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Wit ducked his head and forked in a mouthful of eggs.
Score one for Moody.
Maggie glanced back at the stranger. To her dismay, he was staring right back at her through a sweep of dark lashes. She flashed him an automatic smile, then looked away, tamping down a racing heartbeat.
What was wrong with her anyway? Tightening her hand around her coffee mug, she wished she’d gone straight home from the bank. Instead, she was sitting here fantasizing about a man she didn’t even know, wondering what his smile would feel like against her mouth.
Lord.
The bell above the door jangled again. This time she knew who was coming through the door before she saw him because she heard his voice. The sound of it sent a shiver through her.
Laird Donnelly and two of his men brought the cold air in with them as they swept into the café like they owned the place. Barrel-chested and just as big as the stranger sitting across the room, Laird looked every inch the cattle baron he was. At thirty-five, he owned the biggest operation in northern Montana, not to mention half the men in this town. Maggie slid her eyes shut, wishing she could gracefully slide under the table and disappear.
“Well, well, if it isn’t Maggie Cortland,” Laird said, strolling her way, slipping off his gray felt Stetson. “How ya been, Maggie?”
“Laird.” She sipped her coffee and stared out the window.
“Been keepin’ to yourself a lot lately. Why, we were just talkin’ about you, weren’t we boys?”
The “boys” nodded like good little soldiers.
“That’s right. We were wonderin’ why you hadn’t fixed that fence up on the north pasture yet. A couple of your mares wandered onto my land yesterday.”
Damn him! She’d fixed that fence twice in the last two weeks. Someone had been cutting it, and it didn’t take an rocket scientist to figure out who. “Where are they now?”
Laird smiled magnanimously. “Your mares? Oh, I imagine right about now, they’re happily grazin’ with my best heifers. I planned on bringin’ ’em on by later today.”
Her knee hit the table with a thwack and the old roosters jumped as a single entity. “No!” she said too loudly. “Don’t bother. I’ll come get them later.”
“No hurry,” Laird told her, draping his muscular arm across the high back of her booth. “’Cause from what I hear this hasn’t really been your day.”
“I suppose I have you to thank for that,” she said without a glimmer of a smile.
He did though—a wry, foxlike grin that set her teeth on edge. “Me? Hell, I can take credit for lots of things, but makin’ your day bad isn’t one I’d care to claim.”
Maggie couldn’t actually remember hating anyone the way she did Laird Donnelly. He made her skin crawl. Crowding her the way he was now was something he did for fun. He loved to see the terror leap into her eyes. But she swore she wouldn’t let him do it to her. Not here. Not now.
Thankfully, Moody interceded, nudging Laird out of the way so she could refill Maggie’s coffee cup. “Why don’t you and your boys have a seat, Laird?” she said pointedly. “Maggie’s not in the mood for talkin’.”
“Another time then,” he promised with a wink that sent a shiver through Maggie.
It wasn’t until Laird moved out of the way that she noticed the stranger watching her. Rather, watching Laird watching her. The muscle in his jaw worked rhythmically as his gaze collided with hers, then he looked back at his coffee.
She dragged her purse up from the seat and began rifling through it for money. Moody intercepted her again, setting the coffeepot down on the table. “I told you. It’s on me today. You go on home, honey. Put your feet up. You’re pale as a ghost. You could use a rest.”
Maggie slid an anxious look at Laird and his bunch before sending Moody what she hoped was a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry about me. Okay? I’m just a little tired is all. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure? When you gonna get some help out on your place? Lord knows, you shouldn’t be handling all that on your own.”
“Soon,” Maggie lied. “Thanks, Moody. For everything.”
The older woman just smiled. She was nosy, Maggie thought, but she wasn’t dense. She always knew how far to push, and Maggie had just drawn the line. Gathering up her purse she headed toward the door, deliberately avoiding eye contact with the stranger. He’d disappear in a few hours like the cold wind off the Bitterroots.
And she’d still be spitting into it.
Cain MacCallister made no pretense of ignoring the fragile-looking beauty named Maggie as she unfolded those long legs of hers from the booth and walked by him without a second glance. More to the point, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. Perhaps, he reasoned, it was her resemblance to Annie that had caught him like a sucker punch to the gut. Slender and pale, with that blond, pinned-up hair and swanlike neck of hers, she could’ve been a dancer. Maybe it was the elegant way she held herself as that cow-chaser hassled her.
Maybe it was the way she smiled—the little flicker of that wide mouth of hers that had nearly stalled his heart. All of which had forced him to reassess the “fragile” description he’d pinned on her. Oh, she was delicate all right. Delicate the way centuries-old bone china was delicate, with a tempered core that belied the translucence.
