can tell!” she declared, twisting suddenly to efficiently slide from his grasp and his saddle, landing on the ground on both feet with enough force to jar her back teeth.
Dylan dismounted a moment later. As he did so, she noticed the stiffness of his movement and the way he was rubbing his right thigh. She also noticed the way the denim of his jeans lovingly molded those masculine thighs before dismissing such things from her mind. Or trying to, anyway.
It was difficult, though. The man was six feet of rugged masculinity. At five foot eight, she was no shrimp herself. It wasn’t until he moved closer that she realized he was limping slightly.
“Did you hurt yourself?” she asked in concern.
“You might say that,” he replied darkly, his thoughts on the rodeo injury that had laid him up and forced him to retire from the rodeo circuit. The doctors had told him he’d been lucky to retain as much use of the leg as he had, lucky that he’d still been able to ride at all. But he’d never ride as he had before. The championship belt buckle he wore attested to his skill in the arena. A skill that had shattered along with the bones in his right leg. No, he wasn’t feeling real lucky at the moment.
“Is there anything I can do?” Abigail asked.
“Yeah, you can tell me your name. And tell me what you’re doing way out here. This is Pete Turner’s ranch.”
“That’s right.”
“And since I know Pete doesn’t welcome visitors, I’d say you’re the one trespassing, not me.”
“How do you figure that?”
“Like I said, Pete doesn’t care for visitors. He and I go way back.”
“Really? Have you talked to him lately?”
“A few months ago. March, I think. February, maybe.”
She knew all about cowboys and time. They lost track of it, the same way they lost track of money and women. It was now July.
Still, if Dylan had been a friend of her uncle’s, she wanted to break the news of his death as gently as she could. While she struggled to find the proper words, he impatiently demanded, “Who are you?”
“I’m Pete’s niece.”
“No way! His niece is a starchy librarian in the big city.”
Gritting her teeth, Abigail strove to ignore the starchy part of his description as she silently reflected on the ironic fact that both her chosen professions were rife with misconceptions. “I’m a librarian. Or at least I was until a few weeks ago.”
Dylan eyed her from head to toe as if suspecting her of lying. “You don’t look like any librarian I’ve ever seen,” he replied.
“Really? And when was the last time you were inside a library?” she countered sweetly.
Dylan had visited the hospital library plenty while laid up, although he wasn’t about to tell her that. He preferred to think about her, wondering what kind a librarian rode a horse called Wild Thing. One he wanted to get to know better, Dylan decided. She was all long legs and sleek curves. And her hair reminded him of curly ribbons of silk. It had caressed his face like a slender, seductive rope trying to lasso him and capture his heart—clinging to his rough skin with gentle abandon, rich with the scent of lily of the valley, his favorite flower.
Realizing that he was staring at her mouth without hearing a word she’d said, Dylan murmured, “What?”
“Never mind.” Ignoring him, she ran her hands over Wild Thing’s chest and withers, then her legs and hooves, even inside the horse’s mouth, checking her for anything suspicious. Abigail’s first search turned up nothing; the bay mare wasn’t injured, thank heavens. The horse was still quivering slightly, but her limbs weren’t swollen or cut. A more thorough search, after removing the saddle, provided the answer Abigail had been looking for. “I knew it!” she exclaimed. “I was set up!”
“What are you talking about?” Dylan demanded.
“I knew Wild Thing wouldn’t take off like that for no reason. Look at this!” She showed him the burrs attached to the saddle blanket. Sure enough, there were matching marks on the horse’s flank, although her mahogany color made them difficult to see at first. “You poor baby,” Abigail crooned, making Dylan wish she’d talk that way to him instead of her horse.
“Didn’t you check your rig when you saddled her?” he asked.
“Of course I did. Those burrs weren’t on that blanket then. It may have taken a while for them to work far enough under to really irritate her, but when they did, she bolted. And there’s no way I could have picked up burrs in that location on the saddle blanket unless someone deliberately put it there.”
“Did you leave the horse unattended after she was saddled?”
“Just for a minute. I got a phone call on my cellular phone…”
Dylan rolled his eyes.
“It was my editor from New York,” she continued. “But I only stepped away for a few minutes, no longer than five.”
“Long enough for someone to mess with this blanket,” he said, reaching out to rub the mare’s nose.
“Wild Thing doesn’t like total strangers touching her,” Abigail warned him.
“Like her owner that way, is she?” Dylan countered, soothing the skittish horse with his large hands, calmly reassuring her. The mare, darn her traitorous soul, ate up the extra attention.
Remembering the feel of that hand on her cheek, Abigail shivered. Dylan’s fingertips had been work roughened. She didn’t have to look at the palms of his hands to know they’d be callused and nicked. This was no city cowboy. He was the real thing.
“So why do you think someone would want you thrown from your horse?” Dylan turned to ask her.
“I don’t know. Maybe because I refused to sell out to Hoss Redkins, the local bigwig bully.”
“Sell out?” Dylan repeated with a frown. “You may be his niece, but this is still Pete’s ranch and there’s no way in God’s green earth he’d sell to an overblown buffoon like Redkins.”
Abigail bit her lip, realizing she still hadn’t told him about her uncle’s death. “My uncle passed away two months ago,” she said quietly. “His attorney called me and told me he’d left the ranch to me.”
“I thought he disowned his family when they sold out to Hoss.”
“He did. Over the years, I tried to stay in touch.”
“Yeah, I’m sure you did,” Dylan retorted. “You’d want to stay in the good old guy’s graces, after all.”
“Meaning what?”
