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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!”
Two (#ulink_025a9c07-5b79-5087-bdc0-1aa2f6508afd)
“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?”
“Nothing,” Dylan said wearily, taking off his hat and shoving his hand through his hair before setting the Stetson back on his head again. It shook him to realize that Pete was dead. Dylan had met him at a local rodeo where Pete had supplied some of the horses. The old man might have been about as friendly as a grizzly caught in a bear trap, but Dylan had enjoyed his company over the past ten years—since he’d moved west, in fact. Pete had taught him a lot. It pained him to think that Pete wouldn’t be sharing any more tall tales of the “good old days” with him over a steaming cup of coffee generously laced with whiskey.
“So what are you going to do with the ranch now?” Dylan asked.
“Why, keep it, of course.”
“Keep it? Like some kind of science project? Do you have any idea how much work it takes, not to mention money, to run a ranch, even one as small as this one?”
“I have a good idea, yes. I did a lot of research before I came up here.”
“At the library down in Great Falls, no doubt,” he said mockingly.
“That’s right. And don’t forget that I grew up on the ranch next door.”
“Decades ago.”
Stung, she said, “It wasn’t that long ago!”
“Yeah? How old are you?”
“How old are you?” she retorted.
“Twenty-eight.”
My God, he was just a baby! Well, maybe not, she amended, noting the fit of his jeans. He was definitely all grown-up. But he was a good four years younger than she was.
Thirty-two had never felt so old to her before, but then she’d never been attracted to a younger man before. She was also vastly irritated by him, she reminded herself, lest her hormones incite a temporary memory loss.
“Let me guess, a gentleman never asks a lady her age, right?” Dylan said. “So, Ms. Librarian, are you and your horse going to come along quietlike, or am I gonna have to lasso you?” Seeing her startled look, he continued, “I’ve got a double horse trailer parked a short ways away. It’s attached to my pickup, and I can give you both a lift back to the ranch house.”
“If you think I’m going to hitch a lift with a stranger-”
“I’m not the stranger, you are. You know my name. I still don’t know yours.”
“It’s Abigail,” she replied, staring him right in the eye, the tilt of her chin a challenge and a dare. “Abigail Turner.”
“See, that wasn’t so hard, now, was it?” he teased her, but she was no longer paying attention.
It suddenly occurred to her that maybe she was looking a gift horse, or in this case a gift cowboy, in the eye here. “Now that I think about it, you might be just what I’m looking for,” she murmured.
“Really?” he murmured right back with a lift of one devilish eyebrow. “And how do you figure that?”
“Are you looking for a job?” she asked.
“Why? Are you aimin’ on hiring me for something?”
“Maybe. I know you’re experienced…with horses, I mean,” Abigail added in a rush. She felt like an idiot. “I write better dialogue than this,” she muttered.
“You do?” Dylan replied. “That mean you’re a writer?”
“That’s right.” She lifted her chin, waiting for the inevitable question—What do you write?
Instead, he cautiously said, “What kind of job are we talking about here?”
“I don’t suppose you take dictation, do you?” she couldn’t resist inquiring with the slightest of smiles.
“You’d suppose right.”
“How about typing?”
“Nope.”
“Is that championship belt buckle you’re wearing really yours?”
His dark eyes gleamed in the sunlight. “Want to check out the initials yourself?” he inquired wickedly, propping his two thumbs behind the wide silver buckle in a gesture that was downright inviting and very, very sexy.
For a moment, Abigail wondered what he’d do if she called his bluff. Then she decided she’d better not find out. At least, not right now. “I’m looking for a temporary ranch foreman,” she said briskly. “During the past few years, my uncle wasn’t able to keep up with things, and the property and fences show it. There’s also livestock to be taken care of. I need someone willing to work hard. Hoss has put out the word, so none of the men around here will apply for the job. I should warn you that if Hoss scares you, then this isn’t the job for you.”
“Hoss doesn’t scare me.” You do, Dylan almost added. The blond librarian might be old Pete’s niece, but she looked city bred and very high maintenance. Her jeans weren’t anything fancy, nor was her denim shirt, but she had a way of carrying herself that was downright feminine. Yet she’d been quietly confident when she’d checked her horse, moving with quick capability. The woman was a study in contrasts. And she smelled like lily of the valley. Damn.
