Daddy's Little Cowgirl
Autorzy
Charlotte Maclay
Lektury
17,6K
Rozdziały
15
Chapter One
Reed Drummond drove the thirty head of beef cattle down the narrow California blacktop highway. He could have used a partner to keep the animals in line. What he had was a mangy mutt.
He whistled, and the mutt nipped at the heels of the stragglers.
The winding road divided two main sections of the Rocking D Ranch, a thousand-acre spread located in the rolling hills that rose along the coastline of central California, not far from San Simeon and the Hearst castle. As Reed well knew, wherever you grazed cattle, the grass was always greener just down the road a piece. He’d traveled a lot of roads in his twenty-seven years, worked as a hired hand in a half-dozen different states and more than a dozen cattle ranches. Now he was back home again, had been for a month, and it sure as hell wasn’t a castle.
Automatically he reached into his shirt pocket for his cigarette fixings and came up with a pacifier instead. He grinned.
Who would have thought he’d be a father, not to his own kid but to a brown-eyed sweetheart born to a young couple who’d latched on to him like Reed was their big brother or something. Until Betsy and Tommy had come along, he’d been a loner, a rolling stone that gathered no moss. They’d darn near adopted him, sticking like glue as they moved from ranch to ranch with him.
Maybe they’d stuck to him because they were runaways like Reed had once been—and with the same good reasons.
Those two kids were so tickled when Betsy got pregnant, too young to know better.
And then came the accident, Tommy driving their old jalopy, Betsy in the passenger seat, Reed a halfmile behind them in his pickup, all driving toward Fort Worth and a new job. Betsy made it to the hospital—barely. Tommy hadn’t gotten that far.
Reed’s throat closed on the memory, and he stuffed the pacifier back into his pocket. Betsy’s very last request was that Reed take her baby, adopt little Betina and be the best daddy he could be.
He hadn’t wanted to be responsible for a kid. A thousand other guys would have been a better choice. But Betsy had chosen him and with practically her last breath told him Tommy would have wanted it that way too. No way could he have told them no.
So he’d given up cigarettes cold turkey, hired a housekeeper, packed up Betina and brought her home to the Rocking D. He hadn’t thought of his father’s run-down cattle ranch as home in more than a dozen years. But he couldn’t raise Betina on the road, living in bunkhouses wherever they happened to need a hired hand. That was no life for a kid.
The ranch had been his for more than two years, since his old man’s liver had finally given out on him.
Betina needed a place to grow up, a place she could call home. Reed would damn well see she got it.
He’d given his word to her mother. It was that simple—and that complicated. Reed never went back on his word. Never.
“Keep on movin’,” he urged the lead steer. “We haven’t got all day.”
The longer the herd was on the road, the greater the chances some tourist would come barreling through this scenic route at two hundred miles an hour and spook the cattle into a stampede. With only Reed and the mutt to control the animals, slowing a pack of runaway beef on the hoof would be a damn hard trick to pull off.
There was a school between this particular spot on the road and the pasture where Reed was heading. Nobody had ever bothered to put up a fence there, certainly not his old man, who’d spent more time drunk than sober.
For a moment, he smiled and thought about Betina—Bets, he’d taken to calling her—someday going to that same school. Good God! he laughed. He’d have to join the PTA! Wouldn’t that just make the town mothers roll their eyes.
Fire drill!
The shrill buzzer bleated repeatedly, echoing in the classroom and down the hallways, setting Ann Forrester’s teeth on edge. To compound an already difficult week, the school principal had added one more distraction for the youngsters. She wondered how he expected her to get any teaching done at all between short days for parent conferences, student assemblies and now a fire drill.
“All right, students. Hand your test papers to me as you go out. And remember to stay in line all the way to the goalposts on the football field,” she admonished the class of seventh-graders.
“I didn’t get to finish, Miss Forrester,” Rosetta complained, the ever-conscientious student.
“It’s all right. We’ll work on it tomorrow.”
“Aw, gee, Miss Forrester.” Jason handed her a paper so wrinkled it looked as if he’d had it stuffed in his pocket. Which, knowing Jason, he probably had. “I’m not gonna be here tomorrow. I’ve got a dentist appointment.” He grinned.