Damn, he thought, sipping his cooling coffee. What the hell was wrong with him? He had no business thinking about a woman like her. She was probably married with three kids, a picket fence and a dog. He was in the market for something considerably less permanent.
But that didn’t stop him from watching her pull away in her beat-up old pickup truck, or from wondering who’d put the sadness he’d glimpsed in her eyes.
Swivelling a look at the trio of men seated a few tables away, Cain tightened his fist. He’d known plenty of men like them. In lockup, a man got familiar with the lowest common denominator quickly. In the real world, men like Laird got off on using intimidation. Especially on women.
Cain smiled grimly. He’d give that bastard five minutes behind bars before men much better versed in arm-twisting put him in a place he’d wish he’d never seen. But men like Laird—men with money—rarely found themselves in the black hole. Even if they’d earned a spot there.
Cain reached into his pocket for the last of his change and tossed it on the table. The waitress who’d filled his cup smiled as she cruised by him again. “Finished? Sure I can’t get you something else?”
The smell of cinnamon buns had been making him almost sick with hunger for the past ten minutes and if he didn’t get out of here soon, he might just have to ask her for a job as a dishwasher to earn one.
“Thanks,” he said, managing a smile of his own as he shrugged into his denim jacket. “This is it. Unless you can tell me who might be hiring around here.”
“You’re looking for work?” she asked with a surprised lift of her brows.
He nodded curtly. “I’ve got some experience with ranch work. Horses, mostly.”
Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully, looking him up and down for a moment. “Funny, I didn’t take you for a ranch hand.”
He slid his gloves back on.
“Horses, huh?” She glanced at Laird. “The Bar ZX is always hiring at this time of year.”
Laughter erupted from the men’s table as they shared a joke. Cain glanced out the window. “Anywhere else?”
The woman smiled slowly, then gestured to Cain with a tip of her chin to follow her. “As a matter of fact,” she said softly, walking him to the door, “I just might know of something.”
Chapter 2
The sleeting rain started after lunch, but by one-fifteen it had turned into hail—a sharp, biting deluge that rattled against the tin roof of Maggie’s barn. It had scattered the horses in the paddock in a blind panic. Marble-sized balls of ice pummeled the mares, reducing them to quivering masses huddling against the barn.
One by one, she managed to catch them and lead them into the barn, out of the weather. But Geronimo, a green-broke three-year old gelding, was too frightened to be caught. She’d already missed him three times with her rope as he skidded around the paddock, eyes white with terror.
The gelding was the most unpredictable of her new horses. With the temperament of a scared bulldog, he’d resisted her every attempt at training. But Maggie knew he’d been mishandled as a young horse and she believed he had real potential as a cutter.
The heels of her boots slipped in the mud as Maggie threw the lariat. She missed, going down painfully on one knee. Geronimo crashed into the split-rail fencing and shrieked. Struggling to her feet, Maggie hauled back the spooled out rope, cursing the weather and imagining the bruises she’d have on her before she was done.
Thunder rumbled, shaking the ground and blurring the roar of the hail against the barn. Frigid rain dripped off the brim of her hat and slid down her neck. The stinging hail beat against her slicker-covered back. Instinct warned that she should leave the damned horse where he was. But she knew she didn’t have the heart to do that either. Geronimo had been through enough in his short life to fill a book. She wasn’t about to compound his misery by abandoning him when things got tough. In his state, he could break his neck trying to break out of the paddock.
“Shh—Geronimo—” she called, approaching him again as he pranced madly back and forth on the north end of the enclosure. She knew he hated the rope, but she couldn’t get close enough to him to grab his halter. “Whoa, boy. Settle down, now. Here we go. That’s it. Let’s just get you outta this weather.”
Geronimo rolled his eyes in terror as she tossed the loop one more time, this time, miraculously, dropping it over the gelding’s head. Maggie hauled back on the rope feeling the resistance before she’d even gotten it tight.
The big gelding shuddered for a moment, legs splayed, before he exploded with a high-pitched squeal. Nine-hundred pounds of fury, bone and muscle bore down on her like a shrieking banshee.
There was no time to react. Nowhere to go. She heard a scream and knew it had come from her.
Too late, she lunged sideways, diving toward the fence rails, but Geronimo slammed into her with the force of an oncoming locomotive. The impact sent her careening against the railing and slammed the breath from her lungs. Lights exploded in her skull, and the rain and the sky and even the mud beneath her cheek winked in and out like a flickering lightbulb.
