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“Who cares?” Dylan replied. “It felt damn good.”
“That’s no reason for doing something.”
“No? I happen to think it’s a wonderful reason for doing something. One of the very best.” As Dylan spoke, he reached out to sketch a brief line from the corner of her mouth to the underside of her jaw.
His work-roughened finger created havoc within Abigail. She, who was supposedly fluent in the language of love after having written about it for so many years, found herself unable to describe this suddenly shameless surge of emotion. Instead, all she could do was give in to it, surrendering to the moment, even if only for a second or two. But the instant she realized she’d actually closed her eyes with pleasure, she snapped out of her Dylan-induced trance.
Stepping away from temptation, she said, “Trying to practice some Gypsy magic on me, too? If so, you can forget it,” she added crossly. “Understand?”
“Sure do,” he said in a clipped voice, anger tightening the skin on his lean cheeks and compressing his lips into a grim line. “I’m the hired help, and that’s all. Since I don’t exactly have folks lining up to hire me, I’d better be on my best behavior because, after all, there’s not much need for busted-up Gypsy rodeo riders, right?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Not in so many words maybe.” His jaw clenched as he continued in the same hard inflection, “Listen, lady, there are plenty of other ranches I could be working at.”
“I realize that.”
“I don’t need to go looking for trouble.”
“If you want to leave, just say the word.”
“Right,” he scoffed. “And have you run Pete’s ranch into the ground so that Redkins can get his greedy hands on the place after all? No way! I owe it to Pete to protect this place.”
Dylan and Abigail were almost nose to nose, her blue eyes glaring into his dark ones, when the sound of Raj’s voice interrupted them.
“Hey, I hate to interrupt such a friendly discussion and all, but I just wanted to know…is he staying for dinner?” Raj inquired. Her midnight black hair swung into a short page-boy cut just above her jawline, and her chestnut eyes gleamed with interest.
“Yes,” Abigail said, taking a step back from the fire in Dylan’s dark eyes.
“I’ll add another place for dinner, then. By the way, my name is Raj Patel,” she told Dylan.
“Pleased to meet you,” he said with a polite nod of his head.
“And would you be Dylan Janos, by any chance?” she asked.
“That’s right.”
“How did you know his last name?” Abigail asked Raj.
“Because he’s famous. Everyone knows who Dylan is.”
Who I was, Dylan thought to himself, rubbing his thigh.
“Why, he was the best saddle-bronc rider in the NFR— National Finals Rodeo—championships in Las Vegas last year!” Dismissing Abigail’s blank look, Raj explained to Dylan, “Abbie never reads the ProRodeo Sports News. I’m sorry she doesn’t know how impressive your credentials are. Only the top fifteen cowboys in each event make it to the NFR,” Raj told Abigail before frowning. “Dylan, I heard you’d been badly hurt…four months ago, was it?”
“Something like that.” His voice was completely devoid of expression.
While his face was equally impassive, Abigail saw the briefest flash of something, an inner torment that compelled her to intervene. “I don’t think Dylan wants to talk about it, Raj.”
“I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “Sometimes my enthusiasm gets ahead of me. Come on in and take a load off.”
“I’d like to get settled in and clean up first,” Dylan said. “If you’ll just tell me where my quarters are.”
“I’ll show you,” Abigail stated.
Once Dylan set his belongings down inside the small cabin set aside for the foreman’s use, Abigail realized how little he had with him. She knew cowboys traveled light, and Dylan was no exception. She was willing to bet that most of the stuff in his gear bag was rigging related to riding.
He dwarfed the one-room cabin. He didn’t have the muscle-bound looks of some of the men who graced the covers of her books. Instead, he was very lean and whipcord strong. She still remembered the powerful feel of his arms whisking her off her runaway horse a few hours earlier. She’d felt perfectly safe in his arms, yet she’d also felt a wild excitement that was at definite odds with the first emotion.
Clearing her throat, Abigail said, “Um, the bathroom is in the corner, and over here by the sink is a hot plate. It’s not real fancy.”
“I’ve stayed in worse.”
“Yes, well…” Abigail paused to lean over and nervously smooth the quilt covering the bed. “You haven’t tried the mattress from hell yet. Although I’ve never slept on it, when I aired the mattress I could see the lumps never mind feel them.” She was babbling, but having Dylan and a bed in the same room definitely made her breathless. “Come on over to the house whenever you’re ready. Supper is at six,” she gulped before making her escape.
