The Cowboy She Never Forgot

by Cheryl Biggs

  Of course, since she hadn’t been able to forget him in the three years he’d been out of her life, the idea of forgetting him now was obviously wishful thinking. Nerves, she told herself sternly, that’s all her reaction to seeing him again was. Nerves.

  The moment her captain had handed her this assignment, and she’d realized she couldn’t get out of it, Kate had begun plotting ways to try to avoid running into Shane. She knew he’d be at the arena. Reno’s annual rodeo was one of the city’s biggest yearly events, and most cowboys aiming for the Championships in Vegas didn’t miss it.

  After reading what little information there was available on the case, she’d realized avoiding Shane was going to be impossible. The stock and quite a few of the contestants had begun arriving two days ago. The incidents of sabotage had started almost immediately, and Shane had already been a victim three times.

  “Nerves,” she snapped at herself. Kate jerked the key in the ignition and the engine squealed in protest. Cringing, she tried again, with a lighter hand. The engine purred to life and Kate shifted into gear and headed for the numerous rows of covered blue stalls that lined the eastern side of the rodeo grounds.

  She could have tried to argue her way out of this case, but this would be her first plainclothes assignment since passing the detectives’ exam. If she wanted to have a chance of getting the next open spot in the detectives’ division, turning down assignments wasn’t the way to do it, especially after Captain Aames pointed out she was the only officer available with any rodeo experience.

  She cursed her luck and pulled the Cherokee to a stop in front of the stall the arena manager had assigned her horse. What she needed to do was catch the saboteur quickly, and stay as far away from Shane Larrabee as possible.

  She swallowed hard as thoughts of him filled her mind. Why did he have to come back to Reno anyway? Couldn’t he have made his points somewhere else? She’d purposely stayed away from the rodeo the past two years, just to avoid running into him, and she’d intended to do the same this year.

  Her fingers tightened around the steering wheel. More to the point; why did there have to be a maniac sabotaging the rodeo anyway? Couldn’t he have been a normal nutcase and picked on the casinos?

  She brushed a stray lock of hair away from her face and tried to push the memories of a tall, dark cowboy as easily from her mind. But it didn’t work.

  Marry me, Red.

  Kate closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, trying to calm herself. What they’d had was in the past. She might still be attracted to him physically, but that was all. And even if there was more to it than that, it was still no good. She would never, ever make the same mistake her mother had made. Not for any man. She jerked open the door of the Jeep and walked around to the rear of her horse trailer. “Let it go,” she ordered herself harshly. “It’s over. Finished.”

  Jim Hodges flipped open a ledger, ran his finger down the length of one page, and finally stopped near the bottom. He wrote something down, then looked up at Shane, who was still staring at the door Kate had exited through. “Move your horse to stall 38A.”

  Shane stared at the door, lost in confusion and memories.

  “Larrabee!” Hodges snapped.

  Shane jerked around as Hodges’s voice sliced through thoughts of Kate that he didn’t want and shouldn’t be having. The past had rushed in on him the moment he saw her standing in Hodges’s office, bringing with it an avalanche of feelings he’d thought long dead and buried.

  “Move your horse to 38A,” Hodges said again.

  Shane stared at the arena manager. “Move my horse?” he echoed, forcing his mind back to the business at hand. “What good is that going to do?”

  “I don’t know that it’ll do any good.” Hodges ran a hand through his rapidly receding, silver-streaked brown hair, and pushed back in his swivel chair. “But it’s worth a try until we get to the bottom of whoever’s pulling these stunts. Especially since this is the third one directed against you.” He threw his pen down on the desk. “And for right now, it’s about all I’ve got.”

  Shane left the trailer, cursing under his breath. First these blasted incidents, and now Kate. Next time he’d follow his gut’s hunch, which had been telling him for days not to go to Reno. “Dammit all.” If anything happened to his horse before Hodges got his sorry rear off that chair and nabbed whoever was behind these damned attacks, someone was going to wish they’d never heard of Shane Larrabee. Then a thought struck him; was Kate there to investigate the things that had been happening? It made sense. But he didn’t want it to. He decided not to think about that. At least not right now. He needed to keep his concentration on the rodeo...on his rodeo...on making sure his horse and gear were safe.

