knees together. Resting her forearms on her thighs, she hung her head and let the sights and sounds of the last few hours swirl in her brain.

  The hollow drone of the airplane landing in Denver. The hum of the highway under the wheels of her rental car. The featureless prairie stretching out on either side of the road, marked by an endless parade of telephone poles. The ranch itself, a cluster of broken-down buildings bleached gray by the sun.

  It might be authentic, but even the waves of testosterone emanating from the cowboy window washer couldn’t mask the place’s air of seedy desperation.

  At least the bathroom was quaint, with its old-style tile and porcelain fixtures, though the dried-flower arrangement on the back of the toilet looked as if it had been culled from the dead weeds out front. A decorative shelf above it held a selection of antique cosmetics, along with a chipped mug bearing a selection of pearl-topped hat pins. She briefly considered suicide by hat pin but decided death by puncture wound would hurt more than getting fired by the Art Treks corporation.

  But they couldn’t fire her. Not yet, anyway. The Boyd Dude Ranch had been the company’s choice. She was just supposed to make it work.

  Which meant they would fire her later.

  Rising, she checked her hair in the mirror, tousling the dark waves, and pressed her lips together to refresh her lipstick. The mirror was foxed and dim, with spidery cracks radiating from the corners.

  Squaring her shoulders, she gave herself an encouraging smile and stepped out to confront the cowboy again. He was cleaning the panes in the front window now.

  “Who do I talk to about this?”

  “About what?”

  She gestured toward the bedrooms. “The accommodations.”

  “What’s wrong with ’em?”

  She heaved a theatrical sigh. “Where do I start?”

  His dark eyes narrowed, and what was left of his easy grin flattened into a grim scowl. “I guess you can talk to my mother. She’s up at the house.”

  Great. Not only did he dress like Yosemite Sam and talk like Slim Pickens, but he was a mama’s boy, too. She jammed on her hat and headed for the door, then hesitated on the threshold. Maybe she should pocket one of those hat pins so she could stab the person who put together that website.

  Hell, she didn’t need a hat pin. All she needed to put a hole in the proprietor of the Boyd Dude Ranch were sharp words and a sharper tongue. And while she might look like a doe-eyed Disney princess and dress like a drunken flapper, she’d never had a problem expressing herself.

  Chapter 2

  A heavyset woman was flailing around with a broom in the front hall of the house, hounding a herd of dust bunnies over the doorsill. In her blue-striped housedress and white apron, she fit right in with the dude ranch decor—although the dress, unlike the ranch, looked reasonably new. And clean.

  Cat cleared her throat. As the woman whirled to face her, dust bunnies swarmed around her feet in a broom-created eddy, then skittered for freedom.

  “Why, you must be Miss Crandall.” The woman propped the broom against the wall and crossed the porch in two long strides to grasp both Cat’s hands in a surprisingly powerful welcome. She had the cute, dark-haired country charm of Patsy Cline—if Patsy had been six feet tal
l with the muscles of a stevedore.

  “Welcome to the Boyd Dude Ranch.” The woman’s dark eyes crinkled at the corners. “I’m Madeleine Boyd. You can call me Maddie.”

  “Thank you.” Don’t let her soften you up. Of course she’s friendly; she’s trying to rip you off. “I had some questions about the accommodations.”

  Maddie gave her a knowing smile. “I suppose they’re not what you’re used to?”

  “Not at all. The bunkhouse…”

  “We call ’em the Heifer House and the Bull Barn.” Madeleine smiled, which made her eyes squinny up and her cheeks go plump. If an enormous middle-aged woman could be adorable, that’s what she was. “Don’t worry. People don’t come here to sit around in their rooms. They come for the campfires and the camaraderie. And let me tell you, we deliver on that.”

  Great. They were probably going to sing “Kumbaya.” Or “Cattle Call.” Cat wondered if the cowboy could yodel. He’d probably do it if his mother told him to.

  “The website’s misleading.” Cat put on her best hair pin voice. “I saw pictures of the house that led me to believe…”

  “If anyone wants to stay in the house they’re welcome to,” Madeleine said briskly. “But I think you should try the bunkhouse. Roughing it really adds to the Wyoming experience.” She gave a sharp nod, as if the whole matter had been decided. “We have a fire pit out there, and a chuck wagon. Believe me, there’s nothing better than supper under the stars. You’ve never seen stars like we’ve got here in Wyoming.”

  Cat suspected they were the same stars she’d seen in Chicago. She started to say so, but Mrs. Boyd laid a motherly hand on her arm and met her eyes so honestly Cat felt her will to fight flattening like a possum under a semitruck.

  “All right,” she said. “We’ll try it.”

  It wasn’t like she had a choice. She could hardly ask her students to stay at the Day’s Inn out on the highway. And there was no other option for miles.

  “Good.” The woman’s eyes sparkled. “Just so you know, your hostess—that’s me—is a champion chuck-wagon chef. You haven’t lived till you’ve tried my biscuits. Did you see the wagon? It’s a bona fide piece of Wyoming history.”