“Where’s the fire?” Raj asked as Abigail came rushing into the kitchen.
“No fire. I just came to see if you needed some help,” Abigail maintained.
“You mean you’re not out of breath because of Dylan Janos? Now, that’s hero material,” Raj dreamily declared, tilting her head in the direction of the foreman’s cabin.
Abigail shrugged nonchalantly. “He’s just a guy.”
“A darn good-looking one.”
“His hair is too long.”
“Hah!” Raj said triumphantly. “You’re tempted.”
“I am not!” Abigail denied.
Raj gave her a look that said she knew better.
“Okay, I might have been tempted at first,” Abigail allowed. “In the very beginning, when he saved me. For a minute or two.”
“Wait a second!” Raj squealed. “This is the first I’ve heard about him saving you. From what?”
“Boredom,” Abigail retorted.
“Yeah, right. You’ve never been bored a minute in your entire life. Now, come on, tell me everything!”
“You know I took Wild Thing for a run this morning? Well, we hadn’t been out long when she suddenly took off, and I couldn’t stop her. She was heading right for that stand of woods in the north pasture, the one with the prairie-dog holes. Anyway, Dylan showed up out of no place and helped out.”
“Helped out how?” Raj asked. “Anything that required you to end up in his arms?” Seeing the blush on Abigail’s face, she crowed, “Aha! I knew it.”
“I told you, I might have been tempted, but I got over it. Real fast. He’s a cowboy.”
“Yeah, I noticed,” Raj said dreamily.
“Cut that out. He’s working here. I’m his employer. And I am not about to repeat my past mistakes. You know my rule—no more cowboys. I’ve sworn off of them for good.”
“You know what Katharine Hepburn said—‘If you obey all the rules…you miss all the fun.’”
“I have all the fun I can manage at the moment, thank you very much,” Abigail retorted tartly. “Besides, you’re hardly an objective observer in all this. You’re practically as bad about cowboys as I am.”
“Nonsense. I am merely a fan of Western US. social life and customs.”
“Yeah, right. That’s putting it mildly. You think John Wayne walked on water and you got your master’s degree in Western culture by writing a thesis on the cowboy as mythical hero.”
“Not the most practical thing I’ve ever done,” Raj admitted. “But then I’m not one to conform to expectations.”
Raj had left her native India at the tender age of fifteen, to visit a third cousin who owned a restaurant in New York City. That had been twenty years ago, and she’d often told Abigail that she’d never looked back. By the time Abigail had met her in Great Falls, Raj was working as a waitress by night and taking college courses by day.
The first time Abigail had visited Raj’s tiny studio apartment, she’d been overwhelmed by the Western memorabilia—classic posters of John Wayne and Barbara Stanwyck Westerns covered the cracked plaster walls, while their movies on video filled the bookcases and overflowed onto the floor.
It was a love that Abigail shared. She was lucky to have been able to combine her two loves—books and Western life—into her second career as a Western-romance writer.
“Yes, well, a lot would say that I wasn’t practical leaving my job at the library in Great Falls to come up here and live on this ranch. My parents especially,” Abigail noted wryly. “They think I’m crazy, that this is some passing phase I’m going through, and they’re praying that I’ll ‘come to my senses’ is the way my father put it, and sell the place.”
“To that idiot who was here earlier?”
Abigail nodded. “My parents just don’t understand, and I don’t know how to explain it to them. The thing is that I feel such a sense of peace here, a sense of belonging. When I look at those mountains out there—” she swept her hand toward the large window facing east “—it just feels right in here.” She pressed her clenched hand against her chest.
“Then you did right coming here.”
“Have I told you how much I appreciate you coming up here and spending the summer with me?” Abigail said.
“Oh, yeah,” Raj mockingly retorted, “it was a real hardship for me to leave my cubbyhole apartment in Great Falls and spend two months in these gorgeous surroundings.”
“At least in Great Falls you didn’t have to deal with moose on your doorstep.”
“That made our first morning here exciting, didn’t it?” Raj recalled with a grin. “And I have a feeling that Dylan’s presence is going to make the rest of our summer rather exciting, as well.”
“He’s a little less homely than that moose was,” Abigail replied with a saucy grin. “But I’d be surprised if he stays the entire summer. His kind doesn’t tend to stay in one place very long.”
“He might surprise you.”
“You can count on it,” Dylan stated from the doorway.
