and followed.
He didn’t want to notice her. He didn’t want to wonder if her breasts beneath the snap pockets of the traditional Western shirt were as round and full as they looked, if her slender hips and long legs would cradle a man as perfectly as he suspected. He didn’t want to imagine what she’d look like sprawled beneath him with her hair flung over the pillow and her pouty lips begging him to take her.
But she was fast becoming all he could think about. Only ten more days. It was almost a prayer. She’ll be leaving in ten more days.
“...look like you got out of bed on the wrong side, Boss.”
He became aware that sometime during his fantasizing he’d taken his seat at the head of the table. The speaker was Joe-Bob, the youngest of the cowhands he employed and one of the only three who weren’t married. Wes, his foreman and right-hand man, was grinning as if he knew exactly what Day had been thinking.
Day scowled at them both. “Listen up,” he announced to the table at large. “Here’s the schedule for today....”
By the time he had finished detailing assignments and answering general questions, the meal was over. The hands stampeded through the kitchen to snag their lunches and the day began.
Angel, who had been sitting quietly at his left throughout the meal, began to clear the table. When she stood, his hooded gaze slid down her body despite his best intentions. As it reached her waist, the buckle on her belt caught his eye.
Without thinking, he slipped a finger through a belt loop on her jeans when she started to move toward the kitchen. “Whoa, there. What’s this?” He raised a disbelieving brow. The buckle on her belt was the unmistakable silver prize buckle awarded to junior rodeo champions for barrel racing.
Angel shrugged. “I used to fool around with rodeo competition when I was a teenager.”
He snorted, suddenly aware of the hot press of her flesh against the backs of his fingers. “Lady, if you won this, you did a hell of a lot more than fool around.” He removed his fingers and stepped away, feeling that he’d narrowly escaped being burned. Damn the woman! She had enough sex appeal for five.
In her company, he was starting to feel as frustrated as a stallion penned in the stall next to a mare in heat. Worse, actually, because there was no way he could allow himself to take what his body wanted from this woman. Abruptly he turned on his heel and left the kitchen. He needed some air.
Corky came snarling out from under the porch to growl at his ankles until Day pointed a stern finger at the dog. “One of these days I’m gonna get rid of you, you old faker.” The dog appeared ferocious to strangers, but everyone on the ranch knew he was all bluster and no business.
While Angel finished cleaning up the kitchen, he saddled his horse and another for her—not the placid little mare he’d first had in mind, but a spirited gelding that would more easily keep up with the work he wanted to accomplish. Still, until he saw her swing easily into the saddle, he hadn’t believed she could ride so well.
Jada had hated horses.
He deliberately put the thought out of his mind as they rode out of the yard. Today he wanted to check on the stock in several areas of his range. Tomorrow he’d ride out with some of the men and cull the ones that weren’t healthy, get them ready for sale.
The morning went fast. Angel was as good a rider as that buckle she wore had indicated. If she was in any discomfort, she hadn’t made a peep and she kept up with his pace easily, handling the gelding’s early liveliness with aplomb until he settled down to work. She had borrowed a hat from Dulcie’s old collection and, riding beside her, he had the oddest feeling of...of rightness, as if he was meant to do this with a woman at his side one day.
Not this woman. He instantly rejected the idea. Angel lived a life-style foreign to his, one that he’d tasted and found as poisonous as the deceptively lovely tansy that covered his land in the spring.
The hours slipped away and the angle of the sun told him it would soon be lunchtime. He hadn’t made lunches for Angel and himself because he’d planned a loop that would take them back to the house by noon. He liked to try to get in to the house to have lunch with Beth Ann a couple of days each week, except during branding, when there was no time for anything except the endless cycle of bawling calves and their anxious mamas. Circling around now to come back toward the house, he paused near the front entrance to the ranch road, where the rock columns with the Red Arrow Ranch sign suspended above them in black iron greeted visitors.
“See that bull over yonder?” he asked when Angel reined her horse in beside him.
She nodded. “The one with the white blaze down his forehead?”
“Yep. Don’t forget that blaze. Old Red’s the only bull on the ranch with that face. He’s got a mean streak a mile wide, and it’s directed solely at two-legged creatures.”
Angel regarded the bull solemnly. “Why do you keep him?”
“He’s a great stud. Comes from solid stock and his calves fetch good prices. And if we handle him from horseback, he’s as docile as any bull is ever going to be.” Day squinted into the sun. “I doubt you’ll ever have cause to remember this, but I’ll tell you anyway. As long as you’re in a vehicle or on horseback, you’re just part of the scenery to him. But don’t ever let him see you walking around. Couple of years ago, he rolled a pickup over on one of the hands who had gotten out to check a bad tire.”
Angel sucked in a breath and her face paled. “Did he kill him?”
Day shook his head. “Guy got lucky, dived back through the window and stayed inside even after Old Red turned it over.” He laughed grimly. “We had to tranquilize the crazy animal until we could get the pickup towed.”
Angel shuddered. “I’ll remember.”
Her voice was thready and he glanced at her in concern. “Hey, you don’t have to worry. Like I said, as long as you don’t walk around in front of him, you’ll be fine.”
“You went away to college, didn’t you?”
Day raised his brow at the seemingly irrelevant topic. “Yes. I majored in agricultural economics at New Mexico State.”
“That’s why you don’t remember me, because I moved here the year you left. But what you also don’t know is that two years later my dad was killed in a bull-riding exhibition.”
An icy shock ran down his spine. He vaguely remembered his own father telling him about a hand from the Double Dos who’d gotten hammered by a bull at a rodeo. “Did you see it?”
She shook her head, and he noticed that she seemed to be regaining her composure. “I was preparing for my own contest. When we heard that somebody had gotten gored, we all went running over to see—and it was my dad.”
Day reached across the space that separated their horses and covered her hand where it lay on the horn of her big Western saddle. “I can’t imagine. That must have been pretty horrible for a young girl.”
“It was.” She looked at him, her eyes unusually sober, and he realized abruptly how gently good-humored she was most of the time. A man could get used to that kind of quiet presence at his side. If he was the kind of man who needed that, which he wasn’t, he reminded himself.
The