She felt, more than heard, the thunderous pounding of Geronimo’s hooves against the ground nearby. She gasped and coughed. Her lungs burned. The world, as she opened her eyes, was spinning. The only thing that was holding still was the post she was curled around.
Get up!
The voice was hers. Wasn’t it? She willed herself to try. Her fingernails sank into the mud in her pathetic effort to drag herself toward the nearby rail, but found no purchase around the cold chunks of ice that littered the ground. She could hear the frantic barking of her dog, Jigger, coming from inside the house and she suddenly wished she hadn’t left him there, safe from the storm.
Dimly, it occurred to her that this was a sloppy way to die. Slogged in mud, trampled in her own paddock by a dumb animal who depended on her for its very survival.
Embarrassing, really—
Before she could finish the thought, someone was tugging on her wrists. Pulling her effortlessly away from the sound of oncoming hooves. She felt the heavy, pounding closeness of them as they barely missed her legs. Somewhere in the distance, thunder rumbled with a fierce howl.
And then she was sprawled outside the paddock with someone leaning urgently over her, shielding her from the hail. Touching her face.
“Can you hear me?”
It was a man’s voice. That realization only dimly registered. The sky above her was still doing a slow rotation. “I—” she croaked, licking the rain off her lips. “Ben—?”
The shadow above her shook his head. “Don’t move. You might’ve broken something.”
Not Ben, she thought. Of course, not Ben. Someone else. She tried to sit up. “Who—?”
“Lie still,” he commanded, pressing her back down. “I’m not gonna hurt you.”
He didn’t have to. Everything ached. Maggie squinted up at him past the rain as he ran his hands down the sides of her ribs. Big was the first word that came to mind.
And just like that, her head cleared.
Oh, no.
Pushing his hands off her, she tried to sit up again. “Don’t—”
He swore under his breath, but let her sit.
She couldn’t think. Not coherently anyway. And not while he was touching her. “I’m all right,” she told him. “I just…just had the wind knocked out of me, that’s all.”
Her shaking hands were muddy, but she fingered her aching cheek, taking in the beat up old motorcyle parked twenty feet away.
“You—you were…at Moody’s.”
“That’s right.”
“What—” she shook her head “—what’re…you doing here?”
“Saving your pretty little behind apparently.” The hail was still pelting them, but he scanned her empty yard with a look close to anger. “Where the hell is everybody?”
Everybody? Maggie tried to get to her feet and failed, bracing a hand against the post. A soft curse spilled from her lips.
In one effortless movement, he scooped her up in his arms as if she weighed nothing at all and headed toward the house.
She gasped. “No, wait! I’m perfectly capable of—”
“The hell you are.” Unmoved, he trudged through the mud toward her front door. His arms were strong and thick and she felt unreasonably small in them.
She swung a look back at the paddock and the gelding still racing around in a froth of panic. “But Geronimo—”
A humorless laugh escaped him. “You mean that loco horse that just tried to trample you to death?”
Her head ached. “He’s afraid of ropes. He wasn’t trying to hurt me.”
“And if you had the sense God gave a flea, you’ll call the knacker’s truck for him tomorrow.”
The knacker! She would’ve argued if she had the where-withal, but she couldn’t seem to muster it.
They reached the door then, and he yanked open the screen and gave the handle a twist, shoving it open the rest of the way with his foot. A low growl froze him in his tracks. It was Jigger, who’d planted himself just inside the doorway, poised to do battle with this stranger. But at the sight of Maggie in the man’s arms, the dog whined happily and jumped up to lick her hand.
“It’s okay, Jigger,” Maggie told him. “He’s a friend.” She looked up at Cain, whose expression was considerably more guarded. “Don’t worry. He only bites when I tell him to.”
“That’s reassuring,” he said, carrying her into the warm room and setting her down gently on the corner of the pine-planked kitchen table.
Maggie braced a hand behind her, surprisingly unsteady. She had every intention of getting immediately to her feet, but her knees had the tensile strength of water.
Wordlessly, he tugged off his gloves, reached for her mud-covered right boot and began pulling it off.
“I can do that,” she argued, even though she wasn’t precisely sure that was true. Her head felt like a fractured egg and her hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
“Moody was right about you,” he said, as the boot released her foot with a watery pop.
She frowned. “Moody?”
“She said you were stubborn as mud.”
“She actually said that?”
“Which I see now is true.”
She stared down at the top of his head as he worked on her other boot, at his dark hair, slicked with rain and hanging in dripping hanks against his forehead. His shoulders were thick and wide with a man’s strength. “What else did she say?”
He cupped his palm against her calf and tugged at the heel of her boot. “That you need help.” That boot came off with a pop and his hands followed her muddy sock up her calf and pulled it down.
