The Cowboy Claims His Lady (2 page)

“Atta boy,” Hazel encouraged him. “You just keep thinking like that, and sooner or later things are going to start humming right along.”

He narrowed his eyes in suspicion. “Humming along? Hey, I just run a dude ranch here, Hazel, and I try to be civil with all comers. I got no ulterior motives regarding your niece.”

“Well, you'd better get some,” Hazel insisted.

His jaw slackened in surprise.

But before he could respond, Hazel said, “Shush now, here she comes.”

“The hell you up to now, old gal?” he muttered.

“Just the usual tricks,” she muttered right back, quelling her smile before Lyndie saw it. “Just the usual tricks.”

B
umping her wheeled suitcase along the dirt road toward the bunkhouse, Lyndie began to wonder what she'd gotten into.

A couple of weeks at a dude ranch had sounded fine in the steaming French Quarter—but that was then. Now she found herself in her high-heeled designer shoes, having to negotiate a hoof-rutted dirt path—not to mention the treacherous road map of a certain Mr. Everett.

He'd shaken her more than she wanted to admit. The lazy, hooded stare sparked something inside her which she feared was lust.

But she was not going down that highway to hell.
Not now. Not ever. Fancy lingerie was fine for married women and the swinging single gal, but she was a businesswoman, and the lacy, sheer demi-bras she sold were now nothing more to her than product. They were the accoutrements of some other world, not of her own.

“Ma'am,” a deep-chested voice said in her ear.

Somehow he'd appeared beside her. She faced the ice-gray eyes of Bruce Everett.

He took her suitcase and hefted it easily to his shoulder like a favorite saddle.

“That's all right—no—really, I can manage—” she stammered, following him like a schoolgirl.

“Been told you can manage just about anything—given what Hazel says about you,” he answered gruffly.

He turned and they locked stares.

Again she was frozen by his gaze.

Hazel showed up at the bunkhouse door, beaming. “We've got a good, old-fashioned Saturday night stomp at the Mystery Saloon tonight. You thinkin' of comin', Bruce?”

Lyndie cringed. She suddenly felt like she was in junior high, waiting for that first guy to ask her to dance. And there were no takers.

“You know I go for the trail and not the saloon, Hazel,” he answered gruffly.

Her great-aunt snorted like she was one of the cowpokes. “There was a time before Katherine that
you were all too familiar with the saloon, and it's time you stepped out again.”

If Lyndie didn't know better, she would have sworn Bruce Everett gave Hazel one of those permafrost looks she was beginning to recognize herself. But that was not possible. No one thwarted Hazel. Hazel was the grand-dame of Mystery, Montana.

The McCallums went back more than a century, and had settled the entire valley. Among cattle ranchers, the McCallum name was interchangeable with the Midas touch. Even Lyndie herself knew how persuasive her great-aunt could be. In the midst of expansion and fiscal crisis, Lyndie had been lured to drop everything and attend a three-week vacation at a dude ranch—when she didn't even know how to ride.

“We'll see you at the stomp,” Hazel announced.

Bruce stood and stared at the two women, Lyndie's leaden suitcase still perched on his broad shoulder.

“Well, if looks could kill…” Lyndie murmured as soon as she was locked inside Hazel's signature burnt-orange Caddy and away from the eyes and ears of Bruce Everett.

“He just needs a nudge, that's all.”

She looked at her great-aunt. “Hazel, I said no shenanigans. I certainly don't need them, not when you've convinced me to take a break. And certainly
Bruce Everett doesn't need a woman thrown in his lap when he has this Katherine he's hung up on.”

“He needs to quit his hang-up with Katherine. It wasn't his fault. She was a headstrong fool who couldn't be taught to respect a horse. And I don't care how beautiful she was, he had no business with a woman who wouldn't respect a horse,” Hazel said astutely.

“I am totally confused. What does this have to do with me?” Lyndie enquired. “Because, let me tell you, I respect horses. In fact, if the truth be known, I so respect them that I'm scared to death of them. So let Bruce and Katherine have their respect-the-horse love-fest without me.”

“He needs to go to the saloon tonight and two-step around a bit. It'd be good for what ails him. There was a time when he was the tomcat of Mystery. And believe me, the ladies didn't complain.”

Lyndie released a cynical sigh. “I know too well of what you speak, Hazel, but his tomcat ways sound like Katherine's problem.”

“Katherine's dead.”