“Then I guess you’ll have to come by this afternoon after school to complete your test.”
His smile crumpled. “Hey, no way, man. You’re not givin’ me detention just ‘cause of some stupid—”
“Outside, Jason. On the football field,” she ordered, trying to break up the logjam of students leaving the classroom. In a gesture of frustration, she flipped the ends of her long hair back behind her shoulder.
Preadolescents were at their most creative when making up excuses not to do their work. Ann didn’t let them get away with much, particularly a youngster like Jason. He had a great deal of potential but so far he’d wasted it all. Given that he was in foster care and had a terrible background of abuse and abandonment, it was little wonder he was a troubled child.
Her biggest weakness as a teacher had always been worrying about the kids who were at risk of being lost in the system. Bad boys invariably touched her heart the most. More times than not, her efforts to “save” them were a flop. Why she kept on trying was beyond her. It seemed a part of her nature she simply couldn’t change.
With minimum organization, the students milled around the football field. Teachers tried to keep them contained, everyone waiting with equal impatience for Mr. Dunlap to give the all-clear signal.
Beneath her feet Ann felt a rumbling sensation. The ground quivered like Jell-O. What were the kids doing now? she wondered. Or was it an earthquake? She looked around for an explanation.
Suddenly her eyes widened in horror.
A cloud of billowing dust was rolling toward the unprotected students on the football field. The earth shook harder. The incessant roar increased.
“Stampede!” she screamed. “Run!”
Acting on instinct, afraid her students would be trampled—the kids she loved and worried over and cried for—Ann yanked off her sweater and waved it wildly in the air to divert the lead animals onto a new path.
“Get away!” she shouted. “Shoo! You don’t belong here.”
The smell of dust filled her nostrils; thundering hooves pounded closer as the herd veered away from the students—and directly toward Ann. She could see the lead animals, white blazes on their faces. Eyes wide. Heads bent with determination.
“No!” she screamed.
From out of nowhere, a horse and rider appeared. He bore down on her like an avenging angel. Sorrel horse. Stetson clamped low on the rider’s head. Chaps flying. Heels flailing the animal’s belly. Ann had a fleeting thought that if the cattle didn’t kill her, this deranged cowboy would.
Without the horse missing a single stride, the rider lifted Ann off her feet, swung her up in front of him, and slammed her across his rock-hard thighs like a sack of flour. Every cubic centimeter of breath was driven from her lungs.
“Hang on, lady,” he ordered.
As if she had a choice, she mentally muttered, grasping for whatever she could hold on to. The galloping pace threw her against the man’s pelvis again and again. The ridge of the saddle horn dug into her midsection. Knee-high grass raced by in a blur at what seemed like only inches from her face. On her thigh, holding her, the cowboy’s palm burned into her flesh.
If all the blood hadn’t rushed to her head, she might have given serious thought to the position of her skirt, or wondered whether she’d donned a decent pair of panties that morning.
Before the worry of that embarrassment could take hold, the horse whirled, racing off in a new direction, paralleling the stampeding cattle, driving them away from the students who were scurrying for safety.
Finally slowing, the cowboy clamped his hands around her waist, twisting her, and righting her in his lap as if she were no more than a rag doll. Ann scrambled to restore some modesty to her skirt and drew her first full breath.
The scent of male and musk and leather invaded her senses along with the keen awareness of her rescuer’s broad shoulders and muscular arms.
Oh, my…
He reined the horse to a stop, eased her to the ground and dropped down beside her, all in one fluid motion. The horse heaved a deep breath. Weak with relief, so did she.
“Lady, are you totally nuts or something?” Eyes the color of polished bronze glared at her. An angry glare. A look that mesmerized and made her mouth go dry. For a moment, Ann wasn’t sure if she’d been rescued—or captured.
“Me?” she sputtered, trying to smooth her hair that was in wild disarray. “You’re the one who was riding hell-bent for leather! You and your cows could have killed those children. I’ve never seen anything more dangerous, more irresponsible—”
“Didn’t anybody ever tell you it’s not real smart to wave a red flag in front of a bull?”
She blinked. “Those weren’t bulls.”