Abigail swung around, her face turning red as she wondered how much of their conversation he’d overheard.
She found out when he mockingly added, “And I’m deeply honored that you think I’m less homely than a moose.”
To her relief, Abigail was saved from having to make a reply by the noisy entrance of Shem Buskirk and his two grown sons, Hondo and Randy. Shem had worked on her father’s ranch a few summers when she’d been a child. He’d been the only applicant Abigail had gotten in reply to an ad for help at the ranch. Considering the fact that Hoss owned the newspaper in the nearest town, Big Rock, she supposed she was lucky to have gotten her ad run at all. Hoss had told her that no one would answer it. He’d been wrong.
Not that Hoss considered Shem much of a threat. No one knew how old Shem actually was, but he told stories about his mining days in the Crazy Mountains in the early 1930s. He had a shock of white hair almost as wild as Ziggy’s, while his face had more lines on it than a Manhattan road map. He’d turned down her offer of ranch foreman, claiming responsibility like that wasn’t his strong suit, but had agreed to work for her.
His two sons—Hondo and Randy, as ageless as Shem—had just shown up with him. They were willing to work for room and board. The bunkhouse was empty anyway, so Abigail let them stay on. Neither one of them had what it took to be foreman.
The two “offspring,” as Shem called his sons, reminded her of Mutt and Jeff, with Randy as tall and skinny as a rail while Hondo was much shorter and heavyset. Neither one was real bright, but they were adequate workers, although they didn’t do anything without being told first. However, at this point, Abigail couldn’t afford to be real choosy. Her uncle had let things go for the past few years, and there was plenty of work to be done.
Under cover of the noise Shem and his sons made whenever entering a room, Raj sidled up to Abigail to whisper, “I’m not sure how practical it was to hire Dylan when you’ve sworn off cowboys. It’s kind of like putting a box of imported Belgian chocolates in front of a chocoholic who has just gone on a diet.”
As always, Raj was right. It was one of her less endearing traits.
“Where’s your yodeling friend tonight?” Hondo asked Abigail around a mouthful of mashed potatoes a few minutes later.
“Ziggy is working. Sometimes he comes over and takes over cooking duties from Raj,” Abigail explained for Dylan’s benefit. “You haven’t lived until you’ve tasted his fondue.”
The men all wore similar expressions of horror.
Abigail had to laugh. “Don’t worry,” she said mockingly. “I won’t try and force you big, strong men to eat sissy food like fondue. Who knows what it might do to you?”
“You’ve got that right,” Randy declared. “Food like that can affect a man’s performance. Might make him—” he lowered his voice “—you know…competent.”
“There’s little chance of you ever being competent,” Raj assured Randy.
“The word is impotent,” Shem told his son. “You’d know that if you read the dictionary the way I do.”
“I’ve got better things to do with my time than read a book that’s better used as a doorstop,” Randy retorted.
“Indubitably,” Shem replied.
“Hey, are you calling me a name or something?”
“Look it up in your Funk and Wagnalls,” Shem retorted.
“My what?”
“Never mind.”
“Nice crew you’ve got here,” Dylan mockingly murmured from her side. Trust Raj to seat him right next to Abigail.
Seen through his eyes, she didn’t imagine Shem and his sons looked all that promising. Abigail was well aware that Dylan was only sticking around because he didn’t think she was capable of hanging on to the ranch without his help. The damn thing was, he was right. Not because she wasn’t capable enough, but because she did need help. His help. But she didn’t have to be happy about it.
“Here, have some more peas,” she said in a grumbly tone of voice, grabbing the bowl and shoving it in Dylan’s direction.
She also wasn’t happy about this jolt of sexual awareness from something as simple as his fingers brushing hers as he took the bowl from her. But she was a big girl, and she wasn’t about to let something like chemistry control her. She was the one in control now.
Hondo wasn’t as lucky, wrestling as he was with the yellow plastic container of mustard, turning it upside down and squeezing it as if trying to wring the last gasp of life from it. Hondo was the only person Abigail had ever met who put mustard on everything—including tonight’s meal of meat loaf, mashed potatoes and peas.
“Works more expeditiously if you tilt it at an angle,” Shem informed his son.
“Say what?”
“Better,” Raj translated.
Hondo did as his father suggested, and sure enough the mustard finally came spurting out, along with the lid, spattering the tablecloth and poor Shem, who was sitting directly across from Hondo.