Lyndie gave her a sharp look.

“Yep,” Hazel continued. “She died on the trail with Bruce. There was talk he was in love with her. There was even rumor of a wedding. But Katherine had no horse sense, literally. She felt horses were no better than men, ready to serve her beck and call. When the bobcat attacked, she didn't realize the cat
was protecting her litter. Katherine ignored all her mount's warnings, and, in my opinion, that's why she was bucked and fell to her death off that cliff.”

The news punched Lyndie in the gut. Empathy, something she swore she'd feel for no man after Mitch, came swelling up inside her. “I had no idea,” she said softly. “Gosh, how awful for him.”

“Yep. And him the kind of man who likes to have everything in control,” Hazel said solemnly.

“Maybe you ought to leave him alone, Hazel. After all, I'm sure he feels guilty—”

“Guilty? Why should he feel guilty? It wasn't his fault. The horse neighed and shied. And then shied and shied again. She shouldn't have forced the poor animal. But that Katherine, she was the kind of gal who never took ‘no' for an answer, and she spurred that poor frightened animal to its death. Along with hers.”

“How horrible.” A sympathetic moan emanated from Lyndie's lips. “No wonder he's so cold.”

“He was never cold before. But now he punishes himself every day.”

“Terrible.”

Hazel took a deep breath as she sped the Caddy along the dusty gravel roads toward her ranch. Every now and again, the matron gave Lyndie a probing glance. “It's not your concern whether Bruce Everett heals or not. It's just that the man works so hard. It's as if he's running from something—and I
just want to see him stop and turn around, is all. Success is useless if you can't have some fun now and then.”

Lyndie grew pensive, thinking of her own situation. Her divorce had been public and humiliating, but even worse was the inexpressible shock of betrayal, the sudden discovery that her “charming and loving” husband had been not only embezzling money from her for years, but using the funds to support his mistress.

Swindling his wife, betraying his wedding vows and her trust—it had meant no more to Mitch than killing a fly.

Suddenly, wanting to confide in Hazel, she said, “You know, Hazel, I didn't always work like a slave. I used to have fun, but…well, the fun in me just ran out, I guess. I kind of understand where Bruce Everett's coming from. Lately, work's been my only antidote, you know? Sometimes I think that after going through a divorce, ‘hell' is a redundant concept.”

Hazel gave her another study, then soothed, “You just have to let it go, hon, you hear me? What's done is done, and it can't be changed now. Remember, people come out west to start all over. From now on you have to be forward-oriented. And a few weeks at the Mystery Dude Ranch is just what you need.”

Despite the breathtaking summer panorama, Lyn
die still felt a chill settle on her as she remembered a much different, much uglier picture from last fall in New Orleans. She had returned home unexpectedly early from a business trip to Manhattan. Nothing in her life could have prepared her for the shock of opening the front door and seeing the man she loved, naked and in the throes of orgasmic bliss with a woman she had never even suspected existed.

She had tried so hard, in the difficult, intervening months, to erase that picture, to somehow focus on the good in her life and expunge the bad. But her own mother's divorce had left permanent scars. Somehow work seemed the only way to heal. At least she wouldn't be impoverished as her mother had been when Dad had kissed them all off for a younger woman. Her mother had been abandoned, with no skills, and no job, and a young child of five to raise all by herself. Work was a way to restore her pride, as her mother's pride had been restored when she went back to school and refused to let the McCallum money raise her child.

But no matter how hard Lyndie tried, it seemed that negative thoughts always had the upper hand; already the “good times” she had shared with Mitch had become a formless mist in her memory, while the sharply defined edges of the ugliness still rubbed her raw….

You
have
to curb such thinking,
Lyndie lectured herself,
or the entire trip will be a waste.

“I said, has success tied your tongue? Lands, when you were little, everybody called you Babbling Brook, you rambled on so.”

The memory coaxed a little one-sided smile out of Lyndie. “I forgot about that name.”

Despite the brave front, Lyndie felt the old familiar sting of unshed tears. Even as Hazel watched, Lyndie temporarily lost the battle and one lone tear tipped from her lower lid.

“Love,” Hazel said gently, “they say the best way to cure a boil is to lance it. If you want to talk about something, anything, you just get it off your chest, you hear me? I'm a crusty old dame, it's true, but I'm an excellent listener.”