“Nope, don’t suppose they were.” He rested one arm on the saddle and with his other hand thumbed his hat a little higher on his forehead. His lips curved ever so slightly as he perused her with a lazy, intimate glance. His gaze lingered overly long on her breasts, stripping her bare. “Still strikes me as a damn fool thing to do, though,” he drawled.
Lord, he was a tall, slow-talking cowboy, his body lean and hard all over, his face tanned, his sideburns saddle-brown. Not pretty. Too rugged for that. Too insolent. And she shivered with suppressed pleasure at his too-familiar inspection of her. Lord knew how much more he’d seen of her while she’d been upended over his lap.
Glancing back toward the playing field, she saw the splash of red that used to be her sweater now trampled into the grass. “I guess I wasn’t thinking. I mean, the children…”
“So you thought you’d plant your pretty little body right smack in the middle of their path and scare thirty head of rampaging beef cattle out of the way to protect those sweet little darlings. Now you tell me, sugar, who’s the irresponsible one around here?”
Her pretty little body? Sugar? Ann didn’t know whether to react to his unexpected comments or to the accusation that she was irresponsible. Why, she was probably the most responsible person she knew. With one devastating exception when she was seventeen years old, she’d always been reliable and dependable. The very nerve of this high-flying cowboy—
“Now, listen here, buster.” She’d dealt with her share of recalcitrant bad boys. This guy was no different, only older and a lot taller. And sexier. So sexy he was dangerous. “You’re the one whose herd put those children at risk. If you hadn’t let them stampede that way—”
His eyes narrowed threateningly, cutting her off, and squint lines appeared at the corners of those burnished eyes. “If some fool city slicker hadn’t been driving the road too fast while I was moving my herd slow and peaceful-like, one of my steers wouldn’t have gotten nicked by his car and the rest wouldn’t have taken off at a dead run. And if you hadn’t been waving that damn red flag, I might’ve turned the herd a mite sooner instead of having to pluck you outta harm’s way.” Idly, he stroked the sleek, sweat-dampened neck of his horse, his hand looking both big and gentle on the animal’s rich, brown velvet coat. “For which you haven’t yet thanked me, sugar.”
“I, yes, of course, I appreciate—”
“You’re welcome, sweetlin’.” He touched the brim of his Stetson, a working hat stained by weather and sweat, not one a Saturday-night cowboy would wear out on the town. Nor were his jeans anything but practical, worn hard till they were nearly white and as soft as the warm leather gloving his thighs. His full lips twitched with the merest hint of a smile. “You’re tough, teach. I’ll give you that. Not many women would stand up to me…or to my cows like you did.”
For one breathless moment, Ann wanted to bask in the glow of this stranger’s compliment. She wanted to savor the feeling of being totally feminine against his raw, hard-edged maleness. But that was ridiculous.
She was a math teacher. Foolish notions about a tall, ruggedly handsome cowboy rescuing a damsel in distress had no place in her logical mind. Equations and orderly decimal points rested far more comfortably there.
Yet the scent of him did troubling things to her. His musky heat, the pungent aroma of maleness. Paralyzing things that threatened to consume her power to reason.
“Miss Forrester!”
Dragging her thoughts from the cowboy, she turned to the sound of Mr. Dunlap calling her name. The students were still milling around the football field—excited by the stampede—and the principal was jogging toward her across the grassy field beyond the playground. It occurred to Ann this was the first time she’d ever seen her principal move at a faster pace than a slow walk, and that with difficulty due to his ample girth. She hoped he wouldn’t have a heart attack.
“Looks like you’ve been caught playing hooky, teach.”
“Not exactly, but the children need to get back to class. So do I.” To linger in this cowboy’s company would be beyond foolhardy, not to mention a sure way to destroy her reputation in the small town of Mar del Oro.
“I’ll give you a ride.”
“No, that really isn’t nec—” She squealed as he grabbed her around the waist and hefted her up onto the back of the horse behind the saddle. Her full skirt bunched up to her thighs as she straddled the animal.
Then, in another fluid motion, one so graceful it was almost like a dance, he mounted in front of her.