  A while later, after gathering his equipment and grumbling a bit at the change, he headed toward the new location. With his horse in tow, he paused behind a red-and-white horse trailer attached to the rear of a red Cherokee. Both were parked in the aisle between the stall buildings, and the trailer was blocking the door to Samson’s new stall.

  Shane looked around. There were only two stall doors standing open nearby. One was directly across from where he stood, but he could see that the stall was empty. He moved around the trailer and Jeep to the other open door, which was just beyond the vehicle’s front bumper.

  The most magnificently built Appaloosa mare he’d ever seen stood profile to him in the middle of the stall. Her ebony body seemed to shimmer richly, while the blanket of white hair across her rump was as pristine as newly fallen snow. She turned her head upon noticing Shane, then pawed the ground nervously with one front hoof.

  “Whoa, girl,” someone said softly.

  Shane frowned, seeing no one. He bent slightly and saw two booted feet and a pair of slender, jean-clad legs beyond the horse’s stomach. He rapped his knuckles on the stall’s metal door. “Hey, excuse me. You mind moving your rig so I can open the gate to my horse’s stall?”

  Kate, in the process of brushing down Rain Dancer, froze upon hearing Shane’s voice.

  “Yo, excuse me?” Shane said again, when he received no response.

  Kate tossed the brush into a nearby pail and reluctantly straightened, looking at him over Dancer’s back. The urge to flee filled her immediately, but he stood in the doorway, so there was nowhere to go.

  Sunlight at his back gave his image a dark, almost forbidding appearance. His face remained in shadow, shaded by the Stetson pulled low over his forehead, so that she couldn’t see his eyes, but she didn’t have to. She felt them, remembered what it was like to lose herself within them.

  Something hot and gnawing coiled within the deeper regions of Shane’s gut as his gaze met Kate’s across the dimly lit expanse of the spacious stall. He swore beneath his breath. Her horse had the quarters next to his. If this wasn’t rotten luck he didn’t know what was.

  For a brief moment he was sorely tempted to take Samson back to his original stall. Then he remembered the tacks. And the dirty motor oil that had been slopped on his gear yesterday. And the slashed lead rope. Maybe the next time he saw Hodges he’d just ask the man if there were any other empty stalls.

  Kate walked around Rain Dancer and stopped a few feet from where Shane stood.

  “Your rig,” he said, forcing the words past a tongue that suddenly felt like dried leather. “It’s blocking entry to the gate next door.”

  “The gate next door,” Kate repeated slowly, looking from him, to his horse, to the wall separating her stall from the one next to it. Her gaze jerked back to meet Shane’s as realization flashed into her eyes. “That’s your stall?”

  “Hodges reassigned me.” The knot in his stomach tightened as memories of being wrapped in her embrace taunted him. His gaze swept over her, raking through the dark, red-touched strands that fell to her shoulders in cascading waves, the soft curve of breasts that he’d once held in his hands, the slender length of legs that seemed to go on forever.

  Shane felt his body start to harden and tried t
o look away, but her eyes silently called to him, relentlessly drew him back into the past, and made him wonder why he’d ever walked away from her.

  Tension seemed to fill the air between them.

  Anxiety had seized Kate the moment she’d heard his voice and realized he was standing in the doorway of Dancer’s stall. She felt a shiver ripple through her body, leaving her hands trembling and her nerves begging for release, and slid her tongue across suddenly parched lips. “How—how have you been, Shane?” she asked finally, breaking the silence that had descended upon them.

  Horrible, he wanted to say. “Fine,” he said instead, his deep voice, with its melodious drawl, calm and smooth. “Couldn’t be better. How about you?”

