“A Good Samaritan with a bad temper!” she retorted. “Do I need to know more?”
Adam opened his mouth to make a retort, took one look at the mutinous expression on the young woman’s face, and shut it again. Instead he dragged her unceremoniously to the passenger’s side of his long-bed pickup, opened the door, shoved her inside, and slammed it closed after her.
“My bag! It’s in the back end of the Chevy,” Tate yelped.
Adam stalked back to the rattletrap Chevy, snagged the duffel bag from the rusted-out truck bed and slung it into the back of his pickup.
Woman was too damned trusting for her own good! he thought. Her acid tongue wouldn’t have been much help to her if he had been the kind of villain who preyed on stranded women. Which he wasn’t. Lucky for her!
Tate didn’t consider herself at all lucky. She recognized the flat-lipped expression on her Good Samaritan’s face. He might have rescued her, all right, but he wasn’t happy about it. The deep crevices formed around his mouth by his frown and the webbed lines at the edges of his eyes had her guessing his age at thirty-five or thirty-six—the same as her eldest brother Garth. The last thing she needed was another keeper!
She sat back with her arms crossed and stared out the window as they drove past rolling prairie. She thought back to the night two weeks ago when she had decided to leave Hawk’s Way.
Her escape from her brothers, while apparently sudden, hadn’t been completely without direction. She had taken several ranch journals containing advertisements from outfits all over Texas looking for expert help and headed south. However, Tate soon discovered that not one rancher was interested in hiring a woman, especially one without references, as either foreman or ranch manager.
To confound her problems, the ancient pickup she had taken from the barn was in worse shape than she had thought. It had left her stranded miles from the Lazy S—the last ranch on her list and her last hope for a job in ranch management.
“Do you know where the Lazy S is?” she asked.
Adam started at the sound of her voice. “I expect I could find it. Why?”
“I understand they’re looking for a ranch manager. I intend to apply for the job.”
“You’re just a kid!”
The cowboy could have said nothing more likely to raise Tate’s neck hairs. “For your information, I’m twenty-three and a fully grown woman!”
Adam couldn’t argue with that. He had a pretty good view of the creamy rise of her breasts at the frilly gathered edge of her blouse. “What do you know about ranching?” he asked.
“I was raised on a ranch, Hawk’s Way, and—” She stopped abruptly, realizing that she had revealed more than she had intended to this stranger. Tate hadn’t used her own last name to apply for any jobs, knowing that if she did her brothers would be able to hunt her down and drag her back home. “I hope you’ll keep that to yourself,” she said.
Adam raised an inquiring brow that met such a gamine smile that his heart did that disturbing flipflop again.
“You see,” Tate said, “the truth is, I’ve run away from home.”
Adam snorted. “Aren’t you a little old for that?”
Tate’s lips curled ruefully. “I suppose so. But my brothers just wouldn’t let me live! I mean, they watched every breath in and out of my body.”
Adam found the thought rather intriguing himself.
“My brothers are a little overprotective, you see. I had to run away if I was ever going to meet the right man and fall in love and have children.”
“Sounds like you could do that better at home than traipsing around the countryside,” Adam observed.
“You don’t know my older brothers! They want to wrap me in cotton batting and keep me safe. Safe, ha! What they mean is, they want to keep me a virgin forever.”
Adam choked at this unbelievable revelation and coughed to clear his throat.
“It’s true! They’ve chased away every single beau I’ve ever had. Which is only a waste of time and energy because, you know, a man who’s born to drown can manage to drown in a desert.”
Adam eyed her askance.
“I mean, if something is destined to happen, it’ll happen no matter what.”
Tate waited for Adam to say something, but when he remained silent, she continued, “My older brother, Jesse, left home, too, when I was just eight. It was right after my father died. We haven’t seen him for years and years. I don’t plan to stay away for years, of course, but then, who knows how long it will take to find my Prince Charming. Not that I have to marry a prince of a man.”
Tate grinned and shrugged. “But it would be nice, you know, to just once kiss a man good night, without having my brothers send him packing because he’s not good enough for me.”
Tate realized she was talking to fill the silence and forced herself to shut up.
Behind the young woman’s bravado Adam saw the desperation that had sent her fleeing from the safe haven her brothers had provided for her. He felt sick inside. Was this the way his younger sister had felt? Had Melanie seen him as an oppressive tyrant, the same way this young woman perceived her brothers?
Tate held her breath as the stranger looked into her eyes. There was an awful sadness there she felt constrained to dispel. So she began talking again.
“I’ve been looking everywhere for a job,” she said. “I must have been to fifteen different spreads in the past two weeks. But I haven’t had so much as a nibble of interest.
“What I find so frustrating is the fact that most owners don’t treat me seriously. I mean, I know I’m young, but there isn’t anything I don’t know about running a ranch.”
“Do you know how to figure the amount of feed you need for each head of stock?” Adam asked.
“Depends on whether you plan to keep the stock penned or let it graze,” Tate said. “Now if it’s penned—”
Adam interrupted with, “Give me some symptoms of colic.”
“A horse might have colic if he won’t eat, or if he starts pawing, or gets up and down a lot. Generally an animal that can’t get comfortable has a problem.”
“Can you keep books on a computer?”
Tate snorted inelegantly. “Boy can I ever! I got stuck with all the bookkeeping at Hawk’s Way. So, if you were hiring at the Lazy S, would I get the job?”
“What will you do if you don’t get the job?” Adam asked instead.
Tate shrugged, not realizing how revealing the gesture was of the fact she wasn’t the least bit nonchalant about that distressing possibility. “I don’t know. I only know I won’t go back home.”
“And if your brothers find you?”
Her