Automatically she wrapped her arms around his waist to prevent herself from sliding off. With a shocking awareness, every feminine cell in her body registered the breadth of his back and the contour of hidden sinew and muscles beneath his shirt. “Don’t you know how to take no for an answer?”
“Nope.” He set the horse into an easy lope across the field. “Most times, when the ladies I know say no they really mean yes, or maybe. Thought I ought to give you the same chance, you being a high-class teacher ‘n’ all. Purdy as a little palomino filly I once had and just as sweet, I reckon. Wouldn’t want you to miss out.”
The man was incorrigible. In spite of that, Ann found herself smiling and wishing she could rest her cheek against the blue chambray fabric that covered his broad back. In the heat of the day, it would feel warm. And solid.
And she shouldn’t even be considering such a thing.
They approached Mr. Dunlap, and the cowboy gave her his hand, helping her to slide off the horse. Ann looked up to thank him but he spoke before she had a chance.
“Of course, that filly I mentioned could be darn stubborn when she set her mind to it. A passionate little thing she was when she got riled.” His bronze eyes twinkled with mischief as he spoke low and slow, his voice rusty and unfairly intimate. “She surely could keep a man on his toes, if you know what I mean. Reckon you could, too, sugar.”
Heat flamed her cheeks and the sharp thrill of excitement sped through her. She’d never had a man say anything so outrageous to her. Never. And she hated the way her heart lurched in her chest and the frisson of secret pleasure that swept through her midsection. That was no way for a woman to act. Particularly in front of her principal—even if he hadn’t heard the cowboy’s suggestive remarks.
“Miss Forrester, are you all right?” Harry Dunlap asked between wheezing breaths.
“I’m fine. Really.” Except for a mild case of heart palpitations, which she was sure would quickly pass. Though somewhere downstream she might have an erotic dream or two, this reckless cowboy playing a major role. She suspected he’d provide the hottest, most titillating—
”When you went running out to those beasts, we were all so frightened.”
“As you can see, this gentleman rescued me. No harm done.”
“Well, we certainly are grateful. The children…” Tilting his head, Mr. Dunlap studied the cowboy. “Don’t I know you, young man?”
“You’ve got a good memory, Mr. Dunlap. But then, I spent a hell of a lot of time in your office, didn’t I?”
“Well, my sakes. Reed Drummond, isn’t it?”
“One and the same.” He touched the brim of his hat with a two-finger salute. “Nice seeing y’all again. Miss Forrester.” With a nod, he wheeled the horse around and galloped off toward where his cattle were grazing peacefully. A shaggy black-and-white dog patrolled the perimeter of the herd, his tail wagging like a semaphore.
Mr. Dunlap pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his sweaty brow. “Oh, my, I’m not entirely pleased to see that young man back in town.”
“Back?” she asked. “From where?”
“I heard he’s been in Texas. A rolling stone, I suspect.”
“Oh.” That would explain his slow, cowboy drawl, she realized, her gaze following him. She noted how well he sat his horse, as if they had been molded together as one. He’d ride a woman the same way, she imagined. And the shock of that thought nearly made her knees buckle.
“He was a hellion as a youngster. Got into nothing but trouble all through junior high and high school. Never did graduate that I know of. Bad blood, I’d say. His father used to spend more Saturday nights in the jail than the police chief did. A fighting, brawling drunk, I heard.”
“If his father was an alcoholic, maybe Reed had good reason for acting out” Unable to help herself, Ann had leapt to the cowboy’s defense. Just as she would have if he’d been one of her students, she told herself. Except her feelings for him were far different than those she had for the adolescents in her classroom. Far different and quite unsettling.
They turned to walk back toward the school grounds. Mr. Dunlap was still a little breathless, and Ann kept their pace slow.
“I’m worried, now that that Drummond boy is back,” Mr. Dunlap said. “His property adjoins the school’s. If he can’t keep his cattle in hand any better than he just demonstrated, we could be in for trouble.”
“Maybe the school board ought to pay to put up a fence,” Ann suggested. There were a lot of things the school board ought to be doing—like buying more and better books and additional computers, and hiring several more teachers in order to reduce class size. But they never managed to find enough dollars in their budget to make life easier for the teachers who worked in the trenches. Finding funds for a new car every year for the district superintendent didn’t seem to be a problem, however. “Besides, Reed didn’t exactly stampede the cows himself. A car spooked them.”