  She inclined her head and smiled woodenly. “Fine. I run a few head of cattle on the ranch now, I’ve started an Appy breeding program, my Dad’s retired, and...” She shrugged, knowing she couldn’t go any further for fear of touching on the truth...and that was something she couldn’t do. Aames had made his orders clear: absolutely no one was to know she was a cop, and if she ran into anyone she knew, she had a cover story—she’d quit. That meant she couldn’t tell anyone the truth, because if she did, even just Shane, and Aames found out, he’d demote her to traffic duty faster than she could blink.

  Shane’s fingers tightened around Samson’s lead rope. Everything in him urged him to reach out and drag Kate into his arms, to cover her lips with his and kiss her until he had no breath left in him to continue, until—He cut off the wayward thought, remembering that only moments ago, in Hodges’s office, she’d pretended they were strangers.

  His gaze held hers. Maybe they were strangers, he thought finally. Maybe that’s exactly what they’d always been.

  “So, when did you take up competing, Kate?” he asked, feeling the need to make small talk, to cut through the uneasy silence hanging over them.

  His question whirled about in her mind, seeking the answer she’d prepared, but momentarily forgotten. She gave a nonchalant toss of her head and, averting her gaze from his, tugged irritably at one sleeve of her shirt. “Oh, um, a while ago. I, ah, always did want to compete, you know, but, well, there were other things I had to do.”

  “Like being a cop?” he said bluntly, letting the old resentment touch his tone. He’d loved her, wanted to marry her, and she’d chosen her job over him, over the life they could have had together. The sting of that never had quite left him. He saw her flinch slightly at the question, and her eyes flicked away from his.

  Then her chin rose in defiance. “Yes, like being a cop,” she said softly.

  “But you’re competing now, so I guess you gave it up?” His eyes bored into hers.

  “Yes, I’m competing now,” she said, avoiding at least one outright lie for the moment.

  She’d quit. His gaze moved to her left hand, then back up to her eyes. How many times over the past three years had he picked up the phone to call her, only to curse angrily and slam it back down again? Leaving her had been the hardest thing he had ever done, but he’d had to do it. In reality, he’d had no choice. Of course, he’d believed then that she’d soon see reason and come after him.

  But she hadn’t, and that had nearly killed him, literally. He’d gone off the deep end for a while, closing bars in the wee hours of the morning, then riding bulls and roping steers in the evening while his brain was still half lost in the murky fog of a hangover. He’d spent as much time in the medical trailer as in the arena that year.

  He’d broken his right leg in Denver, cracked two ribs in San Antonio, suffered a concussion in Billings, and been gored in Phoenix. Then, in Mesquite, he’d agonized through a dislocated shoulder after getting his hand tangled with the rope when it was released, and danced with a ton of mean bull for nearly half a minute before managing to get free. Finally, he’d managed to pull himself together.

  “You rode really well at the Championships last year in Vegas,” Kate said.

  His eyes narrowed slightly in surprise at her comment. “You were there?” He felt instantly annoyed with himself for even caring.

  She smiled and shook her head. “No. I watched it on television.”

  He shook his head as memory of that ride came back to mind and an unconscious grin pulled at one corner of his mouth. “I was positive I was going to blow it.”

  “Why?”

  His gaze delved into hers. Part of him knew he should just turn and walk away, but another part kept him glued to the spot, and unwilling to stop the easy flow of conversation between them. “I was in the bull pens the night before the final competition, checking out the animals I’d drawn to ride. Couple of them got antsy and started kicking. A hoof caught me in the shin.” He shook his head and chuckled softly. “Saw stars for hours.”

  “I’ll bet,” Kate said, and glanced away. This was too hard. She didn’t want to talk to him anymore, didn’t want to stand here in this small enclosure and try to deny the feelings churning about inside her like a trapped tornado readying to rip free.

  “So why’d you pretend we didn’t know each other when we were in Hodges’s office?”

  Kate’s head jerked up and her eyes met his, the question startling her. “I—I just didn’t want to explain how we knew each other, that’s all.”

  Her composure threatened to desert her again.

  Skepticism shone from Shane’s eyes and edged his drawling tone. “Really?”

  She swallowed hard. “It seemed simpler to pretend we didn’t, rather than answer any questions.”