“Oh, I'm fine,” Lyndie demurred, angrily swiping at the proof she was fibbing. “And I'm sorry for the sob stuff. I honestly didn't come out here to be gloomy and weepy.”

“Save your embarrassed apologies for somebody who doesn't love you. You just need to get busy is all. But don't you think I'm doing one of those silly fix-ups with Bruce Everett. That's not it. He's my own special project. I just want to bring out the tomcat in him again. And being a woman of a certain age, I know I can't do it all myself, so I'll have to see if the gals at the stomp can do him some good.”

Lyndie couldn't suppress her smile. “Since when do you eliminate yourself on account of age?”

Hazel grinned. “All right. I may be old, but I'm
not dead. And that Bruce Everett is a piece of sirloin that'd be a shame to go to waste.”

Lyndie shrugged. “I guess it's a pity I'm vegetarian, then.”

“So far,” Hazel bested, then pressed down the accelerator.

 

Hazel's guest room was as posh as that in any five-star hotel, but one that blessedly lacked pretension. Curling her toes in the thick Tabriz carpet, Lyndie studied herself in the hand-hewn pine mirror and wondered if she would pass as a Montana native.

She wore her great-aunt's cowboy boots, the ones Hazel wore every day and which possessed enough scrapes and mud to prove it. Tugging on jeans and a simple white cotton T-shirt, she thought the transformation complete, until Hazel knocked on the door and handed her a black cowgirl hat and a pair of dangling turquoise earrings.

“Now you're fit to stomp,” Hazel pronounced, tipping her own custom-made Stetson.

“Then, too bad Mitch isn't here,” Lyndie mumbled on the way to the Caddy. “'Cause I'd sure like to stomp him.”

The dance was held at the old Mystery Saloon, circa nineteen-ten. There was a line to get in at the door, but the minute the Caddy pulled up, a skinny young man in a white cowboy hat opened the door
for Hazel, and after helping the cattle baroness to her feet, he immediately went to park the car.

“You're certainly the celebrity,” Lyndie marveled as the crowd parted to let them in first.

“When you're older than God, the young folks humor you,” Hazel quipped, winking at her.

Lyndie gave her a wry smile and said, “Ri-i-i-ight.”

The western band was already up and running with a two-step. The room was alive with couples having a good time, and Lyndie suddenly felt her aloneness. To get her mind off the negative, she played tourist. She studied the exquisite truss-work of spruce that held the roof, and she was most impressed by the oak dance floor, worn to an ice-pond finish by nearly a century of sliding cowboy boots.

“When in Rome,” Hazel said, handing her a glass from the bartender.

Lyndie took a sip and coughed. “This is whiskey!”

“Like I said, dear, ‘When in Rome,'” Hazel repeated, smiling secretively.

“I'm not much of a drinker…” Lyndie tried another sip. The next one didn't burn nearly as much.

“That which doesn't kill you, my dear…”

“Yeah, I know. But I'm really sick of having to be so strong.”

Hazel gave her another one of those tricky smiles. “That's what tonight is for. Don't be strong tonight.
Just loosen that girth a little and— Why, speak of the devil! There's Bruce Everett!”

Lyndie looked across the packed dance floor.

She found him in the haze, leaning against the bar like a gunslinger. She'd thought he was tall, but in the crowd he looked even taller, gazing over the crowd with those shuttered, unapproachable eyes.

“Look! He's seen us! He's coming over!” Hazel exclaimed with glee.

Suddenly the whiskey started tasting pretty good to Lyndie. Another gulp and she was prepared to meet those silvery eyes.

“Miss Clay, Hazel,” he said, tugging on the front of his black cowboy hat.

“Why aren't you out there on the floor boot-scootin'?” Hazel demanded.

“I was waiting for you,” he offered, taking Hazel's arm and wrapping it inside his, as he led her away.

Lyndie watched the two on the dance floor. Bruce and Hazel waltzed as if they'd been made for each other. As they floated and laughed around the crowded floor, Lyndie gripped her whiskey. She was feeling braver, and yet more out of her element with every passing second.

And for this, she had agreed to a vacation?

She should have stayed home. It was less bruising to her ego to spend every day hunched over her
books, than hunched over a bar, hoping some cowpoke would ask her to dance.

Bruce brought Hazel back to the hitching post that separated the bar from the dance floor. Lyndie leaned against it, anticipating the moment he'd ask her. She couldn't dance a two-step but she was suddenly eager to try.