“You assume a man like Drummond would respect our boundaries. I doubt he’s changed much. He was always wild. He ran with a pack of boys back then. One night they broke out every single window at the elementary school. Of course he denied being involved. But we knew the truth. I tell you, people like Reed Drummond don’t change.”
A shiver slid down Ann’s spine. If she had an Achilles’ heel, it was for the kind of bad boy who’d tempted her in high school. That slip had cost her dearly. She’d spent years rebuilding her self-esteem. Deep in her heart, she still carried a sense of guilt for having been so gullible. And for having lost so much.
Not that Reed Drummond posed any real threat to her. In spite of his flagrant flirtation, he wouldn’t really have any interest in a thirty-something who hadn’t had a date in more years than she cared to remember. No doubt he could have any woman he wanted with a simple snap of his fingers.
She’d just as soon not count herself among his conquests. In fact, she’d make sure she wasn’t.
SMOOTH FLANKS. A mane of golden-brown hair the color of the hills blushed by a late summer sunset. Eyes that held the hint of spring grass after the rains. A stubborn chin and lips so ripe, the urge to kiss them was a living, crawling thing in his belly.
Reed gave Fiero another stroke with the grooming brush but his mind was on the pretty little filly he’d met, not his favorite cow pony.
“Maybe if they’d had teachers who looked like Miss Forrester when I was in school I might’ve hung around longer.” He grinned, remembering the principal had very clearly called her Miss. She hadn’t been wearing any rings, either, on those soft hands of hers. Soft, smooth legs, too. Holding her across his lap, it had taken all his self-restraint not to slip his hand farther under her dress and squeeze the inviting swell of her butt. Gently. Over and over again until she was groaning and wanting more.
“What do you think, Fiero? Should I sign up for a little remedial instruction with that pretty little lady? Or should I plan to teach her a thing or two instead?” Muscles tightened and heat stirred in his groin as he took the thought to its ultimate conclusion.
Ah, hell. He’d been without a woman too long or he wouldn’t even be thinking like that. Why would a classy lady like Miss Forrester want anything to do with a high-school dropout who owned a ranch that was mortgaged to the hilt? A guy who’d saddled himself with raising somebody else’s baby?
Still, any woman who was passionate enough—or crazy enough—to stand her ground in front of a stampeding herd of cattle ought be one hot mama in the sack. With the right man, that is.
Leaving Fiero in his stall, Reed tossed the grooming brush on the workbench. He rotated his shoulders as he walked out of the barn into the twilight that was settling over the rolling hills. From his vantage point, he watched the evening fog slip into the valleys of the coastal range and press against the hilltops like gray memories of the past.
The mutt followed him outside and parked himself on Reed’s right foot. Idly, he stroked the dog’s head.
Until his father died, he hadn’t even considered coming home. Now it made sense. Little Bets needed a home. All things considered, this wasn’t a bad place to grow up.
Glancing at the ranch house with its peeling paint and out-of-kilter porch, he clenched his fists. He was damn well going to prove he wasn’t his father’s son. He’d turn this run-down excuse for a cattle ranch into a paying proposition or break his back trying. If not for himself, he’d do it for Bets. This would be her legacy. He’d make it a proud one.
He lifted his hat and ran his fingers through his sweat-dampened hair.
‘Course, a man had a right to some curiosity now and again about a woman he met. He’d check around town when he had a chance. Somebody ought to know Miss Forrester’s first name.
Not that calling her Sugar wouldn’t suit him just fine.
He wasn’t going to pursue the woman, though. For a man like Reed, Miss Forrester would mean nothing but trouble. He had plenty of that on his own.
Including a potential lawsuit if he didn’t make sure his cows stayed in their own backyard.
There was a big ol’ pile of fence posts out back of the barn and a couple of rolls of wire. Couldn’t hurt to take a few precautions against another stampede, particularly in this day and age. He didn’t exactly have a lot of insurance. And he damn well wasn’t going to lose the ranch because of his father’s negligence. Not when Bets’s future was at stake.