  “Probably.” He looked at her long and hard, a million questions of his own racing through his mind, but only one desire stirring the blood in his veins.

  “Well, I guess I’d better get my rig out of your way.” She ran a hand over her horse’s back, then picked up the pail of combs and brushes and hung it from a hook near the door. Her gaze was momentarily imprisoned by his and Kate stiffened. She was still a cop, she reminded herself. Nothing had changed. He couldn’t accept that, and she had no more intention of giving up her career today than she’d had three years ago. “I—” She what? She mentally shook herself. “I was getting ready to leave anyway.”

  He stepped back and out of the way as she moved past him, pulled the stall gate closed and locked it.

  Kate looked up at him. Her lips curved into an unconscious smile, while her insides continued to roil nervously. “Well, it’s been nice seeing you again, Shane.” She turned to the Cherokee, jerked open the driver’s door, and climbed in swiftly. “Good luck with the competition.”

  “Yeah, you too.” He led Samson away from the Jeep as Kate’s engine roared to life, watched her pull away from him, reach the end of the aisle way, then turn out of sight.

  For the second time that day Shane felt something stir in him that hadn’t been there for three years.

  Shaking his head, he turned to release the latch on the gate to Samson’s stall, wondering if he was going to end up thanking Jim Hodges, or wanting to strangle him.

  Throwing the gate open and reaching for Samson’s reins, Shane’s mind wasn’t on what he was doing. His thoughts were full of a woman he’d expected never to see again. Until he flicked on the overhead light and took a step inside the stall.

  He stopped instantly, anger trembling through his veins as he stared at the ugly threat smeared across the rear wall with red paint.

  Chapter 2

  By the time 6:00 p.m. rolled around and the rodeo’s opening ceremonies began, Shane had blasted Hodges again, worked his anger out on the equipment at a local gym, and finally managed to get his temper back under control, and his memories of Kate pushed to the back of his mind where they belonged.

  He sat on the fence rail of one of the waiting bull pens and watched the activity going on in the arena.

  The crowd cheered as a rodeo clown, waving his straw hat and a checkered bandanna, ran in front of a bull who’d just thrown his rider.

  The angry animal whirled, snorted, pawed the ground, then charged.


  The clown ran for a red rubber barrel set a few feet away, and dived into it only seconds before the massive bull’s head and deadly horns rammed it and sent it spiraling across the arena.

  Shane shook his head in admiration. “And they say we’re crazy.”

  “Yeah, we all are, but stop trying to change the subject,” Tim Norris said, balancing on a fence rail as he handed Shane his gloves. “How did this creep know you’d be moving your horse to another stall, let alone which one?”

  Shane shrugged, though the nonchalant gesture was not enough to mask the fury blazing in his eyes. “I’d like an answer to that question too, but...” A cold, sardonic expression settled on his features as he tugged on the thick, well-worn gloves.

  Another buzzer sounded and a gate several yards from Shane’s pen flew open. Bull and rider charged into the arena.

  “Well, we’d better get an answer soon,” Tim said, swearing softly as he glanced up at the other rider. He pushed his hat from his forehead with a nudge of the back of his hand, and several curls of dark blond hair tumbled free. “Nanniker found the padlock on his footlocker smashed all to blazes this morning, and his best bit gone.”

  Shane nodded at his friend’s comment and shifted the position of his protection vest. “Well, guess it’s time to rock and roll,” he mumbled. Grabbing the rail with one hand, he stepped down to the next, then swung a leg out and over LaBamba’s back.

  The large, mottled brown-and-white bull huffed indignantly at Shane’s weight, then shook his shoulders. “Easy boy,” Shane said. “We’re not out there yet.” The bull snorted and pawed a front hoof at the ground, as if anxious for the gate to open so he could throw Shane from his back...or worse.

  Shane settled into his seat and slid his right hand under the rope that wrapped around LaBamba’s girth.

  The sound of the rodeo buzzer split the air and a roar of approval burst from the audience. Shane glanced toward the arena.