Her problems weren’t his, he reminded himself. If he had a lick of sense, he’d remount and head on out. But cowboy chivalry demanded otherwise, just as it had decreed that he rescue her when he’d seen her wildly racing off across the meadow. Dylan wasn’t the kind of man who went looking for trouble, but somehow trouble always seemed to find him anyway, despite the fact that he liked to keep moving.
His roving life-style suited him just fine; he wasn’t looking to settle down. His older brother might have gotten married and his sister might have eloped, but Dylan wasn’t ready to be put out to pasture just yet. Not by a long shot.
Still, Dylan never could resist a challenge, be it from a horse that they said couldn’t be ridden or a woman as bristly as a porcupine. There was something about both that made his Gypsy blood run hot.
Wild Thing snorted and impatiently stamped her foot, as if publicly declaring her irritation with being ignored.
“I think I will take you up on that offer for a lift,” Abigail decided. “Then we can talk some more about the foreman’s job when we get to the ranch house.”
Once the horses were safely ensconced in the double horse trailer and Abigail had climbed aboard the front bench seat of his pickup, she had the distinct feeling that she’d just taken the first step in an entirely new direction for her life. Only problem was that she wasn’t sure this was the right direction.
Dylan wouldn’t stay long; cowboys rarely did. But maybe he’d stay long enough for her to get someone more permanent for the job. Someone older and preferably married. Someone settled down.
Not that the words settled and cowboy often went together. They never had in her experience. Her third and final relationship with a cowboy had ended two months ago with him heading for Arizona and her nursing a broken heart. She’d be the first to admit that it was rather ironic that a successful writer of Western romances like herself could write a best-seller of a happy ending, but couldn’t seem to find one for herself. At the moment, she was more concerned with finding out exactly who’d sabotaged her horse—putting both her and Wild Thing’s safety, if not their very lives, in jeopardy.
“What the hell is that?” Dylan demanded, staring in disbelief at a strange-looking structure perched alongside the gravel lane heading to the ranch house. The compact building looked as if it had sprung from the earth and, unless his eyes deceived him, it even had grass on the roof. He knew Pete had been getting a little eccentric in his later years, but he wouldn’t have built something this bizarre.
“That’s Ziggy’s place,” Abigail replied as Dylan pulled his pickup truck to a slow halt.
“Who the hell is Ziggy?”
“A friend of mine.”
“And you let him build that monstrosity on your land?”
“Ziggy is an artist.”
As if to accentuate that point, the sudden and unmistakable roar of a power saw filled the air, causing a jay sitting on a nearby cottonwood branch to go skittering across the sky in raucous disapproval.
The sound of horses’ hooves hitting the bottom of the horse trailer conveyed their nervous reaction to the unfamiliar loud noise.
“Get him to turn that damn thing off!” Dylan ordered her in a growl. “He’s upsetting the horses.”
“Wait a second, who’s the boss around here?” she demanded, but she was speaking to empty air since Dylan had hopped out of the pickup cab and gone around back. By the time she’d slid out of the truck, Dylan was already marching over to Ziggy’s place as if determined to shut him up himself.
Even though the day was sunny and warm, Ziggy was wearing his customary Swiss army cap. His shaggy white hair stuck out at wild angles from beneath it. Baggy overalls, a plaid lumberjack shirt and work boots completed his outfit. The middle-aged outdoorsman and wood-carver was described as unique by his friends, crazy by his enemies and talented by those who bought the sculptures he carved out of whole tree trunks. He was up to his ankles in sawdust and standing to one side of the weird dwelling he’d built.
Ziggy spoke English with an accent, but whenever he was upset he reverted to German and French curses mixed with a touch of Italian—a result of his Swiss heritage. When Dylan interrupted him, Ziggy glared and the international string of swear words filled the air instead of the sound of the power saw.
“How can I work when I am always interrupted?” Ziggy demanded of Abigail, his tone much aggrieved.
“Baaaaaaaah.”
