drilling leases. With thoughts of Maddie stirring his blood, he didn’t need more caffeine.
Edgily he shoved the papers aside and stared out the window. He slid his jean-clad legs onto the top of his desk and stacked one scuffed, black, ostrich-skinned cowboy boot on top of the other. It was early yet, but already a brilliant sun blasted the desolate Texas landscape. Thanks to his air conditioner, the interior of his trailer was icy. That was the only thing he liked about living at the drill site for weeks on end while he worked a field. But even the chilled air couldn’t keep out the hot memories of Maddie.
Too well he recalled the first time he’d actually spoken to Maddie, who’d been younger and poorer than him, and hadn’t run in his social circle.
He’d driven home from the University of Texas on a Friday and had gone looking for his girlfriend, Lizzie Collier, over at her daddy’s ranch. It had been spring and the pastures had been filled with bluebonnets.
When Cole had stepped inside the barn and hollered for Lizzie, one of the horses, Wild Thing, had gone off like dynamite, neighing and kicking his stall door. Cole thought Wild Thing was too dangerous to fool with but Lizzie had the softest heart in the world. When she’d found out Old Man Green was starving Wild Thing and beating him, she’d talked her dad into buying the horse. Her father had hired more than a dozen horse whisperers to save the animal, and when they’d failed, Lizzie’s father had wanted to put him down. Lizzie wouldn’t hear of it.
Cole hadn’t thought too much about the ruckus the horse was making until he heard a crooning voice inside the stall. Thinking Lizzie might be trapped, Cole had rushed toward the stall door.
“Lizzie?”
“Shh!” chided a young, defiant voice from inside the stall.
Since Cole couldn’t see too clearly in the shadows, he took the slim figure wearing jeans and a baseball cap turned backward for the young male groom who worked for Lizzie’s dad.
Fixating on Cole, the gelding’s ears swept so far back against his narrow gray skull they all but vanished. Then the big animal lowered his head as his pale forelock shot over terrible eyes that rolled backward. Half rearing, the animal charged, his hooves splintering a board.
“Get out of that stall, boy!” Cole commanded.
Wild Thing’s eyes rolled crazily. Again the gelding reared to his full height and heaved himself with murderous intent against the stable door.
The boy jumped back and flattened against the wall. “Are you trying to kill me?” In the confusion the kid’s baseball cap hit the sawdust, and a lustrous mane of black hair tumbled down the imp’s shoulders. And across breasts.
“Maddie Gray?”
What male with an ounce of testosterone wouldn’t have recognized her sinfully gorgeous, exotic features—Maddie’s creamy pale skin, her voluptuous mouth, her violet-blue eyes? Hell, she looked exactly like her no-good mother, Jesse Ray Gray, the town’s most notorious slut.
Cole’s gaze seared her ample breasts, which heaved against her faded blue cotton work shirt. She’d filled out since he’d seen her last. If her tight clothes were any clue, she’d probably be up to her mother’s tricks—if she wasn’t already.
“You’re Maddie Gray,” he repeated accusingly, disliking her more than a little because she stirred him.
“So what if I am?” Her beautiful mouth tightened rebelliously.
Wild Thing’s eyes rolled, and he neighed shrilly.
“Please lower your voice and start backing away,” she ordered.
At least she wasn’t a total simpleton. She saw the folly of being penned in such a small enclosure with a monster like Wild Thing.
“I said back away!” she repeated. “Can’t you see you’re scaring him?”
She began to speak to the startled horse in a sweet, soothing murmur Cole would have envied if he wasn’t so furious at her for her foolhardiness and willingness to blame him for her own stupidity.
“It’s okay, big baby. Nobody’s going to hurt you,” she said huskily in a purr that would have oozed sex had she been talking to a man.
A gray ear perked up. Not that the large animal didn’t keep his other ear flat and a suspicious eye on Cole.
“You’ve gotta go,” the girl urged when Wild Thing danced impatiently.
“Not until you get out of that stall,” Cole said.
“I will, you big idiot—just as soon as you shut up and leave.” For the horse’s sake, she kept her insult soft and sweet.
Cole’s stubbornness made him stand his ground a few seconds longer, but her pleading eyes finally convinced him. After Cole left, it took another minute or two before the horse settled and the girl was able to slip out. Strangely, no sooner was she safely outside the stall than Cole’s temper flared again. He knew he should forget about her recklessness and go to the Collier house and wait for Lizzie, but Maddie had his blood up. So when he heard her light, retreating footsteps as she lit out the back to avoid him, he rushed after her. When she caught sight of him, she let out a cry of alarm.
Grabbing her arms, he shoved her against a wall. “You have no right to be on this property! Or to be in that monster’s stall!” Cole yelled. “You scared the hell out of me!”
When Wild Thing screamed and sent his hooves crashing against wood again, Maddie stilled.
“I was just doing my job, okay?”
“Your job?”
“I’ll have you know Liam Rodgers hired me.”
Liam, Lizzie’s daddy’s foreman, was no man’s fool. “Why you? Why would he hire you, of all people, when he could hire the best?”
She frowned. “Maybe because I know what I’m doing. While you’ve been off at college driving your fancy cars and chasing girls, I’ve been mucking stalls to get free riding lessons. Maybe I’ve learned stuff. When he saw Wild Thing stand calmly and let me saddle him in the round pen, Liam about fainted. When I rode the horse just as easy as you please, Liam hired me.”
“Well, you can’t possibly know enough to work with that monster.”
“I did what twelve men couldn’t do!”
“You got lucky! Now you listen to me. A normal horse weighs half a ton and has a brain the size of a tomato. Such an animal is wired to defend himself against predators, which includes humans, even half-pint girls like you.”
“I know all that!”
“That horse is a maniac. You shouldn’t be anywhere near him—not in the round pen, not in his stall, not ever!”
Her chest swelled, and her eyes narrowed rebelliously.
Her dark look only fueled his fury. “Don’t you get it? Next time he’ll kill you!”
“Not if you stay out of this barn and let me do my job!”
“Right!