Suddenly he was eager to go inside, to make sure he was there when the housekeeper he’d brought from Texas was ready to put Bets down for the night. Reed always fed her her evening bottle. The one in the middle of the night, too, for that matter.
He grinned. He was getting pretty damn good at changing diapers, too. When he had to.
He went into the house, tossed his hat on the kitchen table and washed up. Lupe came into the room as he was finishing up.
“You’re right on time, señor. Our little chiquita, she is getting hungry.”
Reed took the baby and tucked her under his arm while Lupe got the bottle from the refrigerator. Bets nuzzled at his chest, rooting for some milk. “Hang on, sweet pea. You know I’m not equipped like your mom would have been. Your bottle’s comin’.”
He jiggled her gently, noting she still wasn’t filling out the stretchy sleeper he’d bought when she was born, and the terry cloth flapped loosely like flippers on a seal. He’d had no idea how tiny a new baby could be.
She gazed up at him with her big brown eyes. A bubble of spittle formed on her bow-shaped lips. It popped, like she was giving him a raspberry, and she grinned as if she’d just accomplished the most marvelous thing in the world, telling off her old man.
He laughed, cuddling her closer. “Hey, there. How ‘bout a little respect, huh?”
Taking the bottle Lupe had prepared, he went into the living room and sat down in the wooden rocking chair he’d bought at a flea market. A peace he’d never known existed settled over him as Bets took the bottle into her mouth, looking up at him with complete trust in her eyes.
He swore he’d move heaven and earth to make sure she never lost her faith in him.
JUGGLING HER KEYS and a briefcase full of papers to be graded, Ann walked up the steps to her house. It was nearly dark. She was hungry and tired. Worse, she’d been edgy all day since her encounter with that herd of wild-eyed cattle and the dark-eyed cowboy.
Pretty little body, indeed!
At five foot six she hardly considered herself petite—except possibly to a man who had to be at least six foot two, every inch of which was solid muscle.
On the porch, she stooped to pick up a box that had been delivered. She tucked it under her arm, held open the screen with her hip and unlocked the front door.
The small two-bedroom house she called home was her pride and joy. Polished cherrywood furniture blended with pieces upholstered in subdued federal blue, reflecting her conservative taste and giving the living room a feeling of serenity. The kitchen featured a table in the same pleasant wood. That’s where she dropped her armload.
The first thing she needed was a nice cup of tea to ease the tension from both her mind and her body. Then dinner and back to work grading papers.
She switched on the burner under the teakettle. As she waited for the water to boil, she studied the package that had arrived.
She smiled. She’d all but forgotten she’d ordered a miniature from Dora’s Miniature World a week ago. Supporting local artists was a hobby of hers, although on a teacher’s salary she couldn’t do much. But over the years she had picked up a couple of nice watercolors and some small sculptures. Recently she’d been collecting a series of lead figurines that decorated her fireplace mantel.
Using a paring knife, she slit the tape on the white cardboard carton and discovered it was packed full of packing material. She dug her hands into it and pulled out a smaller box, spraying the plastic popcorn pieces all over the kitchen table in the process. The gold-embossed label read Dream Man Collection.
“Exactly what I need,” she murmured. A four-and-a-half-inch dream man to take her mind off of one who was six foot two.
She lifted the lid and stared at the contents.
Carefully packed in molded foam, the lead figure rested on its side. Gingerly she lifted it from the box. And stopped.
This was definitely not the Dream Man she had ordered.
Instead of the image of a medieval knight with shield and lance, a miniature mounted cowboy rested in her palm. Heavy. Exquisite but not at all fragile. Painted in amazing detail, he was wearing a blue chambray shirt, fringed chaps and pale blue denim pants. The sorrel he rode glistened as though the acrylic paint had actually turned to sweat on the animal’s chestnut neck and flanks.
“No,” she whispered. “It’s not possible.”
With fingers that shook, she removed the dusty brown Stetson from the molded foam and placed it on the cowboy’s head. It fit perfectly, so low on his forehead she could barely see his polished-bronze eyes.
“No,” she said again, more loudly. Her empty stomach knotted and her mouth went dry. “This is definitely the wrong dream man for me.”
